Stop the Clock

by Alison Mercer

I read your letters; I read every single word. It was a painful process, as you may be able to imagine, but an illuminating one. I discovered that you are someone who makes a public show of honesty, but has lived, for years, with a lonely lie.

  The letters. Ah, the letters. Dear Vixen, do you imagine that he treasured them? They were in the garage, underneath the toolbox, next to the snow shovel that we never, in the normal way of things, have cause to use.

  I think he intended to burn them. I don’t know why he had put off doing it, and I haven’t asked him. Sometimes, when you love someone, it is necessary to take on burdensome tasks that they cannot manage alone. And now all those words are ash.

  The letters were stored in an unusual wooden box that I presume is a family heirloom of some kind, and am now returning to you. Sooner or later, he will realize it is missing. Will he then have the courage to bring the subject into the open? I must admit, I am curious, and for that I must thank you: after so many years of marriage it is exciting to find that one’s spouse is not entirely predictable.

  Inconstant he may be, but he is far from inconsistent. As you may have realized, he finds pregnancy and its aftermath unattractive; he started his first extramarital relationship when our son was two months old. Even if he had not taken steps to ensure you could not conceive his child, the demands of childbearing would almost certainly have ended your affair.

  As for the box, I trust you will be able to find a fresh use for it. I am returning it to you because it is not in my nature to destroy something that belongs to someone else.

  Yours sincerely,

  Virginia Dandridge

  William was crying . . . again. She felt the hot needling in her breasts that meant she had milk to give him. It was an almost instant reaction, like the prickle of perspiration in response to stress. She would have to collect herself, go upstairs, sort him out . . . but then there was a gentle knock on the door.

  She folded the letter and stuffed it back into the envelope.

  ‘Mum, no . . . Please, just give me a minute.’

  But it was Dan who came in. He was holding William very carefully, as if jolting him might cause an explosion. He moved slowly across the carpet towards Tina, passed William into her arms and sat down on the bed next to her.

  She yanked up her T-shirt and jammed William on to the breast. Dan didn’t speak, didn’t ask what was wrong, didn’t even look at her. She took his discretion for granted. It wasn’t until later that she realized his presence hadn’t bothered her at all.

  On the tenth day Lucy came, and brought Clemmie and Lottie with her. Lucy held William for a long time, and was reluctant to hand him back. The girls were soon bored of him, tired of the entertainment they’d brought with them – a DVD, some toys – and started roaming round the flat, looking for ways to pass the time while their mother and her friend talked about birth.

  Tina let Clemmie try on her hats and shoes and parade round in them, but Lottie hung back, too self-conscious to take part in dressing up.

  Clemmie took a particular shine to the Ascot fascinator – a silly concoction of feathers and net – and Tina said, ‘You can keep that if you like. I don’t think I’m going to wear it again.’

  Lucy protested, but Tina overruled her. She tried to persuade Lottie to accept a straw boater, which did look rather sweet perched on her dark hair, but Lottie politely declined.

  Clemmie continued to preen herself, and Lottie wandered around the flat, inspecting Tina’s CD collection, the photos, the books, finally coming to rest in front of the old wooden box, which was still sitting on the dining table.

  ‘What’s this?’ she said, running her hand over the surface of the wood.

  She opened it, lifted out the lid of the largest inner compartment, and studied the scrap of paper glued on the inside: Made by I alone.

  ‘It’s a sewing box,’ Tina said, ‘but I’m not very good at sewing, so it’s empty.’

  ‘It must be very old,’ Lottie said.

  ‘It is,’ Tina said, ‘see, there’s a date on it, 1875, so that makes it a proper antique. You can have it if you like. You can keep anything you want in it. I was thinking of taking it to the charity shop anyway, when I got round to it.’

  Lucy didn’t look at all sure about this, but Lottie looked so pleased that she eventually acquiesced. And so Lottie got her wish, and carried off a receptacle ideally suited for the storing of secrets from her mother.

  When they had all gone Tina felt lighter, but also hollow and sad.

  But then, when William started to suck, the past retreated, and the present lulled them both.

  The Vixen Letters

  Nature’s way? Oh, please. Spare me

  Well, I’ve done it – and I’m glad that it’s unlikely that I’ll be called upon to do it again. This is one upside of being a single mother – there is no social expectation that you will provide your little dear with a sibling, whereas respectably married ladies, my own mother among them, are forced into defensiveness about having an only child.

  All only children live with the prejudice that they are lonely and selfish. When I was little, I was completely uninterested in my peers – I was precocious, and preferred the attention of adults, which I retained by being provocative if necessary. Will William grow up to suffer from a similar blend of prickly detachment and self-importance? If he does, and then goes through life both demanding a wider audience and pushing me away, it will serve me right.

  My friendships are as close as I’ll come to sibling relationships. I think it would be fair to say that I’m neither a nurturer nor a peacemaker; I’m a limelight-hogger who is sometimes insanely cagey. Selfish and lonely, in other words. But I won’t persist in seeking to blame my reluctance to play co-operatively on my lonely only status – after all, my shortcomings are not my family’s, but my own.

  Being kind and tactful souls, my friends didn’t really tell me about their experiences of giving birth till I’d done it myself. I am given to understand that if you get a group of mothers together, even if they don’t know each other well, even without the lubrication of a glass of wine, they’ll start swapping birth war stories. I imagine such gatherings as meetings of so many Ancient Mariners, compulsively retelling the tale of the terrible voyages they made, and were somehow able to return from.

  One of my friends very nearly managed to do it nature’s way, first time round; she laboured for twenty-four hours, but to no avail. At least the baby escaped more or less unscathed – apart from the scratch marks on her head where the midwives had struggled to turn her so her mother could push her out. After this emergency caesarean, my friend wanted an elective caesarean next time round, and got it, despite strong opposition? caesareans are, after all, more expensive, and major surgery brings its own risks.

  I always wince on her behalf when I hear the phrase ‘too posh to push’. Too posh to undergo a second round of what you recall as torture? I don’t think so. How about ‘too smart to suffer unnecessarily’?

  I did it nature’s way, and I shouldn’t really complain – it was fast, it was straightforward – but still, it struck me as pretty awful. I would say it’s badly designed, if it wasn’t obvious that no guiding intelligence has had a hand in the process, and it’s simply the blind product of evolution – unless, that is, you belong to the punitive school of thought that regards the pain of birth as punishment for Eve’s rebellious sampling of the apple. Perhaps even that is more honest than the contemporary desire to pretend the whole thing is absolutely wonderful, and needs only the addition of a smelly candle and some whale music to bring you to a state of bliss.

  Another friend didn’t end up with a caesarean, but did lose as much blood as the victim of a car crash, and was catheterized and paralysed from the waist down for the first twelve hours after the birth – which didn’t stop the midwife snapping at her when she asked for help changing the baby’s first dirty nappy. ‘If you want that done, you’ll have to do it yourself!’ She couldn’t stand up, and had no
idea how to do it anyway, so the baby was left dirty until a new shift came on to the ward.

  She found the time she spent in hospital exhausting, stressful and oppressive – she managed about three hours’ sleep in five nights? but that moment of unkindness was, she says, the lowest point. She was not cared for; she was monitored. A midwife occasionally barged in to dole out pills and check her blood pressure, and advice on breastfeeding was available on request, but that was about it.

  These days, the orthodoxy is that new mothers should have their babies at their sides in hospital all the time, right from the start. In practice, that means you may well be left to cope with a fractious and unsettled infant without rest or respite, in a space that is filled with the crying of other newborns.

  My mother remembers when the approach was very different, and all babies were taken away overnight to be cared for in a night nursery, and brought in for breastfeeding – no more than fifteen minutes – every four hours during the night.

  What was lacking, then as now, is a willingness to be flexible, to listen to what individual mothers want and need. Surely, as one of the richest nations on earth, we can strike a balance between neglecting our new mothers on understaffed wards, and forcing them to acquiesce in rigid routines that separate them from their children? Or are we secretly in thrall to a deep-seated cultural contempt that makes it acceptable to turn our backs on women in labour and immediately after birth?

  16

  Young Adonis

  ‘MAY FAIR STALL bookings, strawberry and wine evening, seventies, eighties, nineties disco. I think that’s your lot,’ Lucy said, pushing her forward-planning folder across the table to Jane Morris, who was going to reallocate Lucy’s responsibilities as social secretary of the Parent–Teacher Association.

  Good old Jane – in the end, it had been a suggestion of hers, rather than any of the agencies or jobsites with which Lucy had registered, that had provided Lucy with a route back into relatively permanent work. During the course of the Class 7 parents’ pizza night out Jane had mentioned that a friend who worked for a charity magazine was about to go on maternity leave, and nobody had yet been recruited to cover for her. The magazine – which was circulated to members of the Countrywomen’s Guild? had left it to the last minute, and was keen to avoid the expense of advertising or paying an agency if possible, and might Lucy be interested? Lucy had duly applied, and, to her astonishment, had been asked to start immediately.

  After a few weeks in the job, she had been relieved when Jane suggested she might want to consider standing down from the PTA. Let one of the other stay-at-home mums shoulder the burden for a change; she was working now, and could consider herself excused. If that meant the ornaments didn’t get dusted once a week, and Clemmie’s cake-sale offerings weren’t home-made and Lottie didn’t always get reminded to take in her swimming kit, that was just too bad.

  Handing everything over to Jane was a relief not dissimilar to the final days of Lucy’s stint at Beautiful Interiors, when, as the last day drew closer, it had ceased to matter whether she had mispriced the latest style of contemporary chandelier, and she had felt the burden of needing to prove herself, at least to that particular set of colleagues, gradually lightening, till eventually, as she left the building for good, it had completely disappeared.

  When you were about to move on, all the day-to-day worries of the job began to reveal themselves for the transient chimera they were, and if anything went wrong you could just repeat the magic formula: ‘It doesn’t matter – I’m out of here.’ As you approached the date when you would be officially liberated from your role, you were freed from the oppressive trajectory of your future responsibilities. It was only a fleeting freedom, though, because as soon as you’d started your next job you had a whole load of new performance indicators to worry about, but it was nice while it lasted.

  So far the work at Ladies’ Circle magazine had not turned out to be particularly demanding or oppressive. The editor was a manageable boss – neither depressive, bullying, frustrated, nor slave-driving – and when Lucy was shown round the office after her interview she formed an impression of people quietly pottering at their desks who would probably go straight back to internet shopping the moment the tour was over. Her new colleagues were, in the main, pleasant, middle-aged women who wanted to get away on time, with the exception of one or two young ones who were obviously champing at the bit to escape to a sexier, more cut-throat environment, where the subject matter would be a bit more glamorous than the Countrywomen’s Guild annual Sponge, Jam and Pickle Competition, or the featured herb of the month, or the knitting patterns that they were all, on occasion, called upon to proofread.

  The pay was modest, but it was enough to make a difference, and her financial situation had stabilized. It helped that Adam now had a decent income and was paying out a steady proportion of it as maintenance? he’d submitted to pressure from Emily and got a job as marketing director of a household-name nappy brand.

  If she was careful, she could manage, at least for now – and as for the future, who knew? They were getting by. And maybe in due course she would earn more, and they would do better. In the meantime there would be no holidays, and she’d pared back the children’s out-of-school activities, and renounced the bulk-bought booze, which she had come, for a time, to think of as a necessity.

  It was traditional, at all PTA meetings, to open, and finish, at least one bottle of wine, but she hadn’t had any to offer Jane, and had given her tea instead. She didn’t have a drop of alcohol in the house; after the drama of New Year, she’d lost the appetite for it. She knew she’d been using it as a crutch and an escape, and that it wasn’t much good for either; it provided temporary relief, but it didn’t solve anything, and had been on the way to turning into a problem in itself. It seemed better just to allow herself to be sad.

  It helped that she now had Pomfret, her beautiful Russian blue cat, for company. OK, so she was perhaps also unhealthily obsessed with internet dating websites, and Young Adonis might be just another manifestation of self-destructive risk-taking – but she damn well didn’t care, she was going to meet him anyway.

  It had been good to see Jane, a reminder of old times; she saw Jane as the sort of stay-at-home mum she had aspired to become herself, calm, efficient and contented, a serenely gliding swan whose dignified manner belied the frantic paddling going on underneath. With Jane, there was no whiff of competition, or of jealously thwarted ambition; she seemed to be quietly satisfied with her life, which made her very soothing company.

  Still, Lucy was conscious that it was getting late, and she’d have to be up at six the next morning to sort out the girls and get to work.

  The cat slid underneath the table and brushed against her legs, and she reached down to stroke him and tickle him on his favourite spot, underneath his chin. Before she straightened up she surreptitiously checked her watch. It was already nearly ten o’clock; definitely time to wind things up.

  ‘Do feel free to come back to me if anything’s unclear,’ she told Jane, who had taken a sheaf of papers out of the forward-planning folder and was flicking through them. ‘I may be stepping down, but I’m still up for helping out whenever I can.’

  Jane put the papers back in the folder, but made no other move to go. Then she said, ‘You’re looking really well, you know. I think maybe being back at work suits you?’

  Lucy had been so preoccupied with how her children would react to the change to their routines that she hadn’t really given her own feelings about the job much thought. Luckily, the girls had adapted brilliantly. It was true that Clemmie hated being hustled out of the house and into the school breakfast club on Lucy’s days in the office, but Lottie seemed not to object to her mother being distracted. Perhaps she had felt, in the old days, that Lucy was breathing down her neck all the time. Perhaps she’d had a point. On the plus side, both girls enjoyed seeing her mother in her new working wardrobe. (Lucy had found it necessary to invest in one or two Januar
y sales bargains.)

  Come to think of it, Lucy liked dressing for work in the mornings too, and the job was a partial release from the gentle semi-purdah of her old life, the daytime world of mothers and retired people, the almost exclusively feminine club at the school gate.

  ‘Well, so far so good, I suppose,’ Lucy said.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about going back to work myself,’ Jane said with an apologetic smile.

  Lucy thought: You’re scared. You’re good at what you’re doing right now, and you know you can do it. You’re not ready to face up to the fear that you’ve forgotten how to do anything else.

  ‘Why bother if you don’t have to? I wouldn’t rush it if I were you,’ Lucy said.

  Jane shrugged sheepishly, and Lucy thought: No, not scared? she feels guilty for not working, and she knows when she does go back to work, she’ll feel guilty for not being at home.

  ‘I couldn’t go back to nursing,’ Jane said, ‘I wouldn’t have the stamina. I’d have to look for something else.’

  ‘How about something more desk-based, but still in the health service?’ Lucy suggested. ‘And maybe part-time would suit you. I find it’s quite a good compromise. Anyway, there’s never any harm in looking.’

  ‘True,’ Jane said. She stood up and picked up the folder. ‘Anyway, I’d better let you get on. It was lovely to see you. You will pop along to the next committee meeting, won’t you? I don’t think anybody would expect you to stay for the whole thing, unless you wanted to, but I think they’d all like the chance to say thank you.’

  ‘Of course I will, and thank you again for letting me off the hook,’ Lucy said.

  After Jane had gone she went upstairs to check on the girls. Lottie’s light was still on, but went off as soon as Lucy reached the landing – Lottie was speeding through the final instalment of the Twilight saga, and kept on reading it long after her official bedtime. Clemmie was sound asleep.

  Lucy sat down at the computer to check her messages. And there he was: Young Adonis.