by Anna Hope
The woman puts cold gel on to Hannah’s stomach. Hannah catches her breath as the sensor rolls over the tautness of her skin. She looks at the woman’s face. The woman is silent, staring at the screen, at the dark places inside her – her face impassive. She is a seer, a diviner of meaning, a reader of the runes. But why is she so silent?
A wave of fear and nausea breaks over Hannah. ‘Is everything all right?’
The woman looks up. ‘So far,’ she says.
Hannah clenches her thumbs into her hands.
‘Just taking measurements,’ the woman says.
The woman rolls a ball, the keyboard clicks, and then, ‘Here,’ she says, turning the monitor around to face them, ‘here’s your baby. Everything looks fine.’
A creature is projected there, waving its limbs. A heart flickering, flickering, beating faster than Hannah’s own.
Lissa
All week Sarah’s friends, her colleagues, her ex-pupils, all those who knew and loved her, are encouraged to come to the house and write their messages on scraps of cloth. Lissa and Laurie make coffee and tea, they give out glasses of wine and of water, put crisps and toast and soup on the table, and listen.
She imagines this is a little like it must feel after the birth of a child: this liminal space where time behaves differently, is gentled and held.
There are middle-aged men whom Sarah taught as teenagers, who tell of her classes, of her importance in their life. Younger women with their children in tow, who stare at the house – at the books and the paintings in it – and nod, as though it is exactly what they had expected, or hoped. Sarah’s dealer comes, bearing a spectacular bouquet, leaving a trail of expensive scents in his wake.
Johnny brings his oldest daughter, a tall girl of seven, with straight brown hair that hangs past her shoulder. ‘This is Iris,’ says Johnny. Iris is dressed in high-tops and a hoodie. She stands hand in hand with her dad. ‘We’re going for ice cream,’ says Iris. ‘Do you want to come?’
‘Sure,’ says Lissa.
They walk the streets and the streets are strange – it is the first time she has been out properly in days. ‘Is your mum dead?’ asks Iris.
‘Yes,’ says Lissa, ‘she is.’
Johnny reaches out and puts his arm around Lissa, and she lets him, and his daughter watches them and she does not seem to mind.
She sleeps in her mother’s bed – the bed she died in – and it is not eerie, but comforting. Her mother had the death she wanted, she thinks. She understands now what a gift that was. How many people can say the same?
The morning of the funeral Lissa puts on a yellow sundress. It is October, but unseasonably warm. Johnny and Laurie arrive to help – they wind the fresh flowers through the weave of the wicker basket.
Don’t call it a coffin, darling. It’s a basket, that’s what I want, a basket filled with flowers.
The basket is indeed filled with flowers, dried ones and fresh ones, and posies of herbs and the ribbons of cloth covered with messages to send Sarah on her way. As she and Laurie and Johnny lift Sarah into the back of her old van, which still smells of turps and canvas and coffee, the ribbons lift and flutter in the breeze.
Sarah joked that she wanted to be buried under the pear tree in the garden, but they take her to Islington and St Pancras Crematorium instead.
Which is actually in Finchley, Sarah had said with mild disappointment, when she looked at the map.
The room is packed; there are hundreds of people there. When the ceremony is over, one by one the mourners come to speak to Lissa to say goodbye. Her dad is there, with her stepmother, and he holds her for a long moment before releasing her again. It is then that she sees them – Hannah and Cate. They must have been here all along.
‘Oh,’ says Lissa, looking at her friends. ‘Oh,’ she says again.
Hannah reaches her hand to Lissa and Lissa takes it.
‘You’re pregnant,’ she says, and it is only now that she begins to cry.
‘Yes,’ says Hannah.
And now she is nodding, grinning stupidly in this sun. ‘Look at you,’ she says. ‘You look wonderful.’ And it is true, Hannah does; she is a fine ripe fruit.
‘I came for Sarah,’ says Hannah. ‘I came to say goodbye.’
‘Yes.’ Lissa nods. ‘Thank you.’ And then, ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m so sorry. Please, forgive me.’ And then, for she cannot truly believe it, ‘You’re pregnant,’ she says again. ‘Can I? May I?’ She holds out her hand.
Hannah nods, lets her place her hand there.
And now Lissa is laughing, standing in the sunshine with her hand like this, on the taut skin with the life beneath, laughing and crying and shaking her head.
The house is quiet. Laurie had offered to come back with her, as had Johnny, but Lissa refused. I’ll be fine, she said.
There are books left open on the tables, and she lifts them gently and closes them, placing them back on the shelves. The kitchen has their breakfast things still sitting in the sink. She rinses the bowls and puts them on the side, then props open the door to her mother’s garden. Sunlight pools on the floor. She pours herself a gin and tonic and rolls a cigarette.
She lifts the drink to the urn, which rests on the kitchen table. On Monday, as promised, she will go to Greenham with Laurie and Ina and Caro and Rose, and leave some of her mother’s ashes by the tree. The rest Sarah has asked her to scatter in the garden, wherever you like. She’ll do it tomorrow, alone.
In her inbox is a ticket to Mexico. Her flight is next week. She has no plans, only a vague destination – a town on the Pacific coast. It is not an ending or a new beginning. Or perhaps it is. But if it is an ending, it is not clean, or neat – it is simply the part where one pattern joins another. It is made of blood and sinew and bone.
When she has finished her cigarette, Lissa shuts and locks the door. She comes over to the table. How many hours spent here? How many breakfasts and lunches and dinners? How many times was she put here, with drawing materials or crafts, and told to look after herself?
Once, she remembers not being able to sleep, hearing voices in the kitchen, coming down to find her mother and her friends here, sitting around the table. ‘What are you making?’ she had asked.
‘They’re cranes,’ her mother replied. ‘Here, look.’ Sarah lifted her into her lap and showed her how to fold the paper to make the origami birds, and explained they were making them to mark an anniversary, of a bomb dropping in Japan, that they were a sign of peace, a sign that nothing like that should ever happen again. They sat around the table, the women, speaking in low voices, as Lissa followed her mother’s instructions and a bird emerged, like magic, like something beautiful being born.
The women murmured to each other, and there was the soft, susurrating sound of their voices, the ripple of their occasional laughter, the warmth of her mother, the smell of her, of turps and of spices, the feeling of being allowed to stay up, of being held, the whiteness of the paper and the pleasure in folding and in making something fine.
She remembers all this, standing here in the evening kitchen – the peace there was in this room. She remembers the sense of peace.
2012
Hannah
It has not been easy to sleep, these last nights. Even with all the pillows she cannot find a comfortable place to lie.
The baby wakes her often. She lies there, feeling the baby move her limbs in the small space left to her. Hannah thinks she feels a heel bone, an elbow. She touches the baby through the skin of her stomach. The baby is a selkie. An underwater swimmer. An habitué of the dark.
The baby is a girl. At first, this knowledge troubled Hannah. A boy felt simpler somehow. How to be a mother to a girl?
But now the thought of a girl is wondrous.
Now she is impatient to meet her.
There is a line to be crossed first. A birthing. She is not scared, she thinks, of pain. It is only the surrender, perhaps, that frightens her.
She speaks to Nathan
sometimes. He has a room in a flat close by. He visits and when he visits he is quiet, solicitous. He cooks for her, soups and risottos. He makes a large pan and he leaves it for her on the stove. Sometimes they walk together, along the canal. Sometimes, when she is tired, she takes his arm. Sometimes, before he leaves her where she sits, huge on the sofa, she catches him looking, catches the look on his face.
He asks for little, but he has asked to be present at the birth. She has not said yes to this. She does not know if having him there will make things easier or harder. There are many things that she does not know. And this not knowing, in these cold January days lit from a warmth within, feels OK somehow.
Cate stays one night a week. Hannah looks forward to her visits, when they will sit and talk and laugh. She has asked Cate to be her birth partner, and Cate has said yes. It will take her an hour and a half to drive from Canterbury, two hours at the most.
Hannah wakes in the night.
It is very late, or very early. It is four o’clock. It is the time at which people are born and the time at which people die. It is dark and she is wet – the bottoms of her pyjamas are soaking. She reaches for her phone and calls Cate.
‘She’s coming,’ she says.
She feels the leap of her heart, the beat of her blood in her ears.
She is coming. Here, in the darkness, a new story is beginning.
Her girl is on her way.
London Fields
2018
It is Saturday, which is market day. It is late spring, or early summer. It is mid-May, and the dog roses are in bloom in the tangled garden at the front of the house. Lissa sees them as she passes, on her way to the park.
It is warm. She is dressed simply, in faded jeans, an embroidered peasant blouse. Her feet are in thin sandals and she carries a canvas bag on her shoulder – inside it: good tomatoes, bread, Rioja, a goat’s cheese covered with ash.
As she enters the park, she pauses on the path, looking over towards the back of the big old house with its crumbling garden wall, the old tree beneath which they used to love to sit. Today, the grass beneath the tree is packed with bodies, the air filled with the scent of barbecues and cigarette smoke, the blare of competing sound systems. It looks like a festival for the young. She looks up once more at the house, at the open windows, at the distant, shadowy figures that move around inside, then turns and walks on. They have arranged to meet on the other side of the park – close to the lido – the side where the families go. Here the grass is quieter and still green. She finds a spot and puts down an old rug and kicks off her shoes. The grass is lovely beneath her feet. She is nervous. This meeting was her idea – she wrote to them both, on a whim, one morning from the balcony of her small flat in Mexico City, telling them she was coming – a rare visit to England, to London, for Laurie’s funeral, asking if they might want to see her again, after all this time. She was surprised, and pleased, when they both replied and said they would.
Presently she hears a shout and looks up to see Cate, dressed in a light summer dress, and a young girl of five or so coming over the grass towards her. Lissa sees Cate pause, bend to the girl and point, reminding her, no doubt, who this tall woman with the short fair hair is, for Lissa has never met Cate’s daughter, born the year after she left for good.
This is Poppy, says Cate, when they have hugged hello. She’s been excited to meet you. I told her you used to be an actress. She loves to perform.
Ah, says Lissa, yes, a long time ago. And she kneels beside Poppy, a round-faced, smiling child, and asks the right questions, listening as the girl chatters about her ballet classes, about the play she did last Christmas at school.
Another call, and they turn, and here is Hannah, come from the lido, with her own daughter walking beside her – a tall six-year-old, another child that Lissa has never met, a girl with the look of her mother – the same sleekness, the same dark hair, the same graveness of expression. Clara, says Hannah, this is Lissa. Hannah and her daughter take their places on the rug and the food is brought out and smiled over and tucked into.
The talk, though, is only small talk, and Lissa, who has been imagining this moment for weeks, for years – feels a creeping sense of disappointment. Somehow she had hoped for more. But what, truly, can there be to say to each other, after all this time? Small talk is small, but the inroads to intimacy were savaged years ago. And who is to blame for that?
But then, as the afternoon deepens, as the wine is drunk and the light thickens, the women start to relax. They talk about the old days. They raise a toast to the old house. Hannah asks Lissa about her life in Mexico and Lissa tells her about her job, teaching English in a language school, about the city she has grown to love, the mornings when she takes herself to a cafe with her laptop and sits and writes. Small moments, really, but they make her feel alive. And as Lissa talks, carving the air with her hands, Hannah feels a part of herself unfurl, just as she did that first time she met her – Lissa carries colour in her, she always did, and Hannah feels herself draw a little closer, warming herself at the small fire of her old friend.
When Cate and Hannah talk, they talk about their children mostly – talk through them, even, reaching for them, touching them often, smoothing their hair. And their children talk, too – they know each other well, it is clear; they tell Lissa about a holiday they all took last summer to France. As Lissa watches, she feels a familiar ache. She will be forty-four next birthday. As the years in which she might conceivably conceive have diminished, she has felt a corresponding, surprising sadness rise. It is not that she wants a child, not really, she is happy with her life, with her apartment in a cool-tiled building in Coyoacan, with her partner, who is a kind and gentle man. She and he sleep late on the weekends. They have their lives to themselves. It is just that sometimes, lately, on the way to work, or walking through the weekend markets, she will stop, made suddenly breathless at the sight of a baby. And Mexico is full of babies. But mostly, most days, she is fine. Her partner has a son, a boy of fifteen, who lives with his mother nearby. He spends every other weekend with them. Lissa likes him. He is kind and studious and funny, like his father. He likes to sleep late, too.
Hannah’s daughter talks about her dad – who is coming to pick her up later, as she is staying at his house tonight – and the mention of Nathan hovers dangerously in the air between the women, but as the girl chatters on, oblivious, the moment loses its charge, is lost in the next moment, and the next.
They look at each other, these women, as the girls talk, noticing the ways in which they have aged. They are not the same women they were.
They worry. They worry about their parents – their fathers mostly. Hannah’s father, who forgets things – more and more, it seems – who no longer meets her on the platform at Stockport station when she travels north. Cate’s father, in Spain, who drinks too much, and is lonely. Lissa’s father, who seems to have no joy in his life at all.
They worry about summer, which is coming earlier and lasting longer each year – a worry that taints their enjoyment of this beautiful May afternoon like a dark drop of ink swirled in clear water. Most of all they worry about the future, about their children, about the world they will inherit, a world that seems so fractured and fast and ever more splintered. They worry about how their generation will be judged by those who come after, and if that judgement will be hard, about whether there is still time to rectify this, because, more and more these days, they would like those who come after them to look back and be proud.
Sometimes it seems that the list of their worries is endless, that they are corroded by worry, hollow with it – they and everybody else they talk to, these days.
But long, too (although sometimes harder to name), is the list of things for which they are grateful: for small mercies, which no longer seem so small. For moments. Like this morning, for Cate, saying goodbye to her husband and her son, knowing they will be there to meet her again this evening, when she returns, knowing there will be food to eat, a
table to sit around, the talk of her children. Her husband’s continued steady presence in her life. And for Hannah, the pride she still takes in her work, the fact that she is still friends with the father of her child, the ongoing, unceasing miracle of her daughter’s presence – a love so strong and fierce she feels no loneliness and no need for another, for she has found the love of her life. For Lissa, the quietness of her flat in the morning, when she rises early, and feels the warmth of the day to come in the air, and sits in the cool dawn and writes and feels sufficient unto herself.
They are grateful for these things because they know that old age and illness are not, perhaps, so very far away, and are not kind. They have seen this already, understood this, been humbled by it. They are humbled often, these days.
At a certain point in the afternoon, when the two girls have picked at the picnic and eaten their cake and are full of sugar and spiky energy and impatience, they jump up and move away from their mothers and from the other, blonde woman they do not know and whose name they will soon forget, on to the grass – called by the sun and the sky and by something else, something within that tells them they must move, right now. The same impulse, perhaps, that calls the seed to push up from the earth and reach for the light.
And Hannah’s daughter takes Cate’s daughter by the hand and they spin round and round, round and round, and the women watch them, caught by their clumsy grace, the assertiveness of their small bodies in space, filled with a joy that is close to – that might, in fact, also be – pain. And the girls whirl on, laughing – glad to be free of the blanket, of the weight of their mothers’ attention, of their mothers’ need for them, of the looping, dipping, hard-to-follow thread of the women’s conversation – giddy with movement, their hands clasped tightly together, round and round, round and round, in this spun-gold moment, dizzy with, drunk with life.