‘Any chance of a cuppa before I head back?’ Obadiah said. We searched the dispiriting kitchen and, of course, there was no tea. Someone had been in and cleared out the fridge and cupboards. The sink was deep and cracked and stained and there were cobwebs strung between the taps. The cupboards were full of chipped plates and dented saucepans: everything we’d actually need, though all terribly depressing.
I put the kettle on the stove and, while Obadiah drove Stella to find a shop, I carried you into the garden. It was long, narrow and overgrown, with tulips fighting through the grass. I put my foot in a pond I didn’t even see and stumbled, nearly dropped you – but saved myself, saved you. The garden was full of birdsong and the hum of insects, full of sunshine and life. It was beautiful, and so wild. At its bottom were some fruit trees – a plum, a pear and an apple I later learned – and I held your face near the blossom so you could inhale the sweetness.
Stella called me, her voice a little frantic. ‘Mel? Mel?’ And I carried you back through the long grass. The kettle was whistling and they’d bought tea, crumpets, butter, jam and baby formula. We sat in the dining room at the beautiful table under the window. We’d pulled layers of oilcloth off it and discovered the tabletop was a wonderful swirl of glossy wood. Obadiah said it was rosewood, and would be worth a bomb. He thought it was probably antique. It was the only piece of furniture in the entire house that we actually liked. Everything else was fusty or fussy or old-fashioned or just plain dismal.
I tried to make it an occasion, putting the milk in a jug and finding a set of table mats to protect the wood.
‘To us here, then,’ I said, raising my chipped cup to Stella.
‘Cheers,’ Obadiah said. He had a horrible habit of blowing across the top of his tea, slurping while it was still too hot, then smacking his lips and saying, ‘Ah!’ At Soul-Life I’d always tried to avoid being around him when he drank tea for this reason – the petty rage it stirred up in me was disturbing. Otherwise I liked him; he was slow and deliberate, about as unmercurial as a person could be. He was the oldest member of Soul-Life, a safe and stable person, fatherly.
‘Are these the only cups?’ Stella said. She was still uneasy around food and didn’t like to be seen to eat or to be in the company of others while they ate. She was regarding my butter-slathered crumpet almost with fear.
‘It’s all right, Stell,’ I said.
There was a long pause filled with the sound of Obadiah munching and slurping. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said to me, ‘you’ve been forgiven.’
‘What?’ I watched a trail of jammy grease crawl into the thicket of his beard.
‘Your theft. The cash. The three hundred and eleven pounds,’ he said.
I laughed. ‘I can’t believe you knew the exact amount!’
‘Of course.’ He looked offended.
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘that’s why you’re an accountant.’
He took another explicit gulp of tea. ‘Anyway, you’ve been forgiven. Adam said to tell you to forget it.’
That was the first direct message I’d had from Adam since I’d left him over two years ago. Forget it.
‘Tell him I already had,’ I said.
†
We began to settle. Adam sent enough money for us to live on. I started looking for a job, but soon Stella stopped eating and starting scrubbing and soaking everything in bleach again. I forced her to go to the doctor and he gave her pills that made her sluggish and dull. It wasn’t practical for me to go out to work with you and Stella to care for. It was a golden time, a golden summer. Each day I took you for a walk. I showed you the world. At night when you woke, I woke with you. There was such a special sympathy between us that I would sometimes be there beside your cot before you even whimpered.
†
After a few weeks, Adam came to Lexicon Avenue. There was no warning. You were sleeping in your carrycot in the garden. Stella was also asleep, in a deckchair beside you, and I was trying to cut a bit of grass with a rusty old mower, to give us more room to sprawl. I was hot and sweaty in my cut-off jeans and vest. I’d put weight back on – not too much, about right I’d say – and my skin, which had gone sallow over the winter, was getting brown. I’d stopped pushing the mower and was wiping my hand across my forehead, pushing the sweat up into my hair, when I saw Adam. It gave me such a shock that I shrieked and woke both you and Stella.
His hair was past his shoulder blades and his beard was long. He was wearing a white grandad shirt, open at the neck, over faded jeans and leather flip-flops. There were beads around his neck and as soon as I saw him I felt a sort of upward smack in my stomach. Poor Adam! He didn’t know which one of us to greet first and he dealt with the moment by going straight to the carrycot and leaning down at you.
‘She’s changed!’ he said.
‘We’ve all changed,’ I said. Our eyes met piercingly and I swallowed and smiled, saying in my smile that I forgave him everything. He came close and held me against his chest. Home is not so much a place as a feeling. When I smelled him and heard the beat of his heart against my cheek, I knew that for sure.
I went inside to fetch glasses of water for us all, and to avoid seeing how he greeted Stella. Quickly I washed, sprayed on a bit of deodorant and brushed my hair. I went out with the water and Adam was sitting cross-legged on the grass with you on his lap. There was no conversation going on between Adam and Stella and for that I was glad.
He stayed one night. We all prayed together. He’d been given a method of meditation by the Lord, a long wordless prayer where you let your mind dissolve into the oneness of the universe and if any thoughts came you blocked them with a hum. We developed this method further: each person had their own pitch, a pitch that worked to block – well, I need not tell you this. It’s a most soothing and nourishing method of prayer, though on this occasion you woke and cried and I had to get up and walk you round the garden until you were quiet. And, afterwards, Adam and I ate omelettes while Stella took something to her room. It was awkward. Neither Stella nor I knew what would happen when it came to bedtime. If he’d chosen to sleep with Stella I don’t know what I would have done.
After you’d been fed and bathed, by him, and settled in your cot, Adam came into the dining room where Stella was doing a puzzle and I was reading, or trying to. I looked up and smiled at him.
‘Leila?’ he said. (Leila was the name given to Stella at Soul-Life.) My heart shrivelled and my breath stuck as he looked at her, his eyes so soft and dark and bright.
‘Stella,’ she said, refusing to meet his eyes. And then she looked at me. ‘I am disenchanted, Mel,’ she said, much more loudly than necessary. ‘You can have him if you want.’
She was like that, sometimes, my sister, your mother, who I did love – but this was pure spite, and that word, disenchanted, she must have stayed up all night thinking that one up; it wasn’t the kind of word she’d ever use: disenchanted! She knew that Adam would choose me over her, you see, and didn’t want me to have that satisfaction, she had to spoil it; she had to be seen to be giving him back to me. And why didn’t she say it before, while we were on our own? No, she had to do it in front of Adam.
But Adam rescued me to some extent. ‘I was about to ask to speak to you alone in order to tell you that I still consider Martha my wife. She is the true wife of my soul, despite all that has passed. Martha?’ He put out his hand to me and I got up and took it. My hand was trembling and I was surprised to find that his was shaking too. So strange to be called that name again; I felt myself take on a slightly different shape. Stella said nothing. She fitted a piece into her puzzle, but as we were leaving the room she gave me a gruesome smile.
I led the way into my room. ‘Funny. This was mine when I was a kid,’ he said. He pointed out the place on the door-frame where his height had been marked as he grew up. We sat side by side on the bed. All the things that had happened in the past couple of years ached between us. I didn’t know what to say or even what I felt except for the most overwhe
lming love, the sort they call unconditional and that you only have for your own child, it says in the textbooks. But the textbooks are wrong in this case, because even though I knew he was a liar and even though I wasn’t sure how genuine all his advice from Jesus was, and even though I’d actually seen him screwing Hannah, and even though he’d done the same with my little sister, I still loved him. Could you get more unconditional than that?
He stood up from the bed and went to the window.
‘This is not how you described the house,’ I said to his back.
‘Bedtime stories,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you like them?’
‘I did, but –’
‘But nothing. I told you stories you would enjoy.’
‘It was lies.’
‘Stories, Martha.’ He turned and kneeled down in front of me. ‘You’re angry,’ he said. ‘The baby –’
‘I love the baby,’ I said, and my voice was fierce and choked. ‘I look after her, you know; Stella’s too ill and doped.’
‘I know you love her,’ he said. ‘I knew you would.’
‘I wish she was mine,’ I said, and bit my lip hard.
He smiled, but sadly. ‘Listen. Will you listen to me?’
‘Of course.’
He got up from his knees and lay down on the bed. ‘Come.’
I lay down with him on the narrow bed, our faces just inches apart, and the heat of his body beat a pulse in the air, which my own pulse joined with as he spoke. He described his early conversations with Stella, his frustration with her negativity and the breakthrough when he got her to believe in Jesus and to believe in life. He’d gone back to Soul-Life, he said, in the hope that I would have returned or contacted him there since I hadn’t let them know at Wood End where I was.
‘And there I had a dream,’ he said, ‘and in the dream Jesus spoke to me.’
‘Don’t you even need herons any more?’ I said.
He flattened his lips and was silent for a moment. ‘Jesus told me I must have a child.’
‘But –’
‘He told me you would come back to me, but that until you did I must take Stella – Leila – into Soul-Life and that she must bear me a child.’
‘Why did you give her a prettier name than mine?’ I asked.
‘It was not my wish to be with her. I’ve never seen her in that way. I don’t find her –’ He paused. ‘I’m not attracted to her.’
The throb that surrounded us was becoming deafening and my heart was thudding and my blood was beating in my ears.
‘And what did she say when you told her that?’
‘I think she was glad to get away from home.’
I forced myself to look him in the eye as I asked, ‘And what was it like, screwing my sister?’
His eyes were sad as he looked back, the pupils dilating madly. I didn’t expect him to answer, but: ‘She’s not happy in her physical being,’ he said. ‘However . . .’
‘However, you did the deed. How could you?’ My voice warped and so did my face and I stuck my head against his shoulder to stop him seeing the ugliness. I was helpless to stop the tears and the sobbing that ripped through me and as he held and soothed me I was furious that he, who had caused me so much pain, should be the one to comfort me, and yet I couldn’t bear him to take his arms away.
‘You’re my wife in the eyes of the Lord, and in my heart,’ he said. ‘You, Martha; you.’
‘But what about the others? What about Hannah? I can’t forget what I saw. I wish I could.’
‘Find the hum,’ he said, ‘and block it out.’
‘I can’t bear that you –’
‘If it hurts you so much, and if you will come back with me, then I will stop it. I will make that sacrifice for you.’
‘Will you?’ I said. ‘Will you really?’
‘I will. I need you.’ He kept saying that and stroking my back. I could smell his sweat and my own tears that had soaked the pillow and the shoulder of his shirt. He kissed me and our mouths were wet and salty with tears and feelings that flared through me, through both of us, and made us fuse into one hot animal – and we yelled, we both yelled, at the passion; it was like a detonation.
‘It’s never like that with anyone else,’ he said, when we’d got our breath back. ‘Oh, Martha, I want you to bear me a son.’
‘But what if I can’t?’
He was quiet for a moment, and then: ‘Martha, Stella told me about your operation,’ he said. I hid my face against his chest. Of course she would tell him, of course she would. My skin was burning.
‘You lied to me,’ he said softly.
‘Not lied –’
‘Lied by omission.’ I could feel the puffs of breath his words made in my hair.
‘I thought you wouldn’t love me.’
‘How little faith in me you have,’ he said.
I counted twenty of his heartbeats before I dared to look up. Love was flowing from his eyes.
‘I won’t ever be able to have a baby,’ I said.
He smiled, bent down his head and licked away my tears. ‘Jesus has said it will be so,’ he said. And he rocked me in his arms, his hairy thighs tangled round my smooth ones, the stickiness itching on my skin and his voice soothing in my ear, his heartbeat thrumming the rhythm for mine to join with. I couldn’t believe his faith in miracles. But they do happen sometimes, they do, and maybe this one would. I had to be open to the possibility that it could.
Adam went to sleep, his mouth loosening and drool spilling from the corner. I studied his face in the dying light: so beautiful, so right, so mine. I heard the very beginnings of your waking from the little room beside mine. I never let you cry for long, didn’t want Stella disturbed. I wriggled out from under Adam’s leg, put his shirt on and crept out into the hall – but Stella was already up and on her way to pick you up.
‘There was no need to make such a song and dance about it,’ she hissed. ‘You woke Dodie.’
‘Did we?’
‘I’ve just put her back down.’
‘I didn’t hear.’ I was shocked. You began to squall. ‘I’ll get her,’ I said. ‘You need to sleep.’
‘You honk of sex,’ she said. ‘I’m not having you touching her like that.’
‘I’ll wash, then I’ll take her.’
She didn’t answer, but stomped into your room. I heard her pick you up, your crying stop for a moment and then begin in regular bursts like someone trying to start a moped. It made me hurt to hear you cry like that and I knew it was for me. You’d grown used to me in the night, not cross, doped-up Stella who never had a comfortable way of holding you. I had a quick wash and crept into my room – where Adam was making the little pocking noises in his sleep that I’d forgotten. I removed his shirt and put on my own nightie and dressing gown.
Stella was sitting on the sofa downstairs and your too-hot bottle was waiting on the table while she struggled to keep you quiet. She held you as if you were made of wood and in response you made yourself stiff against her shoulder.
‘You go to bed, Stella,’ I said. ‘Let me.’
She got up and shoved you into my arms.
‘Remember she’s mine,’ she said.
‘I know.’
She went upstairs and I heard the door of her room slam shut. I carried you over my shoulder, singing into your ear and you chomped angrily at your fist until I’d cooled the bottle under the tap. We sat down on the sofa together and you were so hungry that you gulped and choked at first, before you settled into a rhythmic suck.
‘Hey,’ Adam said, ‘my two best girls.’ He was naked but for a towel around his waist. I gazed down at his long narrow feet. They had black hairs on top and on each of the toes except the smallest. I could hold both your tiny feet in one hand and feel the petal quality of soles that have not yet been walked on.
‘I can’t come with you,’ I said. ‘I want to, but I can’t. How can I leave Stella? She can’t look after the baby on her own.’
‘Bring her, then,’
he said. He sat down on the sofa beside me and put his hand on your round tummy. ‘Bring Dorcas with you.’
‘Stella would never . . . and anyway . . .’ I trailed off. We both knew that you were Stella’s only reason for living. ‘I could try and persuade her to come back to London with us,’ I said.
‘No,’ Adam said, with surprising vehemence.
‘Why?’
‘She’s not good there. Not a good influence.’
‘Not a good influence?’ I asked.
You finished your bottle then and I sat you up to burp. We both laughed at the mature, manly tenor of the belch.
‘You’re a natural,’ he said.
‘But you can come and see us? Often?’
‘We’ll sort it somehow,’ he said. ‘I’ll pray for guidance.’
You needed to be changed, but still you drowsed heavily against my chest. He put his arm round me as I was holding you and we sat there for hours in perfect harmony while Stella slept upstairs and while the starry sky wheeled past the window and paled into dawn.
†
Adam left early in the morning, before Stella was awake, and I went back to bed alone. The bed smelled of him now and I luxuriated in the frowsty sheets and pillows, burying my nose and sniffing and sniffing until I fell asleep. I woke late. It was hot again. I could hear birds and your voice too. For once, Stella was up before me and out in the garden.
I leaned out of the open window and looked down. She was wearing her dressing gown, her pale hair hanging greasy and dull. She was hunched over and so thin you could see her ribs and the knobbles of her spine even through the material. I thought that if a person saw her this way they’d think she was thirty at least. She was smoking, even though she had you on her knee. I hated it when she did that. Sometimes I’d pick you up and find your fluffy hair smelled of smoke, or was speckled with flakes of ash.
I showered and went down. Stella was still outside and you were lying on the ground now, kicking your legs and fretting. I scooped you up.
‘Hi, Stell,’ I said cautiously. ‘You’re up early. For you.’
‘I’m the mother,’ she said.
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