Having It All

by Maeve Haran

  ‘Because I don’t want the job. And maybe’ – she paused, remembering her conversation with her father –‘because I’ve taken enough of Liz’s already.’

  Picturing Conrad’s face and guessing that he’d finally run out of arguments, she started to laugh. ‘Don’t worry, Conrad. It’s only television!’

  And she realized, with a start of surprise, that she actually meant it.

  Conrad paced the room furiously. He’d given the job to Claudia on an acting basis and now she expected the appointment to be confirmed. But that wasn’t what he was planning. He was damned if he was going to stay under Claudia’s thumb just because the muscles in her cunt were those of an athlete and she could go down better than any other woman in London. He had even started having nightmares in which he ran away, sweating, chased by two huge fleshy lips. And he knew that they were Claudia’s labia.

  He had another completely different scheme in mind. Given a free rein he would like to have got rid of Claudia altogether but she was party to certain of his more imaginative business arrangements which Ben Morgan of the Independent Television Commission might not see as the simple temporary expedient they really were. So he’d just planned to kick Claudia upstairs. Call her Executive in Charge of Programmes or some such crap and give the job to Britt. And bloody Liz Ward had put her bloody spanner in the works just because she was jealous. There was only one solution. He was going to see that she persuaded her friend to change her mind.

  If she didn’t he’d be lumbered with Claudia for ever.

  Britt’s mother listened at the door of the bathroom until she could hear the gentle slap of water against the enamel and she knew that her daughter was safely in the bath. Britt liked long baths, thank God, so she should have twenty minutes at least.

  Then, very quietly, looking over her shoulder every few seconds as though she might suddenly find her daughter’s hand there demanding an explanation, she crept towards Britt’s bedroom.

  The door opened silently, thank God she’d rubbed a bit of lard into the hinges, and she slipped in. Looking round the room she stopped transfixed. Even when she was a teenager Britt’s bedroom had been immaculate. No records scattered on the floor, no messy Outdoor Girl make-up, no forbidden but unmistakable odours of cigarette smoke drowned in air freshener, not even any loud music. Instead her pale pink bed had always been made, the cushions neatly piled on top, her collection of Sindy dolls ranged on the window-sill.

  The room she had just walked into didn’t feel like Britt’s room at all: suitcases spewed out jumpers, skirts and sweaters; jewellery and make-up littered the dressing table; tights dripped from the drawers; and, in the corner, there was a pile of dirty laundry. For the first time her mother could ever remember, Britt had unpacked her spirit.

  Feeling like a criminal, or a mother breaking the lock on her teenage daughter’s diary, ignoring all warnings to KEEP OUT! PRIVATE!, she fumbled in Britt’s handbag.

  She hated doing this, hated feeling she was sneaking about, that she might be caught riffling through her daughter’s things. But love justified all in her book and she could tell that something in her daughter’s life was going badly wrong.

  Mary Williams was a sensible woman and she had not allowed herself to surrender to the tide of bitterness she had felt when Britt had had the miscarriage. It had indeed seemed unnecessarily cruel that for more than thirty years they had learned to live with their remote daughter, if not to understand her, and just as her icy petals were unfurling in the warmth of their love, she had lost the baby.

  And now this strangeness. One moment laughing and happy, the next silent and withdrawn. Ever since her marriage, Mary had shared every secret with her husband. But not this one. Not her fears for her daughter’s sanity. This she hugged to herself and looked for someone else who could bear it better to confide her fears to. A friend. A friend of Britt’s she could warn and ask to keep an eye, to lend a steadying hand.

  Finally she found what she was looking for, her daughter’s address book. She tucked it into the bib of her faded flowery apron and carried it to the privacy of her own bedroom.

  The book was leather-bound and heavy, bulging with hundreds of names, addresses and phone numbers. She thought for a moment of their own address book, bought in Woolworth’s twenty years ago, and almost never used. She could count on two hands the numbers she had put into it over the years. But then in this household the phone even ringing was an event that aroused surprise and, sometimes, fear. In Rothwell people still knocked on your door, or sent their children with a message, or tapped you on the shoulder in the pub. They rarely used the phone.

  As she thumbed through the book looking for a name she recognized, her heart went out to her daughter. She and Ted might not have many names in their address book, but each one meant something. So many of Britt’s entries seemed to be what she called ‘contacts’. Names with a company in brackets after, businesses, tradesmen, doctors, dentists, health clubs, squash clubs. She paused for a moment, smiling, when she got to ‘Mum & Dad’. But what about her friends? The people she knew so well that they were listed simply by their Christian names?

  In the end there were three. Ginny, Mel and Liz.

  She recalled that she had heard these names from time to time, thrown away in conversation. But it was only Liz that she had ever met, once, when she had come to London on a day-trip and had met up with Britt and her friend in Selfridges coffee shop.

  She had been longing to see her clever daughter, who had just started as secretary for a TV company, and had sat excitedly waiting to show her off to the other ladies in the party. But when they finally arrived, it had been Britt who had looked continually at her watch, clearly wanting to get away, not wanting to waste her precious lunch hour on her mother and her dull provincial friends.

  And it had been Liz who had been kind and friendly and had asked the questions Britt should have asked about their homes and their families, and what they thought of London.

  And, she remembered, flushing at the painful memory, that it had been Liz, not Britt, who had quietly picked up the bill.

  There were two numbers, one in London, crossed out, and another marked ‘cottage’. Feeling more cheerful, she wrote down both Liz’s telephone numbers and tiptoed back into her daughter’s bedroom to return the address book to her handbag.

  At least Britt had one good friend who, she was convinced, would be happy to keep an eye on her when she heard what had happened.

  ‘Goodbye, Mum, goodbye, Dad.’ Britt threw her coat into the Porsche and jumped in after it, trying not to look at the pain in their faces. She knew that they wanted reassurance, they wanted to be told that she was fine, really, that everything was all right. But she couldn’t talk about it, had not mentioned it once, wasn’t able even to put her arms round them or touch their hands. It was as though the loss of the baby had opened up again the gulf between them and the rug of intimacy, so briefly rolled out, had been pulled out from under their feet by that terrible flow of blood.

  Her only solution was to leave, to go back to London and anonymity where she could wallow in her grief among her familiar things.

  ‘Stay love. Just a few more days!’

  She saw the concern in her father’s face as he reached towards her and she wanted to respond. Instead she flinched and he dropped his hand in a futile gesture of defeat.

  ‘Oh, Britt, love,’ he whispered, looking away, a big man stooped now but proud despite his years of rough work underground, wiping away a tear. She’d never seen him cry. ‘If only it could have been me instead of the baby.’

  The love in his voice was her undoing. Its hopelessness. Its helplessness. She opened the door of the car and got out.

  ‘Oh, Dad. Don’t say that. There’s only one of you. I can always have another baby.’

  ‘Aye, well, get a move on, lass!’

  She looked away, not wanting to hear what she knew he was telling her, that he didn’t have long to go.

  ‘I love y
ou, Dad.’

  ‘And I love you, lass. Now off you go back to that den of iniquity!’

  Britt smiled and got into the car. But she knew that it wasn’t iniquity that waited for her in the fleshpots of London, but a numbing well of loneliness.

  As soon as she had watched Britt’s car roar off out of Rothwell, and had waited ten minutes to be sure she hadn’t left anything that she needed to come back for, her mother went upstairs to find the piece of paper, carefully folded in the right-hand drawer of her dressing table, on which she’d written Liz’s phone number.

  In the peace and calm of her bedroom, with the two children playing suspiciously quietly downstairs, Liz took a navy-blue chalk-stripe suit out of her wardrobe and decided it was too off-putting. If she was going to be chatting up conservative local businessmen the last thing she ought to choose was the I’ll-have-your-balls-for-breakfast look London career women loved to flaunt.

  She wondered for a moment how they were all getting on at Metro without her. She’d heard that things were going badly between Claudia and Conrad. Well, well. To lose one Programme Controller might look like an accident. But two was definitely careless.

  She snapped out of thinking about television and got back to the job in hand. What she needed was a nice tweedy suit like the one Susannah Smith had worn.

  She sat down for a moment thinking about what the clairvoyant had predicted. She’d said Liz had to make more changes, and here she was going back to work. But then, her cynical self reminded her, that was such a sweeping prediction it could mean absolutely anything.

  But what about the other glimpse into the future? She’d said that two men would love her and two men would hurt her. As Mel said, no prizes for guessing the first. She put down the suit. She wasn’t going to think about David. David was in the past. But what about this other mysterious man?

  Straightening the rose-patterned duvet, she thought wryly how little use it was getting and told herself to forget it. Since she’d moved down here to Sussex she’d hardly met a man under seventy. Chance would be a fine thing. And anyway the last thing she needed was another man who would hurt her.

  But when the phone rang, seconds later, she almost expected it to be a man’s voice. Instead it was a woman’s. A shy, halting North-country voice that sounded as though it had had to work itself up to make the call at all.

  ‘Hello, is that Liz?’

  Liz thought that if she said ‘Boo!’ loudly the voice on the other end would disappear and never come back. But instead she said, ‘Yes, this is Liz.’

  ‘This is Mary Williams, Britt Williams’s mother.’

  Britt’s mother! It was hard to think of Britt having a mother, or a father. To think that two quite ordinary people could have pooled their genes and come up with Britt. And then she remembered that in fact she had met her ten or eleven years ago. A nice, neat, rather faded lady uncomfortably dressed in a suit and flowery hat, with a look of permanent surprise that she could have possibly given birth to this sharp-suited, elegant, clever young woman who clearly found spending five minutes with her a bore.

  And Liz remembered how she’d felt sorry for the woman, being shown up in front of her friends by her daughter’s obvious embarrassment in her.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but I really needed to ask you a favour.’

  Liz felt her anger bubble up. The woman was going to ask her to do something for Britt!

  ‘It’s about my daughter.’ Not noticing Liz’s silence in her eagerness to get it off her chest she rushed on. ‘I expect you know about the baby?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Liz could hear the sharpness in her own voice and didn’t try to stop it. Did the bloody woman want congratulations? How exciting for you, you’re going to be a granny! You must be thrilled!

  ‘Oh, yes I know about the baby all right.’

  Britt’s mother’s voice dropped a little, as though she was continuing the conversation in church. ‘I’m afraid she lost it last week.’

  ‘Lost it?’ For a moment Liz didn’t grasp her meaning.

  ‘Yes. She had a miscarriage. She’d had a narrow escape on the motorway driving up and nearly got herself killed. The doctor says it was delayed shock.’

  So Britt had lost the baby. Liz felt a wave of emotion, which she recognized with a slight sense of guilt, as satisfaction.

  ‘How is she taking it?’

  ‘That’s why I’m ringing. Badly I’m afraid. Sometimes she seems fine, not a care in the world, then she gets moody, won’t talk for hours, just shuts herself away. I’m worried about her rattling around alone in that great barn of a flat. I wondered if . . .’

  Liz waited. She could hear in Mary Williams’s halting voice how easy it was for her to do favours, and how hard it was to ask for them.

  ‘. . . if you could keep an eye on her. I don’t know any of her other friends and I remembered how kind you’d been. Do you think you could?’

  For a moment Liz felt blindingly, furiously angry. How dare the woman ask her, of all people, to look after Britt when her husband was the father of the bloody baby?

  And then, fighting back hysterical laughter, she knew why. Because Britt, economical with the truth at the best of times, had never told her who the father was.

  She toyed with the idea of telling her now. But people didn’t get pregnant by their best friends’ husbands where she came from, and Liz saw it would break her heart.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Williams, I’m afraid I don’t live in London any more.’

  ‘Oh.’ Clearly it wasn’t the answer she was expecting. Liz could hear the disappointment in her voice and relented.

  ‘I could ask one of our friends, Mel, to give her a ring if you like.’

  Liz could just hear the response if she did. ‘Me phone Britt! You’re kidding! So she’s lost the baby. It just shows there is a God after all!’

  ‘Oh. Well, if you could.’

  She knew that Mrs Williams was disappointed in her, but it would have to do. Anyway, in spite of what her mother said, if Liz knew Britt, she’d be sitting at home, painting her nails, thinking about her career and deciding that maybe, putting everything in perspective, it had all been for the best after all.

  Britt opened her front door and stepped into the sunlit hall. She had expected to fall over a pile of the newspapers she’d forgotten to cancel and to find herself knee-deep in mail-shots, bills and late Christmas cards from hopeful tradesmen. Instead her mail was in neat piles, the newspapers stacked inconspicuously under the bamboo table in the hall, and a bright red poinsettia in a pot stood on top, a present from her cleaning lady, Mrs Wills, who had obviously been in this morning. Of course, it was Tuesday. She had lost all sense of time at home.

  Britt had always loathed poinsettias, associating them with poky front parlours and cheap Christmas cards, but the sight of this one almost made her cry again. A week ago she would have thought it vulgar and embarrassing. Now she was touched. And in some strange unconscious way the blood-red of its leaves seemed to her symbolic. A reminder. And to her surprise she was glad to have it.

  Flinging her suitcase on to her bed, she walked slowly round the flat as the late afternoon sunshine slanted in through the vast windows, catching every tiny mote of dust and turning it to gold. It was the light that had made her fall for this place. ‘How could you live in this huge glass box?’ some people had asked her, horrified by the merciless glare of a summer’s day, hating the idea of having to pull blinds down against the midday sun, as though it were the Mediterranean, instead of the East End of London.

  But that, Britt told herself, was because they’d never been here for the sunrise, when the whole flat became flamingo-pink, or watched the sun slipping slowly down over the Wren churches of the City of London.

  Slowly she wandered from room to room, picking up familiar objects, straightening cushions, stroking the rough wool of her white sofa. She had so dreaded walking in here to find only emptiness. But to her immense relief she found herself moment by mome
nt slipping back into her own life.

  Realizing that it was beginning to get dark and that the heating was turned off, she shivered, and stood up to switch it on. Then, thinking again, she knelt down instead on the rug in front of the huge fireplace, and started to plait old newspapers into firelighters and lay them neatly in the grate as she had watched her mother do. Finally she put a match to the fire and waited for the flames to leap up in the spreading darkness.

  She was home.

  As the tongues of flame flickered up Britt saw them reflected in the brass of the fender and in a silver object on a small table nearby. Not recognizing it, she stood up and discovered that it was the silver-framed photograph David had put out of Jamie and Daisy.

  Staring at it in the firelight, she knew that there was one more thing she must do before she took up the threads of her old life and that, unless she did it, there could be no chance for her of peace or happiness.

  On an impulse she went back to the hall, picked up her coat and her bag, took her car keys from the decorative metal hook, fashioned out of oil drums from Haiti, which hung beside the front door and ran out of the flat.

  Despite the intense cold which was hardening into frost and cloaking the countryside in freezing fog, it was warm and cosy in the bathroom. Bathtime was always Liz’s favourite time, not least, she had to admit, because it meant bedtime was finally in view and she could look forward to five minutes’ peace in front of the fire with a glass of wine watching television. Providing, that was, they went to bed.

  This had been a sore point until, ‘pushed to the end of her tether’, she’d finally taken Ginny’s advice and ruthlessly insisted on the same bedtime every night despite all pleas from Jamie that he had pins and needles, cramp, a tummy ache, was thirsty, or couldn’t sleep because he was lonely. Now life was a lot easier. Sometimes she had a frisson of fear that he would turn out to have been telling the truth and that the pins and needles were a little known symptom, immediately recognizable to the good mother, of viral meningitis. But so far he had still been alive in the morning and she had her evenings back.