A robin beaks at the hard, black earth. There is a spider’s web, perfectly strung from trellis to magnolia tree, the dew-beads on it like the condensed and solidified remnants of a caught dream. That sounds overdone, she thinks, even as she thinks it, but it’s what the day is like: it feels overwrought, unreal, and there is a strange lucidity to everything, as if she is taking in more than you normally think and see, in slower motion.
He has just said, What if she moved into his Earls Court flat and had the baby, and they would see what happened then?
She has not yet said anything in return: does not quite trust herself to speak. They went over it, again and again, last night. The conversation, the loops and grooves of it, was no different from the many faltering discussions about the situation they have had over the past few months, each time one or the other of them, but usually her, has tried to end it. He can’t leave his wife, not yet. Nicky (she tries to hold herself steady when he talks of ‘Cat’ and ‘Nicky’, hating the easy familiarity of it; when she has to refer to them she calls them stiffly, by their full names, Catriona and Veronica Louise) is only just a year old and Cat’s had a hard time of it, she hasn’t found motherhood easy, it was a difficult birth and she hasn’t adjusted. Besides, their families, the church, the marriage. He has a duty to them, she has to understand, and he can’t leave yet. When Nicky’s a year or so older, when things are different. But for now, he can’t, he won’t, he’s not leaving them.
She should leave, then and there, she knows. If she wasn’t so exhausted, she tells herself. If they weren’t so isolated in this bloody Suffolk cottage. If, if. There are always excuses. She is learning this now, has learned this over the course of their affair, and says to herself: this is the shape your life will take from here on in if you don’t leave now. Half-promises, and endless excuses. Nothing is going to change, she tells herself. If he doesn’t leave now, he’ll never leave. When Nicky’s a year older will become when Nicky’s in school, when Nicky’s left primary school, when Nicky’s left home. If he wants her, if he wants them, he has to do it, now.
‘Jane?’ he says.
They might be on a stage set, or a film set. The day has that feel to it. An audience, watching, the decision they are going to make.
‘Your wife and daughter,’ she says, dully, not even bothering to make it into a question. It’s not a question: if it ever was, he’s answered it now, made clear his choice.
‘You know the way things are,’ he says. ‘I wish I had a different answer. All I can say is . . .’
Leave, Jane, leave, Jane, leave, leave, leave.
There is the distant lap and peal of church bells. A wedding, perhaps. Joyous. They listen to the bells, rising and falling, clamouring. All that they will never have. She turns the mug in her hands. She had thought they would both decide: they’d have the baby and be together, with everything that entailed, or they’d abort it (make yourself say it) and end the affair there and then. It doesn’t seem to her that there’s another way. And yet what he’s saying – except surely he wouldn’t, would he?, say what he’s just said unless he truly believed that one day, not now, but one day – maybe indeed in a year, or maybe when the baby was born . . . Her dark, secret, sudden hope is that the baby is a boy. He has a daughter. If she could give him a son. All men, don’t they?, really want a son. If she could get through the next few months . . .
She’s realised that she’s allowed the thought of it, of what he’s suggesting. Hope is a hardy weed, she thinks, grimly, the hardiest. It would grow in this neglected winter garden. It sprouts up at the slightest, meanest drop of sustenance; it clings, conserves, keeps going. Wrings every possible drop of nutrient from a chance comment, a throwaway remark, something that could be made to mean commitment.
‘When you say’, she says, ‘we’ll see what happens . . .’
So many of their conversations are like this: silences, insinuations, things too delicate or devastating to quite be said.
‘I don’t know, Jane,’ he says, and he looks wretched. ‘All that I do know is that whatever way my life goes, it can’t be without you.’
The church bells ring again, a final burst. Those words, she wants to say, aren’t yours to give. You gave them already – on your wedding day – you must have given them and meant them.
‘I need,’ she tries again. ‘I’d need your word. I’d need a promise from you.’
‘I promise you, Jane,’ he says. ‘I promise.’ Even as he says it she is aware he’s not actually promising anything. It will be, you’re not stupid, Jane, a life of half and broken promises.
She has an appointment at the doctor’s surgery tomorrow morning, 8 a.m., the earliest they could give her. In order that she didn’t and couldn’t change her mind, from whatever they decided today. If they are having the baby, this will be her booking appointment: the midwife will take blood samples, weigh her, measure her. If they aren’t, then at less than ten weeks, a termination can be booked before the first trimester is out.
By this week, your baby measures about 2½ cm in length and weighs just under 2g. His eyelids have grown to cover his eyes, and fused shut to allow the development of his eyeballs; he will not open them until the 26th week. Tiny earlobes are visible. His wrists are more developed; his ankles have formed and his fingers and toes can be seen. Already he looks more like a tiny human being. His basic physiology is in place.
If she called it Patrick Michael. If she gave it his name.
How would she tell her parents? It was an accident, she could say. A one-night stand. The father was – was a sailor, or an airline pilot, someone it’s not possible to contact again. They’ll be appalled, but who cares? But is it fair to lie to a child about who its father is? Except she wouldn’t, of course: the baby would know its father, and by the time it was old enough for things to matter – how old is that, say, school age? That’s five years from now, in five years who knows what will happen? He surely won’t still be with Catriona out of duty five long years from now.
She wants this baby, so, so badly. His baby, their baby. So very badly.
‘I wish I’d met you earlier, Jane,’ he says, as if he’s reading her thoughts, ‘before. If I’d met you before, none of this would have happened.’
If he’d met her before he met Catriona she’d have still been in school. She doesn’t say this. She is used, already, to swallowing back the things like this; ignoring them.
He sighs and turns to pour more coffee. They made it on the stove in an old, Scandinavian-style ceramic pot. They burnt it; it is bitter. She shakes her head.
‘I don’t know if I should be drinking this.’
He puts the pot down; balances it on a slanting flagstone.
‘So what do you think?’
‘What do I think, Patrick?’ She tries her hardest to sound brisk but she hears the pleading, the weakness in her voice, and a shudder of self-loathing goes through her. Think of how you attracted him in the first place. You mustn’t be needy. You mustn’t be weak. He despises that. I think I’m going to be sick. She gets to her feet and stumbles out of the rugs towards the wisteria trellis, hands on thighs, bending, tries to breathe. The air tastes like water, sweet and cold. She steadies. His hand is on her back.
‘It’s all right,’ she says. ‘It’s passed.’
‘Have you been . . .’ He hesitates. ‘Having morning sickness, I mean.’ He looks sheepish as he says it: it hadn’t occurred to him to ask before.
‘No. A sort of dizziness, sometimes. Tiredness. But I haven’t been sick.’
‘You’re lucky.’ If he goes on to say, Cat had the auld morning sickness pretty bad, so she did, she will turn and walk away now, out of the gate, down the muddy lane, to the station, and she will close her ears to him if he calls or comes after her and screw it all, screw everything she’ll leave behind.
You’re always making these resolutions these days, she says to herself.
But he doesn’t say any more, just strokes her back, kisses the
top of her head.
There is an old birds’ nest in the wisteria, a shredded-wheat bundle, tilted sideways. The church bells start to chime: it must be midday, now. They will have to leave soon. They must pack up their things and shut up the house, give the key to the woman down the road, get a taxi to the train station at Wickham Market. The train is at one; there are trains only every couple of hours on Sundays and they have to get back to London so that Patrick can get to the airport for the evening flight home; the one o’clock train is the latest they can leave it.
A patch of wild honesty to her right-hand side, the dirty papery husks peeling back to show the pearlescent ovals within. She automatically reaches out, sliding her fingernail between husk and disc and prising it loose, picking off the seeds. She puts them in her pocket. She’ll grow them, back in London, in pots on the windowsill, saving the seeds, year by year, in brown envelopes with the date printed on them.
‘What are you doing?’ he says.
In a stack of paperbacks piled on a chair by the bed, a jumble of detective stories and birdwatching guides bought in bulk from the same charity shop, as the pencilled price in all of them indicates, she found a slim book of poetry. Winter Trees, it was called. She picked it out because it seemed the newest, its covers still shiny, though the pages inside were beginning to swell and warp with the damp of the barely used cottage. She read it last night, while Patrick walked into the village to find a phone box and make his nightly call to Belfast. She doesn’t read much poetry, but she is taken with these poems, and one in particular. You will feel an absence presently / Growing beside you like a tree. She puts the paperback into her overnight case when they leave.
Nothing has changed but everything has. In not making a decision a choice is made. They haven’t quite been able to agree, or agreed in time, that they definitely won’t have it. He’s holding her, now. They’re clinging to each other as if they’re in free-fall. He’s much bigger than her, over six foot, to her five foot two. A bear to her bird. That’s part of it, too, of course. He whelms her, physically, as well as everything else. He saturates her sight. When he is in front of her, when he is enveloping her, his big arms and his beard, his broad chest and solid shoulders, she literally cannot see beyond him: there is nothing but him. I would do it all again, I wouldn’t trade anything, not even the outcome, not even if I knew the outcome from the start.
Routh, East Riding of Yorkshire,
Christmas 1972
The house in Yorkshire is solid, square; whitewashed nineteenth-century bricks. It squats just off the main road, a few hundred yards from the village hall. Jane’s mother, as well as the Spratleys who live in the adjacent cottage, and Mrs Dunning from the rectory, hold keys to the hall. A small band of Scouts meets there on Tuesday evenings, although most boys go to Tickton down the road. Church coffee mornings, Harvest Fair. The occasional bring-and-buy sale or parish meeting. This is all there is to Routh. The church and the graveyard, the village hall, the garage, a row of cottages, a few houses and a couple of farms.
Inside, the house is dark. Dark burgundy curtains and wallpaper, dark mahogany table and chairs, north-facing windows that in the winter months let in a damp, sliding sort of light. Jane’s bedroom, and Helen’s beside hers, are both at the front of the house, looking onto the roads, the fields, the sky. Quilted counterpanes and lavender sachets in the wardrobes. They have lived here all of Jane’s life: her father had a bad leg injury during the war – in a training exercise, ignominiously – and has since had a desk job at RAF Leconfield in Beverley. The garden at the back is concreted over, to save the effort of mowing. There is a shed, where he cuts and glues his model aeroplanes: the planes Jane used to love, then pretended an interest in, and later ignored. Behind the shed, pale, nudging clumps of mushrooms grow.
She left it as late as possible coming back here. Patrick had come over for the practice’s Christmas lunch, which was hellish – they went to the French restaurant around the corner and all of the time she had to pretend to giggle with the receptionists and the other nurses while the partners quaffed wine and made mock-speeches; then the girls decided to go on out somewhere while the surgeons went to the pub, and she could feel their precious last few hours together frittered away and there was nothing either of them could do about it. She waited shivering outside his flat for half an hour when she managed to get away, but it got too cold and she had to give up and go home, so in the end all they had was a hurried goodbye-and-merry-Christmas in the morning, before he got the Tube back to Heathrow for his flight. It almost undid everything. Then she got back to Routh: and it was the dreariest, dampest day of the year, and her childhood home, the familiar creaks and smells, and she thought, with a dreary sort of despair: no. I’ve left this behind, now.
The day before Christmas Eve they go for a walk, Jane and Helen. Already, just after lunch (vegetable broth, white margarined bread, wet slices of ham, beakers of orange squash), the day is giving up, closing in; pressed to thin lines on the horizon. They trudge along the main road west to Tickton, single file. They had each, without discussing it, wanted to get out of the oppressive atmosphere of the house – their father’s mood swings, their mother’s brittle, pleading gaiety – but outside, they find it difficult to talk to each other. A few desultory comments on the weather, on the direction they’re headed – and they huddle down into their scarves and duffel coats and walk on. A handful of crows, ragged scraps of soot, wheels against the dull sky; a flock of starlings scatters like torn paper. Beyond the village hall and the cottages, beyond the garage and the few houses, like lone teeth in the landscape, there is nothing but the flat road and fields. They press in to the verge, from time to time, to let a car go by. The mud clumps on their boots until its own weight makes it fall. Their breath raw, snagging in their throats. The fields to each side of them are bare, or else dirty with stubble and stray rotting corn. Occasionally they pass a field with sheep, yellow-toothed and yellow-wigged; old, crafty eyes in thin stupid faces.
It takes about half an hour to reach the inn at Tickton. Inside is a warm, slow fug of bodies and smoke; the spicy, earthy smell of mulling wine; a fire in the hearth. They shoulder their way through the dour locals and the shrieking gaggles of home-for-Christmases, and squeeze in to the bar.
Two mulled wines, Helen has ordered, before Jane has a chance to ask for something else – something non-alcoholic. The barmaid ladles out two sloppy beakers, Helen pays and they push on through to the back room in search of somewhere to sit. Helen sees some girls she knows and goes over to speak to them. Jane hangs back, stirs at the clove-studded orange with her little finger. Tries to look as if she hasn’t realised she’s on her own. She is gone too long, and home too little, these days, to keep up old school friendships. She just couldn’t move back here, she thinks again. She couldn’t. Yet the thought of living in his flat makes her feel sick inside. A sickness deeper than her bones. She dabs the orange slice, bobs it under, watches it swell and disintegrate. She is thirteen weeks, now: far enough along that she could tell people, if she wanted to. The baby is the size of half a banana inside her, and it’s physiologically complete: right down to the patterns on its fingertips. Not having it is no longer an option. Luckily, she is not quite showing yet. She is so thin and slight that any extra weight shows up on her, usually, at once: but she’s lost so much of late, with Patrick, and everything else, that now she just looks back to normal. For the moment, her trousers still fit, just about, although she has to undo the top button after meals, and her cable-knit jumpers are thick enough to cover her rounding stomach. She’s let out the seams of a smart dress for Christmas day, and she’ll wear a cardigan over it. She wears her dressing gown over her pyjamas when she goes downstairs, when she’s walking from her bedroom to the bathroom, even when she goes to the toilet in the night: but the house is cold – her father doesn’t believe in central heating – and so no one comments on it.
A crib in her bedroom? Helen’s room a nursery?
Sh
e looks over to where Helen is talking and laughing with the girls she knows. She has never felt so alone. The need to telephone Patrick, to speak to him, hear his voice, comes over her so intensely that for a moment she cannot breathe. There is no phone box in Routh, and he can’t phone her at her parents’ house. Her mother would answer the phone and hear his voice, ask questions – or deliberately not ask questions – until Jane fumbled and caught herself out in some or other lie. They last spoke three days ago, just as she was leaving London, and they won’t be able to talk again until after Christmas, when she’s back, and he can find an excuse to slip away from his family. There is a telephone behind the bar, she knows. She could pretend it was a wrong number if his wife answered. She could pretend it was a message from the clinic. A New Year appointment rescheduled. An infection. His wife won’t know – will she? – that the clinic is shut for the whole fortnight. Of course she’ll know. It could be – what could it be? A wrong number is best. She’s never rung Patrick’s number, but she knows it by heart. She knows because she saw his address on his driving licence and memorised it, and later called Directory Enquiries, heart thudding, and the voice on the other end of the line read it out, bored and efficient, unaware of how significant – how powerful – was that string of numbers. She can’t call him. She can’t. Imagine if his wife answered the phone and passed it to him, or he picked it up and she was there, and they had to fake a brief wrong-number conversation. He doesn’t even know she knows the number. He’d think that something was wrong, that it must be an emergency. It is an emergency! She is pregnant, she is pregnant, they are pregnant. Occasionally, in flashes, it seems preposterous, even to her. Sylvia Plath, again: a poem from The Colossus, this time. I’m a means, I’m a stage, I’m a cow in calf. I’ve eaten a bag of green apples, boarded the train there’s no getting off. She’s pencilled inside, in her tidy script: Christmas, 1972. The words make her smile, the mixture of wit and fear, bravado. She’s learned them by heart and she murmurs them to herself. Money’s new-minted in this fat purse. It is a comfort to her to think that she has no choice, that things have their own pace now and she’s just the vehicle, moved inexorably along, forces beyond her control.
All the Beggars Riding Page 13