So when she finds herself, half an hour before her mother is due to arrive, trying to see it through her mother’s eyes for things that might cause offence, trying to have every trace of Patrick neutralised or erased, it’s like a betrayal of him.
Margaret Ann clutches the piece of paper in her spare hand, following the directions Jane gave her on the phone. That awful phone call, Jane so flat and distant and final, ordering her to get a pen and paper and reciting the new address and phone number, and afterwards she fell to her knees, kinking, her breath coming in spasms, and it was a good five minutes before she could get up and straighten her blouse and go back to preparing the dinner. She pushes it from her mind as she begins to check off the numbers of the flats. Fifty-four Allenby is a respectable-looking red-brick mansion block, ornate black railings and mosaic steps up to the front door. There are hanging baskets of busy lizzies, purple and pink and red, either side of the entrance, and a shiny brass intercom with individual buttons for each flat. Her bowels are churning, watery. She takes a shaky breath and peers at her face in the distorted gilt reflection, dabs the beads of sweat off her upper lip and thumbs a tendril of hair back under the brim of her hat, then pushes the button for No. 54.
Inside, Jane starts at the buzzer, even though she’s expecting it. She goes slowly over to the intercom. The baby kicks at her belly. It’s been kicking and wriggling all morning, much more than usual. Perhaps it can feel the nerves, the adrenalin. She strokes at her huge, taut drum of a belly, tries to soothe the baby inside. Patrick Michael, little Patrick Junior, it’s him and her against the world, and when he sees his son he’ll come to her, he will, she knows he will, she just has to get through this, the next few weeks, days, minutes . . . The buzzer goes again, accusing, discordant, and she takes a breath. Just before pressing it she turns one last time to check there’s no trace of him, nothing offensive, nothing her mother can take umbrage at.
But he’s here: Margaret Ann can feel him, sense him, even smell him. She stands and stares, taking the whole place in, as Jane busies herself with her jacket and hat. The one wall papered in brown-and-cream fleur-de-lys, the green velour armchair and rust-coloured shagpile rug, the ceramic-tiled gas fireplace. The cabinet of records and the foldaway record player, the lurid yellow poster advertising something called M*A*S*H, the framed poem on the wall. With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Try to be happy. How dare he? she thinks. Then she wonders if it’s Jane’s, and her eyes suddenly fill. Don’t blink, she tells herself. If she blinks, she’ll blub. The place smells male. It reeks of him. Traces of aftershave caught in the soft furnishings, the stale whiff of tobacco. No sign of her daughter, here, but that sad poem. A yellow mackintosh hanging meekly on the back of the door, a hasty pot of blue hyacinths. There’s no place for Jane, here. She shouldn’t be here. It’s wrong, all wrong, all of it. A sour taste rises in her mouth: she swallows it down and coughs to loosen the knot in her chest. Turns away so Jane won’t see her face, as if she’s taking in the rest of the room. Jane’s sewing machine in the corner: her eyes fall on it with relief. Something to comment on; something to say.
‘You’ve settled in, then,’ she makes herself say, but from the way Jane’s face stiffens she knows that everything she says is going to be taken as an insult, a criticism. She cannot meet her daughter’s eye. She bustles – feels herself bustling – into the galley kitchen and starts unloading her tubs and packages. Jane follows, huge, cowlike, behind her, barefoot in a loose orange dress that does nothing for her. Her face is round, girl-like; a big boiled sweet of a face; she’s piled on the pounds since Margaret last saw her. You’ll never keep him like that, Margaret wants to say. She thinks it with something almost approaching relish, then hates herself for thinking it.
‘Meals for at least the first fortnight,’ she says, opening the small box of a freezer and packing the food in. ‘Chicken casserole and vegetable casserole, you’ll see I’ve them labelled, and those Tupperwares are shepherd’s pie. All you’ll have to do is take them out the night before and let them thaw, then warm them in the oven, but do take heed you cook them through until they’re piping. I’ve baked a fruitcake, too, in grease paper here; if you keep it in its tin it’ll last. That’s good for when you’re feeding, you’ll need to keep your strength up then.’
‘Arval bread,’ Jane says, a strange smile on her face.
‘Beg pardon?’
‘Arval bread. Cake for eating at funerals. That’s what the old ones call it, in’t it? If you’d only see your face.’
Margaret Ann stares at her daughter. She’s gone in the head, she thinks. Jane looks back at her with an expression she can’t fathom. She has a sudden flash of the girls as toddlers, when you’d caught them at something they knew they shouldn’t be doing.
‘O Janey won’t you think of coming home?’ It’s out before she can stop herself. ‘I own we’ve been over this and you’ve made yourself clear but it isn’t too late, Janey, it’s still not too late. We’ll help you, love. We’ll redo your room and put a cot in there and when the babby’s big enough it can move to Helen’s old. You can get a job in Tickton, or Beverley, we can work something out. Oh and don’t worry what folks might say, Ann Spratley and the like, they need know no more than we tell them. And wasn’t Joan Lamplugh’s youngest carrying on with a married man down in Beverley, so it’s not as if she’ll be able to throw stones anyhow. Please, Janey. Oh, the state of me, look how I’m shaking. I didn’t mean to say it like this, but there you go, it’s out now. Come back home, love. Come back to us.’
Jane blinks at her, slow-eyed, as if the words are bluebottles to be brushed vaguely away.
‘Would you like a coffee?’ her daughter says, excessively polite. ‘I’d offer you tea, only I think we’re out. And a bite to eat, you must be famished. We’ve got biscuits, or there’s Battenberg, boughten, but it’s quite nice.’
The fridge clicks and hums, adjusting itself to its new load. The two of them stand.
She gives way first.
‘A coffee would be – would be . . .’
Jane stands aside to let her pass. ‘Go on and sit yourself down. You’ve been travelling, it works you up, I know. I’ll bring it through.’
The coffee is aigre and tepid; weak. She turns the cup in her hands, forces herself to sip. She’s played her cards too early. Blarting it out like that: stupid, stupid woman. Try again: but how? Which moment to choose, which tone to take?
They sit. Jane doesn’t seem to feel the need to talk. She’s not even said thank you for the food. She knows that the food wasn’t just an offering, but an excuse. Margaret Ann suddenly wonders if he’ll have the benefit. Sit here forking his way through her shepherd’s pie, her casserole. Oh, she hates him. It’s strong, this hate, strong and black. God save us. She bites off a hunk of Battenberg, swills her mouth with coffee to swallow down the claggy mass. She tries to think of something to say.
There is a trio of photographs of Jane and a man on the inside shelf of the glass-doored cabinet: she hasn’t noticed it until now. Framed in a cheap frame, the sort you’d buy in the bargain bin at Woolworth’s. It’s him. Part of her wants to reach for it, to take it out and study it: she’s never seen a picture of him before. As soon as she has the thought, another part of her rises up indignant: imagine if it was Jack, and the other woman had pictures of him and her on display. It’s wrong, all of it, so horribly, terribly wrong: her daughter is making a catastrophic mistake. She must be made to see, she must.
Margaret gets to her feet abruptly, or as abruptly as she can, and sets down her coffee cup with shaking hands. She can’t breathe in here. It’s making her sick, being in here, his flat, she can feel it rising again, heaving and greasy, the disgust.
‘Does his wife know, yet? And is he planning on telling her?’
Jane blinks at her again, mawky, stupid, and for one pure instant, she hates her daughter, wants to lace her, lam her, hurt her. ‘Me and your father didn
’t raise you to this,’ she finds herself saying, and then on and on she goes, everything she’s promised not to say, everything she’s only thought to herself in the deepest dark of night; it’s like a boil, now that she’s lanced it, the pus and the poison spewing out, and Jane just sitting there, heaped in the armchair, hands on her huge insolent belly, not saying a word, she should be scringing back in shame but she’s not, she’s got her martyr-face on and there’s nothing Margaret Ann can say to hurt her, she’s even maybe enjoying it, the look of her, and this makes things a thousand times worse and somehow goads her into going further than she ever thought of going.
When it’s over, the sudden silence between them is ringing. Jane still hasn’t said a word: not one flaming word. Margaret’s whole body is trembling; she’s all iv a atterill, as her own mother might have said: some poisonous vapour gotten into her blood and bones.
‘I’m sorry, but it had to be said,’ she says.
Jane heaves up and reaches for the coffee cups and cake plates, nests them carefully inside each other on the little round tray.
‘Let me take that,’ Margaret says. She reaches for it, but Jane holds firm. ‘Will you let me take that, dammit.’ She might as well not have spoken. She follows Jane into the kitchen. Her legs are shaky beneath her, she’s toltering like a sheep with the staggers. Her daughter not saying anything in return is the worst of all.
‘Unbethink thissen,’ she pleads as she leaves, emotion coarsening her accent. ‘Unbethink thissen and come back home.’
When she’s gone, Jane opens the freezer and lifts out the first soft package, beginning to crisp at the edges with ice crystals. Chicken Casserole, her mother has written in pencilled capitals on a masking-tape strip. She rips it open and lets the contents slide in a congealed heap into the pedal bin. The next one, another Chicken Casserole. Another, this time Mixed Veg. She opens the first Tupperware, Shepherd’s Pie, then pauses. It’s a fortnight’s worth of food, after all, and in this thick June stupor, the heat and the final weeks’ sloth, she isn’t going to cook and portion food herself, she knows she isn’t. Patrick will be over as much as he can to get things ready, but he can’t so much as boil an egg himself. The initial surge of cold, pure, intensely satisfying rage is dissipating, slightly. She clicks the lid back down and slides the box back in the freezer and doing so gives her a grim, unexpected satisfaction that she’s beaten her mother, after all. She’s vanquished her: one more battle won. She ambles into the living room to lie on the rug by the telephone, in case Patrick phones: it takes her too long to get from the bedroom, these days. On the way, she opens cupboards, liberates cigarettes and ashtrays and shoes and scarves. Unbethink thissen, she mocks, aloud. Her voice is thin in the small, dark room. She pictures her mother’s lined, pinched, hateful old face. Her accent thickened to almost a parody of itself. Jane tells herself again that she’s won. She has. She’s got what she wanted: her mum won’t come again, and that’s what she wanted, isn’t it? She’s all of a flacker inside, a panicked sparrow in her chest blind-eyed and beating. She eases herself down onto the rug, onto her right-hand side, like the midwife said, closes her eyes and practises her breathing.
Chelsea and Westminster, July 1973
Patrick’s there for the birth. Against all the odds, and her sternly dampened expectations: he’s there. He’s there when the first cramps come, and the seeping waters. There to ring the hospital and ask when to bring her in, there to order the taxi and to push the wheelchair to the ward. There breathing with her, her breath a bubble on top of each contraction, rising as the pain rises. There when the great muscle of her uterus heaves, her body rippling and stretching to ripping point and back again. There when the obstetrician clamps and pulls the baby by the head, draws it out into the world.
It is a difficult labour and his being there is what gets her through. It takes thirty-six hours, and a slit perineum, and feet in stirrups and forceps and haemorrhaging and talk of a transfusion of blood. Even when the gas-and-air wears off, even through the delirium and pain, it keeps her going like a pulse, he’s there, he’s there, and surely that’s a sign.
‘Stay with me, Jane,’ he keeps on saying, ‘stay with me, Jane, stay with me,’ and she thinks: now we have to be together.
But the baby isn’t the boy she hoped – no, knew – it would be. When they hand it to her, the little grub of a thing, a scrunched-up, boiled-looking face and open wailing mouth, its skull dented and misshapen from the forceps, Congratulations, Mum, and here’s your beautiful healthy little girl, she knows there has been a mistake. Congratulations, Sir, the midwife says, as she passes the baby washed and swaddled to Patrick, You’re now a father. But he is already, she wants to scream. Even now, she can’t give him something he doesn’t already have: and the baby not being a boy is a symbol, a message, that things are not going to change.
How could it have gone so wrong? All of them, midwives and friends, everyone she’s spoken to, said a woman’s intuition is always right. The weight she put on: all the books say that you put on more for a boy than a girl, because boy-babies are generally bigger. The quizzes she did, in library books and magazines: all of them, every time, a boy. She was carrying low, not high. When she craved food, it was salty, not sweet: nuts and crisps, Ryvita crackers with marmite, cheese. Her legs – she’s sure this wasn’t just her imagination – were hairier than normal, because the testosterone does that. Her pupils dilated when she looked at herself for more than a minute in the mirror – one of her flatmates swore that was a sure-fire way of telling. Even when she did silly things, old wives’ things, like adding up the age she was when she conceived (twenty-three) and the age of her partner (thirty-three) and the month in which she conceived (October), it is even, to indicate a boy.
She is incoherent with grief and despair.
‘Will you stay?’ she gabbles at Patrick, over and over. ‘Will you stay even though the baby’s not a boy?’
‘Shh,’ he says, not understanding anything. ‘She’s healthy, that’s what matters, that’s all that ever matters. Of course it doesn’t matter that the baby’s not a boy.’
It’s not just that the baby is a girl, of course: it’s confronting the knowledge she’s tried to hold at bay for so long, the sheer terror of what will happen next. They try and calm her down. They say it’s the exhaustion – the hormones – the drugs – but she is inconsolable and in the end they have to sedate her.
After five days – she’s barely out of hospital – he goes back, back to Belfast and on to Donegal, where Catriona and little Veronica Louise are for the summer, with her parents and her brother and his two children and his sister-in-law and her little baby. They’re a big clan, Catriona’s family. Patrick has used the opportunity of their gathering to come to London and fit in extra consultations: that’s been the excuse, and it’s not just an excuse, because he needs money, now that he’s got a whole new family to support. He’s been away too long already – twelve days in total, it’s been the longest yet – and he has to go back before they get suspicious, toss wee Nicky in the air and play happy family with Catriona’s horde.
The other family: the real family. Jane thinks that she wants to die.
The baby has no name, those first few days. Her name in hospital is Baby Moorhouse, because Jane has gone through all of the appointments under her own name, her maiden name, her only name. She could have called the baby Patricia, she supposes, or Michaela – but these names seem a mockery. For the day or so they have at home, she’s simply ‘the baby’. In the end, in a panic, amid the fluster of Patrick’s leaving for the airport, they settle on Lara, inspired by the Doctor Zhivago poster covering up the peeling paint on the back of the bathroom door. But she doesn’t have a better suggestion for a name. The baby’s sheer physical need for her has stirred something deep, primal; beyond exhaustion or disappointment or any of the usual human emotions. It’s as if something in her knows that if she breaks down now, she will be irredeemably broken. So Lara the baby is: Patrick�
��s last, desperate suggestion. Thrown over his shoulder as he changes into a newly dry-cleaned jacket and shirt, and checks the mirror to make sure there’s no baby-sick or telltale signs on him. For this reason, he doesn’t, says he can’t, hold Lara one last time before he goes.
Helen comes to see her: cries at how tiny little Lara is, says how can Patrick abandon them?, that Jane should pack up her things and go back home.
‘How are things at home?’ Jane asks, and Helen tries to bluff but Jane knows her sister too well and knows she’s lying. Their father, Helen finally confesses, is iller than anyone cares to admit. He’s always had a temper on him, and in the last couple of years the sisters had put his sudden rages down to fear of retirement, which was imminent, and his gammy leg, which gave him more trouble each winter than the last. ‘Ee’s a right mardy arse,’ they’d say to each other, imitating the accents they were both trying to soften and lose. ‘Ee’s right radged this morning.’ They mimicked him, too, when he stomped out of the house to go to his damp, gluey shed and his beloved model aeroplanes. ‘Wert born in a shed, tha gormless lass!’ ‘Tha’s not use nor ornament.’ They tried to encourage their mother to laugh, too, as a defence against the ways he’d yell at her. He knew they were laughing at him, and this made things even worse. But now, Helen says, the GP finally convinced him to be seen by a specialist at the hospital, who thought that he was in the grip of dementia. It explained the depression, the violent mood swings, the sudden lashings-out; the way he’d stopped seeing the neighbours or friends, isolating himself in his grey tower of fear and shame. It might explain, Helen says, why he’d refused point-blank to come to London or even to speak to Jane on the phone. It wasn’t that he was angry at her, or ashamed, it was just another symptom of the illness.
All the Beggars Riding Page 15