‘So?’
‘I don’t know that, either. I thought I would, but I kept delaying it. I didn’t understand it myself. I left it till it was too late for it to be a simple procedure – and then I left it even longer. And then – well, then I went ahead with it because it was the only thing left to do. Perhaps I was punishing myself.’
‘But you never wanted to keep it?’
‘Her.’
‘Her. Never wanted to keep her?’
She wheeled to face him, putting a hand across her stomach as if the memory of her pregnancy was a physical presence inside her. ‘What do you think, Connor? Of course I fucking wanted to. Do you have any idea what it feels like to go through a pregnancy and give birth, then give your baby away? The violence of my loss was like – never mind. That’s over. I didn’t know what else to do, is the real answer. It was your baby. Gaby was the person I loved most in the world. Stefan was the person I thought I loved second best. We’d wrecked all of that – and I didn’t know what to do. I was on my own.’
Connor looked at her. The austere face seemed to have fractured, and now he did not feel that she was a stranger any more. He saw the lines on her face and the grey flecking her hair and was filled with a heavy, melancholy affection. He put out a hand and touched her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry too,’ he said. ‘I’m so very, very sorry for all you’ve been through. And I’m glad I know. In spite of everything, I find I’m glad.’
She took his hand then and they walked along the path together, not saying anything.
He felt her warm fingers between his. ‘What time are you meeting her?’ he asked at last.
‘In about an hour and a half.’
‘So soon! Where? Not here?’
He had a vision of the girl seeing them together like this, hand in hand. He let go of her fingers and put his hands back into his pockets.
‘No, not here. Can I ask you something?’
‘Go on.’
‘How’s Gaby?’
‘She’s – I don’t know. She’s calm.’
‘Calm?’
‘I know. Not like her, is it? She’s calm and kind and practical. And almost, well, pitying. She pities me.’
‘Oh!’ said Nancy. She bit her lip.
‘It makes me feel ashamed.’
‘Will you and her – will it be all right?’
‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think that it was all so long ago, and we’ve been so good to each other since, how can it not? And sometimes I think that something’s been broken and, whatever I do, I can’t put it back together. It feels wrong, telling you this.’
‘I understand. Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘It’s not your fault. I should go now. I have to get to work.’
‘Connor?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not a bad man, you know.’
‘Goodbye,’ he said. She could see that there were tears in his eyes. ‘I don’t know if we’ll –’
‘No, nor do I. Good luck with everything.’
‘And to you. Take care.’
‘I did love you,’ she said in a rush, as he started to walk away from her, then put her fist into her mouth.
He turned. ‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing,’ she managed to say. ‘You must go now. Goodbye.’
He set off along the riverbank and she watched as his thin figure, in its dark overcoat, melted into the crowd.
Connor walked until he was sure he was out of sight, then stopped. He had no idea what he was feeling, except that he was sick and empty and tired. He left the river and walked up towards St Paul’s, where he stood for a few minutes, at a loss for what he should do next. Perhaps he should go inside and kneel down in the cold, lofty space, bend his head and pray. But he never prayed. He had no God, nor had he ever had. He had had only a belief in himself, ever since he was a small boy striving to escape the grim world his parents had given him. What would he say to God? Make it not have happened, make Gaby love me the way she used to, make Ethan never have to think of me as the man who hurt his mother, make Stefan live a happy life, make me someone else, turn back the clock, undo the past, make it all right in a way that it never can be.
There was a stall selling coffee, and he asked for a cappuccino. When it came he wrapped his hands round the cardboard cup and felt warmth return to his fingers. He lifted the plastic lid and leant over the steam to let it lick his face. Then he shuffled a few paces and sat on a wooden bench in the lee of the cathedral and closed his eyes. He saw Nancy’s forty-year-old face and Gaby’s. He saw their younger faces. His cheeks were wet and when he felt them with his fingers he discovered he was crying. The salt tears stung his skin. He put the coffee, half finished, on the ground, and bent forward on the bench with his face in his hands. Tears dripped through his fingers, and his shoulders were shaking. Small whimpers were coming from deep within him, like the first warning sounds of a great quake. The whimpers grew louder and now his whole body was shuddering. He was dimly aware that people would be passing the bench and looking curiously at the well-dressed middle-aged man weeping like a baby. He didn’t care. He pressed his head deeper into the cup of his hands and was in his own warm, wet, private darkness. His throat was sore and his chest ached. His eyes hurt and against his closed lids he could still see the faces of those he loved, his own private film of anguish.
‘There, there,’ someone was saying, more like a rustle of leaves than a voice.
A hand was on his bent head, stroking his hair. For a mad second, he thought it was his mother, comforting him as she never had when he was little. His sobs grew louder.
‘There, there.’
At last he lifted his face from his hands and looked around through his watery, bloodshot eyes. A woman was sitting on the bench beside him. She was tiny and ancient, wrapped in a thick, oversized coat tied at the waist with a length of rope and her feet stuffed into moth-eaten slippers. An absurd hat, more like a grubby turban, was perched on her head, and her lined, weathered face reminded Connor of an onion. Her little blue eyes peered at him. ‘Hello, dear,’ she said. ‘You needed to get that out of you.’
‘Sorry.’
‘When you want to cry, you have to cry or it poisons your insides,’ she said. ‘Me and Billy have a good weep together sometimes, don’t we, Billy?’
Connor stared around, bewildered, then saw a small, scruffy dog sheltering between her legs, its face peering out from between the flaps of her coat.
‘Sometimes I sit on this bench all day,’ said the woman, ‘and no one even looks at me. They walk by me and their eyes go right through me. I’m invisible. They even drop litter at my feet. Once someone threw an apple core and it landed in my lap and they didn’t even turn and say sorry. People are very rude nowadays. My name is Mildred May Clegg. I have a name. My mother gave it to me eighty-eight years ago, but there are days when I have to go and stand outside a shop window so I can see my reflection in the glass, just to make sure I’m still there. I say, “Hello, Mildred May.” Maybe I wave at myself. People think I’m not right in my head. They walk in a wide circle so they don’t come anywhere near me. There’s nothing wrong with my head, is there, Billy? There, Billy can tell you. He knows. Dogs see more than people. Billy recognizes when someone’s a bad one. He snarls or backs away. He likes you, though. Look, he’s wagging his tail, that’s a sure sign he thinks you’re all right. It doesn’t matter what they look like, they can be dressed up all fancy and speak ever so proper, but he can tell what they’re like inside. People can’t do that, can they? Or not many, anyway. I reckon I can. I’ve had practice. Years of practice. I used to sing, you know, when I was young. You wouldn’t think it, would you? I wasn’t always like this. I was a pretty girl and I sang and everyone said I’d go far. Life doesn’t turn out the way you think, does it? It was the drink that did for me, or the death. Death first, and then drink. That was the order, though the order’s got muddled up since then and, anyway, nobody cares to ask any more. They used
to care. They used to say, “Mildred May, you have to pull yourself together.” They were probably right. I mean, if you don’t pull yourself together quite quickly you stop remembering how to do it. Since then, I’ve sat on this bench and watched people. It’s a bit like watching the river after a bit. Faces flow by, they do, and mostly you don’t properly look at them. A tide of humanity,’ she said, shaking her head from side to side and winking at him. ‘Just a tide passing by.’
Connor stared at her with his throbbing eyes.
‘But some you notice. They jump out at you, look into your face, and after that they’re inside your head. When I die, a lot of people die with me.’
‘Can I get you a cup of coffee?’ he asked politely. ‘Or something to eat?’
‘Billy would like a doughnut from there.’ She nodded at the stall where Connor had bought his cappuccino.
‘A doughnut for both of you, then?’
‘And one for you, young man. You need feeding up. Don’t you have a mother?’
‘No.’
‘Everyone needs a mother. I was a mother once, you know.’
‘Were you?’
‘My little Danny boy.’
‘What happened?’ His voice was gentle.
‘My father used to tell me that nobody owns anybody else. You’re here for a while and then you’re gone. Gone without a trace.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s a vale of tears, my dear. Never you mind.’
‘I have a son called Ethan,’ Connor said. ‘He’s nineteen. He’s left home now.’
Once again, fat tears began to roll down his cheek.
‘An apple one for me, and a jam one for Billy.’
‘Very well.’
Connor bought three doughnuts wrapped in paper napkins and returned to the bench. He sat down beside Mildred May, close enough that their thighs touched and he could smell the sweet stench of alcohol on her. ‘Here.’
The old woman took the jam doughnut and held it out. Billy crept from the shelter of her coat and grabbed it before retreating again. Then she tore her own in half and posted the first portion into her pursed mouth, making a smacking sound as she ate. She pulled a glass bottle full of clear liquid out of one of her pockets and took a gulp, then put it away again. Connor took a bite of his own doughnut. It had been many years since he’d eaten one and its fried, doughy sweetness comforted him.
‘There,’ said Mildred May. ‘Shall I sing for you now?’
‘That would be a treat,’ said Connor.
‘Quid pro quo. That’s what I say. You gave us doughnuts.’
She stood up, scattering Billy from the tails of her vast coat, and turned so that she was facing him, ignoring the glances of passers-by, their sneers and sniggers. Placing one hand on her heart, she took a deep breath, opened her mouth and began to sing. Her voice trembled and sometimes almost disappeared before returning louder than before; her eyes shone. Billy wailed at her side. She sang ‘My Bonny Lies Over The Ocean’ and then ‘Foggy Foggy Dew’. She sang ‘Early One Morning’ in a quavery, broken-backed high pitch, before looping round again to ‘My Bonny’, her voice giving up by now. They were all in their own ways songs about absence and heartbreak. Connor gazed at her diminutive, rotund shape; her crinkled, battered face folded round the blue slits of her eyes, the puckered mouth in a choirboy’s ‘O’ of rapture. She lifted her dirty hands into the air and gazed past him, at some distant point only she could see. Perhaps she was on a stage, a young woman again with the world before her, or perhaps she was singing to her lost Danny boy. Perhaps she had never been a singer and never had a son, never had the life she’d lost.
When she finished, Connor clapped loudly and she gave a little bow. Behind them a group of teenage girls were giggling helplessly. Connor and Mildred May ignored them.
‘Thank you,’ he said, standing up, taking both her hands in his and holding them there. ‘That was a great pleasure.’
‘We all have to spread what cheer we can,’ she said. She was panting and there were red blotches on her cheek. ‘In this cold and ragged world.’
‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘Can I come and visit you again?’
‘You’ll find me and Billy here most days,’ she said, ‘on and off. Don’t wait to be invited.’
‘I won’t, you can be sure of that.’
He bent down to kiss her on both pouchy cheeks. She lifted her hand and pushed his hair away from his forehead. ‘You’ll do very nicely,’ she said.
‘Will I?’
‘Of course. Won’t he, Billy?’
Twenty-nine
Stefan was sitting in his kitchen under the naked bulb with a giant sandwich in front of him into which he had stuffed any ingredient he had found in his fridge: chorizo sausage past its sell-by date, mozzarella (ditto) and Cheddar, a few lettuce leaves, tomatoes, mayonnaise, pickle, mustard and some aged gherkins. But he had taken one vast, oozing bite out of it, then pushed it away for later. He was practising his knots. He had about twenty smooth, thin lengths of cream-coloured rope, whipped at the end to prevent fraying, and was tying them, one by one, into different shapes. He had started with the simplest, and they lay in a line beneath his sandwich: the overhand knot, the sheet knot, the figure-of-eight, the reef knot and the halyard. These he could almost do with his eyes shut; the challenge was to make them as pleasingly supple and symmetrical as possible. Now he was practising his bowline: he formed a loop a short distance from the end of the rope, passed the end through the loop as though making a half-hitch, then pulled it round the standing end and back through the loop. There, it was easily done and he laid it alongside the other knots.
He opened his can of beer and licked away the plug of foam before taking a warm gulp. The clove hitch, the two half-hitches, the sheepshank – he often had trouble with that one. A blackwall hitch and a rolling hitch and a slippery hitch, a fisherman’s knot and a fisherman’s bend, a lariat loop, a lark’s head. This was the way time ticked by. One by one, he laid them before him. A marlinspike and an intricate surgeon’s knot. He finished with an improved blood knot, for which he used two very thin pieces of rope, almost string. He twisted the strands together ten or twelve times, separated the central twist, wriggled the two ends through the space, then tugged them sharply. He sighed in satisfaction at the neatness of the plait before him, then placed it carefully at the bottom of his grid of knots.
Picking up his sandwich with both hands to prevent its contents spilling everywhere, he opened his mouth as wide as possible, then took a determined bite. He swilled down a bit more beer and picked up the book he was reading, taking care not to spread grease over its pages. When Gaby read a book she would open it wide so that its spine cracked. You could always tell when she’d had a particular book – it would be scuffed and stained and its pages turned down to mark particular passages. She read books the way she ate meals, greedily and with avid attention. If he tried, he was sure that he could chart her life so far through images of her deep in a book: up a tree; sitting on the lawn with her legs apart and a novel propped on her knee; lying on sofas or snuggled into armchairs, every so often putting out a hand and feeling for a chocolate; at a table, her head cupped in her hands; in a bath, the steam softening the pages. She would lose herself while reading. You could call her name several times before she heard and looked up, as in a stupor, her eyes unfocused. He thought of his sister and frowned. Something was bothering her. He wished she would tell him her troubles, not try to protect him.
The sandwich was too large, too messy and the bread was stale. Stefan left it and went into the sitting room, which also served as his study. Books were in heaps everywhere – he could never go into a shop without buying several; he pottered for hours in second-hand shops, rooting out forgotten volumes of essays or remaindered novels from before the war, and he never could bring himself to throw books away. There were piles of scrawled-upon leaves of lined paper on and around his desk. He reminded himself that he had essays to mark, emails to answer
, journals to catch up on, a meeting to prepare for, a lecture to write and a paper he needed to research on radical religion in the Middle Ages. He lived much of his life in the past, in a world of words and ideas, and sometimes he wondered what it would be like to deal with people and objects, the mess of everyday life. He thought of Connor pressing his hands against a patient’s stomach, or probing flesh for an area of pain. He thought of all his family looking after their children as babies, spooning gunk into a small mouth and wiping away drool with the corner of a bib, or changing a nappy, deftly gripping two ankles in one hand and lifting the squirming body, wiping the red, wrinkled bottom and smothering it with thick cold cream. He’d done it a few times, of course, especially with Ethan when Gaby was so ill, but he’d been horrified, incompetent and scared of his own size and clumsiness. Nancy had pushed him away. He could hear her voice now: ‘You’re hopeless,’ she’d said, laughing at him. ‘Let me do it.’
He knew that he was hopeless in many ways. He was vague and dreamy and the practical arrangements of his life floated out of his head, like so many dissolving clouds; he broke things and spilt things and forgot where he was supposed to be. He could tie knots and read charts and sail a boat round the point, avoiding jagged rocks, but he tripped over his shoelaces and lost his keys. He could read twelfth-century texts and understand the life of a miller in Somerset, but he couldn’t understand the lives of his colleagues – their rivalries, affairs and subtle intrigues.
The phone rang, and it was Gaby. ‘Stefan? I didn’t wake you, did I?’
‘Wake me? No. What time is it, anyway?’
‘Half past eleven.’
‘I thought it was about nine. Funny, these long dark evenings – you lose track of time. Well, I do. How are you? Are you all right?’
‘Fine – well, OK. There’s something I want to talk to you about. Connor and I want to talk to you about, actually.’
‘All right, then.’
‘Not now, not on the phone. Do you want to come round to ours or shall we come to you?’
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