The Simple Rules of Love

by Amanda Brookfield

  ‘We? But, Charlie, I'll go alone – it's okay.’

  ‘In this weather? Don't be ridiculous.’ He tore off the message and propped it against the kettle, impatiently shoving the tea-jar against the paper when it slipped out of position. Then he pushed past her out of the kitchen, snatching the car keys from her hands and taking such long, aggressive strides down the hall that even Poppy – usually so delightfully oblivious to all nuances of human mood – shrank against the wall.

  By the time the Volvo crept back along the pot-holed lane, many more branches had been torn from their moorings, converting the already uneven ground into an almost unnavigable sea of wood. Charlie began slowly, then speeded up, driving at logs and twigs alike as if ploughing an ice-breaker through a frozen waste. Serena, white-faced and rigid beside him, gripped the dashboard and fixed her thoughts on the scalpel slicing a window into Jessica's womb, willing it to be fast and successful. Charlie, she feared, had darker thoughts about what might constitute the best outcome. He hadn't expressed them, but she had felt him think them and it sickened her.

  In Hull, Keith scowled as he tried to concentrate over the thunder of the rain now drumming on the flat roof of Irene's kitchen. There were only a few lines on the page; still such a long way to go. His hand ached from gripping the pen, forcing it to form words that he would never have the courage to say out loud.

  The little party in Camberwell was enjoying a third, riotous viewing of Theo's digitally filmed masterpiece, yelling the lines before the characters and singing along with even the most poignant sections of Jonny's soundtrack. Lost to such noisy merriment, they paid no heed to the inconvenience of a howling wind until the entire street was pitched into darkness by a power-cut. Even then, carefree and young as they were, they responded to it as an adventure rather than a catastrophe. Amid much squealing and thumping, an assortment of candle stumps was eventually assembled and lit; Theo, with shy, wary glances at his relatives, then delved into his rucksack and produced two fat, battered joints that Julian had given him. Jonny let out a squawk of delight and groped his way into Clem's bedroom to fetch his guitar. Soon they were sprawled round the furniture, smoking and singing softly, Clem leading the way on harmonies while the boys beat out the rhythm on their thighs, all aware of a spreading, pleasurable cohesion that reached far beyond the usual barriers of being cousins or siblings, lovers or friends.

  Ed, surveying the flickering light cast by the candles and the pale, serene faces humming tunes, misty in the layers of floating smoke, decided it was almost like being in church – a nice church, where there was no pressure to believe, just a mystical sense of unity that took you out of yourself to the sense of something better. He remembered in the same instant, and with rather less peace of mind, the desperate prayer he had made seven months before in the thick of his nightmare with Jessica. Get me out of this and I'll believe in you until the day I die. He wasn't out of anything and yet… he was through it somehow, he thought, with a future he couldn't wait to embrace and a restored belief in himself and his family. Had that been God's doing or his own? He sucked in a fresh lungful of the pungent smoke as he pondered the question, blowing it out in neat rings that held their shape for several seconds before wavering and thinning into small, smeary clouds. He had always imagined that divine intervention would prove its existence in some irrefutable clear-cut fashion, more like the proverbial bolt from the heavens – a striking, instant solution. But it occurred to him now that maybe everyday miracles weren't like that, but evolved slowly out of a combination of effort and circumstance and… love? Ed's cynical eighteen-year-old self resisted the word even as it formed in his mind. He loved himself, and his family, and his life, all right. But as for the bigger stuff – love with a capital L, belief with a capital B – even after the way things had turned out, with his prayer sort of answered, it felt like a too big, too impossible leap to make. And anyway, he reminded himself, reaching out to pat the back of Roland, who had inhaled too deeply and was choking, his aunt Helen was the only really churchy one of the family and it hadn't done her a lot of good.

  On the other side of London, huddled on the furthest edge of Julian's bed after the first serious row of their four-month acquaintance, Maisie, too, was pondering weightier issues than the pummelling of wind and rain against the windowpanes. Transplanting a holiday romance to the chillier, more obstacled environs of everyday life was proving harder than she could have imagined. Jealous of her new friends at Bristol, of her partying with her family – of any air she breathed in his absence, in fact – her boyfriend appeared to have transmogrified from a desirable, interesting fellow creature into something whining, selfish and altogether repellent. Lying in the dark, listening to the unhappy sighs next to her, recognizing in them a plea for reassurance, which she had no inclination to give, Maisie wished with all her heart that she had stayed on at her sister's flat for the party with her cousins and friends. The more she tried to sleep, the harder the wish burned until, surrendering to the directness for which she had always been famed, she burst out, ‘I'm sorry, Julian, I just don't love you any more,’ and reached for her shoes.

  Back in Sussex, Cassie had accepted the offer of Roland's bed for the night and was curled in one corner of her elder sister's cosy sofa, clutching a mug of tea. Elizabeth lay at full stretch on the floor next to her, laid low not by over-indulgence in the day's many causes for celebration but by the sound of Keith's voice on her answering-machine. ‘“Thank you for the cutting. I need to see you,”’ she groaned, repeating the message for the umpteenth time. ‘I mean, what is that? Has he gone mad? So he wants to see me, after all this time, after insisting that we couldn't see each other, and of course I should stop him but I don't want to so I can't and I don't know what to do.’

  Cassie smiled a little wanly. She was pleased for her sister – pleased and afraid: Elizabeth's history in matters of the heart read like a bad novel – but also a little tired of hearing the phone message repeated and, beneath all that, if she was honest, just the tiniest bit jealous. Forty-odd years of being prettier, more confident and conventionally more successful than her hapless elder sibling had not prepared her for this new sensation of being the more misfortunate. In addition to which, witnessing the true extent of Elizabeth's fervour for Keith, the obsessive agonizing, the writhing on the carpet, the moans of desire and despair, it occurred to Cassie that she herself probably wasn't capable of loving anyone so much. The closest she had come was with Dan Lambert, the doctor; the married doctor, who had ultimately chosen his family over her. Before him boyfriends had been things to fit into a busy schedule. After him there had only been Stephen, wooing her with the obstinacy she had eventually found so endearing, until she, too, began to believe… in something that didn't exist, Cassie reminded herself bitterly, setting down her mug and asking her sister whether she minded awfully if they went to bed.

  ‘And, anyway,’ she couldn't resist adding, after Elizabeth had given her a clean towel and a glass of water, and was leading the way up the cottage's creaking little staircase, ‘I don't see why it's all such a problem between you and Keith. It's perfectly clear that you're in love with him.’

  ‘Is it?’ Elizabeth spun round, spilling a few drops of water from her glass across her jumper.

  ‘Can't stop talking about him, can't stop thinking about him, saying what you ought to do when it's perfectly clear it makes no difference… Sounds like a bad case of love to me.’

  ‘Oh, it is, it is,’ Elizabeth gushed. ‘When we're together it's just so… easy, so natural, like no one else…’

  ‘So what's the problem?’ repeated Cassie.

  All the openness in Elizabeth's face vanished. Like the slamming of a book, Cassie mused, watching the performance and the laboured way with which her sister turned to continue her journey up the stairs. ‘So he has family ties up north. It doesn't sound like a big deal to me.’

  ‘I can't explain,’ said Elizabeth, in a muffled voice, then checked that the bathroom was
more or less clean, muttered goodnight and closed her bedroom door. She couldn't explain, not to Cassie, not to anyone. She had played her last card during the ill-fated excursion to Hull, when she had repeated to Keith that what he had done made no difference to her and offered to tell her family herself about the little Pakistani girl. She missed him too much, she had explained, to let anything about his past stand in their way. With Roland a sixth-former, she would have more time for trips up north, she had continued, more time to get to know his sons. The memory of his explosive response still made her shudder. His history not hers. The words were etched on Elizabeth's heart, along with recognition of Keith's right to utter them. The killing of the little girl, the two years in jail, were indeed his story – to forgive himself for or torture himself with as he chose. She was an outsider, one who had reached the limits of her capacity to beg or offer help.

  Lying in the dark, the duvet tucked round her neck and her arms crossed under her head, Elizabeth tried to shift her thoughts to all that had happened before the phone message – the fun of the family gathering, the thrill of seeing Roland's pictures, the extraordinary and, in retrospect, hilarious business of the portrait of Clem – but her mind kept returning to the terse, enigmatic sentence on her answering-machine. What cutting and why should it make Keith want to see her? It was like a cryptic crossword clue and she'd never been any good at those.

  She turned on her side to try to sleep. Love indeed, she scoffed, remembering Cassie's words. A fifty-four-year-old divorcee with dried-out hair, a saggy body, veins round her nose and useless Italian had no business even contemplating such a thing. But it was no good. The sound of Keith's voice on the answering-machine had opened up all the old feelings and the bubble of hope, now swelling round Elizabeth's heart and making it hard to breathe, refused to deflate. She slept at last, but fitfully, her eyes flicking open each time one of the branches outside brushed against her window, half hoping to find Keith clambering into the bedroom, laughing and wet, clutching some fairytale resolution to her desires.

  Charlie tried to drop her off at the main entrance, muttering about finding somewhere to park. Serena almost agreed. The sight of the familiar concrete bulk of the hospital was a shock, far worse than she had expected. She could remember, as if it were yesterday, walking out of the same large doors cradling Tina, wrapped like a little human pupa in a new yellow baby blanket, her small pixie face turned into her mother's swollen breasts, nuzzling for warmth and milk. She could remember the singing of her heart, the lovely confidence of how they would enjoy this fourth, unplanned, child. She could remember Charlie skipping along next to them, one arm across her back, the other holding an umbrella over their heads, shielding his wife and newborn from the September drizzle as if it were a monsoon. There was no question of an umbrella now: the wind was too strong, whipping the rain in so many directions that there was no hope of protection on any side.

  ‘I will not get out,’ she said. ‘There are loads of spaces. We'll park the car and walk together.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ Charlie reversed with unnecessary speed, swinging the Volvo back and round so violently that Serena rocked between the door and the gear-stick.

  Inside the hospital he hung back, forcing her to walk ahead, to be the one to check the signs for directions, to press the right lift button and the intercom guarding the maternity unit. Then, when they were through to the staff base, he left all the questions and explanations to her, wandering past the photographs of the medical personnel lining the walls, his arms pinned behind his back, peering at the images as if they were back at the exhibition and he was assessing the merits of one of Nathan Chalmer's paintings.

  The sister-in-charge had an inky black bun, skin the colour of burnished toffee and a pink dot in the middle of her forehead. Serena watched the dot move as the woman explained calmly and kindly that Jessica was out of theatre, that before the operation she had been given magnesium to stop the fits she had been experiencing and something else to lower her blood pressure. Although she was still groggy, she appeared to be doing well.

  ‘And the baby?’ It was more an exhalation of breath than a sentence. Next to her Serena was aware of Charlie, now nose-deep in one of the many cards of gratitude pinned to a corkboard next to the desk. As she released the words he stiffened and clenched his hands.

  ‘A little girl.’ The midwife smiled, with an effort. ‘She's small, just over a kilo, but from what we can work out she's five or six weeks premature so that's not surprising. She has what we call respiratory-distress syndrome. We have her in NICU –’

  ‘What's that?’ Serena swallowed.

  ‘Our neonatal intensive care unit – she really couldn't be in better hands.’ The midwife smiled more broadly, revealing overcrowded white teeth. ‘Now, I expect you would like to see Mum. She said you were the grandparents. Congratulations.’ She directed the word towards Charlie, who had shuffled over to the desk at last, with his head bowed as if ready to receive a blow rather than good news. ‘It's very early days but there's no reason why she shouldn't make it. Such a fighter – you should have heard her screams when she came out.’

  ‘Jessica's mother, Mrs Blake, is she here too?’ Charlie raised his head to deliver the question, then cast an anxious glance over his shoulder as if the last thing he wanted was Maureen to appear round the corner.

  The midwife shook her head. ‘She's on holiday in Spain, apparently. Talk about bad timing…’

  ‘Indeed.’ Charlie grimaced. ‘I might leave you to it,’ he murmured to Serena, ‘find myself a cup of tea.’

  ‘You will not,’ she whispered fiercely. ‘I can't do this alone. I just can't.’

  ‘We shouldn't be doing it at all,’ he hissed back, composing his features as the midwife, having led them down the corridor, opened a door to what she called the recovery room and stepped back for them to go inside.

  Jessica was lying on her back with her eyes closed. Propped next to her on a bedside table was a photograph of a tiny froglike baby, its scrawny face only just visible beneath a peculiar miniature sock of a white hat.

  ‘Ugly rat, isn't it?’

  ‘Oh, no, Jessica, no, she isn't ugly at all, just very, very small,’ said Serena, stopping short of the bed. She felt badly that an embrace was called for but, with the tubes of two drips in the way and the expression of flat hostility on Jessica's face, had no idea how to manage it.

  ‘Sorry to drag you up here.’

  ‘No need – it's fine, isn't it, Charlie?’ Serena shot a frantic look across the bed to where Charlie was standing, much like a soldier in a sentry-box, straight-backed, his face set and inscrutable.

  ‘Thought I was dying.’

  ‘It must have been awful for you – remember being warned about pre-eclampsia during my pregnancies. It's desperately serious – you poor thing. How are you feeling now?’

  ‘Like shite.’

  ‘Such a shame your mother's away.’

  Jessica made a snorting sound and shifted position, flinching visibly. ‘All of you were right, for what it's worth,’ she muttered next. ‘I should have got rid of it.’

  ‘Now, that's silly –’

  ‘Not you,’ Jessica shot back, ‘I always knew you weren't keen on an abortion.’ She scowled at Charlie, then returned her attention to Serena. ‘You should have been, though. So should I. A fucking baby – almost killed me, didn't it?’

  ‘I know you feel like this now,’ began Serena, softly, shuffling nearer to the bed. ‘It's hardly surprising when you've been through so much.’ She touched Jessica's forearm above where one of the drips had been taped into the veins on her wrist. ‘You'll feel differently soon, when you get to know her.’

  Jessica made a clicking sound and turned her head to the wall. ‘You sound like one of the bleeding nurses.’

  ‘She's your child. You'll love her – you'll see. Millions of women would give anything to be in your shoes.’

  Jessica snorted. ‘Oh, yeah, and who are they?’
/>   Serena struggled for a moment. ‘Cassie – Ed's aunt – for a start. She's wanted a baby for years.’

  ‘Well, this one might not live, anyway, so what's the point?’ Jessica sneered. ‘Be easier all round, if you think about it. Not like her dad wants anything to do with her, is it?’

  Serena wrung her hands and stole another glance at Charlie, who had drawn in his cheeks as if attempting to prevent some involuntary act of self-combustion. The truth, put like that, was so stark, so incontrovertible. She could think of no comfort for it. It remained perfectly clear to her that Ed had had every right to choose as he had. The road Jessica had taken, which had brought her to this pitiful state, was entirely of her own making. ‘Are we allowed to see the… Does she have a name yet?’ she inquired gently.

  Jessica made a face, almost as if she was embarrassed to concede that she had given the matter any thought. ‘I was thinking Gemma… I've always kind of liked it.’

  ‘Gemma. That's a sweet name, isn't it, Charlie?’

  ‘And as for seeing her, you'll have to ask one of the nurses, I suppose,’ Jessica continued sulkily. ‘They, like, rule this place. When I'm a bit better they say they want me to get some milk out – with a bloody pump. I said no bloody way – I'm not a cow, am I?’

  ‘No,’ interjected Charlie, his voice tight and dark, ‘you're a mother, whose baby needs –’

  ‘Don't you start.’ Jessica rolled on to her side, half hiding her face in the pillow. ‘They also said,’ she went on fiercely, ‘that bottles are fine, that it's up to me, so you can just fuck off with all that breast is best crap. It's up to me, okay?’ She punched her hand against her chest and buried her face more deeply in the pillow. Charlie, exasperated almost to breaking-point, moved towards the door, nodding at Serena to follow.

  ‘Try not to worry, Jessica.’ Serena touched the girl's shoulder, which was trembling. ‘They said you need to stay in here for a few days yet,’ she soothed, ‘and then your mother will be back. Everything will work out fine, you'll see.’ The shoulder continued to tremble but Jessica kept her face buried. ‘I'll get one of the nurses,’ Serena murmured, then turned to follow Charlie out of the room.