A young woman came in with a toddler in a buggy. She parked the buggy alongside the table next to Stella’s while she went to order at the counter. The toddler sat huddled in its outdoor clothes like a guy. She had no idea what sex it was, but its bright brown eyes were fixed on her with unblinking intensity. The woman came back with a cup of tea and a chocolate muffin in cellophane. She unwrapped first the toddler, then the muffin, then broke off a piece and held it out.
‘Jack . . . Jack? Wake up, here you are.’
Jack took the cake and pressed it to his open mouth as if snogging it. Lumps of sponge fell on to his quilted legs, crumbs clung in a brown halo round his lips. What went into his mouth he sucked with a faint, adenoidal sound. His eyes remained on Stella, though rather absentmindedly as it he couldn’t quite remember why. He had glossy black hair worn in long curls, which he hadn’t got from his mother who had straight mousy strands and red cheeks. No wedding ring. She sipped her tea and gazed out of the window, glad of the break. She didn’t eat her half of the muffin and when Jack griped and fussed he got another chunk. She was eking it out, piece for peace.
After a couple of minutes she suddenly looked straight at Stella, raising her eyebrows with a ‘know us next time?’ expression.
‘Sorry,’ said Stella. ‘I was admiring Jack.’
‘You what?’
‘He’ll be a ladykiller once he’s learned to eat cake nicely.’
‘He’s only twenty months,’ declared the girl in an aggrieved tone. ‘What d’you expect?’
Rebuffed and misunderstood, Stella went to the counter and paid for the cappuccino. Toting her rucksack she didn’t go straight back to Victoria Mansions but along the high road to the baby shop. This was how she thought of it, as though it sold babies, which in a way it did. Up till now she had regarded it not just with indifference but with a kind of superstitious aversion, like the temple of some alien cult. Now, she told herself she had better get over that.
She walked in feeling starkly conspicuous as if she’d just left jail. Her age, her clothes, her telltale rucksack, did they mark her out as an untouchable, a woman who had stepped back from the brink in the nick of time? In fact the other customers were in the main not the petal-skinned dewy-eyed lovelies of magazine advertisements and TV commercials, but females of every age, shape and kind, from scarily youthful teenagers to women older than herself, some looking as if they might give birth at any moment. No, she told herself she was anonymous here. Whatever she might feel, no one could tell from looking at her that she was a pregnant woman. She could be an aunt, a friend, a sister – a grandmother, for God’s sake, to judge by some of the extravagantly fecund schoolgirls.
It was the merchandise that awed and shocked her. So much stuff – could one tiny infant possibly need or want this amount of clobber, so many things, such a variety of clothes, toys, gadgets, transports? It was inconceivable, obscene. She could not imagine a future occasion on which she herself would come here and walk out with the huge plastic sacks of goods she saw being borne away. She stood transfixed by shelves full of feeding bottles, teats, sterilisers, heaters, thermos flasks, spouted cups, dummies, teethers and dishes, pushers, bibs with troughs and bibs with tapes, and innumerable cunning compartmentalised carriers to put it all in. And then stacks of bedding – sheets, duvets, pillows, rubber sheets, cot bumpers (whatever they might be), papooses, cocoons, cellular blankets and lacy shawls. Numberless nappies, hosts of tiny clothes and shoes, fleets of prams and buggies each more elaborate than the last . . . Did each item, she wonder, perform a different function? Was one therefore required to have one of each? Or to make a selection? And if a selection, on what basis? How did all these women know what to get? And – Jesus wept! – how did they afford it?
The simple, animal connection she had made with the baby was dwarfed by this clamorous multitude of objects. In the middle of it all and in rising panic she closed her eyes for a moment as she had done in the clinic, to recapture those tender, profound feelings which had stolen over her. The other shoppers flowed round and past her, there were no nudges or bumps, no signs of impatience. Her heartbeat steadied.
She felt a hand on her arm. ‘Everything okay?’
A child of about sixteen stood next to her, hugely pregnant. Her round face was a work of art, elaborately painted, pierced and studded.
‘You okay?’ she repeated. ‘Do you want to sit down?’
‘No, thanks. I was – trying to remember something.’
‘Right . . .’ The girl gave a slow nod, her eyes on Stella’s face. ‘I’ll let you get on with it then.’
In front of Stella was a branching display unit hung like a Christmas tree with bootees, socks, mittens and bonnets in cellophane packets. The items were tiny as doll’s clothes. Stella selected a pair of minute white lacy boots threaded with gossamer-fine ribbon, and went to pay. At the next till a woman was unloading a trolly-load of purchases, the bip-bip of the items going through was like morse code. Stella stuffed the boots in her coat pocket and set off for home.
Back in the flat she left her coat and rucksack in the hall, took the boots out of their packet and laid them on top of the piano. She gazed at them: tiny and fragile as snowflakes resting lightly on the symbol of her splendid independence. The first concession to the awesome changes she had set in train.
In silence, without music, she walked slowly from room to room. In each one she stopped and gazed, trying to imagine what it would be like to share it with someone else – or no, not to share, for sharing implied equality. She was going to give it up. For her child this would not be a chosen, but a given place. Not Stella Carlyle’s apartment, but home. Every second of every minute of every day her child would be here, looking to her and her alone for food, drink, warmth, entertainment and love. It would take her and her care for granted, not realising that without her it would not live. The brutal simplicity of the deal made her head spin.
Returning to the living room she saw afresh the undemanding space she had been so careful to preserve, the sense of comforting impermanence which had kept her here for fifteen years. This would change. There would be clutter – she thought with cold dismay of the baby shop and its contents. There would be noise and confusion not of her making. Instead of a retreat from the passionate discipline of work and the turmoil of people there would be demands and responsibilities.
She crossed to the windowseat and sat down. The baby boots trembled slightly as she passed as if they might be sensitive to the presence of their future owner, like one of those plastic desk-flowers that moved in response to voices.
Stella reminded herself that in her rush to embrace and smother her fears she had neglected to take into account the very thing that had prompted her momentous change of heart. There would also, surely, be unconditional love.
The hospital carpark had a ten-mile-per-hour speed limit which Robert had once found irksome. Now he had no trouble sticking to it. He had scarcely exceeded ten miles per hour since turning into the access road. The great concrete complex of the Health Trust which used to fill him with energy and excitement these days oppressed his soul. It was a measure of his state of mind that even he could not ignore. Playing for time, he parked in his usual place, switched off the engine and sat listening to ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ a lament both sympathetic and sardonic, for lost opportunities.
The song was by Leonard Cohen, whom Robert greatly admired, not least for being able to write so alluringly about pain. The singer on this recording was a former sixties rock-chick, more renowned for her star-fucking activities than her handful of breathy minor hits. Now however she had reappeared on the scene, ravaged but still ravishing, her cropped hair swept uncompromisingly back from a face on which was gouged every bad trip and lost weekend. The soft, babyish voice had been replaced by a world-weary rasp fit to break your heart. He could not these days bring himself to listen to Stella but this, he thought, was how she might sound in the future when he no longer knew her, and when her voic
e bore the scar tissue of all the years between.
When the song finished, Robert switched off the stereo and sat in silence for a few seconds out of respect, as well as apathy. Then he gathered himself, his briefcase and his coat and set off to do battle with blindness.
He knew what they said about him – that Mr Vitelio was the best in the business but had no bedside manner. In this he felt himself to be a victim of contemporary political correctness. In a touchyfeely world perversely driven by economic imperatives he was too quick, too focused, in fact too hellbent on curing people, for comfort. What people seemed to want was a ruthless weeding-out of cases according to some bizarre value-for-money criterion, and then a soft-soaping of the remaining ones so that they went softly into the good night of partial or complete blindness, equipped with kind words, social services and a range of useful gadgets. Robert’s preference was for doing as much as was humanly possible in the time available, and moving on. He was a top-notch clinician but his stated view on, for instance, counselling was that it was meretricious bullshit that kept its victims mired in self-pity instead of pursuing busy and productive lives.
Others, he knew, thought he protested too much – that he himself liked to present a moving target. That the reason he did not wish to listen to other people’s problems was an unwillingness to consider his own. He conceded that this was probably correct, and was not ashamed of it – one measure of successful functioning was not whether one had shortcomings but whether one turned those shortcomings to good effect.
He had weathered the complaints because he had made no mistakes. There were no points on his licence. Not one error of clinical judgement, no diagnostic fudges nor botched treatment. He was spot-on.
But at the moment he knew he was pushing his luck. Instead of being his whole focus, his work had become a sideshow, a lightning conductor for the feelings he so infamously chose to keep hidden. He had folded up in one area of his life and seemed increasingly likely to foul up in another if he wasn’t careful. Always a doer, a sublimator, a worker-through, he was not used to the paralysis which currently afflicted him.
Today he had a full programme of laser treatments, an area in which he was the acknowledged king, the fastest gun in the department. He quite simply saw each tiny ocular blood vessel with more clarity and zapped it with greater speed and accuracy than anyone else. It was close, concentrated, pinpoint-fine work with no margin of error. Also, he was aware how painful it was for the patients. It was policy to speak of ‘discomfort’, but that was bollocks – the treatment involved a persistent small agony that could make strong men whimper. To this end, in his view, speed was of the essence. It made his own eyes water to watch the slow, gentle, tortuous work of some of his younger colleagues, and he’d been known to step in and finish the task at whirlwind speed.
But today, as he consulted his list and asked for the first patient to be shown in, he had the unsettling premonition that they would not be getting his best.
In the end it did not take a sledgehammer to break the deadlock, and his paralysis, but a handful of featherlight words spoken in an almost inconsequential tone.
As he opened the front door that night, Sian was coming down the stairs. She had just got changed, and was pulling down the bottom of her sweater over her cord jeans. He could see the way her well cut hair was still settling back after bouncing free of the roll-neck.
‘There you are,’ she said.
‘Hallo.’ He hung up his coat and kissed her cheek, which felt cold. ‘Don’t ask.’
‘I wasn’t going to.’ She went ahead of him into the kitchen. ‘Or not that, anyway.’
‘That sounds ominous.’ He followed her, watched her take a bottle of wine from the fridge, pour herself a glass, lift it enquiringly in his direction. ‘No, thanks.’
‘Something stronger?’
‘In a moment perhaps.’ He knew he didn’t have to prompt her, she was no games-player. She sat at the table, composed, her long-stemmed glass emerging like a flower from her linked fingers. He waited.
‘I am going to ask,’ she said, ‘whether you feel we should separate?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, the shock bleeding slowly through him. ‘Do you?’
‘Well . . .’ She frowned slightly, considering. ‘I’m not happy;’
He was awed by her simple truthfulness. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yes.’ She sounded wistful. ‘Me too.’
‘Do you, as they say, want to talk about it?’ Christ, he thought, listen to yourself. But she knew him well enough to let the cliché pass without comment.
‘I think we should.’
‘This is because of me.’
‘Partly. You and another. But I wasn’t happy anyway, before that.’
He let the first part go, perhaps hoping that she would, too. ‘You never said.’
‘I didn’t think about it very much. We got on with our lives, didn’t we?’ He heard, like a bell tolling, her bleak use of the past tense. ‘But now that there really is someone else – I mean someone who is really important – I realise that I wasn’t. So maybe it’s time we called it a day.’
Her weariness, her stoicism, her goddam’ patience, made him suddenly angry. It was a relief to raise his voice.
‘Don’t you think, Sian, that we’re worth a bit more than this saintly chucking-in of the towel?’
She picked up her glass, said briefly, before sipping: ‘You didn’t think so.’
‘How did you find out?’
She gave him a cool look.‘You’re completely transparent, Robert, it’s one of your greatest charms.’
‘Don’t be so fucking patronising.’
She didn’t reply. But as she lifted her glass again there was the merest tremor.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve got no right to say that to you.’
‘You have every right. It’s called having a relationship.’
‘So you concede we still have that?’
‘Of course. But it’s no longer so important to us as some others.’
‘I see.’ He’d lost his way, as she had intended. And while she sat, he remained standing, like a recalcitrant employee reporting to the boss. He said hotly: ‘So since it seems we’ve established what my problem is, would you care to return the compliment?’
‘There is no one else, in the way that’s generally meant. Just the rest of my life – colleagues, patients, my friends, our friends . . . I no longer care for the feeling that we’re deceiving them.’
He dragged out a chair and sat down, because towering over her with his temper rising was too uncomfortable. ‘Is that what we’ve been doing?’
‘Oh, yes. Surely.’
Her manner was smooth and hard. He wanted to get between the plates of her defence and make her admit to something, anything, which did not imply that she had simply tried for this long but had now given up.
‘You must speak for yourself. Whatever other agendas there have been I’ve always had the greatest respect for our partnership.’
She eyed him mildly, shaking her head a fraction, spoke softly as though to an agitated child. ‘You pompous prick.’
He wanted to kid her. ‘I aim to please.’
‘I know, obviously, that you’ve not been faithful for twelve months together for the last – what? – ten years of our marriage . . . But spare me your “respect”.’ The inverted commas were audible. ‘Please.’
‘So why didn’t you say something before? Or did you simply enjoy the sense of superiority that virtue brings?’
‘You’re right, that is pleasurable. In its way. But curiously, feeling superior isn’t quite enough – even for me. And when I realised that your emotions as well as – the rest, were engaged elsewhere, I thought it time to speak up.’
‘I see.’
There followed a silence. To Robert, his wife’s silence seemed tranquil, almost glacial, while his own was tumultuous with confused emotion. His turn now to feel superior. She was after all a cold
bitch.
‘Are you,’ she asked, ‘going to give her a mention?’
‘I’m not sure what purpose that would serve.’
As he said it he seemed to hear a cock crow. How could he not speak Stella’s name when it had been the pulsing base line of his mind, his heart, his time, for so many years? How could he leave Stella in the lonely darkness of the wings and not bring her into the spotlight that was her natural place?
‘It would,’ said Sian, ‘since you ask, be kinder to her.’
‘It is not a question of kindness.’
‘No, that’s certainly true.’ She was sensitive as a hair-trigger, able to turn his every word woundingly against him. ‘And anyway it’s not as if I don’t know who she is – she’s Stella Carlyle.’
He felt an explosive thud of shock. ‘Yes.’
‘I found out when we went to see her at the theatre. One of those small, extraordinary coincidences waiting to happen. You remember I was late joining you because of the queue for the Ladies? I went to buy a bottle of water, and there was someone at the desk hoping for a return. I heard your name mentioned because a ticket had been kept for you but not been used. In the end it was agreed to give your ticket away. I believe I knew instantly, but from that moment I noticed all the signs about you. You couldn’t possibly hide them. I know you very well, Robert. And I have a very long memory.’ She paused, but he could think of nothing to say, and she went on. ‘When you’re roused your hackles rise, did you know that? Your hair ruffles just here—’ she put her hand to the back of her neck ‘—and your voice changes. You actually smell different. The minute the curtain rose I felt it on you.’
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