It changes you, having a child; you’ll never feel the same again. I remembered the unasked-for opinions offered throughout my pregnancy with a wry bleakness.
Did I feel sorry for him? No. Not while he had my baby in his arms.
Winnie took another step, and as she did so, the door burst open behind me, catapulting Nick into the hall.
“Margot, what the fuck—” he started, and then his eyes alighted on Charles. “Hang on, mate. What are you doing with her?”
Shut up shut up shut up, Nick—
Charles’s head snapped up at the male voice, and the despair on his features rearranged itself into anger. All the hatred, the resentment, and the envy I had imagined coming off Winnie in waves toward me throughout my maternity leave I saw broadcast in her husband’s face, and I knew once and for all who had sent me all those messages, who had left the mixtape for me to find.
“Mate,” Charles spat. “You haven’t got a fucking clue, have you? You’ve hardly been here. You’ve done the bare minimum. Three weeks?! Three weeks and then back to work! You don’t even know her, do you?”
If he hadn’t still been holding my child, I might have applauded. Nick looked like he’d been slapped, and I felt like I had been: Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much I had resented him and for how long.
“Charles—” Winnie spoke in the low notes I recognized from the many times she had had to talk me down from spiraling panic. “Charlie, darling, let’s go home, shall we?”
He moved closer to the top step and to the wooden banister where the landing overlooked the hall. I noticed Winnie take a few more steps toward him as he did.
“Look at her!” Charles sobbed. “Look at what she’s been through!”
He gestured toward Winnie, moving Lila in a wide arcing swing over the edge of the railing that made my stomach jump to my throat and force out a guttural shriek from between my lips. It served to focus his attention on me once again.
“You! After what you did! You don’t fucking deserve this, either of you. You don’t deserve her!”
And he held the baby—my daughter, my precious girl—out over the railing into the empty space above our heads. Lila was a placid baby, trusting and secure; Nick and I were grateful to her for her forbearance with us several times a day. But now—held aloft like that by someone she had never met—she finally sensed something amiss. She began to wriggle, then cry.
Not again. Not Lila. Please. Anything but that.
25
WINNIE
I had just come home after a few hours in my safety zone, watching office workers clock out for the weekend, drunk in anticipation of the pints they’d neck and the Sancerre they’d swig before they’d even reached the polished bars of the watering holes with faux-Dickensian names that occupy every corner in that part of town.
I realized I couldn’t go round to Margot’s house any more than I could shop my oldest friend to the police. I was disgusted with myself, and exhausted.
We needed to get on with our future, Charles and I. We would move away, leave the house that Jack had never come home to, in which the nursery was still as we’d left it the day I went into labor, sealed up as clinically as a crime scene. We would move. It had worked for Helen, after all, although broken bones heal faster than broken hearts.
When I got home, I discovered him sobbing in front of the computer in our study, his head bent against the grained wood of the old policeman’s desk we’d found in a flea market when we’d first moved in together ten years ago. His tears had soaked into the varnish and turned the surface different shades of salty blotches.
There was no need to ask what. Just as he knows exactly what is going through my mind when he finds me in my rocking chair, silent and white faced, staring at the walls, so I knew he had been overwhelmed by it afresh. Sometimes it just hits you, as if it’s happened all over again; as if you hadn’t already spent the best part of a year trying to live with it.
What I wanted to ask, though, was why. Why had he spent so much time sitting at this screen lashing out at people he didn’t know and had never met? Had it hit the spot? Had frightening Margot made him feel any better about things?
No, Charles admitted through the tears. It had just made him hate himself even more.
I could hardly bear to look at him.
I had forced myself to be constructive after it happened: to come back to life, get fit, and sort my head out. He had shut himself away, shut me out and retreated behind that screen to spread his misery online. To make people who had nothing to do with it feel that little bit worse, as if he could parcel up his pain into little nuggets of bile and hand it out in portions to other people, like cake at a wedding, until he himself had none of it left.
Perhaps I had done something similar with Margot.
I didn’t notice right away that her name was among the list of wretched one-sided sallies Charles had been throwing out into the digital shitstorm, but when I did, I made him give me his passwords and sent him to bed with a couple of the tranquilizers we both had prescriptions for. Just one more thing, packed in the overnight bag next to the little suits along with the funeral literature, that I hadn’t expected to leave the hospital with after the birth of my first child.
“Why should fucking Margot be fucking happy?” he wailed before I managed to calm him. “Why should it work out for her? What’s she ever done to deserve it? It could just as easily have been her!”
Throughout my grief, I had never liked thinking that way—although, of course, the thought had crossed my mind more than once. But I wouldn’t wish what happened to us on my worst enemy—let alone my supposed best friend.
I saw the comments Charles had made to her on Twitter. They were petty things, stuff about her weight, her looks, how Maggie was doing so well in her role at the magazine, but I couldn’t deny they were aimed well. Charles had picked just the right things to worry at. They would have hit the spot all right.
I marveled that grief had given Charles the imagination to be as cruel as a teenage girl and wondered whether adolescents treated one another so badly because they were all actually in a state of mourning—for their childhood, their innocence, the security of their tender years.
I wondered whether she thought I had sent them, if when she saw HelenKnows’s stupid oversized sunglasses pop up on her phone screen she thought instead of my red hair. I could see why she might. I imagined her doing a patronizing pity-nod and shrug, and telling people “Winnie’s been through a lot,” as if to explain it away, and I felt suddenly furious at where my life had gone.
I had to apologize to Margot for what Charles had done and for the way I had been with her. Then we could part ways forever, closure finally attained on a friendship that would have politely faded out but for drinks during university holidays or if we both happened to be up north for Christmas. Until we had babies, at least, by which point perhaps we’d have left each other a quick message of congratulations on Facebook before carrying on with our lives.
It struck me with blackest humor that Helen had ended up prolonging the friendship she had tried her best to put a stop to for another twenty years.
I shut down each of the tabs on Charles’s computer one by one and winced every time I saw the pointless cruelty of his words. They jarred with the abiding memory I had of our little boy as something that had been purely good, untouched and untainted by the world and what it does to people.
I noticed as I scrolled back through the Twitter account, my eyes glazed after a while so I didn’t have to take in the hate and the venom that the man I most cared for had been spouting, that it went back far beyond Jack’s death. Silly little jibes at the women who read the news; fights picked with men who voted differently. Charles was such a mild and kind man, thoughtful to a fault. I had had no idea of the secret, screen-lit life of bitterness he had been leading.
&nb
sp; I would think about how best to talk to him about it later on. One thing at a time.
I dug around in the desk’s sturdy central drawer for what I would need to take to Margot’s with me in the morning: the spare set of house keys she had given me when they moved in down the road. In case of emergency, she had said back then, without a beat. As if our friendship weren’t built on a case of emergency. As if that weren’t what had tethered us to each other for years.
I could have sent those keys back with the gifts I’d returned to her. But I hadn’t. I didn’t want to ask myself why.
I dropped them into the ceramic dish on the table by the front door and rubbed at my face. My temples felt thick; my head was like a radiator that needed bleeding. I’d have a shower and change into some comfy clothes. Then I’d sit and let television dross wash over me as though it were any Friday night and I were any woman in her thirties at home on her own, with a baby asleep upstairs instead of a husband sedated for his own safety.
As I lathered and rinsed under the warm water, I thought about how different my life would be without Margot. I hadn’t seen her for ten months already, but I felt none the lighter for it. She had been on my mind a lot—when Jack hadn’t been, of course.
We had meant so much to each other, and then—what? I’d had my head turned: metaphorically, by Helen, but also literally, when Margot had most needed me in that dingy club. I had never forgiven myself for it, I realized, but more than that, I had never forgiven her for it. And it had hardly been her fault. If Helen and I hadn’t left her outside; if we’d all gone home together and resolved to try again another night; if we’d sat and watched films the way we’d told our parents we were going to—what would have happened to those three girls?
I mentally added another apology to the ones I owed Margot in the morning, one that was long overdue and necessary if I ever wanted to move on: I was sorry for having left her all those years ago and for not having been there to protect her. I was sorry for making her feel that what we hadn’t told Helen in time had been her fault alone, her sin of omission.
I had stayed silent too, all those years ago.
I stopped the water and reached for a towel from the rack. As I did so, I heard a clunk from downstairs and started, but then remembered that the washing machine was chuntering with a load of what I realized I now thought of as Charles’s troll clothes: the jogging bottoms and hoodies he’d put on before sequestering himself in the study.
I had thought he was keeping busy with his architecture journals in the months he’d been away from the practice and remembered with fondness that he’d worn smart shirts and chinos even on the days when he used to work from home, he was so fastidious. I had loved how careful he always was with his appearance in the early days; a habitual scruff myself, I had always thought of him as dragging me toward being presentable.
I had been so preoccupied with what I had lost, with being a mother without a child, that I had failed to notice that Charles had changed too. I was glad he was asleep now, recharging. I would do my best by us both from now on, would pay attention to what was going on in front of me rather than the shadows cast by a moment long ago that I had no control over anymore.
I dried and moisturized, and dabbed lavender oil on my pulse points to help with anxiety and insomnia. Then I stepped into a pair of fresh pajama bottoms, twisted my hair into the usual barrette, pulled a T-shirt on, and went to retrieve my cardigan from the end of my and Charles’s bed, expecting to have to tiptoe past his inert form.
There was no need: The covers were thrown back, the mattress empty but for the imprint of him.
I emerged onto the landing again.
“Charles?” I called, and was answered only with silence; I couldn’t even hear the washing machine anymore.
It was only as I was halfway down the stairs that I realized the laundry I had put on this morning would have finished hours ago. The clunk I had heard from the bathroom had been the front door.
At first I didn’t think about where he might have gone, but rather how. My stomach lurched at the notion of Charles’s going anywhere in what I knew would be a pilled-up stupor after the dose I had given him, but my blood ran cold at the prospect of his having taken the car in that state. If he had an accident…My worn-out heart and tear-abraded cheeks couldn’t handle any more loss.
As I ran to the dish of keys on the table, I saw with relief that the chunky electric fob to our beaten-up old hatchback was still lying there. Next to them: Margot’s house keys—labeled as such and tied with a navy grosgrain ribbon from some fancy designer carrier bag. My entire core went cold.
Now I knew where Charles was going, I couldn’t bear to think what impulse had taken him there.
26
MARGOT
I was rooted where I stood, petrified as though in one of my dreams, as my baby veered closer and closer to the long drop above my head. My eyes were fixed on Charles on the landing just as they had been on Helen, up on the balcony long before.
Please.
Then—a movement in the dark behind him, and Charles, unsteady with his arms outstretched, staggered sideways as something collided into him. In the gloom of the landing, I made out bleach-blond hair, a short figure that had come from the direction of the nursery.
Maggie.
As he buckled with the impact, Charles’s arms began to tip Lila from them, as one might a bundle of washing into a laundry basket. I saw Winnie lunge the final few feet toward him.
I thought of another girl, a lifetime ago, in the arms of a man with no say over what was happening to her.
Winnie had rescued that girl, too.
I didn’t like to think about what might have happened if Winnie hadn’t barged into that back room all those years ago. She had courage in her blood, my oldest friend, and a loyal heart pumping it steadily around that spare frame of hers. I noticed then how rangy she had become, how grief had taken some of her sturdiness from her, and my own heart ached, even though it was preoccupied with Lila. There would always be space for Winnie in it, too.
The baby—my baby—was airborne for a few seconds, before landing in my oldest friend’s hands. Those same strong, trusty arms that had clapped me to her so many times over the years despite everything.
I remembered how it had been with Winnie all that time ago. Before Helen, and before Jack. What a perfect fit we were, how joyfully we spent our days, how true we were to each other.
Winnie came to save Lila, not hurt her. She was talking to Charles as well as to me.
She had lost sight of me once, but now Winnie’s attention was focused squarely on the little face gazing up into hers, learning the features it would—I knew then—in years to come recognize as well as it did my own.
Charles was trying to right himself, his arms flailing around in confusion. I realized then why his voice had sounded so strange—he was on something. Whatever it was had dulled his senses and slowed his limbs and, with it, his instinct for balance.
I recognized those movements, the ducking and the wobbling, as the ones that come before a fall. But it wasn’t Charles who fell. With a dull thump, his left arm connected with Maggie, who was trying to disentangle herself from where she had thrown herself into him seconds before, and it was she who was knocked off kilter—and out, away from the top step and toward the bottom. Toward me.
She hit the stairs several times before she stopped moving, a bumpy slither that led with her head and followed with her shoulder, her knees, and her shins, fump-a-dumping down the flight toward where Nick and I stood on the wooden boards at the bottom, which her forehead hit with a loud crack.
In the second before I hurled myself into a crouch at her side, shouting her name, I felt a familiar sensation of looking from a height at the future as it slid out of my hands. Of the years ahead being unpicked from the pattern they had begun to form in and starting to k
nit another way.
I had spent so long dwelling on what I thought Maggie had taken from me, I hadn’t even noticed how much she had given in return.
27
WINNIE
The little fingers curled around mine, just like Jack’s had done. In the dark of the landing, Lila’s big blue eyes stared up at me.
His had been brown.
I lost him all over again.
28
MAGGIE
She was lying on the floor in front of them all, a small puddle of black ink blooming next to her head.
This was not how she thought she’d spend her Friday night.
Shoes began to arrange themselves around her, but instead of a shocked hush, there were words. Gentle words spoken by quiet female voices whose strength came through in their calm authority.
Above her were two young women, one holding a baby and the other kneeling at her side. Maggie found she could not turn to look at Margot’s face and when she tried, the sweet, soft voice above them told her not to.
“Lila…,” she croaked, and felt a bubble burst in her throat.
“She’s here, she’s fine,” Margot said. Then a movement from dark to light, and Maggie heard a tiny mewling nearby. “Maggie, what you did…How can I ever—”
A rumbling pain began in her legs. Like a plane about to take off, it threatened to get louder and louder.
Maggie heard tears. Men’s tears. Grief, and ignorance.
“I’m so sorry, Margot.” Nick’s words were ragged, like his breath.
“There’s no time for that.” Margot sounded sharper now. “Get Charles into the kitchen, and keep him there.”
“There’s an ambulance coming,” the other voice—Winnie’s—said with a waver, the first throughout all this composed efficiency. The women above Maggie looked into each other’s eyes.
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