by Patrick Gale
‘How would you know?’ she protested. ‘Drink your coffee. I’m late already. I must gulp and go.’
But she could not fool Villiers. No one could. His relentless teasing made her smile and her smile connected through to the happiness she was trying so hard to tamp down and it all came welling out.
‘How sure are you?’ he asked.
‘Ninety percent,’ she said. ‘I’ve been being sick and everything. I’ve even got a heightened sense of smell, like a werewolf. I only bought the tester to be sure.’
‘What are you going to do?’
This struck her as an odd question in the circumstances and only then did she realise that Villiers had not said how wonderful or well done. He was looking quite grave, as though she had confessed to a lump in her breast or a growing blind spot in her field of vision. Of course, she reminded herself, Villiers was basically gay; he might lure the odd girl into bed but he was never going to fool one of them into marrying him. Excluded from parenthood, he probably found the whole business mildly offensive.
‘I thought I’d tell Giles tonight,’ she told him gently. ‘He adores children. He’s going to be so happy.’
‘Is he? Giles? Are you sure?’
‘Well I think I know him pretty well,’ she said, half-offended in her turn.
‘And what about your career? I thought you were doing so well.’
‘I am. Pretty well. But it’ll keep. Selina will understand. She can’t sack me for taking maternity leave. Then I…I haven’t really thought about it much yet but I suppose after a bit I’d do what everyone else does.’
‘What? Find a childminder or one of those park-and-pay places while you come back to work?’
‘Yeah. Why not? It’s pretty much the norm, now.’
‘Suppose so.’
‘The thing is I’m not really career-minded,’ she said.
He mimed incredulity.
‘I’m not,’ she said and realised the truth of the declaration as she voiced it. ‘I’ve been making the best of it because sooner or later you have to or you’d crack up but…if I gave it all up tomorrow and became a full-time mother, I think I’d love it.’
‘You?’
‘Yes. Me. I think first reactions are very telling and my first reaction hasn’t been panic. I’ve spent most of the last two days feeling blissed out, natural. Maybe motherhood was my destiny all along?’
Villiers drained his coffee, pulling a little face as the dregs hit his tongue. ‘Sorry. I’m being a pig. It’s wonderful news. It’ll be a stunner. What do you want, boy or girl?’
‘I don’t care so long as it’s got all its bits in the right place.’ She shivered uncontrollably. Someone stepping on my grave she thought. ‘A boy would be fun,’ she went on. ‘After all, we get a girl fix with Dido on a regular basis.’
‘Hmm. It’s just that…’
‘What?’
‘Oh. Nothing. I’m being silly.’
‘No, what?’ she insisted.
‘Well.’ Villiers unwrapped his sugar lumps and munched one judiciously. ‘It’s simply that you’re so different from Eliza. Different in every way.’
‘Thank Christ.’
‘Quite. And it always struck me that, quite apart from your looks, it was your unElizaishness that attracted Giles to you.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Oh I don’t know. I’m being a prat. Ignore me. I’ve made you late and I’m late too now. I’m thrilled, darling. Honestly.’ He kissed her on the lips rather ostentatiously as he stood and retrieved his briefcase.
‘Villiers?’
‘What?’
‘You don’t mind not telling anyone. Not just yet?’
‘Of course I don’t,’ he said. ‘I know how it is. Early days. You don’t even know your own mind yet. You and Giles might not even decide to keep it. I won’t tell a soul. Bye.’
Julia knew she should go too but felt pinned to the little table by the shock of what he had just said. She had grown used to the image of herself as practical and unflinching. A Pill-taker. She had been obliged to have dealings with an abortion clinic just once. That had been experience enough, however, to prevent her ever again viewing the process as a simple choice in which her emotions could remain unengaged. Even if she was an earth-mother in the making, happy to abandon her career, perhaps a baby would be a disaster for Giles?
One of the more senior associate agents had started a family four years ago and had barely had a grasp on her desk diary since. She was forever cancelling things or rescheduling them so as to fly out of the office on the tail of some child-related crisis and several of her more important clients had asked to be reassigned as a result. Then there was Gideon Stone, four years ago their most promising new signing and all set to become a star baritone after a famously good and daringly young Don Giovanni at Cardiff. He had started a family with his longstanding girlfriend – marriage, mortgage, the works – then he had started turning down important offers, saying he needed to spend time with the children. Then his looks went sort of puffy and his hair thinned and his voice started to seem less than extraordinary. Selina had not dropped him – she had a heart in there somewhere – but she had signed another, brighter, more ambitious baritone and it tended to be Julia who returned Gideon’s plaintive calls about work prospects.
Yes, Giles loved Dido, but she was not a permanent fixture in the household. And she was a growing girl and a tidy one at that. Perhaps he would be disgusted as Julia morphed from neat professional into blowsy maternity and appalled as their domestic order was thrown into noisy chaos by a baby. No amount of careful advance planning could forestall broken nights, nappies or a sea of hideous plastic objects. Fight them as she might, circumstances would conspire to turn Julia into another Eliza, housebound, exhausted, depressed and needy. Before she knew it another woman, sharper-eyed, wiser to his needs, would be luring Giles away.
As if confirming this grim prophecy, Tobit Hart ignored her as she smiled at him on her way back into the office. Such was the fate of all cow-minded mothers: invisibility and social demotion.
She performed the test the moment the office bathroom came free. Selina had taken Giles to a director’s meeting and half her other colleagues were out as well; nobody who mattered was there to notice. It was positive. The instructions suggested that she visit her GP for confirmation but every organ in her altering body told her the little plastic wand in her fingers was only confirming what she already knew. What more could a GP add but a referral for a termination?
She hid the tester back in its box, wrapped the whole in a plastic bag then thrust it to the depths of the rubbish bin in the office kitchen, amidst the mess of empty yoghurt pots, half-eaten salads and used teabags. She would take no action just yet. She would not even risk telling Giles and letting his reaction dictate the baby’s future. She would wait and watch, a practice that had never failed her in the past.
She lost herself in work all afternoon. When Selina returned and gleefully announced the good news about Giles and Covent Garden it felt like the first bitter shoots growing from the doubts Villiers had planted. In fantasy, swimming on her hormonal sea all that morning, she had told Giles the glad news and he had taken her in his arms, kissed her over and over again and told her how happy he was. And he had said how much he loved her.
But Giles had never said he loved her, she reminded herself now. Not even in the abandon of sex had he ever gasped, ‘I love you,’ in the meaningless way some men did.
She resolved to say nothing just yet but to watch and wait.
17
Pearce so rarely had appointments to keep that he had to make a great effort both to remember them and not to be late. His timetable usually had little to do with clocks; he rose when the sun woke him, stopped for lunch when he was hungry then worked on until there was no more light. Molly was forever teasing him or rebuking him about his tardiness. It was amazing how fast she had adjusted to worldly timekeeping after leaving Morris’ farm.
But there was litt
le risk of his forgetting this date the way he did appointments with dentist or bank manager. He had thought of little else since Sunday night yet still he had a horror of being late. He had calculated and recalculated how much time he should leave for washing, dressing and driving and as a result drew up on the outskirts of Hayle far too early. Even using a town plan to find it, he arrived on Janet’s street at a quarter to eight.
Feeling inept, he parked well away from her house and made himself listen to a radio programme on skin disorders to pass the time. Battered and muddy, his old car felt as out of place here as a Sherman tank.
Portreath Way was not a smart address but a row of council or ex-council semis. He wondered how long she had lived here. Strung out along sand dunes on one side and a partially silted-up harbour on the other, Hayle had always depressed him because it seemed to lack a centre and the social cohesion that implied. But perhaps Janet had been born here. Perhaps there were things about it she loved. Perhaps she would lead him to see its hidden charms. He forced himself to stay in the car until five past then had to double back to it from halfway down the street when he remembered the wine he had left tucked in a box of grease canisters in the rear.
34 Portreath Way. He had repeated it to himself so often there had been no need to write it down. Still a council house, he guessed, judging from the standardised cream paint and blue door. The grass needed cutting but perhaps the children preferred it long. There was a football, an inflated paddling pool, a framework with a tiny swing on one half and a truncated slide on the other, both in orange plastic.
A child answered his ring, a dark, mop-haired boy who stared.
‘Hi,’ Pearce said. ‘I’m Pearce. Is your mum in?’
The boy stared a second longer then half shut the door and ran into the depths of the house yelling, ‘Mum?’
Pearce heard Janet shouting, ‘Bed, you. Now!’ He imagined her quick glance in the looking glass before she opened the door afresh.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Well. Come in, then.’
She hurried him in off the doorstep before he had time to take much in. She was a brunette but had used some kind of purplish rinse in her hair that made it look dead, too uniform. Her face was tired and rather sharp. Like him she had made an effort though. As he followed her to the living room, he saw she had on a sexy, very revealing dress that showed off a mother’s full chest to advantage and was wearing a richly suggestive scent. Her tanned legs were bare and she had on a pair of heels that gave her trouble. She wobbled nervously on them and soon kicked them off.
Two much smaller children were peering through a baby gate at the top of the stairs.
‘Bed!’ she hissed at them and they vanished, giggling. A bedroom door banged and there was the rhythmic squeaking of beds being manically bounced on. The house smelled powerfully lived-in: lamb chops, cigarettes and air freshener.
The boy had retreated to the huge sofa where he was defiantly watching The Jungle Book.
‘Lance? Bed!’ Janet said.
‘You said I could watch this.’
‘Bed.’
‘You said.’
‘I don’t mind,’ Pearce said. ‘Honestly.’
They both looked at him. Perhaps Lance was unused to having his cause defended.
‘You sure?’ she asked.
‘Yeah. Haven’t seen this for ages. It’s funny. I…I er bought you this.’ He offered the bottle.
‘Red gives me migraines,’ she said, sitting by the boy. ‘But help yourself. I’ve got one on the go.’
‘I want one,’ Lance said.
‘Don’t push it,’ she told him.
Pearce saw the bottle opener she had used on the Riesling she had started. Perhaps it was rude not to drink the same as her? What the hell – he hated Riesling. He poured himself a glass of the madly expensive Brouilly he had bought on the way home from the cattle auction.
The chairs in the room were both at the wrong angle for watching the television and he did not know her well enough to go moving her furniture, so he sat on the other end of the sofa, the cross little boy as effective as any bolster between him and Janet.
Mowgli was dancing with the monkeys. King of the Swingers. He struggled to recollect how much of the film that meant there was still to run. He remembered seeing it when he was this age, he and Molly wedged between chuckling parents in the Savoy in Penzance.
He saw the computer on a cluttered table in the corner. An abandoned computer game was playing with itself, nervously roaming a repeating sequence of torchlit Gothic halls, looking for demons. He wondered if she used it when the children were still in the room, tapping in lascivious chat while they sat on the sofa watching cartoons. No. He had only ever met her in the chat room after their bedtime.
‘You found us all right then?’ she said.
‘Oh. Yes. I used the map but –’
‘Ssh!’ Lance hissed.
Janet tutted and reached for cigarettes and an ashtray which had been modestly tucked beneath the sofa. She offered one to Pearce behind Lance’s back. He shook his head. She lit up, inhaled deeply, then lay back and fired a plume of smoke at the ceiling.
Softened by life in a smokeless world, Pearce’s eyes began to itch almost at once. He fought the urge to cough.
‘Where’s the…er?’ he asked.
‘Next door to the kitchen,’ she said, still staring at the ceiling.
The lavatory walls were a shrine to the children’s father. There were school groups – he had gone to the same school as her in Hayle, so perhaps they had been childhood sweethearts – then football team shots, then pictures of him in Navy uniform. There was a picture of an aircraft carrier and a group shot of him and some mates posing on a dockside, ridiculously young, hair cropped brutally short. Pictures of him clutching babies. He was the image of the kid on the sofa. Then Pearce saw the shot of the war memorial on Plymouth Hoe with fresh wreaths about it. When could he have died? The children were so young. Not the Falklands. Gulf War? Bosnia? Surely no ships went there? Iraq? Perhaps he had died in a training exercise. Perhaps he merely died? Perhaps he merely abandoned her?
The lavatory window was far too small to climb out of so he flushed, returned to the sofa and watched The Jungle Book. The smoke was not so troubling now it had overcome the air freshener.
Her hand slid along the sofa back after a minute or two and began to massage his neck. He felt he should return the favour but it was impossible while her arm was still in place. After a while her hand dropped down onto the sofa back as if exhausted. Then, when Mowgli risked the scorn of a million little boys by catching sight of a giant-eyed village maiden gathering water, she tapped his shoulder and indicated that Lance had fallen fast asleep.
‘You mind doing the honours?’ she whispered. ‘I’ve got a bad back.’
‘Oh. Sure.’
‘His room’s straight ahead, at the top of the stairs.’
Perturbed that she did not think to come too, he scooped the sleeping boy up in his arms and carried him upstairs. The light from the landing spilled into the little room revealing a bed littered with toys and comics. Pearce managed to clear some space by pushing the duvet aside with his foot then laid Lance on the bed. The kid was still fully dressed but it did not feel proper to remove more than his trainers before pulling the duvet over him.
When he came back downstairs she had turned off the television and dimmed the lights. The pulsing glow from the computer screen revealed her stretched out on the sofa, hands behind her head. She stood as he came in.
‘Should I…er?’ he began.
‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘Shut the door.’
There was a rustling sound as he turned from shutting it and he found she had slid the dress down around her waist. Her breasts were bare. They looked full and sore.
‘Get over here,’ she said, ‘And do me. No foreplay.’
She pulled him into a furious, smoky kiss as soon as he stepped towards her then began to tear his shirt off h
im. They fell on each other, scattering the ashtray, cushions and empty Riesling bottle.
It was horrible, all-consuming. They were like starving people bereft of all humanity by the urge to take what they needed from each other. As he came with embarrassing swiftness he was appalled to hear the bed-bouncing noises starting up again from upstairs.
She rolled away from him, slid her dress back over her shoulders then fumbled for a cigarette. In the flare of the match she looked so desolate he felt something like tenderness, felt he should hold her, but she was standing apart, making herself unholdable.
‘Can I see you again?’ he asked. ‘Maybe I could take you out somewhere next time.’
‘What do you think?’ she asked.
He had absolutely no idea how to answer that so stooped to relace his boots.
‘You’d better go,’ she said. ‘We’ve woken the girls.’
She walked out of the room, clutching her shoes in one hand, and disappeared upstairs.
He drove home with the windows wide open until his teeth began to chatter. The house seemed unimaginably remote and cool and dark. He went straight to bed but found he couldn’t sleep. Despising himself as the worst kind of hypocritical puritan, he got up again to take a shower in an effort to wash the evening off him.
18
Kitty was unexpectedly amazing. Perhaps she was striving to fill a maternal void. She dealt with the undertakers – a local firm who ran up kitchens and bookcases as well as coffins and rallied the scant group of mourners back to her house for a funeral tea. Eliza was dimly aware of being an object of pious curiosity – the daughter who had survived but was a disappointment – but people were kind and there were a few faces she recognised.
Never one to trust others to get things right, her mother had paid for her obsequies long in advance, so much so that there was actually some money left over from interest earned. Her solicitor was a member of her church’s congregation. He attended the service then lingered on afterwards so as to broach the delicate matter of the will.
‘You could call at the office during the week if you prefer,’ he said, but Eliza wanted the business out of the way so they risked farce by going through the will while sitting on her mother’s bed, joined by the murmur of voices, the flushing of the lavatory, the regular thump of footsteps up and down the stairs.