See you soon (can’t wait!)
love Sarah xx
PS Lots of baby kicking – I think he’s getting impatient!
Dear Alice
Just a quick note to say I’m really looking forward to meeting you and your mum – you must be very excited at the thought of the wedding!
Hope you’re enjoying life in Edinburgh. I’ve never been, but I’ve heard it’s a lovely city.
love Sarah xxx
Sarah
Neil rummaged in the fridge. ‘Where are the lunchboxes?’
‘On the worktop by the fridge.’ Sarah was closing Stephen’s duffel coat. ‘Leave this on you until you get into school,’ she told him. ‘Not in the yard, all the way into school. Did you brush your teeth like I asked you?’
‘Sort of.’
‘There’s a stone in my shoe,’ Martha said.
‘You can take it out in the car. Neil, give me that comb. Martha, do not take off that shoe – you don’t have time. Neil, make sure you’re back by half twelve at the latest. We need to leave at one for the train.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
A minute later they were gone, and Sarah was alone in the kitchen. She cut a slice of the brown bread she’d baked the previous evening, but as she was spreading it with butter she realised she didn’t want it. Her stomach had been in a knot since she’d woken, which was ridiculous: if anyone should be nervous it was Helen, the star of the show today.
But it was their first meeting, after writing to one another for the best part of twenty years. They’d never said hello, never shaken hands, never come face to face. The only photo she’d seen of Helen was the tiny one that was still used with her articles, which really didn’t show her at all – and Sarah’s publicity shot for the cookbooks, all Helen had to go on, was equally vague. Visually and aurally, they were strangers.
What if they didn’t click? What if they found they had nothing at all to say to one another? What if Sarah came across as gauche and naïve to Helen, her nervousness making everything she said come out wrong?
She looked out of the window at a sky the colour of tinfoil. Not a hint of sun, but hopefully it would stay dry. She would be glad when they got to the restaurant after the ceremony, when everyone would be a bit more relaxed. No doubt she’d be hungry then, ready for a good meal.
She massaged her abdomen absently, the butterflies still very much alive. Another scan due in a few days, everything fine according to her doctor. Seven weeks today she was due, the day she turned forty-five. In her sixties when this one would be graduating from university, the oldest mother in town.
She wished Neil had taken the day off, instead of arranging to do a morning’s work on his current project about fifteen miles away. She would have welcomed his presence now, needed something to distract her, to make the time pass faster.
She thought about going back to bed for a couple of hours, but lying there trying to sleep would be worse than mooching around the house. At ten o’clock she tidied up the kitchen and hauled herself up the stairs. She’d have a bath, paint her nails, take her time putting on her face and getting dressed.
When she’d finished, barely an hour later, she eyed herself critically in the full-length mirror on the landing. At this stage she wasn’t going to look remotely glamorous – not that she’d ever looked particularly glamorous, pregnant or otherwise – but the pink empire-line dress was pretty, and didn’t draw too much attention to her bump, and the blow-dry she’d had the day before was holding up well, even if it was glued together with spray. She’d have to do.
As she walked downstairs, she felt another fluttering in her gut. Great, the baby had decided it was time for some gymnastics. A few minutes later, as she was polishing the knives and forks – anything to pass the time – it came again, stronger, forcing her to drop the knife and lean against the table. Had she picked up a stomach bug? Of all days.
As the spasm subsided, she felt a strong urge to urinate. She turned wearily for the stairs – but before she’d put her foot on the first stair something gushed from her, drenching her legs and splashing onto her flat grey shoes.
Helen
Alice twisted the bottle slowly and eased the cork out with a gentle pop. Helen watched as she poured the champagne, wishing it was brandy to settle her stomach, which had been churning since she’d got up three hours earlier. That was the thing about curry: tasted fine at the time, made its presence felt later.
‘My mother’s wedding day,’ Alice said, handing her a glass with a smile. ‘You look beautiful, by the way.’
‘I do not.’
But Helen had been pleased enough with what she’d seen in the wardrobe mirror. The red dress was far from designer – she’d never paid more than fifty pounds for a dress, usually a lot less – but it suited her dark colouring, and fell in a smooth line to just below her knee. The lines on her face, deeper every year, couldn’t be helped, but Frank knew his way around them all and hadn’t been put off.
‘Are you nervous?’
‘Not in the least.’
Her hair had been given the same trim it always got from Ray, who’d repaired the hatchet job she’d given herself twenty years ago, and who’d been keeping her curls at bay ever since. ‘What are we doing for the wedding?’ he’d asked, when she’d made the appointment. ‘Fresh flowers, veil, a little colour rinse?’ When Helen had told him just the usual, he’d thrown up his hands in despair.
The new shoes that she’d forgotten to break in, higher than she normally wore, were sure to cause problems later on. She’d bring plasters, and kick them off anyway once they got to the restaurant.
‘Have you spoken to Granny this morning?’ Alice asked.
‘No.’
‘Maybe I’ll give her a quick call.’
‘Do if you want, but there’s no need – she knows we’re picking her up.’
Alice, who was insisting on calling herself the bridesmaid, wore a jersey top and skirt in a rich violet that she’d bought in an Edinburgh charity shop for seven pounds – ‘You wouldn’t believe what some people throw out.’ She had a little black feathery hat, also second-hand, and flat black velvet pumps. She looked sweet, and too thin.
Shocked to discover that Helen hadn’t given any thought to a bouquet, she’d gone out the day before and come home with two identical sprays of white rosebuds. She’d tipped out the bric-à-brac from Breen’s blue bowl and filled it with iced water and left them propped in it overnight.
‘Right, your dress is new and your bag is old. Have you got something borrowed?’
Helen indicated her mother’s heavy gold neck chain. ‘And your watch.’
‘Oh yes – and something blue?’
‘Certainly not – blue does nothing for me.’
‘Mum, you’re hopeless. You should have got a garter with blue ribbon. I could have brought one for you.’
She’d wanted to get a cake, but Helen had been adamant that none was required. Bad enough to be parading around as a newly-wed at her age; producing a wedding cake would be ridiculous.
‘This is making me a bit tiddly,’ Alice said. ‘We’d better eat something.’
‘You go ahead, I’m not hungry. There are Danish pastries in the fridge – Frank got them yesterday.’
He’d slept in his own house, determined to observe all the wedding superstitions. ‘I’ll see you there,’ he’d told Helen the evening before. ‘Don’t be too late, I’ll be a nervous wreck.’ Kissing her on the doorstep, murmuring that she’d made him very happy, lingering so long that in the end she’d pretended a tiredness she didn’t feel.
Unsettled had been how she’d felt, memories of Cormac filling her head earlier as the three of them had eaten Alice’s lamb curry and sat in front of the television afterwards. More and more she’d been thinking about him lately, snatches of her first wedding day catching her unawares.
A huddle of neighbours standing at the gate, waving her off to the church as she’d stepped into her father’s car. T
he scratchy feel of her dress’s net underskirt, the sprays of red flowers attached to the ends of the church pews, Cormac’s face as he’d turned to watch her walk up the aisle.
‘Are you thinking about Dad?’
She looked at Alice, who smiled at her. Alice, who’d turned out far better than Helen deserved. ‘Just a bit,’ she said, holding out her glass for a top-up she didn’t want.
Sarah
‘Hold on,’ Christine said, ‘hold on, dear, everything’s going to be OK—’ but Sarah knew that nothing about this was OK, not the frantic drive in Christine’s car to the hospital, Sarah hunched over and sobbing wildly in the back seat, not the trolley she’d been lifted onto in her ruined pink dress, not this rush down the corridor now, trying to hang on to Christine’s hand as her sister half ran alongside her, not the faces of the men in white uniforms who didn’t speak as they raced Sarah to wherever they were going.
Something was terribly wrong, pain knifing through her body as the too-bright lights flashed by above her head, as the trolley was pushed through doorways and turned down new corridors, as something was announced over a speaker that she couldn’t make out, as she cried for Neil but he didn’t come.
And then more doors opening into a room, and the trolley stopping and now Christine was gone, Sarah’s hand suddenly empty. New people rushed silently about, nobody at all meeting her eye, and she could hear beeping and the pain came again, worse, making her cry out – and here was her doctor, the bottom of his face covered with a mask, the top part creased with worry as she begged him, weeping, to save her baby, grabbing on to his green gown and screaming again with the terror and pain of it—
And then a stinging jab into the back of her hand, just before the doctor slid with everything else into the darkness.
Helen
As the taxi pulled away from the kerb, Helen turned to Alice. ‘Bring Granny in, I’ll follow you.’
Alice looked at her. ‘Where are you going? Are you OK?’
‘Fine, I just want a minute.’
She watched them walk up the steps of the registry office, her mother leaning on Alice’s arm, smart in the navy coat and dress she’d picked up in the July sales. At the top of the steps Alice glanced back, and Helen smiled and waved, and waited until they disappeared inside.
She stood on the path as people brushed past her. She pictured Frank sitting on some chair, or pacing the floor maybe, wearing the dark grey suit he’d bought a few weeks ago, his white beard neatly trimmed. George would be there too with his matching buttonhole, the garden centre closed for the day, both partners otherwise engaged.
She thought of Sarah and her husband somewhere inside, sitting apart from the others, or maybe having already introduced themselves – yes, Sarah would be friendly, eager to make herself known to them. And she couldn’t miss Frank: she’d recognise him straight away.
She checked Alice’s watch and saw that it was twenty past two. The restaurant was booked for three, the guests who were meeting them there probably en route by now. Everyone’s day disrupted, everyone gathering to celebrate the occasion of Frank Murphy and Helen Fitzpatrick finally getting married.
She thought of Breen, recently widowed. She looked down at the bunch of white roses she held, pictured it sitting all night in the blue bowl his hyacinths had come in … and she knew she couldn’t go through with it.
She walked a few metres up the path and laid the bouquet on top of a litter bin. She stooped and removed her new black shoes one by one – already starting to pinch – and set them carefully side by side on the edge of the path, and she walked barefoot to the end of the street. She took her mobile phone out of her bag and scrolled through her short contact list until she found him.
Future husband, he was listed as. Already there in the phone when he’d given it to her, and for the laugh she’d left it unchanged.
He’d taken her out and bought her countless presents. He’d held umbrellas over her in the rain, and looked after her when she’d been sick. He’d filled her house with plants and been kind to her mother. Every Valentine’s Day he’d given her a dozen red roses. He’d sent Alice fifty pounds when she’d moved to Edinburgh, told her to spend it on something totally frivolous.
She couldn’t phone him. She couldn’t talk to him, because whatever she said would come out wrong. She couldn’t let him know that she was breaking his heart; he’d have to figure that out all by himself.
She replaced her phone in her bag. She turned the corner and kept on walking, ignoring the ringing when it started.
Sarah
It wasn’t like before, it was a million times worse than before.
‘Talk to me,’ Neil begged, but she turned away.
He had a beautiful pursed little mouth and a cap of damp black hair, and perfect tiny toes and fingers. He was the size of a rabbit and he weighed nothing at all and his skin was paler than paper. He never made a sound, never opened his eyes. Never looked into his mother’s face.
Christine didn’t demand that she talk, just sat by Sarah’s bed weeping quietly, a tissue pressed to her eyes, her free hand resting lightly in Sarah’s.
They’d wrapped him in a white blanket and laid him gently on her chest, and she’d slid her hand inside the blanket to cradle the curve of his skull, and she’d lifted him up to press her lips to his soft forehead, to each of his eye sockets, to his cheeks and his chin and his throat.
His tiny fingers, his adorable little fingers, broke her heart.
‘Drink the tea at least,’ a nurse had urged, but Sarah had left it beside the untouched slice of toast.
He had grown cold and stiff in her arms as she’d gazed at him, memorising his blue-veined eyelids, his long dark lashes, his elfin nose, the adorable squiggles of his ears. They named him Luke, a name she’d always loved.
‘I’m so terribly sorry, Sarah,’ the doctor had told her, hands thrust into the pockets of his hospital gown. ‘The umbilical cord had become twisted, it had interfered with the oxygen supply, and by the time we were able to get to him it was too late. It was nobody’s fault, there was no warning.’
No warning. He’d died all alone inside her, the air choked out of him by the cord that joined her to him, that was supposed to keep him alive. They’d cut her open, they’d lifted him out, they’d disentangled the cord, but his heart had already stopped. They’d done all they could, but he stayed dead. Her baby was dead.
For six days she lay in bed, forcing down food to make the nurses stop asking. On the seventh day, when they let her go, she sat silently as Neil wheeled her to the car, she remained silent as he drove her home, the children blessedly absent, still at Christine’s. She stood under the shower and let the hot water mingle with her tears. She climbed into bed, her hair still dripping, and closed her eyes.
And the following morning, when Neil woke her with tea she didn’t want, she said, in a voice rusty with disuse, ‘Let Helen know what happened.’
Helen
Nobody understood. Everyone demanded an explanation.
‘I can’t believe you did that,’ Alice said. ‘I can’t believe you just walked away. How could you?’
‘I hope you’re ashamed,’ her mother said. ‘You made a fool out of that decent man. What have you got to say for yourself?’
‘I expected better of you,’ George said. ‘Frank worshipped you. You’ve destroyed him.’
But when Helen tried to explain, none of them would listen.
‘What do you mean, you don’t love him?’ Alice asked incredulously. ‘You were living together for years. You seemed perfectly happy. That makes no sense.’
‘You sound like a teenager,’ her mother said. ‘You’re fifty-three – you think your knight in shining armour is still on the way? Grow up.’
‘How can you say you didn’t mean to hurt him?’ George asked. ‘What else did you think you were doing?’
The only one who didn’t look for a reason was Frank. He didn’t show up at the house: it was George who came to
get his things, George who stood with his arms folded while Helen packed them up, who refused Alice’s offer of coffee as he told Helen what he thought of her.
And six days later, when the house was empty of Frank’s possessions, when his ring had been slipped into an envelope and handed to George, who’d accepted it wordlessly, when Alice had gone back to Edinburgh after a stiff hug for her mother at the airport, there was nothing left to do but sit alone in the living room and try to make sense of it.
But what sense was there to be made? She hadn’t loved him, that was all there was to it, however much she might wish it otherwise. She hadn’t loved him, and he deserved better.
And of course she’d done it badly – waited till the last possible minute before running away, made him believe that he was going to have his happy-ever-after before snatching it away from him – but in the end it had been the right thing to do, and now it was done, and she must remember that. She’d done the right thing.
In time she’d be forgiven by Alice and her mother – and possibly even by George, who’d looked at her like he hated her as he’d shoved the ring into his breast pocket. Frank was another matter. By him she might not be forgiven, and that was something she would probably never discover.
As she was climbing into bed in her ancient and much-beloved Alice Cooper T-shirt, which Frank had for some reason christened Prudence, she thought again of Sarah and her husband – and the thought was accompanied, as it had been since the aborted wedding day, by a pang of guilt.
They hadn’t introduced themselves. According to Alice, nobody had come forward to make themselves known, although Sarah must have identified the wedding party. She would surely have known it was them.
Something in Common Page 32