When I got home, goose-pimpled and muddy, I went into the girls’ room. I’d been gone less than an hour. I bent over them, the ends of my hair dripping onto the cheeks of our sleeping children. They hadn’t woken; nothing bad had happened to them while I’d been gone.
I bandaged my hand, and when Nan asked about it I said I’d burned it while boiling eggs for breakfast. She wanted to see, wanted me to go to the doctor, but I told her not to fuss. And an hour ago, when the girls left to catch the school bus, I stuffed the coat into a bin liner and, with the pole that props up the washing line, pushed it as far under the house as it would go.
Ingrid
[Placed in Warne’s Adventure Book for Girls, 1931.]
Chapter 31
On her way out of the house in the afternoon, Flora pressed her ear up against Gil’s door to listen to the conversation he was having with Richard, but their voices were too low for the words to make sense. She considered knocking, but Nan shooed her away. On the beach, Flora kicked through the foam that fanned like a bridal train across the sand. She walked from Dead End Point to the cliff, staring at the ground, trying not to think about her father, and not looking at the people on the beach, controlling her habit of searching for women with fair skin and straight hair. She thought about going for a swim, but even that seemed pointless. She flapped out her towel, lay down, and closed her eyes.
She tried to imagine what Louise would look like now. Just before Ingrid had disappeared, Louise had been elected to the House of Commons, and Flora had seen her picture in the paper. She was wearing a fitted jacket, a pearl necklace, and matching earrings—not someone she could imagine her mother being friends with. The newspaper had been spread out on the kitchen table and Flora had seen that Ingrid had doodled in red pen on the photograph: devil’s horns rising out of the coiffed hair.
Flora might have dropped off to sleep, she wasn’t sure, but she was aware of a shadow across her face. She opened her eyes, shielding the glare with her hand. Richard was looking down at her.
“What?” she said.
“I wasn’t sure if you were sleeping. It’s not good to lie too long in the sun.”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“Someone with your colouring—it’s very easy to burn.” Richard had a long-sleeved T-shirt on, shorts, and walking boots.
“I’ve lived by the sea for my whole life, Richard,” she said.
“Anyway, Nan wants to go shopping and I said I’d go with her. Your father shouldn’t be left on his own.”
“Oh God, is he worse?” Flora jumped up.
“He’s sleeping. He’s the same.”
Gil breathed—a slow, rasping exhalation, and a too-long gap in which Flora waited, holding her own breath. She rested back in the chair beside his bed and closed her eyes, then was jolted awake by her father saying, “I haven’t seen you do any drawing today.”
“Do you want me to do one now?”
He closed his eyes again and she took that as a yes.
When she returned with her sketch pad, the charcoal, the rubber, and her rag, he said, “Sit me up.”
She lifted him under his armpits, the folds of skin nearly empty of muscle. She drew what she saw: his head and shoulders propped up by the pillows, his prominent cheekbones, the hollows below them, his eyes smudged by black, and all the creases and lines in his sallow face. The swelling had gone now, but some discolouration remained. She looked harder this time, recording how his eyes receded inside the cavities of his skull, his thin, downturned lips, the sag of skin under his chin.
“Do you remember when I found that whale’s head on the beach?” Flora said.
Gil opened his eyes. “A real whale’s head?”
“No, plastic or fibreglass I think.”
“A toy?”
“It was life-sized. I wanted you to hang it on the wall.”
Gil shook his head.
“But you must remember.”
“No. I don’t.” His eyes moved to Flora’s sketch pad. “Let me see.” When she showed him he said, “It’s good. I look like my father just before he died, as if parts of me don’t work like they used to and other bits have fallen off.” He smiled and pushed the bedcovers away with his good hand. “I need the toilet,” he said.
“Can I bring you the bedpan? Doesn’t Nan usually bring you the bedpan?” Flora was nervous of looking after Gil on her own.
“And I always refuse it. She’ll have me in nappies next.”
Flora didn’t tell him she’d seen a packet of adult-sized incontinence pants in the airing cupboard. She offered her arm and together they shuffled down the hall, negotiating the books. She waited in the kitchen, staring at the washing Nan had hung on the line. She put the kettle on, searched in the tin for biscuits, yawned, and stared out of the window again. After five minutes Flora pressed her ear up against the bathroom door and heard her father whispering.
“Daddy?” She tapped on the wood. “Are you OK in there?”
“I’m fine,” Gil called. “Go to bed, Flo. We’ll see you in the morning.”
“Daddy, it’s the afternoon.” She crouched at the keyhole, but it was blocked by hardened toilet paper stuffed there by a seventeen-year-old Nan when she had tired of her little sister peeping in. Flora stood and knocked harder.
“It’s just your mother,” Gil said.
“Daddy.” Flora rattled the handle. She glanced down the hall, worried Nan would return soon, worried she wouldn’t. “Please unlock the door.” She heard the bath curtain being pulled and a couple of seconds later the door bolt was drawn back. Gil had his toothbrush in his hand, a swirl of striped paste on the bristles.
He moved to the bath. “Look,” he said, one hand on the edge of the watermarked towelling curtain, the bath hidden. The toilet and the sink spun around Flora; the altitude in the room was too high, the air too thin. Her father drew back the curtain with a flourish, like a conjurer delivering his most celebrated trick. The bath was empty. But the magician didn’t notice his mistake, didn’t realise that the trapdoor hadn’t opened, that the coloured handkerchief was showing from his sleeve, that the rabbit had hopped from the stage.
“Do you see her?” Gil said, looking in the mirror over the bath. “Do you see her? There, beside the sink.”
Flora saw herself and an old man, half his face yellow, grey bristles sprouting from a sagging neck, his eyebrows wild. There was no one else in the room.
“Yes,” Flora said. “I see her.”
Chapter 32
THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 23RD JUNE 1992, 4:15 AM
Gil,
We had another power cut last night. The three of us were in the sitting room when the lights flickered twice and then died. While Nan went out to the road I waited with Flora, holding her hand. She still doesn’t like being inside the house in the dark.
“The whole village is out,” Nan said when she returned. “I’ll get the candles.”
“Shh.” Flora gripped me. “Listen,” she said, with such urgency that Nan and I didn’t move, waiting for something. “There’s a noise,” Flora said, “in the kitchen.” And there was a slow creak, the sound of a footstep. “It’s the loose floorboard.”
“Which loose floorboard?” Nan said.
“The one in front of the cooker.”
I could hear the terror in her voice.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Nan said, and marched up the hallway to find the candles, and of course there was no one in the kitchen.
I need to teach Flora that there is nothing to be scared of, that she can do anything she wants, be anyone she wants to be.
After I finished my previous letter, I thought about what had happened on the beach. At first I was angry that you weren’t there to help me. You brought me to this place, gave me children, and left; everything that’s ever happened to me in my adult life is because of you, and now you expect me to be able to manage on my own, like a fledgling deserted before being taught how to fly. And then it occurred to me that I surv
ived that incident on the beach by myself; I didn’t need you or anyone else to rescue me. I did it on my own.
After my conversation with Jonathan in front of the Agglestone, I decided I would stay. No, perhaps it was more that I made no decision. Leaving was too momentous, too frightening, something I only thought about in the abstract. And while I stored our time in Italy away and tried to forget it, my third pregnancy was something I was surprised to find I welcomed. It wasn’t only that I stopped being sick earlier and felt healthy but also that it made me strong, invincible. I began to join in with your enthusiasm and the list of names which you taped to the fridge door (Herman, Leo, Ford, Günter). I, too, was certain it was a boy.
Jonathan called me after you’d told him.
“You’re still there then?” he said.
“I feel fantastic.”
“Do you want me to come down?”
“It would be good to see you, but you don’t have to come on my account.”
“Is Gil listening?”
“No, I mean it. There’s something about this baby, a connection. He’s not something alien like the others. He’s part of me, I’m part of him. Perhaps I was meant to do this mother thing after all, it’s just taken me a bit longer than everyone else.”
“If anything changes . . .” Jonathan said.
“It won’t.”
“. . . I’m just at the end of the phone.”
One morning in July I asked Martin if I could borrow his lawn mower. We leaned on the gate to the Swimming Pavilion and looked at the grass—coarse and knee-high. Martin loaned me his scythe, sharpened it with a whetstone, and in the gap between the pub’s lunchtime closing and the evening’s opening, he showed me how to use it. I swept the blade before me, only managing two or three jagged arcs before the muscles in my shoulders complained. (Different ones, it seemed, from those I used for swimming.) I cut the grass while Nan was sleeping, and it took me a week to shave it short enough to be able to mow it. After that I dug a flower bed below the veranda, a laborious job through the compacted earth. Milkwood Stables heard about my plans and dropped off a pile of manure. Every day I worked in my wide straw hat, long trousers, and one of your old shirts. Sometimes Martin would lean on the gate to watch and shake his head, telling me what I needed was a rowan and sea buckthorn windbreak and how the flowers Mrs. Allen’s sister had sent would never survive in our salty air. As the baby grew inside me, so did the garden.
When I think back on those months of swelling and happiness, my recollection is that I was alone in the Swimming Pavilion, or, at least, it was just me, Nan, and the garden. But you were there writing, because that summer you submitted your third novel. And it was rejected.
We were living off the tiny trickle of twice-yearly royalties from your first two books and the money your mother had left in trust for you; it wasn’t enough. Margarine sandwiches for supper, tea leaves reused pot after pot, and hiding from the milkman when he came knocking. Martin gave you a job behind the bar but asked you not to return for a third shift after you drank more than you poured for the customers. You worked for a few weeks at the stables but the horses scared you. You lasted six months or so at the dairy, but getting up early was never going to work for long. (Funny, after you’d teased Jonathan about milking those cows in Ireland.)
The garden and the swimming were my release from the worries about money and the relentless grind of motherhood. The water was good for what was happening inside me. Without you knowing, I crept out of the house and down to the sea in the dark, my feet finding their way around the rocks at the top of the beach. I hid the damp towel from you, washed the sand from my hair and the salt from my lips before you kissed me. I was gentle with the baby, I didn’t swim hard or far, we were never in danger. There was something magical about those mornings, imagining the child suspended in its fluid while I was suspended in mine, both of us in our natural states.
I swam until the cold weather came, when instead of going in the water, I went to stare at the sea—flat and grey, or brilliant as the sun rose, or, best of all, with the wind raging and the water throwing itself at the rocks.
In the village shop one afternoon, Mrs. Bankes found me hiding behind the shelves, counting the money in my purse, trying to decide if I could afford a packet of butter. Nan was sitting up in the pram, pointing at everything and saying “jam” no matter whether it was window cleaner or gravy browning.
“She’s such a good girl, isn’t she? Never struggles or wants to get down,” Mrs. Bankes said to me. “You’re such a good girl,” she said to Nan in a singsong voice.
“Jam,” Nan said.
“Let’s hope the next one will be as easy,” Mrs. Bankes said. I looked at my daughter and then, because it seemed to be expected of me, I reached out to stroke a stray curl of her hair. “I expect you’re hoping for a boy. It’s always nice to have one of each.”
“George,” I said, my hand on my belly, the name coming out of nowhere.
“Lovely. After George the Fifth, I suppose. Such a nice man.”
“No,” I said. “Bernard Shaw, or maybe Orwell.”
Mrs. Bankes carried on as if she hadn’t heard me. “They say we’re in for a cold winter, even down here. I hope you’ve got plenty of warm clothes ready for that new baby.”
“I’ve kept Nan’s—in the loft, I think.”
The shopkeeper leaned towards Nan. “Your little brother is going to be wearing pink? That won’t do. That won’t do at all.” And one of Mrs. Bankes’ hands flew down from over her head, and her finger pressed the end of Nan’s nose. Another child would have cried, but Nan smiled, a kind of adult smile—tolerant, patronizing. Mrs. Bankes stood up straight again. “You’re going to have to get knitting. I think we have some blue wool in the back here, and I’m sure I’ll have some needles you can borrow.”
“I can’t knit,” I said. “I don’t know how.”
She tutted. “Come up tomorrow lunchtime and I’ll show you.” She bustled me out of the shop. At home I found a packet of butter and a pot of strawberry jam tucked under Nan’s blanket.
For the next month I spent every lunchtime in the shop, Nan stirring buttons in a saucepan, and Mrs. Bankes and me side by side in front of the meat counter as I learned to knit. The wool was baby blue and soft. I finished one little boot, lopsided and too large for a newborn, but still I kept it under my pillow so I could hold it at night.
On the 23rd of November, in the evening, I was sitting in the kitchen casting on like Mrs. Bankes had taught me, starting the next blue boot, wondering whether you were enjoying your birthday in London and trying not to worry about where you were exactly, when there was a familiar pop and my waters broke, two months prematurely. I put my hand between my legs as if I could stop the flow of liquid, but it ran off the chair and pooled on the lino. I must have cried out, because I heard Nan calling, “Mum mum mum mum” from her bedroom. I dropped a tea towel into the puddle.
I rarely used the telephone, too concerned about the bill, but that night I stood over it, thinking about what number to call. We still had that pop-up address book then, and for several minutes I slid the pointer up and down the alphabet trying to recall the name of your agent, but as I dialled the last digit of his number I realised how late it was, and when the phone rang in an empty London office I felt the first contraction, a mild, low ache, like the others. Jonathan was in London that weekend and I remembered the name of the hotel he was staying in. The operator gave me the number, but when I phoned they said he’d gone out. I knew he’d be drinking with you, putting the tab on expenses. I left an urgent message with the receptionist. The only other person I knew in London was Louise. I hadn’t seen her for more than a year; we exchanged Christmas and birthday cards with letters, mine becoming a round robin with bad news smoothed over like the wash of a tide across dry sand. Louise answered on the fifth ring.
“Fitzrovia 386?”
“Louise? It’s Ingrid,” I said.
“Ingrid.” She said my nam
e without any intonation. There were voices in the background, the chink of cutlery on china. “Ingrid,” she repeated, this time her voice starting high and dropping lower. “How are you?”
“I’m very well,” I said. And then another pain caught me and I clenched my teeth together and breathed through it. “I’m having a baby.”
She paused, and said, “Another? Congratulations.”
“No. Right now.”
“Shouldn’t you telephone a doctor or a midwife or someone?”
“I will. But I’m trying to find Gil. He’s in London.”
“In London,” she said.
“Yes, at a meeting with his agent, or out with Jonathan. I didn’t know who else to call.”
She covered the mouthpiece and spoke, and I heard more people talking and a burst of laughter.
“And you’re having a baby?”
“It’s coming, but it’s too soon.” I didn’t want to cry.
“Ingrid, listen.” She sounded more pragmatic than she’d ever been before. “I’ll find Gil for you. When you put the phone down, call the hospital, tell them you’re having a baby, get them to send an ambulance. Right away. And Ingrid, don’t worry.”
Two days later when I was in my own bed again, one of those thick sanitary towels between my legs, and staring at the empty cot beside me, you went alone to the Royal Oak. I can’t write it; I can’t write the words that describe what happened, and anyway, you were there. The hospital scene still replays in my head, and sometimes it’s easier to let it. They whisked our boy away before I had a chance to say good-bye, and never gave him back to us even in an urn or a coffin. I’d taken the knitted boot to the hospital, grabbing it at the last minute from under my pillow, and although there was only one, I’d been excited to see it on him. It disappeared in that hospital room, and I never found out where it went. In good moments, I like to think the midwife put it on one of his tiny feet. I never told you, but I longed for it; just that one thing that had belonged to our son. What would I have done with one blue bootee? I don’t know; kept it under my pillow, or buried it and said Annie’s prayer over it, perhaps.
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