by Hannah Emery
He looked, and looked. And then he held out his hands.
‘May I?’
Rose nodded, and smiled, and passed the little bundle to her husband. And as she lay back in her comfortable bed in her clean nightgown, her husband held the baby as though it was his.
‘We’ll give her anything she needs,’ he said, and Rose, who knew that her husband only ever made promises that he intended to safely keep, thought about how very lucky she was and how lucky her daughter would be.
When the baby was a week or so old, a postcard plopped onto the large, clean mat in the hallway.
‘A postcard from Blackpool,’ Rose’s husband said, placing the postcard on Rose’s knee. Rose wasn’t yet used to doing everything with one hand, and spent a few seconds trying to keep the sleeping baby still and retrieving the postcard from the edge of her knee.
The picture on the front was of the North Pier. Not an exciting picture, Rose thought, unless it brought back exciting memories of a fire and a boy and a night of love.
She flipped the postcard over to see a square scrawl.
Come back. I am your future. You cannot change what is meant to be, it said.
The baby woke with Rose’s movement and began to fuss.
‘This, my dear, means nothing to me.’ Rose let the postcard flutter down onto the floor, jiggled her little baby and sat back in her comfortable chair.
Chapter Eighteen
Louisa, 1971
Louisa was glad that Rose House was finally empty of guests. The winter stretched out in front of her, blank and untainted by people’s requests for lamb that was hotter or tea that was stronger or beds that were softer. Running a business was hard work, much harder than Louisa had expected it to be. Some days, she found talking to guests and dealing with their every need satisfying. But other days, she felt as though she had leapt into a huge, bottomless pool, pushed by an idea that bore no resemblance to reality. The idea of running a boarding house, of returning to the home that meant so very much to her, had filled Louisa with excitement and delight. But the day-to-day monotony of having clean knives and clean hair and a smiling face wasn’t exciting at all. She wouldn’t tell anybody that she was bored by her new business. She would keep this thought hidden, along with her other secrets that lay curled up in her mind like sleeping cats.
‘Knock knock,’ came Jimmy’s voice from the door, stepping onto Louisa’s blank winter and leaving prints all over it.
Louisa wished Jimmy wouldn’t say ‘knock knock’ when he came into the room. Why say it instead of doing it? It was such a Jimmy thing to do.
‘So, now you’re finally closed up for the winter, can I please take you out for the evening? I have…’ Jimmy cleared his throat, ‘something to ask you.’
A moment’s headache, a blur of the eyes, a flash: a sapphire engagement ring, a glass of warm champagne.
Louisa stared up at Jimmy. Was this really going to be the man who would make her happy for the rest of her life? Would she make him happy for the rest of his? She thought of Penny, still single, still eyeing up Jimmy all the time, still wearing her shortest skirts to make him see what he was missing out on.
‘We can go out for the evening, if you like,’ Louisa said. She felt a tugging in her abdomen, and suddenly wanted to throw up. She did a quick mental calculation. Four days late. More tired than usual.
Could be.
The thought of having a baby of her own made Louisa ache. Every time she saw Noel, every time she held his little body against hers, she felt a physical pull in her belly and an ache behind her eyes, as though she wanted to cry. When Noel cried out for Mags, Louisa’s whole body stirred. She watched Mags roll her eyes, or tut as she had to put down whatever she was doing to deal with her son, and knew that if she had a Noel of her own, she would be much more attentive than Mags.
Louisa touched her belly fleetingly and twinged with longing for whoever might be in there. Jimmy might be irritating, but if he had given her the gift she wanted so badly, Louisa would be forever indebted to him. She would see him in a different way. He would become her hero.
She stood up and kissed Jimmy briefly on his thin lips. He had hard lips and always pressed them too forcefully against Louisa’s, but at that moment she didn’t mind that so much. She felt a rush of pleasure as she remembered her vision of the sapphire ring, and patted Jimmy on the arm affectionately as she left the lounge and went up to her bedroom to choose her outfit for the evening that Jimmy would ask her to marry him and she would say yes.
Louisa managed to eat all of her prawn cocktail, which surprised her, because Mags had thrown up from day one of her pregnancy. Before the main course arrived, Louisa went off to the toilet to freshen up. Jimmy hadn’t asked her yet, but she could see a bulge in his jacket pocket the size of a box and she knew that there was a sapphire ring in it.
Louisa didn’t go straight into a cubicle when she reached the Ladies’ but stared at herself in the mirror. She tried to see herself as somebody’s mother, tried to see her face as the one that someone would look up to and care about and want to please. She smiled at her reflection, and noticed a shard of lettuce stuck to one of her incisors. As she leaned forward to check that she had scraped it away with her fingernail, her vision blurred and her head stung with the weight of a vision.
And then it came. Louisa saw an image of herself in the cubicle behind her, the cubicle she was about to go into. She saw herself sitting on the toilet, staring down at a smear of brown blood in her underwear and felt tears running down her cheeks, and suddenly she knew that there wasn’t anybody in her belly after all, no magical being inside her, ready to justify a lifetime with Jimmy. She wiped her eyes, and took a breath, and pushed the vision she’d just had out of her mind, but still she knew that Jimmy wasn’t her hero after all, and this wasn’t going to be the night that Jimmy proposed and she said yes, and that there might never be such a night.
Chapter Nineteen
Louisa, 1972
About six months after Louisa and Jimmy broke up (for where were they going if not down the aisle?), Mags had one of her gatherings that had warranted a new dining table. Noel accompanied them and clambered up onto Louisa’s lap when she arrived. Sheila came without her husband Jack, because Jack was in one of his ‘moods’. Suzie, the little girl who Louisa had saved from the sea, was thirteen now and tagged along with her mother to the gathering, her hair parted severely down the middle and hanging either side of her small, bright face.
‘Right,’ Mags said, a cigarette drooping from her mouth, ‘let’s have a game of cards.’ She leaned over and lit Louisa’s cigarette for her. ‘We could play for money for once and make it interesting.’
‘You know Mags, you don’t have to gamble for us to think you’re still interesting. Even though you have Noel now, you’re still the same Mags,’ Sheila said. ‘You’re so desperate to still be fun.’ She lit her own cigarette and inhaled, her eyelids half closed and flickering in nicotine bliss.
Mags bristled, and looked over at Noel, who was still wriggling about on Louisa’s knee. ‘I’m not trying to be interesting. Forget the money.’
‘I don’t know how to play any card games.’ Suzie chimed in.
‘Well, we could—’ Mags began.
‘I don’t really want to learn,’ Suzie interrupted breezily. ‘I think we should play Monopoly. We always used to play Monopoly together. It’ll be fun,’ she said, sipping her wine as though she bossed around a group of adults and drank wine every day.
‘I don’t even know where my Monopoly board is, Suzie.’
Suzie stood. ‘I’ll help you find it.’
And so, it was after Mags had sighed and stood up to join Suzie in the hunt for a long-forgotten Monopoly board, and Sheila had lit another cigarette, and Noel had been moved from Louisa’s knee to his bed, and the game had started to really get going, that the doorbell rang. Mags looked at Louisa and blushed at the thought of a guest who they didn’t know very well finding them in the midst
of paper money and property cards.
‘I’ll get it,’ Suzie said. ‘The game’s not as fun as I remembered anyway. It’s no good once you’ve missed out on Mayfair. I’ll miss my turn.’
Sheila threw a little green house at her daughter as she left the table. ‘You’re only wanting to miss a turn so that you don’t land on all my hotels!’
Suzie turned around and stuck her tongue at her mother cheekily.
‘You’re like friends,’ Louisa said to Sheila, the noise of the front door opening and closing and excited voices drifting into the kitchen where they were sitting.
Sheila grinned. ‘Yeah, Suzie’s a good girl. She is like my friend. You know, there used to be a point when I wondered if … ’
But Louisa didn’t hear what Sheila had wondered, because suddenly the kitchen door opened and Suzie ran in yelping excitedly, pulling into the room a windswept Jimmy and Penny.
‘They’re engaged!’ Suzie shrieked, apparently unaware of how this news might impact Louisa. ‘Show them your ring, Penny!’
And Penny showed them her ring and, as Louisa knew it would be, it was sapphire, and twinkled almost black as she held out her hand giddily for inspection.
‘So when’s the big day?’ Mags asked, her eyes glued cautiously to Louisa.
‘Well, this is why we’ve come round here now. We knew you were having a gathering and so we knew everyone would be here for us to tell,’ Penny said, her big white pony teeth gleaming in the light of the candles that Mags had lit an hour before when everything had been different. ‘We’re getting married next week.’
Nobody said it, because nobody had the guts to. But everybody thought it; everybody knew it. Everybody looked from Penny’s glowing face, down a little to her glittering sapphire, and across to her belly, which on first appearances seemed flat but actually, on closer inspection, was more rounded than it had ever been before, and certainly more rounded than Louisa’s.
‘Well! Congratulations!’ Mags said brightly, and under the table her hand flew over to Louisa’s and squeezed it firmly. ‘Lou, would you do me a massive favour? I need to get these two a drink, but I think I heard Noel stirring. Would you pop up and see if he’s okay? You’re so good with him, he won’t go back off to sleep for anyone else.’
Louisa felt a tug in her stomach at Mags’s clumsy kindness, and stood up, suddenly ready to walk through the web of worried glances. ‘Yes. I’ll check on him.’ She wandered out of the kitchen and upstairs to where Noel slept silently in his cot. She knelt down next to him, leaning her forehead on the wooden bars and staring in at the little face that had come to mean so very much.
Jimmy and Penny’s wedding was rather thrown together. Penny’s dress was an unexpected white, frothy affair.
‘I thought she’d have gone for something plain,’ Sheila said, her tone implying much more than the words. Jimmy’s brown suit trousers were too short for his gangly legs, which made Louisa feel like Penny was definitely welcome to him. He had shaved his beard off for the occasion, which made him look quite different, and made it all easier for Louisa to bear.
‘Shall we have one dance, Lou?’ Jimmy said to her at the end of the night. ‘For old time’s sake?’
Old time. Louisa thought of old time, and Jimmy’s snake tattoo on his wiry shoulder, and the way his feet stuck out of the bottom of the duvet when he was in bed, and the red marks the beard he used to have used to make on her skin. She thought of when he had first kissed her and he tasted of chips, and when she thought that she would have his baby and live with him until they were old and his beard was grey. She thought of even older time, when she thought she would have her mother forever.
‘Old time doesn’t want anything from us, Jimmy,’ she said. ‘Old time’s sake is nonsense.’
Jimmy frowned, his new hairless face creasing in places Louisa had never seen before.
‘I never did understand you,’ he said, taking back his outstretched hand and placing it into his brown jacket pocket.
‘I know.’ Louisa replied. And then she thought of new time, of Mags and her loyalty and her determination to always be fun, and Noel with his eyelashes that were getting darker and longer each day and his perfect cherub’s face and his high-pitched little noises. She thought of her boarding house and all the space she had every winter and how busy it was every summer. She thought of the things she might have to look forward to.
‘I have to leave you now,’ she said to Jimmy.
And just like that, she did. She wandered straight over to the bar, where she ordered a drink within seconds of an old man clanging the last orders bell. As she stood there, swaying and sipping, a man came over and smiled at her. He was shorter than Louisa, and his hair stuck out at odd angles. If he couldn’t control his own hair, Louisa thought, what kind of a man must he be? He owned a shop in Blackpool that sold ice creams, so he and Louisa had, as he said, ‘tourists in common’. He danced with Louisa for a couple of songs. He wasn’t a good dancer. His name was Pete.
Pete took Louisa to his own ice cream shop on their first date. He let Louisa try seven different flavours of ice cream and they sat on the counter as they ate from little cardboard tubs, chatting about Jimmy and Penny and the wedding.
And suddenly, it was three months later and Louisa was seeing Pete all the time.
‘He’s not right for you, Lou,’ Mags quite rightly pointed out as she plonked some fish fingers down in front of Noel. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing. He’s too old, for a start. And he’s so boring!’
‘He’s alright,’ Louisa said, gazing at Noel’s fat little fingers squeezing the orange coated fish. ‘I just want to settle down. I want a husband. And a baby. You know that.’
‘Louisa, that is not a reason to marry the wrong man and you know it! Anyway, can’t you see who you will end up with? Isn’t that a perk of the job?’
Louisa shook her head and passed Noel a fork. ‘It’s not like that. I don’t choose what I see. And I haven’t had any visions since that one when I went out with Jimmy and I realised that I wasn’t pregnant like I’d thought … ’ her voice trailed off and Mags looked up sympathetically.
‘You have Noel, you know. You’re like his second mother.’
‘I know, and I love him. But it’s not the same.’
‘Well, just don’t make a big mistake. It’s not easy being married to somebody you don’t even like,’ Mags said as she picked up a pea from the floor and put it back onto Noel’s plate.
But there must have been something wrong with Pete, Louisa thought. She wanted to do what Penny had done. There would have been nothing that would have excited Louisa more than to marry Pete with a telltale rounded tummy. She would have worn a tighter dress and had even practised the meaningful touch she would give her belly as a hint to her fascinated guests. But after six months of having Pete touch her and maul her, his lips squelching unpleasantly against her body, Louisa knew there was nothing in her belly to hide, except, perhaps, guilt that she didn’t love Pete.
‘I’m not the right girl for you, Pete,’ Louisa said to him one day as he stacked up ice cream cones in his shop. His response was one of those cold, disturbing images that takes a while to fade: he lifted a cone back down from the shelf and crushed it in his giant paw. His face was expressionless, his mouth still and silent, and the flakes of cone fell softly onto the floor. For years after, Louisa imagined Pete on his hands and knees clearing up the crushed beige flakes after she had left. The image made her feel sick and sad.
There were other men. All of them were bewitched by her: none gave Louisa what she wanted. Louisa reached twenty five, twenty six then twenty seven. Noel toddled into childhood, leaving baby soft cheeks and cries and squeals behind. Louisa accepted that nothing was going to happen, that she would never wear a dress that strained over her belly, making people stare and whisper. She accepted that there might be a fault deep inside her that made her unable to create a baby like Mags had, like Penny had, like everybody did. She ran her board
ing house. She drank some wine, and then some more. She invited some of the younger men into her bedroom at night. They had smooth skin and silky hair and smelt good. Still, nothing happened.
Louisa started to think it was too late.
And then she met Lewis.
Chapter Twenty
Grace, 2008
The slow, silent atmosphere that has settled over Ash Books seems, Grace decides, to be permanent. Aside from one well-spoken, headmistressy type of woman who marches in to enquire about antique editions of a famous mystery writer, and huffs out when Elsie tells her they don’t have what she’s looking for, the shop is dead for yet another day. Grace stands at the counter as Elsie searches for the mystery novels the customer had wanted on the laptop they bought with part of their business loan. The only noises in the shop are the intermittent clicks of the mouse as Elsie finds a website worth checking and the odd sigh when she doesn’t find what she’s looking for. The plan for the afternoon, when Elsie has finished searching online, is to begin the displays with the items they found in the attic with their mother’s things last night. But this afternoon seems to be reluctant to appear.
Grace’s eyes, wandering around the shop for something to do, fall to the old copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in the window, and she wanders over and returns with it to the counter. It was one of her favourite books as a child, and she feels a pleasant flurry of anticipation as she turns the first yellowed pages to begin reading from the start.
The time sweeps by quietly, the noises of pages turning adding to Elsie’s clicking and sighs. By the time Grace is disturbed by the front door opening, and the sounds of outside: buses, gulls crying, snatches of isolated conversations, Dorothy is well on her way to Oz.
It’s Eliot. His tie is loosened and he looks tired.
‘I’ve finished work early today. The students are on a trip to Stratford that I wasn’t invited on,’ he finishes, and Grace decides that his face isn’t pale from tiredness, but that he is anxious, or stressed about something.