After Before

by Jemma Wayne

  There was still four hours before the surgery was due to begin. They slipped into familiar, mindless conversation and, for the last time, it felt almost normal. But then the nurse returned to remind her about the pills, and she went into the bathroom to take them, and after that, conversation stopped. Vera turned her face towards the pillow. She could not help crying. It is the last time she has ever cried. Charlie hid his own face behind a magazine. She closed her eyes and immediately darkness flashed in front of them. She placed a hand on her not yet empty belly. She glanced towards the sun-soaked window and wished it would be raining. Then, Charlie began humming. Quietly, from behind his magazine, he hummed ‘Singing in the Rain’. It had been their favourite movie, and now the melody came like droplets. Cooling. Helping to drown out hot, black, niggling questions, like whether she was making the right decision and, if she should tell him. The anaesthetist appeared to take her down to surgery.

  “It’ll be okay V,” Charlie whispered.

  And that’s what she had thought of as she told the anaesthetist that she hadn’t in fact taken the pills, and was not going to have the surgery, and was going to keep the baby, and to please tell her friend not to wait.

  Riding the tube home from Lynn’s, Vera scrolls through her phone and pauses on Charlie’s name.

  They had not seen each other for months after that, the end of the university year hurrying them through final exams and packing up. And a ‘trip to Paris’ excusing her from farewell parties she would otherwise have been at. Then the summer arrived and took them away and apart and hid things that needed hiding. But he had called her 12 months later, precisely, to the day. He pretended a booty call but of course he had remembered, which made everything worse. Make me better.

  She’d thought she was doing the right thing.

  Vera pulls her wallet roughly from her bag, yanks out the carefully folded piece of paper, then pauses.

  Her life is a perpetual pause. Though it began with rushing. With haste.

  She was never going to keep it. She was young and she was meant to have a career, and be with somebody who loved her. But perhaps she could have tried, seen if she was any good as a mother. Attempted to be one. Or at least she could have gone through the proper channels. Made sure of things, faced the people in charge. But that would have meant facing herself, and she wasn’t herself. And it would have become real, and it wasn’t real - what she was doing, what she had done, what she was getting rid of.

  He was a boy.

  He weighed seven pounds.

  He had a full head of dark, determined hair.

  She left him wrapped in a blanket outside the children’s home. The tag attached to his wrist said his name was Charlie V.

  She had not even given him her full name.

  Vera puts the piece of paper back into her wallet. She doesn’t need to read it to remember what it says, though she looked at it only once all those years ago - snatched it out of the newspaper she’d been reading over somebody’s shoulder on the tube.

  He was found at the bottom of the stairwell. Three days after she’d left him. Much too late.

  Vera gets off the tube a stop early and stands in stony silence on the platform. Minutes pass, she imagines. It might be seconds. She catches sight of herself in the CCTV and sees a glimpse of what she must look like from the outside: hunched, a little gaunt, strangely not moving. Unmoving. Unmoved? There should be tears. In a movie there would be. But Vera has none. She cannot cry. She is not a woman but a monster made of stone. A mother with a teenaged daughter stops to ask if she’s alright but Vera cannot break her arrest to answer and eventually the woman leaves her alone.

  She will tell Luke that she had an abortion. The rest is too much. For now. Forever? He knows that she has had sex before and it practically killed him. He has been ‘praying on it’. It is something he has had to work through.

  She must find the right time before Lynn does.

  *****************

  It had taken all of her strength not to hit her. Not that hitting anybody was something Lynn had ever done, but she wanted to. She wanted to knock down that brazen modernity, that boldness, that riskiness that she herself had not grabbed.

  When she had found out she was pregnant with Luke, it was the last time she could have turned back, returned to academia, made a different life. After that, she knew it would be nappies and buggies and cooking and housewifery and all the other domesticities she had quite happily been playing at, but this time forever. In the minutes before she told Philip she was pregnant, there had been a pause, the very briefest of moments. And in it had been the fleeting thought that she might not carry the baby.

  That was all it was. A flicker in her mind.

  *****************

  Vera arrives at Lynn’s the next day, half an hour early and laden with cupcakes. She has not slept. She has not spoken to Luke. He’d called during her bath the previous evening and she’d stared at the phone, dripping water just next to it the whole time it rang, imagining him needing her, needing somebody to distract him from his own chasing demons; but she could not talk to him. Not yet. Not until she knows what she will or won’t have to reveal. She is desperate to persuade Lynn to keep her secret. Hovering on the doorstep for a moment, she stares at the cold paving beneath her feet, wishing she could un-tell the half-secret she has told. Wishing in fact, if she is making wishes, that she could undo it altogether. Not the telling of the secret but the secret itself. Or at least if she could modify it, have had the abortion, ended the life before it was a whole one. Or had the baby but had it adopted properly, safely, responsibly. Not stupidly. Stupid. Not stupid. Evil.

  Vera knocks on the door but Lynn doesn’t answer and in case she is napping, Vera avoids the doorbell, takes Luke’s key from her pocket and lets herself in.

  “Hello?” she calls gently in the hallway, before sticking her head into the sitting room and the kitchen and the dining room, without finding Lynn.

  Deciding that she must be upstairs sleeping, Vera sets about putting the kettle on and arranging the cupcakes on a plate. She has chosen vanilla over chocolate, thinking that this is more Lynn. She hopes she is right, that she has not misjudged her future mother-in-law. She can barely breathe with nervousness. In a matter of hours she will be meeting Luke for dinner and he will ask her how things are with his mother, looking at her in that way he has that demands earnestness. His eyes will be sad. They are sad lately, his smiles less frequent and less certain. But his strong frame will offer her an anchor from the spiral that has been engulfing her overnight: grief, regret, panic. And noise. So much noise. Her head is so noisy. It is full of sirens and church bells and nursery rhymes, so many nursery rhymes. Noises that should have been. Luke will mute them. Luke will anchor her. It is what he has always done - drawn her back from the brink with his flicker of unearthly goodness. The problem is, to grab it, him, will mean telling him at least the half-truth, and that will mean risking everything.

  She cannot risk Luke.

  But the only other option is to persuade Lynn to stay silent. And then, to somehow stop thinking about him. Not Luke, but the boy, the baby, Charlie V, who she knew for three days and cannot forget. I love you, I love you…

  “I love you,” she whispered closely into his ear.

  He smelled of milk - formula, not hers. And warmth. And a slight sweatiness from the layers and layers of blankets she had wrapped him in. It was a mild January, but she could not risk him being cold. If she could cry, she would have wept relentlessly onto his slightly spotted cheeks - milk spots they had told her: Just watch, they’ll go in a few weeks. But she would never see them disappear. And she had not been able to cry since she’d made her decision at the clinic.

  “It’s for you,” she muttered, holding him tightly to her. “I’m not ready for you. I’d be a terrible mother. I’d muck you up, I know it.”

  He opened his eyes then and yawned gently.

  Vera smiled at him, in apology, convinced that he unde
rstood what she was saying, and did not believe her. She rocked him back and forth until his eyes closed, then she waited until she saw somebody go into the building.

  She would have liked him to wake up again before she left him. One last chance to persuade him that it was for the best. One last chance to see his still-blue eyes. She willed them to open. But she had to leave him while she knew somebody was there in the building to find him, and he was sound asleep when she placed him and his layers of blankets on the doorstep. He was sound asleep.

  “Hello?” Vera calls again from the bottom of the stairs.

  There is still no response and Vera mulls for a while whether Lynn, too, is sound asleep, or if she is somewhere upstairs lying dead. She cannot be quite certain which scenario she is hoping for, but gambling on the former she wanders again around downstairs and begins opening the undrawn curtains. After the sitting room and the dining room, she comes to a room at the back of the house that she has never been into. She remembers trying the door once before when looking for the bathroom, but it had been locked and Lynn had quickly directed her away from it. It is a laundry room probably. It would be nice for Lynn if Vera was able to do a pile of ironing before she wakes up. Vera hates ironing, but she pushes down the handle and opens the door.

  Inside, Lynn is sitting in an overall, her hair dishevelled, a look of wildness in her eyes as she holds a paintbrush to a canvas. Vera glances around the room. It is full of canvasses and colour.

  “Oh my goodness,” she breathes in amazement. At which point, Lynn looks up. “Mrs Hunter, these are wonderful, they’re - ” But before she can finish her sentence, Lynn is on her feet and storming towards her.

  “Get out!” she orders, ripping off her overall, throwing it over the canvas she’s been working on, and frantically smoothing her hair. “What are you doing here? Get out at once!”

  Vera steps back. She has never before heard Lynn shout. “I’m sorry,” she mumbles. “I didn’t - ”

  “Stop looking! Get out. Have you no manners? Get out, get out, get out!” Lynn grabs Vera’s arm and with surprising force, marches her through the doorway into the hall.

  “What? What?” is all Vera can mutter. “But Mrs Hunter - ”

  “Get out!”

  “I am out. I haven’t seen anything.”

  “No,” Lynn seethes. “Out of my house. Altogether. Go. I tried to weather you, I really did, but I can’t do it. I don’t need help, especially from someone like you.”

  To be clean.

  Vera stands, frozen.

  “Go. Go back to work,” says Lynn. “Your ‘sabbatical’ is over. Leave me alone.”

  She flaps her hand authoritatively towards the door and in the process a long fingernail slits sharply across Vera’s neck. Vera touches it and immediately there is blood. Now both women look a little taken aback. Lynn opens her mouth awkwardly as if to speak, but doesn’t. Her eyes are seething. She cannot tame the fury, but there is a need for something. It was an accident and they both know this, but still there is blood.

  Lynn says nothing.

  Vera says nothing.

  She catches sight of herself in the hall mirror. It is a bright day but she can see only darkness. Seconds begin to tick, but she shakes herself. She takes a faltering step back towards Lynn. “Mrs Hunter,” she tries one last time.

  “Get out,” Lynn says quietly.

  Chapter

  Nine

  The priest made the announcement and the congregation turned genially towards them. A pillar of our community. Lynn nodded modestly and Luke beamed. One of our most active members… has found his life partner... Vera smiled too but looked uncomfortable, as she had done all morning. Neither woman had mentioned the argument of the day before. It embarrassed Lynn to think of it now, to think of herself unravelling; worse, to think of Vera of all people having seen her artwork, having learned something so intimate that she had never shared with anyone, something that revealed her weakness and her regret. Lynn reinforced her smile and nodded to the priest appreciatively. He was young, this one. The third Lynn had seen come and go at St Anne’s, but he’d grown up here, remembered Philip and always made a point of taking her hand at the end of a service and paying his respects. He conducted sermons now in modern language, trying to be accessible, but Lynn thought him a tad foolish. There was little left in the bible that she counted as true, no matter how you wrapped it up; better then to preserve its mystery so that other people wouldn’t also notice the contradictions, the false hope, the passivity of the teachings that had led her to this.

  Lynn was having a bad day. She was in pain and hadn’t slept properly and could feel herself snapping. Luke had picked her up at ten as promised but hadn’t warmed the car so the cold had seeped into her bones. And Vera was there. Silent for once, not wrinkling her youth and beauty with awkward chatter, but full of the power of it. The power too that she held over Lynn. A scarf was wrapped demurely around her slim neck, for now hiding the evidence, but she fiddled with the tassels on the edges as though cautioning Lynn as to how easily this cover may be removed. And John was absent. Vera slipped her hand through Luke’s, as though sensing his disappointment in his brother. Just as she had sensed she should have an abortion, and sensed she should only take a sabbatical. Luke rubbed the palm of her hand with his thumb, and Lynn glared.

  John was rarely available on a Sunday, even less often at church, but this week he had promised to come in order to hear the marriage announcement. It wasn’t his fault – only that morning he’d discovered he had rehearsals he couldn’t miss – but Lynn knew Luke would feel it as a snub. A snub he’d nurse with memories of all the times previous that John had let them down. A patted hand however was not something Lynn was good at. And conversation, proper conversation, was not possible with Vera there, or the watching church. She would have to wait. Wait. Such a waste of precious time.

  Yet it was exactly what her mother had urged when she and Philip announced their decision to marry that first summer.

  “What’s the rush darling? You’ve only just graduated. Weren’t you going to think about a Masters degree?” she’d said.

  But Lynn couldn’t contain her haste then. “I still am,” she had protested, certain. “I still will. Perhaps Philip will find a job in Cambridge, or perhaps I’ll continue my study in London.”

  “You won’t have time darling, not once you’re a wife.”

  They had been flicking through bridal magazines. Lynn could envisage the scene as though it was yesterday. Wearing jeans and sitting cross-legged on the floor opposite her mother who was sorting through a pile of stockings that needed darning, she had been carefully cutting out pictures of dresses and flowers to stick into her wedding book, not really listening. She could still hear her voice so dismissive and sure.

  “Oh don’t be so old-fashioned Mummy. It’s almost the 70s. Things have changed. Women can have careers and be married. Ooh, look at this one!”

  But her mother had shaken her head. She had known already what it would take Lynn years to learn for herself.

  The first autumn that she deferred her place on the History Masters back at Cambridge, she’d honestly believed it was just for a year, so that she could take charge of settling them into their new home while Philip studied for the bar. The second autumn, when she managed to find an alternative course in London that she also deferred, she held faith that the delay was temporary, and purely necessary until Philip was more established, and besides, her choice. But three years later, when she finally let the university know that she wouldn’t be taking up her place after all, she began to realise how quickly her earliest ambitions had slipped away and been replaced by others she hardly recognised.

  Then however, there was no regret. Wrapped up in Philip’s arms, the busy evenings and weekends they spent together made up for the days in which Lynn was often without occupation and alone. Besides, while she may not have been adding new works to the great pool of historical analysis as she’d once imagined w
as her destiny, new priorities constructed themselves around her. Their foundations rested robustly upon that single new word, wife, shooting taller with each passing month so that it became harder and harder to peer over them as they arched into a protective dome above her, their oculus, that ever-present possibility of another word, mother.

  It came just a few years later. Too fast. Before she’d had a chance to decide if she really wanted it. Philip had been thrilled. She had been overwhelmed and very much in need of her mother who sighed deeply and immediately began knitting. Eight months later, Luke arrived. He weighed just six pounds and was jaundiced, but she and Philip cooed over their tiny yellow baby who had ten fingers and ten toes and everything in the right place working the right way, as though he was the first perfect being ever to enter the world. And when they took him home they placed him in a white crib they’d built together, in a lemon-coloured room at the centre of the house, directly beneath their oculus.

  When John burst forth into their lives via an emergency caesarean section 42 months later, he received Luke’s old crib, hand-me-down clothes, and considerably less awe; but John had a gentler temperament from the very start, barely cried, and demanded nothing. Lynn theorised that it was because he had been snatched so quickly from the womb; his rapid arrival had denied him the kind of slow transition that allows one to prepare, to arm, and so he had not yet formulated his plans for the world but was tugged along by it. Philip tried to express as much enthusiasm over their sensitive second son, but Luke always embodied first hopes, always lived up to them, and could always do everything better than his brother, and so won all of their father’s praise. And expectation. To make up for it, Lynn slipped extra biscuits or slices of freshly baked sponge cake into John’s lunchbox.

  Lynn could not help thinking of these days constantly now. She saw the boys as two impish faces that sometimes blurred into one, dashing around the house, scraping knees, needing her. Philip was frequently there, his presence always at the helm of her memories: giving the boys rides on his strong back, teaching them to thread string through conkers or later, how to shave, reaching out for her hand underneath the table at dinner parties, watching her as she entered a room, smiling in her direction, his darling little one. But her sons made up the soundtrack to those busy, oblivious years and pervaded everything. Her husband’s aura was a quieter strength, the ghost of it ever-present but silent, appearing more in shapes than in sound: in the angular faces she found herself painting over and over; in the brown, threadbare dressing gown of his she’d never thrown away and sometimes found crumpled on the floor; in the dent of the pillow next to hers where if she closed her eyes she could see him, blond and tanned, or greying at her whim.