I reassured her and asked if I could give Ester her bottle. Sheila watched her feed with a curiosity that was half appalled. — It’s sort of terrible to think one was ever like that, she said. — I mean, with one’s own mother. Because I don’t like my mother much. I don’t like to think of myself so desperately attached to the teat of her provision (whether it was the real teat or the rubber one – and I’d rather not know). So keen on survival, at all costs. It seems better form, once one’s adult, not to want anything that badly.
When I’d lived with Sheila in the commune, I’d been in awe of her education. She seemed to have read everything; her contralto voice and her slow, debunking, considered speech had appealed to me as an ideal of an intellectual woman. Now that I’d done my own degree and felt more like her equal, I was eager to talk to her about books – but she only wanted to talk about babies. I saw that she’d come looking for me because she needed help and remembered me as a young mother from the commune; whereas I’d finished with that phase of my life and wasn’t interested any longer. She exclaimed in despair when I managed to keep the baby from crying, winding her and then jigging her in my arms, walking up and down and singing to her.
— You see? She won’t ever stop for me. What am I doing wrong?
I said that everyone felt like this at first. After a while it would come naturally.
Sheila stayed at Sea Mills with us for six weeks. She was alone with the baby all day while Mac and I were out at work and Rowan was at school (Luke was in his gap year with a place at Exeter to do history and politics; in the meantime he was working for my brother, restoring classic cars). Sheila said she walked around the rooms of the house for hours with Ester in the sling, because it was the only way she could get her to sleep. Also, she could just about read the newspaper while she was walking round, though it did make her seasick and sometimes she was so tired that the words swam in front of her eyes like a hallucination. If she tried to read while she was giving Ester her bottle, Ester pulled away from the teat indignantly. — But what if, Sheila asked, — when this is over, I’ve forgotten how to think? And anyway, when will it be over?
I said that now Ester was getting older, she was bound to be awake more during the day; Sheila said that when she was awake she didn’t know what to do with her. — Am I supposed to play? I was never any good at playing.
— Give her to the boys. They’ll look after her.
Sheila was relieved and guilty when Luke and Rowan carried Ester off into another room. (— But do they know what to do?) They unwrapped her from her shawls and teased her irreverently, throwing her in the air, flapping her blanket at her to make her screw up her face comically, blowing raspberries on her stomach, laughing at her miniature dictator’s outrage and stolid frown. (They were experienced in all this from playing with Toni’s babies, Mac’s granddaughters – she had two by this time.) Of course Ester loved it, and gave her first wet smiles for them. Sheila had been so sure that Ester’s not smiling meant she was unhappy, judging against the life where she found herself. The smiles gave away another Ester: more foolish and less punishing.
I borrowed a carrycot from Toni and made Sheila put Ester down in it while we all ate supper round the long table in the kitchen. Sheila stared at the food on her plate as if she’d last eaten in another life. She was bone-thin under all the layers of her jumpers and cardigans and scarves: despite her determination to leave everything English behind, she was beginning to be one of those sinewy, sun-toughened Englishwomen of a certain class, angularly elegant, expertly informed. Mac grew to like her when they discussed Brazil and South American politics, and he deferred to her insider’s insight (— the only continent in the world, she said, — where communism is still romantic). If Ester cried while we were eating then Mac picked her up and would walk round with her, crooning to her, kissing her little fists and her head with its night-black shock of hair. We were all as tender with Sheila as if she was convalescent. Mac was the assured paterfamilias presiding over his extended household. He was inspired in this role: even the boys were charmed and he courted them, including them in the generous circle of his affections. He was never handsome, exactly – bald and overweight, with that distinctive round face like the face in the moon – but he gave off a heat of life and force, his fox-colouring was a russet glow.
Sometimes there would be ten or eleven of us for supper if Luke’s girlfriend was there, and Toni with her family – they lived nearby. Lauren honoured us from time to time, visiting from London (where she was a great success, playing in the orchestra at the ENO). If we were too many then we had to decamp into the grander dining room, which I didn’t like because it still seemed like Barbara’s space – yellow-striped wallpaper, electric wall candelabra, antique table and chairs. I confided to Sheila how trapped I sometimes felt in that big comfortable house, decorated in Barbara’s taste – conventional, expensive, gemütlich – overlaid now with what Mac called my ‘hippie style’. I told her about the faithful cleaner who loved Barbara and couldn’t forgive me (secretly I called her Mrs Danvers). Sheila asked why we didn’t move and I explained that Lauren and Toni – who’d grown up in this house – wouldn’t let Mac sell it, not yet.
— Then couldn’t their mother live here instead?
— She can’t, because of what happened.
— But what about you? Don’t you get to have a say?
I let her know about the difficulties between me and Mac. When she asked whether Barbara was awful, I tried to convey how she was really the nicest person, impulsive and imaginative and kind: which made everything worse. — It was a sort of quixotic thing, when she left Mac. She had an ideal that she shouldn’t keep him if he loved someone else – even though we hadn’t seen each other for several years. And Mac believes that too. He believes passion is a life force you have to submit to. I don’t know what I think. It’s a force for a while and then you can step past it. (I was thinking of Sheila’s brother Andrew. She had told me he was married with children, and had given up drinking, and was writing a book.)
Sheila thought that passion was a story people dreamed up to save themselves from boredom. — I’d lived all along as if I was acting out some turbulent drama; then I woke up one day and found I’d stopped believing in the play. Since then my life is saner and more manageable, but it’s thinner – as if this whole colourful noisy troupe alive inside my head had upped and left. I am quite empty sometimes.
— You’ve had a baby. That’s dramatic.
Right now, having a baby seemed more like the end of the story, she said. I asked her again then who Ester’s father was, but Sheila claimed he didn’t matter, she said she couldn’t even remember his name. It had all been a misunderstanding, she said, entirely her own fault; and he didn’t even know Ester existed. Anyway, a baby was not the end, I promised her. I could see that she was studying us, to see how to make a family; she had plenty of friends in Brazil but she had lived alone, and liked it. When she laughed about Mac with friendly scepticism, I felt a defensive pang as if I betrayed him. — He’s like a busy engine, isn’t he? Sheila said. — With you lot all yoked on behind, his caravanserai. Determinedly on his way somewhere: so there’s a lot of heat and dust. Still, it’s better than just turning round in the same space, as I do.
Sheila hadn’t seen Rowan since he was a few days old; as a teenager, he looked startlingly like his dead father Nicky, whom he’d never known. How could it be, she and I wondered together, that these characteristics had been stored in Nicky’s DNA, waiting to unfold inside his son’s separate life: the impatient way Rowan turned a tap full on, then gasped through a hasty glass of water, spilling half of it, with the tap still running; or his careless swaggering walk; or dragging at his school tie as if he needed air? I thought Sheila was almost afraid of Rowan at first, because of how he brought Nicky back and yet didn’t. But she was good at talking to the boys, they liked her. Rowan sang and played his guitar for her. (— Oh, he’s good, he’s really good, she said.) Luke claime
d to remember her from the commune, though he was only four when it broke up: and he did have an extraordinary memory, which was part of his personality – open, accepting of everything he found, storing it away. He remembered visiting the zoo, on the day Nicky was killed. His frank gaze was full of irony mixed with tolerance: his hair was still childishly blond, though darkening, cut short in a thick pelt I loved to push my fingers through. Rowan was taller than Luke was already (and they were both taller than me); Luke was stocky, popular, good at rugby, clowning for his friends with a quick humour, not cruel. He’d been through several girlfriends already, though he’d been protectively uxorious in turn towards each one (and I didn’t think any of them good enough).
Luke brought Sheila the white quartz stone I’d always kept, which we had used in our discussions in the commune, passing it round between the speakers. Sheila hesitated to take it from his hand. — I’m afraid to touch it, she said.
— Why? he asked with interest. — Because it all ended badly?
— It wasn’t our fault, I insisted. It felt so important, that they didn’t carry the wrong story forward. — You do know that, boys? Nicky’s death was just the most terrible accident. The man who killed him was ill.
— It’s not that, Sheila said. — It’s because I hate the idea of my youth. I was so wrong about everything, and so sure I was right. I’m frightened when I remember myself. I worked in a factory making meat pies, out of solidarity with the working classes.
— What’s wrong with meat pies? Luke protested.
— That was quite honourable, I said. — I liked you for it.
— It wasn’t honourable, it was insufferable. How dared I, play-acting other people’s real lives? And of course the women who had no choice about working there hated me, and I didn’t know how to talk to them. It was such a sham.
Rowan remarked that his father had worked building a road.
— That was different. Nicky was different, everything he did was graceful and the right thing. Anyway, he wasn’t doing it out of politics, he just needed the money. I needed the money too; but I could have earned it doing something less ostentatious, something I was actually good at. I was so hopeless, with the pies. I made such a mess of it, I was always dropping them.
We had to go to a family party one Sunday lunchtime: my Auntie Andy’s silver wedding anniversary. Mac complained ungraciously. He thought he was reasonable, and didn’t see any point in submitting to an occasion so utterly against his nature. Wouldn’t it be awful? Weren’t Phil and Andy boring? Couldn’t we just send a cheque? I explained how these obligations weren’t optional, they were the ritual that bound my family together. We weren’t connected because we found one another interesting. Offence was taken even if you forgot to send a birthday card or write a thank-you letter, and my mother and stepfather were always too ready anyway to be offended by Mac; they didn’t really like him, he frightened them. Mum put on an arch, unnatural voice when she was talking to him, as if she was flirting; Gerry was hollowly hearty, hot inside the neck of his shirt. Gerry wasn’t much older than Mac, and yet with his strained good manners and fading handsomeness (inky smudged features, thick head of iron grey hair) he seemed to belong to a different era. He and Mac couldn’t even discuss sport, because Gerry liked football and Mac was a rugby man. The complication was that my parents would expect to be superior themselves, at Phil and Andy’s party. They thought of themselves as having moved into a quite different social tranche – golf, the Masons, even dinner parties; whereas Andy had worked on the production line at the chocolate factory until she retired. Mac blundered across the subtlety of all this, not even noticing he was condescending.
The party was in a function room in a hotel in town, a stuffy low-ceilinged basement with florid carpets and gold drapes arranged across blank walls. Before we arrived Mac was already martyred, because we’d had to drive around for twenty minutes before he found anywhere to park. The boys were chafing to be free of our tension. I threw myself into the occasion and drank a couple of glasses of wine quickly. (Mac took one look at the wine and stuck to beer.) Circulating round the family I hugged and chattered, probably overdoing it.
— Why are you talking like that? Mac asked me at one point.
— Like what?
— Putting on that Bristol accent.
— This is my accent, I said. — It’s the other one I’m putting on.
I was wearing a mauve top over black jeans, with green silk tied in my hair: my mother said the top reminded her of a bedspread she once had. These days, she said with a jollying air to make it seem as if she was joking, couldn’t I have afforded something smarter? (Her attitude to Mac’s money was peculiar: partly complacent on my behalf, partly affronted, as if it was an offence to moderation. If I’d told her how much my top cost she’d have been horrified.)
I made a fuss of Auntie Andy, whom I’d always liked: she was small and fat and cheerful, with her hair dyed orange and a short dress patterned with enormous roses. Clumsily tender, she tucked my arm into hers and introduced me to her friends from work, telling them I’d been close to her little boy who died (which wasn’t strictly true). These women were formidable, raucous, enormous; their talk was very blue, and already their table was in a fug of cigarette smoke. Now Andrea was retired, she lamented, she missed the comradeship of the factory. — Stella, I don’t know what to do with myself all day. Phil does all the housework, because he knows how I hate it. (Queenly, she took for granted the devotions of her stooping, spindly, hypochondriac husband.) Her friends had better suggestions for how Phil could save her from boredom; Andy wagged a finger at them, telling them to be on best behaviour.
— We ’an’t got started yet, they said.
— They’re good girls, Andy confided tipsily in my ear. — Only a bit rough around the edges.
Although there was a buffet, there were place names at every table, written out in Phil’s anxious copperplate: he must have fretted for weeks over the nuances of family feuds and precedence. He panicked now when Andrea insisted on sitting just anywhere among her guests, waving away his remonstrations with her cigarette and gin glass. I was relieved that Mac and I were separated; I sat next to my cousin Richard, Auntie Jean’s oldest son, the one who’d lent me his bedroom when I first left home: he still had a motorbike and he made money as a builder, buying old houses and doing them up to sell, putting back all the original features people had taken out in the 1960s. Skinny and attractive, Richard always flirted with me: husky from all the weed he smoked, with a ponytail, a dreamy, narrow face and grey eyes. (My brother Philip was supplying the weed at the anniversary party; I noticed my sons disappearing outside with him at regular intervals.) Richard’s girlfriend had been segregated at another table. I knew he and I were bending too intimately towards each other, conferring too exclusively, but I’d drunk enough not to care. Jean complained that we hardly touched our food: — No wonder you’re a pair of scarecrows! Richard told me about his dream of going to live in Spain, when he’d made enough money from the houses: not among the expats and English pubs, but somewhere unspoiled in the mountains, with land and a well in the courtyard. You could pick up a medieval farmhouse there, he assured me, for next to nothing.
— How about it, Stella?
— I’d love that, I said. — I’ve never lived anywhere except this city. I’d like to live on a mountain top. I’d like to drink water from a well.
— Come with me. Seriously. I’d like that.
Of course it wasn’t serious, it was just a joke, it was a game: I knew that when I lifted my head and looked around me. I had two sons and a job and a husband, I was not free; probably Richard was not really free either. (Although, later, he did go and live on a mountain top in Spain.) When everyone had finished eating, the disco started up: pounding, and with flashing lights. Mac wouldn’t be able to stand the noise for long. The women from the factory danced in a line together, they knew a set of moves for all the songs. Richard and I slow-danced to ‘Killing
Me Softly’, though he wasn’t much of a dancer; he touched me on the waist to steer me and I saved his touches up to remember later. Luke and Rowan were showing off, learning dance moves from the factory girls. I was aware of Richard’s girlfriend, and of Mac looming, bored and restless, on the periphery of the party. I couldn’t forgive him in that moment for not being able to belong inside this world – though I had spent so much of my own life trying to escape from it. He came to claim me, frowning at his watch, saying he had paperwork to do at home. Philip suggested that the boys could stay behind and sleep over at his place; I arranged to drop Rowan’s school things off on my way to work.
It was raining when we got outside. I pretended to be drunker than I was, leaning against the ticket machine in the car park and humming the music I’d been dancing to, while Mac hunted in his pockets for money. He said I was in no fit state to drive, when I offered. The excitement of the party dropped; stark recognitions blew round inside my emptiness in the cold car park. I thought that Mac and I were strangers joined by meaningless accident, unfathomable to one another and I caught sight of him, freshly with surprised dislike – middle-aged and preoccupied, with a thick wrinkled neck. Our intimacy had only ever been a delusion, monologues passing and missing in darkness – which was all that was possible anyway, with anyone. All this seemed open to the naked eye, as if I saw through everything. In the car Mac started up the heater and I hugged my apartness to the rhythm of the wipers clearing fan-shapes on the windscreen, watching the smudged wet grey-green suburban streets as they passed. At least Mac wasn’t nursing grudges; he didn’t care about me drinking or flirting, was only relieved to be on his way home. He asked cheerfully whether I knew that in the eighteenth century whalers had gone out from Sea Mills Dock for a few years, and blubber had been boiled there; I said I hadn’t known it. I tried to imagine all that scurrying filthy effort and activity, all the endeavour, the great distances and risks of danger, but I couldn’t believe in it. Everything seemed too far off and too tiny.
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