The rain was heavy, Mac had to put on the wipers at top speed. As we turned into the yard at home we saw that Sheila was standing outside in it: rain was streaming down her face and her clothes were sodden, clinging to her. She looked like a medieval saint again: tormented, and rigid as if she was carved in wood.
— I can’t do it, she announced to us over the noise of the rain as the car engine died.
— Do what?
— I give up.
She was deliberately flat and calm.
— What’s happened, Sheila?
Ester apparently had woken up and begun crying almost as soon as we left for the party (which was at about eleven; it was now almost five). Sheila had no idea what the matter was. Ester wouldn’t take her bottle, she screamed all the way through a nappy change. She wouldn’t be cajoled by Sheila putting her in the sling and walking round with her, which had always worked before. Sheila had tried everything she’d seen me try: the singing, the jogging up and down, the distracting her by carrying her in and out of different rooms; even the blowing on her tummy. But Ester only redoubled her paroxysms: she was swollen and purple with rage, throwing herself backwards in the sling, shuddering and howling. Sheila said she’d tried for a long time, and then she’d thought that the baby and her simply weren’t doing each other any good, she wasn’t making anything any better. So she might as well just walk away from her. She’d put her down in the carrycot, in the bedroom.
— It’s all right, Mac said, putting his arm round Sheila in all her soaking clothes. — You did the right thing.
— It’s so hard, I sympathised, — when you’re on your own.
— In fact I thought, if I stay in there with her, listening to her, I’m going to do something dreadful. So I came outside. And I’ve been out here ever since.
How long had she been outside, for goodness’ sake?
— Two hours? Three? Or perhaps that’s melodramatic. I don’t have my watch on. It’s felt like three hours. Actually it’s felt pretty much like an eternity. I’ve walked around some of the time. But mostly I’ve stood here because the rain splashing over from the gutter meant I couldn’t hear her crying. There didn’t seem any point in hearing it, as I wasn’t going to do anything about it. It’s all very exaggerated, isn’t it? I never knew anyone had that much crying in them.
— That bloody gutter, Mac said. — I keep meaning to clean it out.
— Shall I go and have a look? I said.
— I want you to keep her, said Sheila. — You two. Adopt her. Please, won’t you?
Mac was coaxing Sheila towards the back door, saying she needed to get into some dry clothes, to have a cup of tea or a stiff drink. When I went inside I couldn’t hear Ester at first. Sheila hadn’t switched the lights on; the rooms were almost dark because of the rain at the windows, and the white tiles in the chequerboard hall floor seemed to float in the gloom. I picked up the full bottle of formula abandoned on the hall table, and as I climbed the stairs I caught the tail end of a thread of noise, a thin remnant of exhausted sobbing. Sheila was staying in a spare room on the first floor at the back, papered in pale Chinese-green with a pattern of bamboo stems and white flowers. Coming into it in the dim light felt like stepping underwater – and the air in the room was heavy with baby-smell, animal and close. Everything was quiet. The carrycot was on the floor beside the bed; I slipped out of my shoes so as not to wake Ester if she’d fallen asleep at last, though when I tiptoed across to peer into the cot I was sure that she was awake, listening out for me, reciprocating my prickling consciousness of her. Sure enough, when I leaned over the cot her gaze was ready for me, wide-open eyes glassy in the shadows. Her silence seemed full of an awakened intelligence beyond her age. For a long moment of mutual exchange, before she resumed her crying, we stared and seemed to hover between possibilities: I might remain a convenient stranger, she might remain someone else’s baby, sweet but tedious. Or something different might come about.
Mac came into the room to get towels and a bathrobe for Sheila, while I was giving Ester her bottle. She was hungry, she had snatched eagerly at the teat as soon as I offered it. Now as she sucked she was gazing up at me in moist reproach, her breath still catching and snuffling in the aftermath of the long-drawn-out adventure of her sorrows. When Mac leaned over us she tugged away from her sucking, twisting her head to take him in; I thought she might begin to cry again but she only gave him the same slow, measuring look that she had given me, then slid back on to the teat luxuriantly.
— It’s a crazy idea, I said to Mac. — Sheila doesn’t mean it.
— We could do it, he said. — If she did mean it.
— You must be mad, I said.
But I had a vision in that moment of the three of us together in that room, remote as if seen from a very far off place – like the vision of Mac’s whaling ships. And I thought that the substantial outward things that happened to people were more mysterious really than all the invisible turmoil of the inner life, which we set such store by. The highest test was not in what you chose, but in how you lived out what befell you.
And so we got our daughter. (Though we always told Ester that she was Sheila’s daughter; we were her foster parents.) I left my job at the adolescent unit to look after her. I’d been unhappy there anyway, I’d hated it when the nurses gave the girls their sedative injections and the girls fought against it, and then the nurses wrote down in their records that they ‘displayed paranoid symptoms’. I stopped working altogether for six months, staying at home with Ester. And after that I got a part-time job at the Gatehouse, a network of accommodation and services for adults with mental health problems, where I was much happier. The boys loved Ester; Rowan believed that he and she had an extra kinship through their Brazilian connection. Toni and Lauren made more fuss, but they came round to her in the end. Sheila returned to her teaching job, and after a year she came back and was still sure it was what she wanted, so we did all the necessary bureaucratic stuff, and were checked by social services, and became Ester’s legal guardians. (The bureaucracy wasn’t straightforward, it was horribly complicated, but Mac was good at fighting his way through all of that.) Without making any deliberate decision, we slipped into pronouncing her name the English way, Es-ter: it was easier, anyway, when the time for school came round. She keeps her other name, Esh-tair, as if it’s a clue to a different life running parallel to the one she’s actually had. Everything Sheila sends her from Brazil she keeps in a box under her bed, segregated from her ordinary possessions. When Sheila visits, they are mutually guarded and interested and polite; Ester treats Sheila like an eccentric aunt whose favour is flattering but faintly ridiculous and risky.
Ester seemed to settle things between Mac and me. I know that usually it doesn’t work, having a baby to bring a couple together; but perhaps just because she came to us in a roundabout way, she seemed to set a seal on our marriage. Mac was lordly in his confidence that we were doing the right thing; I never caught him out in any petty panic, and I admired him for it almost dispassionately, as if I were admiring a stranger – though dispassionate isn’t the right word, because at that time the passion between us was running rather strongly again. (This was during the same period, too, as he steered through a crisis at work: when they were advised to diversify into calibration systems for long-range weaponry Mac decided against it on moral grounds. Some of the team thought the company would go under, but it didn’t.) The funny thing is how Ester’s grown to be so much like Mac – more like him than either of his actual daughters. Not that she looks anything like him, or like either of us – or like Sheila, for that matter (she’s vividly pretty; people think she’s Malaysian with her dead-straight black hair and neat shallow eyelids and clear brown skin – her skin is like Rowan’s). But Ester is stubborn, diligent, even-tempered, clever at sciences and with machinery. She steadies me when I’m restless or dissatisfied; she cools my heat and saves me from myself.
10
I WAKE UP FIRST, WHILE MAC i
s still asleep. This waking up early is new, it has something to do with my age (I’m fifty, with everything that brings). There’s a thin grey light in the room and the night is over, but that isn’t encouraging. Night suits me, with its depths like infinite rooms sprawling underground. The daylight is exposing, prosaic, bleak – although I don’t know why I’m afraid of its exposure, nothing’s the matter, there’s nothing to be afraid of. But something sour and dreadful seems to have collected, while I was sleeping, in the hollow under my breastbone: it’s both a physical sensation and a mental anguish at once and I have to sit suddenly upright so as not to succumb to it. Then I discover that I need to pee. Was that all it was, after all: the poison and the anguish? So I mutter something to Mac, and potter in bare feet in my pyjamas to the bathroom, trying to keep my mind shuttered against the light which presses into it. I don’t pull up the blind in the bathroom, I try to hold off the day which I can hear gathering its force outside the window: the breezes stirring in the garden, the birdsong in its slippery purity, the whole urgent, ordinary machinery of the present resuming its forward movement.
But I can’t hold it off. I prefer to wake up gradually, lingering half inside my dreams; but sometimes waking is as abrupt as falling over an edge of sleep, the doors to conscious awareness fly open involuntarily between one second and the next. I have a vision of despairing clarity then, as if my life were a featureless bland landscape stretching behind and ahead of me: all surface, all banal anxiety and difficulty, unredeemed nowadays by any promise or hidden content. It’s in these early mornings, if I were an Anglican like Mac, that I’d pray.
Then that passes over. I go downstairs in the quiet of the sleeping house. Usually Mac gets up first but this morning I don’t want to go back to bed, I know I’ll only lie there in the grip of this wakefulness. On the landing halfway down the staircase (this is the house which Mac and I bought together when we moved from Sea Mills), there’s a tall arched window, much taller than a person, with a narrow seat like a shelf across the bottom. I pause there as I always do, because I like the way the garden and the oak tree and the church tower beyond the trees all look mythic through the distorting old glass, like something in a film or a dream. Then my bare feet are cold on the stone-flagged kitchen floor, so I go into the boiler room where I keep a pair of old slippers, worn comfortably to shiny black hollows in the shapes of my heels and toes. I fill the kettle under the tap and put it on to boil. I open the back door and carry the teapot across the wet grass, soaking my slippers; I empty last night’s cold tea leaves into the bedraggled dahlias. Since Mac retired and sold the factory, he’s thrown himself into gardening with the same zeal he once put into business. It’s autumn, these dahlias are a velvety dark orange-red, smouldering in the cobwebby light. Silky floss is tangled amongst the seed heads in the herbaceous border, the plant stems are beginning to blacken and I can smell the frost: frowsty like rotten apples. Back in the kitchen I open the bread crock and get out the bread for toast. Mac makes all our bread, and our marmalade as well. I pour out glasses of orange juice. I go through the motions bringing in the morning, one ordinary thing after another.
Mac would like me to give up work and settle down with him here in the country, but I’m not ready yet. So we keep on our flat in the city, I stay there two or three nights a week when I’m working (I’m still at the Gatehouse). But Ester’s at school down here, Mac drives her back and forth every day and on the way he tests her on her homework – French and poetry and maths and science. I worry that this puts too much pressure on her but she loves it, she nags him to ask her questions; she seems to learn easily, picking things up as a pure pleasure. She learns poems by Herbert and Marvell and Yeats off by heart (‘Love Bade Me Welcome’, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’), and she and Mac recite them in unison. I thought Mac would be bored at home but I understand now that he addresses himself to whatever room of his life he happens to be in with the same kind of serious absorption that doesn’t fail him.
When I’ve taken his breakfast upstairs I sit reading my book at the kitchen table with my legs tucked under me, refilling my mug with tea from the pot keeping warm in its cosy. The book is about the idea of Nature as it was imagined in classical philosophy and then as it developed under the Romantics; I’m reading a section on the Eleusinian mysteries. The last time I was in the British Museum, I saw a Greek red-figure vase which depicts an element of Eleusinian ritual: the demigod Triptolemos sits in his winged chariot with a sheaf of corn in his hand, preparing to descend and bestow it upon mankind. I’m searching all the time, in books and films and paintings, for signs of transcendent meaning like this that I can puzzle over. They excite me and elude me, escape ahead of me as I try to grasp them. And all the time that I’m reading, I’m watching the clock – at quarter past seven I’ll get Ester up and Mac can make her breakfast and then I’ll drive to the station to catch the ten to eight train. It’s unusual to have this interval of reading and abstract thought on a work day. Perhaps I’ll pay for it later and be tired: but for now my mind is racing, leaping from sentence to sentence. Everything’s momentous as if I’m looking through a magnifying lens in my mind, seeing through the words to the whole, to their core; sometimes I’m actually breathless and my heart is racing, in pursuit of the meaning emerging so close within my reach.
I needn’t go to work, we don’t need the money, I could stay here and read and think all day, every day. This house is the first home I’ve ever actually chosen for myself: a Georgian frontage, all light and air, tacked on to a much older farmhouse behind, with walls two foot thick and squint-eyed windows to keep the weather out. For a year after we bought it I devoted myself to doing the house up and buying furniture for it, trying to fulfil the soul I felt it had: subtle with its shadowy corners, poignantly haunted by its past. And then when the house was finished I couldn’t quite bear it: I felt as if I’d made it for someone else to live in and not me. Or it seemed like a bargain I’d made with middle age and the bargain sickened me; I was ashamed of all the money I’d spent, contriving an effect of spontaneity and accidental charm as if the place had been in my family for a hundred years. I thought that I’d bargained my youth away with this house, giving it away in return for a shell, the sordid trick of material things. (But of course youth was over anyway, whether I bargained or not.)
That was a silly fuss, it didn’t last. I’m very happy here now, I know how lucky I am. Though I’m not quite ready yet, to move in finally. I’m holding that day off. When I jump on the train at the last minute on work mornings, I still feel sometimes as if I’m running away, escaping from something coming up behind me.
In the evening after work I have dinner in the city with Madeleine: she’s home from London visiting her mother. We meet in a lively place I like which was the old river police station when the harbour was still for commerce and not just for leisure; the restaurant is all glass on the river side so that you can watch the boats and the swans passing, the water in its metamorphosis (through gold, mercury, steel) as the light goes. Madeleine is there first and finds a good place by the window; when I arrive and don’t see her for a moment she half stands up, tottering on high heels, calling and waving to me eagerly: blonde hair pinned up untidily, protuberant blue eyes, plump chest rounded as a pigeon’s, hot colour of tiny broken capillaries in her cheeks. She’s wearing a tight skirt and big earrings and she’s ordered cocktails already. Madeleine and I don’t meet often, but whenever we do we fall easily into our old companionableness. I talk to her more intimately than I ever talk to Mac, I can tell her anything and she tells me everything too, we spill over to each other eagerly. It’s better without the men (though she likes Mac and I like Donald, her partner). Madeleine doesn’t read and she doesn’t think about abstract things, but she takes in what she sees, without defensive judgement.
She’s Ester’s godmother (Mac insisted that Ester was christened, though the boys aren’t). She doesn’t have children but Donald has teenagers who live with them at weeken
ds and she likes them and is kind to them and comically doleful about her relations with them. (— I think you have to be broken in first by babies, she says. — The teenage craziness comes as too much of a shock otherwise – just as you’ve settled down yourself, into being sensible.) Her job these days is something deep inside the intangibles of management: in public relations, for a company selling software to other companies for managing their systems – she’s not even conducting the public relations, just overseeing the process through which they’re conducted. When I ask her what fills up her day she says it’s too boring to talk about, but I don’t believe she hates it, I suspect she’s happy enough in keeping her fragment of the machinery turning over effectively. I think that I couldn’t bear to do something so null, but then I’m sorry for thinking it: what right have I to criticise? And in its different way that’s what my job is too, just making tiny adjustments to individual lives swept along in the flow. I don’t have all the ambitious ideas about OT I used to have, believing it was a lever for changing things. Mostly it’s just organising badminton or art classes for the service users, or trips to Butlin’s or the ice rink (we did go to Paris once). Madeleine loves my story of the young man in one of our Gatehouse flats who is autistic spectrum and not coping with venturing out anywhere; I’ve taken photographs of his bedroom, bathroom, hallway and kitchen, and laminated them for him, because he feels safer if he can look at them while he’s away from them.
Clever Girl Page 22