by Toby Litt
‘No, it doesn’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t make it a tragedy when it’s not. It looks like an accident. I don’t mind about that.’
‘But you do mind about us not telling you.’
‘No – a little; I don’t like to think of you staying away.’
‘Then tell me what it is.’
‘I’m annoyed we can’t be honest any more, with each other.’
‘Do you mean Henry and –’
‘No, I just mean you and me.’
‘We can.’
‘We’re not being honest now.’ Agatha was amazed at her own tranquillity, almost proud of her clear, direct-stating voice. Although she had not said it, both of them had heard You’re not being honest now.
‘I’m trying to be honest,’ said May.
‘Then tell me how happy you are.’
May overcame the impulse to look away. ‘I’m so happy,’ she said. ‘It’s the wrong time, and –’
‘No, that’s the lie-part,’ said Agatha. ‘Tell me about the being happy – I know it’s what you’re ashamed of. That’s why we can’t be honest, otherwise.’
‘It feels different to the first pregnancy,’ said May. ‘I feel more certain about it – not because I know what’s coming, anything could happen, I know that; but I think I’ve stopped being so rational about it. I’ll listen to the doctors, but really I know everything is going to be fine. I feel fantastic. Not sick at all.’
‘Thank you,’ said Agatha, breathless.
‘Are you sure you wanted me to say that?’
‘Don’t apologize,’ said Agatha, very definitely. ‘Don’t make it seem as if you were just saying the right thing for me.’
‘No. When I came round, I didn’t want to talk about being happy at all.’
‘You wanted to tell me, on and on, how miserable you were.’
‘Oh yes – I am.’
‘But only on the top – the rest is joy.’
‘It’s not as simple as that.’
‘I think it is – there’s terror-joy and worry-joy and I-don’t-know-what-else-joy. They feel different from being happy, and they are, but they’re just part of joy – which is a difficult thing to feel. It has no gravity, no morality; it feels evil. I remember.’
May felt she should be silent. ‘I know you do,’ was what she wanted to say.
‘I am happy for you,’ said Agatha, and it felt as if something were unclenching or perhaps unravelling inside her. ‘I’m able to protect that from all the rest. But, really, you could have chosen a better time.’
‘We – ’said May, then realised Agatha was joking and that the conversation had been moved on. ‘Oops,’ she said.
Agatha closed her eyes and listened to the breathing for a few moments. She felt May taking the opportunity to look closely at her face. Agatha had been missing the companionship of the breathing and even of the scrape. She hadn’t heard it whilst alone in the house that morning. It seemed, this past few days, only to be with her when she was in company. Which was strange, as to start with she hadn’t been able to hear it except when on her own. Perhaps, she thought, the house was getting bored with her. Her memories of the morning were very indistinct, almost non-existent – perhaps she had fallen asleep on the sofa.
May left, and Agatha didn’t hear the breathing again until that evening, when she was in the bedroom with Paddy, watching him get ready for bed.
CHAPTER 20
IT wasn’t any longer the breathing or the scrape which scared Agatha, it was the periods of self-absence – during the day, she seemed no longer to exist; occasionally, she could remember coming to a dim sort of consciousness, hearing a single intake of breath. Most of the time, most of her time, seemed to pass without feature. At first she assumed that, after so many late nights, she had been falling asleep to catch up. Now, though, she feared that her memory was failing. She would look through the left half of her book, sure she had been reading it for the past few hours, but couldn’t remember any of the incidents her eyes moved back through; then, when she started again from the point where her memory bleached out, the words seemed oddly familiar and she became convinced she had after all read them already. So, when Paddy’s getting up woke her this particular morning and she felt herself to be fully there, she wanted to tell him what had been happening. He was finding clothes to wear, by touch. After a minute attempting to phrase the opening statement, she gave up and made another sort of confession.
‘May came round,’ she said, out of the darkness and out of what Paddy had been assuming was sleep.
‘Good morning,’ he said, then, ‘When did she?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Agatha. ‘I think it might have been yesterday.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me, then?’ was what Paddy almost said, in an annoyed voice; instead, he let a gap occur – into which came a second unsayable: ‘Why are you telling me now?’
‘She seemed fine,’ and now Paddy remembered why this would have been so important; he hadn’t immediately thought of May as pregnant.
‘That’s good,’ he said.
‘She wanted to apologize.’
‘For what?’ said Paddy. ‘For being pregnant?’
‘Yes, I suppose she did – to begin with, anyway. But, no, she came round to say sorry that we’d found out as we did.’
Paddy looked at the bed. ‘That was –’
Agatha interrupted him and explained how the conversation had gone, in a softly distorted manner – underem-phasizing her own nearness to cruelty. ‘I think we need to do something to show them we’ve forgiven them.’
‘What?’
‘Invite them round,’ she said.
‘For dinner?’
‘I’d – yes.’
‘On their own or with other people?’
‘On their own – then we can talk about it, a bit. If the subject comes up.’
‘Fine,’ said Paddy, relieved it hadn’t been something much worse. This detail of one of Agatha’s days reminded him how little he knew, how little she told him, about any of them. He hated to think of it this way, but it seemed like progress – relaxation; though, sooner or later, he would have found out that May had been here and would have been mildly peeved not to have been told.
‘Come here,’ said Agatha.
Paddy went over to the bed, bending with long fingers to feel its edge and not stub his toe.
‘Here,’ said Agatha, meaning somewhere beside her in the sheets. On all fours on the bed, Paddy moved his face closer and closer to hers. When she was able to put one hand behind his head and feel one of his ears against her wrist, she pulled him in for a single, gentle kiss. ‘You’re a good man,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
Paddy instantly knew that, at some point, later in the day, he would have to lock the door of his office and spend a short while crying. It would be fine, he would be fine, on the walk to the station, and on the train – routine could keep off the emotion; but he mustn’t allow himself between now and the locking of the door any gap of inactivity or unfocussed thought: not until he’d organized a place for his sad joy. He pulled back from the bed, smiled at her though he knew it was too dark for her to see, and went off to finish getting dressed. This, he felt, was what Agatha wanted. She for her part wasn’t quite sure why she had just done that. Her first untrue explanation to herself was that she had been grateful for Paddy’s lack of reaction to what she’d said about May. But then she realised it was more to do with how close she was to leaving him. He must surely know about this – it wasn’t something she felt she had been able to disguise. And she had wanted to apologize to him for forcing him to live in such horrible limbo. There was the risk, of course, that the apology would reveal to Paddy the limbo which he somehow had failed to notice before. As he pulled away from her, she had been dismayed to feel the heat of his hope – his face was blazing with it; she was directly responsible for this flow of fresh blood. She thought of the weight of Paddy’s head, the responsibility she had always felt for it when it was lying on her
shoulder – and through this of her responsibility towards his whole life. She remembered the feelings of her shoulder, in moments after his head had been lifted away; its shape still being acknowledged by nerve-prickles, the muscles and bones not quite certain it had gone. Strength was what the kiss had been meant to give him – not hope; hope was atrocious. Agatha could hear Paddy pulling through the laces of his shoes (it reminded her of him putting on Max’s first pair of impractical lace-ups); and she could hear or imagined she could hear his changed mood in all his sounds. The extent of his love scared her; the power she had over him, through this love, was something she wanted to get rid of, to return to whomever she’d first taken it from – but that, of course, had not been Paddy; the power had been latent: she had merely spent year after year drawing it together and making it acute. What had seen itself over that time as a process of loving, now seemed the construction and refinement of an instrument of elaborate torture. That was their relation, and her part in it, her part in it at this present time. She wanted to call Paddy back and to explain exactly where she was; how close he was to losing her, how close he should be to losing hope. But anything she did now would make it worse; self-paralysis was the only solution. Let him go – deal with the day. Do not kiss or thank him again, not for a long time. Let his ardour, that’s what it old-fashionedly was, diminish over the next week. If she did this they would return, eventually, so long as she hadn’t ruined him, and he didn’t as a result ruin things, to where they had been only a few minutes ago. She heard Paddy going downstairs, then the quiet noises of his breakfast: each of them was treasurable – around each of them she put a mental frame. They were here, they were for the moment present; this might not always be the case, this probably would not be the case. Again she thought how the most perfect solution would have been his death, and again she was dismayed that the last time she killed this thought she hadn’t killed it properly. At some stage, she was going to have to mourn Paddy; hope in him, not merely life but life-with-hope, that was what made such mourning an impossibility. The day was already wrecked-wretched; she wouldn’t be able to do anything with it. Agatha hated herself for her compassion and her stupidity.
The hours that followed were a gloom of equal density. The breathing was intermittently present, and this perhaps prompted her. She remembered what had happened in hospital, with Rose – not fragmentarily, as usual, but telling herself the story of it, hour by hour. She didn’t know why she had suddenly become brave enough to do this; it was hard to believe her emotions were so intimately connected with the lives of Henry and May. Perhaps she merely, after the disastrous conversation with Paddy, needed to test herself – to see whether she was capable of going through the worst of it alone. All was a horror for her: specifics of it made it difficult for her to believe in or continue living in her own body. She had felt herself to be absolutely monstrous, couldn’t think of any disfigurement – goitre, hump, cancer, elephantiasis – which could have been worse. Hers – her growth – was worst because it meant she could pass for normal; men would give her their seats on the Underground (when she still thought she could go out), and some women who were strangers would even touch her belly and ask how many months. Agatha had become, as she saw it, the most grotesque parody of motherhood – and it had felt like being strapped to a tragedy. One of the things for which she most hated herself was the stupid persistence of her hope. At the birth, after Rose eventually emerged, Agatha had still thought there was a possibility she might be alive. To believe this was, shamefully, to believe in the miraculous – that Rose had a silent and invisible heartbeat. But she was born as she was, and would never move or take a breath or make a noise. Wrapped in a blanket and handed gently to her (she could not fault their tact), the face Agatha looked down on she couldn’t help but see as perfect – if nothing else, perfected; already at its best and most and last. The weight then in her arms (4lbs 7oz) had never really left her. Since, her brain had assembled a collection of images of women with dead infants: refugees carrying little corpses through border crossings in hopes of medicine or magic; westerners making dashes to hospitals with floppy blue bodies in their arms. There was no solidarity in this; she couldn’t wish her complicity or her compassion upon any other woman – and the thought of their emotions made her own move turbidly around within her, as the gurgling of Paddy’s stomach had often made her own go glug. Whatever would happen to her, with Paddy and with Max, with Paddy’s father and her own mother, the worst had already happened; but this made her feel no better. That her life had already managed to accommodate the worst thing she could have imagined, and that she hadn’t been utterly destroyed by it – this was a torture rather than a consolation. At moments, with the sounds within the rooms, she thought she might be going mad (although in an exaggerated, literary way), and while the prospect terrified her, it also gave her a little more moral respect for herself. If she could bear her life, then it wasn’t unbearable; she wanted to feel it was irresistible – she wasn’t a freak of suffering, able to prosper by it. She hated, on television, to see the murder-victim parents and the freak-accident lobbyists who had found a vocation in their grief. Was that unfair? She wanted nothing to do with the partisans of tragedy, the paysans of the tragic. Much better to move, alone, to somewhere no-one knew her, and never speak again of what had happened – spend one day a year shut up in tears and collapse. But that, too, was a glamorous and literary idea: to get on a witness-protection programme for those who had seen the worst. It annoyed her that she had been permanently changed and it annoyed her, also, that there were people incapable of seeing anything different about her; not friends, these had all been able to see the change, the minor wrecking of face and aura – not friends, but street-strangers, shop assistants, even call-centre workers. Agatha wanted respect as well as anonymity: inside seemed the only place for this. She got no expressed respect here, but had been able to maintain a horizon of dignity (meaningless dignity, perhaps), and anonymity was a given, though it had been apart from rather than among, and that was a different definition. The crowd wouldn’t have confronted-comforted her, and it might very well have ignorantly injured her, but she would have felt something small had been achieved merely by being for a while part of it.
What should she do when Paddy got back home that evening? She didn’t know, had not been able to decide on any better course than a slight withdrawal of herself from him – another slight withdrawal, in the long series. He would react, detecting this, with a darkening of mood, but this was only routine: he would see it as pattern and cycle, whereas she feared it had reached decisive, final. Emotionally, she felt she recognized, she had been moving towards an end of them; and she had done this, horrifically, by mimicking what would have been the first gesture in the opposite direction. This had been perverse but definitely alive, and the pain it was going to cause Paddy was part of the energy it had already given her. If he tried to kiss her, she would have to let him, and then take a different course, away-away-away. She would maintain a greater physical distance between them, her replies would have to be given even more slowly, after an even longer pause. It terrified her (as so much terrified her these days) that something so infinitesimal as a wrong kiss, mistimed, could make the epoch, could bring about the end of their marriage.
At first Paddy was late, then he was very late, then he called from the hospital: his father had collapsed, been rushed straight into intensive care. ‘He’s going to die, this time,’ said Paddy.
‘You said that before,’ said Agatha, meaning it to come out more kindly-sounding than it had (all the day’s plans for the behaviour of evening were being scrapped).
‘He doesn’t have any strength left – you can see it. I think he wants this to be the last time. It’s too much palaver, going back and forth between here and home.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Agatha, thinking of the day just gone; apologizing, in disguise, for that. She felt like apologizing for everything she had become but had to make do with expressi
ng sympathy for everything Paddy was suffering, and conventionally at that.
‘Don’t be sorry,’ said Paddy, ‘you know I’ll be glad when he’s not suffering this any more. I want him to die, too.’
‘You don’t have to say that.’
‘I do. Or it’s like – I don’t want him to have to go through the pain and process of dying. But I do want him to be dead, already – so that all the process is over. I’m sorry, I’ve been storing up things to say. I want my old dad back. I don’t know the man in the bed upstairs. My dad wouldn’t know him, either. He certainly wouldn’t like him.’
‘Do you want me to come?’
‘No. Thank you for offering. If he were properly conscious, I’d want you to bring Max, but that isn’t going to happen. His brain isn’t all working any more – it isn’t getting enough oxygen. Sometimes he says really stupid things, really quite offensive. He says things to the black nurses that I’m surprised they don’t hit him for. He calls them big black mammas. It’s ugly.’
‘Are you alright?’
‘I’m going to go back – I’ve got to go back. I don’t want him dying when I’m not there. All of it just makes me think of my mother, and how he was then and after that.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come?’
‘Yes. The only thing I can take is knowing I’m looking after you – your interests – oh I’m fluffing what I mean to say. I want to say I want to protect you but I don’t want you to react by saying I’m being patronizing.’
At another time, perhaps any other time, Agatha knew, this is exactly what she would have done. Now, she said: ‘It’s the right thing – I want to be protected. Give him my love. Kiss him for me.’
‘I tried to do that a while ago. He’d been quite still. I thought it was the end, but the nurses weren’t all that interested. I went to kiss him on the forehead and suddenly, clunk, he tries to sit up and splits my bottom lip. I look like I’ve been in a fight.’
‘You have,’ said Agatha, then added, ‘you are.’