by Morag Joss
Of course I needn’t have worried. He didn’t ask anything awkward at all. Over tea he gazed round a bit more and complimented me on the beautiful room and the lovely things I had. Then he asked me, so sweetly and simply, ‘Tell me all about yourself. I’ve never known anything at all about you. Nobody ever told me anything about you, not even your name.’
So I did. The afternoon passed into evening. And he told me all about his life too, until we had learned not everything, but all we needed to know about each other. I couldn’t say exactly when I realised it, or when he did (he told me much later that he had felt it too), but within a short time I began to know that I was quite strangely safe, a feeling I had not experienced ever before but which I trusted. I knew that nothing Michael could say would ever disappoint me, none of his questions would challenge me. And he would accept anything I might say; together he and I would find our way to our story, whatever it was to be; it would be a story mutually discovered, shaped and cherished, and in this way we would keep each other safe. He was pleased, for example, to hear (I had thought all this up in advance, of course) that his father and I had been serious about each other but that he had been forced into an engagement, for business reasons, with the daughter of a powerful associate of his father’s. I of course had no money, and I had run away to have my baby. He did not even know that I was pregnant, and would certainly have married me if he had, but I felt I could not stand in his way. When he finally accepted that I had gone, he married his heiress and went to live abroad, and the two family corporations merged and became enormously successful. But he never forgot me, and five years ago I received a lawyer’s letter telling me that he had died and left me this house with all its contents.
Good stories unite people. Michael had a good one too, and if he had made his up too, so what? We construct our history in order to understand what we are now, that is all, it’s a perfectly legitimate way of explaining things. Historians do it all the time. So by the time I had heard about how Michael broke away from his terrible foster parents and got a job with a small theatre company, then all about his early career on the stage and, tragically, having to give up his first big film part because of his blackouts, we were quite easy with each other.
It was after seven when we got up together, with the sense that these stories had done their work of uniting us and could now be put aside. Now I think of it I don’t believe we did refer to them again unless fleetingly, in passing, when it was pleasing now and then to point to, for example, a watercolour of Lake Como and say, oh, your father loved Italy. Or, oh, you hold a potato peeler exactly the same way I do. Silly and fond. But I’m running ahead, all that came later. We went to the kitchen to see about supper, still talking and Michael carrying the tea tray, as if we already had a routine. Without discussing it he started loading the dishwasher while I got things out of the fridge. In all the excitement of preparing for him I had forgotten to think about wine, so I sent him to the cellar to choose some. We had champagne. Lots.
They clinked their glasses like children up to something, with smiling and conspiratorial eyes. Michael had opened and poured the wine inexpertly, saying that it was an excellent vintage, but with his first sip his face contorted with the surprising dry fizz that filled his nose and mouth. Jean laughed, relieved to see that his knowledge of wine stopped at the label. He was as unused to drinking champagne as she was, as unfamiliar with this as with other moneyed, sociable pleasures.
‘It’s Pol Roger,’ he said, trying to reclaim some authority. He swigged again, to drown the pain of being laughed at, not yet able to admit that everything he knew about wine came from a book off the stall called ‘Travels with My Corkscrew’ by somebody called Anthony Bouvery Hope, whoever he was. He hadn’t been able to shift the book even for ten pence, so he had kept it. ‘Did you know that Pol Roger,’ he said, ‘was Winston Churchill’s favourite champagne? Do you know, when Churchill died-’
‘Roger! Roger Palmer. How funny! Roger Palmer, he lived in Oakfield Avenue, when Mother and I… My mother, you see-’ Jean shook her head and sipped from her glass. There was nothing she needed to say on this subject after all. She drank again quickly and said, ‘Years ago, it doesn’t matter. Roger was a nice man, he did me a favour once, years ago. But we should have some of that nice Palmer too, with the steak. Chвteau Palmer- it’s a make of wine. You go down and get it, while I get on. It’s down on the right.’
Michael returned from the cellar with two bottles of Chвteau Palmer. ‘It’s too cold to drink now,’ he said, a little importantly. ‘It ought to be warmer. You’re meant to have red wine at room tempera-ture.’
Jean nodded. It was true. She had noticed that she enjoyed her last glass or two more than the first, after the opened bottle had been sitting for a while on the hearthstone next to the fire.
‘The bottles are too high to go in the microwave,’ Michael said, dolefully. ‘What’ll we do? Pour it into a jug?’
‘I know,’ Jean said with a confidence and efficiency that took her a little by surprise, ‘we’ll stand them in hot water.’
Michael got down a wide saucepan from the shelf that Jean could reach only by standing on a chair. He placed the two unopened bottles in it, filled the pan with hot water from the tap and placed it on the edge of the Aga. Then he poured them both more champagne and as Jean moved round the kitchen in her apron, he sat in a high-backed chair next to the Aga to watch her and to keep an eye on the softly clunking bottles in the simmering water. Jean worked with peaceful, unhurried concentration, feeling Michael’s eyes upon her like a blessing. She looked up from slicing onions and smiled at him sitting there, watching her and drinking his champagne. She raised her glass, and Michael did too. They said nothing. They had exhausted, for the time being, the possibilities of stories told in words, but they could still toast one another silently across the kitchen, and celebrate the combined and unfamiliar joys of vintage champagne and being together.
* * *
Steph had made her Bolognese sauce from a recipe on the spaghetti packet. Or sort of; she had had to use vegetable oil instead of olive, had skipped the garlic and herbs and sliced up a bit of leftover, very bouncy frankfurter in place of the mince, but with extra onion and a shake of ketchup in place of tomato puree she thought the result was still pleasing. Unlike Michael, she did not cry easily, and had got through the first hours since his departure feeling his absence but telling herself she was not missing him as such. As she had gone about her routine of cleaning and tidying the flat with a new and unfamiliar energy, even changing Michael’s duvet cover, she had wondered at intervals where he would be now and what he would be doing. He had left at two o’clock on a journey that should have taken an hour at most, allowing the extra time in case the van should conk out again, and Steph pictured him in turn desperately poking about under the bonnet, or trying to hitch a lift. Or she would imagine him sitting in the van in a lay-by outside the posh-sounding house, killing time before walking up to the door and seeing his mother for the first time. She imagined his terror. She mouthed the words of reassurance she would give and pictured how she would be keeping him calm with a gesture or a smile, if she were there with him. Then she wished that he had a mobile phone so that he could ring her. She wanted to hear that he had arrived in good time and was quietly waiting for four o’clock, and even more than that, she wanted to hear him say that he just felt like hearing her voice. He would probably find it easier to say something shy and nice like that on the phone, rather than straight to her. He could manage something like that, probably, if he had a phone. And if she had one too, of course, which she did not.
Then she began to imagine that he had had an accident. She saw the van mangled and overturned, blood streaming from Michael’s mouth, his lips trying to say her name. He would die trapped in the van, and she would never have heard him say that he liked to hear her voice. He had left her forever and he had never ever said it. Steph began to cry. She wished again that they had mobile phones. She wished s
he had heard him say it. She wished she had not been left alone. When he got back this evening she would tell him that. He would come back. It was stupid, wishing. She collapsed on the sofa and sobbed. Strange, because she had been alone before, and she did not cry easily.
Darkness came earlier on that overcast and rainy afternoon, and it seemed to Steph that as the day was wearing away outside, here in the flat time was suspended. Michael’s absence had stopped the clocks; ambient fear, for him and for herself, would fill all the space until his return. She had meant to buy food, but she began to feel a superstitious reluctance to go out to the shops. She tried to tell herself it was because of the dark and the weather. Then she considered that she simply did not like the thought that Michael might return before she did and come back to find the flat empty, even though he must have done so countless times in the past. And in any case, he could not possibly be expected back in Bath at a quarter to five when he would only just have arrived for tea, an hour’s drive away, at four o’clock. Unless there had been some disaster. This renewed the disturbance in her mind enough to halt for a while her fretful tidying and fiddling round the sitting room, and she stood gazing out the window at the sky, her arms folded over her bump, while in her head she played out new and lurid catastrophes that could befall him. Finally, she turned from the window, accepting that she simply wanted him home.
But she definitely did not cry easily, so perhaps it was the baby that was making her want to again. Whatever it was, it was important that she stop thinking about Michael and the surprising and awful discovery that she missed him. It was then that she had roused herself and gone to the kitchen to tackle the Bolognese sauce with a third of the proper ingredients, so that there would be something nice waiting for him when he finally did come home.
***
Again, I think it was something instinctive that had caused me to make up a bed in Michael’s room long before I had met him, or even quite dreamed of his existence. It’s the little practicalities, the things we choose to pay attention to, that so often reveal the desires beneath, desires that are so huge that they really must be concealed if life is to go on in any recognisable form. My life has never been big enough for epic emotions, I now see. I have kept them small, knowing that my life just could not accommodate longing and hope and rage on the kind of scale I could have felt them. I have domesticated my feelings so that I tend them in the little daily observances: making up bedrooms, cooking, gardening. And lighting fires.
On the day back in January when I chose and aired the best white linen with lilac piping for that room and made up the bed, I couldn’t have known that Michael would be needing it that very first night. But there was no question of his driving back to Bath so late and after so much wine. I found men’s pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers in one of the other wardrobes in my own dressing room, as well as shaving and washing things. Michael did not ask where they had come from but accepted them as his own. I recall that he did not thank me effusively for them, or for anything else, when he left the next morning. Not that he was rude, certainly not. Just that he took it somewhat for granted that his room and everything he needed for the night would be available in his mother’s house. He took his leave a little abstractedly after breakfast, in a complete set of different clothes that were all rather better than the things he had arrived in, and I did not mind that, either. Nor did I worry that we did not arrange another visit. Without its being said, we knew that from now on it was his spells of absence from this house that would be temporary, not his presence in it. Besides, what son behaves as a house guest, or thinks his mother needs to know when he might be coming back? He assumes, rightly, that she will be there when he does choose to return, and all a mother needs to know is that he will. But over and above that I felt sure it would be soon.
Michael found Steph huddled and spent on the sofa. She was wrapped in her blankets and half dressed, rigid with cold and with the fatigue of a night spent drifting between fits of crying and shaking and patches of exhausted sleep. Her face was ghastly, smeared with wrecked makeup. Strands of her fair hair stuck darkly to her head where her anxious hands had pasted it down with tears, sweat and mucus.
‘Steph? What’s the matter? Bloody hell, what’s the matter?’
Steph shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘You- you didn’t come back… you… I thought… I thought you were… I thought you wasn’t ever…’
Her eyes were tight shut, so she did not see but only felt Michael’s arms coming round her shoulders and pulling her towards him on the sofa. She heard his moan of incomprehension and dismay, and his saying of her name over and over as he enveloped her and held her. As he rocked her against him, she began to quieten.
‘You didn’t come back, you bastard… you bastard, I thought you’d gone. You went for tea, you never said you’d be away all fucking night … you might’ve been dead …’ She tried to take a breath, but began to gulp. Michael held tighter, taking in the truly puzzling idea that someone else had cared enough about where he was to be frantic with worry. It had not crossed his mind that he should let her know he was staying over for the night. Not that he would have been able to- except, he thought guiltily, he could have phoned Ken, who might have been able to wheel himself along and knock on the door. But he had not thought of it. He felt ambushed by two astonishing feelings: grateful joy that she could weep with concern for him, and overwhelming remorse that he had caused her to suffer. He also found that he had an erection. Holding her close and stroking her back, he whispered her name.
‘I’m fucking freezing and all,’ she said. ‘The gas ran out and I didn’t have any coins.’
Michael rose, fed the meter and turned on the fire. He returned to her and wrapped her close to him again. After several minutes, she pulled in a deep shuddering breath, and then another. There were several crumpled tissues on the floor. Michael reached for one, lifted it to her face and dried her eyes. She took it from him and wiped her nose, and then buried her face in his chest, but did not cry.
‘Are you getting a bit warmer now?’
‘Yeah, I suppose.’
‘I’m really, really sorry-’
‘I thought you’d just gone off, walked out. Just gone.’
‘No. No, no, I never would… never. I never would. Honest, I never would.’ His arms tightened round her and with one hand he caressed her shoulder. The neck of her sweatshirt was wide, and his hand met her skin and dipped under the edge of the material. The warmth and softness of her seemed to flood him with other sensations; she became not just warm skin beneath his fingers but also taste, a smell. She was almost a sound, both in and of his own head, filling every cell of him with an incredible, compulsive music that his body recognised and wanted to move to. He pulled the sweatshirt from her shoulder and buried his face in her neck, kissing, breathing her in, and with a burst of courage he moved his hand and placed it lightly on one breast. One of Steph’s hands was moving up his thigh. Whether he was more terrified than excited, more embarrassed than elated, he simply did not know. As her hand roamed closer Michael pressed the round breast beneath his palm. It could have been made of bread for all he could tell, under the thick sweatshirt, but he was unsure if he was allowed to do more, and now something close to panic washed through him in case it was all going to stop. Her hand had left his thigh and was removing his hand. He would explode, surely, if it had to stop. Steph pulled his hand away and drew it under her clothes, and as he touched her bare breast, she gasped.
‘Sorry!’ Michael blurted, withdrawing his hand.
She replaced it gently and kissed him, pushing her tongue into his mouth. It was only when she stood up and pulled him to his feet that he remembered properly that she was pregnant. He stared at her stomach, trying and failing to conceal his erection, not knowing what to say or do, even less what she wanted. She reached round his neck with both arms and whispered, ‘Michael. Michael, it’ll be all right. Come on, it’s all right,’ and there was silence. Michael’s han
ds reached under the sweatshirt and pulled it off over her head. He gazed at the white-skinned, blue-veined breasts, so lopsided and heavy, while both hands lifted and cupped them and his fingers played over her brown nipples. He searched her face to see if he was getting this right, if his hands being here, doing this to her breasts, really could be what she wanted. He took one nipple in his mouth and she moaned and stroked his head. It was incredible; he was almost unable to believe it, but she was unzipping him now. He felt afraid. He had slept with people, of course, perhaps half a dozen, and with one of them, on and off, for several months, but not for ages. And never with anyone pregnant. He did not know how or even if it were possible. What if he hurt her, or the baby?
‘Come on,’ Steph whispered. ‘It’s fine. Come on, it’ll be fine.’
Michael allowed himself first to be led to his bedroom, then to be undressed, and to undress her. She was beautiful. With the sight of her naked round body came a burst of hope that entering her would be as easy as it was necessary. It was, she made it so. It was easier than he would have believed possible and, beyond that, infinitely happier. She lay on her side and let him travel her with his hands and tongue, moving as and where he wanted. When he began to understand that he had more than her permission and that she was as frantic as he was, he grew bolder, and when he finally parted her legs and found her so wet that he thought he would die from need of her, she reached down and drew him inside her. She showed him how to glide and twist in her. He delighted in the way she instructed and he followed. For ever afterwards he would remember how his delight seemed to please her as much as her own, which she also knew how to take from him. She showed him how, but it was he who delighted her. He touched, pushed and slid and waited, withdrew, touched again as she pulled him back between her legs. For as long as she wanted he sank in and out of her, entering and leaving her, until with her legs gripping him round his waist he felt her tug and tighten over him and she gasped and swore happily. He was long past speech himself.