In the silent hall of Frances’s house he stood for a moment, smelling coffee mingled with a staler aroma, old carpets, soot from the unlit fire. He was both uneasy and exhilarated, like a boy in the head teacher’s study, alone and unseen.
Coats and jackets were bundled onto the hallstand pegs; there were trainers in a heap behind the door; newspapers were piled on a basket chair. The answerphone sat with its light blinking on a small table cluttered with papers, coins and a couple of pens. He thought he recognised this table from their life together. He wondered if he might make coffee; she wouldn’t mind that. But as he moved towards the kitchen, he heard a car in the lane.
Hi,’ he said, going out to meet her. ‘I’ve only just got here. Door was open.’
Frances began to take her shopping out of the boot. ‘Could you give me a hand with these? Just put them in the kitchen.’
His cold hand touched her warmer one, taking a cardboard box of groceries from her arms. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Got it.’
He stood watching her unpack till she said, ‘Put the kettle on or something, for goodness sake.’
‘Where’s Kate?’
‘Gone to a friend’s. I took her over after lunch, then I thought I’d stock up.’ She put the last of the groceries away while he made coffee under her instructions. ‘Cafetiere’s on the window sill – coffee in the blue jar beside the kettle.’ She got out mugs. ‘Let’s take it through to the living-room – the heating’s been on so it should be warm enough.’
He did not think it was, but did not say so. They sat down formally, she on a chair near the window, he perched on the sofa. She had her back to the light and he could not read her shadowed face.
‘Actually,’ she said after a moment, ‘I was quite glad when Kate’s friend rang. I wanted to see you on my own first.’
‘Oh?’ He waited, curious and alert. She had been cool so far but that was nothing new. He assumed Kate had been causing trouble but she did not seem annoyed, though she was certainly tense.
‘She wants me to tell you,’ she went on. ‘So I hope you won’t mind.’
‘Mind what exactly?’
‘Just that it’s me. That she hasn’t told you herself.’
‘Is this to do with school?’
‘No.’
He really had no idea what was coming but he could see it was serious. A hollow giving-way sensation funnelled down his chest. Frances was still distant, as if none of it had anything to do with her. He resented that. Didn’t she care for Kate at all, even now?
‘There’s no easy way to say this. Well, I can’t think of one.’
‘Oh dear. Sounds bad.’
‘Kate’s going to have a baby.’
He went on sitting there, holding a mug of coffee, hearing the words, not believing them.
‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’
‘I’m sorry. I know it must be a shock.’
‘What the hell – are you sure?’
‘Yes – and I’ll put you straight on one thing: it happened before she came to stay with me.’
‘For God’s sake, that’s three months – more – what the hell’s been going on? How long have you known about this?’
He seemed to her like a man acting indignation and anger. She did not believe in any of it.
‘Easter,’ she told him. ‘You’re right, of course, I should have guessed much sooner, but she’s a very private girl. I was trying to leave her alone, leave her to come to terms with being here, with Susan going off. I’m not used to girls, I did tell you that.’
‘Oh God, Fran, I’m not blaming you!’
‘I should hope not.’
‘I’m just shocked – stunned. My God.’ He put his face in his hands, breathing heavily into the cupped palms. Frances did not believe in this either. She grew icy with dislike, recoiling from him. Who had once been her love, her husband.
She thought he looked different from the last time he had been here. Was it only a week ago? She wondered if it was the effect of giving up the business which made him look less prosperous and confident. There was a weary familiarity about his appearance. Young, between jobs, he had looked like this. But then, he had been young and able to carry with style a slight down at heel casualness, a forlorn expression. It did not suit middle age and thinning hair so well.
He looked up, smoothing back the still dark hair. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘What am I going to do?’
She was impatient but not upset. Just as she was remembering precisely how he had once grated on her, he recalled that superior calm of hers. You would bat against it like a moth on a window pane but there was no way in.
‘We’ve seen a doctor, if that’s what you mean.’
‘She’s all right, is she?’
‘Her health is fine. She’s being sick a lot but that’s common. It’ll pass.’
‘Is she that far on, then? God, she must be. You don’t think she should have this baby, do you?’
If anything, she receded farther into shadow. He couldn’t make her out.
‘It hardly matters what I want, does it?’ Cold, she threw him back on himself. ‘Kate has to make her own decisions about all of this.’
‘She’s only fifteen, a kid. She can’t have a baby just because some lad couldn’t keep his fly zipped. Was that it, was it some lad in Newcastle, did she say? She never even had a boyfriend, that I knew about. But I wouldn’t, would I. Christ, if I could get hold of him – ’
‘It seems it wasn’t what you’d call a relationship. Nothing she was keeping secret. Just one night, an accident. There’s no point in going on about it.’
‘My God, Fran, have you no feelings about it, even after all these months? I admit it was an imposition, but she is your niece after all, surely to God you could help her get an abortion?’
‘She’s about twenty weeks pregnant.’ She saw his shocked look and sighed. ‘You said yourself, it’s gone on a long time without being noticed.’
‘You mean it’s too late.’
‘Maybe not within the letter of the law, but yes, it is. Soon she’ll feel the baby move. It’s only because she’s so young and slender it scarcely shows. You won’t remember, but Susan was like that. Didn’t show for months then suddenly up like a balloon.’
‘It’s too late then. Sorry, give me a minute. I can’t seem to get my head round this.’
She sat back, letting him be. After a moment she said, ‘I’m really sorry I didn’t know sooner, but even if I had, Kate’s certain she doesn’t want a termination. God knows why but she’s absolutely set against it.’
‘She’s too young to know what she’s letting herself in for.’
‘I agree with you.’ As she leaned forward into the light he saw signs of strain in her face. ‘I’m sure there are all sorts of complex reasons why she wants to have the baby. A psychiatrist would have a field day, unravelling them.’
‘Let’s not get into that.’
‘No point,’ Frances agreed. ‘But we do have to think about this, plan how she can best be supported.’
‘You want me to take her home, don’t you?’ He grimaced. ‘My responsibility.’
Before she could answer this, the telephone rang. She closed the living-room door behind her and although he could hear her voice, it was too low for him to make out the words or guess who had called.
Restless, he stood up and crossed to the bookcase to look over, in desultory fashion, what she was reading these days, just so that he could think about something else for a moment or two. The more she retreated from him, the more he wanted to puzzle her out, please her, even though he knew the time had long passed when he could hope for anything better than tolerance. Yet she had helped him out, she had taken Kate in. Now, this. Not one cuckoo but two. He thought back, trying to remember the friends Kate had gone about with at home. It was no good. Most of her telephone conversations were on her mobile phone, or like Frances’s one now, behind a closed door. The secret world of fourteen ha
d held her. Fathers, let alone step-fathers, did not have access. Besides, he thought, I was always at work, and when I wasn’t, there was Susan. Guiltily, he thought now of how both of them had left Kate to get on with her own life.
He realised he was staring at a row of Scott Fitzgerald novels. So that was where The Great Gatsby had gone! Yes, it was the same twenty-year old paperback, worth more now perhaps than the 50p he had given for it in a second hand bookshop in Newcastle. The picture on the cover, from a nineteen twenties photograph, was familiar as an old family snapshot.
He did not think Frances had ever cared for Scott Fitzgerald, and when they divided up the books painfully and quickly on that one terrible visit back home, with black jokes and a sudden deceptive camaraderie, he remembered her saying, ‘Here, you have this lot.’ She had tipped them into his cardboard box along with Asimov and Heller, Vonnegut and CS Forester. His books. He took the copy of Gatsby over to the window and flicked through it, wondering when he had last bought a book and read it all the way through. He did not read now, he drifted. Perhaps his only serious attempt at reading had been during his marriage. He had read hungrily then, the way people do who feel they have missed something important in their childhood.
As the door opened and Frances came in, he put the book back on the shelf, fitting it carefully in the space between This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. He took his time, so that she would notice and might even realise he had found her out. There had been a moment during that visit when she abstracted these books, deciding she wanted them for herself after all. In an odd way he was pleased about this: for once he was not in the wrong, and she was not irreproachable.
‘That was Kate. She wants to stay on with Michelle. I told her you were here, but I said it didn’t matter, she could stay. She’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘Does she know you’ve spoken to me?’
‘Yes. I feel bad about that. She ought to talk to you herself. But I didn’t want to bring her back tonight. Soon she won’t have the freedom to come and go, and stay with her friends. It will all change.’ She considered this. ‘I wonder if she realises.’
‘I doubt it.’ As she had sat down again, he did too. Perhaps he ought to insist on Kate being brought back at once, but he shrank from confrontation. What was he going to say?
Frances said, ‘You were asking about taking Kate home.’
‘I’m not even working now, I could spend the time with her.’
‘I think she ought to stay here.’
‘Do you?’
‘She’s suddenly started talking about Susan. She says she wants to stay here till her mother comes home.’
‘She’s not heard – ’
‘No.’ A pause. ‘Have you?’
‘I’d have told you!’
‘No more secret visits to the house or anything?’
‘Fran, she’s vanished.’
He saw her whiten at that as if the horror of it had shaken her again
‘Look, we need to talk this through properly. What’ll we do – can I take you out for a meal since Kate’s not here. The boys are in Aberdeen?’
‘On their way to Glasgow for a couple of days.’
‘A curry or something? My treat.’ He smiled at her, that old rueful smile.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘It’ll pass the time.’ It was going to be a long evening, he realised. Perhaps she did too, since she got up and glancing down at her jeans, said,
‘All right. I’d better put on something more respectable. A curry’s fine – the place in Dingwall is quite good.’
‘I’ll bring my bag in,’ he said.
‘You can have Jack’s room. I’ve made up the bed.’
‘You want to go for a drink first?’
‘All right. You know where you’re sleeping?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said, going out to the car, ‘I know that.’
5
Gillian was going out with someone new. His name was Paul and he was five years younger than she was. She was self-conscious about this and tended to tell people unnecessarily, forestalling comment. He had never been married, though he had lived with long term girl-friends in London and abroad. He had the glamour of other places and countries about him, and Gillian could not believe her luck. Despite his age, he made her feel young and naïve – those enviable, lost things.
As Alec and Frances were ordering chicken tikka and king prawn passanda in Dingwall, with side dishes Alec considered indispensable and Frances did not want, Gillian and Paul were sitting in a trattoria off Lothian Road. They were still at that uneasy but pleasurable stage of telling each other about their lives and preferences, and trying to make these more interesting and amusing than they usually thought them.
Grace and Jim Douglas had long since finished their evening meal and were watching a wild life programme on BBC2. Jim watched and commented, while Grace kept half an eye on it but paid more attention to the piece of tapestry on her lap. It was destined to be a cushion cover for the Lloyd Loom chair in their bedroom. She had a lamp switched on by her elbow, but it was harder work these days keeping her stitching accurate. She adjusted her glasses, peering.
Kate was at Michelle’s house, with Amy. They were in Michelle’s bedroom playing music, and had been sending text messages to a boy who said he wanted to go out with Amy. He was working in his father’s newsagency and when he finished at eight o’clock he would pick up all these messages. While they waited, messing about with Michelle’s long hair, putting it up with sparkly grips then taking it down again, Kate told them she was pregnant.
It was as if, having told Frances, she had opened a door she’d been keeping tight shut. Now there was no reason not to go through, through it and the next one, and the one after that. Whatever Michelle and Amy said, they would not look down their noses at her the way that doctor had done. She was ancient anyway, look at the awful thick tights she wore, how could she understand? She wasn’t the sort of person you could tell anything to. Nor, she discovered, was Frances. This was not because she did not trust Frances: she found she did, more and more completely. Frances was worried, you could see that, and Kate felt bad about it, not wanting to give her any more grief than she could help. Frances was straight, she would be shocked by all the stuff that happened, you couldn’t tell her the way everybody drank way under age or smoked joints or took Es at parties. She would go spare, she’d think it all meant much more than it really did. Not that Kate was going to do any of that; she was going to be very careful.
For about five seconds, Michelle and Amy stared at her like twins, eyes round and wide, mouths open. Then, ‘I knew it,’ said Michelle, ‘It all makes sense now.’
‘What does?’ Amy asked. This was a shock.
‘Oh everything, like her feeling sick and that. My God, what are you going to do? Have you told your auntie and your step-dad?’
‘I told Frances. Well, she sort of guessed. She’s brilliant, though,’ Kate insisted. ‘She wants me to stay till I have the baby and she’s going to tell my step-dad. He’ll be Ok. I’ll see him tomorrow.’
‘My dad would go completely mental. They don’t want to even think you know about sex,’ Michelle said.
‘You’re not going to have it, are you?’ Amy was just catching up, her own false alarm well and truly upstaged. She recalled vividly the terrible fright, then her overwhelming relief. The idea of actually having a baby was so appalling, she did not imagine Kate could possibly want to, yet there was such an air of drama and excitement about her, the room seemed charged with it.
‘I have to,’ Kate said. ‘I’m about twenty weeks, the doctor says. That’s like, more than four months. So it’s too late.’
‘Oh my God, you’re really going to have a baby? When?’
The doctor had given Kate a date which, like a mantra, she had been repeating to herself since her midnight conversation with Frances.
‘That’s quite soon.’ Amy looked surprised. ‘What about school? Are you going t
o leave? You’re not sixteen for ages.’
She had not expected them to be so full of questions, nor that she would feel special, as if she were suddenly at the centre of the world.
‘What do you think you’ll call it?’ Michelle asked. ‘They can tell you if it’s a boy or girl now. My cousin knew she was going to have a boy. She was so depressed, she really wanted a little girl. But she was Ok when Stephen was born,’ she added, as if this might reassure Kate.
‘I’m not even thinking about that!’ It was true, she had concentrated only on pregnancy, not the child to come.
‘No, it’s too soon,’ Amy said, coming in with her own wisdom now. ‘Anything could happen. Well, I’m sure it won’t, but you know what I mean. My auntie didn’t even buy baby clothes till after Kerry was born. She said it was bad luck.’ She laughed. ‘My uncle had to go rushing out to Mothercare and he’d been up all night because she had the baby at four o’clock in the morning.’
It will be all right, Kate thought, people have babies all the time and it’s not the end of the world. It will be all right.
Later, she realised that for all the questions they asked, the thoroughness of their investigation into her symptoms, feelings, action, the future of the still mythical child, they did not once ask, ‘When are you going to tell your Mum?’ They did not ask because they knew about absent parents.
‘Do you think you might get it adopted?’ Michelle wanted to know. ‘I could never do that, could you Amy, have a baby, go through all that and then give it to somebody else. Imagine, you’d keep worrying was it all right, were the people kind and all that.’
‘No,’ said Kate, making up her mind in an instant, on the whim of Michelle’s words. ‘Definitely not. No way am I giving this baby to anyone else. You can look after it yourself nowadays, can’t you, they give you help and that so you can go to college. That way I’d get a good job and earn decent money.’
They were silent for a moment as this vision of Kate’s future hovered before them.
‘You’re lucky you’ve got your auntie,’ Amy pointed out. ‘To babysit, I mean. You’ll still be able to go out.’
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