Tell Me Where You Are

by Moira Forsyth

  ‘Hello Frances, how are you? Kate sounds on good form.’

  ‘I suppose she is. The bouts of crying have stopped, mercifully. She was wearing herself out.’

  Don’t come, she pleaded silently, leave us alone. She realised she wanted the summer with Kenny, unhindered by Alec being around. Kenny had said he might go at the beginning of September, once his redundancy came through. That would be before Kate’s baby was born. So far he’d done nothing about selling the cottage or finding somewhere to live near his son. Sometimes she thought it might never happen and they would go on just as usual. In a week Jack would be home, since he had fixed himself up with a job on the Tulloch estate for the summer. Alec would be in the way.

  ‘My job finishes in August,’ he told her. ‘I thought I’d come up for a few weeks.’

  ‘I’ll have a full house,’ she warned. ‘Jack’s coming home, and Mum and Dad will be here sometime over the summer.’

  ‘Don’t feel you have to accommodate me,’ he reassured.

  Irritated, Frances retorted, ‘I don’t.’

  He laughed as if he thought she didn’t really mean this.

  Sharply, Frances said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything from Susan? Kate’s still hoping. That was what caused so much crying, I think.’

  ‘No.’ He came in swiftly, scotching this. ‘Kate knows that. She’s handling it very well, she’s remarkable.’

  ‘I must go,’ Frances said, unable to bear this. If he had sat with Kate night after night, mopping up tears, or had to listen, as Andrew had, to that wild sobbing in the early hours of the morning, would he still be so cool? She thought of what Gillian had said, about how calmly Alec seemed to take the loss of his wife. For it was loss, however strange and unfinished.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ he said, ‘let you know when I’m coming.’

  ‘You do that.’

  She put the receiver down too quickly, as you do in anger, glad to be rid of him.

  In the kitchen, Andrew had put away everything but the fruit, which lay in red and yellow heaps on the draining board, ready to be washed. He was outside kicking a ball against the house wall; she could hear the hollow thud of it. Kate was sitting on the wooden bench which looked down the garden, reading her magazine. Beneath her, the tabby stretched asleep. Frances, coming round the side of the house and finding them, thought, how peaceful, and sat next to Kate, leaning her head on the rough house wall and closing her eyes against bright sunlight.

  ‘He’s gone all quiet, you think he has a sleep sometimes?’ Kate asked.

  Frances opened her eyes. ‘What?’

  ‘The baby. He’s all over the place in the morning when I get up, and when I’m in the shower. At night as well, when I sit down in front of the telly. But now I can’t feel a thing.’

  ‘It’s a ‘he’ is it?’

  ‘You can’t keep saying ‘it’, can you? He could be a boy.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Frances closed her eyes again. Silence, just birdsong, the turning of Kate’s magazine pages, the thud of the football and Andrew’s scuffling feet, to and fro on the paving slabs at the side of the house.

  ‘Frances?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘It can’t die can it, the baby? I mean, even if I can’t feel it moving, it’s just sleeping, eh?’

  Frances opened her eyes and looked at Kate.

  ‘Of course the baby’s alive,’ she said firmly, sure of this at least. She smiled at Kate. ‘Healthy and growing and very much all right. Any minute, you’ll feel him playing football inside you again.’

  Kate grinned back. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘definitely a boy.’

  Grace stabbed her knitting pins into the ball of wool and got out of the low chair with a struggle. Jim opened his eyes.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ he asked.

  ‘Just going to make it.’

  ‘You still knitting, in this heat?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve given up. Hands were getting too sticky.’

  ‘You knitted pink, when you were expecting,’ he said, with a sudden clear memory. ‘Pink for a girl.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ She shook her head. ‘I’d never have done that. You were so keen on a boy, you thought every one of them was a boy.’

  ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘I see it’s white wool, this time.’

  He went on sitting there, after she had gone into the house. His chair was in shade now that the sun had moved round, but it was comfortable, warm enough. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. He was sleeping too much. Time he was active again, busy. He lay listening to the murmur of the radio from indoors, the sound of water as Grace filled the kettle, the chink of cutlery and dishes. A blackbird hopped down from the crab apple tree to the grass below and paused, looking at him with one beady eye.

  He did not know what made him think of Susan, except that he was always thinking of her. He did not tell Grace how much or how often. Susan, whom he had loved best and who had hurt and angered him most, would not come back this time. The click of the gate, the light step on the path would always be someone else now, never Susan. He knew that, even if no-one else did.

  2

  August was peaceful. The new term did not begin until the last week, so Frances felt more relaxed, and went into her own school only once or twice. She had plenty to keep her occupied at home. Alec called about twice a week but spoke mainly to Kate.

  Kate lay in the garden when the weather was fine and in the house when it was not. She could usually be persuaded to wash up dishes or do a little housework, but she had less and less energy as the weeks went on, and was reluctant to go out. Frances drove her to ante-natal clinic and her friends came round, but she rarely went to visit them now, so that meant there were always two or three at Frances’s house. She watched them from the living-room window, sitting on the grass around Kate’s sun lounger making daisy chains, the shrill of their voices swelling and falling, self absorbed and exclusive. As they moved, their long hair shone glossy in sunlight as they sat surrounded by battered trainers, taken off and flung across the grass. The pages of Kate’s magazine fluttered open, turning by themselves in the breeze.

  The Academy had sent work home for Kate since she was due to sit exams next year, but she had not completed anything. Half-finished essays and an attempt at a geography project lay neglected in her bedroom where Frances had helpfully put a small desk and chair and a bookcase picked up at the local auction. We’ve made no plans, she thought, turning away from the window and the chattering girls. Kate will have to buckle down to it next year. Could they afford a nanny perhaps or a good childminder, if Kate went back to school? Sometime, they would have to discuss the whole thing with Alec. As if infected with Kate’s lethargy Frances could not bear even to think about all that yet. The summer days would drift by with nothing achieved.

  Gillian was working through the summer. When the Festival was over she and Paul would go to Cyprus or Greece, somewhere hot with a beach. She sounded brisk on the phone. She’s got over it, Frances decided, because she’s met someone else. At least this one wasn’t married. Their mother had great hopes of this new relationship.

  ‘Maybe we’ll have a wedding, what do you think?’ she asked Frances. She and Jim had stopped in Dingwall for a few days before driving to the hotel in Skye they went to every year. Frances had taken her mother to the Station Café for coffee after some shopping in Boots and the old-fashioned ironmonger’s where Grace had managed to buy a gadget for stoning cherries. She liked Dingwall shops; the throng of Aberdeen’s city centre was too much for her these days.

  ‘A wedding?’ Frances asked in surprise at this sudden jump in the conversation. ‘I hardly hear from Gill these days, so I can’t tell how serious it is.’

  ‘That’s a good sign,’ Grace said comfortably. ‘She must be quite taken up with this Paul.’

  ‘It would be quite a shock, being married, after so long on her own,’ Frances mused.

  ‘Nice to see her settled, though.’

  ‘
I don’t think I could adapt to it myself.’

  Grace looked at her, assessing. ‘You’ve a busy life Frances. I hope you’re not thinking of taking on this baby as well?’

  ‘What else can I do? Sometimes, when I think of my peaceful life. … After Jack went off to uni and it was just Andrew and me – he’s so easy – it was. …’ She let the words dry up. Had it been peaceful or just empty?

  ‘What about your friend? What does he think of all this?’

  ‘Oh, Kenny. He’s supposed to be moving to live near his son but apart from putting in for redundancy at work, he’s done nothing about it.’

  Grace set her cup down, disappointed. So that was going to come to nothing either. ‘Where does his son live? Is it far?’

  ‘Near Edinburgh.’

  ‘You’ll miss him,’ Grace offered, wondering if this were true. Frances was close, you could never tell. Of all her children it was only Susan who had displayed her emotions, sparing you nothing. Perhaps it was better this way: you could be interested, try to be helpful, but stand back. But she felt excluded from their busy purposeful lives. She was cut off from Susan’s too, but Susan had been gone so long she was used to that. Jim still felt it. She sighed, looking down at her empty cup.

  ‘I will miss Kenny if he does go,’ Frances said with sudden frankness. ‘He’s been a good friend. It’s selfish, I know, but I’d like him to stay.’

  ‘Your Dad and me,’ Grace ventured, since Frances seemed willing to talk after all, ‘we thought you would – not marry again – but maybe get together with this Kenny. Once the boys were away.’

  ‘Did you? Goodness.’ Frances was touched. She patted her mother’s arm. ‘Don’t worry about me. We’re perfectly all right just the way things are.’

  ‘You could do with having a man around,’ Grace pointed out, ‘now this baby’s on the way. If he’s going to retire, Kenny could help out.’ She ignored Frances’s startled laugh. ‘It’s different nowadays. Men do help with children. Your father of course is from an older generation. He left it all to me. I like to see the young ones together with their bairns, the daddy pushing the pram and so on. It’s a good thing.’

  Her mother’s words caught Frances like the snagging of an old pain. She saw herself at twenty five or six, nursing a teething Andrew, Jack pestering her for a story or just some attention. Alec would be out with colleagues or working late, his odd hours never fitting with hers so that he could take the children and help out. At home, he reached thankfully for a bottle of wine and put his feet up. These split shifts, he would say, I’m knackered. When they moved to Northumberland he had an office based job and things were better, at least at first. He was still drinking, but he took more interest. The boys were no longer babies and he was able to talk to them and enjoy their company. Then he left me, she thought, without a backward glance at his sons. He left me.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She shook herself back to the present, the little café with its flowered tablecloths and shelves of photograph frames and pottery for sale.

  ‘Sorry, dreaming. We’d better go. Dad will be looking for his lunch.’

  There were too many of them in the house. Frances had never minded before because it was always for so short a time: at Christmas, Easter, the odd weekend. It had been too much trouble this time to move everyone around so she had simply given up her own room for her parents, and slept on the pullout bed obligingly dragged to the boxroom by Jack. It barely fitted, so she had a moment of grim satisfaction remembering how she had banished Alec here at Christmas, and on the less comfortable camp bed too.

  ‘I’ll sleep in here, Mum, if you like,’ Jack had offered.

  ‘No, it’s fine. There’s enough disruption.’

  ‘You’re not kidding,’ Jack agreed. ‘It’ll be worse after September, eh?’

  Jack had taken the news of Kate’s pregnancy with his usual equanimity, once he managed to believe it was true. He could see a difference in his mother: not just the short feathery haircut which made her seem younger, and the loss of weight, but the tension in her face, her weariness. ‘You Ok, Mum?’ he kept asking, coming into the kitchen to help her cook, bringing in washing without being asked. She was touched by his concern, but felt guilty that he was worrying about her.

  ‘Guess what I just realised,’ he said, when his grandparents left and the house seemed to settle into its familiar state again.

  ‘What?’ Frances asked, pleased to have him there, to have both her sons at home and the place to themselves again. They seemed to anchor her to reality, as Kate could not, with all those familiar signs that all was well: their enormous appetites; the scattered trainers in the hall; the late night videos; the empty beer bottles left lying for her to pick up in the morning; Andrew’s bedroom throbbing with heavy metal.

  ‘Andy and me – we’re going to be uncles.’

  ‘So you are.’

  ‘Magic,’ he said, helping himself to an apple, throwing it in the air, catching it in cupped hands.

  ‘Watch you don’t drop that.’

  ‘I won’t.’ He had taken two other apples from the bowl and held them close to his chest. ‘See what useful skills you pick up at uni.’

  Up went one apple, then another, and the third. His hands crossed, rose and fell, caught and threw. The apples turned in the air. Frances laughed.

  ‘That’s wonderful – who taught you that?’

  Jack caught the three apples neatly. ‘Guy I know. He does it professionally, so if I fail my exams, I could be a juggler. Watch!’

  Up the apples went, russet and green in the air, rising, crossing, falling, caught and up again, over and over.

  ‘Amazing! I’m glad you’re learning something for all the money it’s costing.’

  ‘It’s just a knack.’ He put two of the apples back in the bowl and bit a large piece out of the third. ‘It looks difficult, but it’s not really. You want me to teach you?’

  ‘Later,’ Frances said. ‘I must get my bedroom back to rights.’

  ‘Busy, busy,’ he mocked. ‘You should relax, Mum, it’s the holidays.’

  He sat down at the table to read the sports pages of the newspaper while he finished his apple. He was putting on muscle with his outdoor work, and his face and arms were brown. Andrew had a job in the supermarket, which he kept saying was better because he didn’t have to work as hard, but Frances could tell he envied Jack and thought himself worse off.

  Kate, of course, had no job. She floated through the summer. At least the crying had stopped.

  Gillian’s nuisance calls had stopped too, now that she had her new telephone number. She and Paul were looking through holiday brochures but hadn’t decided where to go.

  ‘We’ll get something at the last minute,’ he said. ‘There are always bargains around.’

  He had a friend from New York staying in his flat for a few months, someone working out of Glasgow on a temporary contract, so he and Gillian were usually in her flat in the evenings. Sometimes Paul stayed over; sometimes he had an early start so went back to his own place. When he left she missed him; when he stayed she wished she had the bed to herself. They had their favourite restaurants now, their weekly visits to the cinema, the rudiments of a routine. They were much the same with each other as they had been at the start: enjoying the company and by now the sex, but still a little wary of anything more. Perhaps, Gillian admitted, she was the wary one. There were things she could not tell Paul, that kept her distanced from everyone, even Frances now this other baby was coming.

  She woke from dreams of a baby stirring within her body, feeling the solid swell of the pregnancy, dissolving as the dream dissolved and she woke in tears. If Paul was there, she turned her face into the pillow, weeping silently. She had read about this of course, in magazines and helpful books on women’s health. It was normal to have some anxiety continue, normal to dream of babies. What dismayed her was that it was the same baby, growing and changing all the time.

  At leas
t they would be away when Kate’s baby was born. They would be in Cyprus or Greece or Turkey, they would lie on beaches and turn brown, sit by cafes drinking iced beer and growing plump with laziness, swim in blue pools, sleep in a white bed in a white room and make love all afternoon through the siesta. When they came back, it would be different.

  Late in August, when term had begun and school-uniformed pupils passed her in groups as she walked to work, Gillian had a call from Frances.

  ‘I’m coming to Edinburgh for an Early Intervention Seminar,’ she said, ‘and it’s a Friday of all days. I wondered if you could you give me a bed for the night? I’ll get a train down early on the Friday, come home Saturday afternoon. Is that all right? It’ll give us some time together.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gillian said, ‘of course.’ Frances sounded unusually tentative, but there was no question of saying no.

  3

  ‘What would you like to eat?’ Gillian asked when she had finished exclaiming over Frances’s new hair, growing out a little now, but still a shock after all these years of the heavy coil pinned up daily. She and Frances were still in suits, Gillian’s sharper with a short skirt, but office clothes. Frances had arrived with a small suitcase and her folder of seminar papers. Gillian had been home half an hour, time spent energetically tidying the flat and making up the spare bed. ‘There’s a good deli round the corner, so I could get some stuff there.’

  ‘Let’s go out. It’s a treat for me, being in Edinburgh in the Festival. We could go down the Royal Mile afterwards, maybe, see what’s going on?’

  ‘I’ll ring Gianni’s. They’ll keep us a table if we go quite early.’

  ‘I’ll have a shower first if that’s OK.’ Frances ran her hands through her hair. ‘I got the early train so I feel as if I’ve been up since the middle of the night.’

  Gillian followed Frances into the small bedroom, which doubled as her study when she worked at home. Most of the space was taken up by the bed and the computer workstation. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘it’s a bit cramped in here.’