The Anniversary

by Hilary Boyd

  Jack waited, not sure where this was leading, but making a pretty good guess as he watched his wife’s face.

  ‘That’s why you don’t want a baby, isn’t it? You can’t be bothered with anything that might disrupt your precious life.’

  True, he thought, and said, not for the first time, ‘Lisa, sweetheart, I told you right from the start that I didn’t want any more children.’ He paused. ‘And to be fair, you said you didn’t either.’

  Rocking backwards and forwards on her sandal Fitflops, hands now wrapped around her slim body, tears dripping unheeded down her cheeks, Lisa said very quietly, ‘I know. But I’ve changed my mind.’

  Jack came round to where she stood, but she backed away, holding her hands out as if to fend him off.

  ‘Don’t hug me and tell me it’s all right. It’s not all right. I really want a baby, Jack. Your baby.’

  There it was. No more subtle hints. Lisa was staring at him mournfully, waiting, he supposed, for him to relent. And his heart went out to her. She hadn’t conned him, like some women might, and just gone ahead and got pregnant ‘by mistake’. She was begging him; it really cut him to the quick to refuse. And at forty-three, time was against her finding someone else to father her baby. But he couldn’t do it. He didn’t deserve another child. He couldn’t even bear the thought of being a father again, let alone the reality.

  ‘Lisa …’

  ‘It’s not fair,’ she said quietly, finally letting Jack take her in his arms. ‘You don’t love me like I love you,’ she added, her words muffled, her head buried in his chest. ‘If you did, you’d be dying to have my child.’

  Pushing her away a little, so that he could see her face, he said, ‘I do love you, Lisa. You know I do.’

  Jack meant what he said. He did love Lisa. But recently he’d had the uncomfortable feeling that he was letting her down, that he’d become a disappointment to her.

  He had worked so hard in the early months to seem virile, energetic and, if not exactly young at past sixty, then as youthful as possible. He’d lost weight, made a brief attempt to get really fit and allowed Lisa to update his look with a shorter hairstyle and buy him clothes that were more on trend. His wardrobe when they’d met had consisted of four suits, all M&S and years old; shirts, mostly shades of light blue, with classic collars; subfusc ties; jeans. Clothes were not Jack’s thing.

  His retirement, he was well aware, had been a blow for Lisa. For a journalist he was young to stop work – many of his associates were pushing seventy and still hard at it – but Jack had woken up one day and known he wanted out.

  In the year since his retirement, however, he’d come to the conclusion that his decision was radically affecting their marriage – and not in a good way. Lisa saw herself as the wife of a highly respected journalist, working for one of the top financial broadsheets, whose opinion was much sought after, who had close relationships with leading politicians, was regularly on television and welcome in the highest political circles. Not a retired codger pretending to write a tome on how Europe would live without the UK. A book that he should be able to write with his eyes shut. But Jack’s problem was that every time he shut his eyes, the only thing he saw these days was his son, Jonny.

  Now, unwillingly, his thoughts returned to Stella and how she’d looked up at him earlier that afternoon, her tear-stained face beseeching him to let the past be. He had wanted so badly to put his arm round her and comfort her, but he wasn’t sure how she would react. Her wishes had to be respected, obviously, however hard that was for him. But it didn’t change how he felt, nor quell his aching desire finally to give voice to his long-buried sorrow.

  ‘Jack?’ Lisa was looking down at him, flushed and breathless from their supposedly make-up sex. ‘Did you come?’

  Disoriented, trying to pull back his thoughts to the present, Jack shook his head, realizing that his erection had sunk miserably to nothing. Lisa pushed both hands on his stomach as she crossly twisted herself off his body and flopped down on her back on the crumpled sheet.

  ‘Great, thanks,’ she said, sounding peeved. ‘I was just about there.’ She raised her arm and laid it across her eyes as if she couldn’t face him.

  ‘Sorry. Sorry, sweetheart. Don’t know what happened.’

  ‘Huh, I’d have thought it was blindingly obvious,’ she retorted, pulling herself up from the bed in one graceful movement. ‘You’re terrified I’ll get pregnant – even through that creepy condom.’

  Jack, eyes shut from sheer exhaustion, heard her stamp across the room and the bathroom door bang. He honestly didn’t know what to do. The two of them seemed to have come to an impasse. And threaded through the recent row, the tears, the anger and finally the sex was the depressing knowledge that he would have to return to London with his wife tonight.

  18

  July 1990

  Stella’s life crawled by like a pointless montage. She felt nothing, not even grief, existing only in a dream-like state where nothing was solid, not even the floor beneath her feet. Nothing mattered now. It was as if she were drugged, although she had refused the medication the doctor prescribed. What surprised her was that she seemed to be managing the basic functions of life with ease, as if someone had programmed her, pointing her in the direction of the bathroom to pee and clean her teeth, the cupboard to find clothes to cover her nakedness, the kitchen to make tea.

  Jack was by her side. He was perhaps feeling similarly dream-like, similarly absent from life. She didn’t ask. But if he left the room, she would sense a sudden ache, a panic, until he returned.

  Her mother, Patsy, hovered. Friends – Rosie, Catherine – dropped by. She spoke to them from a different place that did not engage her heart. She shut her eyes to the embarrassment and horror she saw on their faces because, although she understood, there was no responding echo she could relate to. She knew, of course, that she must be horrified, utterly and completely horrified, somewhere deep down, but she was determined not to give breath to that feeling.

  ‘I’m worried about you, Stella,’ Patsy said almost daily, her perennially impatient tone tempered admirably. ‘You’ve barely cried, you never mention his name.’ Guiding her to the table and sitting her down, she went on, ‘And you’ve got another life to think about now.’

  Which made no sense at all. She knew she was pregnant, of course, but she couldn’t make the connection between herself and the baby in her womb.

  The only conversations she heard, the only moment when she came to life at all, was when Jack or her mother said her son’s name, conjuring him up where she couldn’t in her numb brain.

  A week or so after that terrible moment when Henry had raised the pool cover, Stella became aware of Jack’s voice niggling at her, trying to get her attention. It was morning yet again, and yet again she had not died in the night – as she prayed for – yet again she sat at the kitchen table with another cup of something she probably would not drink. ‘We have to make a plan,’ he was saying, ‘for Jonny.’

  For a moment their little boy was there again, in the kitchen, all around her like a fine mist. She breathed him in with long, cool draughts, felt the fleeting weight of his body pressing against her thighs, the smooth skin of his bare arms under her fingers, the musky vanilla scent of Play-Doh in his curls … saw the laughter in those bright eyes.

  Spinning in her head were the words of the Carpenters’ song, ‘The End of the World’, and she asked herself how the sun could possibly continue to shine, how the waves had the nerve to break, time and again, on the shore … As if nothing untoward had happened. Because every single thing, every single, solitary thing in her nightmare existence had changed irrevocably and beyond reason. But Jack’s voice kept interrupting.

  ‘Sshh.’ She didn’t want Jonny to go.

  Jack sighed. ‘Stella, please. We have to decide.’

  When she still didn’t reply, he added, very softly so she barely heard him, ‘We have to bury him.’

  Whether it was the words thems
elves, or just Jack’s persistence, she never knew. But suddenly Stella felt her body give a violent heave. She pressed her eyes shut and screwed up her face, clamping her lips together in an attempt to stem the tide. Because she was terrified of feeling. Numbness was far safer, it didn’t hurt.

  The pain came anyway, regardless of her wishes. A scorching, incandescent blistering of her heart as she finally faced the truth: her son was dead. Tears pressed through her tightly closed lids, an agonized howl breaking from somewhere deep inside her throat.

  She felt Jack’s arms around her, pulling her up from the chair, and she collapsed into his embrace. The dam had finally burst.

  Stella did not know for how long she cried. But it seemed like forever, her tears flowing from a bottomless pit of anguish and, overwhelmingly, disbelief. This could not be happening to her.

  ‘I don’t know what to do.’ This from Jack.

  They were sitting on the kitchen sofa now, still clinging to each other, their bodies floppy and exhausted from their tears.

  ‘We can’t bury him,’ Stella whispered. ‘Please.’ The thought of cold earth closing round his little body made her want to vomit.

  ‘What then?’ Jack asked, as if there were alternatives, beyond the cruelly obvious. But neither of them could say it.

  ‘Where would he go?’ she asked.

  ‘You mean …’ Jack’s brow furrowed.

  She realized he thought she meant Jonny’s spirit. Not a believer in Heaven or Hell – although she kept her options open about some version of a Higher Being – Stella found herself suddenly wanting desperately to know that Jonny was still being watched over, protected somehow. Is that so ridiculous?

  ‘I meant a memorial. Where shall we remember him?’

  This drove them to silence for a moment.

  ‘Stoke Newington was his home.’

  ‘It’s not really our home, though. We’ve barely been here three years.’ They’d moved into the house only weeks before their son was born, and it was not an area with which either of them was familiar. But they had liked the house and, more importantly, they’d been able – just about – to afford it.

  ‘Where is home, then?’ Jack asked.

  The question seemed important but Stella found she couldn’t answer it. Neither Ealing, where she had grown up with her widowed mother, nor Folkestone, where Jack’s father owned a printing company, could be considered ‘home’. Jack had escaped the port town to go to London University, aged eighteen, and seldom returned. His parents, both now dead, had never forgiven him for refusing to show an interest in the family business.

  ‘Home is family,’ she said eventually, ‘and we don’t have one now.’

  Jack looked pained and rested his hand on her stomach. ‘We do, Stella. Of course we do. You mustn’t say that.’

  She wanted to push his hand away, to shout, How dare you tell me what I must or must not say, think, feel. But she felt the baby moving, so she let her husband’s hand stay where it was, controlling her temper with a titanic effort. If she could not care, then perhaps she must let him.

  On the subject of their son’s funeral, Stella and Jack ground to a halt. They had, literally, lost their reason. Which was when Patsy stepped in.

  A tall, imposing woman in her late fifties, with a greying chignon and flinty eyes that would suddenly crease with unexpected laughter, Patsy never wore make-up on her oval face and dressed mostly in jeans and shirts, loafers, her only ornament an Omega Seamaster watch with a brown leather strap – given to her by Stella’s father – and a solitary silver bangle. She had been round almost every day since her grandson’s death, bringing food from M&S, making coffee, occasionally putting a wash on or running the Hoover over the floors. But Stella knew she would be finding the role of carer wearing. Patsy, although passionately involved with children all her life, was a businesswoman, not the warm-hearted mumsy type people might associate with the field of early education.

  ‘Why don’t you lay him to rest where he died?’ she said one evening, not looking at either of them as she poured the contents of a carton of leek and potato soup into a pan and ignited the gas hob. ‘Scatter him somewhere beautiful nearby.’

  Stella, still curled up on the sofa, felt her breath catch in her throat. Scatter Jonny? How dare she?

  Jack said, ‘Stella?’ as he looked over at her, but she bit her lip, knowing she might say something dreadful. It had never taken much for her and her mother to row. Patsy had been a tough, disciplinarian parent. Later she’d told Stella she was worried that without a father figure, Stella might become overindulged and wild. No chance of that.

  Patsy turned from the stove, arms resting on her hips, lips pursed. ‘Stella …’ she came over and perched on the arm of the sofa. ‘Listen …’ Then she stopped, sighed. Stella waited for the lecture about pulling herself together and getting a grip. But it never came. She realized with a shock just how hard this must be for Patsy too, to lose her precious grandson. Up until this moment, her focus had been so inward, she hadn’t thought of anyone but herself. She reached out and took Patsy’s hand.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ was all her mother finally said, her eyes brimming with unaccustomed tears.

  19

  It was late on Friday night, but Eve wasn’t able to sleep. There had been a violent summer storm earlier, the thunder crashing overhead, flashes of blue light through the curtainless window illuminating the bedroom like a black-and-white movie. Eve didn’t mind the storm herself, but it had put her on alert, in case Arthur woke. Plus the baby had begun wriggling and fidgeting as soon as she lay down. Is this one a girl? she wondered, hoping it was. She’d asked not to be told the sex of her baby at the earlier scan, because Eric wasn’t with her. But this pregnancy felt so different. With Arthur there’d been terrible morning sickness, lasting for weeks, and she’d felt so tired she’d wanted to die. But this time she had barely noticed the child quietly growing in her womb – until she’d been forced to.

  There was no sound, however, from her son’s room as she padded across the corridor to the bathroom for the second pee of the night – and found the blood. She had been checking for weeks now, worrying about it on and off every day. There had been no sign of trouble, though, since that first bit of spotting and the discovery that her placenta wasn’t in the right place. She’d begun to hope it had been a one-off. So now she was actually looking at the stain, she didn’t really believe it.

  Her heart began to hammer. Stepping out of her knickers, she wondered what she should do. The doctor had been very specific. If there was any blood, she should go to the hospital immediately. Was this really blood? Was it enough? Enough to constitute dragging her mother out of bed in the middle of the night? She wasn’t getting pains or cramps.

  After another moment’s hesitation, she went and knocked on her mother’s door. ‘Mum?’ No reply. Gently pushing it open, the old door creaked loudly and she heard her mother stir.

  ‘Eve?’

  ‘Mum, I’m bleeding.’

  The bedside light snapped on and her mother was up and out of bed within seconds.

  ‘Sit down.’

  Eve did as she was told, perching on the side of the bed on top of the soft duvet. ‘It’s not much. I don’t know if I should worry,’ she said.

  Stella didn’t say anything for a moment. ‘Any pains?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Still … I think we should go and get you checked out, sweetheart. Just to be safe.’

  ‘Couldn’t we wait till the morning, see if there’s any more? It’s vicious out there.’ She didn’t want to go to the hospital; all that palaver in the middle of the night. But she could see from the set of her mother’s face that she didn’t agree.

  ‘I’ll go and get Arthur up,’ Stella said.

  ‘No, don’t! I can drive myself, Mum, if you stay with Arthur. It’s just spotting, I’m not crippled.’

  Her mother sat down beside her, put her arm around her shoulder. Eve shivered. The storm ha
d freshened the previously muggy summer night and now it was quite chilly.

  ‘Suppose you get terrible cramps on the way? Or more bleeding? Don’t be silly. Of course I’ll take you.’

  Eve nodded, knowing her mother was right, but still reluctant. ‘Go and get dressed and I’ll do the same. Maybe Arthur will go back to sleep in the car.’

  The roads to the hospital were shiny black with the earlier downpour. Spray from the passing cars on the A21 slicked the windscreen. The rhythmic draw of Arthur sucking his thumb was the only sound in the car, both women tense and discombobulated by the night-time drive.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ her mum said, glancing sideways as she drove.

  ‘You keep saying that, Mum. What if it isn’t?’

  ‘Let’s wait and see what the doctor says.’

  ‘I’m not even thirty weeks. If the baby is born now …’

  Her mother reached out and put a firm hand on her leg. ‘Try not to worry, Evie. You said it yourself, it’s not a lot of blood.’

  Eve felt her breath catch in her throat. ‘Yes, but that may be only the start. I might have to stay in bed – stay in hospital – if it doesn’t stop, and then Arthur will be freaked out and you’ll have to cope …’ She dropped her voice, ‘He won’t understand, Mum, we’ve never been apart, not even for a night.’ She sighed. ‘God, I wish Eric was here,’ she added, then immediately felt bad for her mother, knowing how hard she was trying to help. But Eric was Arthur’s dad. It wouldn’t feel so strange for her son, being left with his father … or it wouldn’t have, before Eric went away.

  The doctor was thin and pale, her dark hair scraped back in an untidy ponytail. Eve decided she was probably not much older than she was. The name tag hanging from the pocket of her blue scrubs said, ‘Dr Andrea Haas’, although she did not introduce herself, and barely looked at Eve as she pulled on some blue nitrile gloves.