The Things You Do for Love

by Rachel Crowther

  Henry lifts his hand to her face, and kisses her gently.

  ‘Flora,’ he says. ‘I love you.’

  7

  It was raining; an unseasonably chilly day. Kitty shivered, wishing she’d worn something warmer. She was early, and she loitered at the spot Lou had suggested, a couple of streets away from Marble Arch in what she thought of as the smart, old-fashioned bit of London. Watching a little girl in a school summer dress being dragged along by an au pair, she longed for a moment for the scratch of gingham seams, the promise of fish fingers for tea.

  At last she spotted Lou, hastening towards her under an umbrella. Despite the suit and the briefcase she looked smaller and more inconsequential than Kitty had expected. Kitty hugged her fiercely, as though it was years since they’d seen each other.

  ‘I’m sorry you’ve been waiting,’ Lou said. ‘I’ve got a perfect plan.’

  Kitty smiled. That’s what Lou used to say when she was little; when their parents were out, or arguing, and Lou had looked after her. Kaftering, Kitty used to call it. Are you kaftering to me today?

  ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  ‘There’s a new Moroccan café on Wigmore Street,’ Lou said. ‘No one knows about it yet, so it’s always quiet. And if you’re up for it there’s a concert at the Wigmore Hall at 7.30.’ Lou looked at her as though sizing something up. ‘The Goldberg Variations,’ she said. ‘Andras Schiff.’

  ‘Will there be any tickets left?’ Kitty asked – but she knew the answer already.

  ‘I’ve bought some,’ Lou said. ‘Just in case.’

  The café was empty apart from a group of men speaking Arabic energetically and with frequent loud laughter. Lou and Kitty sat opposite each other in a booth. Kitty wasn’t hungry, but they ordered a couple of mezze dishes and some mint tea that arrived almost instantly, hot and sweet and fragrant.

  ‘It’s good to see you,’ Lou said. ‘I’m glad we’re doing this.’

  ‘Me too.’

  It was odd, Kitty thought, how little they saw of each other. Partly because Lou scuttled home to Alice every night, to what she called their unfashionable corner of Surrey. Partly because while Henry was alive it hadn’t seemed right to meet in town rather than at Orchards, and because the whole business of Henry’s illness and his rapprochement with Flora had been difficult: because Kitty had been more pleased about that last bit than Lou. But also partly, Kitty thought now, because it still felt as though they belonged to different generations. Lou had been more like an aunt than a sister for most of Kitty’s life, and they hadn’t yet worked out how to behave with each other as adults.

  ‘So Flora’s definitely not coming home,’ she said. ‘Who’d have guessed that?’

  ‘Have you heard from her?’

  ‘Only an email or two.’

  The emails were filled with the names of villages – Quevauvillers, Brueil-en-Vexin, St Rémy-sur-Indre. Kitty supposed these lists were meant to be reassuring, but they felt more like an enigma.

  ‘She’s driving down through France, apparently.’ She hesitated again. ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I mean, it shows she’s enjoying herself. That she’s OK.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lou. ‘I honestly don’t know what she . . .’ To Kitty’s horror, her sister’s face crumpled. ‘I’m sorry.’ Lou scrubbed at her eyes with her napkin, a rather un-Lou-like gesture. ‘I’m a bit emotional at the moment.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Kitty, but she was surprised, and touched.

  ‘No: there’s another reason.’ Lou mustered a smile. ‘I’m pregnant, actually.’

  ‘Pregnant?’ Kitty almost laughed with the shock of it. ‘Lou! I’m – I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Congratulations is the usual thing,’ said Lou, and Kitty did laugh then, with relief as much as anything. It felt as though she hadn’t laughed for weeks.

  ‘How pregnant?’ she asked.

  ‘Hardly at all,’ said Lou. ‘Ten weeks, officially.’

  ‘Alice must be thrilled.’

  Lou grimaced: a fleeting twitch, but its meaning was unmistakable. ‘I haven’t told Alice yet,’ she said. ‘I haven’t told anyone except you.’

  ‘Doesn’t she . . .’ Kitty stopped, brought up short by a rift opening at her feet; a gap in her understanding. ‘But you’re going to tell her?’

  ‘I must,’ said Lou. ‘I know I must. I wanted to – try it out on someone else first.’

  ‘I’m not sure I was the right person,’ said Kitty. ‘I’m not sure I’ve said the right things.’

  Lou shook her head. ‘It was my reaction I was testing, not yours.’

  ‘And?’

  A little smile. ‘I don’t know.’ Then a sigh.

  Kitty took Lou’s hand and stroked it softly. She felt a wash of tenderness for her sister. Lou’s skin felt different to hers, as though it was stuck down more firmly over the bones of her hand. As though she’d been put together by a child from felt and pipe cleaners, Kitty thought; a fragile construction. There were so many things she wanted to ask Lou – about Alice and the sculpture and the baby, but about Henry too, and Flora, but she felt . . . reluctant. Embarrassed, almost. She didn’t know enough about what Lou thought or felt to be sure of her ground; to know whether they were the right questions. How strange it was that her own sister, her own childhood, should feel, in certain ways, so remote from her – and her sorrow about her father’s death was all caught up in the muddle and murk of it. Was it the same for Lou, she wondered? But perhaps this other thing, this baby, had pushed everything else aside in Lou’s mind.

  The food arrived then, a still life of dishes glistening with olive oil. Lou looked at it without enthusiasm, but she slid the bowls towards them. ‘Keep our strength up,’ she said. Another childhood phrase, the prelude to a sharing out of illicit sweets. Kitty smiled, acknowledging the allusion.

  For a while they said little. Kitty picked the olives out of one dish and a few cubes of chicken from another, and Lou ate even less. Perhaps she had morning sickness, Kitty thought, but she didn’t ask. Silence felt easier, as it often did between them. Gradually she felt a fragile sense of wellbeing settle around her, like the tremulous skin on hot milk.

  ‘How’s Daniel?’ Lou asked.

  ‘I haven’t seen him for a while,’ Kitty said. That other night didn’t count, she told herself: he’d been an apparition then. ‘I don’t seem to be able to . . .’

  She wasn’t entirely sure what she meant, but Lou nodded.

  ‘I miss him,’ Kitty said then, taking herself by surprise. ‘In a way I miss Daniel, but I . . .’

  Lou reached across the table and grasped her hand tightly. Kitty waited for her to interpret, to comfort, but instead her sister’s lips trembled and her eyes filled with tears again. Kitty looked at her with a pang of distress. She’d been so preoccupied by her own feelings, she thought, that she hadn’t taken proper notice of Lou’s. Why hadn’t she told Alice about the baby? How had Alice not known?

  ‘Oh, Lou,’ she said. ‘I can see – I can imagine that being pregnant – and the Bacchus thing too . . .’

  She stopped. What did she know? But she couldn’t bear to think of things going wrong at Veronica Villa. Alice had been so good for Lou, bringing into her life a Midwestern certainty that had always seemed marvellous to Kitty. Henry had said she could carve marble like Donatello, and Kitty had been thrilled by that, too, because Henry’s approbation was something worth having. Or so she’d always assumed. Kitty was beginning to realise that some of the assumptions the Joneses had grown up with, including their assurance of a particular kind of cultural superiority, were rather shameful, except that there had been so little to steer by otherwise that they could be forgiven, perhaps, for clinging to them. And Henry’s approval of Alice had been complicated for Lou, Kitty thought now. She’d suspected his motives. But surely the point was that Alice was part of Lou’s escape from Henry and his judgements: an alternative compass, as well as an antidote to
the hard slog of her career. And Alice loved Lou, that was abundantly clear.

  Kitty looked at her sister again, trying to read her expression. Were they both destined to make a mess of their lives, she wondered? Of their relationships, at least? Perhaps that was their inheritance. Perhaps it was the answer to some of those half-formed questions, and the reason they couldn’t be spoken.

  Lou smiled then, almost convincingly.

  ‘So what do you think about this concert?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you want to go?’

  ‘I associate them with you, you know,’ Lou said. ‘The Goldberg Variations. Dad was sitting at the piano playing them when Mum came home and told us she was pregnant. I’ve never forgotten that. I tried to learn them later, but they defeated me.’

  ‘Really?’ Bach had never been a particular favourite of Kitty’s, although Henry had loved Bach, and Kitty’s musical tastes often matched his. ‘Rather appropriate for our family, I suppose,’ she said. ‘The Goldberg Variations. All that . . . complexity.’

  ‘The same damn tunes coming back over and over again,’ said Lou. ‘The Jones Variations, God help us.’

  Kitty smiled. That sounded more like Lou, she thought. The Goldberg Variations would always, now, make her think of her family: Flora and Henry, Lou and Kitty. She liked the idea of them all gathered round the piano, baby Kitty still safe in her mother’s womb.

  ‘We’d better go, then,’ she said, ‘if it’s our leitmotif.’

  She took her sister’s arm as they left the restaurant. The rain had stopped, and they walked up Wigmore Street in watery sunshine.

  November 1991

  Flora can hear the sound of the piano when she gets out of the car, but it’s not until she opens the back door that she realises it’s not a record but someone – Henry – playing. As she comes into the house he hesitates over a phrase and stops, then goes back a few bars, repeating the same passage once or twice before playing on.

  Flora stands inside the door, listening. There are no lights on at this end of the house, and the darkness of the winter evening enfolds her. She knows this piece: Rachmaninov’s Prelude in G minor. It’s one of Henry’s favourites. He certainly knows it well enough not to stumble, and she assumes it wasn’t an error but something more subtle he wanted to correct, a nuance of phrasing or emphasis. She strains her ears, but all she can hear are the notes, the rat-a-tat Russian rhythms and then the melancholy tune: nothing to tell her whether he’s playing well or badly, or what mood he’s in. She imagines him concentrating, his fingers shaping the arching chords and skittering nimbly over the fast passages, and she yearns for a glimpse, just once, of his insight into music. His pleasure in it, she thinks, is so different from hers.

  The piece ends and Flora hesitates, wondering whether to go through to join Henry. But before she can decide, he starts playing again. Something very different this time – Bach, she thinks, pleased that she recognises this too. A lingering, plaintive melody, played so slowly that it almost seems to lay itself bare. To reveal its guts, she thinks: and then she starts, surprised by the surgical image conjured up by some distant part of her mind, and someone turns in response to the slight sound she makes. Lou, standing just inside the sitting room, half-hidden by shadow. Flora’s heart skips, partly at the unexpected sight of her daughter, and partly at the notion that they have been listening together, unknowingly complicit.

  Lou’s movement has caught Henry’s attention. He stops playing and calls out.

  ‘Is that Mummy back?’

  Lou nods, and Flora comes forward, looking for a smile on her daughter’s face. Lou is eight, slight and dark. There’s a sharpness about her lately, as her features emerge from babyhood, and a watchfulness that sometimes snags at Flora’s notice. She feels a sudden acute desire to be close to Lou, and to be proud of her.

  ‘Is it Mummy?’ Henry asks again.

  The Mummy comes home to the Daddy and the little girl, Flora thinks, with pleasure and a slight recoil. A familiar feeling; an acknowledgement that nothing is ever that simple. But then she remembers her trump card, and she gathers Lou into her arms.

  ‘That was nice,’ she says. ‘Play some more.’

  She can see the music on the piano now: the Goldberg Variations. Of course. Sitting down in an armchair, she lifts Lou onto her lap. Henry starts playing again, and Flora can feel the music enclosing them all, filling the rich russet and gold space of the room. She has a sudden sense that they are not themselves, but characters in a story; that it’s possible for them to be people other than those they have been. She sees them, just for a moment, as other people might. Perhaps as the imagined occupants of the painting of this room that hangs over the mantelpiece, given to them for Christmas last year by Nick Comyn. Given to Henry, really, although Nick always makes a point, in his slightly creepy way, of including them both in the dedication.

  The languid theme comes to an end and Henry plunges into the first variation, each hand darting about in different directions and the tune emerging occasionally above the tumult. Flora remembers Henry talking about this piece too, about the difficult beauty of it and the mathematical precision with which it was plotted. She listens to the music rising from the piano and grasps for another parallel from her own world, the flow of blood and the cutting and suturing of tissues. Stitching together happiness, she thinks, and she squeezes Lou tight.

  ‘Enough,’ says Henry, after another variation. He turns to them, smiling, almost self-conscious. ‘Time for supper, I think. We waited for you.’

  Flora hasn’t thought about how she’ll break her news. She hadn’t known for sure that she’d tell them tonight, but it seems inevitable now: the tide has carried them to this moment. She lifts Lou down and stands up, keeping her hand on her daughter’s shoulder.

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she says. ‘Something that will please you both very much, I hope.’

  *

  Henry’s delight is almost too much for her, but she holds her nerve. It’s OK, she thinks, to allow him – and herself – this pleasure. And they are both taken up with Lou. Flora realises, with a shot of remorse, that she hadn’t really thought about how Lou would feel. She’d imagined her as a big sister, enjoying the responsibility and in due course the company, but not the immediate adjustment. The strength of her reaction is unexpected for a child who guards her emotions so carefully. Flora is touched that Lou is so thrilled by the idea of having a younger sibling, but she can tell there’s more to it than that. Henry can tell, too.

  ‘We’ll be a proper family, won’t we, Looby Lou?’ he says, as they sit down to the salade niçoise – hopelessly unseasonal – that has been waiting in the fridge.

  ‘Three’s a proper family,’ Flora objects, her antennae straining to pick up Lou’s sensitivities. She doesn’t want her daughter to feel that she hasn’t been enough, on her own, to hold her parents together. Although isn’t that, in a manner of speaking, exactly what Flora has been thinking?

  ‘What will we call the baby?’ Lou asks. ‘Can we call her Kitty?’

  ‘If she’s a girl, of course we can.’ Flora smiles. Lou hasn’t ever had dolls, and her guinea pigs, Spot and Blot, live a life of neglect in an outhouse. Does she wish maternal instincts on her daughter, she wonders? She catches Henry looking at her across the table – the kind of look she usually, cravenly, yearns for – and feels again that twist of irony that has become so familiar. Henry lifts his glass in a salute.

  ‘Here’s to Kitty,’ he says, ‘and her safe arrival.’

  8

  Taking refuge in the Ladies at Waterloo station, Lou yielded to the familiar ravages of vomiting. She’d missed the ten fifteen train, and she was almost grateful for the wait for the next one and the opportunity to gather herself.

  She’d imagined morning sickness, once upon a time, as a symptom you could take or leave. Not exactly a sign of weakness, but a particular kind of experience one could opt for. But that illusion was long gone. She was besieged by
her own body, she thought now; by a constant disquieting awareness of physical frailty.

  It had been a mistake to go to the concert this evening: it had made it too late an evening for her. She’d thought of leaving at the interval, but Kitty had been enjoying the music and Lou hadn’t wanted to admit how dreadful she felt. She wondered why that was. A kind of shyness, perhaps. A reluctance to show her hand. I’d never have guessed you wanted a baby, Kitty had said, and she’d wanted to say, neither would I, frankly.

  Motherhood certainly wasn’t something she’d ever imagined for herself. She’d known early on that she wasn’t going to be part of a conventional family when she grew up. Her parents had gay friends, Henry especially, but none of them had children. And when she’d looked at her mother’s life, the part of it she’d wanted for herself was the career, the thrill of striving and success. Certainly not the husband – even a better husband than Henry – and not the children either, the complications and compromises they brought. When she’d found Alice, and the two of them found Veronica Villa, that had seemed all she could want, short of partnership at Harvers and Green.

  But then . . . but then.

  The idea had come upon her gradually. Motherhood shared could be fun; it could be easier than it had been for Flora. Alice had been surprised, perhaps even taken aback, but in the end she’d agreed to come along to the clinic. By then, Lou had a plan. She was older by a couple of years, so it made sense for her to try first for a pregnancy. Alice’s work was more flexible, her income less relied-on: she could do the bulk of the childcare once Lou’s maternity leave was over.

  Lou shivered a little, recalling the cheerful practicality with which she’d thought it all through. The violence of her symptoms felt like a warning: if the first stage was so dramatic in its effects, how would she cope when the baby was a baby, rather than a thing like a seahorse deep inside her belly? Perhaps Alice had understood better the audacity of making a new life and being responsible for it. But then – how could she explain her sudden decision to go it alone at the clinic except as a need to ditch rationality and plunge into the unknown on her own terms, with her own resources? That was where her instincts had led, and she’d believed in them. But now her own resources seemed, for the first time ever, uncertain. Pregnancy was so much more momentous than you would guess from watching other people. There was a terrible hubris about it: the ultimate hubris of mortality, fertility, reproduction: of being merely another living organism, after all. She couldn’t do it without Alice.