The Things You Do for Love

by Rachel Crowther

  Alice had grown up in rural Iowa, the daughter of a cattle farmer and a physiotherapist. She had inherited their competence, Lou used to say. She’d learned from them to deliver a calf from a block of stone, and to coax marble limbs to the right angle. Alice had always smiled when Lou said things like that, indulging Lou’s fancy-pants notions. Early on, she’d thought a lot of what Lou said was fancy, in one way or another, and Lou had been equally fascinated by her bizarre combination of farming lore and acquaintance with contemporary art. Lou could never decide whether Alice was a wild creative spirit or a conservative farm girl at heart. Her body was all broad arable plains and then that wonderful hair, that sleek copper-coloured skein that she tossed so casually into thick braids or wound up in a loose suffragette knot. Alice had always seemed a little different every time Lou looked at her; there was always a shock of surprise and pleasure when she moved, or spoke, or came into view. I am what I am, Alice said. What you see is what you get. But it was as though Lou looked at Alice, every time, down a kaleidoscope that shifted mysteriously with each glance.

  They’d met in a surprising way, stuck on a broken-down train between Glasgow and Carlisle. Alice was heading south from art school and Lou had been visiting a university friend in Skye. Lou remembered Alice clad in the same colours as the fells that day, a marvel of greens and purples and greys, with the palest pink flush in her cheeks and her hair worn long and loose. They’d filled the day with talk, uncovering a mutual fascination that was clearly requited but could never, Lou thought, be sated. She had felt her sharp edges, her secret hiding places, her fearsome bulwarks and barricades soften and yield in a way she had never thought possible. Five years later, it was impossible to imagine life – to imagine anything – without Alice.

  Gathering herself now, Lou splashed water on her face. She looked better than she felt; that was a consolation. She tried to imagine Alice coming towards her across the station concourse, just as she’d done at the private view: Alice elegant in that green trouser suit or four-square in her dusty work clothes. The image filled her with doubt as well as longing. In an hour she’d be home, she told herself, and she would find – she would speak – the right words. Everything would be all right.

  *

  The train seats felt harder than they did in the mornings, the lights in the carriage brash and unforgiving. As they rolled along the commuter line, Lou imagined the people who got off at each station going back to their homes and families, to lives she couldn’t help thinking of as simpler than hers. Simpler than Kitty’s, too, she thought, with one of those wrenches of sentiment, unforeseen and disproportionate, that had visited her several times lately.

  Was Kitty’s heart really in her course, Lou wondered? And could she possibly earn a living from music, however talented she was? Even Henry – hadn’t he been able to do what he did, to sustain his patchwork career as critic and compère and eminence grise, because of Flora’s income? She remembered Henry watching Kitty play the piano when she was a little girl, and the swell of emotion settled into a familiar lapping awareness of sorrow and regret and pity.

  Lou herself had been a proficient pianist by the time she left school. She’d sailed through grade after grade of exams, banging out scales and learning pieces with ruthless determination. After Grade 8 she’d worked her way through the preludes and fugues of the Well Tempered Clavier, one key after another, but she’d been surprised when people said she must love it, to practise so hard, or that it must be a wonderful gift. She played the piano in the same way as she drove a car, Lou thought now, carefully and without error. It had never occurred to her that music could be the central purpose of her life: she’d always known she’d settle for something that relied on thinking, not feeling. The law suited her perfectly. It made her feel safe.

  If either of them had the kind of musical gift Henry recognised it was Kitty, but she hadn’t been an obvious prodigy. As a tiny child she would climb onto the piano stool and pick out tunes – carols or pop songs or ditties she made up herself – but if anyone praised her or asked her to do it again, she’d scowl and slam the lid shut. Later, she learned the cello and the flute, then took up percussion, then for a short time the harp: too many instruments to get any good at any of them. She’d landed up at music college this year, Lou assumed, partly to please her parents and partly because it put off the evil hour of deciding what to do with her life, after scraping her way through a degree in English and drama. What came next for Kitty, Lou thought, was almost as big a question as what came next for Flora. Let alone what came next for Lou herself.

  When the train finally pulled into Flockhurst, Lou was almost too tired to climb the stairs to the car park. But she couldn’t put it off any longer, she told herself. She had to tell Alice about the baby tonight.

  *

  Alice was already in bed when she got home; that was the first thing that threw her. Alice usually waited up for her, and that was what Lou had imagined: sitting across the kitchen table, face to face; the kettle boiled, perhaps, for peppermint tea.

  ‘Hi!’ Alice had been reading; she sat up when Lou came into the room. ‘I wasn’t sure when to expect you. Did you have a good time?’

  Alice’s face was shiny with moisturiser. Lou caught a whiff of its familiar vanilla scent and her stomach clenched.

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she said. A tiny pause. ‘I’m pregnant, actually.’ There, those were the words. That was all it took.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m pregnant. I did it. The insemination, at the clinic. The donor we chose.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘A couple of weeks before Henry died.’ Lou still couldn’t read anything in Alice’s face. She attempted a smile, but it felt more like a twitch, a nervous tic. ‘It worked first time.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I know we agreed to wait,’ Lou said, a tremor creeping into her voice. She hadn’t moved from the end of the bed: there was a two metre stretch of white linen between them. ‘I hoped . . .’

  ‘Pregnant,’ said Alice, as though she still wasn’t sure she’d heard Lou correctly. ‘But – my goodness, Lou. I’ve noticed you’ve been – off colour, and I wondered . . . but I told myself you couldn’t be; that you’d never have done it without me.’

  Lou said nothing.

  ‘So when did you find out?’ Alice asked. ‘That it had – worked?’

  ‘The week before last,’ said Lou. ‘Just before the Morris Prize show.’

  ‘And you didn’t want to tell me while I was caught up in all that?’

  This was a lifebelt, Lou recognised that, but somehow it seemed to be just out of her reach. It was over a week since the show, anyway.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. I haven’t really been myself, she thought. It’s all been a bit overwhelming. Either of those would do. Or indeed the truth: I might have told you sooner, but in the car that evening you said . . .

  ‘I’m telling you now, anyway,’ she said. ‘I hoped you’d be pleased.’

  Alice looked at her for a moment, then raised her eyebrows. Whatever they had been hovering on the brink of, Lou realised, this was the moment when it became impossible to escape it.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said. ‘People never used to say anything for three months, not even to their husbands.’

  ‘I’m not your husband,’ Alice said.

  Lou gave a snort of – what? Disbelief? But she could feel herself trembling, and nausea rising ineluctably. Alice should have got out of bed, she thought. She should have tried harder to understand. She should have been happy, despite everything. Tears pressed infuriatingly in her eyes.

  ‘I guess this is my punishment,’ Alice said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For the sculpture. The Bacchus.’

  ‘For God’s sake.’ Lou was suddenly furious. Furious and sorry for herself and horribly, horribly, tired. She swung round and headed for the door. Something resentful and deadly was controlling
her now; something she hadn’t known she had inside her. Punishment, indeed. How could the baby be a punishment?

  ‘Lou . . .’

  Lou didn’t turn round. It was too late, she thought, with another stab of anger. Too late for Alice to regret her righteous indignation. She swept out of the door and slammed it shut behind her.

  In the bathroom, Lou brushed her teeth and washed her face with exaggerated care, then she took a clean pair of pyjamas out of the airing cupboard. The bedroom door, clearly in view down the corridor, stayed shut. The virago inside her was silent now, watching her.

  She’d got it wrong, of course, said the wrong thing just now and done the wrong thing ten weeks ago, but surely . . . Of course it wasn’t a question of tit for tat; she hated that concept. But what Alice had done, giving Henry’s face to that hateful statue, had been wrong too. She’d accepted Alice’s explanations – that she’d been carried away by the idea, that she hadn’t wanted to upset Lou by telling her, that she’d hoped the sculpture would be so powerful that Lou would understand. Lou hadn’t even pointed out that those three explanations contradicted each other. She’d smiled when everyone agreed Bacchus had swayed the judges’ vote in Alice’s favour.

  The spare room bed was horrible, Lou thought, but more than that she wanted . . .

  Alice was sitting exactly as she’d left her. Her hair hung around her shoulders as though it had been poured, molten, over her head. Lou gazed at her, full of fear and desire.

  ‘Hi,’ Alice said at last, her voice flat.

  Lou waited, but there was nothing more. She felt another prop crumble inside her. Big-hearted, whole-hearted, warm-hearted Alice was supposed to do better than this. For a moment Lou was sure she was going to cry again. She thought of Flora, of all those showdowns with Henry: how had she managed it?

  And then she gathered her self-possession.

  ‘I need my pillow,’ she said.

  9

  Flora was grateful to wake to the sound of rain the morning after her visit to Montallon, giving her an excuse to do nothing, go nowhere. She stayed in bed, missing the hour for Madame Abelard’s breakfast. A terrible blankness filled her mind this morning, as though the cheerful film she’d been watching for the last week or so – The New Life of Flora, or some such catchy feel-good title – had simply cut out. Perhaps if she lay still for long enough, she thought, the next reel might start of its own accord without her having to write the script, arrange the casting, seek out locations. The effort of all that was too much for her: too much to expect, day after day. She’d never had to think of things to do before, and the last six months, six weeks, six days had exhausted her resources. What she needed this morning was for Henry to tempt her out of bed with the suggestion of lunch in the next village: one of those twelve Euro workmen’s lunches he loved so much, with four courses and a pichet of wine, a view of the church or the boules court. She felt her throat fill with emotion she didn’t have the will to resist.

  Her bedroom window looked out on trees and fields, but she didn’t open the curtains. Instead she gazed at their toile de jouy pattern, watching the little figures come into focus and then fade again as clouds moved across the sky behind them. The yellowed linings gave an impression of high summer that was belied by the steady splash of rain on the glass. The milkmaids and shepherds, busy with their carefree lives, looked incongruously light-hearted, but Flora was past caring. Let the rest of the world be busy and carefree: she would stay here under the covers where nothing would be asked of her; where there were no mazes to lose her way in.

  She was half-asleep again when someone knocked at the door. Madame Abelard came into the room, carrying a tray.

  ‘I bring you breakfast,’ she said.

  Flora looked at her with an unfamiliar feeling: the submissive gratitude of someone at the mercy of other people’s kindness.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘You are unwell, or tired?’ Madame enquired.

  ‘Tired,’ Flora said.

  Madame nodded. ‘So, I bring you breakfast.’

  She put the tray down on the bedside table and moved over to the window. Silhouetted against the muffled light she looked like one of the milkmaids, tall and very thin, neither quite as elegant nor quite as well-preserved as one might expect of a Frenchwoman her age. She moved like a puppet, in a sequence of little jolts that gave an impression of impulsiveness.

  ‘You prefer the curtains closed?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  With a shrug, she twitched them open. ‘You can see the rain,’ she said. ‘I think it will stop, but not soon.’

  Flora nodded. She looked at the tray beside the bed and felt the choke of tears again.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Madame, not looking at her. ‘So, I leave you.’

  *

  For a minute or two Flora didn’t move, waiting for Madame’s footsteps to disappear down the staircase. When she sat up and looked properly at the breakfast tray – white china on a crocheted cloth, and two kinds of jam in little dishes – it seemed the nicest thing anyone had done for her for a very long time. The jam was beautiful, like liquid jewels, the croissants golden and crisp. She could hardly bear to disturb the arrangement, but at length she tore the corner off a croissant and dipped it into one of the dishes of jam. She tried one sort and then the other, then both together: the red one was very tart, the amber one sweeter. Both delicious, and – she assumed – home made. Redcurrant, perhaps, and apricot?

  For a while she was entirely absorbed by the architecture of taste. There could be a whole spectrum of jam, she thought, with different shades of colour and flavour for every nuance of mood or desire. It reminded her of a picture from an old book showing the arrangement of taste buds on the tongue, bitter and sweet and sour, like the zoning of faculties on a Victorian phrenology head. Nonsense, she knew, but she was strangely charmed by the idea that human sensation could be mapped so tidily.

  The coffee was nearly cold by the time she poured it, and stronger than she really liked, but she drank it dutifully, a sip at a time. When she’d finished she climbed out of bed and washed everything up in the tiny hand basin in the corner of the room, then arranged the crockery back on the tray and placed it, after a moment’s hesitation, outside her door. She would have liked to let Madame know how much she’d enjoyed it all, how touched she had been by her kindness, but for the moment leaving the dishes neatly stacked was the best she could do.

  Now that she was out of bed, Flora pulled on a jumper over her nightdress and inspected the pile of books on the chest of drawers. Several had been given to her after Henry died – a safe gift for the bereaved, she thought wryly. She ought to be amused by the variety of titles chosen for her, from garish chick lit to hefty biographies, respectfully reviewed on the back cover. But she could see that she needed something to read now, if only to satisfy Madame if she should look in again. She picked up Persuasion and took it back to bed with her. Good, she thought. This was a perfectly acceptable way to spend the day.

  *

  Lunchtime came and went without a sound from elsewhere in the house, and the preoccupations of Anne Elliot held sway in Flora’s mind. But as the afternoon wore on, she felt her attention slipping reluctantly away from eighteenth-century Bath and a dilemma sidling into the anaesthetic formlessness of the day. Something – her upbringing, or the work ethic of a lifetime? – told her that however sorry you felt for yourself, staying in bed beyond a certain point was no longer lazy and luxurious but obstinate, perhaps even deliberately nihilistic.

  She glanced at the clock. It was a quarter to four, later than she’d thought. Almost too late to go out. She read a few more pages, a seesaw tipping in her head between inertia and restlessness, until the confinement of her room was finally more than she could bear.

  Putting on the same clothes she’d worn the day before, Flora went quietly downstairs. Madame was in the hall, a letter in her hand, and for a dizzy moment Flora had the impression she’d been wait
ing for her to appear, expecting her at just this moment.

  ‘You’ve been sleeping?’ she asked. ‘You feel better?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Flora. ‘Thank you for the breakfast.’

  Madame Abelard gave a little smile, as though it was nothing, not a thing worth mentioning.

  ‘The rain is less. I can give you a coat, if you want. It will be pleasant to walk now. There is a nice path to the village.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The village shop would just be reopening for the afternoon, Flora remembered. She felt a surge of relief, as though her behaviour had been given a rational frame: she was emerging in time for something, after all.

  Madame’s raincoat was too long for her. It swished against the tall grass as she crossed the field, following the shortcut to the village. Only a slight drizzle was falling now, but everything was steeped in water, every leaf and blade coated with a fresh sheen. Flora had never been a child of Nature, but it was hard to resist the imagery of renewal, the tangible sense of the seasons turning, the crops ripening. Perhaps, if she opened her mind to it, the landscape would imprint itself on the blank screen in her head. Perhaps it would start to shape the next reel of the film.