The Things You Do for Love

by Rachel Crowther

  When she’s sure he’s asleep she rolls gently out of bed. In the dark, she tiptoes round to Henry’s side and lifts the phone from its cradle. Cradle, she thinks; there’s an irony. Another irony to add to the list. Slowly, deliberately, she presses 1471, then the redial key, and after two rings the phone is answered.

  ‘Darling,’ says a woman’s voice. ‘I thought you’d manage to slip away.’

  19

  In the days after Martin’s departure Flora felt weightless. Drifting around the house, trying out the smell of the empty rooms, she felt as though gravity operated differently in this new life of hers, attaching her less firmly to the ground. Perhaps because this was really someone else’s life – a life whose trappings she had taken on like a disguise to conceal the fact that Flora herself, the essence of her, was hardly here at all? Or because, like an astronaut floating above the earth’s atmosphere, she could look back at her old life now from a distance that made everything look strange and unfamiliar?

  There was also, sometimes, the peculiar sense that she had landed at Les Violettes all at once, as though she’d been borne through the summer in the eye of a small tornado that had whisked her blindly across uncertain stretches of time and space before depositing her quite suddenly in this unknown house. And although she’d reached a still point now, time merged and flowed alarmingly in her mind, recent events jostling for position with memories from years before. She caught herself thinking of Kitty in pigtails plaited by the au pair, or planning operating lists in her head, her brain busy with the careful balancing of challenge and routine that had characterised her years as a Consultant. Was it possible that her daughters were grown up and her husband dead? Impossible, surely, that the fleeting romance of the last couple of weeks was more than a figment of her imagination.

  She did her best to live in the present, and to take pleasure in her sole occupation of Les Violettes. She paid the house close attention, noticing things she would never have seen as a casual visitor: the intricate beading along the skirting boards; the desk drawer that gave a little squawk of protest as it opened. She took books off shelves and kept them by her bed, scanned guidebooks for outings she might undertake at some point in the future, gazed at the photographs of Martin’s family, his wife and suntanned children smiling in a faded, long-ago summer. She imagined Martin doing similar things at Orchards, conjuring glimpses of him so vivid that she thought they must be telepathy. Once she woke in the night, certain she’d made a terrible mistake staying on here, and then she lay still, imagining herself as a toile shepherdess, oblivious to everything except the joys of the garden. By the morning she was content again; content enough to get up and begin another day.

  There was a supermarket five miles away, but Flora bought most of her food in the village shop. Not just, she told herself, because it was where she’d first seen Martin; where her path had branched that day. She liked the daily ritual of calling in for bread and milk, the Bonjour, Madame and the counting out of foreign coins. Rituals had become important: she spent an hour or two in the garden every afternoon, weeding and dead-heading – tasks she’d never attempted before but which she found fulfilling and pleasingly tiring – and she took to walking into the village in the evenings as well as the mornings, passing the water tower and the row of cypresses by the river, the houses topped by steep slate roofs like lids you might lift off. She’d always been good with faces, and before long she was nodding and smiling at the people she passed every day. The small satisfaction of this social contact made her feel both a degree less isolated, and a degree more. It put the little life she was building for herself here into perspective.

  She’d been relieved at first not to run into Francine Abelard, but when she saw her coming out of the shop one morning, almost a week after Martin’s departure, Flora’s spirits lifted unexpectedly. Madame Abelard was wearing the same kind of clothes as always – a skirt of some indeterminate dark material, a pale blouse and a long cardigan – and she had several bags of shopping in her hands. She stopped when she saw Flora.

  ‘Bonjour, Madame,’ she said. ‘Do you enjoy Les Violettes?’

  ‘Very much.’ Flora remembered Francine’s commendation of the house, that first time.

  ‘You are not lonely?’

  ‘No.’ Flora hesitated. ‘I’m not used to having nothing to do, though. I’m getting used to it slowly.’

  Francine gave her the appraising, percipient look Flora remembered so well. She wished she knew whether it signified sympathy or criticism: there were so few people left to have an opinion of her that it rather mattered what Francine thought. For a moment she considered asking her to lunch, but then she remembered how busy she was, how the running of the farm as well as the chambres d’hôtes fell largely to her, and blushed at her presumption.

  ‘You like music, I think?’ Francine said, her words taking Flora by surprise. ‘There is a concert next week in Tours. Every year they have a performance in the church. Will you come with me? Claude prefers to stay at home, and you would enjoy it, I hope.’

  Flora recalled fleetingly her frivolous suggestion that Francine could read her mind, and then, more pertinently, the kindness she had been shown during her stay at the chambres d’hôtes.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘that would be lovely.’

  ‘Then I will arrange it. I will telephone to Les Violettes.’

  ‘Good,’ said Flora. ‘I look forward to it.’

  Francine nodded a farewell as she turned back up the road, and Flora went on into the shop. Music might not be her first choice of entertainment, but she was cheered by the prospect of an evening out. And she would like to get to know Francine Abelard better, too. Friendship, she thought, was something she’d never really mastered. There hadn’t been many women to befriend in her old life: there had been so little time for anything beyond her work and her family, and alliances with other doctors were always uneasy. The possibility of friendship with Francine lit like a bulb inside her now, illuminating the loneliness of recent days.

  When she’d finished her shopping, Flora walked slowly back through the village. It was only ten o’clock, but already the sun was burning through the early haze. Flora could feel the advance of summer, especially when she was in the garden: not just the heat on her back, but the plants responding to the call of the sun, unfurling their last leaves and surging into bloom. Today was going to be the hottest day yet, she thought. The pale stone of the village already had a bleached look, and the air was scented with dust and pollen. The smell of holidays.

  She thought of Les Violettes waiting quietly for her: the garden, and the grandfather clock needing winding, and the cheese and ham she could eat for lunch. The future, she thought, not the past. The life she was making here that belonged entirely to her. Deep inside her something stirred: a thread of optimism, taking her by surprise.

  20

  Lou stood at the junction of two paths with shops and houses running in both directions, none of them taller than her waist. This little world was strangely charming, caught in a 1930’s glow of leisurely English life. Castles, zoos, mazes and funfairs were surrounded by fields and trees, linked by roads and rivers and bridges and by a network of tiny, busy trains. On her right, a football pitch was dotted with players engaged in an everlasting friendly fixture. As she looked down, trying to identify the colours of each team’s strip, it seemed to Lou for a moment that she could hear the shouts of the crowd, urging them on – and then the sounds resolved into the voice of her god-daughter Maebh, calling her to come and look at something, and she turned and smiled and allowed herself to be led off to inspect a miniature wedding party, arranged for the photographer in front of a pretty church.

  She’d promised herself to Maebh and Dearbhla several weeks ago, one of the twice- or thrice-yearly outings that Dearbhla regarded as part of a godmother’s duties, but the timing couldn’t have been better, Lou thought, and nor could the location. Maebh’s delight was irresistible, and a morning spent wanderin
g in her wake, sharing her joy, was just what Lou needed.

  ‘Alice didn’t fancy this, then?’ Dearbhla asked, as Maebh ran off to find something else to marvel at.

  ‘She’s been very busy,’ Lou said.

  She knew this was a nicety on Dearbhla’s part, as well as a half-truth on hers. Dearbhla always made a point of asking Alice, but Lou suspected she was always relieved when the invitation wasn’t taken up. Not that – she couldn’t accuse Dearbhla of prejudice, despite her forthright Catholicism. It was more that Dearbhla enjoyed her company too much to share her.

  Their friendship had been forged on their first day at university, and it had survived the vicissitudes of student life and the divergence of their paths thereafter. Dearbhla’s Sligo accent had kindled Lou’s interest when they’d said their first diffident ‘hellos’ outside the ungraceful concrete hall of residence, and she’d never regretted the impulse to befriend this odd-looking, straight-talking, fire-filled Irishwoman. Dearbhla was brilliant: she’d got a First and a place on a sought-after MA course, but halfway through her PhD she’d married a Biology teacher from County Cork, and Maebh had been born a year later. Since then her thesis hadn’t been mentioned. She’d been the first of Lou’s friends to have a baby, and was still the only one to succumb to that particular brand of motherhood that felt to outsiders as much of a holy mystery as her religion had been when they were students together.

  Lou was surprised that no more babies had appeared in the four years since Maebh’s birth, but over Dearbhla’s marriage a discreet veil had always been drawn. Meanwhile, Maebh was unquestionably bonny and absorbing. She had her father’s ginger hair but Dearbhla’s milky skin and rosy cheeks, and in her flowery dress she looked absolutely the part for the model village’s once-upon-a-time ambience. Lou felt a tug of emotion – affection for this sweet child, to whom she had devoted less attention than a godmother perhaps should (and Lou was ever-mindful of the honour of the appointment, as a non-Catholic), but also one of those disbelieving lurches of wonder at the thought that she too would be the mother of a child like this in a very few years. She could just about imagine a baby by now, but a walking, talking, laughing being like Maebh – could that possibly come true? Watching Maebh skip clumsily along the path between an aerodrome and a boating lake, Lou caught a glimpse, just the tiniest glimpse, of a miraculous future, like a door opening a crack onto a world too dazzlingly bright to look at full on. A world that still filled her with as much fear as delight.

  She turned slightly, and caught Dearbhla’s eyes on her.

  ‘Penny?’ Dearbhla asked.

  ‘I was thinking how delightful she is.’

  ‘You could have babies,’ said Dearbhla. ‘There are ways.’ She grinned, the old wicked Dearbhla grin, and Lou felt herself flush from the feet up, a billow of heat that swept right to the crown of her head.

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Dearbhla raised an eyebrow. ‘When were you going to tell me, then?’

  ‘Right now,’ said Lou, and she laughed. ‘I’d forgotten your sixth sense.’

  ‘My Irish witchcraft,’ said Dearbhla. ‘No, it was you who gave it away. You never could keep a secret. How many weeks, then?’

  ‘Only twelve,’ said Lou.

  ‘And you’re not retching?’

  ‘Not today.’ Lou felt a little breathless. This business of telling people was still new, and still fraught with the memory of telling Alice. And she’d anticipated Dearbhla’s reaction being more complicated than it seemed to be – though why, she wasn’t sure, since Dearbhla had taken so much else in her stride. I’m the Catholic, not you, she’d said, years ago, when another university friend had moved into a flat with her divorcé boyfriend.

  ‘Is Alice pleased?’ Dearbhla asked.

  Lou hesitated. She wanted to answer the question properly; wanted it quite badly, in fact, since Dearbhla seemed suddenly the very person to offer the kind of sane advice she needed, but they had never – there had always been a no-go area in their friendship, she thought. She floundered for a moment, weighing up one uncertainty against another, and then Maebh came rushing towards them again, her stubby plaits bouncing.

  ‘There’s ice creams, Mummy. Can I have an ice cream?’

  ‘Ooh, I think we could all manage an ice cream,’ said Dearbhla. ‘Couldn’t we, Lou?’

  They sat at a wooden picnic table in the play area. The little girl chattered away about the delights of the village, and Lou was struck by how much she’d noticed – the sheepdog herding his flock, and the fireman up a ladder. She ought to remember Kitty at this age, Lou thought, but memories of Kitty’s childhood eluded her just now.

  ‘You’re very observant, Maebh,’ she said.

  ‘What’s azervant?’ asked Maebh.

  ‘It means you’re good at looking,’ said her mother. ‘And you’re good at eating ice cream, too. That hasn’t taken you long, has it?’

  ‘It’s delicious,’ said Maebh, producing the word carefully, and offering it to Lou with a heart-stopping smile before handing her empty cone to Dearbhla. ‘Can I go on the slide now?’

  ‘Let me just wipe your face, then.’

  When she had run off again, Dearbhla turned back to Lou.

  ‘So, then?’ she said. ‘Who’s the lucky man? Is there one?’

  ‘A donor,’ said Lou. ‘Anathema to you, I’m sure, a father picked out of a catalogue.’

  Dearbhla shrugged. ‘We all get to pick,’ she said. ‘Does that make Alice the Daddy, then?’

  ‘That’s rather a moot point,’ said Lou. ‘The whole thing is – oh, I don’t know. Everything feels so complicated.’

  ‘No one said motherhood was an easy option, did they?’

  ‘They certainly didn’t.’

  Dearbhla looked at her for a moment.

  ‘Funny – I always thought it would have been easier with another woman.’

  Lou gave her a rueful smile. ‘Not so far.’

  She waited for Dearbhla to speak again, but when she did it was to say, ‘You know, it’s funny you having babies just when I’m thinking of going back to work.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Well, going to work, I suppose. I’ve never really done anything that counts as a job. But Maebh’ll be starting school in September, you know.’

  So perhaps there weren’t going to be any more babies, Lou thought. And no more talk of her own, or at least of her present circumstances. From the top of the slide Maebh yelled, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ and they both turned to wave as she slithered down and ran back to the bottom of the ladder.

  ‘I’ll tell you the truth, Lou: I love Maebh to bits, but I need something for myself, now. Marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, to be honest. Your mother would agree, I know that.’ She made a face. ‘How is your mother, by the way? What does she think about this baby lark?’

  ‘I haven’t told her yet,’ said Lou. ‘She’s off travelling in France. You’re only the third person I’ve told.’

  ‘Well, I’m flattered. But you should, you know. Think how you’d feel if your baby didn’t tell you that you were going to be a granny.’

  That was a situation as yet beyond Lou’s imagination, but even so she felt a little prick of pain at the thought of it; a pain that brought with it a paradoxical flush of reassurance.

  ‘I’m sorry things have been –’ She stopped, realising that her sympathy, like Dearbhla’s, was best left unspoken. ‘Have you got anything in mind, work-wise?’

  ‘I was wondering about your line, actually.’ Dearbhla crushed the remains of her ice cream cone into the waterlogged ashtray on the table. ‘I could see myself as a local solicitor. There’s one here, even: did you see it? Crook and Swindler. Next to Mr Chop the Butcher.’

  ‘So you’re thinking of doing the CPE?’ Lou said. ‘A law conversion course?’

  ‘Do you think I’m mad? I was dreading telling you, to be honest. I thought you’d laugh.’

  ‘Why? You can even do it part-time.’

  �
��We could afford a childminder.’ Dearbhla’s eyes flicked to Maebh again, and in her glance Lou caught a hint of suffering and sacrifice not to be declared.

  ‘Let me know if I can do anything,’ said Lou. ‘I could write you a reference.’

  Dearbhla looked straight at her then, and for a moment Lou thought she might be going to cry.

  ‘I could have Maebh some time,’ Lou said. ‘I’d like that. If you’d like some time to – I don’t know.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ Dearbhla said, her voice melodiously even. ‘She’d like it too.’ She glanced towards the slide again, and then down at her watch.

  ‘One more go, Maebh, or we won’t have time to go round the rest,’ she called, and then she looked at Lou again. ‘My prescription for you, Louisa, is a weekend away with that Alice of yours. By the seaside, perhaps. It’s a well-known cure for morning sickness.’

  March 1984

  Flora has never liked Gillian Sutherland, but even so her news is unwelcome; a shifting of ground Flora thought she could rely on. She and Gillian have paced each other – at arm’s length – through the procession of Fellowship exams and promotion. They have carefully avoided pitting themselves against each other in the scramble for jobs, but been pleased (Flora assumes) to find themselves ascending from SHO to Registrar to Senior Registrar at the same time. The existence of another woman on the surgical ladder has been enough to reassure Flora that she’s not an anomaly – and Gillian has been, if anything, more single-minded than Flora, shameless in her employment of feminine wiles in the cause of advancement. She is all set, everyone can see, to be the first female surgical Consultant since the legendary Barbara Benjamin.