The Mistake

by Wendy James

  She had been unable to feed Hannah or Tom herself. The irony of it was something else she did not let herself consider too closely – her young breasts had been so full, so clearly able to fulfil their maternal function, and yet were so determinedly withheld from that first hungry little mouth. And then the physical distress of that withholding – the tender, rock-like breasts, the weeks of leaking, of mess. She had been so set on feeding her other babies, desperate to do the right thing, the best thing, but the milk was no longer there for the taking. Regardless of all the pinching and prodding, the cracked and bleeding nipples, the endless rounds of lactation consultants, doctors, midwives – her body would not cooperate.

  Gazing down at the tiny indistinct figure of the infant in the photo, all of a sudden she wants to remember this lost child. With this unforeseen proof of her existence, Jodie recognises, for the first time, the full weight of her lost daughter’s being, her humanity – this little person, entire and perfect and wholly separate to her. But still she remembers nothing. Whatever vague recall she’d once had of those features has completely dissolved – she’d deliberately not allowed a picture of the baby’s features to lodge in her memory, had worked hard to not preserve her image. She can only recall Tom and Hannah: their cherubic features, and solid energetic limbs, their unmistakable resemblance to Angus – dark hair, dark skin, full lips – their unassailable connection to her.

  This other baby had been only six pounds, she remembers: small, pale. Her limbs had seemed delicate – frighteningly frail, alien – whereas the other two had been robust, vital – and known, somehow familiar. Hers. She wonders now whether her impression of the fragility of that baby had merely been a reflection of Jodie’s own emotional state, a consequence of her not being anchored securely to Jodie’s consciousness.

  In the newspaper photograph the baby’s face is barely visible, swaddled in a rug despite the summer heat; she can just make out her small, bunched-up features – dark creases for eyes, nose, mouth, like a cartoon character. A tuft of hair – impossible to know the colouring. Just a baby, like any other baby: utterly unfamiliar.

  She wonders if Debbie remembers more. It seems impossible amongst all those births, over all those years, that she would really retain a distinct memory of just one baby. But she had remembered Jodie herself, so perhaps she would be able to recall the colour of hair, of eyes, the shape of Elsa Mary’s limbs, the weight of her head in the palm of a hand. But there is no way Jodie can ask her; no way she can admit to not recalling, to never noticing. At least some things have been recorded – the baby’s weight, length, head circumference – but this small, blurred snap is the only record of her image. And however hard she tries, there is nothing it can tell her; nothing it will reveal.

  22

  Every Tuesday fortnight, Angus takes an early afternoon to play nine holes with Dave. With both men being so busy, it is often their only weekday encounter with sunshine, the outdoors. Their first few meetings after the dinner party disaster are distinctly uncomfortable, the golf played in almost total silence, and they plead subsequent engagements, not staying for the usual round of drinks. But though the evening is never again referred to – and there are no further invitations from either party – the men’s relationship gradually resumes its former laidback character. And soon enough they’re back to having their customary post-golf drink at the clubhouse – not the most modish watering hole in Arding, but as good a place as any to while away an hour or so, to enjoy the cheap beer, the easy banter of long-established friendship.

  This afternoon Angus has enjoyed himself. He likes to think he is a reasonable golfer – coming at the top of the local competitions once or twice before his working and family life became so all-consuming. Today he played well, a return to form that he had thought lost over the past months. The two men discuss the game over the first drink, then move on to work for the second, both complaining about the constant pressure, the lack of time spent doing things they enjoy.

  ‘I guess with everything that’s going on with Jodie, you’ve got even less time.’ David hesitates. ‘I hope you don’t mind me mentioning it, mate, it’s just … well, you being in the field, a lawyer – it must be hard to switch off, to not look at all the angles, see all the possibilities …’ He falters again, and sips his beer nervously.

  ‘Actually, it’s not as hard as you might think,’ Angus lies. ‘All the media stuff’s a bit dire, but other than that I guess I’m not really that concerned. We’ve got Pete handling all the legal business, anyway. It’s not my area.’

  ‘And are things okay? With you and Jodie, I mean. It must be taking a toll?’

  Angus is surprised by his friend’s continued efforts to discuss what’s previously been so carefully avoided. Although suspicious that Dave’s been primed by his curious wife, this time he responds honestly, if tangentially. ‘Well, I’m just so bloody busy at work – we barely see one another.’

  ‘But when you do? Things must have changed. I can’t imagine something this big happening to me and Sue without it becoming world war bloody three. It’s bad enough as it is – all those bloody female hormones floating around our place.’

  Angus gives a commiserating laugh, tries again to deflect the conversation. ‘Yeah. Well, I know what you mean – teenage daughters, eh? Somebody should have warned us.’

  But Dave’s determined. ‘But how are you coping with all the stuff that’s being said? All that shit with her mother must have hurt.’

  ‘That old bitch.’ Angus dismisses his mother-in-law with a gulp of beer. ‘Anything she’s said publicly has already been said to Jodie’s face. And I guess the important people, Jodie’s family, her friends,’ here he pauses a fraction, ‘know who she is, what she’s like. They know what sort of a person she is.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what it must be like – for you. I mean, all that publicity. I saw that other television interview – the one last week. With Jodie. Jesus.’

  ‘I imagine everyone in Arding saw it.’ Wryly. ‘But it wasn’t that hard. She really just reiterated her statement, answered a few questions. We’d asked them to come, so it was on our terms. They had to be polite.’

  ‘Still. I dunno how you can stand it – the intrusion. And it must make you wonder.’

  ‘Wonder what, Dave?’

  But Dave ignores the question, continues, his voice slurring a little. ‘And you really seem like you’re doing all right. You’re saying all the right things, anyway. I gotta say I admire you, mate.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Angus is more curious than irritated, wonders how far his sodden mate will go, where his next conversational lurch will take them.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, Angus. If it was Sue, I think I’d want to cut and run. But I guess we both signed up for better or for worse, eh, and worse is going to arrive sometime. You just don’t get to pick and choose when, or how.’ He claps his hand on Angus’s shoulder, gives it a friendly squeeze. ‘And you and Jodie have been together so long.’ He lowers his voice, speaks almost conspiratorially. ‘And you’ve already done the dirty on her – which I have to say I admire too, mate. Always wish I’d been brave enough. But you know Sue – she’s a bit different to Jodes. She’d have killed me.’

  Angus tries to interrupt the flow, but Dave is unstoppable.

  ‘Y’know, Angus, I’ve been thinking about it, and I reckon you shoulda got out when you had a chance, Angus. You’re over the hill now, mate: your hair’s grey, your dick’s shrivelled, your stomach’s soft. You might’ve been a player once, but no bird’d look at you twice these days. You may as well stick with Jodie.’ He gives a hiccough, adds thoughtfully: ‘And you know something? If you tell yourself you love her often enough, it feels like the truth eventually.’

  Angus knows that his friend’s boozy confidences have far more to do with Dave’s own marriage than with Angus’s relationship with Jodie. Still, he can’t help but wonder how much of what Dave has said applies to him, too. He is conscious
of time passing, of course, how can he not be? He is keenly alert to the dispiriting advance of middle age, his own inevitable physical decline. And accompanying this, the shrinking of possibility, the excruciating awareness of unused potential. Even now – or is it especially now? – it prompts the unthinkable questions: Would he change things if he could go back in time? And if he could go back, what would he do?

  When Jodie reveals his mother’s treachery, that day under the willow, Angus falls in love. His shame and fury at Helen’s outrageous interference is inextricably bound up in this renewed passion for Jodie, who has surely proved her love for him in the most profound way. In an instant, his plans to make a comprehensive sexual survey are discarded, forgotten: Jodie is the most remarkable girl he knows, could ever hope to know, not only beautiful and clever, she is like a knight from a medieval fable, or a saint, perhaps, never wavering in her loyalty, her devotion. To him.

  Crazily, wonderfully, Angus proposes to her then and there – and crazily, wonderfully, Jodie accepts. They keep the engagement secret, from their friends as well as family, knowing that they will encounter only disapproval, disbelief.

  Both Angus and Jodie enjoy the forbidden flavour of their romance, revel in its illicitness. Angus does not understand, at eighteen, how secure these ties of obligation really are, and how difficult to break. He does not realise – at eighteen – how very young he is.

  His first affair – if it can really be termed an affair at that age – is almost accidental. His mother, panicked by his continued pursuit of Jodie, suggests he take a working gap year, secures him a clerkship in a London legal firm. Though he’s well aware of her motives, he decides to take up the offer to see a bit of the world, broaden his prospects. He defers university and bids an emotional farewell to Jodie. ‘It’s only a year,’ he reassures her. ‘And in the long run it’ll be worth it, for both of us.’

  Angus works hard – commits himself to learning (and earning) as much as he can, knowing that he has been given an incredible opportunity, figuring that observing the workings of a real law firm will confirm his own direction and provide him with an understanding that will stand him in good stead in his career. He starts work early, stays late, goes so far above and beyond his duties that he barely leaves himself any time to really experience London, or get to know either of his flatmates: his putative landlord, Martin (a distant cousin, independently wealthy), seems perfectly happy to keep the dull colonial at a distance; the other, Amelia, an Arts undergraduate, is almost an invisible presence, so rarely do the two meet – the only evidence of her domicile the occasional jug of daisies in the kitchen, the damp underwear left hanging on the back of the bathroom door.

  It isn’t until a near disaster just outside the flat that they are thrown together. Angus is walking home from the Tube just past seven on a Friday evening. He had been invited out for drinks by colleagues, but declined, not for the first time, instead making copies of several cases that are of particular interest, taking them home to read. He rounds the corner, walking briskly across the road directly in front of their flat – a Georgian conversion in not-yet-trendy Notting Hill – when he sees a car careen through the lights, then skid on the damp congested road, and swerve as if in slow motion straight towards him. Angus has to throw himself out of the car’s way to avoid being hit – a feat which he manages to pull off with only centimetres and seconds to spare. The car swerves back into the traffic with a screech, but Angus lies on the footpath for a few moments, dazed, while a crowd of helpers gather about him. They are a rather indecisive lot – no one thinks to call an ambulance, rather they check that he is alive and relatively unharmed – one taking his pulse, another putting him into the recovery position, then helping him to sit up when it is evident that he is intact and quite conscious. There are a few minutes of hemming and hawing and then they all drift off to their own important Friday night engagements, leaving Angus still sprawled in the middle of the footpath, grazed and bruised and utterly shocked.

  He would have continued to sit there indefinitely had Amelia not chanced upon him as she was leaving the flat.

  Angus is unable to give a coherent account of his being there, clutching his briefcase, his legs bent oddly, his pinstripe blazer torn, tie askew, trousers damp and muddied, and Amelia immediately takes charge. Having ascertained that there has been no serious damage, she enlists two amiably pissed and hefty passers-by to help him up and half drag, half carry Angus – who protests weakly that he is in fact fine, can manage himself, thanks anyway – up the stairs to the flat, where they dump him unceremoniously on the lounge. He sits, stunned and blinking, while Amelia brings him whisky, then sets about tending his wounds in a brisk, matter-of-fact way: helping him out of his damaged blazer, rolling up his sleeves and trouser legs to inspect the damage on his forearms, shins and knees, swiping the grazes gently with diluted antiseptic.

  After his second glass of whisky Angus begins to feel less dazed, and though the sting and throb of his wounds is suddenly evident, he finds himself oddly comfortable, in what is by any definition a rather peculiar situation – he is lying prone on the settee, with an almost unknown but extremely pretty (in an understated English way) girl fiercely concentrating on tending him in an extraordinarily intimate fashion. While she unbuttons his shirt, unbuckles his pants, wipes and rinses and pats and rubs and bandages with cool gentle fingers, Angus lies silently, the warmth rising from his feet through to the tips of his fingers, feeling the almost forgotten pleasure of an erection.

  Amelia barely speaks all through her ministrations, merely murmuring and tutting, apologising softly in the face of his occasional gasp of pain, but when finally he is cleaned and bandaged to her satisfaction, she sits down on the settee with a sigh, giving him a slow grin.

  ‘Well,’ she says, her smile made incredibly sexy by the gap between her two front teeth, ‘there you go. My Girl Guide first-aid badge came in handy after all. Don’t know what Brown Owl would say about the whisky, though. I don’t think that was on the list of approved remedies. I could do with one myself now.’ But she stays beside him on the lounge, leaning back and folding her arms. ‘Now tell me, Angus, what on earth happened to you?’

  His voice is rickety, the story coming in weird little spasms – a rush and a pause, mimicking his heartbeat – but for once he isn’t worried about sounding stupid, sounding less intelligent than he really is. And Amelia, who has poured herself a whisky and wriggled out of her trench coat, having apparently given up whatever plans she had previously made, relaxes beside him, asking the occasional question, looking appreciatively appalled, satisfyingly concerned. And for the first time, Angus realises, he is talking to an English person without feeling conscious of being Australian – raw, uncultured, boorish. In his bombed-out state he is incapable of minimising his accent, changing his utterances, recon-figuring his body language from its open Australian looseness to mirror his more rigid British counterparts. Angus notices that he is sitting as he would sit at home, letting his knees hang wide, sprawling, shoulders slumping, stomach muscles unclenching – letting that old upper lip go soft, he guesses – and it has something to do with Amelia.

  It’s not long before their conversation, too, takes twists and turns and dives that he hasn’t experienced since he’s been away – and very soon they’ve ordered an Indian meal from the local takeaway, and are sharing their second bottle of wine – the first having been polished off soon after the whisky.

  She’s easy to be with, Amelia – interested and articulate. She’s a country girl, from a village just outside Worcester, and is finding it difficult, she says, to get used to London. She’s come up to study history – although she’d initially been accepted into the local regional university, she’d thought it might be fun to come to the city instead. But it’s not fun at all. Although the university course is just what she’d wanted, and she’s doing well, she’s lonely, hasn’t really made friends, feels hideously rural, dull – not up to scratch. All the other girls in her
classes seem faster, brasher, cleverer – and they’re all happily ensconced in their own social worlds, already connected. And whatever hopes she’d had of creating some sort of cosy alternative home life have been dashed – with both Martin and Angus out most of the time and neither of them much inclined toward socialising anyway. She has a few friends who’ve made their way to London for work, study, but their occasional meetings (she’d been heading to one this evening, but was more than pleased to have an excuse to call it off) have grown more and more strained as their lives, and points of commonality, drift further and further apart. She is, she tells him with a resigned shrug, seriously thinking of calling it quits, heading back home, starting again at the local university. Maybe London life just isn’t for her. And she misses her parents, her siblings (four of them) and their small dairy farm more than she likes to admit – she’d been so desperate to leave – and now, she says with a wry shake of her head, all she wants is to be back there again.

  Angus finds himself reciprocating, telling her how he’s out of his depth in the practice, how he’s working like a madman so that no one will notice that he hasn’t a clue what he’s doing. He tells her – and it’s not something he’s even admitted to himself, really – that he’s not even sure that he wants to do law, that it’s just what’s expected of him, there hasn’t really been a choice.

  And then he’s telling her, hesitantly at first, about Jodie, about his mother’s proposition, their illicit engagement.

  ‘You’re kidding!’ Amelia appears satisfyingly shocked by his confession. ‘But you’re way too young. You can’t make that sort of decision at this age. That’s crazy. It’s too early. You could end up married to someone you don’t really —’ She hesitates. ‘I’m sorry. I’m making a big assumption here. It’s only that … Do you actually love her, Angus? Are you missing her, being here?’