Chestnut Street (13 page)

Libby felt a pang of guilt. Her mother did not know that she had grown up about twenty seconds ago and that nothing would ever be the same again.

At school, she changed. She joined the others after class, she got to know them, to talk to them. She came home on a later bus. She steeled herself to walk in cheerfully and face the reproach and anguish and concern. She was always calm and regretful that they felt such anxiety on her behalf, but this new adult Libby never suggested altering her behavior. She was so nonconfrontational, so willing and eager to help and be part of the family when she was at home, that she eventually broke down a great deal of their resistance. She arranged that she apply for university places far, far from home, and lived her life on campus, writing a long, newsy
letter once a week, and making three-minute phone calls and coming home every vacation for a while. Sometimes she invited friends home to stay.

In her last year at university she brought Martin to meet them.

“Is he the one?” her mother asked her.

“I very much hope so,” Libby said.

“You won’t do anything … I mean, you will be very …”

“Oh, I won’t and I will.” Libby laughed, as she helped her mother dry the dishes. Martin was politely talking to her father about his garden shed.

“But what I mean is you’re not …?” Her mother couldn’t finish the question.

“The answer is yes.” Libby tortured her mother for a moment. “Yes, I am most certainly thinking of marrying him.”

Her mother was both relieved and startled at the same time. She seemed glad that Libby wasn’t saying yes to an open sexual relationship, but amazed that her child was about to marry and start a home of her own.

“Well, you have always been free to make your own decisions,” Libby’s mother said, sincerely believing this to be true. She hugged her daughter and wished her all the happiness in the world.

Libby and Martin got jobs in schools in London, and a small flat with a garden. Martin came from a big family: he had three brothers and two sisters. Nobody ever had any privacy, any time to themselves.

From the start their married life was happy. They didn’t crowd each other out. Libby, so glad not to be questioned about what took her so long on the way home from work, fell into the habit of calling in on the library and bookshops. Martin stayed on and played football with the boys; sometimes he had a pint with the sports master. They shopped together on Saturdays, and took a bag of washing to the launderette. They did twenty minutes’ serious housecleaning every morning and kept their place looking
fine. They often asked each other why people made such heavy weather out of being married and running a home.

Every second Sunday they visited each other’s families. Libby’s parents still had causes, petitions and crusades. Martin’s parents still lived a crowded communal lifestyle.

“No babies for us to play with on a Sunday?” Martin’s mother would say, disappointed, looking at Libby’s flat stomach every fortnight as if it might have swelled since the last visit.

“It’s your decision—fertility is a matter for people themselves—but will we ever be grandparents?” Libby’s mother would inquire.

There was plenty of time. So much to do, so many children to teach, so many projects to set up in the library, and children’s corners in the bookshop, and like-minded friends to call round for meals and conversations.

Libby was almost thirty before she began to think of the future, of someone who might be part her and part Martin—who would, therefore, be a wonderful child. So she stopped taking the contraceptive pill. She remembered the day that she got the result of her test; it was the day she discovered that Martin was having an affair.

A great deal had been written about personal freedom. People had to have their own space, make their own choices. We were not the gaolers of other people, even those to whom we might be bound by marriage vows. Perhaps it wasn’t an affair, more a whirl, a fling, a
thing
, even. People talked of having a
thing
with other people, nothing to break up a home over.

She waited for a couple of weeks before she told him that they were to be parents.

“Oh, shit,” Martin said.

So Libby knew it was more than a whirl or a thing; it was an affair, a love affair.

They hadn’t wanted it to happen, Martin explained. He and Janet had not set out looking for something like this. But it just had. There was no denying it, pretending it didn’t exist, the huge
attraction between them. There was only one life—this was it; it wasn’t a rehearsal. He and Janet had to take their happiness.

Libby nodded glumly.

“It’s early days, still. The pregnancy thing, I mean, it’s not too late—for an abortion?” Martin asked.

“I have no idea,” Libby said, and left the house.

She went to the bookshop; they were stocktaking. She helped them until ten o’clock. When she got home there was a note from Martin. “I’ve gone to Janet’s, I assumed you would not want me here when you got back.”

She sat and looked out at the stars in the sky for a long time. It was the weekend to visit her parents, so Libby went alone. She told her parents about the baby and they seemed very pleased. She didn’t tell them about Martin. It didn’t seem right to dim the pleasure.

In the weeks that followed she told them little by little. Always in a matter-of-fact voice. She never let them know of the nights of despair, the plans to kill Janet, the dream sequences where he would come back and she would forgive him the affair, defining it only as a fling. She never told them at school, nor in the library, nor in the bookshop, where she thought that Mr. Jennings knew something was amiss, but he was too much of a gentleman to mention it.

The medical examination showed that the baby was, in fact, going to be two babies. The baby-minding for twins would be more serious. She would not survive on a school salary alone, and she could not ask him to support two children he didn’t want. She asked for a paid job in the library, and one in the shop. She told them why.

“I thought you and your husband had the perfect marriage,” said the librarian, as she got Libby a few hours. Mr. Jennings said nothing, but wrote to the head office and got Libby a very good part-time job.

The babies were a boy and a girl. There were flowers from
Martin with a note saying he wished her every happiness and he didn’t know the etiquette in matters like this, but she would have his eternal admiration and gratitude for giving him his freedom.

She hadn’t known it was possible to love as much. Their little faces, their tiny fists, their sheer innocence and the way they depended on her for everything. Her life was fuller and happier than she could have believed possible. At school, where she worked a half-day, people said Libby must be made of stone; she had shown no sense of loss when her husband went off, she was able to leave those babies to a minder. Some women were as tough as nails. In the library they said she was a tragic figure but brave, brave like Joan of Arc. Mr. Jennings said nothing about her, but often brought the catalogs around to Libby’s house so that she could read and make her choices of what to order from her own fireside.

Libby’s parents came to call. They loved their grandchildren and, as the children grew, they were full of encouragement for them.

“Go ahead, climb that tree!”

“Surely, you’ll let them ride bicycles on the main road, Libby—what harm could come to them? You must let them go out with their friends on their own.”

It was as if their own restrictions of twenty-five years ago had never existed. And as she listened to them speak, Libby knew that she must listen. She must grow up again as she had grown up the evening her pigeon had flown away.

You couldn’t love something and keep it a prisoner. No matter how much her heart would break, she had to give her children the wings that they already wanted. So she lived by this principle. Even though she must have inherited her own parents’ anxieties, she showed no trace of them. She lay sleepless, waiting for her sixteen-year-old twins to come back in someone’s car from a party. Or, when they were eighteen, for her son to wheel his motorbike into the back garden. Or, when they were nineteen,
for her daughter to come home later and later from dates with a leather-jacketed, low-browed man who looked at worst as if he were a serial killer and at best a professional heart-breaker.

She spent longer hours in the bookshop. Mr. Jennings suggested she leave the school and work there full-time. It was a big decision but she was surprised how few people cared. Her son and daughter were too busy being twenty, her parents too tied up in their own concerns, her ex-husband too concerned with serious litigation. Janet apparently had not understood how he and Harriet had become involved, not wishing to hurt anyone but we only had one life—this was not a rehearsal and they had to take their chances at happiness.

When the twins were twenty-one they told her that they were going to Australia, one with a good job, the other with a de facto relationship that would guarantee a visa.

Australia wasn’t far, they said. It wasn’t forever. They’d come back; she’d come out to visit.

Her heart was like lead, her face a frozen mask as she presided over their departure. Sometimes she overheard them on the phone talking to friends: “No, she doesn’t mind at all, glad to get rid of us, I’d say.”

Could they really think that? These children whom she’d loved for twenty-one years? Always on her own; Martin had taken no part in their lives. They had never sought him out. Now they would be gone, and on the other side of the earth. They would think that she didn’t care, that their leaving was something that probably suited her.

She went, like a robot, to the airport to see them off. She waved until their plane must have been well over France and maybe farther south, over Italy. Her eyes were unseeing as she turned away to go back to her empty flat. She walked towards the exit without seeing the man sitting waiting for her. Mr. Jennings, his eyes full of hope.

“Oh, what are you doing here?” Libby cried, embarrassed to
have been seen so nakedly vulnerable, mourning her children who had flown away.

“Waiting,” he said simply.

“But what were you waiting for?” She looked at him with gratitude. It was so good to have him here to take away the empty feeling.

“For freedom, I suppose,” Mr. Jennings said thoughtfully. “The freedom for me to ask you and tell you things I have wanted to ask and tell for years, and for you to listen without too much else taking up your heart.”

This time Libby Green didn’t feel she was growing up. She had grown up long ago; there was no further growing to do. But she did feel she understood more about this freedom thing. By giving it, you got it. She wondered did everyone else know this, or was she the only person in the world who understood?

Molly lay there in the dark, watching the hands of the clock move slowly, very slowly onwards.

It
must
be more than 3:17 now; it had been 3:10 ages and ages ago, and much more than seven minutes must have passed. And then hours before that it had been 2:30. What had happened to the clock—possibly it wasn’t working?

But it was. Molly ran her hand through her dark, curly hair and twisted to find a more comfortable position. She listened to Gerry’s breathing. He had been fast asleep since 11:30 and he would wake with a start when he heard the alarm at a quarter to seven. That was a whole three and a half hours away. Could Molly get any sleep before that?

Sometimes, when she propped herself up with pillows, she dozed a little and got a crick in her neck. Sometimes in the middle of the afternoon she laid her head on the kitchen table and slept uncomfortably for fifteen minutes. But it was never an easy sleep. The children needed her—Billy, who was three, would come and tug at her arm, urging her out to play, and Sean, the baby, in the pram, might feel hungry or just in need of company, and set up a great wail.

Molly had been to the doctor. He had asked was anything wrong, had she worries. Not more than most people, she had thought. She missed work—it had been a lively office, and she missed meeting her friends for lunch and being involved in their lives. She sometimes found that after you had cleaned a house, done the shopping, the cooking, the washing, the ironing, the garden, then washed, fed and entertained two children, you were utterly exhausted and at the same time your mind was curiously empty. She found it hard to concentrate on newspapers, television programs. It was ages since she had read a book. Gerry came home from work late two or three times a week and it was all she could do not to scream at him. This wasn’t the way it was meant to be if you were planning a dream lifestyle, but it was the way things were.