‘Don’t,’ she shuddered.
‘Seriously, Lara. Forget about it. It’s just a pile of junk in a cellar. Come on, old bird. Let’s make the most of Jacky’s snooze and have a cup of tea out on the stoop. You go and have a sit down. I’ll bring it out to you.’
It could be the sign of a possibly overlong marriage that the first thought for an unexpected half-hour to yourselves is to sit down and have a nice cup of tea, but, after her trying day, Lara welcomed the unasked-for act of kindness.
She went out on to the porch and sat on the creaky old swing seat. The grime she had cleaned from the house felt as if had been tattooed into her skin, infecting her blood. She wished that, instead of going to Stephen’s for dinner, they could have a quiet evening in, relaxing with the kids on the smelly old sofas, watching a DVD and wiping out the day with red wine.
She let her head fall forward and moved it gently from side to side, rolling out the ache at the base of her neck caused by looking down and scrubbing.
The truth was that she couldn’t face up to what was going on inside her head. That was how she operated, and she knew it. Running in the morning and collapsing in the evening with too much wine was her way of anaesthetising the big questions. She was a fan of the quiet life.
But seeing Stephen had dislodged simplicity. She had moved from the middle of a safe but worn-out lawn to the edge of a sharp precipice. And now she stood on the brink, trying to resist the urge to jump. Not going to Stephen’s tonight would be the same as taking a guarded step backwards.
The past twenty-four hours had, she realised, been coloured by a feeling of unease, as if a creature had lodged itself somewhere beneath her solar plexus and now, foetus-like, attempted to stretch its limbs.
She pushed herself more vigorously on the swing seat, to try to dispel that image from her mind.
If it hadn’t been for Marcus, she would be eighteen weeks pregnant by now. She realised that, for the first time, she actually felt relieved she wasn’t. It had been a close call, though. On the day of the procedure, she had sat in the little park across the road from the clinic, counting the petals of a rose she had ripped from its thorny stem, rolling them over in her fingers and inhaling the sweet scent that reminded her of the perfume she used to make with water in a blue plastic flask when she was a child.
‘I don’t think I could deal with another baby,’ Marcus had said, sitting beside her.
He hadn’t
dealt
with any of the others, though. They had impinged in no way whatsoever on his life. He had trolled the same argument out when she found herself pregnant with Jack. It was convenient for him to blame the lack of professional respect he commanded on the fact that he had been lumbered with offspring so early on. He chose to forget that he had been thirty-two when they were born, which hardly qualified him as a juvenile first-time father.
But it was a good excuse.
‘And just as you’re getting yourself back together after Jack,’ he went on, stopping her hand as she tore the rose petals into tiny pieces. ‘Your work, your body.’
‘But I hate my work,’ Lara said.
‘You’re just saying that.’ He patted her knee and she wanted to knock his head off.
He did have a point about her body. After the twins, the shape she had only recently grown into snapped back into place by itself. Which was just as well, because the day after the births Marcus had to go to Manchester for a stretch of six weeks which only saw him come home tired, twitching and with a bag of washing late on a Saturday night. He was off again by Monday lunchtime.
After Jack it had been completely different. Even at thirty-three she was still one of the youngest at her antenatal classes. Nevertheless, it had been a struggle that time to rediscover her abdominal muscles and lose the sheath of fat built out of a craving for condensed milk swirled over tinned peaches in sugary syrup.
That was when the running kicked in. She started on a campaign of physical self-improvement, a focusing on goals of percentage of fat versus lean tissue and body mass index calculation that allowed no room for questioning any other aspects of her life.
With hard work, it had taken her six months to return to her pre-Jack weight. But her skin hung in folds at her breasts and belly, with silvery deltas of stretch marks. She looked passable in clothes, and Marcus seldom cast his eye in her direction when she was between underwear and bed, so he didn’t know any better.
But Marcus’s body-argument had held little sway as she had sat in the park inhaling the rose scent clinging to her fingers. This most recent pregnancy had already melted all that hard-won body tone. From the moment the hapless sperm hit the unlucky egg, she had eaten as if she were the subject of a TV documentary about people who need cranes to get them out of bed. Whole loaves of doughy white bread, and plastic-wrapped cakes meant for a family found their way down her throat. It had been this increase in appetite – far more than a period late even by her irregular and tardy standards – that had sent her to the chemist to buy a pregnancy test. The pink line that shot across the window in the plastic stick immediately after she had dipped it in her hormone-laden pee had done little to curb her appetite. Instead, she redoubled her calorie intake and took days off work, phoning in with tales of flu, to lie supine on the sofa, eating and watching people tear each other to pieces on
The Jeremy Kyle Show
.
She had toyed, back then, with the idea of not telling Marcus till it was too late. But when he returned at the weekend – he had a minor role in an Ayckbourn at Southampton – to his credit, he noticed the change. Or perhaps it was the number of Mr Kipling wrappers in the recycling. In any case, she was rumbled. And rumbled was how it felt; as if falling pregnant had only been down to her. In fact it was he who refused to wear condoms, relying instead on an inexpert withdrawal method. She supposed she could have taken the pill, or at least some sort of control. But the former felt unnatural and, given the rare occasions on which contraception was needed, over the top. And she really had no idea how to do the latter. Throughout her life, control had been something of an abstract concept.
So began a month of a tripartite wrangling with him, her conscience and her body. And it ended, there in the rose garden, with him frantically painting a positive future for her, one where she was free, and Jack was at school full time, healthy, happy and brought up with all the advantages of having only much older siblings and not having to share his parents’ affection with another, younger, brother or sister.
Even as he spoke and stroked her hand, she knew his motives to be entirely selfish. He didn’t want to be tied down even further, didn’t want to be made to feel any more inadequate as a provider.
In the end she had let him lead her to the clinic, where they signed her in, dressed her in a blue surgical gown that did up at the back, sedated her and put her in a waiting room full of women unable to acknowledge even their own presences, let alone those of anyone else. Then, when the time was right, she was taken to an antechamber, positioned on a gurney and given an intravenous anaesthetic. The next thing she knew she was being shaken awake by a kindly but efficient nurse, crying dry-mouthed and uncontrollably, with a sanitary towel packed up between her legs.
When she got back home, silent and shaking, her eating didn’t abate. Quite the opposite in fact. And now here she was, creaking on the swing seat, wondering if it could cope with the extra stone she was carrying. But the running was going to help, and the upside of seeing Stephen again was that since then she had hardly managed to eat a thing.
Once more she felt that dirty relief. How would it have been, meeting Stephen after all those years, yet pregnant again?
‘Nice cuppa char,’ Marcus said, bringing two mugs out on to the porch. ‘Budge up.’
She moved along the seat to make space for him. His Dior aftershave – used for aesthetics rather than function, since he was growing a beard – tickled her nostrils.
‘Someone’s made a great job of the shower,’ he said. ‘I actually feel cleaner after using it.’
‘Good.’ She sipped her tea. It tasted disgusting. Lipton’s had been the only reasonably priced brand in the supermarket – a tiny box of PG Tips cost over five dollars – but it was grey and weak.
‘Are you all right with going to Stephen’s tonight?’ she said. Thinking about the termination had stirred up her irritation at Marcus and she felt like skating dangerously.
‘I’m looking forward to it.’
‘But you’re always a bit iffy when he’s on the telly.’
‘Actorly pride. You have to pretend to despise commercial success. It’s part of the job. No, me and him go back a long way.’
‘I know,’ Lara said.
‘And us not staying in touch is as much down to him as it is me,’ he said, tucking a strand of hair behind his ear.
Lara nodded.
‘It’ll be good to find out what he’s been up to over the years,’ Marcus went on. ‘We’ve got a lot of catching up to do. He might even be interested in what I’ve been doing.’
‘Oh look. It’s Dog,’ Lara said. The big black Great Dane lumbered up the front lawn and sat at the base of the porch steps looking up at them, panting, his tongue lolling.
‘Dog?’ Marcus covered his nose and mouth with his hands.
‘A friend I made on my run.’
‘Don’t let it up here.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Lara said. Marcus was really very allergic to dogs. ‘He looks thirsty, though, eh boy? Stay there.’ She held a firm index finger up to the dog, stood and went into the house.
‘Don’t encourage it,’ Marcus said, but Lara chose not to hear him.
In the kitchen, she leaned over the edge of the sink and put her whole head under the stream of surprisingly icy water, hoping it would percolate into her mind and wash it clean of poison.
Then shaking her head, like Dog might after a swim in the river, she found a bowl and filled it.
On the way back, she paused in the front hallway and, masked by the fly screens, watched the scene outside.
Dog confronted Marcus, who leaned backwards, pinned to the swing seat by his own fear. It was a stand-off.
Dog’s eye, cast upon Marcus, seemed to be saying one thing to him. Lara saw it clearly.
‘You are to blame for everything.’
If only Marcus could open his eyes and read the truth that was being shown to him. But then, Lara thought, perhaps it was too late for that.
She carried the bowl of water to the grateful animal and broke the spell.
SO THIS IS LOVE, THEN, BELLA THOUGHT AS SHE SCUFFED DOWN THE
dusty track to the pool. This feeling in the pit of the stomach, this hunger that couldn’t face food, this tingling in her fingertips. Even Olly’s obscene suggestions – which were, she had to admit, not wide of the mark of what she and Sean had actually got up to – and the unveiled threats he had made as she tried to scrub the bath clean couldn’t obliterate the wonder of it all.
Sometimes she wished Olly didn’t exist. Her life would be a lot simpler.
But when she got to the pool, Sean wasn’t there. His shift must have ended. She swam ten lengths with her eyes open, just in case he appeared, then she lay on her towel, feeling the sun warm every exposed nerve of her body.
In place of Bobby and Sean, two tanned and golden girls sat up on the lifeguards’ ladders, chewing gum, looking bored and, Bella felt sure, smirking at her and her English pallor. What sort of match was she for them?
Sean had probably been after a shag and nothing more. And now he’d had it, he’d probably ignore her.
She strove to believe her gloomy thoughts, to wear them as an armour against rejection, but something in her knew she was wrong. She screwed her eyes shut and tried to get lost in the red and purple floaters that blossomed behind her eyelids. Then a shadow passed over her and a shock of cold water splattered on her belly. She opened her eyes hopefully. But it wasn’t Sean.
‘For fuck’s sake, Olly!’ She rubbed away the wetness, which she now realised came from his hair as he stood over her, dripping and grinning.
‘Don’t doze off,’ Olly said. ‘You might miss lover boy.’
So, Bella thought, Olly had regained his composure, and now, by standing dribbling over her and relegating Sean to a joke, he was attempting to make up. This was typical of him. He could turn on a pin. He was, she often thought, completely mental.
‘Come and dive for quarters,’ he said, standing over her, one hand on his hip.
‘Get out of my sun,’ she said, not stirring. She noticed that, behind him, the lifeguard girls were sizing him up, their immaculate eyebrows raised, their sly glances cool and unimpressed.
‘You’re not in there, in case you were wondering,’ she said, nodding towards them. She shielded her eyes from the sun that flooded her face as he turned to look at the girls, who had returned to surveying the pool.
‘I am not the slightest bit interested anyway,’ Olly said. Then he let a tiny smile slip over his lips. ‘Come on, Bell. Come and play.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ she said, getting up.
After an hour of diving for quarters, they decided to go home, a truce of sorts established between them. But as they reached the end of the steep dirt track up from the pool to the school playground Olly saw his friends, sitting on the bonnet of a battered turquoise convertible, smoking something.
‘Yo, homies,’ he said, raising his hand in greeting.
‘There we go then,’ Bella sighed.
Leaving her brother behind to get up to no good, she skirted across the lawn at the front of the theatre, her skin tingling from too much sun. She had swimming-pool water sloshing around in her ears, so at first she didn’t hear when Sean called out. But he ran and caught up with her, tapping her on the shoulder and making her jump. Thinking it was Olly, she swung round ready to cuff him.
‘Steady,’ he said, smiling at her, tall and beautiful and just, well, perfect in every way. ‘I saw you passing. I can’t stop, I’ve got to set up for the show, but I just wanted to say hi.’ He reached out and put his hand on her arm, and she surprised herself by putting her hand up to his dark curly hair and pulling him down to kiss him.