Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon (33 page)

Anna shrugged. ‘Easy to say that. It’s who you are.’

So he wished it hadn’t happened, did he? Which meant he wished he was still with Ruth? For a moment Anna saw it as a noble gesture she was making, clearing out, clearing their way.

‘Let’s not drag up the distant past,’ Martin said. ‘I can’t see how that helps. Why don’t you come home? I’ll wait while you pack your bag.’

‘
Home
– you mean your flat? It’s never felt like home to me. I don’t like living in London. I prefer it out here.’

He threw her a look of incredulity. ‘You’ve never said that! Never a word. Am I supposed to be telepathic?’

‘What’d be the point? You’d never move out of London. You’re there and I’m here, and it suits both of us.’

Martin shook his head slowly. ‘This is another excuse, isn’t it?’

‘It’s not! I do like it here – it feels more like home than the flat ever has.’

‘So – that’s it, then? You’re not coming back?’

Anna shook her head. ‘I’ve told you, I can’t go anywhere now, even if I wanted. I’m busy tomorrow.’

‘You could cancel.’

‘I couldn’t. Look,’ she said, capitulating slightly, ‘I’ll phone you when I get back, shall I, on Sunday?’

‘Sunday?’ Martin was visibly taken aback. ‘You’re away till Sunday? So you’re planning to spend the night with whoever it is?’

‘There you go, on and on about planning!’

‘I’m wasting my time.’ Martin sprang to his feet, reaching for his coat. ‘Sorry to have taken up so much of yours.’

‘OK. I’ll do it, since that’s what you want.’ Anna felt suddenly reckless. ‘Hire a car next week and come for my things.’

He stood for a long moment looking at her; she couldn’t read his expression. Then he turned away. ‘Fine. It’s probably best. Come when I’m not there, will you?’

In the hall she relented enough to move towards at least a sociable farewell kiss – they could be grown up about this, couldn’t they? – but he was brisk now, already out of the door, calling only a curt ‘Bye, then.’ He zapped his key-fob and the car unlocked with a loud obedient click; Anna closed the door and stayed there, listening, until the sound of his engine had faded.

The house felt empty now, with him gone. She closed her eyes, imagining a different scenario, if she’d gone to him and said, ‘Don’t go, Martin. Stay with me. Please, stay.’ They could have snuggled together in the night-time chill of the bedroom; she could have told him where she was going and why; asked him, even, to go with her. Would he have agreed? He might have offered to drive her to Devon; he was always good at helping in practical ways.

It was pointless, wondering, and too late, now. She’d do this alone. It was a part of her life that Martin had never understood.

In bed, Cassandra is propped up against pillows, leafing through her gardening magazine. She flicks past advertisements for gazebos, conservatories and stylish wellingtons, pauses for longer over photographs of summer gardens, velvety lawns and rose-clad arches. Her attention is caught by a border planted in white, cream and blue; she reads the caption, reaches for the notebook on her bedside table and writes down
Sisyrinchium striatum
.

Don is getting ready for the morning, for an early round of golf with Malcolm; his shoes are clean, his bag of clubs propped against the wardrobe.

‘Have you seen my cap? The dark red peaked one?’

‘It’s in there somewhere. Second shelf down, I think.’ Cassandra doesn’t look up from the irises, the foxgloves, the scrambling white rose. She is thinking of summer, of new gardening projects. She wonders whether a wrought-iron bench like the one in the photograph would look better under the pear tree than the heavy wooden one that’s beginning to peel and flake.

‘Who are these for, love?’

She looks up at Don, over the top of her reading glasses. He’s lifting the paper carrier bag in one hand, the purple shoes in the other, holding them by the straps. Cassandra stares at them and feels herself blushing hotly.

‘Is there some great mystery? What’s going on?’ Don gazes at her. ‘It’s not – you don’t mean – oh, love, is Anna expecting?’

She gives a slight nod. It’s the easiest answer, the obvious one. And, even, possible.

‘Well, why on earth didn’t you tell me!’ He’s beaming now, placing the little shoes side by side on the bed, leaning over to give her a hug and a kiss. ‘Why the big secret?’

She returns his embrace. ‘It’s not certain yet – I shouldn’t have—’

‘But you couldn’t wait to start shopping. Well, that’s fantastic news! Grandparents at last, hey? Won’t that be great?’

She envies him his uncomplicated pleasure, his wide grin. For as long as she remains silent, she can pretend it’s true.

‘Do you think she’ll tie the knot with Martin, then? Will they be shopping for a ring? Living in Hatton Garden they’ve only got to pop downstairs.’ It’s a joke he’s made before.

‘That’d be nice.’ Cassandra finds herself wondering what she might wear to a wedding. Anna would never go for a big fussy church occasion, she’s sure of that much.

Don picks up one of the shoes and holds it in his palm. ‘What if it’s not a girl she’s expecting, though? Too early to tell, surely? Would the shop let you swap these for boys’ shoes?’

‘Oh …’ she says vaguely. ‘It’s a hunch.’

‘One of your Cassandra moments, was it?’ Don rubs his hand up and down her arm. ‘Well, maybe you’re right. We’ll see. We must celebrate, all four of us. Go out for dinner. Shall I see how they’re fixed for tomorrow night?’

Chapter Twenty-two

Sandy, 1967, 1968

Two weeks before Christmas, it was Sandy’s turn to go to the nearby hospital. She went unaccompanied in the ambulance, as none of the home staff could be spared. On arrival she was taken charge of by brusque strangers. ‘Well, what did you expect?’ said the midwife, when she whimpered with the shock of labour pains. ‘No one said it’d be easy, did they? You should have thought of that.’

She felt so ignorant. All the while, she had harboured the idea that her body couldn’t nourish a foetus that the world didn’t want; it would surely wither away, or slip out prematurely. More recently, when she felt it kicking, she imagined it balled up and angry, already resenting her. Often she had felt drained and ill, as if this alien thing was sucking all her energy into itself. At other times she felt a kind of perverse pride that her body could achieve such a feat.

Between her and freedom loomed the inescapable ordeal of giving birth. Marion said that it was like being ripped to pieces; you’d scream and scream, and long for it to be over. Others, newly delivered, spoke of nurses who took relish in the girls’ fears and the pain they would have to endure, and talked in loud voices about adoption. Marion had been in a ward next to a woman whose baby had been stillborn, and who had shrieked at Marion in hysterical grief when she heard the nurse’s tactless remarks.

I’m going to die, Sandy thought, gripped by the frightening power of contractions. Surely I’ll die; something must be going wrong. No one could survive this. Hours passed, in a terrifying private place where she could only strain and sob, wait for the next wave of pain, give herself up to it.

‘Push. You’re not trying! You’ve got to push. It won’t come out on its own.’ The voice floated towards her from a long way off, and at last she had the sense of powerful instincts overwhelming her, an irrepressible force taking charge. She was carried on a current, strong and deep, and at last it was over. She had come through the straining and sweating and heaving; she was alive, and so was the baby; she heard its thin cry. She lay back exhausted; damp hair clung to her forehead; tears ran down the sides of her face and trickled into her ears.

‘It’s a girl,’ said the midwife.

Someone propped Sandy up on pillows and washed her face, and she was given the little wizened thing to hold; only briefly, because it was to be fostered until adoption formalities were completed. She stared at her baby in astonishment. How had such a tiny thing not been squeezed and crushed to death? Its eyes were closed; it moved its fists; it was alive. A living, separate creature.

‘Just for a few minutes, dear,’ said the midwife, in a kindlier tone.

Sandy looked at the clenched face, the new skin, the scalp streaked with hair. She’d never looked at a baby with such intentness, had never fully understood what it was to see a life at its very beginning. Certain for some reason that it would be a boy, she had planned to call it Roland.

Now this. A red-faced baby girl, gasping with the shock of being born, of breathing air.

‘Her name’s Rosanna,’ she said. ‘I want her to be called Rosanna.’

Sandy’s parents had sold their Croydon house in the autumn, and moved, in December, to a smaller one in Tonbridge. Her father continued to commute to London, while her mother found work as secretarial assistant to a local vicar.

Having been reluctant to go to Bridge House, Sandy now found herself equally unwilling to leave it and the friends she had made there, to re-enter a world that wanted girls like her brushed out of sight. The birth had loomed like a punishment, an end of something; she’d given little thought to what she’d do afterwards, and now found herself dumped back into a life that felt only slightly familiar. Even the expected sense of freedom meant nothing, and had turned to anti-climax and lethargy. She had done something almost miraculous, bringing that whimpering thing alive into the world, but her achievement must be hidden away, never referred to. Her body, swollen and bruised, aching for the baby it had toiled so hard to produce, wept blood and tears and milk, but soon recovered, guarding its secret.

In spite of everything, she had done reasonably well in her O-Levels. Her mother, on her weekend visits to Bridge House – Sandy’s father had not come, not once – talked about secretarial courses and the shorthand and typing skills that would give useful entry to a variety of jobs. She enrolled Sandy at a local college, to begin a course as soon as she came home, or rather to the house that was now called home. Sandy also signed up for English A-Level, which she could take by attending a weekly evening class. She’d missed the first term, but the set books studied then were
The Tempest
and
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
; having enjoyed
Far from the Madding Crowd
, and seen the film, with Julie Christie so beautiful as Bathsheba, Terence Stamp imperiously handsome as Sergeant Troy, she felt sure she could cope with Tess. The other students were either adults, or teenagers who’d failed to make the grade for A-Level courses at school, so she didn’t feel as outclassed as she’d been by the few high-flyers at St Clare’s.

The new house, a thirties semi in a road near the station, had nothing of Roland in it; nothing of Sandy, either. Her parents had established themselves, their furniture arranged in much the same way as before, but to Sandy it felt temporary, as if she’d never really belong here. Maybe she wouldn’t stay long. Once armed with shorthand and typing, she could find a flat of her own; even share with Marion, whose baby, six weeks old, was handed over to his adoptive parents in mid-January. ‘It was so awful I can’t tell you about it,’ Marion wrote from Rochester, where she had returned to her parents. ‘But I expect you know.’

On the TV screen, American aircraft bombed villages in North Vietnam; villages burned, terrified children ran from the smoke. In the Winter Olympics, ice-skaters twirled and glided, goggled skiers flew down ramps, commentators stood on snowy slopes. The Beatles went to India to study meditation with someone called the Maharishi, and were photographed sitting cross-legged, hung with flower garlands. Mounted police rode into a crowd of protestors in Grosvenor Square. Martin Luther King was shot dead in Memphis; students rioted in Paris. Cloistered in Bridge House, Sandy had taken little notice of television news and had only the vaguest idea what the Vietnam War was about, or who Martin Luther King was. She skated over the surface of her new life, tentatively at first, certain that the ice would splinter and she would be sucked through into the stifling dark. Something had been left behind; she must go back, go back. But everything was pulling her forward.

Sandy’s parents gave the story to relatives and to their new neighbours that she’d had a long illness and convalescence: ‘Yes, glandular fever takes a long time to get over, but she’s making headway,’ she heard her mother telling the woman next door. Lying was acceptable, apparently, under these circumstances. Usually Sandy found that she could use vagueness as a shield, saying ‘I’ve been in hospital,’ only if pressed. It was taboo to mention the pregnancy, the baby. No one talked about that at home, beyond her mother’s occasional reference to
your trouble
or
all that business
. It had been a diversion, a swerving; now she was back on course.

The surface part of her mind concerned itself with Pitman shorthand, with vowel signs and line position and abbreviations.
We are in receipt of your letter dated 15th March
, she read.
I am writing in connection with the above unpaid invoice. Kindly sign and return the enclosed document in the pre-paid envelope
. She learned about different kinds of filing systems and how to keep a boss’s diary. In the middle of the night she jolted awake from the horror of earth spattering over Roland’s coffin, the impossibility of him being put into the ground. She saw the cross-faced baby that had lived inside her; she dreamed that she had carelessly lost it, abandoned it to die, left it in the street for a stranger to find. In her dreams she searched and searched, with a heaviness inside her that told her she would never find what she was looking for.