Alice ate what was put in front of her, more or less. Helen had offered to teach her how to cook any or all of the dishes, but so far her offer hadn’t been taken up.
Make the dinner or wash up
, Helen had ordered, and Alice had chosen the latter.
Oliver, on the odd
occasion when he joined them for dinner, seemed satisfied with the food too – although the atmosphere, with a silent, glowering Alice across the table, didn’t make for a happy meal. Oliver’s initial efforts at conversation had been met with muttered monosyllabic responses. These days he and Alice acted as if the other wasn’t there, and Helen did her best to ignore the tension.
Alice’s twelfth birthday party had come and gone. Five pre-pubescent girls dressed like mini prostitutes watching
Grease 2
on video, hair stiff with mousse, all giggles and high-pitched squeals, enough makeup between them to keep Helen supplied for a month, bowls of crisps and popcorn and sausage rolls (ready-made) scattered around the sitting-room floor.
Helen’s offer of a cake had been turned down. ‘Cake is for
kids,’
Alice had told her, rolling her eyes at her mother’s ignorance.
‘Didn’t you bring home some cake from Patsy McMenamin’s party last month?’
‘Her dad works in a bakery, that’s why.’
Her dad. When Cormac had died, three-year-old Alice had looked for him, naturally. ‘Where is he?’ she’d asked, coming home from her ‘holiday’ at Anna’s house, the day after he’d been buried. Looking over Helen’s shoulder, as if he might materialise there at any time.
‘He had to go away.’ Every word like a knife slicing Helen in two. ‘He was very sorry that he couldn’t say goodbye.’
‘But when is he coming back?’ Alice had demanded – Daddy’s girl, from the second he’d seen her – and the best Helen could manage had been a whispered ‘Soon.’
Every day for over a week she’d asked, searching for him every morning, pattering into Helen’s bedroom, pulling back the bedclothes on his side, still playing the Hide and Seek game they’d often played, her face falling each time that he didn’t pop up with a ‘Boo!’ like he’d always done.
And then one
morning she’d come into the room and stood by the bed. She’d looked at the empty space next to Helen, and she’d made no attempt to touch the blankets. Over the days that followed, her questions about him had become fewer and fewer, until they’d finally petered out – and
even though it spared Helen the agony of having to talk about him, she’d mourned this new disconnect with fresh tears.
When Alice had started school, eight months after his death, she’d come home one day asking why she had no dad. Helen looked at her and realised with a shock that she’d forgotten him. She’d brought her to the stairs and pointed to the family portrait that still hung there.
‘That’s your dad,’ she said. ‘He got sick and went to Heaven. That’s why we can’t see him any more.’
Alice had gazed at the photo for a few seconds. Helen had waited for questions, wondering how much detail about death and mortality a four-year-old would need.
‘Your hair is funny,’ Alice had said finally, and just like that, the subject had been closed. Since then, Cormac’s name was rarely mentioned between them. Alice had been too young; he’d died before she could properly remember or mourn him, and maybe that was no bad thing.
‘Have you finished your homework?’ Helen asked now.
‘Most of it,’ Alice replied, her eyes never leaving the screen.
Helen picked up the remote control again and switched off the television. ‘You know the rule. Go.’
Alice slithered wordlessly off the couch. The sitting-room door banged after her, and Helen listened to the angry thump of shoes on the stairs. If she got a pound every time her daughter stormed off she could give up writing.
By mutual consent, Alice worked alone on her homework. They fought enough over other things: this, at least, was one battleground they could avoid. Helen carried out cursory spot checks about once a week, and signed the homework diary when it was presented wordlessly to her before dinner each evening.
The phone rang as she was taking the quiche from the oven.
‘You free tonight?’ Oliver’s dark drawl. ‘I could come over around eleven.’
Eleven. Too late for them to go for a drink, even if she could get Anna to babysit at this short notice. No mention of where he’d be before eleven, no clue as to what he’d be doing, or who he’d be doing it with. He was asking, in essence, if she was free for sex.
Helen took a
cigarette from the pack that sat by the phone. She could tell him she wasn’t just someone he could phone anytime he didn’t feel like going to bed alone – but of course she wouldn’t, because she wanted it as much as he did. Even the thought of his hands on her made her hot inside.
Sarah wouldn’t approve of making a date with nothing more than sex in mind. Easy to be righteous with a husband in your bed every night.
‘Make it half ten,’ she said, striking a match against the wall. ‘I feel like an early night.’ She lit the cigarette and drew smoke into her lungs, wondering if she had any massage oil left. Whatever else you could say about him, Oliver Joyce gave a mind-blowing massage.
S
he looked at him, aghast. ‘
Adoption
?’
‘Look, I’m only saying maybe we could think about it. It’s just an option.’
An option: someone else’s unwanted baby. She could feel the blood racing, outraged, to her face. ‘How could you even bring it up? How could you possibly imagine I’d want to do that? When have I
ever
—’
‘Hang on, why are you getting so upset? Can we not at least discuss it?’
‘There’s nothing to discuss.’
‘I think there is. I don’t see why you’re dismissing this out of hand. You want a baby—’
She glared at him, her eyes filling with hot, angry tears. ‘
I
want? There are two of us here. Don’t you care whether we have a child or not? Am I the only one who gives a damn that I’ve miscarried three times?’
He reached for her hand, but she snatched it away. ‘Sarah,’ he said patiently, ‘of course I care. That’s why I’m bringing this up. You know I want children as much as you do. But if this is going to keep happening, it’ll destroy you.’
She rose, pushing
her chair from the table with such force that it almost tottered. She crossed the room to the window, thumbing the tears from her eyes. Was it going to keep happening? Were all their babies doomed to die before they were born? The thought was simply unbearable.
‘We’re not going to stop trying,’ she said, looking out at the branches of the cherry tree. So beautiful when it was in bloom, so different now at the end of June after the blossoms had all fallen, leaving it ordinary and dull. ‘I’m not going to give up. I can’t.’
‘I’m not asking you to give up – of course we’ll keep trying, if that’s what you want. But I’m concerned about you, and how unhappy this is making you. If we could give a home to some unwanted child … I know you’d make a wonderful mother. Just think about it, that’s all.’
She leant forward until her forehead pressed against the window. The glass was ice cold. She
would
make a wonderful mother. She made a wonderful aunt. She closed her eyes and thought about Christine, younger than her by a year and soon to give birth for the third time, due in just three weeks. She pictured her two little boys, rushing up the driveway anytime Christine brought them over, delighted to be visiting.
She remembered Angela Ryan in school, adopted along with her two brothers. She remembered the unspoken pity that had hung like a fog around the three of them. She could see Mrs Ryan, older than the other mothers, dropping them outside the school on wet days in a green station-wagon, waving behind the swishing wipers as they crossed the yard, even though they never looked back.
But why pity them? Hadn’t they been taken in by someone who’d wanted them? Mr and Mrs Ryan who ran the corner shop, Mr Ryan who’d slip you a barley-sugar stick when you came in with your mother for slices of corned beef or a block of ice-cream, who’d ruffle your hair and exclaim at how tall you were getting, and ask what class were you in now.
And, for all
Sarah knew, maybe their real mothers had wanted Angela and the boys too, but hadn’t been in a position to keep them. What did she know about their situation, what right had anyone to condemn or pity them?
She opened her eyes and turned from the window. ‘Don’t forget you said you’d fix the shed door for my father after work.’
Neil looked at her for a moment, an index finger tapping out a slow rhythm on the edge of his plate. ‘I know,’ he said, getting up, sweeping the crumbled shell of his boiled egg into the bin.
Sarah watched him leaving the room. That was the end of it: they wouldn’t talk about adoption again. If he brought it up she’d ignore him, or walk away. He’d get tired of it eventually, and stop.
But for the rest of the day, as she chopped and stirred and whisked in the nursing-home kitchen, the topic insisted on turning itself slowly around in her head. Would it be so terrible after all to take possession of someone else’s baby? Couldn’t she learn to care for it? Wouldn’t any woman’s mothering instinct take over in the face of such helplessness? Care for it – and surely, in time, love it.
But the idea of never feeling a child growing inside her, never giving birth herself, never experiencing that miracle, still felt unutterably sad. However deserving of a happy home the babies were, however good an adoptive mother she might make, she didn’t think she could face the awful implications of defeat that adoption held for her.
She’d ask Helen what she thought, next time she wrote. Helen’s opinion was always worth hearing: she’d say exactly what was in her head. Funny how her forthrightness had brought them together in the beginning, how her savaging of that awful book had provoked Sarah into a response, and how her honesty was precisely what Sarah appreciated now.
She’d get her a present, she decided suddenly. Helen had sent that jar of cream when Sarah had been so desolate, and she’d been touched by it. She’d find some little gift next time she went shopping – not for any specific occasion, because Helen mightn’t want that precedent set. It would just be a present, out of the blue.
And while she
was at it, she’d get something for Alice too – why not? Poor Alice, having to cope without a father and get on with her mother’s boyfriend. Sarah would hunt down something suitable, parcel it in nice wrapping paper and tie it with a pink ribbon. Alice was just twelve, still a little girl, whatever Helen said about her, and what girl didn’t like pretty packages?
Work is busy
, she wrote later that week,
with my right-hand woman Bernadette out with flu. A few of the residents are quite sick with it too – one of them is gone to hospital, poor thing. I went to see him last evening and brought him a bit of lemon meringue pie, but he didn’t look as if he had much of an appetite.
The weather isn’t exactly helping – isn’t it chilly? We’re nearly going through a bag of coal a week at home. Neil comes in frozen every evening, takes him half an hour in a hot bath to feel human again. The joys of working out of doors, but he loves it, thank goodness.
I’m having my father and Neil’s mother to dinner on Sunday. Nuala is just back from a week with friends in Jersey. Seventy-one and not a sign of slowing down. What a shame Neil’s father got sick so young – they could have done so much together. I’m secretly hoping she and my dad will hit it off, but so far I’ve seen no evidence!
I’m enclosing a small token, for no particular reason other than I saw it and thought you might like it. I hope I got it right – difficult to know what to get for someone you’ve never met, even though I feel that I know you quite well in some ways! And I hope you won’t mind if I send a little present to Alice too, under separate cover. I didn’t want her to feel left out.
Helen,
please
don’t
feel you have to reciprocate – this was just something I wanted to do. It’s as much for me as for you! Anyway, you got me that lovely cream (and no, I didn’t feel like I had to reciprocate, honestly!).
How’s your romance? I hope it’s going well. Hope Alice is getting used to him.
She chewed the end of her pen. Chit-chat, small-talk, instead of what she really wanted to write about. Come on, out with it.
I want to ask your advice about something. Neil asked me a few days ago, out of the blue, if I’d consider adoption. I must admit I flew off the handle a bit. I know he means well – he says he’s worried about the effect more miscarriages might have on me – and I know there are lots of babies who need loving homes, but I so desperately want one of my own, and I feel that considering adoption is like accepting defeat. Am I being terribly selfish and short-sighted?
She read it over. It would have to do. She began a new paragraph.
Neil got a window box for outside our sitting room – after much nagging from me! – and I filled it at the weekend with begonias I’d started in pots. They’re such colourful little flowers, aren’t they? Wonderful how they last all summer long.
Her letters weren’t remotely exciting, or entertaining in the way that Helen’s were. But maybe Helen appreciated the normality of Sarah’s life, her steady job in the nursing home, her gardener husband, the routine of her days. Maybe Helen, living with the uncertainty of freelance work and lacking the stability of marriage, even envied elements of Sarah’s safe, settled existence.
But Helen had a
child. For that privilege, Sarah would happily have traded everything.
‘H
e’s a little off today,’ Catherine said. ‘Between you and me, things are a bit troubled at home. Just so you know.’
‘You’re joking.’
Wife had a headache in bed last night, or loaded too much on his credit card, and along comes Helen the following morning to ask him for a rise: wonderful timing. Then again, was there ever a good time for broaching a pay hike to the likes of Breen?