She’d also told him lately that she was glad she’d married him, that she was glad he’d asked her, glad she’d said yes.
She’d introduced Noreen to Dan at the party, and Noreen had walked away from him as soon as she could – and the next time Sarah had seen her, she was dancing with Neil.
Sarah had seen them dancing, seen their arms around one another, and thought nothing of it, nothing.
Noreen had sat at this table and drunk countless cups of tea with Sarah, she’d cuddled Sarah’s children and put plasters on their cuts, and she’d fallen in love with Sarah’s husband.
Noreen
had been here this very day; she’d left the house at three, half an hour after Sarah had got home. Sarah had stood outside with the children like she always did, and the three of them had waved Noreen off. ‘See you on Monday,’ they’d chorused, and Noreen had smiled and waved back.
Had she known that Neil was planning to tell Sarah about them this evening? Of course she had. She’d stood at the table earlier; she’d chopped tomatoes and grated cheese while Sarah had stirred the meat sauce for the lasagne. Was she thinking that this was the last time she’d be in the house? Was she pitying Sarah as she imagined what lay ahead?
And even more horrible – was Neil going to her now? Was she getting ready to receive him, would they talk about what had just happened? Would she bathe his face, tend the injury that Sarah had caused?
She gritted her teeth hard and pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, trying to shut out the pictures of the two of them that pushed their way into her head, that made her insides clench with rage.
Time passed. She sat, unable to move. Eventually she became aware of a gnawing hunger. Her hands trembled as she cut a wedge of cold lasagne and ate it with her fingers, chewing and swallowing rapidly, taking no pleasure from it. The knuckles on her right hand were swelling slightly, turning from red to purple.
Her wet top clung to her, making her shiver. As she ate, another shower of hail began abruptly, flinging itself against the window in angry bursts. When she had finished, she stowed the lasagne dish and untouched salad in the fridge.
She tidied the kitchen, mopping the floor with the towel, and walked upstairs. In the bathroom the bath was still full, the water she’d run for him earlier completely cold. She pulled up her sleeve and yanked out the plug.
Still
shivering, teeth chattering, she opened the bathroom cabinet and gathered up his shaving foam, his razors, his hair gel, his hay-fever drops, his nasal spray and his toothbrush, and dumped everything into the pedal bin.
In the bedroom she swept his clothes off hangers and pulled them from drawers and tossed them out of the window into the garden below. She threw out his shoes and his books and his spare glasses. She went downstairs and gathered everything up, rain pelting down on her as she stuffed it all into the big green refuse bin that sat outside the back door.
Back upstairs she ran a fresh bath and sloshed oil into it, the same oil she’d been buying since Helen had sent her a jar of it just before Stephen was born. She peeled off her damp clothes and left them lying in a crumpled pyramid on the bathroom floor and lowered herself into the steaming, fragrant water.
And through it all, she didn’t shed a single tear.
‘O
’Dowd?’
She turned slowly
towards the sound of his voice, planting a hand against the wall to keep her steady.
‘You look terrible,’ he said.
She smiled faintly. ‘Nice to see you too.’
He extended a raincoated arm. ‘Here, grab on to that – I’m going your way.’
‘I’m OK.’
‘Jesus,’
he said, ‘you’re hanging on to that wall like it was your best friend. If you collapse I have no intention of carrying you. Grab on.’
She reached out and curled her fingers around his arm. It was solid as a stone. ‘I’m just two doors down,’ she said. ‘I’m supposed to exercise.’
‘You can still do that – I told you I’m not carrying you.’
They moved off slowly. She was acutely conscious of the stains on Alice’s old tartan dressing-gown. Her face was damp with sweat from dragging herself up and down the corridor. She must smell ripe, no proper shower or bath since they’d brought her in five days earlier, her hair probably cocked up all over the place.
Breen looked straight ahead as they walked, tapping the point of his big black umbrella on the vinyl floor. His hair was cut very short, as always, and more grey than dark brown now, which did it no harm. He smelt of the outdoors, the bottom half of his raincoat spotted with drops.
It
occurred to Helen that apart from the handshake they must have exchanged on first meeting – at that Christmas party, aeons ago – this was the only time she’d made physical contact with him. He was an inch or so taller than her, no more.
A nurse swung out of a ward and walked briskly down the corridor towards them. She darted a look at Breen before scurrying past, her shoes squeaking.
‘So what’s wrong with you?’ he asked.
Typical: in like a bull. She should tell him she’d been given six months, watch him deal with that. ‘Meningitis,’ she said. ‘I’m on the mend, going home in a few days.’ No response. Same old master of small-talk. ‘How’re things with you?’ she asked.
‘Fine. Still here.’ His shoes were brown suede, and scuffed, which surprised her.
‘I saw you,’ she said, ‘last week, just before I got sick.’
He threw her a pained look. ‘I suppose I’m to blame then.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself. You walked by a restaurant I was sitting inside.’ She didn’t mention the woman he’d been with, and he made no further comment.
They crawled past the first door, which was open. Helen glanced in and saw a bald man sitting on a bedside chair in dark green pyjamas, magazine splayed on his lap as he gazed instead at the wall in front of him. The absence of privacy, and dignity, that hospitals afforded.
They walked on, Helen conscious that she was leaning heavily on Breen’s arm, glad of its stability. A man in blue scrubs wheeled an empty trolley past them, whistling a tune she knew but couldn’t place.
‘I come across your pieces now and again,’ Breen said. ‘You’re still well able to stick the knife in.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ she told him. ‘How’s retirement?’
He turned his head then to look directly at her, the way she remembered he’d always done. She’d forgotten how blue his eyes were. ‘It’s Hell,’ he said mildly. ‘Thanks for asking.’
She was
thrown. Was he trying to be funny? Did he expect her to laugh? He hadn’t sounded like he was making a joke – there wasn’t a trace of a smile on his face. The silence sat between them until they reached her door.
‘This is fine,’ she said, releasing his arm. ‘Thanks.’
‘Want me to walk you in?’
‘No … thank you.’
‘So,’ he said, ‘home soon.’
‘Two or three days, they tell me.’
He nodded. She felt awkward, standing there with him. They weren’t meant to be polite with one another; they worked better when they were getting under one another’s skin. He had no call to tell her his retirement was Hell. What was she supposed to do with that?
He pushed the door open, stood back. ‘Take care,’ he said. ‘Look after yourself, O’Dowd.’
‘You too.’
She shuffled inside. The door closed with a gentle swish. She heard his umbrella tapping its way down the corridor. She wondered who he’d been visiting.
Two days later her mother drove her home. Half an hour after she’d left, as Helen, showered and powdered and in a clean T-shirt, was about to climb into the freshly made bed, the doorbell rang. She looked out of her bedroom window and saw a florist’s van parked by the path. Frank, any excuse for a bouquet.
But the blue bowl of three forced white hyacinths wasn’t from Frank. She opened the little envelope and read,
Don’t let me catch you in there again
in Breen’s impossible scratchy writing.
He must have rung the hospital to see if she’d been sent home. And he must have looked her up in the phone book to get her address – she doubted he’d have remembered it from his days as editor, if he’d ever known it.
She
brought the bowl upstairs and set it on her bedroom windowsill. She climbed into bed, her feet finding the hot-water bottle her mother had filled while Helen was in the shower. She closed her eyes and inhaled the tumbling, glorious scent of the flowers, and drifted off to sleep.
‘H
old
it higher, like this.’ Sarah took the hand that held the sieve and raised it six inches. ‘That way, the flour will get mixed with air while it’s falling into the bowl.’
‘Why does it
have to get mixed with air?’
‘Because air will make the
buns lovely and light.’
‘Why is it not coming out?’
‘You have to tap the sieve gently, like this.’
Martha pushed Sarah’s hand away. ‘
I’ll
do it.’
Sarah watched the flour falling in little clouds, most of it landing in the bowl beneath. There was flour in Martha’s hair, a smear of margarine on her cheek. The table was gritty with caster sugar. There were eggshells on the floor, and a scatter of flaked almonds.
The radio was on, Madonna singing about moving to the music on the dance floor. A few minutes earlier, a newsreader had announced the release after sixteen years in prison of the Birmingham Six. On the far side of the room Stephen was sprawled on his stomach, watching a little wooden train as it clacked around on its circular track.
It was half past four on a March afternoon, the rain beating against the window, the wind whipping the branches of the cherry tree – which only, Sarah thought, made it feel cosier inside the Aga-warmed, fragrant kitchen.
‘Mum,
what does a-e-r-a-t-e spell?’ Martha had finished sieving and was now bent over the open recipe book.
‘Aerate. It means to fill something with air, or let it breathe. That’s what we’ve just done with the flour – and look, see how I’m stirring the mixture very gently with my spoon? That’s called folding, so the air doesn’t get pushed out again.’
She’s so interested in cooking and baking
, she’d written in her last letter to Helen.
I’d love to get her a few child-friendly cookbooks, but I can’t find any. The language in all of my books is too advanced and I have to keep simplifying everything for her.
As they were spooning the mixture into bun cases, the phone rang. ‘I’ll get it,’ Martha said, dropping her spoon and scrambling to the floor. Less than a minute later she was back, deflated. ‘It’s Grandpa.’
Not the man she’d been hoping for. Sarah slid the baking trays into the Aga and closed the door. ‘Leave everything. I won’t be a minute.’ She wiped her hands on her apron and went out to the hall.
‘I’m heading into town,’ her father said. ‘I could pick up a takeaway and drop it in to you on the way home, if you wanted a night off cooking.’
‘I have a chicken in the oven,’ she told him, ‘and we’re making buns for dessert. Come and eat with us.’
He’d defied all their expectations, as healthy now at eighty-one as he’d been when his wife had died thirteen years earlier. Showing no sign of being unable to cope alone – on the contrary, he’d been her rock when Neil had left, when she’d woken the following day and the horror of what had happened had sunk in. Her father had been the first person she’d turned to.
He’d taken her tearful phone call, then hung up and packed a suitcase. Far from coming to live with them as someone who needed looking after, he’d moved into the spare room and taken over. Shooing her out to work each morning, looking after the children as best he could, steering her through the first terrible days and weeks.
He’d been
there at the end of every day, when the hurt and the rage and the loneliness had become too much for her to bear alone, when she’d wept on his shoulder and tried to make sense of it. He’d made her hot chocolate and told her bad things sometimes happened to the ones who least deserved it.
He’d stayed with them until she found a neighbour to look after Stephen, and then he’d driven the five miles back to his own house, promising to return each morning to take Martha to school until a more permanent arrangement could be put in place.
Life had moved on, four months had passed since that terrible evening, and Sarah had adapted to her changed circumstances as best she could. The nights, of course, were the worst, full of memories and regrets and silent longings. However much she despised Neil’s betrayal, and despite their lack of intimacy in the months leading up to his departure, she found herself mourning the physical absence of him, the smell of him, the sound of his breathing in the dark.
And her desire for another child hadn’t dissipated, far from it. There were times in her loneliness when she wished he’d left her pregnant. Would it have distracted her from her melancholy, or would the idea that she was carrying a child whose father had abandoned them have made it worse? But torturing herself with what-ifs did no good: it hadn’t happened, and now it was never going to happen, and this added its own layer to her sadness as she pushed herself through the days and endured the loneliness of the nights.
Christine, naturally, had been appalled.
‘Oh, Sarah, the
bastard!
How could he have done that to you? And Noreen – I can’t believe it. Brian will be mortified, just
mortified
, when I tell him. And to think I got that woman a present for her birthday – and you shared your party with her, and all the time … God, I could
hang
for her, for the
two
of them.’
I’m so very sorry
, Helen had written.
He must be nuts, not that that’s any comfort. I’m glad your dad is staying with you. Be strong, like I know you can be. Be good to yourself. Hug those children.
She’d
sent a box of notelets with watercolour birds on them in blues and greens and greys, and a thin slab of chocolate so dark it was almost black, and a pair of soft leather gloves the colour of blueberries. Sarah had pulled on the gloves and tried to feel something other than wretched and angry, but it seemed unlikely that she would ever be happy after this, ever want to smile again.