And she didn’t invite me to the funeral.
And that woman back there,
that
Mrs Reiber – she was lying. She is Vanessa’s mother. I know it. I know it in my bones.
It feels like the hugest of snubs.
I tuck the hurt up inside me where it festers and throbs like a deep, hidden boil. And I go about my life, as I always do. This is such a busy time of year and there is so much that I have to do. I make my lists. There are cards to be sent, there is food shopping to plan and buy, presents still to be bought and wrapped, as well as things for the house to be done: new napkins to be chosen and something festive for the table, the decorations to be brought down and updated where necessary, bed linen to be aired and ironed for the spare room in which Andrew’s mother will stay. All this as well as so many school things to attend to: rugby matches to pick up from, the end-of-term art exhibition, the concert, and so on. I write things on my calendar and systematically I cross them off again, as evidence of my validity. And I tell myself that I could not possibly do all this
and
work.
Vaguely, like whispering ghosts at the corner of my mind, I remember a time when Christmas was all about lunches and parties and actually having a good time, instead of merely trying to buy one in the endless queues of supermarkets and department stores. But that was before.
I did work. Even after Jono was born. Not full-time then, but three days a week. For three days a week I catalogued antiques at an auction house in Burlington Gardens, and I was still me. I put Jono in the nursery and caught the train and then the Tube to my office in Piccadilly, with nothing in my arms except my handbag. I could have been anyone, then, and when there was just me, I thought I was someone. When I became pregnant again I saw no reason not to carry on. I had it all, as they say, back then: husband, family, career. I had the best of everything.
But when I lay on that hospital bed with my belly all slimed up with gel, with the midwife pressing the scanner into my flesh and dragging it about while she frowned at the screen in silence, I felt my life stop, like the hands of a clock. I’d felt so buoyant, so confident until then. I remember that I looked at Andrew for reassurance, but he wouldn’t look back at me; he was staring at the screen with his eyes, and the skin on his face seeming to be drawn back in a parody of cartoon shock. I wanted almost to laugh. I wanted to scream,
No, no, you’ve got it wrong, everything is fine.
And I wanted to slap the midwife, who was now leaning over me with a little trumpet thing like a kid’s toy held to her ear, which she moved about on my stomach, listening, listening. Pressing it down, listening. For how long was she going to do this? Her hair, which was long and dark and tied back in a ponytail, fell forward and strands of it stuck to the gunk on my stomach and dragged, like seaweed, as she moved.
‘I can’t find a heartbeat,’ she said at last, and I did slap her then, and I did scream.
I couldn’t go back to work. I couldn’t bear to see all those familiar faces, avoiding mine. I couldn’t make that journey, walk those familiar privileged streets so alive with certainty and optimism; I couldn’t go back. That part of my life was over. It was dead, burnt in an incinerator in some far corner of the hospital grounds.
I couldn’t leave Jono at the nursery. I just couldn’t do it. At first, I clung to Andrew and I cried and cried and he held me, and did his best to comfort me. He never said,
You have to
; he never pushed me out, back into the world, back onto the bicycle, so to speak, that I had so catastrophically fallen off. He just held me. And he said it was okay, although it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t.
And so we turned our eyes to Jono. I became the full-time mother I had never wanted to be, but I could see no other way. I knew – we both knew – that if we looked away for even a second, we could lose him too.
Now, I serve up for Jono his sausages and his broccoli and his roast potatoes, and I sit myself down opposite him to watch him eat. And he says, ‘How come Dad gives you more money than he gives me?’
I am taken aback. At first, I laugh. He is, after all, just a child. ‘He doesn’t give me money,’ I say. ‘It’s
our
money. We share.’
‘Dad earns it,’ he says. ‘So why do you get more than me?’
‘Jono, what you get is pocket money. And your father goes out to work, but I work just as hard here, at home, looking after you.’
‘No, you don’t.’ He cuts off a lump of sausage, and spears it. ‘You just do what all mums do.’
Why does it hurt me so when my child speaks to me like this? Why do I feel that these comments of his are so accurately, sharply aimed right at the centre of my love for him? I look at him, methodically working his way through the food I so lovingly prepared, and I can’t stop my eyes from smarting. He knows that he hurts me; that’s why he does it.
‘Jono,’ I say, knowing that I shouldn’t even try to justify myself like this, ‘I used to go out to work. I had a job that I enjoyed very much. But I gave it up, because it would have meant leaving you with child-minders, and I didn’t want to have to do that. I wouldn’t have been here for you in the holidays, or after school. I wouldn’t even have been able to take you to school.’
‘I get the coach,’ he says, in a bored, indifferent voice.
‘Yes, but when you were at junior school.’
He shrugs, and sticks a potato in his mouth. And I feel the heat rising in my face.
‘I thought it would be better for you to be brought up by your mother rather than by a succession of strangers,’ I say tightly. ‘Don’t you agree?’
Again he shrugs. And he almost smirks. ‘Your choice,’ he says indifferently.
Which are the same words that his father used, when I said that I couldn’t go back to work, when I sat sobbing on our bed and pleading,
How can I go? How can I leave Jono in the care of strangers?
Andrew sat beside me. He stroked my back, stiffly, mechanically, as if he’d read it in a book, an instruction manual: when the wife is sad and in need of comfort, she will need to be stroked. And he said,
It’s your choice.
But it didn’t feel like a choice. Quite the opposite, in fact. It felt like all my choices had been taken away.
Jono finishes eating and lets his knife and fork clatter onto the plate. I cannot bear to look at him any more. ‘You know I did have a life of my own once,’ I say as I pick up his plate. A very good life.’
And he says, ‘Well, what did you give it up for, then?’
Jono will be thirteen in March. On June the seventh it will be ten years since my daughter was taken out of my womb. I do not know what has happened to the years. I do not know what has happened to me.
I look at myself in the mirror and it is the same face, but a still version. As if a mask of me, a cardboard copy, has been stuck on over the gap underneath. Once, I was walking past the shops and a young man – a good few years younger than me – started walking alongside me and trying to chat me up.
‘You’re gorgeous,’ he said. ‘But you’ve lost your sparkle. All you married women, you lose your sparkle. It’s criminal. I don’t know what your husbands are doing. Come out with me, love, and I’ll put the sparkle back in your eyes.’ And he persisted, trotting alongside me for the full length of the High Street while I did my best to ignore him. ‘Go on, love, what do you say? Come and have a drink with me and I’ll make you smile.’
I told Andrew. I wanted to know what he would say. I wanted him to laugh, of course, but a little part of me also wanted him to grab hold of me and kiss me and set about putting the sparkle back for himself.
But Andrew was not impressed. He tutted. He barely looked at me. And he said, ‘Oh, Rachel, don’t tell me you’d fall for that old line?’
To which I replied, ‘No, of course not.’ But I couldn’t help wondering:
had
the sparkle gone from my eyes? And was it really that obvious?
And this was three, maybe four, years ago. I turned forty the September before last. Who will ever care about the sparkle in my eyes now?
On the wall in our spare room we have one of those wide glass photo frames that takes three photos, all in a row. We’ve had it for years. I bought it in a trendy little shop near my office, not long after we were married, and I put in it my three favourite photos of us at the time. There’s one of us from our honeymoon, taken by a stranger outside St Mark’s in Venice; I am holding onto my sunhat, to stop it blowing away, and Andrew is holding onto me. And he’s looking at me like he can’t believe I’m there. The middle one is from another holiday; this time we are balanced on the edge of a sailing boat, our faces sun-kissed and smiling, our hair whipping in the wind. You can see we have nothing to worry about. You can see it’s just us, and whatever we want to be, wherever we want to go. The third photo is my favourite, though. In this, we are at Andrew’s firm’s Christmas party one year, long ago. We are sitting at a table among the debris of empty glasses and streamers, and we are flushed from laughing. I am wearing a black strapless dress and my hair, which was longer then, is curling loosely around my shoulders. We have our heads together for the photo and Andrew has his arm around me, squeezing me tight. We look so young, we look so in love, and see – I definitely hadn’t lost my sparkle then.
These photos have been relegated to the spare room. In our old house they were on the landing, and before that, when we lived in our flat in Chiswick, they were in the hall. But gradually photos of Jono overtook their importance: photos of Jono as a baby, as a toddler, and of us with him, on holidays, in the garden, in the park. In these photos Andrew and I are merely the props, the supporting roles; we are smiling at him, we are holding him up, we are saying: look, here he is, our wonderful son.
We fill our home with photos of Jono. We cannot see enough of him. Photos of just the two of us don’t seem relevant any more. They seem out of date, embarrassing almost. Like a too-old woman in a miniskirt and high heels, they no longer seem to fit.
The spare room is where I do the ironing. That is the only reason, really, that I am ever in there for any length of time. And those faces look down at me from the wall then, like actors in a film. Sometimes I cannot meet their eyes. They are strangers to me now, those people. They are the salt, rubbed into the wounds.
Now, I walk into the spare room with my arms laden with various Christmas purchases, and I look at these photos. The house is quiet; it is the middle of the day in the middle of the week, and as usual I am alone. And for some reason the silence is all wrong, as if really there is noise there – many, many layers of busy, vibrating noise – but it has been snapped off, as if someone has flicked off the volume switch. Carefully, I place my purchases down on the trunk among all the other packages and gifts all waiting to be wrapped, and then I stand and I look at those photos. Really look, as I haven’t for a long time. And it is as if I am there again. I hear the noise from the boat; the sweet chink of the stays knocking against the mast and the ripple of the sail, the slap of sea against wood, and our voices, high-pitched, snatched out and away on the wind. I hear the sudden, feverish clamour of a thousand pigeons taking flight in St Mark’s Square simultaneously with the echoing clang of the bell in the clock tower, chiming out the hour, and to the side of me the orchestra outside Harry’s Bar striking up the violins to Verdi. And the voices, so many of them, in so many different languages: a group of French students singing the chorus of some unknown pop song; the vendors, selling corn for the pigeons and strips of postcards; the American guy taking our photo, saying,
Okay, you look great now
, and my own voice, then, squealing as I nearly lose my hat, and Andrew, laughing in my ear.
I hear all these sounds. I hear them all at once. As if they had been trapped all this time inside a locked glass box, but now the lid is off and out they all come, all of them, bursting out.
And that party – there was a live band playing blues music; they were brilliant, I remember. Andrew and I had only just sat down for a minute. See how flushed we are; I can hear our heartbeats pounding, the fast rush of our breath. I hear the music, I feel it, buzzing through my body. I hear the splash and the glug of glasses being refilled, of voices laughing, shouting to be heard.
And Andrew and me. Andrew and me.
I feel his hand on my skin, his body warm and sure next to mine.
Once, we had a terrible row. Before Jono was born. Before we were even married; we were living together, in our flat in Chiswick, and we were standing in our narrow hallway having this row. I cannot remember what it was about, just the fierceness of it, the danger of it in that tight, close space. I remember Andrew’s face, looming up in front of mine, shouting, flushed with anger.
I kicked him, on the shin. I was wearing shoes, and I kicked him hard. He completely crumpled for a second as if his strings had been cut, and then he rose back up, right up, as if in slow motion, and then he grabbed me – literally grabbed me – by the collar of my shirt, fisting his hand into the material, and boom, boom, boomed me along the length of the wall, like a rag doll, saying, ‘Don’t-you-ever-do-that-again.’
Spitting
out the words. I ended up at the other end of the hall, still pinned to the wall by his hand. It was as if he didn’t know what to do next, as if he was frozen now by his own reaction.
He didn’t hurt me. Oh no. He
thrilled
me. I was racked up, horny as hell. All that power so almost unleashed, all that
passion.
But that is the difference between Andrew and me.