After the Storm (34 page)

We discussed the current issue of the magazine in a desultory way. I knew she was building up to something because she’d asked for this meeting – in fact, she had pressed for it. She seemed rather distracted, though, and as I was talking to her she often rested her eyes over my right shoulder as if she wasn’t that interested in what I was saying, and this was mildly disconcerting. Then my coffee arrived and I was thinking, That’s good, she won’t raise anything major now. Perhaps she had just wanted to reconnect after all these months. She was drinking green tea. I’ve noticed she’s very health conscious, and she swallowed two capsules of evening primrose oil with her tea.

She launched into a speech about how I should make her my deputy. She talked in that stilted way she does, always perfect English, but a bit too perfect, so that you know it’s a second language.

‘While you were away I wrote articles for all the sections,’ she said.

Now I was the one who was finding it hard to concentrate on Heja.

There was this couple at the next table who were having a nasty argument. The man had his arms crossed over his chest and he was staring furiously at his empty pudding plate, which was smeared with raspberry sauce. The woman was agitated and colour flooded up her neck and into her face as she twisted a napkin. I saw a waiter approach their table and then he hesitated and I thought he must be used to such scenes, so many unhappy couples. Heja was coming to an end.

‘I
have
essentially been working as deputy editor while you were on maternity leave and I would like more responsibility.’

‘You’ve been doing a great job, Heja, and I’m really grateful for all you’ve done. We’re such a small team and the magazine just doesn’t need a deputy editor, and Philip simply wouldn’t agree.’

Why had I invoked Philip, the big boss, in this way? Why couldn’t I have just said no to Heja in a kind but firm voice? She hadn’t been at the magazine long and a promotion so soon was just not on.

The unhappy couple had turned their attention to paying their bill. He had thrown his credit card down contemptuously on the table and looked away and she was ostentatiously counting out notes and coins, leaving exactly half the amount of the bill, her face taut and ugly.

Heja leaned forward towards me now and she crackled with a kind of pent-up energy. ‘You have such demands on your time now, I thought you would welcome some extra support.’

I almost snapped at her then. ‘That won’t be a problem. We’re a good team and we all know what we’re doing.’

Yet my heart was beating fast as I called for the bill.

During the afternoon I felt slightly sick and anxious, probably prompted by Heja’s comment. Why was I sitting in my glass-panelled office with piles of work on my desk, acting the editor? Why had I even gone for the promotion? I just wanted to get home to Billy and hold him close. As the day wore on it was as if the umbilical cord had never been cut and I was being tugged back to his sweet-smelling head and strong-sucking mouth. I was still breastfeeding every evening when I got back from work. I took out his photograph from my bag and looked at his dear little face and my breasts started to tighten and tingle. Then I put it on the side and pulled the production schedule over.

Karen, the production manager, came into my office and sat down at the meeting table. As I walked over to her I noticed she was looking up at me oddly.

Aisha, my assistant, came in at that moment and said, ‘What have you spilled on yourself?’

I looked down. Two wet circles had formed on the front of my shirt. My breasts had leaked.

APRIL

I have a dark green convertible with pale grey leather seats and I take great pleasure in it. It is one of the ways I have been kind to myself. She left work before me. As I walked towards my car I thought about how she was at our lunch. There had been something coarse about the way she had tucked into that pasta. She likes her food too much. If she is not careful she will run to fat in middle age. Her attention has also fragmented. She used to be more focused.

The car door is heavy but the engineering is so perfect that it glides open and allows me to slide into my seat. I lock the doors and turn on my CD player. I am working my way through every version of Rachmaninov’s four piano concertos. I am seeking the perfect recording of each one. For the third it is Martha Argerich’s tour de force in Berlin in 1982. She brings out the darkness as well as the wild ecstasy of Rachmaninov.

I drive home over Waterloo Bridge. I like to see the buildings at night with their lights reflected in the river. I admire the brutal bulk of Lasdun’s National Theatre. The British are too timid about architecture and they criticized his achievement. They are wrong. His building will outlive its critics. Architecture is the most important thing in the world. We spend our lives in buildings. We are born in them. We grow in them. We make love in them. We work and think in them. Usually we die in them. Buildings stand after we have died. Buildings can get sick, like us, but only if the architect has been stupid or lazy or greedy. Great buildings live long and noble lives.

My lover, Robert, is coming round this evening. The sex is good and it helps me to sleep. I never let him stay the night with me. He has accepted this as one of my quirks, which he is prepared to humour. Robert is highly sexed. I think he is quite turned on by the idea that he comes to my flat for sex and then has to leave. He never showers afterwards. He just dresses and goes. He told me he likes my smell on him when he gets back to his flat.

He is American and recently qualified as a psychoanalyst. I cannot imagine going to see him as a patient, though. His manner is too sincere. He likes to be liked and I cannot see him having the right level of aloofness to become a great analyst. He has come to analysis late. He tells me that age is an advantage in an analyst. It is a job you get better at as you get older. You can still practise when you are eighty, he said. He had no idea what pain it gave me when he said that. The skin on his face is pockmarked and his lips are fleshy. When you look at him your eyes are drawn to his large dark brown eyes, which are serious and thickly lashed, like a child’s. He is always trying to draw me out. He does not do this in an obvious way. He rarely asks me a direct question.

Instead he will say, ‘Just now when I mentioned my father’s death you looked so sad.’ He waits for me to fill the silence that is vibrating between us. He wants a revelation from me and I say nothing. Early in our relationship, frustrated by my reserve, he asked me if I had ever been in analysis.

‘No. Why do you ask?’

‘Because you have this way with you of listening, and I always think that you’re reinterpreting what is being said.’

‘We all do that. We filter everything, don’t we?’

‘It’s usually people who have been in a long analysis who acquire a habit of interpretation, as though experience is a code to be cracked.’

‘I was never in analysis,’ I told him.

This was a lie. When my depression had become unbearable I had sought out the revered psychoanalyst Arvo Talvela. There was a two-year waiting list and no one could get access to him. I wrote to him in confidence, explaining my situation, and he agreed to see me at once. Celebrity has some benefits, it seems. He wrote back to me asking me to come to his consulting rooms in the centre of Helsinki. My early reaction to him was one of profound antagonism. At our first meeting he opened the door and gestured in a courtly manner for me to come into his room. His face was fierce and intelligent. His grey eyes scanned my face.

‘Please take a seat, Heja.’

I looked around the room: the large, gracious windows; the books floor to ceiling; an expensive carpet; and the couch placed with a chair at its head.

‘You are not going to make me lie on the couch, then?’ I asked in a combative tone of voice.

‘I let people decide for themselves when they feel ready to lie down,’ he replied.

‘I will never be ready to lie down!’ I snapped at him.

I was now standing in the middle of his room and noticed this perfect blue glass vase that sat on his polished desk. He followed the direction of my eyes and he knew that I wanted to pick up that vase and smash it on the floor so that it would break into a hundred pieces. My rage consumed me. We battled for months and gradually I fell in love with him. It was not transference; it was love.

Good Friday and Robert had bought us tickets for a performance of Bach’s
St Matthew Passion
at St George’s Church in Hanover Square. He picked me up at my flat and drove us to the church. We joined the queue. What a middle-class English crowd; they looked like civil servants, librarians and lawyers. We were among the youngest ones there. The doors were pushed open and Robert manoeuvred us to prime seats in a box pew in the gallery.

There were six chairs in each box pew. They did not look comfortable and I knew that the music would last for over three hours. The players were tuning their instruments and then the noise fell away as an elderly white-haired canon walked slowly towards the pulpit. The conductor walked just behind him.

The canon mounted his pulpit and asked us if we would please turn off any mobile phones and not to applaud, as this was both a service and a performance. He sat down in his pulpit and was almost dwarfed by its high, carved sides. He was wearing a heavily embroidered cope, gold on black. It was as if the weight of his robes was pressing down on him. The sun was pouring through the high arched windows of clear glass on either side. I enjoyed watching the shadows of the panes as they worked their way up the stone arches. The man who sang Christus was marvellous, he had a memorable voice. The soprano was a bit shrill, I thought.

After two hours there was an interval and I was grateful to stand up. We walked back to Robert’s car and he produced smoked-salmon sandwiches, a half-bottle of champagne and two glasses. He opened the bottle and poured a glass for me.

‘You think of everything,’ I said. ‘Thank you. Do you believe in any of this?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The Resurrection, the salvation of souls, the afterlife.’

He chewed on a sandwich. ‘No, I don’t. I see religion as a check on human vanity.’

‘Vanity...?’

‘We can’t understand everything and the absolute certainty of our individual death stops us from being lords of the universe.’

‘You mean death as the great leveller...’

‘The great humbler.’

‘I can find no comfort in that,’ I said.

‘Has someone you loved died?’ he asked. His voice was gentle but there was an inquisitive glint in his eyes.

‘Only my great-aunt, many years ago.’

‘Were you very close?’

‘She was a special person, Tanya. She was a great singer. And I did love her.’

He nodded, waiting for more detail. I looked out of his car window.

‘She used to sing this piece, she was famous for it. She said I had a good voice too and she would teach me songs. She was always so patient with me.’

‘So she died quite young?’

‘Yes, too young.’

The second half was longer than I had expected. The canon delivered his Good Friday sermon before the music could start again. I wondered at Robert liking this piece of music and wanting to come on this day. As a child I had been used to sitting through long musical performances. I had heard Tanya sing this oratorio so beautifully once. It was not something I would have expected Robert to like so much. Finally the last words of the
Passion
were sung.

And call to Thee, entombed in death:

Rest thou softly, softly rest.

The canon asked us all to stand and sing a hymn and then it was over. As we turned to leave the church I looped my arm over Robert’s. He looked pleased at my gesture and we walked down the stone stairs and out into the early evening coolness.

MAY

I’ve been back at work three weeks now and it’s far more difficult than I imagined it would be. My tiredness goes down to my bones and it’s as if the world is wrapped in this layer of something soft and fuzzy that cuts me off and I have to work very hard to penetrate the layer. I was reading an article about a high-powered woman in New York who was back at her desk two weeks after the birth of her first child, kicking ass and delivering targets, and I thought how was it possible to do that?

So why did I go for the promotion to editor? Because the magazine is Britain’s most prestigious architectural magazine, and because Philip Parr called me at home and said it was as good as mine if I wanted it. He had the old Kathy in mind, I’m sure. I also thought, This is what I’ve wanted for years and I’d regret it if I didn’t take the opportunity. I hadn’t reckoned on how exhausting it was to work at full throttle when you have a small baby.

I got through the day at the office. This evening, after Billy was asleep, I was languishing over the soup and salad and Markus said, ‘Go to bed, you look worn out. I’ll clear up here.’

I stretched out between the sheets of our large bed hugely grateful at the prospect of unconsciousness and must have slept for five and a half hours, which is the longest stretch of uninterrupted sleep I’ve had for months. I don’t know why I woke up. Markus was lying with his back to me, deeply asleep, and I put my hand over his stomach, which is deliciously soft and hairy on top and firm underneath. He stirred and slept on. I looked at the digital clock: 02.57. I got out of bed and went to check on Billy. We moved him into his own room last weekend and I’m still a bit anxious about it. It’s a lovely room, though, one of the lightest in the flat.

We live in this 1930s mansion block off Baker Street. It’s an old-fashioned place with a long central corridor and odd angles in the rooms, and although the ceilings are high it is rather a dark flat, some people might even describe it as gloomy. It will never match up to an architect’s ideal of modern, bright living. My Aunt Jennie, my dad’s sister, lived here for twenty years and when she retired to Cornwall she signed the lease and most of her furniture over to me. She helped me so much by doing that; you could say that she put my life back on track. I needed somewhere to live. It was just after Eddie and I had had our last, hopeless reunion, when he tried to stop drinking again. It ended badly, as it always did, and I needed to get away from him. In spite of the flat’s faults I love it because it feels so safe and solid and no sound comes through these substantial walls from the streets below.