Chosen (27 page)

‘But I don't like living communally,' she went on. ‘I don't like there being so many people I don't know and wearing other people's knickers and everyone interfering all the time
and Hannah hating me and, anyway, I don't really believe in it.' Her look dared me to challenge her. ‘He's always having visions and stuff and it's always Jesus telling him to do exactly what he wants to do anyway.'

It was very hard not to laugh when she said that. It was a thought I'd never allowed myself to have. ‘Is he still sleeping with Hannah?' I said.

‘Probably. Who cares? Anyway, now his dad's died and he wants someone to go and live in the house so I'm moving there. It kills about a million birds with one stone – somewhere for me to live, somewhere for him to come and see Dodie, someone to caretake the house.'

We could hear the scrunch of Kathy's car coming up the gravel drive. Princess, who'd been asleep on the lawn, hauled herself stiffly to her feet and trotted round the front to meet her. You squirmed in your sleep, a smile flickering on and off your face. Your lips mimed sucking for a moment and then you were still again, the warm and precious weight of you secure in my arms.

‘I'll take her and you can drink your tea,' Stella said, but I held on to you and let my tea grow cold.

‘Do you –' I swallowed. Such a humiliating question to have to ask. ‘Do you love him?'

She frowned. She was only eighteen, but she already had deep vertical lines between her eyebrows.

‘It's just' – she tore at the edge of her thumbnail with her teeth – ‘he was part of growing up and he did give me a reason to live, but now' – her eyes went to you – ‘now I have another reason to live. Do
you
still?'

‘Love him?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Yes,' I said, and my voice took on a beautiful simplicity. ‘I'll always love him.'

‘Even though you ran away.'

‘I still feel married to him. I want to see him.' And saying it made it true, made it urgent.

‘Why don't you come to his dad's house with me?' Stella said, a rare ripple of animation in her voice. ‘Oh
do
come, Mel. We could live together with Dodie, maybe we could both get part-time jobs or something and share the childcare. And then' – she hesitated – ‘you'd get to see Adam when he comes to visit.'

‘I might,' I said. I was starting to feel tired and shivery, but I didn't want to let go of you. Princess came trotting round, grinning doggily. The thing I don't like about pugs is not their screwed-up faces but the way their tails curl up and give you such a good view of their bum-holes. It was like a brown rosette flexing and winking at me as she begged Stella for a biscuit and I had to look away.

Aunt Regina and Kathy came round the back with another tray of tea and some steaming scones.

‘We've come to join you,' Kathy boomed.

‘Good day at the surgery?' Stella said.

‘Sterling.'

‘Let me take the wee poppet,' Aunt Regina said and scooped you out of my arms. I shivered at the sudden emptiness. Of course I would come and live with you, there was no question about it.

†

Obadiah came to fetch us and drive us to Sheffield – to Adam's father's house. It was a warm day, the sun slanting through the windscreen of the van and I nodded off, wedged between Obadiah and Stella with you on her lap. I was still convalescing and needing to take little snoozes during the day, particularly as I was often up with you in the night.

‘Here we are,' Stella said, and the van stopped and I opened my eyes. We were in an ordinary street of thirties semis.

‘This isn't it,' I said.

Stella flapped the envelope with directions in my face. ‘Thirty-three Lexicon Avenue,' she said.

‘Aye,' agreed Obadiah. ‘It is.'

‘But Adam said it was a mansion with acres of land.'

‘Adam says a lot of things.' Stella gave me an infuriating look.

We climbed out of the van and stood in the yellow light filtering through a laburnum tree. There was a gigantically overgrown privet hedge and we had to push through its fronds to get through the gate. It was a white house with a bay window. A fox doorknocker snarled from the door. On the step was a quaint little milk crate with a cow whose tail swivelled to indicate to the milkman the number of bottles to leave. You loved to play with it as a child. Do you remember how once we ended up with eight pints after you'd been fiddling with the tail?

You are such a
liar
, Adam, I thought. Still, it
was
a big house for two young women and a baby, with its four bedrooms and long garden, its steep gloomy staircase and wonky plumbing – you had to learn a special way to pull the chain in the downstairs toilet. Obadiah unloaded our paltry store of belongings into the fusty, tobacco-and trousery-smelling hall.

‘Any chance of a cuppa before I head back?' Obadiah said. We searched the dispiriting kitchen and, of course, there was no tea. Someone had been in and cleared out the fridge and cupboards. The sink was deep and cracked and stained and there were cobwebs strung between the taps. The cupboards were full of chipped plates and dented saucepans: everything we'd actually need, though all terribly depressing.

I put the kettle on the stove and, while Obadiah drove Stella to find a shop, I carried you into the garden. It was long, narrow and overgrown, with tulips fighting through the grass. I put my foot in a pond I didn't even see and stumbled, nearly dropped you – but saved myself, saved you. The garden was full of birdsong and the hum of insects, full of sunshine and life. It was beautiful, and so wild. At its bottom were some fruit trees – a plum, a pear and an apple I later learned – and I held your face near the blossom so you could inhale the sweetness.

Stella called me, her voice a little frantic. ‘Mel? Mel?' And I carried you back through the long grass. The kettle
was whistling and they'd bought tea, crumpets, butter, jam and baby formula. We sat in the dining room at the beautiful table under the window. We'd pulled layers of oilcloth off it and discovered the tabletop was a wonderful swirl of glossy wood. Obadiah said it was rosewood, and would be worth a bomb. He thought it was probably antique. It was the only piece of furniture in the entire house that we actually liked. Everything else was fusty or fussy or old-fashioned or just plain dismal.

I tried to make it an occasion, putting the milk in a jug and finding a set of table mats to protect the wood.

‘To us here, then,' I said, raising my chipped cup to Stella.

‘Cheers,' Obadiah said. He had a horrible habit of blowing across the top of his tea, slurping while it was still too hot, then smacking his lips and saying, ‘Ah!' At Soul-Life I'd always tried to avoid being around him when he drank tea for this reason – the petty rage it stirred up in me was disturbing. Otherwise I liked him; he was slow and deliberate, about as unmercurial as a person could be. He was the oldest member of Soul-Life, a safe and stable person, fatherly.

‘Are these the only cups?' Stella said. She was still uneasy around food and didn't like to be seen to eat or to be in the company of others while they ate. She was regarding my butter-slathered crumpet almost with fear.

‘It's all right, Stell,' I said.

There was a long pause filled with the sound of Obadiah munching and slurping. ‘Oh, by the way,' he said to me, ‘you've been forgiven.'

‘What?' I watched a trail of jammy grease crawl into the thicket of his beard.

‘Your theft. The cash. The three hundred and eleven pounds,' he said.

I laughed. ‘I can't believe you knew the exact amount!'

‘Of course.' He looked offended.

‘Sorry,' I said, ‘that's why you're an accountant.'

He took another explicit gulp of tea. ‘Anyway, you've been forgiven. Adam said to tell you to forget it.'

That was the first direct message I'd had from Adam since I'd left him over two years ago.
Forget it.

‘Tell him I already had,' I said.

†

We began to settle. Adam sent enough money for us to live on. I started looking for a job, but soon Stella stopped eating and starting scrubbing and soaking everything in bleach again. I forced her to go to the doctor and he gave her pills that made her sluggish and dull. It wasn't practical for me to go out to work with you and Stella to care for. It was a golden time, a golden summer. Each day I took you for a walk. I showed you the world. At night when you woke, I woke with you. There was such a special sympathy between us that I would sometimes be there beside your cot before you even whimpered.

†

After a few weeks, Adam came to Lexicon Avenue. There was no warning. You were sleeping in your carrycot in the garden. Stella was also asleep, in a deckchair beside you, and I was trying to cut a bit of grass with a rusty old mower, to give us more room to sprawl. I was hot and sweaty in my cut-off jeans and vest. I'd put weight back on – not too much, about right I'd say – and my skin, which had gone sallow over the winter, was getting brown. I'd stopped pushing the mower and was wiping my hand across my forehead, pushing the sweat up into my hair, when I saw Adam. It gave me such a shock that I shrieked and woke both you and Stella.

His hair was past his shoulder blades and his beard was long. He was wearing a white grandad shirt, open at the neck, over faded jeans and leather flip-flops. There were beads around his neck and as soon as I saw him I felt a sort
of upward smack in my stomach. Poor Adam! He didn't know which one of us to greet first and he dealt with the moment by going straight to the carrycot and leaning down at you.

‘She's changed!' he said.

‘We've all changed,' I said. Our eyes met piercingly and I swallowed and smiled, saying in my smile that I forgave him everything. He came close and held me against his chest. Home is not so much a place as a feeling. When I smelled him and heard the beat of his heart against my cheek, I knew that for sure.

I went inside to fetch glasses of water for us all, and to avoid seeing how he greeted Stella. Quickly I washed, sprayed on a bit of deodorant and brushed my hair. I went out with the water and Adam was sitting cross-legged on the grass with you on his lap. There was no conversation going on between Adam and Stella and for that I was glad.

He stayed one night. We all prayed together. He'd been given a method of meditation by the Lord, a long wordless prayer where you let your mind dissolve into the oneness of the universe and if any thoughts came you blocked them with a hum. We developed this method further: each person had their own pitch, a pitch that worked to block – well, I need not tell you this. It's a most soothing and nourishing method of prayer, though on this occasion you woke and cried and I had to get up and walk you round the garden until you were quiet. And, afterwards, Adam and I ate omelettes while Stella took something to her room. It was awkward. Neither Stella nor I knew what would happen when it came to bedtime. If he'd chosen to sleep with Stella I don't know what I would have done.

After you'd been fed and bathed, by him, and settled in your cot, Adam came into the dining room where Stella was doing a puzzle and I was reading, or trying to. I looked up and smiled at him.

‘Leila?' he said. (Leila was the name given to Stella at Soul-Life.) My heart shrivelled and my breath stuck as he looked at her, his eyes so soft and dark and bright.

‘
Stella
,' she said, refusing to meet his eyes. And then she looked at me. ‘I am disenchanted, Mel,' she said, much more loudly than necessary. ‘You can have him if you want.'

She was like that, sometimes, my sister, your mother, who I did love – but this was pure spite, and that word,
disenchanted
, she must have stayed up all night thinking that one up; it wasn't the kind of word she'd ever use:
disenchanted
! She knew that Adam would choose me over her, you see, and didn't want me to have that satisfaction, she had to spoil it; she had to be seen to be giving him back to me. And why didn't she say it before, while we were on our own? No, she had to do it in front of Adam.

But Adam rescued me to some extent. ‘I was about to ask to speak to you alone in order to tell you that I still consider Martha my wife. She is the true wife of my soul, despite all that has passed. Martha?' He put out his hand to me and I got up and took it. My hand was trembling and I was surprised to find that his was shaking too. So strange to be called that name again; I felt myself take on a slightly different shape. Stella said nothing. She fitted a piece into her puzzle, but as we were leaving the room she gave me a gruesome smile.

I led the way into my room. ‘Funny. This was mine when I was a kid,' he said. He pointed out the place on the door-frame where his height had been marked as he grew up. We sat side by side on the bed. All the things that had happened in the past couple of years ached between us. I didn't know what to say or even what I felt except for the most overwhelming love, the sort they call unconditional and that you only have for your own child, it says in the textbooks. But the textbooks are wrong in this case, because even though I knew he was a liar and even though I wasn't sure how genuine all his advice from Jesus was, and even though I'd actually seen him screwing Hannah, and even though he'd done the same with my little sister, I still loved him. Could you get more unconditional than that?

He stood up from the bed and went to the window.

‘This is not how you described the house,' I said to his back.

‘Bedtime stories,' he said. ‘Didn't you like them?'

‘I did, but –'

‘But nothing. I told you stories you would enjoy.'

‘It was lies.'

‘
Stories
, Martha.' He turned and kneeled down in front of me. ‘You're angry,' he said. ‘The baby –'