Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel (33 page)

What’s your story?
I asked him in my head.
Why are you alone? Why are you so numb to everything going on around you?

He didn’t answer, obviously. I moved my gaze further up the horizon, to the gray sea topped with white foam, fighting a battle with itself that didn’t need to be won.

I looked down to find I was resting my hand on my abdomen. The skin was taut and warm, I could feel the blood moving under my hand. In all the times Mal and Stephanie had done that, I hadn’t. I knew it was important not to touch the baby, acknowledge it, engage with it when it was not going to be mine. If I bonded with it, connected with it, then how would I be able to give it to its parents? Now I was touching it.

And in two days, I’d be doing this thing.

My hand slid over the warm skin, and I felt it. Movement. Slight, fleeting, but movement deep inside. I snatched my hand away as all the different emotions that had been bundled up in a tight ball inside me unwrapped themselves.

I’m pregnant.

With Malvolio’s baby.

I’m pregnant with the baby of the first man I ever loved.

It wasn’t anyone else’s baby. It wasn’t a man I’d been casually dating for a few weeks. It wasn’t Keith, who I’d only just split up
with. It was Mal. I’d known him a lifetime. If we had been more honest with each other, this would be something we had planned and were doing together.

But he didn’t want the baby and I had not intended to do this at this point in my life.

I wasn’t sixteen, but I was on my own.

I was a twenty-nine-year-old knocked-up teenager. And I hadn’t even had sex to get myself into this condition. I couldn’t have a baby. I couldn’t bring up a baby on my own.

But I couldn’t lose the only little part of Malvolio I had left.

I moved my hand to my abdomen again. Felt it again. Deep inside, fluttering, small little flutterings. Tears started to leak from my eyes as I waited to feel it for a third time. Just once more I would feel it, then I’d stop doing this. I’d distance myself again.

I had training to complete, a research paper to finish writing, a round-the-world trip to go on.

I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t have a baby on my own.

I couldn’t. That was all there was to it. I couldn’t.

B
y the time the baby’s due date—a day burnt into my mind—arrived, Mal had completely shut off from me.

And he cried all the time.

Even when there were no tears, his eyes had the haunted hollowness of someone who was sobbing inside.

I wanted to help him but he wouldn’t let me near. The crying he did alone, shut away in the room that was once going to be the nursery. He slept with his back to me, like a solid wall of flesh that kept the world out. He talked to me with empty words, in sentences that held no deeper meaning. He used to weave everything he said with the strands of the depth of his love. Now, he talked to me because he had to. Now, everything he said was flat and meaningless.

The grief was so huge, so immense that he was floundering in it. Swimming blind as he would in a raging sea at night. Swimming against the crashing waves and getting nowhere. Every day, he was dragged further down, into those depths. Away from the surface. Away from life. Away from me. All he clung to was the loss. Nothing else mattered. I wanted to take his hand, swim us both to safety. To make him whole again; to soothe his wounds and help him heal.

But he would not reach for me. Instead, he flinched away, preferring to do this alone. He blamed me. He blamed himself. And he blamed me.

I blamed myself, as well. But I also blamed her. Nova. This was her fault, her responsibility, too. If not for her …

Mostly, I blamed myself. Mostly, I wanted him to stop crying, to stop hurting, to stop grieving with every piece of his soul.

I didn’t understand the loss that he and Nova shared. I doubted I ever would. But I understood my husband. And soon, I’d lose him. The one thing I tried to stop by doing what I did, saying what I said, would happen. But this time I wouldn’t lose him to another woman and her unborn baby, I wouldn’t lose him to her and her child; I’d lose him to himself.

I could see it happening: he was going to drown in his grief, he was going to be pulled so far down he wouldn’t be able to break the surface. He would be dragged down to those bleak, gray depths and would never start living again. And all I’d be able to do was stand on the shore and watch.

I
sat up in bed, exhausted, sore, flitting between complete despair and complete euphoria.

Every few seconds, I would glance at the clear cot beside my bed. At him.
Him.
A living gurgle, wrapped up in a white blanket, lying two feet from me. I’d lost a lot of blood, the doctors told me, so I was to stay in an extra day. Every time I glanced at him—his face turned upwards toward the ceiling, his wrinkled eyelids resting together, his mouth open a fraction, his cheeks a reddened mocha—I wondered what I’d done.

Have I made the biggest mistake of my life?
I kept asking myself.
Should I have done what I intended to do when I went to Brighton?

I looked away from the little boy and found her standing at the end of my bed. Even though visiting hours were over and my family had just left (the poor beleaguered nurses had tried fruitlessly to get only two of them to stay), she was back. Standing there in her black overcoat, her blue scarf draped around her neck, her black bag on her shoulder.

She knows
, I realized.
Aunt Mer knows.
The look on her face when she first saw him popped up in my mind: momentary shock, quickly brushed over by elation and delight.

“When Malvolio was born, his cheeks were so red,” she said, staring at my son, remembering hers. “And he had these thick,
thick curls. So blond.” With the gentlest touch, she stroked her forefinger over the tips of my boy’s dark, curly hair. “Your father walked all the way to the hospital to see me the day after he was born because it was Sunday and there were no buses. Your mother wanted to come, but she was close to having you and could hardly move.”

She looked away from the little boy at me. “He’s so beautiful.”

I nodded, slowly, carefully. “You can hold him, if you want,” I said to her. Out of everyone who had visited, she hadn’t held him. “I’m too shaky,” she had said; now I knew it was because she might betray herself and so betray me.

“Thank you, no. I wouldn’t want to disturb him.” Her face, soft and gentle, creased into a deep smile as she stared at her grandson. “When Malvolio was born, all you had to do was look at him a bit too hard and he’d wake up.”

“This one likes his sleep,” I said to Aunt Mer.

“Good for him,” she said. “And you, of course.”

“Yes, good for me.”

“I told Malvolio you’d had your baby and that I was coming to see you today,” she said, her softness now smoothed over with regret. “If I had known …”

“It’s OK, Aunt Mer, you can tell him whatever you want. I really don’t mind. And if you hadn’t, Mum, Dad or Cordy would have.”

“Do you know what you’re going to call him yet?” she asked.

“Yes. But I’m going to try it out just between the two of us before I tell anyone?” I phrased it as a question so that she wouldn’t feel offended.

“I remember when I wanted to call Malvolio Malvolio. Everyone tried to talk me out of it. But I always knew if I had a son that was what I would name him.”

“Because that was the first play Uncle Victor took you to see,” I said before I could stop myself. I had lived twenty years without repeating that to anyone.

“How did you know that?” she asked, looking a little upset. Uncertain. Scared. Aunt Mer didn’t like to be startled. And if I told her the truth, God knows what it might do to her.

“I kind of guessed over the years that it must have had some sort of significance. It’s so unusual.”

“It’s at times like this that I miss Victor the most,” she said with a sad smile. “I know how much he would have loved to be here. I know it doesn’t seem important, but he was sad that he missed Malvolio’s birth. Even being there at Victoria’s birth didn’t make up for it. He missed his firstborn coming into the world. That weighed heavy on him, I know it did.” Her grin grew. “And it obviously meant he would have been able to stop me calling him Malvolio.”

I laughed.

A lot of people—Mal included—didn’t think that Uncle Victor loved Aunt Mer, but I did. Aunt Mer did. But then, maybe that’s because Aunt Mer and I were always hopeless romantics; we believed in the unending, redemptive power of love.

Uncle Victor did time for her. We weren’t even born when he went into prison. We’d been told that he went in for fraud, but we found out years later it was far more serious: Grievous Bodily Harm with intent to kill. The person had called Aunt Mer a lunatic and said she should be locked up, not knocked up. Uncle Victor went crazy. Several witnesses all testified that the man in question had been goading Uncle Victor (who was of good character) for weeks, and had only hit upon that particular button by accident. The reason Uncle Victor was sent to prison was that he showed no remorse. His lawyer had told him to
apologize to the man, to apologize to the court, to throw himself on the judge’s mercy and reassure them it wouldn’t happen again, especially since he had a baby on the way. “I’d rather have the death sentence than apologize when I’m not at all sorry,” Uncle Victor had said. (I heard Mum and Dad discussing it years and years later.)

As a result, he served five years; each one of them was hard and difficult and left him scarred inside and out, but he would do it again and again. Because no one talked about or to Aunt Mer like she didn’t matter.

He never stayed with her, though. That was the deepest sadness. He loved her, but couldn’t handle her illness and had to remove himself from her. He had been a builder before he was sent down—we were told originally that he was working away, then when the local grapevine put paid to that, they told us he was in prison for fraud and not to listen to what anyone else said—and when he came out of prison he decided to leave to find work. Everyone around our way knew what he had done and so wouldn’t hire him, so he traveled the country looking for work, living away, sending money home and returning every so often—usually during the quieter winter months—to live with Mal, Aunt Mer and Victoria. Winter was quieter in many ways—the dark skies, cold weather and general barrenness in the world also quietened Aunt Mer. She was much more depressed in winter, and for Uncle Victor that meant she was easier to handle.

He had to watch her carefully, because the likelihood that she would try to … went up. But he could cope with that. Much more than the highs. Which made her into a different person almost. She was still Aunt Mer but she would talk quickly, do unusual things, spend all the money they had and every penny
they didn’t have, clean maniacally, come up with fantastical schemes (like digging up the garden in the middle of the night looking for archaeological finds), not sleep, not eat.

Uncle Victor loved Aunt Mer, of that I was sure, but he could not live with her for any length of time. He just wasn’t strong enough. Physically he was, emotionally he wasn’t. I used to think it was because he couldn’t stand to see her suffer and know that he couldn’t do anything to stop it; I used to think that he hated himself for not being able to love her better, for not being able to give her enough to keep her well and stable. But I was an old romantic. And as I had discovered over the years, all relationships had their secret coves and hidey-holes, and no one on the outside could ever truly know what lay buried in them.

“I had better be going, dear, I told your parents that I had forgotten these.” She reached into her bag and pulled out her blue wool gloves. “I don’t like telling white lies, but I wanted to tell you he’s beautiful.”

I smiled at her.

“Really”—her voice caught in her throat, a silent sob she managed to choke back—“beautiful.”

“Do you think I did the right thing?” I asked her before she turned away. Now that she knew a part of it, and she probably thought Mal and I had been having an affair, I had to ask. I wasn’t sure, still, if I should have gone through with the other option.

Her face softened with the biggest smile I had seen her give in years. “Absolutely,” she replied. “I couldn’t imagine the world without him. Can you?”

I glanced over at my son. My son. Holy God in heaven.
My
son.

“No,” I replied, a rush of protective emotions surging through me. “No, I can’t.”

W
hat Mal and I need is a holiday.

I’m washing up the tea service Meredith gave us, and I’m feeling more positive. What we need is a break from it all. To get away from the pressures of being here all the time, with only the two of us, everything always the same.

That’s what childless couples are supposed to do: jet off on foreign holidays at the last moment, have sex wherever and whenever we want, spend copious amounts of money on frivolous things. We need to take advantage of the spontaneity being childless gives us. It’s our duty.

Spain? Portugal? Dublin? Milan? Paris? Timbuktu! It’ll be great, wherever we go. As long as we’re together.

And, once we’re both über-relaxed and blissed out, I’ll bring up seeing Leo. Suggest that he talk to Meredith about talking to Nova about seeing him. She still cares for Mal, she must do to name her son for him. Only someone who loved him like I did would notice that, of course: Leo, Malvo
lio.
To do that, she must still have some feelings for him. Which means she may let Mal back into her life, allow him into Leo’s life. And me, as well. But one thing at a time. Mal first.

That will make him happy.

And that’s what I want. So badly, for him to be happy again. To stop missing Nova and missing Leo.

A teacup slips from my fingers and drops the short distance into the washing-up bowl. It doesn’t fall far, but my stomach turns at the sickening crack as it hits something submerged in the soapy water. This tea service is rare. Old, antique, rare. It cost Meredith a lot of money. I didn’t like it, but I appreciated how precious she thought it was. It was meant to last us a lifetime. I pick up the handle, and it comes away with only half of the cup still attached. Without thinking, I reach in with my left hand for the other half and pain shoots through my thumb as a jagged edge of porcelain pierces it. I jerk my hand out of the sink and run it under the cold water tap.