Married Love (3 page)

When Emily got pregnant with her first child, Lottie’s youngest was nine months old and Charis, her eldest, was five. Lottie dumped black bags of used baby things on Emily one evening without warning. — Chuck them out if you don’t want them, she said. — I’ve got no more use for them. I’ve had my tubes tied.

After he finished his degree, Noah went to London and found work intermittently as an assistant cameraman on small film projects. He dropped in at Lottie’s whenever he came home, and they fell easily into their old companionable closeness. She fed him whatever awful mush she had cooked for tea. He was useful for swinging his nieces about and throwing them in the air, all the rough play that Edgar had to be careful of. Often, Edgar wasn’t there; Noah assumed that he was working in his room at the university.

One summer evening, Noah was lying on his back on the floor in Lottie’s front room. Two floor-length sash windows opened from this room on to a wrought-iron balcony; Lottie had made Edgar fix bars across, to stop the girls from getting out there. A warm incense of balsam poplar mingled with petrol fumes breathed from the street.
They
had drunk the bottle of wine that Noah had brought with their teatime mush; while they were giving the girls a bath, Lottie had produced triumphantly from the back of a cupboard a sticky bottle half full of Bacardi that nobody liked, and now they were drinking that, mixed with blackcurrant cordial because that was all she had. — We’ll be horribly, pinkly, sick, Lottie predicted. The girls were asleep at last. While Noah lay supine, Lottie crawled round him on her hands and knees, grunting with the effort, putting away in primary-coloured plastic boxes the primary-coloured toys that were strewn like strange manna all around the carpet.

— I’m grey, she complained. — My life’s so grey.

— When does Edgar get back from work?

— Don’t be thick, Noah. Ed’s retired. The university couldn’t keep on employing him for ever. He’s seventy-two this year. Why d’you think I’ve been going on to you about how hard-up we are?

— Where is he, then?

— At Valerie’s, I expect.

Noah opened his eyes in surprise, angling his head up from the floor to get a look at her. — Oh!

— That’s where he usually is.

— Is that all right?

— Why shouldn’t he? When we’ve been paying half the mortgage for all these years – at least that’s finished at last, thank Christ. There’s a room there where he can work; it’s impossible here. And we don’t have space for a piano. He still likes to write at a piano, before he puts it on the computer.

— So they get on OK, him and Valerie?

— She brings him coffee and plates of sandwiches while he’s working. She unplugs the phone in the hall, in case it disturbs him. He plays things to her. I expect that sometimes while he’s in the throes of composition he forgets he doesn’t live there any more, in that quiet house.

— Mum said the house was old-fashioned.

— It is old-fashioned. Full of antiques, from Valerie’s mother, but Valerie wouldn’t know how to show them off. Valerie doesn’t have a showing-off bone in her body. She’s all complications. She’s a gifted cellist, apparently, but she can’t play in public.

— I suppose you’ve got to know her.

Lottie aimed bricks at a box. — Not in the face-to-face sense. Occasionally she and I do have to talk, about Harold’s allowance or whatever.

— He doesn’t still have an allowance?

— Not after we had the talk. On my wedding night, I tell you, it was like Bartók’s
Bluebeard’s Castle
. My metaphorical wedding night – I don’t actually mean that one night in particular. Behind the first door, the torture chamber; behind the second door, a lake of tears, and so on. Behind the last door were his other wives, alive and well. Well, the first one isn’t exactly alive, but I could tell you all about her.

— I’d forgotten there was a first one.

— Danish, actress, had problems with her abusive father, drank.

— He goes on about them?

— Not really. They’re just his life – they crop up, as
you
can imagine. There’s a lot of life behind him to crop up. Don’t forget, once Valerie was the one he ran away with.

— I’d never thought of it like that.

— Were the babies my revenge? Poor Ed, I’ve nearly killed him.

Lottie lay down on the floor, head to toe with Noah, holding her glass on the soft mound of her stomach, tilting the viscous red drink backward and forward as she breathed.

— Do you know what I did the other week? I was so angry about something – can’t remember what – that I drove up to the recycling depot with the babies in the back of the car to throw my violin into the skip for miscellaneous household waste.

Noah sat upright. — The one Mum and Dad bought for you? Didn’t that cost loads of money? Thousands?

— I didn’t actually do it. I looked down into the skip and got the violin out of the case to throw, and then I put it away again. Apart from anything else, I told myself, I could always sell it. And it’s possible I might want to start again, when this is over. But probably I won’t, ever.

— Is Edgar any good? Noah demanded drunkenly, suddenly aggressive. — I mean, is his music really, actually any good?

— Noah, how can you ask that? You’re not allowed to ask that.

Although Lottie protested, the question seemed intimately known to her, as if she had thrown herself too often against its closed door. — How can I judge? I can’t
tell
. I think he’s good. He’s writing something at the moment, for strings. It’ll get a premiere at the Festival. It’s something new, different. Actually, I think it might be lovely.

Just then they heard Edgar’s deliberate slow step on the stairs, his key in the door to the flat.

— He pretends this new piece is for me. But I know it’s not about me.

Edgar stood squinting at them from the doorway, getting used to the light; his khaki hooded waterproof and stooped shoulders gave him, incongruously, the toughened, bemused aura of an explorer returned. Noah imagined how infantile he and Lottie must look, lying on the floor among the toys with their bright red drinks, and how uninteresting youth must sometimes seem.

— We’re finishing up that Bacardi, Ed, Lottie said, enunciating too carefully. — Do you want some?

Edgar’s eyes these days had retreated behind his jutting cheekbones and sprouting eyebrows; something suave had gone out of his manner. He said that he would rather have a hot drink. Forgetfully he waited, as if he expected Lottie to jump up and make it for him. When he remembered after a moment, and went into the kitchen to do it himself, he didn’t imply the least reproach; he was merely absorbed, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. Noah saw how hungrily from where she lay Lottie followed the ordinary kitchen music – the crescendo of the kettle, the chatter of crockery, the punctuation of cupboard doors, the chiming of the spoon in the cup – as if she might hear in it something that was meant for her.

SHELLEY WAS HELPING
out her friend Pam. Pam had her own cleaning business, but her employees were so unreliable that she ended up doing half the work herself. She’d been hired to do a scrub-off – meaning a thorough cleaning, right down to basics – at an industrial warehouse somewhere at the edge of the city. Shelley had agreed to go along; it was a few weeks before Christmas, and she could do with the extra money. When she went outside to wait for Pam it was still night, the stars showing in the sky like flecks of broken glass. Pam was late as usual, but Shelley hadn’t wanted to wait inside in case the doorbell woke the others: her daughter and baby granddaughter were asleep upstairs. She felt herself growing heavy and thick with cold. You forgot about the cold – the house had central heating, and winters weren’t like they used to be. When Shelley was a child, she’d wrapped her scarf around her head and mouth on the way to school, trying to trap the warmth of her breath inside; these days, you hardly needed a
scarf
. The phase of life Shelley was in now, anyway, the heat of her body came and went in blasts, and she had a horror of being caught out in tight clothes.

She could have stamped her feet or flung her arms around, but it was too early in the morning; instead, she let the cold creep into her as if she were made of stone. When the car pulled up at last, she could barely even move towards it, though she could see Pam lit up inside, peering out through the window, looking for her. Pam always drove with the interior light on. She treated her car like just another room in her house – while she was driving, she’d fiddle around with piles of paper and bits of crocheted blanket and boxes of tissues on the passenger seat, hanging on to the steering wheel with her other hand. She was a danger on the road, but Shelley didn’t drive. For a moment, before she headed over to the car, Shelley imagined herself as Pam was seeing her – just another pillar of dark, like the hedge and the phone box and the pebble-dashed end wall of the kitchen extension. She and her husband Roy lived on what had been a council estate, although they had been buying their house for years now.

Pam was fat like a limp saggy cushion, very short, with permed yellow curls that were growing out grey; her face was crumpled like an ancient baby’s. Roy said that Pam and Shelley side by side looked like Little and Large, because Shelley was tall and thin. She had never been one to eat too much. Her only weakness was tea with sugar; she drank a lot of that – couldn’t give it up. Her daughter Kerry said her insides must be black.

— Hiya, Shell.

Pam leaned over to open the door, then began throwing stuff into the back seat. — I’ve had a letter off the hospital about my gallstones.

All Pam’s conversations began as if you hadn’t stopped talking since you last saw her; they were as cluttered as her car. The heater was on high, belting out a stinging warmth that smelled of the little cardboard pine-tree air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror.

— What gallstones?

— Well, they may not be. I’ve got to go in on the fifteenth. Typical – that’s the day John wants the car to go and see his sister in Tamworth. I said to him, ‘You’ll have to fix another day.’ He says he doesn’t want to mess her around. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve got a lot of time for his sister.

Pam’s husband John was meant to do the books for the cleaning business, but as far as Shelley could see he sat in front of the telly and did nothing, while Pam went driving about all over the place like a mad thing – and the car was forever breaking down. John used to be a plasterer. He was supposed to have damaged his leg years ago, falling from a scaffold, but Shelley had seen him limp with a different leg on different days. Pam was a good worker, though. Once she got into a job, she stuck at it until the sweat was running off her, she wouldn’t give up. Shelley was like that too. They didn’t make a bad team.

They crossed the river. It was at low tide, sunk to a twisting channel between flanks of mud glinting with moonlight. A notice outside the red brick warehouse,
which
was not much more than a two-storey shed, warned that it was patrolled by security dogs, but there was no sign of them. Pam stopped in the empty car park, and they got out some of their kit from the boot; the employers were supposed to provide equipment, but sometimes they left out broken old mops or brooms so heavy you could hardly lift them.

Shelley switched her mobile off before she started working; otherwise, she couldn’t concentrate. Her son Anthony was in Afghanistan. Roy said that statistically Anthony would be in more danger if he were still playing with his rugby club, but Shelley was always waiting for some dreadful kind of message. There was a big operation under way. Anthony had told them that he’d had his leave cancelled, but Roy was sure he’d volunteered to stay. It wasn’t only that her son might be killed or injured – Shelley pushed those possibilities right down in her mind until they weren’t any more than shapes in the dark. She never watched the news; she only listened in from the kitchen while the others watched it. But when there was that fuss about the friendly-fire incident with the Danish soldiers, she fixated on the idea that Anthony had been involved in it, even though Roy insisted that he’d been nowhere near where it had happened. — Why d’you have to make up trouble, he said, — as if there wasn’t enough of the real thing?

Inside, the warehouse was a big open hall, divided into metal cages piled high with different grades of insulating material. Yellow forklifts were parked as if
resting
in the aisles between them. Fibrous orange dust was everywhere, but Shelley and Pam weren’t contracted to clean the warehouse itself – the men were supposed to do that. The canteen and toilets were along one wall, the offices upstairs on a sort of mezzanine. You could see why they needed the scrub-off: the regular cleaners hadn’t been doing much of a job. All the pipes in the canteen were thick with dust. Under the plate rack on the draining board and at the bottom of the plastic pot for the cutlery was a murky grey sludge. The toilets stank; the cleaners had actually mopped around a roll of toilet paper that had fallen on to the floor, not bothering to pick it up. One of the sinks was blocked and full of scummy water.

To be fair, Pam said, the boss had only been paying the regulars for two hours a day, which wasn’t enough: there was a kitchenette and a separate toilet upstairs with the offices, too. Two hours would be just enough time to wash the cups and plates and put them away, and give the toilets a quick once-over; to do the place properly you’d need four hours at least. Shelley knew what it was like if you had a job like this: you got your regular routine going, and then that was all you saw; you played your music and went into a kind of dream, wiping and sweeping, until you hardly knew what you were doing, just going through the motions. But she wasn’t the sort of person who took on this kind of work as a regular thing. She had a proper job at a school as a lunchtime supervisor. She wasn’t such a fool, either – she knew that somewhere like this, if they saw that you were
keeping
it clean in two hours they’d cut you down to an hour and a half. Why should you care whether the place was as filthy as hell?