Playing for the Ashes (14 page)

No one else seems to notice this difference in the sky. When I point it out to Chris, he shields his eyes with his hands and he gives it a look. He says, “Yes. Indeed. By my calculations, we’ve got another two hours of breathable air in our current environment. Shall we live it up or make a run for the Alps?” Then he ruffles my hair and goes down into the cabin where I can hear him start whistling and unshelving all his architecture books.

He’s at work on matching a piece of cornice from a house in Queen’s Park. It’s a fairly easy job because the cornice is wood, which he generally prefers to work with over plaster. He says plaster makes him nervous. He says, “Jesus, Livie, who am I to mess about with an Adam ceiling?” I once thought this was false modesty on his part, considering how many people ask him to work on their houses once the word goes out that another neighbourhood’s being gentrified, but that was before I knew him well. I assumed he was a bloke who’d managed to clean the cobwebs of doubt from every corner of his life. I learned over time that that was a persona he adopted when leadership was called for. The real Chris is just like the rest of us, in possession of a score of uncertainties. He has a nighttime mask that he can pull on when the situation calls for it. In the daytime, however, when power doesn’t count as far as he’s concerned, he is who he is.

I’ve wished from the first that I could be more like Chris. Even when I was the most cheesed off at him—in the beginning when I dragged other blokes back here to the barge with that nasty, knowing little smile of mine and shagged them till they howled and I was sure Chris knew what I was doing and to whom—I still wanted to be like him. I yearned to exchange bodies and souls with him. I wanted to feel free to lay myself out and say, “Here, this is who I am underneath all the cock,” just like Chris and because I couldn’t do that, because I couldn’t
be
him, I tried to hurt him instead. I sought to push him to the edge and over. I wanted to destroy him, because if I could destroy him, then it meant his entire way of living was a lie. And I needed that to be the case.

I’m ashamed of the person I was. Chris says there’s no point to shame. He says, “You were what you had to be, Livie. Let it go,” but I’m never able to do that. Every time I think I’m close to opening my hand, spreading my fingers, and letting memory spill out into the water like sand, something jars me and stops me. Sometimes it’s a piece of music I hear or a woman’s laughter when it’s high-pitched and false. Sometimes it’s the sour smell of laundry left unwashed too long. Sometimes it’s the sight of a face gone hard with sudden anger or a glance exchanged with a stranger whose eyes look opaque with despair. And then I’m an unwilling traveller, swept back through time and deposited on the doorstep of who I was. “I can’t forget,” I tell Chris, especially if I’ve woken him when the cramps take my legs and he’s come to my room with Beans and Toast at his heels and a glass of warm milk, which he insists I drink. “You don’t have to forget,” he says as the dogs settle on the floor at his feet. “Forgetting means you’re afraid to learn from the past. But you’ve got to forgive.” And I drink the milk even though I don’t want it, with both hands lifting the glass to my mouth, trying to keep from groaning with the pain. Chris notices. He sets to with massaging. The muscles loosen again.

When this happens, I say, “I’m sorry.” He says, “What’ve you got to be sorry for, Livie?”

There’s the question, all right. When I hear him ask it, it’s like the music, the laughter, the laundry, the sight of a face, the casual exchange of a glance. I’m the traveller again, swept back and swept back to face who I was.

Twenty years old and pregnant. I called it the thing. I didn’t see it as a baby growing inside of me as much as I saw it as an inconvenience. Richie saw it as an excuse to clear out. He was gracious enough to settle the account with the desk clerk before he disappeared, but he was ungracious enough to let the desk clerk know that I was officially “on my own” from that time on. I’d burned enough bridges with the Commodore’s staff. They were only too happy to evict me.

Once I was on the street, I had a cup of coffee and a sausage roll in a caff across from Bayswater Station. I considered my options. I stared at the familiar red, white, and blue of the underground sign until its logic and the cure for my ills became apparent. There it was, the entrance to both the Circle and District lines, barely thirty yards from where I was sitting. And just two stops to the south was High Street Kensington. What the hell, I thought. I decided then and there that the least I could do in this lifetime was give Mother a chance to drop her Elizabeth Fry act in exchange for a good bout of Florence Nightingale. I went home.

You’re wondering why they took me back. I expect you’re one of the sort who never cause their parents a moment’s grief, aren’t you, so you probably can’t fathom why someone such as myself would have been welcomed back anywhere. You’ve forgotten the basic de
fin
ition of home: a place where you go, you knock on the door, you look repentant, and they let you in. Once you’re inside with your bags unpacked, you break whatever bad news has brought you there in the
fir
st place.

I waited two days to tell Mother about the pregnancy, coming upon her while she was marking papers from one of her English classes. She was in the dining room at the front of the house, with three stacks of essays piled on the table in front of her and a pot of Darjeeling tea steaming at her elbow. I picked a paper from the top of a stack and idly read the first sentence. I can still remember it: “In exploring the character of Maggie Tulliver, the reader is left to ponder the distinction between fate and doom.” How prophetic.

I tossed the paper down. Mother looked up, raising her eyes above the level of her reading glasses without lifting her head.

“I’m pregnant,” I told her.

She set her pencil down. She took off her glasses. She poured herself another cup of tea. No milk, no sugar, but she stirred it anyway. “Does he know?”

“Obviously.”

“Why obviously?”

“He’s done a runner, hasn’t he?”

She sipped. “I see.” She picked up her pencil and tapped it against her little
fin
ger. She smiled for a moment. She shook her head. She was wearing gold earrings in the shape of coiled ropes and a necklace to match. I remember how they all glittered in the light.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said. Another sip of tea. “I thought you’d come to your senses and broken away from him. I thought that’s why you’d returned.”

“What difference does it make? It’s over. I’m back. Isn’t that good enough?”

“What do you intend to do now?”

“About the kid?”

“About your life, Olivia.”

I hated the schoolmarm in her tone. I said, “It’s my business, isn’t it? Maybe I’ll have the kid. Maybe I won’t.”

I knew what I intended to do, but I wanted her to be the one to suggest it. She’d been posing as a woman of Great Social Conscience for so many years, and I felt the need to unmask her.

She said, “I’ll need to think about this,” and went back to her papers.

I said, “Whatever,” and began to leave the room.

As I passed her chair, she put out her hand to stop me, resting it for a minute—and I suppose unintentionally—on my stomach where her grandchild grew. “We won’t be telling your father,” she said. So I knew what she meant to do.

I shrugged. “I doubt he’d understand. Is Dad clear on where babies come from in the
fir
st place?”

“Don’t make a mockery of your father, Olivia. He’s more of a man than what walked out on you.”

I used my index finger and thumb to remove her hand from my body. I left the room.

I heard her get up and go to the sideboard; she opened a drawer and rustled round for a moment. Then she went to the morning room, punched some numbers into the phone, and began to talk.

She made the arrangements for three weeks later. Clever of her. She wanted me to stew. In the meantime, we playacted at something between normal family life and a guarded truce. Mother tried several times to engage me in conversation about the past—largely dominated by Richie Brewster—and the future—a return to Girton College. But never did she mention the baby.

It was nearly a month after Richie left me at the Commodore when I had the abortion. Mother drove me, with her hands high on the steering wheel and her foot pumping the accelerator in fits and starts. She’d chosen a clinic as far north in Middlesex as one could go, and as she drove us there through a dreary morning of rain and diesel fumes, I wondered if she’d picked this particular clinic to make certain we didn’t come across any of her acquaintances. That would be exactly like her, I thought, that would be utterly in hypocritical character. I hunched in my seat. I shoved my hands into the opposite arms of my jacket. I felt my mouth tighten.

I said, “I need a fag.”

She said, “Not in the car.”

“I want a fag.”

“That’s not possible.”

“I want it!”

She pulled over to the pavement. She said, “Olivia, you simply cannot—”

“Cannot what? Can’t smoke or it’ll hurt the baby? What shit.”

I wasn’t looking at her. I was staring out of the window, watching two men unload dry cleaning from a yellow van and rustle it into the doorway of a Sketchley’s. I could feel Mother’s anger and her attempt to master it. I enjoyed the fact that not only was I still able to provoke her, but that she had to battle to keep her persona in place whenever she and I were together.

She said with great care, “I was going to say that you cannot go on like this, Olivia.”