We Had It So Good (35 page)

“‘Of course it has.' Which was a lie, but I wasn't going to tell her the truth.

“She said, ‘You knew I wanted babies. I wanted them so much it was an ache in my body, I couldn't sleep for it. Have you never felt that? Lying there tossing and turning because your bones are hurting with the need to have a child inside you?'

“‘No.'

“‘Then you don't know you're alive, to make something grow. That's the thing!'

“‘I'm not a machine, making children to replace the ones you couldn't have.'

“‘You're selfish.'

“‘Antonia, you're the most selfish person who has ever lived. When did you ever do anything for anyone? You weren't a mother to me, you were always in the fucking garden.'

“‘Don't be ridiculous, I loved you, I still do.'

“‘And how have you ever expressed it?'

“‘How could I have expressed it? I haven't seen you since you were twenty-one. You went away. I still don't understand why.'

“‘Because of him, of course.'

“‘Who? The boy who got you pregnant?'

“‘No, my father.'

“‘Did you have an argument?'

“‘I wouldn't call it that.'

“‘Oh. I see now. Did
he
get rid of it?'

“‘Yes.'

“‘He was such a cruel man, he knew how much I wanted another child.'

“‘Cruel to you? What about me?'

“‘What do you mean?'

“‘He performed an abortion on his own daughter.'

“‘Well, you should have gone elsewhere.'

“‘How could I? It was illegal.'

“‘Then you could have come home and had it, and we would have been happy.'

“‘What a stupid idea. I wouldn't have been happy.'

“‘And are you happy now?'

“And then I got up and slammed the door and went to my room. I was lying in bed, dreaming, I was dreaming I was a bird and then I was woken by birds, in the trees outside the window and my hands were trembling, as if they wanted to turn themselves into wings.

“The sun was coming up over the garden and my mother knocked and entered with a cup of tea. ‘I thought you might like this,' she said, ‘though I've no idea, you always slept in and had no breakfast.'

“She sat on the edge of the bed and started talking. ‘I see now that you believe I have not been much of a mother to you. I'll try to explain. Your father promised me babies, lots of babies, and a life in the country away from town, which I always hated. Those ghastly debs' balls, and the parties and the chinless wonders and the awful stiff frocks they made you wear. I was prepared to put up with his common ways because he liked sex and he was a doctor, a children's doctor—what could go wrong? Well, me, I couldn't make them live.
I went on trying until my ovaries packed up when I was forty-two, I still thought there could be a baby up to the last moment.'

“I said, ‘You refused to love the baby you actually had.'

“‘I adored you. But you were your father's daughter right from the beginning, a daddy's girl. You were in love with him.'

“‘In love? I hated him.'

“‘You had an odd way of showing it.'

“‘What do you mean?'

“‘Do you remember when you were thirteen and you came down to breakfast in your dressing gown and I told you that you were revealing yourself in the chest and you should cover yourself up?' And Philip said, ‘Let's take a look at the mammary development,' and you showed him.

“‘But he was a doctor, a pediatrician, I thought…'

“‘You had a cunt, dear. That's all he cared about. He didn't ever touch you, did he?'

“Of course he didn't touch me, I wish now that he had because then it would have all been over long ago, but I just stared at her and said, ‘No.'

“‘I thought not. He wouldn't bloody dare. I warned him. I'd have murdered him and chopped his head off and buried his body in the garden and his head in the woods. So he got his revenge by making you fall in love with him.'

“But I was never in love with him, you don't think I was, do you, Andrea? She said I was, she said, ‘Oh, Grace, you had a thwarted sexual attraction, it was an unrequited romance. And then you went to him when you were pregnant. You silly girl.'

“I said, ‘Why did you stay with him if you knew what he was like?'

“‘You don't understand marriage. You don't just leave when it doesn't suit you. I did have lunch with Mummy but she was crowing. I told you, she said, I warned you not to marry beneath you. So I was too proud to admit I'd made a mistake. And Mummy said all men have their mistresses, you just put up with it.'

“‘But if you had taken me away when I was younger, everything would have been different. My whole life.'

“‘Yes, I suppose that's right, but you see he promised me he wouldn't touch you, and I thought that the not touching was what mattered.'

“She stood up and said, ‘Before you go, I just wanted to say that your things from Oxford are still in the attic in your trunk, your books and your clothes, if you want to take them. I cleared out the room but I didn't throw anything away.'

“‘Where is my childhood?'

“‘What do you mean?'

“‘I can't see a single picture, or an album.'

“‘Go into the attic, you'll find everything there.'

“‘I'm leaving as soon as I'm dressed, I'm going back to London. Where are my shoes?'

“‘I cleaned them for you.'

“‘You cleaned my shoes? Why?'

“‘Guests always have their shoes cleaned. I was taught that at home.'

“I went up into the attic and found the boxes of old things. They didn't seem terribly interesting when I saw them now, along with golf clubs, panama hats and a croquet set. No, it was definitely time to move on. It was pointless coming, I warned you it would be. I couldn't be bothered to look for the hats.

“I went down to the garden to say good-bye. She was doing something with the roses. I said, ‘By the way, where did you have Daddy buried?'

“‘I had him cremated and put his ashes on the compost heap.'

“Is this over now? Can I stop this relentless self-examination, because it's driving me crazy. Have I earned my right to stay under your roof? I'm definitely thinking about making hats, I want to be a milliner, hats with ears and hats with horns. I could make hats in my sleep.”

Dearest Marianne,

I am so sorry that it has taken so long for me to get to a computer so I can email you. I wanted you to know that I am out of the hospital at long last and back at home and Lucy is looking after me splendidly, with the help of a nurse who comes in every day. I'm in a chair now and the hope is that they'll be able to fit me with prosthetic legs quite soon. They have even brought around catalogues to show me the different options available, it's like choosing a new car!

I have set up this special email account so we can go on talking, but only if you wish. I do understand how bereft and isolated you must have felt, how shut out, but I am sure you can understand that there was no other option. Now is not the moment to tell Lucy that I have for so long lived another life, with you. So you must be strong, and you must do what I have always asked—find someone, get married, have children. You don't know what you are missing, and indeed until the attack I didn't really understand that family is everything, it is everything.

I am quite hopeful for the future. I know I will live with pain, but pain can be managed, and fortunately I know what to ask for, and what doses. I will return to work in a few months,
though not, of course, to what I did abroad. I don't even think I want to. Lying in the tunnel, waiting for someone to come, if someone was going to come, I realized that that other world had reached out its long arm and come to me. I once said to you that you can't stop genocide with a stethoscope. I no longer know why I tried. In the past few years, the only reason I went on going abroad, into the war zones, was you, to be with you. I loved you.

And I was punished for it.

I'm sorry, darling, I'm a Catholic and I cannot escape sin and guilt and punishment and forgiveness and redemption. Right now I'm lying here learning to forgive those misguided young boys who got on those trains. Why should I hate them? What is the point? No, I pray for God's love to enter the hearts of all those who hate.

Write to me sometime, if you like, but please, don't be under any illusions that what we had before will be again, as long as you understand that.

With tenderness,

Janek

M
ax was waiting for his baby to be born. He already knew they were going to have a son and that the son would not be deaf like his mother, he would grow up oppressed by noise, by traffic, drills, sirens, alarms, shouting. The cacophony of music would assault his ears with its electric guitar chords and the screeching voices of opera and the horrible bang bang of drums. But he would be able to hear applause.

Cheryl had drawn up a spreadsheet of the coming expenses and how they were to be met; it made sense for her to return to work as soon as she had had the baby. Max would get up in the night when he heard his son crying while she slept on beside him, unable to hear their child.

He knew what his father thought about this arrangement. He did not know how to deal with Cheryl, was too clumsy to learn to sign and so much of his reality was about sitting at the kitchen table holding forth about an article he had read on the internet, usually, these days, about Muslims.

Max's grandfather was still staying with Stephen and Andrea, it had been months. He seemed not to be in a hurry to go home and the bruises on his face were taking time to subside, not surprising in such an old guy. Grace was still there and she too showed no sign of leaving. To Max, who, he acknowledged himself,
did not have a well-developed sense of humor, this ménage was incomprehensible. Cheryl saw the funny side of it, the mismatched household, Si sitting down to watch a TV soap and inviting Grace to join him, the pair of them in separate armchairs, the old man near the set with the volume turned up, crouched as if on all fours and his face illuminated by its high-definition glow; Grace bolt upright, incredulous. “So who do you think is the father of this kid?” Si would say, for all soaps seemed to depend on disputed parenthood. And Grace would reply, “The one with the face like a brick, of course.” “You think so? If you ask me it's the good-looking one.”

It was autumn. Cheryl grew and grew. She could no longer dance and took refuge in a new hobby, embroidery; he understood that he had married a self-improver, while he had a single fixation, learning new magic tricks. He wished his bones could be replaced by an as-yet-uninvented substance which had rubber in it, so he could bend his limbs in every direction.

Cheryl told him Marianne was approaching a crisis. Marianne had learned to sign and could communicate adequately but without nuance or expression. Throughout these rudimentary conversations, Cheryl watched her sister-in-law's face. There was something terrible in there, she believed, a dark implosion was imminent. She sent Max to her flat to take her by surprise and find out what she was doing when she did not have on the mask of preparation.

Max rang the bell. There was no reply, she might be out and he had had a wasted journey across London but he rang again. He thought he should initiate a bell code with her, so she would always know it was him. After some time, her voice emerged into the street from the intercom.

The flat felt like a grave. Her laptop was on the table, she seemed to have been writing an email.

She was very thin. Years ago she had started to eat only half of what was on her plate and she had lost her excess weight, but now
she seemed to eat just a few mouthfuls. He had no idea when she had last been on a job, and when he asked her, she said she couldn't work, was living off her savings.

He knew she had a couple of pals she went around with, young women from college who like her had not found permanent relationships. Dawn and Isobel. Together they maintained a social life, but she hadn't spoken of them for some time. It seemed strange to him that she had grown up into his introversion while he had widened his social circle through his wife and all the magicians he knew on the circuit. She had made a fateful choice there on the road, when she was ambushed and her car stolen, and Janek had turned up in the UN vehicle and she had followed him like a dog because she wanted to get into Srebrenica.

He could see what she was doing, she was going the same way as their father, living life on the internet, and the first thing to do was to get her out of the house, turn the damned thing off. He had no use for computers, Cheryl dealt with all of that. Max liked solid objects to manipulate, not screens. And his sister was being drawn into the beige box, to email land.

He persuaded her to go for a walk. It was late September and the trees were heavy with wet leaves from the morning's shower, but the sun was still warm on the concrete, an Indian summer, and so many women and young girls, he noticed, dressed like Gypsies in long cotton skirts. It must be the fashion. But Marianne was in her jeans, and only her T-shirt strained around her heavy chest. She's becoming very gaunt, he thought, and it doesn't suit her. There were spots around her chin, she should have grown out of that by now.

They set off down the street to the park, which was full of young mothers with their children in pushchairs or running along the paths or buying ice creams. He reminded her of their childhood holidays in Cornwall, on the beach watching the china clay ships come in and out. She nodded. “Yes,” she said, “we had a lovely time.”

They walked on, remembering how it was on the sand, their
parents watchfully looking after them, the sun fading below a cloud haze, sand in their pants and crabs scuttling in the rock pools and their hands held by grown-up hands as they paddled in the little waves. Then the long stroll back up the hill to their rented cottage, being dried with a towel, and their mother saying, “This was my childhood too,” and their father saying, “I grew up near the ocean, but it was nothing like this, this is just a channel not a real sea. The sea is
huge,
kids, you wait, you'll find out one day.”