The reds were colliding. Not blending and complimenting each other as she’d planned, but crashing in and out of space like blood spattering, competing to make a mess of her creation. Lynn laid down her paintbrush and glanced at the clock. Vera would be arriving in 20 minutes. The thought of this in itself was irritating, demeaning. She had only agreed to it - why? Not because Luke had been so pleased at the solution. Lynn smiled as she realised the truth: it was malicious, unkind, powerful. It was the opportunity to visit her own poor choices on somebody else. Vera, the career woman, who could have had both, had forsaken her career already. For her.
Lynn cast one last stroke across the surreal canvas. It was better than the last and she would have liked to continue, but she did not wish to be caught so exposed. It would take at least 15 minutes for her to clean out the palette, and lock the door and make her way upstairs to change out of her painting clothes. It had been the only joy for Lynn of the past weeks - allowing herself to paint more often. At first, after Philip, it was a cathartic remedy she limited like medicine. She squeezed it carefully onto the palette.
The paint was a dark blue-black. Philip had been gone for three weeks. She said ‘gone’ and not ‘died’ around the boys and now even inside her own head. He had been gone frequently in the years they’d been together. When John was a baby, wrapped in her arms, refusing to be laid even for a moment in his cot, she would count sometimes the hours in which Philip was gone. Count them down, looking forward to the moment at which he would burst through the door filling her with support and company and friendship undimmed. Sharing with her the indescribable wonder of their sons that nobody else would ever quite understand. Creating with her four walls of sleepless, nappy-filled, unexpected… bliss.
He always came back to her then.
And told her when he was going. Gave her time to plan.
She picked up the brush she’d tentatively purchased from the shop in the high street. She had set up the canvas in her garden room at the back of the house and locked the door. John was still at school and Luke wasn’t due home until the weekend, but she couldn’t risk their finding a crack in her exterior. It was necessary for her to seem undefeated.
Luke had not cried, at least not in front of her.
John had wept for days.
She hadn’t painted since Cambridge, since those endless days on sunny riverbanks. Why did she crave the brush now? To see him again. To remember him. To depict without decision the sweep of his hair, the gaze of his eyes, those early picnic dinners on student floors. When she was finished she stared at the images for hours. Longingly.
Lynn caught herself daydreaming and glanced around the room, inspecting the canvasses that she had begun that day. The paintings were like a diary of the last 15 years. Calmer times reflected in cityscapes, and beachfronts and forests from her youth. Other moments, regrets, frustrations, passions, in the sometimes-heady, sometimes-stricken faces of those she loved.
She shook her head. She should cover them. What was the point in remembering a happiness that no longer existed? It had been a foolish path in the first place. Family. Love. A career would not so easily have vanished.
Lynn closed her eyes.
She should have gone to bed earlier. It was unlike her to have stayed awake so late into the night, but the previous evening it had seemed necessary. Panic had begun to sweep over her often now: a sickly, hot sensation that made her kick off the covers or open a window or move around the room despite the pain in her side, for fear of stopping. Or noticing how fast her heart was racing. Or how pitifully nervous she’d become. Poise, people used to call it. She had poise. She’d had poise. Over the years she’d been told this often, and it was something people admired about her, aspired to, something that suggested intelligence and good breeding. She was glad that Luke and John, or worst of all Vera, had not seen her the night before: sweating, fidgeting, turning on the television. The television. She’d watched it until three in the morning, by which time she could hear birds already singing from the tree-lined street. There’d been a programme about reptiles that she’d watched for a while, the intrepid presenter somehow taming a ten-foot python, wild and beautiful, understanding it, showing it off before releasing it once more. After that there’d been only quiz shows, or rolling news of which she’d seen all the stories within the first 10 minutes and drew little satisfaction from the minuscule developments that were occasionally added. Still, she’d been compelled to watch something.
The result however, was this daytime haze that now enveloped her. She ought to shake herself out of it. She ought to clean out the palette and go upstairs. She ought to have done many things differently, and been different herself.
*****************
There is something about Lynn that makes Vera feel crumpled. Dishevelled, as though her clothes are in need of an iron. And condensed somehow, folded, like the piece of paper in her wallet. She sits on the tube, squashed between an old Chinese woman and a slightly pungent teenaged boy, and tries in vain to straighten herself.
She knows that Lynn dislikes her. Lynn barely managed to hide her horror when she and Luke told her about their engagement, and sometimes when they are together, sipping tea and making small talk, Vera catches Lynn glaring. She doesn’t hold it against her. Vera suspects it is because Lynn has seen through her. Luke tells her all the time how good his mother is, how self-sacrificing, how astute, and Vera fears that for all her church-going and toeing of lines, Lynn has somehow spotted her wildness. Her evil.
It is for this reason that leaving work to look after Lynn is so perfect. It will not be easy. It will not be fun. It will be Vera’s punishment, and redemption.
Despite knowing this, Vera has spent the past week concocting improbable fantasies of how things might pass - cosy confidences, raucous moments of laughter, a passing down of womanly secrets. A sharing of son and fiancé. Luke was so thrilled by her offer, touched and effusively grateful. Squeezing her arms beneath his coat he volunteered a ‘something true’, and told her that thanking God for her presence in his life is the first thing he does each morning. Then he kissed her square on the lips in the middle of the park and for once didn’t seem to notice the people walking by. Vera can’t quite quell the spark of hope that has been rising inside of her ever since. If only she can truly befriend Lynn. If only she can be there for her, and for Luke too, be useful, needed, do something good, help him, help them, help ease the transition between now and eternity. Dear God, make me better, make me worthy, make me clean.
Vera so wants to be clean. She wants to be good. When was she last good? She doesn’t mean church and charity and abstinence and all that. She means something else she can’t quite finger but knows she has lost. Purity? Innocence? Humanity? When was she last pure? Who last met that Vera? Not Luke. Though he has no idea.
The train shrieks to a halt. Lynn’s house is the next stop.
Of course it was Charlie.
Charlie.
It’s best to start with his name because so much about him seems to unfold from it. Charlie as in Prince Charles and aristocracy; Charlie as in Chaplin, the joker, the entertainer; Charlie as in cocaine. When they met during their first day at university, Charlie called her V and instantly, with one letter, dismembered her from her previous era, detaching her from the sensible, loving daughter she had once been, and setting her free. Or so she had thought for three blissful, electrifying, terrible years, the two of them filling the void of life, of growing up, of becoming, with chaos and noise and drug-fuelled decadence. Feeling youthful and brilliant, soaring high, until…
Luke fills his void with Jesus. His goodness shines out of him.
Lynn does not smile when she opens the door. Leaving it agape she moves to the lounge where she seats Vera in the comfy chair and insists on making their tea herself. She winces as she lifts the teapot but will not allow Vera to pour. She opens the window for Vera who is hot, then rubs her own arms from the cold. She is a wily old bat. Vera has a momentary vision of Lynn fanning her arms like bat wings. Luke would not find this funny but despite her nerves, or because of them, Vera laughs at the imagery. Lynn raises her eyebrows. Perhaps she thinks that Vera is laughing at her frailty with the teapot. Vera cannot explain. She avoids eye contact and scans the room, trying quickly to spot something to bond them, some nugget to offer up for friendship. It is important that they begin on the right note. Lynn sips her tea silently. Against the delicate china cup, Vera’s own lips feel large and clumsy, and she cannot quite stifle the slurp. On the mantelpiece, a brass-tipped clock ticks loudly. In Vera’s movie version of her life, tumbleweed is rolling by. She can see it moving across the rug and squeezing underneath the coffee table. Vera blinks. She can actually see it. Lynn is frozen, while dried, globular strands of plant creep over her, consuming her, progressing while she is paused. Or is it Vera who is paused? Slumping into the soft cushion, she feels herself folding. She is folded. She is about to fold. On the side table, there is a photo of Luke. Smiling. Smiling with certainty. The photo has pride of place. Lynn is looking at her looking at it. Vera’s mantra circles her head. The silence has become unbearable.
“You must teach me how to make that soup Luke loves,” Vera ventures finally, plucking a thread of conversation from the air.
“You mean before I drop dead and can’t cook it any more?”
“No - I… ” Vera pauses, again, uncomfortably.
Like her life, there is an uncomfortable pause.
“Only the way he raves about it anyone would think you’ve got a Michelin star.”
“I’ll make you a pot,” Lynn replies, leaving Vera to nod gratefully into yet another silence and reach for more tea, which she spills over the antique coffee table. At least it is a reason to escape to the kitchen for a cloth, away, briefly, from Lynn and her disdainful looks, which have a way of dismantling Vera. It is already harder than she had imagined. It is one thing to play a part to willing audiences, to people predisposed to think well of her, but Vera finds Lynn too much of a sceptic to keep up the charade. Especially when, when it comes to her own character, Vera is a sceptic too.
“I’m sorry about that,” she mutters, returning with the cloth.
Lynn stares at her silently for a while, then concedes a nod. “Well, I suppose you might as well get used to mess,” she says, pushing a strand of hair back into place with fingers that Vera now notices are stained red.
Vera pauses from wiping the table. She is taken aback. “I won’t mind,” she offers eventually, tentatively, putting down the cloth and thinking how brave it is of Lynn to admit her fear of the untidy end. To share it with Vera. “And it might not be as bad as you think.” She steps closer, reaching slowly for the discoloured hand.
But at once this enrages Lynn.
“When you marry my son and have children, is what I mean. Children. There’ll be more mess then than someone like you will ever be ready for.”
“I’m not ready,” she tells him.
“Nor am I.”
“I don’t want it,” she whispers.
He says nothing.
“I won’t keep it,” she sobs onto his shoulder. It smells rancid: wine and smoke and sex and sweat.
Vera breathes in deeply.
Someone like you, Lynn had said. Who is she like? Not herself. Not that girl she was for a while. Help me to be better.
When you have children, Lynn had said.
Help me to be better, to be worthy, make me clean. Help me to be better, to be worthy, make me clean. Help me to be better, to be worthy, make me clean. Help me to be better, to be worthy, make me clean.
Lynn taps her foot against the chair leg.
“Did you ever work, before children, before you had Luke and John?” Vera asks, exhaling hard. She passes Lynn a crumpet.
Lynn butters it, adds jam, and then laughs, pityingly. “I had no interest in such things. My choice was to be a wife and a mother.”
Vera flinches, too visibly. But perhaps because of it, to her surprise, Lynn softens: “You’ll understand dear, now that you’ve given up your job.”
“Oh, I haven’t given up,” Vera replies quickly. Her mind is still whirring uneasily from their previous exchange but Lynn has offered an olive branch. Now is the time to capitalise, to clarify that she doesn’t plan to live off her son, that her feelings for Luke are authentic, that leaving work to care for her is a sacrifice not a desire. “I’ve just taken a sabbatical. I’ll be going back.”
Lynn drops part of her crumpet into her lap. “A sabbatical?”
“Yes.”
Angrily Lynn snatches up the fallen crumbs and empties them onto her plate. “A sabbatical,” she repeats. “So how long is this ‘sabbatical’ to be? How many months have you allotted in which for me to die?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean - ” Vera begins, but Lynn has already taken her plate into the kitchen, and then too slowly to be really dramatic, but perhaps more potent because of the pain it is obviously inducing, storms upstairs, away from Vera.
*****************
Lynn lay alone in her bedroom, staring at the ceiling and noticing a chip in the paint that she wouldn’t bother, now, to repair. Downstairs she could hear Vera moving about, tidying up, trying to be quiet, but every sound shot through Lynn’s nerves and filled her with a seething anger. It was bad enough that Vera had arrived early and made her rush from her painting, leaving her dishevelled and imperfect for the rest of the day. But having her there, in the house, right in front of her was like being taunted by her worst demons. Slender limbs without age-spots. Hair still bright and voluminous. Naïvety and hope in abundance. A career. That had been the last straw, to learn that Vera had not been as stupid as she. That, after all, Vera would not cast herself into the periphery. Into dependence. She would marry and live. A whole life still unwritten.
Lynn’s own money ran out a month after their eighth anniversary. She’d had a fund set up for her by her grandfather that she’d drawn from only slightly during university, but with their marital home to decorate and children to clothe, she’d pilfered from the top more and more regularly until there was no longer a top as such, but a fast-approaching bottom. She scraped the last of that to buy Philip a new briefcase made from the soft leather he’d been admiring with his initials embossed just above the buckle. There was a conversation soon after during which Lynn suggested half-heartedly that she apply for a secretarial position somewhere, or something part-time as a supplement. But they both knew that she was trained in Plutarch, Tacitus and Thucydides, and the thought of undertaking a career so far below the options that had once been open to her, filled her with dread. Philip – who by then was earning quite enough salary for both of them and had acquired a number of rising expectations along with his rising status – wouldn’t hear of it anyway. Not his wife. A legal aid perhaps, or something else professional and suitable to her intellect, but that would take further qualifications, and when she pointed out it would also mean the need for a housekeeper and a nanny and an end to his nightly three course suppers, he didn’t push the matter. Instead, he presented a simple solution: a new fund, topped up monthly by him.
But it wasn’t so simple. All of a sudden every penny she spent was accountable to Philip. Not that he asked, but when he ran through the accounts each month she felt a need to explain why they’d required a new toaster, why she’d purchased a new set of curtains, who she’d been at Henry’s with three times for lunch, what was the occasion for which she’d bought her mother chocolates. It was as if all at once she needed his permission for everything she did, and the more often she requested it the faster she felt herself shrinking, submitting, forgetting almost the girl who’d once debated Engels and excelled at Cambridge, and been cleverer than her husband.
The first time she used her new fund to buy anything extravagant for herself, she unveiled the Givenchy dress she’d pounced upon in delight at Harvey Nics as they were getting ready for bed one evening. “It’s the new style,” she informed her husband, holding it up excitedly. “Longer. What do you think?”
Philip was in bed reading a law journal, as if to emphasise the disparity that now stretched between them, a gap across which it was becoming increasingly difficult for her to fly, but he put the heavy book down to consider his wife.
“How much was it?”
Some words are heavy. They can drag a person down.
Although, in hindsight, it was possible that he’d never meant the question to be an indictment, Lynn could still feel the amalgamation of guilt and resentment, which in that singular moment clipped her wings. At once, she began to pack the dress back into its plastic. “It was quite expensive darling, but I did need a new dress. We have the party next week don’t forget.”
“Of course,” Philip agreed. “I’m just curious, how much?”
It had cost twenty pounds. In those days that was a lot of money. It still, to Lynn’s ears, sounded a lot and it shocked her when Luke didn’t blink an eye at paying that much for dinner somewhere, for each person, for each course.
“Twenty pounds!” Philip said no more than that. He’d always been mild-mannered, like John, but there was accusation in his eyes, or she imagined there was and concocted his thought process: I work hard all day, I provide for us, and what do you do? Spend my money like it’s nothing. His unspoken words stung her through the silence.
“Put it on,” he said suddenly. Sitting up in bed now, Philip had taken off his glasses and tidied the journal onto his nightstand. Lynn was already in her nightdress, her hair set in curlers, her confidence dented.
“Not now darling,” she said. “It’s late. You don’t really want to see it now.”
“Put it on.”
Lynn hung the garment onto the door of the wardrobe and turned to face him. She was unexpectedly exhausted and no longer felt like parading in front of him in the dress she now hated. But it had been bought with his money. This, she supposed was how she was to repay him. Philip nodded and so, slowly, she removed the protective material, sliding the dress off its hanger, stepping out of her nightdress and lifting the new outfit over her head while he gazed on. Silently she took out the curlers. Her hair tumbled free. She slipped her feet into a pair of heels. And then she stood, fully clothed now but feeling more naked and exposed by his eyes than ever before. With an abrupt, determined movement, Philip raised himself from the bed and walked rapidly over to her, his hands feeling for her waist and turning her in front of the mirror so they were both looking at her reflection. Her skin was pale and she was still thin after a bout of flu. The dress skimmed her breasts and hung loose.
“It’s stunning,” Philip whispered.
From behind her now, he hitched up the new long-length material, slid his hand underneath, then kissed her neck hard. Slowly she turned to face him again and just as slowly Philip lifted the twenty-pound dress over her head and threw it unceremoniously to the floor, so that she stood before him wearing nothing but a pair of heels. It was by no means the first time. The nights they had been naked together since their wedding were by then too numerous to recall and ordinarily, with both boys asleep, Lynn would have reached eagerly for Philip, for the buttons of his shirt, the string of his trousers, what lay beneath them. But this time the occasion felt contrived, an unequal exchange, her nakedness a gift and payment for him alone to enjoy. She let him trace her body with his hands and squeeze where they liked while she remained motionless. For the first and only time in their marriage, as he tenderly made love to her, Lynn felt tears stream down her face. Oblivious, Philip whispered his usual sweet nothings, my darling little one, but Lynn felt herself suffocating underneath his strong, capable frame, and as he moved on top of her she stared not at him but over his shoulder, fixing her eyes blankly on the then unblemished ceiling above their bed.
Vera knocked gently on the door before she left at five. When Lynn didn’t answer, she knocked again, then retreated downstairs.
Lynn sat up. When she was sure she had heard the front door close, she slipped on the overall she’d hastily stuffed under the bed that morning and walked slowly to the window on the landing. Vera was already halfway down the street, occupied by her mobile phone. Light. Flippant. Unmoved by the fury her presence had sparked. Lynn felt red creeping back up on her. She made her way downstairs, stopping in the kitchen for a glass of water and noticing that Vera had left a small dish of pasta on the counter under cling film. Lynn left the dish where it was and returned to her painting. She pushed the canvas she had been working on to one side and started another. She used reds again, but this time it was a portrait.
*****************
It could have been a bigger disaster. Lynn could have asked her to leave, or told her outright that she hated her, or worse, told Luke. Of course if Vera had been thinking of Lynn and not herself, she may have pre-empted the insensitivity of the sabbatical issue. Someone like Luke would have realised.
At dinner, Luke reassures her. He tells her that his mother is scared, and used to being capable, and says she must simply keep on trying. He does not say that he is scared, and used to being able to fix things, and that he doesn’t know what else to try; but Vera sees the fear behind his eyes, and carries his request for perseverance heavily. “Perhaps, perhaps let her see that everyone is frail in some way,” he suggests. “That we’re all frail, and Jesus knows this. I don’t know, maybe knock over the teapot?”
“Already done that,” Vera grimaces. But she knows of course all about frailty, vulnerability, weak spots. Worryingly, Lynn has begun to hit hers.
She walks home instead of getting a bus, forcing her legs to move steadily. Her mind feels hazy, her body too slow, her being trapped in a strange confusion of stopping, pausing, and running, running, running. Children, said Lynn. Children, children, children. Luke walks sluggishly in the other direction. They are both killing time. Killing the thoughts that surface when one has time. It is almost winter but the plants are not yet dead, the leaves not all fallen, as though petrified into a state of in-between-ness. Vera stays up late watching episodes of sitcoms she has already seen. She drinks coffee and Red Bull. Eventually, canned laughter lulls her to sleep.
The following morning, her head is groggy. Nevertheless she is up early. She has decided to read the bible. She decided this at 3.57am, but forced herself to lay with closed eyes until six. Twice she drifted off, but her dreams then were short, contained, not devastating. She picks a verse she has laboured through before, embraces the sensation of accomplishment that comes with understanding it, allows ancient thoughts to drown out her own, and arrives at Lynn’s armed with determination. At the well-kept door however, Lynn tells her that really she isn’t needed and would do better to go home. Lynn is pristine today, her hair in place, her cheeks perfectly rouged, her fingers un-coloured. On the doorstep, Vera’s feet feel cumbersome. She moves her weight from one to another, aware suddenly of the messages going from brain to muscle to make them lift. She twitches her finger and is aware of thinking that she should twitch her finger. Pushing her shoulder forward, she is conscious of the test she is setting herself and no, she is not able to push forward her shoulder without following this thought process too. There is no mirror, but seconds are ticking by. Lynn taps her foot against the arch of the door like a metronome.
A breath, oh for a breath.
Vera exhales a conscious breath. Politely, she replies that she’d like to stay.
As though having anticipated this, Lynn nods and steps aside, but again Vera is disallowed from making the tea or fetching a blanket, or preparing lunch, and in the end she simply follows Lynn from room to room like a stray dog, offering strands of conversation that with a roll of the eyes are flapped away.
It is an absurd dance and they both know it. Lynn is without real occupation. She is busying herself, lifting books and opening them to random pages, feigning design. Vera’s pursuit is even more ridiculous. The dance however continues. The rooms are cold. They are filled with a lifetime’s clutter but a chilliness has settled upon the chaos like a film of dust. Vera wonders if Lynn sees it too, if with her movements she is trying to wipe it away, if under the trinkets and plant pots and photo frames, she is looking for some lingering warmth. For Life’s heat. She returns frequently to the fireplace.
Eventually, Lynn sits. She holds her side as she does so, although she attempts to hide this. Then she closes her eyes pretending sleep. Again, Vera tries at conversation, but Lynn winces with every one of Vera’s efforts, so in the end Vera decides to say nothing.
She leaves half an hour earlier than planned. Lynn raises her eyebrows towards the clock but Vera feels herself folding more quickly now. She has to get out. There has been silence for too long. Her mind is racing too fast, her mantra losing ground to the other noises inside her head.
Summoned noises. Summoned from the depths. Not from the depths. Vera shakes her head. Yes, from the depths, but so unexpectedly by Lynn, by her stillness today, and by her words of the day before. Words like ‘children’, cutting through Vera’s thoughts. Vera watches her own arm as she raises it in slow motion to shift her bag higher up her shoulder. Her fingers curl around the strap like a reef fluttering in the undulation of shallow water. Folding. Unfolding. Folding. They let go, they release, they move gauchely back through the air. Vera needs occupation. Or distraction. Or both. Dear God make me better, make me worthy, make me clean. Dear God make me better, make me worthy, make me clean.
Clipping quickly down the street, she scrolls through her phone. Charlie’s number is conveniently always near the top of her list of contacts. Luke’s is further down. Vera returns her phone to her bag and thumbs the worn seam of her wallet. She knows she must open it, take out the piece of paper, unfold it in order to unfold herself. But what if it undoes her altogether? What if it undoes them? Her and Luke? Her hope, her happiness, her sanity, her redemption. Her bag is heavy. She is carrying the new bible Luke gave her and it takes up most of the room. Vera sits outside the tube station and fishes beneath the bible for her pack of cigarettes. She lights one, thinks of Luke and stubs it out against the crumbling wall. The tube station is busy. People are jostling. Vera lights another. This time she inhales deeply, a dirty, smoky, cloudy breath. Her fingers feel better for being occupied, though her spare hand lingers over her wallet. She will smoke another cigarette before she boards the tube. She is not yet sure which way she will go.
*****************
Lynn had not planned for John to be their buffer. After three days of tension and silence the friction had seemed insurmountable and even Lynn, who had created it, wondered how long any being could last amidst such tautness of air. The days dragged, weighed down like gravestones. If she had been alone, Lynn could at least have been painting, or watching TV, or staring into space lost in her thoughts, but with Vera there she felt an impetus to feign occupation. And to make elaborate meals that really she was too tired to cook, not hungry enough to enjoy, and later felt the impact of, having stood for so long.
On the Wednesday, perhaps having noticed this, Vera turned up with pre-prepared food from a deli, and Lynn rather fancied a half of the egg and onion bagel, or some of the lemon-topped salad, and the ease of it all. For a moment she even found herself thinking that it was good Luke would have somebody so bent on providing sustenance. But she could not bring herself to accept Vera’s offerings. Galling Vera was her only amusement.
Then John turned up unannounced that Thursday and regaled both of them with stories of blunders from his rehearsals, and did an impression of the power-mad director, and made them both laugh. At the same time. About the same thing. He insisted on a glass of champagne with their three o’clock tea, and by the time he left at four, something had dissipated. Lynn found that she could tolerate Vera without scowling. And to her credit, Vera had not given up on conversation. Her attempts were awkward and unskilled, but she was persistent. Really, Lynn should have put her at her ease, the way she used to with the new wives she met at Philip’s law functions: include her, welcome her, let her in. The women always told her, later, how intimidated they’d felt by her – Philip Hunter’s smart, beautiful wife – and how grateful they’d been for her friendship. They’d loved her for that. Lynn should let Vera love her similarly. But she could not bring herself to help the girl who already had everything. She let Vera scrabble.
“They’re very different aren’t they? Luke and John?” Vera tried, picking crumbs from the carpet near the chair John had sat in.
“I suppose they are.”
“You must be very proud of them both.”
“Of course, I am.”
“And that the family is so close, is a testament to you.”
Lynn nodded, thinking in fact how rare it was for the three of them to congregate together, how she had never once been to John’s flat, how there was so much about him she had pretended not to notice. Were they close? Should she have noticed? When he was a teenager -
“I don’t see my parents often,” Vera offered into the long pause, and Lynn snapped back into focus. She was noticing these lapses of hers more and more often. It was growing harder to stay engaged in conversation, in the present. Ridiculous for a woman not yet 60.
“Why not? You don’t get on?” she said briskly.
“Well, we disagree these days.”
“All parents disagree with their children’s choices.”
Vera flinched, and Lynn noticed the sting of her remark. “My mother for example, despised my choice of churches,” she added.
Now Vera smiled and sat in the chair she had finished brushing for crumbs. “My father doesn’t believe in God at all. If I told him I was going to church now he’d think I’d lost my senses, or stopped questioning things, you know?”
“Not everything should be questioned,” mused Lynn, not convincing herself, but watching with not total irritation as Vera brushed wisps of blond hair from her naïve, freckled skin.
“No. But well, that’s not the only thing that’s come between us.”
“Most things are fixable with time. If you have time,” said Lynn pointedly.
“Yes,” mumbled Vera apologetically.
“Which you do.”
“Yes.” Vera looked down at the crumbs in her hand. “It’s just - well, there’re things I’ve done, before, terrible things that if my parents knew about, if anyone knew about… But of course they’ve been done, so… ”
Lynn rolled her eyes and tapped her nails impatiently against her teacup. Just as she had begun to imagine she could bear the girl, here it was, Vera’s recital: an account of adventure and passion and cleverness and adversity, and things that shouldn’t have been done, in her youth, in her recklessness, but nevertheless had been and made her who she was, and made Luke love her, and were times she would tuck away and store and feed off.
“I’m sure it’s very exciting my dear, but really everybody’s done similar, haven’t they?” interrupted Lynn, a little brusquely now.
“Well, no, I don’t think so. I think of it every day… ”
“Goodness such dramatics,” laughed Lynn, unable to stand it, the very sight of Vera sitting there prickling her again. “You didn’t murder anybody did you?”
Vera looked up at Lynn nervously.
“Well?”
She said nothing.
“Well?”
“I… I was pregnant once.”
Now Lynn said nothing.
And Vera said nothing. Nothing more.
Lynn was shocked by the revelation, and no doubt Vera saw this. Saw the surprise, the amazement, as though Lynn knew nothing of life, of living.
“Mrs Hunter… ” Vera said finally, slowly, beginning again to pick at imaginary crumbs.
Silence.
“Mrs Hunter… ”
At last Lynn looked up. “Well, abortions are ten a penny these days aren’t they,” she said.
*****************
What was she doing? What had she done? Panic sweeps up Vera’s throat and loiters in the back of her mouth.
It is only the second time she has told anyone she was pregnant. The first time of course was to Charlie. She has not told Luke. She swallows hard. A nauseating liquid continues to trickle into her mouth.
She supposes she must tell him now, now that his mother knows. Vera cannot believe she revealed so much to Lynn of all people. Was it the champagne? No. Of course not, she doesn’t get drunk on such small doses. But it is true that her mind is hazy, has been hazy all week, full of it all, full of loss and buried pasts, and perhaps she had felt in that moment between them a small opportunity for trust, for newness, for building a relationship upon. And for those redeeming cosy conversations she had imagined, as though the living room were a confessional and Lynn might prescribe a few Hail Mary’s and clean Vera’s soul. To be clean. To be clean. She knows that it can never be that easy. Stupid. Stupid. But Lynn’s response was surprisingly kind, flippant almost, with her usual dismissiveness making an abortion seem the commonest of things.
If only it had been an abortion.
Not only, but better than the truth.
Of course abortion was still murder, in a way. Or not, but at least that’s how she had felt then. Not back at school when they debated it in Health Education and liberally agreed that every girl should have choice, choice over her life… choice over Life? But when it was her choice to make, her body, her baby inside her. Still there were people who would accept it, understand it, condone and justify and even commend it. A task Vera just could not quite accomplish. Then. Now. And that was why it had all got worse. And crashed down around her, into pauses, and sleepless nights, and flashed in front of her - sanitised rooms and needles and nurses, refusing to be sanitised themselves.
Beginning with needles she herself had wielded.
Charlie had supplied the cocaine, bought from their favourite dealer. By her third year she as well as he a connoisseur. And the high had been amazing. All of the best feelings of energy and sexuality; none of the hallucinations she had suffered once in the corner of a nightclub and still scared her, though not enough to stop. They had been in Charlie’s room getting ready for a party. They were talking at the speed of light about it, disparaging the poor, dense friend who was providing alcohol for everyone and whose birthday it was. She had thrown something at him. A wet tissue? And he had chucked something back. Ultimately they’d ended up on top of each other. Charlie’s bed felt softer than marshmallow. His stubbled cheeks rubbed against her like an exhilarating exfoliation. His skin smelled so manly, so delicious that she wanted to taste it. She remembered biting him. He had slapped her, roughly across her cheek. And then torn at her skirt. They’d both wanted to feel each other so hadn’t bothered with a condom.
By the time her period didn’t arrive, the high had long gone. She and Charlie had been arguing on and off for weeks. Making up and waking up in passionate embraces, then unravelling again when things grew too serious and one of them did something stupid to prove their commitment to flippancy. It was their third year, and such signals were needed. They were like swans during that time. Not in the poetic sense of heart-shaped, life-long figures floating in unison on still waters, but in the sense that after their philandering and solo trips down the lake, they seemed unable but to return to each other.
But Vera was alone in the loo. She had waited for several days before buying a pregnancy test. They were expensive, she told herself, and she was broke. The cashier in Boots stared at her accusingly as she counted out coins. Then she sat on the loo in the sociology block waiting for a blue line, or a lack of it. Though she already knew which it would be.
It was an odd place to confirm that there was a baby. That there was an independent life inside her. That, like the different social classes and statistics and peoples being discussed in the lecture theatre, she was as human as everyone else. As powerful. As vulnerable. As absolutely scared.
“It’ll be okay V,” promised Charlie.
He had taken her to the clinic and she lay on the bed staring blankly away from him. She’d left a voicemail on his phone the night before, late, two whole weeks after she’d found out herself, telling him that she was pregnant, and that it was his. And he had arrived at her room early the next morning unshaven and scruffy from a night spent in another girl’s bed. He had not flinched when she told him she wanted to have an abortion. Charlie, usually so vociferous, suddenly wholly compliant. Had she wanted him to flinch? To say something? His silence threw her, but he didn’t criticise, or oppose, or ask her why her hand barely left her belly. He simply booked the appointment. And drove her there. And shared her bewildered glances when the nurses were as brusque as if she was there to whiten her teeth.
“These help the lining detach before the surgery. You’ll get some cramping. Take them two hours before we start,” said one nurse, handing Vera some pills and taking her blood pressure for the second time while smiling sympathetically at Charlie.
There was still four hours before the surgery was due to begin. They slipped into familiar, mindless conversation and, for the last time, it felt almost normal. But then the nurse returned to remind her about the pills, and she went into the bathroom to take them, and after that, conversation stopped. Vera turned her face towards the pillow. She could not help crying. It is the last time she has ever cried. Charlie hid his own face behind a magazine. She closed her eyes and immediately darkness flashed in front of them. She placed a hand on her not yet empty belly. She glanced towards the sun-soaked window and wished it would be raining. Then, Charlie began humming. Quietly, from behind his magazine, he hummed ‘Singing in the Rain’. It had been their favourite movie, and now the melody came like droplets. Cooling. Helping to drown out hot, black, niggling questions, like whether she was making the right decision and, if she should tell him. The anaesthetist appeared to take her down to surgery.
“It’ll be okay V,” Charlie whispered.
And that’s what she had thought of as she told the anaesthetist that she hadn’t in fact taken the pills, and was not going to have the surgery, and was going to keep the baby, and to please tell her friend not to wait.
Riding the tube home from Lynn’s, Vera scrolls through her phone and pauses on Charlie’s name.
They had not seen each other for months after that, the end of the university year hurrying them through final exams and packing up. And a ‘trip to Paris’ excusing her from farewell parties she would otherwise have been at. Then the summer arrived and took them away and apart and hid things that needed hiding. But he had called her 12 months later, precisely, to the day. He pretended a booty call but of course he had remembered, which made everything worse. Make me better.
She’d thought she was doing the right thing.
Vera pulls her wallet roughly from her bag, yanks out the carefully folded piece of paper, then pauses.
Her life is a perpetual pause. Though it began with rushing. With haste.
She was never going to keep it. She was young and she was meant to have a career, and be with somebody who loved her. But perhaps she could have tried, seen if she was any good as a mother. Attempted to be one. Or at least she could have gone through the proper channels. Made sure of things, faced the people in charge. But that would have meant facing herself, and she wasn’t herself. And it would have become real, and it wasn’t real - what she was doing, what she had done, what she was getting rid of.
He was a boy.
He weighed seven pounds.
He had a full head of dark, determined hair.
She left him wrapped in a blanket outside the children’s home. The tag attached to his wrist said his name was Charlie V.
She had not even given him her full name.
Vera puts the piece of paper back into her wallet. She doesn’t need to read it to remember what it says, though she looked at it only once all those years ago - snatched it out of the newspaper she’d been reading over somebody’s shoulder on the tube.
He was found at the bottom of the stairwell. Three days after she’d left him. Much too late.
Vera gets off the tube a stop early and stands in stony silence on the platform. Minutes pass, she imagines. It might be seconds. She catches sight of herself in the CCTV and sees a glimpse of what she must look like from the outside: hunched, a little gaunt, strangely not moving. Unmoving. Unmoved? There should be tears. In a movie there would be. But Vera has none. She cannot cry. She is not a woman but a monster made of stone. A mother with a teenaged daughter stops to ask if she’s alright but Vera cannot break her arrest to answer and eventually the woman leaves her alone.
She will tell Luke that she had an abortion. The rest is too much. For now. Forever? He knows that she has had sex before and it practically killed him. He has been ‘praying on it’. It is something he has had to work through.
She must find the right time before Lynn does.
*****************
It had taken all of her strength not to hit her. Not that hitting anybody was something Lynn had ever done, but she wanted to. She wanted to knock down that brazen modernity, that boldness, that riskiness that she herself had not grabbed.
When she had found out she was pregnant with Luke, it was the last time she could have turned back, returned to academia, made a different life. After that, she knew it would be nappies and buggies and cooking and housewifery and all the other domesticities she had quite happily been playing at, but this time forever. In the minutes before she told Philip she was pregnant, there had been a pause, the very briefest of moments. And in it had been the fleeting thought that she might not carry the baby.
That was all it was. A flicker in her mind.
*****************
Vera arrives at Lynn’s the next day, half an hour early and laden with cupcakes. She has not slept. She has not spoken to Luke. He’d called during her bath the previous evening and she’d stared at the phone, dripping water just next to it the whole time it rang, imagining him needing her, needing somebody to distract him from his own chasing demons; but she could not talk to him. Not yet. Not until she knows what she will or won’t have to reveal. She is desperate to persuade Lynn to keep her secret. Hovering on the doorstep for a moment, she stares at the cold paving beneath her feet, wishing she could un-tell the half-secret she has told. Wishing in fact, if she is making wishes, that she could undo it altogether. Not the telling of the secret but the secret itself. Or at least if she could modify it, have had the abortion, ended the life before it was a whole one. Or had the baby but had it adopted properly, safely, responsibly. Not stupidly. Stupid. Not stupid. Evil.
Vera knocks on the door but Lynn doesn’t answer and in case she is napping, Vera avoids the doorbell, takes Luke’s key from her pocket and lets herself in.
“Hello?” she calls gently in the hallway, before sticking her head into the sitting room and the kitchen and the dining room, without finding Lynn.
Deciding that she must be upstairs sleeping, Vera sets about putting the kettle on and arranging the cupcakes on a plate. She has chosen vanilla over chocolate, thinking that this is more Lynn. She hopes she is right, that she has not misjudged her future mother-in-law. She can barely breathe with nervousness. In a matter of hours she will be meeting Luke for dinner and he will ask her how things are with his mother, looking at her in that way he has that demands earnestness. His eyes will be sad. They are sad lately, his smiles less frequent and less certain. But his strong frame will offer her an anchor from the spiral that has been engulfing her overnight: grief, regret, panic. And noise. So much noise. Her head is so noisy. It is full of sirens and church bells and nursery rhymes, so many nursery rhymes. Noises that should have been. Luke will mute them. Luke will anchor her. It is what he has always done - drawn her back from the brink with his flicker of unearthly goodness. The problem is, to grab it, him, will mean telling him at least the half-truth, and that will mean risking everything.
She cannot risk Luke.
But the only other option is to persuade Lynn to stay silent. And then, to somehow stop thinking about him. Not Luke, but the boy, the baby, Charlie V, who she knew for three days and cannot forget. I love you, I love you…
“I love you,” she whispered closely into his ear.
He smelled of milk - formula, not hers. And warmth. And a slight sweatiness from the layers and layers of blankets she had wrapped him in. It was a mild January, but she could not risk him being cold. If she could cry, she would have wept relentlessly onto his slightly spotted cheeks - milk spots they had told her: Just watch, they’ll go in a few weeks. But she would never see them disappear. And she had not been able to cry since she’d made her decision at the clinic.
“It’s for you,” she muttered, holding him tightly to her. “I’m not ready for you. I’d be a terrible mother. I’d muck you up, I know it.”
He opened his eyes then and yawned gently.
Vera smiled at him, in apology, convinced that he understood what she was saying, and did not believe her. She rocked him back and forth until his eyes closed, then she waited until she saw somebody go into the building.
She would have liked him to wake up again before she left him. One last chance to persuade him that it was for the best. One last chance to see his still-blue eyes. She willed them to open. But she had to leave him while she knew somebody was there in the building to find him, and he was sound asleep when she placed him and his layers of blankets on the doorstep. He was sound asleep.
“Hello?” Vera calls again from the bottom of the stairs.
There is still no response and Vera mulls for a while whether Lynn, too, is sound asleep, or if she is somewhere upstairs lying dead. She cannot be quite certain which scenario she is hoping for, but gambling on the former she wanders again around downstairs and begins opening the undrawn curtains. After the sitting room and the dining room, she comes to a room at the back of the house that she has never been into. She remembers trying the door once before when looking for the bathroom, but it had been locked and Lynn had quickly directed her away from it. It is a laundry room probably. It would be nice for Lynn if Vera was able to do a pile of ironing before she wakes up. Vera hates ironing, but she pushes down the handle and opens the door.
Inside, Lynn is sitting in an overall, her hair dishevelled, a look of wildness in her eyes as she holds a paintbrush to a canvas. Vera glances around the room. It is full of canvasses and colour.
“Oh my goodness,” she breathes in amazement. At which point, Lynn looks up. “Mrs Hunter, these are wonderful, they’re - ” But before she can finish her sentence, Lynn is on her feet and storming towards her.
“Get out!” she orders, ripping off her overall, throwing it over the canvas she’s been working on, and frantically smoothing her hair. “What are you doing here? Get out at once!”
Vera steps back. She has never before heard Lynn shout. “I’m sorry,” she mumbles. “I didn’t - ”
“Stop looking! Get out. Have you no manners? Get out, get out, get out!” Lynn grabs Vera’s arm and with surprising force, marches her through the doorway into the hall.
“What? What?” is all Vera can mutter. “But Mrs Hunter - ”
“Get out!”
“I am out. I haven’t seen anything.”
“No,” Lynn seethes. “Out of my house. Altogether. Go. I tried to weather you, I really did, but I can’t do it. I don’t need help, especially from someone like you.”
To be clean.
Vera stands, frozen.
“Go. Go back to work,” says Lynn. “Your ‘sabbatical’ is over. Leave me alone.”
She flaps her hand authoritatively towards the door and in the process a long fingernail slits sharply across Vera’s neck. Vera touches it and immediately there is blood. Now both women look a little taken aback. Lynn opens her mouth awkwardly as if to speak, but doesn’t. Her eyes are seething. She cannot tame the fury, but there is a need for something. It was an accident and they both know this, but still there is blood.
Lynn says nothing.
Vera says nothing.
She catches sight of herself in the hall mirror. It is a bright day but she can see only darkness. Seconds begin to tick, but she shakes herself. She takes a faltering step back towards Lynn. “Mrs Hunter,” she tries one last time.
“Get out,” Lynn says quietly.