With every frosty word from Luke, Vera is terrified that his mother has told him. They have been arguing again, or not arguing but always falling just short of understanding the other. She still intends to tell him, herself, about the abortion, or rather the lack of abortion, and everything that came after it. And yet November ticks by. Each night she plans it, practises it, steels herself to accept the fallout from it, but during the day the words just won’t come to her. Jolted out of her head perhaps by the insistent buzzing of her phone. Early in the mornings, before the buzzing begins, she goes to St George’s. She hopes that somewhere in the quiet, under the great dome, along the pews, in the pages of the books, the words she needs will be lurking, along with her redemption. Even after several unsuccessful visits, her hope is not diminished. She feels supported there, as though that light pair of hands is permanently upon her shoulders. Yet the loss of her baby remains fresh and unredeemable, and she has still not told him, and he is too much to risk.
Luke, untold, wants to know why she will not visit. He has brought coffee and her favourite date slice, and a careful gentleness to his tone. But she senses reservation and she has pressed him. “I’m disappointed,” he tries to explain, tries to say calmly.
“Disappointed that I won’t look after your mother?”
They have been walking through Regent’s Park, a rare weekend morning spent together, and now they are sitting in Luke’s car. Outside, remnants of a deep frost cling to blades of grass made razor sharp. Inside, the engine is on and they are warming up. A Bach sonata Vera once knew how to play clatters through the silence from the radio. Luke turns it down. “Disappointed you won’t see her. You don’t visit her, even with me. It’s been months,” he accuses finally, gently. “I know how good you can be Vera, I don’t understand it.”
Can be.
“I’m not sure she’d want to see me,” Vera offers weakly.
“Of course she would. My mother is very forgiving.”
Vera looks away from him and pats her pockets for a cigarette before remembering that she is with Luke and cannot smoke one. To steady the itch in her hands, she reaches for the dial of the radio and turns the music back up.
“Well say something then!” Luke demands suddenly, curtly, raising his voice over the melody.
It is the first time since she’s known him that his face has flashed red, his sandy hair askew, his calm, reasonable composure altogether lost. Luke clenches his left hand and beats the steering wheel making the sound of the horn crash shockingly into the silence. Vera leans away. For a moment, neither of them breathe, and even the music on the radio seems to linger over a single note in uncertain anticipation of what may come next. But the shouting and swearing and aggression she has experienced from other men doesn’t come. She forgets sometimes how different Luke is. How much better. If it had been his baby then maybe… Luke exhales. Everything about him deflates and gently, he rests his head on the steering wheel. The red rushes from his cheeks as quickly as it came and his face fades gradually to an ashen white. Pallid hands continue to grip the wheel.
“Please,” he says, without looking at her, his voice wobbling as it comes. “I’m trying to help her. To do the right thing. At least for the time she has left. You’re my fiancée, you should see her.”
From her bag, Vera’s phone buzzes. Again. “Work,” she lies quickly, turning it off. But Luke doesn’t even lift his head. Has he grown used to it? Used to her being only half there? Only half true? Her stomach tightens. The thought of losing him hits her hard in her gut like a punch. Crouched over the steering wheel, he seems both weak and still so strong. Vera has an urge to touch him and tentatively she reaches for his arm. Through his thick winter coat she can feel his beating pulse. It is the most intimate they’ve been in weeks. And the thump of it is like an electric shock to Vera, a sudden propulsion.
“I should have visited,” she says abruptly. “You’re right.”
He breathes in heavily. Vera keeps her hand on his arm and feels for the rhythm beneath.
“I’ll come Luke,” she says while the beat is strong. “I will. But before I do, I have to tell you something.”
And she tells him.
That she was pregnant by Charlie.
That she almost had an abortion, and told his mother that she had it.
That she had a baby.
That she gave it away.
She stops. Waiting. Hovering. Deciding.
Luke looks up at her. His normally two-tone eyes seem almost black.
The pastries are almost a week later. Short, dark days have crept by and Vera has marked them with a succession of doodles that have now completely obscured the message on Charlie’s card. At the time, after a long and uncomfortable silence, Luke thanked her for telling him, for allowing him the knowledge of the truth. Vera looked down when he said this but he didn’t seem to notice her unease, or presumed probably that what she did confess was enough reason for it. He said he was grateful to her for enabling him to speak into her life with what he hopes will be help and illumination. And for a fleeting, uncertain moment, he squeezed her hand. But seven days have passed and he is yet to ‘speak’. They have not been speaking. He has texted her a few times with wedding necessities - a sign she has taken as positive; but he has not answered her calls, they have not dissected what she told him, he has not unloaded her of her remaining secrets. She presents the sweets to Luke on Lynn’s doorstep feeling a little silly in her grand gesture, but she has nothing else. “I brought pastries,” she declares, stupidly.
He looks good. Tired, anxious, slightly more dishevelled than usual; but with grey-green eyes full of soul, and arms that if wrapped around her would solve everything. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected it,” Luke says quietly after a long pause.
“Expected what?”
“Expected more than, well, pastries. It was too much for you.”
Vera feels the sting.
“It was too soon for me to ask it,” he carries on, attempting to clarify, to temper. Then slowly he bends forwards and reaches for the box.
Accepting it. Accepting her? Accepting what she has done? What he knows of what she has done. Vera shakes her head. She wants to tell him the rest. The truth. She has come so far. But his breath draws close to hers flexing warmth through the cold air and Vera smells his familiar aftershave. The desire to collapse into his forgiveness is too much. Breathing in deeply she wonders how she could ever have placed him in her periphery.
Then, of course, her phone buzzes. Always buzzing. Buzzing. Startling her like a police car or an ambulance siren. A flashing light reminding her of danger ahead.
“Come in,” Luke whispers. And she does, but without telling him anything more, without answering her phone that is blinking at her from the top of her bag, and without quite noticing his hand on her back, or the pain behind his eyes, or the way that he is watching her not watching him.
At first, Vera and Lynn greet each other with great fanfare. A fuss is made over the pastries, which Lynn insists be served on a particular plate that Luke has to root around for in the display cabinet in the dining room, and has to be eaten from matching dishes which Luke says he can’t even recall, but finds eventually. The elaborate display of china seems to please Lynn and she insists on making a pot of tea with another delicate piece, despite their entreaties for her to sit and let them take care of it. Finally they all settle and endeavour to keep up the high spirits.
The older woman sits opposite Vera, loudly saying nothing. Her white hair is pulled back into its usual bun, her blouse freshly ironed, her cheeks lightly rouged, but the creases around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth seem to have hardened into the skin. Her lips are chapped and the first signs of undernourishment are appearing around the jaw. She seems far older than her 58 years. Occasionally, when she thinks nobody is watching, she winces. It is a peculiar feeling for Vera, to mix pity with trepidation. She tries to behave normally but hears herself talking several tones higher than usual and making jokes that nobody laughs at. Luke’s face seems unprepared for laughter. He is absorbed in studying his mother and every now and then his jaw clenches or his eyelids blink in quickened succession. The sight of his bitten nails makes Vera swallow hard. She tries to catch his hand across the couch, but he folds it into his lap, then leaves the room. There is an urgent phone call, he apologises.
From the next room, Luke’s voice rises and falls. Rises and falls. Rises and falls. Vera tries to steady her own breath with his and, alone again with Lynn, tries desperately to think of a topic for conversation, but she cannot come up with anything. Ever since her phone rang on the doorstep she has been thinking about Charlie, and even with Luke and Lynn and the agony of it all directly in front of her, her mind is almost wholly occupied by this, by him: the father, the ex, the victim, the aggressor. And by apprehension and anticipation of what sooner or later she will have to hear him spew - blame, and deserved reproach. She knows that the phone in her bag will ring again, will keep ringing, and she should have turned it off, but now in front of Lynn it would seem rude to fish around for the mobile. Vera endeavours not to stare at her bag too noticeably. The silence persists and she makes a mental note to prepare conversation in advance of her next visit. What does one discuss with future mother-in-laws with no future of their own? For her part, Lynn says nothing, and doesn’t appear to be trying to. Perhaps, Vera supposes, there is simply little for them to say. They are too different. Lynn too pure and Vera too imperfect, still.
Yet they cannot say nothing forever.
“I’ve told him,” Vera announces to Lynn suddenly, out of nowhere.
There is no time for the older woman to reply before Luke re-enters the room.
He looks purposeful. The remains of a smile cling to his face and he seems refreshed almost. Vera watches him gladly, relieved that he is coping after all, that he has been coping without her attention. As he replaces his phone in his pocket however and sinks into his place on the sofa, his steady breath seems to leave him. He coughs slightly and asks his mother if she would like a blanket. She does not. He asks if she would like the window closed. She does not. He asks if she would like another pot of tea, but the one on the table is still half full and Lynn tells him so. Luke nods, and picks up his bible. He offers to read them passages from it, and finally at this Lynn assents. Luke grips the spine tightly. He recites verses that speak of tests of faith, and hard times, and healing. His voice is strong as ever, affirming, sure, but he rarely glances up at Lynn who sits still in her cream-coloured chair with perfect posture and respectfully listens, despite the faint frown that occasionally creeps across her brow, just fleetingly, before she remembers Luke and hurries it away. With the bible in his hand, Luke is no longer looking at her so does not see this. But Vera sees. And watches. Mother and son locked in tragic theatre. Mother sacrifice. Mother devotion. She cannot take her eyes off them.
After what seems like a very long time, John arrives. He flounces onto the sofa in his flamboyant way, and wraps his scarf around his mouth to indicate he’ll be quiet, and although he rolls his eyes and slumps into himself as Luke reads on, he dutifully says nothing. And Lynn says nothing. And as they sit there, separately, bound only by teachings that she knows John does not believe, and promises from God that perhaps they don’t all feel, and messages that she is beginning to learn come not from the book alone but reside in one’s heart, none of them ask: why us? Or confess to each other what is all over Luke’s face: fear and panic and vulnerability. They simply carry on, clinging on, letting Luke cling on for them, his voice growing ever more insistent and desperate and distressed until finally Vera’s phone rings, again, as she knew it would, and at last she has a way to step in to save him.
“That’s probably the minister telling us it’s time to wrap up this service!” she declares jokingly. Then more softly: “Luke, you don’t want to bore your mother to death.” She smiles at him gently as she says this, a smile he’d once told her was sunrise-speckled.
“That’s not funny,” he pronounces solemnly.
Vera’s phone buzzes again.
John smiles in sympathy at her accidental choice of words but the others stare at her expectantly.
The phone continues to buzz.
“I mean - I meant… ” She trails off. What did she mean? Only for him to stop, to look up. Luke is looking up now but does not attempt to rescue her. Vera can think of nothing else to say. She had not meant to be brazen or flippant.
“Well then, it’s interrupted us,” Lynn declares suddenly with a cantankerous flap of her hand. “Don’t you think you should answer it?”
Now everybody is waiting. Watching. The buzzing persists.
“Come on,” hurries Lynn.
Luke nods.
John nods.
Lynn nods vociferously.
Slowly, Vera retrieves the phone from her bag and puts it to her ear.
“Don’t hang up,” says Charlie.