Corinne was sitting down in the low blue velvet chair with her head bent, holding a tiny white romper suit stamped all over with pale blue rabbits pressed to her nose. Inhaling. But there was nothing there, of course. No milky, talcy baby smell.
She laid it down carefully on her lap and smoothed it out, folding it neatly in at both sides and then over in thirds. Then she added it to the pile on the floor.
She had already been there over an hour and, so far, she had taken out just seven little outfits from the white wooden chest of drawers. The trouble is that they each had a story, each caused her heart to grow heavier and the memories to catch in her throat like toast crumbs.
Hannah’s face when she first told her about the pregnancy, a smile stretching her cheeks out till they seemed like they would burst. ‘I’ve even bought something for it, Mum. For her. I’m sure it’s a her.’ Corinne’s own misgivings at celebrating too soon had melted in the face of her daughter’s obscene happiness. And then Hannah had produced a velvet tiger-print babygro with a hood with little ears on it and held it up. ‘How could I resist?’
So much happiness, now folded up and neatly stacked on the floor ready to be put away in the two big plastic carriers. For a moment, Corinne surveyed the pile with all its memories and thought that she could not bear it.
Danny hadn’t been able to face packing it all up himself. He’d rung Corinne the night before and she’d been surprised at her own slight thud of dismay when she’d seen his name flash up on her screen.
Recently, things had been strained between them. Even if he understood in theory why Hannah had done what she did, he couldn’t entirely forgive it. And that bothered Corinne. That lack of unconditionality.
Corinne stood up and pulled on the lowest animal on the pastel-coloured mobile that had belonged to Danny as a baby and now hung over the empty space where the cot used to be. She watched as it swung into motion, twirling round and round with a momentum of its own, the sheep and cow and horse and pig shapes swinging gracefully from their different-length cords.
Danny had been so childishly excited when he’d brought it home from his parents’ house in St Albans and hung it proudly in the nursery. ‘You know, I’m sure I even remember this,’ he’d said, and Hannah had told him not to be such a knob, but he’d insisted. ‘No, really, I have a subconscious memory of these shapes.’
Corinne had been amazed at how Danny’s mum had managed to hang on to it for all those years, and in such perfect condition as well.
She gazed at the mobile and sighed. That would have to come down next, she supposed.
All of a sudden, the realization hit her again of what she was doing and what it meant. Packing up every trace of Emily. Folding away all Hannah’s dreams.
And her own.
She stood up abruptly and went to the window. Danny and Hannah had the top-floor flat in a neat little Victorian terraced house on a quiet road which was part of a grid of streets known as the Ladder because they were abutted at each end by main roads, along which the traffic inched painfully at all times of day. It was rented, of course. The ridiculous cost of living in London meant they’d never managed to put by enough for a deposit for a place of their own, and Hannah’s insistence on saving to have more IVF at a private clinic hadn’t helped.
It had been such a relief when Hannah announced they were giving up on the whole idea. And then she’d got pregnant naturally. It had seemed like a miracle.
The door to Hannah and Danny’s bedroom was open, and Corinne wandered in. The room was painted white, with high ceilings and two sash windows looking out on to the garden. One wall was crowded with blown-up photographs of Hannah and Danny’s wedding. A black-and-white montage of friends and confetti and smiles.
Happy.
The bed was vast with plump white bedding, the pillow closest to her still bearing the imprint of Danny’s head. The bedside table on this side, a low, wooden chest of drawers with peeling white paint, more shabby than chic, was piled with various objects, marking it out as definitely Danny’s. A fat book claiming to be a social history of the entire human race, lying page-down and open so the spine was cracked, a beer bottle, still with a couple of inches of amber liquid inside, a scattering of loose change, as if he’d just emptied his pockets straight on to the surface, a phone charger, its white cable looping over the other items.
Corinne wandered around the foot of the bed to Hannah’s side, which was neatly made up, the duvet cover smoothed down over the pillow, suggesting that Danny still clung to his own side, despite his wife’s lengthy absence. Hannah’s bedside table was no neater than her husband’s. Assorted make-up, two hair elastics (Corinne’s heart constricted when she saw the long fair hairs caught up in one of them), a novel that Corinne immediately recognized to be one she herself had lent her. They often swapped books, texting each other to find out which bit the other had got to.
She sank down on to the white expanse of duvet and picked the book up, opening it on the page that had its top-right-hand corner folded down, remembering how cross she used to get when Hannah would return a book she’d borrowed and the pages bulged with tell-tale creases. How petty that seemed now.
Corinne snapped the book shut and was surprised to see a white corner poking out from between two pages.
She took hold of the edge and pulled out a photograph.
‘Oh!’
The sound of her own exclamation, tearing through the silent flat, shocked her. But her attention was fixed on the picture of a young woman Corinne had never seen before, looking up from a sofa as if someone had just called her name, half surprised, half smiling, so that one cheek only was sporting a dimple as large as a ten-pence piece. She had wild, dark curls tucked behind her ears and was wearing a white vest and faded cut-off denim shorts, with her bare feet resting on the coffee table in front of her.
But it was her eyes that had caught Corinne’s attention, her eyes that had made Corinne cry out in surprise. Or rather, the absence of them. Because just above the woman’s nose, in the space where her eyes should have been, someone had taken a red pen and drawn a line through from side to side over and over again, hard enough to gouge a hole in the middle.
The violence of it shocked Corinne and she turned over the picture with a sense of deep unease. There was just one word, written in the same red pen, the letters gone over several times, leaving an indentation in the paper.
BITCH.