Ten

‘Theo,’ Ruth said.

The child looked up, although he could not possibly have heard her voice from across the river. Even from this distance, Ruth could make out his blond hair, his stocky little body. He was wearing bright blue shorts and a blue striped top, not unlike the doll now carefully wrapped in the bag at her side.

Ruth had been into Edith’s shop that morning, after standing for some time on the pavement across the narrow street, judging the rundown atmosphere of the place, the cracked road surface, the iron rail alongside the pavement on the rapidly rising incline, the open windows at the top of the house, above the shop: they were attic windows just beneath the Flemish lipped roof. What a place to bring a child, she had thought. So typical of Lin. A crowded market street of secondhand shops, furniture restorers, and dusty jewellery behind security-screened windows. Indian fabric hung from rails. A delicatessen on the corner. The market abutting the road.

Ruth had bought a Lenci doll from Edith Channon.

In fact, it looked rather like Theo with its tightlipped, wary, sideways glance. The rag doll had real little black rubber boots on its feet, and a Twenties-style Christopher Robin mop of hair. The fabric of the face was very pleasant, smooth, almost like suede.

Edith had never taken her eyes from Ruth. ‘Do you collect?’ she asked.

‘I’ve never bought a doll in my life,’ Ruth had replied truthfully, ‘but it looks like someone I know.’

‘A present?’

‘Yes.’

‘Shall I wrap it?’

‘It’s for a boy.’

‘A boy,’ Edith had repeated, still glancing up repeatedly at Ruth as she wrapped, a puzzled expression on her face. ‘Not many boys like dolls.’

Theo was climbing the playground ladder now, not very successfully. Lin was standing at the bottom of the ropewalk, holding out both arms.

Between them, the river that sliced through the centre of the town ran swiftly between its concrete banks. Ruth glanced to her left. It was a much-photographed bridge, with shops across its entire length. A fan-shaped basin of deceptively slow water spread out under it. Then came the broad, shallow-stepped weir. After that, the water was pushed into a narrower channel and began running more quickly, with a green stretch of park on either side. Ruth turned and, keeping the playground in sight, walked up to the bridge and began to cross it.

Her first reaction to Theo had been savage. She remembered it in pinpoint, brightly lit detail.

Kieran standing on the back step of the house, half in and half out of the kitchen door. Ruth had been sitting at the table.

‘What did you say?’ she asked him.

‘Lindsay Harris,’ he had repeated, not looking at her but at some distant point beyond the edge of the garden.

It had been spring, and the light that came into the room that morning was touched with acid green. There had been an interminably long silence, in which she tried to piece together the neatly tilled landscape of her life that had just broken bluntly in two. ‘But she’s only nineteen,’ Ruth had said. That was all she could think of. Lindsay Harris was no more than a child.

‘I …’ Kieran hadn’t got any further, for Ruth had risen to her feet.

‘And she’s one of your students.’

‘She’s not mine. Not in my department.’

‘She’s a student at the university.’ Ruth felt a rising tide of disgust constricting her throat. ‘How could you be so stupid.’

‘This isn’t—’

‘You’ll lose your job—your living.’

‘She’s leaving.’

‘Lose your reputation, everything … for what?’

‘She’s leaving the university.’

‘Why?’

Already she knew the answer. She knew in the moment he at last turned around to face her.

‘She’s pregnant.’

Said. It was said.

The sharpest of knives could not have made a deeper cut. The thought of a surgical knife slicing through flesh actually flashed, for a second, in Ruth’s mind.

‘I see,’ she had murmured.

He had put his head in his hands. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he told her. ‘I don’t even know how this happened.’

‘You don’t know how she became pregnant?’ Ruth had echoed. ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t insult me.’

‘No, no … this whole thing, I don’t know how it’s happened.’

She stared at him, his last few words resonating in her head. Flat, dead notes: I don’t know, I don’t know …

‘You’re sick,’ she said.

And it had been true. He really had been sick, infected with Lin and her child. And all the things he had told Ruth, all the reassurances that he had given her since they had first met, that he was not in the least paternal, that he had never wanted children, that her inability to have them meant nothing at all to him, less than nothing, that he had never liked children or felt the smallest interest in them … all that had vanished overnight.

Lin was pregnant with his child.

At nineteen.

Spring, five years ago.

A judgement on her, Ruth had thought at the time. For past sins. For the child in the ward lying limply in her mother’s arms.

Spring. A day like this, in fact, she considered, as she walked across the bridge. Very like this. She looked into the shoulder bag, and her hand closed familiarly around the shape of the doll.

Theo saw her first.

He was standing at the top of the ladder, when his gaze fixed on her. He became very still, other children pushing him from behind.

‘Come on, Theo,’ Lin was saying. ‘You’re holding everyone up. Come on, step down, I can catch you …’

She noticed the direction of his gaze, and turned. Ruth was ten yards away. The colour drained out of Lin’s face.

‘Hello,’ Ruth said. ‘Hello, Theo.’

Lin turned back to Theo, lifted him bodily from the top of the small slide and into her arms. Quickly, without another glance at Ruth, she began to walk away, Theo with his arms tightly about her neck and staring back in Ruth’s direction.

‘Lin,’ Ruth called. She saw the way that Lin was going, down the path that ran alongside the river, to a gate at the farthest corner where there was another small footbridge. There were steps to negotiate on the way, and Ruth began running parallel to the path, downhill across the grass.

‘Lin!’

She saw Lin hesitate on the steps, as if trying to retain her balance. Slowly, Lin took the steps one at a time, feet pausing together on each one. By the time she got to the bottom, Ruth was almost alongside her.

‘I’ve only come to see if you’re all right,’ she said, trying to block Lin’s way.

Lin looked her full in the face for a second, then skirted around her, brushing her arm. Theo shrank back in Lin’s arms as if he had been touched by an electric charge.

‘Don’t be silly,’ Ruth said. ‘Just talk to me. I’ve got a present for Theo.’

Lin walked on.

Annoyed now, Ruth rapidly strode after her, taking hold of her arm.

‘Lin,’ she commanded.

At last, Lin stopped. ‘Don’t you understand English?’ she demanded. Ruth noticed that her face was extremely pale, almost uniformly white. ‘I told you to keep away from us. What are you doing here?’

Ruth tried to stroke Theo’s arm. ‘I want to help you,’ she said.

Lin started to laugh, then abruptly stopped. ‘Help?’ she echoed. She looked at the ground for a second, shaking her head in disbelief. Then she stared back into Ruth’s face. ‘I know what you want,’ she said.

Suddenly she turned and began to run.

‘Lin!’ Ruth shouted.

Lin had reached the bottom gate. Another mother was standing close to it, trying to negotiate her way through its narrow space with a pushchair and an older child clinging to its handle. At the side of the gate, the river roared and sped along its thin channel, white water now, an entirely different animal to the sluggish green pond closer to the town. Lin bent down and helped the other woman lift the wheels of the buggy over a step, glancing repeatedly over her shoulder at Ruth who was walking purposefully towards them.

Theo began to cry, picking up Lin’s distress. Almost absentmindedly, Lin kissed him, smoothing his hair with an agitated gesture. The other mother was saying something to her. Her toddler looked up at Theo and made a face of sympathetic anxiety. Lin tried to get through the kissing gate with its large, rounded fence. Theo, crying and struggling, caught hold of the swinging doorway, and Lin put him down. He slipped through, and, propelled by Lin’s communicated fear, ran straight ahead towards the water.

Lin let out a scream.

Ruth, too, began to run. It seemed like a very long time, a time of disconnected pictures … of the stranger’s face, and her child’s, turned and looking back at Theo … of Lin frozen half in and half out of the gate … and of Theo, arms spread straight on either side, as if he were balancing across a wire, teetering on the edge of the river, a white backdrop to his own blue-and-white outline. As Ruth reached the gate, Lin pushed through to the other side.

Ruth saw her ghostly face in profile. Then suddenly Lin seemed to freeze, as if she had come up against an invisible wall. Her gaze rolled away from Theo and upwards, until her head pitched backwards at an angle.

It was just as though Lin had been shot, suddenly pierced by a bullet, stopped in her tracks. One hand strayed to her throat, the other hung loosely at her side. Her back stiffened and her whole torso became rigid, crucified.

Then soundlessly, smoothly, she dropped to the ground.