The first time I discovered I was pregnant was in Portsmouth, ten days after Richard had sailed for Barcelona. I had felt sick for several mornings, and skipped those hushed breakfasts alone in the dining-room. Finally, I went to a doctor. ‘Two months gone,’ he said.
It was news for my next letter to Richard. ‘Won’t that be lovely?’ I wrote, ‘I’ll be having it in April’ I sent the letter express. The baby would be a girl, I decided. Called Ophelia.
That night a searing pain strangled my stomach and I began to bleed. I rushed from the bathroom, a bath towel between my legs, and picked up the old, heavy telephone beside the bed. The receptionist, who had taken the job because it fitted in with her insomnia, took her usual three minutes to answer.
‘What is it, dear? It’s getting on for midnight.’
‘I need a doctor.’
‘A doctor?’
‘Yes. Quickly, please.’ The blood was beginning to soak the towel.
‘Is there anything the matter?’
‘Yes. I need a doctor.’
‘Is there anything I can do? I took a course in nursing, once, you know, myself – .’
‘Please,’ I said. She seemed immune to the urgency in my voice. ‘Please just get me a doctor.’
‘Well, Dr Harris, I know he’s on to-night. But then you know he hasn’t been well, himself, lately. I wouldn’t like to call him out unless it was really urgent.’
‘It is,’ I screamed.
Dr Harris arrived an hour later. The receptionist let him into my room.
‘Ooh dear,’ she said, when she saw me, ‘you did need a doctor.’ Dr Harris sent her to ring for an ambulance and immeasurable time later I groaned and cursed on the stiff white sheets of a hospital bed. By the next morning it was all over.
My mother came down to Portsmouth to drive me back to the hotel. She had gold chains on her crocodile shoes to match the handles of her crocodile bag. She was dismayed by the fact that I had been treated the same as everyone else.
‘Good heavens, darling, why on earth didn’t they get you into a private room?’ She wrapped a rug round me in the car and said I looked pale. ‘You’re such a worry, Clare. Are you sure you don’t want to come home for a few days? You know you can come whenever you like.’ I thanked her, but declined. She was used to my declining most of her invitations.
Back at the hotel she filled my hot water bottle and put a vast basket of fruit on the table beside my bed. It was wrapped in cellophane paper and topped with a cellophane bow.
‘There are figs, somewhere,’ she said, brightly, with the confidence that figs would cheer my day, ‘I know you’ve always loved figs.’
She paced about my room uncertain what to do, picking up then putting down her precious handbag. We listened to the rattle of the central heating and the croak of gulls, clear against the traffic noise, outside the window. Finally she picked up a photograph of Richard from the dressing-table, stiff and alert in his uniform.
‘What a good looking man Richard is, darling, isn’t he? So mature, I’ve always thought. Do you suppose he’ll fly back?’
‘Not for a moment,’ I said. ‘Anyhow, there’s no point.’
‘I suppose not.’ She picked up her bag again. ‘I must be off, I suppose. Are you sure there’s nothing else you want? Just let me know if there is. Ring me any time, won’t you?’ She bent down to kiss me. She smelt sickeningly of the oily gardenia scent she always wore. ‘I hope you don’t mind my going, but you know what it is. It’s such a busy time of year, one way and another. – No, no. It hasn’t been a trouble, coming all the way down here. You mustn’t think that.’
Three days later came the reply to my first letter to Richard. ‘How lovely, little one, as you say. I’m sure it’ll be a boy. We can call it either Richard or Clive – both family names. You choose. I don’t mind as long as it’s one of those. I will, of course, expect him to follow in the naval tradition of our family. Anything else would be unthinkable. Take care of yourself and I’ll be home long before April… ’
That night he rang me from Barcelona.
‘So sorry to hear, little one.’ He sounded quite sad. ‘Still, these things happen. Don’t take it too badly. We’ll try again next time I’m back.’
‘Of course,’ I said. I felt no enthusiasm about starting again. My stomach ached and my room was a huge, vacant gap all around me. ‘I wish,’ I said, ‘I could join you in Spain. I’d like to be with you.’ There was a long pause.
‘Little one,’ he said, at last. ‘I don’t think you should. For your own sake. You’d do much better to recover where you are, quietly. I’m out most of the day, and you know what the food’s like over here.’
‘None of that would matter,’ I said.
‘I don’t think you should,’ he repeated. I felt cold. My hand began to sweat on the receiver of the telephone.
‘I could spend most of my time lying on the beach,’ I said.
‘The beach isn’t very nice.’
‘Well, I could drive about.’
‘You don’t speak Spanish.’
‘I could get by.’
‘I don’t think you should.’ He sighed. I sighed.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay here.’
‘Oh, little one.’ His relief was infinite. ‘I think you’ll find I’m right. I’ll call you again soon. Or you ring me, any time, if you want anything, won’t you?’
I got up the next day and went back to normal life. The days went slowly as they had done before. Richard didn’t ring again. Three weeks went by. Then a letter:
‘Little one,
How can I ever explain? You know I once told you about a woman called Matilda? Well, in a word, I love her. I have fought it, she has fought it, but there is no denying it. We are in love with one another. We live together and want to get married one day. None of that is to say I don’t love you. In a strange way I still do, and perhaps always will. I will always think of you as my Little One. Please, please don’t take it too badly. These things happen. Perhaps we should never have married. Your mother always said I was baby snatching. But still, I believed in it, in us, at the time. Oh dear, I never have been very good at letters. I’m putting it all very badly. You can cite Matilda, of course. Your father will know a good solicitor. I think of you often. I wish this needn’t have happened just after the miscarriage, but love attaches little importance to timing, does it, and I felt it would be wrong to keep it from you any longer.
Please forgive me if you can, and don’t think badly of the many good times we’ve had together.
Love, Richard.’
*
The second time, with only two weeks to go before Joshua went to Mexico, I felt sick in the evenings. I had kept it from him for a couple of weeks, but decided to tell him when he came home that Sunday from work.
‘Two bits of news in one day,’ I said. ‘Not only am I not going back to Jonathan – ’
‘ – but you’re pregant too, I suppose.’ He was flipping his vodka backwards and forwards in the glass.
‘Exactly. How did you know?’
‘You look pregnant,’ he said. ‘You’ve looked very-careful for the last two weeks.’ I laughed. ‘Aren’t you pleased?’
‘Of course I am.’ He paused. ‘Did you mean to?’
‘No, honestly.’
‘I believe you.’ He smiled, quite kindly. ‘The only thing is, don’t forget, I haven’t said anything about marriage.’
‘Nor have I,’ I said.
‘So what are you going to do about it?’
‘Do about it?’
‘Are you going to have it?’
‘Have it?–’
‘Are you going to have it, I said ?’ I paused to think, pushing the ice cubes round my glass with a numb finger. At last I said:
‘Of course I’m going to have it.’
‘I see.’ He got up and went over to the table for a packet of cigarettes, not looking at me. ‘If you changed your mind, I know a particularly good doctor, even though it’s all legal now.’
‘But I’m not going to change my mind. Don’t you see? I want it.’ Joshua sighed and went back to another seat, farther from me.
‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you’d better find us somewhere to live. Quickly. We couldn’t stay here with a child.’
‘Of course not.’ Potential houses. Prams. Joshua lifting it up to look at it when he came home. Warm milk, small fingers. I began to drown in a heavy calm. Mrs Fox would knit things. ‘And there’s just one other thing,’ I said.
‘I know what that is, too.’ Joshua shifted about on the sofa, unusually restless. ‘As you’re pregnant, it would be quicker and easier and generally more convenient if Jonathan cited me in the divorce. Yes, I accept that too. Is there anything else, while we’re about it?’ He was frowning. I got up and went over to him.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
‘Go and sit down or you’ll feel sick.’ I stood my ground. ‘Go on. You must take care.’ He seemed briefly concerned. I went back to the sofa.
‘About the divorce – ‘ I said.
‘There’s no more to be said.’ He stubbed his cigarette out with his thumb. ‘I’ve agreed happily to being cited. You go ahead and do whatever it is you have to do, as fast as possible, for the sake of the baby. I won’t make any kind of fuss, I promise, and the whole pattern will fall into place. We will all play our parts, Jonathan and I, I’ve no doubt, just as you imagined. It will all be very neat and easy and tidy. No fuss. First husband dies, second husband is divorced, lover agrees to support both you and his child. What more could you want? – Oh, and probably, if you play your cards right, which no doubt being you you will, one day I might even offer you marriage as well. So there’s a lovely future for you, all planned out. All lovely –’
‘ – Joshua!’ I rose in a daze of nausea and tears.
‘Sit down. You’ll feel sick. Stop stomping about.’
‘I do feel sick.’
‘Sit down, then.’ I sat. There was a long silence. Neither of us could think of anything to say. Then:
‘I won’t have it if you really don’t want it,’ I said. ‘I could have an abortion.’
‘No, no. You wouldn’t want that.’
‘Would you?’
‘Probably not, when it came to it. I’m sorry, Face. As usual, I went too far.’ He smiled. ‘But you’ve sprung a lot on me in one day.’ I smiled back.
‘Oughtn’t we do something?’ I asked.
‘You have an infallibly awful sense of occasion,’ he said, ‘but as there’s no food in the place, I suppose we ought. If you’re not feeling too sick, we’d better go out to dinner.’
*
The morning Jonathan brought home the pink toy bear for our unconceived baby he also brought pink roses and the inevitable bottle of champagne.
‘This is nothing,’ he said, ‘nothing compared with what I shall bring when the real time comes. You won’t believe it. I shall have bells rung, guns fired, jewellery delivered. … You wait.’ He was in one of his gayest moods, happy to be away from his study and the blank sheet of paper. He scooped my hair up behind my ears and held it high in an untidy bun. ‘My darling Suki Soo, if you could ever for one moment believe how much I loved you –’, he stooped to kiss the neck he had made naked, ‘ – well, you couldn’t ever believe it. Now. Let’s open the bottle.’
Jonathan toasted our future child. We sat there, side by side on the chintz sofa, hand in hand – his hands were always warm and very soft – Jonathan cooing about what he and his son would do together when the time came. He kissed me on the cheeks, the eyelids, the temples, his lips wet and bubbly with the champagne. He had taken off his coat. He sat in his braces, his shirt very white in the morning sun which slanted through the room and lit up the pot plants in their vases, still tied up in bows.
I drank till I felt weak and dizzy. I laughed and giggled and kissed Jonathan back, on the nose, on the puffy jaws that tasted of after-shave, and at last I was able to say, with all conviction, that I agreed with him. It would be nice to have his baby.
*
Joshua woke in the middle of the night. He put his hand on my stomach.
‘The awful thing is, Face,’ he said, ‘that it looks as if I will probably have to be in Mexico for at least three months. Will you be all right?’
*
Some nights later I was wakened by sharp, familiar pains in my back and stomach. It was three o’clock. I woke Joshua.
‘There’s something wrong.’
‘Oh God.’ He put on the light. ‘Same as before?’ I nodded. He smoothed his hand gently over my stomach and down between my legs. Then he drew it back to the light. It was covered in blood.
‘So the plans have gone wrong after all,’ I said.
‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘Maybe we can save it.’
Everything happened very quickly. I heard him telephoning people, making arrangements in short snappy sentences. I heard my own moans as he lifted me from the bed, wrapped me in a blanket and carried me to the car. The leather of the car seat was very cold. As the engine shuddered to a start I bent double, trying to shut out the pain.
‘Hold on, Face,’ I think Joshua said. ‘The doctor said it would be better if we got you in. I thought I could make it quicker than an ambulance.’
The car screamed through empty streets, the blood rushed warm down my legs.
‘The floor of your car,’ I kept saying. ‘I’m sorry about the floor of your car.’
Someone met us with a stretcher. Grey corridors blistered with neon lights waved like streamers past my eyes. Then there was a white room that smelt of disinfectant. Badly drawn dog-roses on the beige curtains. A nurse bent over me. Three blackheads shaped like a clover leaf were stamped on the side of her nose, sharp points in her starchy skin. She gave me something bitter to drink. A doctor came in and patted me on the flanks like a friendly farmer.
‘How is she feeling, then?’ he asked Joshua, as if I wasn’t there. He flicked down the sheets, lifted my nightgown and pulled the reading lamp, on its metal arm, towards him. Joshua held my hand.
Hours later the doctor came back again. His face was stripped into a thousand coiling pieces as if it had been through a mincer.
‘Good heavens, what a thing, you’re biting the sheet, sheet, sheet, sheet….’ he said, his voice echoing away. I felt Joshua fold up both my hands like a ball of wool and hold them in both his. Then the doctor’s voice came again.
‘I’m afraid that’s that,’ he said. ‘That’s that, that’s that, that’s that…’ I could hear watery noises on the lino floor, someone with a mop, the crackling of paper, nurses’ quick feet going tap-tap, tap-tap, the dry rub of the doctor’s hands. But when I opened my eyes they had all gone. All but Joshua.
‘Oh, Face,’ he said. ‘Are you awake?’ He bent his head down over mine. ‘I didn’t want that to happen, either.’ Then he got up brusquely and strode over to another part of the room, so that without moving my head I couldn’t see him any more.
‘I’ll leave you to sleep,’ he said. ‘I must go. It’s getting on for eleven. The doctor said it would be a good idea for you to stay here for a few days. You’re a bit torn about.’ He returned to my bed and stood looking down at me.
‘You must go,’ I said, ‘you’ll be late.’
‘Poor old Face,’ he said.
*
Mrs Fox, of course, was my first visitor. She arrived with daffodils and a honeycomb later that afternoon.
‘There was a helicopter going over towards Battersea Bridge,’ she said. ‘I saw it from the bus so I got out at the next stop and watched it go by. That’s what made me late. The noise! Then there wasn’t another bus for twenty minutes.’ She dumped her parcels at the end of my bed and drew up an upright chair. This morning she had two poppies in her hat and the silver painted goose feathers, left over from Christmas Day, pinned to the lapel of her coat. She looked me up and down and pulled her chair nearer.
‘Shall I tell you something? Last night I went to this Bach Society evening. Well, it was very interesting. We all sang for a couple of hours, then we went into the Meeting Room for coffee and sandwiches. The members, that is. It was a ‘members only’ night. The cream of the Bach followers they think they are, too. I wouldn’t have joined them if I’d known what snobs they were.
‘Anyhow. Roger Nevern, the young American conductor, you know, had agreed to come and meet us. He was half an hour late, which got some of them very worried. The coffee was finished. And when he did come, my! You could hear the gasps going up. All because his hair was long and he was wearing a lovely flowered shirt and tie. I suppose they expected white tie and tails. They could hardly sustain their titters, I can tell you. The rudeness of it, and he was being so polite, taking an interest in each one of us and repeating our names when he was introduced. When he’d gone they all huddled together, these old things, and the rumour was he’d been seen at another do in a pale blue fur coat almost down to his ankles. What a crime! I said. I felt I had to speak out. What a crime! I said, a blue fur coat. Well, they must have heard the note of sarcasm in my voice, because they all turned on me, you know, all their heads spun round simultaneously and they began to go at me, as if I was wearing blue fur.
‘Well, they got as good as they gave, I can tell you. I told them what a bunch of hypocrites they were. Stupid old fools. If Shakespeare himself came back from the dead they’d expect him to be dressed by Moss Bros. Poor dears, they have no notion of genius. They are so confined by their own mistaken little priorities.’ She smiled to herself and began to wander round the room. ‘This is a nice place you’re in,’ she said, ‘will you be out soon?’
‘In a few days,’ I said.
‘When you’re out we will all go to Brighton for some sea air. You need a bit of sea air. We’ll go for the day. I’ll ask Joshua to take us. We’ll go and look for the house Edith and I were brought up in. I hear it’s a bed and breakfast place now, but never mind. You need the sea air.’
When she had gone a young nurse with red hair came in with pills.
‘What a night,’ she said, brightly, ‘we had the same thing happen next door. A very young couple. They’d only been married three months, too. We had a terrible time with the husband. I think he was rather the hysterical type, mind, but we had to give him sedatives. Your husband gone? Back to work, I suppose.’
It was easier not even to pause.
‘Yes. He’s very busy.’
‘He’ll be back,’ she said, ‘and you’ll feel quite different in a few days, I can tell you.’
That afternoon was one of those slow, white afternoons that often happen in late winter, when shadowless light from the sky stretches taut across a window, flatter than the light of spring and more melancholy. On the table that made a bridge over the foot of my bed twelve daffodils, cruelly yellow against the white walls, squashed rigidly together in a tall, thin hospital vase. A thermometer stood in a glass of pink liquid, above the basin, and in a room so drained of colour the yellow of the flowers and the pink of the liquid jarred my eyes. My stomach ached. It was a scooped out hole. I could feel the shape of the hollow among my guts. I waited for it to wither, to close back into place, and the beat of the ache throbbed in my head like a chant.
The bed was uncomforting, narrow and hard. I stretched my feet down and felt the hardness of the iron bed-end. I turned away from the glare of light in the window, and shut my eyes.
*
I kept my eyes shut for several moments after the matron brusqued in on Sunday mornings, shouting at us with a vicious gaiety to get out of bed quickly, or else. She would clatter down the linoleum aisle between the two rows of beds, tweak back the thin curtains with a petulant snap, and stand triumphant as the daylight gushed in on us. I opened my eyes to watch her return journey. Barely raised the lids, for fear of catching her glance and having no energy to reject it. Through a blur of lashes I saw the familiar, low-slung calves that bulged just a few inches above the well-polished heels of her flat brown sensible walking shoes. A confident walk. Miss Peel was full of confidence and authority. She had an amazing head for name-tapes, too. She could recall the precise condition of scores of pairs of bras, vests and knickers, and whether or not they were adequately marked. Her anecdotes, which invariably appealed to her rather more than they did to her audience, were all about underwear. There was one old girl, famous in Miss Peel’s memory, who went through four pairs of gym knickers in one term. In her own mind, Miss Peel felt her sense of humour to be a little risqué, and among the juniors she managed to curb her conversation to shoes, socks and overwear; but her heart was not in it.
Her usual Sunday call echoed down the dormitory.
‘Nylons for those going out with parents, lisle for everybody else, of course, and no powder for any noses, or there’ll be trouble.’
Sunday at school was an icy, lumbering day that bore no relation to the rest of the week. A gap to be endured until the bustle and normality of Monday: a day when the passing of time was unusually slow and the strictures of confinement almost intolerable. We were forced to observe the Lord’s day of rest with stalwart exactitude, and smarten ourselves up to a standard that would delight Christ Himself should He care suddenly to descend. Scratchy overcoats. Straight seamed, lumpy stockings thick as gloves; pathetically drab brown dresses which, in an attempt to liven up, we scrunched in at the waists with huge elastic belts – the most desirable accessories of the early fifties.
On Sundays we wrote uncomplaining letters to our parents and walked in crocodile to church. We were allowed to listen to classical music and read good books, and there were hundreds-and-thousands on whatever the pudding at lunch. But it was the evenings, the fragile evenings full of the sad thundering church bells from the priory church, that filled us with the wild folly of anticipation and the tremulous ache of longing to be free. We would sit on the summer lawn, rugs spread over pine needles from the vast trees, eyes cast down over our pieces of sewing. The headmistress with her tired Rosetti face, curved eyebrows and wispy hair was the only one to sit on a chair. A bible lay on her lap. She would glance, as she glanced a thousand times a day, up to the hills; two dramatic great purple swellings in the sky now, nothing like the scurvy lumps they were to walk over, diseased with sweet-papers and council notices. The headmistress believed in her range of hills. She took strength from them. ‘I will lift up mine eyes,’ as she so often said.
On Sunday evenings she would talk to her seniors about going out into the world, as the time approached – the great unprotective world beyond the school gate. Her voice was always full of promise.
‘Always remember, girls, to kick against the pricks, as St Paul said.’ All would be fine if we kicked against them. She lulled us in to security. ‘And remember, too, that if God be for you, who can be against you?’ She spoke often of the love of God, never of the love of man. We wondered if she had ever been loved herself, by man as well as God. She was so confident of the happy outcome of loving God. She looked happy on it. And the school magazine was full of the news of old girls who, having learnt like us to love Him, had on the way found husbands too, and were leading lives of pleasurable security, as the child-bearing wives of Midland farmers, solicitors, humble aristocrats and industrial tycoons.
On those Sunday evenings on the shadowy rugs, there wasn’t one of us who didn’t believe that it would all fall into place for us, too. We felt a blinding, overpowering resolve to make our own future work; to kick against the pricks, to stick to what we promised, to go on believing. Trembling with good intention, tears scalded our eyes.
So we left school with all the privilege of having been warned. We left believing in God, in Wordsworth, in our role in life as good wives and mothers. For several years, in fact, some of us still remembered, from time to time, how these old beliefs felt.
*
‘Soo,’ said Jonathan, once, ‘however much I fail you, will you go on forgiving me?’ We were having breakfast in a hard, high and narrow bed somewhere, and he had egg on his chin.
*
Joshua came back in the evening.
‘Feeling better?’ he asked. I raised myself on the pillows and he kissed my forehead. He looked round the bare room. ‘There were such awful flowers on the barrow downstairs that I knew you’d know they had come from there, so I didn’t get any. I’m sorry.’
‘That’s all right.’ The hole in my stomach felt smaller. Joshua grinned.
‘You don’t look your best, Face.’
‘I don’t feel my best.’
‘But well enough to come home to-morrow? It’d be nice to have you there for the last few days. I leave on Monday. It’s all finally fixed.’ To-day was Thursday.
‘Of course I’ll come,’ I said.
‘Good.’ He sat on the chair close to my bed and took my hand. His heel began to tap on the floor. ‘Face, Face,’ he said quietly.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know. All this muddle. There doesn’t seem much point now, does there?’
‘Not much point in what?’
‘You know. In going ahead. Breaking up your marriage. Living together.’ For a moment or two I thought of moving my hand from under his. But I had no energy to make the gesture.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see what you’ve been thinking.’
‘If we’d had the baby, then of course –’
‘ – of course it would have been different.’
‘Of course.’ Silence. Then I said:
‘What a pity I’m not better at having children. I didn’t realise, when the miscarriage began, two things were at stake.’
Joshua thumped the bed and stopped tapping his heel at last.
‘For God’s sake don’t say things like that. You make me sound more of a shit then even I thought I was.’
‘Sorry.’
He bent very near to me, holding up his hands expressively, like a man trying to sell something.
‘Listen, Face. Listen to me. You’ve got to go back to Jonathan. You’ve known that, I’ve known that, really, all along. You can’t leave someone, just like that, just because your heart doesn’t leap about any more every time he comes into the room, and he annoys you the way he eats his kippers. That’s not what marriage is about, if it’s worth anything at all. Besides, you’ve told me hundreds of times you love him, in a way, haven’t you? Perhaps that way is good enough. And hundreds of times you’ve missed him, I know. Even though you haven’t said anything. But I know, because I’ve watched you. Sometimes, when I’ve been particularly cruel or thoughtless, I’ve seen your face. I know what you’ve thought. You’ve thought: maybe Jonathan isn’t particularly clever or witty or interesting, but at least he’s kind, and he’s always loving and reasonable. You’ve thought that, haven’t you? Am I wrong?’
‘My trouble,’ he said, ‘my trouble is that I’m not present in all that I do. Baldwin once pointed out that one should be present in order to be sensual. I’m cruel because I’m thoughtless, and I’m thoughtless about one thing because I’m thinking about another, and so often I get my priorities wrong. And when it comes to you – I have thought about it so much, honestly I have – I don’t think I’m prepared to give up enough for you. I’m too unreliable, too unwittingly unkind. I would only make you unhappy. Perhaps I don’t care enough – and there you are, you see, that’s cruel.’ He began to play with my fingers, hot stony fingers at the end of a weightless arm. Then he smiled at me, quite cheerfully. ‘At least you could rely on Jonathan’s constant loving. It’s a great virtue, consistency. Besides, think how he must miss you, how much he must want you back. Anybody who had been loved by you, and has lost you, would want you back.’
I shut my eyes. Images shifted as in a gently shaken kaleidoscope. The flaring colours of butterflies, a great arc of Norfolk sky, the spray of sand in windy dunes, omelettes on Formica tables, the shimmer of blue sequins.
‘How do you know we’d survive, Face?’ Joshua was saying. ‘Please open your eyes.’
I did. His pale face, now so near, was a fall of imperfect skin – pitted, lined, shadowy. His dark eyes were far back out of reach, sealed behind reflecting lenses.
‘Perhaps we wouldn’t,’ I said.
He sat back. A confusion of expressions crossed his face – surprise, relief, disappointment, perhaps.
‘So what will you do?’ he asked.
‘Go back,’ I said, ‘of course.’
After a long time of silence he fell upon me, kissing me, touching my hair, my ears, my breasts.
‘You’re right, you’re right, you’re right,’ he kept saying. ‘We’re both right, aren’t we? But oh Christ, Face.’ He sat up again, still holding both my hands. ‘It’ll be funny, after six months.’
‘It’s been a pretty good time,’ I said. I heard myself laughing, a sort of small, quiet snort. ‘Joshua Heron’, I said.
‘Mrs Lyall?’
‘Joshua Heron, now it’s all over, now everything is over, I feel terribly, terribly tired.’ He smiled back.
‘Don’t go to sleep just yet. I’ve got something for you.’ He felt in his pocket. ‘I didn’t know what to get, really, so I went to Mrs Fox for advice. I’m no good at presents.’
I opened a small box. On a bed of cotton-wool lay her star-sapphire ring, the colour of milky forget-me-nots. When I moved it, even in the fading evening light, the spikes of a star, dazzling razor lines, split the stone.
‘She gave it to me,’ Joshua was saying. ‘She said I could do what I liked with it. What else could I do?’
At that moment, I think it was, when he put it on my finger and held my hand up to the light, I began to cry. Weakly, hopelessly.
‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘Shut up or I’ll think you don’t like it. It looks marvellous. Much better than on her old hands.’
‘I’m thinking of how she’ll miss it. She must have been rubbing it with her other hand for years.’ I was also wondering what Joshua would do that evening. I didn’t want him to be unfaithful now, not before Monday, when our term officially ended. It was a wasted evening, being in bed.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘But you needn’t worry. I’m taking Mrs Fox to the Festival Hall. Verdi.’
I stopped crying. Calm, calm, calm.
‘But you hate that sort of music,’ I said.
‘It’ll be different with Mrs Fox. She’ll explain it all to me.’
‘I wish I was coming too.’
‘You don’t like Verdi either.’
‘No.’
‘I wish you were, though. But still, we’ll go to Brighton on Sunday, by special request of Mrs Fox. Would you like that?’
‘Oh yes. I’d like that.’
‘We’ll do that, then.’ He paused, bent down, took my face in his hands and kissed my eyes, forcing them to shut.
‘It’s very odd,’ I said, half-asleep, ‘how the most difficult decisions to make are the easiest ones to change.’
‘I daresay,’ said Joshua, ‘I’ll think of you. I daresay I’ll think of you all through the Verdi.’