‘Frances, you can’t send her back. It’s downright cruel. Even if the nuns would have her, which they probably won’t …’ Viv was baking in her steamy, crowded kitchen. She flung sliced apples into a pyrex dish, showered them with brown sugar.
Bunty was licking out the mixing bowl. ‘They read all her letters,’ she announced, through a fingerful of uncooked dough. ‘She told me. That’s why she didn’t write. And they make you wear your PT shorts just below your knees.’ She giggled. ‘All the girls had to kneel in the assembly hall, and two nuns marched round inspecting them, and if their shorts didn’t touch the floor they had to let them down, go and fetch their sewing things, and miss tea and recreation. Magda cut hers off, instead. They were so short, they were like a pair of knickers, and all jagged round the edges. The nuns were furious. She had to wear her Sunday frock on Monday as a punishment, and a black veil on her head, and kneel in the chapel for two whole hours.’
‘What’s a Sunday frock?’ asked Philip, who was bashing nails into a block of wood. Frances and the table jumped every time another nail went in.
‘Oh, it’s all sort of prickly, with a white collar, and the name of your patron saint embroidered on the bodice.’ Bunty removed Rupert from the golden syrup tin. ‘Magda’s saint is Mary Magdalen. That’s twelve whole letters and she can’t even embroider. It took her hours to do it, but then Mother Annunciata snipped the whole thing out again with a pair of scissors, and said it was an insult to any patron saint.’
‘Weird,’ muttered Philip, missing the nail and knocking in his thumb instead. Midge screeched in sympathy.
‘Hush!’ shouted Viv, above them all. ‘Look, kids, Frances and I can hardly hear ourselves speak. Why don’t you go out into the garden?’
Frances almost prayed they wouldn’t. The last thing she felt like was a morning-after playgroup, but even that was better than a heart-to-heart with Viv, on the subject of Magda’s future. That future was all too entangled with her own. If Magda returned to Richmond, then she herself would have to stay and play mother. She didn’t want to be a mother, not even to her own child. What was the point of proving that, if all she did was settle back again with someone else’s offspring? Nothing would be changed, nothing learned or gained, if she and Magda both slunk back to Richmond, and the whole tragic farce restarted.
She hadn’t even seen her yet. From the moment that Bunty had burst in with the news, Viv had taken over, giving orders, acting the part of Magda’s nurse and mother, pushing her into a sick-bay on the sidelines. ‘You stay here. I’ll cope. You look far too rough to do anything but rest.’
She’d tried to remonstrate, but she knew Viv didn’t want her. One part of her was secretly relieved. Easier to take the role of invalid and play nursemaid to herself. While Viv dashed back to Magda, rushing around with blankets and beef tea, she had stayed behind in the ruins of her drawing-room, breakfasting on Alka Seltzer and bandaging her wounded house.
Viv had found Magda barricaded in the garden shed, filthy, exhausted. The child had been up all night, trekking the hundred miles from Westborough, hitching lifts in lorries where she could. Viv had bathed and changed her like a baby, then put her to bed with two aspirin and warm milk. She was still asleep. Thank God, thought Frances, who had arrived at Viv’s an hour ago, and been talking Magda, Magda, ever since. So much had happened in the last few frantic days, she could hardly cope with it, let alone this new crisis.
Charles had phoned from the airport, before she left for Viv’s, so suave and courteous, she’d been thrown off guard. She had been expecting retribution, but all he said was ‘Hello, darling, I’m afraid I’ll be late for lunch. The Oppenheimers’ plane has been delayed.’ Surely the name of Oppenheimer should strike her down like Voodoo, but Charles pronounced it calmly, almost nonchalantly, as if last night had never been. He had rubbed out the party, and her assumed pregnancy, like a misspelt paragraph in an otherwise impeccable life report, and then filed it away and started on a clean page. She heard herself responding in the same careful, treacherous fashion.
‘It’s quite all right, darling, don’t worry about lunch. We’ll eat this evening, shall we, then you won’t have to rush?’
Eat, when her stomach was a battleground; prepare his dinner, when she wasn’t even sure whether she was married any more; finish up the party wines, when his daughter had just run away from school? She hadn’t dared to tell him that. It didn’t seem to fit with the quiet return to order and good sense he’d so carefully prepared. That was the stumbling block. Too much order, white-washing all the mess and questioning inside, blotting out drunken wives and rebellious daughters. Drunkenness was disgusting and rebellion terrifying, so safer to pretend they never happened. But some part of her kept shouting out that she had been drunk, would be drunk again, and not only drunk, but wild, unfaithful, and impulsive.
But if she could rebel, then why not Magda, too? If Magdas went wild, they were bundled off to boarding school, or worse. The trouble was, Magda did things too precipitately. It had taken her fifteen weary years to bend the rules, and here was Magda, stamping them to bits after only six short weeks. She felt a twinge of jealousy, wished she too could run away from things she didn’t like, from having to play mother. Even now, she was being forced to shovel spinach into Rupert, sit down to a hectic, unhinged lunch, with five gabbling children and assorted dogs and cats, instead of nursing her headache in a darkened room. And all because of Magda. Midge was dumping chewed lumps of gristle on her plate, Philip had poured Pepsi in her wine. She pushed the glass away. She couldn’t eat or drink, in any case. Her head was a rifle-range and her stomach a roller-coaster. The noise, the chaos, the constant battlefire of kids …
Bunty leapt up, suddenly, spraying her with gravy.
‘Hey!’ she yelled. ‘Magda’s awake. I can hear her on the stairs. She must be coming down.’
Frances jammed a cold potato in her mouth. She shut her eyes and slowly forced it down. When she opened them, Magda was standing in the doorway, tousled and embarrassed in a pair of striped pyjamas, one bare foot jabbing against the floor.
Frances dropped her fork. ‘Magda,’ she gasped. ‘Your hair!’
Viv had warned her, prepared her, but how could anyone prepare you for such massacre? The long, luxurious tresses were cropped short like a jail-bird’s, sticking up around her head, jagged and uneven. The hair had been hacked and mangled off, longer in some parts than in others, butchered at the back into a lopsided shingle. All Magda’s beauty had been shorn away. Without her crowning glory, her face looked pinched and thinner, her body bulkier. Frances wanted to storm and weep for such barbarous destruction, to hug that mutilated head on its slouched, unsmiling body. She kicked her chair back, jumped up to her feet. Magda stiffened. Even now, she couldn’t touch the child. She longed to take her in her arms and turn pity and horror into some loving, caring, flesh-and-blood gesture. But Magda was recoiling, backing away from her, locking up her face.
‘Excuse me,’ Frances muttered, blundering to the door. She couldn’t bear to see those cold, accusing eyes. She escaped into the kitchen, mumbling something fatuous about a headache.
Yes, of course she had a headache, but what was that, compared to Magda’s scalping? She’d been so concerned with her own paltry little pains, she’d hardly even listened when Viv had explained about the hair. It was the nuns, apparently, who’d first pressured Magda to have it cut. They told her it was injurious to her health to wear her hair so long. It was the health of her soul they were more concerned about. A well-developed girl with such a wild and sensual mane was a temptation to men, and thus a danger to herself and an attraction to the devil – though Magda had shown no interest yet in either men or Satan. She vowed she’d never marry, and refused to let the Brides of Christ lay a finger on her hair. When she swore at them for trying, they locked her in the dormitory. Two hours later, they brought her a glass of water and St Ignatius’ Prayer for Obedience and Humility. She was crouched in a corner, staring at the wall, surrounded by dark, limp swathes. She had cut her hair herself – hacked it off with the nail scissors, exorcized her beauty and the devil, with the same self-destructive strokes.
And there was Frances, Lord Justice Frances Parry Jones, planning to treat her like a convict, to lock her up again, and refuse to take her in, for no more reason than to wallow in her own selfish freedom, spread her own wings. And even that was sheer hypocrisy. She’d made no plans to fly away. Ned was right. He’d called her a homing pigeon, ringed and tagged by Charles. In whichever direction she was pointed, she speeded back to the safety of the nest. Just an hour or so ago, she had laid the table in the dining-room, ready for Charles’ return, decanted the port, left the steaks to marinate in wine. Wasn’t it safer to observe the rules? Magda had only lost her strength like Samson, by refusing to conform, and what had she herself gained by her petty little outrages? – a thick head, a wrecked house, and a bellyful of remorse. She couldn’t even deceive herself that she’d been striking a blow for feminist freedom. She didn’t want freedom – only goose-feather cushioning and jam in her sandwich. By betraying Charles and insulting Oppenheimer, she’d been biting the hands that fed her. It was all too easy to twist things into slogans. Ned would say she’d challenged Oppenheimer as a filthy-rich fascist grinding the faces of the poor. But that was far too pat. Heinrich was a self-made man, who had attended the Frankfurt equivalent of Brent Edge Comprehensive. He also happened to be a model employer and generous patron of the arts, his cheque book ever at the ready for any deserving cause or charity. She herself had basked in the warmth of his largesse. And, even if she left Charles, Oppenheimer’s wealth would still follow her and coddle her – alimony, maintenance, a separate bijou residence, the best divorce lawyers money could buy.
But it wouldn’t come to that – she wouldn’t leave Charles. She knew it, just by looking at his daughter. Magda was a victim now, with no other home than theirs. She would take her to that home and start again. And if Charles was wary, she could always talk him round. He was far less perverse and prickly now he knew she wasn’t pregnant, had overlooked her outrage at the party, shown himself ready to be merciful. Well, Magda must be included in that mercy. They must work at being a family again. It needn’t be as disastrous as before. Things were different now – Ned had changed her, taught her more than simple slogans. She’d been only a diversion in his life, the froth on his small beer, but all the same, he had leavened and unstoppered her. She could still winkle out the gems from his dustbin and bring them back like souvenirs from Brighton. Ned would survive, with his clowning and his cats, and she would survive on his precious, threadbare legacy. She could always swell it out with Charles’ more solid one.
‘Frances? What are you doing out here? You haven’t had your pudding!’
She jumped. Viv had burst into the kitchen, with Rupert burping in her arms and Midge trailing behind her, clutching at her skirts.
‘What’s wrong, love? Why did you rush off like that? Magda’s quite upset. She thought you …’
Frances struggled to her feet. She’d been sitting at the table snapping spent matches into tiny fragments. The table was littered with black heads and broken limbs. ‘Listen, Viv, I want to take her back with me, this evening. For dinner.’ There were still three steaks, three nectarines – exactly right. One each, not for Charles and the Oppenheimers, but for Charles and his wife and daughter. It was fitting somehow, meant. ‘Charles will be back any minute, and he’ll want to see her.’
‘Will he?’ Viv griped. She had picked up the custard saucepan and was scraping out the dregs.
‘He is her father, Viv.’
‘Yes. Funny, I keep forgetting.’
So, even Viv could be sarcastic. Frances marched back to the dining-room and collected up her things. She wanted to escape. If she were going to be Magda’s mother, then why wait for dinner to make a start on it?
‘Look, if you don’t mind, Frances, I’ll just pop over this evening, to see how she is.’
‘There’s no need, Viv. You sound like some social worker checking up on baby batterers. I know I’ve been a bit … well … unreliable, but that’s over, finished. I …’
‘Look, all I want to hear is what you’ve decided – you know, school and things. We haven’t discussed it yet.’
‘Charles and I will discuss it, Viv. This evening.’
‘Fine. And I’ll pop round to hear the verdict. Any objections?’
When Viv knocked, after dark, they had only reached the nectarines. Charles had opened a bottle of sparkling wine to wash them down. Not champagne. They weren’t exactly celebrating.
‘Thanks,’ said Viv, accepting a glass and subsiding on the sofa. ‘Where’s Magda?’
‘Upstairs.’
‘Doesn’t she eat with you?’
Frances fiddled with her fruit knife. ‘Well, yes, of course, but …’ How could she admit that Magda had banged out and marched up to her room the minute she’d made her ‘announcement’? That’s all she had returned for, not fillet steak and a prime-cut, medium-rare family reunion.
‘She’s tired,’ Charles shrugged, finishing off his nectarine and starting on the nuts.
‘She slept all morning, didn’t she?’
‘Look, Viv, don’t be scratchy. Charles only meant …’
Viv drained her glass in one gulp. ‘OK, cut the cackle. All I want to know is what you’ve decided about her education. I mean, if it’s all right with you, I’ll take her down to Highfield first thing in the morning, and make an appointment to see the headmistress. Then, with any luck …’
Charles cracked a walnut so hard, the shell splintered and flew across the table. ‘No, it’s not all right with me.’
Frances stood up. ‘Ssshh, Charles, let me explain. Look, Viv. Charles and I haven’t decided anything – honestly, we haven’t. It’s Magda herself. She wants to …’
‘You’re not trying to tell me she wants to go back to that atrocious boarding school? I’m sorry, Frances, I simply don’t believe it. And if you send her back, I’ll …’
‘We’re not.’
‘Well, where are you sending her?’
‘Nowhere.’ Frances was wringing out her napkin, as if it were soaking wet.
‘What do you mean, nowhere? She’s got to go to school.’
‘Viv, for heaven’s sake …’ Charles exploded the silence with another walnut, then sat there, picking morsels from the wreckage of the shell. ‘She’s going to Budapest.’
‘Budapest? How could she? The schools are completely different over there. She doesn’t even speak the language properly. How will she ever … ?’
‘It’s her own decision, Viv. She asked to go. She wants to.’
‘Rubbish! Of course she doesn’t want to. You want to get rid of her, more like it.’
Charles slammed the nut-crackers back on to the table. ‘Viv, I think you may regret …’
‘Me regret? And what about your regretting something? Treating your own daughter like an outcast, packing her off to outlandish places, just so you can lead your own selfish life …’
Viv was standing, trembling, with her hand on the door. Frances tried to edge her through it, away from Charles, and out into the hall.
‘Viv, do be reasonable. Hungary’s not outlandish. It’s almost her own home, in a way, her second country.’
‘Of course it isn’t! She’s never been there in her life. She was born in London and schooled in Streatham and she’s English to her toenails – English by law and language and upbringing and every other damn way.’
‘Yes, but what about her mother? Her mother’s not English, she’s Hungarian. And she happens to be in Hungary now. That’s important, Viv. Of course Magda wants to join her – it’s only natural. You said yourself a child belongs with its mother.’
‘Not a mother who deserts her own flesh and blood and runs off with some … gigolo. How d’you know she even wants Magda back? Have you checked? She may have scooted off somewhere else by now – with a new boyfriend, I wouldn’t be surprised. I suppose you’d let the poor kid trek half-way across Europe to find a scribbled note saying they’ve moved on.’
‘Don’t be silly, Viv. Piroska’s not as irresponsible as that.’ Ironical to be defending a woman she’d vilified to Viv only a month or so ago. ‘Anyway, Charles seems to think everything’s all right, and he ought to know. He’s kept in touch with Piroska all along.’ Frances had shut the door behind them. She couldn’t bear to see her husband chomping walnuts like an angry animal. He hated walnuts.
Viv stormed down the passage, towards the front door. ‘I’d hardly rate Charles as an authority on anybody’s happiness. Anyway, what about all those objections he raised in the first place – Magda’s education, and so on? He’ll muck up all her O-levels, and how the hell’s she going to get a job out there, when she’s older and left school? I don’t like the sound of it at all – having to share her mother with that … pick-up! They may even kiss and cuddle in front of her. That’s the last thing Magda needs, when she’s been starved of love herself. Look, let her come to me, Frances. I’ve said I’ll have her all along. At least I can be sure she gets a stable home and plenty of affection.’
‘It’s no good, Viv. She wants to go. She …’
‘And did you even try to talk her out of it, make her feel loved and wanted here? Didn’t you stand up to Charles, or think about someone else but yourself, for a change? I’m sorry – I’d better go before I do say something I regret. I’ll phone in the morning and hope to God you’ve changed your minds by then.’ The front door slammed behind her. ‘Give my love to Magda,’ she shouted through it.
Frances mooched along the passage. She could feel the blood oozing between her legs; thirty-five days of mockery and delusion weeping into a Tampax. The dull, cramping pain was like a continual reminder, dragging her down, jeering at her. ‘Give my love to Magda.’ Yes, Viv had love for the child, for every child, enough to last them through a hundred lifetimes, enough to take in the whole, abandoned, battered, unloved world. Her own heart wouldn’t even open to one neglected, wretched teenager. It was so crammed full of conflict and exhaustion, there wasn’t room for love. Despite her new resolves to start again, to return to base and make a nest for the fledgeling, she had felt a whoop of incredulous delight when Magda had announced she was going to Budapest. Relief had poured across the dinner table like hot, sweet custard. She was bitterly ashamed of that relief.
Yet, Magda had decided for herself. No one could say they’d forced her hand, or turfed her out. They had offered her a refuge and a peace-treaty, and Magda had rejected both. Anyway, whatever Viv said, it was surely only natural for a child to seek its mother, return where it belonged. Why should they try to talk her out of it, when it was a solution which seemed to satisfy them all? Mother and daughter reconciled, she and Charles reprieved, a new start both for cuckoo and for host-bird.
Yet, supposing Viv were right? Could they really send Magda off to an unstable household or an empty flat; disrupt her education? Charles had been so vague about it all, leaving everything uncertain, undefined. Strange, for a man who normally checked every smallest detail of a change of plan, examined all the problems, and insisted on solutions. On this occasion, he’d merely sat in silence, looking pained and secretive, and let a fifteen-year-old seditionary dictate to him.
She opened the dining-room door a crack, paused a moment, just outside. Charles was sitting at the table with his head in his hands, surrounded by empty walnut shells. She felt a stab of pity. The last few days had pounced on his neat and tidy life and torn it into shreds, presenting him, in turn, with a pseudo-pregnant wife, a drunken hostess, an illegitimate, non-existent baby, and a runaway teenager shorn of all her hair. His skin looked taut and greyish. Even his breath smelt slightly sour and tainted, unthinkable for Charles, who was always tingling-fresh with mint and vigour.
‘Try not to worry, darling.’ She took his hands, still felt stunned herself, as if she had been flung into a pestle and mortar and pounded into crumbs. But there were things to be done – Charles to be appeased, Magda’s future to be safeguarded.
Charles had already snapped up straight again. ‘I’m not worrying,’ he said, picking up his glass. The frown cut so deep between his eyes, it looked as if it had been gouged out with a chisel.
‘Look, Charles, I admit Viv’s a bit outspoken, but she’s right, you know. We shouldn’t really have agreed that Magda could leave – not before we’d phoned her mother. I mean, perhaps she doesn’t want the child. Isn’t that why she came to us, in the first place? That, and her education?’
‘It was an experiment, Frances, and frankly, it hasn’t worked. Anyway, if she’s run away from school and is refusing to go back, she’s hardly going to achieve much in the way of education.’
‘Yes, but how do we know that Piroska’s got room enough, or money enough? I mean, Viv just said that …’
‘Could we kindly leave Viv out of this? She’s hardly in a position to know the facts. I’ve never kept Piroska short of anything. She’s written to me, on and off, and, as far as I can see, everything’s perfectly all right. You and Viv are simply over-reacting. Anyway, of course I plan to phone. It’s top of my morning list. I’ll go over the whole thing with Piroska in detail – schools, housing, money, job opportunities …’
‘Why don’t you ring her now, darling? I mean, if there is some problem, we don’t want Magda lying there all night, planning a trip she might not even …’
‘I’ve told you, Frances, I’ll do it tomorrow. It’s too late now, in any case. Hungary’s an hour or two ahead of us, and they’ll all have gone to bed. Which – quite frankly – is where I’d like to be myself.’
The skin beneath his eyes looked almost bruised. He had gashed himself shaving and a cruel red line cut into the pallor of his cheek. He was like some wounded bird, but a proud, dangerous species, which refused to let anyone approach it, or show it tenderness. She longed for some warmth between them, so that they could turn towards each other and shut out all the pain. Not sex, not even caresses, just a quiet, united front against the world. But Charles was already on his way towards the door, his back a cold grey gravestone.
‘You go on up, then,’ she murmured, ‘and I’ll clear the supper dishes.’ Best to give in to him, leave him on his own. He’d be more amenable after a decent night’s rest. They could phone Piroska, first thing in the morning. Maybe she’d even speak to her herself. Her husband’s mistress no longer seemed so vile. Ned had somehow bridged the gulf between them.
Yet, all that Ned had taught her seemed to fade and shrivel when faced with Charles’ frown. Even now, with pain in every part of her, she was still scouring out saucepans and sweeping up nutshells when she should have been asleep upstairs. Why couldn’t she leave the bloody dishes? The kitchen was like a museum, as it was. Where were her new resolves, her determination to live more casually, to let both Ned and Magda creep inside the palisade, which she and Charles had built fifty foot high around them? She replaced the silver fruit knives in their rosewood box, rubbed at a scratch on the table, trickled disinfectant in the wastebin. Were habits stuck with you for ever, imprinted like genetic instructions on DNA? Or was it just something about this house? It was Charles’ house, so perhaps it was a tyrant, like its owner. The only time she’d escaped from it, she’d managed to cock a snook at dust and dishes. But, back in its dark, forbidding clutches, duty nagged and flogged.
Forty minutes later, she crept into the bedroom. Charles was already asleep – or pretending to be. He feigned sleep as she feigned climaxes. She undressed as quietly as she could, had already had her bath. Only Neds and Frannys went to bed unwashed. There was hardly room for her in her single bed, which was crowded with a raucous mob of gate-crashers, all quarrelling among themselves and confusing her with contradictory advice.
‘Be a tramp, be a gypsy!’ grinned Ned, biting into a giant-sized Mars bar. ‘Pawn the sodding fruit knives and buy a horse-drawn caravan.’
‘Back with Charles?’ mocked Franny. ‘Cramped by his Ten Commandments, crushed by his Tablets of Stone? What happened to that Brighton sybarite, that Barefoot Contessa?’
‘Love me,’ Magda pleaded. ‘Hug me, hold me. Let me know you want me.’
‘I don’t bloody want you,’ snarled Miklos, in his brutal pidgin English. ‘It’s your ma I fancy, and there’s not room for the two of us.’
‘Selfish, sterile, sour-grapes intellectualizer!’ Viv accused, popping another orphan under the blankets.
Frances struggled up. The voices slunk into the shadows, and were coffined in silence; silence so thick, she could feel it smothering her like a duvet, pressing down on her eyes, her mouth, her life. Even the bedroom furniture seemed to be holding its breath in an accusing, tight-lipped circle all around her, the whole house screwed up to breaking-point.
Could Charles be there, beside her, still breathing, still alive? She reached out her hand and touched the rough beard of the blanket, the curve of an elbow underneath.
‘Charles?’
No answer. Only another swirl and shiver of silence. She couldn’t wake him; it was sacrilege. With Ned, you could jump on his tummy in the middle of the night, or make him three A.M. milkshakes and share a coloured straw. Not any longer. That Ned was dead and buried, like her baby. There was only gelded Ned and supine Charles.
She was free, now. No baby to bind her, no life-plans to blinker her, not even any Ned to confuse her with his teasing. But was that really freedom, or just sterility and loss? Anyway, how could she be free, with Magda’s future undecided, with that morning phone call hanging over her, still threatening and uncertain? One wrong word from Piroska, and the longed-for trip to Budapest might shatter and collapse. Freedom and duty were fighting a duel inside her head.
She pressed her hands against it, trying to banish both conflicting voices. Would people ever understand how one hopeless, hapless, almost grown-up schoolgirl could tear your mind apart like that, make such a difference to a home, a life? She could hardly explain it to herself. Except that with Magda in the house she felt flattened, threatened, trodden underfoot; crushed like a flower in a flower-press, all the sap and colour which Ned had allowed to blossom in her stamped out and dried up. But wasn’t that Charles’ doing? Didn’t he, even more than Magda, have the power to trap her between the pages of a heavy, musty tome, and leave her gasping for light and air?
But Charles was impossible to fight. She couldn’t turf him out, or send him packing to his mother. It was his house, his flower-press, and all those weighty tomes which bludgeoned her bore his name, his crest, his imprint. All she could do was try to work towards a truce with him, and to remove the biggest obstacles between them. Magda, herself, was one of those big obstacles, a danger to their truce. The kid couldn’t help it, but there was something about her which would always lead to uproar and upheaval. Even now, she was causing rifts again, alienating Viv, splitting apart their precarious post-Oppenheimer peace.
Christ! How confused it all was. She threw back the blankets and swung her feet out of bed. The darkness was diluting a little, now that her eyes had grown more used to it. She could make out the hump of Charles’ shoulder, the lowering bulk of the wardrobe, the pale gleam of the charts, beside her on the bedside table. She was still thinking in terms of charts. It was hard to break the habit of all those dots and dates and graphs. Tomorrow would be Day Four, almost time to start her last course of Clomid. Except she’d be chucking it down the lavatory, instead.
She groped in the shadows for the bottle, tipped one tiny smooth white tablet into her hand. White for innocence and safety, purity, fidelity. White for blank pages and clean sheets. White for breast-milk, baby-gowns, delivery rooms. Was she really sure she didn’t want a baby? There was still time, still hope. She’d been so wrong about herself for fifteen years, perhaps she was wrong again, and the last few days had been merely shock and self-deception.
She flung the tablet on the floor. She couldn’t endure her frenzied, circling thoughts, her endless speculation. She poured out the rest of the tablets, let them fall between her fingers. Only cold, unfeeling things were as white and pure as that – ice and alabaster, marble lilies on a grave, Charles’ principles …
She lurched to her feet, swept the charts off the beside table, heard them sigh and rustle to the floor. Her body felt as if someone had wound it tighter, tighter, like a fire-hose on a reel. ‘Let Magda go,’ she prayed, the entire fire brigade clanking through her head, in the startled blaring silence.
She fell back into bed, turned over, away from charts and Clomid towards the second bed, and the dark shape called her husband. The long-case clock was booming through the hall, echoed by fourteen faint and muffled chimes. One A. M. All the clocks were back again, on duty, carving night and day into manageable pieces, reminding her that Time ruled in the universe, and Charles in Richmond Green. How could she have even thought to silence them? More foolish than Canute! If she chose to live in the bank-vault of her husband’s bounty, then she must accept his rule, his clocks.
Half a lifetime later, fifteen throats struck two. Sleep was an impostor, like herself. She crept out to the bathroom, and sat on the cold white shoulder of the bath, peering at the moon. Was it Hungary’s moon, as well? Was Piroska staring at it, even now, through the grandma’s greasy curtains, weeping for a lost daughter, or praying to some moon-goddess that she would never be sent back?
Frances drifted to the window. Thin steel knives of moonlight cut across the floor-tiles, flickered on her feet. She realized, suddenly, and almost with astonishment, that there was no decision to be made. All her tossing, frantic agonizing had been completely purposeless. It was Piroska herself who must and would decide. If mother opened heart and home to daughter, then she, too, would be freed. But, if Piroska hesitated, if there were the slightest frown or obstacle in Budapest, then Magda must stay with them in Richmond Green. However much she longed for the child’s departure, that was her basic duty, and she would follow it. No more reason to lie awake. It was simple now – Piroska held the final card. Softly, she closed the bathroom door, and climbed back into bed. The sheets stretched clammy arms around her neck.
‘Let her be happy,’ she whispered, to the darkness.
Charles flung out a hand and snorted in his sleep.