THE NEXT TIME I left Hetty at child care, I wondered where my normally sunny-natured child had gone. Surely the fairies must have been, and substituted a changeling with a foul temper in her place. I stood and watched helplessly as she went purple with fury, bubbles of spit and snot all over her face.
Her screams rent the air so rudely that other mothers looked askance.
‘Just go,’ said Jill. ‘She’ll be fine.’
I went.
The lecture hall was a refuge. The murmur of voices, the soft carpets, the discreet lighting, the cushioned seats and the air of calm expectancy made me relax. Already, I belonged there a little more than I had the last time. I dropped a pen, and the person in the seat near me retrieved it. He noticed my page of shorthand scrawl. ‘Nifty!’ he said with a smile.
That day the lecture was on Jane Eyre.
I learned that one female critic at the time said that if she had been Jane Eyre she’d have shot Rochester because of his deceit (whereas my impulse would have been to run off and live in sin with him since he wasn’t legally free to marry).
The lecturer spoke of the sadomasochistic forces at work in Jane Eyre, the cruelty Jane was subjected to, how she was like a caged bird. I took notes dutifully, as most students do. She suggested that her spirit was corrupted by the cruelty. Abandonment, loss, defencelessness, were the words I scrawled in shorthand on my pad in the interests of scholarship, as though these were mere words and had nothing to do with me.
She finished up with this quotation from the book, the part where Jane is locked in the fearsome red-room:
‘Besides,’ said Miss Abbot, ‘God will punish her: He might strike her dead in the midst of her tantrums, and then where would she go? Come, Bessie, we will leave her: I wouldn’t have her heart for anything. Say your prayers, Miss Eyre, when you are by yourself; for if you don’t repent, something bad might be permitted to come down the chimney and fetch you away.’
‘I’ll leave you with that,’ said the lecturer, with a smile that came close to sadism. She closed her book.
Something came over me. I was a child again, and had been left alone in an empty flat, thinking I must have done something wrong to deserve it.
Getting to my feet, I pushed in front of people in my urgency to get away. I found myself crying (crying! I never cry!) as I raced down the paths through the university to the childcare centre. I thought only of Hetty, of how alone, how abandoned she must feel. Her screams had been heartfelt, and real.
When I reached the centre, Jill led me through to where Hetty was; her gestures cautioned me to observe quietly.
And there was my baby, sitting in the middle of a cluster of children. A little boy of about three was talking to her, and she was smiling at him and drooling, so clearly charmed by his conversation that she was lost in it. He leaned forward and gave her a hug; she squealed and grabbed him by the ears in her joy. She sat there in her old-fashioned white nightie with embroidered flowers round the neck, looking exquisitely happy.
I left without her even noticing I’d been there, and went to the library, where I sat and looked over my notes from the lecture: abandonment, loss, defencelessness.
That was the night I’d offered to cook for Maggie Tulliver. I’m not a natural cook, unlike Kate, who can turn the compost heap in our laughingly named vegetable crisper into a feast.
But I was happy, frying onions and garlic, chopping vegetables and finding all kinds of interesting flavourings in the cupboards. The main course was a kind of vegetable stew, with tinned tomato soup to start (with a dollop of sour cream), and Kate’s dessert specialty for afterwards. (For the record, it’s a sheet of frozen puff pastry with the edges crimped up, with sliced raw apple, brown sugar and cinnamon piled on top, then baked to caramelised perfection. I’ve heard that some people like a few recipes in a novel, so be my guest. Cook away!)
I fed Hetty while I was cooking. She was tired after her day at child care, and afterwards I put her to bed in our room. Then I sat with Tess at my feet in the kitchen and waited for Maggie Tulliver.
And she never turned up! At the point where I knew she was never going to appear I reheated the soup, because despite my humiliated, stood-up feeling, I was very hungry. After I’d eaten, I went to my room and seethed. I imagined a Maggie Tulliver doll, which I could stick pins into. Then I told myself it didn’t matter. What was one dinner, in a whole life of dinners? One of these days you’ll laugh about it. Isn’t that what people said? I didn’t think I would, as there was nothing funny in the situation at all. One of these days, I would simply forget about it.
I heard Lil arrive back while I was trying to get to sleep. There was a great slamming of car doors and raucous laughter as her friends dropped her off. The conversations those old women had late at night after a few drinks would make a Russian sailor blush!
Much later, I heard footsteps that might have belonged to Maggie Tulliver. I thought it ridiculous that I should be nursing hurt pride over someone I barely knew. But there it was, sitting in my chest like a stone.