CHAPTER FIVE

Sheila

A remedy against sin

 

 

Brazen I suppose some might call it. It’s certainly not what you expect to see, going about the rooms before bedtime, just checking that the able-bodied ones are in their nighties and pajamas, no hot drinks by the bed that might spill and burn when they reach to turn off the reading lamp, everyone toileted nicely, the infirm ones bedwashed and tucked up. A careful eye swept over the room, that’s how I like to think of it; not done in an intrusive or overly bossy way. Just competence, lightly disguised; a few words, a warm smile, all the time making sure everything’s as it should be.

I’m fond of my last-minute night check; thorough and kindly, that’s what I aim for. And so, when you’re looking for cocoa perilously placed, or a lamp wire trailing where it might cause a fall in the night, it’s a bit of a surprise to see paintings, nude ones at that, oil on canvas spelling out desire and knowledge in a way that is instantly recognizable; nudity in a style that I can only describe as nonmedical. I’m not a prude, at least I don’t think I am. I can’t claim to be overly familiar with that aspect of life, but I wouldn’t describe myself as prudish.

Years ago, when I used to work in the maternity hospital, that was different. In a funny way, sex was in the air then, all the time if you think about it, or there wouldn’t have been all those pregnant women, would there? And it was all so clear; all those women’s bodies, so blood-packed and pulsing, all that pushing and twisting. You recognized, even if you were just changing the bedsheets, that it was all about sex and life and blood and redness. Pictures like those perhaps wouldn’t have even caught your eye, not in that environment.

But here it’s all different; geriatric nursing couldn’t be more different. It’s as if everything has been bleached out, to emphasize that all possibility of the other has fallen away. Every day, I look at lips that have faded to the color of old tea roses; eyes that have become a watery blue, white-rimmed like egg yolk. Veins, like washed-out ink, that snake along the backs of hands. I brush hair that has dimmed to gray or white; I wash underarms that retain only a few straggles of hair. I pat dry skin that is no longer pink, but parchment. And it’s hard to imagine these bleached-out bodies, these men and women—even the ones who can still have a little joke, or tell me a well-worn story that comes out from their lips creased through repetition—even these it would be hard to imagine like in those paintings. I work with fading, that is how I think about it; a fading of all things physical and mental, and then of life itself. And those paintings, they weren’t about fading at all. Even I could see that.

Which is why, I suppose, seeing all of Martha’s things gave me such a jolt. Not just the reminder that all the people here were so different once, but, I have to admit, the age she is (for it is clearly her) in the paintings. She looks about sixty, five years younger than me. That’s the thing that has started me thinking. Usually, I just sit here thinking this and that, waiting for a red light to wink from the panel to call me to someone’s bedside, or waiting for the little bell to ring as a reminder to go and turn over the ones who have had strokes so they don’t get bedsores. Yes, usually, all is calm and peaceful in my little night office. I sit at the desk (some of the others sit in the armchair, but I never do; that way lies the drift into a nap, and the unseen light or the unheard bell, and in the morning something that is undeniably your fault, a small, unmeant neglect while you dozed in the Parker Knoll). No, I sit at the desk, often with a nice cup of tea; sometimes my knitting, occasionally a small puzzle or a crossword. Experience has taught me it’s important to keep the brain lightly ticking when you’re on night shift; and then you can think properly if you have to (like when Mrs. Walker fell and broke her hip and I had her off to A&E within fifteen minutes of hearing her cry out).

And now, I find myself here thinking of Martha. Surprise really, layers and layers of surprise the more I think about it. Firstly because she never says much anyway, let alone anything of a confiding nature, and yet there she was, looking at herself as a mermaid as if she was breathing in each daub of the paint, her broad old legs turned to a glittering tail. She looked as if perhaps she’d never seen it before, or as if somehow it had taken her back either to that day, to where it was painted, or, most probably, to who had painted it, I should think. Sitting there on the bedspread, she looked as if she could taste the tang of a salt wind off the water, and her skin glowing from it all. At the same time as taking her in, I was looking at the picture, and wondering why there was an iron painted among the pebbles, an iron all silvered and beautiful so it was like a sceptre rather than something to press out creases. It had love writ large all over it, I could sense that, even though I would not describe myself as someone with an eye for art. And knowledge, too, it had knowledge there. Sometimes, I’ve watched those programs on television when they spend ten minutes explaining a painting to you—there’s always much more to it than I could ever imagine—and they say about whether the painter knew the woman, or if she was a sitter, or perhaps a daughter. Well, I could never write a television program about a painting, but I do know this. That painter knew her, knew her in a way that doesn’t make me think they had been married forty years and were used to watching each other pull on their shoes of a morning.

Martha’s words, what she said to me, This was my beginning … jam-packed with love. The certainty with which she said it, as if everything before had faded into insignificance. Imagine, the thought of starting it all then, now, at my age, when I’ve ruled it out for years. If I think of myself, of my marriage with Henry, of what we do, of what I like to do, it seems unthinkable, impossible even, to be sprinkled with delphiniums on old breasts, or to be painted holding a bowl of plump gleaming cherries like someone from a Greek myth. At this age, when I like best to sit with a cup of tea in front of the television watching Coronation Street, or walk in the park with a nice bag of sherbet lemons, handing one to Henry and watching him carefully twist the wrapper into a ball before putting it into his pocket. And in June, perhaps going on a day trip to Brownsea Island, catching the ferry from Poole, a basket of sandwiches on my lap, tomatoes sliced neatly with ham and mayonnaise, all wrapped tightly in foil with nice crimped edges. I don’t think of this as my endings—I’m not saying that—but they are not my beginnings, not in the way that I think Martha meant. They are, I think, my conclusions, they are the destination Henry and I have reached together.

My beginnings, I think, were altogether different. There has only ever been Henry really. I kissed one man before him; I remember the impression of stubble, of sour whiskey, and a thick bottom lip. In retrospect, I can see that this fleeting impression worked well in Henry’s favor.

I first met him in a park, on my lunch hour, when I was training to be a nurse. He worked in an office nearby and used to sit on a bench by the pond and eat his sandwiches while watching the ducks. I would be sitting on another bench, usually with Rosemary, my friend, usually laughing about some old consultant at the hospital, or some strict old matron, and I would notice him, sitting quietly, sometimes reading a paper, his sandwiches always wrapped in thick waxed paper.

What I noticed first was how clean he seemed to be; his nice gabardine raincoat, his hair always neatly combed back. When I walked past I noticed how clean his fingernails were, how carefully he folded up all his lunch packaging and put it in the bin. The first day he spoke to me was when Rosemary was off with a cold. He was so polite; asked me if I would like to go for a walk around the pond, and we talked about the ducks, and about how the leaves were turning early this year.

He told me he lived with his mother, that his father had died young, and, a week later, invited me to Sunday lunch, telling me not to worry, just to bring myself. His mother opened the door and looked me up and down in a way that took me all in. Not that there was much to object to, I have to say. I would describe myself, then, as halfway pretty; always nicely turned out, and very particular about the feet. My shoes are always more expensive than I can really afford. She greeted me quite formally, and asked me inside, and I was struck straightaway by the dimness of the light, the thickness of the net curtains, the spider plants in pots that seemed to have tinged the room green with their thin, striped leaves.

In the kitchen, Henry smiled his greeting and carried on laying the table. I noticed how carefully he lined up the knives and forks, touching the end of each one with the base of his thumb to make sure they were correctly spaced to the edge of the tablecloth. I remember asking his mother if I could do anything to help; she replied that doing the gravy would be a good idea. Making a good gravy stands you in as good a stead as anything, she said, which possibly has more wisdom in it than I credited her with at the time.

I stood there, mashing the onions from beneath the beef into the gravy, pouring over the potato water, and stirring it carefully with a wooden spoon. After lunch, we went for a walk, and when I left to go home, he kissed me on the cheek. How respectful, said Rosemary, when I told her the next day. With hindsight, I don’t think she knew as much as she thought.

Henry asked me to marry him about two months later, on the same park bench, on a cold day in November, and all I could think, when he asked me, was how decent he was, how clean and how shy. How much of a contrast to my rip-roaring father, who came home of a weekend night smelling of beer and piss, so that my mother told me, Whatever you do, do not marry a man with an eye for the drink. Perhaps, in retrospect, that was what I thought then, that whomever I was marrying it was certainly not a man with an eye for the drink. Instead, it was a man with a clean gabardine coat, who smelled of soap and shoe polish and who liked knives and forks laid out just so.

I said yes, while the wind whipped round the bench, and my fingers turned blue, clasped in my lap. I saw before me a neat, safe life; Henry with a scarf knotted properly at his throat when out on a cold February night; his mother’s gravy recipe endlessly poured over Sunday roasts through the years. The toilet seat, I guessed, would never be left up.

On our wedding night, I didn’t really know what to expect; although I knew enough to know that what happened wasn’t what was meant to. That, put baldly, nothing actually did happen. When I think back, I can understand my uncertainty. At that time—it was the late 1950s—there were inklings of people living what we thought of as more modern lives, but certainly not us. No, we lay side by side under a sea green candlewick bedspread and I lay there waiting, my hands clasped on my stomach, my face half turned to Henry’s in the dark, my tongue heavy in my mouth, thinking that perhaps he would know how to begin. I knew from nursing what the signs were; I was conscious of glancing down to the middle of the bed, looking for any indication that something might be imminent. But nothing. He turned to me, and held me, and kissed me with his lips together in a way that made it clear that nothing invasive was expected. I remember reaching my hand out to stroke his midriff above his pajama waist, thinking perhaps that might let him know I would not be horrified by a turn of events in that direction, but I felt him turn his abdomen away, so clearly turn his abdomen away, that I put my hand back on the bedspread and continued to kiss him in a way that reminded me of two horses I’d seen nuzzling each other over a fence; a communion of sorts, but not what you’d hope for, lying there in your bridal nightie scrubbed clean as a fresh plum.

Each night, the same painful awkwardness, the same silence, the same Good night, dear in a way that made it clear to me that he could now be released to go to sleep. I expect it’s different now; I can’t recall anyone asking Sarah if she was pregnant, or if she and Michael were hoping for a baby. I think people are so aware these days that couples might be having IVF, or that the woman might prefer working, that nobody really asks. It wasn’t like that then; then, your newly married status, six months in, was a license to ask. Standing in the greengrocer’s line, sprouts and potatoes in paper bags in your hand, and someone from the road you lived on asking you, Any happy news yet? or something about tiny feet, or looking at you sideways on with a skillful eye and a knowing look. And I stood there (always the memory of those moments smells of sprouts, and yet I hardly ever bought them) smiling, saying no, no with a small embarrassed laugh, and the tincture of those parch-dry bedtimes still on my skin in the morning.

One night, I remember Henry inadvertently coming into the bathroom while I was in the bath. I stood up, clumsily, quickly, in what I think was going to be an attempt to reach for the towel. I was having a period and as I stood up a plug of dark, glistening blood spilled out onto my thigh. His face, I remember so clearly, was appalled. His hand to his nose, as if trying not to scent me, his eyes horrified as if my entrails were slithering down my leg. And at the same pace as his horror, I could see his attempts to mask it; a clumsy reaching for the nail clippers, or whatever had brought him in there in the first place, a retreat out of the bathroom door that could not be described as unseemly in its haste. But I had seen him. I had seen what his face and his hand registered; I had seen in his eyes what my body, at that moment, was to him. The next day, I sat in the staff room with Rosemary drinking coffee, on the tip of my tongue the question I would not ask, Does your husband ever look at you as if your body appalls him?

In February, after we’d been married a year and a half, I went to see Dr. Hartley, our doctor. I sat in the waiting room, wondering how I’d find the words for it all; my shame at our soft, limp nights jostling with a desire to have a baby that had emerged, new and insistent, like a shoot. I sat in front of his desk, turning the edge of my cardigan sleeve in my hand, my words falling lamely onto the grain of the wood, It’s just that I’d like a baby, doctor, and nothing seems to be happening … each month I’m not pregnant. And I presume, he’d asked, that there is no problem with intercourse? And there it was, the chance to spill it all out to him; to tell him of the nights of clamped-lip kisses, of a back turned firmly to me when I reached out to touch Henry. The opportunity to unfold it on the desk before him (morning glories, we called them on the ward, the possibility of telling him that we’d never even got as far as that), the difficulty of telling him all that and leaving Henry’s dignity intact. Because each night it happened, each night as I lay there, my body frustrated, my skin raging to be touched, I was aware of the affection, the love, in Henry’s voice as he said Good night, dear, sometimes his hand holding mine as he fell asleep. And I felt as if I was sitting in front of Dr. Hartley with a lap full of hot shame; shame that was dripping around my ankles, staining the leather of my shoes. So I was not surprised when I heard my voice say clearly, calmly, the lie coughed up from my throat like a smooth round marble, No, doctor, there’s no problem with that, I’m wondering if there might be something just not quite right with one of us. Give it another six months, he told me, and then come back and we’ll talk again.

I’ve got a photograph that was taken of me around that time; in a studio, properly. I think it was a birthday present from Henry to me. I’m wearing a lemon dress, which still strikes me as an odd color to have chosen. The picture’s black and white, it doesn’t show the color of course, but I found the photograph recently, and remembered the color instantly. I look like a big boiled sweet, except without the sherbet inside. My hair is curled in a very neat roll. My hands are gathered into my lap and I’m looking off-left, in what I presume was reminiscent of the style of women I liked to watch in the cinema. Now, when I look at that young girl I think how neat she looks, how neat and small; not small in stature, but small in womanliness. No femme fatale, I think that’s how you might say it. No buoyant bosom that carried with it the promise of fecundity and Arabian nights. I can see I look the sort of girl that a mother would be very glad to have her son bring home, because there would be no threat there, no alluring call to a bedroom full of clever moves and curling limbs and tilting pelvises. No, just a nice sensible girl with carefully done hair, wearing a lemon dress that is ill-conceived but well-intentioned. And what’s more, a ready vessel for a gravy recipe. Now that I think about it, when you were born to older parents then, you were somehow catapulted straight into middle age when you reached sixteen. My parents dressed like the old people drawn in children’s books, and my bosom seemed to emerge straight into a good sensible blouse. When I look at teenagers now, with jeans that hardly go above their groin, and bare, pierced navels, and skinny-cut T-shirts that are as if stuck to their ribs, then I don’t shake my head and think it’s a disgrace, or that there’s no mystery anymore, like my friend Mary Poole says. No, instead I think it was the mystery that got my generation into trouble in the first place, and the young today are better off without it and having their moment instead.

Six months later I went to Dr. Hartley again, on a sunny morning in August. I sat before him, trying to banish a memory from a few weeks earlier, when, waking from sleep in the middle of the night, the air with the warmth it gets only one or two nights in June or July, and everything feeling so silken to the touch, my skin slightly sticky, and the windows open, and moonlight coming through the curtain, and I thought it’s now or never and reached over, inside his pajamas, and took him in my hand, hoping for a response, that he might just sweep me up and everything happen at last. Instead, he lay his hand gently on my wrist, taking my hand away, lifting it off as if I were a child in a shop ignoring a sign that said Do not touch, and his voice, almost painfully weary, that’s how I still remember it sounding, saying to me Sheila, love, and then turning away, the silence like snowfall between us. And that’s when I knew, all those years ago, that that part of our relationship would not change, that that was not what he wanted from me. And I lay there—such a warm night it was, I swear I could smell the flowers from next door’s garden, and such a lift in the air, such a sweetness and softness—and understood that in his voice, in the way he said love, that there was love, but not like the sort I’d been hoping for. Not the type that would have let me sit in front of Dr. Hartley and say Everything’s fine, I think I’m pregnant. No. I sat in front of him, the memory of that night like a cobweb on my skin, and told him I was certain there was a problem, what could he suggest.

To think, nowadays, of what a hurry-scurry of tests that would have induced; sperm counts and hormone levels and ovulation injections, and IVF, and clinics with walls and walls of photos of miracle babies. Women with tight jawlines and clenched hands and desperate eyes, coming for scans to see if their embryos had taken. Feeling like colanders, I expect, as if small molecules of life slipped through without a trace. But back then, nothing of that. Dr. Hartley hesitated briefly and then asked, Have you considered adoption, and I jumped at it, as you would a raft that could take you to the promised land.

I went home to Henry and suggested it, without any trace of embarrassment, any self-consciousness, with no allusion to the issue we never discussed. I thought he was going to throw back his head and roar with relief. It’s funny, those moments in life when what is not said is more significant that what is; the knowledge, implicit between us, that what I was offering was a way off the hook for him. What a wonderful idea, he said. What do we do?

Birthing homes—what terrible places they were, stuffed full of teenage girls, stern matrons, and correction. Whey-faced young women being punished for something most of them had not entirely understood. We waited in Reception and I watched them coming and going in the hallway; one with a belly neat and compact like a netball, walking up the stairs and tapping each of the spindles as she went, like a child going to bed. And another, with corkscrew curls and cheeks that were florid and rosy, like a drawing of a healthy country child, and who looked as if she should be out in the fresh air, birthing in the field, and kicking up her heels with glee afterward. It was such a sterile place—I remember being conscious of the irony of that—awash as it was with unplanned fertility, and with neat orderly lines of the infertile ready to take the babies away. The radiators and banisters and walls were painted a pale mint green. It matched the resolve, the moral certainty, in the staff’s faces, as they went about their business, alternately chastising and bestowing, that’s how it seemed to me.

When they brought the girl in, she was holding the baby so tightly I thought there might be a to-do about taking him from her. I was struck by how young she was—she couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen. She was shaking; her bottom lip was trembling, and I could see that she was biting into it with her teeth. I couldn’t help but wonder where her own mother was; where was she while her child stood in front of us in a nightgown with bare feet, handing over her flesh and blood to perfect strangers. The brutality of it struck me then and still does now; although it was not enough, at the time, to walk away without the baby in my arms. It was a hunger, that’s how I think of it, a gnawing hunger to have and hold a child that could be mine. I’ve often thought what a ragbag of emotions those places held; all the wanting, the desire to possess, all those umbilical cords severed, some against the will.

Henry was sitting beside me, quietly taking his pen from his pocket, filling in forms and signing papers, and doing what the matron asked swiftly and competently. I couldn’t look at the girl and I couldn’t not look at her. I could see that she was sweating; damp rings marked the underarms of her nightgown, and one of her breasts was leaking milk which made a patch across her front. I felt dry, and small, and cruel, and as if somehow we were nailing her feet to the floor. How respectable we looked; Henry with his fountain pen, me with my neat two-piece, and her sweaty and wet and true in a way that pains me now if I think about it, which in truth I have not for years. Tonight, and Martha, all of this tumbling through my mind so that I cannot start my knitting or do the crossword, or even be bothered to go and make another cup of tea.

She answered the questions matron asked her as if someone else were operating her voice, and all the time her arms were wrapped tightly round the baby, her knuckles white, her veins visible. Then, she handed the baby to the matron, and the matron wrapped him firmly and competently in a white blanket and passed him to me. Like shopping, I thought, like being given a parcel after waiting some time in a line, and the girl turned around slowly and walked out of the room.

When we left the building, I was sure I could hear weeping; I was sure that if I turned around I would see her at an upstairs window. So instead, I looked into my arms, at his small, puckered face, at the small bead of milk still in the corner of his mouth, at the curl of his dark hair on his scalp. He’s lovely, I whispered to Henry, and he smiled and kissed me on the cheek and said, I’m so glad that you’re happy.

I called him Michael, and wrapped myself in a baby cocoon, spun like a spider’s nest with the three of us soft inside. I would place him between us in the bed, his tiny fingers curled around mine, the soles of his feet pushing against one of my hands. His arrival sprang us from the trap of our nights. Suddenly our sexless chastity seemed appropriate, somehow clean, in a bed that smelled of baby skin, of talcum powder, of clean terry diapers.

That first summer Henry dug over part of the yard and made a cutting garden. By July, it was a mass of flowers—delphiniums, larkspur, chrysanthemums, poppies. I would place Michael in his high chair and look out through the kitchen window and see them all, a swell of color and movement and scent. I would carry Michael down in my arms and go along the rows, saying the colors, pointing to the birds, so happy I thought my heart would burst. It still amazes me how quickly I appropriated him and made him mine. I seemed to inhale the smell of his skin, the feel of him, absorb the weight of him into my rib cage until I couldn’t contemplate that I hadn’t birthed him. The girl with the horror-struck eyes faded from my mind, bleached away at the edges until she became indistinct.

I loved him, every minute of him. I was as clear about that then as I am now. He wasn’t just a baby, a child; he tipped the balance of the scales and made everything right. I was able to love Henry, to enjoy Henry’s company, without any of the insistent nagging, the anxiety, the knowledge that all was not perhaps as it should have been. Michael was the guy rope that held it all up straight; the pulse that put the confidence back into my stride. I stood with him in my arms in the greengrocer’s line, asking for apples and carrots, letting old ladies thumb his cheeks, smiling when they said he was bonny.

I can still remember all the milestones so clearly; Michael wobbling on his shiny blue bike, Henry running alongside holding on to the saddle, and me clapping and clapping on a cold frosty February morning saying, You can do it, you can do it, you’re doing it, you’re pedaling by yourself, and taking a photograph I still have, of him standing proudly beside his bike, his finger on the bell, wearing a navy duffel coat and a scarf I had knitted him.

Henry was just the kind of father I would have wished for a child. He was patient and kind, forever making little bits and bobs for him, out in the shed, the sound of hammers and nails, and afterward some version of a suspension bridge held up with such pride by Michael that I would have kissed Henry on the spot if I thought that was what he would have wanted. On Fridays, he took him to the library, returning with books like Swallows and Amazons, which he would sit and read to him in the armchair by the fire, and I would make hot chocolate and carry two mugs to them, and think of my own father and his boozy rages, and Friday nights that were torn with him banging on the door to be let in, and my mother hiding us in the pantry so as to be out of his way. Friday nights always had, for me, the smell of beer, and anger, and the feel of the mop bucket crushed up by my foot, and the shelf with the flour and the sugar right up against my ear, and my mother moving quickly, darting like a bird, her voice cajoling, soothing, trying to jolly him upstairs, and beneath her tone, evidently, a thin note of fear, so when she closed the pantry door, her hand placed on the base of her throat, I could see a small pulse visible on the side of her neck, something tremulous about the way she swallowed. I would put the blanket over my sister and tell her to go back to sleep, and sit there until my knees had imprinted their shape on my chin, and wait for Mom to come down and take us back up to bed, and in their bedroom the sound of my dad snoring fit to bust. So when I carried the hot chocolate in to my own front room, and saw Henry sitting and reading about boats out on lakes, and sandwiches cut for lunch, I could have dropped to my knees and given him thanks for it all. For the child, with the beautiful turn of his cheek and his eyelashes, sitting absorbed in the story, gazing as if he could see it all, and Henry from whom I had only ever seen kindness and goodness, and who somehow healed all my Friday nights while reading to our child. And suddenly, we were in our thirties, with Michael at the grammar school, buying dictionaries for Latin homework, and geometry equipment in gold-and-blue tins, and moving house to one where we could park the car in the front driveway.

And it occurred to me, one lunchtime when I had just returned from a morning shift at the hospital, as I was unpacking some shopping and beginning to make shepherd’s pie for tea, that here I was, thirty-seven in the spring, and still a virgin, still with no knowledge of the other.

Just once, there was one of the hospital porters, a huge man who could take the carts with just one of his hands and used to wheel them along whistling softly to himself. As I was arranging the pillows for a patient he was fetching from theater, he looked at me in a way that was ripe with possibility, a twinkle in his eye that was an invitation to smile back, and the other porter teased him and asked, How come her carts are always delivered on the double? and he laughed good-naturedly, and said, Sheila’s worth extra effort, and for a moment I wondered what it would be like to sleep next to him of a night. His hand on my breast, his leg resting across my belly. A light slap on my buttocks as I got out of bed. Bring me some tea, love, that was what he might say, sitting propped on the pillows, his chest all hairy, one huge hand behind his head. Toenail clippings, there would probably be those on the bathroom floor, realizing, as he took the cart from me, that perhaps my life matched Henry’s more than I knew, although that didn’t stop me from blushing when his hand touched mine as I passed the cart over.

For a while afterward, when I saw him in the corridors, I quickened my step. I thought of my mother saying be careful what you wish for, you might just get it, and knew what mattered most was my life safe with Henry and Michael. Sometimes I watched a film at the cinema, and felt hot-skinned and sticky; a small pang of desire from watching the way the leading man kissed a woman, but it stayed something to dream about, not something that made me look for it properly. Respectable my middle name. Henry and me, as if topped with some innocent 1950s piecrust; him with a slight crispness at the edges, and me bustier, my body slacker, my face peaceful, if slightly watchful, at all times. And my mother, not long before she died, sitting in her armchair and looking at me in a way she had that always conveyed more than she actually said, and saying, Henry’s such an old dear, as if she had seen something that I hadn’t, and it made me mindful of something she’d asked me years previously (Sheila, dear, what is it that homosexuals actually do?), and there it was, staring me in the face as I chopped onions for shepherd’s pie on a white plastic board, that it was possibly that all along.

Then, two summers later, we went on holiday abroad for the first time; went on an airplane to Spain, and sat in restaurants on the beach and ate paella and tried sangria, and Michael joined a group of other teenagers by the pool and Henry and I sat at the table and the waiter, who was what I would have then called flamboyant, swirled around us, putting our napkins into our laps, his fingers fluttery like butterflies, his smile white-toothed and his black hair oiled, and his walk, well, probably the word to describe it was mincing, but at the same time, a confidence, a comfortableness in his own skin. He moved around the table and took the order, and produced a saucer of olives with a flourish and I was mindful of Henry becoming agitated, annoyed, a small patch of pink visible at the corner of his mouth, and his fingers, unusually, clasped in a knot on the table. How can he make such a fool of himself, he said, when the waiter left, prancing about like that for everyone to see. No self-control, no dignity. Ridiculous. And I thought how unusual it was for him to comment on the behavior of someone else, to be so nettled by a waiter taking an order, to appear so discomfited when the waiter returned to the table and lightly touched his shoulder as he placed his plate on the cloth.

Years later, when Michael was at university, we went to pick him and a friend up from the airport after they had spent the summer traveling in Europe. Michael sat next to me in the back, and was telling me about Rome and Florence and what he had seen there. In the front seat, Neil sat next to Henry, who was driving, and whose face I could see in the rearview mirror. Neil fell asleep, his head resting on his own shoulder, his blond hair bleached in the sun, his chest visible in his open shirt, and I saw Henry look across at him, once, just once, with a glance that struck me as furtive and ashamed, the corner of his mouth slightly moist, his lip tremulous, then a small pursing of his mouth, an almost imperceptible shake of his head. His glance was like a small, white-hot flame, even I could see it as an expression of desire. A small surge, unwished for, and quickly carried away. And then I knew, sitting there in the backseat of the car, listening to our son talk about a cathedral in Italy, that for all these years it was not me, it was not personal. It was simply that I would never be able to provide him with what he desired.

A lavender marriage. I have learned (reading in a magazine) that that is what it is called, when a man marries a woman as a smokescreen for his homosexuality. In retrospect, it seems unbelievable that I didn’t piece it together sooner; my mother’s observation, a waiter in a long-ago hotel, a drive from an airport when it was impossible to suppress. I wondered, at first, why someone chose lavender for the term. Was it for its fragrance, which can cover and mask? Or perhaps for its medicinal properties, because it’s supposed to soothe and calm. Why, I wondered, was it not called a rose marriage or a daisy marriage? But the more I thought of it (and I’m no psychologist, but I think sometimes if a word is to be applied to you, it’s best to walk around it, to consider it, to finger its edges like an old medal, until you can absorb it, accept it, and stick it to your chest) the more I realized the term is perfect. I mulled on lavender as I made beds, cooked meals, washed up, and learned to see in it all kinds of relevance that help me understand things better. Lavender, you see, will flourish in the driest of soils, with the smallest amount of water. It will survive in the face of almost no nourishment. And it is clever in the difference between its appearance and reality—the sweet powerfulness of the fragrance is held up by its woody, dry stem. It is a plant without juices, without juiciness within, but which through drying and pressing produces a fragrance and effect that lasts. It helps people sleep, to lay their heads peacefully on their pillows at night. In sachets, it hangs from coat hangers and discourages moths. It preserves orderly housekeeping between folded sheets and linen, keeping everything pristine and freshly smooth.

I am almost sure that Henry has no secret life. I am confident that he does not visit toilets in rest stops, or read magazines, or visit bars tucked away in side streets. I think he has buried this part of himself so deeply that now, when he is seventy-two, it may be of little importance to him. But I wonder, when he dreams, if that part of himself is free; or if he holds it like a sadness, or a small, howling rage. A wet, bundled towel, pressed to a bruise. One night, in bed, ten years ago now, I asked him through the darkness, Do you think, Henry, you know, maybe, perhaps, other men? And his voice dry and broken, as if fighting tears, I never would. I never have. I am a married man. It is enough. And I had a sense of what our lavender marriage meant for him; a mast he had nailed himself to, but which held him, on his terms, upright and correct; allowed him to look at himself in the mirror and see a married man staring back. And I reached over and held his hand, and kissed the side of his face, thinking of Swallows and Amazons and hot chocolate on long-ago nights, and cutting beds full of flowers and a tool kit that made trains and Ferris wheels and suspension bridges, and I thought, as I think now, that there are different kinds of intimacy, and different ties that bind. And we have not spoken of it since; nor of the fact that our marriage has never been consummated. Everything I know has come from these small scraps, held unspoken in my heart all these years, with our chaste nights like a canvas drawn tight over it all.

When Michael was so evidently heterosexual, I confess to a sigh of relief. It is easier, I thought, wanting his way always to be smooth. When he met Sarah, I could see instantly that she was special, different; the way he looked at her, spoke of her, the way she held his gaze. I asked him once if he had told her he was adopted. I mentioned it, he said, as if it carried no significance. I worried that she might consider me somehow less authentic, less valid, but it never seemed so.

Once, when I visited their flat early one morning, Sarah was still curled up in their bed, her dark hair flagged on the pillow, her knees curled to her chest. Michael made us some coffee and took some to her, and as he left the bedroom I saw him touch her face softly and reach down and kiss part of her ankle that was not covered by the duvet. It was done with such affection, with such pleasure in her substance, and when she came into the kitchen, her dressing gown knotted and wearing a pair of his socks, kissing me on the cheek and apologizing for being such a sleepycat, she looked like a woman who knew that she was loved and desired, and I was glad for her, glad that my desiccated papery bed would never be hers. When she became pregnant, she became more fluid, more feline. I was proud of her; proud of the way she made it all look so easy.

I remember so clearly going to the hospital when Rory was born. As I came into the room I couldn’t help but feel how lucky she was. Even though she was exhausted, and desperate for tea and toast, she was so evidently, so visibly, consumed by the emotion she felt for her child, and it felt so proper and right, that a child should be welcomed so. I was unexpectedly sad, as I reached forward to hold the baby, wishing that moment had been mine, that Michael had been mine from his very beginnings. And yet so aware, as I kissed Rory’s forehead, that this was another gift from Michael, another richness that would never have been mine. We are both lucky, I thought as I handed Sarah back her child, and smiled at Henry, who was protesting that he could not hold something so perfectly tiny. It is not a question of blame, or fault, this has always been clear to me.

I had not thought of Michael’s mother for years, yet by Sarah’s bed I wondered again how it must have been for her, her body still leaking with traces of birthing as I took him away. When Sarah said, I think we will call him Rory, I wondered whether Michael had another name, a name that slipped away with no record or trace. As I stood by Sarah’s bed, my hands became busy, professional, smoothing the corners of the sheets, making sure the corners were correctly tucked in. I felt both included and excluded, I can see that now, my hands distracting me away from a sudden desire to weep confused tears for us both. And yet, Michael’s child felt so instantly my grandchild, and a warm step further away from my own beginnings as a mother. I remember fussing over Sarah, wanting to cocoon her and the baby, both for them and to banish the thought of the starkness of Michael’s newborn time. (Again, at that moment, wondering where the girl’s mother was; why she had not smoothed down bed corners and offered to spread butter on toast.) With each grandchild born, I have felt more solid, more involved; layers and layers of binding that hold us as a family.

I remember a song sung by that man with the big toothy grin who used to play the ukelele, the one about cleaning windows and all the things he saw within. I remember singing along to the radio, I can’t have been more than fourteen, about two pairs of pajamas side by side. I think of that, and the life Henry might have lived, and wonder if it hurts him, nowadays when there is no shame or notion of sin attached, to think that he has lived his life in a state of denial. And I have lived mine as a mother and as a wife and as a lavender shrub; firm to the ground, well-rooted, with a man who has been unfailingly kind and generous and supportive. In life, as we age, I think we learn, on our own terms, what is enough.

My marriage—and as I sit here at my night desk I can see it all so clearly, like a map of the stars, each one clear and distinct—my marriage consists of things I find utterly companionable, peaceful, and not without joy. We sit side by side at the breakfast table, and usually manage to complete the crossword. We like to try special-recipe sausages, served with mash and onion gravy. We make mulled wine at Christmas and go blackberry picking when the hedges are laden. We discuss what type of dog we would have, were we ever to have one. We sit on benches in the park, and watch our grandchildren play in the boating lake, and Henry reads to them, just as he did to Michael, and I make hot chocolate for them, and wonder how my hands got to be so old. We visit Michael and Sarah frequently for Sunday lunch, and Sarah laughs warmly and asks me to make gravy like the children’s great-grandmother. Henry builds champion constructions of Lego and Duplo, and he lies on the rug and the children clamber over him and I have a sense of mellowness, of fruition, of peace with it all.

Now, when I am sixty-five and Henry seventy-two, all of my anxiety, all of that hungry skin under a candlewick bedspread, seems insignificant, almost unimaginable. In some ways, our chastity has left no real mark, nothing that I can turn to and say This is the price I have paid. My virginity is still upon me, if someone looked carefully enough, although I like to think I have the doughty demeanor of an old nun, when chaste innocence has been replaced by the wisdom of years.

I have never been desired. I know this and accept this. I have never lain in a man’s arms and understood what it was all about. But I have held and loved my child, and I have loved and been married to a good man.

I wonder if Martha is sleeping now, and where she has put all her things? I wonder if she is holding them curled tight in her palm? I remember once as a child, I insisted on sleeping in new shoes, and railed at my mother in the morning when I found them neatly in the box beside my bed. I can still see Martha’s portraits, the turn of her fish tail; her breasts covered in flower petals, her iron catching the light like a siren on the shore. I can see, at the age she was then, which is almost mine now, that her body is ringing with love, sex, and boldness. Jam-packed, she said, that was her term. It is not my word to use, but I will find my own. I do not feel insubstantial in the face of what I have seen tonight; sitting here, by my desk, I am not a desiccated heap of dust. I am solid and round and grounded like a fruit bowl. I can lie on the floor and feel the planet beneath me, layers and layers of it until it reaches hot rock. My marriage has been gently, quietly, chastely fraudulent, but also loving and kind and joyful and a provider of real companionship. I love Henry. I love Michael. I love Sarah. I love my grandchildren.

I feel like a bedrock, a foundation stone in all of their lives. I am loved in ways that are as valid as passion. I am happy, and can contemplate my past, and my future, with serenity. This is what I know as I sit in my chair at my desk. I have my truth, just as Martha has hers.