Angela came to Christopher’s house after work. He opened the door. She was still angry and wouldn’t cross the threshold. She said, “I didn’t kill it, Christopher, it wasn’t alive.”
“Of course she was alive,” he shouted. “I felt her move, that Sunday.”
She had left her car in the middle of the road. The driver’s door was open and the engine was still running. The interior light was on and Christopher could see that she’d been food shopping. There were two plastic bags on the back seat. A fresh pineapple poked out of one. Christopher couldn’t take his eyes off the pineapple’s fibrous leaves. It didn’t belong in this snow-covered landscape, he thought. It wasn’t natural. She shouldn’t have bought the thing. It belonged in the tropics. It was inappropriate to have it here in this cul-de-sac with snow piled against the verges.
“I’ve got to go,” she said. “Gregory’s got wine appreciation tonight.”
“What’s that got to do with you?” He was furious with her.
“I’ve got to cook his dinner before he goes out,” she said. She knew how feeble this must sound to him. A car pulled up behind Angela’s car, and a young woman tapped impatiently on the steering wheel. Angela said, “We take it in turn to cook dinner. It’s my turn.”
“How can you cook for somebody you don’t love?” shouted Christopher. The young woman, whose car Angela was blocking, sounded her horn and Angela went to her car and drove away without looking back. As she waited to turn on to the dual carriageway she glanced into her rear view mirror and saw that Christopher’s front door had closed.
♦
When she got home Gregory was at the stove, moodily stirring canned tomato soup in the saucepan she liked to use exclusively for milk.
“You know it’s wine appreciation,” he said accusingly, as he lifted the saucepan off the stove and poured the soup into an earthenware bowl.
“Sorry,” she said, “the snow made me late.” Then, “Gregory, your hairl”
“The main roads are clear,” he said. “I got home on time.”
His sideburns and the carefully constructed oiled waves he’d had for over twenty years had gone. His hair was now short and brushed away from his forehead. Without the darkening effect of hair oil she could see that his hair was almost entirely grey. He looked like a distant relation of himself.
“I feel like a new man,” he said.
At eleven AM Gregory had left the shop in the care of his assistant and strolled around the city centre inspecting hairdressing salons. He didn’t want to go anywhere too radical. He rejected places with distressed paintwork and spotlights. He also spurned the old–fashioned barbers’ shops where middle-aged men in white jackets imposed their views on their customers. Gregory had chosen the Upper Cut, a unisex salon where Ella Fitzgerald sang above the noise of the hand-held driers. Michelle, a senior stylist, gave him a consultation. He explained to her about wanting a new look. Together they settled on a style.
“We call it the Prussian schoolboy,” she said, and led him towards a wash basin where his hair was washed and conditioned by a junior called Zoe. In answer to her incurious enquiries about his arrangements for Christmas, he told Zoe about his childlessness, how Christmas wasn’t the same without children, how he longed for a child, preferably a boy, to carry on Lowood’s Linens. He told Zoe things he had never told Angela. To Michelle he confessed his fear of death. As his hair fell to the floor he talked about the black void waiting for him. Michelle told him that she wasn’t too keen on death either, and didn’t know anybody who was.
When she’d finished brushing and blow-waving, Gregory allowed himself to look directly into the mirror in front of him and was uplifted by what he saw. His head looked strong and manly; his features were more pronounced. When Michelle picked up a hand mirror and showed him the back of his head, he thanked her enthusiastically, saying, “I hadn’t realised what a good thick neck I’ve got.” He had left the shop to the mellow sound of Ella Fitzgerald singing, ‘Mr Wonderful’.
“It makes you look older, Gregory,” said Angela.
“Good,” said Gregory, admiring himself in the hall mirror.
♦
Fifteen minutes after Gregory had left the house, the doorbell rang. Angela looked through the fish-eye peephole in the front door and saw with horror that it was Christopher. She opened the door, but kept the security chain on.
“You’ve got to tell me, Angie,” he said desperately.
He put an arm through the door and grabbed at the material of the apron she was wearing. The apron strings which were tied at the waist tore, and Christopher lost his footing and almost fell.
“Go away, Chris, you shouldn’t have come here!”
She was trying to close the door on him. She was terrified that Gregory would return and find Christopher on his doorstep.
“You’ve got to tell me about our baby. If she’s dead, where’s she buried?”
Christopher threw himself at the door. The chain broke and he was in the hall with the dog. He slammed the door shut and wiped his feet on the coconut that which said: Bienvenido.
“I got a taxi,” he said. “I can’t keep away from you.”
He looked around the spacious hall. He recognised that the pattern on the wallpaper was William Morris. The handrail, banisters and newel posts of the dog-leg staircase had been burnished to a high reddish sheen. On the wall facing the front door there was a painting of Angela’s mother and father. They were posed against the huge stone fireplace at Newton Harcourt; they were wearing evening dress, and looked at ease with themselves and their place in the world. There was an arrangement of winter flowers in a vase, on a polished table. Angela’s car keys were in a Wedgwood dish. He could see into the kitchen at the end of the hallway. The pineapple stood on a chopping board on a work surface. She’d obviously got as far as cutting the top off before answering the door to him.
“You can’t stay here,” she said.
“You can’t stay here, either,” he said. He followed her into the gleaming modern kitchen.
Angela picked up a knife and resumed peeling the pineapple. A pool of juice collected on the chopping board. Christopher frowned at the pineapple and said, “There should be a season for everything.”
She didn’t know what he was talking about, and she was too panic-stricken to engage him in any further conversation. She longed for him to leave. He was as intrusive as a shard of metal in an eyeball. He wandered around the kitchen touching the laminated surfaces. The dog followed him; its paws made a desiccated sound on the vinyl tiles.
“Will you show me your garden?” he said. He knew how much she loved it.
“It’s under snow,” she said. “What’s the point?”
“Please.”
“Chris, you’ve got to go. What if Gregory comes back?”
“I hope he does. I want him to know about us.”
“You’re being cruel. It’s not like you.”
She was crying and slicing through the pineapple, then lining a buttered Pyrex dish with the yellow rings.
“I know what matters, Angie.” He tried the door to the garden. It was locked. “And in the scheme of things, bearing in mind infinity, Gregory’s feelings really don’t matter to me.” Christopher realised how awful this statement must sound to her, but he’d got this compulsion to tell the truth lately.
“Bearing in mind infinity,” she said angrily. “What are you reading now? Patrick Moore?”
“No, Nietzsche,” he said. He stared her down, defying her to laugh.
“Gregory’s feelings matter to me,” was all she said. She wiped her eyes on her apron. She was desperate for him to leave. It was inconceivable to her that Gregory could come home and find Christopher in the house. They had made the house their life. Every care and attention had been lavished on it. They subscribed to two interior design magazines. They were stacked in several piles on the bottom shelf of the bookcase in what they called, ‘the family room’. Angela leaned against the draining board and wept helplessly.
“Don’t cry, chick; I love you.”
He tried to put his arms around her again but she moved away and turned a switch above the oven which was set high in the wall. A red glow illuminated the interior, revealing gleaming, stainless steel racks.
“If you loved me, Chris, you’d go. You would. You don’t know how frightened I am. I’ve got to make him a pineapple upside-down cake.”
Christopher laughed incredulously. “Why?” he said.
“Because it’s his favourite. Because I want a quiet life. Because I haven’t given him any children,” she shouted. Christopher watched in silence as she slopped a soft sponge mixture on to the top of the pineapple circles, smoothed it with a spoon, and put in on the middle shelf of the oven.
“Tell me about our baby and I’ll go,” he said. “Tell me in the garden.”
She went to a key box on the kitchen wall and took a key off the hook labelled ‘kitchen⁄garden door’. Before she could put the key in the lock the dog was at the door. As soon as it was open it ran across the garden dribbling yellow urine on the snow.
Angela went into the conservatory and put her quilted green coat on and stepped into her rubber gardening boots.
The garden looked like a brightly lit stage set. The security lighting showed the skeleton of every shrub and tree. The snow-covered lawn was like a white sea of phosphorescence. A rustic bench was upholstered in snow. Christopher cleared the snow from the bench with his hands, then scooped some together, compressing it into a hard ball. He then rolled it along the terrace and the ball grew quickly and seemed to take on a momentum of its own.
“Tell me about the baby,” he said.
Angela pulled a packet of cigarettes and a pink throw-away lighter out of her apron pocket and said, “She weighed about two and a half pounds.”
Christopher rolled the ball into the middle of the lawn and patted snow around the base.
“Go on, I’m listening,” he said, with his back turned to her.
“You couldn’t have called her pretty, Chris. But she was very wonderful. You can imagine, can’t you, how the cave people felt when they looked up at the moon. You know, full of wonder. Well that’s how I felt when I saw her. I shouldn’t have seen her. I didn’t want to. The thing is Chris, the thing is…” He was making a smaller ball now, his back was still turned. She couldn’t see his face.
“There was a nurse in the room who hadn’t seen a late-term abortion before and when our little one was born she got, well, emotional.”
Christopher turned around and placed the smaller ball on top of the larger. Making a featureless snowman.
“Emotional, why?”
“Because our little one was born with a pulse, Chris.”
Christopher rested his hand on the snowman’s shoulder and looked at her.
“The doctor went out as soon as she was born. He’d missed a meal break he said, but I knew he despised me and couldn’t wait to get away. He’d warned me that the labour would be painful, but I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t brave, you see. I’ll never forget that pain. I wish I could tell you how bad it was. Imagine somebody continuously tearing your body in half…I screamed for four hours solid. I had no voice when you came, remember?”
“I remember.”
“So they left me with this nurse.”
“What was her name, Angie?”
“Susan. So Susan was in charge of disposing…the thing is Chris, she couldn’t do it. She should have put the baby in a container and put the container into a bag. But she couldn’t do it, not while there was a pulse.”
Christopher tore two buttons off his overcoat and gave the snowman eyes.
“She lived for nineteen minutes. Susan and I watched her chest jerk up and down. Susan said that only one of her lungs was working, and then that stopped working.”
Angela lit another cigarette, then pressed the pink lighter into the snowman’s face, making a forbidding slit of a mouth.
“She asked me not to tell anybody and I didn’t.”
“Not even me,” he said.
“Especially not you.”
“Did you hold her, Angie?”
“Yes, I did. I held her. You can’t imagine how tiny her hands were.”
“You told me some terrible lies, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did. I never thought I’d tell you the truth. I can’t believe you know the truth now.”
She looked up at the black sky, expecting to see that the stars had gone. The world had entirely changed for her now that Christopher knew the truth about their baby.
She felt light enough to float. They both looked at the snowman.
“We ought to give it a nose,” he said.
She went back into the house and opened the refrigerator door and took a carrot out of the vegetable crisper box. Then she went into the cloakroom in the hall and selected a red scarf and a blue and white striped bobble hat. She took these into the garden and gave them to Christopher and he finished dressing the snowman. When he stepped back to admire it, Angela looked at her watch and said, “He’ll be home in three-quarters of an hour. You said you’d go.”
But it was as if she hadn’t spoken. He fiddled with the snowman’s scarf and said, “We’ll have to find out where she is, Angie.”
“It’s seventeen years.” She sat down on the bench and bowed her head, her hair swung slowly forward, completely obscuring her face.
“Somebody will know where she is,” he said. “Finding her will give me something to do.”
He knew that this was the right time to tell Angela about the other one, the one he’d found in the ditch, but he knew that if he did tell her she’d be frightened of him. She would think he was mad and that would mean that they would never be together as man and wife.