Waiting for her was an ordeal. Christopher walked through the rooms of his house, trailed by the dog. He went into the bedroom and checked it. He had remade the bed with clean sheets and a fresh duvet cover, and had positioned the pillows and their clean pillow slips symmetrically against the bedhead. He went into the largest of the spare bedrooms and began to unpack the books from the boxes, taking them to the shelves and squeezing them into any available space. He worked quickly, not allowing himself to look at the titles in case he got seduced into reading. Before long he’d cleared a large space in the middle of the room. When the shelves were crammed full, he took the residue of the books downstairs and started to fill the alcove by the fire where his television and video used to be.
He went into the smaller spare room, where he kept the first editions and more valuable books. He rearranged the shelves to create more space for the books in the booksellers’ packages which he’d not yet opened. He looked forward to cataloguing and sorting his collection. He would like Angela to help him.
He found a broom and a dustpan and he swept through the house in honour of Angela. As he did so, he wondered how he could tell Angela about the dead baby he’d found. There was no question, he decided, of him not telling her. One day he intended to tell her everything, however much it frightened or hurt her. He thought that telling the truth was the greatest form of intimacy possible between two people.
When he had finished cleaning he washed himself and combed his hair and sat down in front of the gas fire with the dog. The house was so quiet that it was possible to hear the oven clock ticking from the kitchen. He could hear his elderly neighbour coughing through the party wall, and was glad that he’d escaped such loneliness.
When he heard the taxi turn into the cul-de-sac he went to the front door. He felt a flood of relief when he saw her outline on the back seat. She waved to him. He went down the path to greet her and waited at the kerb with the dog at his side. He cried out, “Angie!” when he saw the red gash on her forehead, but she wouldn’t allow him to look at it in the street.
Between them they carried her luggage inside, then Christopher closed the door to the outside world and held her without speaking until she thought he would never let her go of his own volition. She removed herself gently from him and began to give him a fictitious account of how she had hurt her head and cut her hands. Christopher wouldn’t like to hear the truth, she thought.
Gregory had been ‘extremely civilised’ she said, and showed Christopher the piece of paper where her assets from the marriage were listed in Gregory’s looping handwriting. Christopher frowned when he read the last item on the list.
“Have you read this?” he asked, certain by her demeanour that she had not. She took it from him and scanned it quickly until she got to the bottom item which she read again.
N° 24
I intend to commit suicide unless you return to me by 9 AM prompt tomorrow.
They sat down on the bottom step of the stairs and looked at their watches. It was ten minutes to eleven by Christopher’s and three minutes past by Angela’s. Christopher went through to the kitchen and shouted through that the oven clock said it was one minute past eleven. Suddenly the most important thing in the world to them was to find out the exact time. The Speaking Clock told them that the oven clock was correct. They adjusted their watches. “He won’t do it, though,” said Angela.
♦
After his wife had left him Gregory sat under the standard lamp and drank two bottles of Chardonnay, staring at the empty television screen. At midnight he began to clear out the garage. He was furious that so much of her junk had accumulated. He’d never once been able to drive his car into the garage.
He enjoyed the physicality of flinging the stuff into the high-walled garden at the back of the house, regardless of its fragility or of caring where it fell. Occasionally he tortured himself by imagining Angela and Christopher Moore laughing, and naked together, then he would grab the heavy things: old tyres, a sack of sand, an ancient car jack and heave them on to her precious herbaceous borders. It gave him some satisfaction to see the trellis and their climbing plants crack away from the walls. There were many things in there he’d forgotten about: a kite, a paddling pool in a box, a Windsor chair with a broken leg. He found a Swiss Army knife, the Executive, which he thought he’d lost.
The garden security lights went on and off as he came and went. It was after three AM before he had cleared enough space to enable him to park his own car inside his own garage.
♦
Christopher and Angela lay on their backs in the dark, talking about Gregory and looking up at the white painted ceiling. The central heating was still on and the bedroom was pleasantly warm. They had kicked the duvet to the foot of the bed and were covered only by a white sheet.
Christopher said, “You’re not going back to hint tomorrow, are you?”
“No,” she said. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life with you.”
She sat up in bed and lit a cigarette. “He threatened to kill himself once before. I left him for a couple of days after a row. He phoned me and said he’d swallow a lot of paracetamol tablets. I went back to him. I was going to anyway.”
“And had he?” asked Christopher.
“No,” said Angela. “There weren’t even any in the house. I’ll phone him at the shop in the morning and ask him about my car keys.” She didn’t want to talk about Gregory any more. She asked about Christopher’s grandma.
Three years before, Christopher had spent nine hours in a cubicle at the Royal Infirmary watching his grandmother die. She had complained of feeling unwell when he had called in on his way to work that morning. He noticed that she hadn’t done her hair, and he suspected that she’d slept in her clothes. Unusually, she had asked him to stay for a while and drink a second cup of tea with her. She’d insisted that he take his coat off. There was a fire smoking in the grate and she had grumbled about the poor quality of the coal she was forced to buy nowadays. They sat either side of the fireplace, in identical wooden armchairs with wine-coloured cushions which he’d once helped her to stuff with grey flock.
“I dreamt about your dad last night,” she said. “I dreamt that he came home from Canada and I weren’t in; I were out, having my hair done.”
Christopher had picked up the poker and poked the fire basket which was clogged with yesterday’s ash; another small sign that she was not herself.
“I think about Dad a lot,” said Christopher.
“I think about the other one, just lately,” she’d said, as she watched a few flames struggle to take hold of the lumps of smokeless fuel in the grate.
“What ‘other one’?” asked Christopher.
“I had another one,” she said.
“No, Grandma,” said Christopher, talking to her as if she were a small child, “you only had one, Harry, my dad, remember?”
She’d shouted at him, “Don’t tell me how many children I had, I had another one, before your dad, when I were sixteen.”
Christopher was astonished, both at the anger in her voice, and at what she was telling him. She was known in the family for her prudery and condemnation of sex before marriage. She was still scandalised that Christopher and Angela had once ‘lived in sin’.
“What happened to the other one, Grandma?” said Christopher.
She got up from her chair and using the chair arm as a support, shuffled towards the alcove cupboard. He followed her and said, “Can I help you?”
She ordered, “Sit down.” He crouched on the edge of his chair and watched her bring the bulging photograph album down from an interior shelf, next to the button tin. A few loose photographs fell out and came to rest on the half-moon-shaped hearth rug, before she was seated again.
She knew the page she wanted, and turned to it immediately. She fumbled with a sheet of Cellophane paper and extracted a small brown and white photograph.
“That’s me,” she said, “I were carrying the other one when that were took, I were going on the Sunday school outing.” She passed the familiar photograph to Christopher. He searched it now for signs of pregnancy, but saw only a young ringleted girl wearing a dark dress, a white pinafore and lace-up boots. The day must have been windy because her hair was blowing across her large-featured face, and she was holding on to the brim of a straw hat. She was standing in a brick yard of some kind. She was not smiling. She looked frumpy and awkward.
“We went on a horse and cart to Barrow-on-Soar, and had a picnic next to the river.” She took a tortoiseshell comb out of her stiff black handbag at the side of her chair and began to comb her long hair. “I didn’t enjoy it very much, there were too many midges, they got into your hair, and the wasps were after the jam sandwiches,” she said. She pulled small clumps of grey hair from between the teeth of the comb, rolled them between her fingers and threw the ball on to the fire, where it frizzled into liquid for a second, before disappearing.
“When I got home there was this woman in the house, a Mrs Montague, she was the one who delivered the babies and laid out the bodies. At first I thought that sommat had happened to our dad, or one of my brothers and sisters. The house was that quiet. Then my mam told me to go upstairs, put my oldest nightgown on and get into her bed. I still din’t know what were coming,” she said to Christopher.
Christopher looked away from the remembered fear in her eyes. He had guessed what was coming and he couldn’t bear it. He didn’t want to listen. He wanted to put his coat on and leave the house and go to his workshop.
“Mam came in first carrying the bucket. She had some old sheets over her arm, and a bundle of newspapers tucked under the other ‘un. I don’t know where the newspapers came from…”
“It doesn’t matter, Grandma,” said Christopher. He wished she’d do something with her hair. She looked like a witch with it straggling over her shoulders.
“Mrs Montague come in with a shopping bag over her arm, as if she were on her way to the shops…She took a bottle of brandy out of her bag and Mam passed her a glass and she poured it out until the glass were three-quarters full. “Drink it straight down,” she said to me. I did as I was told, you did in them days,” she said, almost proudly. “I’d never tasted alcohol before that day, and it made me gag, and then I felt woozy. They put the old sheets and newspapers under me and my mam put her hand over my mouth and Mrs Montague put something sharp and cold inside my you-know-what. And I screamed and screamed through my mam’s hand with the pain. They sat with me right until it got dark, and the baby started to be born. You’ll never know agony like it,” she said to Christopher accusingly.
“It come out in pieces; they had to fix it together like a jigsaw, to make sure there was nothing left inside me.”
“Oh my God,” said Christopher.
“God din’t help me,” his grandma said, contemptuously. Her mouth moved, but she wouldn’t cry. He wanted to get up and put his arms around her and tell her about his baby, the one that Angela had rid herself of, but he forced himself to sit and listen. She tipped her head to one side and began to plait her hair.
“It were never spoken of again, never. The next time I saw Mrs Montague she passed me in the street with just a nod.”
“What about your mam?” said Christopher.
“I’ve just said,” she said irritably. “It were never spoken of again.”
“Until now,” said Christopher.
“I got septicaemia after,” she said, matter of factly. “I were in the cottage hospital for six weeks, but I never told them what had happened. When they told me that I couldn’t have babies, I was glad.”
“But you did have a baby, Grandma; you had Harry, my dad,” Christopher prompted.
She looked at him slyly. “I didn’t have him,” she said. “Your granddad was a widower when I met him. Your dad was a year old the first time I saw him. His mam died three weeks after he were born.” She looked hard at Christopher. “What’s up with your face?” she said, harshly.
“It’s a shock to find out that we’re not flesh and blood, Grandma,” he said to her.
“It doesn’t matter, does it, lad? We’ve always been pals, haven’t we?” she said.
“Good pals,” said Christopher. He got up and put his coat on and went to his work.
He called in at six o’clock to find her sitting in the same chair. The fire had gone out. She saw him but couldn’t speak to him, though her mouth worked constantly. When he held her hands he knew that the strength had gone from them and would never return.
“Stroke,” said the young doctor in Accident and Emergency, “I’ll find her a bed on the ward.”
Christopher waited hours in a cubicle with his grandma, hidden behind blue cotton curtains. As she lay there a violent argument broke out between the casualties of a fight outside a night club. Christopher and she listened as they screamed obscenities and threats from adjacent cubicles. Christopher wept with impotent rage. He had never once used a swear word in front of her. He went outside and begged them to be quiet, but they were drunk and wouldn’t listen to him. Probably the last thing she heard before she died was somebody telling Christopher to fuck off.