‘You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet . . .
. . . As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods –
But there is no road through the woods’
—Kipling, ‘The way Through the Woods’
Stella 1996
Stella arrived at the Elmhurst composed. She had after all done this before. Boldly, she presented herself as an old hand: they politely ignored her. While she knew they were only doing their job she found this misplaced discretion excruciating – like being delicately brushed by the nettle that she wanted to grasp.
‘Good morning,’ she said, in response to the greeting of the slender Asian beauty behind the reception desk. ‘I do hope you’ve given me a room on the garden side this time?’
The receptionist smiled a faint, sweet smile: she was not to be drawn. She wore a snow-white belted dress, too chic to be called a uniform; minute diamond earrings like grains of sugar.
‘Later on, Miss Carlyle,’ she enquired, looking up at Stella with Parker poised, ‘would you like us to call you a taxi? Or have you arranged a lift?’
‘I’ll look after myself thank you.’
‘Good . . . fine. Well now, let me show you your room and then you can make yourself comfortable.’ She came out from behind the desk. ‘May I take your bag?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘This way.’ She led the way to the lift, trailing a wake of some fresh, sophisticated scent. Her perfect matte skin and slender figure seemed untouched by the messy business of life, let alone the rude hand of man. Which was why, thought Stella bitterly, she was employed here. But if such an appearance was intended to be soothing, it did not soothe her. Beside this paragon Stella felt grubby and spoiled.
They stood in the lift gazing slightly upwards as one did for some reason in lifts. The receptionist caught her eye and smiled again.
‘It’s chilly out there today.’
Not as chilly as in here, thought Stella. ‘I didn’t notice.’
‘It’s the awful greyness,’ the girl went on. ‘I think I must be one of these light-sensitive people you read about, it completely alters my mood . . . Here we are.’
They got out on the second floor and the receptionist walked ahead of her, with the merest susurration of elegant underpinnings, down a corridor carpeted in a pale ash green, the colour of new life. At intervals on the walls were hung unthreatening modem paintings in restful colours.
‘This is you.’ The receptionist pushed open a door and stood back for Stella to enter first. ‘Bathroom, television, telephone . . . No tea tray or mini-bar, I’m afraid, for obvious reasons, but later on you can let us know what you’d like.’
Later on. When one life had been terminated and another, currently on hold, continued.
‘Thank you.’
‘Do make yourself comfortable. If you wouldn’t mind getting into your nightdress.’
‘I know the form.’
Not a flicker. ‘Take your time. And when you’re ready, if you’d like to push the button someone will come and run through a few dull but necessary questions.’
‘I know.’
‘So.’ The receptionist withdrew to the doorway with another whisper of silk, a breath of fragrance. ‘If there’s nothing else you’d like to know, I’ll leave you in peace.’
‘Thank you.’
Stella hadn’t meant this to sound rude, but there was no reaction, and the door closed soundlessly.
If there was nothing else she’d like to know . . . Only everything: the answer to it all. She dropped her bag on the floor and went to the window. As it happened they had given her a garden view: a reward, she surmised bitterly, for loyal patronage down the years. For those false starts, those secret, stifled endings. Those dead babies.
There was a trim flowering plant on the windowsill: a carefully considered message of welcome without the tasteless transience of cut flowers. Bleakly, she undid her bag and got out her pyjamas. She knew they preferred a nightdress but she wasn’t going to buy one specially for this. There was something sacrificial about the process which the receptionist had described as ‘making herself comfortable’: undressing in this blandly tasteful empty room, laying her ragbag of everyday clothing on the back of the chair, getting into the pyjamas and dressing gown and sitting selfconsciously on the bed. It took her less than two minutes. She fiddled with the remote control and found piano music, something rippling and contrapuntal, it might have been Bach.
She put her feet up on the counterpane and leaned back on the pillows. No one knew she was here. They would only find out if she died, when it would no longer concern her. For a short while, at least until they took her down, she would occupy a little pocket of time and space in parenthesis as it were to the rest of life. She had not even, on this occasion, brought a book, since experience showed that she would not open it, nor be able to concentrate if she did.
The music finished on a flourish, and the presenter began to speak. Stella switched the radio off. The ensuing silence was thick and dense. The double-glazed picture window admitted no sound from outside, and she could hear nothing beyond the heavy door. She might have been alone in the building.
Alone, except for the baby inside her.
It was the first time she had permitted herself a thought like this, and it shocked her. Looking down at her still painfully concave stomach she seemed to see right through the material of her nightclothes to where that small cluster of cells lay in their warm watery chamber – pulsing and growing to the rhythm of her own heart. Not just her own cells, but those of another person. And added to them the mysterious, unknowable factor which would produce an individual unlike any other. Or, under other circumstances, would have made.
She had tried often over recent weeks to imagine what Robert’s reaction would have been to her pregnancy. She had stood him up like a tailor’s dummy in her mind’s eye and tried different moods on him for size. It was possible to imagine rage, and jubilation, and a kind of furious mixture of the two which was characteristic of him: less easy to picture indifference or measured argument.
This was the third time she had undertaken a termination, a fact of which she was not proud, but neither could she pretend remorse. The first occasion had been the result of an early fling, scarcely more than a two-night stand, exhilarating but out of the question. Neither of them had taken any precautions. There was no question of a third night, let alone a shared future. The decision had been made for her.
The second time had been not long before she had left Sorority. She had come off the pill and was using the coil – she was one of the unlucky two per cent. She could not even have said with any certainty who the father was, since she was sleeping with two men regularly (one of them Gordon) and there had been a handful of other casual encounters in the relevant period. The prospect of bringing up a child on her own scared her half to death and the thought of handing it over for adoption made her queasy, so it was with a grim sense of inevitability that she’d come to the Elmhurst again.
This time was qualitatively different. She knew whose it was. She also knew that there had been a faint, scarcely realised possibility that she might have spoken of it to Robert, that some sea-change might have happened, and that whatever was said might have brought them closer. But that possibility had been stillborn: stifled in the womb by his smug treachery.
She had not spoken to him since that night at the theatre. He had called several times but she had filtered all calls through the machine. He had rung her doorbell twice when she had been in, but she had not admitted him, had lain curled like an ammonite on her bed with her hands over her ears . . . And he had written her a letter. The letter, lying in her hand like the hand of a child, passive and confiding, had tempted her most. She had even got as far as opening it, but something stern and challenging in the first sentences had stopped her in her tracks. ‘Stella, what’s going on? Why can’t we at least speak to one another? What hope is there if—’ She had thrown it away, burning with unshed tears. She had created this situation, allowed it to develop, suffered its vicissitudes – enough was enough. And he had the gall to speak of hope?
And yet lying here in the enclosed stillness of this impersonal room she felt for the first time a direct connection with the life inside her. She closed her eyes and seemed to feel the minute, insistent patter of its heartbeat, the drip-feed of life – from her – through the umbilicus, the curious separateness of this relentlessly growing stub of flesh . . .
She put up a hand and pressed the call button. It made no sound in the room but she supposed that in some distant official zone there was a discreet buzz. She laid her hand on her stomach. Incredible to think that her attenuated, part-worn body could be the source of life, wrapping it secretly and tenderly in fluid, nurturing it, protecting and preserving it without her conscious will according to some atavistic natural order.
There was a tap and the door opened.
‘You buzzed, Miss Carlyle?’
‘I was told to when I’d changed.’
‘That’s right.’ The nurse was plump and fair with a french plait.
‘I have to fill in this form if you wouldn’t mind answering a few questions.’
‘No.’
‘Right.’ The nurse gave a little sigh as if empathising with the tedium of it all, and pulled up a chair. ‘Let’s see.’
Between them they confirmed her name, age, address, nationality, marital status (a phrase whose opt-out implications Stella had always found insulting), and – even more incredibly in this day and age – religion.
‘None.’
‘It’s in the extremely unlikely event of an emergency,’ explained the nurse. ‘Shall I put C of E?’ She pulled a face. ‘Same thing, really.’
‘I have just enough respect for it to think it’s not.’
‘Fair enough’
They covered next-of-kin, allergies and medical history. The nurse, well trained, betrayed not a flicker of interest in the answers, writing everything down in its appropriate space in her clear, round hand. She took Stella’s blood pressure and temperature and checked that she had neither eaten nor drunk that day. She asked, with no perceptible change of tone, how Stella would like to pay.
When the form was completed she popped her pen back in her pocket. ‘Good. Now let me explain the procedure to you, it’s all very simple and straightforward . . .’
Did they have no idea, thought Stella, how bizarre that sounded? Was irony deficiency a prerequisite in employees of the Elmhurst?
‘. . . about one hour after the premed we’ll take you down to theatre, and next thing you know it’ll all be over and you’ll be able to have a nice cup of tea and whatever you want with it.’
‘I can’t wait.’
‘We like you to stay in for at least an hour afterwards and then you can go. Did Sunita ask you about transport home?’
‘She did. I’m going to get a taxi.’
‘Would you like us to order that for you when the time comes?’
‘It’s all right, I’ll call one myself.’
‘Fine.’ The nurse’s tone implied that they wished all their patients could be as easy as Stella. ‘So – you’ve got everything you want?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘I’ll be back to give you your premed in—’ she glanced at the watch on her left breast ‘—about half an hour. I’m afraid that’s when we’ll have to ask you to put on one of our horrible gowns . . . In the meantime I’ll leave you to it. Don’t hesitate to buzz again if there’s anything.’
When she’d gone, Stella turned the radio on again. The music now was baroque – wind instruments soulful as voices, keening a lovely, plaintive tune. She lay on her side and gazed out of the window. From here she couldn’t see the garden, only the slightly stirring treetops, the uneven line of some domestic roofs and the glint of a distant office block, against a sky bruised with unshed rain. She laid her hand once more on her stomach which in this position sagged and swelled slightly with the passing of the years. This, she thought, was how it would feel – later, when even the most meagre and unaccustomed frame stretched to accommodate its burden.
Soft, unwilled tears slid down her cheeks, the sweat of her secret heart.
Sunita had just checked in a scruffy, dull-eyed, nineteen-year-old model, barely recognisable without the aid of lighting, stylists and clever camerawork. The model’s surgically enhanced breasts sat like the halves of a melon, hard and round on her bony torso. She was accompanied by her boyfriend, a bullishly confident young man in a black suit and open-necked shirt. When she showed them into their room he threw himself down on the bed with his shoes on and turned on the television while she talked to the girl: he was, thought Sunita, a complete pig.
Mr Parsloe had a full list, it was a busy day. Returning to her desk, Sunita scrolled down the screen and marked off the model. When she looked up Miss Carlyle was standing there. Sunita smiled.
‘Is everything all right?’
‘I’m checking out.’
‘That is your right,’ said Sunita coolly. It made her uncomfortable when people backed out. They had been doing too much thinking, they didn’t want what was on offer. As long as the women kept moving through the system the Elmhurst was providing a much-needed service. When the occasional one withdrew, it exposed the nature of the business. Sunita, a vegetarian, compared her squeamishness to that of meat-eaters about factory farming. It gave her what she wanted, but she preferred not to know.
Miss Carlyle agreed that it was certainly her right.
‘May I ask,’ said Sunita, ‘why you have taken this decision?’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’
‘Excuse me, I have to ask this – but are you sure?’
The other woman’s expression said that this enquiry was beneath contempt.
Sunita persisted. ‘Time is a factor, as you know, and you are, let’s see, fifteen weeks.’
‘I’m aware of that.’
‘I’m afraid,’ said Sunita, ‘that we shall have to ask you to pay for the room, which cannot now be used.’
‘I’ll pay for everything.’
‘You do understand.’
‘Perfectly.’ The credit card was already tapping and turning impatiently on the edge of the desk. ‘Will this do?’
Stella took a taxi home. She made sure that she was several hundred yards from the Elmhurst before hailing one, but even then she felt that her rucksack, like a prisoner’s brown paper parcel, must shriek her provenance aloud. The cabbie made a few attempts at conversation, looking chirpily at her in the driving mirror, but gave up when she didn’t respond.
She asked to be set down at the corner of Alma Road, and went into the Coffee House. She sat at a table in the window and ordered a large cappuccino, inhaling the hot fragrance of freshly roasted and ground beans. The smell, and the accompanying hissing, bubbling frothing sounds, seemed stronger and louder than before, as though her nose and ears had been suddenly cleared. When the waiter in his long white apron brought her cup she seemed to see each slowly spinning creamy bubble, each grain of powdered chocolate and spiralling tendril of fragrant steam, in the sort of detail more usually provided by dope. The first sip – the dry nip of the chocolate, the fluffy kiss of foam, the scalding sweetness of the liquid – was a revelation. She wondered if the foetus was experiencing the same heightened sensations or whether it was sleeping tranquilly, oblivious to its narrow escape.
A young woman came in with a toddler in a buggy. She parked the buggy alongside the table next to Stella’s while she went to order at the counter. The toddler sat huddled in its outdoor clothes like a guy. She had no idea what sex it was, but its bright brown eyes were fixed on her with unblinking intensity. The woman came back with a cup of tea and a chocolate muffin in cellophane. She unwrapped first the toddler, then the muffin, then broke off a piece and held it out.
‘Jack . . . Jack? Wake up, here you are.’
Jack took the cake and pressed it to his open mouth as if snogging it. Lumps of sponge fell on to his quilted legs, crumbs clung in a brown halo round his lips. What went into his mouth he sucked with a faint, adenoidal sound. His eyes remained on Stella, though rather absentmindedly as it he couldn’t quite remember why. He had glossy black hair worn in long curls, which he hadn’t got from his mother who had straight mousy strands and red cheeks. No wedding ring. She sipped her tea and gazed out of the window, glad of the break. She didn’t eat her half of the muffin and when Jack griped and fussed he got another chunk. She was eking it out, piece for peace.
After a couple of minutes she suddenly looked straight at Stella, raising her eyebrows with a ‘know us next time?’ expression.
‘Sorry,’ said Stella. ‘I was admiring Jack.’
‘You what?’
‘He’ll be a ladykiller once he’s learned to eat cake nicely.’
‘He’s only twenty months,’ declared the girl in an aggrieved tone. ‘What d’you expect?’
Rebuffed and misunderstood, Stella went to the counter and paid for the cappuccino. Toting her rucksack she didn’t go straight back to Victoria Mansions but along the high road to the baby shop. This was how she thought of it, as though it sold babies, which in a way it did. Up till now she had regarded it not just with indifference but with a kind of superstitious aversion, like the temple of some alien cult. Now, she told herself she had better get over that.
She walked in feeling starkly conspicuous as if she’d just left jail. Her age, her clothes, her telltale rucksack, did they mark her out as an untouchable, a woman who had stepped back from the brink in the nick of time? In fact the other customers were in the main not the petal-skinned dewy-eyed lovelies of magazine advertisements and TV commercials, but females of every age, shape and kind, from scarily youthful teenagers to women older than herself, some looking as if they might give birth at any moment. No, she told herself she was anonymous here. Whatever she might feel, no one could tell from looking at her that she was a pregnant woman. She could be an aunt, a friend, a sister – a grandmother, for God’s sake, to judge by some of the extravagantly fecund schoolgirls.
It was the merchandise that awed and shocked her. So much stuff – could one tiny infant possibly need or want this amount of clobber, so many things, such a variety of clothes, toys, gadgets, transports? It was inconceivable, obscene. She could not imagine a future occasion on which she herself would come here and walk out with the huge plastic sacks of goods she saw being borne away. She stood transfixed by shelves full of feeding bottles, teats, sterilisers, heaters, thermos flasks, spouted cups, dummies, teethers and dishes, pushers, bibs with troughs and bibs with tapes, and innumerable cunning compartmentalised carriers to put it all in. And then stacks of bedding – sheets, duvets, pillows, rubber sheets, cot bumpers (whatever they might be), papooses, cocoons, cellular blankets and lacy shawls. Numberless nappies, hosts of tiny clothes and shoes, fleets of prams and buggies each more elaborate than the last . . . Did each item, she wonder, perform a different function? Was one therefore required to have one of each? Or to make a selection? And if a selection, on what basis? How did all these women know what to get? And – Jesus wept! – how did they afford it?
The simple, animal connection she had made with the baby was dwarfed by this clamorous multitude of objects. In the middle of it all and in rising panic she closed her eyes for a moment as she had done in the clinic, to recapture those tender, profound feelings which had stolen over her. The other shoppers flowed round and past her, there were no nudges or bumps, no signs of impatience. Her heartbeat steadied.
She felt a hand on her arm. ‘Everything okay?’
A child of about sixteen stood next to her, hugely pregnant. Her round face was a work of art, elaborately painted, pierced and studded.
‘You okay?’ she repeated. ‘Do you want to sit down?’
‘No, thanks. I was – trying to remember something.’
‘Right . . .’ The girl gave a slow nod, her eyes on Stella’s face. ‘I’ll let you get on with it then.’
In front of Stella was a branching display unit hung like a Christmas tree with bootees, socks, mittens and bonnets in cellophane packets. The items were tiny as doll’s clothes. Stella selected a pair of minute white lacy boots threaded with gossamer-fine ribbon, and went to pay. At the next till a woman was unloading a trolly-load of purchases, the bip-bip of the items going through was like morse code. Stella stuffed the boots in her coat pocket and set off for home.
Back in the flat she left her coat and rucksack in the hall, took the boots out of their packet and laid them on top of the piano. She gazed at them: tiny and fragile as snowflakes resting lightly on the symbol of her splendid independence. The first concession to the awesome changes she had set in train.
In silence, without music, she walked slowly from room to room. In each one she stopped and gazed, trying to imagine what it would be like to share it with someone else – or no, not to share, for sharing implied equality. She was going to give it up. For her child this would not be a chosen, but a given place. Not Stella Carlyle’s apartment, but home. Every second of every minute of every day her child would be here, looking to her and her alone for food, drink, warmth, entertainment and love. It would take her and her care for granted, not realising that without her it would not live. The brutal simplicity of the deal made her head spin.
Returning to the living room she saw afresh the undemanding space she had been so careful to preserve, the sense of comforting impermanence which had kept her here for fifteen years. This would change. There would be clutter – she thought with cold dismay of the baby shop and its contents. There would be noise and confusion not of her making. Instead of a retreat from the passionate discipline of work and the turmoil of people there would be demands and responsibilities.
She crossed to the windowseat and sat down. The baby boots trembled slightly as she passed as if they might be sensitive to the presence of their future owner, like one of those plastic desk-flowers that moved in response to voices.
Stella reminded herself that in her rush to embrace and smother her fears she had neglected to take into account the very thing that had prompted her momentous change of heart. There would also, surely, be unconditional love.
The hospital carpark had a ten-mile-per-hour speed limit which Robert had once found irksome. Now he had no trouble sticking to it. He had scarcely exceeded ten miles per hour since turning into the access road. The great concrete complex of the Health Trust which used to fill him with energy and excitement these days oppressed his soul. It was a measure of his state of mind that even he could not ignore. Playing for time, he parked in his usual place, switched off the engine and sat listening to ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ a lament both sympathetic and sardonic, for lost opportunities.
The song was by Leonard Cohen, whom Robert greatly admired, not least for being able to write so alluringly about pain. The singer on this recording was a former sixties rock-chick, more renowned for her star-fucking activities than her handful of breathy minor hits. Now however she had reappeared on the scene, ravaged but still ravishing, her cropped hair swept uncompromisingly back from a face on which was gouged every bad trip and lost weekend. The soft, babyish voice had been replaced by a world-weary rasp fit to break your heart. He could not these days bring himself to listen to Stella but this, he thought, was how she might sound in the future when he no longer knew her, and when her voice bore the scar tissue of all the years between.
When the song finished, Robert switched off the stereo and sat in silence for a few seconds out of respect, as well as apathy. Then he gathered himself, his briefcase and his coat and set off to do battle with blindness.
He knew what they said about him – that Mr Vitelio was the best in the business but had no bedside manner. In this he felt himself to be a victim of contemporary political correctness. In a touchyfeely world perversely driven by economic imperatives he was too quick, too focused, in fact too hellbent on curing people, for comfort. What people seemed to want was a ruthless weeding-out of cases according to some bizarre value-for-money criterion, and then a soft-soaping of the remaining ones so that they went softly into the good night of partial or complete blindness, equipped with kind words, social services and a range of useful gadgets. Robert’s preference was for doing as much as was humanly possible in the time available, and moving on. He was a top-notch clinician but his stated view on, for instance, counselling was that it was meretricious bullshit that kept its victims mired in self-pity instead of pursuing busy and productive lives.
Others, he knew, thought he protested too much – that he himself liked to present a moving target. That the reason he did not wish to listen to other people’s problems was an unwillingness to consider his own. He conceded that this was probably correct, and was not ashamed of it – one measure of successful functioning was not whether one had shortcomings but whether one turned those shortcomings to good effect.
He had weathered the complaints because he had made no mistakes. There were no points on his licence. Not one error of clinical judgement, no diagnostic fudges nor botched treatment. He was spot-on.
But at the moment he knew he was pushing his luck. Instead of being his whole focus, his work had become a sideshow, a lightning conductor for the feelings he so infamously chose to keep hidden. He had folded up in one area of his life and seemed increasingly likely to foul up in another if he wasn’t careful. Always a doer, a sublimator, a worker-through, he was not used to the paralysis which currently afflicted him.
Today he had a full programme of laser treatments, an area in which he was the acknowledged king, the fastest gun in the department. He quite simply saw each tiny ocular blood vessel with more clarity and zapped it with greater speed and accuracy than anyone else. It was close, concentrated, pinpoint-fine work with no margin of error. Also, he was aware how painful it was for the patients. It was policy to speak of ‘discomfort’, but that was bollocks – the treatment involved a persistent small agony that could make strong men whimper. To this end, in his view, speed was of the essence. It made his own eyes water to watch the slow, gentle, tortuous work of some of his younger colleagues, and he’d been known to step in and finish the task at whirlwind speed.
But today, as he consulted his list and asked for the first patient to be shown in, he had the unsettling premonition that they would not be getting his best.
In the end it did not take a sledgehammer to break the deadlock, and his paralysis, but a handful of featherlight words spoken in an almost inconsequential tone.
As he opened the front door that night, Sian was coming down the stairs. She had just got changed, and was pulling down the bottom of her sweater over her cord jeans. He could see the way her well cut hair was still settling back after bouncing free of the roll-neck.
‘There you are,’ she said.
‘Hallo.’ He hung up his coat and kissed her cheek, which felt cold. ‘Don’t ask.’
‘I wasn’t going to.’ She went ahead of him into the kitchen. ‘Or not that, anyway.’
‘That sounds ominous.’ He followed her, watched her take a bottle of wine from the fridge, pour herself a glass, lift it enquiringly in his direction. ‘No, thanks.’
‘Something stronger?’
‘In a moment perhaps.’ He knew he didn’t have to prompt her, she was no games-player. She sat at the table, composed, her long-stemmed glass emerging like a flower from her linked fingers. He waited.
‘I am going to ask,’ she said, ‘whether you feel we should separate?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, the shock bleeding slowly through him. ‘Do you?’
‘Well . . .’ She frowned slightly, considering. ‘I’m not happy;’
He was awed by her simple truthfulness. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yes.’ She sounded wistful. ‘Me too.’
‘Do you, as they say, want to talk about it?’ Christ, he thought, listen to yourself. But she knew him well enough to let the cliché pass without comment.
‘I think we should.’
‘This is because of me.’
‘Partly. You and another. But I wasn’t happy anyway, before that.’
He let the first part go, perhaps hoping that she would, too. ‘You never said.’
‘I didn’t think about it very much. We got on with our lives, didn’t we?’ He heard, like a bell tolling, her bleak use of the past tense. ‘But now that there really is someone else – I mean someone who is really important – I realise that I wasn’t. So maybe it’s time we called it a day.’
Her weariness, her stoicism, her goddam’ patience, made him suddenly angry. It was a relief to raise his voice.
‘Don’t you think, Sian, that we’re worth a bit more than this saintly chucking-in of the towel?’
She picked up her glass, said briefly, before sipping: ‘You didn’t think so.’
‘How did you find out?’
She gave him a cool look.‘You’re completely transparent, Robert, it’s one of your greatest charms.’
‘Don’t be so fucking patronising.’
She didn’t reply. But as she lifted her glass again there was the merest tremor.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve got no right to say that to you.’
‘You have every right. It’s called having a relationship.’
‘So you concede we still have that?’
‘Of course. But it’s no longer so important to us as some others.’
‘I see.’ He’d lost his way, as she had intended. And while she sat, he remained standing, like a recalcitrant employee reporting to the boss. He said hotly: ‘So since it seems we’ve established what my problem is, would you care to return the compliment?’
‘There is no one else, in the way that’s generally meant. Just the rest of my life – colleagues, patients, my friends, our friends . . . I no longer care for the feeling that we’re deceiving them.’
He dragged out a chair and sat down, because towering over her with his temper rising was too uncomfortable. ‘Is that what we’ve been doing?’
‘Oh, yes. Surely.’
Her manner was smooth and hard. He wanted to get between the plates of her defence and make her admit to something, anything, which did not imply that she had simply tried for this long but had now given up.
‘You must speak for yourself. Whatever other agendas there have been I’ve always had the greatest respect for our partnership.’
She eyed him mildly, shaking her head a fraction, spoke softly as though to an agitated child. ‘You pompous prick.’
He wanted to kid her. ‘I aim to please.’
‘I know, obviously, that you’ve not been faithful for twelve months together for the last – what? – ten years of our marriage . . . But spare me your “respect”.’ The inverted commas were audible. ‘Please.’
‘So why didn’t you say something before? Or did you simply enjoy the sense of superiority that virtue brings?’
‘You’re right, that is pleasurable. In its way. But curiously, feeling superior isn’t quite enough – even for me. And when I realised that your emotions as well as – the rest, were engaged elsewhere, I thought it time to speak up.’
‘I see.’
There followed a silence. To Robert, his wife’s silence seemed tranquil, almost glacial, while his own was tumultuous with confused emotion. His turn now to feel superior. She was after all a cold bitch.
‘Are you,’ she asked, ‘going to give her a mention?’
‘I’m not sure what purpose that would serve.’
As he said it he seemed to hear a cock crow. How could he not speak Stella’s name when it had been the pulsing base line of his mind, his heart, his time, for so many years? How could he leave Stella in the lonely darkness of the wings and not bring her into the spotlight that was her natural place?
‘It would,’ said Sian, ‘since you ask, be kinder to her.’
‘It is not a question of kindness.’
‘No, that’s certainly true.’ She was sensitive as a hair-trigger, able to turn his every word woundingly against him. ‘And anyway it’s not as if I don’t know who she is – she’s Stella Carlyle.’
He felt an explosive thud of shock. ‘Yes.’
‘I found out when we went to see her at the theatre. One of those small, extraordinary coincidences waiting to happen. You remember I was late joining you because of the queue for the Ladies? I went to buy a bottle of water, and there was someone at the desk hoping for a return. I heard your name mentioned because a ticket had been kept for you but not been used. In the end it was agreed to give your ticket away. I believe I knew instantly, but from that moment I noticed all the signs about you. You couldn’t possibly hide them. I know you very well, Robert. And I have a very long memory.’ She paused, but he could think of nothing to say, and she went on. ‘When you’re roused your hackles rise, did you know that? Your hair ruffles just here—’ she put her hand to the back of her neck ‘—and your voice changes. You actually smell different. The minute the curtain rose I felt it on you.’
‘It wasn’t . . .’ His voice was thick and he cleared his throat. ‘It wasn’t a situation I sought, or that I was happy with.’
‘I’d seen her before, did you know that? I don’t mean on stage. Years ago when we were holidaying on Ailmay. I had no idea who she was then, but hers isn’t a face one forgets.’
‘No.’
‘My only comfort is that she is so different. Different from me. At least I’ve retained my – what shall we say? – my individuality.’
He was suddenly exhausted by her cleverness, her precision, the way she was laying his life out before him like tarot cards.
‘Sian . . . please.’
‘One thing I would be interested to know. How does she feel? She doesn’t strike me as a woman likely to be satisfied with second best. Has she put you under pressure? If she meant so much to you, why didn’t you tell me?’
He considered the answer to this last question. ‘I don’t know. She’s extremely independent. And also . . .’ He fumbled for the words, which she in the end supplied.
‘You thought it best to hang on to what you’d got. It’s all right, Robert, there isn’t a single thing that’s new in any of this. Extraordinary how the old cliché comes up fresh when it’s we who are experiencing it, isn’t it?’ She turned her head and gazed out of the window for a moment. ‘But given all that . . . we must decide what’s best to do.’
He wanted, for his own sake more than hers, to tell her that it was over; that Stella had taken herself away from him. But keeping that to himself was his last shot at dignity, like a screen anti-hero concealing, honourably, a fatal wound.
‘We obviously need to be apart. At least for a while.’
‘No.’ She shook her head as it getting rid of a fly. ‘It should be one thing or the other.’
He had lived for so long with her calm detachment, it was shocking to realise what had been running beneath the surface like an underground stream.
‘Shall I go now?’
Gradually, with this brief exchange of words, the ball that had been thrown so high was returning to earth, bouncing lower and more swiftly, finding its eventual resting place.
‘I think—’ she closed her eyes momentarily, a slow blink ‘—I think that would be precipitate. I mean, you would need to pack. To think, and so on.’
He knew what she meant. To say goodbye.
They had supper, taking things from the fridge and the cupboards and assembling them with unconscious teamwork. Cheese on that plate, tomatoes in this, the small dish of black olives from last night, butter for him, low-fat spread for her, another glass, a can of beer, a bottle of water, a loaf of bread, apples . . . There was a sacramental air about the putting together of this, their last supper under the old dispensation. They were quiet, and Sian turned on the radio and allowed the harmonious conversation of chamber music to ease the silence.
Over supper they spoke of family matters – of Seppi and his wife Denise, and Natalie and the children, and about the house to which they had planned improvements. It was as if they had opened a long-closed box and were taking out the small objects that it contained one by one, gazing at them and turning them over in their hands to reacquaint themselves with the shape and texture before replacing them carefully. Robert thought, A shared life is so fragile and yet so durable, like human hair or spider’s web. It can withstand so much, and then the merest touch breaks it.
Towards the end of their meal the telephone rang and Sian went into the drawing room to answer it. He had scruples about leaving his plate, glass and cutlery in the dishwasher for another day, and so washed up their few things by hand, and put them away before making coffee. He reflected on Sian’s admission that she had seen Stella before, on Ailmay. That must have been the cold early spring that he had heard Stella sing in the pub and boldly said that. Yes, he was there. So the seeds of this day had been sown in all three lives at the same time, and now all three lives were separating again, one from another. It was impossible not to see it as a story, with a desolate completeness.
He took the coffee into the drawing room, where she was still on the phone. He poured each of them a cup, put hers down at her elbow and took his into the study. He had no paperwork to speak of, but the sudden fastidiousness that had prompted him to wash up meant that he did not wish to sit with the newspaper, waiting for her to finish her conversation.
The study was a big room at the side of the house, with a window overlooking the small front garden and the street. Sian’s area was perfectly tidy and ordered: his was chaotic. On her table her computer waited tranquilly, a dove floating and turning in slow motion on the dark, sleeping screen. On his lay an ugly slew of open and unanswered mail, papers, brochures, prospectuses, his laptop sullenly shut, a half-eaten bar of chocolate, a pottery mug full of chewed biros and felt-tips. It looked like not so much the desk of an untidy worker, as of a transient one – the detritus of a person disinclined to settle. Now, he thought, I should sort this out.
He began tidying, at speed – throwing away sheaves of paper, moving others aside for closer inspection. The curtains weren’t drawn and he caught sight of his reflection in the darkened window: a strange, frantic figure, a man in flight, at home nowhere. His longing to speak to Stella was so strong that he actually picked up the phone, only to hear the voice of Sian’s senior partner, and her crisp: ‘We shan’t be long’. Quaking with unhappiness he banged the receiver back and clasped his hands behind his head, his face clamped between his arms. The pain swelled and heaved around in him, his temples throbbed with it, his stomach contracted. It was like a birth.
‘So after the triumph,’ said George, ‘what now? Time off for good behaviour?’
‘Something like that.’
Stella was reluctant to tell her secret. Not that she wished to broadcast it widely at such an early stage, but having decided, for moral support’s sake, to let George into her confidence, she found it difficult to do so. The reason was that while she’d kept it to herself all things had seemed possible. She might tell Robert, he might find out, he might simply storm back into her life and demand to know what was going on. She was dismayed to have uncovered this streak of unreconstructed pre-feminism in herself: perhaps it was pregnancy and its associated hormone-rush that made her so long to be overtaken by events. Or maybe – and this was something she only allowed herself to regard fearfully, at dead of night, from the corner of her eye – maybe she wanted his unconditional, overwhelming love more than anything, ever, in her life before. She had thrown down the gauntlet of her decision in the hope that by some mysterious telepathic means he would know, and come forward to pick it up. Having distanced him so throughly, sheer stubborn pride prevented her from giving an inch.
She was spending the weekend with George and Brian. On Saturday Brian (having taken the golden bowler and a job in human resources) had a course in Cirencester and the older children were not due out from their respective boarding schools until Sunday, so the two sisters had a day to themselves with three-year-old Zoe. The family had moved a few months earlier to the converted stable block of a large, rundown country house. The stable block was nicely enough done by a smart local builder, but it was the house itself, with its faded and neglected English beauty, that spoke to Stella.
In the afternoon they went for a walk around the unsympathetic post-and-wire fence that marked its boundaries.
‘It’s had a chequered history, poor old thing,’ said George in answer to Stella’s question. ‘In the dim and distant it was owned by a family called Latimer, there’s scads of them memorialised in the local church. Then as I understand it it was a convalescent home in the first world war, some sort of lunatic fringe experimental school in the twenties and thirties, and requisitioned by the army in the second war. Since when it’s fallen on hard times rather, as you can see.’
‘So who lives there now?’
‘It’s actually owned by the council and they let it to the Prior Foundation. No, I’d never heard of them either, but they run arts courses. All nice people, what we see of them, but I don’t know whether it’s a long-term arrangement or whether some beady-eyed moneybags that we wot not of is waiting in the wings ready to turn it into a country club or worse.’
They were standing about a hundred yards from the house at a point at the junction of the old driveway and the tarmacked Bells Yard development access road. Stella gazed at the brick, amber and grey in this light as a winter sunrise, the ample leaded windows and rugged chimneys. And for an instant she, the quintessential townie, the woman to whom the countryside was a fearsome wilderness, entertained a picture of living in such a place. Zoe was hanging on to the top wire of the fence, legs bent, bobbing and bouncing, and Stella thought: In three years’ time my child will be like that
‘Tubs! Come on, let’s show Stella the wild wood. Tubs—’ George went and retrieved her daughter from the fence and plonked her down between them.
‘Hold my hands!’
‘Only if you promise not to swing, it does my back in.’
‘I promise!’
They each took a hand. Zoe at once began to swing. ‘No’, said George, ‘walk properly, we’re not going far. Why don’t you go and hide behind a tree and see if you can jump out and give us a surprise?’
‘Okay!’ Zoe ran away, George pulled a ‘so-sue-me’ face. Stella thought: Remember this.
‘Our little ray of sunshine,’ said George drily. ‘Our adorable afterthought.’
‘She’s sweet.’
‘But you’re hellish glad she’s not yours.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You don’t have to. The further I travel along the great road of family life the less I seem to know.’
‘You do wonderfully well. Your lot are a credit to you.’
George paused for a moment, eyes wide. ‘Did I hear aright?’
Stella shrugged. ‘These things need saying from time to time.’
‘You’re going soft in your old age . . . Hang on, there she is, prepare to act startled.’
Zoe leapt out from behind a treetrunk and they obliged with an outrageous pantomime of mock terror which was well received and sent her scurrying off to repeat the exercise. They followed her into the wood, along a footpath marked by a post with a yellow arrow.
‘This is part of the grounds,’ explained George, ‘but the council have done the decent thing and preserved the footpath. You can walk all the way down into the village from here, but it’s a steep climb back and I don’t fancy piggy-backing Tubs up the hill.’
The path wound between the trees pleasingly, as if following the footsteps of people who had meandered that way over the years. They didn’t hurry. Zoe darted, and hid, and was distracted by an enormous fungus which demanded that they stop and pay their respects. It stuck out from the side of a treetrunk like a spongy discus embedded in the bark, its pallid upper surface spotted with mould, underside dark and leprous, edges delicately crenellated.
‘It’s humungous!’
‘The perfect word for it,’ agreed Stella.
‘Will it poison me?’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘Only if you take a bite out of it.’ George gave Stella a look. ‘Sorry, no room for discussion on that one.’
Remember this, thought Stella. They walked on.
‘Why Bells?’ she asked.
‘That’s rather nice. Apparently on a still Sunday if the calendar’s right you can hear the bells of seven churches. Though whether that still applies in the age of the group parish and dwindling congregations I couldn’t say. I must test the proposition some time.’
‘We could do it tomorrow.’
‘I suppose we could.’
Stella chose not to notice her sister’s quizzical glance. After another ten minutes in the wood they emerged on the brow of the hill with the village below them to the left and the White Horse opposite.
Stella sat down on the short grass with her arms round her knees. ‘May we gaze?’
‘Good idea. Tubs will be happy, she can orbit the site.’
They sat side by side, facing the horse. It was true – once a halt had been called Zoe seemed to settle, as though their fixed position were a kind of anchor. She pottered about, examining insects and tweaking off flowerheads to make a bunch, talking to herself. Remember this.
George cocked her head on one side. ‘Are we sure it is a horse? I’m no expert but it doesn’t look like any horse I’ve seen. And from what I gather horses in those days would have been sort of squat, with bog-brush manes. Not elegantly prancing steeds.’
‘Mmm . . .’ Stella reflected. ‘It’s a horse of the mind. A fantasy horse.’
‘I shall hold that thought.’
‘This is a lovely place, George.’
‘We like it. But it’s a classic case of falling for the romantic, impractical option.’
‘Is it so impractical?’
‘Oh, you know . . .’George picked a plantain and attempted to fire the head off. ‘Damn, I used to be brilliant at that. No, it’s the position. The kids are approaching the age when I shall be running a non-stop taxi-service to farflung town centres.’
‘But they like it?’
‘She does.’ George nodded at Zoe. ‘The others don’t really think about it. But believe me they will when their social life bites.’
Zoe rejoined them and sat down next to Stella, pressed confidingly against her leg.
‘I’m getting a pony.’
‘Are you?’ Stella glanced at George for confirmation of this.
‘Maybe.’
‘You said!’
‘Probably. It depends.’
‘You always say that.’
‘Because it’s true. Everything depends.’
‘On what?’
‘Everything else.’
This philosophical assertion seemed to bring the exchange to an inevitable, if not a satisfactory, conclusion. She would remember. They sat a while longer, with Zoe affecting moodiness a little way off, and the shadows of high clouds making the horse look as it it lay beneath flowing water. The peacefulness of the moment, the ease between the three of them, the sense of being cradled in the landscape, created a kind of spell that stopped Stella from speaking.
No rush, she thought. No rush.
On Sunday morning, when Brian had gone to collect the children from school, taking Zoe with him, and George was preparing the fatted calf, Stella went to see her parents. George, in her downright way, had made it clear that while they would normally have been invited to lunch as well, this arrangement had the double advantage of pleasing the old while releasing the young from the embarrassment contingent upon dealing with their grandfather on one of their few days out from school.
Mary and Andrew were sitting in the conservatory that was their pride and joy, drinking coffee. The cafetière and milk jug were on a folding tray-table between them. This regular drinking of proper coffee, a commodity previously reserved for visitors and best, was one of several small recent changes instigated by Mary for reasons which Stella suspected had more to do with her own state of mind than her husband’s.
Another of these changes was Andrew’s appearance: George had mentioned it. Their father’s interest in his toilette had been at best sporadic and whimsical, but until relatively recently Mary had allowed him to get himself up and dressed no matter what that entailed in the way of odd socks, inappropriate t-shirts, undone flies and wrongly buttoned cardigans. She who was never less than elegantly turned out herself had exerted iron control in adjusting (with the greatest possible tact) only what was dictated by the need for decency and dignity. Only when the process of dressing in an ordered way became a trial for him did she intervene, and now a happy hour or more each morning was spent on this joint enterprise to the perfect satisfaction of both.
She had not, however, Stella noticed, attempted to impose her taste on her husband. So today where Mary was immaculate in Scotch House chic – a pale blue polo-neck and grey straight skirt – her husband wore joggers, a white shirt and a maroon sleeveless jumper, all spotlessly washed and pressed.
Mary sprang up and embraced her. ‘Stella – lovely! Look, I even brought an extra cup just in case.’
‘What’s with the just in case? I said I was coming.’
‘Yes, but I never take anything for granted. Darling, it’s Stella.’
‘I can see that.’
‘Hallo, Dad.’ She stooped to kiss him, noticing with a pang that his hair had been cut too. Mary had always performed this task, but never been allowed to take much off. In this one area she had not been able to resist indulging herself. The shorter cut made him look younger.
‘How’s life?’ he asked.
‘Oh, fine.’ She took her coffee. ‘I’m down staying with George and Brian for the weekend.’
‘Good show.’
‘Speaking of which,’ said Mary, ‘the run’s ended?’
‘Yes.’
‘So will you get a bit of a break now?’
‘As long as I want, really, boredom and the bank manager permitting.’
‘Shall you take a proper holiday? Can you take off somewhere nice with friends?’ This was one of those questions which displayed a certain quixotic hopefulness in her mother’s attitude. The ‘with friends’ reference was a tactful, if wistful, assumption that there was no one special. Mary had never been a parent who weighed her children down with force of expectation, but occasionally Stella was aware that what she most wished for them was to be happy, in the straightforward way of her own experience. In the case of George this might seem, on the face of it, to have been achieved, but in Stella’s it was more complicated. And at this moment, more complicated than they could possibly imagine.
‘I might,’ she said. ‘You never know.’
‘And what about work, have the offers been flooding in after your triumph?’
‘It’s good, I can be as busy as I want to be.’ She thought she had better proffer some unsolicited information to keep interrogation, so to speak, at bay. ‘We’ve been invited to do a short season at the Parade on the Park, and if that’s not smart I don’t know what is.’
‘What fun!’
Andrew, who had been gazing at his daughter throughout this conversation, leaned forward.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘where are you these days?’
Stella’s heart lurched. In that question she heard his uncertainty, his instinctive, fumbling feeling of the way, like the hands of a blind person on her face. He knew something, but could no longer recognise what it was.
Mary topped up the coffee, eyes lowered, not intervening.
‘Well,’ said Stella, ‘I’m still living in London. Though I must say after seeing George’s new place I’m tempted for the first time by the idea of moving out. We’ve finished the West End run, so I’m taking stock.’
‘We’re going to Shanghai,’ said Andrew. ‘I’m taking some of the boys.’
‘Are you?’ Stella kept her eyes on his face. ‘When will you go?’
‘At the end of term.’
‘It’s something we’ve always wanted to do,’ said Mary carefully. ‘But whether it will come off or not is anybody’s guess.’
Stella was caught in the cobweb of their gentle conspiracy. ‘It sounds like the trip of a lifetime. Can I come?’
‘No children allowed,’ said Andrew. ‘Positively no children. Grown-ups only, I’m afraid.’
Even if she’d been tempted to take issue with this contradiction, her mouth was stopped by her mother’s first direct, warning look.
‘Dad, you’re preaching to the converted,’ she said, and left it at that.
‘How do you find the brood over at Bells?’ asked Mary.
‘I’ve only seen Zoe so far. She’s seems great, but what do I know? Brian’s gone to spring the others from jankers for the day.’
‘That reminds me, I’ve got some things for them to take back. I’d go and get them right now while I think of it.’
As she left the room, Andrew smiled at Stella. ‘Are we having boys for lunch, then?’
It was an old joke, and her father in turn sounded so much like his old self that for a split second she was disorientated. But with her laugh, his smile faded, and he leaned forward once more with a frown.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘where exactly are you these days?’
Driving back to Bells she thought that this was worse than a bereavement. Worse because her father was still alive but lost to them. Not gone, as the pious hoped, to a better place, but trapped in one that was just out of reach. The fact that his old self was still not quite obliterated, that from time to time it showed itself and pressed its hands, like a mime artist, to the invisible barrier, made it still harder to bear.
She thought: I am about to bring a child into the world who will know its grandfather as a mad old man. But children accepted such things, didn’t they? And new life was hopeful, a stake in the future. It would make Mary happy.
Everything depended on everything else.
They spent a nice day. A day in which Stella strove, for once, to be passive and allow herself to be carried along, to achieve a sense of where she stood in this pattern of family life. She was glad, now, that she had said nothing to George the day before. She wasn’t yet ready, nor fully at ease with her decision. There were other and more important considerations than telling her sister. She had first to talk to herself.
The roast pork and apple sauce, the fresh raspberry trifle and ice cream, and the wonderfully crusty Cheddar cheese, were consumed, washed down by two bottles of Brian’s special-offer New World Shiraz. The two older children were at first hyper and loquacious, showing off for Stella’s benefit and drinking (though not finishing) French lager straight from the stubby. Under the influence of good food and grown-up conversation they reverted to type and retreated, when coffee appeared, to sprawl on the sofa and watch Beauty and the Beast with Zoe.
Brian had a glass of port on the strength of not having to make the return trip at six o’clock.
‘The other side’s turn,’ he explained. ‘I’ve done my bit.’
It was half-past three when they left the table and Brian declared that they should all stir their stumps and take the kite out on to the hill. George said it was only him who wanted to fly the kite, Zoe was too young for it and Kirsty and Mark too old: Brian replied that okay, he would fly it and the rest of them could watch. Normally Stella would have resisted these overbearing tactics and persuaded George to stay in, with loose talk, more wine, the Sunday supplements and an old musical. Today she acquiesced, with the result that the others were less mutinous than they might otherwise have been.
They went out of Bells Yard in the opposite direction from the one she and George had taken the previous day, up a Tiggywinkle thread of footpath that wound diagonally across the hill overlooking the village, with Brian piggy-backing Zoe in the lead, she accompanying George who carried the seagull-kite, and Kirsty and Mark bringing up the rear.
Brian called a halt at a point where the hill shelved and the path levelled out for a few hundred yards with a broad shoulder of grass on either side. On the crest above them stood a small mined building, like a tor.
Brian got the kite into the air and they took turns at flying it, feeling the thrilling tug of the wind, making the seagull climb, turn and swoop. Each of them felt they were doing it for someone else, making a present of their skill. Watching the kite bound them together, they ceased to be a slightly fractious and unwilling post-prandial rabble and became a group, a team, all eyes fixed on the sky.
Remember this, she thought.
Everything depends on everything else.
It was at about eight o’clock when she was only halfway home that Stella began to feel tired. Not pleasantly sleepy, but as though her blood had turned to lead. She pulled into a garage and bought a bar of chocolate which she ate there and then, and almost immediately afterwards fell asleep. When she woke she was startled by her surroundings – the lights, the other cars, a man in a leather jacket peering at her from beside the pumps – and also by the length of time she had slept: it felt like hours and had been only fifteen minutes.
The nap stopped her eyelids drooping but the aching exhaustion remained. Crawling into London in the slow stream of Sunday night red tail-lights she had to exert tremendous concentration to keep going, to co-ordinate the usually unconscious small motions of driving, to read signs and judge distances. When she finally reached the sanctuary of her flat she was trembling with fatigue and went to lie on the bed, with her coat still on. Being there in her own surroundings, safe at last, she reminded herself that she was, after all, pregnant, and that perhaps this was to be expected.
When she woke, it was to a dull pain in her lower stomach and back, which instinctively drove her to the lavatory. By now she was shivering convulsively, her teeth were chattering and her hands, clutching her coat round her as she sat there, were blue and white.
The baby, what there was of it, fell out of her with terrifying ease, like so much waste material voided. As it poured from her one pain ended and another began. She sat hunched with her fingers pressed to her eyes, waiting for it to be over, praying for it to end: the sound and the sensation of loss . . . of losing it.
It didn’t take long, a couple of minutes. She rose slowly, with one hand braced on the wall, and wiped herself. She yearned for a bath but retained some long-ago warning about hot water, that she might faint, or haemorrhage. She tried not to look down as she lowered the lavatory lid, but could not avoid a glimpse of the dark matter, part liquid, part solid, that had only hours earlier been new life, the focus of so much. Fiercely, she pulled the plug and listened to it swirl and suck away. Sweating and freezing she sat on the floor for a couple of minutes until the cistern filled, and then flushed again.
She couldn’t bear to check a second time. She had to do something normal. Unsteadily she walked into the living room, pressed ‘Play’ on the answering machine and lay down stiffly on the chaise longue, her eyes closed.
‘Stella, it’s me, Robert. Please let me see you. Please let’s talk. Everything’s changed. We may not have the right stuff for a sensible partnership, but I believe we could have love, and that’s all you need, some say. Please listen to this. I love you. Don’t ring me at home, I’ll call again. ’Bye. Goodbye? Au revoir.’
Don’t ring me at home. So not quite everything had changed, then. Not for him.
Everything depended on everything else.
No right stuff. No love. No baby. She’d lost it.