Hard Word (22 page)

‘I see that.'

‘It's not that I don't accept the point. I do. It would let me say things to her in a way that I can't say now. That I'm unable to say …'

‘Because?'

‘Because now it'd be cruel. She wouldn't understand, she's a child. She'd have no way of fighting back. I'm not nice, easygoing Mrs Johnson. I know how to crucify her. Besides, it'd make me –'

‘Her torturer?'

‘Yes,' I say.
And can't we take a break now, please?
I want to say, but Jane gives me no chance.

‘But if unexpressed anger blocks the path to love,' she says, ‘what does that leave – pity?'

‘Isn't that enough?'

‘For you or for her?'

‘I'll do everything I can for her. Anything.'

‘Including fighting her to the death for moral superiority?' ‘What a bitch of a thing to say.'

‘Yes,' she says, and looks at me. What is she saying, I wonder. One thing she's not saying is sorry.

‘When you're with her now,' Jane says, ‘what annoys you about her?'

‘Everything,' I say. Snappily, still angry at her for her
moral superiority
crack.

‘Be specific,' Jane says. ‘Something your mother says, or does. Or something she doesn't do, but should.'

‘The tiger grin,' I say without thinking.

‘Tell me.'

‘She's developed this habit of baring her teeth, her upper teeth particularly, when she tries to smile. I don't know really whether it's a muscle problem or what. But she's lost the capacity to smile. She tries, and she looks like a wild animal. I hate to see her doing that.'

‘You hate to see her, or hate to see her doing it?'

‘Don't you
ever
listen to something straight?' I say wearily to Jane. ‘Without complicating it? Twisting it?'

I sit there, waiting for her to react. She won't say sorry, she doesn't seem to believe in it. But I'm not going to say it either. She can just sit there, for all I care.

She looks at me. Waits. Sits. I give up.

‘I hate her doing it,' I say. ‘I hate to see her like that. Trying to express pleasure, enjoyment …'

‘Love?'

‘And not being able to do it.'

‘You're a good person, Miriam.'

‘Where did that come from?' I ask.

‘Do you think she's capable – your mother – of learning again?'

‘To smile? I don't know, I suppose so.'

‘Children learn, after all,' she says. ‘From their mothers.'

‘What are you suggesting? That I should try and teach her to smile? How would that help me to express my anger?'

‘I don't know. But it might shift your view of her somehow. Give her something –'

Give
her something?'

‘Instead of just minding her. You might even find in giving a small part of yourself away, you can give other things away as well.'

‘Like anger?'

‘Maybe that's enough for today?'

Philip

I don't actually believe in telepathy. Nor does Miriam. But it is
weird
, as Laura would say, how often some kind of transfer does seem to take place. It's a Friday night, Mother's in bed, Katie and Laura are in their rooms. I've been in the kitchen for the past couple of hours helping Miriam prepare stuff for her barbecue tomorrow. She really wants this lunch to go well. We've diced and skewered chicken and lamb and a little beef, and they've now been laid overnight in various marinades and sauces that she has prepared. There are bits and pieces of other things, including fish that has to be dressed just so, and some special dessert – Greek or Middle Eastern, I'm not sure which – that Miriam's been practising the recipe for all week as though her whole professional reputation depended on it. Laura and Katie have been her collaborators and tasters and, between the three of them, they claim they've at last got it just right.

I've had my shower and am lying in bed. Miriam's sitting on the edge of the bed, beside me, her back to me. The towel in which she came from her bath has fallen away, and she's naked now. Her hair is still up from the bath, and her neck and shoulders and back are exposed to the cleft in her buttocks. She has deep dimples, low in the back, two hollows so marked and shaped you feel you could lay your lips in them and they would fit perfectly. She looks very beautiful this way, and very vulnerable. I lie there, admiring the perfect cello of her back, its immaculate unpolished wood still tinged with pink from the warmth of her bath. And I'm thinking how stupid we human beings are – visually, aesthetically – when the magazines on every stall you pass thrust these gross, ballooning tits in your face, and all the time there's the magic of this, the back, its perfect musical shape. Painters, I realize, know this – that Bonnard I saw in the National Gallery a few months ago,
Woman in Front of a Mirror,
or whatever it was called … And just as I'm remembering this, Miriam sighs and drops an arm to lift one of her feet up off the floor and lay it across her other knee.

‘I stubbed my toe,' she says.

And as all this happens, the amazing, pliant weight of one breast becomes visible, and I think, okay, backs are okay, I guess –

And I'm still lazily thinking about this, and my prick's filling just as lazily with the thought, when I become aware that Miriam hasn't moved now for some minutes, she's absolutely immobile, her right hand clutching the toes of her left foot, but not doing anything with them, not massaging or soothing or kneading them. It's as if she's stuck, super-glued in place – or time. Stuck fast. I once had a dog when I was a child, a grey-haired mutt called Pete that my parents had rescued from the pound – and he'd get stuck in this same way. He had no pedigree whatsoever, but he was a champion nuzzler, a great biter and licker of his own back, his tail and balls. He'd start on some conscientious licking of his backside, stay at it for some minutes and then – get stuck. His eyes would glaze and he'd stay fixed, his head turned at nearly one hundred and eighty degrees, almost in paralysis. What he was thinking of or imagining during this time, I have no idea – but he could stay like that for five, sometimes ten minutes, until I spoke or another dog barked somewhere off down the street and he'd wake and whip his neck and spine around, and I'd wonder why they didn't snap in the process.

Mother can get like that, not just fixed in a thought, or on a word, but physically, mid-step almost, and stay there, rigid, until someone finds her, and re-activates her. And if she's not found quickly enough, it's not just her mind that's frozen but her whole body, and she has to spend the next morning in physio, just getting the stiffness out of her limbs. And thinking of this, I'm aware of an anxiety that comes to me, and I have to push away more often than I care to admit. What if Miriam ever … ? One chance in five, the specialist told her. Or better. One in four. The dopey bastard. She laughed when she told me, but I know she thinks about it. And, seeing Mother – and her, together – every day, I can't help doing the same.

‘Darling,' I say now, to break my spell as well as hers. ‘A penny for your thoughts.'

‘Mmm?' she says.

‘A penny –'

‘Is that all?' She drops her leg back to the floor, and stretches, and all the muscles and tendons in her back are visible, moving, and I'm amazed, again, at the power there is in her body. And her mind. ‘I'm a pretty cheap fuck, then, aren't I?' she says.

‘Come here,' I say then, and reach for her arm.

‘Philip,' she says, and something in her voice stops my arm in mid-reach. ‘Have you ever thought …' she starts. ‘Have you ever caught yourself thinking, what if Miriam were to get this too? What if she –?'

‘Darling,' I say, and this time I do touch her. Her skin is warm. I catch the round muscle of her arm just below the shoulder, and my brain, as usual, is about to switch off completely.

‘No, seriously,' she says, resisting the slight pull I've given her. ‘Have you ever thought about it?'

‘No,' I say, and in the moment I say it, I haven't, not for the base reason that I want to fuck her, and
now,
and all this is getting in the way, but because I hear the anxiety and fear in her voice, and I'd do anything I could to expunge that – even lie to her. It's false, I know that, even as I say it. It's establishing bad faith with her – in a way that she'd never do with me – but I don't know what else to say. It's all too complicated.

‘Are you sure?' she says. Still not turning.

‘Yes,' I say.

‘Then you're a liar,' she says. Not antagonistically at all. Just telling me she knows, but it doesn't matter.

‘Look, darling,' I say. ‘You're thirty-nine, you're in perfect health. Who knows what in God's name is going to happen to any of us by the time you reach Mother's age? It's another thirty years.
Thirty,
darling. We'll probably all be nuclear ash by then, I'll have had my third triple by-pass –'

‘Oh, no,' she says, and turns at last. ‘You're off butter and cream by breakfast.' And as she says this, and turns to me, her breasts fill my gaze – this close up, they fill my entire visual universe – and I think the magazines may be right after all. ‘Philip …' she says.

‘What now?' I say as she clambers, still naked – which is how she still sleeps – in beside me.

‘There's something I need to tell you,' she says. ‘
Beforehand
. Otherwise, you won't hear it.'

‘I'll hear it.'

‘You'll be asleep.'

‘I'll hear it in my sleep.'

‘No,' she says. ‘Stay there and listen.'

‘Okay,' I say. The vessels in my ears are already surging with blood, and I hear nothing but the soft swish of her legs against the cotton of the sheets. But I try, I do try.

‘There's something I've been wanting to tell you,' she says. And the seriousness of her voice has a sudden, wilting effect. My blood falls back, and I find I can hear again.

‘Ten days ago,' she says, ‘I found something in the drawer of the dresser over there that shouldn't have been there.'

Oh, God, I think. What? Photos? Love letters? They must be old, because I've been faithful to Miriam since we married. But, even so, old things can still hurt – maybe it's from the time we first started going out and I hadn't yet dropped all other contacts. But I thought I'd got rid of all that. I can see her face now, her eyes and mouth, and I know this thing – whatever it is, she's found – is worrying her profoundly. I reach out a hand to touch her face, in reassurance, but she takes and holds my palm and fingers – still away from her.

‘Philip, when I tell you,' she says, ‘please don't just say, It's up to you, it's your decision.'

‘Jesus, you're frightening me,' I say. ‘What is it? What did you find?'

‘Three pills.'

‘You found three pills, and you're scaring the shit out of me?'

‘Three Pills.'

‘Oh.'

‘I don't know how it happened. I'm always so careful. I always take mine out at the same time as I give Mother her night pills. But I got so tired and stressed for a week there, when we had no sitter –'

‘Darling, don't blame yourself,' I say. ‘These things happen. So easily. Christ, if I had to take a pill every night, I'd end the month with fifteen in the packet.'

‘Yes, but you're a man.'

‘There you go again.'

‘Any pills
you
take, or don't, you don't have to live with the consequences in the same way.'

‘Anyway,' I say, ‘what does it matter? Three Pills, so what? When you said
something that shouldn't have been there,
I was thinking, Jesus, it could be anything –'

‘But that's only half of it.'

‘Oh? So what's the other half?'

‘Something else hasn't happened that should have.'

‘But, darling,' I say, ‘that could mean anything. You know that. The stress you're under.'

‘Philip, you know how regular I am. I never miss. Never. Or, put it this way, I've missed twice in my adult life. One miss is called Laura –'

‘And the other Katie.'

‘Philip, I know I'm pregnant. I know. I even know the night it happened.'

When she says this, I lie back and think for a moment. The heat of a special night comes back: ‘That night I returned from Melbourne?'

‘Yes.'

And Mother re-discovered the beeper?'

‘You thought you'd lost your stroke. But you hadn't.'

‘God,' I say.

‘Philip? Are you upset?'

‘No, darling.' And this time she does move towards me, let me put my arms around her.

‘So? What are we going to do?'

‘It kind of complicates things.'

‘I knew you'd say that.'

‘It's just a bit unexpected …'

‘Yes.'

We lie there for a moment, holding one another, her leg now laid across mine, and we think our separate thoughts.

‘Well –' I say eventually.

‘Don't say it,' she says. And I feel her body stiffen.

‘Say what?'

‘That it's up to me. That it's my decision and you'll support me whatever happens. I want to know what
you
think. What you really think.'

Jesus, I think, this is difficult. It couldn't have happened at a worse time. Mother, the problems with sitters, the stress Miriam's under. On the other hand, Katie's six, Miriam's desperate for a son.

‘You've always wanted a son,' I say.

‘Philip,' she says, ‘what do
you
want?'

I take a deep breath. ‘I want a son too,' I say. ‘I just hadn't –'

‘It doesn't come gender-tagged,' Miriam says, ‘or at least not the way we've done it. It may be a Cordelia.'

‘It'll be a son,' I say. I don't know why I say this, on the basis of no evidence. It's out before I think it.

‘Then you do want it?'

‘Darling, of course I do,' I say. Not quite sure what the
it
is. But Miriam takes my words for whatever she wants, and I start to breathe again.

‘You hadn't planned this?' I say jokingly, and I feel the tension going out of Miriam's body.

‘No-o,' she says, pinching the skin under my ribs. ‘What made you say that?'

‘All these ideas about doing something else when the term ended? Not teaching for a while, or not teaching at the college anyway. Doing something else …'

‘It's funny, isn't it?' she says. ‘How things come together. No, I'd never thought of that. I was thinking of something else completely, maybe doing some private work, tutoring or something, something that would give me more flexibility. I suppose I was vaguely thinking that if I worked less, and sometimes from home, it would give me a bit more time with Mother, instead of just fitting her in. You don't think my subconscious arranged it all, do you? Made me forget the pills?'

‘Do a Mother,
you mean?'

‘Oh God,' Miriam says. ‘I'd never thought of that, either.' She laughs shortly. ‘It's crazy, isn't it? Here I am, taking away all Mother's pills, so that she won't forget them or overdose herself –'

‘When all the time you're secretly engineering your own oestrogen rush.'

‘Philip,' she says, and my chest tightens involuntarily, ‘you do think it's a good idea? To go on with it, now it's happened?'

And I want to say to her – Well, as you said yourself, it's the woman who's got to live with the consequences – but I choke the words off and think, what the hell anyway. It's what Miriam wants.

‘Yes,' I say. ‘I do.'

She says nothing for a moment, but her arms tighten around my ribs. ‘Philip,' she says, and her voice is changed utterly. It's arch now, and seductive. ‘It doesn't matter any more.'

‘What doesn't?'

‘When we do it, or how. It's decided. We can forget the Pills. Now.'

‘You don't think you should get a test done first?'

‘There's no need,' she says. ‘I know.' And she rolls over on her back, drawing me on top of her.

‘You haven't …' I say, kissing the lobe of her ear. ‘You haven't been so keen recently.'

‘I am now,' she says.

Later, as we join, her heat is intense, and I imagine, as soon as I enter her, I touch the egg already swelling inside her.

‘A son,' she says, uncannily guessing my thought. ‘Don't you feel him?'