Life (22 page)

They went indoors. “Well, here we are,” he said. “Still together?”

“Still together. Shall we take a tour around the domain?”

The domain could not have been much simpler. There were two small rooms knocked into one downstairs, and a kitchen; two rooms and a bathroom upstairs. The second bedroom was to be Spence’s office, until the baby was old enough to need a place of its own. There was a semi-converted loft, with flat window in the roof. They passed through the rooms, rearranging things, removing traces, and finally climbed up to the loft, which was empty and virginal (Spence’s Mom having been unable to squeeze through the hatch), taking with them a bottle of red wine and some bread. It was the warmest room in the house and somehow a pleasant space. Spence had meant to buy cheese to go with the bread and wine, but he’d forgotten. They toasted each other solemnly. God bless the drug.

Anna was resistant to antenatal procedures. She grumbled and growled at the time wasted in the ghastly waiting room, clutching a bottle of piss. Secretly she was appalled at the power of that place, which brutally transformed her from being Anna, still herself, striving with a perilous adventure, into
a pregnant woman.
She jeered at Spence’s US conviction that you couldn’t have too much intervention. I’m a sex scientist, she told him. Believe me, I know. If you work in the kitchen, you don’t eat in the restaurant.

Spence said, “Oh, hey, I think I hear those hormones talking.”

Who would have thought gentle Anna had such a temper on her? It must be the hormones, or maybe she was getting to trust him with her faults at last.

At twenty weeks she consented to an ultrasound scan and irritated the registrar by being able to read the screen better than he could. The baby was a girl. They named her Lily Rose Lyndall. Lyndall after the heroine of
The Story of an African Farm,
a proto-feminist text once read by Anna under Ramone’s influence. Lily Rose after Spence’s favorite painting, John Singer Sargent’s
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.
In that same week Anna discovered she was not going to the conference in Zurich where the team was making a big presentation. She boldly asked Nirmal why not.

“You will be heavily pregnant. You should not be flying.”

“Not quite seven months. I could still fly. Or I could go by train and meet you—”

“It would not would be suitable.”

Anna held her peace. Nirmal felt betrayed? So did she. But until she had her doctorate, she would hang on. As she saw the odds that were stacked against her, she only became more determined. She would win through, with Spence and Lily Rose.

They learned to get along together. They were very short of money, because Spence had blown his savings on coming over and that car, whereas the executive salary promised by Emerald City was slow to materialize. Anna found it hard to surrender the reins of government. Spence did more than his share of the cleaning and he cooked well, but he couldn’t stick to a shopping list or a budget. He actively preferred a regime that swung between feast and famine: it made life more interesting. She would have to get used to this. She would have to trust Spence. She prepared herself, determined not to falter. When her child was born, she must entrust Lily Rose to Spence’s care, the way fathers have trusted mothers to look after their children from time immemorial. When the child woke from a bad dream and cried for her daddy first, Anna must accept that. A real world of equal opportunities must have room for
average, even mediocre
househusbands, same as the old world managed with vast numbers of disorganized, inefficient housewives. And Spence was better than that. This will be my line, thought Anna. It carried her like music. She knew how to tackle the problem.

On her birthday, in June, she came home from work at lunchtime (it was a Sunday) and found a strange van outside number 131. Indoors her father was sitting on their couch—the single futon they’d bought for Spence’s Mom’s visit, folded in three—having a cup of tea with Spence and two burly men she didn’t know, and there was a small, old-fashioned upright piano against the opposite wall.

“She’s a Lancashire lass,” explained Richard, beaming. “Got to have a piano in the parlor.”

iii

Spence biked up the hill from the town centre, at the end of a warm and dusty day. He’d been working in the reference library. To build a good search engine, first you have to cultivate your own ability to find things in the equivalent of a teenage boy’s heaving heap of a bedroom, only it’s the size of a young universe. Then you have to know when to cheat. Noticing things as he went by: a Siamese kitten curled asleep in a window
(Cesf, what am I going to do about him).
A young Asian woman in a crisp white shirt sitting in the front of a car, enigmatic smile, holding a rubber plant in a pot. The smile made him think of Anna in that sketch by Tex the comic book artist. It had come over to England with the rest of his possessions. Anna looking at it, turning to him, he read the question unspoken on her lips:
am I really beautiful?

Yes, baby. You are lovely. Blame it on the tumbling dice. Can you hack that, can you live with the idea? A poignant waft of grilled meats from the good kebab shop. He had meant to cook a lentil casserole but forgotten to soak the lentils. Have takeaway, starve later. The Pennines against the sky, backbone of England, lumpy eroded vertebrate slopes, am I going to spend my life here?

The house was strangely quiet. Anna was sitting on the futon-couch, an inward look—

“Something’s wrong with Lily Rose,” she said. “She’s not moving.”

Fear tingled down his spine.

“Be glad of the rest,” he suggested, wrestling the bike into its slot in the narrow hall. The car was not for casual use, they were very broke. “She’s usually far more active than they expect.”

“That’s why I’m worried. I noticed it when I was doing my yoga this morning. I’ve been waiting all day for her to stir, but there’s been nothing.”

“Have you called Dr Marsden?”

“She says she’ll see me in the morning and send me straight on to the hospital if there’s something wrong. Or, if anything else happens, I should go there straight away.”

What did
anything else
mean? Premature labor? Hemorrhage? The baby was barely old enough to live, if it was born now. She was small, they said at the antenatal, but healthy… Neither of them slept well. Spence woke the next morning and saw in his wife’s eyes a dread and desolation that he tried to find reassuring. Monster pieces of bad luck do not give warning. Spence and Anna ought to know that. He drove her to the group practice and thence to the hospital. They could not find the baby’s heartbeat.

At length they decided, with Anna’s agreement, to induce. The hormone was pumped into her womb via a catheter. Anna was in a slip of a room on her own, on the Maternity floor, indifferent to the demeaning things done to her body. She was deep inside, like someone buried in a cellar during an earthquake, listening to the far away sounds of the rescue that would not reach her in time. It took many hours for contractions to start. They gave her a sedative, it didn’t work. Spence slept on the floor. The Catholic chaplain visited briefly. He was attending to another woman, someone having a lateish abortion because she couldn’t cope with the idea of a severely disabled child. The priest felt that this poor woman was in more need of comfort and support, and Anna was glad to agree. After a day and a night, labor began. Anna worked for eight hours, Spence holding her hand, the midwife professionally encouraging. They were lucky to have the same one all through that shift.

“How can you stay so calm, through such huge contractions?”

“I’m a yoga student.”

“Oh, is that it? Well you’re doing splendidly. I’m going to tell all my young mothers—” She caught Anna’s eye, bit her lip. “I’m sorry.” No further conversation. At five o’clock in the evening on the third day, Anna gave birth. The body slipped from her in a rush of blood-stained fluid. “Is she still alive, Doctor?” she quavered, as if this whole process had been, like Spence’s marriage plans, emergency first aid: as if everything would be fixable. “Michael,” said the registrar, the same young black man who’d been so rude to the uppity primagravida, over the ultrascan. “Call me Michael. I’m sorry Anna. She’s gone.”

She had asked him, before labor began, about the chances for a small twenty-five-weeks baby who needed resuscitation. She had said, don’t hurt her, please. No heroic medicine. But she had known and he had known that there would be no dilemma.

After the placenta came away Anna gave them a scare. She began to bleed heavily. The midwife and the registrar were too busy putting a stop to this to attend to Spence. He found himself alone in a room, with the baby in his arms. She had been washed, and wrapped in white. She had arched eyebrows like the faintest, most delicate Chinese brush-strokes, tiny spikes of lashes; a self-possessed little mouth. Anna had been able to hold her, briefly, before the hard bleeding began. The registrar thought the baby had been dead before they got to the hospital: no obvious reason why. She seemed to be perfect. Someone came in and asked Spence would he like a cup of tea. He said he’d like to be left alone. “Take as long as you want,” said the woman. A chaplain, the Anglican chaplain this time, turned up and asked would he like the infant to be christened or blessed.

“She never breathed.”

“Well, it’s something that can help. We need ritual at these times. Are you a believer?”

“I’m a Catholic. Yes, baptize her. Can’t do any harm.”

The man took the dead baby, and hesitated. “Would you like to do it yourself? As, er, as you know, you’re as—er—well qualified as I am.”

“You do it.”

So she was Lily Rose Lyndall in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He wondered if Anna would be angry with him. She’d gone through the church wedding rigmarole without much comment. Did she believe in anything? Probably not, probably nor did Spence. But the chaplain was right: he needed something. Then he was alone again, with his twenty-five-week old daughter who had never breathed. Such hours cannot be undone. You must refuse to feel when it’s happening, cut yourself off. Don’t look at her, don’t hold her. Afterwards it will be too late. A part of you will never leave that room, the gleaming metal surfaces, the harsh light, the smell of hospitals: her presence, Lily Rose.

Anna came home from hospital the next day. She lay in bed upstairs, on a beautiful warm evening, listening to Spence who was dealing with well-wishers downstairs. She recognized the voices of Roz Brown and Graham, then the bell rang again. It was Sonia and her husband. They had brought flowers. They were pronouncing the sacred words,
if there’s anything we can do.
Spence had put on some music, he was making coffee. She heard his normal voice, chatting away. This is the way we prefer to behave in times of trouble. We need to make it seem that we have not been badly injured. She felt the bloody discharge seeping out of her womb, slowed and harmless. It would cease in a day or two, and it would be as if she had never been pregnant. At twenty-five weeks, a fit young woman with good muscle tone has hardly begun to feel burdened. Tears soaked the pillow, so that she felt as if she was a child again, because she must have been eight years old when she last cried like this.

Oh, Lily Rose, if it was just you and me, I could mourn in peace. But not this way… If she could undo any one act in her life it would be
that damned phone call.
She had trapped Spence into marriage, she had cheated him, and no matter how long they stayed together (the years stretched out, eternal) Anna would never be free from shame, the ugly liquid seeping from this basic inequality, the wound that would not heal.