Scissors, Paper, Stone (25 page)

‘Yes. She asked us to call you.’

Silence.

‘She . . . the thing is, there was a little bit of an incident earlier. Nothing to worry about, nothing at all,’ the nurse continued, with an over-eagerness that suggested she was compensating for something. Anne felt herself shiver. She looked down and saw a ridge of goose-bumps form along her upper arm. ‘Your daughter came into visit your husband and there was, well, there was . . . an altercation.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

She could hear the nurse twisting the telephone cord in her fingers. When she started to speak again, it was in a low tone that was an almost-whisper. In the background, Anne could make out the familiar hospital sounds: the shuffling footsteps, the creaking trolley wheels, the beep and buzz of countless life-prolonging machines.

‘Your daughter started to hit him.’

‘Hit who?’ said Anne, stupidly.

‘Hit your husband. She, um, she hit Mr Redfern.’

There was a pause. Anne’s throat went dry. She swallowed, gulping noisily. She breathed in slowly through her nose, held the breath internally for several seconds, and then breathed out, counting from one to five with as much control as she could muster. She had read somewhere this helped you to relax but it didn’t seem to work.

‘I see.’

‘He’s fine,’ said the nurse, a little too quickly. ‘It wasn’t all that serious – a few bruises, maybe, nothing more permanent. But . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Your daughter seemed very agitated. We had to –’ she searched for the right word, ‘we had to intervene.’

‘I see.’

‘She was very upset. We had to give her something to calm her down. I’m afraid she was disturbing the other patients . . .’

‘That’s fine. I understand.’

The nurse seemed relieved that Anne was taking it all so calmly, not seeking to apportion blame. She started to talk more easily, a hint of briskness creeping into her voice.

‘Once she gathered her thoughts a bit, we asked her if she wanted us to call someone and she gave us your number. I’m sorry for the intrusion.’

‘No, no, I’m glad you told me.’ Standing in her kitchen, pressing the phone’s receiver into her ear, Anne was struck by how displaced everything seemed, as if she was watching it all through a thick, dream-like lens. The curved outline of the Aga looked strangely precise; the red-tiled floor too shiny. Looking out of the window to the garden beyond, it appeared too vivid; too sharply in focus. She felt untethered, detached. She felt her reactions slowing, the air around her becoming thick with thought; the weight of it pressing down on her chest.

‘Well,’ she heard herself say, ‘thank you for letting me know.’

She started to put the phone down and then she heard the nurse speaking again, a tinny noise like television interference. ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I was just wondering if I should tell your daughter you’re coming to collect her?’

‘I don’t think so.’

The nurse didn’t know what to make of that. Anne could almost imagine her mouth gaping open.

‘Oh, right,’ she stumbled. ‘It’s just . . . well, it’s not my business, but I think she’d like it if you did.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘How do you know she’d like it?’ Anne said, carefully enunciating every syllable. ‘Have you asked her?’

‘She asked us to call you,’ said the nurse, desperately.

‘I appreciate your doing so. But I imagine Charlotte has her car at the hospital and so, you see, it wouldn’t be practical for me to come too.’

‘I really think . . .’

‘I don’t care what you think,’ said Anne with clipped rapidity, the words coming out too quickly now to stop them. ‘These are things you know nothing about.’ Anne put the phone down with such force she could feel the reverberations in her hand. Then she walked into the drawing room and sat down on the sofa that she had never liked but that she had simply grown to live with.

She was taken aback by the nurse’s phone call but, while news of Charlotte’s outburst was discomfiting, Anne found she was not surprised by it. She supposed, looking back, that it had been building up for years, ever since . . . well, ever since that day.

She thought that day had been dealt with, the brutal truth of it concealed, hidden, disguised from their everyday consciousness. She thought it had been best that way: that enforced ignorance was a means of coping with the ugliness of real knowledge. But now, here it was to be confronted all over again and Anne simply didn’t know if she could bear it. It was too much. The past was too dazzling to look at; too blindingly bright and uncompromising.

She folded her arms in front of her chest and sat there, breathing with a heavy regularity, looking straight ahead at the mantelpiece above the open fire, filled with silver-framed photographs and invitations that had gathered a thin coating of dust. She let her eyes rest on the group picture at the far right end of the mantelpiece. It was a black-and-white shot of the three of them that had been taken on the day of Charlotte’s graduation.

Charlotte was wearing a formal university robe and standing outside the terraced red-brick house that she had shared in her last year with friends. She was laughing at something beyond the edges of the frame, caught mid-smile, her eyes looking sideways, not quite focusing on the photograph being taken. Her hair had been blow-dried especially for the occasion but the wind was mussing it up, so that a few strands of it had come loose and were partially obscuring the side of her cheek.

On her right, Anne stood, smiling firmly in a fitted two-piece suit, clutching a slender, oblong-shaped bag in one hand. With the other, she was reaching out for Charlotte but not quite touching her. It looked as though she was trying to alert her to something, to protect her, but hadn’t made it in time. The hand was suspended there, frozen in blurry celluloid.

But it was Charles who dominated the picture, standing on Charlotte’s left, his arm expansively thrown round his daughter’s shoulders as she laughed. He wasn’t smiling exactly but he looked – what was it? – he looked proud, but there was a sheen of possessiveness to it, as if he were somehow claiming his daughter’s success as his own. He appeared totally static, the only figure sharply in focus, immobile and monumental, aware of his own importance without having to prove it. He just was.

There they were, a triumvirate of almost-togetherness, trapped in the freeze-frame of how someone else had seen them. Who had taken the photo? Anne couldn’t remember. She had always thought it odd, afterwards, that it was in black and white. It seemed so old-fashioned now that most people used digital and even newspapers had front-page photographs printed in a blaze of coloured brilliance.

She looked at that photograph for a long time. She sat on the sofa, her eyes analysing, recalling, filing away every small detail. The foggy blueness of evening crept through the bay window. The occasional speeding whir of car wheels sounded in the distance. Anne did not notice. She wanted simply to think; to think and be alone.

Anne; Charles

So. she was pregnant. She sat, hunched forward on the edge of the loo seat, an unopened box of Tampons on the floor beside her. She had been late before. There had, in the four years of their marriage, been countless false alarms when she had been forced to suspend her temporary flicker of anticipation and replace it with the coolness of fact, carrying on as if nothing had happened because, in effect, nothing had. But this time, it felt different. She knew. She simply knew. And yet this knowledge, so hard-won, so long fought for, did not bring her the unquestioned joy she had expected. Instead, Anne felt herself fill up with a sense of resignation, mingled with fear. It was not fear of motherhood, she realised, lifting herself up from the lavatory and pushing down the handle to flush, it was fear of Charles’s reaction.

Charles had always indicated that he wanted children although, as with so much of their marriage, they had never actually talked about any of the practicalities. And then it had taken so long for her to conceive and so much had happened in the interim that Anne was no longer sure what he would feel or, indeed, what she felt herself.

She walked into the bedroom, clasping one arm across her stomach without thinking. She drew the curtains to shut out the daylight and lay down gingerly on the bed, slipping off her shoes and pulling up the duvet over her stockinged legs, the brush of cotton making a swishing sound against the sheerness of silk. She felt cold and tired and far, far away, as though sinking to the bottom of the ocean, the daylight gradually rippling into a thousand fluid molecules of darkness. She fell asleep.

When she woke, several hours later, she was gripped by an immediate sensation of panic and guilt. Anne looked at the alarm clock on the bedside table. It was six in the evening. Charles would be due back any minute and she hadn’t prepared his supper. She sat up in the bed, brushing her hands through her tangled hair, smoothing down her skirt as best she could. She stood up too quickly and her head surged with a dizzy blackness so that she almost lost her balance. What had she been doing in bed in the middle of the day? Why had she allowed herself to drift off like this? Slowly, the knowledge of what had happened started to seep through in fragments and she began to remember. Her heart began thumping wildly and she broke out in a sweat. She looked at her hands and saw that they were trembling. She opened the top drawer of the bedside table and took out a plastic bottle of pills, pushing down the lid as she turned it so that the catch released. She tipped out one of the small white oblongs into the palm of her hand and then, after a few seconds’ hesitation, another one. Anne swallowed them with a single, dry gulp. She had got so used to taking them that she no longer required any water. A soothing numbness enveloped her. After several minutes, she felt herself in a pleasurable daze, the panic loosened like a helium balloon that was floating, un-tethered, to the ceiling. She supposed she would have to give these up now that she was expecting a child. Her eyes filled with tears at the thought but she did not feel sad.

She went to splash cold water on her face. Downstairs, she heard the distinctive murmur of a car engine being switched off. There were footsteps and then the turn of a key in a lock and then the sound of her husband taking his coat off in the hallway. She would have to tell him, she thought, the idea forming unclearly in her mind. And the curious thing was, she had no idea how he would react. For some reason, this struck her as immensely funny and she started to laugh. She looked at herself in the mirror. A trickle of mascara was running down her cheek and she wondered why and then she saw that she was crying at the same time and that seemed even funnier and she carried on laughing, unable to stop until Charles walked through the bathroom door.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked, an expression of distaste curling at the corner of his lips.

Anne looked at him and suddenly it all seemed so simple. The laughter stopped as abruptly as it had started.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. She reached for the loo roll, wanting to blow her nose but she somehow misjudged the distance so that she tripped and fell to her knees.

‘About time,’ Charles said. He walked across to Anne, still sitting in a strange heap on the floor, and then he tore off several sheets of toilet paper and handed them to her, folded up in a wad. ‘Clean yourself up.’

She looked up at him and she noticed that his face was totally blank, a sheet of nothing. She could not read it. She could not understand what it meant. She tried to grab hold of his trouser leg with her hand but he stepped backwards so that she could not reach him. Then he turned and walked out of the room.

Charlotte

That day.

There had been a gap of several months before anything like it happened again. Even then, Charlotte was not sure whether it was right or wrong or swimming fluidly somewhere in between that she couldn’t quite pin down.

Once, she had been sitting on the floor in front of the sofa, watching television. Anne was upstairs, having a bath. Charles had walked in and instead of going to his normal armchair in the corner of the room, he came and sat on the sofa directly behind her and started gently kneading her neck with his fingers.

Charlotte tensed. She closed her eyes, half of her trying to enjoy what she told herself was a friendly physical contact between father and daughter, the other half simply wanting it to be over with.

He didn’t say anything as he stroked her neck, gradually applying more and more pressure until she felt him pushing down on her tendons. Then, quick as a flick-knife, he slid one hand under the neck of her loose knitted jumper, his fingers lightly tracing the outline of her nipple, the tips twitching as if fiddling with a tuning dial. It took less than three seconds. Then he withdrew his hand, stood up and disappeared. Nothing was said.

Another time, he had walked in unannounced when she was in the shower on a Sunday morning. She jumped as she heard his footsteps, but he didn’t do anything except sit on the laundry stool, looking at her, his legs bent together at the knee, as she washed her hair.

Occasionally, he would come to say goodnight as she lay in bed and Charlotte learned to tilt her head sideways at the very last minute so that the kiss landed on her cheek or, if she hadn’t acted quickly enough, at the very edge of her mouth. For hours afterwards, she would feel the imprint of his saliva at the corner of her lips, a wet mark of conquest.