The House We Grew Up In (13 page)

She had no idea why she was still at home. She had a boyfriend. They’d been together for four years. His name was Simon and he was doing a Masters in Combined Science in York. She only saw him every fortnight or so and even then he was too distracted and stressed even to contemplate having conversations about their future. Not that she wanted to have conversations about their future. She didn’t know what she wanted yet. She didn’t have a clue. She’d done a secretarial course just under six years ago. She could type a letter in a minute and a half and take down a garbled conversation in shorthand and programme a word processor to print addresses on to envelopes. She was working for a local building company as PA to the managing director. Her boss said she was the best secretary he’d ever had and had given her three pay rises already. She was great-looking (other people told her that all the time, complete strangers sometimes), she was young, she was hard-working and bright and conscientious and yet …

She gazed again upon her niece, chasing a slippery piece of banana around the tray of her highchair with one chubby
finger. The child that her sister and her partner had made together; that her sister had grown in her body, in her womb, had pushed out and fed and nurtured and got to the age of nearly two without any harm coming to her, whilst simultaneously washing lots of clothes and plumping lots of cushions and buying lots of fresh fruit and working part-time in a school and making a whole other baby. She couldn’t, she just couldn’t, imagine any of it. How did a human make all those decisions? All the big ones, and all the little ones? How would you know you were doing it right? How could you trust yourself? Beth did not trust herself in the slightest. She felt much safer bobbing about in the same patterns and the same places with the same people.

She thought back to the year Rhys had died. She remembered sitting in a weird wine bar near Covent Garden with Megan, before Meg had met Bill, when she was eighteen and Meg was twenty and they were both still vaguely on a par with each other. And she remembered Meg suggesting that she could come and live in London with her. Come and share her bedroom. She’d been half-tempted. It had seemed a soft entry into the world of grown-up-ness. Her sister there by her side to hold her hand. But then Rhys had done what Rhys had done and how could she? How could she have left them all there? And so she had stayed. And stayed. And stayed. And the only mistake she was currently in danger of making, she realised, was the mistake of leaving it all far too late.

Meg was at a hospital called the Whittington in Highgate. It was big and Victorian and scary-looking and it was hard
to believe that something as wholesome and cheerful as the arrival of newborn babies was happening within its mouldering walls.

Beth was directed to a labouring room (which put her in mind of a room full of men in dungarees with pitchforks and chisels and sweaty backs) where she found Meg and Bill flicking through magazines and eating tortilla chips.

‘Was she all right?’ asked Meg, the minute Beth walked into the room.

‘Absolutely fine. Honestly. She is one cool customer. She didn’t even say goodbye.’

‘Oh, thank God,’ said Meg, holding her hand against her chest. ‘That’s the first time anyone apart from me or Bill has ever dropped her off – I thought she might freak out a bit.’

‘No, she’s been a little angel. Ate all her breakfast, let me change her nappy, wasn’t
too
keen on getting into her pram but we managed it in the end.’ Beth beamed. She was feeling strangely powerful. She had not only cared for her niece single-handedly, she had also successfully navigated the streets of a frankly rather terrifying inner London neighbourhood with a child in a pram and then found her way, using public transport, to the hospital.

‘How are you?’ she asked, her eyes directed at Meg’s stomach.

‘Well, apparently I’m only five centimetres dilated and my contractions have slowed right down, so looks like we might be here for the long haul.’

‘The childminder lady …’

‘Danielle?’

‘Yes, that one, she said Molly can stay extra hours. She said she can keep her until six if you like?’

Meg smiled. ‘Oh,’ she said happily, ‘that’s great. I love that woman. Have you told Mum?’

Beth gasped. ‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘I’m really sorry! I completely forgot. I was going to do it earlier, but I didn’t want to wake her, and then Molly woke up and it was all so busy just getting her ready and everything and—’

Meg rolled her eyes and sighed. ‘My family is unbelievable,’ she said. ‘Completely.’

‘There’s payphones round the corner. I’ll go and call her now.’

Bill counted some coins out of the pocket of his jeans and gave Beth a complicitous smile that made her catch her breath. But there was no reply at home and Beth went back to Meg’s room.

‘You know,’ said Meg, ‘in other families, in
normal
families, the mother would have been here right now, holding my hand, helping out. And please God, don’t think I’m not grateful to you, because I really, really am, but you shouldn’t have to be doing this. You have your own life to live. My mother should be here. And if she can’t be here she should be on the phone every hour asking for news. You know, she has not called me
once
since my due date, not once, since
argh, Jesus, argh
!’ She clutched the sides of the bed and sat up rigidly, her teeth clenched together and her eyes screwed shut. Bill jumped to his feet and took her hand. ‘Another one?’ he asked.

‘
Argh!
’ replied Meg. ‘Jesus
Christ
!’

Beth stared at her older sister through wide circles of eyes.
She’d never seen another human being make that face before, or the noise that came with it. It was
horrible
.

‘Shall I call the nurse?’ she asked, edging towards the door.

Meg relaxed the rictus mask of her face and said, ‘No, don’t be daft. It’s just a contraction. I’ll be fine.’

A contraction
, thought Beth,
what is a contraction?
It was a word that meant nothing to her beyond a vague association with the mechanics of childbirth.

‘What does it feel like?’ she asked.

‘It feels,’ began Meg, ‘like a gigantic metal fist squeezing and twisting and pulling all your internal organs until you think you’re about to pass out. It is the most revolting feeling imaginable. And you know, as much as I think our mother is completely and utterly useless in almost every respect, I will always have the greatest admiration for the fact that when she had the twins she had to do this twice. In the
same day
.’

Beth smiled. Meg had said the same thing last time, after Molly was born, and had been terrified during both pregnancies that the sonographer was going to point out two babies on the screen.

‘Coming up for six years,’ she said, her thoughts turning to Rhys. ‘I can’t quite believe it.’

Meg nodded. ‘Twenty-two,’ she sighed. ‘I wonder what he’d be doing now …’

‘Rhys?’ asked Bill, looking over the top of his magazine.

They nodded.

‘Poor soul,’ he said.

‘Has Mum been to his grave lately?’ asked Meg.

Beth bit her lip and shook her head.

‘You?’

She shrugged. She kept meaning to. ‘Not really.’

‘Not really? I mean, you either have, or you haven’t.’

‘Well, in which case, no, I haven’t.’

‘Oh, God, Beth—’

‘I know,’ she interjected defensively. ‘It’s just, it’s so scary there. I don’t like going on my own. I always feel like I’m going to get raped or something.’

‘Can’t you go with Dad?’

‘I suppose. It’s just, he’s hardly ever around. And when he is he’s just kind of …
busy
.’

‘Busy doing
what
?’

‘Oh, God, I don’t know, just doing stuff. Writing his memoirs, apparently, though I’ve never seen anything he’s written. And catching up on correspondence. Anything to keep him away from Mum and Vicky.’ She sighed. She hated talking about home. It made it sound all wrong, whereas, when she was there, living there, just getting on with her life, it all felt perfectly reasonable.

But Beth was spared the trouble of taking this conversation to its uncomfortable extrapolation by the onset of another contraction and the sight of her big sister throwing herself back against the pillows and screaming, ‘
Jesus
fucking Christing bollocks, let me die.’

Meg was still having irregular contractions by the time Beth had to leave the hospital to collect Molly from the childminder. There was talk of doing something to get them coming more frequently, to
move labour along
. But it seemed to Beth that the
baby was not coming any time soon and that she would be required to stay overnight with Molly and repeat all of today’s processes over again tomorrow. Which was fine.

She had finally got through to Lorelei at about midday who had said, ‘Oh, how marvellous, tell her I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for her all day. And Vicky will too, won’t you, Vee?’

She’d heard Vicky chirrup something affirmative in the background and made a mental note not to share Vicky’s best wishes with her sister. ‘Well, I’d better be off, darling,’ her mother had said a moment later. ‘Time to collect Sophie from nursery. And then we’re taking her to get new shoes. Let me know the minute there’s any news, though, won’t you, darling. And big hugs to Meggy and Bill.’

It had been as if she’d called to tell her that Meg’s car was in for an MOT or that her cat was having an operation, but she’d dismissed the thought before it grew roots. It was just her mother’s way. Lorelei filled her head with the things closest to her, the here and now, not the over there and then. It was how she was. It didn’t mean she was a bad person. But still, Beth had waited a count of five or so minutes before returning to Meg’s bedside where she’d slapped a joyful smile on her face and said nothing about new shoes for Sophie.

She took Molly to a playground on the way home. An old lady admired the little girl and said, ‘She looks just like you.’ And Beth smiled and said, ‘She’s not mine, actually. She’s my niece. I’m just looking after her, while my sister’s in hospital having the second baby.’

The old lady smiled back and said, ‘You’ll have your own one day then?’

And Beth’s smile stretched out uncomfortably and she said, ‘Yes, I’m sure I will. Yes. I’m one of four, so you know …’

‘Yes. When you come from a big family, you want it for yourself, don’t you? But you shouldn’t wait too long, not if you want your children to be close to their cousins.’

She said this sternly, with a hint of insight, as if she
knew
. As if she’d looked at Beth and seen inside her soul, seen a clear line to her future. But then her smile softened and she said, ‘But you’re still young. No rush really, is there, dear?’

Beth laughed nervously, politely. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no rush at all.’ But she knew that there was. And it had nothing to do with babies. Before she could even begin to think about babies she first had to find her way to the starting blocks of life.

She was reading
Bridget Jones’s Diary
. She’d found it on her sister’s alphabetically ordered bookshelves. It had been published the year before and everyone had been talking about it and telling her she should read it, but Beth didn’t really read. Usually she watched TV with her mum until she was so tired she could barely speak and then she flopped into bed. But Molly was finally asleep in her cot after a long and rather disordered evening, and there was no one to watch TV with. Hence the book. It was quite funny, although she found it hard to relate to all the talk of weight gain (she never gained weight) and drinking (she never drank) and mad, mouthy girlfriends (she had no mad, mouthy girlfriends). But she was
enjoying the bits about the heroine’s crush on an unsuitable older man.

Although, no, she would not call what she was experiencing a
crush
, no, it was not a crush, it was a …
frisson
. Just a sort of electrical thing, invisible to the naked eye, like a tripwire. It was in the way he looked at her when there was no reason to be looking at her. The way he grasped her by the waist when he hugged her hello and goodbye. And she still hadn’t decided whether she was flattered or appalled.

She was going to turn down the corner of the page and then realised that bent corners were probably on Meg’s long list of Minor Domestic Misdemeanours, so she inserted a hairclip instead and was about to turn off the bedside lamp when she heard a sound that made her heart beat violently. It was the front door. She heard it first open, and then click shut, very gently. She held her breath and put a hand over her racing heart. She envisaged gangsters, she envisaged knives and guns. She envisaged being gang-raped and brutally murdered. She envisaged all the things that she never worried about when she was at home in the Cotswolds. She did not belong here, in the city. It was not the place for her. She wanted to go home, home to the country, to her safe cosy room in her parents’ safe cosy house. Why did Meg live here? Why had she had children here, in this terrible place? She glanced around the room, looking for something heavy, or sharp, or both. But all she could see was nappies and plush bears. She gulped back a strangled cry and was about to start whimpering when she heard a man clear his throat outside her bedroom door.

Bill
.

She breathed out and smiled.

She opened her door and peered out into the hallway. Bill was unzipping his jacket. He turned at the sound of her and his face softened and he said, ‘Hi, sorry, did I wake you?’

She said, ‘No, not at all. I was awake. I thought you were burglars.’

‘Burglars, plural?’

‘Yes, a whole gang of them.’

He smiled. ‘Sorry. I’m clearly not as light-footed as I thought as I was.’

‘So,’ she said, ‘any news?’

‘Well, if you call a nine-pound-nine-ounce baby boy with bright-red hair “news”, then yes, we have news.’

Beth squealed and then covered her mouth with her hands. Then, unable to find a less noisy alternative, she skipped across the hallway and threw herself into Bill’s embrace. ‘Oh, wow,’ she whispered loudly into his ear, ‘wow.
Congratulations!
A boy. Amazing.’