The Telling (13 page)

“If a woman were to arrange something—to find a place—it’s not for me to do; there would be complaints, inquiries, noise; I am trying to avoid noise.”

He closed his book over, pushed it to one side. His hands lay
loosely curled on the tabletop. I could see that fine white scar down the back of his thumb.

“There is no one to do it.”

“Any woman who came to our meetings would be—”

“I would come.”

His hand lay a finger’s breadth from mine; I could just lift a finger, and touch his skin.

“Do you want this, then? Do you really want it so much?”

I looked up at his face, his eyes shadowed, his skin warm in the candlelight.

“I’d give anything,” I said, not knowing that the words were there until I’d said them.

He smiled. “That won’t be necessary.”

I lifted the coffee
cup and took a mouthful. The coffee was cold, greasy, more smell than taste. I could feel there was something else, something soft but solid; it brushed the roof of my mouth. I opened my lips and let the liquid fall back into the cup. A brown ring of coffee-residue stained the cup, a faint scum edged the liquid. A disc of grey-green mould floated on the surface. My stomach heaved and I pushed the cup away.

I was sitting at the dressing table. Outside, the sky was grey with evening. It had been raining. The garden looked sodden and dejected. A brown bird hopped through the ragged grass, jabbed at something, then flew away. The fields beyond were deepening green as the light faded.

The room was dim and chill. The bookcase loomed nearby. She was there. My skin, my entire body, bristled into goose pimples. There was a breath, light as a moth, on my neck.

I was on my feet, swinging around to look behind me. The chair toppled, crashed onto the floor. The air flinched, the shadows took a step back. I searched the room, the hair standing on the nape of my neck. The bed was rumpled with my sleep. The bookcase was stuffed with shadows. The bathroom door stood ajar and the bathroom window was open on birdsong. A hint of breeze; it had touched my neck.

For a moment, I had no idea of who I was.

“I’ve been calling and calling.”

“I’m sorry, really; I’ve just been up to my eyes in it. I lost track.”

My hands were shaking and I was sweating. The peeled man, and those little blue lozenge-shaped pills that taste sweet and faintly chalky on the tongue, that melt into the veins and make you warm with the faith that everything will be fine, everything will be just fine. No more fear. No more dark spaces. I could soften at the edges, melt, ooze into the world.

“And there’s no signal,” I said. “No signal in the room.”

“You must be nearly done.”

“How’s Cate?”

“She’s fine. Look, we’ll see you at the weekend.”

I couldn’t grasp his meaning; he went on.

“Whatever’s left, we’ll just get a houseclearer in. You must have gone through all the, you know, important stuff, by now. We’ll have you home by teatime Sunday.”

A flood of panic. “When,” I asked. “When are you getting here?”

“I’ll come straight from work, pick up Cate. She’ll sleep in the car.”

“Tomorrow?” I guessed.

“Yep,” he said. “Friday.”

Suddenly the days had names again, and ticked like bombs.

I picked my way through the box room, began to sort out the things. The aluminium clasps of the suitcase were stiff and oxidized. Inside were men’s jeans, sweaters, T-shirts, all well-worn and faded. Dad’s old holiday and weekend stuff: I couldn’t see him wanting it now. I set it to one side for the charity shop, then dragged a carrier bag towards me. It was full of photographs. Framed photographs, loose photographs, wallets straight from the developers, the contents still not sorted into albums. I crushed the bag closed, pushed it away. Couldn’t face it.

I opened a box: Mum’s books. Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Dickens, Tolstoy: her comfort reading, books to sink into and disappear for days. My first instinct was to take the box through to the other room and unload the books onto the shelves, as she must have intended to, as she would have if she’d had the energy or time. I was supposed to be packing up, though, not unpacking: this was an ending, not the new beginning she’d anticipated. I folded the top of the box back together.

Moments like those have me wishing for the pills. I take the pills, and I don’t find myself back there, climbing the worn linoleum stairs, the sunlight warm through high windows, conscious
of the heaviness of my legs, the round hardness of my belly, the nausea. The pills close off the door to the ward, keep me away from her bed by the window, the freesias drooping on the locker, the drip’s quiet occasional mutter, the drain-tube snaking from inside her gown, streaked with dark fluids, with the body’s weeping. I forget the paleness of her smiling lips, the darkness of her eyes, the dry coolness of her drip-punctured hand as it held mine.

You look a bit tired, she said. I said, So do you. I bent to kiss her, my face full and heavy with tears. I wanted to tell her about the two pink dots on the test-stick that morning, the final confirmation of what I had been suspecting for weeks. I wanted to give her the secret, hand it over like a gift, tiny and exquisite. Her delight would be a kind of prism: it would split this bald fact into an array of brilliant potentialities, make it seem at once wonderful and real. Instead, I drew up a chair, and sat down, and asked about the wound, the drip, the pain. She answered quietly. I peeled her an orange, the zest spurting up into the air like tiny fireworks, and fed it to her piece by piece. I watched the careful precision of her fingers’ grasp, the slow consumption of each segment, the way the flesh had fallen from her cheeks, and I knew without even thinking that this was not the time to tell. Once she was home and convalescing, when this thing was over and done with and the tests had come back clear: that would be the time to tell her, that would be the time to enjoy her delight in this. We’d hunt out old knitting patterns, hoarded angel tops and matinée jackets.

With the blue pills, I can almost believe it had happened, that we had sat on their bed, the case pulled down from the top of the wardrobe, the thick dust wiped carefully off. Her dark hands lifting
out baby blankets, bootees, bonnets trimmed with broderie anglaise, her eyes soft with memory, and with gentle wonder at the swift flight of time. Still, even now, that image seems almost a memory, almost more real than the reality.

It’s too tempting. The blue softening of the pills is just too tempting. I could have a handful of them on Monday; all I had to do was make the appointment, ask.

I heaved myself up off the floor and was out of the box room and downstairs, opening drawers, grabbing handfuls of utensils, cutlery, dropping them into a carrier bag to sling into the car, anything to be busy, to be occupied, to feel capable. Then I stopped: there was no point packing the kitchen stuff up yet. We’d be needing it over the weekend. But I had to keep busy, had to do something, had to get things into some kind of order before they came.

The fridge smelt bad. The unwrapped end of a block of cheddar had gone translucent and started to crack. I lifted the milk carton and shook it gently. The milk was solid. I’d have to go into town.

I walked into the first estate agent’s I came upon. The blonde woman with the beautiful nails. She gave me a seller’s pack, a sheaf of leaflets on similar properties, her card, and a lovely smile. A seller’s market at the moment, she said. Lots of families looking: property of that kind often went well above the asking price. She seemed quite excited. I stuffed the papers into my bag and slipped her card into my wallet; it all felt rather unseemly. I thanked her and said I’d be in touch.

A youngish man was at the counter of the charity shop. They didn’t deal with furniture, he said, but he gave me a card for an organization that did. A few quid to take it away, then they renovate it and sell it on; skills training for the long-term unemployed, cheap furniture for those in real need of it. I said that it seemed really worthwhile, and I’d definitely give them a call. I put the card in my wallet. I gave him a smile. It was Friday. There was no point calling anybody now.

I hadn’t planned to go to the bookshop.

I was climbing the stairs into the dusty light, passing framed prints and maps. I was walking the hushed aisles, picking up books when I should have been trying to get rid of the ones I already had. I bought an old blue-bound collected Milton, a battered
The Flora and Fauna of the British Isles
, and an old book on geology, the cover burgundy and faded gold, the frontispiece an engraving of a classical temple. It was built high on rocks; the sea had risen to lap at its columns and receded again; had left bitemarks in the stone.

I went to the supermarket. I was hopeless at it. I had forgotten how to do it. I glazed over at the vegetable section: flow-packs of sweet peppers, pillow-packs of salad leaves, punnets of mushrooms, strawberries, blueberries, sealed plastic packs of chives, basil, rosemary, chillies, sage. Oranges, bananas, papayas, mangos, avocados, persimmons. Golden Delicious and Macintosh, Williams and Conference. Anya, Charlotte, King Edward. Organic, basic, or Fair Trade. I felt dazed with choice, befuddled by the shades and nuances of distinction. And I was thinking of the seasons, of the true distance from one harvest to the next. I took stuff and dropped it into the trolley; I had to get something.

I was in the bread section, gazing blankly at a wall of loaves; seeded and unseeded, wholemeal and wheat-free and white and white-but-wholegrain, and sandwich loaves and toaster-loaves; when I remembered avocados for Cate. Had to wheel the trolley around and go all the way back through the store for them. Always going back to that, to avocados.

Her little toothless gums munching away like a tortoise’s, me scraping the bowl to spoon the last of the creamy green mush into her mouth. Taking the bowl to the sink and washing it, and then dropping it into sterilizing fluid, and looking out across the garden below, the garden that belonged to the flat downstairs. That dry ache in my nose and throat. Washing the plastic spoon. My daughter seven months old, sitting in her highchair babbling, slapping the tray, avocado on her vest. My hands pressed down onto the countertop, my shoulders high and shaking. I was going to dry my eyes, and blow my nose, and turn around to Cate with a smile, and say she was a good girl, she was my lovely girl, and we’d get her zipped up in her suit, and out and around the park, she’d like that, wouldn’t she? I was going to get on with it, I was going to be fine, and I wasn’t going to inflict any of my misery on her. But I heard his key in the lock, and the door opening, and he was coming down the hall, and was at the kitchen door, and it wasn’t his time yet, he wasn’t due for hours, but Cate crowed with delight to see him, and I turned from the sink, trying hard to be bright, but red-eyed and puffy with tears, and feeling terrible, feeling guilty, as if he’d caught me bingeing, caught me stoned or drunk alone in charge of our child. He leaned against the end of the work surface. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. He looked at me; he had paled, as if nauseous. I didn’t know it was like
this, he said. How long has it been like this. And he didn’t hold me. And that was just before the talks, and more talks, and more tears, and him forgetting how easy it was to hold me and stop me crying. And the phone call that brought me to the peeled man.

They arrived late Friday evening, the headlights sweeping down the village street, the engine noise a tear through the silence. I went out onto the steps; the stars prickled above. The street was cool and quiet; there was a soft leafy smell, the odd birdcall in the dark. The car—his mum’s, a silver Mazda—had pulled up at the grass verge. He got out.

He was creased and tired from driving. He was still in his work clothes, a grey-blue shirt, faintly striped suit trousers, the jacket hanging in the back of the car. I came down the steps in bare feet. The stone was granular beneath them; grit pressed into my soles. My skin felt strange in the evening air. I’d showered. I’d washed my hair. I’d put on a little make-up. I was ignoring the static hum in the air. I was trying to do normal.

I went to him and put my arms around his neck. He reached around me and pulled me close. The warmth of his body against mine. I had forgotten it.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello.” He mumbled it into my hair.

Cate was sleeping in the back seat. Her face was turned away, so that all I could see was the smooth curve of a cheek and dark curls of hair. She was wearing her stripy pyjamas; her strawberry-patterned blanket was rumpled, half kicked off. Mark ducked past me to open the back door, leaned and fumbled with the car
seat. He lifted her out, and she curled up in reflex, whimpered. He handed her to me, and I took her. She was heavy, limp, and hot. She’d grown. She whimpered again, nuzzled into my shoulder. Her smell: musty, appley; milky and ammoniac. I rested my cheek against her head, stood there just a moment, turning slightly from side to side, soothing her, a haziness coming over everything.

“C’mon,” Mark said, a hand pressed on the small of my back, steering me. I carried her up the steps and indoors. I sank into a chair and leaned back to let her lie against me. Her warmth and weight and scent, the soft puck of her lips unsticking. In the hospital, newborn, curled and pink, her bald head squashed into a mitre, she had lain on my chest, her ear resting on my heart. She had weighed almost nothing, breathed butterfly breaths, radiated heat. Her ear on my heartbeat, me counting her breaths; we were keeping tabs on each other, me and Cate; we were making sure.

I was becoming drowsy with her sleep.

Mark carried in the travel cot. I gestured for him to take it upstairs.

“Room on the left,” I breathed. “There should be space.”

He nodded, took it upstairs. I heard him up there, in the twin bedroom, setting it up. He came back down and slipped his arms around her. I let her weight be lifted from me, blinked the haze and dampness from my eyes.

Normal. Normal normal normal.

I got up and went into the kitchen. I opened a bottle of wine, made a sandwich for Mark. Goat’s cheese, vine tomatoes, rocket. Poppy-seeded bread.

He sat on the sofa and I sat on the hearthstone, watching him. The room smelt of woodsmoke, vacuuming, good tomatoes.
I liked that shirt on him. He was absentmindedly biting at his sandwich as he looked around the room. He swallowed, and his Adam’s apple rolled down his throat and back up again. I could have got up, and gone over to him, and sunk down in his lap, and nudged my cheek in to rest against his throat, and breathed in the warm musky end-of-day scent of him. He looked back at me, pulled a sadly comical sympathetic face.

“Not fun,” he said.

“The estate agent says this kind of property is really shifting,” I said deliberately. I heard the breath hiss in between my teeth. “You should have seen it when I got here. I’ve taken loads of stuff to Oxfam.”