This Must Be the Place (41 page)

I leap to my feet, I cross the bandstand in a few strides, I take hold of her from behind. She turns around inside my arms and I see that she will speak and, for a moment, I think she’s about to ask me something else, some other piercing, reducing question, and I’m quailing because it isn’t going to be a question to relish.

But she doesn’t. Claudette is nothing if not unpredictable.

‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ she says, looking up at me, and her voice expresses a certain surprise, as if the sensation is entirely new to her.

No, I want to cry out, please know what to say to me, you always do.

‘It’s hard to believe,’ she says, with a devastating emphasis, ‘not only that you could do something like that but also that you never told me. You’ve never spoken of it, or her. You’ve carried this around inside you all this time. And you went running off like that because –’

‘I didn’t go running off,’ I cut in, tightening my hold on her. ‘I’m here. I’m right here.’

‘– you suddenly didn’t know how to handle the guilt.’ She looks at me, her face more puzzled than shocked. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she says again.

Claudette walks away. She leaves. But I won’t let her. She steps down from the bandstand in one jump and I’m right there with her. We make our way through the trees and I take her hand in mine, trying to communicate by touch alone that this is the way things are and will be, that we are together, that we are still the people we have always been.

As we emerge from the trees, I am thinking I will say something to this effect, to seal up or cauterise that moment in the bandstand, but suddenly the children are upon us and they are hungry, they are tired, they are wondering what is next on our Parisian itinerary and can they have a snack, a cake, a ride on the Métro, the loan of a phone, a box for their pet worm.

Down the Line

Nicola and Daniel, London, 1986

D
aniel sits opposite Nicola in a café. Separating her from him is a precarious obstacle course of teapots, milk jugs, cups, saucers, sugar bowls, spoons, napkins, teetering arrangements of sandwiches and scones, a vase in which a single plastic carnation slumps, exhausted, to one side.

He wants nothing more than to reach out and take her hand. She has painted her nails a purplish black, the colour of the darkest grapes. He would like to touch that lacquer, tap his own nail against it, to press her fingers in his, to make her look at him, to say, is this what you want, are you sure, should we be doing this, it’s not too late to change our minds.

Nicola has her face turned away from him, her chin propped in her palm. Her grapeskin nails click against the table in a descending rhythm. Her hair conceals one eye: how she stands it, Daniel has no idea. He couldn’t bear it, would constantly shake it off his forehead, but it never seems to bother her.

‘So how was the interview?’ Daniel asks and his voice feels strange in his mouth, laboured, as if he hasn’t spoken in a long while.

Nicola pulls her gaze away from the building across the street, where she has been watching a woman with a bin-liner circling an office, reaching out to empty each and every wastepaper basket. Not a single person looks up at her as she does this. Nicola allows herself to focus on the man opposite her.

Daniel is looking at her, a searching expression on his face. He wants to know something but she isn’t sure what it is. Is she OK? Are they OK? Does she want milk with her tea, butter with her scone, jam with her butter? Any of the above could be spooling through his mind. Sometimes she thinks she can see the workings of Daniel’s mind as if they were her own; other times he feels as alien to her as another species.

‘The interview?’ she repeats.

She has almost forgotten: she was at the BBC this morning, on live radio, a pair of earphones clipped over her head, her lips close to a preposterously large green-headed microphone, answering questions about gender bias in academia which were being filtered to her from somewhere, while people behind a glass screen adjusted dials and switches, transmitting her words into the radios of Britain.

It was only half an hour ago but it feels as though it was something that took place in her distant past or possibly to someone else.

It had been her idea to pair these two activities into one day: the interview, which had been in her diary for weeks, and the abortion, which has been a recent and unexpected addition to her schedule. She is wondering now at the wisdom of this. She had not wanted to have what her GP delicately referred to as ‘the procedure’ in the town where she worked and lived. She might bump into people she knew in the waiting room, her students, perhaps; the attending surgeon would probably be someone she studied with; it was all too close for comfort. This was not something she wanted ever to refer to or discuss again. So she had booked herself into a clinic in London, making the appointment just after her interview. It had seemed the obvious thing to do. She recalls feeling a rush of organisational pleasure as she noted it in her diary, the two appointments listed there together, before remembering exactly what the second would entail.

Daniel, of course, said he would come with her because that was the kind of man he was, she had discovered. When he had first come onto her radar, raising his hand to ask questions at the end of her seminars, appearing at her lectures, she had dismissed him as another introspective man-child. But she had, she is willing to admit, read him all wrong. There was something that set apart a man who had grown up among women – a strong mother and a clutch of sisters, in Daniel’s case – from a man who hadn’t. Men of this ilk were, in Nicola’s opinion, much more evolved and therefore made much better lovers.

He had gone to a gallery while she did her interview. What he will do during her next appointment, she has no idea. She hasn’t asked.

‘It was fine,’ Nicola says. ‘It was all done down the line, which isn’t my favourite way of doing it but, as the interviewee, one isn’t really given the choice.’

She sees, as she speaks, that Daniel doesn’t know what ‘down the line’ means. She also sees that he isn’t going to ask for clarification.

‘Hmm,’ he says, ‘good. When’s it going out?’

He takes a sandwich from the plate between them and crams it whole into his mouth. Nicola watches him as he masticates, this man, her lover, who has come from nowhere and assumed a position of residence in her life, who has inadvertently impregnated her. Mostly, the five years’ seniority she has over him doesn’t make itself felt; other times, she finds him surprisingly, touchingly youthful.

Did she, she wonders, forget to take one of those little sugar-coated pills? Did she miss out some crucial day? Did her chemically stalled ovary see its chance and let slip a minuscule gamete into her waiting, pillowy, elastic-sided pouch? How else could this have happened?

‘It’s gone,’ she says.

Daniel stops, mid-chew. ‘Huh?’

‘It’s gone,’ she repeats, then realises he has grasped the wrong end of the stick. ‘The interview,’ she clarifies. ‘It was live. All done and dusted.’

‘Oh.’ His face clears. ‘That’s a shame. I won’t get to hear it now.’

Nicola shrugs. ‘It’s nothing you haven’t heard me say before.’

Daniel swallows, leans forward and seizes the teapot by its curved handle. ‘Still,’ he says, ‘I’d have liked to listen. You want some tea?’

He is brandishing the spout at her.

‘No,’ she says, covering her cup with her hand – this varnish, she sees, was a mistake for today, arterial crimson, the colour of the dark insides of things – and, shaking her head, ‘I’m not supposed to. You know. Before the …’ She is left circling her other hand in the air. She doesn’t know which word to choose. ‘Abortion’ is so blunt, so devastating, so violent a term, with its emphatic ‘-tion’ suffix, too close to ‘aversion’ and ‘emotion’ and ‘violation’. But she can’t say ‘procedure’, can she? Not to this man, who has based whole papers on ownership of expression, on the importance of squaring up to semantics, to using the most perspicuous and apt word for something. And ‘appointment’ is just dodging the whole issue, hiding behind a generalised umbrella term.

‘… the … the …’ She’s still there, trapped in her sentence, still trying to force herself over the top, and Daniel comes to her aid.

He reaches out and takes the flailing hand, the hand that seeks a word for what she is unable to utter, for what she is about to do, the word that expresses the inexpressible. He plucks the hand from the air, he presses it between both of his. He has to move his chair to do so because the table is piled high with things, things Daniel has ordered, things she can’t eat or drink because she must have nothing in her stomach, nothing in her system before she has the anaesthetic before the procedure, the abortion, the termination, the intervention, the surgery, the end.

He places his chair next to hers and holds her hand, tight, and when she places her head on top of their combined hands, he puts his lips to her temple, to where the hair meets the skin, and she loves him for that, she does; she feels this for perhaps the first time, at the same time as knowing that this is not the moment to say it, not here, not yet, not today. And when he says what he says –
Do you think we’re doing the right thing?
– whispers this, into the whorls of her ear, where each syllable is sent in reverberation along the chain of bones that form her aural canal, a part of her, a small part of her, wants to answer,
No
. No, this is not the right thing. This is absolutely the wrong thing. We must not do this. We must, above all other things, walk out of this café and away from this street. We must not keep that appointment. We must join hands, you and I, and leave together, as we are, intact.

He has managed to say it.

‘Do you think we’re doing the right thing?’

He has said it softly, into her hair, as she is curled there, on the table in front of him. So softly that, if she disagrees, if she’s shocked or annoyed, he can pretend he wasn’t serious, can laugh it off. He had to say it, had to let the words out, had to try to wedge open this discussion, as a burglar might force a door. For the idea of doing what they’re about to do seems suddenly and glaringly monstrous to him, appalling, depraved. While she was at the BBC, he had found himself in a bookstore, found himself in the medical section, where he read, against all better judgement, a description of what they would do to her. Even now he cannot rid himself of certain words. ‘Probe’ is one. ‘Products of conception’ are some more. These words stick to the inside of his mind, like burrs.

Nicola doesn’t say anything. He draws back to look at her. Her eyes are still closed, her cheek pressed to his hand. And Daniel feels his heart start to speed up as he sees what might be, just as it does before he needs to speak in public, or before he went into the confession box, a long time ago, when he still did such things. This is not, he has told himself, over and over again, a reluctance, a queasiness born of that religion, the antediluvian set of values imposed on him by his parents, the rituals and murmurings, genuflections and icons he was brought up with. It’s not that which is causing him to feel as though he has wandered into a confusing and lethal maze, where at any point he might trip or stumble or bang headlong into a wall. It’s not. It’s something else. It’s this: the curved fringe of lashes along Nicola’s closed lids, the mapped waterways of veins in her neck, the way the cuticles lap over her fingernails. It’s the precarious membrane between this, two people in a café, deciding their fate, and the beyond, the oblivion, the nothingness that they will all, in time, have to face.

‘We don’t have to, you know,’ he says. His voice is no longer a whisper. ‘We could keep it. You and I. We could.’

Nicola is deep in a willed daze, her head on the table, but she hears this.
We could keep it
. She hears it and she receives it. She wants to smile but the effort that might require seems too great, especially if she is going to conserve her energy, her resources. That part of her, the small part that wants to answer,
Yes, we could
, seems to grow a little bit bigger.

She keeps her eyes closed. She keeps her cheek pressed to Daniel’s hands.

There is also that other part of her. She knows this too. This Nicola is sitting at a distance, at the next table, perhaps. She is dressed in her favourite zipped boots, her legs crossed, her foot tapping up and down. The table is arranged with stacks of books and she is flicking through pages in her diary, a pen in one hand, a cigarette in the other. And what do you plan to live on? this Nicola is saying, without looking up. What about that sabbatical next year, the one in which you were planning to write your book? And does he have a salary? Does he have a visa? Isn’t he only twenty-four?

But the small part of her feels the warmth of his chest as he curves himself round her, senses the drumbeat of his heart. She feels the ends of her hair catch in his stubble. This part of her murmurs to her as the other Nicola takes charge, makes her sit up, makes her push the chair back under the café table, pay the bill, walk through the streets, go through a pair of doors, give her name to a woman behind a reception desk, makes her nod to Daniel as he slumps into a chair, makes her gather up her things and walk down a corridor.

This part of her is still murmuring as she lies back on a trolley, as the nurse pulls a paper sheet over her, only it isn’t a murmur now; it’s a call, it’s a shout. The other Nicola puts down her diary and lifts her head to listen.

‘I think I’ve changed my mind,’ Nicola manages to say to the nurse.

‘Don’t you worry, dear,’ the nurse says, patting the sheet. ‘It will all be fine.’

Nicola swivels her head to see a man – the anaesthetist, the surgeon? – standing at her head, fiddling with something in a suspended bag.

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she says to him, struggling to sit upright.

‘Count backwards from ten,’ he tells her.

From the corners of the room, from under all the furniture, from the places where it has been waiting, the darkness swarms in.