Keeping Secrets (26 page)

From the bedroom, a cry. Hilda slammed down the phone.

‘Okay, okay, I'm coming!'

The bedroom was dark, and beginning to grow cold, with the sudden, surprising chill of summer nights, forgotten in the overheated ward. She went quickly to the window and closed it, switched on her bedside light and hurried over to the crib. Sam, put down hot and sticky in T-shirt and nappy, covered only with a baby sheet, now felt clammy and cold. The sheet was soaking; so was the mattress.

‘Baby, baby … I'm sorry, I'm sorry …'

She picked him up, peeled off the wet bed things and carried him into the bathroom, flicking on the central heating. She pulled out a towel from the airing cupboard and wrapped him in it, holding him close on her lap, tugging at the tapes on the wet nappy with trembling fingers. He screamed and screamed.

‘Poor Sam, never mind, soon be better.'

Visions of chills, fever, pneumonia. She cuddled him, rubbing his back through the towel, easing the wet T-shirt over his head.

‘There we are.' She carried him over to the airing cupboard, found a vest, and a little blue sleepsuit, got him into the vest and cleaned him up, but had to leave him, still howling, lying on the changing mat while she struggled to tear open the plastic covering of the pack of disposable nappies. She knelt on the floor beside him, and tugged at it with her teeth. ‘Bloody thing.' She crawled over to him, put it on and fastened it with baby lotion still on her hands, so that the tape would not stick down. ‘
Hell!
' She threw it across the room and tugged out another. In the sitting room the phone began to ring.

With all her visitors seen for the day, who else could it be but Stephen?

‘Wait!' called Hilda. ‘
Wait!
'

She wiped her hands, and did up the second nappy. Sam's feet still felt cold; she eased them into the legs of the sleepsuit and picked him up, fastening poppers as she carried him into the sitting room. If she could get him on the breast and stop him screaming before the phone stopped ringing … She pulled open her dressing gown, and Sam's head, his desperate little face almost purple, turned towards her, seeking, yelling.

‘Come on, there it is, come on …' She was standing in the middle of the room, cradling him, easing his open mouth towards her. Drops of milk splashed on to his face; his lips closed on her nipple and the telephone stopped ringing.

‘Oh, no!' Hilda wailed. ‘No, no, no!' She stood there weeping, the tears dripping on to her collar as Sam fed greedily, making small sucking noises, undisturbed. After a while, she went to the bathroom, and tore off a piece of toilet paper; she blew her nose, and saw the face of a red-eyed creature, distraught, look back at her from the mirror over the basin.

‘Dear me,' she said to Sam, who had fallen off the breast and was drowsy. ‘What a sight. Come on, let's call it a day. Stephen will phone tomorrow.'

She carried him out, and switched off all the lights. Back in the bedroom she laid him on the bed while she put clean sheet and coverings into his crib, and then she climbed in and took him in her arms again, to give him the other side. Propped up against the pillows, with the lamp beside her, she found herself, sleepily, begin to feel better. There had been a panic, and she had got through. Her baby was warm, well-fed, soft head nestled in the crook of her arm, the dolls'fingers, so clenched and tense, now limp, relaxed, unfurling. ‘All right?' she murmured, and found she was stroking his cheek. ‘Better now?' She could feel her eyes begin to close, and reached out to switch off the lamp. I'll put him back in a minute, she thought, and lay down with him close to her, like a lover, and fell asleep.

The weather broke ten days later. Alice and the girls stood out in the garden when the first fat raindrops fell from a bilious sky, spattering the wooden table and the path.

‘Come on!' Hettie shouted, tugging off her T-shirt. ‘More, more!'

‘I'm going to
pull
it down,' said Annie, and clambered on to the table. She stood with her arms upraised like a prophet, hands outstretched towards the grey and yellow clouds. ‘Rain! Rain!' But the shower was over in a few minutes, and they went indoors again with damp hair, dispirited. The real downpour did not come for days, and when it did, at tea time, they all jumped up and raced outside.

‘Yippee!' Annie yelled. She struggled to pull her cotton dress over her head. ‘Get it off!'

Hettie was already out of her shorts and top. She danced down the garden, waving her arms. Alice helped Annie out of her dress, then ran inside, carrying the clothes; she stood at the kitchen window, watching them get soaked, standing on tiptoe with open mouths upturned.

‘You come out, too!'

She shook her head. The rain fell faster, beating on to the peonies and drooping roses, bouncing off the parched patch of lawn. Hettie's and Annie's hair clung to their cheeks in thick wet strands. ‘That's enough now!' she called. ‘Come on in.' They came, bare wet feet leaving prints all over the kitchen floor. ‘It's brilliant! It's wicked!'

‘I think you'd better have a bath,' said Alice.

Soon after that, the autumn term began. On picture-book mornings, golden and warm, the three of them left the house and walked up the road to school. Hettie had gone up a class; in the corridors they passed new children, searching for their cloakroom pegs; clinging to their mothers as they went in to the nursery or reception class. Beside these little ones Hettie seemed poised and organised, greeting her friends, taking her lunch box from Alice, calmly kissing her goodbye. She went off without a backward glance. Alice and Annie made their way out again, weaving their way through the boys who came running in from the playground, minutes after the bell, pushing and shoving.

Outside, knots of mothers stood at the gate in the sunshine, with their younger children in prams and pushchairs, discussing the holidays. Among them were au pairs and childminders; the working mothers appeared in the school on open evenings, or at fund-raising meetings, many of them more active in the running of the school than those who, like Alice, brought and collected their children every day. Some of the working mothers managed to do this, too, but they didn't hang around afterwards: down the road, beyond what Alice called the home group, they could be seen walking briskly towards the common, and the tube. There were some, like Yvonne, last encountered in the swimming pool, whose week was a juggling act: dropping off and picking up Rachel and another child two days, swapping with the other mother two days, using a childminder one day. Yvonne did a job-share in a housing association, interviewing and assessing desperate families in bed-and-breakfasts; she was also an active parent-governor and a tireless organiser of weekend outings for Rachel and her friends. She had had only one child out of choice, and had split up with her partner almost at once.

‘How was Brittany?' she asked Alice, on the first morning, looking at her watch as they came out of the gate.

‘Lovely, thanks. What about you – did you get away?'

‘No, but Rachel went down to my parents for a few days, and I had a break, thank God. I must say, I'm glad to be getting back to my own routine, aren't you?'

‘Well … it's a bit different, with Annie home at lunchtime.'

‘Oh, of course, I was thinking she'd started nursery, I suppose it's not till after Christmas.'

‘Not till this time next year,' said Alice, shielding her eyes against the sun. On the pavement, Annie was chasing another little girl up and down; traffic approaching the main road slowed for the lollipop lady, then moved off fast.

‘Careful, Annie!' Alice called. ‘Come away from the kerb.'

‘Next
year
,' Yvonne was saying. ‘God, it goes on for ever, doesn't it? Of course, Rachel was at day nursery from when she was two. Anyway, I must run. See you.'

‘Bye. Come on, Annie.'

Hand in hand they walked up to the common, and across. The first dry leaves from the plane trees swirled gently down to the grass; dogs let off their leads raced up and down or sniffed at and clambered up on each other, panting.

‘Why do they do that?' Annie asked.

‘They're just getting to know each other. Come on.' Alice, as usual, felt out of sorts after her encounter with Yvonne. She reminds me of Hilda, she thought. I want to admire her – I do admire her, in some ways, for being out there, for caring about issues, for getting things done. But I can't bear her sweeping dismissal of … well, of me. She makes me feel as Hilda made me feel, in the old days, before Tony, before the girls: that my life was worthless. In a different, way, of course. Then it was because I didn't know what to do with myself, and was afraid of everything. But Yvonne makes me feel it's still worthless. Perhaps it is. Maybe I should have things more important than my children, I expect she thinks I use them to hide away. Perhaps I do. I shouldn't care what she thinks, but I do.

They had reached the other side of the common, and crossed the road to join the other mothers and children, going through the open door of the church hall, where the playgroup met.

‘I don't want to go,' said Annie, pulling back.

‘It's only because you haven't been for a while. You'll be fine – look, there's Katie.' She waved to a small girl with thick dark hair in a fringe, going through the door with her mother.

‘You stay with me.'

‘Oh, come on, Annie,' Alice heard herself say, and heard her father saying just the same things, years and years ago. ‘Look at Hettie, she went straight back to school without all this fuss.'

There was a silence. Then Annie said: ‘I'm not like Hettie.'

‘No, I know you're not,' Alice said quickly. ‘And you're lovely as you are.' She bent down and gave her a hug. ‘But still – you know it's all right really, don't you?'

Annie nodded.

‘Good girl. I'll be back at lunchtime, just like last term, remember?'

Annie didn't answer. She let Alice lead her in through the door, and then very deliberately took her hand away, and went to hang her jacket on her old peg, with the picture of an owl above it. Ahead, through the open double doors, Alice could see the playgroup workers waving, and the first arrivals begin to swarm over the climbing frame.

‘Right, I'm off,' she said to Annie, and she nodded, and ran into the room.

Trying to be like Hettie? Alice wondered, as she turned and went out again, smiling at the other women coming through the door. Or simply, once she saw it, pleased to be back? She crossed the road again, and walked slowly home over the common.

The weather grew colder, the mornings mistier. Alice dropped off the children and came home again. She cleared up, and made a cup of coffee and took it out into the garden, where she stood surveying the trailing vines, turning a deep, beautiful crimson, the ragged borders and recovering grass. The first garden spiders, speckled and fat, were weaving elaborately from shrub to shrub, and across the shaggy clematis, dropping leaves. Alice got out the leaf rake and the lawn-mower and the pruning shears; she swept and mowed and cut back, and piled up a bonfire; she bought bulbs and knelt on an old sack, whole mornings on her knees with a trowel, planting daffodils, crocus, tulips, narcissi. She took out the summer's geraniums from the window boxes and put bulbs in them, too, and carried them all down to the cellar. It began to rain at night, and in the mornings the air smelt fresh; Alice stood looking with satisfaction at the damp earth, freshly planted. She bought bunches of wallflowers and spent hours putting them in along the borders, behind the bulbs.

She did all this partly because it was the first autumn since Hettie was born that she had had a clear run of mornings to herself: this time last year Annie would have been taking all the bulbs out of their bags and muddling them up, pulling leaves off the wallflowers or having a fit if the pruning shears were put out of reach. When Alice and Tony had moved here they'd had no time for the garden; now, with Tony so busy he barely had time to cut the grass, Alice felt as though she were reclaiming it for both of them, after years given to the girls. But it was also more than this. To give the garden new life was both a distraction from and a substitute for what she really wanted: to feel again the new life of a baby inside her, growing, beginning to kick.

And as she snipped and dug and planted, wearing an extra sweater against the mist, she thought about her nephew, out in Anya's garden, soft warm head against her bare arm, the perfect newborn curve of his cheek, the tiny feet in striped socks. His face had begun to screw up with hunger; she had carried him, crying, up the stairs to Hilda, who looked so harassed and drawn and who held him so awkwardly – not like me, thought Alice, I was never like that with Hettie. Thinking this she realised: I do still have an edge; why am I so ungenerous? I thought Hilda as mother would make me feel miserable and inadequate but I think it's she who feels like that. She's in my territory, but I don't need to protect it. It's she who needs protection.

To think of Hilda in this way was so unfamiliar that at first Alice did nothing about it. From time to time she thought of phoning, to see how she and Sam, cocooned in their attic flat, were getting on; each time, she decided against it. Hilda would probably feel she was interfering, patronising, even; also, Alice was afraid of showing too much of the love for Sam which had engulfed her as soon as she bent over his hospital crib. Hilda might find it overwhelming; she herself might find it overwhelming.

Walking up and down her garden, watching the spiders labour in the thinning autumn sun, she found herself wondering: Was my first baby a boy? Was it? Will I ever be able to know? She pictured herself in the surgery, asking the doctor to look through her notes, and seeing him draw across the desk a thick wad of folded papers, all the details of her breakdown, her overdose, the weeks in hospital. She imagined his frown, his unspoken questions: why was this woman resurrecting all this now? Was she building up to something else? No, she thought, I don't think I'll ask.