Lifesaver (43 page)

I pictured Greg, perched on a hard wooden chair in a circle of other hard wooden chairs, sharing.

‘Bloomin’ marvellous, it is. Never thought anything could keep between me and my pints, but it really works. And I feel so much better for it, too! Weight’s falling off me. Complexion’s improved, too.’ He patted his veiny cheeks playfully and winked at me.

Crikey, I thought, taking in the considerable gut and the greyish pallor; if he looks good now, what sort of shape must he have been in before he quit?

‘Are you familiar with the Twelve Step programme?’ he asked earnestly.

‘Not intimately, no,’ I replied. ‘Vaguely, I guess. Don’t you have to acknowledge your Higher Power, and that sort of thing?’

‘That’s it. That’s Step Two—“we come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity”. Anyhow, I’m up to Step Nine now. That’s about making direct amends to all persons I have harmed through my alcoholism. Which is where you come in.’

‘Me?’

‘Yup. You know I always liked a drink or two, Anna. And it was wrong of me, to go after you the way I did, when you was only a schoolgirl. Not to mention what I did to Jeanette, of course.’

‘Of course,’ I said faintly.

‘And then all that stuff with your dad. I never stuck by you the way I should’ve. It was easier to have a few drinks and forget about it.’

“All that stuff” with my dad. “All that stuff” seemed an odd way to describe a fatal heart attack, induced by Greg’s bad news. I thought of Dad’s funeral, of the two geese which had swooped joyfully, squawking with indecent volume, over our heads as we were all gathered by the small hole in the ground which was about to receive his ashes. I remembered that Greg and Jeanette had been there, but that I hadn’t once been able to meet their eyes, and I’d wrenched my arm away from Jeanette when she’d put a sympathetic hand on my elbow, as if she wanted to help me across the road or something.

I missed Dad then, with a low twinging ache like a period pain. It wasn’t fair. And Mum, too, although her death had been much less of a shock.

Greg was talking again, although I’d tuned out. ‘Sorry, what was that?’ I had to say.

‘I’m asking if you forgive me,’ he said, turning to me and looking in my eyes. For the first time, I saw the essence of the Greg I had fancied so badly, had yearned to be with. ‘And I hope your dad would’ve done, too, for the liberties I took with you. He was my pal, your dad.’

There were tears in Greg’s eyes, and in mine. We reached out and clasped hands simultaneously, twenty years too late. I didn’t recognise Greg’s smell. I supposed that without the cigarette smoke and alcohol component, it wasn’t the same. But for a moment, I closed my eyes and went back to being seventeen, when the most consuming thought in my mind had been whether or not to allow Greg into my pants; or in other words, to allow ‘that’ to go in ‘there.’

‘I’m glad we never actually had sex, though,’ I said. ‘I think that would have been worse.’ I felt him nod.

‘Yeah. I’m glad too—much as I wanted to. I hope you managed to save yourself for someone more worthy of you, love.’

I shuddered. I wouldn’t exactly have called Colin Baxter, a third year drama student at Reading when I was a Fresher, ‘worthy’. After too many brandies with Stone’s ginger wine in the student union bar, we’d spent one night in the narrow single bed in my halls of residence, memorable less for its passion than for its pain (mine), flatulence (his), hangovers (both of ours), and the sight of his grey Y-fronts, draped jauntily over the spout of the kettle, greeting me when I’d opened my eyes in the morning. If it hadn’t been for the guilt of Dad keeling over and dying, then Greg would have been a much better bet in the deflowerment stakes.

‘So, do you?’

‘Do I what?’

‘Forgive me?’

‘I don’t think there’s anything to forgive. I’ve never blamed you, only myself. I’ve blamed myself ever since,’ I whispered.

Greg looked at me with surprise. ‘Why, love?’

It was my turn to look astonished. ‘Because I’m sure he wouldn’t have had that heart attack if you hadn’t just told him you were leaving Jeanette for me. And I led you on in the first place.’

‘Oh love,’ he said, leaning across and hugging me. I found I didn’t mind his embrace. I rested my chin on his shoulder, because right then, he felt like the closest thing I had to a father.

‘You’ve really thought that, all these years? But I
didn’t
tell him. He was clutching his chest before I’d said a word…it was nothing to do with us.’

I couldn’t believe it. ‘You swear you didn’t tell him?’

Greg shook his jowls vehemently. ‘I promise you, love. I didn’t say a dickie bird, beyond getting the drinks in. Just turned round to hand him his pint, and there he was, on the floor.’

My stomach flipped over. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, sliding hastily off my stool. ‘I’m going to be sick. Again.’

When I returned, some time later, Greg was gazing at the lone pot plant on our kitchen windowsill, a poor sickly parched thing with dry brown ends.

Ken and I were useless with houseplants. We watched them slowly dehydrate, then stopped seeing them altogether, leaving their corpses littering our house long after they ought to have been thrown out. Every time I went to Lil’s house and saw her plants, perky with health, their plump sleek-leaves deep green and shiny, it reminded me to water ours—but by the time I got home, I’d usually forgotten again.

‘You all right?’

I nodded. Even though I could still taste the faint bitter taste of vomit over the sharp false minty tang of toothpaste, my stomach had finally settled.

‘Yeah. Actually, I feel better than I’ve felt for days.’

‘You still haven’t said if you forgive me.’

I smiled at him. ‘Of course I do. I’m so glad you came over.’

We hugged again, briefly but with feeling. I realized that not only did I forgive him, I forgave myself too.

It was a start.

After Greg left, it wasn’t just my stomach - or ‘tummy’, as Adam would have said - which felt less churned-up. In all the confusion of the past days and weeks, at last something positive, something definitive, had occurred: some kind of line had been drawn underneath Dad’s death. Such old history amid such present turmoil, and I was surprised that it had hung around for as long as it had. But it was closure; a release from the noose of guilt.

I peeled off the sticky Tigger nightie and went and stood under the shower, letting my body go limp in the stream of water, idly watching it splatter off my shoulders and arms, and off the belly which I saw as nurturing nothing except regrets.

Then I put on a summer dress and sandals, tied my hair up still wet, and brushed on enough blusher to hide my pallor.

As ready as I could ever be, I drove over to Lil’s house, feeling nervous, sensing that Lil would coax truths out of me with the same ease that she used to deliver babies …but I wasn’t even close to prepared for what those truths would turn out to be.

‘Hello, my darling Anna,’ Lil said, giving me one of her reassuring hugs at the front door. I hugged her back, relishing the familiarity of thin shoulder blades under fine wool and inhaling her scent. When she released me, I picked up the two pint cartons of milk from her doorstep, their wobbly cardboard sides cool and slippery to the touch, and handed them to her.

‘Oh good. The milkman was terribly late this morning. I thought I’d have to offer you black tea, but we’ll be all right now. Come in.’

I sat on my usual stool in the kitchen whilst she made the tea. I could see her shooting sharp looks at me, taking in my drawn appearance.

‘Have you recovered from your illness now?’

I nodded doubtfully. ‘I think so. I was sick this morning, but I feel much better now. It keeps coming and going.‘

‘Have you seen the doctor?’

‘No. What’s the point? He’d only tell me that it’s a bug, and I need to rest.’

Lil handed me a cup and saucer, then tipped a bronze stream of steaming tea into it from a large china teapot. Her hand was steady as a rock, and I watched with an almost greedy pleasure at the sheer relief of something as unchanged in my life as Lil pouring tea. She passed me a milk carton to open, and an empty milk jug, and pushed over a sugar bowl containing lumps of sugar and silver tongs. I hadn’t seen sugar tongs anywhere else for years.

I was considering telling her about Greg’s visit, as a sort of softener to any further admissions of adultery she might worm out of me. Break it to her that I’d long been the type of girl who cheated with other people’s husbands. Funny how I’d never thought about it like that before. As I opened my mouth to speak, she beat me to it:

‘Anna, could you, by any chance, be pregnant?’

Instinctively, I laughed. ‘No, of course not, Ken and I haven’t -’

Then I froze, mid-sentence, the wings of the milk carton in my hand gaping as wide open as my mouth was. Ken and I hadn’t.
Adam
and I had. The precautions that Adam and I had taken had been perfunctory, to say the least.

‘Anna? Are you all right, darling?’

My hand was shaking so much I had to put down the milk. When the hell had my last period been? Why hadn’t I noticed? Was it really possible? No, surely I wasn’t. My breasts weren’t sore. I didn’t have itchy shins, which had been a sure sign in my other pregnancies. I
had
been vomiting, but I hadn’t been at all sick with Holly…/span>

‘No, I can’t be. I’ve just had this bug that Max had.’

‘But his only lasted twelve hours, didn’t it? Yours has dragged on for days.’

‘I’ve just had it worse, that’s all. I had a sore throat and everything, not just sickness.’

Lil stroked my hand. ‘Why don’t you pop out to the chemists and get a test. Just to put your mind at rest, if you’re in any doubt? You could do it now. I’ll be here with you.’

I loved her for not judging me. For not asking what was obvious: if I hadn’t slept with Ken, then how could I even be wondering if I was pregnant? She could tell from my face that I’d realized it was a possibility.

‘OK,’ I said.

I was pregnant, of course I was. Sitting on the lid of the toilet in Lil’s old-lady floral-sprigged bathroom staring with incredulity at the pink line on the white wand, it felt so different from all the other times I’d found out that sperm and egg had fused. The first time had been sheer joy. The second: a large measure of joy, and a little fear. The third: equal feelings of both. The fourth—well, that had been Holly. I’d been terrified when I found out about her, but the terror had slowly diminished as my belly grew, month by month, my tentative happiness blossoming as my toes vanished from view.

But this…how was I supposed to feel about this? It was impossible to feel anything at all except craven panic. I thought of Vicky then, and for the first time ever began to understand her predicament. I wanted a baby so badly—but not like this; not on my own and with all the pain it would cause Ken. I’d already decided to confess to him about Adam and the fake job, but how could I tell him this too? He would be so upset, and it would put paid to any remote chance of working things out between us. He would divorce me, without a doubt, and I couldn’t blame him.

I was somehow not at all surprised at the prospect of ending up on my own, doing penance for all my crimes and petty deceits. Adam had already dumped me, and there was no way I’d use the baby—assuming I didn’t lose it first - to blackmail him into taking me back. Besides, Max needed his own mother. It almost felt like a relief, as if God had taken the decisions out of my hands. I slumped back against the toilet cistern, exhausted with grief and confusion.

There was a tap at the bathroom door.

‘Anna? May I come in?’

I slowly stood up and opened the door. ‘I’m pregnant,’ I said, and we gazed at one another. I thought about how, in all her experience of obstetrics, she’d never known how it felt to look at a positive pregnancy test of her own, that first whoosh of realization. I had a vision of her fifty years ago, at my age, grieving the way I’d grieved every month when her period arrived. She had been a slim, beautiful young woman then, with chestnut curls and laugh lines, neat blouses and scaffolded underwear. I bet she’d looked great in her midwife’s uniform.

They hadn’t had these neat, modern, widdle-on-sticks pregnancy tests then, though. She’d have just measured out her child-bearing years in anticipation of an absence of the blood which let her down every single month; having to buy bulky sanitary towels instead of knitting baby clothes; listening patiently to numerous women weeping about the agonies of childbirth, the pain of breastfeeding, the hardship of motherhood. Now
that
must have been hard.

My Dad had been to her like Max was to me, I supposed, a substitute child, her favourite nephew. I always had the feeling he’d been closer to her than he had been to her sister, his mother. Funny how I’d been closer to Lil than I had to my own mother, too.

‘Come back into the kitchen. I’ve made a fresh pot,’ she said, steering me gently by the elbow out of the bathroom. I was so glad that she was there.

‘It’s not Ken’s, then,’ she said, almost conversationally, as we went through the tea-pouring ritual again. She spooned two sugars into mine, although she knew I didn’t take sugar.

I shook my head, treacly shame pouring over me at having to admit it. ‘He’ll be devastated,’ I whispered. ‘I was going to leave him for Adam, Max’s dad, but that’s not happening now. I was still going to confess though, about Adam and Max, to see what would happen from there; whether Ken still wanted to try and make a go of things. But a baby will just make him feel a million times worse about the betrayal. He wanted to be a father so much.’

‘So you do still want to be married to him?’

‘I’m not sure, really. I suppose it would have depended on his reaction when I told him the truth, because I don’t see how I
could
continue to be married to him after everything I’ve done, unless he really wanted me to.’

‘What changed, with you and the other chap?’

I sighed, unable to stop my eyes from filling up. ‘Well for one thing, Adam’s estranged wife came back on the scene. He’d phoned her in a panic when I took Max to hospital—it was my fault, I was in such a state. She turned up that night, just after I’d told Adam I was the person who gave Max his bone marrow donation.
Then
I told him that I was still married to Ken, and he dumped me. Understandably. He and his wife—Marilyn—are going to give their marriage another try, for Max’s sake.’