Lifesaver (45 page)

I decided to call Lil first. Suddenly I didn’t want to see the planes crashing. Didn’t want to think about the people trapped inside, not when I had a new daisy-fresh life waiting to come out of me. I went back into the kitchen to get the phone.

The boiled kettle was still steaming, and I forgot that I’d already made myself a cup of tea. I made another one, welling up with tears as I did so at the thought of all those people inside those buildings. Men like Ken, with pregnant wives. Women like me, waiting to be mothers. With blurred vision I mashed the second tea-bag against the side of the cup, just as my waters broke, causing a mini-tsunami across the quarry tiles. My own little natural disaster, right there in the kitchen, as if tears hadn’t been enough and more liquid needed to flow from my body before an appropriate amount of grief could be demonstrated. I knocked over my mug in the confusion, and brown tea ran in rivulets down to join the amniotic ocean of salt water and baby-piss already on the floor.

I mopped up the deluge with three tea towels, and reboiled the kettle for yet more tea. The pain in my stomach was more intense, although it still felt as though it was happening to someone else. I forgot that I’d already elected to ring Lil, and wondered afresh who to tell first.

Later, after it was all over and we were back in the house, sitting stunned next to the birthing pool full of cold turquoise water, I felt guilty for my grief. Even though part of me knew it was perfectly understandable for me to feel this much pain, a less rational part thought that my pain should be reserved for the people in those towers and their families. For the wives watching their loved ones jumping to their deaths. Not for one little blue dead baby.

Perhaps I never had allowed myself to grieve properly.

I couldn’t remind Ken of that day, not now. It wasn’t fair to bring Holly into it, like some kind of excuse. Although perhaps if we’d talked about her more since she died, I wouldn’t have been sitting there trying to explain what I was trying to explain. I wouldn’t have had to watch Ken’s face going through twenty shades of emotion, most of them involving undiluted pain.

No matter how I tried to focus on other things: fallen bleached-out petals from a vase of blown roses, rivulets of wax frozen into the side of the candles on the table, an upturned flowerpot in the garden, earth and feathery roots spilling out of it—nothing seemed to be able to pull my eyes away from the pain on Ken’s face. The pain that I alone had caused him.

He was staring at the back of a postcard of John McEnroe, trying to take in the words I’d printed in capitals because I was too much of a coward to say them out loud
: ‘MY SOAP OPERA DOESN’T EXIST. THERE WAS NO JOB. I MADE IT UP. I WAS WITH ADAM AND MAX WHEN I SAID I WAS WORKING.’

I felt so sorry for him. Knowing Ken, a lot of what he was feeling was the shame of the cuckold, the loss of pride that he hadn’t been enough for me; the foolishness of the duped. Even though that was utterly missing the point, I knew that was what he’d be thinking.

All of this, and I hadn’t even told him I was pregnant yet. The day seemed endless, as if the weak February sun had been shining relentlessly for about thirty-six hours non-stop. I wanted it to go down so I could go to bed and stay there with the covers over my head. Hibernate like a tortoise until my baby was due, and then start living again. The baby was the most important priority.

‘So, you’re leaving me for this guy Adam,’ said Ken, staring at a smear of bird shit on the glass roof of the conservatory. The heating was on, and the stifling atmosphere added to the guilt already making my scalp prickle. A bead of sweat ran down Ken’s face, and I thought for a moment it was a tear. But although his eyes were red, he wasn’t crying. He hardly ever cried. After Holly died, he’d once said to me, ‘I’m not very good at crying in front of other people,’ and I’d thought, how odd, like crying was some kind of skill he needed to practise until he was up to performance level.

‘No. It’s over between me and Adam.’ I suddenly wanted to put my hand on his knee, wrap my arms round his neck, beg him to forgive me - but I didn’t dare. A blackbird dug around for a worm in the gravel outside, oblivious of next door’s horrible cat stalking along the fence, eyeing it greedily. I hated that cat.

‘Why are you telling me all this then? You’ve gone to such lengths to hide it from me for so long, I’d have thought the last thing you wanted to do was confess.’

‘I couldn’t stand the lies any more.’

‘So you ended it with Adam?’

I hesitated. ‘Well. Not exactly. I told him I was already married.’

Ken laughed, the most excruciatingly laboured laugh I’d ever heard. ‘And he dumped you, didn’t he? So you decided that you’d have to settle for second best after all, the boring workaholic at home who you just happen to be married to. What a drag, eh? What a nuisance, that you foolishly promised to stay with me till death did us part—bet you’re regretting that now, aren’t you?’

‘No,’ I said, thinking that this was a touch unfair—after all, Ken had promised the same thing to his first wife, until I’d come along. ‘I’m not. I just regret...’ Tears fell down my face onto Spesh’s matted, patchy fur. I couldn’t hold them in any more, and words gushed out of me in fits and starts.

‘… just regret everything since. The babies. Holly. Not being able to talk to you about it all. It shouldn’t have been like this. Holly would have been nearly two by now. If she was still here, none of this would have happened.’

It seemed that I couldn’t help bringing her into it after all.

‘It’s my fault then, is it, because we don’t talk about Holly?’

‘No! I’m not blaming you…lthough it hasn’t helped that you’re away so much.’

Again, that hollow laugh. ‘Wondered how long it would be before you got around to my job.’

I swallowed hard. It was tempting to get into a row about it, to wail that Ken was married to his job and not to me; but I had to stay calm if I wanted Ken to do the same. Making excuses wouldn’t advance my cause.

‘So that’s the only reason you’re telling me now, is it? Because you want to be honest with me? It would be much easier if I’d never known.’

I sent up a fervent prayer, to God, to my guardian angel, to the heavens above, that they would have pity on me and help me, a stupid weak human. Help Ken, too.

‘You’d have found out sooner or later.’ I reached into the box and handed him the final card: Andre Agassi.

‘I’M PREGNANT. IT’S ADAM’S.
’

Ken sprang out of his chair with a howl of pain so intense that it was almost a scream, and started to rip up the postcard. I had never heard a noise like it, and I hoped I never did again. The blackbird flew off in a panic, and I saw the cat’s tail vanish over the fence.

I thought he was going to hit me, and at that moment I wanted him to, if it would have helped him. He was crying, finally, as he flung torn pieces of card at me, and swiped the cardboard box off the table onto the floor, scattering my pathetic little props. A chunk of Agassi’s hairy leg got caught on the sleeve of my t-shirt, and I brushed it off.

‘I’m sorry, Ken,’ I pleaded in panic. ‘I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t plan any of it, I promise. I just wanted to meet Max and it all got out of control.…

Ken finished tearing the card into bits. He stood directly opposite me, hands clenched into fists at his sides, his face dark with rage and grief, so incongruous in the hot sunlight. When he finally spoke, his voice was a controlled whisper:

‘Pack your bags and get out of this house, Anna, you evil slut. I never want to see you again. We’re finished.’

I arrived at Lil’s clutching Spesh in one hand and my overnight bag in the other and, no doubt, a haunted expression in my eyes - all I was missing for the complete evacuee impression was a cardboard box containing a gas mask slung round my neck, and a luggage tag on my lapel.

I’d already packed the bag earlier that day, in grim anticipation of Ken’s verdict: pyjamas and washbag, change of clothes. It had reminded me of packing a bag to go to the hospital to have Holly—even though I’d had a home birth, or tried to, I’d still been told to have a bag ready, in case I had to be whisked off in an emergency. Which I had been, although it was too late by then, Holly was already dead.

Still, at least I’d had my toothbrush.

She let me in without a word, sorrow on her face, and stood at the foot of the stairs while I ran straight past her and up to the spare room. The room was already made up for me, with a discreet box of tissues on the bedside table, and a little posy of flowers from her garden in a vase on the dresser. It felt too neat; white and floral-sprigged, for the emotion I was about to pour out in it, as if the worst thing that had ever happened in there was nobody dusting the skirting boards for a fortnight.

I sat on the candlewick bedspread and sobbed and sobbed until I felt desiccated and hollow, a receptacle emptied of everything, except my baby, it’s little peanut shaped body sprouting flappers of limbs and eyes like a tadpole’s in its big misshapen head. At that moment I really believed it was the only thing worth staying alive for.

Lil came up and sat with me, holding me, only breaking away to get me a fresh tissue or a cup of tea. We didn’t talk for a long, long time.

There was a small figurine on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, a shepherdess holding out her china white skirts in a swirling dance of happiness, a dreamy smile on her face and immaculate porcelain curls. I’d admired it since I was a child, and remembered how I used to pick it up when Lil wasn’t looking, holding its slim, cold body in my hand, reverentially stroking the flowing dress and the bumpy hair, feeling as if they ought to be warm to the touch. The shepherdess had the tiniest, reddest, Cupid’s bow lips, and spots of pink on her cheeks not much bigger than pinheads. I’d wanted her so badly. Hinted at Lil on countless occasions to let me keep her. Even, several times, going as far as to hide her about my person and smuggle her out of the house, where she would spend a dusty fortnight under my bed, brought out for furtive inspections at night. But my conscience would always prevail, and on the next visit to Lil and Norman’s, I’d smuggle her back again. She never looked the same away from their house, because I always felt too guilty.

What had happened to my conscience? I’d had such a strong sense of right and wrong when I was a child. I’d have expected that to increase with age, not dwindle away until I couldn’t even see how wrong it was to sleep with another man; to ruin lives with my selfish behaviour. When I was a kid, I’d been desperate to be an adult. Now that I was an adult, I wished for nothing more than the pleasure of that shepherdess’s smile, and black and white moral boundaries which could be stretched, but never broken.

When I could finally speak, I pointed to the shepherdess and said, thickly, ‘I used to steal that ornament from you on a regular basis.’

Lil smiled and stroked my hair. ‘I know, darling. Norm and I used to joke about it. We half hoped you’d start sending us postcards from her, the way that people who steal garden gnomes sometimes do. We’d say, “I wonder where she’s gone this time?”, and imagine her like Julie Andrews up the mountains in Switzerland, or in a meadow somewhere, singing.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘She was always just under my bed.’

‘You always brought her back with never so much as a chip out of her, so I didn’t mind.’

‘Do you still miss Uncle Norman?’

She nodded, gazing at the shepherdess. ‘Every day.’

‘Was he your soulmate?’

I used to think that Ken was my soulmate. But then I met Adam, and wondered if he was. Now I wasn’t sure whether such a thing existed.

‘I don’t know about that. He was my friend, my companion, my…rotector, I suppose. I loved him very much. There’s not much else I can say, really.’

I got the strangest feeling that there was a lot more that Lil wasn’t saying.

‘Do you believe that there’s one ideal person for everyone?’

She looked me in the eyes. ‘Yes, I think I do. But I also think that you have to be incredibly blessed to find them. I—well—I did find mine, but he was married to someone else.’

I held my breath. ‘Is he still alive?’

‘Oh no. He died in the Sixties. His wife later became a friend of mine, actually. You might even remember her - Doreen? Of course she never knew about me and Lawrence. It would have killed her.’

‘You had an affair while you were married to Uncle Norman?’ I couldn’t believe it.

She nodded again, and in her eyes I saw the young woman she once was, frustrated in love, grieving for what she couldn’t have.

‘Nothing physical, of course, not like it all is these days,’ she said. ‘I believe we only kissed half a dozen times. But we saw each other infrequently for years and years, until he died. He was the one for me. I used to dream that Norman, or Doreen, would run off with somebody else so that we could be together. But neither of them ever did, and neither Lawrence nor I wanted to hurt them that badly.’

I put my hand on her arm. ‘That’s so sad.’

She smoothed her skirt over her knees in her characteristic gesture. ‘Goodness, no, not really,’ she said more briskly. ‘Norman was so kind to me. I had a happy life, apart from… that. It’s all ancient history now.’

‘But he never knew?’

‘No.’

‘Ken knows about me and Adam now… I’ve ruined everything.’

Lil took my face in her hands and squeezed my cheeks gently. ‘You don’t know that yet. Just because he’s reacted very badly, it doesn’t mean that he won’t have a change of heart later. Whether that will be weeks later, or months, or even years, nobody knows—just don’t give up on him, if you feel that you and he should stay together.’

‘But I
don’t
feel that we should stay together,’ I said miserably. ‘I want Adam, but he doesn’t want me. I can’t settle for Ken just because Adam won’t have me—that’s not fair on Ken.’

‘Even if he agrees to try and forgive you? You’ve told him the truth, now you have to give him space to come to terms with it, and then you will both need to decide how to go ahead with your lives, together or not together…