Lifesaver (48 page)

He was
really
smiling; Adam’s beautiful warm beam, the one I’d missed so much. I found it difficult to reply.

‘Yes, yes, of course—sorry. He’s got a dreadful cold at the moment, that’s why I kept him out of the draught, hold on, just let me wash my hands, they’re all black—no, on second thoughts, come in, and I’ll wash my hands while you meet him...’ I got up from the step, gabbling uncontrollably. I felt like wrapping my arms around Adam’s knees and
begging
him to forgive me; to love my son as much as he’d once loved me.

Instead, I pushed the front door wide open with my elbow, and George sat there, blinking at the sudden extra daylight in his face. Adam followed me in and knelt down almost reverentially before him, putting his large hands on either side of the carseat in an instinctive protective gesture.

‘Hello, George,’ he said, and the emotion in his voice immediately set me off.

He leaned forward to kiss him, just as George sneezed mightily, spraying snot and wet bread all over Adam’s face.

‘At least you got rid of your beard,’ I said, laughing and crying at the same time. I looked down at Adam’s broad shoulders, hovering over George like a guardian angel, hiding him from my view, but in the knowledge that he was perfectly safe where he was. In a way, I didn’t mind that I couldn’t see either of their faces when they met for the first time. I wanted it to be private between them, to try and help them forge their own relationship regardless of the mess I’d made of everything prior to that one, unsullied moment.

‘Have you got a tissue?’ Adam asked, in a strangled sort of hiccup.

I fetched him some kitchen paper and washed my greasy hands in the sink, not caring that I left the soap black and the sink in a complete state - so much for cleaning the house—then began to dash back, not wanting to miss a second.

‘And could I pick him up, please?’ he added.

‘Of course,’ I said, handing him the kitchen towel and moving to help him unclip George’s harness. But Adam had already lifted him out and hoisted him up in front of his face, staring at him with an almost painfully intense loving expression. George gurgled with pleasure at the unexpected liberation, kicking his arms and legs.

‘Oh Anna, he’s just gorgeous.’

He hugged George to his chest, stroking the back of his neck with a thumb. I remembered the way he used to stroke me with his thumb, and felt a renewed pang of the loss I’d gradually learned to live with. But this moment wasn’t about me, I thought, as I gazed at the pair of them. I was just grateful that Adam was there, holding his son. I watched the tears run down Adam’s cheeks on to the top of George’s chick-fluffy head, and I wanted to keep that exact image of it forever. I pictured the two of them as a complicated mosaic, chips of shiny smashed emotions stuck back together with the grey cement of circumstance, in an utterly lifelike reality. What once was fractured could be reassembled, differently but permanently.

Please let it be permanent, I prayed silently.

‘Did you say you were expecting someone round?’ said Adam, looking at me properly for the first time. I tried to pull myself together, having a flash of realisation as to what my appearance must be like: runnels of tear-streaks in the dust on my face, black fingernails, dirty clothes…ut then suddenly knowing that it didn’t matter; that Adam was looking at me as George’s mother, not as an appraisal of my physical attractiveness. It felt oddly comforting.

‘Yes. A woman’s coming to look round with an estate agent. I don’t want to be here when they arrive, actually. I’ll just put away this ladder and the hoover, and then—how much time have you got? Do you want to go for a walk or something? George’s pushchair is in the car.’

‘That would be great.’

There it was again, Adam’s big smile.

Ten minutes later we were walking along an avenue of naked chestnut trees in the park, two parents bumping their baby in his buggy over frosty ground, on a cold January day. It was the scene that I’d craved for so long and imagined so often. It still wasn’t mine, but as the fresh air pinked George’s cheeks and his eyes became drowsy with the effort of staring up at us, I thought, I’ll settle for this.

It occurred to me that this was the first time I’d ever had the chance to speak to Adam completely honestly, now that the revelations had all sunk in, like rain into parched earth. There was so much I wanted to say, to tell and ask, that for a while I couldn’t say anything at all. We walked in silence, both of us gazing at our son’s face, watching him slide into sleep.

‘Does Max know you’re seeing me?’ I eventually managed. ‘Does he even remember me?’

‘Of course he remembers you. I’m sorry he hasn’t been in touch lately, but Marilyn thought…’

‘Don’t worry. I can imagine what Marilyn thought.’

‘So, no, I didn’t tell Max I was visiting you, otherwise he’d have insisted on coming too. He’s gone to stay with Marilyn for the weekend.’ Adam looked sideways at me, waiting for my reaction.

‘
Gone
to stay with…’

His lips twitched, but whether with amusement or sorrow I couldn’t quite tell. He cleared his throat. ‘Yes. Um. Things didn’t work out between us. She moved to Southampton shortly after Christmas. It’s only about twenty miles away, so she sees lots of Max. We did ask him if he wanted to go and live with her, but he said he’d rather stay with me.’

I stopped so abruptly that George almost jerked awake. ‘You’ve split up?’

My legs started shaking again. I squeezed the buggy’s cold black rubber handlebar so hard that it yielded slightly in my palms, like one of those executive stress toys Ken had periodically brought home, promotional red rubber balls emblazoned with band logos. Ken’s promotional items seemed like relics from a past life.

Adam and Marilyn had split up.

‘We tried, really hard. But we both knew that it wasn’t working, and that we were only doing it for Max’s sake; going through the motions. We thought it was the right thing to do - but in the long run we realized that if neither of us was happy, he wouldn’t be happy either. So we gave ourselves until Christmas. But the truth is, our marriage collapsed the first time she left.’

‘Oh.’ I didn’t know what to say. I thought of George being unzipped from me, and the purple scar I bore. ‘I wish you could have been there when George was born,’ I blurted, thinking, what a selfish and inappropriate thing to come out with.

‘So do I,’ said Adam, putting one hand over mine and stroking it gently. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘But it was my fault, for not telling you. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry about you and Marilyn, too. I know you wanted to make it work.’

Adam rubbed his chin, as if he was taking comfort in a phantom beard. His free hand still covered mine, and even the touch of his warm fingers aroused me.

‘Well, I did and I didn’t. I couldn’t forget you, Anna, that was the problem.’

‘Couldn’t forgive me, either.’

‘That’s what you said in your letter. And yes, I admit that at first I thought I wouldn’t be able to forgive you. But as time went on, and I thought more and more about what we had, and how close you were to Max, and how I really felt about you—then I realized that I’d overreacted. That you hadn’t set out to hurt me; far from it.’

‘No.’

‘I was angry for a while—at least, I thought I was. I was more angry with myself than you, really; at first, for what I saw as having been tricked. Then for letting you go.’

‘Really? You were angry with yourself for letting me go?’

‘Yes. The more I thought about it, and the more Max and I missed you being around, the more I realized that what you’d done was…ell, brave - in a warped kind of way.’

I laughed, painfully. ‘Brave is the last word I’d have thought anyone would use to describe me.’

‘You
were
brave. You’d just lost your baby, you were scared of getting close to Max in case you then lost him too, but you still came down and met him. Us. It all made sense, afterwards, how freaked out you were when he was ill that time, the day Marilyn came back.’

‘I thought he was going to die,’ I said, my eyes filling at the memory.

‘You carried all that responsibility for him by yourself. I had no idea—and I ought to have realized. You met us only a few months after you lost Holly; it was still so raw for you. And there was I, constantly boasting about Max and how wonderful he was. I had Max—thanks to you - and you didn’t have Holly…But you gave yourself to both of us, without a murmur.’

I was crying so much that for a long time I couldn’t speak at all. ‘But the lies,’ I managed eventually. The tears seemed to be searing my cold cheeks, and it felt as if this was the first time I’d ever cried, properly, for Holly; as if all the past tears had just been practise ones.

Adam took me in his arms. ‘No-one’s perfect, Anna. We all make mistakes. And, for what it’s worth, I think you’re still being incredibly brave. You’ve just endured pregnancy and childbirth without a partner, and after all you went through before, that must have taken guts.’

Shattered with emotion and discomforted by the undeserved praise, I broke away from him and busied myself checking that George was wrapped up well enough.

‘Are you still sleepwalking?’

I blew my nose on one of George’s wet wipes and looked at him, puzzled. ‘I don’t sleepwalk.’ How embarrassing for him, I thought, he’s got me mixed up with Marilyn.

‘You do. You did, anyway, several times, when you were living with us. I used to wake up in the middle of the night and have to go and look for you. You were usually in Max’s room, sitting with your back against the wall by his bed.’

I remembered sitting with my back against the wall in
Holly’s
bedroom once, reading Adam’s letter; but nothing about any nocturnal visits to Max.

‘I was a little bit worried that Max might wake up and find you there, and not realize that you weren’t awake.’

‘Oh. Sorry,’ I said, confused and somewhat mortified, still crying. ‘Why didn’t you ever tell me, the next morning?’

Adam’s voice wobbled a little and he looked away. ‘I always intended to. But the thing was, in the night, you were so…unhappy, like a different person. You were often in tears, and sometimes you said things, about Holly mostly. Then you’d wake up in the morning as your usual happy, wonderful self, and it just seemed…ruel, almost, to tell you. I loved our mornings together so much. I suppose I just thought that it might be better to let your subconscious get on with grieving, without having to put you through it during the day as well as at night…I don’t know. It was probably wrong of me. But you shouldn’t be sorry; I should. I knew how much you were suffering, and yet I didn’t even really try to talk to you about it.’

An icy wind swirled through the park, making the branches tremble and numbing my ears. Adam stopped to do up his jacket. He bent his head over the zip, and his words came out muffled at first, and then clearer once he straightened up again:

‘I’m sorry I didn’t contact you sooner, but I needed to make sure that it was completely over with Marilyn, that there really was no chance for her and me. I had been thinking that, even before I got your letter; but I still waited. Got Christmas out of the way; made sure Max would be OK with Marilyn leaving again. And I wanted to think about my own feelings for you, as well, to take time and to check that they were real feelings, and not just a sense of responsibility.’

He slid his hands up the sides of my arms until they gently held my neck, and I remembered how his hands had always felt as if they were supporting me: cupping my breasts, encircling my waist, holding my bottom. Keeping me together. Lucky George, who could have his whole body supported by those hands.

I couldn’t speak at all now, although I just about managed to raise my eyebrows.

He continued. ‘Do you know what I did, the day I got your letter? I went down to the canal, where we talked that time, sat on that bench—the one you were sick behind - and I cried. For hours. I just read the letter over and over again, and cried more than I’ve cried since Max was ill. Nearly gave myself frostbite. But I wanted you so badly. I wanted to jump into my car then and there and drive up to you and grab you and George and take you back with me and never let you go…

I wiped my eyes again. ‘And now?’ I asked, hoping I knew the answer.

He paused.

‘I suppose what I came to say was this: I miss you, Anna. I miss the way that you light up a room when you come into it; and the way that everyone who meets you is fascinated by you. I was so proud to be seen out with you—I miss watching people watching you, and seeing the admiration in their faces. I got such a kick, knowing that it was me who got to go home with you at the end of the night. I loved that Max adored you so much, and the way you made us both laugh -we haven’t laughed like that since you left, and I miss that too. I miss your lovely body, and the shape your mouth goes into when you say certain words, and the way you always sing harmonies of songs on the radio…

‘Which words?’ My hands instinctively slid around his waist and down into the back pockets of his jeans. I had finally managed to stop crying.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The shape of my mouth when I say which words?’

Adam pretended to think about it. ‘Well. Say: “Yes”.’

‘Yes…’ My mouth didn’t feel as if it was doing anything out of the ordinary.

‘Mmm, that’s it. That’s one of them. Now say “Adam.”’

‘Adam,’ I said obediently.

‘You look
very
sexy when you say “Adam”. Say “I want”.’

‘I want?’

He tucked a stray strand of my hair away behind my ears, and gazed into my eyes, smiling. I could barely breathe with anticipation. I glanced down at George, but he was lost in his baby dreams, wispy clouds of his own breath floating up as if he was donating it to me.

‘Good. Now say “to be with you for ever.”’

I opened my mouth to speak, but he carried on. ‘Anna, I’ve missed you so much, and I really want you and George. Please can we try again? Perhaps you’d consider moving back to Gillingsbury, but if that’s something you wouldn’t want to do, then perhaps Max and I could move up here…hat do you say?’