The Secrets of Married Women (37 page)

My dad taps on the bedroom door. ‘You ready? We’re going to be late.’ I look at him, dressed in his suit and cheerful mauve tie that’s already got a tea stain on it and he’s only had it on two minutes. My dad who lost my mother and acquired a single, unemployed daughter with a baby, and never for a moment has been anything other than a trouper. ‘No more doing the Ray Charles….’ I keep hearing him say, a thousand times a day, even when I was just thinking of doing the Ray Charles, and it makes me smile. Yes, family sticks. Friends don’t always. Not even husbands. But I thank my lucky stars that I was born of a close family. I lift little Hannah above my head, and jiggle her there.

‘She’s a beautiful little babsy, yes she is!’ My dad coos to Hannah and he thumbs her little cheek. My daughter’s head looks like a white eggshell with a little bit of pale carpet fluff on it. Her skin, with its flush of pink cheeks, is just like my mother’s. But in every other respect—her eyes, her nose, the shape of her face and her mouth—she is, uncannily, the image of her father. Every time I look at her, I see him, and I probably always will.

Sometimes I’ll catch my dad staring at her. ‘She’s the living double of Rob, isn’t she?’ he’ll say. I’m sure he only says it because he knows damned well that she isn’t.

‘Really? Hmn. You think so?’ will be my reply. Then we’ll stare each other down until one of us—usually me—has to break away first, with some excuse about how I have to go to the toilet, or it’s time for dinner. I often wonder though, if he connects it all to the Russian, and our day out at the beach. My dad has always been a man to know more than he’ll ever let on.

I settle Hannah on my shoulder, patting her big square nappied bum, and she nearly pulls a handful of my hair. I walk into my parents’ bathroom and look at the two of us in the mirror. I did get my figure back quickly, all but a few pounds. Although nowadays I really don’t care. I think of all the time I spent focussing on all my bad bits. Don’t they say that sometimes you just need something bigger than your biggest problem to realise you never had anything to worry about? However, considering I sleep only about two hours a night because of all the crying she does, I actually think I look pretty good.

‘Come on lass,’ my dad says, patting my shoulder. ‘It won’t get prettier the more you stare at it.’

Last time I went to our local church it was for my mam’s funeral, and in the back of my mind, I was hoping that Rob might come. He didn’t of course. How could he come and comfort me? And how could he come and not? But I know how much it would have hurt him to stay away. He loved my mother.

Rob. My head floods with him again, like it’s prone to do at all the worst times. Hannah lets out a great big bawl. Saves me the trouble.

The other day, cleaning my stuff out, I came across something I had long ago forgotten about. A pocket-sized blank book with a silver cover, in which my mother had written quotes that she had collected over the years: quotes about love. She gave it to me as a wedding present. I remember ten years ago thinking it was very sweet and sentimental and typical of her, but not much more. I suppose I hadn’t lived enough back then.

"The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable."
Victor Hugo

Real love, I've learned, is a very, very strong form of forgiveness. I don't think people yearn for love because they hate staying home alone on Saturday night or because they dread going into restaurants alone. People want love because they want their taped-together glasses or ten
extra pounds to be forgiven. They want someone to look past the surface stuff like bad-hair days, a too-loud laugh, or potato chips crunching in their living-room couch when anyone sits down.
Lois Smith Brady

"To love a person is to learn the song that is in their heart, and to sing it to them when they have forgotten."
Anonymous

I ask you to pass through life at my side—to be my second self and best earthly companion.
Mr. Rochester in
Jane Eyre
, Charlotte Brontë

I never knew how much I loved [him] until I saw how much he could hurt me. I felt such pain, literally a physical pain, as if someone had torn off both my arms without anesthesia, without sewing me back up...
The Joy Luck Club
, Amy Tan

That last one always gets me. Maybe in ten years time I’ll be able to read it again and it won’t.

The church isn’t exactly packed, but there’s enough of a turn out for it to have an intimacy as we enter it. I decked the aisles out with strings of white roses. Before we buried my mother, I was a child when I last came here. Now I come here today as a mother myself, with my own child. Something about that gets me right in my gut. Hannah starts to cry again.

I gaze at the small stained glass, rose window while the vicar does a reading and his voice drifts peacefully through me. The organist sits studying her fingernails. There are four other babies getting christened today. All of their names have been printed into a small white book with a flocked cover, which I stare at as it sits open on my knee. Hannah Mallin. I look down the list of names and my eyes keep coming back to my daughter’s. It’s by far the best, of course. I hope I’m not going to be one of these obnoxious mothers who other mothers hide from at parent-teacher meetings. No, I think, looking at her and just wanting to plant kisses on every square inch of her little sausage body; I hope I am.

I take my daughter from my best friend’s arms, my friend who very bravely accepted the role of Godmother to my daughter, despite having lost a daughter herself. I look down the short pew at my dad, his gnarled hands resting on his kneecaps as he listens solemnly. This is all that matters now, I think. This moment that I wouldn’t change if I could; not all the things that I would change given half the chance. It’s all water under the bridge. My dad looks across at me. His eyes are full of tears. I know it’s hard for him. I know he’s thinking of my mam.

I pass Hannah to the vicar when he nods to me. She scowls and twists and puckers her mouth. I look up at the stained-glass rose window again. The vicar starts giving her his blessing and I’m lost on a sentimental journey of thought about this weird state of screwing-up we all go through until we finally accept that life is just something we have to take, however we get it dished up, with all its associate baggage, pitfalls and mistakes. That I am a mother freshly shocks me again. The vicar is just at the point where he asks for her name, when something strange happens. In my peripheral hearing, I hear a dog bark. I mean, you couldn’t really miss it. It’s such a loud, crisp bark, a get-right-on-your-nerve-ends bark.

I’ve heard that bark before. It seems to stop everything, including my heart.

My head instinctively shoots round to the back of the church, and just as it does, the door opens, giving one of those low, burring groans I remember from when I was a child.

Rob pokes his head around the door.

I gaze across a sea of curious faces and look at my husband.

You could hear a pin drop.

‘I’m sorry,’ Rob says, looking even more Heathcliff-like with his wild hair, his arms cocked stiffly by his sides. ‘I thought I’d get here and catch you outside.’ He looks around, self-consciously. ‘Can I speak to you outside?’

How did he know about today? I look across at my dad, who’s looking at me, with Okay So Shoot the Messenger I’m Nearly Dead Anyway, written all over his face.

I look back at Rob. He’s dressed in his old jeans and navy GAP sweatshirt. Then I walk down the aisle toward him, leaving a sea of bemused faces, which all turn and watch me walking out of the church doors.

I’m hot. There’s a ticking of blood in my temples. ‘What are you doing here Rob?’ I ask him when we’re outside into the bright sunshine, on the narrow, gravelled drive framed by headstones, hearing the quiver in my voice. I look at his pallor, his pained eyes. I’ve never seen Rob look so changed. Last time I saw him was that day I went round and begged him to let me come home. I imagined in all this time he would have been back to his old self again.

He kneads his temples with one hand, blows out a big breath. ‘I’ve come to give Hannah my name. I want to be her dad… if you’ll let me.’

He looks right at me, his pupils latching questioningly onto mine. A breeze rustles the trees, and it takes a moment or two for me to speak. ‘But you said you didn’t know if you could love someone else’s child.’

He shakes his head, turns from me, props himself against the dark blue church door with an outstretched arm, and looks down at his feet. ‘Am I not allowed to be wrong?’ His forehead rests now on his arm. I wonder what kind of a drama we must look like.

As much as I’ve dreamed of this moment, of course never expecting for a minute that it would happen, there’s another force going on inside of me: the mother in me. I can’t have Rob barging in and testing the waters of forgiveness at Hannah’s expense. ‘You don’t mean this,’ I say, stupidly. It feels too good to be real.

He nods. ‘I do.’ His eyes meet mine now, and birds tweet in the trees behind us. ‘Of course I’d have loved a kid of my own. I never realised how much until I couldn’t have that. But I can’t have that.’ He smiles. ‘But I’ve come to see that having one that’s yours is the next best thing.’ He touches a stray bit of my hair, tucks it behind my ear, his eyes soften. He scours my face again. ‘And I want you back. If you’ll have me back.’ He takes hold of both of my hands. ‘I love you Jill and I’ll love your baby. I wanted you back the second I made you go. But a part of me thought maybe I should try and live without you, because I was so damned hurt by what you’d done. I just couldn’t understand it. But now… I don’t know, in some ways maybe a part of me does. Or maybe I just don’t think it matters as much as I always thought something like that would.’ He shakes his head, and the birds fly from the trees with a flurry of wings. ‘I’m just not happy without you. These last ten months… I’m a very sad man. And I don’t want to be sad anymore. I keep waiting until I’m going to feel better, until I’m going to come home and not register your absence as I walk in that door.’ He digs the heel of his hand into his eye socket. ‘I miss you more than I ever imagined I could. And I just want us to be a family again.’ He squeezes my hand. ‘The three of us.’

I choke with love for him, and disbelief. I cannot speak. It’s only then that I register Kiefer who is tied up to a tree. When I look at him he wags his tail and barks again, as though to say,
We’re a family again.

‘He passed his obedience training with flying colours,’ Rob says.

I laugh.

He is looking at me like a man who has fallen in love all over again. ‘You know what was on Metro radio the other night?’ he says. ‘Before the phone-in? That song, you know. Bonnie Tyler. The one we danced to at the wedding.
If I sing you a love-song.
’

I nod. Because I remember that song very well.

‘It was a nice song,’ he says. ‘It’s our song.’ He wraps his arms around me and pulls me into his chest. I rest my head against him and hear his heart thumping. ‘So you’ve not met anybody else in all this time?’ I ask.

I look up at him and his eyes ooze love for me. ‘I never even looked.’

I’m terrified a breeze will stir up and this moment will be blown away on the back of this fateful summer day. ‘But it’s his child Rob. How will you ever be able to forget that?’

He cups my face in both of his hands and lightly squeezes. ‘I can forget it, Jill. Whose child it is—it’s just biology.’

I know Rob wouldn’t mess me around. If he’s saying this, he’s given it a hell of a lot of thought and he means it. ‘Oh, Rob…’ I squeeze my arms tightly around him, lay my face against his shoulder again, claiming him, slightly panicked that he’s going to suddenly change his mind. Maybe he’ll say, Look Jill now that I’m touching you, now that you’re in my arms, it doesn’t feel the same, and I’ve made a mistake coming here…

But when he plucks me off him, he’s smiling. He doesn’t look pale anymore. More like flushed. He gets down on one knee, and at that exact moment, through the sunshine, it starts to rain, a fine showerhead sprinkling.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ I press my tear ducts to try to stop the flow.

He looks up at me, quietly doting. ‘Jill Mallin. Will you be my wife again?’

I pull him up by the shoulders of his sweatshirt and pull him back into my arms. ‘I’ve never been anything else.’

Carol Mason was born and grew up in the North East of England. As a teenager she was crowned Britain’s National Smile Princess and since became a model, diplomat-in-training, hotel receptionist and advertising copywriter. She currently lives in British Columbia, Canada.
The Secrets of Married Women
is her first novel.