The Silent Tide (39 page)

He was silent for a moment, watching her. ‘I think you do,’ he said. ‘Isabel, you don’t seem yourself at the moment. Look at you – I mean . . .’ He made a gesture of helplessness.

‘What?’ she said fretfully.

‘Well, I don’t mean to be unkind, but your hair. And you used to take such care with your clothes.’
She closed the book and threw it down beside her. ‘Hugh, I have a baby. I don’t have time for hairdressers and fussing about. Anyway, who is there to look at me?’

‘Me?’ he said mildly. He put down his drink and came to sit next to her. He took her hand and pulled her gently to him. She buried her head in his shoulder and began to weep.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ she managed to say between sobs. ‘I didn’t think it would be like this.’

‘We definitely need Jacks,’ he murmured.

Isabel

Jacqueline arrived two weeks later on one of those hot days that trick the world into believing that summer has arrived. Hugh fetched her from the station, and Isabel like movement watched sullenly from the bedroom window as she stepped out of the car, a squarish figure dressed today in a full-skirted yellow dress and a small felt hat. Like a daffodil, Isabel thought uncharitably, turning away. And caught her own puffy-eyed complexion three times reflected in the triptych mirror of her dressing table. She bit her lip, picked up a brush and began to drag it through her hair, then gave up and went to lie on the bed.

One of the windows was open and from the courtyard below she heard Hugh’s mother say clearly, ‘She’s asleep in the garden, the little dear,’ then the voices receded as presumably they all trooped through the house into the back garden to view Lorna in her pram. Isabel rolled over and lost herself in the safe warm country of the bedclothes. During the last six or seven days she’d felt mugged by sleep, hardly able to get up at all. The doctor had visited and pronounced her ‘run down’, but the pills he prescribed only made her feel worse. Hugh insisted she continue to take them, to give them a chance to work. The anxiety of his expression was enough to make her agree. There was something wrong with her, she knew deep down, a spreading darkness that numbed energy and feeling.

Jacqueline, Hugh explained to her, would be living here for the time being, sleeping in Magnolia, which Mrs Catchpole had made ready. It would be easier than her staying with her father. She wouldn’t need to make the journey every day. ‘Why does she need to come every day?’ Isabel had asked Hugh crossly, but this was before she felt so unwell, and now she accepted the situation. Someone was needed to help with Lorna, and Hugh had begged Jacqueline. ‘It’ll give you a chance to get better,’ he told Isabel. Lily Catchpole would help, too, but he and his mother couldn’t be expected to get up at night if Lorna cried.

As the spring days passed, the household settled into a new kind of rhythm. Jacqueline managed Lorna beautifully, with set hours for her feeding and sleeping, although Mrs Catchpole, possibly out of some sort of skewed loyalty to Isabel, remarked that babies sorted themselves out by this age anyway. While pleased to have Jacqueline’s help, the woman was suspicious about her appearance in the household and her pity swung to Isabel, who only a few weeks before had been the object of her disapproval.

Isabel sensed that Jacqueline was trying to be tactful. She’d bring Lorna to her sometimes and say, ‘Why don’t you play with her?’ and Isabel would dutifully hold her and wonder at her huge blue eyes and her smiles, but when the baby became restless, she’d panic and hand her back. ‘What’s the matter with her?’ she asked Jacqueline once as they stood in the nursery. ‘What have I done to make her grizzly?’

‘She’s probably teething, poor lamb.’ Jacqueline’s eyes had a soft glow as she took the fretting child from its mother, then her nose wrinkled. ‘Oh, I think it’s her little derrière.’

The way she knelt to lay Lorna down to change her, then slotted her limbs back into her clothes, was deft and tender. I can’t do that, Isabel thought, with a sharp pang of jealousy and, what was worse, I don’t want to do that.

‘You are marvellous with her,’ she said bitterly, watching Jacqueline’s busy fingers.

‘She’s a good little baby,’ Jacqueline said, stroking the child’s hair. ‘Aren’t you, darling?’

‘I suppose it’s practice for when you have your own.’ That came out without thinking and she was ashamed, for Jacqueline’s hands stilled momentarily.

‘Yes, well,’ Jacqueline replied. ‘That’s not likely to happen soon, with a husband who’s always away.’ Her voice shook slightly and Isabel understood that there was something deep there, unspoken. ‘You’re so lucky, having Hugh at home most of the time.’

‘Yes, I suppose,’ Isabel said, going across to the window to look out. She thought of Hugh, shut in the study downstairs. With Jacqueline’s arrival he wore a great air of relief. He could retire again to write without worrying about what might be happening in the house.

She sometimes wondered how the novel was going, for he no longer spoke of it to her. Perhaps he thought she wouldn’t want to know, or that she wouldn’t have anything useful to say. She knew she hadn’t shown any interest recently. She felt a little better today, but some days she lay in bed, unwilling to get up, feeling as though she was at the far end of a long dark tunnel. The rest of the world might not exist. She wasn’t even curious about whether Hugh took notes about her any more. They’d be very boring, if he did. There wasn’t really anything for him to write about.

‘I’ll take her downstairs, shall I?’ Jacqueline was scooping Lorna up and rising to her feet. ‘Perhaps we could walk down to the village with the pram. We need some more disinfectant.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Oh come on, getting out will pep you up a bit. It’s an awfully nice morning.’

This was the height of her days now, Isabel thought as she went to fetch a cardigan. Walking a pram down to the village shops. She rarely thought about her life in London. That was only a colourful dream that had vanished with the reality of marriage and motherhood. She was Mrs Hugh Morton now, not Miss Isabel Barber, and she had different responsibilities. Probably there would be more babies. Maybe sometime she would throw off this feeling of despair and learn the trick of happiness. Other women seemed to. She was lucky, she knew she was lucky. Poor Jacqueline had no child and wanted one. Jacqueline effectively had no husband much of the time, either, and was lonely. Only once in the past few weeks had Isabel known a letter to come from Michael. Jacqueline had taken it away to read in private. Isabel had not thought to ask her about it.

It was around this time that a letter arrived for Isabel with a French stamp on it. The handwriting was familiar, but she knew no one in France, so she didn’t realise until she opened it that it was from Vivienne. She read it with complete amazement.

It began
Ma chère Isabelle
and went on cheerfully:

That’s about as much French as I’m capable of writing at the moment, but I imagine that I’ll soon learn. You’ll be so surprised, but I’m living in Paris now. It all happened so fast that I’ve had no time to tell you. As you know, I got a job at King’s College, London, hoping that I’d get on better there than at the college where I did my PhD, but I hated it, Isabel. The work was interesting, much more so than at the previous place, but the men weren’t what you’d call friendly and I was terribly worried that the same thing would happen all over again and that I’d end up with some sort of breakdown. Anyway, I had to give a paper on X-ray developments at the Royal Institution, and there were two Frenchmen in the audience who were crystallographers at a French government laboratory. A woman friend of mine from Cambridge introduced us and we had such an expression on his faces e McKinnon inspiring conversation about our work! The next thing I knew, they wrote and offered me a job in Paris, and so here I am! I only have temporary digs at the moment, but I’ll send you my permanent address when I have one. In the meantime, it might be best if you wrote to me at the laboratory, address above. Isabel, they’re so kind to me here, it’s a completely different atmosphere. I’m sure that I’ll be happy. You must come and stay with me . . .

Isabel was both amazed and delighted to read this. Poor old Vivienne, unappreciated here in England but with so much to offer, seemed at last to have found her feet. But how sad that she’d had to go so far. Isabel wondered when she’d ever see her again. Paris at this moment seemed to her the other side of the world. Despite her happiness for her friend, she felt a stab of envy.

One Friday morning at the beginning of July, Hugh Morton burst into the kitchen to be greeted by what he muttered was ‘a scene from hell’. Through swirling steam and smoke he could make out his wife at the stove, dressed in an apron and a most unbecoming mob cap, stirring a great vat of – he wrinkled up his nose – boiling nappies. Young Lily Catchpole was plucking a duck, its feathers flying everywhere. At that moment, Lily’s mother entered bearing a box of vegetables pulled from the garden, a great streak of earth down her face. Outside, Lorna started to screech in her pram.

‘Baby’s awake,’ Mrs Catchpole said to Isabel unnecessarily. ‘And Miss Jacqueline’s gone out.’

‘I’ll go.’ Isabel laid the washing tongs across the pot and hefted a bucket of freshly boiled and rinsed nappies.

Hugh stood in the doorway, completely ignored, which he wasn’t used to.

‘Hello?’ he said loudly. Three heads turned and three pairs of eyes blinked at the strange sight of a man in the kitchen.

‘Sorry to interrupt. I came to tell you I’ve finished,’ Hugh said to Isabel. He looked triumphant.

‘Finished what?’ called Isabel, halfway to the back door with the bucket.

‘My novel, of course.’

She stared at him, a blank look on her face. ‘Well, that’s simply marvellous,’ she said finally, and disappeared out of the door.

Outside, the crying immediately rose in volume and intensity. Isabel dumped the dripping bucket on the flagstones by the mangle, wiped her hands on her dress, then went over to the pram. She flicked up the muslin canopy and undid the pram cover. Lorna had kicked off her sheet and her long thin body was stiff with rage.

‘Shut up,’ Isabel said through clenched teeth. ‘Just shut up.’ She gripped the pram by its handle and had to force herself not to shake it. Anger ripped through her. Anger at what? She didn’t know. It had been simmering all morning, since she woke and remembered that Jacqueline was going up to Town to meet some friends. Friends! When could Isabel see friends? The pressure intensified as she dealt with the nappies. The smell was revolting and nothing she used, the Milton’s, the laundry blue, ever seemed to get them really clean. And lastly there was Hugh, who with his appearance in the kitchen, had summarised in a few words how wide the gap between the two of them lay.

‘What on earth’s the matter?’ Hugh’s voice came from behind her, disapproving, annoyed. ‘All I said was—’

‘I know what you said.’ Lorna stopped screeching, then took a long breath and started once more.
‘Oh, do pick up that child.’

She leaned into the pram, unclipped the harness and lifted Lorna out. The screeching ceased, but the baby continued to sob, sitting up in her mother’s arms and looking about . Seeing her father, her mouth widened in a gummy smile.

‘Shh, shh,’ Isabel said, resting her cheek on the child’s hair.

‘Well, I thought you’d be pleased.’ Hugh was speaking. ‘Of course, I say the book’s finished, but I mean the draft . It’s all typed up but I need to go over it, make little adjustments. Still,’ he started pacing about, ‘I can’t tell you the relief to have mastered the body of it. It’s lived with me for, I don’t know how long.’

‘I’m glad you’ve finished it,’ Isabel said. She forced her anger down. ‘You’ve worked hard, I’ve seen that.’ It’s my book too, she thought. He wouldn’t have written it without me. All those notes he’d made about Nanna, the suggestions that she had put to him about it. Not that she could say any of this, of course. He’d deny it, say he didn’t understand what she meant.

‘
The Silent Tide
. D’you like the title?’ he said, and she nodded. ‘I’ve put my all into writing this. Every last drop of blood. I don’t know what Stephen will say, of course, but if he doesn’t like it I’ll take it to another publishing house.’ The mention of her old boss was enough to make Isabel’s spirits plummet deeper. She knew the book was good. At least, the parts she’d seen were extraordinarily so . McKinnon & Holt would take it, they’d be mad not to. But it wouldn’t be Isabel herself who would edit it. It would be Trudy or that new man, what was his name, Richard someone. And she would be here washing nappies.
‘Of course he’ll like it,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to read it?’

‘Mmm? Oh, I expect you can. Not yet, though. I’ll be working on it.’ And so he brushed her off with a few casual words. He, who had always trusted her advice. She was only his wife now, he didn’t want her to be anything else. These were her thoughts, and she was plunged into misery.

Emily

Emily was pleasantly surprised by the growing excitement at Parchment about Tobias Berryman’s novel. When she’d finished going over his rewrites she suggested she pop in to see him at Duke’s College to deliver them as she’d be passing near Bloomsbury after lunch. She could have sent them in an email, of course, but she was curious to see Tobias on his home territory, and anyway there was something else. A small, secret part of her that she tried and failed to ignore hoped to catch a glimpse of Matthew.

She climbed the marble steps of the college to a scrolled Corinthian portico where a pair of glass doors swung inward to admit her. The reception area was familiar: she used to meet Matthew there occasionally and memory brought a sharp pang of regret. She didn’t know where Tobias’s office was so she asked the young woman in a hijab who sat behind the counter. Following her directions, Emily turned down a long corridor and went through a door into a cloister that bordered a grassy quadrangle. Entering the building at the far end, she followed the signs to the English department.