The Impossible Truths of Love, page 15
Over the past fifteen months, Annie has seemed to existed in two parallel worlds. There is the tangible world of Bill, Clare and Laura, of shopping and cooking, of the girls’ school life and Bill’s growing business. The world in which she is carrying a new life inside her, knowing how lucky she is to have been granted this eleventh hour opportunity to become a parent again. It is a world Annie knows is real even though sometimes she seems to be viewing it through a haze, as though her life is a film and somebody has smeared Vaseline on the lens. But separate from the real world is Annie’s imaginary existence, a world in which Danny is growing every day, in which she catalogues his every milestone: his first tooth, his first crawl across the carpet, his first tentative steps. It is a world only she and Danny inhabit, a world she chooses not to share with anyone, not even with Bill. Three months ago, on the day they should have been celebrating Danny’s first birthday, she had passed the hours as if in a dream, as though the physical world had faded and the colour had been turned up on her imaginary world. Bill had brought home a bunch of yellow roses, had enfolded her in his arms as she had stood at the kitchen sink, washing the dinner plates, their shared grief palpable between them like charged particles. Sometimes she fears that if it were not for the prospect of this new baby to care for, she may have struggled to find motivation enough to continue. This baby, she knows, has saved her before it is even born.
‘That’s a lovely toy. Why on earth is someone giving that away?’ Pam nods at the plastic telephone in Annie’s hand. ‘Just think, in nine months’ time, the three of us will be sitting here wrapping Christmas presents, and you’ll be wrapping for the new baby too.’ Pam’s smile broadens and Annie feels the warmth of expectation deep inside her. She knows how much she has to celebrate, how much she has to be grateful for. And yet sometimes she feels as though, for the people around her, this pregnancy balances the scales: that the tragedy of Danny’s death is eliminated by the prospect of this new child. She understands how blessed she is with this pregnancy. But she also knows that she could give birth to a hundred other children and none of them would ever put an end to her grief for Danny.
Denise pulls a packet of Fondant Fancies from her bag and offers them round. Annie takes one, bites the cream off the top, eats the rest in two hungry mouthfuls.
‘You know who I saw yesterday evening getting on the bus in the most unbelievable outfit?’ Pam allows a beat of silence. ‘Elsa. As in Bill’s Elsa. You wouldn’t believe what she was wearing. A psychedelic floorlength dress with a cream fur jacket over the top. She looked a bit out of place getting on the 208.’ Pam laughs, shaking her head.
Bill’s Elsa. Annie does not look up, pulls a strip of ribbon between her thumb and the flat of the scissors, curls it into a tight corkscrew.
‘I like her taste in clothes. I think she’s got style. I wish I had a figure like hers – you can wear anything with a figure like that and get away with it.’ Denise sighs. At twentysix, she is three years older than Elsa, and yet it is Elsa who seems to Annie to be the more grown up of the two.
‘God, don’t you start. Alan’s eyes were practically popping out of his head.’ Pam laughs again and Annie snaps a piece of Sellotape from the dispenser, sticks it firmly onto the parcel in front of her.
Elsa has been working for Bill for almost fifteen months now and is showing no sign of wanting to leave, no indication that she is searching for something bigger or better, even though Bill is always telling Annie how talented she is. Annie can only hope that Elsa’s current commitment to Bill’s business is a passing fad: she is only twentythree and Annie is convinced that it must just be a matter of time before she moves on.
She is contemplating how to respond to Pam when she feels it. A slow trickle of liquid between her thighs. At first she thinks it is momentary incontinence; it has happened, on occasion, in the years since giving birth to Clare and Laura. But when she clenches her pelvic floor muscles, the seeping continues. It is like a leak in a dam which, now breached, cannot be stopped. This, Annie realises, is not urine. This is not incontinence.
Excitement flutters in her chest, swiftly followed by embarrassment and confusion. Her waters are breaking on Pam’s best dining chairs and she does not know what to do. She wishes she could call out telepathically to Bill, that he could arrive as if by magic, could reassure her that this time things will be different, this time their baby will be strong and fit and healthy. But Bill is in his workshop over a mile away and even if Pam telephones him now, it will be ten minutes before he arrives.
The water continues its steady flow and Annie’s heart races, both eager to meet her unborn child and anxious that history should not repeat itself.
She turns to Pam, tries to find the words to explain what is happening, to ask her to fetch Bill, but she cannot seem to encourage her mouth to make the right sounds. Instead, a single thought chants silently in her head, somewhere between a wish and an invocation: Please make this baby okay. Whatever else happens, just please make my baby okay.
NOW
Nell wakes from a fitful sleep and peels open her eyes. The neon digits on her phone tell her it is 2:47 a.m. Her fingers scrabble for the switch to the bedside light, and there is a split second of panic when it is not where it should be. Activating the torch on her phone, she experiences a moment’s discombobulation: there are faded flowery curtains instead of plain cream linen; a mahogany chest of drawers where it should be light oak; a thin polyester duvet rather than duck down.
It takes a few seconds for Nell to remember that she is not at home in north London but fourteen miles south in her parents’ house. The realisation fills her with an overwhelming urge to run away, though from what and to where she is not quite sure.
From the bedroom next door she hears the rustle of a duvet and hopes that her mum is sleeping deeply. She finds the switch of the bedside lamp beneath the peach floral shade, turns it on, its glow illuminating the corner of the room. Staring at the heavily artexed ceiling, she is reminded of all the nights during her childhood she would lie in this bed, worrying about the dangers she might encounter the following day.
‘If you hear footsteps behind you, cross to the other side of the street.’
‘If a stranger tries to talk to you, don’t answer them.’
‘If anyone asks you to get in their car, run away.’
‘If someone you don’t know offers you sweets, always say no.’
She can hear her mum’s voice as clearly as if they were standing opposite one another, her mum buttoning up Nell’s coat, placing the Tupperware box with her packed lunch into her rucksack, pulling her hair into a ponytail. So many scenarios, so much vigilance. It is only now, knowing what she knows about the baby her mum was unable to save, that Nell understands where all that caution may have come from.
Nell turns onto her side, knows that if she allows herself to tumble into this warren of memories she will never get back to sleep. But a recollection slips into her head, and it is as if the years are being rewound and she is eight years old again, lying in bed, listening to the whispered conversations of her parents long after they think she has gone to sleep.
‘I don’t know how to live with it, Annie. I don’t know how to bear the guilt.’
‘It’s the only thing we can do.’
‘Is it? We didn’t have to. We chose to. And every day I wonder if it was the right choice.’
‘Of course it was. It was the only choice.’
‘I don’t mean for us. For them. You must think about them too?’
There is a moment’s hesitation and Nell holds her breath, does not dare exhale in case she betrays herself.
‘It was the right thing. Could you have lived with what would’ve happened if we hadn’t?’
There is muffled sound, a stifled sob.
‘You know I couldn’t. But—’
‘It’s done now. That’s all that matters. We did the only thing we could.’
Nell opens her eyes, the feeling attached to the memory lingering beneath her ribs. She has not thought of it for years, is not convinced it is a real memory or just a trick her mind is playing on her in the semidarkness.
In the pale orange glow from the streetlamps outside, her eyes catch the framed photograph by the bed. It is the photo that had graced her dad’s bedside table for the past fourteen years, which Nell rescued earlier from a cardboard box destined for the dump.
In the centre of the photograph stands Nell in an oversized black gown, mortar board at an angle on her head. On one side of her stands her dad in a charcoal grey suit he had bought especially for the occasion, a royal blue tie Nell had given him for his birthday fastened in a compact knot beneath his Adam’s apple. One arm is wrapped around Nell’s waist, his grin so wide it stretches across his face. On the other side of Nell is her mum in the navy floral dress she had worn to Laura’s wedding six years earlier and kept for best ever since. Her arms are rigid by her side, lips held in a tight smile. Between her eyebrows is a tiny indentation which could be worry or could just be a squint against the sun. Behind them, fellow students pose for similar family photographs, the honeyed stone of the Sheldonian visible in the background.
Nell studies the picture, wonders what thoughts and feelings are hidden in her mum’s expression. It is a photo that has always filled Nell with equal doses of pride and sadness. Her dad’s unbridled joy seems to accentuate her mum’s uncertainty. Even now, all these years later, Nell can feel the weight of her own disappointment that day. All she had wanted at her graduation was for both her parents to be happy, proud, to revel in the ancient traditions of the occasion. But her mum had been fretful, nervy, distracted, her anxiety like a dark cloud in an otherwise blue sky. Now Nell wonders whether her mum’s thoughts had been elsewhere that day, whether they had been locked in the past, with the little boy who would not make it to his first day of school, let alone university.
The previous day’s events begin to play out in Nell’s mind like a film in which the frames have been cut out of sequence so that the story no longer makes sense. There is so much she still doesn’t understand: about Danny’s death, about her parents’ grief, about her mum’s garbled memories which may be the missing scenes in her family’s past or may just be discarded sequences she has no need to see.
Laura is the person she needs to speak to. She put off talking to her sister yesterday, reeling too much from the shock of what she has learnt. But Laura must be able to tell her something about the events preceding her birth.
Snapping off the bedside light, she closes her eyes. Later today, she thinks, she will go and see Laura, find out what her sister knows, and see if she can help fill the gaps in her patchworked family history.
THEN
It is three months since Annie’s waters broke at Pam’s dining table. Time has passed in a blur, as if Annie has been watching her life through the window of a speeding train.
Beside her, lying in a wooden crib, the baby begins to cry, shattering the silence.
Annie looks down into the crib, at the baby’s crumpled face and scarlet cheeks, at her curled fingers and jerking limbs, and she is aware of her heart clenching like a fist.
Leaning over the crib, she watches as her arms outstretch towards the baby, watches one hand slip under the baby’s head, the other beneath the small of its back, watches herself lift the baby out of the cot and glide it through the air towards her body. They are not movements she is conscious of performing: it is as though her limbs are acting on an instinct of their own, born of some other time and place.
She holds the infant against her chest, feels the weight of the child’s head against her sternum, its bent knees tucked beneath breasts which have long since dried of milk she has chosen not to offer.
There is a part of her that wishes she could disappear, take nothing with her. It is a weight of yearning so strong, as though something is pressing down hard on her lungs, squeezing the air out of them like the last gasps of a spent balloon.
The baby howls into Annie’s ear and the noise is like shards of glass piercing her thoughts. She jiggles the baby up and down, and although she knows this is what she must do, the movement does not seem to belong to her: she has the sensation of having slipped outside her own body, of hovering on the periphery of the scene, watching herself perform this millenniaold act and yet unable to connect to it.
The baby continues to writhe in her arms and Annie feels the heat of anger and frustration bleeding through the thin cotton of her nightdress, does not know whether the heat belongs to her or the child.
Laying the baby down on the bed, she changes its nappy, replaces its white babygrow. Each of these duties she performs as if she has been preprogrammed to do so, as if there is no individual will involved in her actions.
The baby falls silent and in those few brief seconds Annie manages to fill her lungs, to reinhabit her body. But then the baby’s forehead furrows into a frown, its lips form a wide gummy circle, and a noise emerges that is so shrill, so demanding, that it penetrates every pore of Annie’s skin. She has to stop herself from clamping her palms over her ears to shut it out. Instead, she picks up the baby, puts it back in its crib, tucks a cotton sheet around it. The baby looks up, eyes wide with disbelief that it has been returned to a place it has no desire to be.
Annie and the baby stare at each other, neither of them uttering a sound, but the silence is filled with such need, such desire, that Annie imagines it leaching all the oxygen from the air and suffocating them both.
Love. That is what this child needs. She needs love. And Annie has tried, she has tried so hard. But whatever love she once may have possessed seems to have leaked out of her, like heat from a poorly insulated window, and she does not know how to capture it, bring it back. She does not know whether she will ever be able to love this baby, not as a child ought to be loved. She is doing her best to care for it – she knows she must – but it is a poor facsimile of what a mother’s love should be.
The baby sucks in a deep gulley of air and Annie feels her skin prickle in anticipation before the next plaintive wail emerges. She sinks down onto the bed, wraps the duvet around her, pulls a pillow over her head to muffle the sound, trying to shut out the memory of what happened in the hospital three months ago. But she knows it is something she must hold on to, knows that she must cling to the truth of what happened, whatever anyone else might say. She has to. Because only by clinging on to the truth does she keep alive the hope that one day the unforgivable wrong will be put right.
The bedroom door scrapes against the carpet and Annie scrunches her eyes tighter, wishes she could make herself invisible.
‘Are you okay?’
Bill’s voice is soft, forgiving, but Annie does not want his forgiveness. What she needed from him he failed to provide and now it is he who should be seeking forgiveness, not her.
She hears him pad over to the crib, hears him coo reassurances as he lifts the baby from under the cotton sheet, hears her cries reduce to a gentle whimper. It is a form of magic, this ability he has to stop the baby crying where Annie cannot. It is a type of sorcery Annie had possessed with Clare, with Laura, with Danny, but now it seems to have abandoned her.
‘Pam and Alan are downstairs. They’ve popped round with a lamb stew for dinner. Why don’t you come down? They’d love to see you.’
It cannot be almost dinnertime. If it is, the day has passed without her noticing and she has no idea where the lost hours have gone.
She shakes her head, the heels of her hands pressed against her eye sockets.
‘Come on. It’d do you good. It’s only Pam and Alan. You don’t even have to get dressed. Just pop your dressing gown on.’
She does not move, keeps her breaths shallow.
‘Annie, please. Clare and Laura are both on sleepovers. It’ll just be the four of us. And Nell, of course.’
If she could make herself disappear, she would. She does not want to see Pam and Alan, does not want to see anyone. She just wants to be alone.
‘Okay, well I’ll take Nell down and give her a bottle. That’s what you want, little one, don’t you? You’re a hungry Poppet, aren’t you? We’ll be downstairs if you want to come down.’
She listens to him leave, whispering endearments into the baby’s ear. ‘Let’s get you some food shall we, sweetheart? Are you a hungry girl?’ There is nothing pointed in Bill’s voice but Annie hears the accusations anyway: Your mummy won’t feed you, will she? Your mummy’s useless, isn’t she? Your mummy can’t even get herself dressed, can she?
The door closes behind them and she listens to the soft tread of Bill’s feet on the carpeted stairs, to the diminuendo of his footsteps, wanting to be certain that he isn’t coming back. And then she hears muffled exclamations from the lounge below and she imagines Pam stretching out her arms, taking the baby from Bill, gazing down beatifically at it. The thought curls Annie’s fingers into hardened balls.
All she wants is silence.
She has seen neither Pam nor Alan since the day her waters broke, has seen no one except Bill and the girls and the hospital staff. She has not wanted to see anyone, is not capable of keeping up the pretence.
The muscles in her stomach push against the wall of her bladder and she propels herself to her feet, onto the pale blue carpet worn through with years of footfall. Treading carefully, she heads for the door and opens it slowly so as not to alert the gathering below. She moves silently towards the bathroom, is level with the top of the stairs when she hears their voices.
‘I really think you need to get the doctor to see her.’ Pam’s voice is hushed but it still drifts through the lounge door, up the stairs and into Annie’s ears.
‘It’s still early days. She’s just . . . tired, that’s all.’ Bill does not sound convincing and Annie does not move, transfixed by a conversation she knows she is not meant to hear.
