The Impossible Truths of Love, page 18
‘What? Come on, it can’t be any worse than telling me Mum was depressed for months after I was born.’ Nell has attempted to inject some humour into her voice but can hear her hunger for information.
Laura wraps the Jcloth around her hand, pulls hard, the tips of her fingers turning red. ‘Then you ended up being Mum’s favourite. You were the one she always loved the most.’ There is a strain in Laura’s voice, like a spring that has been coiled too tight. ‘You’ve always been the one she loved best, you know you have—’
‘Laura—’
‘It’s fine, I’m a grownup, I can handle it now. But it wasn’t easy when we were younger, knowing how besotted she was with you. It was like she was obsessed. She just wanted you with her all the time. Clare and I barely got a lookin.’ There is something out of kilter in Laura’s voice and it takes a few seconds for Nell to understand what it is: Laura is trying to be kind but her resentment has trickled through like blood seeping into a thin piece of gauze. ‘It wasn’t your fault. You were just a baby. To be honest, I think Clare found it harder than I did.’ Laura pauses, meets Nell’s eye, looks away again quickly. ‘I have sometimes wondered whether Clare would’ve got pregnant so young if things had been different at home.’
It takes a few seconds for the implication to take shape in Nell’s mind and when it does, it is as though she is holding a shell against each ear and all she can hear is the distant swell of the sea. She thinks of Clare’s short, unhappy marriage, all her years as a single parent, and the thought that she is inadvertently responsible is like a leaden weight deep in her stomach.
‘I’m sorry, Nell. That was a shitty thing to say. Clare was an adult, she was old enough to take responsibility for her own decisions.’
Nell shakes her head, her mind scrambling to put everything she has heard into coherent order, but her thoughts are a tangled ball and will not be untwined. ‘I’d better get back to Mum’s. There’s so much to do.’ She picks up her bag, slings it over her shoulder.
‘Please don’t rush off. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.’
Nell twists the keyring of her mum’s house keys around her finger, lets it dig into her skin. ‘I pushed you to tell me. I wanted to know.’ Her voice is higher than usual, as though her vocal cords are being stretched by invisible hands. She turns and walks out of the kitchen, into the hall, Laura following closely on her heels.
‘If you give me ten minutes, I’ll come with you. I need to sort out the last of the lounge anyway.’
Nell puts a hand on the front door lock, pulls it open. ‘Honestly, don’t worry. I’ll see you later.’ She doesn’t wait for a reply as she turns and walks down the short garden path.
As she hurries away, theories clamour in her head like clues to a puzzle she does not know how to solve. And loudest of all she hears her dad’s voice, eighteen words that continue to echo in her ears: You need to know that I’ve always loved you even though you were never really mine to love. They are like a bruise on her memory that will not heal and as she arrives outside her parents’ house, she knows what it is she must do. There is only one way to answer the question that otherwise may never be silenced.
THEN
The doorbell rings and Annie leaves Nell on her playmat, walks into the hall, glancing at the clock on her way. Ten thirty. They are right on time.
When she opens the door, Denise and Pam stand smiling at her. Melissa is asleep in the pushchair, head lolled to one side.
There is a moment’s hesitation, an awkwardness born of unfamiliarity. It is eight months since the three of them were last together, and Annie does not know how to close the gap for which she is responsible. But then Pam bundles the pushchair into the narrow hallway, throws an arm around Annie’s shoulder and squeezes tightly.
‘We come bearing gifts.’ From underneath the pushchair she retrieves a square cardboard cake box. ‘I’ll get some plates, shall I, put the kettle on?’ She doesn’t wait for a reply before breezing into the kitchen, and Annie is grateful for her informality.
Denise hugs her, heads into the lounge, makes a beeline for Nell. ‘Oh my God, she’s adorable. Those eyes! She’s just gorgeous.’ Denise sits crosslegged on the floor beside Nell, picks up a fluffy bunny, bounces it along the playmat, Nell laughing in response. ‘I can’t believe how big she is.’
There is no censure in Denise’s voice, but Annie feels it nonetheless: the months she has allowed to go by without seeing her friends, without letting her friends see her baby.
‘Right, where shall I put this? The kettle’s on.’ Pam carries a tray with cakes, paper napkins, and a stack of side plates. Leaving it on the dining table, she joins Denise on the floor, tells Nell what a pretty girl she is, and Annie feels a rush of relief that her friends are making things so normal, that there are none of the tacit recriminations she has been dreading.
It is three months since Bill came home and found Annie with her collection of newspaper cuttings. Three months since he called Dr Lewis, who came to visit Annie the next day when the girls were at school, and talked to her in his kindly, avuncular manner about the way she was feeling and what might be causing it. At first she had not wanted to listen, had refused to answer any of his questions, but he had returned a second time, and then a third, and it was on the third visit that he managed to persuade her to try a course of antidepressants, just to see if they might help regulate her feelings. For the first few weeks she had felt nothing, had thought it a waste of time. But then she had noticed how the edge had been taken off her feelings: anger diluted to irritation; panic abated; the heaviness of her limbs lightened. There had been headaches at first but they had eased in time. Now there is a strange sense of distance where once her heightened emotions had been, and Annie is not yet sure whether she likes the way the medication clouds her thoughts and feelings, rendering them slightly out of reach. She has told this to Bill and Dr Lewis, and they have both raised the same point: whether this slight distance from her feelings is not preferable to the amplified emotions she had been experiencing before.
Since starting the medication, she has been seeing Dr Lewis every week, late on a Wednesday afternoon, while Bill looks after the girls. The doctor has sought to reassure her that it is not uncommon, what she has experienced: postnatal depression is surprisingly widespread, he has said, and given what she has already been through with Danny, he does not seem surprised that Nell’s birth caused a recurrence of the melancholy she had suffered then. Grief, Dr Lewis has told her, can manifest itself in a multitude of ways.
‘Is she hitting all her development milestones okay?’ Pam runs a finger along Nell’s hairline where dark curls cling to her scalp.
As if on cue, Nell points a chubby finger towards Annie. ‘Ma! Ma!’ Annie beams with pride as Pam and Denise burst out laughing.
‘Just the odd sound like that. And she’s crawling everywhere. I have to watch her like a hawk.’ Annie crouches down, scoops Nell into her arms, sits her on her lap and hands her the clothbound book she picked up in the charity shop last week.
‘That’s incredible at eight months. None of mine tried to speak before their first birthday.’
Annie turns the pages of the book, pointing at various animals as she says their names aloud, kisses Nell’s cheek, her daughter’s porcelain skin as soft as silk.
It has taken time – more time, Annie knows, than it ever should – but between Bill, Dr Lewis and the antidepressants, she has begun to accept that what happened in those months after Nell’s birth was a symptom of her illness. That it was hormones and historical trauma that had made her imagine such terrible things. It is still early days, but now when she holds Nell in her arms, she is aware of something swelling inside her chest: the love she ought to have felt from the outset that has finally begun to take root inside her now.
From the hallway comes the squawk of a child, and Pam goes to fetch Melissa. They return a few moments later, Melissa clutching Pam’s fingers in one hand, a toy penguin in the other. She burrows her face into Pam’s thigh when she sees Annie, and Annie feels a stab of guilt that Melissa – now almost three and a half – no longer recognises her after an eightmonth absence. ‘Come and say hello to Nell. She’s got some lovely toys you can play with.’
Melissa buries her head further into Pam’s leg, who lifts her into her arms and sits down with her on the floor. ‘You’re still a bit sleepy, aren’t you, sweetie?’
As the three women talk about the council’s refusal to renovate the playground, about the supermarket opening up in town, about Pam’s new nextdoor neighbours, the butterflies that had been flitting inside Annie’s stomach since she got up this morning begin to settle, and she is aware of a feeling she has not experienced in a very long time: a feeling of normality. After months of darkness, there is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, and she can finally see the possibility of a happy future for her family.
NOW
She has only just closed the front door behind her when she hears a voice calling out.
‘Laura, is that you?’
Nell curses under her breath, annoyed with herself for not realising Clare might be there.
‘It’s me. I’ve just got to get something.’
Clare strides into the hall, stands in front of Nell like a sentry on duty. ‘Where have you been? Denise said you left ages ago, that you were only popping out to get some bread and milk.’ She looks down at Nell’s empty hands.
Nell opens her mouth to defend herself, thinks of all the boxes she has lugged down from the loft, all the rubbish she has transported to the dump, all the cupboards she has emptied and the clothes she has taken to the charity shop. But then she looks at Clare’s tight expression, at the patch of eczema in the crook of her elbow, and thinks about all that Laura has just told her, all that Clare has been through without Nell ever knowing. ‘I’m sorry. I got totally distracted. I can pop out now to get some bread and milk?’
Clare shakes her head with exaggerated vigour. ‘Don’t bother. I’ll get Laura to pick some up on her way over.’
Clare tuts and Nell feels it immediately: the pull towards conflict that has been their default position for as long as she can remember. It happens so quickly, as if they are both operating on autopilot, but today she does not want to take Clare’s bait. Today she has no intention of allowing them both to fall into that same, familiar trap.
‘I really am sorry I was so long. I know this is hard for all of us – you and Laura especially, doing the lion’s share of it – but I just needed to clear my head for a bit.’ She looks at Clare expectantly, waits for her sister’s impatience to make itself known, is nonplussed when it is not forthcoming.
A series of imagined scenes slip into Nell’s head: Clare, aged eleven, watching her mother fall apart after the death of her child; Clare, aged thirteen, anxiously awaiting the return of her mum from the hospital; Clare sensing her mother’s love pivot to her baby sister and being unable to win back her attention; Clare, aged eighteen, falling pregnant, getting married, escaping a household in which the centre of gravity has shifted, relocating her from the nucleus to the periphery.
Nell reaches out a hand, places it on the flesh of Clare’s arm, just below the elbow. Clare flinches almost infinitesimally, but Nell keeps it there. ‘Mum’s so lucky to have you around. Dad was too. I don’t know what either of them would have done without you.’
There is a moment’s stillness, like the hesitation before a breath, like the darkness before dawn, and it seems to Nell that she and Clare are balancing on the braided wire of a tightrope, waiting to see which way they will fall, whether they will be caught.
Eventually Clare looks up, meets Nell’s gaze. ‘Thanks. It’s not just me. Laura obviously does a lot too.’ There is none of the usual corrosiveness in Clare’s voice and Nell allows her hand to rest on her sister’s arm a moment longer before Clare turns around, calls over her shoulder. ‘I’d better get back to the kitchen cupboards. You wouldn’t believe how much grime there is in them.’
Nell watches her disappear behind the kitchen door. The moment she is gone the flutter of adrenaline returns, and she is reminded what she has come for, where she needs to go.
Heading up the stairs, two at a time, she turns left into her bedroom and grabs her overnight bag before heading back across the landing and into the bathroom. Locking the door behind her, she opens the white cabinet above the sink, where pill bottles fight for space with tweezers, nail scissors, scrunched up plastic shower caps. On her mum’s shelf she sees what she is looking for amidst halfused tubs of face cream, a tattered blue washbag with a broken zip, and a bottle of talcum powder yellowed with age. She pulls it out and puts it down on the toilet lid before reaching up on tiptoes to search through her dad’s shelf. She takes out a bottle of cod liver oil way past its expiry date, a stick of deodorant, a bottle of aftershave from which she lifts the lid, inhales deeply, letting the smell fill her nose. But she puts that aside too, continues to rummage through the clutter with her fingers until she finds what she is looking for lying flat on the shelf. She takes it out, places it next to her mum’s on the seat of the toilet, looks at them side by side.
Her mum’s black Denham hair brush.
Her dad’s brown tortoiseshell comb.
Staring at them both, she wonders if she really has the courage to do this.
There is a clatter from the kitchen downstairs and Nell’s heart leaps. Pulling off a long strip of toilet paper, she wraps it around her father’s comb until it is completely secure, places it carefully in the inside pocket of her overnight bag. With a second sheaf of paper, she prises a handful of hairs from her mum’s brush, folds the paper around them, winding it in every direction so as to seal any gaps, before opening the zip of her purse and placing it inside as gently as if lowering a baby into its crib.
She is careful to watch her tread as she heads back down the stairs, careful to avoid the creaking fourth step. Opening the front door, she clicks down the Yale lock slowly so as not to make a sound, closing it softly behind her, muting the snap of the lock back into its cylinder. Getting into her car, she texts a joint apology to Laura and Clare, tells them that something has come up at work, that she has to leave but will be back soon. She knows it is a flimsy excuse. But she also knows that she has to do this. If she doesn’t do it now, she may never find the courage.
THEN
Birthday cards are lined up on the mantelpiece, like pictures in an art gallery awaiting inspection.
Happy 2nd Birthday!
To A Super 2YearOld!
You’re 2!
Annie’s eyes travel along the cards, and then down to the lounge floor where Nell is pushing pieces of wood through the holes of a shape sorter.
How can two years have passed? she thinks. How can it be two years since she had lain in that hospital bed, feeling her world turn upside down, thinking such dark, terrible thoughts?
‘Mama! You take! You push dem dare!’
Nell points to the shape sorter with a chubby finger and Annie kneels down on the carpet next to her, picks up a red star. ‘This one?’
Nell nods. Annie makes a pantomime of trying to fit it into the circular hole, and then the square. ‘I’m not very good at this, am I? Why don’t you have a go?’ She passes the wooden shape back to Nell who finds the right hole immediately, twiddles it with a dexterous hand, pushes it through.
‘Me do it!’
Annie wraps her arms around Nell, hugs her tightly. ‘Well done, angel, you clever girl.’ She kisses the top of Nell’s head where a mass of dark curls cling to her scalp as if wary of straying too far from her head. People keep telling Annie they’re just baby curls, that they will disappear with her first haircut, never to be replaced, but Annie refuses to believe them. She has never seen such beautiful hair on a child. It is so unlike her own mousey hair, so unlike Clare’s and Laura’s; they have hair so fine it refuses to be styled. Annie has always kept the older girls’ hair short as a result, but Nell’s hair she imagines tumbling down her back like a character in a period drama.
‘Me do dat jigsaw.’ Nell points to some jigsaws on top of the mahogany sideboard.
‘Which one? The world jigsaw or the alphabet one?’
‘Da world!’
Annie laughs and leans across to the sideboard, prises the box from beneath a pile of other toys, puts it on the floor. Lifting the lid, she takes out the chunky wooden frame, arranges the individual pieces in a random formation on the playmat. Nell’s eyes scan the choice of brightly coloured continents decorated with animals and buildings, before picking up the jagged South American triangle and slotting it correctly into place. Asia, Africa and North America follow. Europe is a trickier fit where the edges abut Asia, and Nell wiggles it from side to side, trying to make it go in, but her angle is slightly skewed and it will not comply. She looks up at Annie, frustration puckering the skin across her forehead, and Annie resists the urge to dive in and do it for her. ‘You can do it. Just turn it round a bit and it’ll fit. You just have to keep trying.’ Nell focuses back on the jigsaw, eyes narrowed with concentration, and after a few seconds Europe slips into place.
‘Look, Mama! Me do it!’ Nell beams up at her, pride shining from her eyes.
‘Well done. Now can you find Antarctica?’
Nell identifies it correctly, fits it into its rightful slot, before doing the same with Oceania. Her eyes roam over the remaining twenty pieces, the countries that fit on top of their continents, and Annie watches in silence as Nell picks up Argentina, Russia, India, Germany and slots them into place.
When Elsa had given Nell the jigsaw puzzle at her second birthday party a fortnight ago, Annie had rolled her eyes at Pam, bemused that someone should have so little conception of a twoyearold’s capabilities, bringing her a present clearly way beyond her years. Pam had laughed and the pair of them had shared a moment’s silent agreement that Elsa, at twentyfive, would inevitably choose an inappropriate gift.
