Marguerite
Marguerite
MUCH TO ELLEN’S DISMAY, SHE AND LEO WERE invited to France for Christmas, just as they were on the point of booking a winter sun holiday. ‘She says my half-brothers are going skiing with their father,’ Leo told Ellen after a phone call, ‘so she’ll be on her own if we don’t show up. Would you mind?’
What could she do but agree? He’d spent just one Christmas with his mother since he and Ellen had got together – and knowing that Marguerite wasn’t exactly enamoured by her son’s choice of partner, Ellen guessed that saying no to this invitation would be another black mark against her, so on Christmas Eve they flew to Nantes.
By now, Ellen’s jeans were beginning to be difficult to fasten. Her ankles were puffy, and her calves ached when she climbed the stairs. Her initial queasiness had been replaced by heartburn, and she was waking up more frequently at night with a bladder demanding to be emptied.
‘Wait till you get to the last three months,’ Joan warned. ‘You’ll be waddling instead of walking, and your back will kill you, and you’ll go to the loo a million times a day. Just wait and see.’
None of this bothered Ellen unduly. The thought that a baby, her and Leo’s baby, was growing inside her was a continuing source of joy. Let the symptoms do their worst: she couldn’t wait to be a mother, and she was certain that as soon as Leo saw his child, he would be just as smitten as her.
They were met at the airport by Marguerite’s driver, Claude, who on being introduced to Ellen lifted her hand and touched it to his lips, and murmured ‘ Bonne Noel, Madame ’. He was silver-haired and dignified, and as upright when he sat in the driver’s seat of Marguerite’s enormous old Peugeot as a man forty years younger.
It was bitterly cold. Huddled into her red coat, Ellen looked through the car window at skeletal trees and bare hedgerows stiff and white with frost. She tucked the wool blanket that Claude had produced from the car boot more tightly around her, and yearned for blue skies and sunshine.
The house where Marguerite and her sons lived was located a few miles from the centre of Nantes. Ellen’s first sight of it put her in mind of the Bennet home in Pride and Prejudice . Inside, it featured high-ceilinged rooms with large fireplaces where tiny fires flickered, and elegant sash windows whose insides were frosted over when Leo folded back the shutters each morning, and ancient radiators that clanked and groaned and did their best. Ellen shivered her way through the week in three layers of woollens, and clung to Leo in bed at night, craving warmth rather than passion.
But the bed linens were crisp and immaculate, the pillows feathery and deep, the mattress just the right balance of firm and soft. Their room had a view of rolling hills and patchwork fields, and the cook, Emmaline, wife of Claude, and as round and rosy as he was pale and straight, brought mugs of steaming hot chocolate up the stairs in the mornings that sent sugary heat rushing all the way to Ellen’s toes.
And to be fair, Marguerite was gracious. She greeted Ellen civilly on arrival and congratulated her on the pregnancy, and enquired as to how she was feeling – and Ellen couldn’t help wondering if Leo had had a word.
Marguerite instructed Claude, who seemed to double as a sort of manservant, to light a fire each evening in Leo and Ellen’s room. She told Leo that Claude and the car were at their disposal for the week, and she brought them to a local hotel for Christmas dinner, and invited neighbours in for drinks another night.
But in her dealings with Ellen, particularly if Leo wasn’t within earshot, she remained coolly distant – and once or twice Ellen thought she caught a look directed at her that felt antagonistic. She decided it was just the woman’s default expression – and anyway, they didn’t have to be best friends.
She was sorry the half-brothers weren’t around to provide distraction. ‘You’ll meet them soon,’ Leo promised. ‘We’ll have them over to London.’
In the middle of their stay Ellen developed a chesty cough which Emmaline treated with honey and ginger teas, and bowls of soup so spicy they made Ellen’s eyes water, and by the time they touched down in London the cough had pretty much dried up. ‘Could we coax Emmaline to come and be our nanny?’ she asked Leo, and he laughed and said he wouldn’t dare try to steal her away from Maman .
Frances had been right in her prediction that Kevin wouldn’t last. ‘He and Mam have split up,’ Joan reported on the phone in early January. ‘She didn’t say why, and I didn’t ask. It’s tough on both of them, still having to work together. How was Christmas in France?’
‘Lovely.’
Her mother hadn’t responded to the letter Ellen had sent from Frances’ house. At Christmas, a card had arrived to Ellen’s old address with Happy Christmas Ellen written on it, and no mention of Leo. Apart from the Walkman that Ellen used daily on her journey to work, her mother continued to disappoint her spectacularly.
As her pregnancy advanced, they made preparations.
‘Yellow,’ she said, ‘for the nursery. Works for a boy and a girl.’
‘It’ll be a boy,’ Leo said. ‘I can feel it.’
‘What if it’s not?’
‘We send it back, of course, and demand another.’
They furnished the nursery with a cradle and a rocking chair and a chest of drawers, all cream. They found a mobile to hang above the cradle, zoo animals dangling. Lucinda came one Sunday afternoon and painted a moon on the ceiling and a cow jumping over it.
When the room was ready they stood in the doorway, taking it in. Ellen found his hand and lifted it to her lips and kissed it. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
He looked at her with a quizzical smile. ‘For what?’
‘For everything.’
At the end of April Ellen rang Laura at the employment agency. ‘Do you supply nannies?’ she asked.
‘We certainly do. Are you in the market for one?’
‘We will be, around the end of August, when my maternity leave is up. Someone mature,’ she said, ‘with lots of experience.’ As it looked like neither grandmother would be involved to any great extent in the baby’s life, she thought an older nanny might go some way towards filling that gap.
Two weeks before her due date she finished work, weary of the round-the-clock trips to the loo that Joan had promised, and a constant ache in her lower back that made it difficult to stay sitting for long, regardless of how many cushions she propped there, and the sheer effort of hauling her extra bulk around.
‘Ring me,’ she said to Lucinda, ‘if you need to toss around ideas. I can still think, even if I’m physically useless.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it – put your feet up and forget about us. We’ll struggle on till you get back.’ They sent her home in a taxi, with a stack of tiny unisex clothing from Harrods and a new bottle of Chanel No. 5.
Two days before Ellen’s due date, Claire came to visit. The new deli was doing well, all pale wood and stainless steel. Cold, Ellen had thought when she’d seen it a few weeks earlier. Smart and sophisticated, but lacking the colour and warmth of the sandwich bar.
Claire seemed happy, though. She brought a trio of picture books and a giant bar of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut that Ellen immediately opened. Throughout the pregnancy she’d craved chocolate, which normally she could take or leave.
‘Still no word from your mother?’
‘No.’
Her baby would have two largely absentee grandmothers, a pair of great-grandparents who would probably never know of their existence, and a grandfather whose whereabouts were unknown. The rest of their relatives were separated by either the Irish Sea or the English Channel. Not exactly your typical Irish family.
They would grow up with English and Irish passports – a French one too, if they wanted – and they would probably have a hybrid, but mostly English, accent. They would be fluent in French thanks to their father, and they would ski from an early age if Leo had his way. Ellen had yet to decide if it was a battle she wanted to fight, already imagining a catastrophic accident on the slopes that would leave their child paralysed from the neck down before the age of ten.
But she would definitely do battle on the Eton front. Leo had been sent as a boarder there at twelve, an action which Ellen privately regarded as tantamount to child cruelty. Time enough for that confrontation.
‘What does it feel like?’ Claire asked.
‘Being pregnant?’
‘Not physically, mentally. Knowing you’re going to be a mam.’
‘It’s scary. Such a huge thing, bringing a new person into the world, having it entirely dependent on you – but it’s exciting too.’
‘You’ll be a good mother,’ Claire said, breaking off another square of chocolate. Ellen wondered if she ever regretted the abortion. Her child would be five now, developing a personality, already showing signs of the adult it would become.
‘Best of luck,’ Claire said on leaving. ‘Let me know when there’s news.’
Five days later, there was news. On the nineteenth of May 1988, Juliet arrived, and the world shifted on its axis.