Chapter 6
6
B ack from her receptionist job at the health centre, Helen dumped her handbag on the kitchen table and stood staring at her fridge. Something was missing but she couldn’t think what. She was full to the brim from an afternoon of ingrowing toenails, mucus-encrusted noses and her co-worker Daisy’s home-made tiffin cake. She narrowed her eyes. The dried-up painting Jack did at primary school was still there, and the chipped London Bridge magnet. But what was missing?
She couldn’t think so she walked over to the sink, leaned across the drainer and stared at her garden instead.
Can we wait until the scan?
That had been Libby’s response to her first tentative questions. How, Libby? What will you do Libby? What will we do? Why didn’t you…?
So she’d stopped asking and started waiting, and the prickly tensions of the house had bubbled away under a shaky lid that prevented discussion of everything that might have needed discussing. Her daughter was in shock, she needed time, that’s what Helen kept telling herself. Either that or wilful denial.
Still, the scan had come along, and with it a due date and, helpless, Helen had felt the mood of the house shift again. Into this present becalmed period of nest building. A state of being that seemed to Helen to have been woven from thin air and yet was as sticky and stealthily inescapable as a spider’s web.
Nappies, for example. No one had asked her, but suddenly she was buying nappies again. Emptying drawers, moving furniture. Trawling the baby aisles of the supermarket and reading the small print on bottle teats, moving through a world that she had become glued to – each attempt to free herself with a quiet half-hour looking at houses she might be able to afford was an exertion of ever-decreasing will.
And it wasn’t until twenty-four hours ago, when she’d finally battled her way up the ladder into the attic to look for all sorts of half-forgotten baby paraphernalia, and glimpsed instead her hopelessly old-fashioned rucksack, that, standing there on the top rung, she’d thrust her head back, broken the thick sticky surface of this world, and gasped for air!
The sight of it had slapped her awake. Produced tears. Her poor old rucksack! Bought with the proceeds of a summer job in Woolworths, it had once had so much hope invested in it. It should have spent a gap year trekking the beaches and deserts of Australia. Her father had scoffed all that into oblivion. Her husband had never wanted to go any further than the next mountain and, for reasons that were now as lost to Helen as size eight jeans, she had allowed it to sit up here, in the dust and dark of a rarely visited attic.
Because where had it ever gone? One week in Cornwall and a series of weekends in wet and windy western Scotland, where she’d traipsed along behind Lawrence, pretending to enjoy herself. Oh, and that wonderful weekend at Stonehenge, the last year of uni with Caro and Kay. That one weekend of her life when she’d felt closer to breaking free of all the expectations that bound her than at any other time in her entire life.
She hadn’t intended to bring it down and dust it off, but leaving it up there was suddenly not an option. So now here it was, propped up against the side of the tumble drier. Where it was going from there, she didn’t know.
She straightened up, dragging her hands through her hair. The lawn needed mowing. Pink carnations and peonies bloomed. The lupins were out and the poppies, and ever reliable Hebe: all the colours of an English summer.
From upstairs came the soft whomp-whomp of a drum beat, otherwise the house was silent. Helen folded her arms, turned back to the kitchen and looked again at the fridge door. What was missing?
Can we wait until after?
That had been Lawrence’s response, when she’d ambushed him in the kitchen last night, with the suggestion that they really needed to talk. Now. Today. The rucksack and all its dusty memories galvanising her.
After?
After Libby has the baby.
At which point, Libby and her hugely swollen belly had appeared in the room silencing all discussion.
So here they all still were. Waiting, waiting, waiting… All of them bound up in this web of a house, navigating directional lines that hummed with tension. Lawrence to work, cycling or running, anything that needed a Garmin gadget. Helen to work and the garden, where she mostly just stood, hijacked by memories of Kaveh. Jack to school and Libby, the spider in the middle. Waiting, waiting, waiting.
Sighing as loudly as she possibly could, she went to the fridge, pulled out an open bottle of wine and took a glass from the dishwasher. As the bottle glugged out a cold inch she sighed again. The drumbeat from upstairs was getting louder. First, she glanced at the clock, then she tipped her head to the ceiling. The sound, now she listened, was coming from Libby’s room. She sighed again, and this time her sigh was loud enough for her mother to hear it in her grave. But really? She’d been at work all day, and now there was a dinner to be made, and Libby was sat up in her room playing music?
She banged her wine glass on the drainer and walked back to the fridge, opened the door and stared angrily at the contents. Salad. Potatoes. A bowl of cooked rice, at least a week old. There was always a bowl of rice at least a week old. She took it out and banged it into the compost bin. Bang… Bang, bang, bang. So where was Libby? Where was the mother-to-be, if not here in the kitchen learning to be a mother? She threw the bowl into the sink and went through the motions of preparing a meal for her family.
Lawrence came home, unstrapped his Garmin watch and laid it ceremoniously across the dresser.
Jack came home, dropped his rucksack in the hallway and put his phone on charge.
Libby came downstairs, yawning.
‘Dinner,’ Helen announced, ‘is ready.’
At the table a subdued Jack ate with his head down. He hated fish. Poor Jack. He’d looked, Helen thought, perpetually bewildered since Libby came home, like he’d wandered into the wrong house. She watched him fork reluctant mouthful after reluctant mouthful. Libby had been his hero. And, three years older, she’d been his protector, bossy, confident and always right. Talk about a fall from grace. Added to this of course was Helen’s own recent fall from the pedestal of motherhood and so yes, poor, poor Jack. The sight of his bowed head and stooped shoulders squeezed her heart. Her boy had always been chilled and loose as a hand-knitted cardigan, easy as a Sunday morning and, she realised, wholly unprepared for a life that was going to have plenty of rainy fucked-up Mondays. The lump of fish in her mouth dried up. She forced it down with a gulp of wine as the understanding of the precious little time left to get him ready stuck in her throat.
It was mere weeks now until he left for university. So how to prepare him? How to prevent him from making the same stupid and fundamental mistake as his sister? What must she get through to him before he left? And how to do it? From nowhere a cold, tripping panic began, flinging open thought after thought like so many kitchen cupboards. Her fingers drummed the table. Where to start? Jack couldn’t even do his laundry, and he had about as much ambition as a sloth. Whereas Libby. Libby had been pairing socks since she was eight (and look where that had got her). Libby had led the successful charge that Yes, Disney Princesses Set Harmful Stereotypes in her sixth form debating competition (useful as a chocolate teapot when it came to insisting on contraception). Her fingers stopped drumming and clamped themselves around the stem of her glass instead. What the hell did she need to get through to Jack before he walked out of her door almost forever?
‘I had an answer from the English department today,’ Libby said. ‘I’ll be able to take my exams in January.’
And all her mental cartwheeling came to a shuddering stop. Helen put her glass down. ‘January?’ she said as lightly as she could, a speeded-up film of nappies and pink, baby limbs whirling through her mind now. ‘The baby will be less than six months old in January, Libby.’
Libby shrugged. ‘It’s OK, Mum. I’ve done all the revision and everything. It’ll be like a week, that’s all.’
‘A week?’ Helen swirled the contents of her glass. ‘And who’s going to have the baby then?’
‘I was thinking…’ Libby paused. ‘I was hoping,’ she began again, ‘that maybe…’ And quite suddenly she trailed off.
You, Mum.
Those were the missing words, and everyone at the table knew it, although of course no one would actually say it. The conspiracy of it all enraged her! Lit her up, like paraffin on a bonfire. ‘What about after your finals?’ she said tightly, because arguing against a week was hopeless, and of course she wanted Libby to take her finals and of course she would look after her grandchild, but that wasn’t really what this conversation was about. Suddenly, and it felt strangely exhilarating, Helen understood that all the waiting was finally over.
‘I had some ideas. About the masters programme, but…’ And again, Libby trailed off as if what she was going to say was far more difficult than she’d anticipated.
Now Lawrence looked up. ‘What about if you were to cut back?’ he said.
‘Me?’ Helen blinked, trying to look surprised, trying to look as if she hadn’t been expecting this every single day since Libby came home.
‘You’ve been there so long. I’m sure they’ll be willing to find something that works for everyone.’
‘Everyone?’ she mouthed, holding Lawrence’s eye.
‘It’s just a suggestion,’ he said and went back to his plate.
Helen looked away. The emotion she felt now wasn’t even hot enough to be anger. It was more of a lukewarm resigned sludge of whatever. Twenty years of climbing every mountain in the world to escape the daily drudgery and slug of parental responsibility and now her husband was oh-so-casually dumping someone else’s responsibility on her doorstep. This isn’t your baby, Helen. Who had said that? No one had said that! No one was in her camp, aside from Caro and Kay.
A great tuning fork of truth banged down on her head and she turned to look at Jack, who, head down, was emulating his father. This. This is what she needed to teach Jack. She needed to show her son exactly where the buck stopped, in a way she obviously hadn’t with Libby. Exactly where. And if necessary she’d get a stick out and draw the line at his toes. Here, son. This is where it starts and ends. And suddenly she was thinking of Kay and how wagons of responsibility had circled around her life and how Kay had done nothing but rise to the challenge and then, looking from Jack to Libby, it felt entirely possible to Helen that both her children were actually capable of growing into people she could find it possible to dislike. It was a stunning, dreadful idea. And it was her fault!
And Lawrence? Well, what was the point of including him in this parental day of judgment?
Her eyes narrowed to slits. She loved her daughter. God knows she loved Libby, but this baby wasn’t her baby, and she had no intention, not even for a moment, of allowing Libby to make the mistake of thinking that it was. ‘What were you thinking? ’ she asked. ‘That I would look after the baby?’
Libby nodded.
Jack bit down on his lip.
Lawrence folded his hands into his chin as he leaned his elbows on the table.
Helen didn’t speak. She picked up her glass and looked up to the antique-copper lampshade overhead, dull from lack of polishing, and across to the hand-painted tiles behind the butler sink and the duck-egg-blue Roman blind, which had cost nearly five hundred quid (and that was twelve years ago!). She looked past her daughter to the massive pine dresser, where a large collection of spotty Emma Bridgewater crockery sat unused, and beyond, to the Aga, cluttered with pans, and the fridge… And suddenly she knew what was missing from the fridge door! Her magnetic pad with the picture of the kingfisher. Her ￡2.99 pad that was hers and hers alone – because no one uses notepads any more. Two bloody pounds and ninety-nine pence! Where had it gone? Was nothing sacred? She turned back to the table. The solid oak table Lawrence’s parents had bought them as a wedding present, which had seen ten thousand breakfasts and ten thousand suppers, and she knew what they were all waiting for. Her family with their ten thousand needs. They were waiting for her to commit to ten thousand more! She took a sip of wine and Cypriot flavoured memories flooded back. Kaveh. Sea and salt. The boy’s dusty limbs outside the taverna. Postcards of her life. The trail of gold-dust that had been her stillborn son’s eyebrow came back to her.
‘I’m sorry, Libby,’ she said as she put her glass down and shook her head. ‘But this baby is your responsibility. I’ll help. But it starts and ends with you. This is your life now. Not mine.’
Because suppers weren’t postcards. And if this wasn’t quite the last one, the last one was now in sight.