Half Broken Things

March

Hiya Nan! I’ve picked up my stuff, sorry you werent here you must be at work. Thought you might be wondering where I was, well Jace and me have split, dont worry I wont be in your way, I’ve got somewhere to stay! Jace and me just wasnt working out, I’m staying with Michael now, he’s just a friend, he’s really nice, alot older than me, I’ll send you the address. Anyway dont worry, but you’r not the worrying kind! I am making a go of it this time, hopefully thing will work out. I took Ј10 from the draw, I will pay you back, thats a promise Nan. I’m sorry I gave you heartache in the past hopefully thats all behind me now, Luv from Steph xxxxx

ps theres also a pan, 2 blankets plus a towel they looked like they were old ones, if you want some money for them I will pay you back.

On the first few days after Steph’s arrival Michael had gone out in the mornings before she was properly awake, apparently embarrassed by her presence. Then one day Steph got up and made him some toast, and as he ate it standing in the kitchen he told her, in what felt like an exchange- information for breakfast- that he would be out trying to do a bit of dealing. That day Steph blitzed the flat and was asleep on the sofa when Michael returned in the afternoon. He made her a cup of tea, sniffing at the air that was vibrant with the smells from plastic bottles lined up on the draining board, with names like citrus cavalcade and mountain mist.

A few days later when he came back his face was tight. When Steph asked him what was wrong, the look had turned to one of slight confusion. He told her about Ken, who was worse and was going into a home. He had just come from there.

‘Aw, got no family to go to? Poor old soul,’ Steph said, putting teabags into mugs and getting out milk, in the manner of the sort of mildly compassionate, busy wife that she had seen on television.

‘He’s not old, he’s just disabled. He was in the Gulf War. Got divorced after he came back. Doesn’t see his kids and his wife’s got someone else now. He’s got emphysema, other stuff as well, he can hardly walk. He’s in a right state.’ He paused with the effort of producing so many words at once. ‘Got medals. Decorated, he was- he’s got medals. That’s about all he’s got, poor bugger.’

‘He’s got you. He’s got a friend.’

Michael frowned. He had never thought of himself as Ken’s friend although it had been a slight surprise to realise, as he was talking, just how sorry he felt about him and how much he knew about him, when he had never noticed being actively sympathetic or curious. He grunted and sipped at the mug of tea that Steph had poured out, struggling in his mind with another surprise: the strangeness of being asked by Steph what the matter was. He had not realised that his face might betray his feelings. Even less had he expected there to be someone else around to notice the look on his face and care. But he had stopped wondering, on his way back to the flat in the afternoons, if she would still be there. He took it for granted that she would be.

‘Yeah, well,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the tea. And for asking.’

‘You’re welcome,’ she said. That was the first time that they exchanged smiles. After that they did so often, enjoying first the novelty, then the habit of it.

Steph had shoplifted a set of fairy lights that she strung along the shelf above the gas fire. But the sofa was too small for both of them. In the evenings, with the remains of that night’s takeaway lying in dishes on the floor around them, Steph would stretch out along the sofa and Michael would sit on the floor leaning against it, his long legs bent in front of the fire, which was now always lit. For a while they would not speak of anything and their silence seemed meditative. Then, full-bellied in the warmth, and in the soft coloured lights and confessional flicker of the candles Steph lit, they talked, unable to see each other’s faces.

Michael told Steph the story of his fifteen-year-old mother and the children’s home. He hesitated after a few moments, when he had finished the short, true part. From the age of about six he had begun to learn that some facts required decoration; there had been hardly anyone at the children’s home whose mother was not a ballerina or a princess, whose father had not commanded a submarine or killed tigers with his bare hands. Michael had so long ago concocted his own story that he felt more its curator than its author; the adult version was by now a carefully embellished artefact that required only occasional polishing. It had never mattered very much that he had made the story up because most of the time he barely remembered that he had. He could, if he chose, reel it off to Steph. It had undergone slight variations over the years and now it went like this: Most of the papers have been lost. What I do know is that my father was a household name. He was married, and my mother was so young, and of course it was not to be. It broke both their hearts. At this point Michael was quite used to being asked who the famous father was. Of course his career would have been destroyed if the story got out, I mean this is years ago, it was a different world. So my mother refused to put his name on the birth certificate though he begged her to. But in high circles, and I mean high, my existence is an open secret. But it’s all in the past. Hey, it happens. You’ve got to move on.

Instead, he told Steph, ‘When I was eight I had to have my tonsils out. They did it to loads of kids then, they cut out people’s tonsils all the time.’

Steph said, ‘Urgh, do you mind, I’ve just eaten.’ She squirmed.

‘There was four of us all sent to the children’s hospital, we thought it’d be worse than the children’s home but it wasn’t. The doctor told me they would put me to sleep and take away the bad bit inside me, and afterwards I would get jelly and ice cream and feel all better with the bad bit taken away. Well, I was dead surprised that they even knew about my bad bit, because nobody had ever said anything before so I thought it was just me and nobody else had one or knew what it felt like to have a bad bit inside them, so I was really happy it wasn’t a secret and they were going to take it away. Only they didn’t. It was maybe ten days later I could feel the bad bit was still there, you know? I still felt bad inside but I didn’t say anything because they kept looking down my throat and saying it was fine.’

‘Didn’t you tell anyone?’

‘Nah. I just went back to thinking it was just me. I nearly told Sister Beth. She was my favourite nurse, she came to see me a lot and ask me how I was feeling. Sometimes she sat on a chair with me on her lap, one time I just put my head against her and stayed there for ages. The other three boys that had their tonsils out at the same time as me went back, but I stayed. I hadn’t picked up, they said. I was there for weeks on the children’s ward, in my pyjamas and dressing gown. We did jigsaws. And this boy’s parents brought him in this train set- with trailers and goods wagons and stuff that went in them and carriages and everything. Most of the time I just lay on my bed, though.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘Dunno, really, don’t remember. I must’ve got better.’ He hesitated. ‘Well, Sister Beth, she didn’t have her own kids, she must’ve felt sorry for me. She set it all up. She arranged to foster me, they asked me if I’d like to go and live with her and I said yes. Well, I thought it’d be great. I was miserable unless Sister Beth was on the ward. I thought it’d be wonderful.’

There was a silence except for the sighing of the gas fire. Steph asked, ‘Did you go?’

‘Oh yeah. I had to meet her husband and all that first, he was OK, friendly. Barry, he was called, he wanted me to call him Dad. The day they came to get me from the ward Sister Beth was in tears, hugging me the whole time. I was there till I was fourteen. Then they sent me back.’

‘Why did they do that? They sound nice.’

‘Oh, yeah, they were. Wasn’t their fault, I s’pose I was messing around. It just didn’t work out.’

‘Why not?’

‘Just didn’t.’ Michael stretched and sighed. ‘I just wasn’t like them. I wanted to be an actor, for a start. I always wanted to be an actor, they didn’t understand that,’ he said, trying to close the matter.

‘I’m sorry. Honest.’

‘S’okay. I didn’t become one, anyway, did I? Didn’t work out. It doesn’t always.’ He was sitting in his usual place leaning against the sofa, and now shifted his legs and tipped his head back just a little towards her. It was less than a clear sign but Steph reached with one hand and stroked his hair, once.

Michael sniffed and drew in a deep breath. ‘What about you, then?’ he asked.

‘Me? Oh- I’m a survivor, me,’ Steph said, automatically. ‘Nothing’s going to hold me back. I’m an art student. Only I’ve got to take a bit of time out, for obvious reasons.’ She glanced down at her stomach. ‘I’m going back, though. Definitely. When I’m sorted,’ she said. But it was no good. She petered out in simple disbelief and stared into the gas fire, remembering that she had once impressed Jace with all the survivor talk. That was when she’d just got into Bath City College, at twenty-two, to do A-level art. Jace had been doing an NVQ in something to do with building and came in one day a week on day release. When she had told Jace she was a survivor, it was not as if she had not meant it. Look where it had got her.

‘Oh, that’s all bollocks,’ she sighed. ‘I haven’t got a fucking clue.’

‘I know,’ Michael said, complacently. ‘You’re as bad as me.’

‘Bloody cheek. Who asked you?’

‘Well, not your kid’s dad, anyway. Where’s he?’

‘What’s it to you?’

‘Maybe nothing.’

Or maybe something, Steph thought. She did not dare ask if he wanted her to leave. She had been here for weeks now, and the longer something went on, the more that meant that it was all right, surely? They had worked out a kind of routine; she cleaned and shopped for food, using money that Michael left on the kitchen worktop next to the kettle before he went out in the mornings. To begin with she tended to go through it too fast and once he had complained, but apart from that not one word had been said about the arrangement, nor how long it was to last. Usually she lay down and rested in the afternoons, and Michael would be back by the time she woke up. Quite often now he cooked; he said that takeaways cost too much. At the end of each evening they would say goodnight, Michael would go to his bedroom and she would make up her bed on the sofa with blankets and Michael’s coat.

‘He’s not around, OK? If that’s what you mean,’ she said.

‘OK. So it’s not a problem, then.’

A few nights later Steph explained what the matter had been with Jace. She added a little of what had been the matter with one or two others, including the father of her first child.

‘He was called Lee. We were far too young, we didn’t know what we were doing. I left school and had her. I called her Stacey. I wanted to keep her but I didn’t have anywhere, I couldn’t get myself together, so they took her off me.’

‘Didn’t you have no family that could help? What about your mum and that?’

‘She told me to get her adopted. They all went on at me. Said I had my life ahead of me and anyway she’d be better off with a mum and dad that could look after her. They said I’d soon get over it.’

‘Sometimes the gran looks after it, if you’ve had a baby too young.’

‘Yeah, well. My mum had her own baby then, with my stepfather, my second stepfather. My Nan wouldn’t do it neither. She’s not that sort of Nan. Got her own life to lead.’ After a pause she added, ‘Besides I don’t particularly get on with any of them. They can be quite awkward. I still think of Stacey, though, most days.’

‘So what did you do after that?’

Steph shrugged. ‘Usual- bummed around, did stuff, stayed with friends, sometimes with my Nan. She put up with me on and off after my mum moved to Colchester but she don’t like it. I had jobs sometimes, retail, shops and that. I was always good at art, though. Got sorted in the end, went to college, met Jace, got pregnant. Bloody hell, I never learn, me. Told you I ain’t got a clue, didn’t I?’

‘Yeah, well. Nobody’s perfect.’ It really did appear that that would do. Not only was he not going to criticise her and tell her what she should have done instead, Michael did not even seem to expect from her the effort of pretending that she bounced back from failure all the time. The thought made her tearful.

‘I’m keeping this baby, though. No way am I giving up this baby, all right?’

Michael said nothing. Later, settling down in the sudden silence that followed the click of the gas fire being turned off, and surrounded by the smell of curry, which seemed stronger in the dark and which tainted even the stuffy air under her Nan’s blankets, Steph hugged herself and hoped that everything would be all right. Because really, she hardly knew where she stood, or even where she wanted to stand. Michael had never tried anything on with her, and while she supposed she would have been flattered by an attempt, the practicalities might have made it difficult. She was getting so much bigger. She wondered if Michael were one of those men disgusted by pregnancy. She smoothed her hands over her stomach. She quite liked it, getting so round and important-feeling, and she had the idea Michael liked looking at her. Could it be he was old-fashioned, a proper gentleman who would never exact favours in return for bed and board? Or perhaps he was just gay. The filthy soup tins that she had cleared from the bedroom pointed to straight male slobbiness, but the cooking, the nearly becoming an actor, and the suspicious number of books in the flat suggested otherwise. Whichever it might turn out to be, Steph was grateful that Michael had neither asked her, nor shown any sign of wondering privately, when she might be moving on. In the dark she tapped a rhythm on her stomach with her fingertips, and whispered to her baby that everything would be all right.

I was under instructions to look through the post, bin the obvious junk mail, catalogues and so on, and leave anything else in the desk in the library. The owners had arranged matters, Shelley said. They had given their forwarding address to all the important people, banks and all that, so anything that came to the house could either be chucked out or could wait. I hadn’t given it a thought. I’ve done enough houses not to be curious about other people’s arrangements, but I began to think what a cheek to put me to that trouble. Why hadn’t they re-directed everything via Royal Mail? Or left a stack of printed labels with a forwarding address, so that I could simply stick them onto things and give them back to the postman, when I remembered? Actually, I thought, why don’t they correspond by the internet or e-mail or whatever they call it? It irritated me to have to think about them at all.

In fact the only reason I didn’t jam the entire post into the kitchen bin without looking at it was because I had begun to wait for my own letter. The post came early. I watched for the van before I was properly awake, and when I heard the bump and fluttering of envelopes coming through the door I would be down at once, still in my pyjamas, my hair in a dreadful mess. It was quite long now, and it took me a while to learn how to manage it. I frequently forgot to brush it and tie it back at night, and although I found clips for keeping it up in the daytime, they took some time to master. Still, there was nobody to see, not yet. Every day I scanned every envelope but my letter didn’t come and didn’t come. It was awful to wake each day with such excitement, feeling sure that it must be today, to pick up the post, to read envelope after envelope that was not mine, then to realise that I would have to spend another day waiting, another night hoping. With every day it didn’t come I got more convinced that it must come the next. And when it didn’t, I would wonder what I was going to do with all the rage and disappointment I felt, where would I put it? For it seemed like somebody’s fault, my letter failing to arrive.

But even on those bad days, by the time evening came I would be quite calm, because from the moment I had finished scanning envelopes for my name, the house would begin to quieten and soothe me. It was like breathing in a kind of incense, a faith that since the letter had not come today, the day when it would arrive was drawing closer. After dark, when I had settled in front of the fire with my tray and bottle- wine with supper, I had discovered, made proper cooking worthwhile- my mind and body seemed to be ticking. I ticked with an optimism that had been entering me little by little over the hours of the day, as if with each heartbeat. So the passing of the day turned into hope for the next; not yet, not yet, not yet, it ticked through me, but soon.

The money was running out. After the car battery, the electric, some rent, a bit towards his fines (not enough), gas and food, there was hardly anything left. Michael had bought and sold a couple of things and made a bit, but there wasn’t enough for the next deal. He told Steph this, over their toast one morning, with tears of apology in his eyes. But he did not look away from the fixed look in hers. Nor did he pull away when she suddenly got up and put her arms round his neck and drew his head onto her shoulder. Instead he put his arms round her, gently so as not to squash the baby but also because he was not sure if he had permission. He held on but he did not cry. He simply breathed in the scent of shampoo and female skin, the newness and privilege of closeness to her.

Drawing slowly away from him she said, ‘OK, then. So we got a problem. We need to do something about it then, don’t we?’

She sat down again. She was so tiny, really. Except for her stomach she was tiny, and he marvelled that so much courage seemed to fit in so small a container.

‘Okay then. We will, yes,’ he said, trying out what confidence sounded like.

It was Steph’s idea. It was something she’d thought up ages ago but never done, and she considered it far cleverer than Michael’s escapades with church treasures or his little deals among the stallholders in Walcot Market.

‘With your church stuff, you’ve got to sell it on, haven’t you? If you ask me,’ she said, ‘that’s where you fall down. My idea needs two of us, so it’d be you and me, in it together.’

Michael smiled.

‘What do we do?’ he asked, stabbing at the toast crumbs on his plate with one finger.

She smiled back, cleared a space on the table, brought over the backpack that was leaning against the wall under the shelves and sat down again.

‘You take the backpack, empty, right?’ She handed it to him. ‘So, you’ve got the backpack, I’ve got nothing. We go into a shop, but separately, right? A big shop, a department store or something, as long as there’s loads of people and more than one floor? So I go and get something off the rail, right, and I go and try it on, then I buy it and I pay for it-’

‘You pay for it? I thought you said-’

‘Listen. I pay for it, right? You’ve given me a bit of cash, right, and I go and pay, and they put it in a bag and I get a receipt and all that, okay?’

‘Yea-eh,’ Michael said uncertainly.

‘Then- I meet up with you somewhere in the shop, only miles away from the till and where I tried the thing on, on another floor or something, or in the cafй or somewhere, and I give you the thing I’ve bought and you get it in the backpack and then you leave, okay?’

Michael nodded. He would understand it in a minute. Probably.

‘Only I’ve still got the bag and everything, right? Then I go and get another exactly the same as what I’ve bought, I take it off the rail and I put that in the bag, right? I’ll pretend I’m trying something else on or something. So then I go to leave the shop with the second one in the shop’s own bag and- right- beep beep beep, off goes the alarm at the door. OK? So, then, I go all surprised, and show them the receipt, the receipt, right, from the one I bought that you’ve already gone off out the shop with, and they go oh sorry, we didn’t take off the security tag. So they take it off, and off I go, right?’

‘But then you’ve got two things you didn’t want, haven’t you? Shop stuff’s hard to get anything for, there’s a couple of pubs but it’s dodgy. I haven’t got the contacts. I specialise, see, I do old stuff. It’s hard. You wouldn’t believe.’

‘No, no, no-listen. First off, we only take stuff we do want. Like I need a tracksuit or something you need, a jumper. Doesn’t matter what it is as long as it fits in the backpack and we can get it in a big shop, like M & S, Jolly’s, Boots, whatever. And second, yeah we’ve got two, so next day I take one of them back and say it don’t fit, and I get a refund. See? We can get all the stuff we need plus we’ve got our money back.’

Michael frowned. ‘But you still paid. And what about food, and the gas, and the rent?’ His throat puckered with the effort of keeping down panicky tears. ‘There’s the fucking fines and all. And what if we got caught? I’d do time. Straight off, no questions. We need money, not stuff. How’re we going to get money?’

‘Look,’ Steph said, taking the backpack again and pulling out the two magazines from inside it. If Michael was unimpressed it must be that he had not quite grasped the brilliance of it. ‘Suppose I buy one of these, pay the cash and I got a receipt, okay? I shove it in here and you leave. Like this. Then I get another one off the shelf,’ she waved the second magazine at him, ‘and then I try and leave and the alarms go off. I just go, look, I’ve got the receipt. So they let me go with the magazine, and then next day I go in and say oh I don’t like this I’m returning it, can I have a refund. So then you’ve got, one, the thing you wanted, and two, you get your money back so you can go off and get something else you want, like for free. Now do you see?’

Michael shook his head. ‘They don’t put those tag things on magazines.’ There was a pause while Steph groaned. ‘And you can’t take a magazine back and say you don’t like it, neither.’

Steph sighed, and to stop herself saying something unkind, she opened the magazine in her hand. ‘What is this Lady crap, anyway?’ Oh God, she was thinking, is he gay after all? ‘What is this, it’s not porn, is it? Oh, it’s all ads.’ She leafed through. ‘Hey, look. We could always get a job,’ she said, beginning to read. There’s stuff here for couples, looking after places. With accommodation and a wage. We could do something like that,’ she said, idly.

‘Need references,’ Michael said.

But Steph was not listening. She was stabbing at an advertisement.

‘Christ! Christ, this is you, Michael. Listen. This has got to be you.’

56 Maynard Terrace

Bath

9th March

Dear Madam

This letter is in reply to the ad in the Lady, concerning your son. My mother couldn’t keep me and so I was given away. I have brown eyes, I am 6 foot 1 and a half inches with dark hair and I would like to meet up with you. If you are my mother, there’s a lot of things to talk about obviously, to see if you are her, but it sounds like it, it all fits together. I have always wanted to know about my family especially my father who he really was etc. Due to the circumstances I do not know if he is still alive, maybe you will be able to tell me about him, in addition to yourself.

Yours sincerely

Michael Hunter

ps This is only the name I was given in the home, as I was told you did not give me one (if it was you) or maybe it just didn’t get passed on.

Pps I do not have very many papers either, hopefully we will not need them to find out the truth.

Steph wrote out the letter from Michael’s rough draft, while his mind lurched between possibilities and impossibilities, starting with the idea that anybody who could be his mother could be living, as the advertisement said, in a ‘country house’. He did not try to curb Steph’s sudden crazy faith that his mother had been found by pointing out that while he did indeed have brown eyes, he had been born in 1961, not 1955; it seemed unkind to disappoint her. Besides, what if it was just a mistake, a misprint, an oversight? He could miss finding his own mother because of a clerical error! It could do no harm to look into it.

Jean’s reply came at once. She invited Michael to come to tea on the following Friday, 15th March, at four o’clock. ‘I do not go out, so I hope it will not inconvenience you to come here. The house is not hard to find.’ There followed directions.

In the days between the arrival of Jean’s letter and the day of his visit Michael worked on the bare fact that his mother had not been heard of since around 1971 until it seemed almost plausible that she should have changed her name, kicked the drugs, married a wealthy man, be living in a country house, and miscalculate her son’s birth by six years. By the day of the visit he was ready to forgive her, quite ready to overlook the shortcomings of the drug-raddled teenager, on and off the game, who had given birth to him and then disappeared.

I will admit to misgivings about the whole thing after his letter came. And it was only after I had replied to him that I realised it had been a mistake to invite him for four o’clock, because it would give me nearly the whole day to wait feeling nervous, and worrying. That was why I deliberately gave myself lots to do that day, so that my restlessness could be directed into preparing a proper welcome. It started with food. The immediate problem of what to give him to eat became, almost before I knew it, an obsession with feeding him that I can only describe as maternal. And although to begin with it felt hardly natural (for after all, the last person I had provided food for had been Mother) I gave in to it. I had never until that point bothered much about what I now consider to be proper cooking although since the day I pulled out the buddleias I had found myself looking forward to supper each evening, more than I ever had before. I had been eating more and things were beginning to taste better. I suppose, in the same way that I was now paying new attention to bathing, dressing and sleeping, I had begun to enjoy the little acts of care that I bestowed upon myself when I cooked. These things start, I think, with oneself. Only after I had begun to make myself comfortable (in every sense) did I find myself inclined- qualified, you might say- to care for anybody else. Poor Mother, really. I cared for her in a way, of course, the best way I could at the time, mimicking the manner in which she had cared for me when I was a child. My caring was as perfunctory and spiritless as hers was. Not that that makes it my fault. I wasn’t myself.

Anyway, having the whole day to fill before Michael’s arrival was the start of it. Thinking first about giving him tea when he arrived, I baked a cake, and standing in the kitchen beating it all up by hand, I tried to remember when I had last made one. It must have been for Father; he liked cake, anything sweet. I had a light hand with a cake, he said. I had forgotten that entirely, and it was nice to remember again. Not that I made many cakes even for him, certainly not as many as I wanted to because although Mother did not bake, it annoyed her if I turned out too many things he liked. She said it was bad for him but the truth was she hated to see him delighted. When she saw him happy, especially if the source of it were anything to do with me, she must have felt she was being done out of something that should have been hers.

While the cake was baking (it was a Madeira cake and I used the electric oven to be certain of the temperature; the Aga has its virtues but I wouldn’t trust it for a Madeira) I realised that that would be just the start. Because if things went well over tea he would stay, and I would have to give him supper, and I did not think my usual fry-up would quite do. I looked in the freezer and found fillet steaks. There were broad beans and runner beans, packets of smoked salmon, strawberries and raspberries from the garden, and ice cream. My mind filled with possibilities; in fact I think I permitted myself an anticipation close to greed. Of course they didn’t have anything like chips or potato croquettes but I had a few potatoes that I thought I could manage to do something with. That was what led me to the recipe books, because I remembered seeing Delia do something once with a few potatoes and cream and garlic. Well, I had to tear myself away in the end, from those books. The pictures! Not to mention the wonderful-sounding recipes, and all the advice and things to learn. I felt so excited at the thought of reading these books properly, and even put Larousse Gastronomique by my bed. But I had so much to do. There was a string of garlic hanging in the kitchen that I had not touched until that day. I even found one or two usable onions in the pantry, while I was getting olive oil and vinegar and mustard and so on, and outside in the garden there was any amount of thyme, rosemary and sage in the borders, and a bay tree. It amazed me, that in the same way that those cookery books were filled with wonders, all these good things were just here, waiting until I should notice them and have use for them. Such quiet gifts.

The woman who opened the door was not his mother. Yet Michael felt, even as he was calculating that she was at least ten years too old, that there was something about her.

‘It’s me,’ was all he said. Her face crumpled, he opened his arms and folded them round her. He liked her lemony warm scent and the smell of her clean hair, that was like a white wire brush tickling the side of his face. As they drew apart Michael scanned her face again for a similarity with his, and he found it in her long, blue eyes. Outwardly they were quite unlike his own, but he saw in them a shade of supplication. Even while her mouth was smiling and producing ordinary, conventional words in a frenzy of flustered politeness- had he found the house easily, he must come right in, would he like to sit down- her eyes were imploring him to belong to her. They held a dignified plea that he not disappoint her, perhaps also a warning that she would be unable to bear it if he were about to deny that she could mean anything to him. Michael recognised it. He returned her gaze and said nothing. It seemed to him suddenly that neither of them could withstand indefinitely, or even for much longer, the dull ache of not mattering to anyone else, and in their wordless acknowledgement of this they were related, conjoined.

I want to write about my first impressions of him. Since he’ll never read this I can, can’t I? I was terrified, of course, in case he was going to turn up with all sorts of documents, even photographs perhaps, that would prove I wasn’t his mother. And even if he didn’t, he would be bound to have bits of information about his natural parents that I might not be able to keep up with. I imagined him saying something like, ‘So, tell me about my father’s time in Australia. He did go to Australia, didn’t he?’ Or even worse, my time in Australia, I mean suppose his real mother had been brought up there or he knew she’d gone there after having him or something? If the questioning got too dangerous I could always claim a bit of senile memory loss, but only up to a point. All these worries, which I was trying so desperately to hide, almost stopped me from noticing what he looked like when I first opened the door. I was so frightened that he was just going to look at me in disgust, accuse me of fraud or some terrible thing, and leave. But I did notice at once how tall he was. And I could see he was good-looking, although very thin. I realised that when he hugged me. I could almost breathe his hunger, and I immediately felt glad that I had thought so much about food for the visit. It was as if I had instinctively known what he would need, in the way mothers are supposed to. But the most striking thing about Michael was that he looked so tired. Tired in the mind, I mean. His eyes darted round a bit to begin with, taking in me, the house and everything, and then he looked at me and did not move his eyes from mine. There was a mildness in the look he gave me, but also a kind of film over his eyes that made them seem too bright, as if they were concealing, not very successfully, some terrible fatigue. Would it be fanciful to say that I saw straight in to the weariness of his soul? I don’t know. The point was that he let me see it, his eyes did not leave mine.

Of course I needn’t have worried. He didn’t ask anything awkward at all. Over tea he gazed round a bit more and complimented me on the beautiful room and the lovely things I had. Then he asked me, so sweetly and simply, ‘Tell me all about yourself. I’ve never known anything at all about you. Nobody ever told me anything about you, not even your name.’

So I did. The afternoon passed into evening. And he told me all about his life too, until we had learned not everything, but all we needed to know about each other. I couldn’t say exactly when I realised it, or when he did (he told me much later that he had felt it too), but within a short time I began to know that I was quite strangely safe, a feeling I had not experienced ever before but which I trusted. I knew that nothing Michael could say would ever disappoint me, none of his questions would challenge me. And he would accept anything I might say; together he and I would find our way to our story, whatever it was to be; it would be a story mutually discovered, shaped and cherished, and in this way we would keep each other safe. He was pleased, for example, to hear (I had thought all this up in advance, of course) that his father and I had been serious about each other but that he had been forced into an engagement, for business reasons, with the daughter of a powerful associate of his father’s. I of course had no money, and I had run away to have my baby. He did not even know that I was pregnant, and would certainly have married me if he had, but I felt I could not stand in his way. When he finally accepted that I had gone, he married his heiress and went to live abroad, and the two family corporations merged and became enormously successful. But he never forgot me, and five years ago I received a lawyer’s letter telling me that he had died and left me this house with all its contents.

Good stories unite people. Michael had a good one too, and if he had made his up too, so what? We construct our history in order to understand what we are now, that is all, it’s a perfectly legitimate way of explaining things. Historians do it all the time. So by the time I had heard about how Michael broke away from his terrible foster parents and got a job with a small theatre company, then all about his early career on the stage and, tragically, having to give up his first big film part because of his blackouts, we were quite easy with each other.

It was after seven when we got up together, with the sense that these stories had done their work of uniting us and could now be put aside. Now I think of it I don’t believe we did refer to them again unless fleetingly, in passing, when it was pleasing now and then to point to, for example, a watercolour of Lake Como and say, oh, your father loved Italy. Or, oh, you hold a potato peeler exactly the same way I do. Silly and fond. But I’m running ahead, all that came later. We went to the kitchen to see about supper, still talking and Michael carrying the tea tray, as if we already had a routine. Without discussing it he started loading the dishwasher while I got things out of the fridge. In all the excitement of preparing for him I had forgotten to think about wine, so I sent him to the cellar to choose some. We had champagne. Lots.

They clinked their glasses like children up to something, with smiling and conspiratorial eyes. Michael had opened and poured the wine inexpertly, saying that it was an excellent vintage, but with his first sip his face contorted with the surprising dry fizz that filled his nose and mouth. Jean laughed, relieved to see that his knowledge of wine stopped at the label. He was as unused to drinking champagne as she was, as unfamiliar with this as with other moneyed, sociable pleasures.

‘It’s Pol Roger,’ he said, trying to reclaim some authority. He swigged again, to drown the pain of being laughed at, not yet able to admit that everything he knew about wine came from a book off the stall called ‘Travels with My Corkscrew’ by somebody called Anthony Bouvery Hope, whoever he was. He hadn’t been able to shift the book even for ten pence, so he had kept it. ‘Did you know that Pol Roger,’ he said, ‘was Winston Churchill’s favourite champagne? Do you know, when Churchill died-’

‘Roger! Roger Palmer. How funny! Roger Palmer, he lived in Oakfield Avenue, when Mother and I… My mother, you see-’ Jean shook her head and sipped from her glass. There was nothing she needed to say on this subject after all. She drank again quickly and said, ‘Years ago, it doesn’t matter. Roger was a nice man, he did me a favour once, years ago. But we should have some of that nice Palmer too, with the steak. Chвteau Palmer- it’s a make of wine. You go down and get it, while I get on. It’s down on the right.’

Michael returned from the cellar with two bottles of Chвteau Palmer. ‘It’s too cold to drink now,’ he said, a little importantly. ‘It ought to be warmer. You’re meant to have red wine at room tempera-ture.’

Jean nodded. It was true. She had noticed that she enjoyed her last glass or two more than the first, after the opened bottle had been sitting for a while on the hearthstone next to the fire.

‘The bottles are too high to go in the microwave,’ Michael said, dolefully. ‘What’ll we do? Pour it into a jug?’

‘I know,’ Jean said with a confidence and efficiency that took her a little by surprise, ‘we’ll stand them in hot water.’

Michael got down a wide saucepan from the shelf that Jean could reach only by standing on a chair. He placed the two unopened bottles in it, filled the pan with hot water from the tap and placed it on the edge of the Aga. Then he poured them both more champagne and as Jean moved round the kitchen in her apron, he sat in a high-backed chair next to the Aga to watch her and to keep an eye on the softly clunking bottles in the simmering water. Jean worked with peaceful, unhurried concentration, feeling Michael’s eyes upon her like a blessing. She looked up from slicing onions and smiled at him sitting there, watching her and drinking his champagne. She raised her glass, and Michael did too. They said nothing. They had exhausted, for the time being, the possibilities of stories told in words, but they could still toast one another silently across the kitchen, and celebrate the combined and unfamiliar joys of vintage champagne and being together.

Steph had made her Bolognese sauce from a recipe on the spaghetti packet. Or sort of; she had had to use vegetable oil instead of olive, had skipped the garlic and herbs and sliced up a bit of leftover, very bouncy frankfurter in place of the mince, but with extra onion and a shake of ketchup in place of tomato puree she thought the result was still pleasing. Unlike Michael, she did not cry easily, and had got through the first hours since his departure feeling his absence but telling herself she was not missing him as such. As she had gone about her routine of cleaning and tidying the flat with a new and unfamiliar energy, even changing Michael’s duvet cover, she had wondered at intervals where he would be now and what he would be doing. He had left at two o’clock on a journey that should have taken an hour at most, allowing the extra time in case the van should conk out again, and Steph pictured him in turn desperately poking about under the bonnet, or trying to hitch a lift. Or she would imagine him sitting in the van in a lay-by outside the posh-sounding house, killing time before walking up to the door and seeing his mother for the first time. She imagined his terror. She mouthed the words of reassurance she would give and pictured how she would be keeping him calm with a gesture or a smile, if she were there with him. Then she wished that he had a mobile phone so that he could ring her. She wanted to hear that he had arrived in good time and was quietly waiting for four o’clock, and even more than that, she wanted to hear him say that he just felt like hearing her voice. He would probably find it easier to say something shy and nice like that on the phone, rather than straight to her. He could manage something like that, probably, if he had a phone. And if she had one too, of course, which she did not.

Then she began to imagine that he had had an accident. She saw the van mangled and overturned, blood streaming from Michael’s mouth, his lips trying to say her name. He would die trapped in the van, and she would never have heard him say that he liked to hear her voice. He had left her forever and he had never ever said it. Steph began to cry. She wished again that they had mobile phones. She wished she had heard him say it. She wished she had not been left alone. When he got back this evening she would tell him that. He would come back. It was stupid, wishing. She collapsed on the sofa and sobbed. Strange, because she had been alone before, and she did not cry easily.

Darkness came earlier on that overcast and rainy afternoon, and it seemed to Steph that as the day was wearing away outside, here in the flat time was suspended. Michael’s absence had stopped the clocks; ambient fear, for him and for herself, would fill all the space until his return. She had meant to buy food, but she began to feel a superstitious reluctance to go out to the shops. She tried to tell herself it was because of the dark and the weather. Then she considered that she simply did not like the thought that Michael might return before she did and come back to find the flat empty, even though he must have done so countless times in the past. And in any case, he could not possibly be expected back in Bath at a quarter to five when he would only just have arrived for tea, an hour’s drive away, at four o’clock. Unless there had been some disaster. This renewed the disturbance in her mind enough to halt for a while her fretful tidying and fiddling round the sitting room, and she stood gazing out the window at the sky, her arms folded over her bump, while in her head she played out new and lurid catastrophes that could befall him. Finally, she turned from the window, accepting that she simply wanted him home.

But she definitely did not cry easily, so perhaps it was the baby that was making her want to again. Whatever it was, it was important that she stop thinking about Michael and the surprising and awful discovery that she missed him. It was then that she had roused herself and gone to the kitchen to tackle the Bolognese sauce with a third of the proper ingredients, so that there would be something nice waiting for him when he finally did come home.

Again, I think it was something instinctive that had caused me to make up a bed in Michael’s room long before I had met him, or even quite dreamed of his existence. It’s the little practicalities, the things we choose to pay attention to, that so often reveal the desires beneath, desires that are so huge that they really must be concealed if life is to go on in any recognisable form. My life has never been big enough for epic emotions, I now see. I have kept them small, knowing that my life just could not accommodate longing and hope and rage on the kind of scale I could have felt them. I have domesticated my feelings so that I tend them in the little daily observances: making up bedrooms, cooking, gardening. And lighting fires.

On the day back in January when I chose and aired the best white linen with lilac piping for that room and made up the bed, I couldn’t have known that Michael would be needing it that very first night. But there was no question of his driving back to Bath so late and after so much wine. I found men’s pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers in one of the other wardrobes in my own dressing room, as well as shaving and washing things. Michael did not ask where they had come from but accepted them as his own. I recall that he did not thank me effusively for them, or for anything else, when he left the next morning. Not that he was rude, certainly not. Just that he took it somewhat for granted that his room and everything he needed for the night would be available in his mother’s house. He took his leave a little abstractedly after breakfast, in a complete set of different clothes that were all rather better than the things he had arrived in, and I did not mind that, either. Nor did I worry that we did not arrange another visit. Without its being said, we knew that from now on it was his spells of absence from this house that would be temporary, not his presence in it. Besides, what son behaves as a house guest, or thinks his mother needs to know when he might be coming back? He assumes, rightly, that she will be there when he does choose to return, and all a mother needs to know is that he will. But over and above that I felt sure it would be soon.

Michael found Steph huddled and spent on the sofa. She was wrapped in her blankets and half dressed, rigid with cold and with the fatigue of a night spent drifting between fits of crying and shaking and patches of exhausted sleep. Her face was ghastly, smeared with wrecked makeup. Strands of her fair hair stuck darkly to her head where her anxious hands had pasted it down with tears, sweat and mucus.

‘Steph? What’s the matter? Bloody hell, what’s the matter?’

Steph shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘You- you didn’t come back… you… I thought… I thought you were… I thought you wasn’t ever…’

Her eyes were tight shut, so she did not see but only felt Michael’s arms coming round her shoulders and pulling her towards him on the sofa. She heard his moan of incomprehension and dismay, and his saying of her name over and over as he enveloped her and held her. As he rocked her against him, she began to quieten.

‘You didn’t come back, you bastard… you bastard, I thought you’d gone. You went for tea, you never said you’d be away all fucking night … you might’ve been dead …’ She tried to take a breath, but began to gulp. Michael held tighter, taking in the truly puzzling idea that someone else had cared enough about where he was to be frantic with worry. It had not crossed his mind that he should let her know he was staying over for the night. Not that he would have been able to- except, he thought guiltily, he could have phoned Ken, who might have been able to wheel himself along and knock on the door. But he had not thought of it. He felt ambushed by two astonishing feelings: grateful joy that she could weep with concern for him, and overwhelming remorse that he had caused her to suffer. He also found that he had an erection. Holding her close and stroking her back, he whispered her name.

‘I’m fucking freezing and all,’ she said. ‘The gas ran out and I didn’t have any coins.’

Michael rose, fed the meter and turned on the fire. He returned to her and wrapped her close to him again. After several minutes, she pulled in a deep shuddering breath, and then another. There were several crumpled tissues on the floor. Michael reached for one, lifted it to her face and dried her eyes. She took it from him and wiped her nose, and then buried her face in his chest, but did not cry.

‘Are you getting a bit warmer now?’

‘Yeah, I suppose.’

‘I’m really, really sorry-’

‘I thought you’d just gone off, walked out. Just gone.’

‘No. No, no, I never would… never. I never would. Honest, I never would.’ His arms tightened round her and with one hand he caressed her shoulder. The neck of her sweatshirt was wide, and his hand met her skin and dipped under the edge of the material. The warmth and softness of her seemed to flood him with other sensations; she became not just warm skin beneath his fingers but also taste, a smell. She was almost a sound, both in and of his own head, filling every cell of him with an incredible, compulsive music that his body recognised and wanted to move to. He pulled the sweatshirt from her shoulder and buried his face in her neck, kissing, breathing her in, and with a burst of courage he moved his hand and placed it lightly on one breast. One of Steph’s hands was moving up his thigh. Whether he was more terrified than excited, more embarrassed than elated, he simply did not know. As her hand roamed closer Michael pressed the round breast beneath his palm. It could have been made of bread for all he could tell, under the thick sweatshirt, but he was unsure if he was allowed to do more, and now something close to panic washed through him in case it was all going to stop. Her hand had left his thigh and was removing his hand. He would explode, surely, if it had to stop. Steph pulled his hand away and drew it under her clothes, and as he touched her bare breast, she gasped.

‘Sorry!’ Michael blurted, withdrawing his hand.

She replaced it gently and kissed him, pushing her tongue into his mouth. It was only when she stood up and pulled him to his feet that he remembered properly that she was pregnant. He stared at her stomach, trying and failing to conceal his erection, not knowing what to say or do, even less what she wanted. She reached round his neck with both arms and whispered, ‘Michael. Michael, it’ll be all right. Come on, it’s all right,’ and there was silence. Michael’s hands reached under the sweatshirt and pulled it off over her head. He gazed at the white-skinned, blue-veined breasts, so lopsided and heavy, while both hands lifted and cupped them and his fingers played over her brown nipples. He searched her face to see if he was getting this right, if his hands being here, doing this to her breasts, really could be what she wanted. He took one nipple in his mouth and she moaned and stroked his head. It was incredible; he was almost unable to believe it, but she was unzipping him now. He felt afraid. He had slept with people, of course, perhaps half a dozen, and with one of them, on and off, for several months, but not for ages. And never with anyone pregnant. He did not know how or even if it were possible. What if he hurt her, or the baby?

‘Come on,’ Steph whispered. ‘It’s fine. Come on, it’ll be fine.’

Michael allowed himself first to be led to his bedroom, then to be undressed, and to undress her. She was beautiful. With the sight of her naked round body came a burst of hope that entering her would be as easy as it was necessary. It was, she made it so. It was easier than he would have believed possible and, beyond that, infinitely happier. She lay on her side and let him travel her with his hands and tongue, moving as and where he wanted. When he began to understand that he had more than her permission and that she was as frantic as he was, he grew bolder, and when he finally parted her legs and found her so wet that he thought he would die from need of her, she reached down and drew him inside her. She showed him how to glide and twist in her. He delighted in the way she instructed and he followed. For ever afterwards he would remember how his delight seemed to please her as much as her own, which she also knew how to take from him. She showed him how, but it was he who delighted her. He touched, pushed and slid and waited, withdrew, touched again as she pulled him back between her legs. For as long as she wanted he sank in and out of her, entering and leaving her, until with her legs gripping him round his waist he felt her tug and tighten over him and she gasped and swore happily. He was long past speech himself.

In a state of amazed exhaustion they lay together through the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. The bedroom was freezing. Under the covers, they could believe themselves just about warm enough if they did not move. Lying face to face, they laughed because their noses, when they touched, were both so cold. Above them the dog barked, and feet pounded. They dozed. Hours passed and they watched darkness come, the time of day an irrelevance. Then Michael wanted her again, and afterwards Steph fell asleep while Michael lay looking at the ceiling, trying to place himself in this new, re-ordered scheme of things. From his bare past, which already he was thinking of in the way that a freed man thinks of prison, it was like stepping through an archway. It almost eclipsed the finding of his mother but was also part of the same thing, marking the beginning of his life as a person who had other people. He turned and looked at Steph’s face. Her eyes, so large, seemed smaller when she was asleep. The eyelids were thin-skinned and bluish and reminded Michael of a baby bird. Her lips had relaxed and seemed fuller. They were still wet. His eyes wandered down to the swell of her stomach over the duvet, the line of her splayed legs. He placed a hand gently on her and let it climb her curve, barely touching. He could hardly bear the distance her sleeping put between them, but he would not dream of waking her. There was no hurry. They had each other. And soon there would be a baby, and all of them, they would all belong to one another. A voice in his head declared it.

When Steph woke she looked even more tired than before, and she had a headache. When she told Michael that she had eaten hardly anything since he had left the house, he went into the kitchen, where he found her frankfurter spaghetti in a coagulated mess. He brought her tea and biscuits, feeling slight consternation because he was out of aspirin. Then Steph said she wanted a bath, so he switched on the immersion heater. It only produced enough water for one bath, so he washed in cold water and got dressed. Later he returned to the bathroom and ran a bath for her, fetching a clean towel and placing an old one on the floor. It had occurred to him that the wet floor might be dangerous. What if she were to slip while he was out? He explained all this solemnly, warning her to be very careful and to step onto the towel on the floor, while Steph lay propped up on his pillows and drank her tea, listening and nodding, rather stunned. Michael could have laughed aloud with the pleasure of spoiling her. He still had not told her about Jean, and she had not asked. Things had happened too quickly, and even now he was in a hurry to get her the aspirin. Suddenly he was so busy, life was so full.

‘You’re nice and cheerful, anyway,’ Steph said, looking over her mug of tea.

‘Yeah, well, and I reckon you are too,’ he said. ‘Cat that’s got the cream, that’s you.’ She laughed.

He came back with paracetamol, which the pharmacist had told him was better than aspirin for pregnant women, and two or three carrier bags of food including a chicken and a bottle of wine. He found Steph sitting on the sofa in front of the fire, barefoot, dressed in pyjamas and one of his sweaters, combing out her hair, which dangled in wet loops over the towel round her shoulders. She looked up almost shyly because she had planned for him to notice her hair. She wanted him to think it was nice when it was newly washed.

‘You warm enough there like that?’ Michael asked. Steph smiled and nodded, turned her head and continued combing, while he watched.

They said little else for a while, and their silence lapped generously to the edges of the room and enclosed them.

Then Steph said, ‘It’s like a little church in here.’ It was true. The small room was dark but for the fire, the fairy lights and the candles. Michael stretched himself out on the floor in front of the fire, and said he knew what she meant.

He had seen a chapel like that, once. He had been persuaded to go to Spain for a week, years ago, with three other lads who drank in the pub where he was working. On the first night they had gone round the bars and the other three had brought girls back to the apartment, all of them so drunk they paired off and then, Michael told Steph as she slowly pulled the comb through her hair, ‘they just screwed all over the place, right in front of each other, four of them in the bedroom, two in the main room. I didn’t know where to look.’ He had spent the night on the concrete balcony and woken the next day with mosquito bites on his lips and eyes. The others, when they surfaced in the afternoon, thought it hilarious. Michael had hardly seen them after that. He spent the week alone, disfigured and miserable, keeping different hours. He couldn’t face the pool or the beach so instead he took buses inland, alighting in hill villages and walking about in the heat to the silent bafflement of old people and children who watched him from sitting places in the shade. To get out of the sun he would buy soft drinks at cafйs that had only two or four white plastic chairs and an umbrella, or he went into churches. He liked the brick floors, dusty here and there with sprinklings of fallen plaster, the green stains in the joins where a little damp seeped between whitewashed walls, and the peeling Madonnas in their painted, fairground colours. He knew that these places were in poor taste, mawkish and out-of-the-way, and that the country saints they elevated were obscure, but it had seemed to him that the plastic chrysanthemums, the tinsel and the coloured lights somehow made them precious, contained, intricate.

‘If it’s like a church in here, that makes us a couple of saints,’ he said.

‘Sinners more like,’ Steph said, with satisfaction.

They grew comfortable. One of the candles burned down. Steph could not lay her hands on the matches to light a new one and Michael found them in her pyjama breast pocket, or pretended to. He set about roasting the chicken, and when Steph suggested they bake potatoes at the same time since the oven was already on, he thought her brilliant. He opened the wine and between them they finished the bottle. Soon afterwards the gas ran out again. Michael had spent the last of his money on the food, so they went to bed. They lay while Michael stroked her bump, and asked her what it felt like to be pregnant. Did she want a boy or a girl? He kissed the bump. Did she talk to the baby?

‘You’re meant to,’ he said. ‘I read it somewhere. You’re meant to talk to it.’

‘That’s plants,’ Steph said sleepily. ‘Anyway, I do sometimes. Hello, baby!’ she whispered, to prove it. ‘Why don’t you talk to it, Michael? Say hello. ’Cause if it’s a boy,’ she added nervously, ‘I was thinking of Michael.’

Michael turned to her and tried to see from her face if she were serious. But the flickering light from the silent television was dancing over her features and he could not tell. ‘You mean calling it Michael?’

Steph nodded. ‘So you’d better get to know it, it ought to know who it’s named after. Or it could be Michaela, if it’s a girl.’ She pronounced it Michael-ah.

‘Michael-ah,’ he repeated.

‘Talk to it, go on. Tell it something nice.’

He kissed the bump again and stroked it, and when his lips brushed the taut skin of her stomach and he felt the ridges of her stretch marks on his mouth he was aghast at the intimacy of it. He whispered something that Steph could not hear, and she realised she was not meant to. She could not fight sleep any longer. Seeing her settle down, Michael switched the television off. As she was letting her eyes close, she remembered with a shock that she had not heard a word from Michael about his mother.

‘Your mum! You never said! Was it all right, then? Seeing her? I can’t believe you never said. She is your mum, isn’t she? What was it like?’

Michael smiled in the dark. He too was almost asleep. ‘Oh, oh yeah, it was great. She’s my mum all right. It was great. You wait till you meet her. I’ll tell you tomorrow. Plenty of time tomorrow.’

Steph woke because the baby had just kicked her much harder than usual. It was not painful, exactly. She lay awake until it happened again. It was somehow serious, not in the least playful. This one must be a boy, definitely a footballer. She needed to pee anyway, and she got up, feeling an ache in her back. The baby moved again when she was on her way back to bed and she groaned softly, with surprise rather than pain. In bed she lay and nearly fell asleep again. A little later, she was not sure how long but perhaps half an hour, another kick came, along with a bigger surprise. Was it possible? Steph stared into the dark and tried to remember what giving birth had really been like last time. But she couldn’t; it was too long ago and she had been so young, practically somebody else. It was as if it were something dramatic and mildly scandalous that she had been told about, or seen in a film. But even as her mind was trying to keep it from her, her body was digging into old memories asleep in the blood, kicking nerves and muscles awake. These were contractions, not kicks. That last one had been stronger, more like a clamp seizing her round the middle than the baby’s foot knocking her from inside. She waited. Twenty minutes later came the next one, the same grabbing and wringing of her body, not painful yet but with the threat of ferocity to come. The struggle to expel was beginning. Still, she had done this before. It would be ages yet, hours and hours. Time enough she hoped, biting her lip, to get Michael used to the idea. It was surely a bit early though, she thought, trying to count back. She had thought she had at least another six weeks or so, judging by her size and what she could recall of the goings-on with Jace. But whether it was coming early or whether she’d just got the dates wrong, she had to get Michael used to the idea not just that she was having it, but that she was having it now, and she was having it here- at home, or the nearest she had to one. Steph suddenly felt her confidence fail, because after what had happened today, getting Michael to go along with that might be more difficult than if he had stayed as he was at the beginning, tolerant but careless of her. But he was turning out to be so kind. If that thing with the towel on the bathroom floor was a sign of how careful he was going to be with her and the baby, he might panic and drag her off to Casualty.

She had to smile at the picture that made, Michael with his eyes wild and everybody thinking he was the worried father. But it would not happen that way, because she would just refuse. She was not going to hospital. Once she explained to Michael why she had to have it here it would be all right, she reassured herself, feeling for a moment oddly powerful. There was something about having a baby that stopped other things mattering too much. She would get her way. Then the thought of Michael drew her mind back to the memory of him inside her, just a few hours ago, and she found this was easily the nicest thing to think about while she waited for the next contraction. Actually, wasn’t it supposed to bring on labour? Steph was suddenly sure now that it did. Once at the clinic, when she was pregnant with Stacey, another woman in the waiting room had said how fed up she was, overdue and still waiting, and somebody else said, you go home and have a nice time with your boyfriend, that’ll bring it on, never fails. Another grab of her belly that this time reached right round to her back interrupted her thoughts. Michael stirred, turned over and stretched out an arm for her.

‘Michael?’ Her moment of calm faith evaporated. Her heart was beginning to beat now with the same fear she had felt when Michael had failed to come home. Perhaps it wouldn’t be Michael’s care and concern that would land her in hospital. Perhaps she was just wrong again and he would turn out to be the same as the others. It would be nothing unusual if he didn’t want to stick around; in fact it would be a bloody miracle if he did. Now he had had sex with her, he would probably just dump her at the hospital to go through it alone, and they’d take the baby away before she even saw it properly. Or he might just leave her here again. He’d leave her and go straight back off to his mother. It was almost a certainty that he wouldn’t stay. People didn’t. Her stomach felt another grip, longer and more aggressive.

‘Michael? Oh, Michael!’ she yelped, and burst into tears.

But not quite as soon as that. Not at half past three in the morning of the following day. But even though I was surprised, I felt no fear at the sound of the van coming into the courtyard. I knew it would be him, somehow, and anything happening at half past three in the morning is enough in itself to suggest a crisis. I remember I pulled on my dressing gown, went down to the door and opened it a matter of seconds after Michael had banged on it, and one look at his face confirmed that it was a crisis. He looked worse than she did, in the time-honoured way of panicking fathers. And she was a funny little thing! She even managed a smile and a handshake, and a ‘pleased to meet you’, like a child dutifully displaying her party manners, though she was stooped over and holding her stomach, and there was a pinched look about her little face. The eyes were huge. Her legs were buckling under the weight of Michael’s jacket and all the blankets he’d put round her. He hadn’t had a clue what to do for her, and keeping her warm was all he had managed to come up with, apart from the important thing of bringing her here, of course. Bringing her home.

The minute I saw her in the light of the hall I knew what was happening. The poor thing’s manners gave out just then and she made the most extraordinary grunting noise, followed by something like an animal lowing. Then she had a fit of simple crying that was girlish and frightened. I saw then the wet stain on the front of her clothes under her stomach. Even though I had never been in such a situation in my life I was quite calm, at that stage at any rate. I thought quickly. She was well wrapped up but still perished, and Michael was shivering with cold and fear. He could hardly speak at first but I managed to get it out of him that the van heater did not work, and that he’d had trouble finding the house again in the dark and in such a state of nerves. Then she piped up that she’d started about four hours ago. I remember I said something soothing about how he had done exactly the right thing and that everything would be all right now that they were here, and I could see he believed me. In fact they both did. Steph looked so grateful I could see she needed some older and kindhearted person to say that everything would be all right. Well, it seemed I was to be that person, and so I took her in my arms and said it again, and then I believed it too.

She couldn’t really stay on her feet. She needed to find a place to lie down, or squat on all fours or however they do it nowadays (I’d read articles and gathered it had all changed). Not their bedroom though, it would be too cold. The heating was off for the night and not due to come on until seven o’clock and it didn’t seem like the moment to go fussing with the timer. Besides which I doubted if she could manage the stairs. I took them into the kitchen and she immediately lay down in front of the Aga and started gasping. Michael and I stared at each other.

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ I said, and he looked relieved.

‘Yes! Yes, that’s what you do, isn’t it? Hot water, you always need hot water, don’t you?’ Actually I hadn’t a clue what people delivering babies were supposed to need hot water for. I’d been thinking of a cup of tea to calm us all down. But obviously Steph couldn’t go on lying on that hard flagstone floor, so I sent Michael upstairs for some pillows and bedding. He was pleased to be given something to do and so then I made the tea after all. Steph was glad of it, and so was he, so it was the right thing after all. Then I left them together and went upstairs to put some clothes on. I felt I was dressing to go into a kind of battle. It seemed a shame that I hadn’t got old clothes suitable for the occasion, such as people keep for messy jobs around the house. I knew I’d never get the marks out.

In what seemed no time at all Steph stopped being cold and warmed up. She moaned and rocked and pulled herself nearly upright when the pains got hold of her, in fact she got terribly hot. When the contractions came, her mouth stretched in an awful grin of effort; her lips cracked with the dryness and her cheeks grew bright red. It was terribly hard work. She was in a lot of pain and it was awful, just watching the pains gradually get longer and longer and the times between them grow shorter. She sweated until her hair was soaked. Michael dabbed her face with a cold cloth and did not once leave her side. She would tell him to rub her back, or she would take hold of his arm with both hands and squeeze tight, hissing and wearing that grin, and all I could do was stand there. I felt so helpless and ignorant. I had no idea how much worse it was going to get, and so I felt frightened too, but tried to hide it. I brought down more bedding, and some towels, thinking we’d be bound to need them at some point. I made more tea, but Steph sicked hers up a short time later. After about an hour and a half I couldn’t bear it any more and got very upset myself. Even though I knew it was out of the question, I said we should get her to a hospital. I was too distressed by the pain she was in to think straight, of course. Because bringing an ambulance or a doctor down here (Michael was in no fit state to drive) and letting strangers in might have risked everything that was important. Who knows where meddling by the authorities might have ended up. There would have been all the business of addresses and names and it would have all got back to the agency and the owners somehow. Not that I had thought all this out at the time. I just wanted the best for her, I wanted something to be done about the shrieking. I wasn’t thinking straight, so thank goodness Michael was. It was Michael who said it was too late for that, and then Steph herself got even more upset and yelled and swore she would not move from here. So on it went, for another two and a half hours. By this time she was writhing, and bawling for somebody to help her, and very soon after that she screamed that it was coming.

But it still seemed to take an age. She half sat, half lay, panting, and got Michael to hold her from behind. She pushed and pushed. I don’t think I have ever seen such effort. Then she shouted at me, as if she really were angry, to see if it was coming yet, and I had no choice but to look, and there it was, this veiny, foreign-looking dome growing and swelling out from between her legs with a long slick of slime and blood. Also, I’m afraid, foul, gingery, wet rags trailed out from somewhere behind her- I’d had no idea that could happen. I cleaned her up. Steph won’t mind my going into such detail; she’ll never know. I’m putting it all down because it was so extraordinary. It’s such an ordinary-sounding thing, ‘having a baby,’ and I had not realised until that night how very extraordinary it is. It crossed my mind that the only other birth I’d ever had anything to do with must have been my own, and it struck me that birth is simply the most puzzling, immense duet between human beings; nothing ever again in the life of mother or child will demand such struggle and mutuality, and possibly forgiveness. So when one witnesses another birth, one is changed. The ferocity of my feelings for that child and for her parents began then, with the sight of her bald blue head as her mother pushed her out of her own body into my arms, and it has never abated.

Jean stepped out of the kitchen into a freezing pink dawn and closed the door quietly behind her, leaving Steph and Michael holding each other and their daughter, squatting on piles of gore-soaked bedding on the kitchen floor. Outside, the night had been a cold and windless one, and now a frost lay over the walls of the garden and across the bare arms of the trees. Sunlight was slicing through branches and slanting across the grass. Jean took a few steps towards the walled garden, wrapping her arms round herself, breathing in the cold water smell of the almost-spring earth and listening to the rasping of rooks in the tops of trees. Despite the cold she would stay out here a while; she needed a little time to herself. She needed a moment to recover from the terror of it, from the baby’s eventual rushed, slippery emergence with limbs jerking and its frowning face squeezed tight, and its appalling silence. God, the silence. And then, as she had been trying to wrap a towel round the wet torso and lolling head, there had come the splutter and the sucking yell, then Steph’s answering cry. Between them she and Michael had managed the tying of a length of string round the cord, both taking instruction from Steph, who now lay exhausted, but in charge. It was Michael who had claimed, holding up the length of string, that that was what the hot water was for, and had insisted on boiling it first. Steph had lain waiting with the baby resting on her stomach while he tied it; but it was Jean who had finally taken the scissors from his shaking hands and cut the cord. Then she had suggested quietly that the baby might like to suck, and although the idea seemed a novel one to Steph, she had nestled the child at her breast. Jean had been unprepared for the lumps of liver that had slipped out of Steph soon after, but Steph herself had peered over between her legs and watched it without surprise. Presumably it was just the afterbirth, and all quite natural. Jean stopped on the path and looked back towards the house. There would be more to do presently. She had reached the wide crater at the end of the garden from which she had torn the four buddleias out by their roots, and she now recalled something she had heard or read somewhere about burying the afterbirth. Was it Indians, a tribe of Red Indians, she wondered, who buried it in the ground at the base of a tree, or planted a tree in that place? It was, she remembered, supposed to represent the claim of the new child to that very spot on the earth, which was thereafter the place to which it and all its descendents would belong. It seemed to Jean suddenly apt, marvellous, poetic. She hoped Steph and Michael would think it so as well and, turning, hurried to go and tell them.

When she got back to the kitchen Steph and the baby were installed in the large Windsor chair wrapped in a duvet, both almost asleep. Michael, sitting at the table waiting for the kettle to boil, had laid his head on his arms. Steph looked up.

‘I thought,’ Jean began, pointing to the mess on the floor, ‘I thought…’ But she found it was impossible even to say the word ‘afterbirth’, never mind explain about burying it. Steph was staring bashfully where she was pointing. They both had been struck by a sudden, immobilising shyness; hardly surprising, Jean thought, since they had after all met for the first time only a few hours before. The enforced intimacy of Steph’s labour and Jean’s reluctant midwifery was now receding, leaving each regarding the other with a slight wariness. Jean felt suddenly foolish, anticipating how it would sound in the bright stillness of the kitchen; something about a little ceremony with the afterbirth, a thing Red Indians did, exactly what she was not sure. How mad and, worse, meaningless the words would seem; while those that were not meaningless, that the ceremony would bind them all to one another and to this place, were presumptuous and unsayable.

‘Yeah, sorry,’ Steph said, trying to ride out her embarrassment. ‘Should have got some old newspapers or something down first, shouldn’t we? Didn’t think. I’m covered in it and all, underneath. I need a bath. So does this one here.’ She smiled, dipping her head towards the baby’s. ‘And I’m dead sore.’

Jean beamed with sympathy and also with relief at finding her role again, as if Steph had just handed her the script. Grandma, mother-in-law, indispensable, here to help. ‘Oh, of course! You must be tired out, you poor thing. You’re such a clever girl. Now,’ she said comfortably, ‘would you like a bath straightaway, or a sleep first? Michael will take you both up, won’t you, Michael? I’ll deal with that,’ she added, nodding back towards the floor, ‘and then with breakfast. You must be hungry as well. And then we’ll just have a nice quiet day. Nothing but rest for you, young lady.’

She rather amazed herself, discovering not just the right tone to take but also what her job would be from now on. Here she was, already talking as if she had never been anything else but the gentle arranger of all domestic comfort; it seemed like a little triumph to add to the day’s great one. Jean sighed with the happiness of knowing what she ought to do next.

‘She’s a great cook,’ Michael told Steph, as he helped her to her feet. They were both almost mournful with tiredness. Jean watched the three of them go, and then went to find rubber gloves and a bucket. How easy and clear everything had become. Michael and Steph’s bathroom overlooked the other side of the house. So while Michael bathed his daughter and the new mother in soft warm water and found clean and beautiful things to dress them in afterwards, she would have plenty of time to slip the lot into the hole in the garden. It would be a more private and prosaic committal than she had had in mind: just her and the bloody contents of a blue plastic bucket. But there would be enough time, before she had to return to cook breakfast, to linger over the dug earth and whisper a few words (the right ones would come to her) and to watch the bright entrails of her grandchild’s birthing soak into the soil of the place that would be ever afterwards charmed.

‘Steph was thinking of Michael-ah,’ Michael said shyly, from the chair by the window. He and Jean had brought breakfast up on trays to the bedroom which was now his and Steph’s. From where she sat in a chair on the other side of the bed Jean considered this, drinking her coffee. Steph’s head rested on several pillows and her eyes were closed. She was lying in the largest and most comfortable bed she had ever been in in her life, and Michael-ah, dressed in new baby clothes that Jean had directed Michael to find in the nursery, lay sleepily in her arms, feeding without urgency. Her hand was covered by a too-long sleeve, which had been folded back. They had picked out the smallest baby suit with a label that said ‘newborn’, but it was much too large. Michael reached over and pulled the material back so that he could see the tiny fist stirring the air, as if its waving were a necessary part of her sucking. Three teddy bears and a white baby shawl lay on the bed next to the tray with Steph’s empty plate.

‘Michael-ah. Or Michaela, perhaps?’ Jean murmured. Michael looked embarrassed, so Jean went on quickly, ‘It’s a lovely name. It reminds me of Miranda, it’s got the same number of syllables. I think it means miracle.’

Into the warm silence came Steph’s slow voice. ‘Miranda. I like that better. A miracle. Michael, would you mind if we called her Miranda?’

Michael smiled. ‘She is a bloody miracle,’ he said. ‘Miranda, then. Miranda,’ he yawned.

Jean tiptoed out and went to her own room, knowing that she was going to have to cry at the honour of choosing the baby’s name. They all slept until the day was over, except that Miranda, stirring from time to time, would feel the skin of her mother against her face and with her soundless mouth she would seek and find a nipple, clasp it between her gums, and tug.

Of course it wasn’t all plain sailing. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that once we’d all found one another, and the baby having come safely into the world, that all we’d have to do then would be to settle down to life in our new house. And there could be no easier house to settle in, I knew that already; and they were so pleased to be here. I don’t believe we ever did discuss it in the formal sense, it was just understood by us all that we would all be living here from now on. Everything we needed (or very nearly) was here, in a way that seemed quite magical to them. I think I had stopped being astonished at how the house somehow went on providing what we needed, starting with the time and the privacy just to be our best selves. Or perhaps I had begun to take a little credit for it myself, as if the house and I worked together, or at least had begun to reflect each other. It was close to the feeling I had first had when the two Dutch students turned up. It had become personal. The house and my life now were like things I could shape in my hands, like arranging flowers, or painting, something I was creating and of which I was also a part. Steph and Michael ended up feeling the same. But the important thing to start with was that they stayed. Any other arrangement would have been unnatural. I never did quite get to hear much about the place where they’d been living, but they were certainly not in any sort of hurry to get back to it. It was at least a week before Michael went off in the van and came back with the rest of their things, none of which quite suited the new way of life. I don’t think we kept any of them except for some of Michael’s books.

No, it was the baby who worried me from the start, in a niggling way that I told myself was due to my own inexperience. And thinking it was inexperience, of course I said nothing, not wanting to start up any doubts about my not actually having had any children. I mean I don’t know what they thought of my story at that stage, but it seemed a courtesy not to challenge whatever they had decided to believe. I know new babies seem impossibly small, but Miranda was so tiny. I didn’t like to say so and her size didn’t seem to worry her parents, but I wondered all the same. On the day after she was born Steph was still in a bad way and I volunteered to change Miranda’s nappy- there were plenty, thank goodness, in the nursery- and I slipped downstairs and popped her on the kitchen scales. It was difficult! I weighed the biggest mixing bowl first and then put her in it, which she did not like. She wriggled so much I told myself that it couldn’t be a completely accurate reading. But four pounds five ounces! Still, I said nothing. Steph was only slightly built herself, so maybe the baby would just take after her. And it seemed that Miranda had arrived on the early side, so you wouldn’t expect her to be big. As long as we kept her well fed and cared for there didn’t seem anything to worry about. Babies grow, don’t they? In fact it’s all they do, really.

It was Steph who was doing the feeding. She wasn’t a natural at it though. She got very tired and cross over it and I remember she was often in tears. With Miranda bawling over her shoulder she would nag at Michael or me about getting Cow & Gate or something. There must be bottles and that in the nursery! There’s everything in there! Can’t we give her a bottle? We had to tell her there weren’t any. Miranda would get used to the feeding, I was sure of it. I mean, it was natural to take mother’s milk, and must surely be better for her. It wasn’t as if she’d ever had a bottle, was it, so why should that be any easier for her than the natural way? It seemed a reasonable argument and I really did believe it, and I could see Michael did too. We couldn’t suggest going out to buy baby milk and bottles. We both honestly thought it would be better to spend what we had building Steph up so that she could feed the baby herself.

Money. Of course, it was mainly to do with money, though at the time we convinced ourselves we were doing it for better reasons than that.

Miranda blurred Steph’s nights and days by waking her almost every hour, chewing her till she bled and vomiting up curds. She writhed and groaned in her arms when she was not actually fretting at the nipple. Steph’s right breast swelled up and became so red and sore that she could hardly bear it to be touched even by bathwater, then it grew so hard that she had to squeeze the spurting milk from it, yelping and crying with the pain and the waste of it; it was mixed with blood and serum from the cracked nipple so that she could not slip it into Miranda’s mouth from a spoon. Her temperature rose. She grew feverish and woke from wild and anxious dreams. Her heat entered the baby, who did not seem to know if she screamed for want of Steph’s milk or out of disgust for it. Steph lay beached on the soft bed, or sat for hours in cool baths to ease her breasts and the stinging from what she called her exit wound. She could only lie and hope that the burning, if it were not to stop, would just consume her altogether. At appallingly frequent intervals she would take the baby from Michael or from Jean, clamp her to the breast, and suffer. Later it seemed to her that in those weeks she cried not just in the bath or when Miranda was mauling her, but at every waking moment, even when eating, or drinking the glasses of water which were also brought to her too solicitously, and too often. Miranda’s periods of sleep were snatches of exhausted respite from what seemed her personal awareness-raising campaign at the injustice of having been born; she would wake from them freshly enraged and renewed for the fight. Steph herself felt cowed by her ferocity and at the same time enslaved to the task of appeasing it. Sometimes she cried for shame at her own inadequacy. Nobody understood. All Jean’s brightness and Michael’s doggedness were irrelevant, merely atmospheres that she sensed dimly against the background of the days and nights, as they moved about bearing trays and glasses or bringing the baby to her again. They took care of the practicalities as best they could, but there was no relief. Miranda screamed and would not feed, or she screamed and then attacked with her pitiless mouth, later sicking up most of the milk she had pulled from her weeping mother. Not once did anyone suggest calling a doctor.

When Steph’s temperature eventually fell and her infected nipple shrank and dried, she ate. She had been torn during the birth and walking was still painful, but she began to come downstairs for meals, dressed in clothes that Jean had put in the wardrobe in her bedroom. Michael had brought her few old things from the flat but she discovered she could not bear to look at them. It was Jean who sized her up and chose from her own collection the ‘youngest’ trousers and shirts that would be comfortable, though fashionless. None of it much suited her. Steph did not care.

Michael and Jean exchanged a smile when she came into the kitchen early and slightly sheepishly for breakfast one day, taking her presence as a compliment to themselves. Perhaps kindness was becoming a habit with them all, for Steph did not spoil their pleasure by saying that it was not their company she was in need of but simply more to eat. It was the smell of bacon that had brought her down, and she thought it might be easier to get a second helping or extra toast and butter if she were nearer the food.

Jean’s beautiful trays, with flowers and napkins and silver, had been getting a little short on quantity.