Clever Girl

9

OF COURSE I REGRETTED IT, MARRYING Mac Beresford. Often I regretted it. Oh, the violence of those early years! I don’t mean physical violence. (Mac would never, ever hit me — and I’ve only hit him a few times, not all that hard — though once I threw a hardback book which grazed his temple and drew blood.) I can remember cleaning my teeth in the en suite bathroom of the house he took me to when we first lived together — the same house where he’d lived with Barbara, at Sea Mills with fifteen acres (it’s not where we live now) — and spitting into the sink and saying to myself over and over between spits that I cursed the day I met him. Cursed the day! For that moment it was quite true. What was I doing there in that bathroom — which was not to my taste at all, with its pastel luxury, concealed strip lighting, seashells stencilled on the walls, fish-shaped stone soap dishes, painted seaweed climbing up the shower tiles? This was Barbara’s taste, we were haunted by Barbara. (What pangs of longing, for my plain old attic at Jude’s.) I couldn’t meet my own eyes in the mirror over the sink, for rage at myself, at what I’d let myself in for. How could we two, Mac and I — with our infinite complexities, and our so-divergent experiences, which had hardened into our natures — be forced to fit inside this shared circle of a marriage, curled up as tightly together as yin and yang? That’s what marriage is like, I think — this squeezing of two natures into one space which doesn’t fit either of them. At least, that’s how mine was for a long time — now, it’s settled down into tranquillity (which brings its own complications).

One night I ran away from Mac in my nightdress. This was only a few months after I’d moved in with him — before he was even divorced, before we were married in the Registry Office. Usually we quarrelled about the boys, but they were away: Luke was staying with friends (he was sixteen), Rowan was at my mother’s. For Mac’s sake, I tried to set up these occasions when he had me to himself. Our quarrel that night wasn’t about any subject in particular; it was about the way Mac talked at me. I’d cooked something special and we’d been drinking Mac’s good wine (he knows his wine). Mac loved to tell me about his ideas. All day long at the factory, in the intervals between all the practical things he had to plan and decide, he was working out his theories of everything. He said, for instance, that he needed to believe that our experiences weren’t lost in time but were all held somewhere, coexisting simultaneously — in God’s mind, or in an alternative dimension where time was a kind of perpetual present. But if that were so, he puzzled, then everything terrible must also be held for ever as it happened: suffering would have no end, there’d be no relief in oblivion.

I knew he’d never talked about these things to anyone before. He had chosen me as the necessary listener, the one person on earth to whom he wanted — needed — to explain himself. He thought that no one else understood him as I could. (Barbara hadn’t ever wanted him to talk like this to her, she’d feared it. She had believed superstitiously, Mac said to me once, that talking about suffering could bring it on.) But when I tried to answer him and put in my part of the argument, it seemed to me that he waited kindly for me to finish then carried on regardless, uncoiling the tight-wound spool of his own thoughts. It might have been like this, I thought, if I’d been the wife of a great philosopher or a poet in the past; I would have sat at his feet and written down his ideas devotedly, then consoled him for them in the dark. Only Mac wasn’t a great philosopher, he was a factory owner, and it was me who had a humanities degree; I had read as much philosophy as he had (though he did remember more of what he read than I did, and was better at logical argument). Yet if I stopped speaking altogether — sat with my expression closed to him, rage in my heart — he didn’t even notice. (Perhaps it was a small thing to get mad about. Nowadays, when I love him steadily, I don’t want him to know my inmost thoughts.) Undressing in the bedroom that evening I felt I was smothering, because of the central heating and the fitted carpets everywhere. We didn’t bother to close the curtains in that room because the windows only looked towards the Portway and the river gorge, over the scrubland in front of the house where the horses grazed (these belonged to Lauren and Toni, Mac’s daughters). The windows were black and cold with night; I could see our lamps and our room reflected in the glass as if I was looking in from outside, and I saw myself moving around, putting away my clothes. Of course Mac wanted to end the evening with love-making.

— Don’t touch me! I snapped, pushing him away. I complained that he wasn’t interested in my opinions, he never asked me what I thought and only wanted me as his audience.

— It isn’t small talk, you know, Mac said, hurt, his forehead wrinkled and reddening with feeling. When I hated him I saw how his head was round and dense like a cannonball or a hard nut. — I’m telling you what’s really in my heart, things I’ve never shared with anyone. I’m talking to you freely: I thought you appreciated what that was worth. Would you rather I was polite, and paid you compliments and asked after your knitting?

I couldn’t believe he’d said that about knitting: martyred, exulting, I said I’d got a first-class mark for an essay on Bergson and T. S. Eliot. — Why would I want to talk about knitting? I can’t even knit! You don’t even know that about me.

Mac said I must be drunk (and probably I was — we often finished two bottles between us, sometimes we started on a third). He got into the shower and I ran downstairs, escaping outside. On my way out I picked up the keys to the little Peugeot he’d bought me for work and for running around in. I might have driven off, just as I was, barefoot in my 1940s vintage nightdress — and if I had, who knows whether I’d ever have come back again. But I saw in the light from the windows that the horses had come up to stand against the fence, and I went across to talk to them. Because I was cold, though the adrenaline from our fight was still surging in me, I nuzzled into their peppery smell and greasy, dusty heat — a secret life, rich with its own purposes, out there in the dark which had looked empty from inside the house. Misty was Lauren’s jaunty chestnut mare and my favourite; she jabbed at me with her nose, snorting and hoping for treats. (I cherished those horses partly as my way of making up to Lauren and Toni, who wouldn’t have anything to do with me at first.) Mac came out of the house behind me, calling my name, his towelling bathrobe tied over his pyjamas. He didn’t like the horses; he was afraid of them.

I climbed up over the gate and on to Misty, clinging to the tufts of her mane with both hands; then I set off riding across the field bareback. It was stupidly dangerous, I probably was drunker than I knew. (And on the way I lost the keys to the Peugeot, the only set: Mac was out early the next morning, eyes down, hunting for them everywhere. We never found them, and had to buy replacements.)

— Follow me, I yelled back over my shoulder. — If you want to keep me, follow me.

— You’re an idiot, Stella.

— I don’t care what you think. Follow me.

And he did follow — though not just obediently trotting after the horse, as I’d rather pictured it. (Misty shucked me off anyway, halfway across the field, not too roughly.) Mac went back inside first for a torch and wellingtons, and put one of the old picnic blankets over his shoulders, then set out to where I was waiting for him under the beeches. By the time he arrived all the anger had drained out of me. It was marvellous out there under the huge old trees soughing and groaning in the wind, dragging at their roots in the dark. Mac turned off his torch and on the blanket I clung to him passionately. — We could be in our comfortable bed, he said, bemused.

(I told him later that I believed there was a solution to the problem of time and suffering he’d proposed. It was only intractable if you came at it head on, wanting a single story; instead, you could try imagining that two time dimensions coexisted. In one, still moments were all held objectively for ever; in the other, time as experienced subjectively was always a flow, bringing the relief of endings. Nothing was added, in that model, to anyone’s suffering; on the other hand suffering — like happiness — wasn’t obliterated in the total sum of things, which it shouldn’t be if the sum of things is justice. I thought my idea was something like Bergson’s durée, but a proper philosopher explained to me years afterwards that I’d got this wrong.)

Mac was made to be the father of daughters. There’s a photograph of him holding Toni minutes after she was born: he looks astonished as a bear with a princess in a fairy tale, afraid of his own strength, dreading already the boyfriends she’ll bring home. The girls brought out a patriarchal, sentimental streak in him and in return he fostered in them an inward-turning femininity. Self-important with their father’s adoration, they were bruised and scandalised by his betrayal. Toni, rounded and blonde like her mother, was a teacher in a primary school, and married by the time Mac and I moved in together (though she’d had a wilder phase, and before I knew him Mac had fought off a succession of unsuitable boys). Lauren was moody, a talented clarinet player, a changeling who didn’t look like either parent — very white-skinned, tiny, gamine with black hair and glasses and a sharp little muzzle like a fox. Mac and Barbara had worried together — and out of all proportion, I thought — through the various phases of Lauren’s giftedness and restless dissatisfaction. Later, when Toni got pregnant (by which time the sisters were more or less reconciled to the idea of me) I was ready to be supportive through the difficulty of her young maternity — only she didn’t find it difficult, she loved it uncomplicatedly.

It seemed to me that I worked hard at building relations with Mac’s family, while he hardly tried with mine. This was our longest-lasting and worst fight. (Then in his mid-sixties he capitulated all at once, genially making friends with everyone.) Mac said that it was different because the boys were living with us and of course that was true; but he couldn’t see that there was an imbalance in the settled hostility between him and them — he was an adult, so ought to hold back the whole force of his scowling intolerance of their mess and mistakes and ignorance. He claimed he was protecting me from how they took advantage of me. It was obvious, though, that he was jealous of how I loved them, and I told him so — in front of the boys, which wasn’t a good idea. But I think Mac would have fought with his own sons too, if he’d had any. His was that touchy, growling kind of masculinity which can’t resist tussling with other males and testing them. (Yet he was tenderly solicitous towards the craftsmen who worked for him at the factory.)

So we had some awful confrontations. Mac had never had to deal with anything like Rowan’s scenes before; Lauren had only ever slammed doors and sulked. He thought each row with Rowan was terminal — which was what Rowan thought too; in his tantrums he was desperate with self-destruction, provoking you to say the worst thing possible to hurt him, reaching as a simplification for the last unforgivable gesture which would pull down the whole edifice of his life. I can remember Mac holding Rowan at arm’s length by the shoulders, bellowing (‘How dare you speak to me like that?’), while Rowan kicked at Mac’s knees and Luke tried to intervene physically between them; or Rowan punching through a door panel; or Mac locking Rowan outside one night and Rowan appearing ghoul-like at the downstairs windows with his face flattened against the glass, smearing the panes with tears and snot. It all seems fairly absurd, in retrospect. What I can’t recover is what the rows were actually about, what small seeds of daily cause gave rise to those hurricane effects.

Mac managed to pick quarrels with Luke too — for smoking weed, for sleeping late, for missing school — though he was such an easy teenager and only ever did these things in moderation. Mac went berserk when he found that Luke had taken the Mercedes out one night while we were away (without a licence or insurance or driving lessons: like me, Luke was a natural driver). I had the dream-sensation sometimes that I was closeted again with the stepfather I’d spent my life getting away from. (‘Do you think the world owes you a living?’) When Rowan and Luke developed a comic parody of Mac’s outrage, I didn’t know if I was relieved or disappointed: was he ridiculous? Perhaps that was the mistake I’d made, I’d married a fool: not the more interesting one, of marrying a monster. I knew Mac blamed Rowan’s behaviour on the way I’d brought him up. And no doubt it partly was because of the way I’d brought him up, but I wasn’t going to concede that. The trouble was that Mac took him on as an equal, refusing to see the suffering child with his white face and inchoate despair. (Though in the long run it may be that Mac’s refusal was better for Rowan than my sympathetic penetration. When Rowan came home at seventeen after living for a year with his grandmother in Glasgow, he and Mac were suddenly close, conspiring in glum distaste against my interrogations: ‘How are you feeling now? Are you happy?’)

I used to console myself, when things were at their worst, by spending Mac’s money. He didn’t mind me doing this, in fact he liked it; I suppose he thought my shopping expeditions were a sign that I acquiesced in the outward conditions of our life together. But I came closest to leaving him when I was using my credit card; I defied his logic, that his money was a power over me. I’d never had money in my life before. All through my twenties and early thirties I’d bought my jeans and shirts from charity shops and vintage stalls; it was strange to be in a position to choose whatever I liked — it was almost inhibiting, I didn’t know where to start. Mac joked that although some of the clothes I bought cost a fortune, they looked as if I might have picked them up at a jumble sale after all: silky slinky scraps, faded prints, torn bits of net and lace with velvet trimmings. That waif look was fashionable and it suited me — I even adapted it for work with plain black cashmere jumpers and flat shoes. I had my hair cut off short and spiky at Vidal Sassoon’s; I was still very thin. (Some of the women I worked with in my first job as an occupational therapist, attached to the adolescent unit in a psychiatric hospital, couldn’t forgive me for the cashmere and the thinness. But they didn’t like me anyway, they thought I was arrogant and aloof because I didn’t join in their gossip. I was out of my depth all the time I was at that unit — and I identified too sympathetically with the teenagers who were our patients.)

I think what I felt about my appearance at that time in my mid-thirties was elegiac. It seems comical, looking back from the age I am now: but I believed then that I was at the end of my youth, on the brink of leaving certain experiences behind, losing my old freedoms inside the substantial middle-aged categories of a career and marriage. The clothes and the hair and the way I still painted my eyes, that whole look with its sexy bitter twist — I entered into it as though it was a last flare of possibility, before youth vanished for ever.

In the early nineties, when Mac and I had been living together for about four years — and before Rowan went to Glasgow — I had a visit from my old friend, Sheila. I hadn’t seen her since the break-up of our commune; the last I’d heard of her was that she was settled in Brazil and teaching English. She arrived one Bank Holiday weekend when we were all at home. Everyone who called at our Sea Mills house came to the side door into the kitchen, but she turned up in a taxi without warning at the front and used the heavy knocker — which seemed significant when I thought about it later, because her entry into the house brought a momentous change. I struggled to drag back the bolts in the dusty porch, which depressed me because it was heaped with cast-off coats and boots (I wasn’t tidy like Barbara), and by the time I got the door open the taxi was just driving off. For a moment I didn’t recognise who was standing there. When she was twenty-four, Sheila had looked like a saint in a medieval painting: austerely stately, pale with long auburn hair which was wiry and burnished like threads in an old embroidery. Now, her hair was cut short and bleached dry by the sun, her skin was tanned and roughened: she looked rakish and unsettled, challenging. She was wearing some kind of long bedraggled print skirt, and hoop earrings. In those first moments I hardly took in that she had a baby slung in a tie-dyed vermilion cloth against her breast — a little girl, asleep, with a tiny closed perfect face and thick black hair.

— Is it yours? I exclaimed.

— Of course it’s mine. Did you think I’d borrowed it?

We were awkward together at first — or perhaps it was just that she’d always been angular and abrupt. She seemed to find it funny that our house from outside looked like a child’s drawing: rectangular and red-brick with a chimney at each end, planted bang in the middle of its flat garden which was really just the same scrubby field as outside the garden walls (Barbara had grown things but I’d neglected them). Mac wandered across the hall, pretending to be preoccupied, taking flight from introductions behind his air of being a hundred years older than any of my friends. Inside the house, Sheila went around touching everything, exclaiming that she couldn’t believe I owned all this. I thought she was criticising me — because of the world of poverty she’d come from, or out of the returned traveller’s disdain for everything they’d left behind and forgotten — and I felt weighed down by the settled, responsible life I’d taken on. It was mid-autumn and a gloomy light, muddled with damp from the river, seemed to have got everywhere indoors; we had all our lamps switched on in the middle of the day, and the wind was tugging round the house, teasing it.

In the kitchen, Sheila wouldn’t take off her coat; she really wasn’t dressed for the English climate. She snuggled with a groan of relief close to the Aga, unwrapping the sleeping baby on her lap. I bent over to make a fuss of it: it was the most satisfying, perfect creature, clear-skinned, the eyelids closed in straight black lines, the brows tiny upward brush strokes, purplish lips pressed shut as if in repudiation. Her name was Ester, Sheila said, pronouncing it the Brazilian way, as Esh-tair. She was three months old, born in Recife. Sheila talked about motherhood with a stiffly comical air, avoiding my eyes. No one had told her that you couldn’t send the baby back if you weren’t enjoying it. The Indian women seemed to have a completely different kind of baby; they slept all day, you could take them to work in the fields. She’d wanted one of those. I suggested that Ester looked like an Indian baby anyway, but Sheila wouldn’t give anything away about the father. She explained that she had six months’ unpaid leave from the language school where she worked, and that she’d come home to show the baby to her family, then after a week couldn’t bear being at home — she was hoping I would let her stay for a few days. When Ester began to stir on her lap, she seemed immediately strained and anxious. There was a bottle of formula mixed up in her bag; would I warm it up in a pan of water? — I suppose you think it’s awful that I’m not breastfeeding, she said accusingly.

I reassured her and asked if I could give Ester her bottle. Sheila watched her feed with a curiosity that was half appalled. — It’s sort of terrible to think one was ever like that, she said. — I mean, with one’s own mother. Because I don’t like my mother much. I don’t like to think of myself so desperately attached to the teat of her provision (whether it was the real teat or the rubber one — and I’d rather not know). So keen on survival, at all costs. It seems better form, once one’s adult, not to want anything that badly.

When I’d lived with Sheila in the commune, I’d been in awe of her education. She seemed to have read everything; her contralto voice and her slow, debunking, considered speech had appealed to me as an ideal of an intellectual woman. Now that I’d done my own degree and felt more like her equal, I was eager to talk to her about books — but she only wanted to talk about babies. I saw that she’d come looking for me because she needed help and remembered me as a young mother from the commune; whereas I’d finished with that phase of my life and wasn’t interested any longer. She exclaimed in despair when I managed to keep the baby from crying, winding her and then jigging her in my arms, walking up and down and singing to her.

— You see? She won’t ever stop for me. What am I doing wrong?

I said that everyone felt like this at first. After a while it would come naturally.

Sheila stayed at Sea Mills with us for six weeks. She was alone with the baby all day while Mac and I were out at work and Rowan was at school (Luke was in his gap year with a place at Exeter to do history and politics; in the meantime he was working for my brother, restoring classic cars). Sheila said she walked around the rooms of the house for hours with Ester in the sling, because it was the only way she could get her to sleep. Also, she could just about read the newspaper while she was walking round, though it did make her seasick and sometimes she was so tired that the words swam in front of her eyes like a hallucination. If she tried to read while she was giving Ester her bottle, Ester pulled away from the teat indignantly. — But what if, Sheila asked, — when this is over, I’ve forgotten how to think? And anyway, when will it be over?

I said that now Ester was getting older, she was bound to be awake more during the day; Sheila said that when she was awake she didn’t know what to do with her. — Am I supposed to play? I was never any good at playing.

— Give her to the boys. They’ll look after her.

Sheila was relieved and guilty when Luke and Rowan carried Ester off into another room. (— But do they know what to do?) They unwrapped her from her shawls and teased her irreverently, throwing her in the air, flapping her blanket at her to make her screw up her face comically, blowing raspberries on her stomach, laughing at her miniature dictator’s outrage and stolid frown. (They were experienced in all this from playing with Toni’s babies, Mac’s granddaughters — she had two by this time.) Of course Ester loved it, and gave her first wet smiles for them. Sheila had been so sure that Ester’s not smiling meant she was unhappy, judging against the life where she found herself. The smiles gave away another Ester: more foolish and less punishing.

I borrowed a carrycot from Toni and made Sheila put Ester down in it while we all ate supper round the long table in the kitchen. Sheila stared at the food on her plate as if she’d last eaten in another life. She was bone-thin under all the layers of her jumpers and cardigans and scarves: despite her determination to leave everything English behind, she was beginning to be one of those sinewy, sun-toughened Englishwomen of a certain class, angularly elegant, expertly informed. Mac grew to like her when they discussed Brazil and South American politics, and he deferred to her insider’s insight (— the only continent in the world, she said, — where communism is still romantic). If Ester cried while we were eating then Mac picked her up and would walk round with her, crooning to her, kissing her little fists and her head with its night-black shock of hair. We were all as tender with Sheila as if she was convalescent. Mac was the assured paterfamilias presiding over his extended household. He was inspired in this role: even the boys were charmed and he courted them, including them in the generous circle of his affections. He was never handsome, exactly — bald and overweight, with that distinctive round face like the face in the moon — but he gave off a heat of life and force, his fox-colouring was a russet glow.

Sometimes there would be ten or eleven of us for supper if Luke’s girlfriend was there, and Toni with her family — they lived nearby. Lauren honoured us from time to time, visiting from London (where she was a great success, playing in the orchestra at the ENO). If we were too many then we had to decamp into the grander dining room, which I didn’t like because it still seemed like Barbara’s space — yellow-striped wallpaper, electric wall candelabra, antique table and chairs. I confided to Sheila how trapped I sometimes felt in that big comfortable house, decorated in Barbara’s taste — conventional, expensive, gemütlich — overlaid now with what Mac called my ‘hippie style’. I told her about the faithful cleaner who loved Barbara and couldn’t forgive me (secretly I called her Mrs Danvers). Sheila asked why we didn’t move and I explained that Lauren and Toni — who’d grown up in this house — wouldn’t let Mac sell it, not yet.

— Then couldn’t their mother live here instead?

— She can’t, because of what happened.

— But what about you? Don’t you get to have a say?

I let her know about the difficulties between me and Mac. When she asked whether Barbara was awful, I tried to convey how she was really the nicest person, impulsive and imaginative and kind: which made everything worse. — It was a sort of quixotic thing, when she left Mac. She had an ideal that she shouldn’t keep him if he loved someone else — even though we hadn’t seen each other for several years. And Mac believes that too. He believes passion is a life force you have to submit to. I don’t know what I think. It’s a force for a while and then you can step past it. (I was thinking of Sheila’s brother Andrew. She had told me he was married with children, and had given up drinking, and was writing a book.)

Sheila thought that passion was a story people dreamed up to save themselves from boredom. — I’d lived all along as if I was acting out some turbulent drama; then I woke up one day and found I’d stopped believing in the play. Since then my life is saner and more manageable, but it’s thinner — as if this whole colourful noisy troupe alive inside my head had upped and left. I am quite empty sometimes.

— You’ve had a baby. That’s dramatic.

Right now, having a baby seemed more like the end of the story, she said. I asked her again then who Ester’s father was, but Sheila claimed he didn’t matter, she said she couldn’t even remember his name. It had all been a misunderstanding, she said, entirely her own fault; and he didn’t even know Ester existed. Anyway, a baby was not the end, I promised her. I could see that she was studying us, to see how to make a family; she had plenty of friends in Brazil but she had lived alone, and liked it. When she laughed about Mac with friendly scepticism, I felt a defensive pang as if I betrayed him. — He’s like a busy engine, isn’t he? Sheila said. — With you lot all yoked on behind, his caravanserai. Determinedly on his way somewhere: so there’s a lot of heat and dust. Still, it’s better than just turning round in the same space, as I do.

Sheila hadn’t seen Rowan since he was a few days old; as a teenager, he looked startlingly like his dead father Nicky, whom he’d never known. How could it be, she and I wondered together, that these characteristics had been stored in Nicky’s DNA, waiting to unfold inside his son’s separate life: the impatient way Rowan turned a tap full on, then gasped through a hasty glass of water, spilling half of it, with the tap still running; or his careless swaggering walk; or dragging at his school tie as if he needed air? I thought Sheila was almost afraid of Rowan at first, because of how he brought Nicky back and yet didn’t. But she was good at talking to the boys, they liked her. Rowan sang and played his guitar for her. (— Oh, he’s good, he’s really good, she said.) Luke claimed to remember her from the commune, though he was only four when it broke up: and he did have an extraordinary memory, which was part of his personality — open, accepting of everything he found, storing it away. He remembered visiting the zoo, on the day Nicky was killed. His frank gaze was full of irony mixed with tolerance: his hair was still childishly blond, though darkening, cut short in a thick pelt I loved to push my fingers through. Rowan was taller than Luke was already (and they were both taller than me); Luke was stocky, popular, good at rugby, clowning for his friends with a quick humour, not cruel. He’d been through several girlfriends already, though he’d been protectively uxorious in turn towards each one (and I didn’t think any of them good enough).

Luke brought Sheila the white quartz stone I’d always kept, which we had used in our discussions in the commune, passing it round between the speakers. Sheila hesitated to take it from his hand. — I’m afraid to touch it, she said.

— Why? he asked with interest. — Because it all ended badly?

— It wasn’t our fault, I insisted. It felt so important, that they didn’t carry the wrong story forward. — You do know that, boys? Nicky’s death was just the most terrible accident. The man who killed him was ill.

— It’s not that, Sheila said. — It’s because I hate the idea of my youth. I was so wrong about everything, and so sure I was right. I’m frightened when I remember myself. I worked in a factory making meat pies, out of solidarity with the working classes.

— What’s wrong with meat pies? Luke protested.

— That was quite honourable, I said. — I liked you for it.

— It wasn’t honourable, it was insufferable. How dared I, play-acting other people’s real lives? And of course the women who had no choice about working there hated me, and I didn’t know how to talk to them. It was such a sham.

Rowan remarked that his father had worked building a road.

— That was different. Nicky was different, everything he did was graceful and the right thing. Anyway, he wasn’t doing it out of politics, he just needed the money. I needed the money too; but I could have earned it doing something less ostentatious, something I was actually good at. I was so hopeless, with the pies. I made such a mess of it, I was always dropping them.

We had to go to a family party one Sunday lunchtime: my Auntie Andy’s silver wedding anniversary. Mac complained ungraciously. He thought he was reasonable, and didn’t see any point in submitting to an occasion so utterly against his nature. Wouldn’t it be awful? Weren’t Phil and Andy boring? Couldn’t we just send a cheque? I explained how these obligations weren’t optional, they were the ritual that bound my family together. We weren’t connected because we found one another interesting. Offence was taken even if you forgot to send a birthday card or write a thank-you letter, and my mother and stepfather were always too ready anyway to be offended by Mac; they didn’t really like him, he frightened them. Mum put on an arch, unnatural voice when she was talking to him, as if she was flirting; Gerry was hollowly hearty, hot inside the neck of his shirt. Gerry wasn’t much older than Mac, and yet with his strained good manners and fading handsomeness (inky smudged features, thick head of iron grey hair) he seemed to belong to a different era. He and Mac couldn’t even discuss sport, because Gerry liked football and Mac was a rugby man. The complication was that my parents would expect to be superior themselves, at Phil and Andy’s party. They thought of themselves as having moved into a quite different social tranche — golf, the Masons, even dinner parties; whereas Andy had worked on the production line at the chocolate factory until she retired. Mac blundered across the subtlety of all this, not even noticing he was condescending.

The party was in a function room in a hotel in town, a stuffy low-ceilinged basement with florid carpets and gold drapes arranged across blank walls. Before we arrived Mac was already martyred, because we’d had to drive around for twenty minutes before he found anywhere to park. The boys were chafing to be free of our tension. I threw myself into the occasion and drank a couple of glasses of wine quickly. (Mac took one look at the wine and stuck to beer.) Circulating round the family I hugged and chattered, probably overdoing it.

— Why are you talking like that? Mac asked me at one point.

— Like what?

— Putting on that Bristol accent.

— This is my accent, I said. — It’s the other one I’m putting on.

I was wearing a mauve top over black jeans, with green silk tied in my hair: my mother said the top reminded her of a bedspread she once had. These days, she said with a jollying air to make it seem as if she was joking, couldn’t I have afforded something smarter? (Her attitude to Mac’s money was peculiar: partly complacent on my behalf, partly affronted, as if it was an offence to moderation. If I’d told her how much my top cost she’d have been horrified.)

I made a fuss of Auntie Andy, whom I’d always liked: she was small and fat and cheerful, with her hair dyed orange and a short dress patterned with enormous roses. Clumsily tender, she tucked my arm into hers and introduced me to her friends from work, telling them I’d been close to her little boy who died (which wasn’t strictly true). These women were formidable, raucous, enormous; their talk was very blue, and already their table was in a fug of cigarette smoke. Now Andrea was retired, she lamented, she missed the comradeship of the factory. — Stella, I don’t know what to do with myself all day. Phil does all the housework, because he knows how I hate it. (Queenly, she took for granted the devotions of her stooping, spindly, hypochondriac husband.) Her friends had better suggestions for how Phil could save her from boredom; Andy wagged a finger at them, telling them to be on best behaviour.

— We ’an’t got started yet, they said.

— They’re good girls, Andy confided tipsily in my ear. — Only a bit rough around the edges.

Although there was a buffet, there were place names at every table, written out in Phil’s anxious copperplate: he must have fretted for weeks over the nuances of family feuds and precedence. He panicked now when Andrea insisted on sitting just anywhere among her guests, waving away his remonstrations with her cigarette and gin glass. I was relieved that Mac and I were separated; I sat next to my cousin Richard, Auntie Jean’s oldest son, the one who’d lent me his bedroom when I first left home: he still had a motorbike and he made money as a builder, buying old houses and doing them up to sell, putting back all the original features people had taken out in the 1960s. Skinny and attractive, Richard always flirted with me: husky from all the weed he smoked, with a ponytail, a dreamy, narrow face and grey eyes. (My brother Philip was supplying the weed at the anniversary party; I noticed my sons disappearing outside with him at regular intervals.) Richard’s girlfriend had been segregated at another table. I knew he and I were bending too intimately towards each other, conferring too exclusively, but I’d drunk enough not to care. Jean complained that we hardly touched our food: — No wonder you’re a pair of scarecrows! Richard told me about his dream of going to live in Spain, when he’d made enough money from the houses: not among the expats and English pubs, but somewhere unspoiled in the mountains, with land and a well in the courtyard. You could pick up a medieval farmhouse there, he assured me, for next to nothing.

— How about it, Stella?

— I’d love that, I said. — I’ve never lived anywhere except this city. I’d like to live on a mountain top. I’d like to drink water from a well.

— Come with me. Seriously. I’d like that.

Of course it wasn’t serious, it was just a joke, it was a game: I knew that when I lifted my head and looked around me. I had two sons and a job and a husband, I was not free; probably Richard was not really free either. (Although, later, he did go and live on a mountain top in Spain.) When everyone had finished eating, the disco started up: pounding, and with flashing lights. Mac wouldn’t be able to stand the noise for long. The women from the factory danced in a line together, they knew a set of moves for all the songs. Richard and I slow-danced to ‘Killing Me Softly’, though he wasn’t much of a dancer; he touched me on the waist to steer me and I saved his touches up to remember later. Luke and Rowan were showing off, learning dance moves from the factory girls. I was aware of Richard’s girlfriend, and of Mac looming, bored and restless, on the periphery of the party. I couldn’t forgive him in that moment for not being able to belong inside this world — though I had spent so much of my own life trying to escape from it. He came to claim me, frowning at his watch, saying he had paperwork to do at home. Philip suggested that the boys could stay behind and sleep over at his place; I arranged to drop Rowan’s school things off on my way to work.

It was raining when we got outside. I pretended to be drunker than I was, leaning against the ticket machine in the car park and humming the music I’d been dancing to, while Mac hunted in his pockets for money. He said I was in no fit state to drive, when I offered. The excitement of the party dropped; stark recognitions blew round inside my emptiness in the cold car park. I thought that Mac and I were strangers joined by meaningless accident, unfathomable to one another and I caught sight of him, freshly with surprised dislike — middle-aged and preoccupied, with a thick wrinkled neck. Our intimacy had only ever been a delusion, monologues passing and missing in darkness — which was all that was possible anyway, with anyone. All this seemed open to the naked eye, as if I saw through everything. In the car Mac started up the heater and I hugged my apartness to the rhythm of the wipers clearing fan-shapes on the windscreen, watching the smudged wet grey-green suburban streets as they passed. At least Mac wasn’t nursing grudges; he didn’t care about me drinking or flirting, was only relieved to be on his way home. He asked cheerfully whether I knew that in the eighteenth century whalers had gone out from Sea Mills Dock for a few years, and blubber had been boiled there; I said I hadn’t known it. I tried to imagine all that scurrying filthy effort and activity, all the endeavour, the great distances and risks of danger, but I couldn’t believe in it. Everything seemed too far off and too tiny.

The rain was heavy, Mac had to put on the wipers at top speed. As we turned into the yard at home we saw that Sheila was standing outside in it: rain was streaming down her face and her clothes were sodden, clinging to her. She looked like a medieval saint again: tormented, and rigid as if she was carved in wood.

— I can’t do it, she announced to us over the noise of the rain as the car engine died.

— Do what?

— I give up.

She was deliberately flat and calm.

— What’s happened, Sheila?

Ester apparently had woken up and begun crying almost as soon as we left for the party (which was at about eleven; it was now almost five). Sheila had no idea what the matter was. Ester wouldn’t take her bottle, she screamed all the way through a nappy change. She wouldn’t be cajoled by Sheila putting her in the sling and walking round with her, which had always worked before. Sheila had tried everything she’d seen me try: the singing, the jogging up and down, the distracting her by carrying her in and out of different rooms; even the blowing on her tummy. But Ester only redoubled her paroxysms: she was swollen and purple with rage, throwing herself backwards in the sling, shuddering and howling. Sheila said she’d tried for a long time, and then she’d thought that the baby and her simply weren’t doing each other any good, she wasn’t making anything any better. So she might as well just walk away from her. She’d put her down in the carrycot, in the bedroom.

— It’s all right, Mac said, putting his arm round Sheila in all her soaking clothes. — You did the right thing.

— It’s so hard, I sympathised, — when you’re on your own.

— In fact I thought, if I stay in there with her, listening to her, I’m going to do something dreadful. So I came outside. And I’ve been out here ever since.

How long had she been outside, for goodness’ sake?

— Two hours? Three? Or perhaps that’s melodramatic. I don’t have my watch on. It’s felt like three hours. Actually it’s felt pretty much like an eternity. I’ve walked around some of the time. But mostly I’ve stood here because the rain splashing over from the gutter meant I couldn’t hear her crying. There didn’t seem any point in hearing it, as I wasn’t going to do anything about it. It’s all very exaggerated, isn’t it? I never knew anyone had that much crying in them.

— That bloody gutter, Mac said. — I keep meaning to clean it out.

— Shall I go and have a look? I said.

— I want you to keep her, said Sheila. — You two. Adopt her. Please, won’t you?

Mac was coaxing Sheila towards the back door, saying she needed to get into some dry clothes, to have a cup of tea or a stiff drink. When I went inside I couldn’t hear Ester at first. Sheila hadn’t switched the lights on; the rooms were almost dark because of the rain at the windows, and the white tiles in the chequerboard hall floor seemed to float in the gloom. I picked up the full bottle of formula abandoned on the hall table, and as I climbed the stairs I caught the tail end of a thread of noise, a thin remnant of exhausted sobbing. Sheila was staying in a spare room on the first floor at the back, papered in pale Chinese-green with a pattern of bamboo stems and white flowers. Coming into it in the dim light felt like stepping underwater — and the air in the room was heavy with baby-smell, animal and close. Everything was quiet. The carrycot was on the floor beside the bed; I slipped out of my shoes so as not to wake Ester if she’d fallen asleep at last, though when I tiptoed across to peer into the cot I was sure that she was awake, listening out for me, reciprocating my prickling consciousness of her. Sure enough, when I leaned over the cot her gaze was ready for me, wide-open eyes glassy in the shadows. Her silence seemed full of an awakened intelligence beyond her age. For a long moment of mutual exchange, before she resumed her crying, we stared and seemed to hover between possibilities: I might remain a convenient stranger, she might remain someone else’s baby, sweet but tedious. Or something different might come about.

Mac came into the room to get towels and a bathrobe for Sheila, while I was giving Ester her bottle. She was hungry, she had snatched eagerly at the teat as soon as I offered it. Now as she sucked she was gazing up at me in moist reproach, her breath still catching and snuffling in the aftermath of the long-drawn-out adventure of her sorrows. When Mac leaned over us she tugged away from her sucking, twisting her head to take him in; I thought she might begin to cry again but she only gave him the same slow, measuring look that she had given me, then slid back on to the teat luxuriantly.

— It’s a crazy idea, I said to Mac. — Sheila doesn’t mean it.

— We could do it, he said. — If she did mean it.

— You must be mad, I said.

But I had a vision in that moment of the three of us together in that room, remote as if seen from a very far off place — like the vision of Mac’s whaling ships. And I thought that the substantial outward things that happened to people were more mysterious really than all the invisible turmoil of the inner life, which we set such store by. The highest test was not in what you chose, but in how you lived out what befell you.

And so we got our daughter. (Though we always told Ester that she was Sheila’s daughter; we were her foster parents.) I left my job at the adolescent unit to look after her. I’d been unhappy there anyway, I’d hated it when the nurses gave the girls their sedative injections and the girls fought against it, and then the nurses wrote down in their records that they ‘displayed paranoid symptoms’. I stopped working altogether for six months, staying at home with Ester. And after that I got a part-time job at the Gatehouse, a network of accommodation and services for adults with mental health problems, where I was much happier. The boys loved Ester; Rowan believed that he and she had an extra kinship through their Brazilian connection. Toni and Lauren made more fuss, but they came round to her in the end. Sheila returned to her teaching job, and after a year she came back and was still sure it was what she wanted, so we did all the necessary bureaucratic stuff, and were checked by social services, and became Ester’s legal guardians. (The bureaucracy wasn’t straightforward, it was horribly complicated, but Mac was good at fighting his way through all of that.) Without making any deliberate decision, we slipped into pronouncing her name the English way, Es-ter: it was easier, anyway, when the time for school came round. She keeps her other name, Esh-tair, as if it’s a clue to a different life running parallel to the one she’s actually had. Everything Sheila sends her from Brazil she keeps in a box under her bed, segregated from her ordinary possessions. When Sheila visits, they are mutually guarded and interested and polite; Ester treats Sheila like an eccentric aunt whose favour is flattering but faintly ridiculous and risky.

Ester seemed to settle things between Mac and me. I know that usually it doesn’t work, having a baby to bring a couple together; but perhaps just because she came to us in a roundabout way, she seemed to set a seal on our marriage. Mac was lordly in his confidence that we were doing the right thing; I never caught him out in any petty panic, and I admired him for it almost dispassionately, as if I were admiring a stranger — though dispassionate isn’t the right word, because at that time the passion between us was running rather strongly again. (This was during the same period, too, as he steered through a crisis at work: when they were advised to diversify into calibration systems for long-range weaponry Mac decided against it on moral grounds. Some of the team thought the company would go under, but it didn’t.) The funny thing is how Ester’s grown to be so much like Mac — more like him than either of his actual daughters. Not that she looks anything like him, or like either of us — or like Sheila, for that matter (she’s vividly pretty; people think she’s Malaysian with her dead-straight black hair and neat shallow eyelids and clear brown skin — her skin is like Rowan’s). But Ester is stubborn, diligent, even-tempered, clever at sciences and with machinery. She steadies me when I’m restless or dissatisfied; she cools my heat and saves me from myself.