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.