Consequences (24 page)

“The relief—I can’t tell you. It’s as though a sort of gray mist had been suddenly whisked away. I used to every now and then. Wake up in the morning and suddenly think about it. Now I just wake up and think—oh, it’s all okay.”

“Why did you wait so long?”

“Terror,” said Simon. “Sheer terror. Thinking—if we are, or one of us, it’s maybe better not to know.”

“Well, thanks be. I suppose I’d have had to wonder, if Sam hadn’t come along just before it all began.”

“Fidelity is paradise.”

They both smiled.

“But it’s so confusing,” Simon went on. “To be glad about this when one’s also wretched about Dad.”

Molly nodded. “Incompatible feelings aren’t unusual.”

The others returned from the basement, looking somber.

“I can’t bear it,” said Ruth. “I loved the press. And the house. It was like Lucas—refusing to conform.”

Lucas’s house was conspicuous and had been for many a year. The stucco was peeling, the railings rusty, the steps cracked. It was an anachronism, amid the vistas of sparkling fresh white paint, the bright front doors with brass furnishings and carriage lamps alongside. It was a shabby poor relation, a reminder that this area had not always been the haunt of the high-salaried young, or those blessed with expansive family trust funds. It was a fossil, a survivor of the early part of the century, when different folk lived here—respectable but not prosperous, office workers, salesmen, and that now-extinct species, the housewife. When an impecunious young printer could afford to buy a house in these parts.

“I suppose Lucas was always gentry,” said Molly, “but when gentrification came he failed to behave like gentry are supposed to do.”

Now the house would move on. It would be hauled into modern times; there would be ripping out and stripping down, it would be wired and plumbed and polished and painted and at last reborn with central heating, spotlights, alarm system, and a bay tree in a pot on the doorstep. It would have been integrated, and would cease to be a source of faint disquiet to the neighbors, some of whom had enormous mortgages and must maintain an active interest in property values.

Sam sat down. “I’m afraid I need a glass of wine, after that.”

Ruth said, “I’ve got something to tell.”

They stared at her.

“Peter and I have decided to get married.”

So that’s it, thought Molly. He’s to be a fixture. Seems a nice enough guy, one doesn’t really know him, more…intense…than she is, good thing maybe, highflier by the sound of it, career person, which she isn’t, so much, bread-and-butter work, she calls it. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “Where? When?”

The occasion was to be low key, Ruth stated. The Town Hall in a month’s time. Lunch for a few people at a local restaurant afterward. “By the way, he was sorry not to be here today. He had a deadline.”

Peter was a journalist, like Ruth. They had been living together for a year or so now. Is there something a bit…flat…about this? Molly wondered. A bit perfunctory? Is she pregnant? No—she’d have told me.

“Well, that’s great,” said Sam. Tim asked if wedding presents were permitted. And then, somehow, no one could think of anything much more to say, and Ruth had evidently imparted all that she intended to impart. That was it: a late twentieth-century marriage, a formality about which not too much fuss was to be made, which would only superficially affect the relationship concerned. Plenty of people did not bother nowadays. We did, thought Molly, Sam and me. Because it seemed so amazing to have found each other at all that something emphatic had to be done about it. And my parents did—out of defiance, I suppose. And Lucas asked my mother to marry him, not just to live with him. Today it is a cursory matter, unless you are a movie star or the aristocracy or someone set on making a splash. Ruth and Peter will get married, and carry on living much as they did before.

Sam was looking at her. “I think it’s time we were off. You’re looking knackered.”

Molly nodded.

Simon said, “Shall I get going on winding up the house, Moll?”

“Please. I wish I could do more to help.”

“Not to worry. Tell me what you want to keep.”

They trooped out, down the steps, into the road. As Sam helped her into the car, Molly looked back—just once.

That’s it. An ending. The years there. Lucas. The evidence wiped out when the house is sold. All of it stashed away in one’s head now, and nowhere else.

Molly cannot remember the accident. It is a black hole, it has been removed from her memory bank, perhaps was never there. She knows that she was driving along a familiar road, a few miles from home, on her way to Exeter and a meeting about an exhibition. And then everything stops: there is just a single fragment in which she is lying somewhere, and all is gray and fogged, but she knows that it is real, this is not a dream scene, something awful has happened. Nothing more—until she surfaces again, and for good, in a hospital bed, and Sam is there.

A man driving a car that was virtually without brakes—a person who could not be doing with MOT tests or insurance had come out of a side road straight into her path. Maybe he had tried to brake, maybe not. She had done so, apparently, but to no avail. The man has some minor injuries; Molly’s are not minor.

In the ensuing months, she thought much about the way in which a stranger can finger your life: this man, who knows nothing of her, nor she of him, until both arrive at the fatal grid reference, which has always lain in wait. And now the man is gone, back to his own life, and she into hers, which will be different.

She will walk again. Eventually. When they have finished pinning and fixing, when the physiotherapists can get their hands on her. She will go home, and learn how to manage, first from the wheelchair, and, in the fullness of time, on her feet again. There are certain things she won’t be doing, the specialist says cheerfully; she won’t be running marathons, or joining the local women’s football team, or going rock climbing. Molly smiles obediently, and says that it is fortunate that she never went in for any of these things. She understands that she will be whole again, but not entirely so. Her knee will never be quite right, nor her shoulder; she will hurt, the battery of painkillers will go home with her.

People say, “It could have been worse.” That is always said of accidents—an automatic response. A strange one; equally, it might not have happened at all. Indeed, the odds must be heavily weighted against it happening; the sufferer has picked the shortest straw. “Why me?” we say. Why, indeed? Molly said this, to herself, for weeks, months, until eventually this event had become a part of the fabric of her life. This had come about, just as everything else had come about—the good, the bad, the insignificant. There was before, when she was able-bodied, and there was after, when her body dictated. She had seen the X-rays; she saw in her mind’s eye now that shattered invisible infrastructure beneath the skin—the fractures, the shadows, the pins.

Once, back when she and Sam were first together, he had found a little white scar on her leg: “What’s that?” “I fell on a rusty gate, when I was about five. The district nurse had to stitch it up. I can just remember—the blood, the affront, the shock-horror.” Sam ran his finger over it: “Our bodies keep the record, bear witness. Whatever we forget, they do not.”

The half-inch of silvery flesh was merely decorative beside what has now happened. And then, a few months into Molly’s convalescence, there came Lucas’s brief illness, and his death.

“My mother has had this bad accident.”

The paper’s cafeteria. He sits down beside her—that Peter something from the Business pages, to whom she has spoken before—and he looks closely at her and says “Are you okay?”

So she says that, tells this man. And he is concerned, he asks sensible questions, is positive, rational. “Sounds as though she’s going to be all right. It’ll take time, that’s all.”

Ruth is angry with herself. She is not someone who pours out her woes to any old acquaintance. “I suppose,” she says. She blinks—seeing again the hospital, Molly’s ravaged form.

“You need another cup of coffee.” He goes to the counter—decisive, brisk—returns with two coffees.

“I should be going,” she says. “Deadline.”

“You’ll get there. We all do. Therapeutic break is what you need, right now.”

She starts to notice him, properly. He is wiry, muscular, sprung with energy, you feel. An intense, dark look. A man who does not much sit still—he has a pile of papers beside him which he shuffles, and slides into a briefcase.

“What’s the deadline?”

“Someone’s glossy home.” Ruth does not want to discuss her piece, which would no doubt seem arcane, frivolous indeed, to someone whose concerns are mergers, takeovers, and the intricacies of the market. She has graduated from roundups of lamp shades and cutlery to the occasional interview or profile. She likes working for this paper.

“Go for it,” he says cheerfully. “Send it up.”

She smiles. “As if. But it’s tempting.”

She is an accidental journalist, she sometimes feels, drifting into it from a dogsbody job on a magazine when first she left college, writing the occasional piece of copy, an article or two, eventually regular fee-earning journalism. It still surprises her, that this is what she does, this is how she can earn a living.

This man is different. He is a pro—you sense the narrowed eyes of purpose, of focus and commitment. I should read the back pages more, she thinks. She takes a gulp of coffee.

He is watching her. “Feel a bit better?”

She does. Perhaps this vigor is infectious. She homes in again on her mother. Molly has never been beaten by circumstance.

“Good.”

They talk for a while longer, then he pushes back his chair. “Well—see you around. Though not for much longer.” And he tells her that he is leaving the paper, moving elsewhere.

Pity, she thinks, later. Oh, well.

She is twenty-nine. Birthdays have begun to challenge. She sees thirty ahead, like some menacing shoal in the water. But things are fine, there is plenty of time. Time still to be young, to work, to enjoy, to find the right man, maybe, at some point, in due course.

She sees him across a heaving room, at the exact same moment that he catches sight of her. And at once he is waving his glass, detaching himself from a group.

“You again! Ruth. Peter Stern—remember?”

They shout at one another, amiably, above the racket. After a while he says, “This is a god-awful party. Do you fancy getting out of it?”

He steers her through the mob, helps her to find her coat, leads her to a nearby Turkish restaurant. “I know this place—it’s fine.” The talk is easy, casual, as though they knew each other better than they do.

“How’s life at the paper?” he asks. “How are the glossy homes?” For an instant Ruth is on guard. Is he being patronizing? No, he is not, she decides. This is just his way. She tells him that she has left the paper, she is freelancing now: more scope, more variety. ‘Issues,’ she tells him, “when I get the chance. You know—whatever the current argument is about. Right now I’m the ultimate authority on the dangers of cosmetic surgery.”

“I don’t have one,” he says thoughtfully, eyeing her. “Do you?”

“What?”

“A home. Glossy or otherwise. Rented flat, is all.”

“Me too.”

“One should move on. I am thirty-four. Rented flats are juvenile.”

Ruth laughs. “Juvenile?”

“And don’t make economic sense. My job is to spot economic folly.”

“Ah, mortgages,” says Ruth, sagely. “The housing ladder.” Dear me, she thinks, we’re not going to talk about mortgages, are we? I was enjoying myself.

But they are not, it seems. He swerves off, questions her about her family—how is her mother?—talks rather cursorily of his own. Proposes, suddenly, a date next week, whipping a diary from his pocket. Businesslike. Ruth is amused, confused. Where is this going, for heaven’s sake?

Peter’s courtship is vigorous, applied. It moves from stage to stage as though according to some manual. Further meetings—a film, a walk on Hampstead Heath. First kiss. A weekend in the country: first sex. Regular evenings and weekends together—in her flat, in his.

“This won’t do,” he says, looking around. “We need a place.”

And Ruth finds that they are now a couple, they are looking in estate agents’ windows, he is doing quick calculations on the back of envelopes. Does she love him? Does he love her? She is not quite sure, either way. She enjoys his company, his drive, his range of interest, his darting attention to anything that comes along. She would be put out if he suddenly departed. Love? I don’t know, she thinks. Perhaps I don’t know it if I see it.

“The blue one,” says Peter.

They are buying a sofa.

“I rather prefer this.” She sits down again, bounces, puts her feet up. “And it’s cheaper.”

“The blue. I thought I was paying, anyway?”

“Ooh!” says Ruth. “Is this a stand off?” She lies back on the sofa, eyed by other customers. She looks up at him, grinning.

“A deal, more like. The blue sofa and I’ll throw in one of those halogen lamps you fancy.”

“I’ve gone off them. Come and sit down. There, isn’t it comfortable?”

“You are an obstinate woman,” he says. “But I am not going to the wall over a piece of furniture. This one, then.”

They sit, side by side. We have a sofa, thinks Ruth. And a sound system, and a Le Creuset cooking pot, and a kelim rug. We are now underpinned, in some peculiar way. We are doing what is required. When the time seems ripe. She looks around the store. People, in pairs, are buying sofas and coffee tables and lamps and magazine racks. It is a sober process; there is assessment and discussion and occasional dispute but not much merriment, except where children have happened, and now run amok. Ruth watches with appreciation, as a small girl assaults a pile of cushions.

“Eleven months,” says Peter. “Give or take a few days.”

The small girl is whisked away by a parent. Ruth beams the child a complicit look. Children? How is it, to have children?

“What? Eleven months what?”