Consequences (25 page)

“Eleven months since we moved into the flat.”

“I suppose it is. Goodness.”

“I’ve been wondering about June.”

“June?” says Ruth.

He is in purpose mode, full steam ahead mode, that application to a matter in hand that she has come to know well.

“I’m thinking we should get married in June.”

Ruth stares at him. “Peter,” she says “We’ve never actually talked about getting married before.”

“We’ve thought about it. Haven’t we? Well, I have. So what do you say?”

This is a proposal, she thinks. Conventionally made over a candlelit dinner, not on a display sofa in a department store. Oddly enough, I do not seem to be going to take offense.

She finds herself on the edge of laughter. She puts a hand on his knee. “Go on.”

His turn to stare.

“You should kiss me.”

He does so, after a quick glance around. No one pays them much attention.

“We’re all set, then?” he says. “June.”

They leave the store hand in hand. So that’s it, thinks Ruth. So it goes. We get married. And why not, indeed? Lots of people do it.

Peter is talking marriage arrangements, and of a holiday.

“Honeymoon,” she says.

“Honeymoon, of course. How about Crete?”

There is a moment’s silence. “Actually, not Crete, if you don’t mind. Maybe…Sicily.”

“Fine, then. Sicily.”

Marriage carries its own impetus, Ruth found. It is a loaded situation, weighed down with requirements. It demands a move from a flat to a small house. It brings a bigger mortgage and larger bills and companionable silence and squabbles and the deep peace of the marriage bed, which is sometimes that and at other times is not.

It brings children.

When Ruth found that she was pregnant, Peter said: “Oh God, are you sure?”

It was not the response that she had anticipated. She replied that she was quite sure. “I thought we’d been assuming we’d have a baby sooner or later?”

“One was thinking later rather than sooner, I suppose.”

For a brief and disquieting moment they stared at one another across some treacherous divide. Then Peter gathered himself and suggested a glass of champagne to celebrate. The champagne made Ruth feel even more queasy than she already was; he drank too much and later that evening they had an argument about the installation of a shower unit. The fact of an impending baby seemed to have been tacitly shelved, to be addressed at some other point.

Ruth tells the ceiling of the hospital delivery room that she is not doing this again, no way. She tells the ceiling and the midwife and Peter but she tells in yelps and grunts so no one takes any notice and when eventually someone puts Jess into her arms, this warm damp creature, this
person,
she forgets all that, she sheds the last few hours; with a single bound she is into a new world, a different world, one in which you understand something you never knew existed.

“What’s for supper?”

Peter is City Editor now. His pay packet has prospered, his working hours have stretched. The Editor comes home hungry.

Ruth tells him that she hasn’t a clue what there is for supper. The kitchen drain is blocked, she was half the morning on the phone about that, she had a piece to write, the child-minder only has Jess for three hours, may she remind him. Plus, she has news, but she decides to set that aside for now.

Peter is focused, as always. He ransacks the fridge and the cupboards and finds the wherewithal to knock up a pasta. Upstairs, Jess is refusing to settle. Her howls raise the temperature. Ruth goes up, comes down, goes up again. She reminds herself that all over the country there are households in this state of ferment. All over the world, indeed: Greenland, Sudan, Peru.

They eat. Jess subsides, eventually. Ruth feels like a simmering kettle; she judders a little, all over. Peter is reading the City pages of the
Standard,
plucked from his briefcase. He is back with boardroom machinations and share price predictions. Life as husband and as father suits him well enough, that Ruth knows, but he is able to float free, at will, when he wishes. She watches him reading, and it seems a sudden surprise that he is in her life, at the center of her life, that he arrived and made everything different.

He made Jess, of course, for which he is to be forever blessed.

Peter looks at her over the boardrooms and the takeovers—a kindly look. “Everything okay now?”

She tells him that everything is fine. As indeed it is. Blocked drains and a work crisis are superficial complications, above which a strong woman rises. She thinks of her mother, who waved such things aside.

“Jess seems to have packed it in at last,” he says.

“How many children under two are there in the world?”

“How on earth would I know?”

“You’re so handy with statistics. I thought you might. Anyway—scads of them. And presumably at any one moment about half are yelling. A kind of global uproar. It puts things in perspective—one’s small local contribution.”

Peter refolds his paper. “That’s one way of looking at it. I can’t say it helps much.”

Definitely not the moment to give him her news. “Maybe there’s an article here,” she wonders. “Bedtime performance—the cultural divide. French toddlers dining out in restaurants. Is there bedtime in Zambia, say?” Write out of your own concerns, she has been telling herself. Motherhood is opportunity; half the nation was raising young, and professionally interested.

“Have fun,” says Peter. “Coffee?”

She gives him a slightly sour look. Detachment is one thing, within a partnership, but sometimes Peter steps aside rather too swiftly.

“No, thank you. I am going to see what Google has to offer on the subject.”

Simon arrived with two Sainsbury carrier bags which he dumped on Ruth’s kitchen table. “Here it is—the family silver. A portfolio of your grandfather’s engravings, and some of his tools, and some of his blocks. I’ve been meaning to bring them ever since I finished clearing out the Fulham house. I found them in a cupboard in the basement.”

They spread the engravings out on the table. Jess reached up, trying to grab. Ruth provided a biscuit as distraction. In another room, the baby was grizzling. Simon thought: heavens, she’s not a girl any more, suddenly. He saw ten-year-old Ruth, seventeen-year-old Ruth—overlaid by this harassed woman with bags under her eyes and a stained T-shirt.

“Wow!” said Ruth. “Some of these I’ve never seen. Mum’s got the farmyard with geese. And that one—the church. Look at this—blackberries and spiderwebs—amazing. He was very good, wasn’t he?”

“Very. One of the best.”

Simon waved toward the carrier bags. “The tools are wrapped up. Maybe they should go to some young practitioner? And the blocks are in bubble wrap. I have a feeling they need some fancy conservation box. Lucas was never into that sort of thing, needless to say.”

“I’ll take them all to Mum. We’re going down there next week. Do you know—there are only a couple of photographs of him. And he looks so
young.
”

“He was.”

“Younger than I am now. Not how you think of a grandfather.”

Simon said, “What is known about how he died?”

“Not a lot. Mum’s got a letter her mother had from someone in his unit. Just that he was shot in an action near—Heraklion, I think it was.”

“I’ve never been to Crete. We thought of a holiday there once—then didn’t go.”

“Nor me.” Ruth stared down at the engravings. Jess was tugging at her hand, vocal and imperious. The baby was now in full spate. Ruth sighed. “Hang on a minute—I’ll have to get him.” She came back with Tom propped over her shoulder, Jess clutching her leg. “He’s their great-grandfather,” she said. “That seems even more unlikely.”

“Please remember that you have made me a great-uncle.”

“Sorry—it wasn’t deliberate.”

“I am keeping quiet—it does my street credit no good at all.”

Ruth sat down. She gave Jess a drink of juice, flipped up her T-shirt and began to feed the baby. “Could you put the kettle on—we need a cup of coffee.” She was gazing again at the engravings. “It’s so strange—that these are all that’s left of him. A person gone entirely—but what he saw still there, and how he saw it.” She looked at Simon. “I want to go to Crete, one day—where he was. Is, I suppose—there’s a war cemetery, isn’t there?”

Whenever Ruth saw Simon, Lucas hovered. There was his beaky nose—a little less pronounced—and the thick glasses, and that gawky stance. Later, she would look in the mirror, seeking her parents, and find at first nothing but her own familiar features, and then all of a sudden Molly would signal—something about the line of a nostril, the set of the mouth—and then she would see an echo of James Portland’s intent look, those large brown eyes, and his sleek dark hair. The codes are eloquent, if you can read them. She would inspect Jess and Tom—their volatile infant faces, which in time would refer to herself, and to Peter, and to uncles and aunts and grandparents. The ineradicable genetic inheritance. We are ourselves, but we remember everyone else.

In the world that was without Lucas, Simon had found himself untethered. There was Tim, and there were the satisfactions of domesticity—the little Victorian terrace house, their pleasure in kitting it out; there was the bookshop in the prosperous London suburb, and its demanding routine. But he felt as though he had walked into strange territory, with crucial landscapes out of sight. He remembered doing just that as a child—getting lost in streets not far from home and searching in panic for some familiar reference point. He talked a lot to Molly, on the phone, in those first weeks and months. “I’m sorry—I’m making an awful fuss about being orphaned at forty-six.”

“I’d like you less if you didn’t.”

He knew that Molly, too, was bereft, and had the additional burden of the struggle toward recovery from the accident. Her pain and frustration rang out, as she reported small advances. She had walked to the garden gate—“A ten-mile hike, in my terms”; she could do a few kitchen tasks—“Peeling a potato has never been so enthralling.” Hearing her, he felt further disoriented; all his life, she had been the busy, feisty, vigorous presence. He could not bear this diminishment, this endurance.

He said to Tim, “It’s not fair, is it? Nothing’s fair.”

“Of course not. One knew that at the age of five. And said so.”

Tim was ten years older than Simon, an editor in a fine art publishing firm. He had been greatly admiring of Lucas, with a professional appreciation of his past achievements, and indeed had set about making a collection of Heron Press editions, trawling the catalogs of specialist dealers. For Simon, Tim had arrived in his life at a point when he was in discontented solitude after several short-term relationships, and he relished this stability, the unexpected haven that Tim provided, his solid presence, their shared concerns. The bumpy passage of his earlier years was a slightly distasteful memory; now, there were the holidays in Italian hill-towns, the visits to friends in the country, the considered acquisition of a CD, a new picture, something choice to cook at the weekend. “I feel middle-aged,” he told Molly. “And I love it.”

To the garden gate. Soon after, fifty yards along the lane. Then, a visit to the supermarket. Molly edged back into mobility, into a semblance of life before the accident. She could work again, but had to cut back and take a less demanding job; driving any distance was a strain, she could not walk far or stand for long. This is how it would be, now.

Sam had told her that in the weeks after the accident he came close to seeking out the man with defective brakes: “To clobber him from here to kingdom come, you understand. For the first time I knew blood lust.”

“It would have been satisfying,” said Molly. “Unfortunately you’d have gone to prison.”

“Exactly. I have never before regretted the rule of law.”

Molly, too, had known bouts of vindictive rage, in the early weeks. Now, she saw the man more dispassionately, as just one of those malign interventions, on a par with the cancer cell.

James Portland had come to visit her in hospital, bearing an armful of roses, and glancing around the ward with ill-concealed alarm. Molly said, “You won’t often have come eyeball to eyeball with the NHS.”

“I’m afraid not. Molly, if there’s anything at all I can do. Somewhere more private…I’d be happy to…”

“No, thank you. I’m fine here. Or as fine as it is possible to be under the circumstances.”

He sat down. Beyond a drifting curtain, a family party was loudly installed beside the neighboring bed. Molly shrugged. “It’s all right, James—distractions can be therapeutic.”

He shook his head. “I can’t come to terms with this. You—of all people.”

“Why not me?”

“Just that you have always seemed to lead some sort of charmed life. Ever since you so resolutely turned me down. You decide where you are going, and get there.”

“Well, not this time.” After a moment, Molly went on, “Actually, I thought something similar of you. You seemed to move with such certainty.”

“It hasn’t always felt like that,” he said. “Or, indeed, worked out thus.”

His hair was gray now; he had lowered himself a little stiffly into the chair. Molly had not seen him for some years, and was startled; he must be in his mid-seventies. She wondered about his marriage: over the years, oblique remarks from Ruth had hinted that perhaps all was not entirely well. The suggestion was that of an arrangement that was convenient rather than one that flourished.

James said, “Ruth will keep me informed about how things go with you.” He paused. “Do you think this chap of hers is a fixture?”

“It is looking rather like it.”

“She brought him to the house. Positive in his views, was the impression I got.”

“In other words, you had an argument.”

James smiled. “If you like. There was some talk about the publishing world. No doubt he saw me as a relict, where the trade is concerned. Which I suppose I am.”

“What did Ruth do?”

“Sat there. Detached.”

Molly laughed, then winced and closed her eyes for a moment.