Birmingham Friends (38 page)

We enjoyed the novelty of the house and discovered new skills in each other. One day I watched Douglas building a small cupboard for the kitchen, impressed with the deftness of his hands.

‘I didn’t know you were good at that sort of thing.’

He looked round, squatting on the floor of the back room, and grinned. ‘My hands have never been the problem.’ His face grew serious. ‘You look lovely – with the baby I mean.’

I smiled, stroking my stomach. My pregnancy was showing by then and I was proud, excited. Except that now, knowing about Olivia’s baby, I could not enjoy these feelings without a sense of ambiguity.

‘You do look different, though.’ Douglas lurched to his feet and came over to me, lifting and stroking my hair which was hanging loose. ‘Your face is – softer somehow. More womanly.’ He took me in his arms. ‘I love you, Kate. Things’ll be better now we’re here, won’t they? New and different.’

I looked over his shoulder across our new room. I thought of Olivia. I could smell the curled wood-shavings on the floor. ‘I hope so.’

I wouldn’t want to deny that there was fault on my side where Douglas was concerned. I was so caught up in my feelings for Olivia, and bringing her to our house seemed the natural, the only thing to do.

‘Don’t make me go to Mummy and Daddy,’ she’d pleaded with me on my final visit to Arden. ‘Please don’t.’

‘I’m not going to make you do anything,’ I told her. ‘Livy – when you get out of here people aren’t going to be able to make you do things any more.’ When I told her she could come to live with us it seemed to settle her mind, and especially as it was no longer to Chantry Road, which was so near the Kemps and all the associations with childhood.

I made the promise before I told Douglas. But he was all right about it. He felt safer with me then, knowing I was going to give up work, to the regret of my colleagues, and would be constantly at home.

‘It’ll be nice for you to have some female company, won’t it?’ he said. ‘And both of you will need to rest. You should be good for each other.’ It let him off the hook for working so hard, of course – I would not be relying only on his company. And I was relieved – I would no longer have to be alone with Douglas in the loneliness of our marriage. I would have Olivia.

Before she left the hospital, I knew I had to tell her about the baby. It was becoming so obvious and she was going to have to know.

‘I’m worried for you,’ I said. ‘That it’ll be upsetting for you living with me when I’m pregnant. I would have told you about it before, only then you’d just told me about . . .’ I trailed off.

‘About my baby?’ Determinedly she said, ‘My baby. I had a baby. He was mine.’ She spoke with more energy than I had seen in her for a long time, turning to me with a kind of fierceness. ‘I can’t hold it in my head. It’s like a dream that keeps floating away. When I try and touch him, he’s gone. But I don’t think it matters about your baby. That’s different. Your baby is yours. It might make mine seem real when I see it.’

I was encouraged by this. It was her longest speech for a long time, and she hadn’t sounded like someone trying to be brave. There was sense in it and I’m sure she believed it then. That all she needed was to be able to feel properly, to remember, and to have a period of grieving for her child.

So far as I was concerned at that time, Livy’s state of health and her odd behaviour immediately before being sent to hospital were all connected with the loss of her baby. My mind carefully threaded everything into that weave, discounting things that had happened before, much earlier. Of course she’d been highly strung and moody, but nothing more. And I had a clear, substantial explanation for the state she was in now.

Douglas greeted her with surprising warmth. The sight of her in the limp new clothes Elizabeth had sent to the hospital and which did nothing to hide her emaciation was pitiful in itself. Both of us were moved in those early days, wanting to protect and indulge her. In a strange way, for a short time, Olivia helped to bring Douglas and me closer, united in our care for her.

‘It’s appalling,’ Douglas exploded at me soon after her arrival. ‘What the hell have they done to her? When I think how she used to look! Those places must be a law unto themselves.’

I hadn’t told him about Alec Kemp, though. I didn’t want to do it to Olivia, nor even to Elizabeth Kemp. Alec had been worried enough about his public image – and presumably about Olivia – to keep his side of the bargain. That was all that mattered. They could go to hell apart from that.

The silence that had come over Olivia in Arden was still wrapped around her in her waking hours. It was a silence, though, that held no calm. Her mouth was full of ulcers which made it difficult for her to speak or to eat. She was slow in her movements, as if she found it hard to do anything voluntarily, was unused to making choices for herself. She ate very little, wincing at the pain in her mouth. Mostly she sat still and barely spoke.

In the beginning, she slept for hours of each day. I had prepared a room for her with a comfortable chair close to the bed. It was not a very bright room, but she could sit looking out at the garden and the changing light on the poplars. She sat swathed in blankets and extra layers of clothing, often seeming to want to be alone up there. Everything was in shortage that winter. There was barely any fuel to be had and I couldn’t light a fire in her room. Often I came in to find her sleeping in the grey daylight, her head propped on a pillow tucked against the arm of the old maroon chair. Sometimes one of her almost weightless hands might be outside the blankets, and I’d cover her again, watching her face, the translucent blue like bruising under her eyes, her hair lying against her cheek.

Her dreams came to her at night. Often I heard her before she had woken herself with her screaming and sobbing. At first came the tiny mewling sounds: small signals of a distress beyond words. I came to recognize it and left my bed to be beside her when it all broke over her, the terrible cries, her eyes opening finally, bulging in her head. Every part of her would shake with extraordinary force.

I held her, night after night, saying, ‘Livy, my Livy. It’s all right, my love. It’s all right now, Katie’s here,’ over and over until she could hear me. I felt so full of tenderness towards her in those days that it was like a physical ache in me. I devoted myself to this feeling.

When the snow came that winter, falling for days and lying thick, permanent-looking, we stayed in almost all the time, the muffling whiteness like a seal around the house. The city was silenced by it. Factories were being laid off for lack of fuel. I felt my energy concentrate in that house, for my friend and my child.

Livy’s silence concerned me, but I felt there was activity in it, not absence. I waited for it to end.

Then one Sunday, after the snow had fallen, the Kemps arrived. Fortunately Douglas was in and answered the door.

‘We’ve come to see Olivia,’ I heard Alec say, his voice brisk and businesslike.

Olivia and I were in our sitting-room, chairs pulled close to the meagre fire. The sound of her father’s voice seemed to pass through her like a physical force.

‘No!’ She was on her feet immediately, shaking with agitation. She ran out of the room before they had even got through the front door and took refuge in the kitchen, stumbling down the step. I followed.

‘I don’t want to see them. I can’t. Never. I don’t want to see them . . .’ Her eyes were stretched open, flecked with distress.

‘Livy, Livy – stop.’ I took her firmly by the shoulders. ‘Listen to me. What matters now is what you want. They don’t matter. If you don’t want to see them I’ll send them away.’

She watched me mutely, disbelieving.

‘I promise. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.’

She said she’d go upstairs and I led her out, repeating what I’d said, trying to soothe her.

‘Olivia!’ Alec’s voice cut harshly across the tiled hall. Douglas had had little choice but to let them in.

Olivia made a convulsive movement, as if the word had struck her like a bullet, and dashed to the stairs. ‘No. No!’ She ran up, her voice higher than a child’s.

‘Olivia?’ her father cried after her, this time his voice containing a hurt, wheedling tone. ‘Darling, come down. We’ve only come to see you.’

I found myself noticing small details: the smart line of his black coat collar, the white hairs beginning to outnumber his dark ones, the tiny lines like cracks round his mouth. Behind him Elizabeth, wearing a fur hat, was weeping quietly.

‘She doesn’t want to see you,’ I told him. ‘You can see that. It’s not me trying to stop her, so you needn’t accuse me of that.’

I knew Douglas was watching me, taken aback by the bitter tone of my voice.

‘But I’ve come to see her. She’s got to see me. We’ve had quite a job getting here in this.’ He waved an arm towards the door and the white light outside. ‘I’m not having this nonsense.’ He moved as if to go to the stairs. Elizabeth suddenly reached out, clutching the back of his coat. ‘Darling, no. Don’t – ’

‘Let go of me, Elizabeth,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve come to see my daughter and I’m damned if these people are going to stop me.’

‘No.’ Douglas moved to stand across the foot of the stairs. ‘You heard her. She doesn’t want to see you.’

I watched Douglas’s face, his powerful eyes boring coldly into Alec Kemp. Elizabeth was sobbing, no longer trying to hide the fact.

‘Get out of my way.’ The ugliness of Alec’s tone took even me by surprise. ‘Just get out of my way. I’m not putting up with this. I’ve come to visit my daughter. I’m not being ordered around by some jumped up cripple.’

Blood rushed to Douglas’s face. He looked so broad and strong standing there. For a second I thought he was going to punch Alec Kemp but, keeping control, he blazed at him: ‘Your daughter doesn’t want to see you, and having seen the way you behave I’m not at all surprised. Now take yourself out of my house and don’t come back until you’re invited here.’

Perhaps that was the first time Alec noticed Douglas’s size and strength instead of only seeing his leg. After staring at him for a few seconds, he turned silently and walked back to the front door.

Before Elizabeth could disappear I caught her arm. ‘It’s not been long,’ I said. ‘She’s not ready yet.’ Elizabeth nodded, face half covered by a lace handkerchief. I moved closer and whispered, ‘Come on your own another day.’ She gave a tiny nod before following her husband out into the flurry of flakes.

Douglas slammed the door behind them. ‘What a complete bastard,’ he said. He turned to me, embarrassed, needing my approval. ‘Sorry.’

I went and put my arms round him. ‘Nothing to be sorry for. That just about sums him up. Thank you for what you did.’ We kissed, briefly. Then I pulled away from him. ‘I’d better go and see what state she’s in.’

The tears which followed this went on for days, and I could give her no comfort. It had punctured the great reservoir of feeling in her and she cried and cried, clinging to me in a storm of grief, ‘
Katie, oh Katie
. . .’ her body racked with it. She wept when alone, and when I saw her afterwards her face was puffy and distorted. Sometimes when I looked in on her when she was sleeping there were tears slipping out from beneath her closed lids, rolling down the angle of her cheek towards her hair and the pillow. She couldn’t eat. She cried herself sick.

At first I was relieved by this outbreak of emotion. Then I began to panic. I didn’t know who to turn to. I wondered if her weakened body could stand such an onslaught of pain. Alone with her, the silence of the snow around us, I feared she might die and I would be responsible for having kept her here without looking for help. I held her tightly, sometimes for an hour or more, making soothing sounds, caressing her and pouring my own emotion into her.

‘I can’t bear it,’ she cried to me. ‘My baby. My tiny, tiny boy. I feel as if they’ve torn my heart out of me.’

Sometimes she took a pillow in her arms and rocked it with her body, trying to find some comfort. I couldn’t bear to see it. I could feel the movements of my own child so clearly now. Sometimes I cried with her.

After the thaw came her tears slowed, then stopped. She began to talk. I realize now just how little she really talked about. She had schooled into herself an inability to confide about her home life and her parents. She talked instead, on and on, about her lost baby.

We ventured out at last, walking slowly round the sodden ground of the parks. I revelled in the sensation of the cold air on my face, of using my limbs, feeling I was convalescing after a winter illness. As the days passed, bulbs pushed up through the ground, bursting colour into our grey, sad world. It felt a long time that I had been confined with Olivia. My feelings had been so exhaustingly twisted up with hers. And because of the weather I had seen scarcely anyone else, neither my mother nor Lisa. I longed suddenly to see Lisa, or someone like Brenda Forbes, someone with whom I could have a good, careless laugh. I reflected that the months of my pregnancy had been sad ones, and hoped my child would not be downcast as a result.

One day we were standing by the pond in the middle of Highbury Park, the water flooding over the lip of its normal bed after the thaw. A woman walked past us with three children, two of whom ran boisterously on ahead. The last and youngest, a little girl with straight, brown hair, sidled past us slowly, her eyes never leaving our faces until her mother called her, a sharp note of impatience in her voice.

Watching her, Olivia said, ‘You know, by now he must be running around like her – talking – everything. He would be calling me Mummy, wouldn’t he?’

I nodded, helplessly. Olivia turned and stared at the ducks, skirmishing on the unusually wide expanse of water. The collar of her black fur coat covered the lower part of her face. I wondered how this wound would ever heal. She had talked endlessly of his birth, every detail of what she remembered of her first and only night with him.

Standing now on the mush of leaves by the bright water, she said, ‘I wonder what they’ve called him?’

‘What was your name for him?’