The Photographer's Wife (18 page)

A fresh, even stronger wave of cramping rolls through her body, followed by a weird, sickening push that originates from deep within. A new batch of more-viscous liquid gushes out and she is torn between the alarmed instinct to look and see what’s happening down there and a new terror of what she will discover if she does. She is sweating heavily now. She’s crying too, she realises in surprise – tears are rolling down her cheeks, snot is dribbling from her nose. It feels as if her body is turning to liquid, melting like an ice cube. ‘Water, water, everywhere,’ she thinks. Perhaps Joan will come upstairs and simply find a puddle on the floor and no one will ever know where Barbara vanished to.

She knows what is happening now, and on top of the fear and the cramps, and the sweat and the tears, she feels as if her heart is breaking as well; her sobs become real, become tortured. “Oh baby, not yet,” she gasps, screwing up her features.

And then, as if in reply, a vast, stabbing cramp wracks her innards, making her double over and gasp loudly as something slides from within her – something of consequence, something big enough that she hears it slap against the porcelain of the toilet bowl.

“Joan!” she starts to scream. “Joan! Joan! Joan!!” But Joan can’t hear her. The damned vacuum cleaner continues to throb and moan below, the vibrations travelling through the walls of the house.

Yet another round of cramping seizes her body but she’s empty now, so terrifyingly empty, as empty as she has ever felt. She needs to look. She doesn’t think the baby can be alive this early on, but in truth she doesn’t know. She doesn’t think anyone has ever told her how many months would be needed before the baby is actually alive. But whatever came out felt big; it felt terrifyingly, traumatically big. So she needs to look. Just in case.

She moves back as far as she can and peers into the bowl. And there it is. A bloody, translucent bag, a misshapen foetus.

Paralysed, she stares at it. She stares at the tiny arms, at the outsized, alien head. She wonders if it’s dead or if it was never, in fact, alive. She wonders if it’s deformed because there’s something wrong with it, or because it’s simply too early. The unborn babies in the book certainly looked nothing like this. And then she wonders, with a fresh batch of tears, if it’s alive and slowly suffocating inside the bag.

She reaches out and prods it with a trembling finger. It’s warm and surprisingly solid. She had expected it to feel, somehow, less real. She can barely see through the tears now, so she wipes her eyes with her wrist and then reaches out again and tries to turn the head towards her, tries to see if this thing (and could something this ugly really be her baby?) is alive or dead. It unexpectedly slides an inch down the porcelain, making her jump. The movement makes her scream and once she starts screaming, she can’t stop. She screams as loudly as she has ever screamed. And below her, finally, the vacuum cleaner stops and over her own screams she hears Joan’s voice rising from below. “Barbara? Barbara? Are you alright, love?”

***

Barbara opens her eyes and looks at the green curtains surrounding the bed. Her memories of the trip to the hospital are patchy. A neighbour brought her, she thinks. Yes, a neighbour who is a taxi driver, that’s right.

She looks to the left at the jug of rehydration salts and remembers both that she is supposed to drink the liquid within and that it tastes horrible.

Behind the curtain, she can hear Joan whispering to someone. Joan, talking, always talking. “She lost a lot of blood,” she is saying now and Barbara remembers that too.

She dozes off again for a while and when she awakens, Joan is still talking. “That’s what they said. That it was nature being kind.”

“What a thing to say!” It’s Tony’s voice and Barbara is torn between calling out to him and keeping quiet so that she can hear Joan’s reply.

“The baby wasn’t right, love,” Joan is telling him, now. “I brought the poor thing in so they could look at it and the doctor said it had stopped growing a while back and that even if it hadn’t, that it was better this way.”

“Tony?” Barbara calls out, as much to interrupt the flow of uncensored information as anything else.

“Sounds like she’s awake,” Joan says.

Like a Punch and Judy puppet, Tony’s face appears between the curtains. “I just got here,” he says, moving around the bed now and taking her hand. “I came as soon as I heard.”

“I’m so sorry,” Barbara says.

“Hey, it wasn’t your fault, was it?”

“At least she’s OK,” another woman’s voice says from behind the curtain.

“Is that Diane?” Barbara asks.

Tony nods. “She wanted to come see you. Is that OK?”

“I don’t want to see anyone else,” Barbara says. “Just you.”

“OK.”

“I’m so sorry, Tony,” Barbara says again. “I think I walked too far.”

“That’s not the reason,” Tony tells her. “They said he’d stopped growing already.”

“He?”

Tony nods. “That’s what Mum said.”

“A boy!” Barbara gasps, an actual future discovered only once it has been cancelled; her loss, suddenly made real.

“You’re going to be alright,” Tony says, now patting her hand. “That’s the main thing.”

“It was a boy though.”

“Yes, well, we can always try again.”

Try again! Barbara can’t think what to say to that. Because right now she never wanted anything less. Tony’s expectant face is just too much to bear so she closes her eyes and then decides that the best strategy is, in fact, to keep them closed.

Eventually, he releases her hand and she hears the rattle of the curtain runners as he steps outside. “She’s fallen asleep again,” he says.

“She’s exhausted, poor thing,” Joan says. “It’s the worst thing that can happen to a woman.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Such a shock,” Diane says.

“I just wish we’d known before, you know...” Tony whispers.

“Well, quite,” Joan says. “But life’s like that, love. You never know what’s around the corner.”

“Should I stay d’you think?” Diane asks.

“Nah. Go,” Tony tells her. “You can both go, actually. I don’t think she’s going to be in the mood for visits today.”

During Barbara’s week in hospital, there are three things, three obsessions, that she finds herself unable to push from her mind. The first is the image of the baby – huge head, tiny hands – so human and yet so very wrong. The second is the phrase, “Nature being kind.” It’s the cruellest thing she has ever heard. And the third is Tony declaring, “I just wish we’d known before.”

It’s not until they are being driven away from the hospital that she dares to ask him what he meant by it. Tony asks her to repeat herself twice before looking shifty and saying, “No. I wouldn’t have said that. I definitely wouldn’t have said that.”

But she knows that he did. She knows that beyond doubt.

***

Barbara opens her eyes to find Joan bustling into the bedroom. “I’ve never seen such a mess...” she is saying, and Barbara struggles to focus on the room around her. She tries to see what might be wrong with it, then realises that Joan is talking about a guest’s room. “They only came for two nights, but there’s shopping bags and underwear all over the floor, knickers hanging on the door-knob, dirty cups they’ve brung up from downstairs. I dread to think what it’s like in their own homes. And I say
homes
advisedly. I’m pretty sure they’re not married, even if they
did
introduce themselves as Mr and Mrs Grady. I wonder what the real Mrs Grady would have to say about their little trip to Eastbourne? Then again, she’s probably glad of the break. From the cleaning, like.”

Barbara blinks and struggles to situate herself in the here and now of this moment, this bedroom, this bed, bathed in the afternoon light. She tries to wrench herself from the woozy afternoon dream she was having where she had been so very pleasantly... Where had she been? Damn. It’s gone. Only the pleasant afterglow of whatever it was remains.

She tries to concentrate on Joan’s stream-of-consciousness monologue as she folds and piles and dusts and collects plates from around the room. “... over at Beach Cottage...” she is saying now. “...actually managed to break a window...”

Barbara knows that she needs to concentrate because from time to time Joan throws a curve-ball and actually asks her a question. Much of the time she manages to get away with a noncommittal “hum”, or a vague, mumbled, “I suppose so,” but not always. Sometimes the questions require specific answers, typically answers that Joan already knows, often answers to questions that have been asked previously, and repeatedly.

Like now. Joan is sitting on the edge of the bed, touching Barbara’s forehead and waiting for a reply. From some vapour trail left by the passing of Joan’s words, Barbara drags up, “iron pill” and answers, hopefully, “Yes, I took it with lunch.”

Joan nods, apparently satisfied. “Good,” she says. “Mrs Davis was anaemic after she had the twins but she won’t take pills, says the devil’s in them. Ended up with
terrible
jaundice, she did! She was yellow as a daffodil, I swear to God. Had palpitations too. All kinds of horrors. They ended up taking her in just so they could force the pills down her. So you need to take them like the doctor said.”

“I took it,” Barbara says again, even though she is now beginning to doubt herself. These days and nights of bed-rest merge together so seamlessly, so endlessly, that who’s to say if the pill she remembers was yesterday or today?

Tony was here when she took it, she remembers. He had been about to go to London on a delivery. “Where’s Tony?” she asks, more to clarify the taking of the pill in her own mind than to ascertain his whereabouts.

“Tony? He’s in London today. You know that. But he’ll be back in time for tea. For a late tea, he said,” Joan replies. “Now, though I’d love to sit and chat to you all afternoon, I’ve got to get down to the fishmongers. Lionel wants a kipper for his tea and if I don’t get there soon there won’t be any left. I’ll probably get us a bit of cod, maybe make a fish pie for the rest of us. How do you feel about fish pie for tea? Not so keen on the kippers myself. I wouldn’t mind so much if it weren’t for the smell. Has half the guests complaining and the other half wanting kippers themselves. But Lionel likes ‘em so...”

Barbara yawns and listens to Joan’s voice fading as she retreats downstairs. She will wait until she hears the front door close and then she’ll see how well she manages the standing position today. Two weeks of bed rest, the doctor said, and though she’s already halfway through, she still can’t stand up without feeling dizzy. And she wants to get up. With each day that passes, her need to get up grows exponentially. She needs to escape the house before Joan drives her, quite literally, insane.

On days like today, with the weekend approaching and Lionel and Tony home for tea, it’s not so bad. Joan has other ears to bend, other fish to buy and fry. It’s the weekdays Barbara fears – endless yawning empty days when the guesthouse is as empty as a church. Tony and Lionel are absent and Joan, with nothing else to do, sits and talks at her. It’s surprisingly torturous.

Barbara hears the front door close and swings her legs to the edge of the bed. She needs to be up and about, specifically up and
elsewhere
by the time the weekend is over. She must talk to Tony about moving to a place of their own too. She needs to escape Donnybrook and, as a couple, now the momentum and trajectory the baby had imposed has vanished, they require some new destination, some fresh objective of their own.

She grabs the brass knob on the foot of the bed and levers herself upright and waits for the nausea to hit. After twenty seconds, when it has passed, she murmurs, “Not bad.” She’s desperately trying to convince herself that she’s getting better. Her legs still have that jelly feeling but the nausea is less marked, more easily defeated, isn’t it?

She pulls on her dressing gown and heads down to the next landing where the toilet is situated. She’s supposed to use the potty but she must make herself progress, even though the toilet is the very same toilet where the terrible thing happened.

She sits on the seat and reads the awful toilet tapestry again and tries not to remember the sensation – the push and the rush; tries not to remember the sound and her scream; tries not to sense the void inside her, a void that says so definitively, so inescapably that she is a failure at the one thing that made Tony want to marry her. Perhaps not even “want” in fact. The one thing that made Tony marry her, then.
If only he had known
, he had said. And Barbara is pretty certain that she knows what he meant by that.
If only they had known, they would never have had to bother with any of this silly marriage business.
But married, they are, so she needs to get up and about and somehow make him proud of that fact.

The next time Barbara wakes up, the daylight has faded and Diane is entering the bedroom. Tony will be home soon. She knows this instinctively, because Diane’s arrival precedes Tony’s arrival as night precedes day.

“Hello. How are you feeling?” Diane asks, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking Barbara’s hand in her own. Her touch is soft, her skin powdery and smooth – a surprising contrast to her tomboy haircut and bushy eyebrows, to her brusk, no-nonsense nature.

“I’m OK,” Barbara says, stifling a yawn. “I feel a bit better each day. What are you doing here?”

“I came to check up on you,” Diane says. “I thought you might need the company.”

Something flutters within Barbara’s chest, a convoluted, conflicted flutter caused by a feeling that somehow, this would be lovely were it to be true, that this would be a little
too
lovely – abnormally, perhaps
dangerously
lovely. But it isn’t true. It isn’t true at all. So the lie is cause for both pain and pleasure.

“What time’s Tony back?” Barbara asks, pointing as distinctly as she dares at the truth here.

“I don’t know,” Diane replies, but even as she is saying this, the sound of Tony’s motorbike spluttering up the street outside provides a backdrop of irony to her words.