A Woman of Our Times. Rosie Thomas
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‘They didn’t know. Not for a long time. I’ve just seen the doctor. He says they’ll pull her round. She lost a lot of blood, you see.’
‘Charlie, listen to me, I’m coming. I’ll be there in — in half an hour.’ She was looking into Leo’s face. He had gone pale, his eyes were wide and dark.
‘No. No, don’t do that. There’s nothing you can do. They’ve told me to go home, and they’ll call me. I just wanted to talk, to tell someone.’
Harriet knew that Charlie’s parents were dead. Jenny’s elderly mother lived in the north of England somewhere. ‘Have you told Jenny’s mother?’
Charlie said very quietly, ‘I … I thought I’d leave it until the morning. Now that they say she’ll be all right.’
Full of fear, Harriet said, ‘What about the baby?’
‘It’s still alive. It went, it went without oxygen for quite a long time, they don’t know exactly how long. It’s in their intensive care unit. It’s a little boy. I haven’t seen him. I don’t know if they’ll let me. They let me take a quick look at Jenny. She opened her eyes and saw me.’
‘Charlie, please let me come. Or let Jane come. I’ll ring her now. I don’t want you to be on your own.’
He sounded exhausted when he answered, ‘I’ll be all right. I’ll go home and sleep, if they won’t let me stay here with Jenny and the baby.’
Harriet nodded. Leo came round the counter and stood in front of her, trying to decipher what had happened.
‘Call me first thing in the morning. Or as soon as you hear anything, it doesn’t matter what time it is. Will you, Charlie?’
‘Yes. Harriet?’
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing. Just, thanks. Jenny’ll be glad to know you’re … there.’
‘Don’t worry. She’ll be all right.’ Harriet groped for words of proper reassurance, but found none. ‘Everything will be all right.’
Charlie rang off. Leo put his hand on Harriet’s shoulder, but she felt the distance between them. She told him what had happened, and saw tears come into his eyes.
‘Christ,’ Leo whispered. ‘Oh God, that’s terrible. Poor Jenny. The poor little baby.’
Harriet was practical. Her concern had all been for what could be done, for what Charlie or Jenny might need. But Leo was different. She knew his grief was genuine, there was softness buried under his swagger, a deep streak of something vulnerable that was almost sentimentality. Tonight this underside of Leo irritated her, and she turned away in order not to witness it.
She put the kettle on and made coffee, performing each step in the sequence with careful attention. She was thinking that it seemed a long time, much more than the few hours of reality, since she had hurried towards Leo’s studio with the cinema tickets folded in her bag.
Harriet poured the coffee into two cups, and gave one to Leo. They sat facing each other across the kitchen table, in the positions they always sat in.
‘Will the baby survive?’ Leo had sniffed and cleared his throat, then lit a cigarette. His face had regained some colour.
‘I don’t know. I don’t suppose they do, either. Oxygen deprivation is critical, isn’t it? I imagine if he does live, he may be badly damaged.’ She tried to imagine the small addition to humanity, suspended under lights and wired to machines, but she could not. Her feelings were all for Jenny.
Leo and Harriet talked for a few moments about the possibility of the baby’s survival, the significance for Jenny and Charlie if he should be handicapped.
‘Perhaps it would be best in the long run if he didn’t live.’
Harriet shook her head. It felt very heavy. ‘I think they will just want him to be alive. However bad the reality is, they’ll still want him to survive.’
They were doling the words out to one another, aware of the diminishment of their own unhappiness by comparison, but all the same unable to forget it, or to hope of overcoming it.
Harriet drank her coffee. When she looked back at Leo she saw that he held his head in his hands, and that he was crying again.
‘Leo …’
His head jerked up. ‘If we had had a baby, Harriet.’
Harriet thought, had had. As far in words as it was possible to get from will have, or even might have. That distance made her understand more clearly than the longest explanatory speech could have done that their marriage was finally over.
‘If we’d had a baby,’ Leo shouted this time. Anger licked up in him. Harriet saw how he seized on his own anger almost with gratitude, as though giving vent to it eased his pain. ‘I would have loved a child, but you wouldn’t consider it, would you? That’s what marriages are for. They’re about creating families. Not about all this, shit.’ His arm swept sideways. Her eyes followed the movement of it. He meant the tiled floor and the ceramic hob and the dishwasher, the Spanish plates hung on the wall, the wedding presents on the shelves and the painting and decorating they had done together.
‘I wanted a whole tribe of kids. I’d have been a good father, a great dad. Like my parents were to me.’
Harriet thought briefly of Harold Gold, a blandly bonhomous man fond of delivering advice on how to succeed in business, and Averil, her mother-in-law, to whom Leo was a religion with its own commandments, most of them to do with food.
‘But there was never any chance of that, was there? Your own concerns came first, your fucking career, your little business. You’re a chilly bitch, Harriet. It’s like living with a robot, living with you. You do what’s expected of you because you don’t like criticism, but it’s all an exercise, isn’t it?’
Harriet stopped listening. He went on, with his familiar mixture of selfishness and arrogance and childish disappointment. He wasn’t wrong, Harriet knew that. He could make every complaint against her with justification, but she no longer wished to change herself for him.
This is what you feel when you stop loving someone, Harriet thought. You see them quite plainly, in all their dimensions, with no blurring into hopes or expectations. It was the absence of hope that made it final.
She stood up and went to the coffee-pot for a refill. Too much coffee would keep her awake, but she wasn’t optimistic about sleep in any case.
Leo was right to protest that she had refused him a baby, too. They had talked about it, although not often. Leo had always been interested in other people’s offspring, much more than she had ever been, except for Jenny’s. She had watched the progress of her friend’s pregnancy with interest, but without envy. Jane, the third member of their trio of old friends, had been envious. Harriet shied away from the possibility for herself. She felt too precarious to contemplate it, believing that stability, such as Jenny Thimbell had possessed, was as much a prerequisite for motherhood as a womb.
It came to her that she had simply felt precarious with Leo. She wondered why she had never reached the obvious conclusion before.
She had felt, too, that there was still time. She was not yet thirty, and there were other things to be accomplished first. If pressed she might have admitted that she meant business achievements, although she would not have been able to say what kind of achievements. Something more than Stepping, she would have said, with uncharacteristic vagueness.
Leo’s spurt of anger had died away. Her silence had denied it its necessary fuel. He sat and stared dully at the table-top.
Harriet found that she could imagine Jenny’s baby now. She could see his tiny, folded limbs and his birdlike chest heaving as he took painful breaths.
Live, baby. Live, she commanded silently. She wondered if he was living at this moment, or