I wasn’t surprised when I got up the day after the storm to find him in the kitchen making three cups of tea. Too dangerous last night to go back in the boat, he said, so he’d slept in front of the stove. I was sorry he hadn’t had a mattress, but I liked it that he stayed. With the storm going on outside, I had lain awake for a while thinking that if our cabin had been put here for just this purpose, to be filled with people who needed a haven, there would surely be another place like it somewhere that was sheltering you and Anna. I prayed for your arms to be around her, wherever you were, and I fell into a deep sleep. I was sure a part of me had known Ron was there all night, and that was why I slept.
The weather had cleared, and Annabel got up and went down to wave him off from the jetty. When she came back I said to her that Ron was a blessing, it was good he had stayed. She nodded.
“It would be good if he could stay more,” I said. “We should get something for him so he doesn’t have to lie on the hard floor.”
For once Annabel had been thinking ahead, because she agreed with that as if she had already planned for it in her mind.
To keep her happy, I let her go off shopping the next Sunday with Ron. I wanted to be by myself, and with her gone I could attend to some of the cleaning she hadn’t done very well. There was nothing I wanted to buy anyway, but she needed some bigger clothes, and there were places in Inverness where they could get folding beds, some pillows, and other things. She was excited about going out, and I tidied her up, I brushed her hair myself. But I couldn’t do anything about the sleepy, foolish look that had come into her eyes. She hadn’t been away from the cabin for many weeks, and she looked strange and distant, drugged on solitude. Ron had the Land Rover waiting on the road, and she set off up through the forest in her unironed man’s clothes with her belly large and her hair thick and springy, panting with every step. Soon she wouldn’t be able to make it up the steepest part. As I watched her go, I was anxious. I hoped she wouldn’t attract too much attention. But I was also afraid to be letting her disappear out of my sight and into a world that could swallow up the people I loved.
As Ron drove toward Netherloch, my excitement disappeared and I felt only fear. The people at the Invermuir Lodge Hotel would certainly know that one of those lost on the bridge had been a guest there; quite probably the press had turned up to interview the staff about the tragic couple. What if one of them, the nice waitress, say, saw me and remembered me? And don’t people always notice pregnant women anyway? I would have to spend the entire day with my collar up, staring at pavement, my heart thumping and sweat pouring down my body. I gazed out of the window and wondered if my mother, noticeably pregnant with me, had once ventured out like this and also found her courage melting away the moment she left the shelter of the house.
Ron said, “Some year for foxgloves, this. Just look at them all.”
There were lots of them, growing tall in the banks among the bracken and at the forest edges in under the shade of the pine trees. I agreed, pretending I had noticed them, too.
“Sure sign of a good summer, foxgloves,” he said. “A hot, dry summer.”
“Lovely,” I said, not meaning it, imagining the hot, dry summer when my mother was carrying me and Annabel Porter died. Maybe someone raised an eyebrow at her rounded stomach and crossed the street, maybe a neighbor, bitter on the Porters’ behalf, hissed “child slayer” as she walked past. Or did the people she met assess her with remote, grieving eyes and say nothing? Perhaps things like that happened, perhaps none did. It’s possible that every bit of evidence of my mother’s defamation she conjured up herself out of nothing but her sense of sin.
“A hot, dry summer. We don’t get many of those,” I said.
“Not like we used to. Not like the summers you look back on, when you were a kid.”
I wanted to tell Ron that I never did look back on them, at least I tried not to. I wanted to tell him about the later summer, when I was thirteen, the one my father said sent my mother over the edge, though in truth the weather had had little to do with it. We both knew it had been coming for years, but we needed an additional factor, one beyond our control, to blame for an occurrence that we had failed to prevent.
It was the summer holidays, and nearly all the girls I knew from school had gone to the seaside or to visit relatives. We, of course, were staying at home.
“Here,” my mother said one afternoon, “take this on down to your dad at work. It’s just a list. A few things we need to get.” She handed me a small envelope. “Tell him I’m not up to much,” she added, as if her not doing the shopping was unusual and required explanation. Her voice sounded careful and hurting, as if there were too many bones in her throat.
She was lying on the sofa with a handkerchief balled in her hand; tears had been spouting from her eyes all day. I didn’t ask why she had put a simple shopping list in an envelope. I asked if it was her hay fever, one of several euphemisms we used to cover her various states of collapse. She said it was.
“I’m just not up to much. Stay while he reads it, you hear?” she said, with her eyes closed. “Don’t skip off. He’ll need you.” More tears trickled from under her eyelids.
“You mean I’m to stay and help carry things back? I’ll take a basket then.”
She took my hand and looked at me.
“Go now, and you’ll be down there before five. You’ll find him all right, he’s filling in for somebody on vacation in the outer office.”
I nodded. “I’ll push the bike home. He can carry the basket.”
She closed her eyes again before she let go of my hand. “I’m sorry,” she sighed. “I need some peace and quiet now. Be a good girl. Mind the road.” I put the shopping list in my pocket and left her alone.
But before I set off, I went into the bathroom, and that was when I discovered the blood between my legs. I went quietly up to my room. I knew what was happening, in theory; some of the girls in my class had already started, and one or two actually talked about it. But I felt disoriented and shy, and there was the practical problem of what to do about it. Before I could go out I needed help from my mother, and I couldn’t go to her; she was vacant and inaccessible, crying on the sofa and wanting peace and quiet. The afternoon was muffled and hot, and I realized then that warm sunshine no longer meant, and never again would mean, perfect play weather, hours and hours for swings and sandboxes and running across the grass. I would never be carefree again. The day had turned wearyingly complicated and the heat treacherous; it would make me sweat, and itch, and smell. I lay on my bed unbearably dismayed, with my hands folded over a wad of paper tissues pushed up between my thighs, and I fell asleep.
I woke less than an hour later, in a panic. It was after four o’clock and I couldn’t delay it any longer. I went in search of my mother. The house was empty. I found her hanging from a cord attached to a metal spar in the garage roof, her face black and her neck broken.
The note in the envelope in my pocket said,
Dear Gerald
Please forgive me there is nothing else I can do to keep going. It is taking me over and getting worse and worse. Thank you for everything Gerald I know it hasn’t been easy. You are a good man, you will both do better without me. She doesn’t need me any more she is not a baby any more. I can go at last. I know I am a coward but I have to let go of it all. Please try and understand it’s for the best.
Love to you both
Irene