Then she began to imagine that he had had an accident. She saw the van mangled and overturned, blood streaming from Michael’s mouth, his lips trying to say her name. He would die trapped in the van, and she would never have heard him say that he liked to hear her voice. He had left her forever and he had never ever said it. Steph began to cry. She wished again that they had mobile phones. She wished she had heard him say it. She wished she had not been left alone. When he got back this evening she would tell him that. He would come back. It was stupid, wishing. She collapsed on the sofa and sobbed. Strange, because she had been alone before, and she did not cry easily.
Darkness came earlier on that overcast and rainy afternoon, and it seemed to Steph that as the day was wearing away outside, here in the flat time was suspended. Michael’s absence had stopped the clocks; ambient fear, for him and for herself, would fill all the space until his return. She had meant to buy food, but she began to feel a superstitious reluctance to go out to the shops. She tried to tell herself it was because of the dark and the weather. Then she considered that she simply did not like the thought that Michael might return before she did and come back to find the flat empty, even though he must have done so countless times in the past. And in any case, he could not possibly be expected back in Bath at a quarter to five when he would only just have arrived for tea, an hour’s drive away, at four o’clock. Unless there had been some disaster. This renewed the disturbance in her mind enough to halt for a while her fretful tidying and fiddling round the sitting room, and she stood gazing out the window at the sky, her arms folded over her bump, while in her head she played out new and lurid catastrophes that could befall him. Finally, she turned from the window, accepting that she simply wanted him home.
But she definitely did not cry easily, so perhaps it was the baby that was making her want to again. Whatever it was, it was important that she stop thinking about Michael and the surprising and awful discovery that she missed him. It was then that she had roused herself and gone to the kitchen to tackle the Bolognese sauce with a third of the proper ingredients, so that there would be something nice waiting for him when he finally did come home.
Again, I think it was something instinctive that had caused me to make up a bed in Michael’s room long before I had met him, or even quite dreamed of his existence. It’s the little practicalities, the things we choose to pay attention to, that so often reveal the desires beneath, desires that are so huge that they really must be concealed if life is to go on in any recognisable form. My life has never been big enough for epic emotions, I now see. I have kept them small, knowing that my life just could not accommodate longing and hope and rage on the kind of scale I could have felt them. I have domesticated my feelings so that I tend them in the little daily observances: making up bedrooms, cooking, gardening. And lighting fires.
On the day back in January when I chose and aired the best white linen with lilac piping for that room and made up the bed, I couldn’t have known that Michael would be needing it that very first night. But there was no question of his driving back to Bath so late and after so much wine. I found men’s pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers in one of the other wardrobes in my own dressing room, as well as shaving and washing things. Michael did not ask where they had come from but accepted them as his own. I recall that he did not thank me effusively for them, or for anything else, when he left the next morning. Not that he was rude, certainly not. Just that he took it somewhat for granted that his room and everything he needed for the night would be available in his mother’s house. He took his leave a little abstractedly after breakfast, in a complete set of different clothes that were all rather better than the things he had arrived in, and I did not mind that, either. Nor did I worry that we did not arrange another visit. Without its being said, we knew that from now on it was his spells of absence from this house that would be temporary, not his presence in it. Besides, what son behaves as a house guest, or thinks his mother needs to know when he might be coming back? He assumes, rightly, that she will be there when he does choose to return, and all a mother needs to know is that he will. But over and above that I felt sure it would be soon.
Michael found Steph huddled and spent on the sofa. She was wrapped in her blankets and half dressed, rigid with cold and with the fatigue of a night spent drifting between fits of crying and shaking and patches of exhausted sleep. Her face was ghastly, smeared with wrecked makeup. Strands of her fair hair stuck darkly to her head where her anxious hands had pasted it down with tears, sweat and mucus.
‘Steph? What’s the matter? Bloody hell, what’s the matter?’
Steph shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘You- you didn’t come back… you… I thought… I thought you were… I thought you wasn’t ever…’
Her eyes were tight shut, so she did not see but only felt Michael’s arms coming round her shoulders and pulling her towards him on the sofa. She heard his moan of incomprehension and dismay, and his saying of her name over and over as he enveloped her and held her. As he rocked her against him, she began to quieten.
‘You didn’t come back, you bastard… you bastard, I thought you’d gone. You went for tea, you never said you’d be away all fucking night … you might’ve been dead …’ She tried to take a breath, but began to gulp. Michael held tighter, taking in the truly puzzling idea that someone else had cared enough about where he was to be frantic with worry. It had not crossed his mind that he should let her know he was staying over for the night. Not that he would have been able to- except, he thought guiltily, he could have phoned Ken, who might have been able to wheel himself along and knock on the door. But he had not thought of it. He felt ambushed by two astonishing feelings: grateful joy that she could weep with concern for him, and overwhelming remorse that he had caused her to suffer. He also found that he had an erection. Holding her close and stroking her back, he whispered her name.
‘I’m fucking freezing and all,’ she said. ‘The gas ran out and I didn’t have any coins.’