‘Look,’ said Ali, laying one hand on my arm and the other on Rebecca’s. ‘Look, what you two need is a gorgeous little Georgian terrace with lots of light and some original features, and I promise you you’ll feel completely different.’
Ali often took this route in conversation, of recommending as a panacea the very thing by which you claimed to be being tormented.
‘We can’t afford that,’ said Rebecca sullenly.
‘Have Nimrod Street,’ shrugged Ali.
‘You’ve got tenants in there.’
‘Have it.’
‘In fact, darling, they’re leaving anyway,’ said Rick agreeably, with the distinctive accord the Alexanders always found in such moments.
‘Have it,’ said Ali again, dramatically, as though this were grist to her mill.
‘Hey!’ wailed Rebecca’s brother Marco, who was listening. ‘That’s not fair!’
Marco was in his last year of the sixth form at a boys’ school in the city. He was a big, thick-fleshed boy with black hair that stood out in wild curls all over his head, and a sallow, pitted face on which he perpetually wore an expression of soporific surprise. Whenever I saw him I was reminded not of myself at his age, but of other people at that time who I’d seen but one way and another never got to know.
‘Look,’ said Ali, ‘just shut up, all right?’
‘Yeah, just fucking shut up,’ added Rick.
Rick and Ali often spoke like this to their children. With the exception of Rebecca, they all recognised verbal abuse as a form of good manners. For the Alexanders, conventionality in matters of domestic conduct was the ultimate humiliation. For example, I remember around this time an evening during which Rick repeatedly accused Marco of being cold to Ali, because he wouldn’t let her drop him off at school on her way to work, but insisted on walking there himself.
‘Why don’t you want her to take you?’
‘I just thought she might want to steer clear of school for a while,’ Marco finally disclosed.
‘Why?’
There was a pause.
‘She didn’t make the list,’ said Marco heavily.
‘What list?’
‘The list.’
‘Oh,’ said Rick.
‘What list?’ I asked.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Rick. ‘Well, that’s a fucking disaster.’
‘There was nothing I could do,’ said Marco, holding out his hands helplessly.
‘You’ve got to get her on the list,’ said Rick.
‘Believe me, I tried. No can do. It’s a democratic process.’
‘What list?’ I asked again.
‘Go on, tell him,’ said Rebecca loudly to her father and brother. ‘Tell Michael exactly what you’re talking about! God, I don’t believe it,’ she added, putting her head in her hands.
‘What’s the list?’ I said.
‘Every year,’ said Rebecca, with disgust, ‘the pupils at Marco’s school make a list.’
‘Of what?’
‘Mothers.’
‘You know, the fit ones,’ said Marco.
‘They make a list of the mothers they’d most like to sleep with,’ said Rebecca in a sing-song voice. ‘They vote on it.’
‘This is the first time she hasn’t made it,’ Marco said.
‘It’s so embarrassing for her,’ said Rick.
‘I know, I know,’ said Marco. ‘I told them, I really did. Apparently it happens all the time with the top year, because so many younger mothers are coming up the school. Believe me, I tried, but Alex is a real stiff. He hates my guts.’
‘So make friends with him,’ said Rick. ‘Kiss his arse. Just get her on.’
‘I can’t!’
‘Why not?’
‘I’d have to nominate her myself,’ said Marco sheepishly. ‘That’s the only way. I just thought, you know, there has to be a limit.’
*
The day our son Hamish was born I woke in the early hours of the morning when it was still dark. The night seemed to have been full of shadows and motion, like a night spent on a train. Rebecca was sitting on the edge of the bed. Her great body made a depression in the mattress that seemed infinite.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
She sighed.
‘I’m so tired,’ she said indistinctly.
‘Can’t you sleep?’
‘I’ve been up for hours. I’ve been pacing the room, like mum said to do.’
Her voice palpitated dramatically between self-pity and common sense.
‘Does that mean it’s started?’ I said.
‘I can’t believe you didn’t wake up,’ she said.
I considered this, there in the thick, crumpled dark.
‘Well, one of us might as well get some sleep,’ I said.
‘How could you sleep with me walking around your bed? What did you think I was doing?’
‘I didn’t realise you were walking around.’
‘How could you lie there asleep while I was in pain?’ she shrieked.
I had to remind myself that what I had or hadn’t done was now irrelevant. Events were overtaking us. In the taxi Rebecca sprawled, affronted, on the back seat, while I sat next to the driver. Every time I glanced back at her, her belly seemed to rise and impose itself between us. It seemed to erupt through the surface of the life on which we had agreed, and I saw everything cascading down its numinous sides. I felt a part of that landslide: I felt myself plummeting down to a region of irreparable disorder. Occasionally Rebecca would groan, a melancholic, interior sound. I tried to hold on to her in the jolting car when she made this noise, but it was as though it were a strong current bearing her away on the waters of her own experience. I watched her recede into the darkness of herself and then return, thrown back into the yellow light of the car, each time more dishevelled and wretched; and I waited for her to retaliate with the sense of her own autonomy, to locate in herself the primitive instinct that would tell her how to negotiate this storm of her body, but she didn’t. She cried and groaned with what appeared to me to be more than pain, to be an actual constitutional flaw. I understood that I was witnessing her in the last minutes of her wholeness, as I might have watched a fragile, falling object in the seconds before it hit the floor. It was around that time that Rebecca vacated one part of my consciousness and took up residence in another. Her new home was far more crowded: it housed everyone, more or less, whom I loved under obligation. As I pretended that this change had not occurred, I felt it didn’t really matter that it had. All that had happened was that I was, at my centre, alone again.
Hamish was a big, peculiar baby with flowing blond hair and the prominent features of a general or a politician. He seemed to relish pointing out the obvious, and treated everything as a joke: in this way he was identifiably male, though in spite of his size and virile countenance there was something effeminate about him. He was like a big, exuberant, bad-mannered amphibian, or a laughing, androgynous cleric. The spectacle of Rebecca looking after him suggested that of a teenaged girl entertaining her first, unruly boyfriend in the family home. She giggled, or reddened with shame; she was by turns prim and infantile, and then, as time went on, intermittently burdened, disgusted, recondite, submissive. It was Rebecca who had wanted the baby, but from the start I had the subdued sense that Hamish would ultimately be transferred to my sphere of responsibility, like the pets people buy their tender, clamorous children; children who then harden, as though the giving, the giving in, were proof in itself that in order to survive and succeed in the world you must be more callous and changeable than those who were so easily talked into acceding to your desires. I knew Hamish and I were in it together. I knew it even as Rebecca put him in the pouch she wore on her front and picked her way, moon-faced, farouche, through the streets accepting the compliments of strangers.