‘Yes,’ she said.
When Amy had gone, to catch the National Express coach back to Bath, Elizabeth scrambled herself an egg and ate it out of the saucepan with the spoon she had used to stir it, standing up by the cooker. Then she ate an apple and a digestive biscuit and made herself a mug of instant coffee which she carried back into the sitting-room. Her wineglass, still almost full, stood beside the chair she had sat in when Amy came. Amy hadn’t really wanted to go. Elizabeth had seen in her face that she felt she was just getting somewhere, that she had just glimpsed gold unexpectedly, when she had realized she had to go, that Elizabeth wasn’t going to open up, tell her everything, spill the beans.
Elizabeth sat down, holding her coffee mug, propping her chin on its rim and feeling the steam rising damply up against her skin. On the way home from work, she had called in at a set of consulting rooms off Harley Street, where she had previously been to visit a gynaecologist who was married to a colleague of hers. Elizabeth had been examined, and had had a blood test taken and, that evening, had been told that not only was everything normal and healthy, but also she was still ovulating.
‘Of course,’ the gynaecologist had said, ‘your chances of conceiving would be even better if you had chosen a strapping boy of twenty-two. But we don’t choose these things, do we? They choose us. Good luck, anyway.’
Elizabeth had sat in a taxi between Harley Street and her flat with one hand pressed against her stomach, as if its newly realized potential made it something worth guarding, something deserving of respect. She had felt mildly elated, as if she had been congratulated for an achievement or won a small award, and had reflected, with a gratitude directed at no-one in particular, how this new knowledge managed to put the disturbing events of the previous weekend into a different, and altogether less menacing, perspective. Then she had got home, and found Amy’s message on her answering machine and had been diverted, by Amy’s imminent arrival, from telephoning anyone with the joyful news that, given the limitations of her and Tom’s ages, she was still fertile, still stood a chance, at least, of conceiving a baby.
But now, sitting with her mug of coffee, she wondered about that earlier urge to telephone. Whom should she ring? Tom? Her father? What would she say? ‘You’ll never believe it, but I’m not too old to have a baby!’ And what would they say? Would they both, for various and separate reasons, be rather taken aback, her father because babies never occurred to him even as a concept unless one was actually thrust under his nose for admiration, and Tom because she hadn’t mentioned babies to him yet, because he had already had three by two previous wives, because his mind was so full – painfully full – of Dale just now that a distraction as intimate as this might seem merely provocative? She thought of Amy. Did Amy visualize having Lucas’s babies, had Dale wanted Neil’s? When women wanted babies, was the man they wanted them by – if indeed, this factor entered the equation at all – the first person they told, or the last? Elizabeth ducked her chin to take a swallow of coffee. Perhaps she should, in fact, tell nobody. Who, after all, needed to know, but her? Just as no-one needed to know her secret rapture in family supermarket shopping, in the possession of a car, in being able to say nonchalantly ‘my fiancé,’ and mean Tom by it, so no-one needed to know about this new, and extraordinary, possibility. She took another swallow and put her mug down, beside the wineglass. She had told Tom she would try, in the matter of being patient with Dale. She had meant it. She would try. She put her hands gently and firmly across her stomach and held them there. Of course she would try. She could now afford to. Couldn’t she?
Chapter Fourteen
Karen, Matthew’s sister, waited at the gates of the school where, Sedgebury’s grapevine told her, Josie was now teaching. The same grapevine had informed her that Matthew’s children were also now back in Sedgebury, living with Matthew and Josie, and the stories of how they got there ranged from Nadine’s being hospitalized after trying to kill herself to Matthew abducting them from their schools, using his authority as a deputy-head teacher to do so. Peggy, Karen and Matthew’s mother, was inclined to believe both stories, the last followed, as a consequence, by the first.
‘Don’t be daft, Mum,’ Karen said. ‘Why would Matthew do anything that made things worse for his kids than they are already?’
Peggy glowered.
‘We all know whose fault that is.’
‘You haven’t met her,’ Karen said. ‘You haven’t even seen her.’
‘I don’t need to.’
‘Too right,’ Karen had said with emphasis. ‘Too bloody right. You don’t need anything but your own warped mind to turn someone into Enemy Number One.’
Peggy said she was going round – straight round – to Barratt Road to demand to see her grandchildren. Karen had noticed that she talked a lot like that now, insisting on her supposed rights as a consumer, a public-transport user, a council-tax payer, a wife, a grandmother. It didn’t mean much, any more than those years of verbally abusing Nadine had done, it was just, Karen thought, her mother’s way of asserting herself, of trying to demonstrate that, even if life had dealt her a very poor hand, she wasn’t going to lie down under it. In fact, Karen had come to see, her mother loved her grievances, felt they gave her a kind of stature. If Karen’s father dropped dead, all the air would rush out of her mother’s balloon in an instant, being deprived, as the ultimate unfair gesture, of the focus of everything that was wrong about her life, and had been wrong for the last forty-five years.
‘I’ll go,’ Karen said wearily.
‘Where’ll you go?’
‘I’ll go and see if the kids really are back—’
Peggy snorted.
‘No use asking your brother—’
‘I’m not going to.’
‘Who then?’
‘Someone who’ll know.’
‘Not her?’
‘It’s none of your business, Mum,’ Karen said, ‘who I ask. Those kids are my nieces and nephew just as much as they’re your grandchildren.’ She looked at Peggy. ‘Don’t ring Nadine.’
‘I’ll ring who I please.’
Karen hesitated. She knew Nadine had rebuffed her mother and thought that the rejection had hit hard, had taken the excitement out of a new emotional campaign.
‘OK.’
‘OK what?’
‘Ring whoever you like. Just remember when you go stirring that the people who’ll suffer in the long run are the kids.’
Now, standing at the school gates, with her hands in her pockets and her bag slung over her shoulder, Karen wondered what she was going to say. She’d recognize Josie all right – you couldn’t mistake that hair – but she’d only exchanged about ten words with her at the wedding, and there didn’t seem to be an etiquette for talking to someone who you hardly knew at all but who was now part of your family. It had crossed her mind to go and see Matthew who was, after all, her brother, but Matthew on the defensive was a Matthew Karen had been well able to do without since small childhood. In any case, she didn’t have anything much personally against Josie, whatever she’d felt about Nadine. Even if Nadine had possessed an eccentric vitality that Karen had never encountered anywhere else, you could see from the children, from poor old Matt, that living with her was like living in the domestic equivalent of a permanent air raid. The grapevine that had brought news of Josie’s job and the return of Matthew’s children also reported a marked improvement in domestic regularity.