The child is always neatly presented, as though ready for church, but some kind of skin condition causes her to constantly twitch and scratch, and her glum disposition merely confirms his suspicion that she is in perpetual discomfort. What worries him most, though, is that when she deigns to smile, she does so with an openness that he feels sure some man will exploit before she is too far into her teenage years. For the first hour of each visit the girl’s mother retreats to her bedroom and closes in the door behind her in order to give father and daughter time together. This suits him, for somewhere beneath her swollen face and bloated waistline he can still detect the woman he married, and he has no desire to look at her. Back home he rescued this woman from a life working as a shop assistant in a haberdashery on Liverpool Row that was run by the Lebanese Sahaley brothers. He offered her the choice of forty more years serving customers, with the fresh sea breeze cooling her through the open jalousies, or marriage and a trip to England and a new and exciting beginning. She had waited dutifully for him during the three long years he had dedicated himself to his coursework and earned a Bachelor of Arts at the University College on the larger island to the north, and when he returned, it was to claim the island scholarship and sweep her off her feet and onto a ship bound for England. But she had country values, and whereas most women would have considered the possibility of a life in England to be a lavish reward for simply waiting faithfully for a fiancé, he soon discovered that their arrival in England served only to stimulate the woman’s materialistic cravings, about which he had hitherto been ignorant. After he had rejected her and found a basement flat in Oxford where he felt he could live and work for the four remaining years of his scholarship, she hired a lawyer and began to harass him. Mercifully, and with help and advice from the University Overseas Office, he was able to quickly secure a divorce and put this marriage behind him. He speculated that perhaps some years hence, when she had finally grown up a little, she might well make some man a loyal and decent spouse, but this would be in the future and would be none of his business.
As his former wife emerged from the bedroom, he looked from mother to daughter, and again he wondered how he could have miscalculated so disastrously. The place contained not a single book, and as the woman began to speak, he was once again reminded that her conversation never ascended above the banaclass="underline" their daughter’s life at school, her new job as a cleaner at a local hospital, her friend the nurse who minded the girl when she worked the night shift. He had read about such people, but it didn’t seem fair that he should be connected to them. His former wife had, as always, prepared rice and peas and chicken for him, and he watched as she carefully spooned out his food onto a plate, and then she and the girl sat and stared as he ate, and he knew that this charade would end only when he handed over the slim brown envelope of money that they were expecting. Until then he forced himself to appear amicable, all the while stealing glances at the girl, who, when she opened her mouth, exposed teeth that had already been attacked by sugar.
Sometime later he sat on the tube and stared at his reflection in the smudged mirror that was the glass, and he knew it was essential that he empty his mind of the events of the day. He had made a mistake and he was paying for it and that was all there was to it. Once he got off the tube, instead of going straight home, he made his way into a noisy pub next to the underground station and stood by the bar and began to order drinks. Once the landlord called time, and the pub began to let out, he wandered into a small park and sat alone on a damp bench with a slat missing. Monica needed help, he knew this, and in fact he had begun to worry about her before they had even moved to the south coast. It was not just the blank stare that perturbed him, for the truth was she had always displayed a tendency to lapse into these trances; what alarmed him the most was her ability to withdraw completely from him yet continue to function as though nothing were happening. It was clear that at such moments she wasn’t listening to him, and when she finally came back to herself, she seemed to have no understanding that she might have been behaving oddly. He knew that Monica couldn’t be happy, but how was he supposed to know what to do about it if she wasn’t prepared to talk to him? He sighed. Really, when all was said and done, this wasn’t the ideal moment for him to be dealing with this. Not now.
By the time he was ready to stumble home he had no clue how late it was and no idea how his life could have taken such a depressing turn. He quietly pushed the key into the door of the bed-sitting-room, hoping that Monica would now be asleep. He eased the whining door shut until he heard the reassuring click of the Yale lock, and then he stepped on the back of first one shoe and then the other and silently slipped out of his jacket and trousers, leaving them pooled on the floor. He watched as his increasingly mutinous wife extended a thin arm out over the side of the bed. He stood half undressed in the doorway and continued to look across the bed-sitting-room at Monica, who stirred and then, with her exposed arm, lifted the blankets over herself and turned away from him and onto her side.
* * *
When Monica understood that she was pregnant, she began to visit the local library and borrow poetry books and novels; apart from trips out to the shops, or to the odd matinee at the local cinema, these were about the only times she ever left the room. She spent long mornings and afternoons folded up on the settee, reading as she had done throughout her first perplexing year at university, when she had found everything vexing to cope with, be it making friends or simply handling the heavy silver knives and forks in the college dining hall. Now that she was expecting, however, she realized that reading aside, she seemed to be investing countless hours trying to anticipate the sensations that she suspected would soon be overpowering her. She had been alarmed by a few early-morning episodes of vomiting and nausea, and she continued to suffer from an ongoing inability to find a truly comfortable position in which to sleep at night, but beyond these inconveniences she soon came to the conclusion that, far from confounding her, the experience of being pregnant was fairly boring. As she began to show, Londoners nodded and made eye contact when they passed her in the street, and passengers on the bus actually stood up and offered her their seats. All of a sudden she was visible, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about this. With the onset of winter the weather turned bitter, but it annoyed her that she could still feel herself blooming, a peculiar northern flower in an ominously arid southern landscape.
“You know,” she said, looking up from the settee, “unlike other mammals, our babies spend far too little time in the womb. They come out helpless and unable to run from predators, and that’s just not right.”