Swimming Lessons(60)

“Fitzrovia 386?”

“Louise? It’s Ingrid,” I said.

“Ingrid.” She said my name without any intonation. There were voices in the background, the chink of cutlery on china. “Ingrid,” she repeated, this time her voice starting high and dropping lower. “How are you?”

“I’m very well,” I said. And then another pain caught me and I clenched my teeth together and breathed through it. “I’m having a baby.”

She paused, and said, “Another? Congratulations.”

“No. Right now.”

“Shouldn’t you telephone a doctor or a midwife or someone?”

“I will. But I’m trying to find Gil. He’s in London.”

“In London,” she said.

“Yes, at a meeting with his agent, or out with Jonathan. I didn’t know who else to call.”

She covered the mouthpiece and spoke, and I heard more people talking and a burst of laughter.

“And you’re having a baby?”

“It’s coming, but it’s too soon.” I didn’t want to cry.

“Ingrid, listen.” She sounded more pragmatic than she’d ever been before. “I’ll find Gil for you. When you put the phone down, call the hospital, tell them you’re having a baby, get them to send an ambulance. Right away. And Ingrid, don’t worry.”

Two days later when I was in my own bed again, one of those thick sanitary towels between my legs, and staring at the empty cot beside me, you went alone to the Royal Oak. I can’t write it; I can’t write the words that describe what happened, and anyway, you were there. The hospital scene still replays in my head, and sometimes it’s easier to let it. They whisked our boy away before I had a chance to say good-bye, and never gave him back to us even in an urn or a coffin. I’d taken the knitted boot to the hospital, grabbing it at the last minute from under my pillow, and although there was only one, I’d been excited to see it on him. It disappeared in that hospital room, and I never found out where it went. In good moments, I like to think the midwife put it on one of his tiny feet. I never told you, but I longed for it; just that one thing that had belonged to our son. What would I have done with one blue bootee? I don’t know; kept it under my pillow, or buried it and said Annie’s prayer over it, perhaps.

I heard you bought your own drinks in the pub that time; you bought the bottle. I don’t blame you, sitting at the bar in the far corner on Mrs. Passerini’s seat, while Martin and his regulars whispered, casting worried glances at you.

“Let the children come to me, do not hinder them,” you said into your glass, according to Martin.

And that idiot, George Ward, at the other end of the bar, almost under his breath, said, “Must have got the priest in there pretty damn quick if that baby made it to heaven.” He didn’t say it quietly enough, because you got off your stool, staggered up to him, and when he turned, you punched him in the face. Martin told me he heard George’s nose crack under your knuckles as he staggered backwards, blood running from his nostrils (so much blood). You swayed, took another swing, and then Martin was around the front of the bar, holding you off, saying, “Gil, it’s all right, Gil, Gil.” As if he were soothing a baby.

Sometimes I think about George Ward in the accident and emergency department, lying on a bed behind a curtain, holding a blood-soaked bar towel to his face while his nose was reset, and at the same time, somewhere in the same hospital, there was our own George, cold and alone. A little fish, swimming too early from his private sea.


Ingrid


[Placed in Joe Strong, the Boy Fish, by Vance Barnham, date unknown.]





Chapter 33



Richard and Flora sat opposite each other on the sofas, books crowding around them. Gil and Nan had gone to bed. Flora tried to ease a paperback out from one of the towers behind her: Joe Strong, the Boy Fish, written on the spine. Above her, the tower shifted.

“Careful,” Richard said. Flora pushed the book back in and took another from higher up. A hardback called Pruning Fruit Trees and Shrubs. She flicked through it, and heart-shaped pieces of sugar paper fluttered out over her lap.

“A heartfelt invitation,” she read from the typed text. “Please come to Michael and Clementina’s engagement party on 14th February 1957.” The paper was soft, fragile, purple faded to pink.

“Perhaps they fell out of love before Valentine’s Day,” Richard said.

She chose another. Moby-Dick. A giant flat-nosed whale reared up from the sea, dwarfing a wooden boat of sailors. Inside the front cover someone had glued in a bookplate. “This book belongs to,” Flora read out, “Sarah Sims.” The writing was laboured, the pen scoring the paper, and she imagined a young girl, hardworking, her tongue sticking out in concentration. Under her name, Sarah had added, But I don’t want it. Flora laughed and held the page up for Richard to see. “Your go,” she said.

He reached behind him and extricated a book, patting the stack so that it dropped with a jolt but didn’t topple. “Red Sky at Midnight,” he said, reading the title. He flicked through the pages but nothing fell out. He turned them more slowly and stopped when he reached the middle. He smiled.

“Marginalia.” He lowered his voice, lengthening his vowels, making his consonants more pronounced, a good impersonation of Gil: “It’s a female vulva, drawn by a fucking male of the species.”