Sorrow and Bliss(23)

I did not want to get out of the car.

Hamish and my father went in with the bags. Ingrid waited until I said okay, and walked me inside. By then, my mother was elsewhere. Ingrid took me up to my room. The bed had been made up and next to it, on a chair that had always been my bedside table, there was a ceramic jar full of ivy branches, cut from a vine that grew up the side of my mother’s shed. I thanked Ingrid for putting it there. She said, ‘I didn’t. Here –’ she pulled the covers back.

For a while she lay next to me and stroked the inside of my arm, talking to me about Hamish’s annoying sister and the tenets of the South Beach Diet. Eventually she said she was going to go so I could sleep. She put her feet on the floor but remained on the edge of the bed. ‘Martha, it’s going to be okay. You’ll get over it much faster than you think, I promise.’

I sat up and leaned against the wall, arms around my legs. ‘We were going to have a baby.’

Ingrid’s face fell. She reached for my foot and held it. ‘Martha.’ Her voice was so quiet. ‘You said –’

‘It was Jonathan’s idea.’

‘So you didn’t really want one. He talked you into it.’

‘I let him.’

She frowned, I first thought at me, but it was disdain for Jonathan. ‘He is such a fucking car salesman.’ She squeezed my foot and said she was so sorry. But then, ‘Thank goodness it didn’t happen. Can you imagine, having Jonathan Fucking Annoying Face for a father.’

Ingrid let go of my foot and said she’d come back later; that it was still going to be okay.

My mother entered as she was going out, stopped a short way in and looked at the ivy for a moment. ‘I can’t remember if I put water in that or not.’ Then she turned to leave again but paused at the door and said, ‘Martha. Jonathan is a shit.’

*

In the morning, I started putting away the clothes Hamish had packed then stopped, realising I did not want any of them. Things I had acquired while Jonathan and I were together, things that I had owned before, now poisoned by some association with him. The drawer I had opened wouldn’t close again. Behind it, I found a half-used box of pills from a previous era, a brand I didn’t recognise, prescribed by a doctor whose name meant nothing, for whichever pathology he/she thought I had. I took some and hoped they would make me feel better even though they were so far past their use-by date.

*

It was a sort of muscle memory that compelled me out of my room and down flights of stairs to the kitchen when the phone started ringing. Answering it had been added to the list of duties my mother conscientiously objected to a long time ago, an interruption to her repurposing like cleaning and cooking and raising daughters. Often her shrieking somebody bloody answer that would see my father and Ingrid and me congregated in the same room, a minute later, as if we had been mustered by a fire alarm. I had forgotten about it, and although I hated it at the time, the same feeling of slipping in socks off the front of each carpeted stair made me feel nostalgic for the four of us at home. But only by the definition Peregrine taught me once, later – ‘the original Greek, Martha.’

It was Winsome, ringing to talk to my mother about plans for Christmas, which, she pointed out, was nearly upon us, with it being suddenly September. She did talk about Christmas – to me, because my mother did not respond to my calling out – rapidly and with an edge of hysteria in her voice for a number of minutes after I answered her question as to why I was there.

She was flirting with the idea of a buffet, Jessamine was bringing a boyfriend, something was being painted, something may or may not be finished in time – I was looking out the window at a blackbird pushing its beak into the same bit of grass over and over again. ‘And Patrick won’t be with us.’ He was overseas – Winsome could hardly imagine the day without him but, she said, in compensation we would be seeing much more of him afterwards, now that he was near finishing at Oxford and coming up and down to organise a job, staying with Oliver who had just bought in Bethnal Green – why there, she did not know.

She went on to list the deficiencies of the flat itself, but I could not move past the image of Patrick in the street outside Jonathan’s apartment, the sense of him looking only at me before he turned the corner. Then, I believed what Oliver said. I didn’t any more. In the short course of my marriage the idea had come to feel absurd. Winsome concluded her list but said, ‘At least it isn’t in one of those awful glass towers that are all surfaces and sharp corners.’ Her first and final word on Jonathan.

*

The lady behind the counter at the Hospice Shop would not accept my wedding dress. Piece by piece, she was emptying my clothes out of the bin bags I had carried in. I was wearing the only outfit I would own once I left – jeans and a Primark sweatshirt that Ingrid bought two of because they were ￡9 and had the word University printed on the front, which, she said, made it clear to people that we’d been educated at tertiary level but weren’t so desperate for approval we needed them to know where.

My wedding dress was underneath other things and when she tugged it out by its sleeve and I told her what it was, the lady gave a little gasp. Aside from the fact something as lovely as that should be in tissue paper and a proper box, she was sure I would regret parting with it. Her eyes darted to my left hand. I was still wearing my wedding rings and, assured by their presence that she had not said something unfortunate, the lady smiled and said, ‘You might have a daughter to give it to one day.’ She was going to nip out the back and see if she had something better for me to take it home in.