Sorrow and Bliss(35)

My phone rang. I had not managed to say anything. Patrick said don’t worry and told me to answer it.

It was Ingrid. She said she was in a disabled loo in Starbucks, in Hammersmith, and she was pregnant. She had just done a test.

Because she was talking so loudly, Patrick heard and did a thumbs-up, then pointed to his watch and stood up, simulating walking back to work and texting me later. I mimed him taking our rubbish to the bin but said goodbye out loud.

Ingrid asked me who I was talking to.

‘Patrick.’

‘What? Why are you with Patrick?’

I said, ‘Something weird is happening. But, you’re pregnant. I am so excited. Do you know who the father is?’

I let her talk about it for as long as I could, about the baby, morning sickness, names, then said, ‘I’m so sorry, I have to get back to the office. I’ve got so much work to invent.’

Ingrid said okay. ‘Don’t get stuck there. Burning the five p.m. candle on a Friday.’

I was so happy for her and did not know how I was going to survive it.

*

I didn’t want to see anyone the next day. I was supposed to go to a thing with Patrick. He had already paid for the tickets. In the morning he texted me and I said I couldn’t go and, because he said okay and didn’t make me feel guilty, I texted back and said I actually could go.

It was an exhibition at the Tate, of works by a photographer who only seemed to photograph himself, in his own bathroom. Patrick became despondent as we entered the third room of it. We were both looking at a picture of the artist standing in his bath, wearing an undershirt and nothing else.

I said, ‘I don’t know much about art but I know I would rather be at the gift shop.’

Patrick said I’m really sorry. ‘Someone at work said it was amazing. I thought it sounded like your kind of thing.’

I put my hand on his arm and kept it there. ‘Patrick, my only thing is sitting, drinking tea or something else and talking, or even better, not talking. That is the only thing I ever want to do.’

He said good, okay, noted. ‘I think there is a café here. On the top floor.’

*

In the lift, he said, ‘You must be excited about Ingrid.’ I told him I was and felt glad that the doors were opening. We sat at a table by the window, sometimes looking at the river and sometimes at each other, and drank tea or something else, talking for a long time about other things than Ingrid being pregnant. Patrick, about being an only child and how much he used to envy Oliver for having a brother, then his memory of meeting me and Ingrid for the first time, how inscrutable our relationship had been to him, for years afterwards. He said, until then, he hadn’t known it was possible for two separate people to be that connected. From looking alike and talking alike and, in his memory, never being apart, it felt like there was a sort of force field around us, impenetrable to other people. Were there matching sweatshirts at one point, with something weird written on the front?

I told him there was – I still had mine but now, ‘nivers’ and a spray of sticky white bits was the only thing left across the chest. He said he remembered me having it on every single time he ever came to Goldhawk Road in the months I lived there.

Ingrid and I were aware of the force field, I said, and it felt like it still existed sometimes but I knew it wouldn’t be the same once she was a mother and I wasn’t. ‘It’s why I’m not overburdened with female friends, because they all have children now and –’ I just said well and moved the sugar.

‘But it will evolve, don’t you think, once you do too.’

‘I don’t want children.’ I was suddenly thinking about Jonathan, front-running it, and I did not hear Patrick’s reply at the time; only later that night, replaying the conversation while I lay awake. He hadn’t asked why not. Only said, ‘That’s interesting. I’ve always imagined myself having children. But I guess just in the way everyone does.’

*

It had become Saturday night by the time we emerged from the gallery, and there was nowhere I wanted to go less than home. My parents had established some sort of salon and as she was in charge of the guest list, artists less important than my mother and writers more successful than my father would be packed into the living room, draining bottles of supermarket Prosecco and waiting for turns to talk about themselves. Because I couldn’t say where I did want to go when Patrick asked me, we crossed over the river and started walking along the Embankment until it became so crowded we kept being forced apart by the shoals of people coming the other way.

I could see Patrick was annoyed by the over and over of it – having to separate, having to find each other again a second later. For me it was so many tiny bursts, a salvo, of the Thank God feeling, which was why I wanted to keep walking. Finally, as a couple unready to give up their dream of rollerblading hand in hand down the Thames came towards us, he got my hand and pulled me to one side. He said, ‘Martha, we need an objective. I am worried we’re risking our lives only to end up at a Pizza Express that will make you sad if it’s empty and anxious if it’s full.’ I did not know how he knew that about me. ‘Can we go back to your house?’ He clarified – he meant, could he come with me on the Tube to Goldhawk Road in a protective capacity and leave me at the front door.

I thought about it, then said, ‘Do you know what’s funny? I’ve known you for however long, fifty years, and I’ve never been to your house.’