Sorrow and Bliss(42)
‘Ingrid.’
‘I’m just saying. He would be such a good –’
‘Ingrid.’
‘And you could do it. I promise. It’s not even that hard. I mean look at me.’ She directed my attention to her unclean clothes, her swollen chest, damp spots on the cushions and looked about to laugh, then like she was going to cry, then merely exhausted.
I asked her what she wanted for her birthday.
Ingrid said, ‘When is it?’
I told her it was tomorrow.
‘In that case, a bag of salty liquorice. The kind from Ikea.’
The baby squirmed and pulled off. Ingrid let out a little cry and covered her breast. I helped her turn the cushion around and once he was on again, I asked if I could get her a kind of liquorice that didn’t require a journey to Croydon. She did cry then, telling me through tears that if I understood what it was like, being woken up fifty times a night and having to feed a baby every two hours when it takes an hour and fifty-nine minutes and feels like being stabbed in the nipple with four hundred knives, then I would be like, do you know what? I think I will just get my sister the liquorice she specifically likes.
I drove directly from her house to Croydon and left on her step the next day ￡95 worth of salty liquorice in the blue bag and a card. It said ‘Happy birthday to the world’s best mother, daughter, wife of a mid-ranking civil servant, neighbour, shop customer, employee, council-tax payer, crosser of roads, recent NHS admission, her sister’s entire universe.’
Days later, Ingrid texted me to say that after the third packet, she’d really gone off it. Then she sent a photo of her hand, holding a Starbucks cup. Instead of asking her name, the person who took her order had just written LADY WITH PRAM.
21
WE GOT MARRIED in March. At our wedding, the first thing the minister said when I got to the altar and stopped next to Patrick was, ‘If anyone needs the toilets, they are through the vestry and to the right.’ He made the gesture of a cabin steward pointing out the exit on one side. Patrick tilted his head towards me and whispered, ‘I think I’ll try and hang on.’
The second thing the minister said was, ‘I believe this day has been rather a long time coming.’
*
I wore a dress with sleeves and a high neck. It was made of lace and looked vintage and came from Topshop. Ingrid helped me get ready and said I looked like Miss Havisham, pre her big day turning to absolute shit. She gave me a card that said ‘Patrick Loves Martha’. It was attached to the present, Hot Tracks ’93.
*
When my cousins were teenagers, Winsome could correct their posture at the table by silently getting their attention and, once they were looking at her, reaching up her arm and taking hold of an imaginary string attached to the crown of her head. Then as they watched, she would tug it upwards, lengthening her neck and drawing her shoulders down at the same time in a way they could not help imitating. If they were sitting slack-mouthed, Winsome would touch the underside of her chin with the back of her hand, and if they were not smiling while they were being spoken to, she would smile at them in the hard, artificial manner of a school choir mistress reminding her performers that this is their happy number.
At the reception, my mother stood up in the middle of my father’s speech and said, ‘Fergie, I will take it from here.’ She was holding a brandy balloon containing a countless number of standard drinks and every time she raised it to toast one of her own remarks, the contents spilt over the rim. When, at one point, she raised her glass to the height of her forehead so she could lick brandy off the inside of her wrist, I looked away and saw Winsome, beside her, flash her eyes at me. As I watched, my aunt’s hand went to her crown, then she pinched the invisible string and I felt myself rise, in unison, as she pulled it upwards. She was smiling at me but not as the choir mistress, as my aunt telling me that we were going to be brave.
But in a second, my mother started saying something about sex; instantly Winsome brought her hand down and knocked over her own glass. Wine flooded across the table and began running off the front onto the carpet. Leaping up she said, ‘Celia, napkin’ over and over until my mother was forced to stop talking. By the time Winsome finished her show of cleaning up, my mother had lost her train of thought.
*
Jessamine was the only other person who drank too much at the reception. As Patrick and I were leaving, she wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me and whispered, loudly into my ear, that she loved me so much and she was so, so glad I was marrying Patrick. Probably – no, definitely – she was still in love with him but it was fine because I might get tired of being with someone so boring and good and hot and then she could have him back. She kissed me again, then apologised because she had to quickly go and be sick in the loo. Patrick believed that it happened but not that it was true; Ingrid believed both.
*
His father did not come to our wedding because he was in the process of divorcing Cynthia. I told Patrick we should go to Hong Kong and stay with him. He said, ‘We really shouldn’t.’ I didn’t meet Christopher Friel until much later when he had a coronary incident and Patrick finally agreed to go. I did not like him after the first five to ten minutes in his company. Patrick had been charitable in every story he’d ever told about him.
Nothing in Christopher’s apartment testified to the existence of a son. I asked if he had anything of Patrick’s from childhood that I could look at but he said he’d got rid of it all years ago. He sounded proud. But, as we were packing to leave, he brought out a small collection of letters Patrick had written to his mother while she was overseas for a number of weeks. They’d somehow survived the cull, Christopher said, and offered them to me, in their Ziploc bag, inviting me to keep them.