Sorrow and Bliss(50)

She looked at the time on her phone. ‘Don’t worry. I have to go.’

‘Go where?’

‘Home.’ She sighed in anticipation of standing up.

‘But you just walked out.’

She emptied the rest of the wine into her mouth then said, ‘Martha. As if I would actually leave Hamish.’ She circled her hand above the sling. ‘As if I could do this by myself.’

‘But you said you have lost sight of him as a person.’

‘I know, but it’s no reason to ruin the weekend.’

I knew she was joking but I didn’t laugh.

Really, she said, it was just a question of toughing out the next forty years.

I told her to please be serious. ‘Are you leaving Hamish or not?’

Ingrid stopped smiling and said, ‘No. I’m not. You don’t just leave your husband, Martha. Not unless there’s a proper-proper reason or you’re our mother and you don’t give a fuck about anyone except yourself.’

‘But what if you’re unhappy?’

‘It doesn’t matter if you’re unhappy. It’s not a good enough reason. If you’re just bored and it’s all a bit hard and you don’t feel like you love them any more, who cares. You made a deal.’

She got up and did something to the sling. I followed her to the door and, waiting for me to open it, she said, ‘I know this won’t mean anything to you because you’re not having them, but the best thing a mother can do for her children is love their father.’

It didn’t sound like something my sister would have thought of and I asked her who said it.

‘Me.’

‘No, but who told it to you?’

‘Winsome.’

I said, ‘When were you talking to Winsome?’

We looked at each other, separately incredulous. In general, I spoke to my aunt once in April, when she rang up to talk about arrangements for Christmas, and not again until two weeks before Christmas, when she rang up to reiterate them.

Ingrid said what, and narrowing her eyes, ‘I speak to her about fifty times a day. That’s if she is not already at my house, folding washing and making shepherd’s pies and doing all the other things my own mother should do but doesn’t because she is too busy making shit out of forks.’ She sounded so weary. I watched her press the heel of her hand into one eye and rub it back and forth.

‘But you can’t stand her,’ I said. ‘You gave birth on her floor for revenge because she offered you a chair with a cushion on it. You’ve always hated her.’

‘I hated her because we were supposed to. I never hated her myself, and even if I did, it would be hard to keep hating the only person who’s ever helped me without being asked.’

‘And it really is helpful? Having her around all the time?’

‘What? Of course it is.’

I had no image of Winsome at my sister’s house. The thought of her there, and the two of them forming their own close, separate relationship, Ingrid relying on her instead of me, made me feel peripheral, and jealous of their proximity now that I was in Oxford.

She said, ‘Don’t look like that Martha. You make me happy but you know you can’t actually help me.’

For a second she disappeared into some private memory then said, ‘I didn’t know what it was going to be like. I really have to go.’

I held the door open and Ingrid walked out ahead of me. She hugged me and then, pausing, said, ‘That’s another reason I wouldn’t leave my husband, Martha. Because I’d have to convince myself first that it was only about us and I didn’t owe anything to the people around us.’ She looked at me in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. ‘And I would never be able to do that.’

I watched her go to the car and put the baby in the capsule, just the two of them inside the small cone of light. A minute later she drove away and reconciled with Hamish after their three-and-a-half hour separation.

*

Not long afterwards, they left London because Ingrid said she was sick of sandpits full of cat shit and condom wrappers. They moved to a village which collectively pretends Swindon isn’t right there.

She called me while she was watching their furniture come off the truck and told me she already hated most things about it, in particular the people and everything they stood for, but had decided to endure it because it meant we were only forty minutes apart.

I drove to see her the following day and sat at the island in her kitchen that had been described by the agent as ‘to die for’ instead of, Ingrid said, a future dumping ground for everyone’s shit and wallets. I coloured in with her son while she put away groceries, breastfeeding the baby at the same time even though he was so big now.

She kicked a block of toilet rolls towards the laundry door and said if she had to characterise her stage of life right now, it would be spending two hundred pounds a week on paper products: kitchen roll, loo roll, pads, nappies, in such quantity that the trolley was full before you put anything else in. I stopped drawing and watched her retrieve a heavy bottle of milk from the floor, open the fridge with her elbow and swing it into the door without disturbing the baby. ‘If Sainsbury’s had one aisle that was dinner ingredients and absorbent shit, I would be in and out in two minutes.’

Her son was trying to push a crayon into my hand so I would go back to what we were doing. Ingrid kept talking. I took the crayon and stared down at the page so she couldn’t see my face. ‘I’m legitimately jealous, you only shopping for two,’ she said. ‘Oh my gosh. You probably use a basket! You probably didn’t even know they sell toilet roll in forty-eight packs.’