He Said/She Said(9)
It is only eight thirty, still before office hours, and I realise there’s a cowardly way around this. I call the refuge knowing I’ll go straight to voicemail, leave a message asking them to take my picture down for personal reasons and hope that they’re too embarrassed to dig deeper. I’m lucky that I make a good living doing something I love and believe in, but my career has definitely been impeded by my reluctance to publicise myself along with the causes I raise money for. I still get head-hunted once or twice a year but my answer is always the same. I cannot have a high profile.
I knew from early on there was madness in the heat of Beth’s moments. It wasn’t until Zambia that I understood she was as dogged as Jamie in her own way. I often wonder if she lives, like I do, with our history bubbling constantly in the background, spilling over only when an eclipse is coming. You couldn’t live at that level for the best part of fifteen years. It must come in waves, as it does for me. Or as it must for Jamie, whose campaign is not governed by alignment of the planets but legal mechanics.
After hours in the chair, I’m stiff all over and when I stand up my lower back cramps in response. I use the loo for the fourth time this morning, then rearrange the magazines in the bathroom into his-n-hers piles: New Scientist, New Humanist and The Sky at Night for Kit; New Statesman, The Fundraiser and Pregnancy and Birth for me. For balance I take the stairs crabwise, straightening the pictures on the walls as I go. It’s a series of eclipse shots, glossy black circles surrounded by tongues of white fire that look more like abstract art than anything from nature. They are in chronological order, deliberately unlabelled, although even if I were to mix them up Kit would be able to tell you exactly when and where each one was taken.
On the console table by the front door sits our wedding photograph in a little silver frame. It’s a bittersweet image; two frightened kids wearing other people’s clothes on the steps of Lambeth Town Hall. Kit’s bandages had only come off the day before.
There’s a thudding noise as the builders next door start work for the day. Until a few years ago the house next door to the left had two different families crammed into it; last year, it was bought by Ronni and Sean, who are now converting the flats back into a house big enough for their three children. Like everyone else who moves in these days, they are furious at having been priced out of Crouch End. Our neighbourhood is known as the Harringay Ladder, because on the map the streets look like eighteen rungs strung between Wightman Road and Green Lanes. Wilbraham Road is the sixth rung down. When we told Ronni and Sean we’d been on the Ladder since 2001, Sean whistled and said, ‘You must be swilling in equity.’ Once, perhaps, if everything had gone according to plan, but Kit’s earning power isn’t what we thought it would be and maintaining Edwardian houses doesn’t come cheap. If we hadn’t had the roof replaced we’d be able to see the stars from our bed whether we wanted to or not. And that’s before you count the IVF. After the third failed round it was clear that the only way forward was a hefty remortgage.
Kit hates Ronni for something she said to me a few weeks later. She was hugely pregnant with a toddler in a pushchair, and as I helped her up the steps to her front door, she said, ‘You must really rattle around in there, with no kids. We should swap! Our flat’s just about the right size for two.’
I kept it together until she was through her door, then I ran home, crashing so hard into Kit that I had his toothmark indented in my forehead for the rest of that day. I threw myself on the sofa and wailed while Kit called her a rude, clumsy, insensitive bitch and threatened to go next door and say something. (He’s much tougher on my behalf than he ever is on his own.) I had to beg him not to.
I’ve packed an emergency bag in the hallway, my maternity notes wedged into the side pocket. Everyone, from my consultant to my mother-in-law, says I won’t need it, but not to have the bag prepared is to tempt fate. I’m not nervous about the birth. I’m booked in for a C-section at thirty-seven weeks. What really worries me is having three new relationships thrust on me overnight; a mother twice over and a co-parent. I suppose I can’t see how it will work, sharing Kit. It’s always been just me and one other person – me and my mum, then me and Dad, a succession of intimate friends throughout school, then me and Ling and now me and Kit. I suppose that, for a while, Beth was virtually living with us. My mistake, as I’m reminded every time I see or feel Kit’s scar, the valley of shiny flesh with its mountains of scar tissue on either side.
The doorbell rings, and I haul myself to my feet. The postman has a parcel for me to look after most days. Working from home means our house is the porter’s lodge for half of Wilbraham Road. I don’t mind, or at least I don’t mind now I’m pregnant. And I never minded the bulky stuff; I didn’t even mind the garden furniture for number 32 that once sat in my hallway for a whole week. It was the baby stuff that used to pain me, the parcels for Ronni from Mothercare or JoJo Maman Bébé or Petit Bateau. The packages of miniature clothes would mock me, the voice in my head screaming get them out get them out get them out get them out.
Our front hall is one of my favourite things about the house. The floor tiles are Minton, all fleur-de-lys and fiddly curlicues – they go for thousands on eBay – and the front door is the original Arts and Crafts, with leaded lights in four panels. I can tell through the coloured glass that it’s not the postman but Mac; his profile is quite distinctive these days. He was an early adopter of the now-ubiquitous beard and at the moment he looks rather like D. H. Lawrence, with a huge gingery fuzz that makes Kit’s putative beard look like five o’clock shadow.