in hard, physical objects: the road, his BlackBerry and iPhone. There is nothing to be had in believing in organics.
Six-lane traffic, its smoothness and gentle contours has a blank, hypnotic quality. Something about the road erases, forgives. He sees now why men drive and the attraction of long distances. How two hours on a clear road is probably more therapeutic than a year’s worth of visits to any shrink.
The hospital offers counselling the way doctors hand out pills, automatically, by the handful. How much time did women in the past spend with a psychologist between their pregnancies and miscarriages? Were they given the luxury of a week-off from housework and radio silence from relatives in order to recuperate? People got on with things, then. Everything about their own upset, the clawing in his gut, her muffles, is by comparison lazy, self-indulgent, and most likely, deserved.
But maybe it is in the nature of women to dust themselves down and carry on. He can see her back in the office next week, glued to the BlackBerry, allowing herself no time to reflect. Maybe it is only the men who have let the modern age weaken their resilience, crying into baked goods and wallowing into beer. But everything about her knotted sleep in the car makes that a lie. She feels it all.
Trouble comes when he stops for a toilet break at a Road Chef a couple of miles before the A21. She wakes and follows him, half-running across the car park to catch up, which generates a pang of fear that something might be wrong with her insides.
‘I need to change the dressing. Nothing for you to worry about.’
It is the first he has heard about dressings. All this time he has avoided looking at her abdomen, as he fears this will wound her, though he badly wants to; to study the contours of her body, and look for evidence of smoothness where a bump was once imagined and fussed over. But she is on to him, reads the unsophisticated voyeurism knotted across his brow, and keeps her hands folded over her tummy as she walks. Fingers locked, elbows straight, her moves are geisha, doll-like. She wears a t-shirt and the patterned mohair cardigan he bought her for Christmas. Mohair on mohair. The whole car park knows about it. When she made to get out of the passenger seat, the static squeal bounced from one vehicle to the next.
Ignoring the tightness in his bladder, he stands at the entrance to the Ladies, as he is trained to do. He sees aqua tiles from floor to ceiling and detects the same family of smells as those from the hospital. He does not know what he is waiting for. All the damage has already been done. Besides, he is exhausted with having to be the man of the relationship. He is unsure how much reserve he has left if he is called upon for the second time.
There is a reason Claud discharged herself before he arrived. She wanted to keep all the medical details between herself and the doctor. The dressing is only one secret they share. He suspects others.
‘Wives keep secrets from their husbands,’ said his best man on his wedding day. Hari is the expert, shagging one frustrated wife after another; a Lone Ranger, regularly pulling up in his Land Rover at the cafés most of them use after the school run.
Amal is unsure that secrecy can exist in a marriage as close as theirs. When he has every breath pattern and face pore memorized, predicting how she will toss and turn in her sleep – right then left, curl and back; in the midst of urgent, concentrated sex, in sync, when the concept of possession is anathema, to the point where he feels that he actually becomes her; and when, as he cooks, he knows how each particular food will taste for her, where are the secrets? Where in their airy, uncluttered house can they be held?
He was stupid to think that cleaning was the priority, obsessed as he was with staying busy with his hands. He should have camped outside the hospital, greeting the doctor with chair sweat and a furry tongue. He should have left no opportunities for secrets, not because he is possessive, but because he knows that secrets will hurt them. They have had to make the conscious effort to be transparent with one another. It is one of the essential requirements of a marriage such as theirs, to avoid misunderstandings and the breeding of corrosive resentment. It means therefore that any gripes are put down to superficial, bachelor selfishness, laziness, or lapses in judgement; trifles that can be rowed over and then quickly resolved.
His plan is to wheel her back to the car as soon as she reappears, avoiding the McDonalds concession, KFC, and the children’s play area. The precautions, should he have to explain them, are ridiculous. There is no emotional meltdown waiting to happen in the space between the mechanical fire engine and giant revolving tea cup. She is too empty to do that. He only wants to hide these things from her for as long as he can. Pretend that there are no children in the world, that they are as rare as baby eagles or panda cubs. Make it seem like it is a miracle for everybody.
But something about the new dressing energizes her. She is not to be shaken off, wanting to visit the shop to pick up a token for Pat. The gift store, opposite all that he wishes to disappear, is as claustrophobic and depressing as any he has encountered on the side of the motorway. Still, there is a shine to Claud that the flat strip-lighting cannot diminish; perked up by the piles of outdated CDs and tartan car blankets.
‘Two for £25 it says. I could use one in the car now and give the other to Mum.’
‘It’s terribly made. Look at the label. Says it’s a wool-poly blend. Listen to how it crinkles up. It’s like plastic.’
‘I like them. They’re pretty.’
‘Since when have you been into tartan?’
‘It’s not a question of being into. Tartan’s something everyone’s brought up with in Britain.’
Those final two words, randomly chosen to put him in his place. His parents were not born in England. He wouldn’t understand. It is something from Sam’s repertoire, picked up so thoughtlessly, used so often. She does not know that she is even doing it; does not know what it means.
‘It might not seem like a big deal, but we cannot do Sunday lunch without Yorkshires. Bring that dinner out from an English pub kitchen and they’d have your balls on a plate . . . Yes, I know it sounds like the cast of Billy Smart’s circus, but my daughter really does need four ushers, two page boys, and two flower girls. That’s how it’s done in this part of the world.’
Bigots do not raise ugliness in their daughters, just a certainty of where their place is, and what is right. For all her education, wit, compassion, Claud is guaranteed to fall into the tartan setting every once in a while, usually when they are snappy and close to argument. It is as natural as temper, right as rain.
He thinks of some of Puppa’s friends from the ’70s, and their marriages. A stream of white wives crying in Ma’s kitchen surprised at being beaten for similar displays of indigenous expression. There are one or two husbands he remembers in particular, chubby Indian beefcakes, stinking of the card table and taking no shit. Filthy tempers. The kind of men who would think nothing of giving the woman a slap beside the lopsided pile of wool-poly tartan blankets.
Slapping is not an option, inconceivable, but there are other forms of cruelty. He can protect her until she is smothered by concern, for example. Or, more easily, he can throw her to the wolves, leaving her to fend for herself once he remembers that he still needs a slash. A party of school kids are stampeding towards the crisp aisle. Thirty of them, fresh from the cramped hire coach and ready to use their feet.
‘See you at the car. Probably easier.’
He watches as she takes a deep breath, kidding himself that it is the choices between blanket colours which is making her cheeks flush and her arm imperceptibly wobble. Red-green, red-yellow, blue-green, blue-yellow, red-black. He waits only until the first of the children stream around her in their quest for confectionary,
