you even know for sure?’
‘Does it bloody well matter?’
Harriet stood up abruptly. She went to the window and looked out. The streetlights had come on, but there was still a child skateboarding on the pavement. She watched him weaving in and out of the lamp-posts. She wanted to close the curtains, but she didn’t want to shut herself in here, in this flat. Behind her she heard Leo go into the kitchen and take a beer out of the fridge. He came back into the room, dropping the ring-pull into the nearest ashtray with a tiny clink. Harriet turned to face him. Her legs and back ached with sitting motionless for so long.
‘So what do you want to do?’ she asked him.
She felt the ground dropping away, faster and faster, in ragged chunks now. Chasms had opened up everywhere, and there was nowhere to put her feet.
‘Do? I don’t know. What is there to do?’
Harriet’s lips felt stiff. In their quarrels before now she had made similar suggestions but it had been to test him, even to test her own aversion to the idea. But this time, when she said, ‘Call it a day, Leo. Agree to separate,’ she spoke the words flatly because she knew what would happen was irrevocable. Tonight they had passed the last possible turning-point.
Leo’s bounce, the cocksureness that had been a part of him for as long as she had known him, seemed to have drained out of his body. He sat down heavily in the Victorian chair, his hands dangling loosely between his knees.
‘If you want to. I don’t know. I don’t know what I want.’
‘Are you unhappy?’
‘Yes, I’m unhappy.’
‘So am I,’ Harriet whispered.
But there was no path left that they could safely tread to reach one another. In the silence that followed Harriet went into the kitchen and began mechanically to tidy up where no tidying-up needed to be done. After a moment or two, the telephone rang. She glanced at the digital clock above the door of the oven. It was ten past eleven. Late, for a social call. She lifted the receiver from its wall socket, leaned back against the counter-top.
‘Harriet, I’m sorry, were you asleep?’
‘Charlie?’
It was Charlie Thimbell, husband of her old friend Jenny. Charlie was a friend, too.
‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘It’s late, I know it’s late.’
Harriet gripped the receiver tightly. ‘Charlie, what’s happened?’
‘It’s Jenny. She started to bleed.’
Jenny was thirty-two weeks pregnant. Harriet had begun to count the days with her.
‘When?’
‘Tonight. Seven o’clock. The ambulance came, rushed her in.’ Harriet could tell that Charlie was shaking. Even his voice shook. Harriet was aware of Leo appearing in the kitchen doorway, his eyes fixing on her face. ‘They did an emergency Caesarean. The placenta had just come away. I’ve never seen so much blood.’
‘Charlie. Oh, Christ. Is Jenny …? Will Jenny be all right?’
‘They didn’t know. Not for a long time. I’ve just seen the doctor. He says they’ll pull her round. She lost a lot of blood, you see.’
‘Charlie, listen to me, I’m coming. I’ll be there in — in half an hour.’ She was looking into Leo’s face. He had gone pale, his eyes were wide and dark.
‘No. No, don’t do that. There’s nothing you can do. They’ve told me to go home, and they’ll call me. I just wanted to talk, to tell someone.’
Harriet knew that Charlie’s parents were dead. Jenny’s elderly mother lived in the north of England somewhere. ‘Have you told Jenny’s mother?’
Charlie said very quietly, ‘I … I thought I’d leave it until the morning. Now that they say she’ll be all right.’
Full of fear, Harriet said, ‘What about the baby?’
‘It’s still alive. It went, it went without oxygen for quite a long time, they don’t know exactly how long. It’s in their intensive care unit. It’s a little boy. I haven’t seen him. I don’t know if they’ll let me. They let me take a quick look at Jenny. She opened her eyes and saw me.’
‘Charlie, please let me come. Or let Jane come. I’ll ring her now. I don’t want you to be on your own.’
He sounded exhausted when he answered, ‘I’ll be all right. I’ll go home and sleep, if they won’t let me stay here with Jenny and the baby.’
Harriet nodded. Leo came round the counter and stood in front of her, trying to decipher what had happened.
‘Call me first thing in the morning. Or as soon as you hear anything, it doesn’t matter what time it is. Will you, Charlie?’
‘Yes. Harriet?’
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing. Just, thanks. Jenny’ll be glad to know you’re … there.’
‘Don’t worry. She’ll be all right.’ Harriet groped for words of proper reassurance, but found none. ‘Everything will be all right.’
Charlie rang off. Leo put his hand on Harriet’s shoulder, but she felt the distance between them. She told him what had happened, and saw tears come into his eyes.
‘Christ,’ Leo whispered. ‘Oh God, that’s terrible. Poor Jenny. The poor little baby.’
Harriet was practical. Her concern had all been for what could be done, for what Charlie or Jenny might need. But Leo was different. She knew his grief was genuine, there was softness buried under his swagger, a deep streak of something vulnerable that was almost sentimentality. Tonight this underside of Leo irritated her, and she turned away in order not to witness it.
She put the kettle on and made coffee, performing each step in the sequence with careful attention. She was thinking that it seemed a long time, much more than the few hours of reality, since she had hurried towards Leo’s studio with the cinema tickets folded in her bag.
Harriet poured the coffee into two cups, and gave one to Leo. They sat facing each other across the kitchen table, in the positions they always sat in.
‘Will the baby survive?’ Leo had sniffed and cleared his throat, then lit a cigarette. His face had regained some colour.
‘I don’t know. I don’t suppose they do, either. Oxygen deprivation is critical, isn’t it? I imagine if he does live, he may be badly damaged.’ She tried to imagine the small addition to humanity, suspended under lights and wired to machines, but she could not. Her feelings were all for Jenny.
Leo and Harriet talked for a few moments about the possibility of the baby’s survival, the significance for Jenny and Charlie if he should be handicapped.
‘Perhaps it would be best in the long
