to be alive. However bad the reality is, they’ll still want him to survive.’
They were doling the words out to one another, aware of the diminishment of their own unhappiness by comparison, but all the same unable to forget it, or to hope of overcoming it.
Harriet drank her coffee. When she looked back at Leo she saw that he held his head in his hands, and that he was crying again.
‘Leo …’
His head jerked up. ‘If we had had a baby, Harriet.’
Harriet thought, had had. As far in words as it was possible to get from will have, or even might have. That distance made her understand more clearly than the longest explanatory speech could have done that their marriage was finally over.
‘If we’d had a baby,’ Leo shouted this time. Anger licked up in him. Harriet saw how he seized on his own anger almost with gratitude, as though giving vent to it eased his pain. ‘I would have loved a child, but you wouldn’t consider it, would you? That’s what marriages are for. They’re about creating families. Not about all this, shit.’ His arm swept sideways. Her eyes followed the movement of it. He meant the tiled floor and the ceramic hob and the dishwasher, the Spanish plates hung on the wall, the wedding presents on the shelves and the painting and decorating they had done together.
‘I wanted a whole tribe of kids. I’d have been a good father, a great dad. Like my parents were to me.’
Harriet thought briefly of Harold Gold, a blandly bonhomous man fond of delivering advice on how to succeed in business, and Averil, her mother-in-law, to whom Leo was a religion with its own commandments, most of them to do with food.
‘But there was never any chance of that, was there? Your own concerns came first, your fucking career, your little business. You’re a chilly bitch, Harriet. It’s like living with a robot, living with you. You do what’s expected of you because you don’t like criticism, but it’s all an exercise, isn’t it?’
Harriet stopped listening. He went on, with his familiar mixture of selfishness and arrogance and childish disappointment. He wasn’t wrong, Harriet knew that. He could make every complaint against her with justification, but she no longer wished to change herself for him.
This is what you feel when you stop loving someone, Harriet thought. You see them quite plainly, in all their dimensions, with no blurring into hopes or expectations. It was the absence of hope that made it final.
She stood up and went to the coffee-pot for a refill. Too much coffee would keep her awake, but she wasn’t optimistic about sleep in any case.
Leo was right to protest that she had refused him a baby, too. They had talked about it, although not often. Leo had always been interested in other people’s offspring, much more than she had ever been, except for Jenny’s. She had watched the progress of her friend’s pregnancy with interest, but without envy. Jane, the third member of their trio of old friends, had been envious. Harriet shied away from the possibility for herself. She felt too precarious to contemplate it, believing that stability, such as Jenny Thimbell had possessed, was as much a prerequisite for motherhood as a womb.
It came to her that she had simply felt precarious with Leo. She wondered why she had never reached the obvious conclusion before.
She had felt, too, that there was still time. She was not yet thirty, and there were other things to be accomplished first. If pressed she might have admitted that she meant business achievements, although she would not have been able to say what kind of achievements. Something more than Stepping, she would have said, with uncharacteristic vagueness.
Leo’s spurt of anger had died away. Her silence had denied it its necessary fuel. He sat and stared dully at the table-top.
Harriet found that she could imagine Jenny’s baby now. She could see his tiny, folded limbs and his birdlike chest heaving as he took painful breaths.
Live, baby. Live, she commanded silently. She wondered if he was living at this moment, or dying.
She picked up her own coffee-cup and Leo’s, and rinsed them in the sink. She left them on the draining board, turned off some switches.
‘I’m going to bed.’ There was no answer, but she had not expected any.
In their bedroom she undressed and lay down under the double quilt. After a moment she sat up again, took the telephone extension off the table on Leo’s side of the bed and brought it round to her own. She lay down once more and closed her eyes. She wondered if Leo would come to bed. They couldn’t both stay here after tonight. Then she remembered that Leo was going away for three days from tomorrow, on an assignment. Before he came back, she would have to find somewhere to go. She didn’t mind very much that she would be the one who would have to leave. The idea of staying here, alone in this house of strangers, was less appealing still.
She was awake when Leo came to bed. They lay back to back, without speaking. Later Harriet fell into a heavy unrefreshing sleep.
In the morning, very early, Charlie rang to say that Jenny had woken up properly. She was in pain, but she was only concerned for her baby. The baby’s condition was stable. The next few days would be critical, and if he survived them his long-term chances would be good. They would not be able to tell for some time yet how severely his brain had been damaged, if it had been damaged at all.
‘That’s good,’ Harriet said warmly. ‘That’s better than it seemed, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose so,’ Charlie said. He was normally an ebullient man, but there was none of it in his voice that morning.
‘Can I come in and see her?’
‘Tomorrow, Harriet, perhaps.’
‘All right. Give her all my love.’
Harriet dialled Jane’s number. Jane was a teacher, at a huge comprehensive school in east London. It was impossible to reach her during the day, and it was still early enough to catch her before she left.
‘Jane? Have you heard what’s happened?’
‘Charlie just rang.’
‘What do you think?’
‘It doesn’t sound very promising.’
They murmured their concern together. Jane was a forthright, single woman, a feminist and espouser of causes. Sometimes she exasperated Harriet, but she also loved her for her warmth and honesty.’
‘I wish I could go over there and just hold her,’ Jane said.
‘I’m sure Charlie will do that.’
‘Hm.’ Jane took a less positive view of the relationships between men and women, never having achieved a satisfactory one herself.
‘We’ll go tomorrow.’
‘Yes. God, I wish this hadn’t happened. If anyone deserves a normal healthy baby Jenny does. I can’t think of anyone who would make a better mother. How are you this morning, Harriet?’
‘I’ll tell you tomorrow, when I see you,’ Harriet said, without emphasis. ‘Bye, now.’
While they
