The Drowning Lesson (4 page)

She got to her feet, catching a mug with her elbow. It fell with a crash, the china splintering into tiny fragments on the slate.

‘I'm sorry …' Megan tried to gather the broken china in her fingers.

‘It's not important. I'll sweep it up in a minute.'

She reached for her coat, pulling it round her tightly. She'd been caught off guard. I should have been less abrupt; it wasn't her fault that she knew about Alice's problems. If Adam shared family worries with her, I'd just done the same. There was something generous about her that invited confidences. As I led the way to the front door, I picked up the scans from the dining-room floor and slipped them into their envelope. ‘Thanks for coming.' I handed the packet to her. ‘Don't worry about the mug. It really doesn't matter.'

She gave an awkward little wave as she walked down the steps to the street.

I began to sweep up the pieces of china scattered on the floor. The girls came down here with bare feet in the mornings. I leant further to reach the
fragments that were under the stool and a shard lodged in my palm, diamond sharp. I pulled it out; a drop of blood welled and I put the tiny wound to my mouth. We didn't need china to remember our wedding. I tipped the shattered remains into the bin and went upstairs to my study.

I didn't sit down straight away, I felt restless and stood at the window for a while. Richard was outside again, crouching by the apple tree at the edge of the lawn. The garden was immaculate. Adam's territory: the neat beds and edged grass were as ordered as his desk. I'd wanted a wild-flower patch, but when I looked it up online, it seemed complicated and I knew I wouldn't have time. The cat was crouched low, staring into the twiggy depths of a laurel bush, paws folded under his sleek body, tail twitching. Above him, the dark branches of the apple tree were thick with white and pink blossom. How had I not noticed before? The buds must have swollen, then opened unseen. In the gardens that lay alongside ours, there was blossom everywhere, tender flashes of brightness close-hemmed by walls and fences. I'd missed it all. Putting my hand low on my abdomen I closed my eyes, feeling the warmth of my palm seep through my clothes to my skin. Inside me the tiny heart was the size of a poppy seed; it would be beating twice as fast as mine. At this stage her skin would be as translucent as a petal.

The back door slammed below me: Sofia back from her English class. I pulled out my papers, accidentally smearing the top one with blood. I wedged a tissue into my palm and settled down to read.

No, wait. The cot isn't empty.

There are a few blond hairs in the dip where his head has rested; a shiny circle of dried mucus from his mouth.

‘For Christ's sake, Em, don't fucking touch it,' Adam shouts.

There are bloody footsteps on the rug and on the crumpled mosquito net, but it's my blood: the sole of my foot has been cut by a piece of broken glass. His white blanket is missing.

‘We need to move out of here.' Adam bundles me from the room. ‘The police will want to take it apart.'

So it's a crime scene now. A criminal has my son. I twist out of Adam's grasp and put my hands to my cheeks, clawing the skin. ‘What did you see? When you got home, what did you see?' I'm shouting at him as we walk down the corridor. Alice backs against the wall in the sitting room. Zoë stands close to her, sucking her thumb, watching us.

‘No one … everyone …' Adam is wheezing
badly – he can hardly talk. The girls glance at him, scared. ‘I phoned the police. They're coming.'

‘What did you see, Alice?' Ashen, she stares at me. Sliding my arm round her, I feel her body shake as though in the grip of a fever. ‘Ally, did you hear anything?'

She twists away.

‘I'm going back outside with Kabo,' Adam gasps. ‘Don't move. Stay with the girls.'

Sitting on the floor, I pull them to me. Zoë climbs onto my lap. I hold Alice's arm, which is as cool and stiff as a doll's. Adam disappears from the room.

‘What happened, Zo-Zo?' I put my face against hers but she begins to cry again, deep shuddering sobs. I hold her tightly. There is a roaring noise in my head. Someone touches my arm: Elisabeth, with a glass of water. I tip it into my mouth, swallowing quickly.

‘What did you see, Elisabeth?' The children cringe at my harsh voice.

‘Nothing.' Elisabeth looks frightened. ‘I was in the garden with the girls.'

‘Josiah? Teko?'

‘Josiah is sleeping. Teko found that the baby has gone.'

‘Where is she now?'

Elisabeth points through the back window. I stand to see: Teko is faintly visible, her white shirt
glimmering as her torch sweeps over the reeds by the pond. The noise in my head gets louder.

‘I can't sit around doing nothing when everyone is looking.'

‘Chief Momotsi lives in the village,' Elisabeth says. The name is familiar, my patients have mentioned him: an important man, a leader. ‘He will help you.' She nods.

‘I'm going right now.' I move from the children and fumble for Adam's keys on the row of hooks, grab the remaining torch on the shelf above and call the girls to me again.

Adam meets us at the door, bent over and gasping for breath; he puts a hand on my arm. ‘Wait. The police …'

I shake him off. ‘For Christ's sake, get a fucking inhaler, top drawer of the chest in our bedroom. The police could be hours. I'm going to the chief in Kubung, I'll keep the girls with me.

‘Emma –'

‘And ask Teko why the fuck she wasn't with Sam this afternoon,' I shout back, running down the steps to the open-sided jeep. ‘She should have protected him.'

The girls flutter after me, little moths in the darkness. They climb up quickly, over the top of the door, and fall into the front seat when the engine starts. Alice puts her arm round Zoë. They sit jammed together.

Adam appears, waving and running towards us. As I swerve to avoid him, the jeep glances off the jacaranda tree, and a bird flies shrieking from the branches. White discs around orange eyes, a Verraux owl. It swoops off into the darkness. How strange: he's been waiting for weeks to see one.

As we turn onto the track, the headlights dance with insects; beetles clip the windscreen and crack open. My breasts, bursting with milk, are jarred as the car jolts over potholes. Sam will be starving, tears soaking his face. My abdomen cramps viciously.

Alice searches her side of the road; I search mine. After a few minutes she yells at me to stop, pointing into the ditch. I brake, scramble down, fumbling, and almost dropping the torch. The curved shape resolves itself in the light as Josiah's dog. The yellow fur is pale in the torchlight. Half the head is missing; the back is covered with a moving blanket of maggots.

The neuro-oncology clinic dragged on till late. It was nine by the time Adam returned bringing roses, their tight buds already wilted. He set a bottle of wine on the table, and pulled a stack of cardboard boxes from a carrier bag, the foil lids seeping orange grease.

I was curled on the kitchen window-seat with my laptop, the window a crack open to catch the faint scent of apple blossom. I'd forgotten about food. He poured the wine carefully, then handed me a glass. ‘Megan said you were very kind.'

I shook my head. I hadn't been kind. She'd been unhappy as she'd left. I put the glass on the windowsill, watching the red meniscus rock against the curved sides. I'd contact her, reassure her that it didn't matter about the mug. I'd offer to buy her lunch.

Adam put the roses in the jug and began to ladle out piles of bright yellow rice and orange chunks of chicken; the spicy scent of tikka masala rose in the air. My stomach turned. ‘I only want half that, Adam.'

His spoon hovered over the steaming containers. Usually I was starving.

‘I ate with the girls earlier.' Untrue, but I'd been with them in the kitchen taking a call from the hospital as they'd had their supper with Sofia. She made Polish dumplings, herb-flecked and glistening, compensation, I guessed, for breaking the dolls. Alice looked pale though she chatted to Sofia.

‘Naan?' Adam handed me the warm slab, and I sat at the table, biting into its doughy blandness. ‘Interesting day.' Adam sat opposite me with a little sigh of relief. ‘I had a phone call from Botswana, a man called Kabo. He's studying for his doctorate in Jonathan's lab. He'll be the one I work with. He sounded very friendly. He wanted to run the protocol by me. He said how sorry he was not to be meeting the family …' Adam glanced at me, then he talked on: funding had come through, there were recruitment problems, the testing centre had yet to be decided …

I stopped listening. A sense of guilt was at my throat. Adam didn't know his plans would be wasted. How would he feel when he discovered I was pregnant and that there wouldn't be time to go to Africa? He caught my eye and gave a quick grin. We tapped our glasses together. I replaced mine untouched but he didn't notice. Should I show him today's scan now, while he was smiling at me? Warn him he ought to go quickly before it was too late?

I put my fork down and looked out of the window into the darkness, forcing myself to remember the time I'd taken off for the children, how I still organized the family, the greater freedom he'd always had. I kept up through the previous two pregnancies, but Adam was there, in the background. Alice's pale face threaded through these thoughts; she needed both of us. I had to remember that and once this baby was born, his disappointment would quickly fade.

‘You're quiet tonight, Em. Anything wrong?'

I must pull myself together. ‘Thinking about Alice.'

It was true: I was always thinking about Alice. Beneath a constant hum of anxiety, the questions whispered relentlessly: should we push for answers about the pilfering or say nothing more? Give her space and time, or try to get closer? Decisions at work were simple. There were set procedures to follow: when to expedite delivery, what to do if a patient bled at hysterectomy, how to treat an advanced ovarian tumour. If only there was a protocol for bringing up children, something I could stick on the back of a cupboard door and refer to in emergencies. Tonight, as we began to talk about Alice again, our words followed each other round and round in tired circles, going nowhere.

We went up to see her. She had fallen asleep over a
book, her dark hair fanning out on the pillow. I kissed her, then Adam did. She half woke, murmured and turned her head into the pillow. The china dolls were upright now, all neatly mended. I slipped them carefully back, one inside another. The hairbrush, comb and little deodorant bottle were evenly spaced on her dressing-table. Even the hairclips were in colour-coded rows. We stared at them for a moment. Adam gave a guilty little shrug; his genes.

Zoë was asleep, her thumb in her mouth, surrounded by toy animals. Her clothes were scattered all over the floor. I picked them up. When we kissed her she didn't stir.

Later, as we undressed, I thought back to the scan hidden in my briefcase. My pregnancy still felt unreal. Disbelief was woven through with strands of guilt and excitement. I turned to Adam, sliding onto his body. We made up the rules as we went along and tonight I had the power, though he had no way of knowing how much. At the end our soaked bodies slipped apart.

We lay holding hands. His head turned towards mine as I gazed at the tiny pinpoints of stars through the sash windows. I'd never hung curtains: I loved the fragment of night sky we could see from our bed. Though it was orange-stained and cut by high buildings, I could still imagine the space beyond the stars.

I used to look for my mother in the sky. If she was here, I could have shared my news. She would have been happy – at least I thought she would. I was only five when she died, I remember the cake she made for my birthday and her smile, lit by the candles. She had dark hair, like Alice. Freckles like Zoë. A brain tumour. It had taken six weeks, he told me afterwards, but the smell of the hospital, her thin blue-veined hand on the sheet, the taste of neighbours' food, coloured the years of my childhood. I looked at the stars on the anniversary of her death and on my birthday. I'd been looking for her the night before I turned ten.

The grass is stiff under my feet. Moonlight is on the trees.

Wind presses my nightie. My face is cold.

Are you there? Hiding between the stars somehow, or behind the moon? Can you see me?

A door opening. Footsteps on the gravel. Whisky breath. ‘Emmie? What
are
you doing, child? It's gone eleven.'

He lifts me up, though I'm too heavy. ‘Don't cry. You didn't think I'd forgotten it's your birthday tomorrow, did you? Look, I'll come to your gala.'

His face against my cheek is wet. His tears or mine?

Later I sneak down to check: he's in the kitchen, head lolling, a half-bottle of whisky on the table. A parcel wrapped beside it.

I tiptoe back to bed, my heart banging. Will he die too? Die of sadness? Die of drinking?

‘How will you manage when I'm gone?' Adam's sleepy voice was easy to decode in the dark. I could tell he thought we would manage fine without him.

‘I might get an extra pair of hands,' I said, turning away and pulling the duvet close around me. ‘Maybe a tutor to help with the girls' homework, when I'm on call.'

When he saw me vomiting the next morning, I blamed the curry.

That evening, Sofia handed me a package that had come in the midday post. The card was simple:

Dear Emma,

Thank you for the coffee. I'm sorry I broke the cup. Yours, Megan

Inside the layers of wrapping was a painted china mug with a delicately curved handle and an exquisite pattern of pale pink flowers; it shone on the shelf in the row of dull white china.

During the day, a case was cancelled. I waited for the next patient in the staff room, nausea hovering; the smell of cheap biscuits and milky tea seemed to leak from the broken upholstery. Two theatre nurses sat close together opposite me. One was middle aged; her grey hair emerged in wisps from her theatre cap, the sleeves of the regulation greens stretched
tightly over plump upper arms. Her friend was younger, neater, her dark hair tucked away, a glinting cross on a chain round her neck. They laughed and whispered together, eyes darting round, hands dipping into the same crisps packet. When the older woman's gaze met mine, I looked away, ashamed, as if caught out coveting something that wasn't mine.

My colleagues were mostly men: we had jovial working friendships that didn't go deep. Joan Ridley-Scott, the only other woman on the team, was always preoccupied. She twinkled at me over the top of her half-moon glasses as she passed me in the corridor, her grey hair pinned in an untidy knot. She was kindly but remote. Dropping the children off early and collecting them late, I never met other mothers at the school gate. In any case, friendships seemed to demand complicated input, obligations accumulated; time was needed for groundwork. Today, though, I envied the easy closeness of the nurses. Like sisters, though I'd never had one. Adam and I were only children of dead parents. Sometimes it felt as though there was an echoing space around our family where a larger family should have been. Was that what I was missing? I wondered, as I sneaked another glance at them. A sister?

I got up and threw my cup into the bin. As I went through to the scrub room, I pulled out my phone and texted Megan, thanking her for the mug and
suggesting we meet for lunch next week in a café near the hospital. I scoured my hands with the little brush, turning them this way and that under the stream of hot water. The palm muscles were stronger and larger than most women's. My hands had to battle with implements against the clock, gripping, cutting and sewing. Megan's hands came into my mind as they had been on the kitchen table, smooth-skinned, tranquil, acquiescent, like she seemed to be, as if they were waiting calmly, with all the time in the world.

The noise of women eating, talking and laughing hit my face, like a wave. I hesitated inside the café door. I should be at my desk; this wasn't my world. As I began to text an excuse, I caught sight of Megan in a far corner. She hadn't seen me. She was wearing a flowery blue jacket, her hands clasped on the table, her head tilted as she waited. I put my phone away.

‘This is lovely,' Megan said, as I slid into the seat opposite her. ‘Andrew and I never go out to eat. Not that I mind, of course, but I'd forgotten …' She was staring at the pink roses in a vase on the table, as though contrasting this with mealtimes at home, the unremitting chore of getting food to table every evening so that it had long ago stopped being a moment to celebrate or even relax. I wondered if she had to feed Andrew sometimes.

‘We don't go out either,' I said. ‘Only on holidays.'

We talked about holidays as we waited for food. She showed me pictures on her phone from three years ago: Megan on a beach with a tall man leaning on a stick, dark hair blowing in his eyes. She leant to look at mine. They were mostly of the children on beaches in France. Scrolling, I paused at a close-up of Alice on a boat: her eyes, reflecting water, were dancing with light, her mouth open in a wide grin, ice cream smeared on her cheek. An ill-defined sense of loss hovered. I put my phone away, looking round, as though somewhere among the crowded tables and chairs I would spot what had vanished, though I wasn't even sure what it was.

As she talked, Megan touched the roses unconsciously, as if tidying the petals. She was telling a story about Andrew. The background noise had faded, and the sun poured through the open window next to me; the cutlery on our table glittered like treasure. It was peaceful, as if I had stepped outside my normal world and found another one.

Over coffee her phone sounded. Gesturing an apology, she left the table almost immediately. Andrew had fallen and couldn't get up. She hurried out, her face tight with worry.

There was a bumpy brown package by my plate. She must have taken it out of her bag along with the phone. Inside there were two small knitted lions,
complete with woolly manes and labels tied around their necks with red ribbon: ‘For Alice' and ‘For Zoë'. Texting me later, she told me Andrew had panicked; he was fine now. We arranged to try again a fortnight later.