Another pause. “Yes, I see. Well, I don’t really need to know this. Not at this juncture. Goodbye.”
Click. She had rung off. The bitch, Suzanne thought; the monster. Jim had not told her then. He had not told her there was going to be a baby. Unless she did know, and was trying to ride it out. There was something very strange about the woman’s attitude altogether. Perhaps she was just one of those people who never face up to anything until they have to. Immediately she picked up the phone again and rang Jim at the bank. She asked to be put through to the assistant manager. He answered at once.
“Suzanne? I thought we agreed you weren’t to call me at work?”
“Yes. We did.”
“I told you: let me call you.”
“But you never do, Jim.”
“No. Well…”
“I rang up your house just now.”
“That was silly.”
“Why silly?”
“I gave you that number for…emergencies.”
“Emergencies.” Suzanne digested the word. “I spoke to Isabel,” she said.
Jim swore softly. There was silence for a moment. The line crackled.
“Your wife…I’m not sure if she’s very stupid or very clever. She didn’t seem to know about the baby.”
“She does now, I take it.”
“Of course.”
“Suzanne, get off the line. The switchboard will be listening in.”
“All you care about are appearances.”
“Appearances are all I’ve got,” Jim said. “I’m ringing off now. I’ll be in touch.”
Suzanne put down the phone. She trailed upstairs.
Isabel lay on the bed, her head turned sideways on the pillow, watching the telephone as if it were alive. She felt sick; she didn’t know if it were the phone call, or what she had drunk that morning. It’s not often you get a call like that.
So that’s what Colin thinks of me. Why did he talk about me at all then? What combination of circumstances made him confide in that hysterical teenager? And how did she get my number?
Her mind moved slowly, very slowly, in smaller and smaller circles. One day I ought to call Colin, and ask him how the past is catching up. Compared to her, he had nothing on his conscience. Errors personal, errors professional…memory with violence. Like a series of snapshots, or outline drawings, flip them through at speed and watch them move…Daddy slinking home from the park, Muriel Axon with her idiot head lolling above her strange blue smock. She suspected, and didn’t let herself suspect; she had made connections, and tried to break them. She had punished herself; but of course that would never be enough.
She wasn’t joking when she said she had troubles of her own. She smoothed her hand down over her body. It was all most unusual. There was nothing inside her but her liver, getting harder and harder. It was a horrible death, people said; but then it was a horrible life, wasn’t it? She ought to be able to feel it, a tender mass expanding just below the margin of her ribs. Everybody knows what happens to people who harbour guilt; they get malignant diseases, and die. Not just little Suzanne who was pregnant. She had carried the weight around for ten years. Now it was becoming visible, that was the difference.
On Friday Suzanne went down to the Housing Aid Centre. She took some magazines to wile away her time, and a box of tissues, because she knew that she would keep crying every few minutes. She could no longer do anything about this; it was as if a tap had been turned on inside her head.
Yesterday she had told her mother that she saw no point in going back to university in the autumn. That had precipitated another row. She expected her father to see the sense of what she was saying because at least he knew something about education, and he could have confirmed how difficult it would be for her to go on studying. But her father seemed afraid of her mother nowadays. He didn’t want to offend her. Mum had said that she needn’t think she was going to mope about the house getting more and more pregnant, waiting for this man who was probably never coming. Claire had made her a cup of tea, and she had knocked it over in temper and fright. The atmosphere in the house was poisonous. As she ran upstairs again she had seen Lizzie Blank watching her; the look of speculation on the woman’s face had been quickly replaced by an expression of sympathy and concern, and immediately she bent down, scrabbling under the hallstand with her dustpan and brush. The vacuum cleaner had packed up, the tumble dryer had broken, and the iron was overheating; perhaps there was something wrong with the wiring? Wiring? her father said: I haven’t had the estimates for redecorating the kitchen yet, do you think I’m made of money? She began to cry again, at the look Lizzie Blank gave her, at this evidence of compassion from a total stranger.
At the Housing Aid Centre she sat for two hours in a waiting room surrounded by mothers with children. The women were pallid and harassed; each one of them was hung about by three or four plastic carrier bags. Although it was the height of summer, they wore great cardigans. She could not take her eyes off these cardigans; sagging and shapeless, hanging almost to their knees, or shrunken and felted and standing stiffly away from the narrow bodies inside them. Some of them wore jeans, others wore summer frocks with gaping plimsolls on their feet. Their hair hung in rat’s tails, they had spots around their mouths, some of them sported tattoos. They made her feel an uneasy guilt, as if she had somehow been transported to the Third World. Some were heavily pregnant, some had babes in arms; they all had a couple of toddlers, running about the room, sucking from bottles or trainer cups, crumbling biscuits in their sticky hands. Every few minutes the one called William fell over, bashing his head on the corner of the table which stood in the centre of the room. Their mothers watched them with lacklustre eyes, unable or unwilling to check them. They climbed over the women’s legs, snivelling and bawling; one of them took Suzanne’s
