Sun at Midnight

‘Sometimes I think that no one ever looks at me now, even Harry. I’m an invisible appendage. I have no function except as a machine for feeding and wiping and tending Leo and Charlie. I’m just a mother. I want to be myself, but I can’t even remember what I was like before this happened.’

‘You are yourself. Only more so. This time will pass.’

Alice wanted to put an arm round her friend, but she was pinned down by the baby she was nursing. And this was only one of them, for a few minutes. When she looked out into the garden again she saw how narrow the view really was. Jo had told her how long it took to get both babies ready to leave the house, even for a walk to the shops. What must it be like, to think that the world had shrunk from its infinite breadth to the four walls of a house and a square of suburban garden?

‘It’s only twelve weeks since they were born. They’ll grow up and start running around.’ With the present helpless morsel of humanity in her arms, Alice realised how very far in the future this must seem.

Jo sighed. ‘I know, of course they will. It is getting better, too. Remember at the beginning when some days I didn’t even find time to get dressed? I’m sorry, Al. I don’t mean to complain. I’m just sounding off because I’ve been here on my own all day. I wanted them so much and I do love them. I didn’t even know what loving meant before I had them.’

She put a teapot and two mugs on the table.

‘Which one is this?’ Alice asked sheepishly.

Jo laughed. ‘Leo.’

‘I’m sorry. I’ll learn to tell them apart.’

‘Don’t worry. Even Harry gets it wrong half the time. D’you want some toast or a biscuit or something? ’Fraid I haven’t made a Victoria sponge.’

Alice shook her head quickly.

Jo eyed her, then sat down next to her at the table. ‘What’s up?’

‘It’s Pete.’

‘Go on.’

Alice told her. While she was talking Leo’s eyelids fluttered and then closed. His gums loosened on the bottle teat and a shiny whitish bubble swelled at the corner of his mouth.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jo said at the end. ‘And I’m sorry for going on and on about my problems without giving you a chance.’

‘You didn’t. You never do that.’

There was a moment of quiet in the kitchen. Both babies were asleep, and the oasis of calm silence was more notable and the more precious because it would last only a few minutes. Jo’s face went smooth and luminous as she stared peacefully into the garden. Alice’s sympathy for her twitched into sudden envy and she bit her lip at the realisation.

She said, ‘The thing is, I’m not sure that Georgia is the only one. Now I’ve seen this much, all kinds of other details seem to be falling into place. Pete’s so evasive and maybe I’ve been convincing myself that it’s just because he’s an artist, needs space, can’t be tied down. When he doesn’t come home in the evenings, when he goes off to Falmouth or London or Dieppe for days at a time, I just get on with my work and feel pleased about how…how separately productive and mutually in accord we are. In fact, he’s probably got half a dozen women on the go, hasn’t he?’

She started on a laugh to distance herself from this possibility and then a flicker in Jo’s eyes made the laughter stick in her throat.

‘What do you know? Jo, please tell me.’

Jo hesitated. ‘Harry saw him one night. In a pub near Bicester.’

‘Everyone goes to the pub, Jo. Quite a lot of Pete’s working life seems to take place in them, in fact. What does he call it? Necessary inspiration?’

But when Jo said nothing Alice felt the last of her defences crumbling. Was I happy? she wondered. Or was I just determined to be? ‘Go on,’ she said miserably.

‘Pete didn’t see him, because he had his tongue down some woman’s throat at the time. That’s how Harry put it. He said they didn’t look as if they were going to get as far as the car park before they…well. I’m sorry, Al. I’m so tactless. I’ve forgotten how to talk to real people, haven’t I?’

‘Was it Georgia?’

‘It didn’t sound like her.’

‘No. I see.’

In the Moses basket Charlie stirred and gave an experimental whimper. Jo said, ‘It’s coming up to his lively time. He’ll be awake now until about ten. I thought you sort of knew about Pete and that was the way you chose to handle it. Knowing and not knowing.’

‘Perhaps,’ Alice murmured. Humiliation made her want to bend double, as if she had a stomach-ache.

‘You deserve better,’ Jo observed, lifting Charlie out of his basket as full-scale crying got under way. She rocked him gently, shushing him softly.

‘Perhaps,’ Alice said again.

‘Do you love him?’

Yes, she loved him. Or was it actually the idea of him that she loved, the concept of Pete? Not just the illusory domesticity that they had enjoyed, but the very way his disarray and lack of precision had made an anarchic foil for her own selfimposed orderliness?

Perhaps that was it. His work, his pieces of sculpture, were only just on the right side of giant rubbish heaps. (Of course they are, he would say. It is all a metaphor for our world. Arbitrary arrangements scraped together in a disintegrating society, drowning in its own discarded refuse. Or something like that. She never had quite mastered the language.) Whereas she had grown up with Trevor, sitting on a sun-warmed stone and watching her father frowning and scribbling stratigraphic measurements in his notebook. She had loved the names of the rocks. Gabbro and dolerite and basalt. The earth’s apparent solidity and her father’s dependability had somehow fused into a reassuring constant. It was only much later, as a geology student herself, that she began to appreciate the immense scale of the earth’s restlessness. And now, in her mid-thirties, as the balance of power between them shifted and her parents grew frailer, and as Pete’s shape shifted, her notions of what was solid and dependable were all being overturned.

‘I don’t know,’ she told Jo now. The realisation that she truly didn’t know shocked her.

‘What will you do? Tell him to behave or else?’

‘It’s a bit late for that. I was going to ask if I could stay here until he’s moved out?’

They were both holding a baby. The sun had moved off the garden and the light was fading.

Jo said immediately, ‘Of course you can.’

Alice made pasta for dinner while Jo bathed the babies and fed them again. Harry came home, his face creased from the day, and they juggled the wakeful twins between the three of them while they ate. Pete rang Alice’s mobile every half-hour, but she didn’t take the calls. He rang Jo and Harry’s number too, and Harry did pick up the phone.

‘Yeah, she’s here. But I’d leave it for a while, mate, if I were you.’

The calls stopped after that. Before she went to bed Alice spoke to her father in the hotel in Madeira. ‘Is she feeling any better?’

‘The doctor called in again. He’s been very good. We think she might be better off at home, you know, so we’re going to take a flight tomorrow. All being well, that is.’

‘Can you put her on?’

Alice put the flat of her hand against the wall of Jo’s spare bedroom, wanting to feel its solidity.

‘It’s very annoying,’ Margaret said into the phone. The words were hers but her voice was almost unrecognisable, falling between a whisper and a sigh.

‘You’ll be fine. Once you’re home. A couple of days and you’ll be yourself again.’

‘Will I?’ She asked the question as though she were a child.

‘Yes,’ Alice said with a tremor in her voice.