Making up for Lost Time Ch. 08

By January Anna was twenty weeks gone -- halfway, the midwife said, and Anna had smiled and taken the congratulations as they were intended.

She was showing properly now. Not the coy little swell she'd carried through Christmas but a real bump, the genuine article, the kind that made strangers soften at her in the Tesco and offer their seat on the bus. She'd forgotten this part, the public tenderness of it; it had been twenty years since Leo, and she'd been a girl then, near enough, and had taken it all for granted. She did not take it for granted now. She stood in the queue at the shops with her hand on the shelf of herself and let an old man insist she go ahead of him, and felt, underneath the ordinary embarrassment, good.

Throughout all of this whole strange pregnancy, her husband had been relentlessly and unshowily there. That was the word that kept arriving. There. Simon came to the appointments and sat in the plastic chairs and held her coat. Simon had read, God help him, a book -- an actual book, with a stork on the spine -- and knew things now about her cervix that no man should have to know and relayed them to her at breakfast. Simon had even started, without announcement, clearing the box room. She'd gone up one Sunday to find him standing in the middle of it with a roll of bin bags, and neither of them had said the word nursery, and both of them had known.

She was thinking about all of it -- the box room, the stork book, the seat on the bus -- as she put the shopping away that Sunday afternoon, and so she was already halfway to soft when her phone lit up on the counter with Leo's name, and she wiped her hands and answered it smiling, glad of her boy, with no idea at all that he was about to knock the wind out of her.

"Mum. Mum. Are you listening, this is important."

"I'm always listening, love. What's important?"

It was not, in fact, important; it was Leo, full of Leo's new life, and for ten minutes she leaned on the counter and let it wash over her -- a module he was failing, a housemate who never did the washing up, the boxing club where he was apparently now competent enough to get hit by better people than before. She made the right noises. She loved the sound of him, launched and happy and hers. And then, in the middle of a sentence about a night out, entirely in passing, entirely without weight, her son said the thing.

"--yeah, and Jake couldn't come in the end because he was doing something with Sophie, they're like properly official now, he's taking her to meet his mum and dad at half term, it's very serious, we're all taking the piss out of him about it--"

Anna kept her hand flat on the counter.

"That's nice," she heard herself say. "Good for Jacob."

"I know, right? Never thought I'd see the day. He's gone all soppy." Leo laughed, careless, oblivious, the most oblivious boy in England. "Anyway--"

And he was off again, on to something else, and Anna stood in her kitchen with the phone to her ear and made the right noises for another five minutes while a cold quiet thing opened up in the middle of her and sat there.

Meeting the parents. Very serious. Properly official.

She had known there was a Sophie. Of course she'd known; she'd been the one, hadn't she, who'd sent him off with the instruction to go and have exactly this, the girls his own age, the whole ordinary life -- she'd said it in a hotel by a station with his child already inside her, you get your life, I get this. She had meant it. She still meant it. She'd have been ashamed of herself if she hadn't meant it.

But there is a difference, she was discovering, between a principle and a girl with a name who is meeting his mother at half term. There is a difference between he'll have other women said bravely into the dark and they're like properly official now said by your own son over the washing up. She had signed the contract. She had not, it turned out, read all of the clauses, and one of the clauses was this: that she would stand in her kitchen at twenty weeks pregnant with the boy's child and feel, hearing his girlfriend's name, a jealousy so sudden and so total and so entirely unearned that it frightened her.

She got Leo off the phone. She was proud of how normal she kept it. And then she stood for a while at the sink with the tap running over nothing, and did not cry, because she'd decided some time ago that she wasn't going to be a woman who cried about this, and after a bit the running tap did what running water always did to her now and she turned it off before it could start something.

She hadn't heard Simon come in. She didn't know how long he'd been in the doorway.

"All right?" he said.

"Fine. Leo. He's failing something and boxing badly." She turned, and her face must have done something, because Simon's did something back -- that careful attentiveness he had now, the readiness -- and she found she couldn't hold the fine for very long under it. "He mentioned Jacob's got a girlfriend. Properly. Meeting-the-parents properly."

"Ah," said Simon.

Just that. Ah. And then he crossed the kitchen and did not say any of the things a stupider man would have said -- did not point out that this was the deal, did not remind her whose idea it had been, did not, worst of all, look pleased, the way the old Simon, the collector of her every humiliation, might once have looked. He just came and stood next to her at the sink and put his arm around what used to be her waist, and she leaned into him, this soft unspectacular man she'd married at twenty, and let herself be held by the one person in the whole arrangement who was never, ever going anywhere.

"He's allowed," she said, into his shoulder, arguing with nobody. "I told him to. It's good. It's what's supposed to happen."

"I know," said Simon.

"Then why do I--" She stopped.

"I know," he said again, and didn't make her finish it, and that -- the not making her finish it -- was so exactly what she needed that she had to shut her eyes.

It took her two days to do anything about it, and when she did it, she did it badly.

She went up at half nine on the Tuesday saying she was tired, which was true, and shut the bedroom door behind her. She could hear the low mutter of the television coming up through the floor. She sat on the edge of her own bed with her phone in both hands like a fifteen-year-old and told herself she was going to text him about the scan, which was a real thing, and reasonable, and even nearly true.

What she did instead was take her top off.

She had never sent him a picture. Not once, in all of it -- he'd never asked, and she'd have died first, and the whole idea of it belonged to a species of woman she wasn't. She sat there for a while with her jumper on the floor. Then she pulled her bra down under her tits, which had gone enormous and veined and had a mind of their own lately, and held the phone out at arm's length above herself and got the bump in as well, everything except her face, and sent it before she could change her mind.

Delivered. Then Read. Then nothing, for a length of time she could have measured in heartbeats.

Then he rang her, which she had not expected, and she nearly dropped the phone getting to it.

There was noise behind him. Voices, a lot of them, and music with the bass coming through the wall of wherever he was, and a girl laughing about something on the other side of it. Then a door, and the noise cut down by half, and then his voice, up close.

"What's that, then?"

"Nothing."

"Doesn't look like nothing."

"It's twenty weeks of your daughter," said Anna, "is what it is," and heard how pleased with herself she sounded, and hated it slightly.

"Mm." A shift, a scrape -- he'd sat down somewhere, a stairwell, a corridor. "Send another one."

"Jacob--" She looked at the door. "Leo phoned on Sunday."

"Yeah?"

"He said you're taking a Sophie to meet your mum and dad. At half term."

A beat. Not a guilty one. Just a boy waiting to see whether there was more coming.

"Yeah," said Jacob. "Half term."

"That's nice," said Anna.

"Take the rest off."

And that was the end of the subject, and she knew it was the end of the subject, and the awful thing -- the thing she'd be turning over at three in the morning for a week -- was the wash of relief that came with being told to do something instead. She put the phone on the pillow and got out of the rest of it and lay back on the bed she'd made that morning, thirty-nine years old and twenty weeks gone and doing as she was told.

"Done."

"Legs."

"Simon's downstairs."

"So?"

She opened her legs on her own marital bed and put her hand where he'd have put his and said, "Right. Done."

"Tell me what it's like."

"It's -- wet. God, Jacob, it's--"

"Say it properly."

"My cunt's soaking," said Anna, into her own bedroom, in the same voice she used at the school gate, and heard him breathe out, and felt that breath go through her like a current. "It's been like this since Sunday. It's ridiculous. I'm carrying your baby and I'm lying here like a--"

"Like a what?"

"Don't."

"Say it."

She said it. She said it and it came out in a rush and she was not, by any measure she'd been raised with, the same woman who'd stood in an aisle that afternoon choosing a shepherd's pie. He made her put the phone down between her legs so he could hear it, and she did, with her cheek pressed into the duvet, and lay there listening to a nineteen-year-old boy listening to her, a hundred and fifty miles away, at a party he'd walked out of.

"You still there?"

"I'm here."

"Two fingers. Not the clit yet."

She'd have argued about that in the summer, when she still had opinions about things. She did as she was told. She did it for a long time, until her wrist ached and her hips had started going on their own, and he asked her questions and she answered them in a voice that got progressively less like anybody's mother -- what it felt like when he'd first got into her, whether her husband could reach where he reached (no), whether anything ever would again (no), what she'd been doing on that Friday in September with her hands on the wallpaper of a hotel by a station.

"Say what I did to you."

"You put a baby in me."

"Say it like it happened."

"You took the condom off -- I took it off, you made me take it off -- and you held me down and came inside me and you told me it had worked before you'd even finished," said Anna, all in one breath, "and I believed you, I believed you straight away, I lay there afterwards and I knew--"

"And it had."

"And it had."

"Clit," said Jacob. "Now."

She came inside a minute. She had to put her forearm across her mouth to do it, because of the television downstairs and the man watching it, and she arched off her own bed with her arm in her teeth and her other hand between her legs and a phone lying by her hip with a boy on the end of it, and it went on for a stupid, sprawling length of time, and when it let her go she was shaking.

For a while there was just the two of them breathing at each other down the line.

"Friday," said Jacob.

"Friday."

"Wear the shoes."

"I always wear the shoes."

"I know." She could hear the grin in it. And then, further off, the door going, and the noise of the party coming back into the phone -- voices, the bass, somebody calling something that might have been his name -- and, "Right. I've got to go, they're waiting on me."

"Course," said Anna. "Go on."

The line went dead.

She lay on the bed in the lamplight for a good ten minutes with her hand resting on the bump and the whole of her humming, and she felt, she was ashamed to notice, enormously and childishly better. He'd walked out of a room full of people for her. He'd been hard for her in a stairwell with his mates on the other side of the door. She took that reassurance in both hands and did not turn it over to look at the back of it, where it said they're waiting on me, and she went down half an hour later in her dressing gown to make a cup of tea.

Simon looked up from the television. He looked at her for slightly longer than he needed to, and something went across his face which was not, any more, the greedy little flare it would once have been.

"All right?" he said.

"Better," said Anna, and put the kettle on.

The scan was on the Wednesday, and Simon took the morning off work without being asked.

Anna had been to this hospital before, twenty years before, for the scans that had turned out to be Leo, and the corridors smelled the same, that particular hospital smell of hand gel and radiator dust, and the waiting room had the same fish tank, or its grandchild, burbling in the corner. She sat with her coat on her lap and a full bladder -- drink a pint beforehand and don't wee, the letter had said, the great indignity of it -- and Simon sat beside her reading the posters about folic acid with the concentration of a man revising for an exam, and held her hand between the plastic chairs, and she looked at his profile and thought about the last time they'd sat in a room like this, two children themselves, terrified and thrilled, and how far they'd come, and by what an unimaginable route.

"Anna Peters?"

The room was dark and warm. She lay back and hitched up her top and the sonographer tucked the blue paper into her waistband and warned her about the cold, and then the cold, and then the wand pressing in, and then -- the screen.

There it was. Grey and strange and turning, a whole secret person swimming in her, a curve of spine and the little bones of a hand held up as if waving, a heart flickering away at the frantic speed they flicker at, and the sonographer moving the wand and murmuring her measurements to the machine, femur, abdomen, good, lovely, and Anna forgot, for a moment, absolutely everything -- Sophie, the contract, the whole mad architecture of her life -- and was simply a woman looking at her child.

She turned her head. Her husband was staring at the screen with his mouth slightly open and his eyes gone bright and swimming, this man who was not the father in any way a biology teacher would recognise and was, she understood with a completeness that stopped her breath, entirely and unconditionally the father in every way that a child would ever feel -- and Anna, lying there in the dark with cold gel on the bump and her husband's face lit grey by the screen, was ambushed. Not by mere tenderness, but by love -- plain, enormous, specific love, for this particular soft ridiculous devoted man, so much love and so suddenly that it came out of her as a kind of gasp, and Simon squeezed her hand and thought the gasp was for the baby, and she let him think it, because it was for the baby, and it was for him, and by now she had stopped being able to find the seam between the two.

"Do you want to know the sex?" the sonographer asked. "Some people like a surprise. No pressure either way."

Anna looked at Simon. Simon looked at Anna. And the deciding of it, the small silent conferring of it -- do we? shall we? together? -- was somehow the most married thing they had done in a year, more married than the wedding, more married than Leo, a whole marriage compressed into a shared look in a dark room.

"We'll find out," Anna said, and didn't take her eyes off her husband. "We'd like to know."

"Congratulations," said the sonographer, doing something with the wand. "You're having a little girl."

A girl. Anna had had a boy, twenty years ago, and loved him to the marrow, and had never once let herself imagine the other thing, the daughter, the whole unlived country of it -- and here it was, waving its little hand at her off a screen, and beside her Simon put his free hand over his mouth and teared up, a middle-aged man in a hospital gown-blue light crying at a photograph of another man's daughter that was going to be his, and Anna reached up and pulled his head down to hers and held it there, and thought, with a fierceness that surprised her: mine. This one's mine. And so is he.

In the car afterwards they sat for a minute before Simon started the engine, the little printout in Anna's hands, the grey alien profile of their girl.

"A girl," Simon said, wonderingly, for about the ninth time.

"A girl."

"I'll have to -- there's stuff I'll need to read up on. Girls. I only know boys." He said it seriously, a man contemplating a syllabus, and Anna laughed for the first time in three days, properly laughed, and leaned across the handbrake and kissed him, and it was not a thank-you kiss or a comfort kiss or any of the managed kisses of the last strange year. It was just a kiss, for her husband, because she wanted to, and when she pulled back he looked so surprised and so pleased that she nearly did it again.

"What was that for?" he said.

"Nothing," said Anna. "Drive us home."

Jacob came on the Friday, reading week, exactly as arranged, and the machine of it started up the way it always started up now, and despite the rapprochement with her husband, and the emergence of Sophie, Anna went into it wanting him. That, at least, had never once wavered, not for a second, all the mess of the week notwithstanding. Her body did not care about Sophie. Her body heard the doorbell at four o'clock and went liquid and stupid exactly as it had the first time, and there was something almost restful in that, in the one part of her that never overthought anything.

Simon had done the readying. She stood in the bedroom while her husband knelt and worked her open with his careful patient hands and buckled her into the heels that weren't for his enjoyment, and she watched the top of his head and felt the two feelings run side by side without touching -- the deep animal readiness for the boy who was on his way, and the deep new tenderness for the man on his knees preparing her for him -- and did not try, any more, to reconcile them. They didn't want reconciling. They were just both true.

And then Jacob, in the doorway, filling it more than he used to; a term and a half of the rowing club had done that. He put his hand on the bump first, always the bump first, and said "look at you, you're enormous" with the delight of a boy watching his own experiment succeed, and Anna's stupid body sang, and Simon took his chair in the corner, and the evening became what these evenings became.

She was determined to notice it this time. That was her private resolution, lying back on the bed with the heels on and her husband three feet away in the tights-chair: to actually be there for it, inside it, rather than doing what she usually did, which was to leave her own head somewhere near the ceiling and let her body get on with it. She wanted, this once, to feel the whole of the thing she'd built.

So she felt it. She felt Jacob take his time undressing her round the bump, careful of it in a way that did something to her, the big careless boy gone gentle over the evidence of himself. She felt him lift her legs -- and here he arranged her deliberately, she could tell he'd thought about it, folding her back and up until the heels were pointing at the ceiling and she was open and stretched and utterly displayed, for him and, she was made abruptly aware, for the man in the corner. She felt the flush of that, of being looked at like this by her husband, her ankles up by her ears in another man's shoes, the least private she had ever been in her life. She had thought, when they'd first let Simon in the room, that she would never get used to his eyes on her. She had been right. She never had got used to it. That was the point of it; that was why it worked.

"Tell her how she looks," Jacob said to the corner, not looking up from her.

"You look--" Simon's voice, cracked, from somewhere behind her lifted knee. "You look -- God, Anna. Wanton. You look completely -- there's nothing left of you that's hidden."

"There isn't, is there," Jacob agreed, and pushed into her bare, all of it, one long unhurried claim of a stroke, and Anna's whole body arched up off the bed to take it, and she heard herself make the sound she made, and she was there for it, all of it, present in her own skin for once -- the enormous bare heat of him, the stretch that even now she never quite believed, the deep place he reached that no one else reached, her husband's ragged breathing in the corner narrating her own undoing back to her. She came almost at once, embarrassingly fast, the pregnancy or the week or just him, and Jacob laughed low and pleased and didn't stop, and rode her through it and past it toward the next, his hand splayed always on the bump, on his daughter, and Anna gave herself up to being, for this stretch of a Friday evening, purely and simply had.

It was somewhere in the second -- or the third, she'd lost the count she'd promised herself she'd keep -- that his phone went.

It was face-down on the bedside table and it buzzed, once, twice, the way a phone buzzes for a person and not a notification, and Jacob's eyes flicked to it, just a flick, a fraction of a second, barely a thing at all -- and Anna, being present this time, being there the way she'd promised herself, saw the screen light the ceiling and saw, upside down and backwards but unmistakable, the four letters of a name.

Soph.

He didn't answer it, of course. He wasn't a monster; he was a sweet boy who'd learned to take what he wanted, and he turned back to Anna and gave her his whole self again, undimmed, and the phone stopped, and the evening carried on exactly as before.

But something in Anna had gone very quiet and very clear, even as her body kept climbing, and the clarity was this, arriving not as pain but as simple information, the way you finally read a sign you've been driving past for years: I am the thing he visits. Not his life. His life was in that phone, buzzing, nineteen years old and meeting his parents at half term. She was the extraordinary thing he came home to and left -- the marvel, the secret, the best of it, but the visited, always and only the visited. He would love her, in his way, for years. He would knock on this door whenever he was home, for the rest of both their lives, exactly as promised. And he would never once, not for a single hour, be hers the way--

She came again, hard, at the exact moment the thought completed itself, so that she could never afterward be sure whether the shudder was the orgasm or the understanding, and perhaps there was no difference, perhaps by now there never was.

He finished in her, deep, the ceremony of it; and Simon knelt and did his bit with the warm cloth and was sent downstairs afterwards to see about the boy's coat, which was how they did the last twenty minutes now, and nobody had ever discussed it. And then Jacob was tender, and kind, and Anna lay in the wreck of the bed and watched him dress in the lamplight with a feeling she was surprised to find had no bitterness in it at all.

"I've got to get back tonight," he said, apologetic, pulling on his shirt. "There's a -- I said I'd--"

"I know," said Anna. "Go on."

"January was mad, sorry it took till reading week, halls stuff, and--"

"Jacob." She said it gently, and he stopped, and she looked at him, this boy, this beautiful boy who had rewired her at thirty-eight and given her a daughter and could not stay for breakfast. "Go and live your life. I mean it. It's the whole point. Go."

He came and kissed her, and put his hand on the bump one last time, and for a second something crossed his face that was younger than the rest of him, the old nervous boy from her husband's study, there and gone -- "you'll send me a picture? When she--" -- and Anna said of course, of course she would, and meant it, and then he did the thing he always did to Simon on the way out, the hand on the shoulder, the captain and the good man, and he was gone, down the stairs and out into the January dark, back to the buzzing phone and the girl and the whole bright ordinary life she had ordered him to have.

And the house was quiet. And it held.

She thought Simon would want to talk about it, or want the details, the way the old Simon always had, but this one came back up with the front door bolted and lay down beside her on top of the covers, in his shirt, and put his hand where the boy's had been, and didn't say anything at all.

Anna rolled onto her side and looked at him until he noticed.

"What?" said Simon.

"Take your shirt off."

"... Anna--"

"Simon. Take your shirt off."

He did it far too quickly, and got an elbow caught, and she watched him fight his way out of his own sleeve and thought that she loved him so much it was faintly ridiculous. She reached across and put her hand flat on his chest and pushed him down onto his back, and he went, of course he went; he'd have gone anywhere she put him.

"You've been sat in that chair since half four," she said.

"Don't."

"You have, though." She let her hand go wandering down over his belly and found the state of him through his trousers, which was the state he'd been in for three hours without permission to do a thing about it, and Simon made a noise like a man stepping into cold water. "Oh, Simon. Look at you. Three hours."

"Please don't be kind about it."

"I'm not being kind," said Anna. "I'm being smug," and laughed at him, and got his belt open one-handed while he lay there and let her.

She'd not been able to do this a year ago. That was the plain fact of it: this woman, the one propped on one elbow with a bump in the way and her husband's cock in her hand, saying whatever came into her head, was not somebody who had existed in the spring. The boy had made her, part of her; the rest she'd made herself, out of what was left lying about. And she found that she liked her. She liked her a great deal.

"You didn't touch yourself all evening," she said.

"I'm not allowed."

"No." She worked her hand slowly, watching his face come apart, taking her time about it, because she had all the time in the world and he plainly hadn't. "And who says?"

"Anna--"

"Who says, Simon?"

"He does," said Simon, into the dark of his own bedroom, in a wrecked little voice, and Anna kissed him hard for it, because he'd told the truth, and because the truth was the sexiest thing in the house.

Then she swung her leg over him, which took some managing at twenty weeks, and involved his hands under her and a certain amount of undignified shuffling, and she reached back and put him where she wanted him and sat down on her husband.

She could barely feel him.

That had always been true, and had always been the one thing in twenty years neither of them said, and had sat in the middle of their marriage like furniture nobody mentions. Anna settled her weight and rocked once and looked down at him and said, quite gently, "God, I can hardly feel you."

Simon's whole body jerked under her, and he made a sound she'd never heard him make before, and his hands came up and gripped her thighs.

"I know," he said. "I know."

"Poor thing," she said. "Poor me. Twenty years of this."

She wasn't cruel about it, and it undid him more than the cruelty ever would have. She said it again, kinder, into his open mouth while she kissed him; she told him what she'd been full of an hour ago and how little of it he could reach and how much she wanted him anyway; she put his hands where she wanted his hands, one on the bump and one on her breast, and she moved on him the way she'd learned to move this year, and got her own fingers down between them, and did what she had never once thought to do in two decades of lying underneath this man being patient.

"You're doing yourself," Simon whispered, marvelling.

"Somebody's got to."

"Anna--"

"Shush. Don't you dare go yet."

He didn't dare. He lay there with his jaw clenched and his eyes wet and did not dare, while his wife used him, unhurried, taking exactly what she wanted from the parts of him that could give it and not resenting for a second the parts that couldn't -- and she came like that, sat up in the lamplight with her hand between her legs and her husband inside her and his name in her mouth, and it was nothing whatsoever like the great annihilating things the boy did to her and it was, she found, worth just as much.

Then she leaned down over him, breathless, and said, "Go on, then."

He lasted about four strokes.

"That's a record," she said, afterwards, into his hair.

"Shut up."

"That is a record, Simon."

He was laughing, and shaking a bit, and she held her ridiculous husband against her while he came down, his useless blameless blanks, his whole soft heart, and stroked the back of his head, and felt brimming and complete and absolutely certain of what she had.

"I've got you," she murmured -- which was his line, which he'd said to her a hundred times this year, kneeling, cleaning, waiting -- and she felt him go very still, hearing it turned around. "I've got you, Simon. And I've got him too. I must be the luckiest girl in the world."

Later -- much later, the house dark, Simon asleep beside her with one hand still on the bump out of a habit he'd formed in his sleep and didn't know he had -- Anna lay awake and let herself think about all of it properly for the first time in months, and found it had all quietly rearranged itself while she wasn't looking.

She would open the door to Jacob whenever he was home. That hadn't changed and wouldn't; her body had signed that contract in a hotel by a station and her body did not renege. He was the fire. She would warm herself at it for years, and love him in the strange sideways way she loved him, and send him pictures of his daughter, and want him the second the doorbell went. All of that was real and none of it was going anywhere.

But she knew now which was the fire and which was the house. She'd spent a year confused about it, dazzled, and the dazzle had cost her, and it had cost her husband a great deal more, out in the cold of it for so long while she learned what her own body was for. She was not going to spend another year confused. The boy visited. The husband stayed. She was going to make very sure, from here on, that the one who stayed knew he was the house.

Downstairs on the fridge, under a magnet shaped like a strawberry that Leo had won at a fair a decade ago, there was a grey printout of a little girl waving. It had two names written under it in biro, in Anna's hand, where the sonographer's label said PARENTS. Not the true name. Not the name in the blood. The other name, the real one, the one that would be on the birth certificate and the school forms and the Father's Day cards drawn in wax crayon for the next eighteen years.

Simon's.

Anna settled back against her husband in the dark, and drew his sleeping hand more firmly over their daughter, and closed her eyes, and slept the way she only ever slept in this bed, in this house, with this man -- like someone who was, at long last, exactly where she meant to be.