Bread and Chocolate Page 9

  We sat before the fire that evening, opened the box and took them out and wiped them clean together. There were some amazing pictures of deep tropical forest and a deep sepia brown river winding beneath tree trunks as high as the towers of a cathedral. There were a few shots of birds – rather disappointing, I thought. One was obviously dead, and one had flown before the exposure was completed. There were lots of photographs of the Indian villages from long distance, but very few people. The picture I had first seen, of the man with the spear and the bold stare, was the best. In one of the others the sitter had obviously lost his courage and fled before ten seconds.

  I printed them all as a record, and sent prints to George Cozens. There were two plates which were blank so I cleaned them and treated them for my own use. That would give me one in the camera and one to spare until I got some more glass.

  ‘It’ll drive you mad,’ Mark said with satisfaction. He knew how much film I liked to use before I had even one worthwhile shot. ‘You’ll never manage with only two shots at any picture.’

  ‘It’ll be good discipline for me,’ I said, smiling. The baby shifted inside me, and I took Mark’s hand and laid it on my rounded belly so he could feel the movement.

  ‘D’you feel her?’ I asked. ‘Can you feel her kick?’

  Mark nodded. ‘I need to make a phone call,’ he said. ‘You go on up to bed, you must be tired.’

  I went slowly upstairs. Behind me the sitting room door closed gently. I heard the click of the phone as he picked it up. I didn’t know who he was phoning. I held to the bannister and took a deep shuddering breath. The scars on my wrists tightened in remembered pain. I wondered if I had the courage to go back downstairs and open the door which he had shut so quietly. I wondered if I had the courage to say simply and honestly to him: ‘Mark, you made a decision. You came home to me, we moved house, I gave up my work and we are having a child. These are not decisions you can play with. I am not a hobby you can take up, or put down. You must not see her, or phone her, or even think of her again.’

  I waited on the stairs. I heard his voice say something, and then silence as the other person replied. I knew I could not find the courage to make demands of Mark. I was a hostage to fear. And besides, I said to myself, as I turned and went up the stairs, I might be lucky: it might not be Helen on the other end of that low-voiced conversation at all.

  The pains started that night as we slept. They woke me, like a nudge in the belly. For a little while I lay on my back and smiled at the moonlit ceiling, thinking of my baby, on her way to be born at last, after these long months of waiting. I felt myself to be blessed, blessed beyond and above anything I could ever have earned. Mark had come back to me, we now lived where the air was so sweet that you could taste it on your tongue, and my baby, who would make us a family, an indissoluble unit, was coming in this moonlit quiet night.

  I rolled over so I could see the clock. I watched the hands move and timed the uncontrollable clenching of my body. I breathed lightly, as I had learned to do, and then I woke Mark. He leaped out of bed in a panic, like a film version of an anxious father. He dragged on a track suit, he stumbled over my case at the door. He thrust clothes at me, imploring me to hurry. He slapped his forehead when he remembered that the car was low on petrol after our trip to the sale. I smiled. I felt as if I were floating, out to sea a long long way. As if I too, like my baby, was starting on a journey to an unknown country. By this time tomorrow night, I would hold my child in my arms.

  I was not afraid. Not at any time, though the labour lasted through the night and the baby was not born until half past ten in the morning. I was deeply tired then and I slept. The last thing I saw before I slept was Mark turning out his pockets for change for the telephone to tell people that our baby had been born, and that she was a perfect brown-headed blue-eyed girl. ‘Not Helen,’ I thought as I slid into sleep. I didn’t want to say it. I trusted him. He would not, I knew he would not, telephone Helen to tell her our child was born. Not right away.

  I hated the hospital. The cheerful insouciance of the nurses who changed my baby’s nappy with lightning skill, and wrapped her so she stopped crying, could not endear it to me. I came out after two days. My doctor said I was well; and anyway Maggie, my friend, had promised to come and stay and look after us all.

  She and Mark had a silent truce. He had not liked himself that night, when she had dragged him away from Helen. Now they were either side of my bed again and he remembered that she had rescued him from a fantasy of selfishness. He didn’t like looking bad in front of anyone. Especially not women. Maggie was matter-of-fact.

  ‘I bet you’re glad now, Mark,’ was all she ever said. She picked my little girl, Penelope, out of her hospital perspex cot and hugged her close. ‘I bet you’re happy now.’

  Mark looked happy. He could not do enough for me, for Penny. He took a fortnight off work and he got up through the night, and dozed in a chair during the day. He looked exhausted, but he glowed from inside. Maggie nodded at me and smiled with shared knowledge that she, and I, and even little Penelope, had won.

  As soon as I felt halfway back to normal I brought out the camera and showed it to Maggie. We waited until the baby was asleep. I didn’t want her face blurred by moving during the exposure. Maggie and I set up the camera while Mark was out shopping. It took a lot of doing. I used a modern tripod to get the angle right. I didn’t think that amounted to serious cheating. I plunged under the hood at the back and gazed at my baby through the thick glass window. Then I slid in the treated glass, took off the lens cap, pulled out the shielding slide and counted, slowly in my head, up to twenty-five.

  ‘Why twenty-five?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘It’s my age,’ I said. ‘It’s as good as any other figure. I haven’t a clue how long I should leave it.’

  We did two shots, with my two glass plates, and then I took them away to my darkroom and printed them up at once. I used sepia colours, a sentimental gesture to old Clive Cozens, the photographer who followed the fashion of his time and preferred sepia. Penny looked delicate, ethereal in the light brown. I loved the effect. I did two copies for me, one for George Cozens as I had promised, and one for Maggie.

  When Mark came home he brought steak for dinner – and a polaroid camera. ‘If we have to wait for photographs that satisfy you, we’ll be celebrating her wedding,’ he said, and kissed me on the top of my head.

  We drank a good bottle of wine between the three of us and then we went to bed. Penelope was asleep in the cradle at the bottom of our bed. I kissed her gently but she didn’t stir so I thought I would leave her to sleep.

  She did not wake me for feeding in the middle of the night.

  She did not wake at all.

  When I woke in the morning, to that dreadful silence, with a clutch of unknown terror like a cold fist grabbing my belly, I knew it had happened to her, to us. She was cold in her little crib. And the only thing I had left of her was the limp tiny body, and the pictures in the darkroom.

  Maggie stayed with us. Through the speechless agony of the next few days, Maggie took the phone calls, made the arrangements, ordered the flowers. Maggie chose the little white coffin and the white marble headstone. I could not bear to think of them. Mark and I fell into depths of complete silence and avoidance. He slept in another room while I tossed and turned in our bed. I kept starting up in the night, thinking I heard her crying for me. The ache in my wrists matched the raw gulf inside me.

  Maggie stayed. A full month. It was summer holiday at the school where she taught, and she cancelled her trip to America to stay with me until I could get through the day without weeping. She stayed until Mark was writing again, until we were eating ordinary meals and digging the garden, and talking about a conservatory. Then one day I came in from shopping, and the camera, the beautiful rosewood camera, was up on the tripod and Maggie was settling herself in front of it.

  ‘Take my picture,’ she said. ‘I fancy myself in a sepia print.’

 
I knew why she was doing it. Maggie is clever but transparent. Mark was back to his work, editing his literary magazine, writing his novel. I should be back to work too. And in a little while, we would have another child. But he or she would always be my second child.

  ‘Take my picture,’ Maggie said again, beaming at the camera. ‘Go on.’

  I dumped the shopping down on the table and I was going to refuse, but the rosewood camera was warm under my fingertips, and the brass knobs on the leather bellows were dulled and dusty. I pulled a Kleenex out of my pocket and wiped them without thinking. Then I dived under the cape, took off the lens cap and saw the oddly upside-down image of Maggie, sitting on her head by the open window and the honeysuckle framing her.

  ‘It’s good,’ I said reluctantly. ‘Bit chocolate-boxy.’

  I went to my dark room. The two glass plates were cleaned and treated, ready for use. Safe under the red light where I had stacked them after I had printed my two pictures of Penny. Clear and clean as if she had never been there at all. As clear as a stream after someone has crossed it, and gone on.

  I took them gently and wiped them lovingly, then I clipped one into the metal shield and took it through to the kitchen where Maggie sat smiling in the sunshine.

  I slid it into the camera, and pulled out the shield. I counted carefully. ‘Why only ten?’ asked Maggie.

  ‘Brighter light,’ I said briefly. We both remembered the cool shade as Penny had slept.

  I put the lens cap on, slid in the metal shield, and carried the plate to my darkroom. The picture was a good one. Maggie sat like some loving guardian angel in the window-seat of my kitchen, with the sunlight behind her, and the honeysuckle flowers like little trumpets around her solid silhouette.

  ‘I look fat,’ she said indignantly when I brought out her copy.

  ‘You look real,’ I replied. Then while she prepared lunch I drifted back into my darkroom and printed the other copies. One for me. One for George Cozens.

  The picture, ‘Maggie and honeysuckle’, was a farewell gift. That evening she leaned forward with her chin on her hands and smiled impartially at both of us. ‘I’m leaving you two chickabiddies, I need to go home.’

  Mark looked blank. ‘I’m so used to having you here, I had forgotten you had a home,’ he said. ‘D’you have to go, Maggie?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She reached a hand out and touched his arm. ‘I’m glad I’ve not outstayed my welcome. But term starts next week and I want to get home. I’ve got to prepare some work, and my house and garden have been neglected too long. I’m not far away, remember.’

  I felt my throat tighten and tears at the back of my eyes. ‘I’m glad you were here, Maggie,’ I said. My voice was quavery. ‘I don’t think we would have survived this without you.’

  Maggie shot a quick look at Mark to see if he was going to reach out to me. When he didn’t move she came around the table and hugged me. ‘You’d have made it through,’ she said gently. ‘You’re a survivor, you are. You don’t know how strong you are.’

  We opened another bottle of wine and we drank it in the sitting room, lighting the fire of applewood and pine cones more for the light than for the warmth. I watched the shadows flicker on the wall and saw Mark’s beloved face lit in profile by the warm glow of wood embers.

  ‘I’m going to start doing portraits,’ I said suddenly. ‘It’s time I got back to work. I shall try portraits for a change.’

  Maggie beamed at me. ‘And I’ll be in an exhibition,’ she said. ‘Fame at last.’

  It was two before we went upstairs to bed, and that night Mark didn’t sleep in the spare room. He came to my bed and we made love slowly, with great care as if either of us might shatter with sorrow. When he slept he turned away from me. And when I woke in the morning he was gone.

  Maggie and I ate a leisurely breakfast and then she went upstairs to pack her case. I lent her some books, and she took some flowers from the garden. I took a cutting of the honeysuckle and embedded it into a pot for transplanting into her London windowbox.

  When the time came for her to leave she held me very tightly. ‘You are a survivor,’ she said again. ‘I meant what I said last night. You are a survivor.’

  I tipped my head back so that I could see her face. ‘There are some things I’d rather not survive,’ I said. ‘This past year – Mark leaving me, and then Penny’s death – I’d rather never have known those pains.’

  Maggie smiled. She looked very old and wise. ‘You learn from them,’ she said gently. ‘One day you will be able to see them for what they are. Penny’s death is a tragedy, but Mark leaving you, in truth, was little more than inconvenient.’

  I jerked back at that. ‘Inconvenient!’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘You always have a picture in your head,’ she said gently. ‘That’s what makes you such a good photographer. You always have a picture in your head of how you want things to look. You liked the look of you and Mark together, and so you did everything you could to get and to hold that picture. But it’s only a pretty picture, it’s not real. The real Mark is not how you see him at all.’

  I stepped back from her. I was speechless. She gave me a mischievous wink. ‘Oh, don’t get all cross,’ she said. She slung her handbag in her car, slipped behind the wheel and slammed the door. She wound down the window and smiled at me. ‘Chocolate boxes,’ she said. ‘Chocolate box pictures.’ Then she backed the car carefully around, and drove down the drive.

  ‘Drive safely!’ I shouted after her. She always did, anyway.

  I rang to see that she was safely home. There was no reply. I stayed up all night trying her number, though Mark wanted to use the phone to call someone and was impatient with my fussing. That night he slept in the spare room. All through the night I woke and phoned Maggie on the extension phone by my bed. There was no reply.

  The next day I rang the police and they told me about the accident. She had been driving carefully, as she always did. The brakes had failed on one of those big articulated lorries whose wheels seem so huge when they thresh past you on the road. The lorry had ploughed across the central reserve of the motorway and hit Maggie’s car sideways on. She was dead on arrival. That was what they said: dead on arrival.

  I remembered that she said I was a survivor and I thought she would be happy to know that I tried to survive. I went to her funeral and saw her mother and her friends and I told them what she had done for me. How she had broken in when I was such a fool as to hurt myself, how she had held me and rocked me when I could not sleep nor stop crying for Penelope. Then I went home and changed out of the dark black coat and went to a camera shop and bought myself a new lens for my beloved Nikon and started to think what sort of portraits I would like to take now: survivor’s pictures.

  Mark did not come to the funeral. He said he had to see someone in London at the magazine office, and he could not put them off. I rang him there, but he was not there. The secretary said she had not seen him that day.

  He did not come home until late. As soon as he walked into the kitchen I knew where he had been. I could recognise it now, as sharp as a smell around him, as obvious as lipstick on a collar, or perfume on a jacket. He looked petted. He looked glossy. His clear hard profile was somehow softened, as if he had been eating icecream all day and it had melted around his mouth. He looked a little rounder, he looked self-indulgent. When he came to kiss me his breath smelled of sweeties like the breath of a child. He had been sucking peppermints to take away the taint of lunchtime alcohol on his breath. They had probably been drinking champagne in bed while I had been standing at the deep edge of Maggie’s grave.

  He was not hungry, I threw away his share of the chicken casserole. My own tasted like water. He drank wine while I was eating and then, when we sat together in the sitting room, he glanced sideways at me and told me that he was very very busy on the magazine these days. The circulation figures were rising, and they really should add more pages. And that commuting was such a pain, such a trial.


  If I did not object, the magazine’s proprietor had offered him the use of the little flat above the office during the week. ‘Not every night of course,’ he said as I looked from the flames in the fireplace to him. Maybe two, or maybe three nights a week.

  ‘I’ll always be home at weekends,’ he said, as if he were promising a difficult child a treat for the future.

  ‘And what about Helen?’ I asked. The courage I thought I would never find again came unbidden to my hand. Came to me as I sat at my fireside and heard the man I had loved to the point of death and back open his mouth and lie, and lie, and lie.

  He flushed scarlet, I could even see it in the dusk. ‘I never see her now,’ he said.

  I nodded. ‘And if you’re away so much, how would we care for another baby?’ I asked. ‘When we have another child?’

  He smiled at me, his confident smile. ‘I think we should wait for a while,’ he said. ‘It’s been very recent …’ I was glad he did not say her name. ‘I know you want another baby but …’ He broke off. ‘Many people think it is better to wait.’

  I nodded slowly, watching his smooth smiling face in the firelight. Helen thought it was better to wait. She had taken my husband and now she was denying me my second child.

  ‘You’ll start your photography again? It’s portraits you want to do now, don’t you?’ he asked me pleasantly. I could hear Helen’s calm planning in every word he said. ‘That will mean a change in your technique – you don’t want to rush something like that. I met someone today who could perhaps organise a little exhibition if you got some nice pictures together. And I’ll see how the expanded magazine goes. Let’s wait for a while and see how we feel.’

  I knew exactly what he meant.

  I should know what I felt by now. I had waited, and waited already.

  He meant he would have us both. Helen in town and me in the country. He would weigh us, and taste us, and test us. And then, at the very end of it, he would delay. He would be in no hurry to choose. Mark was not passionately committed as I was … as I had been. Mark liked having two women in love with him. It made him feel desirable. I looked at him clearly, and for the first time in my life I truly saw him. I thought of Maggie telling me that I liked chocolate box pictures. I had held in my mind a pretty picture of Mark. I was finished with it now.