— Of course it’s mine. Did you think I’d borrowed it?
We were awkward together at first — or perhaps it was just that she’d always been angular and abrupt. She seemed to find it funny that our house from outside looked like a child’s drawing: rectangular and red-brick with a chimney at each end, planted bang in the middle of its flat garden which was really just the same scrubby field as outside the garden walls (Barbara had grown things but I’d neglected them). Mac wandered across the hall, pretending to be preoccupied, taking flight from introductions behind his air of being a hundred years older than any of my friends. Inside the house, Sheila went around touching everything, exclaiming that she couldn’t believe I owned all this. I thought she was criticising me — because of the world of poverty she’d come from, or out of the returned traveller’s disdain for everything they’d left behind and forgotten — and I felt weighed down by the settled, responsible life I’d taken on. It was mid-autumn and a gloomy light, muddled with damp from the river, seemed to have got everywhere indoors; we had all our lamps switched on in the middle of the day, and the wind was tugging round the house, teasing it.
In the kitchen, Sheila wouldn’t take off her coat; she really wasn’t dressed for the English climate. She snuggled with a groan of relief close to the Aga, unwrapping the sleeping baby on her lap. I bent over to make a fuss of it: it was the most satisfying, perfect creature, clear-skinned, the eyelids closed in straight black lines, the brows tiny upward brush strokes, purplish lips pressed shut as if in repudiation. Her name was Ester, Sheila said, pronouncing it the Brazilian way, as Esh-tair. She was three months old, born in Recife. Sheila talked about motherhood with a stiffly comical air, avoiding my eyes. No one had told her that you couldn’t send the baby back if you weren’t enjoying it. The Indian women seemed to have a completely different kind of baby; they slept all day, you could take them to work in the fields. She’d wanted one of those. I suggested that Ester looked like an Indian baby anyway, but Sheila wouldn’t give anything away about the father. She explained that she had six months’ unpaid leave from the language school where she worked, and that she’d come home to show the baby to her family, then after a week couldn’t bear being at home — she was hoping I would let her stay for a few days. When Ester began to stir on her lap, she seemed immediately strained and anxious. There was a bottle of formula mixed up in her bag; would I warm it up in a pan of water? — I suppose you think it’s awful that I’m not breastfeeding, she said accusingly.
I reassured her and asked if I could give Ester her bottle. Sheila watched her feed with a curiosity that was half appalled. — It’s sort of terrible to think one was ever like that, she said. — I mean, with one’s own mother. Because I don’t like my mother much. I don’t like to think of myself so desperately attached to the teat of her provision (whether it was the real teat or the rubber one — and I’d rather not know). So keen on survival, at all costs. It seems better form, once one’s adult, not to want anything that badly.
When I’d lived with Sheila in the commune, I’d been in awe of her education. She seemed to have read everything; her contralto voice and her slow, debunking, considered speech had appealed to me as an ideal of an intellectual woman. Now that I’d done my own degree and felt more like her equal, I was eager to talk to her about books — but she only wanted to talk about babies. I saw that she’d come looking for me because she needed help and remembered me as a young mother from the commune; whereas I’d finished with that phase of my life and wasn’t interested any longer. She exclaimed in despair when I managed to keep the baby from crying, winding her and then jigging her in my arms, walking up and down and singing to her.
— You see? She won’t ever stop for me. What am I doing wrong?
I said that everyone felt like this at first. After a while it would come naturally.
Sheila stayed at Sea Mills with us for six weeks. She was alone with the baby all day while Mac and I were out at work and Rowan was at school (Luke was in his gap year with a place at Exeter to do history and politics; in the meantime he was working for my brother, restoring classic cars). Sheila said she walked around the rooms of the house for hours with Ester in the sling, because it was the only way she could get her to sleep. Also, she could just about read the newspaper while she was walking round, though it did make her seasick and sometimes she was so tired that the words swam in front of her eyes like a hallucination. If she tried to read while she was giving Ester her bottle, Ester pulled away from the teat indignantly. — But what if, Sheila asked, — when this is over, I’ve forgotten how to think? And anyway, when will it be over?
I said that now Ester was getting older, she was bound to be awake more during the day; Sheila said that when she was awake she didn’t know what to do with her. — Am I supposed to play? I was never any good at playing.
— Give her to the boys. They’ll look after her.
Sheila was relieved and guilty when Luke and Rowan carried Ester off into another room. (— But do they know what to do?) They unwrapped her from her shawls and teased her irreverently, throwing her in the air, flapping her blanket at her to make her screw up her face comically, blowing raspberries on her stomach, laughing at her miniature dictator’s outrage and stolid frown. (They were experienced in all this from playing with Toni’s babies, Mac’s granddaughters — she had two by this time.) Of course Ester loved it, and gave her first wet smiles for them. Sheila had been so sure that Ester’s not smiling meant she was unhappy, judging against the life where she found herself. The smiles gave away another Ester: more foolish and less punishing.
I borrowed a carrycot from Toni and made Sheila put Ester down in it while we all ate supper round the long table in the kitchen. Sheila stared at the food on her plate as if she’d last eaten in another life. She was bone-thin under all the layers of her jumpers and cardigans and scarves: despite her determination to leave everything English behind, she was beginning to be one of those sinewy, sun-toughened Englishwomen of a certain class, angularly elegant, expertly informed. Mac grew to like her when they discussed Brazil and South American politics, and he deferred to her insider’s insight (— the only continent in the world, she said, — where communism is still romantic). If Ester cried while we were eating then Mac picked her up and would walk round with her, crooning to her, kissing her little fists and her head with its night-black shock of hair. We were all as tender with Sheila as if she was convalescent. Mac was the assured paterfamilias presiding over his extended household. He was inspired in this role: even the boys were charmed and he courted them, including them in the generous circle of his affections. He was never handsome, exactly — bald and overweight, with that distinctive round face like the face in the moon — but he gave off a heat of life and force, his fox-colouring was a russet glow.
Sometimes there would be ten or eleven of us for supper if Luke’s girlfriend was there, and Toni with her family — they lived nearby. Lauren honoured us from time to time, visiting from London (where she was a great success, playing in the orchestra at the ENO). If we were too many then we had to decamp into the grander dining room, which I didn’t like because it still seemed like Barbara’s space — yellow-striped wallpaper, electric wall candelabra, antique table and chairs. I confided to Sheila how trapped I sometimes felt in that big comfortable house, decorated in Barbara’s taste — conventional, expensive, gemütlich — overlaid now with what Mac called my ‘hippie style’. I told her about the faithful cleaner who loved Barbara and couldn’t forgive me (secretly I called her Mrs Danvers). Sheila asked why we didn’t move and I explained that Lauren and Toni — who’d grown up in this house — wouldn’t let Mac sell it, not yet.