I made a fuss of Auntie Andy, whom I’d always liked: she was small and fat and cheerful, with her hair dyed orange and a short dress patterned with enormous roses. Clumsily tender, she tucked my arm into hers and introduced me to her friends from work, telling them I’d been close to her little boy who died (which wasn’t strictly true). These women were formidable, raucous, enormous; their talk was very blue, and already their table was in a fug of cigarette smoke. Now Andrea was retired, she lamented, she missed the comradeship of the factory. — Stella, I don’t know what to do with myself all day. Phil does all the housework, because he knows how I hate it. (Queenly, she took for granted the devotions of her stooping, spindly, hypochondriac husband.) Her friends had better suggestions for how Phil could save her from boredom; Andy wagged a finger at them, telling them to be on best behaviour.
— We ’an’t got started yet, they said.
— They’re good girls, Andy confided tipsily in my ear. — Only a bit rough around the edges.
Although there was a buffet, there were place names at every table, written out in Phil’s anxious copperplate: he must have fretted for weeks over the nuances of family feuds and precedence. He panicked now when Andrea insisted on sitting just anywhere among her guests, waving away his remonstrations with her cigarette and gin glass. I was relieved that Mac and I were separated; I sat next to my cousin Richard, Auntie Jean’s oldest son, the one who’d lent me his bedroom when I first left home: he still had a motorbike and he made money as a builder, buying old houses and doing them up to sell, putting back all the original features people had taken out in the 1960s. Skinny and attractive, Richard always flirted with me: husky from all the weed he smoked, with a ponytail, a dreamy, narrow face and grey eyes. (My brother Philip was supplying the weed at the anniversary party; I noticed my sons disappearing outside with him at regular intervals.) Richard’s girlfriend had been segregated at another table. I knew he and I were bending too intimately towards each other, conferring too exclusively, but I’d drunk enough not to care. Jean complained that we hardly touched our food: — No wonder you’re a pair of scarecrows! Richard told me about his dream of going to live in Spain, when he’d made enough money from the houses: not among the expats and English pubs, but somewhere unspoiled in the mountains, with land and a well in the courtyard. You could pick up a medieval farmhouse there, he assured me, for next to nothing.
— How about it, Stella?
— I’d love that, I said. — I’ve never lived anywhere except this city. I’d like to live on a mountain top. I’d like to drink water from a well.
— Come with me. Seriously. I’d like that.
Of course it wasn’t serious, it was just a joke, it was a game: I knew that when I lifted my head and looked around me. I had two sons and a job and a husband, I was not free; probably Richard was not really free either. (Although, later, he did go and live on a mountain top in Spain.) When everyone had finished eating, the disco started up: pounding, and with flashing lights. Mac wouldn’t be able to stand the noise for long. The women from the factory danced in a line together, they knew a set of moves for all the songs. Richard and I slow-danced to ‘Killing Me Softly’, though he wasn’t much of a dancer; he touched me on the waist to steer me and I saved his touches up to remember later. Luke and Rowan were showing off, learning dance moves from the factory girls. I was aware of Richard’s girlfriend, and of Mac looming, bored and restless, on the periphery of the party. I couldn’t forgive him in that moment for not being able to belong inside this world — though I had spent so much of my own life trying to escape from it. He came to claim me, frowning at his watch, saying he had paperwork to do at home. Philip suggested that the boys could stay behind and sleep over at his place; I arranged to drop Rowan’s school things off on my way to work.
It was raining when we got outside. I pretended to be drunker than I was, leaning against the ticket machine in the car park and humming the music I’d been dancing to, while Mac hunted in his pockets for money. He said I was in no fit state to drive, when I offered. The excitement of the party dropped; stark recognitions blew round inside my emptiness in the cold car park. I thought that Mac and I were strangers joined by meaningless accident, unfathomable to one another and I caught sight of him, freshly with surprised dislike — middle-aged and preoccupied, with a thick wrinkled neck. Our intimacy had only ever been a delusion, monologues passing and missing in darkness — which was all that was possible anyway, with anyone. All this seemed open to the naked eye, as if I saw through everything. In the car Mac started up the heater and I hugged my apartness to the rhythm of the wipers clearing fan-shapes on the windscreen, watching the smudged wet grey-green suburban streets as they passed. At least Mac wasn’t nursing grudges; he didn’t care about me drinking or flirting, was only relieved to be on his way home. He asked cheerfully whether I knew that in the eighteenth century whalers had gone out from Sea Mills Dock for a few years, and blubber had been boiled there; I said I hadn’t known it. I tried to imagine all that scurrying filthy effort and activity, all the endeavour, the great distances and risks of danger, but I couldn’t believe in it. Everything seemed too far off and too tiny.
The rain was heavy, Mac had to put on the wipers at top speed. As we turned into the yard at home we saw that Sheila was standing outside in it: rain was streaming down her face and her clothes were sodden, clinging to her. She looked like a medieval saint again: tormented, and rigid as if she was carved in wood.
— I can’t do it, she announced to us over the noise of the rain as the car engine died.
— Do what?
— I give up.
She was deliberately flat and calm.
— What’s happened, Sheila?
Ester apparently had woken up and begun crying almost as soon as we left for the party (which was at about eleven; it was now almost five). Sheila had no idea what the matter was. Ester wouldn’t take her bottle, she screamed all the way through a nappy change. She wouldn’t be cajoled by Sheila putting her in the sling and walking round with her, which had always worked before. Sheila had tried everything she’d seen me try: the singing, the jogging up and down, the distracting her by carrying her in and out of different rooms; even the blowing on her tummy. But Ester only redoubled her paroxysms: she was swollen and purple with rage, throwing herself backwards in the sling, shuddering and howling. Sheila said she’d tried for a long time, and then she’d thought that the baby and her simply weren’t doing each other any good, she wasn’t making anything any better. So she might as well just walk away from her. She’d put her down in the carrycot, in the bedroom.
— It’s all right, Mac said, putting his arm round Sheila in all her soaking clothes. — You did the right thing.
— It’s so hard, I sympathised, — when you’re on your own.
— In fact I thought, if I stay in there with her, listening to her, I’m going to do something dreadful. So I came outside. And I’ve been out here ever since.
How long had she been outside, for goodness’ sake?
— Two hours? Three? Or perhaps that’s melodramatic. I don’t have my watch on. It’s felt like three hours. Actually it’s felt pretty much like an eternity. I’ve walked around some of the time. But mostly I’ve stood here because the rain splashing over from the gutter meant I couldn’t hear her crying. There didn’t seem any point in hearing it, as I wasn’t going to do anything about it. It’s all very exaggerated, isn’t it? I never knew anyone had that much crying in them.