— That bloody gutter, Mac said. — I keep meaning to clean it out.
— Shall I go and have a look? I said.
— I want you to keep her, said Sheila. — You two. Adopt her. Please, won’t you?
Mac was coaxing Sheila towards the back door, saying she needed to get into some dry clothes, to have a cup of tea or a stiff drink. When I went inside I couldn’t hear Ester at first. Sheila hadn’t switched the lights on; the rooms were almost dark because of the rain at the windows, and the white tiles in the chequerboard hall floor seemed to float in the gloom. I picked up the full bottle of formula abandoned on the hall table, and as I climbed the stairs I caught the tail end of a thread of noise, a thin remnant of exhausted sobbing. Sheila was staying in a spare room on the first floor at the back, papered in pale Chinese-green with a pattern of bamboo stems and white flowers. Coming into it in the dim light felt like stepping underwater — and the air in the room was heavy with baby-smell, animal and close. Everything was quiet. The carrycot was on the floor beside the bed; I slipped out of my shoes so as not to wake Ester if she’d fallen asleep at last, though when I tiptoed across to peer into the cot I was sure that she was awake, listening out for me, reciprocating my prickling consciousness of her. Sure enough, when I leaned over the cot her gaze was ready for me, wide-open eyes glassy in the shadows. Her silence seemed full of an awakened intelligence beyond her age. For a long moment of mutual exchange, before she resumed her crying, we stared and seemed to hover between possibilities: I might remain a convenient stranger, she might remain someone else’s baby, sweet but tedious. Or something different might come about.
Mac came into the room to get towels and a bathrobe for Sheila, while I was giving Ester her bottle. She was hungry, she had snatched eagerly at the teat as soon as I offered it. Now as she sucked she was gazing up at me in moist reproach, her breath still catching and snuffling in the aftermath of the long-drawn-out adventure of her sorrows. When Mac leaned over us she tugged away from her sucking, twisting her head to take him in; I thought she might begin to cry again but she only gave him the same slow, measuring look that she had given me, then slid back on to the teat luxuriantly.
— It’s a crazy idea, I said to Mac. — Sheila doesn’t mean it.
— We could do it, he said. — If she did mean it.
— You must be mad, I said.
But I had a vision in that moment of the three of us together in that room, remote as if seen from a very far off place — like the vision of Mac’s whaling ships. And I thought that the substantial outward things that happened to people were more mysterious really than all the invisible turmoil of the inner life, which we set such store by. The highest test was not in what you chose, but in how you lived out what befell you.
And so we got our daughter. (Though we always told Ester that she was Sheila’s daughter; we were her foster parents.) I left my job at the adolescent unit to look after her. I’d been unhappy there anyway, I’d hated it when the nurses gave the girls their sedative injections and the girls fought against it, and then the nurses wrote down in their records that they ‘displayed paranoid symptoms’. I stopped working altogether for six months, staying at home with Ester. And after that I got a part-time job at the Gatehouse, a network of accommodation and services for adults with mental health problems, where I was much happier. The boys loved Ester; Rowan believed that he and she had an extra kinship through their Brazilian connection. Toni and Lauren made more fuss, but they came round to her in the end. Sheila returned to her teaching job, and after a year she came back and was still sure it was what she wanted, so we did all the necessary bureaucratic stuff, and were checked by social services, and became Ester’s legal guardians. (The bureaucracy wasn’t straightforward, it was horribly complicated, but Mac was good at fighting his way through all of that.) Without making any deliberate decision, we slipped into pronouncing her name the English way, Es-ter: it was easier, anyway, when the time for school came round. She keeps her other name, Esh-tair, as if it’s a clue to a different life running parallel to the one she’s actually had. Everything Sheila sends her from Brazil she keeps in a box under her bed, segregated from her ordinary possessions. When Sheila visits, they are mutually guarded and interested and polite; Ester treats Sheila like an eccentric aunt whose favour is flattering but faintly ridiculous and risky.
Ester seemed to settle things between Mac and me. I know that usually it doesn’t work, having a baby to bring a couple together; but perhaps just because she came to us in a roundabout way, she seemed to set a seal on our marriage. Mac was lordly in his confidence that we were doing the right thing; I never caught him out in any petty panic, and I admired him for it almost dispassionately, as if I were admiring a stranger — though dispassionate isn’t the right word, because at that time the passion between us was running rather strongly again. (This was during the same period, too, as he steered through a crisis at work: when they were advised to diversify into calibration systems for long-range weaponry Mac decided against it on moral grounds. Some of the team thought the company would go under, but it didn’t.) The funny thing is how Ester’s grown to be so much like Mac — more like him than either of his actual daughters. Not that she looks anything like him, or like either of us — or like Sheila, for that matter (she’s vividly pretty; people think she’s Malaysian with her dead-straight black hair and neat shallow eyelids and clear brown skin — her skin is like Rowan’s). But Ester is stubborn, diligent, even-tempered, clever at sciences and with machinery. She steadies me when I’m restless or dissatisfied; she cools my heat and saves me from myself.
10
I WAKE UP FIRST, WHILE MAC is still asleep. This waking up early is new, it has something to do with my age (I’m fifty, with everything that brings). There’s a thin grey light in the room and the night is over, but that isn’t encouraging. Night suits me, with its depths like infinite rooms sprawling underground. The daylight is exposing, prosaic, bleak — although I don’t know why I’m afraid of its exposure, nothing’s the matter, there’s nothing to be afraid of. But something sour and dreadful seems to have collected, while I was sleeping, in the hollow under my breastbone: it’s both a physical sensation and a mental anguish at once and I have to sit suddenly upright so as not to succumb to it. Then I discover that I need to pee. Was that all it was, after alclass="underline" the poison and the anguish? So I mutter something to Mac, and potter in bare feet in my pyjamas to the bathroom, trying to keep my mind shuttered against the light which presses into it. I don’t pull up the blind in the bathroom, I try to hold off the day which I can hear gathering its force outside the window: the breezes stirring in the garden, the birdsong in its slippery purity, the whole urgent, ordinary machinery of the present resuming its forward movement.
But I can’t hold it off. I prefer to wake up gradually, lingering half inside my dreams; but sometimes waking is as abrupt as falling over an edge of sleep, the doors to conscious awareness fly open involuntarily between one second and the next. I have a vision of despairing clarity then, as if my life were a featureless bland landscape stretching behind and ahead of me: all surface, all banal anxiety and difficulty, unredeemed nowadays by any promise or hidden content. It’s in these early mornings, if I were an Anglican like Mac, that I’d pray.
Then that passes over. I go downstairs in the quiet of the sleeping house. Usually Mac gets up first but this morning I don’t want to go back to bed, I know I’ll only lie there in the grip of this wakefulness. On the landing halfway down the staircase (this is the house which Mac and I bought together when we moved from Sea Mills), there’s a tall arched window, much taller than a person, with a narrow seat like a shelf across the bottom. I pause there as I always do, because I like the way the garden and the oak tree and the church tower beyond the trees all look mythic through the distorting old glass, like something in a film or a dream. Then my bare feet are cold on the stone-flagged kitchen floor, so I go into the boiler room where I keep a pair of old slippers, worn comfortably to shiny black hollows in the shapes of my heels and toes. I fill the kettle under the tap and put it on to boil. I open the back door and carry the teapot across the wet grass, soaking my slippers; I empty last night’s cold tea leaves into the bedraggled dahlias. Since Mac retired and sold the factory, he’s thrown himself into gardening with the same zeal he once put into business. It’s autumn, these dahlias are a velvety dark orange-red, smouldering in the cobwebby light. Silky floss is tangled amongst the seed heads in the herbaceous border, the plant stems are beginning to blacken and I can smell the frost: frowsty like rotten apples. Back in the kitchen I open the bread crock and get out the bread for toast. Mac makes all our bread, and our marmalade as well. I pour out glasses of orange juice. I go through the motions bringing in the morning, one ordinary thing after another.