There was complete silence on the top landing and no line of light under Matthew’s door. Rosa stooped and set the tray down on the carpet.
Then she tapped.
‘Matt?’
Silence. Rosa turned the handle very slowly and opened the door. Matthew hadn’t pulled the curtains and the queer reddish glow from the night-city sky illuminated the room enough for Rosa to see that Matthew was sitting, fully dressed, in the small armchair that matched the one in her own room.
‘Matt,’ Rosa said, ‘are you OK?’
He turned his head. In the dimness she couldn’t make out if his eyes were shining or tearful.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes’.
Chapter Eighteen
‘Why the silence?’ Laura emailed from Leeds. ‘What’s happening? Is it something I said?’
‘No,’ Ruth typed rapidly. ‘Nothing to do with you, don’t worry. But lots to tell you. Lots’.
She took her hands off the keyboard and looked at what she had written. Then she deleted the last six words. She would tell Laura, she thought, of course she would, if Laura could be deflected from the choice between Cuba or Mexico for her honeymoon, but she wouldn’t tell her yet. There was, after all, no need to tell Laura, no need until she had got a little further down her own path of thinking, of realising, of unpicking, stitch by stitch, everything that had happened. And, more to the point, everything that was now going to happen.
Ruth took her hands right off her desk and laid them in her lap. It was that time of the day in the office when most people had gone home, taking the possibility of interruption and urgency with them. A colleague might come in for a chat or with the suggestion of a drink but finding Ruth dreaming at her desk would be something they expected, something they might even do themselves, to postpone the disconcerting business of going home. After six in the office was a time when being beholden to an obligation melted peacefully into a choice. She could, she thought, answer all the emails from America, or she could, if she chose, leave responding until the morning when the Americans would still be asleep, and concentrate instead, with tentative wonder, on the fact that the last thing Matthew had said to her when they parted was, ‘I’ll ring you’.
He hadn’t, but she wasn’t anxious that he wouldn’t. She had, in almost a single second, shed the anxiety that had been such a burden for so long the moment she had realised he was crying. She’d been so tense about telling him about the baby, so poised for a rebuff, so braced for rejection that, when the words were out and he said nothing, it took her some little time to realise that he was saying nothing because he was crying. She’d put a tentative hand out towards him but he’d shaken his head and grabbed handfuls of tiny napkins out of the holder on the café table and scrubbed at his face with them while his shoulders shook.
Ruth said, immediately regretting it, ‘You’re not angry?’
He moved his head again.
‘Of course not—’
‘I thought,’ she said diffidently, ‘that you might think you’d been very unlucky’. ‘No. No—’
She gave a little laugh.
‘I did wonder if I’d been unlucky’.
He stopped mopping his face and looked at her.
‘Don’t you want a baby?’
She stared down at the tabletop.
‘I don’t know. I think I do. I think I want – your baby. But it wasn’t what I planned’.
He said, a little more sharply, ‘Does it upset your plans?’
She looked up.
‘Well, it upsets those ones. But those aren’t the only ones’.
‘Aren’t you pleased?’ She hesitated.
He said, more insistently, ‘Aren’t you pleased, that you can be pregnant?’ ‘Yes, I suppose—’
‘I think,’ Matthew said, leaning forward, sniffing, ‘I think it’s wonderful to get pregnant. I think it’s amazing to make a baby’.
She said, ‘It wasn’t very wonderful alone in the bathroom looking at that little blue line’.
‘No’.
‘And it still isn’t very wonderful not knowing what will happen. Not – knowing how you feel’. Matthew pointed to his face. ‘Look at me’.
‘Matt—’
He said quickly, ‘Don’t hurry me, Ruth, don’t push, don’t want answers now this minute’. ‘OK,’ she said reluctantly.
Matthew blew his nose into a clump of napkins.
‘It’s just knocked me out. This news’.
‘Yes’.
He looked at her.
There was a pause and then he said, ‘It’s wonderful, you – you’re wonderful,’ and then he picked up her nearest hand and kissed it and returned it to her as if he was afraid of becoming responsible for it.
When she and Matthew first met, Ruth reflected now, staring unseeingly at her half-finished email to Laura, Matthew had often told her she was wonderful. Her hair was wonderful, and her body, and her laugh and her driving and her taste in music. She was wonderful to him for what she was, for the package of a person that seemed to him desirable enough to warrant persistent and energetic pursuit. But, sitting at that café table with him and listening to him tell her she was wonderful, it had come to her, with a kind of glow, that she seemed wonderful to him at last for something she had done, rather than something she was. She felt, and had felt ever since, that Matthew had awarded her a recognition, that he had acknowledged an admiration and a pride at what she had done, in becoming pregnant. She couldn’t remember if he had ever looked at her professional efforts and accomplishments with the respect and approval he seemed all too ready to accord her now. She was inclined to think that if he ever had she would indeed remember, recognition of achievement being about as basic to human need as food and drink, and thus this extraordinary glow of approval in which she was tentatively basking was not only unexpected, but was also probably a first.
She couldn’t, of course, blame Matthew for withholding admiration in the past. For as long as she could remember she had, as so many of her girlfriends had, worked assiduously at relinquishing recognition. When she fell in love with Matthew, and the discrepancy in their earnings inevitably dictated the mechanisms of their life together, she had almost unconsciously played down her achievements, withdrawn all visible evidence of her paying power behind a barrier of standing orders and direct debits as well as ceding any available attention to Matthew whenever possible. It was only when this curiously primitive need to own her own flat expanded to become something she could not give up that she confronted him – no, both of them – with the bald fact that she did not want him to hold her back just because he couldn’t do what she could do.
And the consequence of that determination to buy the flat was that she had been made to feel – or, she thought truthfully, just found herself feeling – that in behaving in a way that was not automatically self-deprecating and deferential she had surrendered the chief defining quality of femininity, that of being the giver. Essential womanliness, that warmth and tenderness and loyalty that makes girls conventionally desirable, was, apparently, something that Ruth had turned her back on, thrown down and stamped on. Never mind the unfairness of it, never mind the way that most cherished traits of femininity always seemed to be defined within a relationship, as if possessing no value unless to others, that was how it had seemed to her. She had acted with all the self-reliant, decisive independence that would have been so much applauded in a man, and felt her very sexuality had been assailed in consequence. She might be endorsed most heartily at work for what she was achieving, but what was that endorsement worth when spread thinly across the whole of her life outside work? Who would care, in ten years’ time when all her contemporaries had families, that she was earning, at thirty-eight, more, annually, than her father had ever earned in all his working life? The Victorians had described women who were hell bent on higher education as agamic, asexual. How many people still, Ruth thought, including a shrinking part of her own outwardly accomplished self, would have agreed with them?