‘Make sure it doesn’t happen again,’ Laura said, but her voice was weighted with tiredness rather than anger, and she soon fell asleep, waking only when the nurse came to help her feed Rosa. Rosa, too, seemed sleepy, but when she found the nipple and sucked a rhythm fell into place between them. Whorls of hair failed to cover that too-naked skull, her feet were too soft, her vulnerability too extreme. When the visitors Laura was expecting, Mother and Aunt Dee, came later, she found it difficult to speak to them. They bore with them fears about the rumours building outside, but Laura was slow to respond. She needed to learn the contours of a new face and the rhythms of a new life, and all her energies were being taken up by those imperatives.
This is the unanswered question of motherhood, Laura came to realise over the following few days. Had her life got bigger, enlarging itself around this new being? Or had it got smaller, fixing itself to the well-being of this tiny person, cutting out any dream of freedom? The actual physical space of her life was so constrained now as to be claustrophobic. This was not entirely Rosa’s fault. The reporters would not give up, and even once they had driven back to Patsfield after Laura had spent a week at the hospital, they were unavoidable. The women kept the curtains closed on the ground floor; they never answered the door unless they knew who it was; they did not use the garden because reporters would hide in the shrubs to listen to them; they could not walk into the village without their footsteps being dogged. Outside, the summer was flowering and lengthening, but Rosa and Laura could see nothing of it. So it remained a close, warm, female world, in which the smallest person became the largest, and all Laura’s energy was concentrated on the feeding, the sleeping, the crying – a slow circling in which days moved on without changing shape. All the time, the telephone rang, but even when the voices of friends and acquaintances were heard, Laura put them off visiting.
The only person Laura wanted to see now was Sybil, and she was the only one who had not been in touch since the birth. Toby had telephoned, telling Laura he was off to see his mother, who was obviously quite distracted with worry. Laura asked if Sybil would come and visit, and Toby replied, absolutely, very soon. His voice was always so clipped. But Sybil’s silence continued. Laura needed to break through it, she thought, she needed Toby and Sybil; she needed the protection of the group.
So one morning, when she had slept reasonably well, Laura telephoned Sybil and asked if she could come and see her. Sybil’s voice was always flat on the telephone, but she agreed. It was odd, Laura thought, that she did not offer to come to her, but presumably she had heard about the ring of reporters around the door – who would expose themselves to that? She held onto the fact that Mother and Aunt Dee had long been insisting that they could look after Rosa for a few hours now that she was taking a bottle, and Helen had said that she could drive Laura about, since the Caesarean wound still made it impossible for her to drive herself.
Even though Helen drove Laura’s car right up to the door, and Laura rushed out with a scarf over her head, the reporters saw what was happening immediately. There were cars right behind them all the way through the village, disconcerting Helen, who began to drive erratically. Laura wanted to ask her to try some tricks on them: to drive south for a while, perhaps, and then double back, or jump a light to put distance between them. But just as she opened her mouth to speak, she stopped herself. She found Helen more trying than ever these days; there was something too watchful about her manner. So she sank back into the seat, wanting to pretend she was unaware of their followers. It was not hard just now to seem passive. This was the first time since the birth that Laura had been apart from Rosa, and her milky, aching body felt the absence.
Eventually Helen parked in Chester Square, and the reporters’ cars found places next to them. Laura realised there was no avoiding them. She agreed that Helen should remain with the car rather than come in with her, and put on her sunglasses. As she stepped out, the door of Sybil’s house swung open immediately. She must have been watching for her from the window, and there was Ann on the doorstep. Laura tried to ignore the shouts of the reporters. One of them – that long-haired young man – was offering money, absurd sums, just for a few comments. He was trying to get in front of her as she walked, to take a photograph. Laura was sweating by the time she gained the steps, but then she was standing in the hall, pulling off her sunglasses, and Sybil was at the top of the stairs.
‘Every time I come here I remember the night I first met you – and Edward …’ Laura said, walking up to meet Sybil. It was surely a statement that laid claim to a particular intimacy with her, an intimacy that had grown between them over the years, the long years that they had come to know one another little by little, up to that strange moment in the Surrey garden not so long ago when Sybil had been about to tell Laura some confidence.