“How about that fine public house up the road? The one Martin opened up about”—you looked at your watch—“an hour ago?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.
“Oh, come on. What the hell is wrong with both of you?”
“We don’t have enough money to go to the pub!” I was shouting. “We need more milk, more washing powder, more food.”
“Don’t be such a spoilsport, Ingrid. I promise you it’ll be fine.” You swept me up in your arms and waltzed me around the kitchen, bent me over backwards, and kissed me with Jonathan watching.
We walked up the road to the Royal Oak, you carrying Nan, and Jonathan and me trailing behind.
There were several people in the pub: that farmer and his wife (the ones whose barn burned in the lightning storm); Joe Warren, who’d now lost all that weight; Mrs. Passerini with her yellow fingers, perched on her usual stool at the end of the bar; a couple of cattle-feed reps in their suits having a lunchtime pint; and of course Martin serving the drinks.
“Gil,” he said, smiling and holding his hand out. “Long time no see.”
Mrs. Passerini got down shakily from her stool, put her cigarette in her mouth, and lifted Nan out of your arms. Nan didn’t cry, just kicked her fat legs in her little white tights and gurgled.
“I’ve got an announcement, Martin,” you said. “Pass me a piece of cutlery.” You stood at the bar and took the long-handled spoon out from the pickled-egg jar and chinked it against the glass. The pub quietened.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” you said, “we’re here to celebrate that the Colemans are bringing the average age of this village down to sixty. My beautiful wife, Ingrid”—you waved me over and pulled me in to your side—“is having another baby!”
I was passed around like Nan—hugged by beery neighbours, my stomach stroked by their wives—and you didn’t have to buy a single drink. At two thirty in the afternoon I left with Nan, and Martin locked the door behind us. You hadn’t asked him about a job.
It was cold that January, and while I waited for you and Jonathan to return I got into bed with Nan to keep warm. When the evening arrived and neither of you had come home, I put the oven on, keeping the door open to warm the room, and cooked and mashed some carrots. After Nan fell asleep I ate the last of the bread, sitting alone at the kitchen table. I went to bed and heard the front door open and someone go into Nan’s room, the spare bed creaking up against the adjoining wall. I rapped my knuckles on it, and Jonathan returned the knock. I lay in the dark and stared at the nearest bedpost rising up and disappearing into the shadowy ceiling, my fingers threaded together across my stomach. I was numb. I heard you and a crowd of people come back, long after closing time. Your celebrations continued in the kitchen.
I must have slept because when I woke in pain in the dawn you were snoring beside me and I hadn’t noticed you come to bed. The sheet under me and my legs were red and sticky with blood. In the kitchen I leaned over the back of a chair, breathing in through my nose, out through my mouth. When the cramp passed, the only sensations I felt (facts and truth, remember) were relief and guilt.
I went to the toilet, and as I flushed our second baby away, I listed all the un-telling I would have to do that day, starting with you, Gil, and afterwards Jonathan, and then our neighbours. And I worried—considering the number of empty bottles in the kitchen, none of which you’d have paid for—whether they would believe I’d ever been pregnant.
Ingrid
[Placed in Money, by Martin Amis, 1984.]
Chapter 27
In the afternoon, Flora sat opposite her father on the veranda. It was still warm and the bees droned in the honeysuckle that her mother had planted and now ran wild over the side of the house. She and Nan had excavated one of the high-backed armchairs from the sitting room, placed it in a strip of sunshine, and tucked Gil into it with a blanket. The last time she was home he had just been her father, a reclusive eccentric who was always there in the Swimming Pavilion or his writing room, even when she wasn’t thinking about him. Now he was an old man who was dying. She hadn’t been able to discuss her new knowledge with him; she wasn’t even sure it was new—perhaps she had known as soon as she’d seen him struggling out of the car two days ago.