• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 552 0

in an obscure column of small print close to the obituaries, Notice of Divorce, and after a decent interval of thirty seconds, printed notices to friends and relatives, Mrs. Niall Cameron has pleasure in announcing the forthcoming – and so on. Sometimes you were there with nothing settled, but that didn’t matter – I never held out for any precise settlement. You wanted to be there, was the thing. Naturally, you were concerned about the child. Thousands wouldn’t have been, but you were. Of course. It went without saying, But even more, you were concerned about me. You kept saying “Are you sure you’re all right, Rachel?” I had to laugh a little at that, because men always think it’s much worse than it really is, and as I told you, unless the woman is positively deformed there’s actually nothing to get alarmed about in ninety per cent of cases, barring bad luck. Stacey’s voice, her exact words, those years ago, the last time she visited here – “As I told Mac, unless a woman is positively –”

Then the operation. Afterwards, I felt only sick. Nothing else mattered, not even you.

You weren’t there, after that. Something collapsed, some edifice. No – not so much, that, not a breaking, nothing so violent. A gate closed, quite quietly, and when I tried to open it again, it wouldn’t. There wasn’t any way around it. No way in, not there, not any more. Visa cancelled. I don’t know why. The gate just shut. I once used to try to stop myself going there, but now when I tried to get in, I couldn’t. I needed to and wanted to, but I couldn’t.

Nick – listen –

That’s what I was afraid I would say under the anaesthetic. When I came to, there was only myself in the room, and then I saw there was a very young nurse as well. I asked her, and at first she wouldn’t say, although I could see she knew, because I suppose they’re not supposed to tell, and I was certain I had spoken your name and God knows what else. “Nick, what I love is the way the hair grows under your arms and down from your belly to your sex, and the way your thighs feel, and your voice’s never-quite-caught mockery –”

What did I say?

I must have sounded so obsessed that finally she told me, explaining beforehand that patients said some funny things and it made no sense and so one shouldn’t mind. Then she repeated what she’d heard me mumble.

I am the mother now.

The tumour turned out to be benign. The surgeon told me the next day. “You are a lucky young woman,” he said, and I felt weak-mindedly touched by the adjective, although he was all of sixty and would have thought of me as young no matter how haggard I looked. “You are out of danger,” he said. I laughed, I guess, and said, “How can I be – I don’t feel dead yet.” And he looked at me for the merest flick of an instant, only curiosity, and then he passed on to another bed.

The days and trays followed one another. Flowers were received, and letters. Calla sent a dozen yellow roses. Willard and Angela sent a potted begonia. How like Willard, something practical that would last. My kids sent russet asters with a card in Calla’s beautiful script – From Grade Two, and they had all signed their names, the faint spidery printing of Eva Darley, Petula Thomas, Marion MacVey, the heavily pressed-down pencil strokes of David Torrent, Ross Gunn, George Crawley, and one who had evidently thought his surname too laborious and so put only Jim L. I felt something at the sight of that card, the first of anything I’d felt since the operation was over, and when I once started to cry went on for a long time and the nurses said delayed shock and seemed unperturbed as long as it could be readily explained.

Mother had wanted to come into the city with me. I said No. She was hurt. “I won’t hear of you going in there all alone, dear – why, that would be simply awful.” No. “But Rachel, all on your own with no family – it’s unthinkable.” No. Later, when it was all over, I wrote to her and explained I hadn’t wanted her to undergo the strain, what with her heart and everything. I suppose she knew I lied. I was sorry. I couldn’t help it, but I was