What Alice Forgot (35 page)

All she had was that morning.

“But Nick,” she began.

“What?” he said grimly, irritably. He really didn’t like her. It wasn’t just that he didn’t love her anymore. He didn’t even like her.

“We were so happy.”

Elisabeth’s Homework for Jeremy

3 a.m.

Hi J. Ben drove off somewhere. I don’t know where he is.

I’m so tired.

Hey. You know how if you say a word over and over again, it starts to sound really weird?

Like, let’s say the word is, oh, I don’t know, INFERTILITY.

Infertility. Infertility. Infertility. Infertility.

It’s a twisty, curly, nasty word. Lots of syllables.

Anyway, Jeremy, my darling therapist (as Olivia would say), my point is that things become weird and pointless if you examine them for too long. I’ve thought about being a mother for so many years the whole concept has started to seem weird. I’ve wanted it, wanted it, wanted it. Now I’m not even sure if I wanted it in the first place.

Look at Alice and Nick. They were so happy before they had the children. And sure, they love their kids, but let’s be honest, they’re hard work. And it’s not like you get to
keep
those adorable babies. Babies disappear. They grow up. They turn into children who are not necessarily that cute at all.

Madison was the most beautiful baby. We adored her. But the Madison of today doesn’t seem to have anything to do with that baby. She’s so furious and strange and she can make you feel like an idiot. (Yes, Jeremy, a ten-year-old can make me feel inferior. That shows a lack of emotional maturity or something, doesn’t it?)

Tom used to bury his face in my neck and now he wriggles away if I try and touch him. And he tells you the plots of TV shows with a lot of unnecessary detail. It’s sort of dull. Sometimes I think of other things while he’s talking.

And Olivia is still gorgeous, but actually she can be manipulative. Sometimes it’s like she knows she’s being cute.

And the FIGHTS. You should see them fight. It’s amazing.

See. I’m a terrible auntie. I’m making bitchy remarks about those three beautiful children, whom I hardly see anymore anyway. So what sort of mother would I be? A horrible one. Maybe even an abusive one. They’d probably take my children away and give them to someone else. An infertile woman could adopt them.

You know, Jeremy, once, when Olivia was a toddler, I minded her for a whole day. Alice and Gina were out at some school function. Olivia was perfectly behaved and she was so cute, she would have won an award for the cutest baby, but you know, by the end of the day, I was BORED OUT OF MY SKULL from walking around after her and saying, no don’t touch that, ooooh yes, look at the bright light.

Bored. Tired. A bit irritable. I was relieved to hand her over when Alice came home. I felt as light as a feather.

How’s that? All this “oh, poor me” obsession with being a mother and I was bored after one day.

I’ve always secretly thought that Anne-Marie, my friend from the Infertiles, would make a terrible mother. She’s so impatient and brittle. But maybe they’re all thinking that about me, too. Maybe we’d all make terrible mothers. Ben’s mum is probably right when she says that “Nature knows best.” Nature knows that I would make a terrible mother. Each time I get pregnant, Nature says, “Actually, this kid would be better off dead than having a mother like her.”

After all, Ben’s mum couldn’t have children either and look at her, she DID make a terrible mother.

The bottom line is, we shouldn’t adopt.

I don’t want to be a mother anymore, Jeremy.

A mother. A mother. A mother. A mother.

Sounds like smother. It’s a weird word.

I don’t even know why I’m crying.

Frannie’s Letter to Phil

Mr. Mustache turned up at my door this morning just as I was about to leave for Tai Chi.

I almost didn’t recognize him. He’d shaved off his mustache.

I said, “I hope you didn’t do that for me.”

His upper lip looked so
naked
! He seemed like an entirely different person. Softer and gentler. Although at the same time, more sophisticated and . . . masculine.

He was wearing tracksuit pants and a T-shirt and he said he’d been thinking he might give this “Tai whatchamacallit” a go, but he said he felt “shy” about turning up on his own.

I said, “Oh, yes, because you’re such a shy, retiring type.”

We went along to the Tai Chi, and he was utterly hopeless. I had to keep trying not to giggle like a naughty schoolchild. Afterward he looked so endearingly rumpled, I invited him back for a cup of tea and some of Alice’s banana muffins that she’d given me last week.

We had quite a chat. I told him how I’d recently become quite addicted to “Facebook” after an old student invited me to join. (Little Mattie Marks. Remember him, Phil? He’s some sort of IT big shot these days.) Mr. M was impressed. He said he used the Internet a lot but didn’t know anything about Facebook. It made me feel quite hip!

He told me about his two sons and how much he misses them. (One lives in the U.K. and the other is in Perth.) He said both his boys were adopted.

“My wife and I couldn’t have our own children,” he explained. “That’s why I felt so sorry for your granddaughter.”

(He says “granddaughter” so naturally, even though he knows I’m not really related to Elisabeth. It may be to do with his own children being adopted. Perhaps it’s not so presumptuous of him. Perhaps it’s rather nice. I can’t make up my mind.)

“It’s a very lonely feeling when all your friends are having babies,” he said. He told me he could still remember the expression on his wife’s face while they went to her niece’s baptism, even though it was over sixty years ago. “It made me want to punch a wall,” he said.

I wonder if he was reprimanding me for my “babies are not the be-all and end-all” comment. I wonder if he thinks I’m being a bit harsh about poor Elisabeth.

Do you know something, Phil? I had always secretly hoped that you and I might have our own little baby. Just the one. Boy or girl. Didn’t matter. I was thirty-eight, but I knew it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility. One of the sixth-form mothers at the school had a baby at forty-one. She was almost embarrassed about it. She brought the baby to the school one day and I remember holding out my finger for the baby to clutch and suddenly thinking,
I’m younger than her.
I felt that sudden rush of disbelief and exhilaration you feel when your ticket number is called in a raffle.
I could still be a mother,
I thought, and I felt like dancing.

It was two weeks before what should have been our wedding day.

One week before the phone call.

It’s true I’ve never been pregnant, but I know what it’s like to lose the possibility of a baby. So of course I sympathize with Elisabeth, Phil! Deeply. My heart breaks for her. I’ve cried and cried for her each time she’s lost another baby.

It’s just that sometimes I want to say to her, “Darling, maybe you don’t get to be a mother, but you still get to be a wife.”

Chapter 23

“
R
ight. Seat belts on?” said Alice. Her hand shook slightly as she turned the key in the ignition. Did she really drive this gigantic car every day of her life? It felt like a semi-trailer. Apparently, it was called an SUV.

“Are you sure you’re safe to take them to school tomorrow? Because if you think there is any risk at all to the children, I’d rather drive them myself,” Nick had said the night before when he was leaving, and Alice had wanted to say, “Of course I’m not right, you idiot! I don’t even know where the school is!” But there had been something about Nick’s tone that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up with a powerful, strangely familiar feeling that was close to . . . fury? He had such a sneery way of talking to her now. That snippy voice spoke up again in her head:
Sanctimonious bastard! Trying to make me look like a bad mother.
“I’ll be fine,” she’d said. And he’d sighed his huffy new sigh, and as she watched him walk out to his shiny car, she felt something almost like relief at the same time as she thought, “But why don’t you just come up to bed with me?”

Now her three children sat in the seat behind her. They were in horrible moods. If they’d been drunk last night, now they were all suffering from terrible hangovers. They were pale and snarly, with purple shadows under their eyes. Had they slept badly because of her? She suspected she’d let them stay up way past their normal bedtimes. There had been a lot of vagueness when she asked them what time they normally went to bed.

Alice adjusted the rear-vision mirror.

“Do you remember how to drive?” asked Tom.

“Yes, of course.” Alice’s hand hovered nervously over the handbrake.

“We’re late,” said Tom. “You might have to go quite a bit over the speed limit.”

It had been a strange and stressful morning. Tom had appeared at Alice’s bedroom door at seven a.m. and said, “Have you got your memory back?” “Not quite,” Alice had said, trying to shake her head free of a night of dreams all involving Nick yelling at her. “She hasn’t got it back!” she heard Tom cry, and then the sound of the television being switched on. When she got out of bed, she found Madison and Tom lounging around in their pajamas, eating cereal in front of the television. “Do you normally watch television before school?” Alice had asked. “Sometimes,” Tom had answered carefully, without removing his eyes from the TV. Twenty minutes later, he was in a frenzy, yelling that they needed to leave in five minutes’ time. That’s when it emerged that Olivia was still sound asleep in bed. Apparently it was Alice’s job to wake her.

“I think Olivia might be sick,” Alice had said, as Olivia kept collapsing back against the pillow, her head lolling to one side, saying sleepily, “No thank you, I’ll just stay here, thank you, goodbye.”

“Mum, she’s like this every morning,” Tom had said disgustedly.

Finally, after Alice had dragged a half-comatose Olivia into a school uniform and spooned cereal into her mouth, while Madison had spent half an hour with a roaring hair dryer in the bathroom, they had left the house, incredibly late, according to Tom.

Alice put her hand around the handbrake.

“Did you even brush your hair this morning, Mum?” asked Madison. “You look sort of . . . disgusting. No offense.”

Alice put a hand to her hair and tried to smooth it down. She had assumed that she didn’t need to dress up for dropping the kids off at school. She hadn’t bothered with hair or makeup and had pulled on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and an old watermelon-colored jumper she’d found at the back of the drawer. The jumper was faded and frayed, and it had given Alice a start when she realized she remembered buying it brand new with Elisabeth just the other week.

Just the other week ten years ago.

“Don’t be mean to darling Mummy,” Olivia said to Madison.

“Don’t be mean to darling Mummy!” mimicked Madison in a sugarysweet voice.

“Stop copying me!” Alice felt the thud of Olivia’s feet against her lower back as she kicked the seat.

“We’re so late,” moaned Tom.

“Would you three just be quiet for once in your lives!” snapped Alice, in a voice entirely unlike her own, and at the same time, she released the handbrake and reversed out of the driveway and turned left, her hands smooth and capable on the leather-clad steering wheel, as if she’d said exactly those words and done exactly that maneuver a million times before.