‘No, no. I’ll manage. You go in, Rita. I need a moment.’ She unclasps her handbag and rummages inside for a cigarette.
Rita hesitates, fearing Jeannie might jump behind the wheel and drive back to Claridge’s, or even the house that ignited on the anniversary of the baby’s birth. A fact no one mentions. The firemen blamed the antique palm-tree lamp in the drawing room for starting the blaze. But Rita’s not so sure.
The moment tautens, like thread.
‘Fear not. I’m only having a ciggy, Rita,’ Jeannie says wryly.
Rita colours and smiles, reassured. But as she walks towards the house, she hears the gassy whoosh of the lighter and the muttered words, ‘Although I’d much rather burn this bloody place down.’
4
Hera, 4 August 1971
When I peered out of my bedroom window that morning, a year ago last week, the London sky was blue and still, and it felt like the whole city was holding its breath, waiting for our baby’s first cry to peal across the rooftops. She wasn’t meant to come for another two weeks. I’d circled her due date in my flip-top calendar with a red felt-tip heart. But neighbours had already started dropping off Pyrex dishes loaded with toad-in-the-hole and Coronation Chicken. Mother, who’d started to walk like a cowboy, had also had ‘little twinges’: the words made me think of garden birds on the wing.
After lunch I helped her lay old towels on her bed, then newspapers on the floor, and we giggled about the nonsense poetry they stamped on our fingers. I tried not to think about what the newspapers were there to soak up and concentrated instead on what it would be like to hold my new little sister. (I’d done a deal with God to secure a sister, an ally, the best friend I’d never had, but I’d forgotten to make Him promise she’d stick around.) She’d be raw-looking, like an over-sucked thumb, and would grow up to be a slightly plainer version of me. I imagined cradling her in my lap and people saying, so my mother could hear, ‘Oh, you’re such a good big sister, Hera. She’s lucky to have you,’ and me shrugging modestly, as if I’d not been practising, using the neighbour’s cat, for weeks.
But then the twinges flew away. It felt like a party had been cancelled at the last minute. We waited around. Aunt Edie arrived, creating a sizzle, as she always does. Aunt Edie’s declared herself too clever for marriage and wears a white shirt and navy slacks and works on a news magazine that sends her abroad to dangerous places, armed with a pen. She’s been shot at twice. She has love affairs with war photographers. She finds kids’ stuff boring. Whenever she came with us to feed ducks in Regent’s Park she’d stifle coffee-stinky yawns and check her man’s watch. I loved her just for this.
‘Don’t let us keep you from the frontline, Edie,’ Mother would mutter, a bit vinegary, making me wonder if she found feeding ducks boring, too, but wasn’t allowed to say. Mother was much fonder of Aunt Edie when she wasn’t actually there. She became a useful reference point in arguments with my father, waving like the vibrant flag of an exciting new country. Women like her were the future, my mother would declare, beating the cake mix harder and harder, so that shreds of it flew into the air and landed in unexpected places, like my father’s raised eyebrow. Edie was living the sort of life Mother would if she hadn’t got married so young – at nineteen – and had me (six months after the wedding). It always made me feel bad when she said that. Like I’d come along and stopped her being her, and dragged her back into a time before television.
Anyway, that Tuesday our life still resembled one of my mother’s House & Garden magazines. The napkins were fan-folded on the dining-room table, which was polished like a mirror. I was plump then, not fat. Mother was still completely sane. She wore an apple-print dress that rocked over her bump as she moved, like it was enjoying itself. Aunt Edie had popped over and brought some things for the baby, a silver rattle and a yellow blanket, soft as butter. When my mother wasn’t looking she nibbled off the price label with her teeth. It was obvious from my aunt’s expression she’d mistimed her visit – she’d thought she was safely two weeks from the birth. And now she was stuck. Like us. Like the baby.
Soon, Mother was orbiting the drawing room, her hand on her lower back, blowing out in puffs, like a boiling kettle, then straightening with a short, breathless laugh, herself again. Teddy didn’t like it. Aunt Edie didn’t like it. She said, ‘Christ, Jeannie, do you want an ambulance?’
Mother bellowed back, ‘No, I want to be a man!’
It wasn’t just Mother’s words that had roughened: she’d started to look different by then, sort of ugly. Her face was flushed and swollen. Even her feet had gone pulpy: I could press my finger into them and lose my nail. When she paced in front of the sunlit window in her apple dress, her tummy was no longer high or round but slumped, as if whatever was inside was too heavy to be held there much longer. The thought of something so big leaving her body, through the same tiny secret slit as the one between my own legs, worried me. I couldn’t work out the mechanics of it. But I took comfort in knowing it’d been done before.
Daddy came home early from work, tugging off his tie. He brought Mother a glass of water, which she shooed away, like he’d done something wrong. After that, leaving Aunt Edie and my mother alone, he sat on the metal steps that spiral down to the patio. He lit cigarette after cigarette and frowned, as if the baby’s arrival needed serious mental preparation. He’d been doing this a lot as my mother’s belly had got bigger.
At one point the phone rang in the hall. Mother and Aunt Edie exchanged funny looks as Daddy scrambled up to answer it and hissed something to the caller before clapping the receiver back on its cradle. After that he stood there, glaring at the phone, the cigarette burning down to an ash wand in his fingers then falling on to the floor. When Mother asked who it was, he didn’t answer. Aunt Edie was pretending to read House & Garden. So it was me who let in the midwife.
Mother started to grab on to the sofa with her fists, as if trying to stop it galloping across the room. Her curls clung to her forehead, oily and dark. ‘Time for you to go to bed,’ she managed, through a gritted smile. She hugged me. She smelt different. ‘You’ll have a new sibling by the morning.’ Then she sucked in air loudly, adding, ‘Stay upstairs with Big Rita, okay, darling?’ I couldn’t get away fast enough.
On the top floor, Big Rita emerged from Teddy’s bedroom with her huge smile, like the seaside was inside her. Her skirt was still soaked from Teddy’s bath and she had a white caterpillar of bath foam caught in her hair. She hadn’t been with us long then – a few weeks, her nickname already stuck – and every time I saw her still felt like a nice surprise. I’d expected to dislike her, as I had all the other mother’s helps and nannies who’d been brought in after the death of Nanny Burt two years ago. (Sharp left-handed smack and a frown like the fork print in her pastry pie lids: I never liked Nanny Burt either.) But I liked Big Rita. She asked me questions. She filled a room. Her hands were as big as Daddy’s. But she never used them to slap. And if Teddy woke in the night, scared of the shadows under the bed, I’d hear her say, ‘The safest place in the entire world is exactly where you are, Teddy.’ Like bad things happened outside houses like ours. Never inside them.