After Purple (6 page)

A man marched through the double doors and almost knocked me over. He was cream as well. Top-of-the-milk shirt, an exactly matching tie and a suit which looked as if it were pretending it was summertime in Acapulco. He and Janet exchanged double-cream smiles. Janet scribbled something on a pad, pushed back her orange Dralon chair and stood up. And then I saw it. The baby. Janet's baby. Adrian and Janet's baby.

It was huge, monstrous, pushing out her stomach like some malignant growth, blocking all the space between her and Acapulco. I was prepared for one month (cells divide), two or three months even (baby's limbs begin to form), but not this vast, completed hulk, jutting out like a gargoyle, almost overbalancing her. It wasn't just a clutch of cells, but a living, breathing, kicking, finished creature which might drop out any moment and claim its name, its rights, its milk. It might even demand its father —
my
father, my husband, my Adrian.

Janet was still standing up. She no longer stood upright, as she had in all those years of Girl Guide Posture Badges and deportment lessons, but tipped back against the weight. She was totally transformed; not just her shape, her stance, her breasts, her breathing, but something else more subtle, more sublime. She had Entered The Kingdom, and been transfigured, glorified. Those preening hothouse flowers were nothing to do with Mercantile Investment. They were an offering to her alone — to fertility, to motherhood. Adrian had swelled inside her and sanctified her. She was growing round him like ivy round a tree, bursting into flower. I realised now I would never get him back.

Janet had sat down again and the baby vanished from my view. Only her flower face was left, and those lumbering milk churns weighing down the desk. The man from Acapulco was walking back towards me, whistling through the double doors. I darted after him into the lift and tried to stand close, so that some of Janet's glory would rub off on my own unhallowed, concave form. He had been in the Presence and was beatified. When we reached street level he shot away, and all I picked up was the tailwind from his expensive camel coat.

I turned left out of the building, across the road into Moor Street and along to Chiswell Street. The streets looked grey and empty, as if somebody had dumped all children, pets and people underground, and then tipped concrete over them. Not that I really cared about my surroundings — I was far too busy working out Janet's dates. That baby must have been in there before I'd even got the Decree Nisi. I'd thought I'd left Adrian, but really he'd already left me. He'd allowed me to play the role of deserter and destroyer, while he hung on to the house and his good name and the judge's sympathies, and Janet swelled and burgeoned on the sidelines. At least Leo had the decency to admit he was a swine, whereas Adrian confused you with ten-pound notes and darlingses and read the
Guardian
and
New Society
, and joined in all the agonisings about Northern Ireland and the slaughter of the seal, so that you
thought
he had a conscience. Yet all the time, he must have been sleeping with Janet and me in shifts. I saw it now. Janet had had the lunch and evening slots, while I got nights and breakfast. And while Adrian and I simply thrashed around like animals, he and Janet had been engaged in a sacred act. Easy for me to dismiss Janet's prowess between the sheets, imagining her wasting half her stint on douching, or refusing to remove her vest. In blazing fact, she and Adrian had been creating life — begetting, engendering, propagating — all those glorious, gloating, biblical words which kept the earth spinning and the grass thrusting and piled man on man on man.

I crossed the road and turned into Bunhill Row. I knew where I was going — St Joseph's church, a place of sanctuary when your stomach is a bombsite and your head a half-demolished building. It's one of the poorest Catholic churches in the whole of London. It isn't even consecrated, but God still lives there (when He's not at the Vatican or Lourdes or Knock or Compostela). I collect Roman Catholic churches like other people collect coins or stamps or Chinese restaurants. The only reason I know my way around, is because London for me is the bits between churches. St Joseph's is so hidden away and hard to find, that even a lot of priests have never heard of it. You can walk past it in the street and still be asking, “Where's the church?” It's built in a basement, underneath a school which has now closed down, and all you can see is a door and a flight of dark stone steps with wild cats peeing on them. Most of the time, it's empty.

I slunk down the steps and into the church, which smells of chalk and ink and punishment and unwashed hands, like an old school hall in Dickens. There's nothing sublime about it — no towering nave, or shimmering mosaics, no Gothic tracery, or whispering arches. I didn't feel like splendour. I wanted a Cinderella church in a dark cellar, where I could hide away and be solitary and idle, after all the glass, the toil, the tower blocks. I was trying hard not to think of Janet.

I walked up to the altar and knelt down in the very front pew. I don't believe in humility. It only makes dominant people worse, and God, if He exists, is bound to be a Leo. I say ‘if He exists', but that's only in deference to Adrian who is what he calls an eclectic agnostic, which means he spent five years studying God in relation to anthropology, psychology, sociology, economics and historical geography, and still couldn't say for certain whether He was there or not. I knew He was, of course, because of my convent school. Step-fathers make quite an impression on you, especially when they're all you've got. Not that I talk about it much. People always assume that God and sex are incompatible, so that if you screw around, you can't grab God as well. That's rubbish.

Mind you, religion has always been a problem. My father was vaguely C. of E. and missing. My mother was an atheist with a private line to God. She railed at Him without believing in Him, and grudgingly accepted convent education as a sort of insurance policy against the bad vibes and worse morals of a world He hadn't created. That was the only concession she made to Him — entrusting me to the nuns — and I suspect it was more to improve my accent and my manners than to polish up my soul, or perhaps to put two hundred miles between us. She hadn't even allowed me to be baptised, although my father had booked the vicar and bought a silver christening mug (which disappeared when he did). The nuns at my school saw me as something between a leper and a freak. When they weren't struggling to fill the gaps in my religious ignorance, they were praying for my salvation. I feared damnation like other girls fear rape. Only Catholics were indisputably saved. I longed to be a Catholic, not only to avoid the horrors of hellfire, but also to be the blood-child of a close and legal Father.

Janet wasn't Catholic, but she had Adrian and her pregnancy instead, and parents who still celebrated their wedding anniversaries and sent each other cards with satin hearts and flowers on.

She kept squeezing her great swelling belly into the church, even though I'd tried to shut her out. The Blessed Virgin could have been her double — the same vanilla-blancmange complexion and social-worker expression in her eyes. And holding a baby, of course —
Janet's
baby — blond, blue-eyed and goody-goody, with her crinkly permed hair and stubby fingers. The church was full of hideous painted statues, all holding Janet's baby in their arms. One podgy infant was gurgling against St Anthony and another almost sitting on St Joseph's lily. It was a relief to turn to St Bernadette, who was holding nothing except a candle and who wasn't even looking at the Virgin, but staring up at the window as if she hoped she might escape. It's rare to find a statue of St Bernadette — that's why I liked this church. She's one of my favourite saints, in fact; a shabby, homely person, who was illiterate for years and never learned to spell. Saints make good substitutes for friends. They never let you down, or answer back, or pinch your boyfriends or your clothes. I always avoid the intellectual ones like St Thomas Aquinas, or the prigs like St Thérèse of Lisieux or the rigid toe-the-liners like St Ignatius.

St Janet was less easy to avoid. I could see her huge, misshapen stomach everywhere. In the swell of the tabernacle, the curve of the windows. The two fat pillars in front of the altar were nine months gone like she was. The halos of the saints were her white moon breasts. I wondered if it would be a son. Adrian and I had had a son, once. He's in a jar now, sterilised and labelled, a four-month foetus they saved for the students. It was a big teaching hospital and they asked me if I minded. How could I mind with a ward-round almost swamping me and the remnants of my baby still bleeding into the bed? We'd planned to call him Lucian. It meant light (I think). Adrian chose the name.

There was no light in the church, only a grey, musty film over everything as if chalk had been mixed with rust. The pews were scratched and grimy, and the kneelers looked as if some rodent had been nibbling them. It didn't really matter. It's like sex with a man who's got holes in his socks — it doesn't affect your orgasm. I could feel prayer oozing out of me — my soul lying back and opening, moistening to God's touch. I was almost scared to pray. I knew the prayer would be a savage one. But the words were forming in my mouth, squeezing through my lips, whispering through the church.

“Let Janet's baby die,” they murmured. Very simple, very unambiguous. I knew God heard, because at that very moment, all the lights went on and the church burst suddenly into life. The orange wall behind the altar glowed a deep sunset colour and the figures in the stained-glass windows fled into their backgrounds to escape the glare. Even the shabby wooden floor gleamed and shone a little. I turned round. A priest in a skimpy cassock was standing by the light switch. I think he was trying to flush me out, like you might shine a torch on a rodent to blind and startle it.

“Good afternoon,” I said, and added “Father” to placate him.

“You shouldn't be here,” he griped. “The church is locked. I've trouble enough with vandals, as it is …”

“It wasn't locked,” I said. “And I'm not a vandal.” I threw in another “Father” for good luck. I like to call them that. Fathers are rare enough, for heaven's sake.

He mumbled something about “can't go away for two seconds without intruders”, so I got up from my knees. Priests are often a stumbling block to prayer. They're more materially minded than most of the laity — always on about sex, or vandals, or the state of the church roof, or their own poverty. I made a giant-sized sign of the cross to mollify him and walked down towards the door. He was poking about by the rack of religious pamphlets, probably making sure I hadn't nicked one. I had, in fact, noticed one on Motherhood which I could have pinched for Janet. I knew what it would say — every new baby is a soul for God, and it's God who puts it there. I only wished He had, instead of Adrian.

The priest was walking up towards the altar. I strode after him, scrabbling in my pocket. There was still five pounds sixty left from Adrian's money, and twelve pence of my own. I poured it into his hands. “Say a Mass for me, Father,” I implored. “Special intention, something very urgent.” He seemed to hesitate. Could you still buy Masses, or was that only in the Middle Ages? Adrian would know, but I could hardly inquire of Adrian when it was his and Janet's baby I was bribing God to kill. Fortunately, a coin dropped on the floor. The priest bent down to pick it up (they never scorn small change), and while he was grovelling on the floor, I nipped through the door and out.

He'd have to say the Mass, now I'd paid cash in advance. After all, I'd offered all I had for it. I hadn't even left myself the tube fare. I buttoned up my sheepskin, stuck my hands in my empty pockets, and began the long trek back.

I was so chilled, blistered, and exhausted when I finally limped into Notting Hill, that I made straight for Leo's vodka, which he keeps hidden in his bureau. There was only a centimetre left, so I topped it up with Lucozade, then added the dregs from a dry martini bottle. It tasted strange, but comforting. I sat in the kitchen with my feet on a chair and tried to think of nothing. Leo wasn't back yet. The breakfast dishes were sticky on the table, the broken vase still weeping on the floor. I picked it up, tenderly, as if it were part of Leo. There were four main pieces and a little spray of chips. I fitted them together on the table, but the cracks still showed and shivered and there were tiny gaps and crannies in the phoenix. I had disfigured Leo, smashed his youth, clipped his wings. The vase was a sort of proof of his existence. That's why people have children, I suppose, to prove they were once alive (Leo hasn't any).

On the way back, I'd nipped into a bookshop and filched a book called
Mending and Restoring China
, in reparation to him. I opened it at the step-by-step instructions, spread a copy of
The Listener
on the table, and fetched glue, sandpaper, and a few of Leo's tools. There was a picture of the author on the back cover — E. H. Leatherstone Esquire — a finicky old fellow with a white moustache, which looked as if it had been daubed and stiffened with his own flour-paste. Mr Leatherstone suggested making a rest-bed for the broken object. I liked the word rest-bed. It had overtones of healing, care, compassion. I wished I could lie on one myself and have all my shattered pieces stuck together. The mending wasn't easy, even with the diagrams. The smallest chips fell off, and the glue squeezed out too quickly, and the phoenix seemed to have lost a lot of plumage. If I held it firmly in my hands against the table, it turned into a bird again and seemed even to be arising from the ashes, but as soon as I let go of it, it broke apart and moulted, and I was left with just a pile of random feathers.

The trouble with me is I haven't any staying power. As soon as I start something, I want to give it up. I really wanted Leo. I abandoned the vase and walked along to his bedroom which is the darkest room in the house. He always keeps his curtains closed and has lots of dark purple hangings and gloomy pictures of uninhabitable landscapes. I took off all my clothes and crawled into his bed which is high and covered with a tattered Persian rug with black and scarlet dragons woven into the border. It's so heavy, it's like another man on top of you. Sometimes, I lay beneath the two of them (Leo and the rug) and felt I was being crushed into a sort of dark, dragon-haunted past, which I dimly remember from some other, nobler, long-ago existence when I was perhaps a male and probably a Persian.