The Last List of Mabel Beaumont(23)
I’m staring at her, mouth hanging open, probably. It’s horrendous. But women have these stories, don’t they? So many women. They carry them around. They carry on.
‘He put his foot down, then. Flatly refused to try again. Said enough was enough. I was all ready to go down the IVF route, but he said not with him. That if I wanted a baby that much, I could do it with someone else. Well, of course that wasn’t what I wanted, was it? I wanted a baby that was mine and his, had daydreamed for years about whose nose it might have, whose chin. He had the snip without telling me. Said he’d done it for both of us.’
She looks at me, and I expect to see tears in her eyes, but they are dry. Perhaps she’s cried them all. And I think that the sadness I always notice in her isn’t just about Martin leaving. It’s about this, too. The family she wanted and never had.
‘So that’s why I didn’t have children,’ she says.
‘I’m sorry.’ It’s such a meagre thing to say.
‘That’s all right,’ she says.
It’s clear that it isn’t. But she’s gone. She’s miles away.
‘I didn’t want to,’ I say. ‘Arthur did. Stalemate. I shouldn’t have married him, without letting him know.’
Julie shrugs. ‘You can’t blame yourself for that. He should have asked before he went down the aisle, if it was so important to him. I wish I’d asked Martin how hard he’d try, if it came to it. Whether he’d give up if it didn’t fall in our laps. But I didn’t ask, and here we are.’
We are quiet, and I sip my tea. The air in the room is heavy with the weight of our regrets.
‘I wonder whether your friend Dot had any,’ she says.
I try to imagine Dot with children but it’s impossible. She’s a girl, giggly and full of mischief. She isn’t a mother. And yet, I know the chances are slim. Women like me, like Julie, who end up childfree – we’re the minority. The outcasts.
When Julie goes, I put the fire on and stretch out my legs, going back over what she told me. All that heartache. All that pain. She hides it fairly well, most of the time. I wonder whether I do, too. In bed that night, I close my eyes and play a scene I haven’t lingered on for a long time. Arthur and me, lying next to each other in our first house. On our sides, facing one another. The window open and cars rushing by outside. It was summer, and we just had a sheet on, no blanket. Arthur reached across and pulled me a bit closer.
‘I just thought we would,’ Arthur said. ‘Once we were married. It’s what people do, isn’t it?’
He’s right, it is. But how strange it is, that creating new people is just a thing people do, with barely a thought.
‘I don’t want to,’ I said.
‘You’ve been lonely, since Dot left. You’ve never made another friend like her. Aren’t you ready for things to change? To leave your job and be at home? We can manage it on my salary, if we’re careful.’
It’s like he didn’t hear what I said. Not that I wasn’t ready, or that I wasn’t sure, but that I didn’t want to. I turned my body away from him.
‘Mabel, talk to me.’
‘You don’t listen,’ I said.
‘Tell me why.’
‘There is no why,’ I said, turning back so I could see his eyes as I told him. ‘It’s just not something I want.’
Would it have been different, with someone else? Someone I loved more, loved properly? Maybe. Or maybe not.
12
‘I want to do something I’ve never done before.’ It’s the first thing I say to Julie when she arrives.
She doesn’t know the courage it takes. Doesn’t know how out of character it is, because she doesn’t know me. That’s what allows me to do it, I think. If I’d said that sentence to Arthur, he would have fallen out of his seat in shock. But Julie doesn’t bat an eyelid.
‘Good morning to you, too, Mabel. Right then. Something you’ve never done before. Okay, let me think.’
She’s been buzzing about the place for half an hour before she brings me a mug of tea – too much milk, and definitely added after the water, though I’ve told her my preference – and says it. ‘I could take you to that ballroom dancing class I sometimes go to.’
‘I’ve done ballroom dancing,’ I say.
And as I say it, I’m back there in my head. At those dances with Arthur and Bill and Dot, watching Bill and Dot glide gracefully across the floor, my heart thumping as I felt Arthur’s eyes on me, knowing he was going to ask.
‘But have you done a class?’ she asks, persistent.
‘No.’
‘Well then.’
The way she says it, it’s already settled. And it could be worse.
‘Patty will be delighted to have a new face there.’
‘I’ll call her Patricia,’ I say.
‘I don’t know whether that’s her name.’
‘It’s bound to be.’
She looks like she has reservations about offering to take me. But she won’t go back on it; I know that much about her. She’s got a feather duster in her hand and she goes over the room while we’re talking, though I haven’t asked her to.