Nobody said anything. The music was extraordinary. The sensation of it was physical, like warm water being washed over a wound, agonising and cleansing and curative. Ingrid came in and wedged herself into my chair, as Winsome was entering a section that got faster and faster until it no longer seemed like the music was being manufactured by her. My sister said holy shit. A series of violent chords followed by a sudden slowing down seemed to signal the end but instead of stopping, my aunt melted the final bars in to the beginning of O Holy Night.
My perception of Winsome belonged to my mother – I thought of her as old, punctilious, someone without an interior life or worthwhile passions. That was the first time I saw her for myself. Winsome was an adult, someone who took care, who loved order and beauty and laboured to create it as a gift to other people. She lifted her eyes to the ceiling and smiled. She was still wearing her wet apron.
The first person to say anything aloud was Rowland who had come in last and was standing in front of the fireplace with his elbow on the mantel like someone posing for a full-length portrait in oil. He called out for something a bit bloody cheerier and Winsome took a brisk turn into Joy to the World.
My mother stopped it by singing – a different song that my aunt could not follow her into because she was making it up. Her voice got higher and higher until Winsome improvised an ending and took her hands away from the piano, saying it was probably time for the Queen. But, according to my mother, we were all having fun. ‘And,’ she said, ‘I need to tell all of you, please, that when she was a teenager, my sister here was so convinced she was going to be famous, she used to practise with her head turned to the side – didn’t you Winnie? – in preparation for when you’d have to play while gazing out at your vast audience.’ Winsome tried to laugh before Rowland said right, and ordered everyone born after the coronation to make themselves scarce, unnecessarily since Ingrid, my cousins and Patrick had started evacuating during my mother’s speech. I got up and walked to the door. I wanted to apologise to Winsome but as I passed her, I looked at the floor, and went back to the downstairs room. I didn’t come out again until it was time to leave. In the backseat of the car, Ingrid told me she had unwrapped my presents for me. She said, ‘So much shit for the Don’t Like pile.’
I wasn’t better. I had just been given some of Christmas Day off. The next time I went to Belgravia, the piano was closed and covered.
*
I went back to university in January and did my exams. Foundations of Philosophy 1 was a take-home. I did it on the floor in my father’s study, pressing on the Shorter Oxford.
The paper came back with a comment at the bottom. ‘You write exquisitely and say very little.’ My father read the essay and said, ‘Yes. I think you chewed more than you bit off.’
Here lies Martha Juliet Russell
25 November 1977 – TBC
She chewed more than she bit off
*
The pills did not make me feel like the old Martha when they took effect a month after I started them. I was not depressed any more. I was euphoric, all the time. Nothing scared me. Everything was funny. I started second semester and made friends, by force, with everyone in my classes. A girl said, ‘It’s weird, you’re so fun. We all thought you were a bitch.’ The boy with her said, ‘They thought that – we just thought you were cold.’ ‘The point is,’ the girl said, ‘you didn’t speak to a single person for like, the whole start of the year.’ Ingrid said I was less weird when I was under my desk.
*
I lost my virginity to a doctoral student assigned when my probation was lifted, the dean said, ‘to find any gaps and fill them in’。 I left his flat as soon as it was over. It was the afternoon but still winter and already dark. On the street I only saw mothers with prams. It felt like a parade, converging from multiple directions. Passing under streetlights, their babies’ faces looked pale and moonlike, tinged with orange. They cried and twisted uselessly against the straps that held them in. I went into a Boots and was told by the disapproving chemist that I needed a prescription for the morning-after pill, he couldn’t just sell it to me like headache tablets. There was a clinic down the road that did walk-ins; if he was me, he’d go straight there.
I waited for hours to be seen and reassured by a doctor who did not seem much older than me that I was well within my window of opportunity – she said, ‘So to speak’ and giggled.
That night, I did not take my medication. I did not take it the next day or the next, until I was not taking it at all. The doctor who had given it to me was non-specific about the harm it would cause, she could not tell me how long it ‘lingered in the system’。 But all I could think about was the way she had whispered the word foetus.