16

Anne is beautiful in a way her daughter will never be. A brown-haired blue-eyed girl whose quietness Emmett believes is his own private haven. He needs the healing she offers and by degrees she becomes the mother he never had, whether she wants that or not.

At first she doesn’t understand there’s something wrong with him and later she puts his rages down to worries at work, thinks that if she gives him no reason to be upset, then the smoothness of life will continue.

It takes a year or so for that unquiet feeling she first had about him to re-emerge. She will never forget that day with Marge and Ray down at the beach when he had the tantrum because his foot got wet; but why, she wonders, did she go ahead with him after that? What was wrong with her? She had the chance to get away and missed it.

She’s in bed next to Emmett listening to him snore. He sounds like a rusty gate caught in the wind and he takes up all the air. The booze makes him snore. She’s lucky to have a small corner of the bed.

She remembers when he didn’t snore, in the days when he was tender and when he seemed the cleverest man. It slips her mind that he was handsome, but she knows he must have been. Handsome. Never remembers this because it might lead to the idea that she loved him. Truth is, if there was good sex, it went away so fast it might have been imagined. Now, the best you can say about it is that it’s fast. These days Anne thinks of sex with pure revulsion. And anyway, is Emmett still within that snoring man? Is this really Emmett sawing at the air beside her? Can that really be him? No, she thinks, it cannot be.

Anne doesn’t believe in crying, doesn’t indulge in what she thinks of as weakness. She just moves her face forward onto the cool cotton of the pillow. But whether she believes in weeping or not, tears seep down the pillow to make a pocket of rain.

The rhythm in Emmett’s snoring drones on and then all of a sudden she realises with a stab of panic that she has to be at work by eight-fifteen. Work, thuds her heart in the language she most understands, work. Must sleep, she thinks. Must not let the sawing cut into her head.

And then, in a moment of clarity as clear as light, she cannot be in the same room as this man another second. She pushes herself up and with the practised habit of a ghost, puts her hand on her dressing gown, shrugs it on in the dark and quietly moves to her babies, drawn to them as though they hold every answer.

The relief of sleeping with the babies is a consolation she can’t live without. Settling in around their soft warm limbs and feeling their small breaths, she believes there’s no comparison to the purity of her children and their perfection is her blessing.

She tries to drift off but her mind is stuck in the groove of how she let Emmett into her life. Maybe she said yes to him because he was smart, smarter than anyone she’d ever met, and she wanted brains for her children.

She’s stroking Peter’s small head absently as a way of settling herself. She had wanted her kids to be cleverer than the others and cleverer than herself. Can that have been wrong? And if it was, who will know?

Anne sometimes remembers that she was beautiful in a way that made her look like the young Queen of England, refined and poised and somehow vulnerable, with her wide smiling mouth and innocent eyes. She could’ve married Des Peck, the gawky young plumber, and lived happily ever after in Newport but then Emmett called her Bambi. He saw the purity.

Her father never liked Emmett, he thought he was strange and dangerous and told her so. She never knew what her mother thought because they never discussed it.

At first she loved him so deeply it amazed her and she was his willing pupil. He read books to her while they were in bed on the weekends before Louisa was born. The girl who left school at fourteen to become an apprentice dressmaker was thrilled with what he knew and how he’d taught himself so much. He spoke about writing with reverence. He read The Grapes of Wrath to her and they were both in tears. Such a book. Then they tore through all of Jules Verne because the future appealed to Emmett. He loved the idea that it would be better then, that people wouldn’t be slaves in factories, that their kids would be educated and if they were educated then they’d be rich and if they were rich, they’d be happy.

She doesn’t think about what went wrong and doesn’t allow herself the time to be disappointed. Anyway, all the women she knows are smarter and better than their husbands, that’s just the way it is, and most of them take a belting now and then. She just gets on. She has only enough money to make it each week and it seems there are just so many kids.

She has to work, that’s all there is, but she thanks God for it because without work she would be lost.