‘My sister and her husband have been trying for a baby for so long and it keeps failing and I don’t know why, because they deserve it so much.’
Miss Primrose’s hand finds mine. Her fingers are very long and strangely, I imagine them playing the piano, coaxing delicate music out of the keys.
‘Did you ever play the piano?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I wasn’t taught to play it as a child though, not the way I was brought up: no money. In later years I had the chance and I did.’ She stretches long fingers untouched by arthritis. ‘I took up the piano when I was sixty and I have to say, I did adore it. But now my stretch is rather gone, you need the stretch in your fingers you know.’
‘I understand,’ I say.
‘Your sister,’ she prompts.
‘They deserve a child so much. She’s brilliant with my children. You met Teddy and she’s such a little pet but she can be an absolute monkey. Scarlett comes over all the time and helps me with the children at the weekend if I have to go down to the country and do a demonstration and if Dan has got work. We have a lovely childminder, Angela, during the week. But our work is sort of strange, doesn’t come at ordinary hours of the day.’
‘What I have found from my time on this green earth,’ Miss Primrose says, putting down her teacup, ‘is that we don’t always get what we deserve but we have to learn to live with what we get.’
‘I know,’ I agree, taken aback at this approach. ‘I know, but I keep seeing people who shouldn’t have children but they have them and Scarlett and Jack don’t.’
‘They may never have them,’ she adds calmly.
I stare at her crossly.
‘I’m just telling you what you know in your heart,’ she goes on.
And the anger dissipates. She’s right.
People don’t always get what they want. There’s no law that says they must. If they did, there would not be people starving all around the world, parents who couldn’t look after their children, diseases that killed parents and children. Those things wouldn’t happen because everyone would have what they want.
We have to learn to live with it. The truth of this is so overwhelming that I cannot quite deal with it right now, so I shove it into a corner of my mind.
Taking a deep breath and another sip of the mocha, I continue.
‘Last year my father had a huge stroke: he’s there but he’s not there, if that makes sense. My mother takes care of him. She takes care of his father and her mother as well, and that’s hard work but taking care of my darling Dad is slowly killing her. She has to do it, she says, because she loves him so much and ...’
‘Then you must let her do it.’
This is not how I want this conversation to go.
‘But she’s wasting away,’ I insist, ‘watching him not being there and mourning what they had, what they never will have now. I worry so much about her.’
‘Still, it is her choice to make,’ Miss Primrose continued.
We have to learn to live with it, I think again, unearthing Miss Primrose’s words.
That can’t be right. What about ‘the universe will send you all great things’or whatever the hell it is?
I snuffle some more into her handkerchief.
‘As if that wasn’t enough, I was mugged in a parking garage and it was horrible. I was pushed to the floor and I broke a bone. But that wasn’t the worst thing; it’s The Fear. That fear coming back. And my daughter has a birth mother, and she’s sniffing around my daughter now, causing trouble.’ I finish with my voice suspiciously high.
‘How can I live with any of that?’
This is the first time I’ve said any of this out loud to another human being. I had skirted around this when I spoke to AJ, my doctor, but that’s all.
If I had been going to the putative counsellor or attending some sort of a victim support group, I might have spoken of The Fear there. But I wasn’t doing any of those things. So here, in this little café, I was telling this woman I barely knew about The Fear.
‘Tell me what this fear is like, how it effects your body,’ said Miss Primrose, all pretence at drinking her Earl Grey abandoned. And I began to tell her.
14
