Maura, Con and I areteam-tagging this. Mum phones at night, but she reports that Scarlett won’t stay on the phone for any length of time.
None of us, Scarlett has insisted, are to come to visit her.
‘I am not an invalid,’ she says fiercely. ‘I will manage this myself.’
And then, on an evening when it’s so warm that Dan fires up the barbecue and we eat in thestill-overgrown garden, and Teddy, Lexi and Liam are blissfully at one with the world, my phone pings with a text from Scarlett.
Sorry, sorry, Freya. But I need you. Can you come?
18
We are all works in progress
Scarlett’s usually perfectly tidy house is in a mess as I let myself in. Bad sign – she is wildlyhouse-proud.
The mail is piled up on the tiny hall table, and Scarlett’s jackets hang on the newell post. She’s standing in the kitchen and I’ve never seen her look this way before.
She looks broken.
‘Thank God you texted,’ I say, racing to hug her because I am suddenly really scared for what would happen if I leave.
‘I know where he is,’ she says.
I let her sob into my shoulder, holding what turns out to be a frighteningly thin body close to me and thinking back to when we were children and she was my little baby sister. When Mum got pregnant, Maura and I were both desperate for a little sister, but me even more so, because I didn’t want to be the baby anymore. I wanted a little doll to dress and play with. I got all those things with my beloved Scarlett.
‘I know where he’s gone,’ Scarlett sobs, ‘he’s had enough, he wants a child so much. You have no idea, Freya. We have spent everything we have ever had on this and now there is nothing, there is practically no more money and no point and I kept thinking there was no more point, but we wanted this so bad, I want this so bad.’
‘Where is he?’ I ask, wondering if I should kill him or send rescue.
She pulls away from me and looks at me with beseeching eyes: ‘Where else could he be, but going out to get a baby with a real proper woman, not this husk like me.’
She scrapes her fingers over hernon-existent belly as if ripping at herself for her lack of fecundity.
I’m stunned to silence.
‘No, he isn’t, Scarlett, I say earnestly, although if he was, I think I’d kill him myself.’
‘You’ve got to stop thinking like that. Jack loves you: I know it’s true, you know it’s true.’
But I stop. Because even though I know he loves her desperately, I know that sometimes even love can’t overcome the pain of life. What if Jack really had just had too much and had gone away? Not to find another woman but just to get away from the pain of their failure.
‘No, you’re wrong. He needs a baby,’ she sobs. ‘It’s all I can think about: he’ll find someone he loves more and have a baby with her.’
She really seems to think that Jack is out looking for women to impregnate. Because she couldn’t get pregnant, it was therefore all her fault and he would find someone with whom he could have a baby. I could understand it, for sure. Understand how her mind would go off in that direction, but it was crazy—
There it was: that word again.
Crazy. Sometimes I felt crazy and now it looked as if Scarlett was going crazy.
There really needed to be a new word to describe what happened when huge emotions overtook us.
What was wrong with huge emotions?
Everyone has them. The person with them shouldn’t be given a shroud and a bell and made to chant ‘unclean’.
But in ourInstagram-filter-happy world, we aren’t allowed to be sad.
Like I have been.
