It was when this thought hit her that she stopped, mid-piling up of paperbacks, winded as if she’d been hit in the solar plexus. She felt sick at what she was doing, poleaxed by what she had set in motion and now did not have the power to halt. She was leaving everything and everyone and she realized, in a hot, livid flush, that Helena was right and she had made a terrible mistake.
But the flat was sold, she had already exchanged, and was due to complete any day now. The stone house was signed for and she would lose the thirty thousand euro deposit if she pulled out, let alone any fees if Mileva decided to sue for breach of contract. There was no turning back.
***
Once the flat no longer belonged to her, Sophie went to stay with Anna for a few days. She couldn’t leave the country yet as she needed to tie up all the paperwork from Matt’s death; it would be hard to do it from Montenegro. Crazy, lovely, irrepressible Anna lived in a huge, rambling house in Camden Town, a place that had been designated as short-life housing some time in the Eighties and then been ignored and neglected by the council ever since, apart from intermittent threats that it was about to be condemned or sold or auctioned or demolished. Anna had inherited her flat within it from her ex: the one thing he had given her, she always said, apart from a broken heart.
Though she couldn’t admit it, Sophie was finding it harder and harder to cope, unable to function with nothing to do, no schedule to keep to. The sleeplessness and night terrors were getting worse and she was exhausted. Perhaps they might go away if Anna and Tomasz were nearby, or at least recede enough to allow her a few hours’ rest.
For so many years her life had been dictated by the school year and now without it she was adrift on a sea of uncertainty, vaguely wafting to and fro with no purpose or direction. At the same time, she was glad she had resigned and, now that it was well into the autumn term, that she didn’t have to face the classroom every day, the scores of stroppy, hormonal, demanding teenagers, many with their own problems as bad or worse than hers. She knew she wouldn’t have got through it and, more to the point, would not have been a good teacher but instead a bad-tempered, impatient, ineffectual one.
There was one thought that preoccupied her, gliding in and out of her mind on an hourly basis. It was nearly three months since she’d had a period. She had hesitated in front of the pharmacy several times in the last few weeks but not gone in and bought a test. The truth was that she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to be pregnant or not. She found herself negotiating the matter with Matt or God or fate or someone – she wasn’t really sure who.
‘I don’t mind not being pregnant if you just give him back to me,’ she would hear herself silently saying. ‘We’ll have plenty of chances for babies, all the time in the world, just let me have him back.’
There was never any answer, and she didn’t expect there to be. But she couldn’t stop the bargaining.
‘Did you know when you fell pregnant with Tomasz?’ she asked Anna one evening, amidst the chaos of Anna’s dining table, where you had to clear a space of post, newspapers, paint pots and brushes, mugs, toys, and books just to find room to put your elbows. Sophie didn’t tell her why she was asking. She knew she would not be able to withstand Anna’s insistence that she do the sensible thing and just buy a test, and she couldn’t face doing that right now.
‘As soon as he was conceived.’ Anna sighed happily at the memory, though it was not one of fantastic sex with a gorgeous man. Despairing of ever finding a life partner after being disappointed and let down once too often, Anna had conceived Tomasz as a single mother with the help of IVF and a sperm donor. Nevertheless, a pregnancy is a pregnancy however it occurs and Sophie didn’t feel pregnant at all.
‘How did you know?’ she pressed, insistently.
Anna shrugged. ‘I just did. Women know these things. You’ll know when you –’ Anna stopped, abruptly. ‘What I mean is, often people just … know it. That’s all,’ she continued, lamely.
Sophie looked into her cup of tea as if the leaves might have the answer. She couldn’t be pregnant, then, if she were so uncertain. And if she wasn’t now, she never would be. The bargain hadn’t been accepted, because there didn’t seem to be a baby and there wasn’t Matt, either.
Tomasz wandered in, halfway to bed, the ankle-skimming legs of his pyjamas marking his latest growth spurt. Sophie ruffled his white-blond hair as he passed. She had him, her godchild. She would always have Tomasz to love. He would be enough.
Realistically, even if she had ever been carrying a child, or the very beginnings of a child, she couldn’t be any more. Surely such extreme emotion, such terror and shock as she had experienced, would have killed it off? What minuscule bunch of cells could survive such trauma? And then giving those cells no nutrition, so many days and weeks passing when she could hardly swallow anything down without gagging, even if she bothered to get round to trying, would only have contributed to the harm. But still – at the back of her mind resided the possibility of a baby.
Despite Sophie’s gratitude for Anna and Tomasz’s company, their house was anything but restful. Sophie had not accounted for the constant comings and goings, or the casual droppings-in of the motley collection of inhabitants who occupied the other floors. On her last evening, it was even more hectic than usual; there were visits from the sound recordist downstairs who wanted Anna’s opinion on a new jingle he’d written, the penniless playwright in the attic who needed her to comment on the authenticity of a Polish character he had created, and the ‘self-employed’ (euphemism for unemployed) hipster from the flat in between who came to borrow a teabag and stayed ‘for a chat’ for three hours.
When she did finally get to bed, Sophie sank under the covers with a huge sigh of relief. She found herself longing for the stone house on the waterfront, for the peace, quiet, and solitude that awaited her there.
The airport was heaving, despite the fact that it was late October and only 5 a.m. Sophie remembered that it was half-term and she couldn’t believe that after all her years of teaching she’d forgotten that it always fell at this time of year. Weaving her way through torrents of men, women, and children pulling suitcases with thunderous wheels or loaded down with bags dripping from every arm and shoulder, she fought back rising waves of panic.
The intermittent announcements rang out across the terminal building, shattering her nerves. Apart from the last few days at Anna’s, she had been living silently since Matt’s death, not listening to TV nor radio, not travelling on the tube, not going to work where there was constant noise and bustle.
The flight was uncomfortable, as she was crammed into the budget airline seat that was far too upright to make rest, let alone sleep, possible. The little girl seated next to her became fractious and had to be bribed with chocolate, which led to a predictable messy, sticky outcome. Sophie felt anaesthetized to it all, not caring about the child’s cries or her liberal distribution of smears of chocolate that constantly threatened Sophie’s own book and cardigan. What did it matter? What did anything matter?
Now that the denial and the desperate bargaining were over, she was starting to feel angry – searing, entrenched fury coursing corrosively through her veins. She was enraged with Matt for not taking care of his health and therefore bringing upon himself the aneurysm that had killed him. The reports on his death had come through and a massive, catastrophic bleed to the brain had been diagnosed as the cause.
But her wrath was tinged with guilt; Matt had been complaining of headaches and she had not given it much heed, advising him to take an ibuprofen and get an early night. It had seemed to Sophie that headaches were inevitable with the hours he worked and the stress he was under and she had tried to mitigate both with good, nutritious food and lots of love. But it hadn’t, in the end, been either of these things that he had needed. He should have been having proper medical treatment, MRI scans, and consultant’s appointments, not lamb tagine with couscous or something healthy with aubergine from Deliciously Ella and so, as well as her anger at him, she was incandescent at