With Your Crooked Heart by Helen Dunmore

Author:Helen Dunmore
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-11-10T22:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

I wrote her a letter. I wanted her to know why I didn’t come and see her. I don’t think Anna would ever believe I didn’t want to, but then she’s been away from me for a long time now. I haven’t kept her thinking I’ll come at any minute and take her away with me.

I’ve never been north of Birmingham in my life. I would have gone, but not to Sonia’s house. I don’t dislike Sonia and I don’t like her. I never think of her. She thinks she’s married to Paul: well, let her. I know the truth.

I could write a book about what Sonia doesn’t know. First, she doesn’t know that Paul is still married to me. Second, she doesn’t know that Anna is still my daughter. Third, she doesn’t know that giving birth to Anna was like shitting a pineapple, and Paul was there all the time, much against his original inclination, but he stayed, he sponged my face, he held my knees still when they wouldn’t stop shaking.

There are times when you think your life has changed for ever, and it can never go back to the way it was. That night in the hospital was one of them. By the time Anna was born it wasn’t night any more, it was morning. The midwife left us to have a few minutes with the baby before they cleaned me up. Paul went to the window, looked out. He said, ‘It’s raining,’ then he came back to the bed and knelt down beside it so his face was level with the baby where I was holding her wrapped in one of those towels that have the hospital name printed on them. She was fast asleep. He didn’t touch her. He just looked and looked, for a long time. And I said, ‘We did it,’ and he nodded. There wasn’t room for questions, because all the answers were wrapped up in my arms.

Paul was wiped out. So tired, and younger-looking than I’d ever seen him, even when we first met. Paul’s one of those men who’ve never let themselves look young. He always had to look older than he was, so people would take him seriously.

He didn’t touch her. I remember that quite clearly. I think he was frightened, that’s all it was. There was this new person in the room with us, and we didn’t know her. It shouldn’t have troubled me, because there was plenty of time, but it did trouble me. I felt as if he hadn’t reached out and claimed her. It pressed down on me, even then in the moment that she was born. I had my knowledge of where she had come from, and it pressed down on me. My mother would have said that it trod on my tongue. It stopped me saying to him to all the little senseless things I wanted to say to someone, about the beauty of her and how I couldn’t believe it. How there was nothing else in the world like her, and we had made her.

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