A Woman of Our Times. Rosie Thomas

      They laughed again. Jane knew Harriet’s mother-in-law.

      ‘Then I’ll look around for somewhere to rent. I suppose, in the end, I’ll get half the proceeds of our flat. I haven’t thought about it very clearly yet. I’m only sure that we can’t be Leo-and-Harriet any more. It will be a relief just to be Harriet.’

      Jane looked soberly at her. ‘All right. You know you can come and stay with me for as long as you want, don’t you?’

      Jane had her own tiny house in Hackney, a welcoming place that was often full of people.

      ‘Thank you,’ Harriet said, meaning it.

      Jane sat back in her chair. ‘I wonder what’s happening across there.’

      ‘Helplessness makes it worse. Think how it must be for Jenny and Charlie.’

      They stayed at their table in the wine bar, finishing their bottle of wine without relish, and talking sombrely. It was hard to think for long about anything except the baby and what his tiny body must have to undergo.

      At last they paid their bill and went out into the warm night. Neither of them felt that they could eat anything; Harriet was reluctant to go back to the new strangeness of her home, but she knew that she must begin to be on her own so that it could become familiar. She had no choice.

      They walked a little way together, then paused at the point where they had met earlier.

      ‘Are you sure you won’t come back with me to Hackney?’ Jane asked.

      ‘No, but thank you. I’ll take you up on your offer another time.’

      ‘Good-night, then.’ They held on to each other for a minute. Jane’s cheek was very warm, and soft.

      ‘Talk to you tomorrow.’

      ‘Tomorrow.’

      Harriet went back to the flat that wasn’t home any longer. She walked through the rooms once again, touching possessions that had been Leo-and-Harriet’s, thinking.

      At five minutes to midnight the telephone rang, only once because she snatched it up.

      Charlie told her that James Jonathan had survived the operation, and had been returned to the special care unit, but then his heart had stopped beating. The paediatricians and the nurses had restarted it once, but the rhythm had slowed, and grown irregular, and last it had faded away.

      ‘Jenny was holding him when it stopped.’

      Charlie was crying. Harriet’s tears rolled down her face.

      ‘I’m sorry, Charlie, I’m so sorry.’

      James Jonathan’s life had lasted just a little more than two days.

      Harriet went into her bedroom, lay down in the darkness, and cried for him.

       Three

      When she set out for Sunderland Avenue, for her mother’s house, Harriet didn’t take her car. It was parked outside the flat and the keys were in her bag, but she didn’t even glance at its shiny curves as she passed. She walked to the end of the road, turned right and went on, away from the river and towards the tube station.

      In the early days of her independence, before the onset of Leo and the flat and the car. Harriet had always gone home by tube to see Kath. Her mother and stepfather lived on the southern fringe of London, where the narrow streets of terraced houses gave way to the broader, suburban avenues and closes. It was an awkward, boring journey, involving two changes and then a bus ride from the tube station, but it seemed fitting to do it this way, today.

      Harriet smiled faintly as she negotiated the local street market, skirting the stalls piled up with cauliflowers and Indian cotton shirts and cheap cassettes.

      Going home to mother? she taunted herself, experimentally.

      But it wasn’t that. She was close to Kath, and she felt the need to explain to her what had happened. She was going home to do that, as if to a friend.

      Harriet came out at the other side of the market and saw the tube station ahead on the corner. The pavement outside the entrance was smeared with the pulp of rotten oranges, and littered with vegetable stalks and hamburger cartons. A handful of post-punks and market traders’ boys were lounging against some railings. They inspected her as she passed. Harriet had begun to think of herself as too old and too married to be a target for street-corner whistles, but now she reminded herself that she was not quite thirty, and that she was no longer quite married.

      She caught the eye of one of the market boys. He stuck out his lower jaw and whistled through his teeth.

      ‘Ullo, darlin’! Can I come wiv yer?’

      It wasn’t much of a tribute, but it heartened her. She smiled, more warmly than was necessary, and shook her head.

      ‘Aw right, I’ll wait for yer!’ he shouted after her.

      Harriet went on through the shiny mouth of the ticket hall and the dense, fuggy tube smell closed around her. She pressed her money into the ticket machine and moved through the barrier in a sea of Saturday morning shoppers. The escalator swept her downwards, making her one of an unending ribbon of descending heads like intricate skittles. The train was crowded. Harriet squeezed in with a press of bodies, and reached up to a pendant knob. A newspaper was folded in her bag, but she could not twist around to reach it, let alone open it to read. Instead she studied the passengers around her.

      A young black couple sat immediately beneath her elbow, with a small girl perched on her father’s lap. The child’s hair was twisted into springy pigtails and she wore a spotless white ruched dress. The child beamed up at Harriet and Harriet smiled back at her. The young parents nodded, conscious and proud.

      The smile lingered on Harriet’s face as she looked beyond. Standing next to her were three teenage girls, going up west to spend their week’s wages on clothes. Beyond them was a fat man in overalls, two boys with headsets clamped over their ears were hunched next to him. There were old ladies, tourists in raincoats, foreign students, wax-faced middle-aged men, all wedged together, patiently perspiring.

      Harriet didn’t mind being a part of this pungent mass, even felt affection for it. She thought of it as a slice of the city itself, pushed underground, with herself as a crumb of it.

      When she changed trains the crowd thinned. She was travelling against the tide of Saturday shoppers and there were plenty of empty seats. Still Harriet didn’t unfold her newspaper. She stared through the window opposite at the unending runs of pipework, thinking.

      At the end of the line she was almost the only passenger left on the train. She ran up the littered steps, through the various layers of station smells, and boarded a bus outside. Harriet climbed to the top deck. She had always ridden upstairs with Kath, when Lisa was a baby, enjoying the vistas and the glimpses into lives behind first-floor windows.

      It was a short ride to Sunderland Avenue. Harriet had long ago decided that somewhere in the course of it came the dividing line between London, proper London, and its dimmer, politer suburbs. Shopping streets gave way to long rows of houses fanning away from the main road. There were steep hills, lending the impression that woods and green fields might be glimpsed, in the distance, from the top of the bus. Harriet knew quite well that there never was anything to be seen, even on the clearest day, but the spread of more streets, winding up and down the hills.

      The bus stopped at the end of Sunderland Avenue, and there was a steep climb from there to her mother’s house. Harriet walked briskly under the avenue trees, past front gardens full of asters and dahlias and late roses. They were big, detached houses built in the Thirties, and their owner-occupiers took pride in them. It was a neighbourhood of conservatory extensions and new tile roofs and house names on slate plaques or slices of rustic log or spelt out in twisted metal.

      The house belonging to Kath and her husband, facing