In which Carla decides how to keep herself safe
Three hours to her afternoon meeting with Helen.
She locks and bolts the door, and pulls the curtains. The shade is welcome but her motive is privacy. She feels safer when casual passers-by who might peer in are unable to. But try as she will, she can’t shut out her loneliness in the wake of the old lady’s departure. The darkened room quickly turns her mood sombre.
Addison is out, busy with Pete and the young men after doing some visits. He may stop off for a bite to eat somewhere. She supposes she might pop over to the house to see how the lads are shaping up. ‘Very keen’ was how Addison had described them. For his sake, she wills the project to last beyond the first setbacks. They’re bound to come.
So, no Rebecca, no Addison. And only fear and danger to look forward to. Some kind of existence.
Dinah gurgles and suddenly Carla knows that she is courting misery, shutting herself in like this, allowing others to decide how she will live. She jumps up again and pulls back the curtains. She will not hide. Life has to be faced head on.
The room opens up round her, windows beckon to be flung wide, and she responds.
After several lungfuls of noontime air, she reaches behind the settee, pulls out a long-neglected cross-stitch project, and settles herself within sight of Dinah’s baby-seat, grinning cheerfully at her dribbling contentedness. They’ll relax to ClassicFM together.
She imagines Great Aunt Rebecca at the station, haranguing some poor luggage assistant, threatening him with dynamite, and generally sorting out the train services. Then she loses herself in Respighi’s Pines of Rome until Dinah shouts with hunger and drowns out the soldiers marching down the Appian Way.
She opens a tin of spam for her lunchtime sandwich, and her thoughts return relentlessly to a darker mood.
What is she thinking of? She has one week, one measly week before Steve’s deadline, and here she is hanging around with half-baked plans and no real hope of success, doing cross-stitch. She’s not a responsible person. She doesn’t deserve Dinah. She’s made a mess of everything all her life and if it’s all taken from her, well then, she will only have herself to blame.
Helen has been warned by Addison that she’s in the way, so she can’t rely on Helen always to be there for her, even if their trip this afternoon looks otherwise. In fact, Carla agrees that more independence is necessary. But more independence means more isolation.
Rebecca has done her week’s tour of duty – and reminded her graphically how useless the protection of an octogenarian is. Her company was like a comforting woollen car rug. But a car rug is no protection against violence.
Her little plan for making the marriage real is a distraction, nothing more; an immediate response to pressing need, which now seems pathetic. The reality is that it will solve only their own problems, not the imminent threat of Steve abducting Dinah forcibly. Legal rightness is of little use if the child’s been kidnapped. Steve wouldn’t wait around for a court to award her custody. Dinah would be dead before the papers were signed.
The slices of soft meat giving way to the cut of the knife seem like days falling away without protest. The inevitability of it reaches into her chest with a pain so deep and high that she sucks breath audibly.
She starts trembling. Dinah has set up a wailing, and the plaintiveness of her cry calls to Carla’s inner despair and accentuates it into unbearable agony. Her hands refuse to steady. She cuts jagged lines now. The baby’s needs should be seen to before her own lunch. But she has lost the ability to prioritise. Finish slicing or feed child. They’re both hungry. But Carla’s hunger is also for safety she’s never known, for someone to take care of her, and she’s oblivious in this moment to Dinah’s dependency. She carries on feverishly.
The knife nicks her finger end. And in an instant of pain the turmoil of indecision is released.
The knife!
She washes and dries it, gently probing the cutting edge of the blade with her thumb: two inches of steel weapon. She has other knives, but none as good as this, with its lifetime guarantee of razor-sharpness. She folds it carefully in kitchen paper. Just sufficient to disguise it. Dinah cries again.
‘Hush, darling, Mummy’s coming.’ She goes to the pram and lifts the corner of the mattress. Slipping the packet under, she makes sure that the sheet and bedding are replaced carefully. Then she puts her hands on the handlebar.
‘Now!’ she says.
In a flash, her hand is under the corner of the mattress and in possession of the blade. A grin of satisfaction, mingled with relief, spreads across her face. She replaces the packet in its hiding place. This feels more like her old resourceful self. She will not go to pieces, she will fight for what she wants.
She turns to the baby-rocker with outstretched arms and Dinah responds by stopping mid-wail and initiating sucking motions. Carla’s own hunger has abated. She’ll feed the baby first and only then then consider the implications of what she’s done.
