Duchess
.
Meg and I met at the wedding of two of our friends, in a manor house near Dungannon. She asked me how I knew the groom and I told her Freddie Campbell had been famous at Oxford for drunkenly feeding LSD to a horse and almost being suspended. (His mother was on the board of fellows and pulled some strings to get him exonerated. The horse, moreover, was fine, if not better for it.) I asked her how she knew the bride and she told me India Reeves was famous in their year for getting off with an archbishop during a school trip to Armagh.
I shouldn’t really tell people stories like that, Meg remarked, finishing her drink and lifting another from the fast-depleting pyramid of champagne coupes. Perhaps that’s why I wasn’t invited to the hen, she said.
The hen party (according to Freddie) had been an afternoon of twenty women sitting around tables crafting flower crowns as if members of a pagan cult, in a hotel conference room that had been hired for the purpose. I pointed this out and suggested that Meg had a lucky escape. She shrugged, agreed and asked what we did for Freddie’s stag. I described it in terms vague and wholesome: house in the country, lots of long walks, plenty of good wine. I did not bring up the hunting party, or that Freddie had shot the venison served for the wedding meal. People can be funny about that sort of thing.
What did you think of the venison? I ventured later in the conversation.
She said she had the vegetarian option.
*
Meg was a writer. It was one of the first things she told me about herself, so I gathered she wasn’t a very good one. The people who are keenest to tell you they’re writers are always literature students barely scraping a 2:2 with their god-awful poetry, or baristas who haven’t touched their novel in months. Meg told me she wrote short fiction, and I asked what she wrote about. She rattled off pithy nothings that I imagined she had read in reviews of current literary sensations she dreamed of emulating.
Most of my writing centres around womanhood, bodies and relationships in modern Ireland, she said, without any apparent irony.
Bodies, I commented. What, like murder mysteries?
No, she laughed. More like – you know – the female body as a site of political resistance.
She didn’t elaborate further, and I didn’t ask. The vagueness and specificity of womanhood and relationships in modern Ireland led me to suspect that her body of work was a dozen half-written stories based on her own disappointing romantic experiences. I imagined her furiously scribbling down all the things she wished she had said in arguments with ex-lovers, torrents of bombastic dialogue that no-one other than a paid therapist would have any interest in reading.
I asked her if she missed having parents. You don’t miss what you never really had, she said.
She asked questions about me that read like a beginner’s exercise in character profiling; it was never simply what do you do for work? but rather what do you do for work, and does it make you happy? She asked if I had family, and was I close with them. She asked what I liked to drink, and what kind of drunk I was. These questions were designed to colour Meg as someone with a curious mind and depth of spirit, rather than to find out anything particularly meaningful about me. I know this because she asked them again on our first date, and even on subsequent dates made comments like, I didn’t know you had a brother, or, oh you’re a whiskey man, are you? In Meg’s defence, she put away so much champagne that first night that I could have committed mass murder in front of her and she would have forgotten it the next day. When the bar closed at three o’clock in the morning, she asked if I wanted to come to her hotel room. I said no because she had begun to punctuate her words with small belches that suggested vomiting was in the offing. I asked if she’d like to go for dinner with me when we were back in the city, and she agreed.
*
I was from London originally, but Freddie and I had been transferred to the Belfast branch of the bank we both worked for. We had not been to Northern Ireland before then and broadly deemed it a shithole. Once or twice a year we organised weekends in North Down with our university set. Fox hunting remained legal in the six counties, and there was something rather liberating – almost quaint – about mounting a horse and galloping across the countryside with a pack of hounds. It was the same kind of thrill girls like Meg got from visiting Jane Austen’s writing desk in Chawton or wandering the Yorkshire moors dreaming of Heathcliff.
I once made this case to her over dinner, and she argued: You say that as if you’re just dressing up for a Renaissance fair and fencing with plastic swords. You are quite literally slaughtering a living creature.
How’s your steak? I asked, nodding at her plate. Meg was a fair weather vegetarian. Most of her politics, it transpired, were fairly flexible; particularly when she was drunk, and she was drunk often.
Freddie used to wonder what exactly she saw in me. Not that you aren’t a catch, he qualified. But she’s so – you know. Artistic. One of those protest-march-and-Susan-Sontag sort of girls. She’s got to have one hell of a slurry pit of daddy issues, no?
Meg’s father had been an alcoholic with a hefty hangover of post traumatic stress from the Troubles, and had enlisted her at an early age in the role of therapist and carer. Her mother had suffered severe postnatal depression when Meg was born, and left when Meg was almost one. Her father had taken his own life when she was at university. I asked her if she missed having parents.
You don’t miss what you never really had, she said carelessly.
*
When we knew each other better, Meg sometimes wondered aloud whether I’d like her as much if she were boring in bed. I knew what she wanted to hear, and I quite happily obliged. She wanted me to be specific about the parts of her personality I found attractive, wanted me to describe her the way she’d write herself as a protagonist. I told her I liked her because she was funny (she wasn’t, but she tried), because she was clever (she liked to think she was, because she read books and didn’t use social media), because she was kind and caring towards her friends (she made regular passive-aggressive comments about their life choices, which was endlessly entertaining).
I liked Meg, in fact, because of her endless novelty; every assignation we had felt like an unplanned encounter with an almost-stranger. She told deliberately aloof anecdotes about past partners and family conflict, the details of which would mutate very slightly with each retelling. I had at first anticipated that these casual vignettes, once sown, would in time sprout into more personal (and tedious) disclosures of hurt and heartbreak; I would be expected to listen to, then sympathise with, and ultimately endeavour to heal her catalogue of wounds. Weeks passed, months passed, and still she spoke to me with the surface-level oversharing of a wine armoured lush in a smoking area. I never grew tired of it.
*
I knew I wanted to marry her. She was ridiculous, came out with the silliest opinions and could at times be totally lacking in self-awareness. But she had a particular confidence and charm that I could not help finding intoxicating. I could critique her foibles all I liked, and it would not undo the simple fact that I was besotted with her.
As I got older, I found myself romanticising the thought of raising one or two smart, well-rounded sons.
At the age of thirty-seven, I was also considering that I might be ready to start having children. In my twenties the idea of impregnating someone had seemed like a terminal diagnosis that would severely reduce my quality of life before robbing me of it completely. In my early thirties the notion had held no more appeal; I could not attend a friend’s party or a family function without a litter of infants present, being coddled and chased and having pulped food spooned into their needy mouths. I had borne no ill will towards these children, but I could not call myself fond of them.
As I got older, however, I found myself occasionally romanticising the thought of raising one or two smart, well-rounded sons. Whereas in my twenties I had sneered with Freddie at the hapless greenness of the fresh graduates employed by our banking firm, by my mid-thirties I had begun to feel a sense of gentle paternalism towards the younger lads in our office, whom I felt looked to me for professional mentoring and advice that I found I was happy – keen, even – to provide. I began to imagine sipping pints with my own young adult sons and offering them guidance on everything from work to politics to relationships with women. I pictured a boy with my features joining us on our hunting trips, taking out a fox with a shot straight to the eye, my school friends telling him he took after his old dad.
*
Meg spoke vaguely about our future marriage and the children we would one day have, but made no move to set timescales for these things, as though she expected they would arrive as inevitably as the seasons. She seemed pleased when I proposed to her and was accepting of the fact that the wedding would have to take place in Sussex, since I had several elderly relatives there who had neither the constitution nor the desire to travel to Belfast.
Freddie volunteered to walk Meg down the aisle, and later told me that it was like heaving a shot stag into the back of a Land Rover. Not a comment on her weight, he said hurriedly. Just a few too many jars that morning. Happens to the best; India had a bottle of champagne and two keys of bugle before our ceremony. And look at us now! (Freddie was having an affair with a girl from payroll at that point, but I chose not to bring it up.)
Several of our friends had small children at the wedding, and my family cooed as I made an effort with them, playing peek-a-boo with the babies and dad-dancing with the toddlers at the reception. Meg was a little less confident, holding my one-year-old nephew like a sack of potatoes and inching away when Harry Balfour’s daughter wanted to touch her ‘princess hair’.
It’ll be you two next, my mother said, beaming.
In our hotel suite after the reception, I carried Meg to the bed and set about tunnelling under her wedding dress. She moaned, but not in the usual way. I’m steaming, she said. I don’t think we should.
It’s our wedding night!
We’ve got the rest of our lives, she sighed, her eyelids slipping lower.
I knew Meg; I knew she would regret it afterwards, that when she saw her friends next, she didn’t want to tell them she’d passed out drunk and wasted an expensive hotel room on the night of her wedding. She would want to hold court and tell them I’d ravished her in her dress, then out of it, then on the bed, on the chaise longue, against the wall. I persevered. She was quieter than usual, none of her feral screams, which I assumed was out of respect for the other hotel guests.
*
Two months after the wedding, Meg came to me whey-faced and tearful in our bedroom, holding the small plastic baton of a pregnancy test. I was so sure we’d been careful, she whispered.
I hugged her, kissed the top of her head, and said, But this is what we wanted, isn’t it? It was sure to happen at one point or another.
Not yet! There are things I want to do before then. I thought I would have a career when I started having children.
I wasn’t sure what she meant at first. Meg worked as a bookseller in a large city-centre shop, and never had any ambitions to ascend in her field. Management vacancies arose every so often, and she always said she liked her job as it was, stacking displays and chatting to customers. It took me a moment to realise that she meant a career as a writer, that she had imagined popping out one or two bestsellers before she even had to consider motherhood. She had once shown me the beginnings of her novel – because beginnings were all they were, handwritten pages of fanciful scenes and bullet-point questions about her characters that were destined to never be answered.
I think I want to go to England, Meg said. She was shaking in my arms. I can’t do this, she said. Not now. It’s too soon.
I sat her down and I stroked her hair and I told her she was in shock. I told her she would be a wonderful mother and that I couldn’t wait to meet our little one. She started sobbing with a visceral terror and kept insisting she needed to go to England. I held her and soothed her until she had calmed a little, and I put her to bed. When she had fallen asleep, I went to her purse and I removed her bank cards, the ones she had for our now joint accounts. It was just for a few months, I thought; just in case.
*
Rose was born early, and I still wonder whether this was because Meg was drinking while pregnant. We agreed that a single glass of wine once in a while had been proven harmless, but in the third trimester Meg was often erratic and hyper-verbal in the way she got after several neat vodkas. I will never be quite sure.
I named Rose after my grandmother. Throughout the pregnancy I had tried to discuss possible names with Meg, but she had been consistently non-committal. I don’t have any strong opinions, she said. Whatever you think.
For the first two weeks I took up residence in the hospital special care unit; all the nurses came to know me by name, and would often ask, Where’s Mum today? I did not want them to judge Meg, and I told them she had contracted norovirus and didn’t want to risk infecting anyone at the hospital, especially our daughter.
In reality, Meg spent her days lying in bed at home, staring into nothing. I brought back photos of Rose in her incubator, Rose in my arms, Rose eventually being bottle-fed. Meg’s breasts were leaking; her clothes were stained and there was a lingering sour smell in our bed.
When Rose had passed her full-term date, the hospital staff advised that she was ready to go home. She’s thriving, the midwife told me.
When I passed the baby to her to hold, she did so with the bored detachment of a taxi driver holding a name card at an airport.
I returned home to tell Meg the good news, and I found her sitting at the sliding glass door to the back garden. It was dark, and the door was open, and Meg was whispering to someone. I thought she was on the phone, until I approached and saw that she was caressing the head of a small, red-brick-coloured fox.
Meg, I said abruptly, and the fox started, stared and took off into the darkness.
You’ve scared her, Meg upbraided softly.
You need to wash your hands. You don’t know what kind of bin-plague those things are carrying. Jesus, Meg, it could have bitten you.
She’s been coming to the window all week. She’s quite gentle; I think she just wants looking after.
I followed her into the bathroom to make sure she used the antibacterial soap. Rose is ready to come home, I told her. We’re going to pick her up tomorrow.
Rose?
Our daughter.
Meg nodded slowly, and said, That’s a nice name. Did you choose that?
I wondered if she had been drinking. Bedtime, I think, I said.
*
The first night we had Rose back home I woke up in the small hours at the sound of her cries, and found the bed next to me empty. I wondered whether Meg had gone to fetch a bottle, or a nappy, but she did not reappear. I fed and changed and settled the baby, and then I went looking for Meg. She was by the back door; and so, again, was the fox.
Meg, I whispered. Come to bed.
I’ll follow you up, she insisted. Go on.
I hesitated, but I did not want to leave Rose too long unsupervised. I returned to bed; I was still awake when Meg climbed in around dawn.
Every night, Rose woke crying, and every night, once I had settled her, I went downstairs and found Meg at the back door; sometimes alone, staring out at the garden, and sometimes keeping company with her grimy little fox friend. The creature fled the first few times it saw me, but the more times it returned to our house, the more comfortable it felt simply staring insolently as Meg tickled it behind the ears. On one occasion, I came down in the middle of the night and found Meg cuddling the fox in her arms. She did not turn her whole body around straight away, looking over her shoulder at me, and I thought for one wild and gruesome moment that she might have been feeding the animal at her breast.
*
I negotiated a few weeks of additional paternity leave with my manager, claiming that Meg was ill and unable to care for the baby herself. We had no support from our family, since my parents were across the water, and Meg’s were both gone. I did not feel entirely comfortable arranging for Rose to be looked after by a nanny when she was still so tiny, and I certainly did not feel confident leaving her alone with her own mother.
During the day, Meg was distant and silent. She did not want to take a turn at doing the clownish children’s-TV-presenter voice and tipping a bottle of formula into Rose’s hungry mouth. When I passed the baby to her to hold, she did so with the bored detachment of a taxi driver holding a name card at an airport. In the evenings, while Rose slept, I tried to encourage Meg back to her old self – even that, I thought, would be better than nothing. I cooked dinner and I poured her a large glass of wine and I fed her gossip about Freddie and India’s slowly disintegrating marriage, trying to encourage her to repeat old stories and tell me all the things she didn’t say to India’s face. Meg was withdrawn, her rare laughter monosyllabic and exhausted, as though conversation – once her favourite hobby, exercise and bloodsport – was now a colossal effort.
I made the case to my employers that their company ethos claimed to accommodate flexible working, and they grudgingly allowed me to work from home. My productivity at home was minimal; my unread emails were stacking up and my line manager’s patience with me was wearing thin. I asked Freddie for the details of his child’s former nanny, but he declined on the basis that she was unprofessional and had left his employment on bad terms (which I assumed meant she had refused to sleep with him and had swiftly given her notice).
I shared a few sparing details of Meg’s presentation with Freddie, and he speculated that it was probably the baby blues. India was the same when we had Hugo, he said. Miserable bitch for at least the first three months. Not that anything’s changed, but I don’t think the baby’s to blame for that.
*
My parents came over to visit their new grandchild when Rose was two months old; they’d wanted to come sooner, but my father was having a hip replacement. They came to our house in the evening, and I answered the door with Rose in my arms. They fell in love immediately, Mum tearing up and Dad clapping me on the back like a business associate with whom I had just done a canny deal. I invited them to come and sit in the living room, where we found Meg in an armchair with a sleeping fox nestled against her. Mum shrieked.
Sshh, Meg whispered tenderly. I’ve just got her settled.
Meg, I hissed at her, not wanting to upset Rose. Please.
Meg ignored us all, pressing her nose gently to the animal’s head. Mum and Dad looked plainly horrified, and I cocked my head urgently towards the kitchen.
Darling, we’ve all had a brush with the baby blues, Mum said furiously. But what would possess someone to bring a wild thing like that into the house?
She’s not been well, I explained gruffly. It’s just a phase, I’m sure of it.
*
At three months old, in the small hours of the morning, Rose laughed for the first time. It was a beautiful, gurgling, infectious laugh, and if I were much of a crier I am sure I would have wept at the sight of it.
Meg was not there to see Rose’s first laugh. For the last two months she had not even been pretending to go to bed with me; she napped during the day and spent her nights at the edge of the lawn. In spite of everything, I wanted her to see our daughter chortling merrily in my arms, perhaps hoping it would somehow bring her back to us.
I went downstairs to look for her, Rose cupped carefully against my chest. The back door was open, but Meg was not in her usual seat. I called her name into the garden.
A fox came prowling round the back of the house; I was unsure whether it was Meg’s fox, or another; perhaps she had a Von Trapp-style brood of many. The creature stared at me, unfazed. It bared its teeth in what looked like a sneer; and before I could react, it took off into the night.
.
.
Gráinne O’Hare is a writer from Belfast based in Newcastle upon Tyne. She was awarded a Northern Debut Award by New Writing North in 2022, and her first novel, Thirst Trap, will be published by Picador in June 2025. She is also completing a PhD on eighteenth-century women’s life writing at Newcastle University.
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