The First Day Read online

  Orr carried this attack into the bedroom. Always attentive, he became, said Anna, more physical. He was everywhere.

  She asked him if he thought God would punish him.

  For what?

  For this, she said. You and me.

  Of course He will, he said.

  He came to visit, a Tuesday afternoon. He followed her into the kitchen. She put water on to boil. He knew something was the matter. He waited for her to speak.

  I’m pregnant.

  He nodded. Okay.

  She shook her head. Okay?

  He looked at her.

  What do you want to do? she asked him.

  He walked over to her, standing by the stove, and put his hands on her belly. He was silent for a while, watching her belly, watching his hands.

  We’ll have a child, he said.

  How can we have a child? Anna answered.

  People have been doing it for decades, he said.

  Anna was prepared for anger, or fear. Instead she experienced an unexpected calmness. Orr made cups of tea for them both and they sat at the small wooden table.

  Will you tell your wife?

  Orr nodded.

  Will you leave her?

  He looked at Anna.

  Do you want me to leave her?

  I love you, she said. If I do not love you I shall not love.

  They did not say much else that day. A simple satisfaction settled in Anna, chasing away her expected anxiety. She wanted the child; it is not a complicated desire, she reckoned. The weight of the world lies behind it.

  Everything changes, but there is nothing new under the sun. Orr told his wife. He made no excuses, no arguments. He told her as clearly as he could, he said, that he had met Anna and she had become pregnant. Sarah surely asked him for details and he surely provided them. Whether this was a kindness or not is hard to say. By Orr’s account, Sarah was measured in her reaction. Her anger was real but not showy, as he had expected. She asked him what he intended now to do, and he told her that he didn’t know.

  Orr continued to see Anna, though after she announced that his child was growing inside her, their physical intimacy abated. They still had sex, but more gently, and less often. She did not know at the time whether this was a temporary or permanent change, but in the aftermath of such persistent physical pleasure, its absence felt like pain. With the rawness of intimacy tempered, there were small gaps opened up in their conversations, spaces of uncertainty which had once been filled by sex. Orr still looked at her with longing, with desire, and his hands still moved over her. After the initial conversation Anna did not press him on whether he would leave Sarah and his family; but his continued return to her house was an answer, or answer enough. His faith was not diminished, neither in God nor in himself. Anna recalled a particular conversation, a week after her announcement. She was lying on her sofa, Orr making tea. She mentioned an article in the newspaper she was reading, about global warming, the melting ice caps, oil running out. She wondered aloud about their child, what world she or he would grow up to inhabit. About how we need to learn to care properly for the earth. Orr appeared at the doorway, the kettle rumbling behind him.

  All these people talk about how we need to do this for the earth, do that for the earth, he said. The earth doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter to it whether it’s covered in ice or sand, ants or people. The planet feels nothing. It’s all narcissism. Talking about what the planet needs when what they’re talking about is themselves. How can the selfishness that created this mess get us out of it? Deep down people know this, somewhere inside them. That’s why humanism and secularism can never save the day. We need God, someone to lift us outside our own vision, to let us see the planet as creation—as though it did feel something. Have ye not known? Have ye not heard? Hath it not been told you from the beginning? Have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.

  Anna watched him, bemused. A smile appeared on his mouth, and he moved out of his rant, shaking it off like wet clothes.

  He moved back and forth, between his own house and Anna’s. What was it like, returning home, putting the key in the lock of his front door? His heart speeding up, slowing down. Sarah, hearing him arrive, moving further into the house, retreating. The boys not understanding what was happening, but sensing invisible chasms open up between rooms as their parents moved around them.

  Orr spoke so rarely of Sarah to me; but the few times he did it was of a woman whose kindnesses were relentless, who loved him and his boys with simple devotion. Anna was not a refuge from unhappiness, nor a reaction to a felt hurt. Orr said he did not stop loving Sarah, but rather—now I speculate—he felt his desire widen, expand. Her patience—was it patience?—as he hauled an affair before her, set it up and told her what it was but not what to do with it. What was she supposed to do with it?

  Anna had few people she would have called friends. Her fellow lecturers were amiable, one or two genuinely enjoyed her company, but for the most part she treated them, and they her, with a professional courtesy and restraint. Outside of work she kept largely to herself; a yoga class a couple of times a week, a monthly film club at the university theatre, occasional nights out for drinks with colleagues. She still saw her mother often, her father having moved back to England with another woman who, on the two occasions they had met, Anna hadn’t liked. She wasn’t sure how to talk of her pregnancy, or with whom. She knew that sooner or later she would have to, were she to keep the child.

  In the eight years that had passed since Anna’s father left, her mother had solidified. Throughout university Anna had half expected a second phone call to echo the first, her mother falling apart after her father’s leaving. But the call never came, and Anna watched her mother slowly steady herself, taking that extra breath before replying, swallowing whatever sadness she had to to keep going. Anna’s choice to study Beckett as an undergraduate was arbitrary, unaimed; but by the time of her PhD she experienced his writing as prophetic, as the voice her mother strangled in those breaths. It is better to adopt the simplest explanation, even if it is not simple, even if it does not explain very much.

  She told her mother as little as she could, the bare facts, stripped of emotional judgement. Anna had prepared herself for an onslaught, for the full weight of her mother’s unspoken anger at her father’s betrayal to fall on her, or on Orr, whom she did not name. But Anna’s mother responded to the news with a quiet pragmatism. She arranged doctor’s appointments, made lists of baby items that she would need, even began preparing a room in her house where Anna and the baby could stay. The expected interrogation did not come, and Anna felt, in a strange way, disappointed. She had wanted conflict, something to react to and fight against, and neither Orr nor, now, her mother would provide it.

  It was terrifying, Anna said later, that it was not terrifying. That it felt so natural, making and carrying a child inside her with a man she did not know she could trust, or rather, that she knew she could trust to be exactly and entirely himself, whatever that was, but who in some distinct way was not hers. Possession obsessed her in those first few weeks. Who belongs to whom, and in what way can human beings belong to one another, or, for that matter, to themselves? She had not, until a child grew in her womb, thought of relationships as a form of property, but now she could think of nothing else. She returned repeatedly in her head to Beckett’s description of love in Malone Dies as ‘a kind of lethal glue’, and lay awake at night—on her back, a new, forced position—trying to imagine what it would be like, holding her own child in her arms. In these visions, Orr hovered in the background, present but out of focus, addendum. She could see, she claimed, the child’s face before it was born.

  She found herself not so much embracing the idea of motherhood as falling into it. It was not a pile of books beside the bed, or signing u
p for classes, but a simple quality of attention: she noticed children in a way she had, she realised for the first time, never done before. They existed. She began to see what had always been there. It came as a shock. She who thought she was so observant, so sharp and precise, had failed utterly to register the presence, the interiority, of so many people. Interiority, yes: the inner life, the racing thoughts and unfolding trauma of human existence, pounding itself into the future heartbeat by heartbeat as they clattered and thrashed their way around her. On one afternoon, as she walked through the Botanic Gardens after work—the gardens sat adjacent to the university, and on sunny summer evenings when the students had largely evacuated the city they were populated by families, old couples, the great unwashed of Belfast—she spotted a young girl chasing a butterfly. It was a clichéd delight, her tiny arms flapping and her cheers and shrieks as the butterfly dipped and hovered, moving from leaf to leaf. But Anna watched with something close to horror as she saw the child learn—in a matter of minutes—that if she was quieter, and slower, and more deliberate, the butterfly would not move so readily. That it could be, in a word, fooled. The girl’s eyes narrowed, her face tightened into a furrowed, vital concentration; Anna saw her lose her sense of everything else in the park and become a composed, taut violence, poised to pounce. And she did pounce, and caught the butterfly, and in catching it crushed it. Anna stared at her as she stared at the broken creature in her hand. Her face relaxed again into a calm flatness, and she beheld the deadness with absolute impassivity. And then she shook it off, and turned before it had even hit the ground, laughing and running back to her parents, sitting forty feet away, oblivious.

  Anna was beginning to show; a hint of roundness to her belly, a faint pulsing in her body which she may, she thought, have been imagining. It was a period of silence, of a sort.

  Sarah left the house, a bright June day, heat in the air from early morning. The three boys had left for school already. Orr was in his study, and heard the front door open and close. He turned to the window to see her walk down the driveway. She worked as a teaching assistant in a primary school in Holywood, just outside Belfast. Orr watched her go, as she did every morning, to walk to the station.

  At two-thirty Orr’s phone rang. He was in the hospital visiting an elderly member of the congregation. He ignored it. It rang again, the same unknown number, and he excused himself and stepped out of the room. The caller identified himself as Superintendent Murphy from Bangor Police Station, and asked if he was speaking to Samuel Orr. We need you to come to the hospital, said Murphy. I’m in the hospital, said Orr. There was a brief moment of confusion, after which Murphy said, Your wife has been involved in an accident. You need to come to the Royal. Orr said, I’m in the Royal, Ward 34. Where is she? Is she alright? Come to A&E, said the policeman. Now.

  Orr stepped back into the old man’s room, made a brief apology, and walked quickly to A&E. By the time he arrived he was running. There were two policemen standing with a doctor. He described what happened, on the few occasions he talked of it at all, less as a story than a list, as things observed: the senior policeman, Murphy, a good fifteen years older than himself; moustache; younger partner doesn’t introduce himself; doctor, forties, wears a name tag: Dr Susanna Bell; small amount of blood on her jacket sleeve, glistening; follow me, she says (like Jesus); Murphy nods to his colleague.

  You can almost see him, walking behind her as she strides quickly through the overlit corridors of the emergency wards. She opens a door and steps inside. The light comes on by itself, a sick green hue. An office, not a ward room; Orr feels his stomach turn. Take a seat, Mr Orr, she says. Orr shaking his head, struck dumb. Your wife was hit by a train. She died there. At the station. Silence. It seems she slipped as the train approached the platform at Holywood. Silence. I’m sorry. Silence.

  He asks to see her, and when they initially refuse—she was mangled, broken in a way a body should not be—he insists. When they pull the sheet back he says nothing. The policemen and the doctor recede. Orr’s heart quickens, pounding so hard he can feel it against his chest. A train hurtling at speed, the pull of air as it passes, part gravity and part desire. He feels himself pulled forward, towards the body. He feels the panic rise in his throat, imagines faces at the window watching for a reaction. Sounds compounding, adding one on top of the other, until the silence is a roar. He stares at the body until the noise abates, fights with himself until the only sound he hears is not a sound at all but a question, which he knows will never now be silenced: did she really slip? When nothing is named, confusion grows and with it comes anguish. What name could he give it? Naming is a presumption, an act of ownership. But there is nothing to own; an absence, a place where something used to be.

  Sarah’s father, Jackie, ran a grocer’s on the Cregagh Road, the same shop he’d owned since Sarah was born. Orr called him, and he closed the shop early—it was only four in the afternoon—and made his way to the Royal. Jackie did not know about Orr’s affair. He hugged Orr to his chest, something he’d never done before. It was like holding a greyhound, he said: coiled energy, all blood and muscle. Jackie spoke to the doctor, and Orr sat by himself, still, staring ahead. Jackie called Orr’s parents, who arranged to pick the boys up—the two youngest, both still at primary school, had been waiting for over an hour for their mother. He brought Orr to the hospital café for food. You can’t just stay here, he eventually said to Orr, who had hardly spoken since Jackie arrived. I’ll drive you home.

  Orr resisted. He drove himself home, despite Jackie’s protests, and spent the night alone. He texted Anna only to say that he wouldn’t be there to visit her the next day. Orr was not given to texting, and Anna was unsettled. She called him immediately but he did not answer.

  It was three days before Orr saw Anna. She knew already. The news report had been specific, and whilst Anna had deliberately avoided learning the detail of Orr’s domestic life, she immediately recognised the name and the geography. She called him again—this was the day after the accident—and offered awkward, hesitant sympathies. Guilt had not been a stranger to either of them; Anna had cocooned it within her, hedged it off with a combination of Orr’s brazen example and her own visceral, physical pleasure. But for the first time it took on a substance, it ceased to merely hover in the background of their love but stepped into full view. Anna found herself touching her belly constantly, as though the innocence of the child might somehow be transferred to her. Or vice versa.

  For the three days Orr remained cut off, sealed inside his own world. He moved between his house and the paths across Divis and Black Mountain, pacing out his grief and anger and whatever else ran nameless through him. The rain fell persistently, the sky low and full. His children stayed with his parents. He phoned on the second day, and his mother told him that he must come to them, that they needed their father now. But he did not go, not until the following afternoon. He walked through his parents’ unlocked front door, into the living room, where they sat blankly watching television. The youngest child was five years old; his face was red from crying. None of them moved when he entered the room. He kissed each of them on the head, then turned off the television and sat in an armchair facing them. For a moment they simply stared at him. You know your mother is dead, he said finally. But we are alive. The youngest had stopped crying, and like the other two, watched him, followed his eyes and words with expectation. Orr’s father had also come into the room, but Orr didn’t acknowledge him. The boys looked at him without fear. I love you, Orr said to them. The youngest stood up, still tearless, and put his arms around his father, and Orr responded, and there was a stillness, and death was temporarily defeated.

  But only temporarily. As Orr himself had often preached, the dead do not stay dead. He called on Anna that evening, the third day. She opened the door to him and wordlessly touched his face. Her hands moved over the surface and he closed his eyes. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit o
f God moved upon the face of the waters. He opened his eyes and she led him inside. They sat in the kitchen and drank tea, the rain finally stopped, the late light of summer throwing lines on the table, like the bars of a prison cell. They barely spoke. Orr remained inaccessible, present but detached. She wanted to ask him what would happen next, but the questions dissipated as they formed, each insufficient to the moment and to what it was she really wanted; not information, but Orr himself.

  They slept together, though they did not have sex. The alteration: first one held, then the other; an exchange of griefs and fears. There was a hesitation, as though they were sharing the same words but in a different language that neither had quite mastered. Anna’s sleep was broken; every hour or two she stirred. But each time she found Orr sleeping, his face a stone.

  In the morning, as Orr dressed, she said to him, God did not do this.

  He was silent, putting on his clothes. Then he nodded. No. We did.

  On the following Sunday Orr did not preach. He sat in the church like everyone else, in a seat a few rows from the front, and listened to the words of a young man barely out of school tell of the great things the Lord had done for him. Everyone knew of Sarah’s death. The boys sat by Orr, in order of height, eldest to youngest. It was a sight rarely seen, as Orr was almost always at the front, conducting affairs, and the boys sat with their mother. The effect of the four of them together was almost startling, their features so similar that it looked as though, if one said something, all their mouths would move together.