by Esther Freud
‘He didn’t used to like being undressed,’ I told the teacher, as if to explain why I’d not been to his class before, and he bent knowledgeably over Sonny, papoosed in a yellow towel, and said that no babies liked to be naked when they were very young.
‘You might find he drops off to sleep after he’s had a feed,’ and he moved away between the mats to magic one fretful baby into silence with a special sideways hold.
Sonny was still asleep when we got home so I laid him like a pat of butter on the bed and went to run myself a bath. There was a message from my mother asking if I’d like to come and have lunch the next day. ‘We could have a picnic in my garden,’ she enthused.
‘I’m sorry,’ I rang her back, ‘but I’ve already arranged to sit for Dad.’ And she laughed brightly, trying not to sound too hurt, and said we’d have to try another time.
There were three large windows in my father’s studio, folding half into the roof, and the sun streaked in as thick as paint. Together we pinned sheets against the glass, hopeful of some shade, and then we had to twist them back to lose the shadow. I watched my picture from the corners of the room. I’d been looking at it too closely, and now, from the right distance, I could see exactly how it fell into place. Each stroke, each ridge of oil, was smooth and dense and lively, and I wondered that my father never felt the need to step back while he worked. I pulled the loose folds of the dressing gown around me. I’d grown thin again, my stomach flat against the pale pink scar and, without noticing, I’d stopped longing for him to whittle down my legs, paint away the veins, or soften the high flush of my once pregnant face. ‘It’s beautiful,’ I murmured, and in place of my domed stomach there was Sonny curved in profile up towards my breast, ‘I love it,’ and I felt the edge of sharp delicious tears.
‘Yes,’ he was looking thoughtful, ‘it may be nearly done.’ And we stood admiring it in silence for a full five minutes.
Sonny lay waiting, his hands in fists above his head. He had a nappy on and nothing else. ‘He does look wonderful like that,’ he said, stepping in for a better look, and I quickly draped the stretched and faded Babygro across him before my father allowed himself a new idea.
‘It’s too small to go on at all now,’ I explained, and I slipped into the lump and dent of the old sofa and smiled up at him to carry on.
‘Dad,’ I asked after we’d worked in silence for a while, ‘does your cousin still want someone to go out to Gaglow?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
I left him alone for another minute.
‘It’s just . . .’
And he turned to me, his eyes severe, his brush sharp in his fist. ‘I want nothing more to do with it.’ I didn’t have the courage to complain.
‘So what’s your idea?’ Kate wanted to know. She’d got my message about going away.
I hunted round for something else. ‘I thought we could drive down to Devon, have a few days by the sea . . .’
‘Hmmm.’ Kate sounded uninspired. ‘I’ll talk to Natasha.’
‘Or we could get the train?’
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I might have an editing job that goes right through till Christmas.’
‘That’s great,’ and I thought of her whiling away the summer, half underground in a windowless room. ‘What is it?’
She said it was some Scottish saga, set up in the Highlands near the Isle of Skye.
‘It’s not . . .’ My head began to thud. ‘It’s not Kilmaaric?’ And I imagined her and Mike together, separated only by a bank of screens. She’d see him before I had the chance, and day after day she’d edit him out.
‘Sarah, are you all right?’ And then I heard that she was laughing, low down in her throat, waiting for me to guess it was a joke. ‘It’s a big documentary series, you idiot,’ and she promised to let me know as soon as she had her dates.
‘Devon!’ Natasha sneered. ‘You can’t imagine I’d want to go to Devon.’ And in great and gruesome detail she reminded me of a weekend she’d once spent with some regrettable man. ‘That whole coast is ruined for me for ever, I’m afraid.’
I rang my mother and invited myself round for tea, accepting that for this summer I’d have to make do with her plum tree and her tiny patch of lawn.
‘Maybe we could start something else now that this is finished?’ my father murmured, as I lay lulled by heat against the sagging sofa.
‘Hmm.’ I wasn’t giving in too easily, and to collect time I fingered the frayed leg of the discarded Babygro, unravelling and streaked with paint. ‘You really think we’re finished?’
‘Could be,’ he mused, adding minute touches to my ankle and stepping back at last to take in the whole thing.
Sonny was unrecognizable. He’d lost the dark fringe of his baby hair and his eyes had faded finally to a middle-Europe blue. I looked at the breadth of his stomach and his lamb-cutlet legs, and knew he was too big to go on drifting in and out of sleep. My father began turning over canvases. He had them leaning up against his walls, knocked together in their wooden frames and painted over white. I saw him eyeing Sonny as he measured one frame after another with his arm.
‘Actually, Dad, I think we might be going away on holiday,’ I cut in quickly, and he let the light white canvas fall back against the wall. ‘I’d like to try and get out of London, just for a while,’ and I smiled optimistically as he stood fidgeting away his mood.
‘Where might you go?’ I could see he was trying to be polite.
I told him I was arranging things with Natasha and Kate. ‘Somewhere in the country, we just can’t decide where.’ He nodded, wiping his hands against his trousers before wandering through to the kitchen to prepare something to eat.
‘Would the baby like anything?’ He was peeling sharp fins of haddock on to plates. ‘I’ve got . . .’ but although at four months I had started him on carrot and ground rice, there was nothing childish enough for him to taste.
‘He’s all right.’ And I kissed the soft top of his head.
‘Dad?’ He was making me a salad, rinsing leaves under the tap. ‘Why do you never leave London?’
‘I used to. When I was a child we used to spend summers in the country.’ He laid the salad on a sheet of linen to let the water soak into the cloth.
‘You mean Gaglow?’
‘No, no.’ I could see he meant his real life. ‘Norfolk. We went there in the holidays.’
There was something in the way he said it that made me want to laugh. ‘Did you hate it?’
‘I didn’t like it much.’ And he searched among the cups and bowls and papers on the table for the flask of olive oil. ‘Maybe it was because it was so flat. However far I went, wherever I hid, my mother always knew exactly how to find me.’
‘Sometimes I think Sonny’s first words will be “Mum, get off!”’ I nibbled his cheek while I was still allowed.
But my father’s eyes had cooled right over and I noticed the shooting line between his brows. I remembered him telling me how his mother didn’t ever let him alone. She settled her attention on him like a vice. ‘Once when I was about twelve,’ he’d told me, ‘I went to call for a friend. “I don’t know where he is,” his mother said, and I thought, the luxury of it. My mother never lost track of where I was. She knew more about me than I did myself.’ And I thought of his kiss, remote and tender on her dying hair.
Simply out of habit I kissed Sonny’s head again, glancing up guiltily with a shiver of defiance. But Sonny was cooing, low down, like a dove.
‘We rented the same house every summer,’ he went on, laying out a cardboard box of cake, ‘somewhere by the sea,’ and I realized it was the house I knew. The house I’d dreamed about. There were washing lines and hawthorn and I could see the garden now, the lawns all tufted up with seaside grass. My grandmother was there, leaning on the gate, listening to her summer neighbour telling her in detail about a girl that could be me.
‘I tried not to go there if I could help it.’ He cut me a thick wedge, slicing through the
jellied tops of fruit.
‘I wish I’d been brought up in the country,’ I said, and I had a bright image of Sonny running off across the fens.
It was past midsummer and the evenings from my top-floor flat were long and light. Sonny was asleep, and I circled round the room, trying to adjust to the rare sensation of this time alone. I lay down on the floor, stretching out my arms and back and legs, trying to find a part of me that didn’t ache. I breathed in deeply and then right beside my ear the telephone quivered into life. Two fierce, demanding rings before I pounced. ‘Hello?’
There was a muffling and a choking and a broken gulping wheeze. ‘Pam.’ I held my heart out to her. ‘Pam, what is it?’
She had to let out three long sighs of pain before the words came through. ‘The bastard!’ she flailed eventually and I knew that she was going to be all right.
‘Where are you?’
She had folded up again with sobbing. ‘I’m on my way round.’ I heard a car somewhere behind her swerve away with a long loop of its horn.
Ten minutes later I saw her running towards me through the strained light of the evening, clutching cigarettes and a flat hard paper bag. She’d left her car half out in the street, and she looked more beautiful than ever, mascara streaked in dirty washes down her face. I ran downstairs to meet her. It was hard not to smile. ‘Oh, God, Sarah.’ She hugged me, and the ends of her hair, split white and smoky, smelt of vanilla essence.
‘Come up.’ Together we attempted to climb sideways, arm in arm, to the top floor.
Pam sank onto the sofa, kicking off her shoes, and I snuggled down opposite her, pushing my feet into the seams. Our knees knocked warm and brown against each other. ‘At least this time you can have a drink with me,’ she said, and broke the gold tin seal.
‘Oh, Pam,’ I cut in, as the woefully familiar tale of Bradly Teale swept on and on, ‘oh, Pam,’ and every now and then she broke off for another hot gulp of her drink and another cigarette. There was something inoffensive about the way Pam smoked. It curled and caught up in her hair, drifting over her like angel cloud, and even first thing in the morning she smelt like a sugary advert for Silk Cut.
Beguiled, I tried one and, as always, the bitter oil of it settled on my tongue so that I had to swill the taste of it around with brandy. ‘So that’s it, then, over?’ And a small disloyal gleam sprang up in me to think I’d have her, for a short while, all to myself.
‘I hope I never see the loathsome creature again.’ She leant out for the bottle and her furious gaze caught the long arrangement of postcards, tartan, heather and misty Highland skies spread out over the mantelpiece. She arched her eyebrows at me, ‘Excuse me?’ and, reinvigorated, she jumped up off the sofa and went over to inspect them. ‘There are two here the same,’ she said, ‘but then again I don’t suppose there’s a limitless amount of choice.’
I could tell that it was paining her to keep from flipping over to the other side. ‘They’re all to Sonny.’ She took that as licence to lift one down.
‘They’re love letters,’ she screamed, and even as I protested she snatched the others and spread them face up over the cushions. ‘“My dear sweet little boy, I hear you’re cooing like a dove and blowing bubbles.” You’ve been writing to him?’ And she kicked me hard with one bare foot. ‘“So avocado is your favourite food? You lucky lad. All we get up here is haggis and jam tarts.”’ She turned over a pale pink sunset. ‘“I’ve bought you a blue and purple tam-o’-shanter, big enough to fit you in the autumn when your daddy . . .”’ I knew that daddy had been crossed out. ‘“When I’ll be home.” Christ, what’s got into him?’
‘Distance makes the heart grow fonder, I can only assume.’ And I topped up both our glasses, wishing she hadn’t read out the secret, shameful word.
‘So when will he be back?’ There were thin grey tears still streaked across her face.
‘Not for ages. November, I think. And you know how these things run over. Pam,’ I bundled up the postcards, ‘you don’t fancy coming on holiday with me?’
Pam looked startled. ‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. Anywhere.’ I’d ruled out East Germany and Devon.
‘Maybe.’ I could tell she wasn’t keen. I’d probably mentioned too often how Sonny woke five times a night. ‘It’s just that I did tell Camilla I’d be in town if any work comes up.’
‘You bloody actors.’ I had my chance to kick her now. ‘You’re all the same. Just think how well you’ll feel when you get back. How much more employable you’ll be.’ It was strange not to include myself.
‘Yes.’ She sighed. ‘It might be good to have a holiday.’ But I could tell she was only thinking about Bradly Teale and how glorious it would be if he rang to find her gone.
‘My editing job has been brought forward,’ Kate told me. ‘I start in just over a week.’ She had come to look after Sonny while I took her bike and cycled up to Hampstead for a swim.
‘Oh, Kate.’ I realized I’d hardly see her now.
‘You should go somewhere with Natasha,’ she said, ‘even for a few days.’
‘Yes,’ I said, but I didn’t want to be alone just with Natasha. We needed her to smooth things through. I picked up one strand of her honey-coloured hair and let it fall again.
‘Go on, if you’re going,’ Kate urged. ‘We’ll talk when you get back.’ I could tell that she was nervous.
I took one last look at Sonny and kissed his fingers.
‘Go on,’ Kate hissed at me, ‘while he’s still asleep,’ and without looking back I fled downstairs. I pushed the bike out into the street and spun the pedals. It was the first time I’d left him. My throat felt heavy with alarm as I lurched out into the traffic.
The journey to the ladies’ pond on Hampstead Heath was subtly and gradually uphill. My thin dress stuck to my body, and occasionally I felt the tug of cotton as it twined up in the spokes. I wrenched it out and carried on. I had to get off and push the last hundred yards and then I was on the Heath, gliding past the men’s pond, with a field packed like a beach, and up past the ice-cream van. The lane here was gold and gritted over and I let the pedals fly as I sailed down towards the gate. The entrance to the lake was cool with shade. Back wheels of bikes overlapped along the fence and the grass behind the trees was thick with bodies, reading, eating, talking, bathing up the sun, and all stripped down to the waist. There were tattooed women with nipple rings and pale, long-legged Camden girls studying for school. There were old women and large women, some beautiful, some pocked and veined, and others you would never see naked in any other public pool. I ran into the changing room and pulled on my old costume. ‘I thought my life was over when my husband died,’ a woman, well over seventy, was chatting to a friend, ‘but since then I’ve taken a psychology degree and taught myself to swim.’ I followed her out of the changing room and watched as she dived into the lake.
There was a ladder and I lowered myself in one rung at a time. The water was breathtakingly cold, but then, steeling myself, I pushed away and ducked my head. The water closed silk brown above me and I thrashed and swam, arm over arm, until I came up warm. I ducked onto my back. A dragonfly buzzed beside my nose and three small birds skidded to a stop. It was impossible not to smile. The thick brown water slunk around my waist and as I stretched and turned, rolling over weightless, the warm smell of watermelon drifted towards me on the breeze. I hovered on my back and stared up at the sky. It’s like being reborn, I laughed, and I struck out and swam in strong, long breaststroke right up to the other end where beds of yellow and blue iris made a natural bank. There were sudden patches of cold water, mysterious swells shadowed from the sun and as my feet caught one I suddenly remembered Sonny. I hadn’t thought about him for nearly twenty minutes – for the first time in five months – and it amazed me that he was possible to forget. And then suddenly I was cold, and tired, and it seemed a long way back to land. Will he be all right, waking up to find that I’m not there? The whole strength of my body dragged behi
nd each stroke.
There were beards of mud around my legs and chin and I had to stand under the one cold shower to smear them off. I dressed myself and then stood for a minute, tingling in the sun, calm again, and looking out over the lake where slow swimmers floated on their backs. I had intended to lie down beside the sea of women on the slope of grass but instead I turned the bicycle round and headed home.
