Nobody's Perfect

by Stephanie Butland

  ‘About what?’

  ‘She went to the Head with some pretend concerns. That I wasn’t “participating in the life of the school” because I kept out of the staffroom at lunchtime. I told Jane it was because they go quiet whenever I go in. Now, if they stop talking when I walk through the door, I ask if they were talking about vibrators.’

  Kate laughs, horrified. ‘You don’t!’

  ‘I don’t. I have thought about it, though. And I’m sorry you’ve got caught up in her nastiness.’

  Kate turns to face him. ‘I’m used to the pointing and whispering. I don’t like it, but I can cope with it if I need to.’ She had met her mother at school after the 3.30 show, blurted out what had happened, and Richenda, as always, had spoken calm good sense. Nothing in Kate’s life was anyone else’s business. Some people look for targets. Don’t rise to it. She hadn’t said anything Kate didn’t already know, but it made her feel as though she could manage it, rather than being certain it would crush her again.

  ‘What did Bridget say to you?’

  ‘She didn’t say anything. But I knew what she was thinking.’

  And then Kate is back five years, pushing Daisy through the Throckton streets in a pram, smiling at her daughter’s tiny face, her days always shadowed by her nightmares of drowning in black water. In those first tentative months of mothering she was wary about anyone who approached her, fearful of a barbed comment or a snub, terrified that she might see someone who cared more for Mike’s widow than for his child, and not afraid to tell her what they thought of her. She endured it all: faux-sympathy, observations about how like her father the baby was, curt enquiries about how Kate’s mother was coping, the implication being that Kate had brought problems to everyone. Her mother had told her to ignore it all – ‘This place has its moral roots in 1950, and if they would rather you had left that baby to die in a ditch than bring her safely into the world, then shame on them.’ Her father had nodded agreement, but with less enthusiasm: he’d been an advocate of abortion, and could not quite disguise his disappointment that his bound-for-Oxford daughter had chosen the life that she had. They had been horrible times. Kate had gone through them, day by day; she knows the worst is behind her. But that time cast a long shadow, and Daisy’s condition means her life is never going to be free of nasty whispers. That feeling of utter overwhelm returns, and before she knows it, she’s crying again. She cannot remember a day when she has cried so much in recent years. Spencer is holding her, steadying and calm. When the tears abate, he leads her to the sofa, puts her tea on the table in front of her.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘it all just seems too tiring. I’ve been through gossip before. It all gets a bit much.’

  ‘I know,’ Spencer says. He’s drinking his tea, but he never stops watching her. Then his gaze flicks away. ‘People will gossip about us. They already gossip about me.’

  Kate picks up her blue mug. ‘I’m not like this. I mean, usually. I don’t cry like this. You must think—’

  ‘Don’t guess what I think,’ he says, smiling, but his eyes are serious.

  This time last week, Kate’s brain reminds her, you hadn’t even been on a date with him. But that seems impossible. Already he is closer to her than any boyfriend; she knows she would tell him anything. She smiles back. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No need to apologise. But do you want to tell me what happened with Mike? Only if you want to. I know you told me a bit, the other night. But it feels as though I should understand it, properly.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. If you want to.’

  So she tells him the whole tale. How she met Mike at the village fete, and flirting with him made her feel special. How unhappy she was, living with her constantly fighting parents, scared of the great and wonderful future that everyone was convinced she would have, and that she could not remember ever signing up for. How she started to bump into Mike, deliberately; it was easy because he walked his dog, late in the evening. How talking led to touching to kissing to sex and before she knew it – no, she corrects herself, not before she knew it, because it was all that she thought about; she was obsessed with seeing him, with trying to make him love her – they spent more and more time together. She shakes her head. ‘It was all so – furtive. I thought it was romantic. I don’t know what he was thinking.’

  Spencer twitches an eyebrow at this, but says only, ‘It doesn’t sound like he was thinking much at all.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She takes a breath. ‘He died, because of me.’

  Spencer takes her hand. ‘I doubt it’s that simple.’

  Kate continues. She doesn’t want to – her stomach has tightened to nausea at just the thought of talking about it – but he may as well hear the full story from her, without the Throckton embellishments. ‘We met up after Christmas. It was nearly six years ago. He told me he couldn’t see me anymore, but he had sex with me first.’ Stated so simply, she wonders if he was really the hero everyone thought. But it doesn’t matter now. ‘I – I don’t remember it very well, but I slipped and fell into the lake. Butler’s Pond. There wasn’t a fence. There is now. Mike came in after me. He got me out of the water. But he drowned.’

  Spencer is silent. Kate looks at his profile, wonders if he will make an excuse, leave now. From what he’s said, his own life has been so straightforward. A few heartbreaks, staffroom gossip. Not nice, but nothing like this. And that’s before you factor in Daisy. Well, he may as well know everything. ‘I didn’t find out I was pregnant for months, and I only told my mum when I was five months and had some bleeding. I wouldn’t say who the father was, but Mike’s mother came to see me and told me that Mike was a cystic fibrosis carrier, and so then everyone knew.’

  Kate waits.

  Spencer hasn’t let go of her hand.

  He turns to face her and says, ‘That sounds awful, Kate, I can’t imagine.’

  Something deep un-fists. ‘It was.’

  ‘Did you love him?’ Spencer shakes his head. ‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t know why I asked.’

  ‘I don’t know. I mean, I thought I did. Now – I just think how stupid I was. And him. I had no idea of the risks I was taking. I don’t mean pregnancy. I mean – I mean’ – she feels tears rising but she cannot cry again today, doesn’t want to – ‘other people’s happiness. I didn’t care about anything but him. After he died I used to sneak into his garden and leave flowers there. And now’ – she laughs, a great hiccup of sound – ‘now I carry hand sanitiser everywhere and I have little bags in my handbag in case Daisy needs to spit and I write down every bite of everything she ever eats and sometimes I don’t know where that old me went.’

  Spencer puts an arm out, and she leans against his side. It’s become a simple fit. ‘Have you ever talked to anyone about this?’

  ‘I had counselling for postnatal depression. It helped. And I talked to Mike’s widow, before and after Daisy was born. That was really hard. I think it helped us both. She’s back in Australia now, and Mike’s mother died last year, so there aren’t the reminders there used to be. So – so I’m sort of OK. But every now and then something makes it all come back.’

  He holds her more tightly. ‘I’m sorry about what happened today.’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ she says. The warmth of his body, the not-aloneness it brings, means that everything feels more manageable than it did this morning. Or last week. Or this time last year. Melissa has been asking for updates ever since the date, and Kate hasn’t wanted to say too much, in case she jinxes it. But maybe it’s time.

  ‘When I think about Mike and me,’ she says, ‘it’s unreal. I know people talk about how things seem to have happened to someone else but that’s honestly how I feel about this. I can remember the – the idea of how I felt about him, but it doesn’t seem real anymore. Not like—’ She stops, just in time. They’ve been on one date, for crying out loud; had sex twice and decided to start seeing each other. She should really try to put the brakes on.
>
  ‘Like us?’ he asks, and she can feel his breath, cooling on the dampness of the hair at her crown.

  She nods. ‘Like us. We’re – I mean, already this feels’ – what are the words for it, the words that will be true, and not sound ridiculous? – ‘deep. And comfortable.’

  Spencer laughs. ‘Deep and comfortable. I like that. It makes us sound as though we’re lying in a really weird bed. I know what you mean, though.’

  ‘Do you?’

  She sits up, picks up her mug although the tea is cold now and she doesn’t want to drink it anyway. He looks at her, and says, ‘You mean that you’re falling in love with me.’

  Kate feels precarious, off-balance, as though she’s being accused of something. She knew she was going too far, telling him everything. She’s got it wrong, again. At least she’s done it early on, this time, before anything is truly broken. But then she looks at his face, properly, the curl of smile, the way even such tired eyes have a directness that she – yes – loves. She nods.

  He nods back. ‘I’m glad. Because I’m falling in love with you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, and just like that, it’s done. Simply, honestly, truly. She puts down the mug, lies back against Spencer, and feels his arms encircle her as she closes her eyes.

  Chapter 9

  Christmas

  C

  HRISTMAS IS THE BUSIEST it’s ever been for Kate. After the Christmas play comes the school fair; Kate keeps Daisy as close to her as she can, and steers her away from the coughing, sneezing, sniffing parents and children as far as she is able, without Daisy noticing. She doesn’t want her little one to be at any greater risk than usual of catching something that her immune system won’t be able to fight off, and she doesn’t want Daisy to grow self-conscious and over-cautious. A child with a health condition, not a health condition with a child attached: that’s always been her plan for Daisy. But it’s hard when Daisy joyfully plunges her hand into the polystyrene-snow-bran tub that so many children have already rooted about in, and Kate is trying not to wince; she cleans Daisy’s hand with sanitiser afterwards, but only minutes later, looks around to see Daisy and Amelia taking it in turns to bite the ends off a candy cane.

  Jo apologises, which is more than the other mothers would do; then she says to Amelia, ‘You know we have to be extra careful about Daisy,’ and Kate sees Daisy’s face fall. When she glances up from talking to Daisy to see that Mrs Piper is watching her, a cold, dark smile on her face, Kate turns away. There’s no need to walk towards trouble. Daisy starts to cough, and Kate takes her to the toilets for her to spit up the mucus and breathe some cooler air.

  As the fair gets noisier, hotter, Kate is always aware of Spencer, wandering around the room, joking with pupils and parents. The elf hat he chose on their first official date is proving a great hit, and Kate gets a sweet thrill from knowing that she was there when he bought it. She can see their lives as a slow building up of tiny threads that will make the fabric of a shared life. If she can be this lucky. Can it be as perfect as it seems?

  Kate extracts Daisy after an hour, with the bribe of meeting Granny and Blake at the café for hot chocolate and gingerbread reindeer. Richenda and Daisy are soon involved in a complicated game involving two half-eaten biscuits and a lot of clapping; Blake says, ‘You look as though you could do with a whisky in that chocolate.’

  Kate smiles, pushes her hair out of the way – too late, there’s whipped cream on the ends of it. ‘It’s hard to enjoy these things, and I feel as though I ought to. But I worry . . .’

  Blake nods. ‘For what it’s worth, no one much enjoys a Christmas fair. You can bet your bottom dollar that everyone’s glad it’s over.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  Blake looks over the table, sees that Richenda and Daisy aren’t listening – they’ve moved on to counting the baubles on the Christmas tree. ‘I hear the d-a-t-e went well.’

  Kate’s mood lifts instantly. ‘It did.’

  ‘I’m glad. Are we going to meet him? You know I’ll need to do a full background check.’

  Kate laughs. ‘I’m sure you will.’

  ‘I hope he’s worthy of you’ – Blake looks across the table – ‘and of Daisy, too.’

  *

  The day before Christmas Eve, Kate, Daisy and Richenda make their way to Jilly and Wendy’s home. It’s a solid Georgian house, thick-walled and square-windowed, with a drive decorated with Christmas lights and a green-and-gold wreath on the door. ‘I believe Jilly’s legal practice is very successful,’ Richenda says, in answer to Kate’s unspoken question, as Kate lifts Daisy to ring the bell.

  Wendy opens the door. She’s wearing a snowman jumper and jeans; Daisy laughs with delight as she unzips her coat to reveal her own snowman jumper, three dancing, smiling characters on a navy background. ‘This is my favourite,’ she tells Wendy, ‘but when we bought it at the shop it was in the boy section, and Mummy said it was – a big word that means wrong to girls.’

  Jilly, who’s gone for a plain red dress and snowflake leggings for the occasion, comes up behind Wendy and says to Kate, ‘Is it too early to offer Daisy a job? I can just see her cross-examining the shop owner. Come through.’ And before they know it, they are in a kitchen-diner that spreads the length of the back of the house, Wendy and Richenda are talking animatedly about someone they both used to know who is about to sell her company for a rumoured fortune, and Jilly is handing Kate a cup of mulled wine that smells so good that Kate’s plans for an alcohol-free afternoon are instantly forgotten. ‘Cheers,’ Jilly says. ‘Happy Christmas Eve eve.’

  ‘Christmas Eve eve?’ repeats Daisy in amazement.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Jilly begins. ‘It’s a day when Wendy and I see all of our special people—’

  But before she can get any further, Daisy is pulling at Kate’s free hand. ‘Look, Mummy, Mr Swanson is here!’

  ‘Oh, so he is,’ Kate says, seeing his head, tall above the two people he is talking to, across the room. He’d said he should be there by the time she arrived; he was right.

  He looks over. There must be thirty-odd people in the kitchen, and at least a dozen more in the living room beyond. The door chimes ring. Kate wonders how many people she would invite to a Christmas party, how many would come. And then Spencer smiles, starts to make his way across the room to her.

  Daisy says, ‘The invitation said Fancy Christmas Dress, Mr Swanson. You could have worn your elf hat if you didn’t have a jumper.’

  Spencer puts a hand in his pocket and, a second later, his sweater lights up with flashing fairy lights. Daisy’s eyes go big. Kate laughs, and then Daisy says, ‘You could have worn your hat too.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Spencer says.

  ‘How are you?’ Kate asks. She wonders if she could risk a touch, but you never know who’s watching. Spencer puts his hand, briefly, at the small of her back, under the pretext of moving her out of the path of someone behind her.

  ‘I’m fine. I like your top.’

  ‘Thank you.’ It’s a baseball-style silky T-shirt, pale blue, with ‘TEAM RUDOLPH’ in navy letters on the front, and the number 25 on the back. Kate wasn’t sure about it, but it was better than the few women’s jumpers that were left when they arrived at the hypermarket with Richenda first thing this morning, in an attempt to beat the worst of the Christmas-food shopping busyness. Kate should have read the party invitation properly, and then she’d have been more organised. But actually, the T-shirt looks quite good with her skinny jeans and a pair of silver plimsolls she bought in the sale. And she bets she’s cooler than everyone else in the rapidly warming kitchen.

  ‘The shop was wrong,’ Daisy supplies. ‘It was in the men’s section.’

  ‘It was this, or a couple of badly placed Christmas puddings. Or a pink fluffy jumper that said “Naughty or Nice?” that gave me an electric shock when I touched it.’

  Richenda appears at Kate’s shoulder. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘this must be the Mr Swanson I’ve been hearing so
much about.’

  ‘Indeed it is.’ Spencer holds out a hand, which Richenda shakes. ‘Spencer. You’re Daisy’s grandmother, aren’t you? I didn’t get a chance to say hello after the play.’

  ‘Richenda.’ Kate’s watching her mother’s face for signs of approval, disapproval, anything, but there’s nothing to see. ‘And Kate’s mother, too, of course.’

  ‘And also a person in your own right.’ Spencer smiles.

  ‘Which goes without saying.’ Richenda looks mildly annoyed, which seems unfair to Kate, as her mother would be the first to point out that she is a separate being from her daughter and granddaughter. And it’s clear that Spencer was attempting a joke.

  ‘Mummy! I think there is a buffet! And I can see my picture of a butterfly that I gave Miss Orr on the wall!’

  ‘Excuse us.’ Kate doesn’t really want to walk away – she wants to be privy to all of the conversation between her mother and Spencer – but any chance to get food into Daisy can’t be passed up.

  ‘I hear that . . .’ Richenda says, but the rest of the sentence is drowned out by Daisy wondering if there will be macaroni cheese, and Kate saying it isn’t really a very buffet thing, but they could see if they can find some in the freezer when they get home.

  *

  ‘How did I do?’ Spencer had waited for Kate’s text to say that Daisy was asleep before arriving; he’s holding a bottle of Prosecco, and Kate knows she shouldn’t open it because there is so much to do between now and the morning, but the thought of clinking glasses and saying ‘Merry Christmas’ is impossible to resist. Spencer is setting off on his drive northwards first thing tomorrow. They have agreed not to exchange gifts, and instead to do something special in the new year. Kate knows that Spencer doesn’t have money to spare; and anyway, for all they are falling for each other, and they know it, a Christmas gift so early feels fraught with difficulties. Melissa tells her she’s overthinking, but to Melissa, who seems to have spent the last two weeks messaging Kate from Ubers as she runs errands for the magazine where she’s interning, Kate overthinks everything.