by Patrick Gale
This was true, Hilary knew, but Rufus’s values were plain unnatural. Everyone needed domesticity. One had to have a home – food, at least – and a roof. A roof. Most amusing. While Hilary could not be called frigid, he did find passion less vital than comfort. He had often winced with guilt to hear himself cool Rufus’ advances in favour of something less strenuous. On the last occasion when he and Bridget had played word association, she had said ‘Men’ and he had answered, ‘Breakfast’. While breakfast in bed was, in a sense, a treat to compensate for the lack of sleep, he now wondered whether the treat would feel as special if it had not been earned. The telephone rang again and Dan watched, fascinated, as he answered.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi. I feel ghastly! I forgot your birthday.’ It was Evelyn Peake, his godmother.
‘Hello, Evelyn. It doesn’t matter. Honestly.’
‘At least, I bought you a card, but I clean forgot to send it. Will you come to tea and tell me all your news?’
‘Lovely. How about tomorrow? I finish early.’
‘Marvellous. Three-thirtyish?’
‘Can’t wait. I’ve got a baby on my lap, by the way.’
‘Goodness. Whose?’
‘Well, it seems to be mine for the moment.’
‘But Hilary, that’s absolutely wonderful,’ Evelyn enthused, scenting a cause. ‘You mean you’ve adopted it?’
‘I just found him.’
‘What a superb idea! We must talk it over tomorrow. I’ve got to fly; there’s someone at the door and Bids is barking the house down.’
‘OK. ‘Bye. And thanks.’
He replaced the receiver. There was a dull thump against a window-pane. He glanced up in time to see a snowball sliding down the glass.
‘Oi,’ Henry called from the street. ‘I think your doorbell’s bust again and I’m cold.’
He should have told her about the baby. She would never understand at short notice.
‘Coming,’ he yelled. He tried to make Dan lie down, but the latter protested so loudly that he had to hurry downstairs, comforting him against a shoulder. He opened the door. ‘Sorry.’
Her overcoat had snow on the shoulders. Her cheeks were pink and taut. She looked well. She shuddered theatrically and pushed past him into the warmth. As he closed the door she started up the stairs, calling over her shoulder,
‘Looking after the landlord’s babies now, are we?’
‘Well, not exactly.’
He was about to explain that, actually, it was the other way around, but she forestalled him, coming to an abrupt standstill in the living-room doorway.
‘Oh my God! Hilary, what’s happened?’
‘Sit down.’ He motioned her to the sofa. He could see that she was all prepared to lecture him. Whenever they met she was ready to be all loving and sisterly, but he always seemed to do or say something wrong within minutes of her arrival. ‘It’s absurd really,’ he began, ‘but I found him in the subway last night. Well, obviously I couldn’t just leave him there to die of exposure, and it was too late and I was too tired to go calling out the police, so I brought him home. I marched him round to the local clinic this morning to hand him over, as it were, and they said oh no, I had to keep him until they could arrange an adoption.’
‘But that’s mad.’ Henry laughed. ‘They can’t expect you to …’
‘I was only trying to be a good Samaritan, and they ended up making out I was trying to dump my bastard on them.’ He sat with Dan on the arm of the sofa, laughing back at her. She was taking it better than he had supposed. Perhaps he would tell her about Rufus. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘I was in a dreadful rush for school and by the time they’d finished with me I felt so guilty I thought I might as well.’
‘Might as well what?’ The warning note came back to her voice.
‘Look after him for a bit. Mrs Sharma’s lent me all this stuff, very sweetly, and says she’ll mind him during the day. He’s no trouble. Just sleeps and needs feeding and changing occasionally.’
‘Changing?’
‘Nappies.’
‘Oh.’ Henry raised her eyebrows and looked faintly disgusted. ‘Could I have a drink, Hil? It’s been a vile day.’
‘Yup. Wine?’
‘Great.’
‘Hold this, then.’
He handed Dan to her unwelcoming arms, noticing for the first time that she didn’t have much in the way of a lap, and went to the kitchen for some wine. She called out after him, ‘Hang on, Hil. I don’t know what I’m saying. No, of course I can’t have any wine. I must rush.’
‘Oh. Can’t you stay for supper?’ He came back and found her standing holding Dan the wrong way, with his head askew. He rescued the child.
‘No. It’s very kind of you but I’m expecting someone.’
‘That’s nice. Anyone I know?’
‘No. He’s a friend from work, really,’ she lied.
‘Oh, I see. That sort of friend.’
‘But this is all absurd.’ She waved a hand at this, who was kneading Hilary’s chest. ‘We must do something. I’ll make some calls tomorrow and get him taken away for you.’
‘Well, if you think … but wouldn’t it be better if … ?’
‘Hil, you can’t let them bully you like that. Honestly, I ought to file a complaint. Thinking a boy could look after a newborn baby!’
‘I’m twenty-five.’
‘Oh shit. So you are. And I have got a present, but it’s at home. I’ll drop it round, all right?’
‘OK.’
She started for the stairs.
‘Oh yes. Before you go, you couldn’t possibly do me a sick note for school?’
‘Yes. Fine,’ she sighed and pulled out her notepad. ‘How long for?’
‘Just this morning.’
‘Food poisoning suit you? Sounds likely enough after a birthday.’
‘Great,’ he said as she scribbled. ‘Thanks. Dad rang, by the way. Sent you his love.’
‘Good.’ She gave him the note.
‘Sorry you can’t stay.’
‘So am I.’ She pulled on her coat. ‘But you know … Are you at home tomorrow morning?’
‘Only till nine-fifteen.’
‘Fine. I’ll get someone round. ‘Bye.’
She kissed him briskly on the cheek and was gone.
Hilary opened his briefcase and took out the baby bath and powder he had bought on the way home. Upstairs he held his fingers under the water; waiting for it to run hot, he felt faint but distinct stirrings of fraternal rebellion. In the living room the telephone rang again.
Chapter fifteen
‘Pour boiling water over sachet and leave to stand for thirty seconds,’ Henry muttered as she read the instructions on the packet. She rinsed the coffee grounds out of a mug and threw in the sachet, then poured on boiling water from the kettle and sat on the kitchen stool to eye the second hand of her watch. Beneath her towel, her body glowed pink from a zealous session with some Naturegrains Bodyscrub in the bath. ‘Eliminates that grey, tired look by sloughing off dead cell layer and skin impurities’ the packet had promised. The stuff had been unexpectedly mentholated, so as well as having a raw thigh, she smelt like a bag of lightly toasted mint imperials. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. She tipped out the coffeeish water and chased the sachet like a spiteful goldfish around the sink, burning her fingers. ‘Snip off corner and spread liberally over damp hair,’ she read. The scissors were not in evidence, so she used the bread knife and then spread the lurid oil over her hair. The Luvlox Hairpak was evidently designed for waistlength tresses, for it overran her boyish crop, coursing stickily down her spine. ‘Wrap in hot towel and relax for fifteen minutes.’ Tugging the towel from her body and winding it in a precarious turban over her unpleasantly squelching scalp. She left the kitchen and sat, naked, on the chaise-longue.
A steady rain was falling now, puckering the river face and clouding her view of the other bank. Occasional slabs of melting snow slithered off the roof and
past her balcony. She stared, remorsefully unconvinced, at her exotic reflection.
Someone had mended the telephone line during the day. There had been a message on the answering machine (given her by Dad several Christmases ago) from Candy asking her to supper, and one from Marie-Claude to say that she would try again tomorrow. Ignoring Candy, Henry had tried to ring her parents, but found them out.
The visit to Hilary had been abortive too. Whenever she mentioned him to friends, she saw that they pictured a snug alliance. My brother. Hugs. Loyal affection. Midnight analyses. Fond reminiscence. Indeed, all this had been there until he went away to Durham, when suddenly she had found it harder. He loved men, of course, but if anything that should have fostered the same sisterly kinship she felt for M – C. They had raised a barrier of cowardly silence on the subject, however, which was foolish. It was not that she disapproved. Rather, she had no feelings one way or the other.
As she drove to North Pole Road this evening, still shaken from her encounter in the hospital car park, she had imagined bursting into his bachelor den with cakes and kisses. She would tease him about being a twenty-five-year-old chorus boy, and he would tease her for being considerably older and single, then they would laugh and fall on the sofa and … and she would tell him all about being held at gunpoint by a patient. Then perhaps, just perhaps, she would tell him about her new man and how she was actually being Someone’s Mistress. Then maybe he would come clean and tell her about the special person in his life and maybe the person would turn up and they could all do something lazily comfortable like eat beans on toast by the telly. But the cake shop had been closed. And his doorbell hadn’t worked. And when she did get in, she couldn’t kiss him because he had an armful of baby.
That baby! She couldn’t cope with that baby. He had always seemed sadly single – in contrast to her voluntary, intermittent spinsterhood – but then, he had always kept his private life from her view. Since her first visit to his digs in the cottage at Durham, he had presented a seamless front of bachelor domesticity: tea, toast and neutral conversation. From the moment she saw all those baby things in his living room, she had sensed that he had no intention of letting the thing go. Whatever he said, professional intuition told her that he wanted to be a single father. He even knew how to hold the creature properly. She had had to rush home because of her shock at the spite which suddenly boiled up inside her. Without the baby she could look on him as satisfactorily failed – not even an academic, but a low-flying teacher who wanted to be a chorus boy; now he made her feel as selfish as did those women one was always hearing on the radio, the ones who left work to go on the dole and adopt unwanted spastics. Even though she had devoted her teens to his welfare, she could see that he was the one who would end up appearing sacrificial. If he had his way, that was. Driving home, she had determined to have the child taken away. It was not as though she was jealous. She had never wanted a baby herself; being a surrogate mother at the tender age of ten had cauterized all such impulses. As she lolled, at once nude and orientally adorned, her wry reflection was that her proper reaction under the circumstances should be that of a smug new grandmother.
Stupid of her to forget his present. She had bought him the new Richard Rodgers biography. The shop had wrapped it for her. She could see it on the bread-bin now. It had cost the earth, but it was exactly what he wanted.
Fifteen minutes up, Henry rinsed out the Hairpak under the kitchen tap then towelled her hair dry. It had worked; her thin, blonde crop felt full and soft. She brushed it back off her face with a little gel, staring narrowly in the mirror. She liked it tight back like that; she fancied it made her look like a smart, enigmatically lesbian sportswoman. She never wore make-up, but she had her eyelashes dyed dark brown. She pulled on a favourite black dress; a knee-length silk affair that showed her thin legs to advantage and made her feel like an expensive fountain pen.
She was glad now that she hadn’t told Hilary about Andrew. She would have loved to see the surprise on his face, and it might have made her less of a bossy elder sister in his eyes, but his condescension would have been inevitable. After she had left, he would have felt sorry for her, imagining that her lover was bound to return to his wife in the end, leaving her with nothing. He would cast her in the role of the career woman intellectual of magazine mythology, whose private life never gets off the ground because she’s not prepared to make the slightest compromise to her emotions.
Would he leave her with nothing and go back to his wife? Probably. But then, he would leave her with nothing but memories of an adventure, which was all she wanted. She had decided long ago that she could not afford to want anything more. Hadn’t she? Oh God.
Henry poured herself a Martini cocktail. She had made up a batch in a jug in her fridge, because this seemed the sort of thing that Sandy would do. She tossed a stuffed olive into her mouth, dropped a second one into the glass and walked back to the chaise-longue to wait.
Why was she waiting? He hadn’t rung and they had nothing arranged. He had said he would come, but it was more likely that he was watching home videos with a wife and 2.5 children. The feminine intuition which she usually ignored told her otherwise.
Granted that he was totally unsuitable, he was very attractive. She might even go so far as to admit that he was the most attractive man, married or otherwise, she had met. Barring her father. Given that there was always the chance that things would develop further, and that games of make-believe tended to lose their thrill and become plain exhausting, perhaps she should let on who she really was? But if things were fated not to develop, if he were due to run back to his wife in three weeks anyway, how foolish to miss out on so much fun simply because women with decent IQs affected his prowess. Perhaps his wife was a genius? Perhaps she never had time for him because she was too busy perfecting her cure for muscular dystrophy and knocking off a witty biography of Hegel? Perhaps she knew her?
Henry took another sip of her Martini. Oh God.
Chapter sixteen
Through his palm he could feel her heart slowing from a gallop to a canter. At her nearside temple a vein echoed the pulse. She was staring up at the metal beams, blinking away droplets of sweat as they were channelled into her eyes. An ambulance wailed below them, then away. The rain, torrential now, clattered on the roof. Sweat shone on her face, ran teasing down his spine to the hairs above his buttocks, formed a hybrid shadow on the sheet beneath them. She lay, stared, waited. He had to break the silence.
‘I hurt you.’
‘No.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘I’d say it’s because I love you, but I don’t know you at all so that would be a lie.’
‘No. You don’t.’
‘Know you or love you?’
‘Know me.’
Still she didn’t move. She fired her short answers into the air over her head, like a child daring to let her spit fall back in her face. He had nearly not come.
After that absurd mistake over the telephone, his first impulse had been to go to take an extended refuge in bed. Hilary’s voice had suggested her own so strongly that for a crucial moment he had forgotten that she didn’t have his number. He could have asked Hilary round, but after claiming that a pupil called Sandy was there it would have involved a heavy-handed lie. Hilary’s importunate tone had maddened him. What had he said? Let’s leave it for a bit? No. Far worse. Let’s let it go. Just let it go. Back in his room he realized what he had done and found himself running back to the hall and dialling the number, but Hilary’s line was engaged.
He returned to his flat, made himself a stiff gin and French and drifted from a stab at some Scriabin to some easier Prokofiev and thence to a new magazine. The adrenalin was searing through his system, however, and the alcohol only heightened its effects. Icy glass in hand, he hurried clumsily back to the hall and called the number a second time.
‘Hil? Hi … Yes. Look, I’m sorry. It looks as though Sandy’s going
to leave early. Can you still come round? … Great! See you in about half an hour? … Great. ’Bye. And look … I’m sorry.’
There was nothing in the fridge but some sausages which had passed their sell-by date and a piña colada-flavoured yoghourt. Rufus snatched up the brown envelope that served as his wallet and slipped out to Marylebone High Street. The supermarket was still open. A musak version of one of the songs from Hilary’s execrable musicals was being played. Rufus could never remember which was which. This was ‘Going out to Surrey’ or something equally unlikely. He scoured the shelves for something quick that still looked thought out and listened to the coconut clip-clop of the musak pony.
Midway between bananas and lavatorial blue-rinse he was held up by a voluminous Turkess with a trolley, stared at a packet of Coco Pops and realized how narrowly he had just avoided losing the most important person in his life. His eyes caught those of the baby on a disposable nappy pack and he knew that he loved Hilary, that the knowledge that he was even now risking life and limb on that dreadful old bicycle brought the sharpest joy, that if just now he had cut himself off from that daft good humour, that recuperative trust, that bottomless fund of sympathetic support, his life would be inexpressibly empty. He had put all this in jeopardy for a glorified masseuse who was … well, yes, who was admittedly extraordinary in bed and was possessed of a rare pair of arms, as well as a fast car and a steady income, but whom he didn’t know at all. He knew nothing whatsoever about Sandy save, vaguely, how she earned her keep and how her deep voice sounded across a pillow in the dark. Of her personal life, of her needs and responsibilities, he was wholly ignorant. Quite possibly she would vanish back into a semi-marriage tomorrow and he would have lost all hope of keeping Hilary.
Suddenly impatient and beginning to sicken with fear, Rufus snatched up and paid for a bottle of overpriced claret, two helpings of Cordon Bleu Kitchen ready-made Chicken Kiev, and a tub of Hilary’s preferred American pecan ice cream. There wasn’t time for a bath, but he changed out of his suit into jeans and a clean shirt. He didn’t shave; Hilary liked stubble.
