‘Honey, what’s wrong?’ said Jacob.
‘It’s Fred Astaire. He’s dead.’
‘I know. I saw that on the news earlier. Kind of sad.’
‘He was my granny’s favourite.’
‘I guess he was a lot of people’s grandmothers’ favourite.’
‘How can you say that? That’s a horrible thing to say! Anyway, it’s not true. Most people loved him because of the dancing, but we loved him for his singing. My granny used to sing “Isn’t This a Lovely Day to be Caught in the Rain” to us, when we were little. Because it always rained, when we went to stay with her. There was a film she loved that had Jack Buchanan and Fred Astaire and they sang this little song together. I wish I could remember what it was called.’
‘You mean “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan”?’ said Jacob.
‘That’s it! I’m so glad you knew the name. She used to say, “No one has that kind of innocent charm any more.”’
Neither of them spoke.
‘I just missed you so much. I was on this bus.’ Isobel had started to sob again. ‘I’d been to a film, it was all fine and then I missed you so badly that I couldn’t stop crying. Someone was wearing your cologne. Sometimes I miss you so much I think it’ll kill me if I don’t see you. I don’t like anything, without you.’
There was silence at the other end of the line. Eventually Jacob said, ‘I’ll come find you. Where are you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Isobel wailed. ‘Can I come there instead?’
‘Of course,’ said Jacob.
Isobel put the receiver down and stepped out into the evening air. She composed herself, getting her bearings. She began to walk towards Holborn tube station. She bought a ticket and made her way towards the escalator. Halfway down, the smell of hot used air, like slightly singed carpet, reached her. She went to the platform to wait for a train.
She knew what would happen once she got to Jacob’s flat. And, if she slept with him, she knew it would set her back all that she had gained: the slow, slow journey back to a sense of herself as a complete person without him. She wavered. Yet the knowledge that she could be in his arms, his bed, in seven tube stops – Central Line, change at Tottenham Court Road, then take the Northern Line: less than twenty minutes, if the trains weren’t slow – was like being pulled by a force, something like gravity, a thing that could not be fought. She remembered suddenly that Rita was alone, and would need to be let out. She wasn’t sure if she’d filled the dog’s water bowl. It was irresponsible to leave an animal all night. She didn’t deserve to have Rita living with her, she rebuked herself, if she didn’t take proper care of her.
Isobel stood on the platform procrastinating. It would be possible, in theory, to go to the flat and see Jacob and have a drink of some sort and just talk. It might clear the air. It might be a first step towards their becoming friends. But it didn’t seem very likely, because really they had never had a friendship. There hadn’t been the time to be friends, since she had fallen in love with him on second meeting. And anyway, she didn’t want to be Jacob’s friend, not truly. She remembered the first time they had slept together, how the bedclothes were like a tide ebbing higher and lower across their bodies through the long night, how serious Jacob was as a lover, how reverent and how slow. She wished more than anything that she could be back on that first night. The wishing was a kind of hollowness, an ache.
She told herself that she didn’t have to go. Standing in the underground with a ticket in her hand placed her under no obligation. Neither did the fact that she had telephoned Jacob and he would be expecting her. She wasn’t crying any more, she didn’t have to go. She had left the dog alone for long enough already, and anyway she had work the next morning and seeing Jacob would mean having to get up at dawn in order to catch the tube home, to feed Rita and get changed before she left for the gallery. And yet, and yet. To see him, to see his face. His mouth on her skin. The things he said.
On the platform she felt the breath of the train before she heard it, a displacement of the stale human air in the station with another kind of staleness, a metallic gust, like the smell of Brillo pad. In only a moment the doors of the train would open alongside her, inviting her in. Isobel made up her mind.
When Ruth was back at home, a few days after Iris’s funeral, Ilse said, ‘That was your mother’s pet. If Isobel doesn’t want to home him, the bird should come here.’
‘Really? That’s so sweet of you! Are you sure you don’t mind?’
Ruth felt ashamed of herself. Every now and again, over the years, Ilse had expressed a wish that they get a cat, but Ruth had always put her off. One of the very few things which had angered her mild uncle Christopher had been when cats from neigh-bouring houses had come into the garden, stalking songbirds. His hostility towards cats had rubbed off on his niece.
‘It’s naughty of Isobel,’ she said. ‘Mummy trusted her to look after Birdle. I’d always thought, if something was in a will, you had to do it. Still, I don’t suppose he’ll live for terribly much longer.’
‘It will be all right,’ said Ilse.
It was agreed that Birdle was too elderly and too prone to biting for his cage and stand to be situated in the rooms used by the children. Ilse thought he would feel too out of the way upstairs and Ruth didn’t quite like the idea of him in the kitchen, so a polythene sheet was spread across the new leather surface of the desk in the study, with newspaper on top to catch droppings and seed husks. Here Birdle could enjoy a view of the garden, as well as human company in the evenings.
Ruth had had no idea a bird could be so stubborn. Birdle seemed determined to resist all blandishments, but stood with his back towards the room, shoulders hunched, like a tiny rumpled gangster. He didn’t talk and barely moved. Emily suggested dry macaroni, smeared with peanut butter – Ruth had to go and buy peanut butter specially – but he hardly glanced at this delicacy. Grapes were met with the same disdain.
Then one evening Ilse began to talk softly to him, in German. ‘In den alten Zeiten, wo das Wünschen noch geholfen hat, lebte ein König, dessen Töchter waren alle schön, aber die Jüngste war so schön, dass die Sonne selber, die doch so vieles gesehen hat, sich verwunderte, sooft sie ihr ins Gesicht schien.’
Something in the bird changed. His bearing softened. He sagged a little, like someone who had just put down a heavy package. He half turned towards her voice, tilting his head to one side. Buoyed by this modest success, Ilse started telling him stories every afternoon, after the children had gone home. Ruth sat with the newspaper on her knee, listening: she loved to hear Ilse speak German, because the sounds – so modest and tender, with none of the theatricality of French, say, or Italian – seemed to mirror her personality.
‘… und sie hatte zwei Kinder, die glichen den beiden Rosenbäumchen, und das eine hiess Schneeweisschen, das andere Rosenrot.’
The words sounded beautiful, as if they were the language breath had been intended for.
On the fourth evening, the bird inched his way gingerly along the dowel of his stand until he stood only a hair’s breadth away from Ilse, his head inclined. The next day, while she spoke, he made the journey again and then, once within reach, began to pull at the shoulder of her sleeve with his beak.
‘He used to do that with Mummy,’ said Ruth. ‘I think it means he’s grooming you.’
‘I should be flattered,’ smiled Ilse.
On Fridays Ruth left early to drive over to Alcester and fetch Joe, so that they would get back in time for him to have a play and settle in before his supper and bath time. That way he was used to them and to the house and to Emily not being there before bedtime. Such consideration barely seemed necessary, since he was, everyone agreed, the smiliest child anyone had ever met. Ilse generally prepared something for him to eat, but both women liked to watch him in his bath, splashing, the meagre tuft of his hair sticking up like the feathers on a crested duck. They took it in turns to enfold him in a towel, his slippery little body limp with p
leasure as his grandmother or Ilse took each damp pink toe in turn between their fingers, reciting, ‘This little piggy had fine roast beef, and this little piggy had none …’ until he arched his back in anticipation, already squealing, ready for the tickling which concluded the rhyme: ‘… and this little piggy cried wee-wee-wee-wee all the way home!’
Emily had so adored her little boy from the moment she first saw him that it came as a constant surprise to feel that love increase. It hardly seemed possible to love him more. Emily knew that scientists said that the whole universe was constantly expanding and now it seemed to her that the human heart was the same. It was as if she had been let into an enormous secret. Could it be that everyone felt this extravagant, flooding emotion towards their children: the people wheeling pushchairs along pavements, or chatting outside the post office; the mothers waiting at the playground gate for the school day to end? Were they all gripped by the jolts and surges of this same fierce passion? Had her mother loved her and her sister like this? How did people bear it? When Joe, a few weeks old, interrupted himself as he fed to smile up at her, allowing the nozzle of her nipple to spray tiny jets of milk across the side of his head until she smiled back at him, the love seemed to spread warmth through Emily’s whole body.
What was so astonishing was that she was able to be with Joe every day. Everyone she had loved before – her mother and father, Gary – had only been available for some of the time. Isobel had always been there, of course, but Emily had never had the longing, almost a hunger, for her sister that she had felt for these others. She had not had occasion to. But now, with Joe, there was all the desire she had felt before for the other people, but with none of the agony: every morning when she woke up, he was there. He would still be there the next morning, and the morning after. It was like a miracle, like winning a prize every single day.
For the first few weeks of her son’s life, she lived cocooned with her baby. Pat had offered to help her out by having Joe a couple of days a week, so Emily could work part time. Emily dreaded leaving him, but was surprised by how readily she readjusted. It wasn’t a wrench to part from him, because she knew she would see him again later on in the day. And Joe himself was gregarious. When Roger mentioned taking on someone else at the practice, Emily dismissed the idea: she would come back full time and find a childminder for Joe, someone with children of her own, for him to play with.
Gary’s first idea was that he could be the baby’s childminder. He could come round to the flat every morning, look after the boy himself. Who would be better to take care of Joe? Shelly wouldn’t need to know what kind of work he was doing.
‘But you’d have to stay indoors all day,’ said Emily.
‘We’d be all right. We could watch Postman Pat.’
‘Not all the time,’ said Emily. ‘It wouldn’t work. She’d ask about your day.’
Gary had had to concede. It would be awkward when he didn’t bring home any work clothes to go in the wash, but arrived back looking as fresh as he’d looked when he’d left the house in the morning, except possibly with baby’s sick on his shoulder. When he didn’t have any funny stories about the people he was working with. Or a proper pay packet.
‘Mind you, me in work: the shock might kill her,’ he said.
His next idea was more radical. He’d thought of a better arrangement, the perfect person to act as childminder to Joe. Someone with plenty of experience with kids. Had two of her own. Lovely personality. Shelly.
For a couple of minutes Emily was persuaded that this was a totally brilliant plan. He was right! What could be better, more natural, than that Joe should spend time with his very own sisters, under his own father’s roof? Then she considered the lies which would need to be maintained, in order for this to work. The contact she would have to have with Shelly. The deception she would be visiting upon her innocent boy.
To Ruth Emily maintained that Saturday was her day for what she called ‘admin’: for sorting through bills and sending off cheques and getting in provisions for the week ahead. This, nominally, was why her mother began to take Joe for the night on Fridays, and most of the next day. Emily said it was difficult for her to get such simple chores done during the week, because she was either looking after her son or she was at work, while he was at the childminder’s. There was no time to buy light bulbs or Hoover bags or see to the flat or the car, she said. Ruth guessed that her daughter had other things in mind for her free mornings, but said nothing. She did not begrudge Emily the time. She was glad of the opportunity to be with her grandson.
For the first few months after Joe was born, it was fine. Gary came over on Saturday mornings as usual, but instead of going out to the river they stayed in the flat, waiting until the baby’s mid-morning nap to get undressed and into Emily’s bed. While Joe was in the room with them, Gary couldn’t keep his eyes off his son. Emily was touched to see the two together, but it made her nervous. What if they were to see Gary out in the town, with Shelly and the girls? Would Joe call out to him, beaming with recognition? What if Shelly noticed a resemblance between her children and this little boy? And what would happen when Joe began to talk? She started to feel that it was too risky, allowing them to meet. And she didn’t want Joe to form an attachment to Gary, when she had no idea what the future would hold for them all.
So Emily came to the arrangement with her mother. Gary had looked almost hollowed out with disappointment the first time he appeared at the flat to find only Emily. He had sat down heavily, with his face in his hands.
‘You could have warned me,’ he said. ‘You should have let me at least say goodbye to him. You could have said.’
Emily knelt on the floor and put her arms around his shoulders.
‘You’ll see him again,’ she whispered. ‘It’s not as if you’ll never see him again.’
‘Yeah, well,’ he muttered. He made no sound, but she saw a drop run across his wrist and down towards his forearm, until it blotted on the cuff of his shirt. Emily took his hand and kissed the inside of it, the place where it met his wrist, where the tear had been. He didn’t move but sat with his head bowed, like a figure on a war memorial. She untucked her shirt from her jeans and took his hand with its bitten nails and drew it inside the fabric of her clothes, until his fingers were against the skin of her breast. Then she kissed the side of his neck below his ear and pulled him towards her.
Some mornings Ruth woke up with sadness in her chest and thought: I am an orphan. Even as the thought dawned, she realised how ridiculous it was. I am a woman in late middle age, she rebuked herself. And it wasn’t true that she had no surviving parent, because her father was alive still. But Christopher was dead and Iris was dead and not having either of them sometimes made her feel, in those moments between sleep and waking, very alone. It created a sense of vertigo which diminished only gradually as she went about the business of the early morning: switching on the wireless, making a cup of tea for herself and a small pot of coffee for Ilse, brushing her teeth, dressing.
There were compensations. There was solace in music and in the little children at the nursery, in walking on the hills and in Ilse’s company. There was Joe. And Ruth had not seen so much of her daughters since they were children. Emily generally arrived at tea time on Saturdays and often now she stayed the night and for lunch on Sunday. Isobel brought her ugly dog up from London every other weekend or so, disappearing early in the mornings on long walks, coming back with a colour in her cheeks that seemed to be bled away by her life in London. A young cousin of Ilse’s was teaching at a private school near Henley-on-Thames and he sometimes brought his family to stay with them in Malvern. For years Ruth and Ilse had ignored Sunday lunch – it hadn’t seemed worth it just for the two of them – and its rituals had been a discomforting reminder of the people who were not sitting down with them. But now there was Ilse and Isobel and Emily and Joe and herself, or sometimes Heinie and his wife Sylvia, who was Swiss German, and their two little boys: enough people to lay a table for,
to make Yorkshire pudding and pour cream into a jug and dig out and polish the old silver napkin rings which had belonged to Ruth’s grandparents.
Iris had always insisted that it was a ghastly business, getting old.
‘There must be something good about it,’ Ruth had protested.
‘One minds less about things. That’s the only advantage I can think of. The rest is simply awful: aches and pains and waking up far too early and not being able to find one’s glasses and the worst thing is being so frightfully slow. One feels just as one has always felt, but it’s as if the handbrake’s been left on. I mean it’s a bore.’
Ruth did not find it so. She liked being at once busy and settled. She felt her life was richer than it had ever been, fuller and more rewarding.
At least once a month there were concerts in the town which they often went to, at the abbey or in the theatre. She and Ilse went to hear a visiting orchestra and choir perform Bach’s Magnificat, one November evening. It was a very cold night and cloudless; their breath fogged as it met the freezing air outside. Ilse had her old red knitted gloves already in the pocket of her coat, but Ruth couldn’t find hers, a nice pair made of soft grey leather lined with sheepskin, a present from Isobel.
‘Take these,’ said Ilse. ‘Your hands get colder than mine.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Ruth.
‘Sure,’ said Ilse. And she held the cuff of one of the gloves open, and Ruth wiggled her hand into the nubbly wool and then did the same with her left hand. On Ilse’s hand, holding the glove, was the sapphire and diamond ring which had belonged to Iris. Ilse had not gone in for jewellery, only occasionally wearing the cameo brooch she had inherited from her mother, leaving the rest of her things in the carved wooden box she had had since she was a girl. But she never took off the ring, even when she made pastry and the spaces between the tiny claws became clogged with flour paste, so that she had to use an old toothbrush to clean it. Ruth had blushed when her father, visiting for tea one day, had first seen it on her.
My Former Heart Page 22
