Little Bits of Baby

by Patrick Gale

  Jake’s briefcase was stainless steel with black rubber lining and handles. Candida had bought it for his thirtieth birthday. It held special compartments for his newspaper and car keys but he never used these as it made the case look too empty. Floor-to-ceiling Japanese sliding doors separated his office from the conference room where they would hold tomorrow’s working breakfast. If both doors were slid far to one side they uncovered a small fridge and drinks cabinet, slid in the other direction, they revealed a hidden wardrobe. He took his lightweight overcoat and left the office. Joy had collected his squash kit from the cleaners in her lunch hour. He found the bag beneath her desk and slung it inside the briefcase on his way to the lift.

  Jake had been playing secret squash games with Robin’s father ever since Robin ran away to be a monk. They knew each other vaguely before that, of course; from the countless holiday evenings Robin and Jake had sat out at the Maitlands’ kitchen table setting the world to rights. Peter would wander in apologetically in search of his crossword or reading glasses. Jake would give him a polite good evening and Robin would tease him gently and offer him a beer, but Peter rarely stayed and never for long. Jake had often been the Maitlands’ guest, but he had avoided moments alone with the grown-ups. He used to lie awake in his room until Robin came in to find him, then spend the day trailing in Robin’s wake.

  Then Jake and Candida. Well. Then It had happened and Robin had run away and they had all done Finals and Jake and Candida had got married. The news about Robin joining a monastery had filtered through. Jake forgot how exactly. They had all been slightly shocked at this apparent about-turn in Robin’s principles, but their surprise was tempered with relief that he had not committed suicide as they had begun to fear, or run off with someone neither of them had met, as a kind of revenge. For some time after this, Jake had been meaning to pay a call on the Maitlands to make his peace, not least because locals were saying great things of the progressive kindergarten they had started and Candida was keen to send Jasper there when he was old enough, but Jake lacked courage. In the end it had been Candida, arguably in the more awkward position, who had broken the radio silence, driving over with cool impatience to the old Clapham house where she had spent so many childhood afternoons, and enrolling Jasper for the coming Autumn.

  The squash games had been Peter’s initiative. He had rung Jake at the office one day, out of the blue and suggested they meet for a talk. Flustered (he did not have an office to himself at that stage), Jake had suggested they have a drink together after work. Then Peter had pointed out that he no longer drank and made the counter-suggestion of a game of squash. Although he had opted out of the City, he retained the life membership he had taken out to a sports club along with the other stress sufferers.

  ‘I don’t play,’ Jake protested.

  ‘I’ll teach you,’ Peter replied. ‘The club’ll rent you a racquet until you’re sure you want to carry on.’

  Jake was fairly fit, but his jogging sessions were intermittent at best, and fell off with the onset of colder weather. He tended to clumsiness and had a horror of ridicule but as soon as he saw Peter waiting for him at the club doors, greying and with that familiar unfocussed look to him, he realised that this was as much an effort for the father as for the son’s friend-as-was. They talked of nothing in particular while changing and, as soon as they were closeted in their court, talked only of the rules of the game. Peter was an adept teacher, Jake an attentive pupil and they managed to fit in a first match before their time was up. The changing-rooms were crowded when they had finished and the two men showered and dressed in shy silence.

  ‘Want to go for a drink?’ Jake asked as they left. ‘An apple juice, or something?’

  ‘Better not. I’ve got to get home. Do you want to play again next week?’

  ‘Why not? I certainly need it,’ Jake replied and made an exaggerated mime of panting, still feeling ill-at-ease. ‘Same time?’

  ‘Yes. Jake?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘This sounds a bit strange but I didn’t tell Robin’s mother I was meeting you and I’m not going to. Not yet, at least.’

  His oddly distant way of referring to his wife took Jake back years.

  ‘Would you rather I didn’t tell Candida?’

  ‘Heavens no. I mean, that’s your affair. But I’d rather she didn’t tell any … Actually yes, it would be easier if you didn’t. Would you mind very much?’

  ‘No.’ Jake chuckled, strangely elated. ‘After all, I’m sure there are things she doesn’t tell me.’

  ‘If you like,’ Peter had offered, ‘You could keep your kit in my locker. I hide my squash racquet here. Andrea thinks it’s one of those games that give you heart attacks so I just pretend I’m going to a gym.’

  ‘No, thanks. If she asks, I can just say I’m playing with someone from work.’

  And they parted until the same time the next week. It was Jake’s first deception of his wife. Although merely a trifling omission and nothing that he needed to cover up with complicated falsehoods, the accumulative deceit as, weekly, he deleted an hour from the account of his day, had come to weigh as heavily on his conscience as a full-blown love affair. (Not that he had pursued any such indulgence beyond the requirements of good manners.)

  Seven years and some three hundred games later, Peter and he still pent up their meetings within the bare requirements of their sport, still held off from sharing so much as a carrot juice on leaving the club. They talked more though, not least because each was now considerably fitter and capable of panting more than half-sentences as he played. Curiously enough, the aggressions of the game did not prevent them from confessing their fears and weaknesses. Each now knew most, if not all there was to know about the other’s marriage. The most important of their conversations however, dealt not with their women but with the son and friend whose absence had brought them such intimacy. Peter had admitted that he was partly to blame for Robin’s inability to cope with life as the majority lived it. He had treated him too much as a son, he said, as someone who brought home school reports and prizes and made severe demands on a household budget; he had neglected to view him as an emergent adult. He confessed that the idea of having a child’s respect had always frightened him out of getting too close to Robin.

  Jake’s birthday fell a few weeks after their first secret encounter. Peter had a parcel delivered to Jake’s office. It was a squash racquet. The accompanying card was addressed ‘to my almost-son’, a phrase so weighted with need that Jake was tempted to cry off from their next appointment. He had an alarming four successive nights of most unsatisfactory sex with Candida, however, and Peter was the only person with whom such things could be discussed. He sent him a thank-you card (disguised with brown envelope and typing as some kind of bill) addressing him as ‘my nearly-father’ and their relationship became a sealed thing. He kept the racquet in the boot of his car; not hidden exactly, but undisclosed.

  This was the first time that Peter had come to find Jake at his office. They had always met at the club. Seeing him here, sunk in one of the foyer’s leather sofas beneath a shimmering ficus benjamina, pretending to read a magazine, Jake thought he now knew how a philandering husband must feel when his mistress comes out into the open to force his hand.

  Peter fairly leaped up when he saw him approach. He laughed. Jake had never seen him this happy.

  ‘What a surprise finding you here,’ Jake said. ‘Is everything OK?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Fine. You look well. Are you well?’

  ‘Couldn’t be better. Well I could. I’m knackered.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Jake, I know it’s not, well, not what we normally do but do you think we could skip squash for once and go for a drink?’

  ‘Of course. There’s a place next door. Come on.’ He followed Peter through a revolving door and led him into the bar in the basement of the next building. He knew the management there so when he asked for the music to be turned d
own, it was. ‘Are you sure everything’s OK?’ he asked Peter as they perched on their stools.

  ‘Sure I’m sure, it’s just that I’ve got some news for you that wouldn’t wait.’

  ‘What?’ Jake asked, but Peter was talking to the barman.

  ‘Yes,’ he said peering closely at a cocktail menu. ‘Could I have this vegetable pick-me-up thing only without the vodka?’

  ‘Certainly, Sir,’ said the barman. ‘Usual for you, Jake?’

  ‘Yup,’ said Jake and turned back to Peter. ‘So tell.’

  ‘Andrea talked to Robin this morning.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Fine. But he’s coming home.’

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘Mmh.’

  ‘I mean,’ Jake went on, ‘Great. Great for you, I mean. Andrea must be thrilled.’

  ‘She is,’ said Peter. ‘So am I.’

  ‘Yes, and Candida will be glad to have got him as a godparent. He did agree to be one, didn’t he?’

  ‘Oh yes. No problems there, I think.’

  ‘All the same.’

  ‘Mmh. Quite.’ They fell briefly silent, and to watching the barman whizz up a mixture of carrot, celery, tomato and ice in his kelvinator.

  ‘When’s he coming back?’ Jake asked finally.

  ‘Soon. Any day now, I suppose. Maybe tomorrow. It hasn’t really sunk in yet. Andrea only told me at lunchtime and I’ve spent the afternoon visiting Marcus.’

  ‘How’s he? I should have asked earlier.’

  ‘Oh. Fine. That’s to say, he’s probably dying again and that’s fine by him. He looks awful.’

  ‘Poor old chap.’

  ‘He’s not that old actually. He must be about my age, well, maybe a few years older. He’s aged so much these last few months, though; to look at him, you’d think he was my father.’

  They drew themselves up slightly as the barman interrupted.

  ‘One vegetable pick-me-up, no vodka.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Peter.

  ‘And one usual.’

  ‘Great.’ Jake’s usual was a whisky sour made with bourbon. He raised his glass to Peter. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Peter, and drank.

  ‘God!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This is the first time I’ve ever had a drink with you outside of Clapham eight or nine years ago.’

  ‘So it is.’

  ‘It feels strange. As I was coming down in the lift – you’ll think this is weird – but I suddenly thought it was rather like being accosted in the open by one’s bit-on-the side. Not that you are; it’s just how I felt.’

  ‘Yes I am. In a way.’

  ‘Can I tell Candida now?’

  ‘Is that wise? I’d have thought she’d be rather hurt.’

  ‘Not about all the rest, just the drink. After all, if Robin’s coming back to be Perdita’s godfather we’ll all be meeting up soon anyway. It’s the perfect moment to drop the cover. I’ll say that you just rang up to tell me the good news and that we had a drink.’

  ‘I suppose I should tell Andrea too. Which reminds me.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘I’m meeting her at the cinema in half an hour.’

  ‘Whereabouts? I can drop you off.’

  ‘Thanks, but there’s no need. I can walk, it’s only Soho.’

  ‘Ah. Peter?’

  ‘Mmh?’

  ‘Is he coming back for good? Does this mean that he’s giving up Whelm?’

  Peter stared at his nearly empty glass, sloshing the vegetable dregs from one side to another.

  ‘I don’t honestly know. Would you rather he didn’t?’ Jake met his gaze and gave his board meeting laugh; half cough, half throat-clearance. ‘Mmh. Don’t answer that,’ said Peter and smiled. ‘When’s the christening?’

  ‘Whichever Saturday we can all manage to be in the same place at the same time. If he’s coming home straight away, probably the Saturday after this.’

  ‘Right.’ Peter paused then pulled a mock-innocent face. ‘Are we invited?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Jake clapped him softly on the shoulder, ‘Of course you are.’ He chuckled.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘I was just thinking. We’ll both have to be awfully careful to act as though we haven’t met up in years.’

  ‘It might take the girls in but Robin takes a lot of fooling,’ said Peter.

  ‘That had crossed my mind. Oh Christ.’ Peter stood and took out his wallet. ‘No. Don’t,’ Jake told him, waving a hand. ‘I earn more than you.’

  Peter held out a note, grinning.

  ‘We’re putting the fees up in the Spring.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Jake, making a playful show of snatching the note. Then he stood too and pushed Peter’s hand away. ‘No. Go on,’ he said, ‘Look on it as part-payment for my first squash lesson. Enjoy the film. What are you seeing?’

  ‘Le Financier Aveugle.’

  ‘Isn’t that meant to be a bit grim?’

  ‘Terribly.’ They laughed and this time Peter clapped Jake on the shoulder. ‘We’ll speak,’ he said, and left Jake alone with his whisky sour.

  Jake gulped most of his drink and, for the first time since a brief flare-up when Candida first announced her christening plans, entertained thoughts of Robin. He remembered a gangling frame astride a speeding bicycle, one arm dangerously hampered by a clutch of library books. A broad grin and a wild cry of,

  ‘No brakes!’

  Unreadable blue eyes that sought his own too often for comfort. A bold tenor voice that wavered when reading aloud. Deafening bach choral music dropped suddenly in volume for the same voice to say, ‘Come in’. A huge, sunny room with a view onto a river, every surface collaged with open books, dust, forgotten biscuits, petals of dying flowers, candles tampered into sculpture and clothes thrown aside in mock despair. He remembered a mess of oranges on a lawn; orange after orange diligently skinned until a whole peel could be removed to form an unbroken J. He remembered Candida laughing in a wild, infectious way she never did after she married him and felt a kind of expectation that had grown so long unfamiliar that it hurt him.

  Six

  Watched by her attentive dog, Andrea stood and glared at her full-length reflection. A few months ago she had finally taken the hint her mother had been giving her Christmas after Christmas in the shape of panty-girdles for the filling figure. Peter had laughed when he first found a pair discarded in the top of the laundry basket. He called them her ‘power pants’. She preferred not to speak of them at all. In an effort to be supportive, Peter had suggested they keep her mother’s beige and cream ones for emergency rations, and go shopping in search of something in a sexier colour. Black or red or vivid purple.

  ‘Look on them as an architect would,’ he suggested. ‘If you’ve got to have something that big, you might as well make a feature of it.’

  Andrea shifted position slightly, with a critical frown, and regarded this new feature in her design. Her bottom never used to be large. It wasn’t especially large now, but it had begun to relax slightly, like a neglected pear. She turned sideways on to the looking-glass and touched her breasts. She had always been proud of her breasts. Peter had always been proud of her breasts. Not too small, not too large, and firm as twin nectarines. They had begun to deflate. Looking at her silhouette now, Andrea thought she resembled some inflatable doll that swelled at her points of least resistance so that, on deflating her breasts with a cruel squeeze one could watch her buttocks swell and spread. She cupped each breast in a hand then, having raised them to their former level, let them flop. Her dog yawned, barked once then twisted around for a brief, ungainly washing of genitalia.

  ‘Oh, all right, Brevity, I’m coming,’ Andrea answered her and, turning away from her reflection, tugged back on a discreetly cantilevered bra and light summer dress. ‘Who wants to see your mistress naked anyway?’

  She fell onto her knees with a grunt and rooted in the dusty jum
ble under the bed for her walking shoes. Peter still remembered to undress her occasionally, but he no longer so much as blushed as he did so; even her bosom-weary gynaecologist Dr Jhabvala showed more excitement at her unpeeling. Finding a long-lost shoe-tree of Peter’s, she tossed it to his side, then sat on the bed’s edge to lace her suede brogues. She knew that they looked strange beneath a floral print but they were comfortable; now that the rot had set in with power pants and Brunei bras, she had decided to carry the look through.

  Brevity frisked and danced a yard or two ahead as Andrea walked downstairs, picked up her cardigan and some stale bread and left the house. Then, clipped onto her fine leather plait of a lead, she trotted obediently to one side, pausing only once, politely to pee in the gutter. She was a Japanese spitz, a half-size version of the pomeranians painted with such uncharacteristic wit by Gainsborough, but larger and more robust than their papillon kin. Andrea hated small dogs but had bought her on impulse when Robin went away to Whelm. Brevity was eight; fifty-six in dog years. Dogs were banned on Whelm, which was a nature reserve, so Robin could never have seen her, even had Andrea braved a second visit. The wholly undoggy Peter had been won over in minutes. He lavished half-an-hour each evening on brushing Brevity’s coat and taking her for a late night walk. He had dubbed her, ‘The child of our menopause’, meaning Andrea’s.

  Andrea walked up The Chase and onto the common. Faber had said he would drag his daughter out on their tandem for some exercise and would meet Andrea by the duck pond, so she let Brevity off the lead and struck out in that direction, stale bread swinging in a bag at her side. She had first got to know Faber when he enrolled Iras in the kindergarten. The fashionable epithet, ‘visually-disadvantaged’ would have been a cruel euphemism applied to this little girl. Deprived by some genetic freak not only of sight but of eyes, Iras’s American parents had put her up for adoption at birth and she had been nearly four when she found a home with Faber. There was nothing ugly about her disability since she still had eyelids and lashes, permanently closed over rounded bony shells where her eyes would have been. At worst, she resembled an animated sleepwalker. Faber had wanted Iras to have as normal an education as possible and Andrea had felt that it would be educative for the other children to have a disabled friend. The arrangement had thrived for a month or two – it was astonishing to see the games infants could invent that didn’t involve sight – but it soon became clear that Iras was compensated for her blindness with a prodigiously fast brain. She was learning braille in outside lessons and was already leaving her contemporaries far behind in spelling, vocabulary and grammar. In the end her boredom became disruptive and Faber had been obliged to send her to a specialist school and an outside tutor.