Cuckoo

by Wendy Perriam

  She closed her eyes again and the red letters slipped behind her eyelids and arranged themselves into wicked, unprintable messages. She smiled. She was wasting time, deliberately lolling about doing nothing, and actually enjoying it. There she was, sandwiched between Ned and the sun, with no clock except the sea, and no plans except allowing one luxurious moment to fall, fat and somnolent, against the next. She dared not move, lest the idyll shatter into a thousand jagged pieces. So long as she stayed still, she was like the picture on the jigsaw-puzzle box, a perfect copy of how the puzzle should come out – no cracks, no missing pieces. But if she stirred a finger, if she listened to the little voices nagging in her head, the whole day might break apart, and all she would have left would be a boxful of rattling cardboard cut-outs.

  Ned was lying half underneath her, her shadow turning him from gold to charcoal.

  ‘Your eyelashes curl,’ she murmured, tracing their barbed-wire fretwork on his cheek.

  ‘Mmmm’ – he fluttered them – ‘they badly need a cut. I suspect that’s the reason I can’t swim. They’re so thick, they drag me down.’

  ‘Boaster.’

  ‘Not!’

  ‘Are!’

  ‘Kiss me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please.’

  His mouth was so near, it was easier not to argue. His lips tasted salty. She could feel his body murmuring underneath her, his mouth opening and softening, his hands prowling along the hollow of her back. Her breasts were trying to reach him through the flimsy Union Jacks, pressing greedily against his chest. He was already growing out of his swim trunks. He was smaller than Charles, smaller everywhere. Her head reached higher up his body, so that when he kissed her, everything else seemed to fit together like another jigsaw puzzle. Little cardboard bumps fitting into slots and making a picture; unmatched lines and splodges joining up and forming a design; limbs slotting into limbs, heads into hollows. Neat, and very orderly. A million, billion gold stars. No – stars were Charles’ notion, and she mustn’t bring him into it. There was some new, raw excitement because this wasn’t Charles. For fifteen years, she’d closed her mind and mouth to any other man.

  ‘Men are all the same,’ Laura had shrugged, dismissing a score of lovers, as if they were frozen peas. But they weren’t the same. Ned even tasted different, stronger and sweatier, with a slight after-tang of brine. His body was different, easier to sprawl against, less of it to oppress and overwhelm her, the hair soft and strange against her stomach. He was licking the coils of her ear, his slow tongue meandering through a maze of pathways she’d never known were there. All the paths seemed to lead, dangerously, down between her legs. Her bikini bottom was shouting out rude words, egging him on. He shifted a thigh and let his damp swim trunks tease against hers. His tongue was busier further up. It had abandoned the ear for an armpit and was circling it in a tantalizing fugue. Charles had never included armpits in his timetable. She pushed the tongue away. She mustn’t think of timetables, or include Charles as a threesome. The whole idyll would collapse.

  She tried to close her mind against his name, to move out of her head again into the warm mix-and-match that was happening further down. Too late. All the pieces had already come apart. Charles had shaken up the puzzle and destroyed it. Even the sun had gone behind a cloud. She shivered. What in hell’s name was she doing? Defiling a public beach, when she herself was private property; wasting time, playing games. Her bikini was damp in wrong, accusing places; there was sand in her hair; she was faithless, childish, cheap.

  ‘No, Ned, no. Stop. Please.’

  She was already on her feet, pulling on her dress over the damp, drooping flags. Yet she didn’t want to ruin everything. She couldn’t bear to climb back into the control tower of her head and wrestle with guilt and doubt again. Or litter the beach with apologies and explanations. Or wrap warm, simple things in Charles’ fulminating phrases. Why couldn’t Charles stay in Nassau? He had his own beach there, for heaven’s sake.

  Ned groped to a sitting position. ‘What’s wrong, love? Did I press the wrong button?’ He grabbed the last, jammiest knob of swiss roll and crammed it in his mouth. She had expected hurt pride and reproaches, and there he was, cheerfully munching, as if a botched kiss were no more important than a broken shell. She loved him for it, for being so easy and greedy and relaxed, for not wrecking everything with complaints, recriminations. She was still Franny – his T-shirt said so. He had pulled it on again, and was doing a cartwheel on the sand.

  ‘Let’s go on the pier,’ he said, as he landed wrong side up. ‘I’ll show you where I used to fish. I caught my first bass from Brighton pier – a six pounder. It took me twelve minutes to land it. I was half dead when I reeled it in, and d’you know what …?’

  ‘What?’ She looked at his mouth in astonishment. How could it chew swiss roll and chatter on about bass, when it had just made her whole body turn cartwheels itself?

  ‘I had an eight-ounce pout-whiting on one hook and a five-and-a-half pound chunk of driftwood on the other. I’ve never liked whiting since. I cook it for the cats. Tell you what, though, I’ll win you a goldfish on the rifle range. I’m a crack shot with a rifle.’

  He carried the goldfish back on the train in a jam jar. He had already christened it Edward. ‘We’ll give it gender confusion if it turns out to be a girl. But if I call it Franny, I’ll spend my whole life trying to catch it. Or end up in the jam jar, sharing the same waterlily leaf.’

  She didn’t answer. She liked the crazy, dangerous things he said, but it was almost time to veto them. She was hanging on to the last dregs of Franny before all-change at Victoria. She didn’t want to talk, just shut her eyes and lean against his shoulder. He still felt strange, after Charles. She was always looking up to Charles. Her head only reached his heart, so he made her feel frail and over-mastered. With Ned she felt equal. He was taller than her, but not king-sized, god-sized. Only a Puck, an Ariel, a lion-eyed leprechaun who had cast a spell over her and turned her from Snow Queen to changeling.

  Snow Queens didn’t eat chips out of newspaper or scream in ghost trains or buy hats that said ‘Kiss me slow’. Snow Queens would never deign to travel second-class to Brighton, in the first place. A town so tawdry, so blatant, a carbuncle on the coast, where tired insurance clerks took tarnished secretaries. Brighton was a joke, a nudge in the ribs, a dirty postcard. There were better parts, of course – the Lanes, the University, the Egon Ronay-recommended restaurants, the quieter streets of Hove. But Ned hadn’t even glanced at them. Ned had chosen pier and promenade, candyfloss and jellied eels, paddle boats and palmists.

  ‘I see romance with a fair young stranger,’ whispered Madame Astra from her plastic silver ball. ‘And twins.’

  They’d laughed about the twins, but her heart had shifted into bottom gear. Twins meant charts and Clomid – subjects she had banned today. With Ned she felt at least two decades younger, too young and irresponsible to have children of her own. A whole day had passed and she hadn’t even thought about fertility. There wasn’t a baby in the whole of teeming Brighton. Strange, when every other Richmond resident was pregnant or a pram-pusher.

  She sat on her bed back home and uncapped the Clomid. Day Seven. She tipped a smooth white tablet into the palm of her hand. How could something little bigger than an aspirin make her a mother? She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be one. There were other, crazier things she wanted first – forbidden Franny things. The tablet was as heavy as a ball and chain, all the responsibilities of motherhood weighing like a burden. She’d passed Magda’s room and stopped for a moment outside the locked door. Brighton slowly seeped away. It had been only a snapshot, a mirage. She was Frances now, back with the permanence of hate.

  She slipped into her Harrods housecoat, and dropped her damp, dishevelled beach-clothes into the laundry basket. She showered the sand away and removed Ned’s mouth with the electric toothbrush and the Listerine. Now, sterilized and plaque-free, she sat waiting for Charles’ call.
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  It came, dead on ten, as promised. He was phoning from the lawyers’ chambers, where he was filling in the background to the case. It was still only teatime in Nassau, and he had several hours of gruelling paperwork in front of him. His voice was jaded, faint.

  Yes, the flight had been fine; yes, Nassau was stifling; no, Oppenheimer was still in Buenos Aires. And how about her? Had she had a good day? Frances tried to remove the Brighton grin. Not bad, on the whole. Yes, of course she was missing him; no, she wouldn’t forget to cancel his dental appointment; no, she hadn’t played golf today.

  ‘Where tomorrow?’ Ned had asked, when he kissed her goodbye in a doorway off Victoria. ‘Kempton Park, Kew Gardens, tea with the Queen at Windsor?’

  ‘Windsor,’ she said. ‘Tea with you.’

  ‘You’re on!’ He doubled the kiss. ‘Hot buttered Franny on toast.’

  ‘Try to get out a bit,’ murmured Charles, between the pips. ‘It’ll do you good.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Frances, straightening the L to R directory, so that it lay at a perfect right-angle to the desk.

  ‘Yup,’ repeated Franny, doodling a six-pound goldfish on the cover, in wild red biro.

  ‘Love you.’

  ‘Love you, too.’ She was talking to the goldfish.

  Chapter Thirteen

  They took it in turns to choose. On Ned days, they went by train to street markets and to stock-car racing, with shandy and fish-paste sandwiches in a plastic bag, and on Franny days, they drove to Windsor or Henley and picnicked on chicken breasts and Chardonnay. By the end of the week, Franny was buying shop-made Cornish pasties and Ned had tried his hand at making pâté. It was a sort of holiday. Magda stayed at Viv’s, and Frances told lies about doing freelance work in London for a week. And yet Magda was the reason for it all.

  Every time they met, they started with Magda. It was the first part of the ritual, which excused and justified the rest. With Magda away, Frances could hardly remember why the child had seemed so unendurable. She’d cleared away her things, which had strayed all over the house; her comic books littering the drawing-room, half-eaten bars of chocolate stuffed in the sideboard drawers. She sent her clothes to the cleaners, first removing stones and chewing-gum from torn and grubby pockets. It seemed wrong, in a way, to be rifling through the girl’s possessions. And yet it was only because she longed to know her better, find some vital clue to this reserved and secret creature. The child was like her father, both of them closed and secretive. Magda had arrived with almost nothing, no photographs or books, or treasures, nothing personal, revealing. The things she owned now were mostly gifts from Charles: the leather-bound stamp album, the set of encyclopaedias, the French course on cassette. There was nothing else, except a letter in a cheap blue envelope. She recognized the writing – it was Viv’s. Why in heaven’s name was Viv in correspondence with the kid, when she had her in her house half the time? It was shameful to read other people’s letters, something not even Frannys did, let alone Frances Parry Jones. The letter looked like Viv herself, sprawling, untidy and badly put together. She unfolded it uneasily.

  ‘Darling Wombat’. A double shock, a darling first, and then a nickname. She herself never called Magda darling, and even her Magdas sounded wary and steel-tipped. But Wombat was a pet name, a cosy and affectionate one. Whatever was a wombat? She’d heard the word before, in connection with a zoo. She looked it up in Magda’s encyclopaedia, the pages so immaculate she doubted if the girl had ever opened it.

  ‘An Australian marsupial mammal of the family Phascolomyidae.’ No wonder Magda didn’t like encyclopaedias – they made everything sound fossilized. ‘Thick, clumsy body, coarse hair, rough to the touch, small mean eyes, naked ugly muzzle.’ But that was nothing like Magda; Magda was beautiful. How could she stay with a woman who insulted her by calling her a wombat? She read on. ‘A solitary nocturnal animal, reserved and retiring.’ That was more like it. ‘The wombat wreaks so much damage on cultivated pastures, it has been widely destroyed and persecuted.’ A brute beleaguered pest, tamed and loved by Viv, kept as a pet in one home, when it had been snared and wounded in another. Not an insult, but a declaration of love.

  She tried not to read the rest of the letter. It was too intimate, too painful. ‘Little one,’ Viv called her. ‘You know I care about you.’ How dare she care! And Magda wasn’t little – she was a great hulking colt of a creature. ‘Remember what I told you …’ What had Viv told her, and why were they having secrets from her? How did Viv communicate, when she had failed? Love for Viv was something everyday and plentiful, dollops of it larded over everything like cheap strawberry jam. Love in the Parry Jones establishment was rarer; rationed; measured out like caviare, in tiny, precious portions.

  Frances dropped the letter miserably back on to the desk. She’d tried, for God’s sake, even read books on parenting and puberty. She’d coached Magda in history and offered to cook her favourite food. But Magda didn’t have a favourite; didn’t want her fancy dishes, or anything to do with her. The studio was empty now. The cornflowers had disappeared with the lipstick, under a wash of bland new paint. Magda had turned herself into Viv’s daughter and gone off to be a wombat.

  She always seemed more like a cuckoo, a rapacious, gatecrasher bird, taking over someone else’s nest. Almost absent-mindedly, she replaced the W volume of the encyclopaedia and took out the C to D, leafing through the prim, print-crowded pages from Crusades to Cubism. She stopped at Cuculus.

  ‘A shy, brown, undistinguished, often furtive bird.’ Yes, that was all more or less correct. ‘A summer visitor to these islands’ – right again – ‘it departs for warmer climes in early September.’ (Would to God it did!) ‘Famed for its habit of brood parasitism, the mother cuckoo selects its victim, then destroys or devours one of the host bird’s eggs, to make room for its own.’

  Frances stared at the drawing of the cruel, predatory female stalking towards an unprotected nest. Wasn’t it symbolic, somehow? The very word ‘victim’ was strangely apt. She had always felt duped and oppressed by Piroska. By infiltrating an alien chick into the nest, she had somehow destroyed her own capacity to be a mother in her turn.

  No, that was quite unfair. She was taking her Clomid, wasn’t she, preparing herself to conceive this very month, only days from ovulation. It was absurd to draw analogies between a cuculid parasite following its instinct, and a human child deprived of her natural rights. She tried not to see the drawing of a doting and devoted robin perched on the baby cuckoo’s back, feeding it a grub. ‘The fledgeling cuckoo soon grows larger than its foster mother.’ Well, that was true, at least. Magda towered above her, made her look puny and insignificant. ‘It rarely receives attention from its real parents.’ How could it, when one of them was whoring in Hungary, and the other truant in Nassau? All the more reason for it to have the full devotion of its foster mother. But Frances was no tireless robin or self-sacrificing pipit. And there was no precedent in bird life for a fledgeling to fly away to another nest.

  ‘I’ve failed, Ned,’ Frances muttered, when they were climbing Box Hill with ice cream cornets and a home-made kite. ‘Magda doesn’t even want to live with us. I can’t get close to her at all. Do you realize, I’ve never so much as kissed her goodnight. And yet she lets Viv give her bear hugs. How does Viv do it, Ned, when I can’t even touch her?’

  Ned swapped cornets. His was three-quarters finished and hers was melting. ‘Viv’s not married to Charles,’ he said. ‘Viv’s not beautiful and talented. Viv’s got Bunty.’

  He didn’t add ‘Viv doesn’t live in a showcase, or polish up her own swingeing version of the ten commandments. She’s a mother and you’re a monster.’ He didn’t even insinuate that she hadn’t kissed him goodnight, either. He could have hinted that she was the one who was scared of touching. She loved him because he didn’t. In all the five days they’d been out and about together, he never nagged or criticized, or made everything complicated and accusing. Even when she shied away from him – his mou
th, his dangerous body – he only grinned and teased her, and called her a gazelle or a unicorn. She let him hold her hand because he did it so matter-of-factly, and she allowed their bodies to touch and overlap a little, when they lay down to capture a view or digest their sandwiches. It seemed churlish to make a fuss about simple, easy things. She had to repay him with something, when he gave her so much time and understanding, listened unendingly to her fears about Magda. She knew he wanted more, impossibly more, but she tried to close her mind to it.

  Brighton had been a dangerous precedent. She had been knocked off guard by sun and sleep, and then her own body had betrayed her. She almost marvelled at it. It seemed like someone else’s flesh and blood, doing things spontaneous and sensual, without a nagging chaperon. But once was enough. Her body belonged to Charles and was trying to have his baby. It had no right to jaunt off on its own and help itself to barren pleasures.

  Sometimes she longed to tell Ned everything. But how could she trot out Mr Rathbone, when Ned was playing hopscotch at the zoo, or launch into the topic of infertility when they were sitting in a teashop with butter dripping down their chins? They had constructed a Peter-Pan-and-Wendy world where grown-up subjects didn’t stand a chance. It suited her, in fact; a never-never land, where the nevers weren’t real and chilling as they were with Charles.

  ‘We’ll never have a baby,’ she felt like shouting at him on the phone, when he rang so punctiliously from Nassau. It was already day eleven, so they should have been making love by now. It was so damned difficult explaining, long-distance, that her egg was bursting to be fertilized, primed and prepared by Clomid, waiting to turn them into pedigree parents, if only he weren’t five thousand miles away. There were just three more days to go, three crucial, desperate days, before the whole thing was too late, the egg dead and dissipated. He must be back, he must be.