by Rosie Thomas
‘Col, thank you, but I can’t afford it,’ was Polly’s automatic response.
‘It’s my treat, and you can’t refuse,’ he told her. ‘Please? I want you to so much.’
‘So do I,’ she said in a rush. ‘Let me ask Selwyn.’
When he woke up, Selwyn rubbed his jaw and yawned. ‘Why not?’ he muttered.
Why not, Polly mutely echoed. She was quite well aware that self-denial was not always a gift to other people.
Bountiful hot water gushed from the taps of the hotel bathroom. Steam rose and silvered the mirrored walls.
Polly ruffled the piles of soft white towels, opened the complimentary jars of creams and sniffed them, smoothing lotion into her winter-chapped hands. Colin cleared a swathe of mirror so they could examine their faces. Her reflection glowed at his.
‘Look at me,’ she cried. ‘I’m not wearing a jumper. I can put my hand down here, like this, and hey presto, it’s not covered in muck. I can run a hot bath, or even two if I feel like it. You can’t imagine what a joy this is, Col. Thank you.’
She swaddled herself in the white towelling bathrobe.
‘Everything is so clean and shiny. I love it. You’re very generous.’
‘Why generous, since I’m getting exactly what I want?’ he grinned.
It wasn’t generosity, he knew that much. He had more than enough money. Coming back to Mead, as he had been doing for the past three months, had given him more of a sense of home than he had known for a long time. It was Polly who was the kernel of that homeliness, and he wanted to make some return to her.
He was increasingly aware that there were invisible triangulations between Polly and Miranda and Selwyn, and he believed it would be good for his old friend to have a change of scene and some looking-after for a day or two.
‘Look at me,’ she sighed. Gingerly she held up a hank of her hair between two fingers, then let it fall again.
‘You need a haircut and a manicure, that’s all. See?’ He drew back the offending hair and tilted her face. ‘You know, Poll, to me you don’t look one bit like a grandmother.’
She had told him about the chance encounter with Nic in the bar, and how she and Miranda and Katherine had taken her back to the Knights’ Bloomsbury flat for supper and the solidarity of women.
Since then Polly had dialled the mobile number several times a day, but never got beyond the voicemail service. She was forced to admit that Nic had conclusively vanished again.
‘I’m going to be a grandmother soon enough,’ she said now to Colin. ‘If Nic will let me be, that is.’
A knock on the door turned out to be room service, with a silver ice bucket and a bottle of champagne.
‘We’ll drink this, then we’re going out to dinner,’ Colin told her.
They stood at the window with their drinks, gazing down into Park Lane. The trees were ethereal clouds of tiny fairy-lights, backed by the glowing river of evening traffic. Beyond that lay the massy darkness of the park. Polly breathed in Colin’s scent of clean shirt and citrus cologne. She went on sipping champagne and silently admiring the view with him at her side, like an old couple who no longer need to converse because each already knows what the other is thinking. Two trees with their roots entwined, bending away from the wind, Polly thought. Mercurial, demanding Selwyn never made her feel like a tree. Life with him could be nourishing, or famishing, but it was never tranquil. She needed him physically and mentally, like needing a fix, but there was never peace.
It didn’t take more than a single glass of alcohol these days to make her knees melt. She half-closed her eyes and the moving lights became a glittering snake.
‘I’m so happy,’ she sighed.
She meant it lightly, but it came to her that the simplicity of being here with Colin was as near to real happiness as she could hope to come these days.
‘What’s Selwyn doing with himself while you are away?’ Colin asked. His thoughts seemed to follow the route that hers had taken.
‘What he’s always doing. It doesn’t matter that Amos is out of the race to get a habitable home at Mead, it doesn’t even matter that there never really was a race. Selwyn has created this imaginary challenge for himself, and he’s going to be the winner even though there isn’t another competitor in the field. By December the twenty-fourth I can guarantee you that all the bedrooms will have glass in the windows, there’ll be at least one functioning bathroom and a log fire burning, the children will come for Christmas, Sel will be the paterfamilias and that will be QED from him.’
‘Is that so?’
Polly’s mouth curved. ‘The barn will be habitable, yes. I expect Alph and Omie to come, although Alph’s got this new boyfriend she seems to have fallen in love with. Omie’s Tom goes to Ireland, to his own parents. Ben’s never predictable. Especially as he’s so distraught about Nic.’
It seemed to Colin that the dramas of Davies family life continued, as always.
‘Why is Christmas so important?’ he wondered. ‘Miranda wants me to help her to decorate the house. We have to start by going into the woods to cut sheaves of ivy and mistletoe, apparently. She wants there to be a Boxing Night party. The guests confirmed so far are her, me and Joyce.’
Miranda had telephoned each of them to say that Joyce was definitely going to be discharged from hospital the next day, and they planned to come straight home to Mead.
Polly’s features narrowed to slits as she laughed.
‘Are we Davieses invited?’
‘Expected, I’d say.’
They talked about how Miranda was eager to create a big, sprawling, boisterous family Christmas. It would symbolize the new Mead, and she was determined that this was how it should be because Jake had never wanted such a thing, and because she had no children of her own, and because she was so anxious for her great experiment not to break up into the fragments of splintering families before it had properly got under way.
‘That’s what I mean about Christmas,’ Colin groaned. ‘It bears far too much weight on its knock-kneed, tinselly little legs. It isn’t too late for you and me to just skip away to Goa together, you know.’
Polly shook her head. ‘Can’t do that. And I like Christmas just the way it is, quarrels and family dramas and all.’
Was that strictly true, this year? Perhaps not. A sense of foreboding fluttered beneath her diaphragm.
Quickly she added, ‘Anyway, Katherine’s the one likely to be shedding responsibility for the familial turkey and trimmings and slipping off with another man. We can’t all do it.’
Swearing him to secrecy, she had told Colin about Katherine and her archaeologist. He hadn’t been all that surprised.
‘Where would they go? Looking at ruins somewhere?’
‘K and Mirry and I will do the ruins jokes for ourselves, thank you,’ Polly retorted.
‘All right. Amos will be with us, won’t he?’
‘Yes. I don’t know where else he would go.’
It was strange how quickly the ability to direct and determine seemed to have oozed out of Amos. He had become an almost pathetic figure. ‘I suppose Sam and Toby will rally round?’
‘I expect they will do absolutely the decent thing,’ Colin agreed.
Polly was still smiling vaguely at the dazzle of lights. ‘No doubt Miranda will organize us all.’
Colin drew in a breath as if to say something, but then he changed his mind. Instead he took the empty glass from her and put it aside.
‘Come on. The table’s booked. What are you going to wear?’
She made a dismal face.
‘My old black thing.’
‘Tomorrow. Shopping,’ he said, slicing a crisp shape in the air from her shoulders to her hips.
It was the middle of the next morning when they reached Selfridges. In Colin’s wake Polly zigzagged through the mobs on the overheated ground floor, breathing in walls of perfume as thick as stone slabs and blinking through her hangover at the glitter of lights and mirrors. In Colin�
��s company, her appetite kindled by his, she was invigorated by the infinity of choice. With a credit card in her purse any of these necklaces or face creams or jangly handbags could be hers, and the bills would come another day.
They stopped at a counter where Colin showed her the eye cream that he insisted on using himself. Examining his face as he demonstrated, she saw how losing weight had sculpted his cheekbones. Rimmed with tiny white dots of cream his dark eyes looked luminous and certainly quite free of surrounding wrinkles. He tapped the cream into his skin, using the very tips of his fingers.
Polly paid what seemed an extortionate price for a tiny pot of this elixir, and they headed for the escalator. In the men’s department she enlisted his help in finding a designer T-shirt that Ben wouldn’t dismiss as too gay.
She held one up for his approval. ‘What about this one?’
‘I’d wear it.’
‘Good.’
‘But Poll, I’m gay.’
Polly’s mobile rang. She glanced at the number and then dropped everything.
She gabbled, ‘Hello? Hello? Yes, I’m here. What is it? Listen to me, just tell me where you are. Wait, that’s only around the corner…’
Colin let his attention wander. Across the aisle an assistant in a tight black shirt was folding cashmere sweaters. Colin returned his half-smile but Polly shook him by the arm, summoning him back to earth.
‘We’ve got to go down to the café on the ground floor. Never mind the T-shirt. That was Nic.’
The café was crowded but they squirmed into a booth by a table covered with dirty crockery. There was a view down a shallow flight of stairs over a sea of heads. Everyone seemed to know where they were going. Nobody tripped or collided with anyone else, the tide just flowed to the refrain of piped Christmas carols. Then they both spotted the lone exception. One person stumbled towards them, creating a miniature whirlpool of turbulence in the steady current. She clawed her loose coat around her as passing heads turned to glance at her streaming face.
Polly bounced up out of her seat and dashed to meet her.
Nic was sobbing and incoherent. Between them, they guided her into a chair. Polly murmured reassurances and fed tissues into her hand while Colin managed to attract the attention of a waitress. He ordered tea, water, buttered toast.
‘Is it the baby?’ Polly whispered. Her face had gone grey under her make-up. ‘Nic? Tell me, is something wrong with the baby?’
The girl gasped and coughed, wadding up the tissues and pressing them into her eyes.
‘No. Except for me. I’m what’s wrong. Look at me. What kind of a mother will I be?’
Polly relaxed a little. She hugged the shuddering girl.
‘A good one. Of course you will. We’ll all help you.’
The tea and toast arrived with surprising speed. Colin poured a cup, laid a buttered slice close to Nic’s clenched fist.
‘Shall I leave you with her?’ he murmured.
No, stay, Polly signalled. If Nic made another dash for it, it would be easier if there were two of them in pursuit.
‘Drink some tea,’ she said firmly. ‘You’re all right here, with us. When you’re ready, tell us what’s happened. It won’t be anything we can’t handle.’
It took two cups of tea and most of the toast before they were able to piece together the story.
As part of her beauty therapy training Nicola had been on a week’s placement at an urban spa only two streets away from where they were now sitting. She had been giving a reflexology treatment to a woman who was also pregnant. As Nic described it, the customer had been a rich bitch. There were so many diamonds in her rings she couldn’t have lifted a finger even if she’d tried. Every item of clothing a look-at-me label. Bag worth two grand, which was more money than Nic had seen in three months. Complaining non-stop about how tired and uncomfortable she was. Sighing and fidgeting and prodding her BlackBerry.
‘Made me feel really crap. Said I was clumsy. Didn’t like a single thing I did for her.’
Then there had been a moment when Nic applied more pressure than was perhaps necessary to the arch of the customer’s pedicured foot. The woman jumped straight in the air and then started screaming her head off.
‘For God’s sake. What are you trying to do?’
Nic said she was only trying to release her qi; the customer exclaimed that she was massacring it.
Nic’s supervisor dashed in, the customer complained about being given a student to work on her, in her condition, and the spa manageress had to be called to placate her.
‘The manageress told me to go and sit in the staff room, and she’d come and see me,’ Nic said. She had gone in there to wait and caught sight of herself in the mirror.
‘I thought, I’m pregnant too. The only difference between us is she’s got plenty of money and everyone’s running around looking after her, while I’m bending over her feet and I’ve got nowhere to turn and I’m a useless therapist and how am I ever going to look after this baby?’
Nic had collected her coat and walked out of the spa without a word to anyone. Then she had found herself standing alone in the street. At that moment the only person she could think of to call had been Ben’s mother.
‘Thank God you did. It’s such a piece of luck I was right here,’ Polly said.
Nic blew her nose. ‘What were you doing?’
‘Christmas shopping.’
Nic’s eyes instantly refilled with tears. A couple of fat drops rolled down her cheeks. ‘Mary’s Boy Child’ arranged for the pan pipes drifted over their heads. Colin moved her cup so he could take her hand.
‘It’s the best time of year if you’re happy and with the people you love, and if you’re alone or hurting it’s the very worst. I’ve personally never been able to see the point of reflexology, by the way. It wouldn’t be my desert island treatment.’
Nic turned her head, and looked properly at him for the first time since Polly had made the introductions.
Polly said afterwards that it was like seeing someone recognizing a long-lost sibling, or understanding how to solve a quadratic equation after never having been able to do even basic maths. Nic just fell into adoration with Colin.
Polly would have been jealous, if she hadn’t understood exactly why any woman would be drawn to him.
Nic said slowly, ‘You’re right. Thanks for the toast. I was starving.’ She blotted the tears, and folded an arm protectively across her bump. ‘Which treatment would you choose, actually?’
He gave the question proper consideration.
‘Shiatsu.’
Later, when it became clear that Nic had no intention of ever going back to the spa, and was only temporarily lodging with friends on their sofa bed in the flat in Kilburn, they conferred about what was to be done. The result was that Polly telephoned the course organizer, and gave herself some authority to speak for Nic by introducing herself as the mother of Nic’s boyfriend. Nic shook her head and spluttered no, but Polly held up her hand to silence her. It was finally agreed that under the circumstances Nic should take some time out, and come back to resume her coursework in the New Year.
‘Ben and I split. It’s totally finished,’ Nic snapped.
‘I know that. But you’ve got to help us to help you,’ Polly said.
Colin interceded. He pointed out that so far the only purchase they had managed was one small pot of Eve Lom eye cream. He said that he would take Nic back to the hotel and let Polly get on with buying her presents. Anxiety leaped up in Polly at the thought of allowing the girl out of her sight again, but it was clear to Colin that Nic couldn’t be coerced or captured.
‘If you don’t mind spending the afternoon hanging out with me, that is?’ he said casually to Nic.
It was evident that she had no objection.
‘Buy that T-shirt for Ben,’ Colin advised as Polly departed.
Room service brought up another pot of tea with a plate of tiny triangle sandwiches and miniature mince pies. While they tal
ked, Nic devoured everything. Colin suspected that she hadn’t been taking proper care of herself.
‘Why are you all on your own like this, Nic? Where’s your own family? Is there anyone you can rely on?’
Her exact words, as he repeated them later to Polly, were that she didn’t want to rely on anyone, because no one was reliable, were they? Why place unreal expectations on the world?
Her mother was up in Liverpool, living with a boyfriend Nic didn’t like. She had left home at seventeen, to escape his predecessor, and there hadn’t been much communication since then between mother and daughter.
‘Does she know about the baby?’ Colin asked.
Nic shrugged. ‘No.’
‘Have you got any siblings?’
‘I had a younger brother. He was killed in a motorbike accident on the M56. He was on the pillion when he and his mate went straight under a truck.’
‘That’s very hard for you, Nic.’
She pushed the crumbs of the last mince pie into a heap in the centre of her plate.
‘Have you known anyone who was killed?’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘Well, then,’ she said. Her shoulders lost some of their rigidity. Colin lifted his arm an inch, and Nic slid a little closer to him.
‘So this will be your mother’s first grandchild. Don’t you think that will be important to her? You already know how much it means to Polly.’
She exhaled sharply. ‘My mother had me when she was sixteen,’ she said, as if this explained volumes. It told Colin enough for the time being.
He asked her about Ben, and why she had chosen to keep the baby but not the boyfriend.
‘I thought about having an abortion but I decided it was the wrong thing to do. Even my mother didn’t have one, which means I’m here now, doesn’t it? But as it is I’ll have the baby and myself to look after. I don’t need to add a third person to that list, do I?’
