The Family Gift

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘Want ice cream,’ announces Teddy. ‘Oh, swimming pool!’ She’d caught sight of the fountain.

  ‘That’s a special swimming pool only for fish,’ I say. ‘People are not allowed in it in case they stand on the fish.’ Being able to fib at short notice is a very important skill for a mother and I have the imagination for it.

  Dan keys in the number to the pad at the electric gate and it swings open seamlessly.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ says Lexi, awestruck, and I feel a shiver of alarm and annoyance. I thought we’d taught her that stuff like that doesn’t matter, that who you were was what was important. And yet here she is with her mouth open, looking at this house.

  Instead of having to wait to be let in by a butler, Adele Markham and her husband, William, whom I have always thought is straight from central casting from a Ralph Lauren advert stand at the open door. A coppery spaniel is at their feet, sitting perfectly.

  For once, unlike the times we have met her over the years when she’s been all done up, Adele has clearly dressed down – or her version of it. She’s wearing chinos and a white shirt with actual pearls around her neck. She looks anxious.

  She and William come forward, with the spaniel bounding up happily, ears and trailing dog fur flying.

  ‘A dog,’ cries Lexi and gets to her knees.

  ‘Welcome,’ says William.

  I think there are tears in his eyes but I don’t know him well enough to be sure.

  ‘This is Coco, who loves licking people. Hello, my dear Lexi. And you,’ he turns to Liam, ‘must be Liam.’ He holds out a polite hand to Liam.

  Liam, who has not done much hand-shaking, gives it a try.

  ‘And this delightful little girl must be Teddy,’ he says finally.

  ‘I’m hungry and I want a go in your swimming pool,’ says Teddy winningly, and she takes his hand and reaches over to his other one to examine his watch.

  I need to work on her ‘don’t talk to strangers’ thing but then again, we have been selling this visit as a ‘fun time’.

  Adele hugs Dan and approaches me before Lexi.

  She looks worried, I realise. Her eyes are a little red and there is a faint tremble in the hand she puts forward. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she says. ‘I do want this to work.’

  I allow myself to smile at her. Mama Lioness being cautious.

  Then she puts her other hand over mine. ‘Elisa’s not here.’

  She’s afraid, I think. Afraid that Elisa will ruin this fragile meeting and she will never see this precious granddaughter.

  ‘This is for Lexi, Adele,’ I whisper. ‘Elisa is only a small part of it. Lexi needs to see she has a family outside of Elisa.’

  Once Lexi and Liam have been hugged, we all follow Teddy into the house, where she is opening every door and blithely picking up every no doubt priceless ornament.

  The house is beautiful but the first thing I notice is all the pictures.

  They’re all over the walls, some black and white, some colour and they’re all beautifully arranged in a way that must have taken many hours to organise but comes naturally to interior designers. There are ones of two good-looking men from boyhood to adulthood, complete with their weddings and lovely shots of gorgeous boys who are older than Lexi. Then there’s Elisa in all sorts of various guises from her early days as a schoolgirl to even ones of her marriage to Dan.

  ‘Look, look there’s Elisa and Dad.’

  ‘Family’s important,’ says Adele, standing behind her granddaughter and looking as if she wants desperately to touch her but dare not. I feel the guilt of having kept this woman out of Lexi’s life for so long apart from an hour every Christmas.

  ‘But there aren’t any of me,’ says Lexi.

  ‘There are when you were little,’ says Adele evenly and she leads Lexi over to a part of the wall where there are many baby pictures and some toddler ones which we have copies of. After that, the pictures of Lexi are a few school ones, ones Dan must have sent because I refused to have more than the barest contact with these people.

  ‘We need more pictures of you up there, Lexi,’ I say, meeting Adele’s eyes. ‘How about we start with one today. We could get you and . . .’ I don’t know where the words came from but they did, ‘your Grandma and your Grandpa and you can put that on the wall then.’

  ‘That would be lovely,’ says Adele and William is at her side, squeezing her hand.

  ‘We should have Teddy and Liam in there too because it’s important to have everyone together,’ he says.

  Definitely tears, I think, smiling at him.

  ‘And Coco,’ says Liam, ‘Coco has to be in the picture.’

  Coco, who is now surgically attached to him, wags her tail, apparently agreeing with this.

  ‘Bring food,’ William says, smiling. ‘Coco loves being in pictures as long as someone is feeding her at the same time.’

  ‘Brilliant plan,’ says Liam, looking around. ‘Where’s the food?’

  Once dog treats have been found, we sit them all on a couch and put Coco beside them.

  Then Adele and William sit in at either end. Dan takes the pictures because I think my hands might shake too much.

  Lexi looks so happy and I feel utter shame that it has taken so many years to reach this point. I should have organised this years ago. I’m Lexi’s mother and I owe it to her to know all her family properly even if her birth mother isn’t my favourite person.

  Somewhere deep inside me I heard Mildred go ‘But’.

  ‘Shut up, Mildred,’ I say mentally, ‘you really are surplus to requirements.’

  Lunch is fabulous fun. Adele, typically, turns out to be a wonderful cook but I do not hold this against her. Instead I ask her about some of the recipes.

  ‘I have two sons,’ she says. ‘Elisa was the last baby and possibly a bit spoilt,’ she adds, looking down. ‘But the boys: they ate so much. One minute the fridge would be full and the next minute it would be empty. I just couldn’t keep the place full of food. You have to learn how to cook but I’m a simple cook. You’re the proper cook. Chef, sorry,’ she corrected herself.

  We were there about an hour and a half when Lexi suddenly enquires: ‘Is Elisa coming?’

  ‘Do you know,’ said William easily, ‘I don’t think so. This is about us, not just Elisa.’

  ‘Family,’ Adele and I say at the same time.

  We have tea in the garden where Teddy, Lexi and Liam play with Coco, and Liam keeps up his running commentary about how we need a dog.

  Finally, it’s time for us to go. So we reluctantly get up and have discussions about what we’ll do next time so we can all meet up with Lexi’s cousins, uncles and aunts. There are hugs and lots of little chats going on in the kitchen where Liam and Teddy have discovered Coco’s stash of treats.

  ‘She’ll be sick,’ I say to William, who beams at me.

  ‘I don’t care,’ he says, smiling, and whispers, ‘thank you so very much, Freya.’

  Suddenly Teddy lets out an eldritch screech.

  ‘I never got to go into paddling pool with the fishes,’ she hisses, now catching a glimpse of it again and realising she’s been duped.

  ‘Next time,’ I say, and take Dan’s hand.

  22

  You create your own happiness

  I can’t work but not because I have no ideas – I’m full of them – but I want to grab a lovely special coffee from Giorgio and Patrick’s first. Just one moment in there makes me happy: that’s down to them.

  I run upstairs to check that my hair isn’t too wild, slash a bit of lipstick on and I’ll do. Patrick and Giorgio don’t care what I look like. In five minutes I’m at the café door and I push it open, letting the glorious scents hit me: nutmeg, Patrick must have done something with nutmeg today, I think. And I look around the cabinet to see. There they are: his Portugu
ese tarts, and he puts an unusual dash of nutmeg into the custard/crème glaze which gives it just a little something extra. The place is half full, buzzing along nicely and there is no sign of either of the men. Instead, Josie, another of their part-time staff, is behind the counter.

  ‘Hi, Freya,’ she says, ‘the usual?’

  I’m a big fan of the flat white. Extra dry and fluffy.

  ‘Yes, Josie, thanks a million,’ I say. ‘Can I just run in the back to see the boys?’

  ‘Er . . .’ Josie says, which should have been my first warning.

  There’s a tiny kitchen but it’s fitted out beautifully and even though Patrick buys in most of his stock, he still makes some of the beautiful goodies he sells. He trained in patisserie and met Giorgio when they were both working in a big hotel in London.

  ‘Hotels are hard work,’ said Giorgio, ‘and then when we fell in love, well, it seemed natural to come home.’

  There’s no sign of them there either and I’m a little confused.

  ‘Josie,’ I yell, ‘where are they?’

  ‘They might be upstairs,’ she says, sounding harassed. ‘There’s . . . uh . . . a visitor.’

  ‘Oh, well I won’t go up then,’ I say, feeling embarrassed at my being here at all. They’re my friends but I don’t know them that well and I’ve never been in the upstairs apartment and—

  ‘Freya, that you?’ yells Patrick from somewhere upstairs.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, going to the door which separates the kitchen from the stairs to their apartment. ‘But Josie said you’ve got someone with you. I was just coming in for a natter,’ I say quickly. ‘It’s fine, I’ll talk to you again another time.’

  ‘No, no,’ chimes in Giorgio’s voice. ‘Come up, come up! She’ll know what to do, Patrick!’

  I briefly wonder about not going up. Is there a dead body upstairs and Giorgio saying I’m practical merely means he thinks I’d be good at cutting up a corpse because I know my way round butchering?

  But I’m nosy, so up I go.

  Even the walls up the stairs are typically Patrick and Giorgio: classy, arty, beautiful. They’ve created a fantastic gallery wall with wonderful old posters of food and drink from the twenties and thirties with prints of peacock-feathered girls sitting on top of coupes of champagne alongside Art Deco adverts for hot chocolate. It’s bliss.

  ‘Keep coming,’ says Patrick and then I hear this strange noise, a squeaking.

  A dying pig, I think, with anxiety.

  I’m not that practical. They need a vet. Then Patrick appears at a door wearing his apron, his sleeves rolled up, and not looking his usual immaculate self.

  ‘It’s all going fine so far but we’re hardly experts, you see,’ he says.

  ‘OK,’ I say, wondering what exactly I have gotten myself into.

  I walk into a beautiful kitchen-cum-sitting room with a marvellous dining table and exquisite club chairs in front of a genuine thirties fireplace, but in the middle of the floor is a mound of cushions, fluffy blankets and on that lies a smallish white dog of indeterminate breed who appears to be giving birth.

  ‘Oh,’ I say. Not what I expected.

  ‘Look,’ says Giorgio, turning to show me. ‘Two already.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a dog,’ I said, bending over near the dog.

  ‘Oh, we don’t,’ Giorgio says, ‘but we found her in the back yard and we couldn’t leave her because, look, she’s so thin. You can see her ribs. I went out to feed her and whoosh, a baby started to come out. Well, I called Patrick pretty sharpish and we got her onto this,’ he indicates the blanket, ‘which was very difficult because she growled and then we carried her upstairs. Although, I think we should have brought her to the vet.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Patrick, sounding uncharacteristically anxious.

  ‘Farming or animal experience, anyone?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ they said.

  ‘We had cats when I was a child,’ adds Patrick.

  ‘How many pups do dogs have, do you think?’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Patrick. ‘Giorgio is looking it up on the internet. Some dogs have eleven.’

  Giorgio looks as if he’s saying a prayer to some deity.

  ‘Her figure will be ruined,’ he says.

  I get down on my knees and look at the dog who isn’t wagging her tail or looking particularly happy to see me. She’s concentrating on birthing another small little puplet.

  ‘But we should ring a vet.’

  ‘We did! They’re busy. Said it should be fine. It’s natural, they said. Does this look natural to you?’

  ‘Not if I was having eleven, no,’ I reply.

  ‘These ones seem OK,’ I say as I look at the two little ones lying beside her.

  ‘They came out with film on them, so she started licking the film off one and we got the film off the other and they are breathing. We’ve put them up close to her because that’s what it said you should do,’ says Giorgio, holding an iPad. ‘But what if there’s more and something goes wrong and, and you know we aren’t qualified for this.’

  ‘I’m not qualified for this,’ I say.

  With a huge sigh the dog groans and another little bundle comes out of her wrapped in a milky film.

  ‘Oh wow,’ I say. ‘This is amazing.’

  Despite the fact that I have never done this before, I reach down, take the tiny little puplet up and place it in front of the mother.

  ‘She’ll know what to do,’ I say with some strange instinct and sure enough, the mother licks away the film from the pup’s mouth and then the tiny creature begins to make a little mewing noise. I realise the other two are mewing too.

  ‘Food, they need food. Women put babies on the breast as soon as they are born and that helps with the afterbirth,’ I said suddenly.

  ‘Ugh,’ Giorgio shudders.

  ‘It’s natural,’ I hiss.

  Patrick and I are on the floor, the world’s two strangest midwives who really know nothing about this, but with Giorgio on the iPad as well, we begin to think we are in control.

  ‘Do you think she needs a drink?’ says Giorgio.

  ‘I need a drink,’ says Patrick. ‘But Freya, what do you think? Does she need water?’

  He looks at me. I, as a female, am apparently the expert in all matters of childbirth, including dog birth.

  ‘Let them feed first.’

  I remember that puppies are born blind, so I take each tiny creature and put its miniature little face close to a teat. In an incredible act of magic, the little mouths open, close on the teats and they suck.

  ‘You do know what to do,’ says Patrick as if he had expected nothing else.

  One more tiny little creature is born, this one smaller, a little all-black puppy, and the dog is tired, too tired to lick the membrane away, so I remove the film from the puppy. It feels still and I hold it close, smelling an indescribable smell of tiny new little creation just born into the world. I don’t think it’s breathing and without thinking, I gently open its tiny mouth and blow in. Then I rub the little back, trying to get the lungs working. I blow again. I have no idea if this is right or wrong but it feels right and then suddenly, this tiny little thing begins to mew. I cuddle it close, wet fur and all. ‘You’re mine,’ I say, and check to see if my family are getting a girl or a boy.

  ‘Magic, Princess Magic,’ I announce, and put my little darling beside her brothers and sisters where she begins to drink energetically.

  Patrick finds some ham in the fridge and brings it to the dog, along with a bowl of water. She drinks but doesn’t eat for a moment, waiting to see if she’s safe. We retreat to give her space and she finally wolfs down the ham.

  We all sit there, lost in admiration.

  ‘Oh.’ Giorgio looks at them and I can tell he’s crying. ‘They’re beautiful,
let’s keep her, let’s keep them all,’ he says. ‘Except for your one, Freya.’

  ‘We don’t have the space,’ says Patrick running his dirty hands through his normally immaculate hair. ‘But we can,’ and he looks into Giorgio’s eyes and the two of them melt.

  *

  I swear that as soon as Lorraine hears my steps outside our office, she’s got the machine on to make a cappucino.

  ‘Hey boss lady,’ she says, ‘how’s it going with the taking over the world and taking no crap from anybody?’

  I really like her, said Mildred. She takes no prisoners, you should be more like her, why are you not more like her?

  Because I’m not, I say. Deal with it.

  Fine.

  ‘Something bad’s happened?’ I ask, as I take the coffee and drink.

  ‘The cappucino was a giveaway, right?’

  ‘Yeah. What gives?’

  ‘Nina has been on the phone and because she thinks I’m some sort of answering machine so she doesn’t have to keep anything secret from me, she wants you to know when – what was the word she used? Oh yes – ‘when the bloody hell you were going to have something fun to say about your new series-slash-book-slash-any bloody thing.’

  ‘She is a little bluebird of joy,’ I say sarcastically.

  Somehow, and it might be because I’m feeling stronger than I’ve felt for a long time, I decide to ring Nina and tell her it isn’t that simple but it’s all coming together. Finally.

  Lorraine groans.

  ‘You don’t trust Nina, do you?’ I say. ‘I do, I think she’s brilliant.’

  ‘You trust everyone,’ says Lorraine. ‘You trusted bloody Geraldine when she was robbing you blind by drinking the profits.’

  ‘True,’ I say. ‘Sometimes there are people who aren’t your friends: they just work with you and they don’t mind ripping you off.’

  ‘Nina doesn’t mind ripping you off and she would if she got half a chance.’

  ‘Nina has been with me longer than you’ve been with me,’ I say hotly.

  ‘Fine, but keep her on speaker. I’ve better instincts than you.’

  ‘When did I start to rely on you for all my business judgements?’ I grumble, even though I know she’s right.