Annet opened the front door and watched as David unstrapped the Moses basket with excruciating delicacy, closed the car door in the same manner, and covered the intervening distance in two long, loping strides to avoid the rain. He put his finger to his lips, pointed into the basket and then mouthed the word: ‘Where?’
She in turn pointed to the drawing room, where she’d left the fire low and one lamp lit.
A couple of minutes later he reappeared, announcing: ‘Out for the count.’
‘Thanks, darl. I appreciate it.’
It was the moment when she might have returned the kiss he’d tried to give her earlier, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do so. She was simply too tired to face the full release of his love at what was the nearest they’d had to a real opportunity since the baby was born. So the moment she’d spoken she turned away to pick up plates, pretending not to have seen the dawn of expectation on his face. It was like hitting a puppy, but it was still easier for her than the alternative.
‘I know you’re not supposed to keep this stuff hanging about,’ she said briskly, putting the skillet on two mats on the table, ‘ but a few congealed noodles are a small price to pay for a whole half hour of peace and quiet.’
When she’d dished up, she asked: ‘So how was the day? The in-tray from hell?’
‘No, all quite orderly really. I’ve got a temp for the time being, rather robotic, but efficiency on legs.’
‘Sounds good to me. And Doug?’
‘Fine … We had lunch. He sent his love.’
‘Bullshit. He doesn’t like me.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘How long have you got?’
Annet was always brought up short by David’s obliviousness to certain attitudes and behaviour, even though she knew this was a characteristic he shared with many others of his gender. For a man who was quite painfully sensitive about his relationship with her, he could be almost wilfully obtuse about others.
‘Come on,’ he said now, ‘he thinks you’re great!’
‘No he doesn’t.’ She knew he was cheerful because she was more like her old self: stroppy, contentious. Of such strange stuff, she thought, was marriage made. ‘That’s what he pretends,’ she went on, keeping him happy in the only way open to her, ‘ but I annoy the hell out of him.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true. He admires you.’
‘Exactly.’
David said: ‘That’s too complicated for me.’
‘Look who he married,’ Annet pointed out, and then wished she hadn’t.
‘Marsha? How do you mean?’
‘She’s a very nice woman but you wouldn’t call her independent-minded.’
‘Well, no,’ conceded David. ‘I suppose not, but then opposites agree.’
That left them even Stevens, thought Annet, because he probably wished he hadn’t said that, either.
David changed the subject. ‘ Something awful happened on the way back just now. I knocked a woman off her bicycle.’
‘God, David!’ She seemed genuinely shocked. ‘How is she?’
‘All right actually. I say I knocked her off but that isn’t quite true. I popped out at a junction and didn’t see her, and we both had to stop rather abruptly. She was quite elderly and fell off her bike. There was no actual contact, but it was entirely my fault.’
‘Poor woman. She must have been shaken.’
‘She wasn’t the only one,’ he said ruefully. ‘It’s the sort of thing that makes your life flash before your eyes.’
‘I should think so indeed.’ Annet put down her fork and subjected him to a narrow-eyed look. ‘It’s not like you though, what on earth were you thinking of?’
‘I don’t know … bit dazed, first day back … looking forward to seeing you, who knows?’
‘Flannel,’ said Annet, standing up to put the plates on the side, but must have been satisfied, for she went on: ‘So the woman wasn’t injured at all?’
‘She had a nasty graze on her leg where the pedal scraped her. Don’t worry, I’m going to get in touch. I feel very bad about it.’
‘Did she make a scene?’
‘No. On the contrary, she apologised.’
Annet snorted. ‘ Dear oh dear.’
‘Shock, I suppose,’ he said Freya slept and slept. They went to bed early, carrying her gingerly up the stairs and placing the basket on the divan in her room, sure that at any moment the spell would break. When David came out of the bathroom he found Annet standing bent over the basket, staring fixedly at its occupant.
‘Everything OK?’ he whispered, joining her.
‘I suppose so – what do you think?’
‘Looks fine to me. Famous last words, let’s leave her to it before she decides to wipe the silly smile off our faces.’
As he said this, he put his arm round her shoulders. She was wearing her dark blue satin nightshirt, and the warmth of her skin beneath the slippery material reminded him of how long it had been, and how much he wanted her.
‘Come on.’
Without looking at him she laid a hand on his chest to detain him, but she left the hand there as she spoke.
‘She’s been asleep for such ages.’
‘She had some ground to make up, let’s face it.’ To soothe and oblige her he stooped over the basket. Freya was pale and still as a boxed hothouse flower lying there, but he could just make out the faint tremor of the downy hair over her fontanelle. ‘She’s asleep,’ he said, and putting his arm once more around his wife, drew her out of the room. ‘Come.’
After they’d made love, Annet fell asleep at once, but he was wide awake. It wasn’t the best sex they’d ever had – she was still sore, and they were both a little tense and wary – but it had nonetheless marked the beginning of their return to each other.
His stomach rumbled: he hadn’t eaten much at supper, and now he was ravenous. He slipped out from under the duvet, pulled on his dressing gown and padded downstairs to the kitchen. He lifted the lid of the skillet and considered the remains of the noodles, but that wasn’t what he was after. Fuel. He needed fuel. He replaced the lid, cut a couple of slices of bread and put them in the toaster, and then filled a bowl with cornflakes, added plenty of milk and too much sugar and stood under the strip light eating them while the toast was making. When it popped up he slathered on injudicious amounts of butter and some slices of Cheddar, and wolfed them down, still standing up. Childishly, the pleasure of this simple orgy was intensified by the knowledge that if his wife could see him she would voice her most wasting disapproval: ‘Well, it’s your heart, darl,’ or something like it.
When he’d finished he put the crockery in the dishwasher. Crossing the hall he noticed that they’d omitted to replace the fireguard, and went into the drawing room. When he’d dealt with the guard something prompted him to go to the window overlooking the road and part the curtains.
The rain had stopped, and there was no wind. Neither was there anyone about on this Monday night in Newton Bury.
Midnight and all’s quiet, he thought to himself as he closed the curtains and went back up the stairs. Which was tempting fate, because as he reached the landing Freya snickered into life.
Chapter Five
Annet didn’t want to visit her mother, but she knew if she didn’t take Freya to see her now while she was off work it was something that would have to be squeezed in with more difficulty – and even less enthusiasm – in the course of a precious free weekend.
Karen took time out from the kitchen surfaces to come and see them off. She stood by the car with her arms folded, watching with a hint of indulgent schadenfreude as Annet fixed the babyseat in place.
‘Have fun!’ she instructed. ‘Be careful on those roads.’
‘I shall certainly do the second,’ said Annet. ‘ The first’s asking a bit much.’
She was pretty sure she saw Karen shake her head in mock despair as she went back into the house. It was all very well – Karen’s own mother
was a great grandmother at not yet sixty, and appeared (from what Annet understood, she’d never actually met her) to have been in training for the role all her life. Whereas one thing her daughters were agreed upon was that Marina Holbrook was not one of nature’s nurturers.
The drive from Newton Bury to the outer London suburb where Marina lived took one and a half hours, and Freya was lulled as always by the car, so Annet had plenty of time to reflect on the difficulties. There was no doubt Marina had got worse since the girls’ father, Miles, had died fifteen years ago. At the time Annet was working as a secretary for the World Women’s League off Piccadilly, and sharing a large gloomy flat in Bayswater with a churchy young woman whose dispiriting tights dripped endlessly into the bath and who had a framed postcard of the crucifixion on her bedside table. Annet would return from the ageing but still-feisty Fabian glories of the WWL to find Ellen presiding over a glum Bible-study group at the gateleg table in the living room. Partly, though not solely, for this reason she tended to retire to the bath for half an hour with a glass of wine and the radio at full-blast, prior to going out again. It was pre-Seth and she’d had no regular boyfriend, but there were two or three ex-Sussex University friends with whom she pursued evenings of dedicated drinking and clubbing, culminating (more often than she cared to remember) in nameless one-night stands.
During this period Louise, who was seven years younger, was still living at home and in her second year of A-levels at the local grammar school. Louise had been pretty and amiable and popular and successful, none of which epithets could at the time have been applied to Annet. It went without saying that Miles’s death from a massive and richly-deserved coronary hit Louise the harder of the two sisters, and Annet had returned home crossly, dutiful but dry-eyed, to find her mother and sister weeping enough tears for all three of them.
Louise was at least understandably shocked and saddened by her father’s death, but Marina was sorry only for herself.
‘We were lovers!’ she keened embarrassingly. ‘Right to the end we were lovers! We weren’t ready to say goodbye – whatever shall I do without him?’
Under the circumstances Annet refrained from saying ‘Settle up with the off-licence and get a life’, but by the end of that week she’d developed a migraine from the effort of not saying it. It astonished Annet that her mother could persist in the notion that she and Miles had enjoyed a lifelong romance, when his only love affair had been with himself. Their father had been a large, amiable, floridly handsome man who had never found anyone or anything half so deserving of passionate devotion as what he saw in the mirror, and who was hugely content with this monogamous relationship.
When she’d finally aired her views to Louise, her sister was as always more inclined to be forgiving. ‘But if she’s happy thinking that—’
‘Happy? The woman never stops weeping and wailing!’
‘You know what I mean. If she finds that consoling, why worry?’
‘I don’t worry, it annoys the hell out of me to see her deluding herself.’
‘Then don’t let it. After all, marriages work in different ways, and if Mummy was deluded then it certainly kept them together.’
‘OK, that was when Dad was alive, but now he’s gone I suppose I hoped a little honesty and realism might peep through.’
Louise laughed. ‘You’ll wait a long time – now he’s gone he’s taken honesty and realism with him to the grave.’
This much was irrefutable, but for a long time it was the spectre of her parents’ horribly successful charade of a marriage that put Annet off contemplating such an idea herself. Her mother’s arch fantasies, her father’s blind, jovial complacency, it was all too ghastly. Equality, truthfulness, mutual independence were what she aspired to in a long-term relationship.
She’d got very drunk after Miles’s funeral, and she was a combative drunk. Marina’s display of frail, tremulous pluck, and the mawkish comments it provoked, made her gorge rise. She had to keep escaping the rheumy stares, clutching hands and egg-sandwich breaths of the mourners, and retreating to the back garden to smoke furiously.
It was during one of these interludes that Marina had come out and stood nearby, but at a little distance, like a character in a play. Annet wanted to tell her for Christ’s sake to cut to the chase and get it over with, but it was a pregnant minute and a half before Marina said in her most wistful, whispy voice:
‘Your father always loved this garden.’
‘Did he?’ replied Annet.
‘Oh yes. You remember, he and I used to sit out here on summer evenings and he always used to say the same thing – “ This is happiness, my darling”.’
‘Really?’ Annet knew she was being ungenerous, but she felt she simply couldn’t stand another second’s vacuous sentimentality.
And anyway Marina wasn’t going to notice, she was well away. ‘He knew how to be happy. It’s a great gift, perhaps the greatest, and he had it.’
‘If you say so.
‘I only wish—’ There was a pause, during which Annet could all too clearly picture the brimming eyes, the delicate hand raised to the working mouth … She couldn’t bring herself to ask what her mother wished, when what was certain was that she would be told anyway.
‘I only wish,’ Marina murmured brokenly, ‘that he’d passed it on to you.’
Now Annet was genuinely dumbstruck: that was the last thing she’d expected. She had so deliberately distanced herself from these proceedings and her mother’s performance in them, confident in the assumption that no one, least of all her mother, would notice. And here she was with the spotlight suddenly upon her.
‘I’m sorry?’ She made herself look at Marina, whose face was puckered into a parody of maternal concern.
‘I wish you were happy, Annet. Or even that you wanted to be happy. Daddy and I used to worry so much about you.’
This was too much. ‘Mother!’
Her outrage did nothing to shake Marina’s sickly intrusions. ‘You’re not happy, are you?’
‘That’s a fatuous question, predicated on the idea that people go around consciously being happy. They don’t—’
‘We did.’
‘Well bully for you, but most people don’t, take it from me.’ She was close to boiling point, and conscious of the occasion, reined her voice back in. ‘I know when I’m not happy, which incidentally is now, and the rest of the time I’m too busy to think about it.’
‘Now you’re angry with me,’ said Marina. She was closing in: Annet could smell her sweet scent and hear the small, confiding creak of her black patent court shoes. ‘Please don’t be. Today of all days.’
‘I am not angry!’ hissed Annet furiously.
‘You don’t know how proud he was of you.’
‘No.’ Annet shrank inside her jacket, hoping, no, praying, that her mother wouldn’t touch her. ‘No, I don’t. Was he?’
‘He thought the world of you, but he was afraid you’d never find happiness.’
‘Mother.’ Unable to stand any more, Annet turned to face her. ‘Enough. I’m not angry, and most of the time I’m not unhappy, very far from it. At this precise moment I’m just getting through today like we all are, as best I can. As for Dad being proud of me, I’m glad if he was, but he never said anything to me.’
‘But he would have done. If he’d – That’s why I’m telling you now.’
‘Thanks,’ said Annet. ‘I appreciate it. Excuse me, Mother, I’m going to go round with the bottle.’
She went back into the drawing room with a cold, set face, but she was on fire inside – hating herself for behaving badly, hating Marina for always making her do it, hating (at his funeral, for heaven’s sake!) her father, for having talked a lot of bullshit and then buggered off leaving the rest of them to cope.
Not long after that, she’d taken up with Seth, and Louise had passed her A-levels with rather less brilliant grades than expected and opted for what came to be known as a gap year. Weirdly, in Annet’s view, she
spent this working as a playleader at a community project in Catford, while living at home. The gap had extended indefinitely. Louise had met Coral, a tall, red-haired, local government officer, who was now her partner, and whom she looked after beautifully in a nice garden flat not a mile from Marina’s house. Marina herself seemed resolved to see nothing unusual in the domestic arrangements of her younger, prettier, happier daughter, and it was never discussed, but this particular form of wilful blindness was one which Annet was prepared to overlook in the interests of her sister’s wellbeing.
Louise and Coral were not politicised in any obvious sense: indeed, being with another woman had seemed to give Louise permission to be the old-fashioned wife she was so perfectly qualified to be. Their flat had the comforting feel of a place run along traditional role-specific lines, with napkins in named rings, a cake always in the tin, and a cat, Porridge, on the hearthrug. Annet half suspected that Coral crossed the threshold each evening with a ‘Hi honey, I’m home!’ Theirs was the setup for which the phrase domestic bliss had been invented, and which in a heterosexual couple might well have given rise to accusations of smugness.
Marina, meanwhile, played the heartbroken widow, and the field. With her lifelong romance safely behind her she could move about the cocktail and conservative club circuit making men behave like gentlemen while feeling like goats. Annet, still smarting from the ‘wish you were happy’ exchange found this behaviour profoundly irritating. She knew she should be pleased that her mother had moved on and made a new life for herself, but was this, then, what it took to be happy? Or what it meant? She despised Marina’s vanity and her small hypocrisies, to an extent which Louise couldn’t understand.
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