by Morag Joss
‘Oh, Christ. Look- Steph, it’s… look, I know, I know. I do, honest.’
Without saying more, Steph walked on. Michael followed a few steps behind. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s not all bad. I mean I’ve sorted the money. I’ve done it. We’re OK. Come on.’ He pulled at her arm and drew level. She shook herself free, but walked along beside him, at least.
‘Steph, listen, you don’t have to. You don’t have to, there’s enough money now,’ he said. ‘Please. Please don’t go back.’
‘But it’s not just the money.’ She stopped again, turned to him and shook her head. ‘It’s Charlie.’ Other words of explanation were stranded in her mouth. Her face crumpled, because she could tell from his eyes that Michael was not, after all, going to hit her, and never had been. He was frightened, that was all. But she could not help that, not now that there was Charlie. She turned away, sobbing.
‘You wait! Just wait, Michael, you’ll see!’
Then she spun past him and ran the rest of the way back to the house, where Jean was already in the kitchen wondering which of three massive joints of meat to put in the oven for supper. Steph flung herself at her and wrapped her arms round her neck.
Michael hovered in the doorway. Jean looked carefully at him over Steph’s shoulder as she patted Steph’s heaving back. She was feeling rather unsteady on her legs and Steph had nearly knocked her over, but she would have to find the strength from somewhere. Taking a deep breath, she said, ‘Oh, Michael dear. I think a drink’s called for. Would you, dear? Then we’ll all settle down and talk things over.’
***
And then there was Charlie. Suddenly, there he was. From that day onwards, he was ours. It was all Steph’s doing, the clever girl, and she was proud of herself for doing it, and quite right too. I was with her over Charlie right from the start, without even having to think about it. It was in her face, for one thing. The necessity of it, I mean. Charlie was, purely and simply, a necessity. He still is. When she burst into the kitchen that day, there was, I don’t know, a very important look on her face, I can’t describe it any other way. She was in need of something- exactly what, of course, I didn’t know just that minute- but she was in very serious need. I still cannot see that there is anything extreme in the idea that people should have what they need, particularly if they have had to go without it for most of their lives.
That same evening we managed to settle Michael down about it all. You know, it is amazing how much more amenable people are when they have been properly fed. I wonder less, now, at Mother’s permanent irascibility when I was growing up, remembering what we ate in that house! Mother’s meals were not just unappetising, they seemed to take more out of you than they put in. We would rise from the table debilitated, thwarted and restless; afterwards I would wash up and clear away but I could never wipe the surfaces clean of my disappointment.
So over dinner, together Steph and I persuaded Michael about Charlie. Because of course the minute she told me about her job, I saw it as clearly as she did. She began to explain it to me when we were doing the potatoes and beans together in the kitchen, while Michael was in the cellar deciding on something to go with the beef. I still feel some pride in the way I took control that evening, weak though I was myself. Because they needed me; my two young people were quite ragged with tiredness and hunger and with this matter of Charlie, so I kept them both busy and away from each other until we were at table. The little jobs I set them to were those pleasant tasks that fill the hungry waiting time and slowly transform a dining room while the cooking proceeds: replacing candles, setting out the beautiful claret glasses and the silver (we always used the dining room in the evenings, but did so that night with special ceremony), decanting the wine. I sent Steph out to pick flowers for the table and she, bless her, came back with hedgerow flowers: some late primroses, buttercups and campion. She wasn’t sure if she was meant to pick the garden flowers, she said. I point this out because that’s the sort of girl she is. Not greedy. Not inclined to assume that things are hers for the taking. But if it’s a question of necessity, well, that puts a different complexion on it. Anyway, by the time we sat down to dinner the tension had almost gone; by then we could think of little else but the food. And afterwards, such a happy atmosphere, it’s funny how you remember the details.
I have thought about this since I began to cook, and I believe that it is very much underestimated, the effect of food on one’s outlook. I do not mean just being hungry or not. I mean the very things we eat. That night we ate red meat, a great deal of it. I roasted a sirloin of beef. To begin with, the smell of rich meat like that belongs in a house like this. It made us feel optimistic and at home, although we were too hungry to feel quite happy until after we had eaten. We were so hungry that we could not wait, not with the smell of it tormenting us, so we ate our meat very, very rare. And that sort of food makes one courageous, even slightly bolshy. Perhaps it’s the blood or the chewing, something metallic that sharpens the air, an edge of steel, but that beef did something for us that another dish (poached salmon, say, just as nutritious, and delicious too) would not have done. Not an obvious summer dish, a sirloin of beef, but it was exactly what we all needed; it resisted just a little against our teeth before melting down our throats, it was so sustaining and rich, and the potatoes and vegetables were so sweet.
So, I agreed with Steph that Michael was worrying unnecessarily, because of course there would be no question of her spending her days apart from us, going off to that house in the village and staying there all day with the baby. I knew that without having to be told. She would bring Charlie here. His mother already thought she was some sort of genius with children after just one day. I gathered that Sally was getting her head round (Steph’s phrase!) the idea of going back to that job of hers, and Charlie had already slept right through the night, for the first time, the night after Steph’s very first visit. So in Sally’s eyes Steph could do no wrong, right from the off. We didn’t see a problem with her agreeing that Steph could bring him to the manor. We’d win her over with the thought of all that space, the gardens, and the pool (where of course Steph would not let go of him for so much as a second). She’d probably go along with it. And if she didn’t, how would she even know? Steph could get him back to Sally’s in good time, if need be, at the end of each day. A detail.
Bit by bit our confidence soaked into Michael, so that by the end of dinner he was as full of it as if he had mopped it up himself along with the juices on his plate. Afterwards we sat outside with glasses of brandy to watch the sunset from the terrace that faces west. It must have been the first time we had all sat there together, for we had not had many fine evenings. This was a perfect one, full of contentment, the sun such an improbable, huge, burning orange, the pinks and blues in the sky so painted-looking. Such a hazy evening sky seems to hold neither air nor colour but is like pure, liquid light just melting over empty land. Steph said it was like a Turner. She and Michael were sitting quite cuddled up by then, all happy. It did us all good to be sitting together looking outwards, beyond the boundary of our own place.
I began to wonder what we had been so frightened of. I was beginning to think we’d been a bit over the top, with all this keeping ourselves so apart, even being frightened about Michael going shopping. I said so, and it turned out they had been thinking much the same. After all, as Michael said, his trip to Bath had gone off perfectly. Steph pointed out that she had taken herself off to the village and come back not just unharmed but actually bringing us a baby boy. I said I did not want to be furtive about everything, it made me feel as if I were doing something wrong. Perhaps we did not have to be quite so cautious. Private, yes, and discreet- we were not about to fling the doors open to all and sundry- but if we were sensible and clever about it, there was no reason why we shouldn’t be a little more relaxed. Life would continue just as before. It was Steph who said oh, but it’ll be even better than before. And we agreed.
Michael had brought back a vanloa
d of food and over the next week or so we all grew strong again. But in no time at all the need for money reared its ugly head again. We weren’t hungry any more, but we found there were other things we needed. Steph admitted that she couldn’t bear her clothes (the things she had from my wardrobe were, in truth, much too old for her, and she was tired of borrowing Michael’s shirts). She wanted to make herself something to wear, she said, and it wouldn’t be expensive. That’s fair enough, she’s young, and these things matter especially if you’re pretty, as Steph is. Her shape had changed, so she needed things that were looser. She had noticed that we had lots and lots of white sheets made of real linen, scores more than we ever used, and white linen would be just right for summer clothes and she knew how to make what she wanted. She didn’t even need a pattern, she said, just thread and a few buttons and a sewing machine.
Well, we hunted high and low for a sewing machine, even in the attics, but there wasn’t one. I thought it odd, but there you are. Although our money situation was much better, with what Steph was earning and with my rise in salary, we still did not have the wherewithal for big purchases like that. Never mind then, Steph said, but we could tell she was disappointed, and it was such a modest request. So Michael and I surprised her. One day when she thought he had just gone shopping for food, he came back with her sewing machine. I had told him, you see, to take a pretty little brocade-covered button back chair from one of the other bedrooms, and a pair of watercolours of Venice, and get what he could for them. It’s marvellous, our sewing machine. You can even do embroidery on it. Steph was delighted and said she would learn how to sew CHARLIE in big letters, and customise all his T-shirts, but in fact she’s never got round to it. But she set to work on the linen sheets while I minded Charlie. (Charlie, even if I say so myself, took to me from the start, and even though I couldn’t feed him myself, he was very happy in my care.) Steph worked quickly, so that after only a day or two she had made some pairs of pyjama-like trousers and simple tops, a wrap-round skirt and some dresses. Everything was loose and summery, draping and elegant, in simple shapes and layers that allowed her to move easily and gracefully. Michael could hardly take his eyes off her. But she only wore her linen clothes here, never to fetch and return Charlie. She wore a sort of uniform of navy trousers and floral blouses for going outside.
Steph got used to arriving at Sally’s to find both her and Charlie in a state of fractious semi-undress. During the first week she had walked into the house each day eating a bar of chocolate that she bought from the village shop on her way past. (She very soon got, with her chocolate and her change, a ‘you all right, then?’ from the man in the shop, whose name was Bill. And as a regular customer she was no longer invited to buy the bargain tent, which was still for sale.) But very soon Steph sensed that her chocolate-stopped mouth diminished her authority in Sally’s eyes and, more importantly, she realised that authority over Sally was going to be the key to success. So she left the chocolate in her pocket for later and walked in smiling, pulling Charlie from Sally’s hip or lifting him from whichever location he had been dumped in while Sally tried to organise herself. Without speaking, she would fill and switch on the kettle, and then she would track down whatever it was that Sally was at that moment most frantic about not having immediately to hand: often her keys, the briefcase, her diary, a pair of tights, her other shoe. On bad days, it could be her first cup of coffee, the vital papers she had been working on last night, a tampon, and once, a new bottle of shampoo (it being, apparently, a surprise to the dripping, naked Sally that the bottle she had finished the day before and left in the shower was still empty the next). Then Steph would shoo Sally upstairs (or better, out of the door, on days when she was halfway ready to leave on time) and settle in a kitchen chair to feed Charlie, always ready to whisk him away from the breast and plug his astonished mouth with the bottle if she heard Sally begin her clattering and swearing descent down the uncarpeted stairs. When the door had finally closed behind her, Steph would keep the smile on her face until she heard Sally’s car start up and drive away.
At the end of the day Steph would be waiting, still smiling, when Sally banged in shouting that she was bloody knackered, dumping her briefcase, bag, keys and usually also carrier bags of shopping in the hall, and walking out of her shoes on the way into the kitchen. Charlie would be bathed, in a clean sleep suit, and fed; Steph always placed an empty, apparently drained bottle of formula on the table next to her elbow. Steph would rise, sit Sally down, deliver Charlie into her lap, make her a cup of coffee and, because Sally usually asked her to, pour her a glass of wine as well. If not actually asleep, Charlie would be sleepy enough not to mind how his mother’s arrival shattered the peace, and would drop off gratifyingly in her arms.
Steph was pleased that she did not have to say very much at the end of the day, beyond confirming that Charlie had been ‘absolutely fine’. In between slurps of coffee and wine, Sally would talk as if she had been forcibly gagged for hours, throwing out what sounded to Steph quite manic and incomprehensible details of the day’s confrontations: with colleagues, clients, pedestrians, idiots in shops, but also with machinery- chiefly computers and telephones- as well as the traffic and the weather. Although neither of them realised it, it was Steph’s very stillness that stimulated Sally into such torrents of speech. Because just in case there were something judgmental in Steph’s silence, Sally filled it with authoritative babble about how impossible life was and how she was managing to overcome its many obstacles. It sounded simply like an impassioned and colourful account of Sally’s heroic daily struggle with a world hostile to intelligent, well-qualified lone mothers, but the implication was that this was a struggle that a humble childminder knew little of and would be unequal to, and so had no cause to be smug about. Into her patronising commentary Sally continued to drop expletives and throwaway revelations so personal that Steph was further robbed of any power to reply. But Steph, though she did not become more talkative, grew not to mind. Sally seemed to speak this way to other people too, she learned, when Sally, answering the telephone and blaring down it (obviously in reply to a polite enquiry about how she was), gave more information about her cystitis than Steph could imagine anyone would need to know, then returned to the kitchen and reported that that had been her father-in-law, miserable uptight bugger.
***
It was while we were turning the place upside down looking for a sewing machine that Michael came across the silver picture frames that I’d torn the photographs out of in January. After I’d burned the pictures I’d put the frames away and hardly thought of them. He said we ought to have some of our own family pictures, and of course he was right. So he sold more of the old books and bought a digital camera. I had no idea what was meant by digital (I still don’t) but Michael laughed and said it was all done by computers and that he didn’t even need film! Sure enough he spent a couple of sunny afternoons taking pictures and he actually developed them in the study. I’d always thought you needed a dark-room. Michael did explain- he said he was new to it himself but if you spend a bit of time on a computer it’s amazing how fast you pick it up and in any case the computer tells you what buttons to press half the time- but the details escape me. I’ll never understand it. There were some lovely shots of Charlie and Steph, the garden, and even some not bad ones of me. You don’t notice how you change until you see a photo of yourself, do you? All that hair I have now! It has grown bushy as well as white and thick, but I fancy it suits me. When I noticed my hair in those photos I thought back to that night in the cellar and the label on the wine bottle, and saw how far I had come in a few months. Steph had taken some pictures of Michael, too; so we are all there, somewhere or other; the pictures are all still here, in their frames, all over the house. Steph and I had great fun trimming them for the frames and sticking them up all round the place. The very best one of Charlie was too big for any of the frames, though. That’s the one that’s still on the door of the fridge, under a toy magnet shaped li
ke a carrot that Michael picked up at the garden centre.
Oh, yes- the garden centre. Well, I had begun to think seriously again about a tree for Miranda’s grave. In fact that was another thing. It became easier to talk of Miranda. We all learned how, even Steph, we helped each other, persevering even when it was difficult. Not that we can ever speak of her casually or without longing, even to this day. Still when her name is mentioned, more often than not one or another of us weeps. But there is a certain sweetness in that. We learned to speak of her often, always fondly and sadly, and one day I told them about my idea of a tree. They both said very firmly that I should have it. There was a rather florid Edwardian dinner service that we none of us cared for and agreed we could spare. We never used it, preferring the very thin, plain white porcelain. So I got my tree. I sent Michael off to the garden centre with careful instructions and he brought back a very large magnolia that we planted all together.
Michael had been amazed by the garden centre. It turned out he had never been to one before (well, why would he, with no garden?) and it was a revelation, all those tender shoots, just waiting to be put in the ground and allowed to thrive. He thought he would like to plant a proper vegetable garden. Everything he needed was there, he would only have to buy the seedlings and put them in. I can see it now, how his face was shining. He was already taking a pride in this garden, which existed at that point only in his mind. It was yet to be planted, but just the idea of keeping us supplied with fruit and vegetables for the summer made him proud. I at once encouraged it, so he picked out some more things we could do without (I left it to him this time to choose what- I knew he would be sensible). I believe it was more furniture from the bedrooms. He filled the walled garden with row upon row of fresh, bright little plants, and he tended them every day. There was no end to the care he took with them, and he kept the lawns cut and the flowerbeds tidy, too. We were all in a kind of heaven- not sitting about on clouds, you understand, but busy doing things that made us happy.
