When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  “I’m a goddess to him now,” Dr. Hunter said, laughing, “but one day I’ll be the annoying old woman who wants to be taken to the supermarket.”

  “Och, no, Dr. H.,” Reggie said. “I think you’re always going to be a deity for him.”

  “Shouldn’t you have stayed on at school, Reggie?” Dr. Hunter asked, a little frown worrying her pretty features. Reggie imagined this was how she was with her patients (“You really have to lose some weight, Mrs. MacTavish.”).

  “Yes, I should have,” Reggie said.

  Come on, sunshine,” Reggie said to the baby, lifting him out of his high chair and planting him on the floor. She had to keep an eye on him all the time because one moment he’d be sitting contentedly trying to work out how to eat his fat little foot and the next he’d be commando-crawling towards the nearest hazard. All he wanted to do was put things in his mouth, and you could be sure if there was an object small enough to choke on, then the baby would make a beeline for it, and Reggie had to be constantly on the lookout for buttons and coins and grapes — of which he was particularly fond. All his grapes had to be cut in half, which was a real chore, but Dr. Hunter had told her about a patient whose baby had died when a grape got stuck in his windpipe and “no one had been able to help him,” Dr. Hunter said, as if that were worse than the dying itself. That was when Reggie got Dr. Hunter to teach her not just the Heimlich maneuvre but mouth-to-mouth, how to stop arterial bleeding, and what to do for a burn. And electrocution and accidental poisoning. (And drowning, of course.) “You could go on a first-aid course,” Dr. Hunter said, “but they do such an awful lot of unnecessary bandaging. We can do some strapping of wrists and arms, a basic head bandage, but you don’t need anything more complicated than that. Really, you just need to know how to save a life.” She brought home a CPR dummy from the office so that Reggie could practice resuscitation. “We call him Eliot,” Dr. Hunter said, “but no one can remember why.”

  When Reggie thought about the baby who had choked on a grape, she imagined him stoppered up like the old-fashioned lemonade bottle with a marble in its neck that she had seen in the museum. Reggie liked museums. Clean, well-lighted places.

  Mr. Hunter was very easygoing about the baby. He said babies were “virtually indestructible” and that Dr. Hunter worried too much, “but then, you can’t expect anything else given her history.” Reggie didn’t know anything about Dr. Hunter’s history (imagined herself saying, “What’s your story, Dr. H.?” but it didn’t sound right). All Reggie really knew was that William Morris sat on the bookshelf in Dr. Hunter’s living room, while her own father was officially declared junk and lived in the old curiosity shop on the top floor. Reggie herself thought babies were extremely destructible, and after the grape story she became particularly paranoid about the baby not being able to breathe. But what else could she expect, given her history? (“The breath,” Dr. Hunter said, “the breath is everything.”)

  Sometimes Reggie lay in bed at night and held the breath in her lungs until she thought they would burst so that she could feel what it was like, imagining her mother anchored underwater by her hair like some new, mysterious strain of seaweed.

  “How long does it take to die from drowning?” she asked Dr. Hunter.

  “Well, there are quite a few variables,” Dr. Hunter said, “water temperature and so on, but roughly speaking, five to ten minutes. Not long.”

  Long enough.

  Reggie placed the baby’s dishes in the draining rack. The sink was at the window and overlooked a field at the foot of Blackford Hill. Sometimes there were horses in the field, sometimes not. Reggie had no idea where the horses went when they weren’t there. Now it was winter, they wore dull green blankets like Barbour jackets.

  Sometimes when Dr. Hunter came home early enough, before the winter dark descended, they would take the dog and the baby into the field and the baby would crawl around on the rough grass and Reggie would pursue Sadie round the field because she loved it when you pretended to chase her, and Dr. Hunter would laugh and say to the baby, “Come on, run, run like the wind!” and the baby would just look at her because of course he had no idea what running was. If the horses were in the field they remained aloof, as if they ran, which they must surely do, but in secret.

  The horses were big, nervy creatures, and Reggie didn’t like the way their lips curled back over their huge yellow teeth; she imagined them mistaking the baby’s excited fist for an apple and biting it off his arm.

  “Horses worry me as well,” Dr. Hunter said. “They always seem so sad, don’t you think? Although not as sad as dogs.” Reggie thought dogs were pretty happy creatures, but of course Dr. Hunter saw the potential for sadness everywhere. “How sad,” Dr. Hunter said when the leaves came off the trees. “How sad,” she said when a song came on the radio (Beth Nielsen Chapman). “How sad,” when Sadie whined quietly at the sight of her getting ready to leave the house. Even when it had been the baby’s birthday and they had all been so happy eating cake and pink ice cream, afterwards as they drove home, Dr. Hunter said, “His first birthday, how sad, he’ll never be a baby again.”

  For his birthday, Reggie had given the baby a teddy bear and a bib embroidered in blue with ducks and the words Baby’s First Birthday. First things were nice, last things not so much so.

  Often, after one of her moments of sadness, Dr. Hunter would give her head a little shake, as if she were trying to get rid of something from it, and smile and say, “And yet we are not downhearted, are we, Reggie?” and Reggie would say, “No, indeed we are not, Dr. H.”

  “Call me Jo,” Dr. Hunter said to Reggie. “Fiddle-dee-dee, fiddle-dee-dee, the fly has married the bumblebee,” she said to the baby.

  Reggie had never told Dr. Hunter about her mother, about her being dead. The weight of the sadness of it might have been too much for Dr. Hunter to bear, even without the unnecessary and tragic manner of Mum’s going. And every time she looked at Reggie, Dr. Hunter would have had the sad expression on her face and that too would have been unbearable. Instead, Reggie made up her mother. She was called Jackie and worked on the checkout at a supermarket in a shopping center that Dr. Hunter never went to. When she was young she had been a champion highland dancer (although you would never have guessed that). Her best friends were called Mary, Trish, and Jean. She was always planning the next diet, she had long hair (lovely hair, sadly Reggie had not inherited it) that she said she was going to have to start wearing up because she was getting too old to wear it down. She was thirty-six this year, the same age as Dr. Hunter. She was sixteen when she got engaged to Reggie’s father, seventeen when she had Billy, and a widow at twenty. Reggie supposed it was just as well she had packed everything in early on.

  She took a terrible photograph, made worse by the goofy faces she always pulled the moment a camera was pointed in her direction. One of her favorite sayings was “It’s a funny old world,” said affectionately, as if the world were a mischievous child. She liked reading Danielle Steel and her favorite flower was a daffodil and she made a really good shepherd’s pie. Actually all of these things were true. It was just the being alive bit that was made-up.

  While Reggie was wiping down the draining board, her eye was caught by something moving at the far end of the field. The sun had hardly popped its head up today and it was hard to distinguish anything more than smudged shapes at that distance. Not a horse, this was not a day for horses, they were living their mysterious lives somewhere else. Whoever or whatever it was seemed to scuttle along the hedge, a blur of something black. Reggie glanced at the dog to see if her canine senses were alerting her to anything, but Sadie was sitting stoically on the floor next to the baby while he tried to stuff her tail in his mouth.

  “I don’t think so, mister,” Reggie said to the baby, gently releasing a fistful of fur and lifting him in her arms. She carried the baby over to the window but there was nothing to be seen out there now. The baby clutched a hank of her hair, he was a terrible hair grabber. “Atavis
tic instinct, I expect,” Dr. Hunter said. “From the days when I would have been swinging through trees and he would have been clutching on to my fur for dear life.” The idea of Dr. Hunter, always so neatly groomed in the little black suit she wore for work, as a primitive tree dweller was comical. Reggie had to look up atavistic. She still hadn’t found an opportunity to use it. She was working her way through the a’s, so it fitted in well with the drive to improve her vocabulary.

  Lately, Reggie had got into the habit of staying longer and longer at the Hunters’ house, while Mr. Hunter seemed to be out of the house more and more. “He’s setting something up, a new venture,” Dr. Hunter said brightly. Dr. Hunter seemed glad that Reggie was there so much. She would suddenly look out the window and say, “Heavens, Reggie, it’s dark, you must be getting home,” but then she would say, “I hate this horrid weather so. Shall we have another cup of tea?” Or “Stay and have some supper, Reggie, and then I’ll give you a lift home.” Reggie hoped that one day soon Dr. Hunter might say, “Why go home, Reggie? Why not move in here?” and then they would be a proper family — Dr. Hunter, Reggie, and the baby and the dog. (“Neil” didn’t really figure in Reggie’s daydream of family life.)

  On one of these evenings, apropos of nothing (apropos was another new word), when Dr. Hunter and Reggie were giving the baby a bath, Dr. Hunter turned to Reggie and said, “You know there are no rules,” and Reggie said, “Really?” because she could think of a lot of rules, like cutting grapes in half and wearing a cap when you went swimming, not to mention separating all the rubbish for the recycling bins. Unlike with Ms. MacDonald, recycling was something that Dr. Hunter was very keen on. She said, “No, not those kinds of things, I mean the way we live our lives. There isn’t a template, a pattern that we’re supposed to follow. There’s no one watching us to see if we’re doing it properly, there is no properly, we just make it up as we go along.”

  Reggie wasn’t entirely sure that she knew what Dr. Hunter was talking about. The baby was distracting her, squawking and splashing like a mad sea creature.

  “What you have to remember, Reggie, is that the only important thing is love. Do you understand?”

  That sounded okay to Reggie, a bit Richard Curtis, but okay.

  “Loud and clear, Dr. H.,” she said, taking a towel from the radiator, where it had been warming. Dr. Hunter lifted the baby out of the water — he was slipperier than a fish — and Reggie wrapped him in the towel.

  “ ‘Knowing that when light is gone, Love remains for shining,’ ” Dr. Hunter said. “Isn’t that lovely? Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote it for her dog.”

  “Flush,” Reggie said. “Virginia Woolf wrote a book about him. I’ve read around the subject.”

  “When everything else has gone, love still remains,” Dr. Hunter said.

  “Totally,” Reggie said. But what good did it do you? None at all.

  Ad Augusta per Angusta

  This would be the scenic route, then. He was taking the long way round. Jackson tipped a metaphorical hat in the direction of the Dixie Chicks.

  For reasons best known to itself the GPS stopped working five miles after leaving the village. At some point they had obviously taken a wrong turning, because Jackson found himself on a one-way road that wound its leisurely way up through a deserted dale. There was no signal on his phone, and the radio had given out nothing but crackle and hiss for some time now. The CD player contained one disc accidentally left over from the previous rental and Jackson wondered in what circumstances he would feel so desperate for the sound of another voice that he would listen to Enya’s.

  He should have brought his iPod, he could have been listening to songs of heartache and redemption and redneck righteousness. And it had obviously been a really bad idea to leave that OS map behind, although he wasn’t convinced that the roads around here actually conformed to any map. If it hadn’t been for a signpost a mile back reassuring him that they were heading for the right destination, he would have turned round by now. (Although should he put so much faith in signs?)

  Bleak in its beauty, the landscape was beginning to bring out the mournful streak in Jackson that he was usually better off keeping at bay. Hello, darkness, my old friend. Life was easier if you were an unimaginative pragmatist, a happy idiot. “Well, you’ve got the idiot part right,” he heard his ex-wife Josie’s voice say in his head.

  The road stretched tightly over the contours of the land and, apart from its taking the occasional dip, they were climbing the whole time. Although Jackson would have referred to himself in the singular if he had been (God forbid) on foot, when he was in a car, he became a plural pronoun. They, we, us. The car and me, a biomechanical fusion of man and vehicle. Pilgrims on God’s highway.

  They were alone. Not another car in sight. No tractors or Land Rovers, no other drifters on the high plains, no fellow travelers at all. No farmhouses or sheep barns either, only grass and barren limestone and a dead December sky. He was on the road to nowhere.

  There were still a lot of hardy sheep wandering around, though, aloof to the dangers posed by a bloody great Discovery bearing down on them. They must surely lamb late up here on these wuthering heights. Jackson wondered if they were already carrying next year’s lambs. He had never considered the gestation period of a sheep before, it was surprising what a lonely road drove you to. His daughter had recently announced her conversion to the vegetarian cause. In a word-association test his automatic response to the word lamb would be “mint sauce,” Marlee’s would be “innocent.” The slaughter of. She was being brought up as an atheist, but she spoke the language of martyrs. Perhaps Catholicism was genetic, in the blood.

  “Becoming a vegetarian seems to be a rite of passage for teenage girls these days,” Josie said, during his last visit to Cambridge at the end of the summer. “All her friends have given up meat.” No more father-daughter bonding over a burger, then.

  “I know, I know, meat is murder,” he said, as they sat down at a table in a café of Marlee’s choice called something like Seeds or Roots. (“Weeds,” he called it, to her annoyance.) He had had a hankering for a beef-and-mustard sandwich but settled for a chewy brown roll with an anemic-looking filling that he guessed to be egg but that turned out — horror of horrors — to be “scrambled tofu.”

  “Yum,” he said, and Marlee said, “Don’t be so cynical, Daddy. It suits you too much.”

  When had his daughter started speaking like a woman? A year ago she had skipped along like a three-year-old on the path by the river to Grantchester (where, if his memory served him right, she had eaten a ham salad in the Orchard Tea Room, no guilt at all about ingesting Babe). Now, apparently, that girl had run on ahead out of sight. Turn your back for a minute and they were gone.

  When you had children, you measured your years in theirs. Not “I’m forty-nine,” but “I have a twelve-year-old child.” Josie had another child now, another girl, two years old, the same age as Nathan. Two children united by the common thread of DNA they shared with their half sister, Marlee. Just because Nathan didn’t look like him didn’t mean he wasn’t his son. After all, Marlee didn’t look like him either. Julia claimed that Nathan wasn’t his child, but when had anyone ever believed anything that his ex- girlfriend said? Julia was born to lie. Plus, she was an actress, of course. So when she looked him earnestly in the eye and said, “Really, Jackson, the baby isn’t yours, I’m telling the truth, why would I lie?” his instinct was to say, “Why change the habit of a lifetime now?” Instead of arguing (“I generally only argue with people I like,” she had once said to him), she had given him a pitying look.

  He wanted a son. He wanted a son so he could teach him all the things he knew, as well as how to learn all the things he didn’t know. He couldn’t teach his daughter anything, she knew more than he did already. And he wanted a son because he was a man. Simple as that. He suddenly recalled the surge of emotion he had felt when he touched Nathan’s head. That was the kind of thing that made a strong man weak
for life.

  And anyway, he had said to Josie, since when was twelve a teenager? “Teen is the clue — thirteen, fourteen, et cetera. She’s only twelve.”

  “Double figures count,” Josie said casually. “They start earlier these says.”

  “Start what?”

  Jackson had passed through his teens without ever being aware of them. He had been a boy at twelve and then he had joined the army at sixteen and become a man. Between the two he had walked in the valley of the shadow of death, with no comfort to hand.

  He hoped his daughter would have a sunny passage through those years. He had a crumpled postcard from her in the pocket of his jacket from when she had been on a school trip to Bruges in her half-term. The postcard showed a picturesque view of a canal and some old redbrick houses. Jackson had never felt the need to go to Belgium. He had transferred the card from his old leather jacket to the North Face jacket — his disguise — although from no clear motive, only that a message from his daughter, banal and dutiful though it was (“Dear Dad, Bruges is very interesting, it has a lot of nice buildings. It is raining. Have eaten a lot of chips and chocolate. Missing you! Love you! Marlee xxx”), seemed like something you shouldn’t just throw away. Did she really miss him? He suspected her life was too full to notice his absence.

  A ragged-looking sheep, long-in-the-tooth mutton, stood foursquare in the road ahead, like a gunslinger waiting for high noon. Jackson slowed to a stop and waited it out for a while. The sheep didn’t move. He hooted his horn but it didn’t even twitch an ear, just continued chewing grass laconically like an old tobacco hand. He wondered if it was deaf. He got out of the car and looked at it threateningly.

  “Are you gonna pull those pistols or whistle ‘Dixie’?” he said to it. It looked at him with a flicker of interest and then went back to its incessant chewing.