A Hidden Life (11 page)

Lou closed her bedroom door and sat on the edge of her bed, knowing it would take her ages to get back to sleep. It always did when she had to get up fori Poppy. At least tonight there was something to look at. Dad had put two big boxes of Grandad's papers on the desk for her to take back with her tomorrow. She was eager to see whether John Barrington sl made notes or kept a diary. Boxes of papers – there was probably nothing important or interesting among them, but just the phrase made Lou feel interested and excited. And she wanted to know more about how he came to write
Blind Moon
and what he might have thought about it, and the kind of reception it had when it was published. Perhaps she was on the point of finding out something amazing and even if she didn't, simply knowing what was there would bring him closer to her. His handwriting – small, beautiful, carefully made, right-sloping letters, always in black ink – would be a powerful reminder of him, and his words would make him alive for her again for a little while. There might also be letters from other people. What she'd probably find was bank statements and lists and boring stuff of every imaginable kind, but as long as the papers remained unread, they were full of possibilities.

When Lou had volunteered to take the boxes back to London, her father was obviously very relieved. In answer to her mother's queries about where on earth she was going to store them, she'd said there was lots of space, which was a lie. The boxes would end up under
her bed. But Dad was going to drive her home. If Poppy stays here, Lou thought, then the car won't be full of all her stuff and the boxes could sit on the back seat all by themselves. Does that mean I've decided about leaving Poppy? It must do, but I haven't even thought about it yet.

Lou listened to the silence. Poppy's asleep, she thought. She must be by now, or she'd have called out, cried, or shouted for me to come back. Okay, so what about Mum's offer? She sighed and wondered whether she could really walk out of this house tomorrow and leave Poppy behind. Of course I can, she thought. Mum would be so happy. But maybe I'm deluding myself. It's not true that I'm only doing it because Mum wants it so much – a favour to her, giving her something she's longed for ever since Poppy was born. I'm doing it for me too. So that I can be on my own, doing what I want to do and nothing else. How selfish is that? Am I really such a terrible mother? No, she decided. There really is a good reason for it and it would make Mum so happy. Surely that had to outweigh the feelings of guilt that she found so hard to shake off.

Lou went to the window and looked out at the back lawn, shadowy in the dark but with the dim light of a half-moon outlining the tips of the shrubs with silver and making mysterious her mother's neat but rather uninspired garden. The prospect of empty days and days ahead of her … she found it hard to imagine. She took a deep breath. Grandad's book might be a film, she thought. As soon as this occurred to her, she felt a little dizzy, as though she'd come to the edge of a high cliff and looked over into a kind of void. But she couldn't stop thinking about what a great film
Blind Moon
would make, if only someone wrote it who knew what they were doing.

The longer she worked at Cinnamon Hill, the more strongly she believed that the script was the single most important component of a movie. You could cover up for a weak one with any number of special effects, or photographic dazzle; you could employ the very best actors and directors, but when push came to shove, what made the difference between the flashy and mediocre and the lasting and good was the story and the way it was told. Harry … he could do it. Or Martyn Westord, who'd written the most moving script Lou had read since she'd started working as a reader. Any number of other
people came into her mind who might be ready and willing to take on Grandad's book and make something of it. And I could sell them the rights, she thought. I could make some money from it and that'd be one in the eye for Constance.

Then she sat down on the bed again, knocked back by a thought so startling that she had to catch her breath and think it over to herself a couple more times, testing it for madness, recklessness and general lunacy. No, the more she repeated it, the better it seemed to her. It was crazy perhaps, but when she thought it, she could feel excitement rising in her. She spoke the thought aloud, to test it in the air, to see whether it sounded like the ravings of a woman who was suffering from too little sleep.

‘I'll do it myself,' she said. She said it again, slightly differently this time: I'm going to write the screenplay for
Blind Moon.'
Silently, she vowed not to tell a single soul. Because what if she couldn't do it after all? What if she failed? She knew she wouldn't be able to bear it if Mum and Dad and Nessa, and maybe Harry and other people at Cinnamon Hill, were all hanging on to see how she was progressing. Asking questions, or deliberately not asking questions. For the first time since Ray threw her out, Lou felt unalloyed happiness; a pure elation unmixed with any other emotion that you don't usually get to enjoy after you've stopped being a kid. Everything was going to work out. It was pure accident that Mum had offered to take Poppy on the same night that she herself had made such a momentous decision, but somehow Lou couldn't help feeling everything was being
organized:
being arranged so that she could do what she wanted to do, for the first time in a long time.

And Grandad's boxes would now be research. I'll only have a quick look, she told herself, just to see what's there and then I'll go to sleep. She picked out a notebook that was right on top and opened it.

Matt looked across the kitchen at his wife, who was sitting next to the high chair and spooning beige puddingy goo into Poppy's open mouth. This high chair lived normally in the box room on the attic floor. It had been used for Tamsin and now he brought it down every
time Poppy came to visit. It was wooden and well made, and they'd bought it when Lou was born. Matt was concentrating on the chair in an attempt to calm down. He knew that if he began to argue now, while Poppy was being fed, Phyl would refuse to answer. It was one of her iron rules: no fighting in front of children. He wasn't altogether sure about how he felt at the prospect of Poppy's stay. He had no idea of how long she'd be with them, but it was sure to be a few weeks at least. Matt thought the world of Poppy and was happy to have her to stay for a bit, but he also felt a little miffed that this had been decided without so much as a word of consultation with him. He listened to the babble of grandmotherly noise and chat that was coming out of Phyl's mouth in an unending stream. Was it going to be like this every day? And at night – and in the middle of the night? He liked to think of himself as a good grandfather, but that didn't mean that he was willing to relinquish his rights to a bit of peace and quiet altogether.

‘I can see you're cross,' said Phyl, over her shoulder at him, with a smile that he knew was meant to disarm him. ‘You don't have to try and hide it. I'm sorry. I
am
sorry, really, not to have asked you what you think, but I knew you'd agree. We both know how hard things are for Lou. She's trying to make a go of her career and she finds it difficult. Mothering, I mean. Not everyone's cut out for it and you don't know till you have a child what kind of parent you're going to be, do you? You should have seen her last night. She looked half dead. Pale and with shadows under her eyes. I hate seeing her like that.'

‘I'd hate to see you like that,' Matt said, spreading marmalade on his toast. ‘And that's how you're going to be, Phyl. What about
your
work? What about that? And our lives? Our sleep? Have you given any thought to how the house will have to be reorganized?'

‘I have. It's not so much, when you think about it. We'll childproof it in the way we used to for Tamsin. I've got stair gates, a cot, a high chair, and Poppy's as good as gold. Aren't you, pet? As good as gold?'

Poppy leaned out of her high chair and hit her grandmother on the wrist with a plastic spoon covered in goo. Phyl wiped it off nonchalantly and Matt winced.

‘This …' he waved a hand to take in the high chair, Phyl still in her dressing gown, the baby now babbling more and more enthusiastically ‘… is how it's going to be from now on, is it? Are you absolutely sure, Phyl? How are you going to like being stuck at home with a baby every single day?'

‘I'll love it. So will you, whatever you say. And of course I can't go back on what I said to Lou. She's counting on us, Matt. It's only to give her a short break. How can we fail her?'

‘Fail her?' He couldn't help his voice rising and Phyl frowned at him. ‘Sorry, I didn't mean to shout, but honestly. I would never fail her. I'm happy to help her in any way I can. You know that. Financially and otherwise. Neither of us would do anything else and for as long as it's necessary, obviously. Also, it's not as though we're not willing to lend a hand from time to time, but to take up the full-time care of a baby! That's a bit different, Phyl, you have to admit. I think you've been a bit hasty, that's all.'

‘Your mother did it. She looked after Nessa and Justin lots of the time. They were forever going up there and staying for weekends, and half the holidays as well. And Lou, too … she had the benefit of a grandmother.'

‘It was easier for my mother. She had a housekeeper. Miss Hardy had a whole squad of young women coming in to help with the housework. And as it turns out,' Matt said, ‘her grandmother turned out to be a bit of liability, wouldn't you say? Lou went up there for my father, not for Constance.'

‘But you know what I mean. I don't want Poppy being – being distant from us. In the way that Tamsin is, for instance. We hardly ever see that child.'

‘No, well, you know Nessa. I think she'd bring her more often but she does have that business which takes up her time, it seems. I don't see Lou keeping Poppy away from us … but this is a bit much, Phyl. Don't you think it is? And' – Matt felt quite proud of himself for thinking of this argument – ‘it's surely not good for a young child to be away from her mother.'

‘Obviously it's bad if you deprive a baby of love and care, put her in an institution or something. But a grandmother – and grandfather – are fine substitutes for a short while. Poppy won't suffer. In fact,
she'll thrive. I'll get her into a routine and she'll have much more attention from me than she gets in that nursery, I'm quite sure. And it's not just Poppy I'm thinking of, either. Having children means doing what you can for them when they need it, and Lou needs it. She needs the time to grow into motherhood. She has to get used to it slowly. Only a few months and then everything will be different.'

‘A few months?
A few months?'

‘Keep your voice down, for heaven's sake, Matt. You'll scare the baby.'

‘On the contrary, she's scaring me. But no …' He stood up. ‘I've got to go. If you're thinking of handing in your notice then one of us has got to earn a living.'

‘What do you mean … but no?'

‘I mean, not
months,
Phyl. No way. One month at most. I really don't mean to be unkind, and you know how much I adore Poppy, but we do have our lives to lead as well, don't we? Say goodbye to Lou from me. I'll phone her from work. She's already sleeping in, I see.'

‘We had a disturbed night,' Phyl said.

‘And it's not going to be the last, is it? God, Phyl, is this wise?'

‘As it'll be me that's getting up to see to Poppy at night and doing most of the childcare,' she replied in a chilly voice, ‘I don't see that you've got any reason to object.'

Nothing to say to that, Matt thought, so he said nothing. The number of reasons to object was growing all the time. You thought you could do what you wanted when you wanted to: go off to Paris for the weekend, have friends overto to stay, lie around on Sunday doing nothing more taxing than reading the papers, and then out of the blue you had to take someone else into consideration, and someone, moreover, who needed looking after twenty-four hours a day.

But. Being a lawyer, he was used to weighing up both sides of an argument.
But –
this was a baby you loved and cherished, and she was the daughter of your child whom you loved and cherished even more. And all that stuff about giving in notice and earning a living was nonsense. Phyl did enjoy working at the vet's. She'd been there for years and liked Dr Hargreaves and the contact with the animals and their owners, but of course they had quite enough money to
employ help if they needed it and there was the extra money he'd receive from his mother's estate. He sighed. He'd have to put up with it, make the best of it, put a brave face on things, but he was a little pissed off. Annoyed. Phyl thought she knew what he felt about it but he could never tell her how he dreaded the coming weeks. And he couldn't say anything or Lou would hear of it and he didn't want that. There it was: the bottom line. He didn't want to hurt Lou. Not ever, not in any way.

He stood up, leaned over to kiss the top of Phyl's head and left the room before she could say anything else. He heard her calling after him: ‘I'm not giving notice. Leave of absence. I'll take leave of absence. They'll have me back at work, I'm sure.'

In the car on the way to work, Matt thought about what Phyl had said. Could you take leave of absence from a vet's receptionist's job? Probably not, but it was true that there were always young women eager to come and work near animals, so it wouldn't be a problem to replace her for a bit.

He parked the car and leaned over to the back seat to pick up his briefcase. A kind of weariness overcame him and he shut his eyes. It wasn't just Poppy. It was everything. He genuinely loved his grandchild and he wasn't even the kind of person who disliked babies in general. So why was he resisting this invasion? Because it will mean a loss of freedom, he told himself. And that's why Lou needs us to do it. Her freedom was as important as theirs, he knew, but that meant also that his freedom – his and Phyl's – was as important as Lou's. Round and round …