Cooee (19 page)

Max was at the airport to pick me up the next morning. I'd never been more pleased to see him. I felt as if I'd sailed back into harbour, as if I was rocking safely again, lapped, unharmed after a close shave out on the open waters. I didn't tell him what had happened with the young guitarist. There was no reason why I should, of course; still, it felt odd to keep something from Max, to whom I told everything, in whom I confided as I had never confided in anyone before.

Doubly glad to be back home, I nestled into Rain, consciously luxuriating in its beauty and comfort, letting its surfaces and textures, its angles of light and its slanting shadows, soothe me. It was easy to be soothed.

During the day I worked with Bea: the business was booming and, although we didn't pick up on the Sydney terraces, more and more work was coming our way, and we were doing it well and enjoying it. Bea started to speak about employing a third architect. I didn't mind much one way or the other, so long as it was somebody who could be trusted with the name we were building for attention to detail, smooth, unfussy plans, flowing space, subtle planes and clever use of light.

There was plenty of work and I worked hard, but at the end of the day I went home to Max and enjoyed the life I had created for myself. I rang Dominic regularly: he didn't want to talk to me, but that would come in time.

When I look back on this period, I think it was the happiest time of my life. I had descended a little from the dizzy heights of my first wild infatuation with Max: that had been intensely happy, it is true; but it had also been accompanied by much trauma. Now, as we headed into our fourth year together, our life had settled and established itself: we were comfortable together in ways that were essentially domestic, undramatic, snug.

Our snugness was shared by Gavin, who turned up more and more frequently. We got to a stage in which we no longer noticed his presence at breakfast: it seemed as regular and predictable as Kate's own and I poured his orange juice without thinking about it.

It was no surprise when they appeared one night, silly and giggly and high as kites, interrupting our pre-dinner Scotch and announcing their engagement with all the erupting excitement of five-year-olds on their way to a circus. They declared that they intended to marry soon, soon!

I was conscious of a vague, undefined disappointment, but I tried not to show it and I certainly didn't make any attempt to dissuade them. Gavin didn't light up any candles for me, but I wasn't Kate, and in fact when I thought about it I found it impossible to imagine Kate marrying someone I might have liked.

Gavin was at least relatively inoffensive: he didn't put my teeth on edge more than three or four times a day. He did seem genuinely in love with Kate; he was working as a part-time tutor and seemed quite likely to turn into an academic (heaven knew there wasn't much else I could imagine him doing), so there was some prospect of his being able to support a family.

We all drank champagne and hugged and kissed and said how wonderful, and part of me half meant it. I knew Kate was very young, but so had I been when I'd married for the first time. If mothers chose their daughters' partners, after all, the world wouldn't work any better than it does now.

I suppose it was two or three weeks later — and a week or two before the wedding — that I came across Kate throwing up in the toilet.

‘Is there anything you think you ought to tell me?' I asked, when she'd got herself cleaned up. We were in the kitchen and she was sipping the peppermint tea I'd made her. Peppermint tea had helped me through the early stages of both pregnancies, and it seemed to be doing the trick for Kate, too: she still looked peaky, but her colour was starting to return, and so was her composure.

She smiled her fey smile and cradled her mug in her hands.

‘Well. Yes, I guess so.'

‘You're pregnant?'

‘I suppose so, Mum. Are you cross?'

‘I'm not cross, no. I didn't think you and Gavin had been playing Scrabble up there in your room all night. But do you
know
, Kate? Have you done the tests?'

‘Oh, yes,' said Kate, smiling again. ‘It all seems pretty clear. The right colour and everything, you know. The blue line.'

This was incomprehensible to me. There hadn't been a blue line in my day.

‘But have you seen a doctor?'

‘Not yet. I will do. I've got an appointment.'

‘Is that why you wanted to marry so quickly, Kate?'

‘Not really. I mean, it isn't like it used to be, is it? Nobody really minds these days, do they? I guess we just couldn't see any point in waiting.'

‘And Gavin knows?'

‘Well, yes, Mum,' said Kate, looking slightly hurt. ‘Of course he does. He's terribly thrilled.'

‘Kate,' I said, very earnestly. ‘Kate, you know you don't have to get married, if you don't want to. I don't want you to feel trapped.'

She looked astonished. ‘Why would I feel trapped?'

‘Well, only that if you thought — because of this, I mean — because of being pregnant — that you had to get married, I'm only saying, you don't have to.'

‘But, Mum. That's what I've been saying. I don't feel I have to get married. I
want
to get married.'

‘To Gavin?'

‘Of course to Gavin. There's no other candidate, is there?' said Kate, laughing.

‘If you're sure,' I said.

‘Of course I'm sure.'

‘I just want you to be happy, Kate.'

‘I'm going to be happy.'

‘Okay. That's fine, then.' I stood. I was running late for work.

She put up her arms to me. ‘Aren't you pleased, Mum?'

I embraced her, somewhat awkwardly, murmuring reassurance.

Was I pleased? I wasn't sure. I thought about it as I drove to work. I should have guessed, of course: Kate and Gavin were no more competent to supervise their own contraception than the guinea pigs Kate had kept when she was eight. I wasn't sure if I was pleased, to tell the truth. I was only forty-one. I wasn't at all sure that I was ready to be a grandmother.

To my relief, Kate didn't want a big wedding. I'd had some misgivings about this: two years before, she'd been bridesmaid for one of her cousins on Steve's side of the family. Sarah had gone right over the top on the tulle and the glitter. The bridesmaids had frothed down the aisle like a trio of big white cappuccinos, preceding the large and twinkling pavlova of Sarah in her wedding dress. Kate had been very taken by it all, and I confidently expected a replay in her decisions about her own marriage. It didn't eventuate, however. Whether it was the lingering morning sickness, or consideration for her father's budget, she requested and got something a lot smaller, a lot quieter.

After the wedding, she settled into domestic contentment with the dreadful Gavin, rather as if all her dreams had been fulfilled and this was all she wanted of life. To be pregnant and not quite barefoot.

Well, I suppose I wasn't too far from that, when I married Steve.

They settled into a nasty little house with cheap second-hand furniture Steve helped them to buy; Steve also gave them some old things, things he and I had bought when we were first married. I contributed the nursery furniture, which was neither second-hand nor cheap. I must say, Kate was most appreciative.

She painted the nursery herself, and got me to help her put up a wallpaper frieze with elves and hedgehogs and whatnot scampering over it. We bought a walnut cradle with white lacy sheets, and a gleaming white cot, and a sumptuous navy pram with a suspension that would lull any baby to sleep. I started to dawdle in babywear shops, feeling a maternalism to which I was unaccustomed, and bought the odd growsuit and fluffy toy. It was all rather pleasant.

Towards the end of Kate's pregnancy, late on a Sunday afternoon during which she and Gavin had visited us, I came across Max standing absorbed in thought, chin in hand, in the back garden.

‘A penny for them,' I said, snuggling into his side and kissing his cheek.

‘Do you still want the pool?'

I was taken aback. ‘It's you who wants the pool, not me. I don't mind one way or the other.'

‘It's a beautiful pool,' he said, thoughtfully.

‘You've always said so.'

‘I'm just thinking. There's not much of a garden, is there? Not around this side. The pool takes it all up. We're going to have a grandchild. Well, I know it'll be your grandchild, but I think of it as ours. I'm just thinking, wouldn't we rather have a garden for the little tyke to run around in?'

‘I don't know. Wouldn't you miss it?'

‘I'm not sure.' He rubbed his chin. ‘I'm not sure I wouldn't rather have a bigger garden, you know. Couple of rose beds, perhaps? A herb patch? Maybe a winding path, a big tree or two? Bit of a lawn?'

‘I don't mind,' I said.

And it was true: I didn't. Max could do this sometimes: we'd been through it with Rain's sunroom, which at first he'd loved. After a year, he found there was too much lemon in it, and eventually, once he'd worked up steam, the room was completely repainted and refurnished. Suddenly, what had been perfectly adequate turned out to be misguided, a foolish error, unsatisfactory from the start.

So I wasn't surprised that he wanted a garden, and I wasn't surprised when, in the next couple of days, he started to contact landscapers and pool demolishers. Max had never been a procrastinator.

He devoted immense effort to the planning, and, instead of returning to the swanky landscape gardener he'd originally employed for Rain, held endless discussions with Jack, of Jack's Landscape Solutions, recommended by some business acquaintance. Jack was a fatherly man with a ginger beard, which he had the habit of twirling, deep in thought.

Together they pored over diagrams and garden books. Max went out to nurseries and examined their stock, engaging in intense conversations with the nursery staff about anticipated heights and growth habits and conditions and colours and heaven only knows what else. What Max did, he did thoroughly.

And then Sophie was born.

It is impossible adequately to describe how Sophie's new presence, her existence as a new person, affected me. Everything was more fun. I fizzed more; I laughed more. Making love was better than ever; I embarked on an extravagant series of kitchen explorations, buying new equipment, cooking new things, trying new flavours. I attacked the front garden, which it seemed to me needed a lift, and planted dozens of seedlings, most of which died within a week because I forgot to water them. Max came across me humming one day: I was ironing, and I hate ironing. He laughed at me.

‘You're worse than Pollyanna. It's like living with Julie Andrews: suddenly the hills are alive.'

I was startled. I knew I felt different, but I hadn't realised I'd shown it so clearly.

‘You are utterly transparent, my love,' he said, kissing the back of my neck. ‘That tiny little mite has transformed your life completely, and there's no point in denying it.'

Well, I didn't want to deny it. Something melted inside me every time I picked her up, every time I saw her. And relations between Kate and me were so good, too: after a lifetime of tension, we were finally doing the mother–daughter thing.

I started to work part-time, turning up maybe three days a week if they were lucky. Bea complained loudly, and I laughed and said I was learning how to be a granny and she'd have to get used to it.

I drove over frequently and helped Kate to bathe Sophie: peacefully we marvelled together at her perfection, stroking her cheeks, kissing her tummy, cuddling her, giggling like a couple of schoolgirls.

It seemed to me that Kate liked me more than she ever had before. I certainly liked her. She was deft and gentle with Sophie, and sweet. She was willing to defer to me, to ask my advice. ‘What should I do here?' she would ask. ‘How should I handle this, or that? Did I do this, when I was a baby?' And so on.

New harmonies established themselves, crept into our conversations, our modes of discussion. We conferred over what name I could be called. Nanna? Grandma? Gran? We settled on Gandie because it was a bit different, and I liked its rhythm, its slow movement.

We would sit together quietly as Kate breastfed. I took to knitting small things in fleecy white or soft pink wool, on fragile metal needles that clicked companionably through our amicable chat, our compatible silence. We were there together, hanging over her cradle, when she smiled her first smile. ‘You can't say
that's
wind!' Kate cried in triumph, and we hugged. We actually hugged.

Picture postcard, we were. No, better: high art. I see us in retrospect, heads bent, sitting in the slanting sunshine of a rustic Dutch interior. Tendrils of hair, shimmering in the faint and dusty light, escape from our starched white caps. Blue hyacinths make a statement in an earthenware vase; a solid curvaceous milk jug squats on the wooden table. The baby kicks and coos. There's probably a damsel playing a dulcimer in a courtyard out the back.