Cooee (20 page)

Well, it happened. It was brief, I grant you; but it happened.

When Sophie was about three months old and we were engaged in one of these idyllic scenes, Kate said one day: ‘Families are so important, aren't they, Mum.'

‘Mmmm,' I say, with some wariness. I am conscious of being vulnerable in this kind of discussion.

‘And ritual's important, too, I think. Don't you?'

‘Possibly,' I say. I have no idea where this is heading.

‘Dad asked me the other day if we were going to have her christened.'

‘Ah,' I say. Religion has never meant much to me. It seems clear to me that if there is a God up there he's just as baffled by everything as I am, and he's therefore not much use to me. I was faintly surprised, after we were married, to discover that Steve had C-of-E leanings. Not that they ever made much difference to anything.

‘And are you?' I ask.

‘No, I don't think so,' says Kate, reflectively, detaching Sophie from her nipple and lifting her to her shoulder. ‘There you go, my precious, see how you feel after that little lot. I talked about it with Gavin. He doesn't really mind: he'll do whatever I want, he says.'

That'd be right, I think. Hopeless.

‘And I don't really want the full christening deal. You know? It seems hypocritical, somehow. I mean, we never go to church, and I really don't want all the trappings and so forth. But we agreed we wanted something. Just something to sort of celebrate Sophie, and her arrival into the world, and how perfect she is. To welcome her formally, I suppose. She's had enough, I think. Can you take her for a moment, Mum?'

I receive Sophie into my arms. She gives me a bleary grin and my insides liquefy into warm honey. It keeps happening, the miracle of holding her and feeling myself melt with the wondrous beauty of it, the beauty of her.

Kate is doing up her bra. ‘So I thought, perhaps, let's have a kind of reception.'

‘A reception?'

‘Well, yes. I mean literally. A receiving of her, into the family. You know? Just like a party, really.'

I don't know, at all, but I'm feeling soppy these days and I'm prepared to agree to pretty much anything Kate suggests. Within reason.

‘Of course,' she goes on, thoughtfully, ‘it would mean you and Dad would be here together. Would that be uncomfortable for you, do you think?'

It will be exceedingly uncomfortable, of course. As I've explained, Steve and I didn't split up with the kind of cold-fish amity other couples seem to achieve on occasion. We were bitter and hot and hurt; we shouted and screamed; we wounded each other with express calculation. We never actually hit each other, but we came close. Well, I did, anyway. And now we avoid each other with resolute circumspection.

But I have thought about all of this. Steve and I are grandparents, now, and perhaps it is time to face up to our joint obligations. Grandchildren are different. There will be birthdays, Christmases, school sports, school concerts. There will be ballet performances and netball matches and tennis finals and maybe eisteddfods and piano competitions. Trophy presentations, prize-givings, all the trappings that accompany clear public evidence of excellence. (Not that I'm necessarily expecting these, you understand; but they might happen all the same.) There will be graduations and debuts. And then there will be more weddings. So if I can manage to be grown up about all of this, Steve can, too.

‘That's fine,' I say, casually. ‘Max will have to be invited, of course.'

Kate nods. ‘Max is part of the family, too,' she says, seriously.

I am pleased she says this. I tell him about it, later, that evening, when we're having a whisky in the light stone courtyard leading in from Rain's well-equipped kitchen — silvery granite-topped benches, best-quality Swedish appliances, capacious and ingenious cupboards in pale mountain ash.

He tinkles the ice in his glass, gazing down at it and saying nothing. I think I can tell, however, from his faint crinkly smile, that he's glad Kate has said this, that he interprets it as her cementing his relationship with Sophie, with her family.

So Kate's reception proceeds. She chats about it a lot: it fills her mind. Invitations are sent out for a Sunday afternoon. We are each to bring a gift: not a physical, wrapped gift (though I intend to bring one of those, too: I have bought a glorious snowy crochet wrap which will, I realise, be of strictly limited use but drapes superbly and seems to me to establish my gravitas as a grandmother), but a metaphoric gift, a spiritual gift, which requires each of us to nominate the essential quality that in an ideal world we would pass on to a baby aspiring to the best of everything. In short, we are to be fairy godmothers.

I give much thought to what I will propose as my gift to Sophie. I am not blind to the possibilities this occasion offers for Steve and me to insert vengeful blades sleekly between each other's ribs, but I am determined to rise above this, to demonstrate my large-mindedness, my benign serenity. Should Steve meanly come up with some quality such as fidelity, I am prepared to look mildly hurt and to forgo my corresponding opportunity. Forewarned, I smugly believe myself forearmed.

Max is interested in what he sees as Kate's ingenuity and engages to think seriously about his own gift, but for some reason we do not discuss our intentions.

Before we leave for the reception, I glance out the back door and see that the wattle is in vibrant bloom. Yellow has always seemed to me to be Sophie's natural colour, and even at that stage of her life its radiance carried its own appropriateness for her special glow, her sunlit essence, her goldenness. I rush out with secateurs and mutilate the young trees, carving out great swathes of vivid flowers, which deposit themselves all over the fine leather of Max's back seat on the way over. Ever since then, whenever I see the electric lemon fuzz of early cootamundra blossom, I remember Sophie's fairy godmother party.

I realise when we get there that the wattle has been a mistake: Kate exclaims over its beauty but is clearly at a loss when trying to find a suitable vase, and it makes the devil of a mess of her carpet while she struggles with it. Never mind: it gives us a way to get through the awkwardness of Steve, who has already arrived and has obviously decided to behave well. He nods at me, shakes Max's hand mournfully, and mutters something which may not be gracious but at least is not provocative.

So we're all sitting around and dandling Sophie and covering awkward gaps with exclamations over her beauty and intelligence. Then, at a sign from Kate, the hapless Gavin shambles over to the fireplace and looks about him with myopic satisfaction.

‘Thank you all for coming,' he says, and meanders on for some time about Sophie, and Kate, and how happy he is to be married to Kate, and the importance of families.

We sit on the cheap, velveteen lounge suite and listen to him with more or less pleased looks on our faces. Kate is on my right, I recall; holding Sophie and watching Gavin with approval. Dominic is beyond her, tight, tense, closed in. (Dominic was about fifteen. He still had the slim fawnlike look of prepubescence; when he wore bathers you could see the delicate angular projections of his shoulder blades, jutting out as if his skeletal structure hid wings that were trying to bud through the bones. His chest and arms hadn't filled out. His voice was just breaking and his skin still had a childish sheen to it. He was so beautiful he made you weep.) Steve is beyond Dominic; his shoulders are hunched and he stares at the carpet.

And on the other side of the room — in the old armchairs Steve has given Kate, the armchairs he and I bought when we were first married — sit Zoë and Henry. I hadn't expected Zoë and Henry to be here and I'm not sure why they are: I'd thought it was only the immediate family; but I'm determined to be good-tempered about everything today. Max is next to me (I've made sure of that), on the other side of me from Kate. I see Steve glancing at him, every now and then. Sophie is making gurgling noises, bless her.

Gavin comes, with slow humour and elephantine tread, to the end of his speech. He beams at us all and then says, with no particular emphasis: ‘And my gift to my daughter is charm.' And he goes and sits down.

Kate breaks in to protest. ‘You have to say why,' she cries, dissolving into laughter.

We have all been instructed thus. It is not enough simply to give: we must speak to our gifts, describing the manner in which we wish them to manifest themselves and the reasons for our choice. Gavin has, of course, forgotten this. Smiling ineffectually, he lumbers to his feet again and considers.

‘I haven't got it,' he says. ‘Charm, I mean. I've never had it.'

Some people make ineffectual demurring noises. (I don't.)

‘No, I haven't,' he continues. ‘I know I haven't. I've always wanted it. I've always been — how would you put it —
beguiled
by charming people. They make you want to be with them; they make you want their good opinion; they make you want to do things for them. People who have that — they've got the battle won. That's what I want for my little girl. If she's got that, I reckon everything else will follow.'

Kate applauds and the rest of us, unsure about whether we are meant to join in, clap in a piecemeal kind of way as Gavin, blushing and ungainly, sits down again and tries to look as if he has some marginal capacity for self-possession. Later on, as we have a quiet drink in the courtyard at Rain, Max will say to me that he found this speech touching.

‘Touching?' I say, mystified.

Max regards me in what seems a slightly odd way.

‘You really don't like Gavin, do you?'

Briefly, I investigate my emotions.

‘I don't like him or dislike him. I don't know what she sees in him. But I don't specially dislike him. It's just that he irritates me. How can she go to bed with him, Max? He's like a long, thin puppet, a clown puppet; his head bobs around as if his neck's on a spring; he's so gangly and bumbly and he always looks so damn worried.'

‘But you don't dislike him,' says Max, laughing.

‘No. He drives me mad, but I don't dislike him.'

‘It was a very honest speech,' says Max.

Anyway, whether Gavin was touching or not, we now move on to our next contributor, skulking palely in the corner.

‘Dad!' calls Kate, who is the self-elected emcee for this occasion. ‘Your turn.'

Steve has actually written out a speech, which he drags from a back pocket and self-consciously unfolds. ‘I have thought a good deal about this,' he reads, flat and hurried. ‘I have found it a difficult task.'

I school my features to look earnest: it will not do to snigger.

‘It is a new thing for me to have a granddaughter,' continues Steve. ‘I find I am quite surprised by it. It seems to me only the other day that Kate was still a little child herself and I do not know where the years have gone. But here we are, and suddenly here is Sophie, who is now a part of our family.'

Steve pauses and takes a deep breath; a light sweat gleams on his upper lip. I am puzzled. Grace and sophistication are not attributes of Steve's: I realise this; indeed, no one knows it better than I, but he can normally exhibit a kind of bluff self-possession that serves him better than this awful rehearsed floundering. Suddenly I wonder if he is as disconcerted by my presence — and, of course, by Max's — as I am by his. I suppose it's possible.

‘I have thought a lot about Kate's request and I have tried to come up with something that is appropriate for me to give Sophie as her gift from me,' Steve goes on, so clearly uncomfortable and embarrassed that these sensations are communicated to us all like a rabid infection.

‘Of course I understand that whatever I come up with it will only be my wish for Sophie and not actually a real gift, no matter how much I would like it to be. Still, it is important to wish for the right thing. And so I have decided to wish for Sophie not beauty or wealth or talent but something else that I think is more important. I am wishing her resilience. You don't ever know what life will bring you, and whatever it does bring you, you have to try to bounce back from. This is something all of us know from different experiences, in different ways.'

He pauses and glances around, in a dissatisfied, unfocused way. ‘So,' he finishes, lamely. ‘So. That is my wish for Sophie.'

Again, as he sits down, the patchy applause dribbles around, Kate clapping over-enthusiastically and the rest of us still not sure about joining in. It's a bit like a school prize-giving where none of the students like each other very much. I'm relieved. Resilience is okay, as Steve's wish. Fidelity I would have had trouble with.

‘Max!' Kate declares. ‘Your turn.'

Max stands, with the graceful diffidence he's so good at. He's not at all nervous, unlike his predecessors, but he's not going to err on the side of over-confidence either. Oh God, he speaks so well, and I am so proud of him! He says, with his own gorgeous quiet understated charm, how glad he is to be here, how much he appreciates everyone's forbearance and warmth and how good it is to feel part of a family.

He goes on: ‘I've never been part of a family — or at least, not for so long that I almost can't remember it. I'd been on my own for a long time, before I met Isabel. Frankly, I'd expected always to be on my own. And it's such a privilege, such an honour, to be accepted among you all.'