Cuckoo (29 page)

Then he'd packed her case and driven her to this other dump of a church, and rat-face Cornelia had pressed a pale, damp hand into hers and said, ‘No, I'm not Miss, I'm Mother,' which was crap, because she was far too old and ugly to be anybody's ma, and Mother was a stupid name, anyway. Charles had stood with her at one end of the starched white dormitory, which was empty except for twenty staring beds and a picture of a bloke with golden ringlets and his heart on the outside. And he'd asked her a whole load of detailed questions about her mother and ‘What was it like when you were little, Magda?' Well, he should know, shouldn't he, and how the hell could you remember stuff like that, when you'd just been marched off to some Jesus-freak prison, and were wearing a blue serge frock that rubbed the skin off your neck?

Christ! He was going to start it all again – the muscle in his face was twitching. The nun had disappeared, and he was leaning forward in that phoney, trust-me-darling way.

‘Look, Magda, now you're living with us …'

‘I'm not living with you.'

‘Of course you are. This is just school. You'll be back in the holidays.'

‘It
is
the holidays. Nobody else is here yet. It's like a bloody morgue.'

Charles shifted his chair, so that a new pig-eyed Pope glared at her over his shoulder. ‘It would be worse at home, darling. Frances is still away, and I'm working very late most evenings, so you'd be all alone.'

She hated his darlings. They plopped out of his mouth half dead, like wet, struggling fishes. Of course she wouldn't be alone in Richmond. She had Viv and Bunty, didn't she, and all the animals, just a bike-ride away? They wanted to get rid of her, that was pretty clear. ‘What have you come for?' she asked her father warily.

He was probably going to move her somewhere else. She hadn't budged from Streatham in all her fifteen years, but now it was all-change. First Richmond, then Westborough, and bloody borstal next.

‘I've just come to see you, darling, to make sure you've settled in.' Another darling, another fucking lie. He'd never just come to see her, must be after something. Grown-ups always were.

He was sitting on the edge of his chair, his legs stretched out in front of him, dead legs, made of granite. ‘Look, Magda, all I want is to get to know you better. I missed out on your childhood. That was sad. There were reasons, of course, but that doesn't mean we can't catch up now. I'd like you to trust me, tell me about yourself when you were small, fill me in on things.'

Trust him. He must be joking. You couldn't trust people who lied. ‘What sort of things?' she asked.

‘Anything. Your friends, your mother, people who visited the house. You and Piroska lived alone, didn't you?'

‘Yeah.' Funny the way he called her ma Piroska. It sounded sort of weird.

‘What can you remember when you were really tiny?'

‘Nothing.' Christ, who the hell did he think she was – bloody Einstein or something, to remember things in her cradle?

‘Your mother was working, wasn't she? Did she ever bring friends home?' He made his eyes all soulful like a basset hound. ‘Try, Magda.'

Why should she bloody try? He'd been there himself, hadn't he? Not when she'd been old enough to have a memory, but years before, he'd visited. A tall man who didn't have a lap. She'd drawn him, sometimes, in her colouring book and never had to use her coloured crayons – he was always grey. Except the once she'd seen him lying on top of her mother in the narrow wooden bed. He'd been pale then, pale all over, except for his eyes. They'd gone almost black, when they saw her standing there. He'd never come again.

Perhaps she'd been mistaken and it wasn't him at all. Could such a stiff grey man be so soft and pink and pillowy underneath, or even take his clothes off? People looked so stupid when undressed, and Charles was never stupid.

‘Did you and your mother have any – er – special friends?'

She remembered the way his legs had stuck out beyond the bed, almost level with her face, when she'd crept in through the door, and caught sight of him, feet first, crushing her mother. Miklos probably lay on her mother like that, but without the legs. He was so squat and dumpy, he hardly had legs.

‘Yeah, there was one.'

‘What, when you were a baby?'

‘Yeah.' Miklos had only shown his ugly mug last January, but Charles wouldn't know that.

‘He slept on my mother, right on top of her, smothered her.'

‘Magda!'

‘Well, he did. He put his hands all over her, and then he …' Disgusting.
She'd
never do it. Some of the girls at Streatham did, and then bragged about it in the lavatories, and giggled and went pink. But she'd refuse to take her clothes off in front of anyone. ‘He was horrible. A Jew. A foreigner. He hadn't any legs.'

‘No legs? Magda, please.'

She looked down at Charles' feet again. Black, smug, shiny feet. Could they ever have been naked, only inches from her face? Charles had moved his chair towards her. She suddenly wanted to hug him, like her mother had, crush into him and under him, strip off all the hard grey skin and find him pink and soft and loving underneath.

‘This – er – foreign chap. Did your mother ever say how long she'd known him?'

‘Oh, years and years.' If she couldn't hug him, at least she'd lie for him. These were the things he wanted her to say, she was quite aware of that. He was moving nearer to her now, and for the first time in her life, she had his total concentration.

‘Before she knew me?'

‘Oh, long before.' Perhaps he'd touch her now. She was answering correctly, she could tell. He was so close, she could smell the sharp spicy fragrance on his chin. She wanted that smell on top of her, overwhelming her. He took her hand, held it very tight.

‘Look, Magda, I want to …'

‘Time to go, Mr Parry Jones.' Mother Gregory billowed through the door, and Charles leapt up as if he had been doing something wrong.

‘No!' Magda threw herself in front of him. ‘There's something I've got to ask you.' The name had reminded her. ‘I want to use your name – Parry Jones, I mean. Kornyai is such a stupid name. They teased me at the other school, and they'll fall about at this one.'

Charles had stopped, but he wasn't looking at her. He was staring at a picture of the Blessed Mother Foundress blessing a leper. Magda tried to squeeze between them.

‘If you don't want me to have all of it, I'll just take half. The Parry bit, or even just the Jones. It's safer being Jones.'

Charles had turned to steel again. ‘Look, Magda, names aren't important. They're just a legal fiction.'

She was speaking to his back. ‘Well, if they're not important, why do you mind?'

‘I don't mind.' He was lying to please her, as she had done for him.

‘So I can, then?'

He straightened the picture, so that Mother Foundress's nose lay exactly parallel with the frieze beneath the whitewashed parlour ceiling. ‘Well, not just at the moment, Magda. It'll only cause confusion.'

‘Who with?'

‘With whom.'

‘Pardon?'

‘Well, Frances doesn't …' Charles began.

‘What's it got to do with Frances? She's got your name already, hasn't she?'

He was staring at the leper in the same desperate fashion as the leper was staring at the Foundress. ‘Look, Frances isn't very strong at the moment …'

Bunk! Frances was the strongest woman in the world. She had Charles, didn't she? – his name, his house, all his books and desks and beds and cash and … She was bound to be back home again, now she had her precious husband to herself, devouring him, building herself up on him, swallowing his body like the nuns did at Communion.

Two more nuns were hovering in the background, fawning on her father, trying to lure him into church – well-fed nuns, stuffed to the ears with God. ‘Time for Benediction, Magda, and perhaps your father would like to come along?'

He didn't. Magda knelt alone behind the nuns, and watched his car zip along the drive, the two five-pound notes he had given her tucked down the bodice of her dress. So that's what a name was worth. He'd bought her off, awarded her a tenner for giving up his name. He couldn't be her father if she didn't have his name.

She picked up the small silver cross on the end of her rosary and held it like a pencil. ‘Magda Rozsi Parry Jones' she etched across the pages of her prayer book. She could hardly read the name. The cross was blunt and hadn't made much impression on the paper. She whispered it instead: Magda Parry Jones. It sounded wrong – poncy and affected. She took the cross and scratched it to and fro across the faint marks of the letters. It ripped through the frail paper, leaving a hole.

She tried again. Magda Rozsi Kornyai. That sounded strange as well. It always had. Other kids didn't have stupid foreign names no one could pronounce. OK, she wouldn't have a name. You didn't need one – didn't really need a mother, come to that. Or a father. Or a dog. The less you had, the less they could take away.

The priest turned round with a blaze of gold-encrusted vestments. ‘The Lord be with you,' he intoned. There was always God. The nuns said if you had Him, you had everything. Lucky nuns!

Magda grinned. She inserted the cross in the hole where her name had been, and twisted it backwards and forwards until it had torn through almost fifty pages of the prayer book. She joined her hands, as if she were praying, pressing them hard against her breasts, until she could hear the faint rustle of the bank notes tucked inside her dress. At least no one could take away the cash.

‘I'm pregnant,' Frances whispered to the lion. She had brought him out into the garden with her, to use as a pillow. You had almost a duty to be comfortable, when you were carrying another life.

‘I'm going to have a baby,' she repeated, in case he hadn't understood. She gazed around her. The whole lush garden was gloriously pregnant. Each pansy was a mauve and yellow uterus, every foxglove flower a purple cervix. The poppies had run to seed and their swelling pods were rounded, bursting ovaries. The golden rod curved over like fallopian tubes. Even the geranium leaves were foetus-shaped. Everything was budding and burgeoning into life, bees pollinating, small green apples plumping into full-term heaviness.

She stretched out on the bare brown patch Ned called the Earl of Rothmere's croquet lawn. Ned himself was out all day, at a weekend summer school on Icelandic Sagas. But better to be alone and becalmed in Acton, than buffeted by storms at Richmond. She had told Ned that Charles was abroad again, and had packed a suitcase full of bits and pieces, including the lion and extra vitamins. Ned's garden was a jungle and his house a disaster area, but it didn't matter any more. Nothing mattered except her swaggering uterus. She was a woman now, at last – sanctified and special. It was like receiving the Stigmata – pain and radiance combined. She had outlawed the pain for the moment, so that she could savour the full holy bliss of motherhood. Of course there were problems, so many and so complex, her mind trembled to confront them, but Ned was teaching her to leave problems, as he left the washing-up. Neither really mattered. She'd have the baby his way, not agonizing over guilt and paternity, but revelling in something she had wanted all her life. She wouldn't stifle it with lists and schedules, or expensive, unnecessary equipment, nor martyr herself with terrors and regrets. There wasn't even any rush. She had nine languorous months to change and blossom in.

She turned over on her back and stared up at the swollen white clouds. Even the sky was pregnant, labouring to give birth to an overdue sun. Rilke stalked across the grass and sprang on to her stomach.

‘Not there,' she grinned. ‘That's reserved!'

It was almost shameful how jubilant she felt, mooning about like some Mills and Boon heroine, in tune with all creation. She wasn't a career girl any more, but the highest sort of lowest woman, all womb and sentiment. Even her fantasies were disgracefully unoriginal – Ned pacing up and down the hospital corridor, minutes before the hushed Leboyer birth, with its soft lights and mystic music, the first cry, the first champagne. Well, perhaps not champagne, not on Ned's salary, but that was a detail. She might have twins, triplets even, her photo splashed across the
Daily Mirror
. No, she didn't want publicity, not with Charles' mother and the narrow-minded Golf Club crowd.

Best not to fill in the fantasies. There were too many complexities if she fleshed them out – awkward unromantic details like inlaws, illegitimacy, divorce, division of property, puerperal fever, complications of birth. She'd just
be
, for a change, live in the moment, as Ned encouraged. It was an almost revolutionary idea. With Charles, there had never been a present; only a strong-box of a future, a vaulted old age. She and Charles were always looking forward, waiting, expecting – when their annuities matured, when inflation eased, when a rival retired, or a senior partner died. Even the baby had been a future prospect – when the house was finished, or the mortgage paid off, when they'd established their careers … But now she had leap-frogged Charles' system and launched the baby as a here-and-now reality. Ned would say, ‘Don't ruin it with fears for the future or regrets about the past, just savour the moment of it.' She closed her eyes, felt the sun sink into them, Rilke hot and heavy against her leg. She tried to remember her mantra, some strange gobbledigook which sounded like an opera singer's exercise. Ned had been teaching her to meditate. She hushed the cynical, mocking voice that scoffed at him – Charles' voice, which saw the life-force as a pound sign – and sought to sandwich herself between all creation, to become one with the sun, the cat, the grass, the summer afternoon.