Cuckoo (34 page)

The wasp was wooing Laura from the other side. She sprang up, to dislodge it from her hair. ‘I'm afraid it's a little late, my love.'

He stared at her scarlet back. She was wearing all red, too harsh for the faded afternoon. ‘What do you mean?'

‘It's a very tedious journey from Johannesburg to Paris, darling.'

‘Johannesburg?'

‘Yes, my sweet. I didn't really intend to tell you, in the middle of a matinée, but your sudden protestations of devotion have rather forced my hand.'

Charles made an angry swipe at the wasp. ‘What the hell are you talking about?'

‘Relax, darling. They only sting you if you needle them. We're emigrating to South Africa.'

‘Emigrating?'

‘Yes, next month. Houghton Drive, just north of town. Five bedrooms and a swimming pool.'

‘We, who's we? What in God's name are you saying?'

‘Well, me and Clive, of course. Who else?'

‘But I thought … Look, Laura, this is absolutely nonsensical! You always told me you had no future with Clive.'

‘Poor love! I have been disloyal to him, haven't I? You've always encouraged me, but that's only natural, I suppose. Clive's very easy to insult – he's also very easy to get along with. I never realized that before. Funnily enough, it was you who made me see it. Clive loves me, Charles. He needs me. You don't need anyone. You use them. I don't exist for you as a person; nor does Frances, or Magda, or that poor, godforsaken brat Frances plans to bring into this wicked world. They're just inconveniences to you, cyphers to be slotted into your electronic calculator and assessed for their investment potential, or their scrap value.' She was still stroking the grass across his chin, cruel steel against soft flesh.

‘When Magda loused you up, you handed me my cards. You didn't need me any more. Or, even if you did, I might prove dangerous. You never wondered how I might feel about it. In fact, you drove me back to Clive. It's probably better, that way. You stay with your precious daughter, and I'll stay with my old man.'

Daughter! That tone-deaf, blue-jeaned urchin who had lost him everything – his wife, his pride, his sex, his self-respect – and now Laura. Turned him into a cuckold and a laughing stock. He could see her now, picking her nose on his gilded Grecian couch, disposing of her chewing-gum on the underbelly of his Sheraton writing-table, dissecting meatballs with her fingers, dribbling gravy down her breasts, rinsing out her stained and bloody panties in his own private bathroom. This was the brat who had driven away his mistress, his voluptuous, witty, stylish, two-faced turncoat of a superwoman, who had the cheek, the insensitivity, to betray him with her own husband.

Well, she'd have to go, his ‘daughter'. He'd had more than he could take. His so-called flesh and blood would be sent packing to her mother as soon as he could conceivably arrange it. He'd phone Piroska the moment he got home and more or less command her to send that telegram. Why should he fret any longer over threatened O-levels and damaged lives, lie awake agonizing over near-miss abortions, when the kid was almost certainly somebody else's? Magda could no more share his chromosomes than Clive could share a bed with dazzling Laura. It was time that Jewish dwarf took on the burden. If he'd fathered the brat, well, let him worry about her. Only he'd better do it back in Budapest. Because that's where Magda was going, as fast as a telegram could take her.

When he opened his eyes, the kid had already gone, packed off on an aeroplane, deported on a train. There was only Laura standing over him, tickling his neck with her cruel grass rapier. He almost slapped it off.

‘I simply don't understand you, Laura. This doesn't make any sense at all. You always made out your … your husband was some sort of spastic mooncalf!'

‘Come, my sweet, you're exaggerating. I admit he's not as bright as you are, but that's probably an advantage. And – no – his seduction technique isn't quite as slick and assured, but he's loyal and loving and a lot of other boring, dependable, old-fashioned things.'

Charles snatched the grass from her hand and crushed it into pulp. ‘Seduction? What d'you mean? You always told me Clive was impotent.'

‘Did I, darling? Or was that what you wanted to believe? Even now, you're not listening. The only word you heard was ‘‘seduction''. You're still comparing penises with Clive. Perhaps that's what all affairs are based on – a sort of eternal cock fight, the lover gaining inches on the spouse. Well, I've finished with affairs. I'm off to Jo'burg to queen it on my floodlit patio, with my half dozen coloured maids. I might even go in for a family myself – adopt a little Bantu baby. I have to fill those five large bedrooms somehow.'

‘You're joking …' He couldn't take it in – Clive screwing her, Clive zipping off to Jo'burg, Clive winning. Laura winning. Slipping in her insults, slapping him down.

‘About the adoption, yes. You know how I feel about kids. Clive and I don't want any. Nor do you and Frances – if only you could see it. That's another reason I've finished with you, Charles. I rather despise a man who doesn't know what he wants, or where the hell he's going. Clive's always been clear about the basics. He wanted me – and not much else. No kids, no other woman on the side, no driving ambition. You want everything, Charles, and you'll land up with nothing.'

The phrases slashed like knives. There was a tight ball, spring-coiled in his skull, a black sun scorching through his body, blistering his life, black humiliation mixed with fury.

Laura had sat down again, and was staring at her sparkling middle finger. ‘Funny, really,' she taunted, in her Judas-kiss voice. ‘This is what they call an eternity ring. Perhaps you didn't realize?'

He was silent, fighting a strong urge to tear the ring off, rip her strutting husband from her arms, blitz the prissy, preening house in Houghton Drive.

She was picking daisies now, white petals on her scarlet lap, pretending she was presiding at a simple country picnic, rather than a massacre. ‘How long is eternity for you, Charles?'

He didn't answer. Two-faced hypocrite! She'd gulped down all the presents, grown fat and glossy on his jewels, allowed him to slip a ring on her finger, the very moment she was leaving him. He had given up a precious working day, simply so she could restock her wardrobe for Johannesburg; actually paid for the lingerie she was to seduce her husband in! And there she was, sitting demurely making a daisy chain, slitting the stems with her cruel crimson talons, in the same way she'd ripped his life apart, and smiling as she handed him the rejects.

It was all the more intolerable, because there was some truth in what she said. If only she'd accused him of stinginess or stupidity, he could have shrugged it off, but Laura had stabbed him in his most defenceless places. He could feel his anger ticking like a time-bomb. He must defuse it before it exploded in her face, blew up the whole of Guildford. Never before had he allowed himself to get so close to danger, to lose his self-control, throw away his shield and his defences. He shut his eyes, tried to concentrate only on the rhythm of his breathing, to count the notes in the rapture of a thrush's song.

Laura's voice had crept inside the song, and was wrenching it out of key. She was leaning over him, fastening the completed daisy chain around his neck. ‘Let's not quarrel,' she murmured, letting both hands tease and linger. ‘I still fancy you, you know – even in a twenty-minute interval, surrounded by Guildford's geriatrics, and despite everything I've said. Crazy, isn't it?'

He felt a twinge of answering desire, clogged with only half-extinguished fury. Laura's thighs were spread apart on the seat, the flimsy fabric of her skirt straining over them. She wasn't just a bitchy tongue – there was a body attached to it, and it was the body he'd desired in the beginning. He'd first seen her sitting in the Golf Club, flirting with a bar stool, her long legs looped around the rungs, taunting him in black stockings. Today, the stockings were a paler shade of oyster. He placed his hand on her thigh, felt it warm and silky through her skirt. His head was a spinning roulette wheel. He hardly knew which colour would come up – the scarlet of desire, or the furious black of resentment and revenge. Even now, there was still some tantalizing overlay of Magda. He could feel the child underneath his hands, the long, sloping insolence of her legs, the swelling breasts pushing out her shirt, the neat, tight, dangerous, virgin bottom. Chewing-gum and nose-pickings hardly mattered any more – his hands were further down.

He sprang up from the seat, as if it had caught fire. Magda must go, if only for her own protection. If truth could be told in a telegram, it wasn't Miklos who'd be cited, but his own vile, unpardonable obsession:

‘Magda, leave at once! Your brute of a father desires you.'

Except he wasn't her father. He couldn't be. Fathers didn't feel such lust and murderous violence towards their daughters; want to fondle them and rape them, then bash their bloody brains in. He shuddered, felt like some foul debris chucked into a wastebin. Back in his office, he could still parade with rod and sword, still receive homage as monarch and Führer, but closed in the filthy dungeon of his mind, he was only chaff and scum. He was so exhausted, he felt as if he'd lived and laboured through all the centuries from Shakespeare's to his own, yet this was a day off, a spree, a jaunt, a relaxation.

The interval was almost over. The lutenists had worked through Dowland, Byrd and Campian, and were now playing songs from the finale of the play itself.

When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight …

That's all it was, paint. Even this theatre garden was plasticine and pigment. The tenor was flat in the upper register, the baritone had acne. He shaded his eyes from the pitiless purple-pink of the petunias, longed to lie down on the ground, and rot back into dust; or, at least, have Frances' frail, familiar form beside him, her small, soft hands curled around his misery.

Balls! His wife had gone. Her small, soft hands were curled only around her womb, or some other swine's filthy private parts. He kicked at a clump of daisies, decapitated their simple, smiling heads. He mustn't give in to this spinelessness, this wallowing self-pity. Frances was best forgotten. At least Laura was still sitting there beside him. He must woo her, recapture her, stand up to Clive, refuse to let him win. If some sexless nincompoop with thinning hair and a handicap in double figures could bribe her with five bedrooms and a swimming pool, then he must offer more.

‘Look, Laura, I know things have been difficult, but just give me time. It can still work out between us …'

‘Can it?' Laura broke the noose around his neck by plucking the largest daisy from the chain. ‘Let's find out.'

She tore off one white petal and tossed it in the air. ‘He loves me,' she chanted.

The countertenor's strange, metallic voice was shrilling from the balcony:

The cuckoo then on every tree
Mocks married men, for thus sings he,
‘cuckoo'.

Laura wasn't listening. All her attention was concentrated on the tiny white flower-head.

‘He loves me not.' A second petal fluttered to the ground.

‘Loves me.

‘Loves me not.

‘Loves me …'

Charles was mesmerized by her soft, mocking voice. How could there be so many petals on a common daisy? White flags of surrender littering the grass. The warning bell was sounding from the theatre, above the chorus of the song:

Cuckoo, cuckoo! O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!

He shivered. A spiteful wind was blowing off the river and the sun was all glare and no heart. He had no desire to return to Navarre – it was a vain and empty kingdom, and a cold one.

‘Loves me not,

‘Loves me …'

Stupid game! Laura's voice was like an incantation. There was one last petal on the mutilated daisy – only one. Slowly, teasingly, she pulled it off, handing him the scalped stalk.

‘Loves me
not
,' she whispered. He could smell the pollen on her fingers, and her Benson and Hedges breath.

The final bell was pealing across the garden, mixed with the still insistent chorus:

‘Cuckoo, cuckoo! O word of fear …'

Charles turned away, head down. He couldn't endure that last act of the play, with its savage peasant songs, its jeering cuckoos. Laura took his arm, steered him back towards the theatre.

‘Come along, darling, we don't want to miss it, do we? I doubt if there'll be much Shakespeare in Johannesburg!'

Frances was shelling peas. She dropped the last empty pod in the waste bin, and laid out thirty-five green peas in a horizontal line – a chart, a menstrual cycle, made of peas. She counted them again. She was right – thirty-five. Day thirty-five. One week overdue. A hundred thousand years overdue. How did giraffes endure it, with fifteen-month-long pregnancies, or elephants, with six hundred days to count? The way she felt, the baby should be born by now, and yet it was still only a pinhead, smaller than the smallest unripe pea. And still fatherless. How could Ned be the father of something he didn't even know existed? She had tried to tell him, practised openings to spring on him when the moment was propitious. It somehow never was.

‘Ned, how would you like to teach a son to fish?'

‘Ned, guess what I found behind the gooseberry bush this morning?'

He'd laugh, grab her round the waist and say, ‘I'm your baby, give me a breast to suck.' Or, ‘Let's call it John Dory, after the fish.' He wouldn't take her seriously. He never did. That was one of the problems. It was fine to live his larky, lazy way, when there were only the two of them, but a child changed everything. She didn't want her precious baby shoved in an orange box with a cat on top of it, or its Farex used for bait. And how would she ever dry its nappies, when the airing cupboard was purple and fermenting with home-made sloe gin? It wasn't easy to turn a man like Ned into an instant pre-packed father. He complained when she defrosted the fridge – claimed it disturbed the lugworm – and refused to discuss wallpapering the bedroom. So long as she was in his bed, he argued, why should he care what was on the walls? Sometimes she submitted, and they lay indolent and sweaty all day long. It was as if she had wallpapered over all the doors and windows and they couldn't get out. Ned was the world and there wasn't any other – no wars, no weather forecasts, no share reports nor parliamentary crises. It seemed strange to her, later, that a cabinet minister had died, or Israel had threatened Egypt, and she hadn't known or cared. She almost liked not caring. Strange how quickly you could sink into grubby apathy, the soft, delicious centre of your own abandoned world, switching off the universe, turning worktime into bedtime, playing at being full-time layabouts. It wasn't, after all, so difficult to renounce deodorant and dental floss, or eat chocolate cake for breakfast, or share your pillow with a self-opinionated cat. At least it wasn't hard until the nights. So long as Ned was over her, or under her, stopping her thinking with his childish, cheerful banter, telling her she was Salome and Venus and Bugs Bunny and the Blessed Virgin, then she didn't agonize. But when his breathing deepened, and he rolled away from her, to sleep, absurdly, on his stomach, then the small, niggly voices, stifled all day long, began to shout and hammer in her head. Why did he always feel so small inside her? Why did he come too quickly? Why did he pee with the bathroom door wide open and talk above the plash? Why was he idle and untidy, feckless, fatuous? Why wasn't he more like Charles? No, not like Charles. Then, he wouldn't push his face between her thighs and linger there over a four-course lunch, or use Werther's tail to do crazy, tickly things across her breasts, or sauté mashed bananas with marshmallows and feed her from the frying pan. Charles didn't perform Icelandic war-dances stark naked in the kitchen, or stick daisies in her pubic hair, or draw golden-syrup kisses on her porridge. Why couldn't she be Franny and settle for Ned and the syrup? Or, give him up and be a thoroughgoing Frances?