Cuckoo (35 page)

It was so confusing being half of two different people, warring with each other and wanting half of two different men. Sometimes she hated all the halves – theirs and hers, the whole complicated mix-up. It was like that game she'd played as a child – ‘Heads, Bodies, Legs', each painted figure cut into three. You had to try to fit them back together, but you got some strange permutations on the way – a layabout's mouth with a paragon's penis on the end of it, a dirty fishing hat straddling a pair of Gucci shoes.

That's what her baby would be like – a hybrid. Now that Charles had refused to have anything to do with it, it remained a cross-breed, a monster, swelling in the nights, until it was a giraffe and an elephant inside her, accusing her of adultery, recklessness, betrayal. But if only Ned accepted it, it would shrink and mellow. It might still be a mongrel, but a happy, harmless one, with a name-tag and a home. Why was it so impossible to tell him? In old romantic movies, the woman didn't even have to spell it out. She merely reclined on the sofa, a beatific smile playing over her stomach, a fragment of white knitting fluttering in her hands. The man entered, their eyes met – sobbing violins, throbbing chords, et cetera, and he
knew
. Ned wouldn't. She'd tried the sofa and the knitting, and all he'd said was, ‘Shove up, love, you're hogging all the cushions. And if you're knitting me a sweater, does it have to be white angora?'

She eased up from the kitchen bench. One last forgotten pea-pod was lurking at the bottom of the basket. She slit it with her thumb. Inside, just two tiny peas, identical and perfect. Twins. She'd have to tell him. You couldn't inflict twins on a man with a one-bedroomed flat and an out-of-work airing cupboard. She would break the news tonight, over a celebration dinner. Ned had gone down to Dover to try out a new Penn casting reel. She'd welcome him back with
boeuf Bordelaise
in the oven and a baby in her womb. No, not
boeuf Bordelaise
. She'd renounced her fancy Oppenheimer style of cooking, in favour of a new Ned simplicity. No more salmon soufflés or juliennes of ham, but pasta and tinned pilchards, which saved time and fuss and money. The Gospel according to Ned – though she wouldn't take it too far. The Simple Life needn't mean squalor and slumming, or baked beans from the can. There new ménage must be a compromise, with the baby as the symbol of it. It had already united her and Ned, and they must follow up the process. She wouldn't ask too much. They needn't even move. She could merely renovate the flat and tame the garden. Ned's pad, with Franny's stamp on it. The same with dinner. They mustn't toast the baby in spam and chips, or lobster thermidor, but something in between. Simple soup and unpretentious chicken casserole. She threw on her mac and went to buy a Tesco's frozen chicken, no free-range Fortnum's darling, but a base-born cut-price broiler.

Burnt chicken was baser still, she thought, as she turned the oven lower, and scraped charred onions off the bottom of the casserole. Ten o'clock and Ned hadn't even phoned. He was always late.

In nine months' time, he'd probably miss the birth. ‘Sorry, love, couldn't make it. Had a mermaid on the line!'

She smiled. He drove her crazy with his tomfoolery, his unpunctuality, but somehow he always managed to atone for it, when he kissed her entire body from right temple to left toe, or turned boring, basic things like shins or vertebrae into new erotic zones. He couldn't perform like Charles, but he bounced into bed with such exuberance that all her warning lights switched off and she swooped straight into overdrive. Sex with Charles was technically impeccable, but silent and controlled. He never took risks, or ventured out of lane. And there was no engine noise. Charles never purred or roared or hooted, as Ned did, never let her see his pleasure, let alone hear it. He must always be the stiff, munificent benefactor, the driver at the wheel; she the grateful passenger. It was quite a new experience to have Ned beg her to stroke his feet or squeeze his balls, and then yell, ‘Christ, you're bloody marvellous, woman!' when she did it right. There was joy and power in giving.

Charles refused to be distracted from the road. Sex took his total concentration for the carefully calculated period he allotted it, and then it was back to verticality and work. But Ned stretched it out in all directions, made whole days horizontal as well as nights, interrupted kisses with date-and-banana sandwiches, told her fishing stories in the middle of a come. There was no structure, no timetable, just sex sprinkled over everything, like sugar.

So, how could she accuse him, when he accorded Dover beach the same lingering, day-long treatment? At least, when he did arrive, he'd probably be triumphant. Easy to slip a tiny baby in, when he was wreathed in ten-pound turbot. She only hoped he'd got a decent catch. Whatever happened, she mustn't be impatient. That would ruin everything. She could always use the waiting-time to rehearse her lines. She decided to keep them simple, like the meal.

‘Ned, darling, I'm going to have your baby.'

She slipped gracefully into a broken chair, and tried it out aloud. ‘Ned, darling, I'm going to …'

‘Grub up!' shouted a familiar voice. ‘Full bag! Fish supper! Frying tonight!'

Ned barged through the door, festooned with four dead dabs and a still-expiring dogfish, and kissed her through the lot. The reek of Dover breakwater swamped the smell of chicken. ‘Sling a lump of butter in the pan, love – I'm going to cook you Neptune's feast!'

She dodged a scaly tail. ‘Let's save them for breakfast, darling. I've already made a chicken casserole.'

‘Christ, Fran, I didn't flog all the way to Dover for plastic battery hen. Fish must be cooked the day it's caught. Fresh fried dabs are a knockout! Here, chuck over the butter and it can be melting while I clean the little blighters.'

‘But the chicken's ready, Ned. It's been ready hours, in fact. I was expecting you at eight.' It had been something of a trauma cooking anything at Ned's, when there were tin-tacks in the spice jar instead of peppercorns, and half of last year's Christmas dinner still clinging to the oven.

‘Never expect an angler.' He peeled off his anorak and flung it on the table, disturbing her flower arrangement. ‘OK, love, we'll have the chicken afterwards. Fish course first, then poultry.' He was dripping fishy water over the newly polished floor, bunging up the sink with scales and fins.

‘But I've made a soup to start with.' A Ned soup: leek and potato broth, earthy and unsophisticated.

‘Better still. Soup, fish, poultry, pud. What's for pud?'

‘Gooseberry crumble.'

He hugged her. He was still in his waterproofs and he felt slimy like the bottom of a pond. She pulled away.

‘You don't cook dab with their heads on, do you?'

‘Why not? More protein. Hey, where's the salt? What on earth have you done in here? I can't find a thing. The fridge is so bare, it looks like a toupee ad. Franny, you've springcleaned, you rotter! I smelt it as soon as I came in, or rather, I didn't smell it. You've ruined the bouquet. It took me years to build up that
je-ne-sais-quoi
fragrance of cobwebs and vintage bottled cat, and now you've gone and doused it all with Cleen-o-Pine.'

He was genuinely annoyed. She could hear it underneath the banter. He mustn't be annoyed – not on the night she was going to invest him with his fatherhood. She tried to distract him, take an interest in his catch.

‘What's that one?' she asked, pointing to an evil-looking creature with a squashed back and a long whip-like tail.

‘Thornback ray. The little bleeder almost dragged me in. Watch out! Those thorns are poisonous.'

All his fish looked poisonous. The charred aroma of her home-spun country sauce was outdone by the scorching smell of dab. Ned had left them to burn, while he scrabbled on his hands and knees, replacing the pile of ancient paperbacks on the bottom shelf of the larder. ‘Look, Fran, if I want to keep my Enid Blytons next to the Branston pickle, that's my affair, right? Don't interfere, or try to take me over. You complain that's what your husband does to you. Well, I don't need any Charleses in my life. I'm happy as I am. I don't want Harpic sprinkled down my gut or my soul scrubbed out with Sqeezy.'

He rushed back to the frying pan, scraped the blackened fish off the bottom, then doused them with cold water from the sink. He stood over her, the dripping, sizzling pan still in one hand, her left nipple in the other.

‘I want
you
, Franny – your crazy mixed-up cunt which isn't sure whether it's the Virgin Mary or the Whore of Babylon; your neon-tetra eyes. But I don't want your Minit-Mop or your Brillo pads, or your prissy little War-on-Dust Campaign. Kiss me.'

She did. Anything to stop him talking – she knew what would come next. ‘I don't want your prissy little private-prescription, germ-free, Harley Street baby …'

She continued the kiss as long as the smell allowed. She seemed to be nose-to-nose with the entire dead-and-living contents of the English Channel.

‘Shall I run you a bath?'

‘Christ, no! I'm knackered. Grub first, scrub later.'

He plonked the frying pan in the centre of the table, grabbed a fork and skewered a dab on the end of it. It was black on the outside and still seeping water from the sink. ‘Here, take a bite of this.'

‘Ned, I've laid the table in the other room.' She had found some semi-decent china in the cellar and scrubbed off years of grime, improvised a clean white tablecloth out of a sheet. There were roses in a soup-bowl, paper napkins twisted into swans.

Things must be simple, but there was no need to pig it. She mustn't forget the compromise, the baby.

‘I'm too whacked to move. Anyway, they're nicer eaten straight from the pan. Try a bit, it's bliss.'

He tore off a morsel with his fingers and popped it in her mouth. ‘Know something? When a dab's born, it's got an eye on either side of its head, but when it grows bigger, the eyes sort of move, and it ends up with two eyes together, on the same side. Crazy, isn't it?'

Utterly crazy. The whole romantic evening had been shattered at a blow. Here was Ned, sprawling in his socks, smelling like Billingsgate, and spearing waterlogged flatfish from a frying pan. She'd planned low lights, hushed, tender conversation leading slowly but inexorably to the subject of paternity, not a clapped-out beachcomber explaining, with his mouth full, the ocular peculiarities of dab.

‘Ned?'

‘What?'

‘I've got something to tell you, darling, something important.'

‘Hold on a sec, I want some HP sauce – it'll cover up the burnt bits. Where the hell have you hidden it? Christ, Franny, you've moved everything out of its proper place.'

‘Ned, I'm talking to you.'

‘Look, Fran, I'm not often angry, you know that. I'm an easy-going sort of chap, but I don't like my house messed about. You're welcome to share it, live in it, use anything you like in it, but not dismantle it and put it back your way. That's what my wife tried to do and that's why I left her.'

Frances passed him the sauce bottle from its new home in the spice cupboard. She laid down her fork. ‘Your
what
, Ned?'

‘Look, forget it. I'm probably over-reacting. Let's have the chicken now. It smells a treat.'

‘You said your
wife
.'

‘Yeah. Shall I get the plates?'

‘You never told me you had a wife.'

‘Well, I haven't got one now. I told you, I left her. Want the last dab?'

‘You're divorced?'

‘No.'

‘Still married?'

‘Well, legally, I suppose, but …'

‘You never told me.'

‘No.'

‘I mean, I asked you about your life and past and … We went over things like that …'

‘Things like what? You're making it sound like a sort of contract between us.'

‘Well, wasn't it?'

‘Hell, Franny, one of the main reasons I was attracted to you was the fact that you made it so damned clear you
weren't
available. You told me about your husband the very first instant I set eyes upon you, and you haven't stopped embroidering on him, since. I've almost fallen in love with Charles myself, his brilliance and his business skills, his Ted Lapidus after-shave, his deodorant-impregnated socks. I knew I could never compete with a paragon like that. And, frankly, I don't really want to try.'

‘What do you mean, Ned?' She tried to sound cool and uninvolved, as if they were discussing sea conditions in the Channel.

‘We're friends, Franny, lovers, good pals, but that's all. I don't want a wife or a housekeeper. I've had both and it didn't work.'

‘But why didn't you tell me, Ned?' The baby in her womb was drowning, flailing.

‘Why should I? I didn't want to launch into that messy, miserable business and dig the whole thing up again. It's over – finished and done with. I should never have married in the first place. I'm a loner. You knew that, Franny. I never promised you anything or told you that I loved you. It's safer that way. Neither of us has lost our heart or head. I always assumed you were Charles' property – that was half the attraction. You were tied, tagged, accounted for, ringed like a homing pigeon. I don't like girls when they're single, or available. Oh, no doubt there's some devious psychological explanation. My mother didn't breast-feed me or my father wore a wig, but who cares? That's how I am, and I'm happy with it. Look, we're meant to be having dinner, aren't we? Where's this four-course feast you promised me?'

She got up automatically, surprised her legs still worked.

Someone had chopped them into pieces, floured them, and flung them in a casserole. She couldn't even think. Her mind was a soup, mushy and diluted. Somehow, she'd never put Ned in any context, or let him have a life story. He was simply there, ready and waiting, to fit any of her fantasies – lover, confidant, playmate, Peter Pan. Father of her baby. It was partly his fault. He'd always played along with her, never answering any questions, treating life as a game. But she'd lost the game. She was pregnant by a man who didn't even want to be a husband, let alone a father; who wanted to be free, untrammelled, single.