Cuckoo (42 page)

‘It's her own decision, Viv. She asked to go. She wants to.'

‘Rubbish! Of course she doesn't want to. You want to get rid of her, more like it.'

Charles slammed the nut-crackers back on to the table. ‘Viv, I think you may regret …'

‘
Me
regret? And what about
your
regretting something? Treating your own daughter like an outcast, packing her off to outlandish places, just so you can lead your own selfish life …'

Viv was standing, trembling, with her hand on the door. Frances tried to edge her through it, away from Charles, and out into the hall.

‘Viv, do be reasonable. Hungary's not outlandish. It's almost her own home, in a way, her second country.'

‘Of course it isn't! She's never been there in her life. She was born in London and schooled in Streatham and she's English to her toenails – English by law and language and upbringing and every other damn way.'

‘Yes, but what about her mother? Her mother's not English, she's Hungarian. And she happens to be in Hungary now. That's important, Viv. Of course Magda wants to join her – it's only natural. You said yourself a child belongs with its mother.'

‘Not a mother who deserts her own flesh and blood and runs off with some … gigolo. How d'you know she even wants Magda back? Have you checked? She may have scooted off somewhere else by now – with a new boyfriend, I wouldn't be surprised. I suppose you'd let the poor kid trek half-way across Europe to find a scribbled note saying they've moved on.'

‘Don't be silly, Viv. Piroska's not as irresponsible as that.' Ironical to be defending a woman she'd vilified to Viv only a month or so ago. ‘Anyway, Charles seems to think everything's all right, and he ought to know. He's kept in touch with Piroska all along.' Frances had shut the door behind them. She couldn't bear to see her husband chomping walnuts like an angry animal. He hated walnuts.

Viv stormed down the passage, towards the front door. ‘I'd hardly rate Charles as an authority on anybody's happiness. Anyway, what about all those objections he raised in the first place – Magda's education, and so on? He'll muck up all her O-levels, and how the hell's she going to get a job out there, when she's older and left school? I don't like the sound of it at all – having to share her mother with that … pick-up! They may even kiss and cuddle in front of her. That's the last thing Magda needs, when she's been starved of love herself. Look, let her come to me, Frances. I've said I'll have her all along. At least I can be sure she gets a stable home and plenty of affection.'

‘It's no good, Viv. She wants to go. She …'

‘And did you even try to talk her out of it, make her feel loved and wanted here? Didn't you stand up to Charles, or think about someone else but yourself, for a change? I'm sorry – I'd better go before I do say something I regret. I'll phone in the morning and hope to God you've changed your minds by then.' The front door slammed behind her. ‘Give my love to Magda,' she shouted through it.

Frances mooched along the passage. She could feel the blood oozing between her legs; thirty-five days of mockery and delusion weeping into a Tampax. The dull, cramping pain was like a continual reminder, dragging her down, jeering at her. ‘Give my love to Magda.' Yes, Viv had love for the child, for every child, enough to last them through a hundred lifetimes, enough to take in the whole, abandoned, battered, unloved world. Her own heart wouldn't even open to one neglected, wretched teenager. It was so crammed full of conflict and exhaustion, there wasn't room for love. Despite her new resolves to start again, to return to base and make a nest for the fledgeling, she had felt a whoop of incredulous delight when Magda had announced she was going to Budapest. Relief had poured across the dinner table like hot, sweet custard. She was bitterly ashamed of that relief.

Yet, Magda had decided for herself. No one could say they'd forced her hand, or turfed her out. They had offered her a refuge and a peace-treaty, and Magda had rejected both. Anyway, whatever Viv said, it was surely only natural for a child to seek its mother, return where it belonged. Why should they try to talk her out of it, when it was a solution which seemed to satisfy them all? Mother and daughter reconciled, she and Charles reprieved, a new start both for cuckoo and for host-bird.

Yet, supposing Viv were right? Could they really send Magda off to an unstable household or an empty flat; disrupt her education? Charles had been so vague about it all, leaving everything uncertain, undefined. Strange, for a man who normally checked every smallest detail of a change of plan, examined all the problems, and insisted on solutions. On this occasion, he'd merely sat in silence, looking pained and secretive, and let a fifteen-year-old seditionary dictate to him.

She opened the dining-room door a crack, paused a moment, just outside. Charles was sitting at the table with his head in his hands, surrounded by empty walnut shells. She felt a stab of pity. The last few days had pounced on his neat and tidy life and torn it into shreds, presenting him, in turn, with a pseudo-pregnant wife, a drunken hostess, an illegitimate, non-existent baby, and a runaway teenager shorn of all her hair. His skin looked taut and greyish. Even his breath smelt slightly sour and tainted, unthinkable for Charles, who was always tingling-fresh with mint and vigour.

‘Try not to worry, darling.' She took his hands, still felt stunned herself, as if she had been flung into a pestle and mortar and pounded into crumbs. But there were things to be done – Charles to be appeased, Magda's future to be safeguarded.

Charles had already snapped up straight again. ‘I'm not worrying,' he said, picking up his glass. The frown cut so deep between his eyes, it looked as if it had been gouged out with a chisel.

‘Look, Charles, I admit Viv's a bit outspoken, but she's right, you know. We shouldn't really have agreed that Magda could leave – not before we'd phoned her mother. I mean, perhaps she doesn't want the child. Isn't that why she came to us, in the first place? That, and her education?'

‘It was an experiment, Frances, and frankly, it hasn't worked. Anyway, if she's run away from school and is refusing to go back, she's hardly going to achieve much in the way of education.'

‘Yes, but how do we know that Piroska's got room enough, or money enough? I mean, Viv just said that …'

‘Could we kindly leave Viv out of this? She's hardly in a position to know the facts. I've never kept Piroska short of anything. She's written to me, on and off, and, as far as I can see, everything's perfectly all right. You and Viv are simply over-reacting. Anyway, of course I plan to phone. It's top of my morning list. I'll go over the whole thing with Piroska in detail – schools, housing, money, job opportunities …'

‘Why don't you ring her now, darling? I mean, if there is some problem, we don't want Magda lying there all night, planning a trip she might not even …'

‘I've told you, Frances, I'll do it tomorrow. It's too late now, in any case. Hungary's an hour or two ahead of us, and they'll all have gone to bed. Which – quite frankly – is where I'd like to be myself.'

The skin beneath his eyes looked almost bruised. He had gashed himself shaving and a cruel red line cut into the pallor of his cheek. He was like some wounded bird, but a proud, dangerous species, which refused to let anyone approach it, or show it tenderness. She longed for some warmth between them, so that they could turn towards each other and shut out all the pain. Not sex, not even caresses, just a quiet, united front against the world. But Charles was already on his way towards the door, his back a cold grey gravestone.

‘You go on up, then,' she murmured, ‘and I'll clear the supper dishes.' Best to give in to him, leave him on his own. He'd be more amenable after a decent night's rest. They could phone Piroska, first thing in the morning. Maybe she'd even speak to her herself. Her husband's mistress no longer seemed so vile. Ned had somehow bridged the gulf between them.

Yet, all that Ned had taught her seemed to fade and shrivel when faced with Charles' frown. Even now, with pain in every part of her, she was still scouring out saucepans and sweeping up nutshells when she should have been asleep upstairs. Why couldn't she leave the bloody dishes? The kitchen was like a museum, as it was. Where were her new resolves, her determination to live more casually, to let both Ned and Magda creep inside the palisade, which she and Charles had built fifty foot high around them? She replaced the silver fruit knives in their rosewood box, rubbed at a scratch on the table, trickled disinfectant in the wastebin. Were habits stuck with you for ever, imprinted like genetic instructions on DNA? Or was it just something about this house? It was Charles' house, so perhaps it was a tyrant, like its owner. The only time she'd escaped from it, she'd managed to cock a snook at dust and dishes. But, back in its dark, forbidding clutches, duty nagged and flogged.

Forty minutes later, she crept into the bedroom. Charles was already asleep – or pretending to be. He feigned sleep as she feigned climaxes. She undressed as quietly as she could, had already had her bath. Only Neds and Frannys went to bed unwashed. There was hardly room for her in her single bed, which was crowded with a raucous mob of gate-crashers, all quarrelling among themselves and confusing her with contradictory advice.

‘Be a tramp, be a gypsy!' grinned Ned, biting into a giant-sized Mars bar. ‘Pawn the sodding fruit knives and buy a horse-drawn caravan.'

‘Back with Charles?' mocked Franny. ‘Cramped by his Ten Commandments, crushed by his Tablets of Stone? What happened to that Brighton sybarite, that Barefoot Contessa?'

‘Love me,' Magda pleaded. ‘Hug me, hold me. Let me know you want me.'

‘I don't bloody want you,' snarled Miklos, in his brutal pidgin English. ‘It's your ma I fancy, and there's not room for the two of us.'

‘Selfish, sterile, sour-grapes intellectualizer!' Viv accused, popping another orphan under the blankets.

Frances struggled up. The voices slunk into the shadows, and were coffined in silence; silence so thick, she could feel it smothering her like a duvet, pressing down on her eyes, her mouth, her life. Even the bedroom furniture seemed to be holding its breath in an accusing, tight-lipped circle all around her, the whole house screwed up to breaking-point.

Could Charles be there, beside her, still breathing, still alive? She reached out her hand and touched the rough beard of the blanket, the curve of an elbow underneath.

‘Charles?'

No answer. Only another swirl and shiver of silence. She couldn't wake him; it was sacrilege. With Ned, you could jump on his tummy in the middle of the night, or make him three A.M. milkshakes and share a coloured straw. Not any longer. That Ned was dead and buried, like her baby. There was only gelded Ned and supine Charles.

She was free, now. No baby to bind her, no life-plans to blinker her, not even any Ned to confuse her with his teasing. But was that really freedom, or just sterility and loss? Anyway, how could she be free, with Magda's future undecided, with that morning phone call hanging over her, still threatening and uncertain? One wrong word from Piroska, and the longed-for trip to Budapest might shatter and collapse. Freedom and duty were fighting a duel inside her head.

She pressed her hands against it, trying to banish both conflicting voices. Would people ever understand how one hopeless, hapless, almost grown-up schoolgirl could tear your mind apart like that, make such a difference to a home, a life? She could hardly explain it to herself. Except that with Magda in the house she felt flattened, threatened, trodden underfoot; crushed like a flower in a flower-press, all the sap and colour which Ned had allowed to blossom in her stamped out and dried up. But wasn't that Charles' doing? Didn't he, even more than Magda, have the power to trap her between the pages of a heavy, musty tome, and leave her gasping for light and air?

But Charles was impossible to fight. She couldn't turf
him
out, or send him packing to his mother. It was his house, his flower-press, and all those weighty tomes which bludgeoned her bore his name, his crest, his imprint. All she could do was try to work towards a truce with him, and to remove the biggest obstacles between them. Magda, herself, was one of those big obstacles, a danger to their truce. The kid couldn't help it, but there was something about her which would always lead to uproar and upheaval. Even now, she was causing rifts again, alienating Viv, splitting apart their precarious post-Oppenheimer peace.

Christ! How confused it all was. She threw back the blankets and swung her feet out of bed. The darkness was diluting a little, now that her eyes had grown more used to it. She could make out the hump of Charles' shoulder, the lowering bulk of the wardrobe, the pale gleam of the charts, beside her on the bedside table. She was still thinking in terms of charts. It was hard to break the habit of all those dots and dates and graphs. Tomorrow would be Day Four, almost time to start her last course of Clomid. Except she'd be chucking it down the lavatory, instead.

She groped in the shadows for the bottle, tipped one tiny smooth white tablet into her hand. White for innocence and safety, purity, fidelity. White for blank pages and clean sheets. White for breast-milk, baby-gowns, delivery rooms. Was she really sure she didn't want a baby? There was still time, still hope. She'd been so wrong about herself for fifteen years, perhaps she was wrong again, and the last few days had been merely shock and self-deception.

She flung the tablet on the floor. She couldn't endure her frenzied, circling thoughts, her endless speculation. She poured out the rest of the tablets, let them fall between her fingers. Only cold, unfeeling things were as white and pure as that – ice and alabaster, marble lilies on a grave, Charles' principles …