Cuckoo (3 page)
‘I’ll miss him so much,’ Rose murmured.
‘Me too.’
Rose leaned her head on his shoulder.
‘Look. I want us to be together on this,’ she said, after a while.
She didn’t want it to be like her pregnancy, when she had felt as if she were carrying both Anna and the baby on her own. It had been frightening, feeling so alone. The endless work on the house, and the blustery, wet, psychotic English weather seemed to grind Gareth down. He was tall, with big hands, thick hair, and solid legs. But, over that period, he seemed to get smaller and smaller. Rose’s belly had swelled in counterpoint to Gareth’s decline, but she had been determined to pull her not inconsiderable weight on the building work. She remembered aching everywhere. Her tenacious optimism, which usually saw her through anything, had started to desert her.
Everything had begun to seem hopeless, when, unannounced and two weeks early, the baby arrived.
The labour was an unseemly two hours, far too short to get to the hospital. So Andy and Gareth – who had been wrenched from his slough by the pressing nature of the event – delivered her with telephone support from the emergency services.
The minute the baby slipped into his hands, Gareth was smitten. He declared her to be Flossie – not the prearranged Olivia that Rose had whittled out from all the possibilities. Rose was so relieved at Gareth’s instant transformation that she would have agreed to Weasel or Troutface if that was what he had wanted.
This new joy had taken them through the last stages of the build – the final fixings, the colour schemes and the flooring decisions – into the completed house, where life was ready to begin as an ordered, organised existence. There was a cupboard for everything; shelves displayed only books or the useful and beautiful. They had space, at last. It was so different from cramming their lives into a one-bedroom flat with no garage and no attic as they had done back in Hackney. And this space was special: they had punched and pulled and sweated to create it. Spring was on the way, and the sun would soon begin to warm their bones again. The forecast was for a great summer.
Rose knew that her instinctive reaction to Polly’s situation had posed a threat to all this balance, but she also knew that neither she, nor Gareth, had any real choice now. And she was pretty sure he saw it like that, too.
‘Look,’ she said to him. ‘They’re not staying for ever, and if it doesn’t feel right, we can always ask them to move. It’s only till they get their feet on the ground here, really it is.’
The air shifted slightly in their willow shelter. Very, very slowly, he began to smile, and she knew in that moment that it was going to be all right.
‘Oh yeah, I can really see you asking her to move on,’ Gareth said. ‘You’re too softhearted, Rose. You’re a pushover, always looking out for something to look after.’
‘That’s why I chose you,’ she said, and he drew her in close.
‘But I’m serious, Rose. If it goes tits up, then I’m going to be the one to send her on her way, and I won’t take any sort of opposition from you, OK?’
‘OK,’ she said, curving into him. ‘Besides, we’re rock solid now, aren’t we?’
‘Too right,’ he said, and he threw a stone into the river, skimming it so that it bounced four times.
Three
‘Tell me a story about when you were younger.’
Two weeks had passed. Anna was curled up next to Rose. Manky, the old cat, was sprawled over the two of them, purring like a motorised, heated blanket.
‘Did I ever tell you about when I met Polly?’ Rose said.
‘No.’
‘Would you like to hear it?’
‘Yes!’
They were on the bed in Rose and Gareth’s room. Already it had become the favoured place for bedtime stories. It sat up in the eaves of the house, tucked under the roof whose topping-out was responsible for Flossie’s existence. The sloping, oak-beamed ceilings – high enough to stand under except in the very far reaches of the room – made the place feel enclosed, like an embrace. And the low, warm lighting made you feel protected and held, even on a night as stormy as this.
‘Well now. When I was six – the same age as you – I lived in a big house by the sea. It was in the middle of a town too, though.’
‘That’s Brighton.’
‘Yes. The house I lived in was a guesthouse.’
‘I know that!’
‘OK.’
‘But what’s a guesthouse? A house with guests – like we’re going to be when they get here?’
‘Not really, it’s more a sort of hotel. My mum and dad – your grandparents – let rooms out to people who came to Brighton on holidays, or for business. They gave them breakfast in a room in the basement in the mornings. The people paid. It was hard work for your grandparents. The guests were always coming or going, only staying for a couple of nights at most.’
‘Did you like living there?’
‘Do you know what? Not really. There were always these strangers shuffling up and down the stairs, waiting for the lavatory, wanting this or that. Complaining.’
‘I wouldn’t like that.’
‘No. But it was all I knew. Your grandparents were kept really busy by it all, so I was pretty much left to get on with things myself.’
‘Sounds boring.’
‘It was. And a bit lonely. I wasn’t lucky like you. I didn’t have a sister to play with. There were never any children apart from me. Your grandparents didn’t allow children.’
‘Why not?’
‘Oh, you know. Noise. Mess. They hated all that.’
‘They sound horrible.’
‘I liked living by the sea, though. I used to go down to the beach every day. It was my route to school.’
‘You used to walk on your own, right?’
‘Yes. Out the house, take a left. Cross the road at the zebra then down onto the beach. I used to cut under the pier, although I wasn’t really allowed to.’
‘I wish I could walk to school on my own.’
‘You’re too young. It’s dangerous these days.’
‘Why weren’t you allowed to go under the pier?’
‘That’s another story. But the thing was, you see, that the sea was extraordinary. Every time it was different. One day it might be flat, like a sheet of silk. The very next morning there would have been a storm, like the one we’ve got tonight, and it would boil, reaching up and trying to grab you off the pebbles to drag you out to sea. I loved it like that. I’d poke my tongue out at it, following the waves back onto the wet gravel as they pulled outwards, then I’d pelt back up the beach as they threw themselves in again.
‘One day, the sea got me and I turned up at school soaking wet, my homework book ruined. The teacher told me off and the other children all laughed. I was freezing cold.
‘Then the teacher said there was a new child, and brought in this tiny, skinny girl with a bush of black, matted hair. Everyone giggled again, but she looked back at them like a tiger and that shut them all up.’
Rose made the face for Anna. She remembered it clearly.
‘The teacher got us all to sit down. “This is Polly, everyone, and I want you to make her feel welcome,” she said. “Polly, would you take a seat, please?” Well, the only seat available was the one next to me. So she came and sat there, right by my side.
‘She looked at me, all soaking wet. “I’ve got some spare clothes in my rucksack, Miss,” she said to the teacher. “Can this girl put them on? She’s freezing, look.”
‘And amazingly, the teacher said yes. And me and Polly went out to the cloakroom. Her clothes didn’t fit me all that well: she was so skinny, and I was quite chubby back then. But at least they were dry.
‘And ever since that moment, we’ve been best friends. We sat together every day at school and it turned out that her mum lived in the flats in the next street from ours. So at last I had someone to be with at school and at home. We’d spend days rummaging round the guesthouse, hiding from my parents in empty rooms, pretending it was our hotel, or pretending we were newlyweds on honeymoon. We’d dress up in Polly’s mother’s clothes – she was very poorly and stuck in bed all the time, but she had loads of beautiful things from the days before she got sick – and parade along the seafront in long, floppy velvet coats, too-big platform T-bars and feather boas.
‘Polly and I called ourselves twin sisters. And, thanks to her, I wasn’t lonely any more. Or bored. She always had ideas about what to do next. So, in the end, I was lucky like you. You’ve got Flossie and I’ve got Polly. We lived together in Brighton from when we were sixteen, and then later, when she was a singer and I was a teacher, we shared a lovely flat in London. We had loads of adventures, and sometimes we were quite naughty.’
‘What sort of naughty?’
‘Ah, now, that’d be telling. Another story for another day. Look at the time. It’s bedtime, Mrs.’
‘Oh. Pleeease.’
‘No! Come on. We’ve got a long day tomorrow. We’re going straight after school to the airport to pick up Polly and the boys. So you’ve got to be full of beans. Just think, not only have you got your little sister, but you’re going to have Nico and Yannis to play with all the time.’
Excited by this thought, Anna picked up her teddy and padded downstairs to her bedroom, where Rose tucked her in and kissed her goodnight. She smoothed her daughter’s thick brown hair and felt the warmth of her breath on her cheek. Manky jumped up and took his place at the end of Anna’s bed.
Rose turned out Anna’s light and went to find Flossie for her bedtime feed. On the way downstairs, she tried to remember what it was really like in her parents’ house, on that dark, winding staircase that seemed to go on for ever from the little basement flat that they lived in to the very top attic bedrooms. She remembered landing after landing of closed doors that seemed to draw her to them, tempting her to eavesdrop on the transient lives that played out behind them. But most of all, she remembered that sick, fearful feeling she always had in that house, and she was glad that her daughters would never have to go through all that.
Did she have some of the hotelier in her blood? She hoped not – she would rather not have anything to do with all that – but she had enjoyed preparing the Annexe for the visitors. It had been a bit of a rush: once Polly had the invitation from Rose, she lost no time in organising her departure. But Rose was nearly there. She ticked off in her mind the final things she needed to do to prepare for them: make up the beds in the Annexe, put milk in the fridge, fresh towels and loo roll in the shower room and a bunch of daffs in a vase on the table.
And then, everything would be ready.
Four
‘How much longer?’
Anna tugged at Rose’s coat. It was getting late, and they were both a little irritable. They had been waiting in Heathrow for over an hour. Polly’s flight had been delayed at take-off because of a storm in Crete, and there was no definite landing time on any of the screens, just an annoying message that told them to wait for further information.
They had finished the rice cakes and apples they had brought along as snacks and Anna was getting tetchy and impatient. Rose began to wish that she had left her back at home. Flossie was fast asleep in her sling, thank goodness, so at least she only had one child to contend with.
‘All right, let’s go to Starbucks,’ Rose said. They wandered over and, after a lot of deliberation, Anna settled for a Grande hot chocolate, with cream and marshmallow. Rose had a cup of tea. They took a seat where they could see both the screens and the people coming through the arrivals gate from airside.
Rose loved watching the arrivals. Whenever she had to meet someone she’d always get to the airport early. She’d tell Gareth it was in case there were any problems parking, but what she really wanted to do was to watch the moments of exposure and connection, the bare meeting points between people. It was like theatre: the travellers appear on the stage a little dazed, blinking, dragging their luggage behind them. There’s a moment of confusion, then they spot their loved ones and the scene becomes pure and focused as they wave, run, embrace.
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