Her (7 page)

Later that evening, as Cecily rustles sleepily in the travel cot at the foot of the bed, Ben and I undress in low light. At moments like these, I long for a proper therapeutic debrief, a bit of a giggle, as well as some sort of vaguely appreciative apology, but I won’t get either from him and I know it’s wrong,
mean
, to want them so much; just as I know it’s wrong,
mean
, to wish Dirk and Peggy might offer us a little financial help while we’re going through this tight spot (though of course Ben would never solicit or accept a handout, even as the shed door lists on its hinges, the brown stain on the ceiling of Christopher’s bedroom grows larger, and the mortgage repayments and credit-card bills stalk our dreams).

‘They seem very well,’ I murmur, finding a clean babygro and putting it next to the wipes and nappies, ready for the morning. ‘Your mother’s really into this gym thing.’

Ben, climbing into bed, grunts. The slippery blue bedspread whispers as he pushes it down towards the foot, and then it slides off altogether, pooling on the carpet, a lake of static. ‘I expect she spends a lot of time in the salad bar,’ he says, ‘gassing with Angela Sinclair.’

I look down at Cecily, whose dark eyelashes are fanned out on her round cheeks, her fists curled on either side of her head. Her chest rises and falls in her moon-patterned sleeping bag: in, out, in. I visualise Peggy on the treadmill in pink velour joggers and a light sweat glaze, eyes locked onto
Cash in the Attic
or
Homes Under the Hammer
.

I rub moisturiser into my face, my neck. When I pull back the duvet, there’s a dark smear of chocolate and a flattened foil wrapper on the pillow: one of Peggy’s thoughtful touches. I must have melted my guest orange cream unwittingly, when I was feeding the baby this afternoon.

The visit unfurls as these visits always do. We gather for chilli con carne and baked gammon and rissoles made with leftover turkey. We attend the Sinclairs’ New Year drinks where Ben becomes rather animated because one of the other guests was once a formative crush. We go for wet walks along the bridleway, Cecily in the backpack, Christopher managing to get water in his beetle wellingtons, necessitating an early return. In the evenings, with the children in bed, we watch period dramas and play competitive games of Scrabble and listen to Dirk talking about a new ride-on mower he’s thinking of buying, to Peggy havering over where to go in February (Cape Verde islands? Madeira?).

At regular intervals during the day, Peggy does a ground-floor sweep after which bossy little cairns of our possessions – jumpers, Blue Bunny, bibs, wipes, the tube of Christopher’s eczema cream – are left for our attention at the bottom of the stairs. It’s a silent scream of protest. And, as things are never where I left them, it makes my life just that little bit harder.

We spend a lot of time saying, ‘Put that down, Christopher,’ or ‘That’s Grandma’s special china bell, it’s not for playing with,’ or ‘The curtains aren’t a toy.’

‘He’s a livewire, isn’t he?’ says Dirk admonishingly as we return the Scrabble tiles to their rightful place. The chess set is missing a queen and two pawns but no one has yet commented; with luck, we’ll find them before we leave. ‘Bright as a button, I expect?’ There’s an edge of doubt in his voice. It’s just before lunch, a time for peanuts and sherry. I never have sherry anywhere else. Here, it’s a bit of a highlight.

‘That reminds me, Dirk,’ says Peggy, over the scream of the electric carving knife, ‘Jemima’s been put in the top sets for maths and literacy, did Tom mention that?’

Dirk did know. ‘And of course the standard at The Chase is terribly high,’ he adds, for our benefit.

Jemima is their other granddaughter, precious firstborn of Ben’s brother Tom. Tom was going great guns in corporate finance – Dirk was always keen to tell us that he was nailing targets, collecting scalps, being showered with bonuses – until about three years ago when it emerged, in a roundabout fashion, that he had been made redundant. Since then, Tom has been ‘regrouping’, ‘working on something very hush-hush’, although he and his matchy-matchy wife Carolyn, who does something in ‘comms’, don’t seem to have pulled in their horns: they’re still a two-car household, they’re still going to Verbier and Dubai, and the porridge-faced Jemima continues to put on her blazer with the green piping every morning. Is there a boater? I think there might be a boater.

We sit there, waiting to be called for lunch, and suddenly Dirk rocks forward in his chair, barking, ‘Oh, stop fiddling!’ and Christopher is looking down at the coffee table, at the upended bowl and the spilled peanuts, a salty finger in his mouth.
Uh-oh
.

On the last morning we come down and find that Christopher has risen early and balanced two cushions on the sofa, giving him access to the holy grail on the top shelf. The curtain mechanism is broken, the curtains jammed at half-mast. Dirk puts a brave face on it. ‘Not to worry,’ he says, taking the back off the remote to see if new batteries will do the trick. They don’t.

We escort Christopher to the naughty step, out in the cold hall, next to a balled-up pair of walking socks and a copy of
Peepo
. He sits there mute, bearing his punishment, almost noble in his acceptance of it.

Back in London, unpacking the children’s bag, stuffing the dirty clothes into the washing machine, I find the little green drawstring sack from the Scrabble set, and inside it the queen and the pawns.

Sophie’s face, I think, is like the moon, cold, mysterious, remote. I look at my child now, standing there in the hall in martyred resignation – slightly knock-kneed as the fashion has it, her hair pulled in a slippery fall over one shoulder – and I’m not sure who she is.

She puts her tongue in her cheek, turns the rope of her hair around, twisting it, tugging it, bored, waiting for the moment to pass.

The inflections of Arnold that I notice at these moments, when Sophie’s busy hating me, are hard to bear. The weary inhalations. The lip-pressing. The holding back from saying things that I can, in any case, imagine. When she speaks, I smell Wrigley’s first, and then cigarettes.

‘My phone ran out of juice,’ she’s saying, ‘So I didn’t get your message.’

‘Well, you should have remembered to charge it up properly,’ I say, hearing my voice, shrill, reverberative, appalling. My power, already compromised, dwindling further. ‘And you could have borrowed a friend’s phone. It’s a school night! How many times do we have to go through this?’

She stifles a yawn, the phone in her hand suddenly illuminating as a text or email arrives. ‘I just forgot. I won’t do it again,’ she says, moving her hand quickly to hide the light that confirms her deceit.

‘I’ve heard that before,’ I say, deciding not to take her on about the phone right now:
pick your battles, first things first
. ‘I was worried! Anything could have happened.’

‘Well, it didn’t,’ she says, and then, more quietly, ‘For God’s sake. It was only an hour.’

I check my watch. ‘Two, nearly three, actually. Where were you, anyway?’

‘At Tasha’s. She asked me for supper.’

‘I’ll talk to her mother tomorrow,’ I say, but she interrupts: ‘Oh, don’t make a fuss, Tasha had to keep an eye on Tilly, their parents were going out. I said it would be OK.’

‘Oh.’ I feel my anger slackening slightly, my desire to believe.

‘Look, I won’t do it again,’ she’s saying, and as I say, ‘You’re running out of chances,’ she shrugs off her school blazer in an attempt to delineate the end of the episode. Her head lowered over the phone as she walks away, up the stairs. ‘Yup, yup, yup.’

Charles has tidied up the kitchen after supper and is in the sitting room, socked feet on the footstool, reading the
Evening Standard
. He raises an eyebrow as I come in, nods at his single malt. ‘Can I get you one?’

‘No, thanks.’ I can’t sit down quite yet. I move around the room, between the white sofas, putting another log in the wood burner, collecting the
Economist
and adding it to the pile of last weekend’s supplements. Rain hits the window in fits and starts, as if it’s being flung in handfuls. I pull the curtains against the black night.

‘She’s fine,’ he says in a low comforting voice. ‘It’s normal. It’s what they do, teenagers. School’s OK, isn’t it?’

‘As far as I know. No, nothing to worry about there. All on track.’ I find it hard to put it into words, this sense that I’m losing her, that she’s moving away from me, into a room that I can’t see clearly, as it’s badly lit or full of smoke. A place where anything might happen.

What am I scared of? Perhaps it’s a car. A dark street. A drink briefly left unattended. A careless boy or an older man. The usual horrors. Or it could be something more prosaic, more everyday. Perhaps I’m frightened that she no longer needs me in quite the same way. That my authority is being diminished, and I can do nothing about it.

‘She’s a sensible girl, more sensible than Jess was at her age,’ Charles says, as he always does, and thinking of Jess – the fast druggy crowd I’ve been told she fell in with at school, her job at English Heritage, her window boxes and stew-making – I laugh a little and switch on the TV and watch the last half-hour of a spy thriller.

Upstairs, Sophie moves from her bedroom to the bathroom and back again, and finally shuts her door for the night.

It could have happened to anyone. So easily done, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Anyway, it’s all fine, people behaved as you hope they will, with kindness and decency – after all, the world is full of good people, we need to remember this – and Christopher has already forgotten about it. He hasn’t mentioned it since.

Just one of those things.

Everyone agrees it’s not my fault: Ben, Lucy, the Monkey Music mothers, as we sit cross-legged on the carpet in between ‘Wheels on the Bus’ and ‘Mary Mary’, the children’s raincoats piled on a chair at the edge of the community hall. The other mothers make offerings of their own stories: Ruth’s Max ran off at London Zoo; Miranda came
this
close to leaving Jimmy in Sainsbury’s car park; when Fran was away for an uncle’s funeral, Luke forgot to pick up Ruby from the childminder (‘I came out of the wake and there were six messages from her on the phone. It was seven-thirty!’).

People couldn’t be sweeter, more understanding, more sympathetic. But I know what they’re thinking. I don’t blame them. I’d be thinking the same thing, in their shoes.

During the very earliest weeks of my first pregnancy I had a dream about motherhood. I dreamed that I had a newborn baby of my own, the size of a thimble or a larva, a tiny mewing scrap of dependency that I kept in a walnut-shell cradle. I can’t remember if it was a boy or a girl, blond, dark or a redhead: the key thing was, I was forever losing it. The dream was one long desperate ransacking of cutlery drawers and recycling boxes and laundry baskets. When I woke up I told Ben the dream, gratefully turning it into a joke, a riff on my own entirely appropriate anxieties (the phrase ‘elderly primagravida’, boldly scrawled across my hospital notes, did not fill me with confidence); but even as we laughed, I was still feeling the cold sickening buzz of panic in my blood. I’m not sure that sensation has ever really left me.

An afternoon in the park. Early spring, the long wet paths gleaming in thrilling bursts of sunshine, buds punctuating the chestnut branches to mark the end of winter. I have lifted Cecily out of the buggy and I’ve wedged her into the little swing in the babies’ playground. It’s the first time I’ve bothered to do this, and at first she’s terrified, hating it, her mittened fists flailing, unable to fathom the pendulum rhythm; and then suddenly the penny drops, and she starts to enjoy herself, her mouth open in a great astonished O of delight. Christopher is on his Christmas micro scooter, racing up and down along the flat stretch between the playground and the park gate, sailing through and around puddles bright as mirrors.

After a few minutes I look at my watch, and then I glance around. I can’t see him.

I turn my head, checking the paths. A woman jogs past, earphones in, lost in her own secret soundtrack. A man bends down for a stick and throws it for his spaniel.

I scan the shrubbery, the battered huddled outline of the ornamental walk, the view over to the kitchen garden, and then I turn in the other direction, towards the pond, the boardwalk around it, the disused drinking fountain and the line of empty benches leading to the adventure playground. Two women walk past with pushchairs, chatting and laughing. The sun slides into cloud.

He’s wearing a bright green anorak and a knitted wasp-striped bobble hat. I search for that acid flare of yellow, and I can’t see it anywhere.

I pull Cecily out of the swing, ignoring her complaint, the crumple of her face, and I clip her into the buggy. Which way? I come out of the playground, the weighted safety gate knocking my thigh. I turn right, to the pond. ‘Christopher!’ I shout, and then I shout it again, hurrying the buggy along, my eyes on the black water through the iron railings, snarled with leaves and twigs; and, hearing me, two fifty-something women glance up out of their conversation and come towards me.

‘He’s nearly three, he’s wearing a green jacket and a yellow striped hat,’ I tell them. ‘His name is Christopher, he was just there, on his scooter,’ and I point, and they say they didn’t see him by the pond, he didn’t come in their direction, they’re fairly sure of that, but they’ll do a quick circuit and they’ll check the adventure playground as they go past. ‘Thank you so much,’ I say, for something to say, and then I’m off again, hurrying in the other direction this time, towards the kitchen garden and the shrubbery.

It’s dark under the trees, and as I pass, calling for him, heavy fat drops of water slide from the overhanging foliage and fall on me, little detonations on my cheek and hands, spilling through my hair.

I’m calling for him, and Cecily has stopped crying, maybe it’s the motion of the buggy or maybe she can tell from my voice that something’s wrong.

A few people hear me shouting and approach, concerned, wanting to help, and then they join the search, but it’s all hopeless, I know it, he’s not here. ‘Thanks, that would be great,’ I say to them, and then I run off, heading uphill to the little café, the terrace deserted, chairs tilted to the tabletops, the windows opaque with breath and steam from the Gaggia, and there’s no sign of him, and I can’t see him on the lawn, and – oh Jesus – he’s not near the fountain either, though it’s a source of endless fascination. I run up to the fountain, and I look in, and then I turn on my heel and bump the buggy down the broad steps, between the broken stone urns, heading downhill again, taking the path that comes out by the compost bins and the lower gate.