Cuckoo (7 page)
‘Jeez. I’m glad to be home,’ he said.
And that was it. After that, he seemed to dislike Polly even more intensely. Rose’s plan had failed, and the two of them hadn’t spoken to each other again. And now, here he was, in their kitchen, holding her hand, offering her comfort.
He was really trying.
‘Where are those boys, then?’ Gareth broke away and tapped the table, breaking the moment.
‘Gareth has been ever so excited about meeting Nico and Yannis,’ Rose said as she carried the salad over. ‘He’s surrounded by females in this house. He’s going to love having someone to kick a ball around and do a bit of rough stuff with.’
‘Yeah, Anna’s a real girly girl,’ Gareth smiled.
‘Despite my best efforts at countering gender stereotypes,’ Rose chipped in. ‘I’ve bought her cars and balls and books with tomboy main characters. I scoured car-boot sales for those damn Action Men. But it didn’t work. She’s still seduced by pink.’
‘I think Rose had to reconfigure some of those feminist nurture/nature beliefs,’ Gareth told Polly, then he stood up and went to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Kids!’ he yelled. ‘Get on down here!’
At the sound of his voice, the children thundered downstairs.
‘We were making too much noise to hear the bell,’ Anna panted. ‘Nico and Yannis, this is my dad, Gareth.’
The two boys stood either side of Anna, suddenly a little shy in front of this towering man.
Gareth squatted in front of them. ‘Hi guys,’ he said gently.
‘He’s great fun,’ Anna said. ‘When he’s not working.’ She rolled her eyes.
‘Hey, madam, less of that,’ Gareth said and scooped Anna up, swinging her up, over his shoulder and round again – a complicated manoeuvre that never failed to make her squeal with laughter.
‘Me! Me! I want a go!’ Yannis said.
‘All right, little guy, here’s yours,’ Gareth said, repeating the trick on him.
Soon all three children – even Nico had begged for a swing – were collapsed on the floor in a giggling heap. The whole kitchen seemed to be filled with a new kind of energy.
‘Hey, come and have supper, you lot,’ Rose had to strain to be heard.
‘I guess we’d better do what the lady says,’ Gareth said, helping Nico and Yannis up.
In his big pullover, sheepskin slippers and baggy cords, Gareth looked like a gentle giant set against the two boys. Nico and Yannis were so tiny Rose thought they would probably have had a social worker assigned to them, had they been born in England. She looked at her man and smiled. He was welcoming them all to the cave.
Tucking Anna and the boys into their seats, Gareth kissed Rose and sat down.
‘You’re going to have your work cut out feeding this lot up, Rose,’ he said. And Polly – anorexic, hypersensitive about her size and eating, with a twisted relationship to food – Polly laughed. Such was Gareth’s gift at putting people at their ease.
He had once told Rose that his charm was learned as a baby, when he was placed into strangers’ hands.
‘But Pam and John must have loved you instantly. They wanted you so badly,’ she had replied.
‘Then why did they lie to me?’ he said. And that was that. Rose could say nothing to that.
They sat around the long oak table and Rose served up the beef stew that had been simmering away since dawn.
For a while there was little sound except that of the boys’ noisy munching. It was as if they hadn’t eaten for weeks.
Rose counted just two forkfuls that found their way into Polly’s mouth. She was performing her old trick of pushing food round the plate: a facade of eating that was pretty convincing.
‘What’re those?’ Yannis had bolted his food down and was cruising round the room, taking it all in. Normally, Rose would have told a child to wait until everyone else had finished before getting up. But she decided to make an exception for this one night.
‘My eggs,’ said Anna, after finishing her mouthful. ‘You can get them down if you like.’
‘Hey, let me give you a hand,’ Gareth said, getting up to lift the basket down from the dresser. ‘It’s pretty heavy these days.’
Yannis took the basket of polished stone eggs over to Anna, who laid them out one by one on a space he had hurriedly cleared next to her by pushing his plate and cutlery back.
‘Careful, Yannis,’ Rose said, catching her wine glass as it toppled, knocked over by the displaced crockery. She watched, amused, as her carefully laid table was sent to chaos.
‘This one,’ Anna said, taking a life-sized, shiny green egg from the basket and handing it to Yannis, ‘Daddy brought me back from China.’
‘Let me see!’ Nico was on his feet, snatching the egg from his little brother.
‘Oy!’ Yannis cried.
‘Never mind, Yannis,’ Anna said, lifting a bigger, turquoisecoloured egg from the basket and giving it to the little boy. ‘You can hold this one – look. It’s my favourite. Daddy brought it back from Japan when I was four.’
‘What about this one?’ Nico lifted a polished lump the size of an ostrich egg from the basket.
‘That’s the biggest. It’s made of onyx, which is a semi-precious stone. Daddy got it in Singapore.’
‘Does your papa bring you eggs from everywhere he goes?’ Yannis asked.
‘Yes. I’ve got sixteen. Though he hasn’t been anywhere for ages and I want another egg.’ Anna looked at Gareth.
‘So you want me to go away?’ Gareth laughed.
‘No! No, Daddy, I didn’t mean that. I just want another egg and for you to stay.’
‘Oh, OK, that’s all right. I thought you wanted me out,’ he said. Feigning great relief, he got back to his food.
‘Does anyone want any more stew?’ Rose asked, trying to change the subject, surprised that Gareth couldn’t show more tact towards two boys who had just lost their father. But Nico and Yannis didn’t seem to have noticed. They both appeared to be strangely resilient. Perhaps Polly was right – perhaps it hadn’t yet sunk in for them. A month can seem like a lifetime when you are young.
‘What was your school like in Karpathos?’ Anna asked Nico, carefully arranging her eggs back into the basket.
‘Small,’ said Nico. ‘There were twenty-three children in the whole school and we all had lessons in one room.’
‘Was your teacher nice?’
‘He was OK,’ said Nico.
‘He was great!’ Yannis said.
‘And you learned your lessons in Greek?’
‘Yep.’
‘It’s not like that at mine,’ Anna said. She went to the village primary, which was a short walk across the fields at the back of the house. ‘Each class is bigger than your whole school.’
‘Are we going to go there, Mama?’ Yannis asked, going over and sitting next to Polly.
‘What?’ said Polly. She had zoned out during the children’s conversation.
‘Are we going to Anna’s school?’
‘I suppose so,’ Polly said. ‘I hadn’t really thought about it.’
‘I’ve spoken to the Head,’ Rose said, clearing the table. ‘They’ve got a couple of spaces in years one and four, so you should be OK. But you’ll need to go up there tomorrow because I think you’ve got to fill in some forms or something for the council.’
‘There’s no hurry, though,’ Polly said, pouring herself another glass of wine.
‘No, not at all,’ Rose said. ‘Gareth, could you finish the table while I get the pudding out?’
Gareth got up and put the basket of eggs back on the dresser shelf.
‘You’re coming to my school!’ Anna clanged her cutlery together. ‘Wicked! It’ll be like you’re my brothers. Or like Mum and Polly when they were at school.’
‘Like we were.’ Polly caught Rose’s eye across the room, and smiled.
Holding herself slightly back from that dense gaze, Rose thought she detected something a little more complicated than pure nostalgia. Confused, she broke away, and busied herself with the custard.
‘So,’ Gareth said, as the children raced up the stairs, their bellies full of apple crumble. ‘How long are you with us, Polly?’ He put another bottle of red on the table and sat back down opposite her.
‘I’ll get me coat.’ She smiled lopsidedly.
‘You know that’s not what he means,’ Rose said, pouring everyone another glass of wine. ‘Is it?’ She turned to Gareth.
‘Of course not,’ Gareth said, looking at Polly. ‘I was just wondering if you have any plans.’
‘Not really.’ Polly leaned back in her chair and folded her arms.
‘It’s early days . . .’ Rose said.
‘Yeah, all that,’ Polly said. ‘But I’m sure a plan will emerge, and as soon as it does I’ll let you know.’
Rose reached across and took Polly’s hand. She wanted to calm her down a bit. They had all drunk a fair bit of wine, and she didn’t want anything to upset this first night, not after it had been going so well.
In Rose’s own warm fingers, Polly’s felt like dry sticks. Rose saw what Polly was doing. This shell, this apparent insouciance, was all a load of armour. This was a woman in shock. Not just anyone, either, but Polly. Her Polly. And she determined there and then that she was going to do everything in her power to bring her back to life.
Polly needed her help.
Unaccustomed as she was to playing the leading role in the drama of herself and Polly, Rose couldn’t help but feel excited, even a little relieved. In the years they had spent apart, she had become used to being in charge of her own world. She didn’t think she could ever slip back into how things used to be between the two of them.
Flossie had slept so solidly since the car journey that Rose had nearly forgotten that she had left her in the living room in her car seat. But she quickly reasserted her presence by setting up a wail that was in danger of bringing down all the new ceilings and smashing the triple-glazed windows.
Rose gave Polly’s hand a squeeze, knocked back her wine, then went to find her book so that she could give her poor baby a good, long feed. This one, the last of the night, was the stocking up that Flossie needed to see her through her six-hour sleep. Rose knew she should really start to think about moving her on to solids, but something in her was resistant to the idea. She was a little guilty about the amount of wine she had drunk, but she knew it had the benefit of making babies sleep that little bit deeper.
‘We’ll go upstairs,’ she called to Gareth and Polly. ‘We don’t want to get Floss all over-excited.’ She also thought that it might be a good move to leave the two of them downstairs alone together, to give them a chance to relax a bit into each other’s company without her getting in the way. She knew she was only trying to smooth things out, but it was the grown-up thing to step away, to trust Gareth and Polly to their own devices.
As she carried Flossie up the stairs, she smiled to herself. At least she didn’t have to worry about Gareth being drawn to Polly in the way that most men seemed to be. Apart from the fact that she trusted him completely, his former loathing for Polly was so far away from attraction that she knew that wild horses wouldn’t pull him in that direction.
Up in Rose and Gareth’s bedroom, Flossie fed and sucked and murmured like a hungry little beast. Rose tried to read, but her eyes kept blurring over the same paragraph, and she couldn’t take in a single word. Her mind kept going back to that look Polly had given her at supper, to the weight it contained.
Rose edited her past meticulously for public consumption. She had to. Only Polly, sworn to secrecy, knew it all. Had there been danger in that look?
She closed her eyes and tried not to think back, tried not to remember running for her life. As a teenager, she had possessed a talent for provoking extremes in her father. Mostly, she managed to get away and lock herself in a bathroom until whatever it was he was feeling subsided. But sometimes he got to her before she could escape, and he would rain his fists down on her until she screamed so loudly that he had to stop, for fear that the paying guests might hear.
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