Freeing Grace (29 page)

‘I’ve got no heart to break,’ I told her.

By the time I heard a car rumbling down the lane, it was late. We’d already had supper, and Perry had disappeared off to his study. I waited for her footsteps in the hall. I found myself glancing towards the door, wanting to see her. Five, ten minutes passed, but she didn’t come in. So I went outside to find her. She was standing under the lilac tree in her long winter coat, staring bleakly up at the house.

For a moment, I lingered by the front door. A whisper of light, escaping from an upstairs window, glanced slantways across her face and shoulders; her eyes were in shadow, as though she was wearing a masquerade mask. Watching that motionless figure, I finally faced the fact that she made me feel very strange. It wasn’t just physical desire.

Deborah’s story was the opposite of mine. She’d sacrificed her youth, been an army wife, brought up children. She’d lived a lie, really, but she’d done it for more or less the right reasons. Me, on the other hand? I’d clung to my youth, avoided commitment, lived selfishly but honestly. I was even selfish in my honesty.

We were opposites. And yet, at some horribly fundamental level, I recognised something in her, a sort of kinship. A passion for freedom, perhaps. I felt as though she was a part of my past, and my future, and myself. I felt as though she was my home. But I couldn’t have her. Never. I could put that idea right out of my head.

She didn’t move as I walked up to her. She seemed stunned.

‘I never want to go in,’ she said quietly. ‘And he never wants to come out. An agoraphobic, living with a claustrophobic. Impossible.’

‘The Dog and Gun is beckoning,’ I suggested. ‘How about a swift one?’

‘I’ve already had too many swift ones.’

She had, too. Her voice lacked its usual precision. ‘I expect they do coffee,’ I said. ‘C’mon.’

She turned her shadowed eyes up to me. ‘I still care about him, Jake.’

I took her elbow. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Perry, I mean. But he doesn’t make me happy. No, he makes me very
un
happy. I worry about him, and I want his approval. And I hate him.’

I steered her down the shadowy drive. ‘Mind the pothole.’

‘And I pity him, and I resent him because I pity him. He has a power over me . . . but it’s black magic. That’s why I had to get
clean
away.’

We walked along the road. Once in the pub, she folded herself into a window seat while I went to the bar. Same barmaid, bigger tee-shirt. When I returned, I saw that Deborah had closed her eyes. There was a deep line running vertically down the middle of her forehead. My mum used to look like that when she had a migraine.

I perched on one of those little plush stools and gestured to her coffee. ‘Headache?’

‘The prison gates are clanging shut.’ She pressed a hand to her mouth as though she’d just been told she had a week to live. There were purple shadows like bruises around her eyes. ‘Sorry, Jake. You hate it, don’t you? Emotion. Not your thing at all.’ She blinked slowly and forced an unconvincing smile. ‘I gave myself a day alone, to think.’

‘And? What did you decide?’

‘She’s beautiful.’

‘She . . . ?’

Deborah’s gaze slid past me to a hunting print on the wall. ‘They had her in the back. A lime-green room. Ugh. Why
lime
green? There was a huge mirror, obviously a two-way job. I bet Imogen was on the other side, watching beadily and taking notes.’

‘Jeez. Hard to relax when you’re being spied on.’

‘Mm. But Matt was there.’ She smiled. ‘Holding her in his big arms as though he was a butler and it was his duty to provide a comfy place for Her Highness to lay her royal head.’

I caught myself grinning goofily. I’d have liked to have seen that.

‘Matt is so proud,’ she said. ‘He’s
my
Matt again, you know? My son. The one made of pride, with his shoulders back and his chin up. Fatherhood has had quite a profound effect on him.
Mum, Grace . . . Grace, meet your granny
.’

‘I suppose she looks pretty much like a baby?’

‘One of her hands was clenched around his little finger.’ Deborah held up a fist. ‘Imperiously, like this. Dark eyelashes, fuzz of hair, mouth like a little red heart. She’s perfect.’ She cradled her cup. ‘Well, except for the fluffy pink cardigan. Looks like coconut ice. It
has
to go.’

I chuckled at that, and she sighed into her coffee. ‘I’d forgotten that baby smell.’

‘Yuck!’

‘No, no, it’s
not
yuck, Jake. Just you wait ’til you’ve got one of your own. It’s captivating . . . washing powder and milk and brand-new life.’

‘Pheromones,’ I said sourly. ‘Even ants are driven by pheromones.’ I wasn’t enjoying this conversation. It was like hearing all about somebody’s dream holiday in a place you couldn’t possibly get to, ever. ‘Was she asleep the whole time? Bit boring.’

‘No. She smiled at me.’ Deborah’s tired eyes creased too, at the memory. ‘Matt handed her over, and she lay on my lap, burbling and chewing her toes. Matt knows all about mixing bottles—can you believe that? He pottered off to the kitchen, and as soon as she started to whimper, he had one ready.’

‘Man of many talents.’ I downed the last of my half.

‘He got me to feed her. Haven’t done that for donkey’s years— wasn’t sure if I still had the knack. But she stopped squalling and started filling her face, looking up at me with those great big eyes. I could hear the air rushing into the bottle . . . I could have cried. It all came back. That feeling.’

‘For God’s sake,
what
feeling? Get real, Debs. You legged it from domestic life, remember?’

Her eyes weren’t focusing at all; she was thinking about that wretched little pink blob. She seemed entranced.

‘They’re vulnerable,’ she murmured. ‘And they trust you.’

I had no idea what she was talking about.

‘If Grace had arrived in ten years’ time, I’d have been overjoyed,’ she said. ‘She’s truly bewitching. It’s just that she’s . . .’

‘A disaster?’ I prompted heartlessly.

‘A disaster.’ She twisted her mouth. ‘Precisely.’

There was a burst of laughter from the bar. Some sort of Celtic pipe music started trickling out of the loudspeakers.

‘Matt’s crazy about her,’ she said. ‘He asked me what I thought, and I told him she was the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen. And she is, Jake. She
is
.’ Deborah nodded several times. ‘I didn’t have to lie. She’s glorious. She’s my family.’

She sighed. Drained the coffee. ‘And she needs me.’

‘Poor Rod,’ I said.

Chapter Twenty-two

The call came when they were painting the baby’s room.

They’d removed the study phone because it wasn’t a study any more, it was a nursery. Leila balanced her brush on a pot and ran downstairs to answer it, while David rolled swathes of primrose onto the wall, whistling under his breath. She seemed to be a long time, so he knew it wasn’t for him. Today was his day off, for all that was worth. They’d got up early to start painting; it was still only nine o’clock, and they’d almost finished the first coat.

Her footsteps as she climbed the stairs were slower than usual, and he paused in his whistling and stood among the pots and trays, facing the door uncertainly. When she appeared her face was blank. She stopped a few feet away, looking at him. Paint oozed from the roller in his hand, splattering onto the sheet they’d spread over the floor, but he ignored it.

‘There’s a problem,’ she said, very clearly, very loud. Already, he saw the hopeless calm creeping back into her eyes.

‘A problem?’ Drip, drip.

‘The birth family are putting up a fight. They’ve produced a grandmother, like a rabbit out of a hat.’

They stood neither moving nor speaking, while paint splashed onto the sheet. David stirred first, dejectedly pressing the lid onto a pot and shoving the roller into a plastic bag. There was no point now. Leila bent to pick up her brush and dropped it into a bucket of water, and then began to stack the pots in one corner of the room.

David was attacking the stepladder with unnecessary violence, and much crashing and grinding of metal. ‘Damn,’ he muttered through clenched teeth, as it refused to fold.

‘Yes. Damn.’ Listlessly, Leila peeled off her overalls. She untied the scarf she’d used to cover her hair.

‘So that’s that?’

‘The court thing is still on. We just have to wait until then. The grandmother might turn out to be hopeless. Maybe she’ll have Alzheimer’s or something.’

David crunched the stepladder into a new contortion. ‘Do we go along? Do we get to have our say and show what nice people we are?’

‘Oh, no.
We’re
only the adoptive parents.
We’re
only the ones who’ve got her room all ready, who want to love her and care for her for the rest of our lives. Why should we be allowed to participate? No, no,
no
! We have to be kept safely in the dark.’

‘This is inhuman. He shouldn’t be allowed to do this.’

Leila rubbed her hands on a rag. ‘Who? The father?’

‘Yes, the father. And the grandmother. What the hell are they playing at? Do they think this baby’s a toy?’

‘And them, too,’ said Leila. ‘The adoption people. They
promised
us he’d given up.’

Finally folding the ladder, David smashed it against the wall. A small piece of plaster fluttered to the floor, leaving a white hole in the new paint.

‘We could always sue them for all this yellow paint,’ said Leila bleakly, handing him the rag. ‘You’re going to have the jolliest study in the diocese. You’ll have a nursery rhymes frieze, and a mobile that plays the Brahms Lullaby, and—’

The telephone rang again. It was a sort of leitmotif in their lives: the interrupted conversations, the unfinished sentences.

‘Leave it,’ said David.

‘Oh, go on. It’s your turn. Perhaps it’s Linda again: Granny’s turned out to be an axe murderer.’

David wandered down the stairs, barely finding the energy to lift the receiver.

‘Ah, David,’ he heard. ‘Good morning. I’m
so
glad I’ve tracked you down.’

He knew the voice all too well: Marjorie Patterson, captain of the blue rinse brigade and treasurer of the PCC.

‘Marjorie.’

‘I need to have a word in your shell-like before the meeting on Friday evening, David.’

‘This is my day off, actually.’

‘Really?’ Marjorie’s charming hostess tones hardened a little. ‘Well. Never mind. This will only take a few minutes.’

‘Couldn’t it wait until tomorrow?’ He heard Leila trailing down the stairs and knew she was standing behind him, listening. He twisted around and crossed his eyes at her. She didn’t smile. Her eyes bored into his, red-rimmed.

There was a small, irritated laugh; it rattled frostily in his ear. ‘No, I’m afraid it couldn’t. There’s no time like the present. Now, do you have the agenda before you?’

‘Er, no, and it’ll take me a minute or two to dig it out. This isn’t a good time, Marjorie. We’re moving out of the study.’ He ruffled his hair, distracted, distressed.

‘I’ll read the relevant section to you, then.’ The woman was like a steamroller.

Leila’s arm shot out and she snatched the receiver from David’s hand. ‘Marjorie?’ she yelled. ‘Are you
deaf
? It’s his day off. It’s his fucking day off, do you understand? One day, one miserable sod-ding day a week. So piss off and leave us alone for once in our sodding lives.’

There was an animated clucking from down the line, as though a fox had got into the chicken shed.

‘I don’t give a toss, you bossy old bitch,’ snarled Leila, tossing her hair. ‘Go ahead, make my day. Tell the fucking rector. Tell the Archbishop of fucking Canterbury, for all I care.’ In the stunned silence that followed this invitation, she slammed the phone down.

She glared defiantly at David, whose hands were over his ears. ‘Well, she deserved it.’

‘Feeling better?’

‘Much.’

David shook his head. ‘You are truly magnificent. I’m delighted to see you’ve lost none of your fire. But you’ve also just destroyed my career, so I’ll have to ring her back and apologise.’

Lips pursed, Leila folded her arms. ‘You do that and I’m walking out of that door and never coming back.’

‘Come on, Leila. You can’t—’

‘I mean it. You’re a bloody slave to these people, David. They’ll suck out everything you’ve got, every ounce of youth and energy. And finally, at the end of your working life, when you’re just an empty, dried-out husk, they’ll chuck you away. You’ll eke out a miserable existence on a clergy pension, eating cat food, until one day the Meals on Wheels lady finds you dead and cold, propped up in front of
Neighbours
. Then they’ll do a commemorative seat with your name on it and put it in the churchyard for teenagers to shag on.’

‘All of that may be true, but I’ve still got to phone Marjorie back and grovel sickeningly.’

She shoved her hands into her pockets. ‘Oh, God,
I’ll
phone her.’ As she dialled, she looked up at him. ‘We’ve got to get out for the rest of the day, David. Please. I’ll murder the next person who rings the doorbell. How about a walk up in the Malverns?’

‘Lunch in that pub?’

‘Ooh, yes. Let’s be real devils. Hello, Marjorie? Look . . .’

Pulling the paint-splattered shirt over his head, David climbed the stairs, dragging his wounded soul. Each step seemed an unnecessary effort, as though it were barely worth the energy expended in lifting his foot. At this moment, right now, he felt he truly understood the pointlessness of his future—of all their futures, the whole human race. There
was
no point. There was no punchline to the joke.

He feared for Leila; for
them
, as a couple. In a little while he would put on a clean shirt and go down to her, and they would set out together. They must carry on. They
would
carry on. They always did. But first he needed to gather his strength, because this time he was utterly overwhelmed.

He sat on the bed, trying to see some other picture, trying not to care so much. After all, he had resigned himself to childlessness before they had news of this baby. Surely he could be resigned again. But he could taste only the loss. Loss for himself, for Leila. Loss of the happy Leila he had briefly regained. Loss of the future they had imagined for themselves. It was poison, acidic, burning in his throat when he tried to swallow. Choking, he reached out for—well, something. Just something
.