Half Broken Things (14 page)

Anyway, having the whole day to fill before Michael's arrival was the start of it. Thinking first about giving him tea when he arrived, I baked a cake, and standing in the kitchen beating it all up by hand, I tried to remember when I had last made one. It must have been for Father; he liked cake, anything sweet. I had a light hand with a cake, he said. I had forgotten that entirely, and it was nice to remember again. Not that I made many cakes even for him, certainly not as many as I wanted to because although Mother did not bake, it annoyed her if I turned out too many things he liked. She said it was bad for him but the truth was she hated to see him delighted. When she saw him happy, especially if the source of it were anything to do with me, she must have felt she was being done out of something that should have been hers.

While the cake was baking (it was a Madeira cake and I used the electric oven to be certain of the temperature; the Aga has its virtues but I wouldn't trust it for a Madeira) I realised that that would be just the start. Because if things went well over tea he would stay, and I would have to give him supper, and I did not think my usual fry-up would quite do. I looked in the freezer and found fillet steaks. There were broad beans and runner beans, packets of smoked salmon, strawberries and raspberries from the garden, and ice cream. My mind filled with possibilities; in fact I think I permitted myself an anticipation close to greed. Of course they didn't have anything like chips or potato croquettes but I had a few potatoes that I thought I could manage to do something with. That was what led me to the recipe books, because I remembered seeing Delia do something once with a few potatoes and cream and garlic. Well, I had to tear myself away in the end, from those books. The pictures! Not to mention the wonderful-sounding recipes, and all the advice and things to learn. I felt so excited at the thought of reading these books properly, and even put
Larousse Gastronomique by my bed. But I had so much to do. There was a string of garlic hanging in the kitchen that I had not touched until that day. I even found one or two usable onions in the pantry, while I was getting olive oil and vinegar and mustard and so on, and outside in the garden there was any amount of thyme, rosemary and sage in the borders, and a bay tree. It amazed me, that in the same way that those cookery books were filled with wonders, all these good things were just here, waiting until I should notice them and have use for them. Such quiet gifts.

———

The woman who opened the door was not his mother. Yet Michael felt, even as he was calculating that she was at least ten years too old, that there was something about her.

‘It's me,' was all he said. Her face crumpled, he opened his arms and folded them round her. He liked her lemony warm scent and the smell of her clean hair, that was like a white wire brush tickling the side of his face. As they drew apart Michael scanned her face again for a similarity with his, and he found it in her long, blue eyes. Outwardly they were quite unlike his own, but he saw in them a shade of supplication. Even while her mouth was smiling and producing ordinary, conventional words in a frenzy of flustered politeness—had he found the house easily, he must come right in, would he like to sit down—her eyes were imploring him to belong to her. They held a dignified plea that he not disappoint her, perhaps also a warning that she would be unable to bear it if he were about to deny that she could mean anything to him. Michael recognised it. He returned her gaze and said nothing. It seemed to him suddenly that neither of them could withstand indefinitely, or even for much longer, the dull ache of not mattering to anyone else, and in their wordless acknowledgement of this they were related, conjoined.

I want to write about my first impressions of him. Since he'll never read this I can, can't I? I was terrified, of course, in case he was going to turn up with all sorts of documents, even photographs perhaps, that would prove I wasn't his mother. And even if he didn't, he would be bound to have bits of information about his natural parents that I might not be able to keep up with. I imagined him saying something like, ‘So, tell me about my father's time in Australia. He did go to Australia, didn't he?' Or even worse,
my time in Australia, I mean suppose his real mother had been brought up there or he knew she'd gone there after having him or something? If the questioning got too dangerous I could always claim a bit of senile memory loss, but only up to a point. All these worries, which I was trying so desperately to hide, almost stopped me from noticing what he looked like when I first opened the door. I was so frightened that he was just going to look at me in disgust, accuse me of fraud or some terrible thing, and leave. But I did notice at once how tall he was. And I could see he was good-looking, although very thin. I realised that when he hugged me. I could almost breathe his hunger, and I immediately felt glad that I had thought so much about food for the visit. It was as if I had instinctively known what he would need, in the way mothers are supposed to. But the most striking thing about Michael was that he looked so tired. Tired in the mind, I mean. His eyes darted round a bit to begin with, taking in me, the house and everything, and then he looked at me and did not move his eyes from mine. There was a mildness in the look he gave me, but also a kind of film over his eyes that made them seem too bright, as if they were concealing, not very successfully, some terrible fatigue. Would it be fanciful to say that I saw straight in to the weariness of his soul? I don't know. The point was that he let me see it, his eyes did not leave mine.

Of course I needn't have worried. He didn't ask anything awkward at all. Over tea he gazed round a bit more and complimented me on the beautiful room and the lovely things I had. Then he asked me, so sweetly and simply, ‘Tell me all about yourself. I've never known anything at all about you. Nobody ever told me anything about you, not even your name.'

So I did. The afternoon passed into evening. And he told me all about his life too, until we had learned not everything, but all we needed to know about each other. I couldn't say exactly when I realised it, or when he did (he told me much later that he had felt it too), but within a short time I began to know that I was quite strangely safe, a feeling I had not experienced ever before but which I trusted. I knew that nothing Michael could say would ever disappoint me, none of his questions would challenge me. And he would accept anything I might say; together he and I would find our way to our story, whatever it was to be; it would be a story mutually discovered, shaped and cherished, and in this way we would keep each other safe. He was pleased, for example, to hear (I had thought all this up in advance, of course) that his father and I had been serious about each other but that he had been forced into an engagement, for business reasons, with the daughter of a powerful associate of his father's. I of course had no money, and I had run away to have my baby. He did not even know that I was pregnant, and would certainly have married me if he had, but I felt I could not stand in his way. When he finally accepted that I had gone, he married his heiress and went to live abroad, and the two family corporations merged and became enormously successful. But he never forgot me, and five years ago I received a lawyer's letter telling me that he had died and left me this house with all its contents.

Good stories unite people. Michael had a good one too, and if he had made his up too, so what? We construct our history in order to understand what we are now, that is all, it's a perfectly legitimate way of explaining things. Historians do it all the time. So by the time I had heard about how Michael broke away from his terrible foster parents and got a job with a small theatre company, then all about his early career on the stage and, tragically, having to give up his first big film part because of his blackouts, we were quite easy with each other.

It was after seven when we got up together, with the sense that these stories had done their work of uniting us and could now be put aside. Now I think of it I don't believe we did refer to them again unless fleetingly, in passing, when it was pleasing now and then to point to, for example, a watercolour of Lake Como and say, oh, your father loved Italy. Or, oh, you hold a potato peeler exactly the same way I do. Silly and fond. But I'm running ahead, all that came later. We went to the kitchen to see about supper, still talking and Michael carrying the tea tray, as if we already had a routine. Without discussing it he started loading the dishwasher while I got things out of the fridge. In all the excitement of preparing for him I had forgotten to think about wine, so I sent him to the cellar to choose some. We had champagne. Lots.

———

They clinked their glasses like children up to something, with smiling and conspiratorial eyes. Michael had opened and poured the wine inexpertly, saying that it was an excellent vintage, but with his first sip his face contorted with the surprising dry fizz that filled his nose and mouth. Jean laughed, relieved to see that his knowledge of wine stopped at the label. He was as unused to drinking champagne as she was, as unfamiliar with this as with other moneyed, sociable pleasures.

‘It's Pol Roger,' he said, trying to reclaim some authority. He swigged again, to drown the pain of being laughed at, not yet able to admit that everything he knew about wine came from a book off the stall called ‘Travels with My Corkscrew' by somebody called Anthony Bouvery Hope, whoever he was. He hadn't been able to shift the book even for ten pence, so he had kept it. ‘Did you know that Pol Roger,' he said, ‘was Winston Churchill's favourite champagne? Do you know, when Churchill died—'

‘Roger! Roger Palmer. How funny! Roger Palmer, he lived in Oakfield Avenue, when Mother and I . . . My mother, you see—' Jean shook her head and sipped from her glass. There was nothing she needed to say on this subject after all. She drank again quickly and said, ‘Years ago, it doesn't matter. Roger was a nice man, he did me a favour once, years ago. But we should have some of that nice Palmer too, with the steak. Château Palmer—it's a make of wine. You go down and get it, while I get on. It's down on the right.'

Michael returned from the cellar with two bottles of Château Palmer. ‘It's too cold to drink now,' he said, a little importantly. ‘It ought to be warmer. You're meant to have red wine at room tempera-ture.'

Jean nodded. It was true. She had noticed that she enjoyed her last glass or two more than the first, after the opened bottle had been sitting for a while on the hearthstone next to the fire.

‘The bottles are too high to go in the microwave,' Michael said, dolefully. ‘What'll we do? Pour it into a jug?'

‘I know,' Jean said with a confidence and efficiency that took her a little by surprise, ‘we'll stand them in hot water.'

Michael got down a wide saucepan from the shelf that Jean could reach only by standing on a chair. He placed the two unopened bottles in it, filled the pan with hot water from the tap and placed it on the edge of the Aga. Then he poured them both more champagne and as Jean moved round the kitchen in her apron, he sat in a high-backed chair next to the Aga to watch her and to keep an eye on the softly clunking bottles in the simmering water. Jean worked with peaceful, unhurried concentration, feeling Michael's eyes upon her like a blessing. She looked up from slicing onions and smiled at him sitting there, watching her and drinking his champagne. She raised her glass, and Michael did too. They said nothing. They had exhausted, for the time being, the possibilities of stories told in words, but they could still toast one another silently across the kitchen, and celebrate the combined and unfamiliar joys of vintage champagne and being together.

 

Steph had made her Bolognese sauce from a recipe on the spaghetti packet. Or sort of; she had had to use vegetable oil instead of olive, had skipped the garlic and herbs and sliced up a bit of leftover, very bouncy frankfurter in place of the mince, but with extra onion and a shake of ketchup in place of tomato puree she thought the result was still pleasing. Unlike Michael, she did not cry easily, and had got through the first hours since his departure feeling his absence but telling herself she was not missing him as such. As she had gone about her routine of cleaning and tidying the flat with a new and unfamiliar energy, even changing Michael's duvet cover, she had wondered at intervals where he would be now and what he would be doing. He had left at two o'clock on a journey that should have taken an hour at most, allowing the extra time in case the van should conk out again, and Steph pictured him in turn desperately poking about under the bonnet, or trying to hitch a lift. Or she would imagine him sitting in the van in a lay-by outside the posh-sounding house, killing time before walking up to the door and seeing his mother for the first time. She imagined his terror. She mouthed the words of reassurance she would give and pictured how she would be keeping him calm with a gesture or a smile, if she were there with him. Then she wished that he had a mobile phone so that he could ring her. She wanted to hear that he had arrived in good time and was quietly waiting for four o'clock, and even more than that, she wanted to hear him say that he just felt like hearing her voice. He would probably find it easier to say something shy and nice like that on the phone, rather than straight to her. He could manage something like that, probably, if he had a phone. And if she had one too, of course, which she did not.