Half Broken Things (28 page)

‘You sound well at home,' Shelley said, flatly. ‘I'll say that.'

‘Oh, no, you just notice things after a while,' Jean said, backtracking. She felt like screaming at the woman. ‘I just mean, the flowers. That's honeysuckle growing through that tree, for instance.'

Shelley did not reply. Just then Michael reappeared, followed by a shyly smiling Steph, dressed from top to toe in white. Her hair hung like long, gleaming cornstalks and Charlie's fingers turned and twisted in its thickness as he stared round. His skin was the same colour as Steph's, a mixture of gold and milk, and their faces wore the same sleep-soothed shine. Jean, for a moment until she remembered herself, looked at them with unguarded adoration.

‘Hello! Charlie's come to say
hello
!' Steph trilled. She stepped forward and shook Charlie's forearm in the air. ‘Charlie says hello!'

Shelley had no option but to lift her hand and give a tinkling wave back, with a sort of
Watch with Mother
smile. ‘Hello, Charlie!' she said. Jean did the same.

‘No sign, I'm afraid,' Michael was saying, scratching the back of his head. ‘Bloody paperwork, never where you think it is. Know it's there somewhere, but need to have a bloody good look. Sorry!'

But Shelley was not listening. Steph had advanced towards her with Charlie, who had given a sudden beam and stretched his arms out towards her. He was now being settled in Shelley's lap and Shelley was taking off in an unselfconscious flight of rapture. It was not clear to whom she was speaking, Charlie, his parents, or herself, but she was making kissing faces and letting loose with a burble of words and noises of admiration. Charlie gazed up at her, impassive and open-mouthed. A bead of saliva that had been gathering on his bottom lip fell onto the back of her hand. She did not even notice.

It was Charlie who saved us. I never would have taken Shelley for the type to go helpless over babies, but once she'd got Charlie on her lap I knew we would be all right. I apologised nicely about the inventory again and Michael kept butting in saying the fault was his; between us we bored Shelley into the ground over the inventory until she said it wouldn't matter. She was hardly listening. By then Charlie was smiling and laughing up at her and she was completely taken up with talking to him and shaking his bunny rabbit at him. We just bombarded her—Charlie with his giggles, I with cup after cup of tea, Michael with all sorts of banter to show what a scatty but charming sort he was. Steph just sat nearby looking luminous and drinking up the compliments about Charlie. Michael offered to check over the house himself with the inventory, when he found it, and report anything amiss direct to her in Stockport. Shelley said that would be fine.

I suppose Michael simply wore her out with protestations about what a good job I was doing and how he had said so to Oliver on the telephone. Now that was an awkward moment, because Shelley was a bit surprised at that. For a minute I thought we'd gone too far. But it was just that the agency had been instructed not to contact ‘Oliver' (as Shelley was now calling him, even though she had never met him) unless there was some dire emergency. He did not wish to be disturbed, apparently. Oh, but of course the family keeps in touch, Michael said, so barefaced I could have blushed for him. So when he finally pulled her off to see the swimming pool nobody even remembered she was supposed to be here on this stupid ‘Management Visit' and she'd long since lost any hope of seeing over the house. But by then she didn't really care. After all, she had satisfied herself that the place was still standing.

I point this out because even though I've never been a fan of Shelley's I don't think the agency can be blamed for anything, except for trying to get rid of me before I was ready.

———

Charlie grew fractious just in time. First he got a little cranky, and then he twisted in Shelley's arms until Steph took him firmly, settled herself back in her chair and flipped out one enormous blue-veined breast. Shelley at once turned her startled eyes away, embarrassed at being embarrassed. Nobody else was.

‘More tea?' Jean asked, cupping her hand round the pot and frowning. She glanced at the clock. ‘You've got a bit of a journey, haven't you?' she said pleasantly.

‘Yes, poor you,' Steph murmured, smiling down at Charlie, who was slapping and guzzling happily.

‘I usually go round and close the windows about now,' Jean went on. ‘So if you'll excuse me—'

Shelley said quickly, ‘Oh, perhaps I ought to come with you, normally I would, you see, on a normal Management Visit, if there was just the house sitter in residence. If you don't mind, I could just go round—'

‘Oh,
don't
! We'd die of embarrassment, wouldn't we?' Michael almost shouted. ‘If we'd known you were coming, of course it would be different. We wouldn't have dreamt of letting you see what utter piggies we are, we'd have had a proper tidy round. I'm sure you understand. But with babies, well, they do rather take over, it's a bit messy. But I'd
hate
you to see.'

‘Oh, well, of course I wouldn't like to intrude, but—'

‘And anyway you
know
Jean's marvellous, don't you. She keeps us in order, doesn't let us get away with too much. Eh, Jean?' He almost leered at her before turning back to Shelley. ‘Come with me and see the pool,' he commanded, in a new onslaught of friendliness. ‘For a bit of fresh air, before you're all cooped up in the car. Haven't got a cozzie with you by any chance—no, too bad! Still, you could always have a paddle!'

Shelley was torn; reluctant to follow the striding Michael outside and God knew where, in the wrong shoes, but pleased to have a reason to get away from the spectacle of Charlie feeding. ‘Oh, well, I suppose. Just for a minute, then,' she said, with a careful smile. Michael was already at the door.

Fifteen minutes later they all trooped out to see her off, Charlie now latched to Steph's other breast, Michael once again wearing his straw hat at a silly angle. Jean was careful to stand a way off from them, and lifted a hand once at the departing car with a courteous but disinterested wave. They watched until after the car had gone from sight, and stayed listening until long after the noise of the engine had died in the evening air. The returning silence seemed newly their own after Shelley's cooing baby voices, her noisy breathing and her
Yankee Doodle Dandy
telephone.

‘Party time,' Michael said, under his breath.

Well, we did go a bit daft after that, I will admit. It was late for Steph to be taking Charlie home, so Michael drove them down to the edge of the village and Steph walked him in the pushchair from there. She wanted to arrive on foot, thinking that Sally might already be home (she wasn't). She knew she would go berserk if she saw them and found out that Charlie had been travelling in her arms in the front of the van, not in a proper car seat, and of course on top of that Sally knew nothing of Michael's existence. Do you begin to see the trouble we took to keep everybody happy?

It happened to be Steph's payday, and when she met up with Michael again they went off to Corsham and bought a Chinese takeaway. They had decided between them, the sweethearts, that I had had too demanding a day to cook that night! In fact they bought so much food that the man taking the order threw in free Cokes and prawn crackers, a calendar and a bottle of soy sauce. It felt like a sort of approval. They came back giggling. Then Michael said the occasion called for something special and got four bottles of champagne up from the cellar. I don't have a good memory for the names of wines, because we tried so many. But Steph stuck a candle in one of the empties from that night and it's been on the table ever since, so I know that it was a 1988 Krug, which Michael would insist is marvellous. It wasn't the ideal thing with sweet and sour though, and I think it was the combination of the two, plus the release of all the tension, that caused me to be ill so suddenly that evening. I would like it to be understood that afterwards I made every effort with the carpet. By the way, the rings on the dining table date from that evening too. There was such an air of celebration we didn't even notice how much soy sauce was escaping down the side of the bottle. Actually, when we did, it didn't seem to matter. After all, it's only a table, Michael said, and I recall that that led on to us talking about possessions in general, and how it is that the objects that bear the marks of events in our lives are always the ones most precious to us. There was general agreement on this point.

June

Oh, it was like a life from the pages of a magazine for a while. There was the weather. I don't believe I have ever noticed the weather so much before. Here, the seasons get themselves noticed in a way that does not happen in towns, and by the time the summer really arrived I had developed something of a countrywoman's eye for it. The garden burst into bloom, of course, a thing that I would have observed without much interest before I became the kind of person who would stick her nose into flowers and bring masses of them into the house. My choice of reading expanded out from the cookery books. In the library there were dozens of books on gardening. There was one in particular that had pictures and descriptions of just about every flower that grows in England, and I took it into the garden with me and learned the names of all the ones we had. I found that the Latin names went into my head and straight back out again, but even now in August I can still recite the common names of the flowers that came up in the garden in June. There were some I already knew, of course: fat daisies that were almost spherical like pom-poms, candytuft, forget-me-nots and wallflowers, catmint, and the peonies: both white and red ones, so many! I watched the peony buds swell like wet green fists in the rain and when they split open and the flowers came I could hardly get over them, they lolled on their stems like upended tutus, all those petals with their edges ripped into tiny points. And the colour! I wondered how that shade of crimson could be brought into existence without some juice deep underground in the root being crushed and distilled and sucked up to the very tips of the flowers. There were also Canterbury bells, columbines, leopard's bane, bishop's hat, foxtail lilies, Chinese trumpet flowers—every one a delight to me.

On and on it went. Birdsong woke me at five, and I wore the same three or four dresses over and over until they grew soft and familiar. I could feel something dancing inside me, all day long. It was my first barelegged summer since I was a girl, and I almost gave up on shoes. Mine had never fitted me, quite. Then Michael brought back for me and for Steph some espadrilles that he had seen on sale at the supermarket, which turned out to be just the thing. They were such a success he bought us several more pairs, all in different colours. Our feet were as happy as the rest of us.

———

One day when they were finishing breakfast Michael said, ‘Am I the only one who's noticed? We're all bigger.'

He looked round the table. ‘Haven't you noticed it? We're
bigger
.'

They always had breakfast late. They preferred to wait until Steph had been to Sally's and returned with Charlie, by which time they were all hungry. Jean's breakfasts had resumed their original lavishness. It did not matter that they seldom got round to doing anything else before about half past eleven; the days were theirs to spend as they chose. Steph smiled her sleepy smile, and nodded without speaking. She was sitting with Charlie, who had fallen asleep with his mouth open against her skin.

‘Speak for yourself,' Jean said. ‘I may have filled out, a
little
. Cheek.'

‘No, I mean bigger. Not fatter, just bigger. In every way. As people.'

Steph sighed, shifted Charlie and buttoned herself back into her clothes. She didn't really understand or care. She had some news for them, but she was enjoying, for the moment, having it all to herself. The pleasure of giving it could wait a little while, and anyway, she liked listening to them talk. They were always talking, these days. They just were words people, Jean and Michael, and really, she was not, never had been. What was different was that she no longer felt inadequate about it.

‘All right, I have put on a little weight,' Jean said, complacently, ‘I suppose.' She fitted well inside her clothes, now. ‘Is that what you mean? Isn't that all it is?'

‘No, we're bigger in every way.'

‘Not
taller
.' That was impossible. Yet Jean began to wonder if he could be right. She liked the earnestness with which Michael would explain new things to her. She did not always succeed in seeing things differently, but she made a point of being receptive to all his ideas.

‘I mean,' Michael said, ‘we take up the space more. Not that we take up
more space
.' Jean and Steph raised their eyebrows at each other. ‘Don't you see? We displace the space more, we breathe more air, we take more of everything, we're more solid, we're as solid . . . as,' he waved one hand around vaguely, ‘as everything else here.'

Steph laughed. She laughed a lot, now. Charlie stirred and groaned, decided that the noise was familiar, and settled.

Michael looked at her. ‘See? That's part of it. All that sound you make. It's because we're not just
here,
it's because we're
in
it.' He gestured round the kitchen with both arms. ‘It's like we've entered the walls. We're so big we're in the walls. Don't you know what I mean?'

He hardly did himself, and perhaps it was asking too much for them to grasp it. Perhaps, he thought, it was impossible to understand unless you had first of all lived in Beth's house in Swindon. Not that there had been anything wrong with it, certainly nothing that Michael had been able to explain at the time, and barely could now. Beth and Barry were proud of it; they had bought the house brand new, they told him, on the drive there from the children's hospital. Michael had sat in the back of the car not really paying attention, because he was busy trying to get used to Beth in ordinary clothes. He had only ever seen her in her uniform and had somehow imagined that was the only thing she wore. In the slacks and jumper she had on now she did not seem quite the same person, although she chatted as before; even her hair did not seem properly her own. Michael sat watching the back of her capless head, feeling jaded and dismayed. Their house, they said, was on such a friendly estate. People's doors were always open. You could see green fields from it, in fact the estate itself was built on a hillside, and you could even see it from the motorway. When Barry pointed it out ('See up there? That's home from now on, son,' he had said, and Beth turned in her seat with brimming eyes and squeezed Michael's knee) Michael looked and saw half a dozen broken rows of semi-detached houses stretching horizontally across the landscape. In the distance they looked tiny, like dislocated, uncoupled container wagons from a derailed train, just like the toy ones from the fancy set that the boy in hospital had been given by his parents.

After that Michael had never quite rid himself of the feeling that he lived in a form of transport, only temporarily halted, or in a container, just a square vessel with thin walls and different compartments for putting things in. It turned out to be true that everyone's doors were open. Beth's were, usually the front and the back. She might be in the back garden hanging out washing or something, and some neighbour would arrive at the front, walk in and call out for her, and stride straight through and out the other side of the house as if the hallway were just a continuation of the pavement and the front path. Or Beth, looking from the sitting room window, would catch sight of somebody walking along and wave and yell, and rush to the door to tell them to come on in for a minute. Even the neighbourhood dogs ran in and out; one Saturday afternoon Michael, sprawled on the carpet watching football on television, suddenly heard behind him a noise like something frying in a very hot pan. He turned round to see a brown dog with an enthusiastic face peeing up against the doorframe, rattling the woodwork and carpet with yellow urine as if the sitting room were just a bus shelter or something. Michael had burst into tears. That particular incident seemed to generate even more droppings-in, callings-out and visits, full of explanations, apologies and finally gales of adult laughter. Never let it be said that Beth and Barry were the kind of people who couldn't see the funny side.

Barry drove a long distance lorry, and he worked a shift pattern that Michael never got the hang of and that added to his sense of transit. Just when he felt sure that Barry was off working for four days he would walk in, or when Michael expected to find him at home, he would have vanished. Beth would try to explain, using words like
earlies
,
split
and
doubles
, until Michael stopped asking. Beth's hours were easier to understand, but all day long at school on the days when she was at work Michael would feel wistful and anxious, picturing her in her uniform on the children's ward. He could see all too clearly a boy just like him but
not
him, lying motionless on her lap with his head against her body, and it gave him a pain in his chest. He told the teacher about the pain and Beth was summoned to take him home, but after the third or fourth time and a visit to the doctor, Beth said, kindly as always, that it was not to happen again. He was getting to be a big boy, she told him, too big to be jealous. So Michael tried to shrink the feeling in his chest by shrinking into the house-container that he thought of as merely parked on the friendly estate where people's doors were, alarmingly, always open. From the sitting room, whose huge flat window reached almost to floor level, he watched the traffic of neighbours, children and dogs, and looked out for Beth coming home. He still felt conspicuous, even though he had shrunk himself so much by now that he was almost managing to live in his allocated space without touching the sides.

‘The thing is,' he said now, ‘we've expanded to fit our space. Even our voices are louder. Don't you know what I mean?'

Jean thought about it. She knew the sounds of the house now. There was the faint rush of water as the washing machine filled or emptied that she could hear upstairs in the nursery, directly above the laundry room. There was the faint gurgle of the water softener, the creak of espadrille soles on the waxed upper floors, the friendly burble of music when someone, usually Steph, left the radio on in the kitchen. (She said that music helped her milk flow, it was well known, the same thing happened to cows.) Also, these days, Jean could spend hours in the house going about her tasks, and though alone, hardly for a moment would she be in any doubt about where the others were or what they were doing. She might hear a distant, mechanical cough and then the whine of the saw, and she would know that Michael was cutting logs at the woodpile behind the far wall of the vegetable garden. She would know that he was breathing in the smell of resin and the faint warm stew of the compost heap a few yards away. Sawdust would be flying in the air around him, and he would look up from time to time and see the world streaked and skewed by the plastic safety goggles, which would be making his face sweat. She might hear the chug of the mower, or the clack of the ladders against a wall and the rustle and snap as he pruned the climbers. From the other side of the house she might hear Steph at the pool chanting a counting game with Charlie, dunking and lifting him in and out of the water, or pulling him about with a lulling sing-song, as he perched, with her hands supporting him, on a massive, duck-shaped float.

Or there might be a very particular silence from the white plastic loungers (another purchase from the garden centre) on the grass in front of the kitchen windows. At such times Steph might be drawing something. She would only draw things she could see, a detail of the roof, a lavender bush, sometimes even an impromptu still life of whatever was to hand: an apple core, sun cream tube, sandal, or empty glass. But most often, she would draw Charlie. She filled page after page with silvery pencilled lines out of which emerged his little buds of toes, the coiled ends of hair slipping behind one ear, his closed eyes, the warm cheeks bulged in sleep, the fanning fingers and pink scoops of fingernails. Sometimes Jean would peep out of the window and see that Steph was dozing along with him, her drawing pad collapsed and pressed against her chest. Then, not wanting to disturb them, Jean would think to herself that it would make no difference if she vacuumed the kitchen tomorrow instead of this minute, or if she blended the herbs and nuts for pesto later on (she had gone from Larousse to the River Café by this time).

Sometimes she would hear Michael and Steph going about something together, talking in a continual, contented banter about the score of a croquet game, the amount of fruit to be picked, how slowly Steph read, how fast Michael did. Even, once, she heard them arguing gently about which one of them Charlie resembled more, stopping just short of actually using the words
takes after
. And then there were the shrieks, the calling out, the yelling from one end of the place to the other when one of them wanted the others for something, doors opening and closing, footsteps.

‘We make more noise,' she said, ‘if that's what you mean. Because we go about things just as we like. As if nobody is ever going to mind,' she said, smiling at Charlie.

‘And nobody is,' Michael said, as if his point had been proved.

‘Oh, by the way,' Steph said, ‘Charlie's staying the night.'

She had been waiting to tell them this, and now looked round with shining eyes. It was great fun, being able to tell people something that was going to make them pleased with her. She had never realised. ‘Aren't you, little Charlie-arlie, little Charlie's going to sleepy-byes in his cot, going to stay all night and be a good baby, aren't you, Charlie?' she crooned at him, drawing out both her pleasure and their surprise. ‘Sally's got a boyfriend,' she said. ‘She met him at work, he's a lawyer as well, in her firm, he joined when she was on maternity leave. She goes on about it all the time. Philip. He's younger than her. And she doesn't know if she should tell her husband about him or not, she sort of wants to.
I
said she should wait a bit.'

She looked up at them importantly. ‘Anyway, the thing is she asked me to baby-sit. Ages ago. She's asked me loads of times and I kept saying I couldn't, so she got somebody else from the village, only tonight they've cancelled. So this morning she's all desperate and I said I'd do it but it'd be better if we just kept him here instead of me taking him back for six o'clock and baby-sitting him there, better for her so she's got lots of time to get ready, and he can sleep over here so she won't have to worry about getting back afterwards or anything. ‘And,' she smiled again, 'cause it's a Friday, I said we might as well have him tomorrow so she can have a Saturday to herself for a change, we'll keep him till six. So we've got him nearly a whole weekend.'