Little Bits of Baby (10 page)

‘Oh. That's nice. Do you really want that Chianti light in here?'

‘Yes.'

‘It's ghastly.'

‘I like it. Oh. And I forgot.'

‘What?'

‘This is for you.' He dug in his bag and pulled out a piece of beeswax, still indented with tiny hexagons, wrapped around a wick to form a simple candle. It smelt delicious.

‘Lovely,' she said. ‘Thank you, darling.'

‘It's from your friend Jonathan.'

She started to pull at the clarinet in an attempt to take it apart.

‘I'd better put this away before someone sits on it,' she said and heard herself sigh.

‘No. Let me.' He half ran across the room and crouched at her feet. She sat while he used her lap as a table on which to dismantle the thing and put it away. She had a sharp burst of memory.

He was eleven. He had almost finished building an intricate plastic model of a human skeleton, bought with a postal order sent for his birthday by some harassed godparent. She had been sitting at the kitchen table flicking through a magazine. She could even see its colours again: bright yellows, electric plastic blues. A copy of
Honey
or, given his age, probably
Good Housekeeping
. He walked solemnly in, wearing shorts held up with a snake-belt, and handed her the sinister ‘educational' model.

‘Hold it steady,' he commanded her. ‘I've left the cranium till last.
You
can put that on. It's not like a real cranium, of course, because real craniums don't have a hook in them for hanging us up by. Now. Hold the rest of it. No. Like that.' She held the skeleton gently around its slithery ribs. He dug in his pocket for the tube of glue and smeared some around the open bowl of the skull then passed her the cranium. ‘Go on,' he said. ‘Put it on. No, silly. That way.' She held the cranium in place. ‘That's it. Now. You've got to hold it for at least forty seconds.' Then they had exchanged broad smiles and he had wandered out into the garden leaving her with a headful of glue fumes and a handful of mortality.

When he had finished putting away the clarinet her lap was grey with dust. He tried to brush it off but, flustered, she pushed his hand away and stood. She became aware of a strong smell of burnt lentils and felt her hunger revive.

‘Come on,' she said and they left his room to air. Down below Peter called out,

‘Lunch, you two!' then coughed, embarrassed at the unfamiliarity of shouting.

Eleven

On her way home from work, Candida asked the studio car to stop off at a florist's before they crossed the river. There were people coming to dinner and there was nothing in the garden but lavender, maggoty apples and a lot of tired foliage. She heaped the counter with lilies, birds of paradise and some elegant, sword-shaped leaves from a South American country where they executed children for sedition. On television this morning she had looked chic but humane while a revolutionary Catholic priest and his interpreter told her about this country's latest outrage, which was why the name on the box caught her eye as a florist filled a bucket with them. She also picked out an unusual large blue cactus and asked for it to be delivered to her secretary, Jason, who was turning thirty-two tomorrow. Then she paid with plastic, gave out a couple of autographs and sank with her dripping parcel into the back of the car.

Quite apart from the spectacular money (which, frankly, left her cold), the only compensations for starting her particular work at dawn were riding to and fro from her job in a studio car and being able to do so before the morning and evening rush hours. Even had her celebrity not proved a problem with the other parents, she preferred to keep meetings with Andrea and Peter Maitland to a minimum. While she was often far too tired to do much more than kiss Jasper and admire the latest
soi-disant
painting, she made a point of at least being in the house when his nanny brought him home. Candida found her nannies through Lady Canberra's, an agency that specialised in tireless, healthy Australian girls who replaced each other each year and so had no time to grow overly fond of child, husband or house. Her nannies never drove Candida's car, although it went unused during the day. Instead, she had bought them a customised jeep, safe for driving Jasper to kindergarten and parties, practical for carrying out the heavy shopping duties that fell to them in his absence. The agency insisted on a weekday off for its girls so, once a week, Jake would drop Jasper off and Candida would pick him up. At least, she would park her car across the road and he, well trained, would slip away discreetly and get in.

Samantha, Lady Canberra's latest, was peeling potatoes when Candida let herself in. She would soon have to be replaced; Jasper had twice unthinkingly referred to her as Mummy. Her straw-blonde hair was tied back in a pony-tail and she had on one of her unwise, short skirts. Seeing her mistress, she flushed pink behind her unkind freckles.

‘Boy, am I glad to see you, Candy!' she exclaimed.

‘And why's that, Sam?' Candida undid a button on her blouse and washed her hands at the sink.

‘You're back just in time. Perdita's been guzzling all day and the last of your milk ran out an hour ago. Christ! Amazing flowers! Where'd you get them?'

‘Is she awake now?'

‘She's hollered herself to sleep but Jasper'll wake her in a sec with all his thumping.'

Jasper could indeed be heard crashing his pedal car around the playroom overhead.

‘How was she with the bottle?'

‘Hated it at first, but I did as the book suggested and squeezed a drop or two onto her tongue. Once she realised it was still your stuff and not something out of a can, there was no holding her. A couple of days and we can put her on to formula.'

‘Goodee,' sighed Candida and went to inspect her mail. The envelopes were on the table beside the salmon, which Maison Rostand had dropped off as ordered. The fish lay under clingfilm on its returnable plate, poached, boned and with its skin replaced with alternating ‘scales' of blanched arugula and radicchio. If Madame Rostand's promises had been fulfilled to the letter, its intestinal cavity was stuffed with a fluffy mousse of haddock and ricotta, coloured with flecks of tarragon and lemon zest. Maison Rostand was confidential to the point of invisibility. Each dish delivered to a household for the first time was accompanied by its easily memorised recipe, all ready for passing on to an enquiring guest. Candida paid the company a small retainer to keep her recipes unique and to buy the right to pass them off as her own in magazine articles. ‘The hollandaise,' she murmured. ‘They've forgotten the hollandaise.'

‘It's in the fridge,' said Samantha. ‘I'll slip it into the bain-marie before I put Jasper to bed.'

‘Fabulous. What have you made us for pudding?'

‘Two chocolate terrine. That's in the fridge too.'

‘Good girl. You have been busy.'

The letters were more than Candida could face. She glanced at a couple of facetious postcards from abroad, peered inside a bank statement then, casting the rest aside, walked upstairs. She took off her shoes to free her hot, cramped toes, and tiptoed into Perdita's bedroom. Her baby was fast asleep, breathing heavily. Candida had spent the weekend trying to acclimatise herself to the indignity of a human milking-device and Perdita to the less-than-luxury of a rubber teat. The news that she had accepted the replacement so fast had come as a relief; Candida was a valuable commodity but the studio would not take kindly to a backstage nurse, not now that the baby had already been introduced to the nation and become stale news. As it was, she was having to hire a babysitter from Lady Canberra's to cover feeding times on Samantha's day off. She was tiptoeing out again when the playroom door was grappled open with a grunt and Jasper came pedalling to greet her.

‘Mummee!' he shouted.

‘Quiet,' said Candida, and gestured to the doorway behind her. ‘She's asleep and Mummy's tired.'

‘I'm tired too.'

‘Are you, poppet?'

‘Very. But Peter showed us how to make pasta pictures. Do you want to see?'

‘Yes, please.'

‘Oh. Well, I gave it to Rachel Highsmith because hers wasn't very good and she's always giving me kisses and things in the shrubbery …'

‘Is she, by Jove?'

‘Yes, so you can't see it but it was very good. At least, Rachel said so.'

‘Do you want a kiss from me?'

‘Yes.'

‘Where?'

‘Here.' He pointed to his cheek, turning his head to one side. ‘And make sure you leave a red kissy-mark. Rachel can't do those.'

‘All right.' She knelt on the carpet before him and planted a thick kiss where indicated. Still in the car, he trundled over to a full length mirror to inspect himself.

‘Brilliant,' he said. Although the kiss mark was less red than
nymphe bronzée
, and he would have preferred one to match his car, he knew from a severe dressing-down she once gave him, that Mummy's lipsticks were fabulously superior to the redder ones Samantha let him play with.

‘We've got people coming to dinner tonight, poppet, so you will be good about going to bed on time, won't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Good boy.' Candida rose, stroked his hair and started towards her bedroom to choose what to wear.

‘Mummy?'

‘Yes?'

‘There's a man peering up at the house from the playground.'

‘Is there?'

‘Yes. He was there when you came home, only you didn't see him. I did though, because I was watching, and he's been there for ages.'

‘Never mind. I expect he's just another funny-man.'

‘Like the one outside the station with all the plastic bags?'

‘Yes. Now go and see if Samantha needs help in the kitchen, there's a good boy.'

Jasper abandoned his car and ran downstairs to his nanny while Candida carried on to her room.

The house was one of sixteen in an early Victorian square in Stockwell. The square was making up for its maiming at the hands of wartime bombs with an ostentatious flurry of self-improvement. A firm of builders and a pet decorator were forever being passed from recommending hand to hand within the residents' association. The Browne's house was Jake's, bought when Candida was a rising researcher and he won the bulk of their daily bread. Stockwell would not have been Candida's first choice, or even her third, but she had come to appreciate its charms and had recently consoled herself by purchasing the bomb-site adjoining Jake's property. The square was too close to the council tower blocks for the playground in its centre to be a suitable haunt for Jasper and his friends; Candida proposed to extend her garden over the land she had bought to give them more room for a climbing-frame, a swing and, just possibly, a very basic swimming-pool. She had also applied for and won planning permission to build a garage with a staff flat on top. When the children were too old for nannies, she would redecorate the flat and bring her mother to live there as a babysitter. Or Jake's mother; whichever won the race for widowhood.

She shut herself in, rapidly stripped, draped her dress into the pile for Samantha to take to the dry cleaners, then walked in her knickers to the bathroom. She washed off all her make-up, cooling her face and arms with a cold flannel and dabs of scent, then pulled out the sort of clothes she would never parade for Candida-Thackeray-relaxes-at-home photographs. She tied her hair away from her face with a piece of rather stained white silk and slipped into an incredibly cheap but flattering tube of creamy cotton she had bought while shopping in dark glasses for Samantha's birthday. Then she remembered to peer out of the window to look for Jasper's ‘funny-man'. Her first reaction was an involuntary, out-loud, ‘Oh no!' her second was to dart behind the curtains where she could peer unspotted, her third was to replace half of the make-up she had just washed off.

There was no mistaking him, even with his beard and longer hair. She had not expected him to look so normal. She had not expected him so soon or so unannounced. Then she reflected that this was no longer the Middle Ages and monks would not be expected to swelter through hot weather in thick woollen habits. She also decided to be touched at her childhood friend's naive assumption that she could be paid impromptu visits in mid-week and found in.

Why didn't he come and ring the doorbell? Perhaps he had missed her return home. (Impossible.) Perhaps he had merely come to spy out the lie of the Land of Marital Bliss; see where she and Jake had ended up. (An idyllic afternoon had been spent with him when they were thirteen, trailing their biology teacher for hours to see what precisely she did on her weekends.) She ought to ignore him. She ought to draw the curtains and take a couple of hours' rejuvenating sleep before changing for dinner. She flung the window up so hard the sash weights clunked in their shafts.

‘I don't believe it!' she shouted. ‘It is you, isn't it?' He just smiled up and wayed. It was him. He never shouted in public places. For once the playground was deserted. He was sitting on a swing, long legs stretched out before him. He had lost weight; it suited him. ‘Will you come in or shall I come out?' He stood, still smiling through his beard, which also suited him, short and Jacobean-looking. She assumed he was coming in. ‘Be right down,' she called and pulled the window shut again. She stopped in the bedroom doorway, hurried back to dig in the back of her dressing-table drawer, and pulled out a thin silver crucifix on a hair-fine chain. She kissed it, thoughtlessly, and tied it round her neck, leaving it to dangle outside her dress. The bell rang. She heard Samantha shifting in the kitchen.

‘I'll get it,' she shouted and ran downstairs.

She unlocked the front door with the unfamiliar sensation of a broad smile tugging her cheeks into craziness. He was taller than Jake. She had forgotten that. Eight years.