Little Bits of Baby (14 page)

‘Fascinating,' said Candida, with only half her mind because Robin had stood up. ‘Andrea are you sure you've had enough to eat and everything?'

‘Perfectly, thanks. It's all so delicious. And, well, I'm so glad you asked Robin.' She laid a cool hand on the back of Candida's own. ‘You were such friends for so long. It was time to start talking again.'

Candida hugged her briefly because it seemed the easiest thing to do.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Thanks.' She extricated herself, saw the rather pretty young monk, hovering to talk to Andrea. ‘Now,' she said, ‘I must go and be good.' She stood, shaking out her skirt. ‘But do keep in touch, now, won't you?'

‘Of course,' said Andrea and noticed the monk with a tipsily vague smile.

Robin was standing alone because Faber had just left his side to talk to his peculiar daughter. Candida crossed the lawn towards him but was beaten to her goal by Jasper who came charging across from the summer house.

‘It's you again,' he said.

‘Yes,' admitted Jasper, twining short fingers in the hammock strings. ‘So. If we've just been to church and if you're a holy man, why aren't you dressed like the one over there?'

‘If you're a little boy, why aren't you dressed like that one on the climbing-frame?'

‘No,' said Jasper, wriggling. ‘That's not fair. I'm not that little, anyway.'

‘True,' said Robin. ‘You're fairly fat, really.'

‘Mummee!' the child objected, turning to Candida for support.

‘Run along, darling,' she told him.

‘I'm talking to the holy man,' he said. ‘I've nearly finished.'

‘Jasper?' she warned.

‘So, what makes you think I'm a holy man?' Robin asked him.

‘You come from a holy man's island. And Daddy said you were, I think, and Andrea, your mother.'

‘Well, not all holy men look alike.'

‘But. Oh. OK,' Jasper replied, then saw the other little boy move to the swing and sprinted off to defend his property.

Robin turned to Candida.

‘Hello,' he said. ‘Irritating son you've got.'

‘I thought you and Faber Washington would never get out of the hammock. Nobody liked to interrupt you.' She felt herself leer. ‘We were beginning to think it was true love.'

‘Could well be,' he said quietly.

‘Your mum was just telling me about his daughter's gifts,' she told him, ignoring this.

‘Does he have a daughter?'

‘Yes. Adopted. Didn't he tell you?'

‘Funny. No. He didn't. We were talking about gods and baptisms and things. She's a lovely baby,' he added, with a kind smile.

‘No, she's not. She's vile.'

‘Well. She was fairly vile today, and no one's baby looks especially appealing to start with.'

‘Perdita Margaux Browne is hideous,' she heard herself say.

‘Who did think of that absurd name for her?'

‘Joint effort. I'd wanted a Perdita ever since doing Florizel in
A Winter's Tale
in school, and Jake's mother's a Margaux.'

‘Is she, now.' He looked across at the conservatory where Margaux Browne was now spreading herself for a talk with his own mother. ‘Yes. She looks like a Margaux.' He stopped to pick a white rosebud which he tugged through a buttonhole of his black cotton jacket. ‘Candida, could I see that portrait again, the Faber Washington, now that I've met him?'

‘Of course. Come on. Shall I get the man himself to explain it to you?'

‘No,' he said, ‘It doesn't need explaining.' He put an arm around her shoulder. ‘Let's just go. Can we walk round and go in by the front door to miss all the people?'

Still with his arm around her and with her daring to place her own around his waist, they half-circled the house.

‘This feels too good,' she thought. ‘Why am I doing this?'

‘Thank you for coming today, Dob,' she said.

‘Thank you for asking me. But I'm not Dob anymore, you know.'

‘Sorry. Robin, then. Why not Dob? I liked Dob.'

‘Why not Candy?'

‘I've become a media star. I haven't been Candy since I was a researcher on
Coffee Morning
. Samantha calls me Candy, but she's Australian. I call her Sam to get my own back.'

‘Who's Samantha?'

‘The nanny.'

Robin stopped on the landing and turned to her.

‘You have a
nanny?
'

‘And a cleaning lady on weekdays.' She chuckled. ‘Isn't it awful?'

He carried on towards the painting.

‘It's worse,' he muttered. ‘Christ, it's clever!' he added, almost at once.

‘What?' she asked, then saw that he meant the painting and shut up.

It was a clever painting, catching the loving absorption of the scene even while rendering it with a certain coldness. She remembered distinctly the two mornings she had given up for preliminary sketches and photographs. Faber Washington had made housecalls in those days, like a doctor. In those days she had been as close as she ever came to abandoning all attempts at a career in order to sit back, have babies and woo Jake's bosses; she had seemed so bad at work, so good at having babies. The old rocking-chair she sat on to nurse Jasper for the sittings had been disastrously restored last year. She realised too late that its principle charm had lain in the bad repair of its rushwork seat; in replacing this, she had wrecked the chair and remorse had forced her to remove it to the nursery.

‘Of course, it doesn't look much like you,' Robin said.

‘It looked like me then.'

‘Were you really that shape?'

‘I'd just had Jasper.' She came to stand beside him. ‘It's funny, but because I see it every morning and every night, I don't really look at it any more. The only thing that I really notice now is how desperately dated those clumpy yellow sandals look.'

‘I helped you buy those.'

‘That's right,' she laughed. ‘From that hippy couple in the market.'

‘I bought some too, green ones.'

‘They had soles made from old car tyres. So comfortable. I lived in them.'

‘Candy lived in them.'

‘Mmm.' She paused. ‘Dob?'

‘Robin.'

‘Robin?'

‘Yes?'

‘Are you going back to Whelm very soon?'

‘Probably tonight.'

‘Oh. What a shame. I thought that perhaps …'

‘Hell!' He started downstairs at a run. She followed him.

‘What's wrong?' she called. Jake was in the hall, waving some friends of his off; mystery squash partners probably.

‘What's the rush?' he asked Robin, laughing. ‘Have we turned out so very unspiritual?'

‘Have you seen Luke?' Robin asked, not laughing.

‘Who's Luke?' asked Candida, coming down beside them.

‘Dob's friend from Whelm,' Jake told her. ‘We had a good talk. He trained as an engineer before he … And he actually knows Lurking Kimberley – you know, that village where you saw the cottage you wanted to buy?'

‘Is he still here?' Robin almost shouted.

‘We're not to call him Dob anymore,' said Candida in an undertone. People were coming in to find discarded jackets and bags.

‘No, he isn't,' Jake went on. ‘He went about ten minutes ago, said he had a train to catch, but he left a note for you on the table there.'

‘Where?'

‘Over there,' Jake pointed.

Robin raced to the table, snatched up the note, swore and ran out of the open front door.

‘Something up?' asked Candida's father, drifting out of the sunshine by the same route.

‘Nothing at all, Julian,' Jake told him. ‘One for the road?'

Candida walked out onto the porch and watched Robin run halfway round the square then give up and walk back, red and panting, into the garden. Faber Washington was standing just inside the side gate and they fell into another conversation and drifted out of sight. She picked up the note he had dropped in his hurry.

‘You'll cope, Robin,' it said, then ‘Talk to Iras Washington sometime. Blessings. Luke.'

She folded it several times, neatly, but on her way round the side of the house let it fall.

Sixteen

On one, sometimes two nights of the week, Andrea made her way from Clapham to a public hall in the City for choir practice. Since the traffic was always slow at that time, she would take the bus there rather than the dormobile. She enjoyed the opportunity this gave her to do nothing more strenuous than stare out of the window or read without shame one of the horror or crime paperbacks she bought for the purpose; something with a suggestion of violence on the cover.

For all its bluff, amateur atmosphere, the choir was a much-praised and busy one. Attached to a major orchestra, it made something in the region of three records, two short tours and ten London appearances each year. The choir master was a professional, employed by the orchestra, but the singers were representatives of every world save the musical one. There was a high-court judge among the basses, a star of the tenor ranks was an Irish plasterer and one of the sopranos was a kind of orderly in the London Zoo monkey house. The group's heterogeneity meant that it functioned like a masonic lodge; all manner of useful contacts could be made through friendly introductions, then cherished over the mid-rehearsal visit to the pub. When Peter was still a broker with Warburg and Orff, Andrea had often gleaned him helpful snatches of office gossip from judicious barside eavesdropping on two colleagues of his, a
basso profundo
director and a grim, comparatively young soprano called Melissa Something-Andrews who wore a grey velvet hairband and was one of the firm's legal advisors. Elsewhere in the choir there were lawyers to consult, town planners, dentists, typists, architects, linguists, a women-only plumber, a mechanic who spoke fluent Dutch, three estate agents and a second-hand car dealer. A travel agent contralto regularly fixed members up with cut-price flights and an extremely pretty manicurist, who always kept a seat for her, seemed to have taken up singing simply for the thriving trade she ran in the half-hour before each rehearsal. There was even a priest among the baritones, said to be available for exorcisms and informal confessions.

Andrea had joined as the last of her thirties were vanishing. Robin was a fairly grown-up teenager then, spending hours up in his room, working or deep in discussion with Candida. It was a time when many of Andrea's contemporaries and their husbands were going through the same awkward patch – unneeded by children, frightened of admitting that either might be slightly bored with the other and anxious not to submit an ageing relationship too soon to the test of a return to life
à deux
. Apart from the obvious, and far from certain solution of taking in lodgers, one or the other's widowed mother or a large, demanding pet, the awkwardness seemed most frequently neutralised by the adoption of time-honoured pastimes. With their back-to-school associations, hobbies (from embroidery to building matchstick cathedrals) and evening classes (in anything but Psychology for Beginners) laid the perfect foundation for the mock-virginity of late middle-age. The Maitland family's garden had never been more than a long lawn with contented weeds and a few bushy roses around the edges so Andrea coaxed herself into taking up a trowel and for a while had tried to interest herself in bringing it up to neighbourhood scratch. Gardening only took over precious, inoffensive weekends, however, leaving bare the awful stretch of weekday evenings: frantically conversational suppers, from which Robin escaped as soon as possible, followed by four long hours of television, reading, or – most dreaded of prospects, – each other.

It wasn't that she was ever bored with Peter, not really, but as they were left increasingly alone together, she had sensed him growing bored with her. The gradual erosion of her few slender mysteries had been worrying enough during courtship – letting him discover what, if anything, she did with her spare time, what she ate, how often she washed her hair – but the destruction after marriage of almost all barriers save, in her case, the bathroom door, had been cause for major alarm. The idea of a weekly musical vacation from each other came to her from a bad historical novel she had borrowed from the library, just for a change, in which a young wife in Edwardian Middlesborough joined a madrigal society. The wife hoped that by gently arousing her husband's jealous curiosity then restoring him her company after two hours' deprivation, she could refresh her charms. Andrea's charms for Peter lay as much, she was sure, in such perilously temporal areas as her bosom as in the quality of her mind. Determined not to spread herself too thin, she auditioned for the choir and was accepted.

She finished the Middlesborough saga some weeks later, alarmed to find, too late, that the woman's husband used her choral absences for hot dalliance with his step-sister and that she found true love and a second marriage with a dashing organist from Gwent.

For some time Peter had been toying with the idea of reviving his clarinet-playing. When he announced that he, too, had been for an audition and would be playing with an amateur orchestra one night a week, she was mildly upset. Not only did his rehearsals happen on a night when she would be free, thus confirming her fears about his boredom, but it emerged that his percussion-playing secretary had suggested the audition, a complicity that smacked too much of Middlesborough. She could express nothing but delight, of course. It was only fair.

On her night out (or nights out when the season was a demanding one), she took care to leave him her love in the shape of a meal complete with full serving instructions. She was ashamed to admit that, percussive secretary notwithstanding, she soon came to enjoy the nights when he was with the orchestra and it was her turn to be on her own. Robin would be there for supper (briefly as ever, but it gave them a chance to talk in a way that they never could in Peter's presence) then she would lie on the sofa and make long phone calls around the family or watch a film or go to bed early and write letters there. Peter had expressed disappointment at being deprived of her company two evenings a week, but she suspected that this was no more than a handsome gesture and that he had as good a time on his own as she did – perhaps some whisky (this was before he gave up) and a radio play. He maintained that radio plays were far superior to anything television could offer, but could never listen to them with her around because she couldn't focus her attention properly and would interrupt them with idle chat and amusing things she had forgotten to tell him over supper.