Little Bits of Baby (6 page)

‘Right.' Peter paused then pulled a mock-innocent face. ‘Are we invited?'

‘Don't be silly,' Jake clapped him softly on the shoulder, ‘Of course you are.' He chuckled.

‘What's funny?'

‘I was just thinking. We'll both have to be awfully careful to act as though we haven't met up in years.'

‘It might take the girls in but Robin takes a lot of fooling,' said Peter.

‘That had crossed my mind. Oh Christ.' Peter stood and took out his wallet. ‘No. Don't,' Jake told him, waving a hand. ‘I earn more than you.'

Peter held out a note, grinning.

‘We're putting the fees up in the Spring.'

‘Oh, well,' said Jake, making a playful show of snatching the note. Then he stood too and pushed Peter's hand away. ‘No. Go on,' he said, ‘Look on it as part-payment for my first squash lesson. Enjoy the film. What are you seeing?'

‘
Le Financier Aveugle
.'

‘Isn't that meant to be a bit grim?'

‘Terribly.' They laughed and this time Peter clapped Jake on the shoulder. ‘We'll speak,' he said, and left Jake alone with his whisky sour.

Jake gulped most of his drink and, for the first time since a brief flare-up when Candida first announced her christening plans, entertained thoughts of Robin. He remembered a gangling frame astride a speeding bicycle, one arm dangerously hampered by a clutch of library books. A broad grin and a wild cry of,

‘No brakes!'

Unreadable blue eyes that sought his own too often for comfort. A bold tenor voice that wavered when reading aloud. Deafening bach choral music dropped suddenly in volume for the same voice to say, ‘Come in'. A huge, sunny room with a view onto a river, every surface collaged with open books, dust, forgotten biscuits, petals of dying flowers, candles tampered into sculpture and clothes thrown aside in mock despair. He remembered a mess of oranges on a lawn; orange after orange diligently skinned until a whole peel could be removed to form an unbroken J. He remembered Candida laughing in a wild, infectious way she never did after she married him and felt a kind of expectation that had grown so long unfamiliar that it hurt him.

Six

Watched by her attentive dog, Andrea stood and glared at her full-length reflection. A few months ago she had finally taken the hint her mother had been giving her Christmas after Christmas in the shape of panty-girdles for the filling figure. Peter had laughed when he first found a pair discarded in the top of the laundry basket. He called them her ‘power pants'. She preferred not to speak of them at all. In an effort to be supportive, Peter had suggested they keep her mother's beige and cream ones for emergency rations, and go shopping in search of something in a sexier colour. Black or red or vivid purple.

‘Look on them as an architect would,' he suggested. ‘If you've got to have something that big, you might as well make a feature of it.'

Andrea shifted position slightly, with a critical frown, and regarded this new feature in her design. Her bottom never used to be large. It wasn't especially large now, but it had begun to relax slightly, like a neglected pear. She turned sideways on to the looking-glass and touched her breasts. She had always been proud of her breasts. Peter had always been proud of her breasts. Not too small, not too large, and firm as twin nectarines. They had begun to deflate. Looking at her silhouette now, Andrea thought she resembled some inflatable doll that swelled at her points of least resistance so that, on deflating her breasts with a cruel squeeze one could watch her buttocks swell and spread. She cupped each breast in a hand then, having raised them to their former level, let them flop. Her dog yawned, barked once then twisted around for a brief, ungainly washing of genitalia.

‘Oh, all right, Brevity, I'm coming,' Andrea answered her and, turning away from her reflection, tugged back on a discreetly cantilevered bra and light summer dress. ‘Who wants to see your mistress naked anyway?'

She fell onto her knees with a grunt and rooted in the dusty jumble under the bed for her walking shoes. Peter still remembered to undress her occasionally, but he no longer so much as blushed as he did so; even her bosom-weary gynaecologist Dr Jhabvala showed more excitement at her unpeeling. Finding a long-lost shoe-tree of Peter's, she tossed it to his side, then sat on the bed's edge to lace her suede brogues. She knew that they looked strange beneath a floral print but they were comfortable; now that the rot had set in with power pants and Brunei bras, she had decided to carry the look through.

Brevity frisked and danced a yard or two ahead as Andrea walked downstairs, picked up her cardigan and some stale bread and left the house. Then, clipped onto her fine leather plait of a lead, she trotted obediently to one side, pausing only once, politely to pee in the gutter. She was a Japanese spitz, a half-size version of the pomeranians painted with such uncharacteristic wit by Gainsborough, but larger and more robust than their papillon kin. Andrea hated small dogs but had bought her on impulse when Robin went away to Whelm. Brevity was eight; fifty-six in dog years. Dogs were banned on Whelm, which was a nature reserve, so Robin could never have seen her, even had Andrea braved a second visit. The wholly undoggy Peter had been won over in minutes. He lavished half-an-hour each evening on brushing Brevity's coat and taking her for a late night walk. He had dubbed her, ‘The child of our menopause', meaning Andrea's.

Andrea walked up The Chase and onto the common. Faber had said he would drag his daughter out on their tandem for some exercise and would meet Andrea by the duck pond, so she let Brevity off the lead and struck out in that direction, stale bread swinging in a bag at her side. She had first got to know Faber when he enrolled Iras in the kindergarten. The fashionable epithet, ‘visually-disadvantaged' would have been a cruel euphemism applied to this little girl. Deprived by some genetic freak not only of sight but of eyes, Iras's American parents had put her up for adoption at birth and she had been nearly four when she found a home with Faber. There was nothing ugly about her disability since she still had eyelids and lashes, permanently closed over rounded bony shells where her eyes would have been. At worst, she resembled an animated sleepwalker. Faber had wanted Iras to have as normal an education as possible and Andrea had felt that it would be educative for the other children to have a disabled friend. The arrangement had thrived for a month or two – it was astonishing to see the games infants could invent that didn't involve sight – but it soon became clear that Iras was compensated for her blindness with a prodigiously fast brain. She was learning braille in outside lessons and was already leaving her contemporaries far behind in spelling, vocabulary and grammar. In the end her boredom became disruptive and Faber had been obliged to send her to a specialist school and an outside tutor.

‘Andrea! Hey!' She looked round. Brevity was yapping recognition. There was no one in the playground but two little girls confiding at one end of the slide and an adult pair canoodling on the roundabout. ‘Over here!' She turned and saw Faber racing towards her on his tandem and Brevity in hot pursuit. Andrea watched him swing a leg over, so that he slowed up standing on one pedal. She envied his grace. She smiled as he said, ‘Hi,' and envied afresh his perfect dark brown skin. He made her feel pale and mottled.

‘Where's Iras?' she asked.

‘Home,' he said, ‘Glued to that wretched computer. Mmm. Kiss you.' He kissed her cheek, she, the air.

‘Is she still rewriting Genesis?'

‘Oh no.' He laughed, wheeling his bike beside her as they walked. ‘Much worse. I took Dot Halliwell on one side when I picked Iras up from her classes the other afternoon and said that she had got it into her head to rewrite the first books of the Bible from a woman's point of view and that I was concerned that this might be taking her away from her proper work.'

‘What did Dot say?' Dot was Iras's tutor at the school for special children.

‘Well she said that Iras was bang up to date with her maths exercises and so on – if anything, ahead of where she should be, as usual – but that she'd have a word with her about it.'

‘And?'

‘And the next thing I find is that Iras has been encouraged to “write something of her own”.'

‘Nothing wrong with that. Creative writing's standard syllabus for any child.'

‘Honey, Iras Washington isn't just any child. I mean, a sweet little story about a day at the zoo, or a poem or two, or My Worst Dream or something like that would be fine but my little girl's almost finished her first novel.'

‘No! But that's wonderful. Isn't it?'

‘Well of course it's wonderful. Iras W. is the wonder of Clapham Common South Side. But it's not normal. She's only twelve, for pity's sake. She should be out playing and instead she's shut away tapping at that machine hour upon hour. She's working harder than I am. She skipped school today to write.'

‘They don't play at twelve, they sit together in corners and giggle about boys.'

‘Well, even that would be fine, but she's way past boys. You know I can't work that computer much, and even if I could, you can bet she'd have put codes everywhere so that I couldn't snoop, but yesterday I had a good read over her shoulder when I went in to make her come and eat some lunch.' He stopped and turned to her. ‘Andrea, my little girl has progressed into alien sex.'

‘What?' she laughed. ‘Little green men?'

‘Precisely. Little green men. Together. Well, to be honest, she did start to explain that her little green men are actually hermaphrodite. She's got it all from some book on snails and earthworms so it's all slime and interchangeable slithering parts.'

‘Sexy.'

‘Oh, shut your mouth and give me some bread.'

‘Here.'

They stood throwing bread pellets at the pondwater and were soon standing in a seething crowd of wing and darting beak. Andrea concentrated as usual on ignoring the queue-jumpers and throwing her bread to the less pushy birds, floating modestly in the background.

‘Well?' Faber asked her.

‘Well what?'

‘When's he coming home?'

‘Oh God. I'd forgotten. That's why we're meeting isn't it? Well all he said was soon, so I expect he'll turn up over the weekend.'

‘You must be overjoyed.' He read her expression then added,
‘N'est-ce pas
?'

‘I'm frightened, Faber. He hasn't been home for eight years. People change in that amount of time. Last time he was here was his twenty-first. We offered to clear out of the house for the weekend to let him throw a party for all his friends but he insisted we stay and give a small dinner party, instead; just we three, my mother, Candida, of course, and Jake. It was all rather solemn and grown-up, with champagne, all the silver and I'd spent hours actually making puff pastry for a vast salmon
en croûte
. That was the May of their last summer term. Jake drove Candida and Robin back the next morning and four weeks later I had Candida in tears on the phone. But I've told you all this.'

‘Yes. Well, not really. Only bits. Come back for coffee.'

‘I mustn't. You're working.'

‘I'm not. I'm talking to you. Coffee?'

‘Yes, please.' They set out over the grass towards Faber's studio.

‘Were there any signs then? Of Candida's interest in Jake?'

‘Oh yes. Robin didn't see, of course, and neither did Peter. I did. I suppose I should have said something. Robin would only have been cross with me. He was always being cross with me; it's one of the things I've missed.'

‘Did he love her very much?'

‘Oh, it wasn't Candida he loved.'

‘No? But I thought she was his childhood friend and so on.'

‘She was. But it was Jake that he loved. Poor Robin.' They were nearing the roadside. Andrea stooped to fasten Brevity back on her lead and felt tears well, stinging, in her eyes. Faber let his tandem drop on the turf and took her in his arms. She hugged him back, staring across his shoulder to incurious traffic churning by. ‘I've been so strong. I've tried so hard,' she whimpered then realised the spectacle they were presenting. ‘Come on,' she said, pushing him gently away. ‘They must take us for a middle-aged woman parting tearfully from her young black stud; hardly flattering for either of us.' He laughed as she trumpeted into her handkerchief then stuffed it back up her sleeve. ‘If only I were Irish. They love it when their sons turn into monks.'

‘Only with them it's usually less of a surprise.'

‘And as if Robin coming home in a habit and cowl weren't enough, I think Peter may have found a girlfriend somewhere.'

‘What in God's name gives you that idea?'

‘Well, I don't really. But he's become terribly vain – obsessed with his age, spending hours in the gym keeping fit, that sort of thing – and he's suddenly trying awfully hard to make a show of interest in me by helping me buy new knickers and things, which my mother always said was deeply suspicious.'

‘We won't talk about this until I get you home, Missy and give you a jug of coffee.'

‘Strong and black?' She laughed, waiting for the familiar response.

‘Like yo' man, honey chile, like yo' sweet hunk of man.'

Seven

Faber slung Andrea's mug into the dishwater and ate the one gingernut she had left in the packet. A slow thumping sound overhead reminded him of Iras's presence and that it was time to make something for her lunch. When she was concentrating hard, or happy – the two being commonly simultaneous – she swung her feet hard against the sides of her desk. He walked out through the studio and up the stairs.

‘Iras?'

‘Yes?'

‘Can I come in?'

‘Yes.'