Summer at Gaglow (22 page)

‘Mama.’ Eva felt she must explain, but Marianna stood up and, clicking her tongue for the dogs, strode off towards the house.

Eva could hear the ice melting even before she reached it. The rocks had thawed on contact with warm air and, like a spring, it seeped and dripped into the ground. The reeds in which she’d wrapped her dog had uncurled over the surface, and there was the whippet’s tail, broken into pieces and returning to a mush of snow.

Bina was greatly excited by the news. ‘Vandals from the village! Smashing in the door!’ And she hugged herself and shivered.

‘But couldn’t the rest of the ice be saved?’ Martha asked. ‘If the doors were closed immediately?’

Bina pointed out to her that rubbish had been thrown into the pit. ‘Reeds and straw and God knows what else and now the ice wouldn’t be worth having.’

‘It’s her own fault,’ Bina kicked at a trail of loose straw, ‘for being so high and mighty. Pretending to be some kind of baroness and allowing the local people to come up and entertain her.’

‘Schu-Schu always said she shouldn’t have made Papa take the house,’ Martha remembered. ‘She always said it was bad luck.’

‘And she wanted him to keep the land – imagine,’ Bina added.

‘Couldn’t it have been the wind that blew open the door?’ Eva asked, loyalty pushed down in her chest. ‘I’m sure I was woken last night by some kind of storm.’ But Bina only scowled at her, shaking her head in mock exasperation, and asking what other patriotic German woman gave up her own food for a crowd of English dogs.

The vegetable garden was in perfect order. Eva found her mother pulling tiny radishes to make a soup. ‘We should be thankful,’ she told her, and Eva found herself genuinely relieved to see their rows of shoots all lying undisturbed.

Chapter 16

‘I wonder what they’re saying now, our mothers?’ Kate poured the wine, and I sipped mine as I tested the spaghetti.

‘Do you think they’re talking about us?’

‘They’re probably wondering where they went wrong.’ She smiled. ‘You know, all three of us heading towards thirty, unmarried, still not settled down.’

‘Hardly,’ Natasha said. ‘And, anyway, I have settled down. I’ve got a job with a salary, however small.’ Natasha worked long, hard hours as a nurse, and she used her full employment to make fun of us.

‘In any case,’ I pointed out to Kate, ‘I’m sure Patrick would marry you tomorrow.’ Patrick was her long-suffering boyfriend, hanging on just by his nails for years.

‘I’d like to go away,’ Kate sighed, ‘have some kind of adventure,’ and to weigh her down I heaped her plate with food. ‘Maybe we could all go?’ She sucked a long strand of spaghetti up out of her sauce.

‘Go where?’ Natasha was adding up her scant days off.

‘Oh, somewhere different. Chile or Mexico . . . Or where’s that place practically no one has ever been – the Yemen?’

I looked at her and saw a speckling of sauce over her nose. ‘The Yemen?’ Just then Sonny woke up and yelled. ‘Look,’ I told him, ‘I didn’t put you down for a ten-minute nap. It’s bed-time, night-time, understand?’ But he looked so pleased to see me, the tears flicked back from his eyes, the roof of his mouth all pearly pink.

‘The sweetness of that boy,’ Kate said, as he rode in on my arm. He was passed around the table while we took it in turns to curl spaghetti with one hand.

‘I don’t suppose it would be impossible.’ Natasha was coming round. ‘Sarah could leave Sonny with her mother and we could go off, the three of us. Even just for a weekend.’

‘Or we could bring Sonny with us?’ Kate held tightly on to him while she stretched over the table for cheese.

‘It depends when.’ I felt a tiny stirring of excitement. ‘We’ve never been anywhere together, the three of us, have we?’ And we drank more wine and dug out hard helpings of ice cream.

‘Even if we just went to the country for a day.’ Natasha waved her spoon, and I could see Kate closing up with disappointment.

‘No,’ I insisted, ‘we’ll have to make it special,’ and I remembered I’d forgotten all about the strawberries, which would be leaking through newspaper into the bottom of my bag. ‘To somewhere special,’ I raised my glass, and the others joined me, making Sonny chuckle when they cheered.

The next morning Sonny woke at five and then again every hour until I crawled out of bed to get away from him. The kitchen smelt of wine and cold spaghetti, and I opened the window where my cornflowers had grown into a mass of long green shoots, dark and dusty and in desperate need of thinning out. The sweet peas were trailing half-heartedly round sticks. ‘I need a garden,’ I mumbled into the jumble of backyards, and it suddenly occurred to me that we should visit Gaglow. ‘Gaglow, it’s the perfect place,’ and I rushed through to my framed photograph and smiled at the far-off faces of the Belgard girls.

I rang Kate first and then Natasha, but both were either still asleep or out. ‘We are going to Gagalow,’ I sang, ‘we are going to Gag-a-low,’ and then, like a shock, it hit me. I stood in the middle of the floor, my nightdress limp, my hair all straggled on my neck and looked down at my feet. I’m lonely, I thought, and I crawled back into bed and rested one arm across my baby’s body where the breath drew in and out under his vest.

‘Pam?’ I knew she’d still be asleep, but I didn’t feel I could wait any longer. ‘Pam?’

Then with a click and a whirr she cut through her machine. ‘Hello?’

‘I’m sorry, did I wake you?’ I tried to sound surprised, and already I could hear her in her smoky bed, the creamy pillows denting while she searched round for a light.

‘No.’ There was a cigarette between her teeth now. ‘What time is it?’ A match hissed into the phone.

‘I just wondered, did you ever find out anything about Mike?’

She took a deep inhalation and lowered her voice. ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I did.’ And she talked right on through her smoke so that I could almost see it drifting towards me down the line.

‘You do realize, don’t you, that Mike’s not just in
Kilmaaric
. He
is
Kilmaaric. He’s the lead.’ And my ear felt hot with fury. No, I thought, not like that. Something bad, something real and nasty, but instead I listened as she carried on. ‘Apparently they’re all really excited about him, think he’s going to be the next Big Thing,’ and she stopped to take another drag and say, ‘I hope he’s sending you lots of money.’

‘I don’t care about the fucking money,’ and I thought about my tulip dress, flowered in blue and white, and bought with the whole contents of one cheque. ‘So he’s not having an affair with anyone? Not sleeping with the producer? Come on, Pam, there must be more? I’m going crazy.’

Pam paused. I could feel it pained her to admit it, but she didn’t know. ‘I think Carol would have mentioned if there was any kind of intrigue. Why? What have you heard?’

‘Nothing.’ I sighed. ‘Pam, you don’t fancy coming up this way for lunch?’ But she settled back against her pillows and said she was having lunch with Brad.

‘Brad is it now?’

And she promised to call me later with more news.

‘So what are we going to do?’ Sonny had woken and was looking at me sideways. Outside our window was a long, hot, empty day. ‘I suppose we’d better get ourselves dressed.’ Then I remembered that once a week in Primrose Hill there was a baby-massage class. ‘I don’t suppose it can last long.’ I eyed his dimpled arm and packed a towel, some almond oil and a sheaf of extra nappies.

The streets were gritty with ice cream and the sticky pips of fruit. I clacked along in my new dress, avoiding chewing gum, and stopping every now and then to adjust the shade above Sonny’s head.

A mass of pushchairs was already in the hall, and upstairs, in a long bare room, babies were laid out naked on a semi-circle of mats. They lay white against the green, like water-lilies or slivers of lychees, and their mothers knelt above them rubbing oil into their hands. The babies mewed and twittered, coughed and cried while vital information was swapped back and forth from one woman to the next. The whole room hummed with their voices and the baby-massage teacher, a young, lean man with close-cropped hair, sat waiting to begin. ‘All right, ladies,’ his voice, soft London, cut through the noise, ‘let’s start with the right leg,’ and I fumbled with the sticky tag of Sonny’s nappy to pull it off in time. ‘Lots of oil, that’s right, then take the leg and ease it out, hand over hand.’ Sonny was looking at the baby on his right, a tiny oriental girl with a shock of fine black hair. ‘And now the other leg.’ I eased oil into the creases, feeling the soft ligaments, like squid, behind each knee and the dense cool ripples of a thigh. There was silence in the room. ‘Now knock those heels together for good humour,’ and each woman smiled as she felt the soft pad of her baby’s feet spring back into her palm. We rubbed their tummies with our fingertips, eased out each hip and let their short soft arms slide through our hands. ‘Now turn them over,’ and they flipped and slipped like seals on to their fronts while we smoothed along their backs with quick warm strokes. My shoulders were tight with concentration and then one baby began to cry. ‘Pick him up,’ the teacher said, ‘if he’s not happy.’ And as if on cue another wail went out. Soon the room was fretful with demanding cries and a great array of breasts and bottles was ushered out to soothe them. I wrapped up Sonny in his towel and cuddled him against me. His face shone silkily with oil and his hair smelt bitter as a nut.

‘He didn’t used to like being undressed,’ I told the teacher, as if to explain why I’d not been to his class before, and he bent knowledgeably over Sonny, papoosed in a yellow towel, and said that no babies liked to be naked when they were very young.

‘You might find he drops off to sleep after he’s had a feed,’ and he moved away between the mats to magic one fretful baby into silence with a special sideways hold.

Sonny was still asleep when we got home so I laid him like a pat of butter on the bed and went to run myself a bath. There was a message from my mother asking if I’d like to come and have lunch the next day. ‘We could have a picnic in my garden,’ she enthused.

‘I’m sorry,’ I rang her back, ‘but I’ve already arranged to sit for Dad.’ And she laughed brightly, trying not to sound too hurt, and said we’d have to try another time.

There were three large windows in my father’s studio, folding half into the roof, and the sun streaked in as thick as paint. Together we pinned sheets against the glass, hopeful of some shade, and then we had to twist them back to lose the shadow. I watched my picture from the corners of the room. I’d been looking at it too closely, and now, from the right distance, I could see exactly how it fell into place. Each stroke, each ridge of oil, was smooth and dense and lively, and I wondered that my father never felt the need to step back while he worked. I pulled the loose folds of the dressing gown around me. I’d grown thin again, my stomach flat against the pale pink scar and, without noticing, I’d stopped longing for him to whittle down my legs, paint away the veins, or soften the high flush of my once pregnant face. ‘It’s beautiful,’ I murmured, and in place of my domed stomach there was Sonny curved in profile up towards my breast, ‘I love it,’ and I felt the edge of sharp delicious tears.

‘Yes,’ he was looking thoughtful, ‘it may be nearly done.’ And we stood admiring it in silence for a full five minutes.

Sonny lay waiting, his hands in fists above his head. He had a nappy on and nothing else. ‘He does look wonderful like that,’ he said, stepping in for a better look, and I quickly draped the stretched and faded Babygro across him before my father allowed himself a new idea.

‘It’s too small to go on at all now,’ I explained, and I slipped into the lump and dent of the old sofa and smiled up at him to carry on.

‘Dad,’ I asked after we’d worked in silence for a while, ‘does your cousin still want someone to go out to Gaglow?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

I left him alone for another minute.

‘It’s just . . .’

And he turned to me, his eyes severe, his brush sharp in his fist. ‘I want nothing more to do with it.’ I didn’t have the courage to complain.

‘So what’s your idea?’ Kate wanted to know. She’d got my message about going away.

I hunted round for something else. ‘I thought we could drive down to Devon, have a few days by the sea . . .’

‘Hmmm.’ Kate sounded uninspired. ‘I’ll talk to Natasha.’

‘Or we could get the train?’

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I might have an editing job that goes right through till Christmas.’

‘That’s great,’ and I thought of her whiling away the summer, half underground in a windowless room. ‘What is it?’

She said it was some Scottish saga, set up in the Highlands near the Isle of Skye.

‘It’s not . . .’ My head began to thud. ‘It’s not
Kilmaaric
?’ And I imagined her and Mike together, separated only by a bank of screens. She’d see him before I had the chance, and day after day she’d edit him out.

‘Sarah, are you all right?’ And then I heard that she was laughing, low down in her throat, waiting for me to guess it was a joke. ‘It’s a big documentary series, you idiot,’ and she promised to let me know as soon as she had her dates.

‘Devon!’ Natasha sneered. ‘You can’t imagine I’d want to go to Devon.’ And in great and gruesome detail she reminded me of a weekend she’d once spent with some regrettable man. ‘That whole coast is ruined for me for ever, I’m afraid.’

I rang my mother and invited myself round for tea, accepting that for this summer I’d have to make do with her plum tree and her tiny patch of lawn.

‘Maybe we could start something else now that this is finished?’ my father murmured, as I lay lulled by heat against the sagging sofa.

‘Hmm.’ I wasn’t giving in too easily, and to collect time I fingered the frayed leg of the discarded Babygro, unravelling and streaked with paint. ‘You really think we’re finished?’

‘Could be,’ he mused, adding minute touches to my ankle and stepping back at last to take in the whole thing.

Sonny was unrecognizable. He’d lost the dark fringe of his baby hair and his eyes had faded finally to a middle-Europe blue. I looked at the breadth of his stomach and his lamb-cutlet legs, and knew he was too big to go on drifting in and out of sleep. My father began turning over canvases. He had them leaning up against his walls, knocked together in their wooden frames and painted over white. I saw him eyeing Sonny as he measured one frame after another with his arm.