The Kindness (3 page)

He ought, at least, to deal with Michael. Michael has every right to think of himself as his stepson’s saviour as well as his agent, but the last thing Julian wants right now is anyone turning up to save him.

Not so when he was twenty-one. Then Michael’s offer of a job had come as a blessing. Julia was pregnant and they were about to be thrown out of his student room when Michael flew in. Julian was working every shift he could at the Crown and Julia was in the sort of debt that made her scribble hasty sums on bits of paper. She was constantly tearful and Chris, her fuck-up of a husband, kept turning up at his lodgings (where Julian wasn’t supposed to have overnight guests), dumping bin bags of her clothing in the hall and pushing wads of bills that he’d maliciously decided were hers to pay through the letterbox.

London was as good a place as any to start their life together. They found a cheap room with its own bathroom at the end of the Northern Line. Julia, washed out with the morning, noon and night sickness of that short-lived first pregnancy, was hired by a horticultural centre a short bus ride from their street. Julian was glad that she at least could be in the fresh air. Unlike him. First the tube, then on to the subterranean world of the children’s books slush pile in the basement at Abraham and Leitch. The Abraham being Michael, his mother’s husband, the man he was supposed to think of as a father.

His employer then, his agent now and bursting with questions that need answers. Julian scrolls on past Michael’s emails. There’s something from the new girl in publicity, a school has requested he open their library: couldn’t someone there ensure he wasn’t bothered by this sort of thing? From the shelves beside him garish copies of his own books leer down at him in their cartoon covers.

This career of his, built on a knack for reducing history to the level of pets, started to pall even before Mira was born. When Julia needed to go back to work, he was more than happy to take a break from the hairy rogues’ endless gossip, the goings-on in the kennel at Hampton Court, the New Model Army of bull terriers, the sycophantic little dogs in the laps of their Queens. Yap, yap, yap.

Oh, but he should be grateful. Without them he could never have raised the cash and loans to reclaim Firdaws. But even Firdaws, which he used to think he loved as much as any person, had not been enough to override the flare of humiliation when a writer he admired congratulated him on the success of his most recent,
Ponsonby
. This last, a Restoration comedy told through the eyes of Charles the Second’s spaniel, was finished without enthusiasm shortly before Mira’s birth.

He attempts a couple of emails, but still has difficulty settling. There are several from his old mate William. They are cautious in tone: ‘I am sorry to disturb . . . I’m sure it may not be the right moment for you to think about this . . . Please do not hesitate to call if it would help to talk, any time, day or night . . .’ Julian rocks back in his chair and closes his eyes.

‘Mira’, a miracle. They started trying for a baby soon after Julia lost the first one, but it took Mira five years to arrive. They were in the bathroom of their flat in Cromwell Gardens, trying not to care, when she first made herself known. He was in the shower when Julia peed on the stick (as she did most months because her periods liked to taunt her by being late). She called to him over the beat of the water, pointing to the white stick on the cistern and a blue line that was deepening from a hint of pale forget-me-not to a navy certainty. They both stared at it, hardly daring to speak, and Julia had to sit back down on the loo. He quickly did the maths on his fingers. ‘Paris!’ he said, and biting her lip she looked up at him and nodded.

She broke away, urging caution when he knelt to hug her. She asked him to get a second test ‘just to be sure’ and when he ran back with it, out of breath, with the bag from the chemist in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other, she was in the kitchen and, still wrapped in her towel, was sitting on the little stool beside the telephone, crying.

The day disappears much like the ones that went before it. Firdaws sinks into the dusk until eventually he switches on the lamps. He manages crisps, heats up some sort of stew and finds the scent of the jasmine has grown stronger when he returns to his desk with a sturdy Duralex glass and the remains of a bottle of red wine.

In their bedroom above, Julia would throw open the window to let in the scent. He imagines she’s up there now, her lustrous hair kinking and purling, Mira framed beside her in the golden square of light, holding out her arms, calling down to him: ‘Dadoo . . .’ to make sure he can see her there in her favourite pyjamas. He pours the wine.

Soon he’ll go out for some air, find the dog and together they’ll cross the garden by moonlight. He takes a gulp from his glass, the smell of the jasmine giving him a headache already. He can summon the taste of the sleeping pill he plans to take. Upstairs the empty bed waits.

He has nightmares about Mira falling. He’ll wake in a sweat, his arms grabbing at the air like a newborn. Then emptiness. No Julia, no Mira.

He rolls a last cigarette, calls to the dog. Mira skips back into his mind, avenues of trees unfurling leaves and promises, the afternoon sunny enough that he can’t resist her pleas for the playground when he picks her up from nursery. Pigeons hanging around like boys at the bus shelter hoping for a few extra crumbs from her lunchbox, and Mira hurtling down the bigger children’s slide, her face screwed shut until he catches her. Blinking with shock, her eyes meet his and instantly she’s confident as she gauges that he is smiling. All will be well: ‘Brave girl,’ he says as she slips from his grasp. ‘Again, again.’ Running back along the concrete to the steps, a loose strap of her dungarees flying, grabbing her to secure it; she watches his fingers intently, always learning. Her funny skippy steps and his mix of pride and terror whenever she tries anything new. Swinging her straight up to the top just so she doesn’t have to work so hard climbing the metal steps, swooping her skywards and blowing a raspberry on her neck to make her laugh.

All of this over and over until he glanced at his watch and realised that it was Friday and Julia would be back at Firdaws already.

Mira looking down at him from the brink to where he’s ready to catch her: ‘OK Dadoo?’ – that’s what she called him and neither he nor Julia could bear to correct her. ‘Ready?’ Quite solemn. Seeing her from a new angle, from the crepe soles of her shoes up, no longer a baby. And then down she comes, a starfish hurtling towards him, and he braces himself ready to catch her.

He set Mira on the foot of the slide to help her get a stone from her shoe, her sock a little sweaty as he straightened it. He slipped the shoe back on to her foot, bowing nobly, ‘Is your name Cinderella?’ And she giggled, told him: ‘Don’t be a silly.’ He showed her again how to thread the strap through the buckle. Her breathing grew heavy as she concentrated on the task and he held her foot steady.

He reaches to the drawer, opens it a touch just to be sure it’s still there. It’s impossible to resist. He takes it out and holds it as he does every day. The creases across the toes have shaped it; the soft leather sole has yielded, the heel bulges, so it is almost as though he has her little foot in his hand and not just her shoe.

Around him familiar shadows watch, the friendly ghosts of four generations of Vales. It’s snug in here, with beams so low they just clear his head, a couple of ancient armchairs, Turkish rugs on the floor that have had their corners chewed by a succession of his mother’s dogs. ‘Hey, how about this as a playroom for Mira?’ Julia tried suggesting the first time he showed her the estate agent’s pictures of Firdaws.

‘Oh, but that was always my den.’ He couldn’t help but be crestfallen. ‘It’s probably the best place for me to write.’

It’s cosy, this room of his: the familiar west-facing window partially covered by the vines, lending a suggestion of a cave or an arbour.

He replaces Mira’s shoe and closes the drawer. This desk was once his father’s. On the day he and Julia moved in, his mother had all the old furniture taken from storage and sent around in a van. Julia was uncharacteristically grumpy as it all came through the door: the big kitchen table, the Welsh dresser and its brightly painted pottery animals, chests of drawers, armchairs, rugs, this desk. Sitting here now, he’s struck by the thought that perhaps nothing had happened to him. For a moment he is a boy again, looking up at the same patch of sky through the same leaded glass, waiting for his mother to call him to the kitchen for soup. He drains the last of the wine, closes his document, puts his computer to sleep. He won’t be far behind.

Two

Firdaws is the last cottage along the lane that winds from the village to the river and since the schools have broken up it seems there is never a day someone isn’t around, whistling to a dog or shrieking on the way down through the water meadows. Most of the other houses have front paths and gardens, but Firdaws is reached across a small meadow of scrubby grass filled at this time of year with yellow wildflowers, cornflowers and dog daisies. Its chimney rises tall and crooked and in the evenings soft mist rolls in from the river to surround it, giving it the appearance of a house in a dream. Of a gentle weathered brick and hanging tile, it was built into a natural nook, so if you lie on the riverbank looking up towards the village it’s the first house you see, tucked close into the bosom of the landscape with nothing but dark-green conifer woods at its shoulders and the spire of St Gabriel’s pointing to the sky.

Beyond the meadow the lane from the village comes to a meandering halt at Jerry Horseman’s fields, whose rusting gates with their elaborate bracelets of baler twine are of no consequence to locals long decided this access to the river is common land. Occasionally Jerry Horseman livens things up by grazing a bull in one of his fields but on the whole he is amicable and leaves this part of his empire to a rough hay which is always too full of buttercups.

At the back of the house a small wooden porch faces the downward slope of the garden across the fields with their waving fronds of yellow and rusty dock and on to the river that glints through the trees. When it rains it’s good to sit in the porch, to smell the wet earth and smoke and listen to the water dripping off the roof and leaves. On a really still night you can hear the owls at the river, and around the house the squeaking of pipistrelles that flit among its creepers.

There’s a small terrace for herbs and beds for clambering roses, a few fragrant shrubs. The rest is down to fruit trees and seedy grasses; that is, if you can manage to ignore the three formal flower beds the Nicholsons left behind, where massed bushes of candy-pink roses have flowered all summer long, the air made heavy by their scent.

Strung between the furthest pair of apple trees the hammock mocks him with a low-slung smile for the hours he spent feeling safe, Mira cradled beside him begging for stories. There’s a worn patch of grass beneath it, down to the earth in the middle, scuffed by his foot pushing them to and fro beneath their canopy of blossom and leaves.

The garden was wet with rain after they had been and gone, as though it too had been rinsed of her presence. Their efficiency was astounding. He became increasingly agitated as he tore through the rooms, opening drawers and searching behind cupboards. That night, unable to sleep, he wandered barefoot across the wet grass. The sky, cleared by the rainstorm, was ablaze with stars. The granary windows glinted silver at him and he shivered as something rustled in the apple tree. His bare arms looked freakishly white as he reached inside the hammock. Mira’s shoe was caught in its folds, the strap still buckled, so it must have slipped from her foot, a damp wad of blossom stuck across the toe.

The blossom is gone from the trees now, replaced by hard little fruits, the hammock is streaked with mould and should probably go too.

In the orchard the air will be sweet with ripe plums, but he doesn’t go there to pick them. Beyond the plum trees and the damsons there’s a tree that Julia planted. He tells himself not to be ridiculous – of course it’s still there – but can’t bring himself to check in case it isn’t. It’s a pear tree, carefully transplanted from Cromwell Gardens, special because it was given to Mira at her Naming Day.

Julia had written their daughter’s name in silver italics on the invitations:
Mira Eliana
, and they waited until April to throw the party so that people could spill out on to the patch of lawn. They had stumbled over what to call this event since
Christening
would have opened the door to frenzied entreaties from Gwen, Julia’s Catholic mother. They settled on Naming Day and Mira’s snowy dress was lovely as any christening gown.

Mira was carried round the sitting room like a doll by older children, Julia more relaxed about this sort of handling than him. She was a robust baby, already able to support her own head, but still . . . The bluish pulse, beating like a guppy beneath the tender skin of her fontanelle, had caused him deep pains only a few weeks before when invited to hand her to anyone other than Julia. When Julia’s father Geoffrey waddled in to the hospital to incant her with his brandied breath, he wanted to find a way to say: ‘No, she’s too new.’

Lucky for them Geoffrey rarely left the shambolic caravan behind the recreation centre in Vernow where he sometimes got work on the grass but more often didn’t. At Mira’s naming party he wasn’t to be parted from the table where the champagne was poured for the toast. Julia’s mother Gwen fixed her gaze pointedly at her daughter’s chest: ‘Are you sure you’re producing enough milk for the baby?’