Authors: Sarah Bilston
Tom and Paul walked on along the beach, two tall figures with hands thrust deep in their pockets, while I settled myself down to nurse Samuel, who was beginning to wail. I looked out to sea, think
ing about a return to late nights and early mornings, a return to seeing each other on weekends, of packing my overflowing mother-love into a rushed kiss over breakfast toast. I was due to go back to Schuster in less than three weeks. Tom’s holiday from Crimpson would be over next week.
If he still had a job to go back to, of course.
“Of course it’s—y’know, insane,” I offered, trying to laugh, when Tom finally came to sit beside me. Paul had taken himself off to give us time to talk. Tom nodded, gentling our son with tender fingers, as the gulls shrieked and cackled and fluttered in a great white whirlwind at the sound of poor Samuel’s wails. “We can do better than small-town law,” I went on firmly. “I mean, what kind of a life could we have here? The whole idea is simply ridiculous!”
Jeanie
D
ave phoned to say he’d found a cheap flight, and was coming out in five days’ time. “It’s a bit sooner than we planned, obviously, but it’s a special offer. This week only,” he explained, his voice brimming with excitement. “Plus Ranger says this airline is investing in researching cleaner fuel options,” he added virtuously. He paused. “Although, to be honest, I’d have bought the ticket
even if they weren’t. Bugger the environment. I can’t
wait
to see you, Jeanie, I miss you so much. Gotta get my hands on that body…”
“My boyfriend is flying out to see me,” I told Paul airily. “This weekend.”
“I’m pleased for you,” he replied calmly, and I flushed.
“He is an environmental warrior,” I went on severely. “He’s very hard-core. We’ll probably go and demonstrate in Washington against—” I frantically rifled the back-pages of my mind for something to demonstrate against.
“Air travel?” Paul offered innocently. I scowled.
I was already a little overwrought because I’d had to spend several hours with Paul by myself while Q and Tom went out to do shopping. Extraordinarily, Paul’s office was actually able to do without him for a
whole Monday.
“Are you sure you can hack it, sitting around here with me, doing nothing?” I asked him once the sound of the car had receded. “I mean, don’t forget the brevity of life!” I went on sarcastically. “A day sitting lazing in Connecticut is a day you have failed to earn a million dollars on the stock market. Did you think about that?”
Paul looked up at me over his paper. He was sprawled comfortably on the window bench in the kitchen at the time. “Thanks for worrying about me, but I have a well-diversified stock portfolio,” he said calmly, sipping at his small white cup of espresso. “I assume you also have your savings safely invested?”
“Of course,” I returned coldly, wondering frantically whether I’d ever actually got around to filling in that retirement-sheet thingie the bank gave me when I graduated. I mentally cast an eye over my current financial position. One current account, overdrawn to the tune of £562.47 (last time I checked); student loans totaling £16,902; contents of Abbey Savings Account (established for me by my parents when I was born, and regularly rifled since for stereo/ bike/shoes/booze/cruises): £123.89. I couldn’t honestly say my money was “working hard” for me, since it barely existed. I gulped and threw him a discouraging look before leaving the room for the
washing machine in the small laundry area just off the kitchen.
“Do you want me to hold the baby while you do that?” He was standing just behind me, I realized, in the door to the laundry room, and was watching me clutch Samuel in one hand while attempting to fold clothes with the other. We’d had washing piling up for days now; Q was managing to get it all into the machine but then lost the plot when it came time for the sorting. (I’d actually found her in tears over the socks. “So many of them! And they never match! And half of Samuel’s simply evaporate into thin air!” I’d promised her I’d get on top of it all, although I was increasingly inclined to agree with her that the washing machine subsisted on a nourishing diet of baby booties.)
“Of course not, I’m managing perfectly well,” I said testily to Paul’s outstretched arms. “You go back to your serious newspaper-reading. I wouldn’t want to disturb you.” I put Samuel down on the floor on a soft bed of towels and went back to my folding.
Paul sat down on the tiles beside me with a pile of washing in his arms. “It’s fine, I’m happy to do it. I’ll start work on this,” he said calmly. “I’m pretty good at folding. Although—”
He plucked something out of the tumble of clothes. It was my knickers, of course, and it had to be the pink ones, didn’t it, the ones my flatmate Una gave me the previous year, with the words “Access All Areas” in white fluff on the front. The ones I wore when everything else was in the basket. I blushed three shades deeper than the undies and snatched them out of his hands. “I don’t think there’s enough here to fold,” he said, all innocent bewilderment, and as he was holding on tight to them, they sort of
ping
ed as I pulled. I turned magenta.
“Get off,” I muttered furiously, scrunching the offending undies into a package roughly the size of a postage stamp.
“Sorry, I apologize,” he said, sweetly, picking up a large gray T-shirt instead. “How about I do Tom’s clothes? That seems safer. You do the rest.”
We sat in silence, folding. There is something indescribably
embarrassing about sitting next to a man with your underwear accumulating in small piles between you. He walked around my lacy bras with an excessive carefulness that simply drew my attention to the fact that he was, in fact, very conscious of them indeed. Look as much as you want, I told him scornfully, with my eyes, because you ain’t going to see me in this stuff.
“Must be almost lunchtime,” he said with a yawn, when the laundry was organized at last into four separate neat piles—plus a selection of lone baby boots in fifteen hues of blue. “Why don’t we walk into town? We’ll pick up sandwiches for everyone, there’s a new little gourmet place I’ve found. And you can show me the place where you’ll be working.”
I secretly thanked the heavens that I’d thought to telephone Quiet Lanes Elder Care Home the previous night—I excused myself when everybody else was eating, correctly anticipating from further experience of Paul that I might need corroborative information. I told the woman who answered I wanted to ask about the position, only it turned out you didn’t need to do anything so formal as submitting a form, because the job was unpaid and thankless, and basically involved emptying bedpans and singing “America the Beautiful” and helping with knitting. “Gee, this is just
wunnerful,”
Mrs. Forrest (manager of Quiet Lanes) said, when I explained my background. “We usually just get sixteen-year-old girls who can’t tell a knife from a fork. They do their best, but they keep trying to talk about iPods, y’know? I’ll tell the old folks today you might be coming, they’re going to be
psyched…”
I was left with the uncomfortable suspicion that by leaving my name, age, and telephone number with the said Mrs. Forrest, I had not only applied for but been given the job.
“In fact,” Paul went on cheerfully, “if you want, we can go in and meet the old folks; I bet they’ll be thrilled to see a baby. My grandmother was always transformed by the sight of children. My sister
Jenna’s little boy used to have an extraordinary effect.” We both looked at Samuel, who was just embarking upon one of his fits, purple and thrashing. “Well, maybe not today,” he conceded after a moment. “But the walk will do him good at least,” he added. Five minutes later I found myself walking, Samuel dressed and strapped into his buggy, down the driveway, along the road, and into Sussex. Paul, I reflected, achieved an awful lot through sheer force of will.
The sidewalk was narrow; Paul’s arm was pressed close to my shoulder. Cars whizzed past us. I was conscious of Paul glancing several times down into my face.
“So tell me more about your boyfriend, Jeanie,” he said, at last, when Samuel had mercifully slipped back into sleep, his poor tiny face streaked with tears.
“What do you want to know?”
“Are you serious about him?”
“I—yes,” I said. “I mean, he’s very kind, and he loves me, and we have fun together. I know you think I have to have everything worked out at twenty-four, but I don’t, and for the time being at least, fun and laughter are enough for me.”
Paul laughed. “Point taken. Actually, fun and laughter sound more than enough, they sound positively good. I didn’t have anything like that at your age.”
“Perhaps you were too busy working.”
“Perhaps.”
“So what about you?” I asked suddenly, looking up at him, smiling roguishly. “Is there anyone special in your life?”
“Yes, there is. She’s called Tina. She’s a musicians’ agent.”
“I see. And why didn’t she come with you this weekend?”
“Because she’s speaking at a conference in LA.”
“Oh. Is she very important?”
“Very.”
“Is she very beautiful?”
“Very.”
“Oh.” I’d sort of imagined a different reply, something along the lines of “no, she’s not very pretty, just terribly competent.” Now I felt crestfallen, outdone by the absent Tina and her manifold talents and charms. She was obviously very glamorous. I sneaked another quick look at him, at his elegant clothes, his handsome face, his heavy brows, his pronounced cheekbones, his long eyelashes. Of course his girlfriend would be stunning. Of course she would be successful. “Are you going to get married?” I asked disconsolately.
For the first time since I’d met him, Paul looked confused, even wrong-footed. He coughed. “Uh—well, you’re not the first person to ask me that question, let’s put it that way,” he said at last, with a slightly strangled laugh. “It’s—nothing’s fixed.”
“I see.” I didn’t really. Was the gorgeous Tina less committed to him than he was to her? Or the other way around?
He had paused for a moment, and was standing by a wooden fence overlooking the sea; I retraced my steps, reversing the buggy, and went back to join him. On the beach below, a sun-wizened man was just hauling in a catch of opalescent fish. We watched the bloody, slippery bodies tumbling out of his net onto the wooden deck. “Actually—” he began, but at that highly interesting moment, a horn beeped loudly behind us, and the car that had just passed stopped, reversed, and metamorphosed into Tom and Q. “Where are you going?” Q shouted, falling out of the passenger seat in her haste to see Samuel. “What’s going on, is he all right, how has he been doing, is he hungry, why’s he wearing new clothes, what happened to his bunny, oh there it is…”
Paul and I exchanged amused glances for a fraction of a second-did she think we couldn’t take care of a child, how silly—and then I busied myself explaining everything that was needful to Q. She decided she wanted to walk the buggy back to the house, to give Samuel more time to sleep, and suggested I take the car home with Tom.
My brother-in-law’s face was cold and cross; they’d clearly been arguing. Q was barely looking at him. Paul, after a second’s pause, offered to walk home with my sister. There was no room for three-abreast on the pavement, so, feeling vaguely cheated, I opened the front door of the car and got in beside Tom.
“What’s going on, then?” I asked him, as we pulled off. The air conditioning was on high; I shivered. Tom kept his green gaze firmly fixed on the narrow bending road.
“Nothing much,” he replied shortly. There was a pause. And then, keeping his eyes straight ahead: “I love my son, but God Jeanie, I need a change of scenery,” he blurted. He rubbed a hand over his face, his pale sunken cheeks. “I don’t know how much longer I can take this, to be honest. I have to get out of the damn house, have something else to think about. I mean, what does she think I am? Does she think I can take this—the screaming, the yelling, no sleep—indefinitely? Some days I think I’ll just go back to Crimpson and be done with it…”
He stopped himself, biting his lip, then glanced down at me for a second. “Forget it, Jeanie, this isn’t your problem,” he went on, in a tight voice. “Obviously we’ll work something out soon, I mean, she understands, right? She understands I need challenges in my professional life.
Obviously.”
We drove on in silence. I couldn’t quite think what to say.
Q
S
o you are enjoying motherhood, then, darling?”
Alison’s tones were silkily insinuating. In my mind’s eye I could see her, sitting at her burnished eighteenth-century desk in the sunny alcove of her expansive study, overlooking a discreet south London garden. A huge oak nods in at the window. The carpet beneath her feet is spotless deep-pile white—the sort that swallows every sound—and as she leans back in her chair, the cable of her old white telephone flexes gently. There are homemade sugar biscuits on a plate of thin bone china at her elbow, a cup of pale tea idling in her hand, and a smile of deep self-satisfaction on her lips.
At this unfortunate moment in the conversation, just as I was summoning up a particularly breezy account of my life and capabilities as a mother, Samuel, resting in my lap, began to cry—loudly. This put me in a tricky position, not least because the phone kept willfully flinging itself away from my hot, sweaty grasp. “He—er—he has his
moments,
of course, but generally he is an—er—easy—did you hear me?
Easy,
I said…A very easy child—”
Alison listened to the yells in silence for a while, then decided to start diagnosing his distress from her lofty perch three and a half thousand miles away. (“I was an unusually attentive mother, I could just feel what my children needed, I think it was a gift.”) “He sounds tired,” she asserted, at which point I almost hung up the phone
on her because he’d only just woken up. When she heard this, she switched tack and went down the usual list of causes of baby crying—which, as I pointed out, in a voice that was testy in spite of my very best efforts—I was perfectly capable of doing myself.