Little Bits of Baby Page 10

  At last the priest stood up.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Perdita’s mum has asked for All Things Bright and Beautiful. You’ll find the words under number 45 in your copy of Hymns for Now!. I’m sure you all know the tune.’

  ‘Finally,’ said Iras rather too loudly, and they all stood and sang, while Perdita roared a descant.

  Fourteen

  Robin was late for the christening, naturally. Luke, of all people, had rung up the night before to say that he was in London for his father’s funeral and was Robin all right. Robin said they should meet up and was he all right? So they fixed up to meet for breakfast in the National Gallery as Luke was in Holloway somewhere and Trafalgar Square was roughly a halfway point between his hotel and The Chase.

  Luke was not especially all right. He had come away wearing his novice’s habit as an approach-me-not armour. It turned out that his father had been in some kind of home for years. He was all that remained of Luke’s family and had suffered from a condition that effectively turned him back into a baby. Luke’s mum had been his nurse at first but she had later died of cancer and, there being no money, Luke had to sign papers for his father to go into state care. He told Robin all this over breakfast and Robin gave him a good talking to for not asking him along the day before as moral support. Luke said it was all very quick and a merciful release but Robin could tell he was buttoning his lip rather because he kept trying to change the subject, asking Robin questions about himself.

  In the end Robin told him. They took a stroll around the weird John Martins of the Elysian Fields and the end of the world. Robin said that basically he was coping but that he was having a bad attack of the Rip Van Winkles. Luke had been away on Whelm for even longer than he had, Robin pointed out. Didn’t he find everyone had changed in his absence? But Luke said that his nose had been in a book all the way to Holloway and that nurses and crematoria were fairly timeless places. So Robin took him away from the John Martin apocalypses and paradises and made him come for a walk outside. He made him look through a copy of the magazine called Capital. He made him look at the posters, at the things people were buying in the shops, and the things they were paying to see in the theatre. He showed him how all the cars were new and all the people’s faces had closed up. But Luke was singularly unimpressed and just put an arm around Robin’s shoulders (which raised some strange glances, not least for his being in his St Francis costume) and gave him a compassionate lecture on how there had always been greed and selfishness.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to take it as a good sign,’ he said. ‘All this was here before but in those days you were too trusting and you didn’t notice it. Now you’ve grown inside. You won’t be betrayed again.’

  ‘But I don’t like being “grown inside”,’ Robin said, ‘if this is what it’s like. I think I’d rather be shut away, like you.’

  ‘You can’t just “rather be”,’ Luke told him. ‘You’ve got to want to be, to have to be. Stay a little longer. You’ll cope.’

  ‘Jonathan said I could come back straight away,’ Robin protested. ‘He said I didn’t have to prove anything to anybody.’

  ‘But he doesn’t know you like I do. Now that you’ve come back, you’ve got far too much to prove to be able to go and sit still in Whelm for long.’

  ‘But I sat still there for years.’

  ‘You didn’t have much option,’ Luke said.

  He asked him when the christening was. That jogged Robin’s memory (which hadn’t been too strong since his return) and he realised he was already late for it. He told Luke he had to come too because he had every intention of making him see how dull and strange everyone had become and so convince him to take him back to Whelm. Robin’s memory had kept a hold on its list of public reference libraries and good bus routes, for some no doubt metaphysical reason, so they hopped on a double-decker and went to watch Perdita being made over to Jesus.

  Jake was waiting for him at the door. Robin had been slightly dreading this particular encounter. Luke had guessed this, typically. The bus pulled up right outside the Community Centre so Luke had time to see Jake standing there, to touch the back of Robin’s hand and say,

  ‘I’m here.’ Sweet of him, but useless, of course.

  Jake looked a little worn away, but then this was eight years, a career, a wife and two children beyond when Robin had seen him last. Jake’s hair was still all there and still curly. His face still bore a built-in apology. He still held his hands behind his back rather than put them in his pockets. He had lost, however, the immeasurable ingredient that had made his simple attractiveness an invitation to folly. Robin’s heart was sinking as they left the bus and he was all prepared to greet Jake with school-reunion sobriety to mask the awkwardness of having suffered a kind of death on his account. Then he met Jake’s eyes and felt this drastic, invisible alteration. He remembered that on their last, briefest encounter he had tossed Jake’s incalculably valuable final year essays into Jake’s full, hot bath, so he smiled instead, and deepened the apology on Jake’s face by introducing him to Luke with no explanation.

  ‘I’m glad you made it, Dob,’ Jake said, having shaken both their hands.

  ‘We’re unforgivably late,’ Robin told him.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Jake replied, with a twitch of a smile, and gestured for them to hurry in. Luke threw Robin a quick, accusatory glance as they paused in the aisle, a centre of attention. Robin pointed crossly to two empty chairs and they sat down.

  Robin looked around him. His parents were there. His mother was looking anxious and slightly reproachful, as she had been ever since Robin’s return. It had been something of a surprise to learn that she had been in regular communication with the Abbot; Robin had not realised that Whelm’s rule of honesty could be bent to allow the withholding of information from members of its community. Taking her lack of curiosity to mean that she had already been told all there was to know about his condition in the past few years, Robin told her nothing. It had come as a shock to find her beloved garden paved over and turned into a playground. He was touched to think that this revolution in their lives had been a direct result of his ‘almost-death’, but now that he was back the arrangement felt strained, as though his unlooked-for presence were throwing some delicate domestic equation out of true. The appalling, yappy Brevity was as much a son-replacement as the kindergarten and Robin felt bound to regard the dog with the chilly politeness of a resurrected first wife for her successor.

  Altogether charming, however, was the change in Dad. His last-ditch bid for eccentricity, throwing in his job at Warburg and Orff for a life of multi-cultural fairy tales and potato-printing, disarmed his son. Dad still wore spiritual pin-stripes, but he had proved himself human and slightly mad, which left Robin to draw the sentimental conclusion that he had been short-changing his father all his life. Determined to compensate in some way, he had begun a one-man campaign to get him back into an orchestra, even if only a local one. Every evening, after supper, he had forced him to sit down with his clarinet and practise. At first Dad had acted all embarrassed, treating it like a party-game humiliation, then he had tried to make feeble excuses about helping to wash the dishes or catching up with some television serial, then quite suddenly he had begun to practise without Robin’s bullying him. He was keen again. Mum still sang with her choir, after all and Robin decided that Dad envied her this.

  There was a girl beside his parents in the chapel, a twelve or thirteen-year-old, who seemed to be fast asleep. And beside her sat a man. He was black, about thirty and with an expression that could only be described as luminous. His skin was smooth, his nose perfectly Roman and he had a strong-willed, inviolate air like a piece of living propaganda for some difficult but beneficial philosophy. Robin could not stand the unreality of him so he tried to make him smile. He beamed at him without success at first but then, once they had mumbled through All Things Bright and Beautiful and the godparents were gathered around the font, Perdita roared so loudly that the priest had
to shout the bit about ‘grant that carnal affections may die in her’ to make himself heard. The service actually broke down for a moment. The congregation turned briefly into an audience and laughed out loud. Candida didn’t laugh, she was too busy trying to stifle the baby, and neither did Jake, who’d been in a satisfactory sulk throughout. But Robin laughed and he caught the black man’s eye again and made him smile back.

  Fifteen

  ‘Jasper, will you stop whining!’ begged Candida. ‘And let go of my skirt.’

  Jasper persisted in hanging on. The skirt was made of a delicate cotton and his hot little hands were crushing two fistfuls of it. Judging by the quantity of egg mousse around his mouth, they were probably staining it too. Candida’s mother, able once more to appear at the same functions as Candida’s father, now that the stepmother was thoroughly out of the way, had never been so welcome.

  ‘Need a hand, darling?’ she offered.

  ‘Oh, Ma. Could you?’

  ‘Come along, Jasper, poppet. Come and see your uncle’s smart new car,’ she wheedled.

  ‘Don’t want to,’ Jasper told the skirt. ‘Seen it. Ugly and … and very boring.’ The little tableau was beginning to attract an amused audience. First Perdita had played up, and now the ex-baby. Candida was close to cracking point.

  ‘Ma?’ she asked, dangerously.

  Ma stooped and took her grandson firmly by the armpits.

  ‘Lovely car,’ she assured him, ‘lovely German car!’, and bore him off.

  ‘At last!’ Candida clapped her hands together and laughed for the benefit of her onlookers. ‘Somebody give a mother a drink.’ Samantha was passing with two full glasses for somebody. Candida took one.

  ‘Oy!’ the nanny complained without thinking.

  ‘Thanks, Sam,’ said Candida and went on a tour of her party.

  Faced with the ghastly prospect of the St Thomas Community Centre, she and Jake had decided to invite only nearest and necessary to the service and to summon the rest straight to the house a little later. This also neatly saved neglected candidates for godparenthood the pain of seeing who had been chosen over them. There were about fifty guests in all: family, a clutch of good friends and then a crowd of broadcasting and advertising colleagues. The buffet laid out in the kitchen had been laid waste by the hungry and the disaffected. Candida came in to find something among the ruins to blot up her alcohol and surprised some children highly amused at something awful they were doing with a beef bone and some strawberries. She left them to it, drained as she was of grown-up rage, and grateful that at least they were occupied and in one easily washable place. She paused in the hall to sign a stranger’s plaster cast then carried on to the conservatory and the garden where most of the guests were surrendering to champagne and autumn sun.

  Her mother and father were burying their post-divorce differences in the conservatory swing seat, at least, her mother was burying their differences and her father seemed beyond either protest or withdrawal. She looked for Robin and found Jake instead. His cheeks were flushed in a way she would once have found sweet.

  ‘Hello, wife,’ he said and kissed her cheek.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Have you seen Robin?’

  ‘He’s sitting on the hammock with Faber Washington.’

  ‘Still?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve scarcely managed to get a word in. He looks well.’

  ‘Doesn’t he. Shame about the beard, it ages him so.’ She shifted so as to see the two men draped across opposite sides of the hammock as though it were a Victorian love-seat. Robin was laughing aloud at something, Faber Washington looking less certain. Andrea Maitland was watching her son too, from a deck-chair on the terrace. She turned, saw that Candida had seen her watching and smiled benevolence. Candida smirked and, feeling caught out, looked back to Jake. He had been poached by Peter Maitland, however, and drawn into some argument with one of the better-looking men among her researchers.

  Candida rose from the momentary vexation to her duties as a hostess. She snatched a passing, fullish bottle with a proprietorial grin and topped up a few glasses on her way to Andrea.

  ‘There you are,’ she said, emptying it into Andrea’s glass. ‘The luck of the bottle.’

  ‘Oh, no more children, please!’ Andrea begged.

  ‘Is that what it means?’

  ‘Usually. Unless you’re not married, in which case I think it’s meant to mean you’ll be married within the year. Like catching a bride’s bouquet.’

  ‘Was one child enough for you?’

  ‘I think so,’ Andrea said. Candida noticed that she wasn’t touching her glass and wished she had saved the champagne for herself. ‘They need so very much and every new child means a halving of whatever you have to give. Not that it isn’t perfectly lovely about Perdita …’ she added hastily and drank some champagne after all. Fast.

  ‘Mmm.’ Candida said. ‘I’ve had enough of my two for the moment.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Andrea and gave an unfocussed smile at the crowd beside them to fill the pause. ‘She did cry rather hard, poor thing,’ she added.

  ‘Certainly did,’ Candida agreed. ‘She’s asleep now and if she wakes before six, her grannies are welcome to her, bulging nappy and alt. Whose is that?’ She pointed at the blind girl, sitting in a corner of the garden on her own and reading in such sinister oblivion to the chatter around her.

  ‘Iras Washington. Faber’s daughter.’

  ‘Is it really? I didn’t recognise her. Of course, I haven’t seen her since Faber did the painting of me and Jasper; she was tiny then.’

  ‘That must have been when she was still coming to the kindergarten.’

  ‘Oh. She didn’t go to a … a special school?’

  ‘Not then. Faber and I agreed that it was best for her to be with sighted children. But she had to go in the end, not because of her disadvantage, just because she was so very brilliant.’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘Well, her brain is exceptional. She was learning to read with her braille tutor long before any sighted children of her age. I think it’s because she couldn’t fiddle around with pots of paint like the rest of them, she just jumped the picture stage and went straight to words.’

  ‘So keen to communicate?’

  ‘Exactly. But it hasn’t stopped there. The special schools teach them how to use computers now. I think the machines are basically word processors but the keyboard and print-out are in braille. Naturally, once they’ve learnt to tap away on a braille board you just have to plug them onto a traditional printer and, hey presto, communication. The thing is, little Iras has developed a flair for fiction.’

  ‘Sweet little stories?’ Candida picked a hair off her dress.

  ‘Far from it. Faber says she’s nearly finished her first full length novel and that it’s most alarmingly grown-up.’

  ‘How exciting!’

  ‘The trouble is that it’s cutting her off,’ Andrea went on with a wave of her hand. ‘As he says, it’s all very well for a writer of twenty-five to shut herself away in a garret, but at twelve she’s hardly in a position to know if she’s doing the right thing.’

  ‘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 p
eculiar 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.’