Little Bits of Baby Page 11

  ‘Could well be,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Your mum was just telling me about his daughter’s gifts,’ she told him, ignoring this.

  ‘Does he have a daughter?’

  ‘Yes. Adopted. Didn’t he tell you?’

  ‘Funny. No. He didn’t. We were talking about gods and baptisms and things. She’s a lovely baby,’ he added, with a kind smile.

  ‘No, she’s not. She’s vile.’

  ‘Well. She was fairly vile today, and no one’s baby looks especially appealing to start with.’

  ‘Perdita Margaux Browne is hideous,’ she heard herself say.

  ‘Who did think of that absurd name for her?’

  ‘Joint effort. I’d wanted a Perdita ever since doing Florizel in A Winter’s Tale in school, and Jake’s mother’s a Margaux.’

  ‘Is she, now.’ He looked across at the conservatory where Margaux Browne was now spreading herself for a talk with his own mother. ‘Yes. She looks like a Margaux.’ He stopped to pick a white rosebud which he tugged through a buttonhole of his black cotton jacket. ‘Candida, could I see that portrait again, the Faber Washington, now that I’ve met him?’

  ‘Of course. Come on. Shall I get the man himself to explain it to you?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘It doesn’t need explaining.’ He put an arm around her shoulder. ‘Let’s just go. Can we walk round and go in by the front door to miss all the people?’

  Still with his arm around her and with her daring to place her own around his waist, they half-circled the house.

  ‘This feels too good,’ she thought. ‘Why am I doing this?’

  ‘Thank you for coming today, Dob,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you for asking me. But I’m not Dob anymore, you know.’

  ‘Sorry. Robin, then. Why not Dob? I liked Dob.’

  ‘Why not Candy?’

  ‘I’ve become a media star. I haven’t been Candy since I was a researcher on Coffee Morning. Samantha calls me Candy, but she’s Australian. I call her Sam to get my own back.’

  ‘Who’s Samantha?’

  ‘The nanny.’

  Robin stopped on the landing and turned to her.

  ‘You have a nanny?’

  ‘And a cleaning lady on weekdays.’ She chuckled. ‘Isn’t it awful?’

  He carried on towards the painting.

  ‘It’s worse,’ he muttered. ‘Christ, it’s clever!’ he added, almost at once.

  ‘What?’ she asked, then saw that he meant the painting and shut up.

  It was a clever painting, catching the loving absorption of the scene even while rendering it with a certain coldness. She remembered distinctly the two mornings she had given up for preliminary sketches and photographs. Faber Washington had made housecalls in those days, like a doctor. In those days she had been as close as she ever came to abandoning all attempts at a career in order to sit back, have babies and woo Jake’s bosses; she had seemed so bad at work, so good at having babies. The old rocking-chair she sat on to nurse Jasper for the sittings had been disastrously restored last year. She realised too late that its principle charm had lain in the bad repair of its rushwork seat; in replacing this, she had wrecked the chair and remorse had forced her to remove it to the nursery.

  ‘Of course, it doesn’t look much like you,’ Robin said.

  ‘It looked like me then.’

  ‘Were you really that shape?’

  ‘I’d just had Jasper.’ She came to stand beside him. ‘It’s funny, but because I see it every morning and every night, I don’t really look at it any more. The only thing that I really notice now is how desperately dated those clumpy yellow sandals look.’

  ‘I helped you buy those.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she laughed. ‘From that hippy couple in the market.’

  ‘I bought some too, green ones.’

  ‘They had soles made from old car tyres. So comfortable. I lived in them.’

  ‘Candy lived in them.’

  ‘Mmm.’ She paused. ‘Dob?’

  ‘Robin.’

  ‘Robin?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you going back to Whelm very soon?’

  ‘Probably tonight.’

  ‘Oh. What a shame. I thought that perhaps …’

  ‘Hell!’ He started downstairs at a run. She followed him.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she called. Jake was in the hall, waving some friends of his off; mystery squash partners probably.

  ‘What’s the rush?’ he asked Robin, laughing. ‘Have we turned out so very unspiritual?’

  ‘Have you seen Luke?’ Robin asked, not laughing.

  ‘Who’s Luke?’ asked Candida, coming down beside them.

  ‘Dob’s friend from Whelm,’ Jake told her. ‘We had a good talk. He trained as an engineer before he … And he actually knows Lurking Kimberley – you know, that village where you saw the cottage you wanted to buy?’

  ‘Is he still here?’ Robin almost shouted.

  ‘We’re not to call him Dob anymore,’ said Candida in an undertone. People were coming in to find discarded jackets and bags.

  ‘No, he isn’t,’ Jake went on. ‘He went about ten minutes ago, said he had a train to catch, but he left a note for you on the table there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Over there,’ Jake pointed.

  Robin raced to the table, snatched up the note, swore and ran out of the open front door.

  ‘Something up?’ asked Candida’s father, drifting out of the sunshine by the same route.

  ‘Nothing at all, Julian,’ Jake told him. ‘One for the road?’

  Candida walked out onto the porch and watched Robin run halfway round the square then give up and walk back, red and panting, into the garden. Faber Washington was standing just inside the side gate and they fell into another conversation and drifted out of sight. She picked up the note he had dropped in his hurry.

  ‘You’ll cope, Robin,’ it said, then ‘Talk to Iras Washington sometime. Blessings. Luke.’

  She folded it several times, neatly, but on her way round the side of the house let it fall.

  Sixteen

  On one, sometimes two nights of the week, Andrea made her way from Clapham to a public hall in the City for choir practice. Since the traffic was always slow at that time, she would take the bus there rather than the dormobile. She enjoyed the opportunity this gave her to do nothing more strenuous than stare out of the window or read without shame one of the horror or crime paperbacks she bought for the purpose; something with a suggestion of violence on the cover.

  For all its bluff, amateur atmosphere, the choir was a much-praised and busy one. Attached to a major orchestra, it made something in the region of three records, two short tours and ten London appearances each year. The choir master was a professional, employed by the orchestra, but the singers were representatives of every world save the musical one. There was a high-court judge among the basses, a star of the tenor ranks was an Irish plasterer and one of the sopranos was a kind of orderly in the London Zoo monkey house. The group’s heterogeneity meant that it functioned like a masonic lodge; all manner of useful contacts could be made through friendly introductions, then cherished over the mid-rehearsal visit to the pub. When Peter was still a broker with Warburg and Orff, Andrea had often gleaned him helpful snatches of office gossip from judicious barside eavesdropping on two colleagues of his, a basso profundo director and a grim, comparatively young soprano called Melissa Something-Andrews who wore a grey velvet hairband and was one of the firm’s legal advisors. Elsewhere in the choir there were lawyers to consult, town planners, dentists, typists, architects, linguists, a women-only plumber, a mechanic who spoke fluent Dutch, three estate agents and a second-hand car dealer. A travel agent contralto regularly fixed members up with cut-price flights and an extremely pretty manicurist, who always kept a seat for her, seemed to have taken up singing simply for the thriving trade she ran in the half-hour before each rehearsal. There was even a priest among the barit
ones, said to be available for exorcisms and informal confessions.

  Andrea had joined as the last of her thirties were vanishing. Robin was a fairly grown-up teenager then, spending hours up in his room, working or deep in discussion with Candida. It was a time when many of Andrea’s contemporaries and their husbands were going through the same awkward patch – unneeded by children, frightened of admitting that either might be slightly bored with the other and anxious not to submit an ageing relationship too soon to the test of a return to life à deux. Apart from the obvious, and far from certain solution of taking in lodgers, one or the other’s widowed mother or a large, demanding pet, the awkwardness seemed most frequently neutralised by the adoption of time-honoured pastimes. With their back-to-school associations, hobbies (from embroidery to building matchstick cathedrals) and evening classes (in anything but Psychology for Beginners) laid the perfect foundation for the mock-virginity of late middle-age. The Maitland family’s garden had never been more than a long lawn with contented weeds and a few bushy roses around the edges so Andrea coaxed herself into taking up a trowel and for a while had tried to interest herself in bringing it up to neighbourhood scratch. Gardening only took over precious, inoffensive weekends, however, leaving bare the awful stretch of weekday evenings: frantically conversational suppers, from which Robin escaped as soon as possible, followed by four long hours of television, reading, or – most dreaded of prospects, – each other.

  It wasn’t that she was ever bored with Peter, not really, but as they were left increasingly alone together, she had sensed him growing bored with her. The gradual erosion of her few slender mysteries had been worrying enough during courtship – letting him discover what, if anything, she did with her spare time, what she ate, how often she washed her hair – but the destruction after marriage of almost all barriers save, in her case, the bathroom door, had been cause for major alarm. The idea of a weekly musical vacation from each other came to her from a bad historical novel she had borrowed from the library, just for a change, in which a young wife in Edwardian Middlesborough joined a madrigal society. The wife hoped that by gently arousing her husband’s jealous curiosity then restoring him her company after two hours’ deprivation, she could refresh her charms. Andrea’s charms for Peter lay as much, she was sure, in such perilously temporal areas as her bosom as in the quality of her mind. Determined not to spread herself too thin, she auditioned for the choir and was accepted.

  She finished the Middlesborough saga some weeks later, alarmed to find, too late, that the woman’s husband used her choral absences for hot dalliance with his step-sister and that she found true love and a second marriage with a dashing organist from Gwent.

  For some time Peter had been toying with the idea of reviving his clarinet-playing. When he announced that he, too, had been for an audition and would be playing with an amateur orchestra one night a week, she was mildly upset. Not only did his rehearsals happen on a night when she would be free, thus confirming her fears about his boredom, but it emerged that his percussion-playing secretary had suggested the audition, a complicity that smacked too much of Middlesborough. She could express nothing but delight, of course. It was only fair.

  On her night out (or nights out when the season was a demanding one), she took care to leave him her love in the shape of a meal complete with full serving instructions. She was ashamed to admit that, percussive secretary notwithstanding, she soon came to enjoy the nights when he was with the orchestra and it was her turn to be on her own. Robin would be there for supper (briefly as ever, but it gave them a chance to talk in a way that they never could in Peter’s presence) then she would lie on the sofa and make long phone calls around the family or watch a film or go to bed early and write letters there. Peter had expressed disappointment at being deprived of her company two evenings a week, but she suspected that this was no more than a handsome gesture and that he had as good a time on his own as she did – perhaps some whisky (this was before he gave up) and a radio play. He maintained that radio plays were far superior to anything television could offer, but could never listen to them with her around because she couldn’t focus her attention properly and would interrupt them with idle chat and amusing things she had forgotten to tell him over supper.

  When Robin left for university (which was effectively when he left home, so small were the spans of holiday he spent in Clapham) Andrea had let herself be drawn into a deeper involvement with the choir. She took time off from the nursery school in Barnes where she then worked, and went on singing tours of Denmark, Israel and Holland, not enjoying herself greatly, because she missed Peter, but writing him long, amused letters and assuming that such extended leave from her presence would be a treat for him. When the choir librarian took time off to have a baby, Andrea stood in for her then accepted the post full-time when her predecessor miscarried and defected to sing for the BBC. Not content with the considerable task of ordering, numbering, distributing and recovering music, Andrea stood for election soon after this and was voted Alto Representative. This was a sort of Head Girl post. Any alto unable to attend a rehearsal had to call her in advance to apologise, she had to organise lift rotas for altos stranded in the suburbs, take head-counts, issue disciplinary warnings to absentees, sell choir pencils to those who had forgotten to bring one, welcome new girls and acquaint them with the vagaries of the dress and attendance codes.

  When Robin ran away to become a monk and his childhood friend (to whom Andrea had shown such kindness, having her to stay for the entire summer holiday of her parents’ divorce) married Jake Browne, Peter had gone to pieces. At first he took a week’s holiday and, convinced that Robin had been brainwashed by some right-wing cult, had set about trying to get Abbot Jonathan to release him then, when that failed, trying to alert the police and press. Eventually, once Andrea was in communication with the Abbot, Peter accepted that Whelm was a bona fide religious community but the thought that his only child had rejected them both and the life for which they had so carefully nurtured him broke some inner support of his and he crumpled before Andrea’s eyes. He didn’t throw in his job and he wasn’t sacked; it was a compassionate in-between with an early pension. He gave up the orchestra soon after that, or was tactfully eased out of it. The idea of starting a kindergarten of her own had always been at the back of her mind and she had never got over her relief at the way he had seized on her suggestion and used it to climb out of his collapse.

  The visits to Marcus’s hospital bedside and trips to the gym were now Peter’s only regular outings from the house without his wife so, more than ever, Andrea clung to the choir as his important respite from her. She knew that he had no time in his life for fitting in any but the most self-effacing mistress. Inflamed by magazine articles, despite her intelligent scepticism, she nevertheless made half-jokes to Faber about her suspicions in the superstitious hope that these would defuse the risk.

  The evening was cloudy-hot and humid and, with thin windows twenty feet off the floor and impossible to open, the practice hall was almost entirely unventilated. To make matters worse, a nervous fug lingered from an exam held in there that afternoon. Andrea had arrived early, as usual, and helped the Honorary Secretary set out chairs. He was a bossily efficient administrator with a military bearing she suspected of being bogus. He had never been particularly amiable towards Andrea but tonight it seemed that no courtesy would suffice.

  ‘I say, you look well!’ he said, and ‘Easy now. We don’t want to strain that graceful back of yours,’ and then, ‘I’ll do the rest with young Tompkins, here. It’s so frightfully stuffy in here tonight. You sit down there and get on with your bookery.’

  So, perturbed but grateful, she sat at her table by the swing doors, reading some more of Blood Will Out and occasionally signed out copies of The Dream of Gerontius to those who had missed its first rehearsal last week. The heat had made people pink and short-tempered so it was possible that she was mistaken in detecting a strangeness in the manner of the altos she greete
d. The pianist arrived, deep in chortling conversation with the choirmaster, and the rehearsal began. The piece being a choral society standard, most of the singers knew it well and by half-time they had covered Gerontius’s dreamed death and run once, erratically, through the devils’ chorus. The men could leave early, it was announced, because the second half would be devoted to the women-only angelical sections.

  ‘However,’ the Honorary Secretary continued, ‘an EGM has been called for.’

  ‘What’s an EGM?’ Andrea’s neighbour asked her.

  ‘Extraordinary General Meeting,’ Andrea told her.

  ‘Presumably none of you gentlemen wants to come back from the pub just for that, so would anyone object if we held it now?’ said the Honorary Secretary. ‘Shouldn’t take too long.’ He looked around. There were questioning looks, not least from Andrea, but no objections. ‘Right,’ he said and cleared his throat. ‘I declare this extraordinary general meeting open. Mrs President?’

  The President, a soprano with an imposing manner and silver coiffure to match, rose to take the floor.

  ‘Very briefly,’ she said, ‘I’ve been asked to call an election for the post of Alto Rep. It seems that Andrea Maitland, who has served us well and long, has a challenger in the person of Maeve Mckechnie.’

  Andrea froze. She knew who Maeve Mckechnie was, of course, having welcomed her into the choir, but they had never spoken since then. Maeve Mckechnie went to a different, younger pub in the rehearsal interval and always sat in the back row, while Andrea sat at the front. Maeve Mckechnie had a close-knit circle of sharp-faced City-worker friends.

  ‘Now, if you ladies could both stand up briefly in case anyone doesn’t know which you are …’ Andrea stood and heard a giggle somewhere behind her, presumably where Maeve Mckechnie was standing. ‘Lovely,’ the President went on. Andrea’s cheeks were burning. This had never happened before; voice rep elections were only called on the announcement of a rep’s death or voluntary retirement. She could sense the awkwardness around her. ‘Right. You can both sit down, now.’ Andrea sat. The tenors and basses were muttering, some even chuckling in embarrassed disbelief at this palace revolution. She could meet no one’s eye but fixed her stare on the President’s clipboard. ‘Now, those voting for the present Alto Rep, Andrea Maitland, please raise a hand,’ the President asked. Andrea felt hands rise close by, but the President’s counting didn’t take long. ‘Thank you. And now, those voting for the new candidate, Maeve Mckechie?’ She began to count then said, ‘Only one hand,’ which raised a giggle. ‘Thank you. Now, any abstainers.’ There were several abstainers, kindly embarrassed at so public a taking-of-sides. ‘There,’ said the President with a satisfied smile, totting up figures on her clipboard. Her nickname, doubtless known to and enjoyed by her, was HRH. ‘Now Andrea, do we have any absentees today?’