Little Bits of Baby Read online

  ‘There’s your old clarinet,’ Robin said. Crouching, he pushed aside a pile of much-mended lilos and tugged a brown clarinet case from under a bunch of magazines tied with string. ‘What’s it doing up here?’

  ‘Well … I … After you …’

  ‘You haven’t given up?’ Peter nodded. ‘But why?’ In its tone of slightly aggressive concern, he heard that, behind the beard, his son’s voice was unchanged. He wished he had sold the clarinet, or hidden it better. It was a painful subject.

  ‘Well. Yes. I suppose I have, really,’ he confessed.

  ‘But what about the orchestra? You used to enjoy it so much. You said it gave you something to look forward to in the office.’

  ‘I didn’t want to give it up, but they suddenly held a load of auditions and they found someone better than me, younger too. Not hard for them, really. So to make it less abrupt they said they were having to cut down on numbers to save expenses with hiring music and so forth. I didn’t fail my audition but they’d obviously decided to replace me with the new chap as they demoted me to third clarinet.’

  ‘Christ, that was mean!’

  ‘There isn’t often a call for a third clarinet, you see.’ Robin, again not listening, had opened the box and was taking the pieces out, trying to remember how to slip them together.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Play me something.’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly.’

  ‘Yes, you could.’

  ‘Careful. You’re not doing that quite right. Don’t force it. Here. Let me.’ Peter took the instrument. Why was he doing this? The boy had barely arrived. The man had barely arrived and he was about to sit down and squawk at him from an old clarinet. Robin had always had the knack of making him look foolish in the kindest possible way. ‘I’ve forgotten everything,’ Peter went on.

  ‘No, you haven’t. You’re putting it together perfectly. I’m sure it’s like riding a bicycle. Play me that Mozart thing you used to do.’

  ‘Which? The bit from the Quintet? It’s far too long since I …’

  ‘All right. Peter and the Wolf, then. Play me the cat’s bit from that.’

  ‘Well, pass me the reeds. No. In that little box down the side. That’s it.’ Peter picked over the reeds his son had passed him. ‘They’re all dried out and cracked,’ he said.

  ‘No excuses. Go on.’

  He sighed and fastened one in. The instrument had a smell of locked-away spittle about it. It felt utterly familiar in his grasp, even though he had not touched it for over four years. After licking a few times at the reed to soften it he gave a few exploratory blows and a stab at a chromatic scale because he found a hazy memory that those used to make Robin smile. Sure enough, crouched on the floor against a tea-chest, like a ten-year-old in a beard from the dressing-up box, Robin was smiling. It was like riding a bicycle, even with such a dilapidated reed. Peter cleared his throat,

  ‘The Cat,’ he announced, ‘from Peter and the Wolf.’

  Ten

  Andrea felt sick. She had been feeling sick anyway from eating several gingernuts too many but then Brevity had made things worse by falling prey to diarrhoea on the way home (a direct result of Faber having fed her gingernuts, too). Because Brevity had long hair, this involved a certain amount of wrinkle-nosed mopping up with a newspaper filched from a litter bin. Her dog had responded to this indignity by dragging all the way home, leaving Andrea to smirk her innocence at accusatory passers-by.

  ‘I think she’s trying to say “No”,’ chirped one.

  ‘Ahh. Poor little thing!’ sighed another.

  She couldn’t have felt less like eating lunch and thought of telling Peter that she had eaten something at Faber’s. He had done the shopping then disappeared somewhere. She quickly liquidised some left-over vegetables in a jug of stock and set the resulting soup to heat on the stove. In a few brisk turns around the kitchen she found a loaf of suspiciously over-fragrant supermarket bread, a bagful of cheeses that needed finishing up, a dish of butter and a bowl of fruit. She stirred the boiling soup, slid it to a back burner to simmer then went in search of Peter, Brevity close behind.

  In their days as a family of three, days when she had made more of an effort with her cooking (going to cookery classes on Tuesday evenings and tossing off soufflés or glamorous puddings without blinking), days when there were always friends, relatives or children around for meals, she would stand in the hall and simply yell to announce a meal. Similarly, Peter or Robin would yell when a programme was about to start on television, when there was someone at the door or on the telephone for her or simply when he wanted to know where she was. Ever since Candida’s tear-choked call to say that there had been a silly misunderstanding and that Robin had disappeared without trace, the yelling had stopped and the number of casual visitors had fallen off. Suddenly it seemed brutal to yell when there were only the two of them there, and each would spend minutes of every day in padding round the house in quiet search of the other.

  The basement was wholly given over to the kindergarten and the Señoritas Fernandez’s kitchen. Andrea toured the ground floor (effectively a first floor, it was so raised) looking into the dining-room, that doubled as Peter’s study, and the drawing-room. No Peter; only, here and there, a dirty coffee cup or expired newspaper that she gathered on the move and returned to the kitchen. She was on her way to look in her study on the floor above when she heard him playing the clarinet in the loft.

  He had been playing the clarinet when they first met. She was a soprano in the student choral society and at the dress rehearsal for a college performance of The Dream of Gerontius, found herself sitting right behind him. He had turned round and smiled at her, although they had never met, and asked if he might borrow the Hemingway she was clutching. She passed him the book, he read it during his rests, and then invited her for a coffee at the student’s union when the rehearsal was over. He had given up the instrument for stockbroking until one of the firm’s secretaries (a percussionist) dragged him to a successful audition for a City orchestra – one of those organisations battening upon the wealth of talent, and ready cash, languishing in the insurance and finance firms. After they lost Robin, Peter had given up again. The orchestra had let him stay on, although he was no longer a broker, but he claimed that he was fed up with having to explain that he had hung up his pinstripes to go footpainting with toddlers. It made him feel a freak, he said. Rather, the weekly contact with his old world made him feel a fool for not having started footpainting earlier. Andrea still belonged to a choral society (which happened to be rehearsing The Dream of Gerontius at the moment) but her husband’s clarinet had been shut away in the loft.

  Andrea continued her climb and stopped at the foot of the ladder into the roofspace. Brevity started barking. She had to pick her up to silence her.

  ‘Peter?’ she called. The music stopped. There was whispering then he called back,

  ‘Coming,’ and there were footsteps. ‘Here. Can I pass you this?’ he said and held out the clarinet through the hatch.

  ‘I thought you’d given up,’ she said, gingerly mounting the lower few steps of the ladder to reach it.

  ‘So did I,’ he said. ‘And this?’ He passed her down the instrument’s case. The dust lay thickly on the once-black fabric, like a bluish fungal coating. ‘Here I come,’ Peter announced, and clambered down. His trousers were slipping down at the back. Andrea noted that it was now his turn to be taken shopping for underwear.

  ‘Lunch is ready,’ she said. ‘I had a bite to eat with Faber, but I’ll keep you company with an apple or something.’

  ‘And here,’ he continued, ignoring her, ‘is a surprise for you.’

  ‘Where?’ she asked. ‘Did you manage to find a bedside light for Dob?’

  ‘Damn. I left it up there,’ he said.

  ‘OK,’ said someone else. ‘I’ve got it.’

  A man started out of the hatch. He was all in black; black suede shoes, black jeans and a black cotton turtle-neck. He was thin
– the jeans bagged slightly in the bottom – and he had a short, black beard. All manner of explanations suggested themselves.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ he said and she recognised a grin and wrinkled eyes.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘Kiss me.’ She set Brevity down, who sniffed him suspiciously, and he stepped forward to kiss her. The beard tickled. He needed a bath.

  ‘What in God’s name is that?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s Brevity,’ said Peter, stroking the dog protectively.

  ‘You’re early,’ Andrea said. ‘We weren’t expecting you so soon. Oh, Robin, nothing’s ready! And that light!’ She gestured at a terrible lamp Peter had once made from a Chianti bottle which she had only recently managed to banish. Well. Three years ago. ‘Peter, we can’t let him have that. Isn’t there a ..?’

  ‘I like it,’ said Robin, touching her arm above the elbow. ‘Honestly.’

  ‘We must make your bed,’ she went on, starting down the stairs. He was so thin. ‘I haven’t even hoovered in there.’

  ‘I did it last week,’ Peter piped up. ‘Let’s have some lunch first, anyway. What are we having?’

  ‘Soup,’ she told him. ‘My God! I left it on the stove. Would you be a saint and rush down and turn it off for me? It’s full of beans and things. They’ll be burning on the bottom of the saucepan.’

  ‘God,’ said Peter and hurried past them. Them. There were three of them again. ‘Have you looked round?’ she asked, stopping at the next landing.

  ‘No. I’ve barely got here. I came straight up to have a pee and then heard Dad tramping around under the eaves. You’ve had it painted.’

  ‘Well, it was in a terrible state. The whites had all gone a sort of custardy colour.’

  Robin pushed open his bedroom door.

  ‘In here too,’ he said.

  ‘I thought you were a bit grown-up for that bright yellow now,’ she said. They had painted his room pale blue. ‘But I kept all your posters and things. They’re on top of the chest of drawers. And look. We found you this lovely old mirror in a shop in Brixton. The gilt’s a bit chipped but it’s rather fun.’

  ‘But I wasn’t here, Mum,’ he said, walking to look across at the treetops from his window. He murmured something to himself like, ‘Beech tree still there.’

  ‘But you hadn’t got married or died or anything,’ she replied and sat heavily on the edge of the bed. It was an extra long one they had bought for a sixteenth birthday surprise from a man in Exchange and Mart. ‘And I couldn’t stand having it all unchanged and waiting up here, with that yellow. Sunflower yellow had got so dated. I didn’t want a time warp across the landing from us. It made me feel old. I’d see it every morning and remember the three of us sloshing it up.’

  ‘Four of us. Candida helped.’

  ‘So she did.’

  ‘She wore dungarees and nothing else and you pretended to be shocked and Dad went all quiet.’

  He tugged down the top half of the window then sat on the battered ottoman against the sill and regarded her with an alarming blankness.

  ‘You’re lovely and brown, Dob,’ she said.

  ‘All that gardening and sea air,’ he told her. ‘But please don’t call me Dob anymore. I think it went out with Sunflower Yellow.’

  ‘Sorry. Robin.’ She ran a finger through the dust on Peter’s clarinet case, watching it furl into a tiny roll beneath her touch. ‘You haven’t become Brother something-or-other, have you?’ she asked slowly.

  ‘No,’ he said and she recognised his grin again. ‘I’m still just Robin. Do you like my beard?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘It makes you look rather like Jesus.’

  ‘Is that a bad thing?’ he asked, rising.

  ‘I’m not sure. I like you in black, though. Very smart.’

  ‘Thank you.

  He sat on the bed against the headboard, swung up his legs and bounced.

  ‘Robin, darling?’

  ‘Mmh?’

  ‘I wish you’d written more. I wish you’d written at all.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You weren’t worried or anything?’

  ‘Well a bit. Mainly I was hurt.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t apologise.’

  ‘Why not?’ He stood again and went to finger the frame of his new, old mirror. ‘It was nice to get them. I couldn’t always bear to read them, though. When you’re so far away, so cut off … outside news gets to seem a bit … well.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘No, you don’t. Usually I get Luke to read them – he’s a novice – he gives me a brief summary.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Sometimes he cheats, though, and sneaks in a whole paragraph of your own writing. It’s a kind of game.’ He turned to face her and she decided that she did like the beard. He looked strangely like an Edwardian photograph of his grandfather, who was a priest. ‘Why haven’t you visited me, then?’

  ‘Jonathan – the Abbot – said it was better if we didn’t. I came once. Your father …’

  ‘How do you know he’s called Jonathan?’ he cut in.

  ‘He told me to call him that. We talk sometimes. On the phone. I came to see you once, on your open day. But you’d gone sailing.’

  ‘You should have told me you were coming. I’d have stayed in for you and got someone to bake a cake.’

  ‘I did. I wrote about it at least twice. It was awful. I sat in your room all morning then went to have communal lunch with all the other visitors and their friends and had to make polite chit-chat and try not to cry and then I went back to your room and waited some more. It was a very long sailing trip.’

  ‘We went once around the Isle of Wight.’

  ‘Do the monks often go sailing?’

  ‘No. Only once every two years, when they cross to Corry – more than that if there’s an emergency and they have to go home. I’ve got a special dispensation, more like an honorary post.’

  ‘Oh. That’s nice. Do you really want that Chianti light in here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s ghastly.’

  ‘I like it. Oh. And I forgot.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This is for you.’ He dug in his bag and pulled out a piece of beeswax, still indented with tiny hexagons, wrapped around a wick to form a simple candle. It smelt delicious.

  ‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘Thank you, darling.’

  ‘It’s from your friend Jonathan.’

  She started to pull at the clarinet in an attempt to take it apart.

  ‘I’d better put this away before someone sits on it,’ she said and heard herself sigh.

  ‘No. Let me.’ He half ran across the room and crouched at her feet. She sat while he used her lap as a table on which to dismantle the thing and put it away. She had a sharp burst of memory.

  He was eleven. He had almost finished building an intricate plastic model of a human skeleton, bought with a postal order sent for his birthday by some harassed godparent. She had been sitting at the kitchen table flicking through a magazine. She could even see its colours again: bright yellows, electric plastic blues. A copy of Honey or, given his age, probably Good Housekeeping. He walked solemnly in, wearing shorts held up with a snake-belt, and handed her the sinister ‘educational’ model.

  ‘Hold it steady,’ he commanded her. ‘I’ve left the cranium till last. You can put that on. It’s not like a real cranium, of course, because real craniums don’t have a hook in them for hanging us up by. Now. Hold the rest of it. No. Like that.’ She held the skeleton gently around its slithery ribs. He dug in his pocket for the tube of glue and smeared some around the open bowl of the skull then passed her the cranium. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Put it on. No, silly. That way.’ She held the cranium in place. ‘That’s it. Now. You’ve got to hold it for at least forty seconds.’ Then they had exchanged broad smiles and he had wandered out into the garden leaving her with a headful of glue fumes and a handful of mortality.

  When he ha
d finished putting away the clarinet her lap was grey with dust. He tried to brush it off but, flustered, she pushed his hand away and stood. She became aware of a strong smell of burnt lentils and felt her hunger revive.

  ‘Come on,’ she said and they left his room to air. Down below Peter called out,

  ‘Lunch, you two!’ then coughed, embarrassed at the unfamiliarity of shouting.

  Eleven

  On her way home from work, Candida asked the studio car to stop off at a florist’s before they crossed the river. There were people coming to dinner and there was nothing in the garden but lavender, maggoty apples and a lot of tired foliage. She heaped the counter with lilies, birds of paradise and some elegant, sword-shaped leaves from a South American country where they executed children for sedition. On television this morning she had looked chic but humane while a revolutionary Catholic priest and his interpreter told her about this country’s latest outrage, which was why the name on the box caught her eye as a florist filled a bucket with them. She also picked out an unusual large blue cactus and asked for it to be delivered to her secretary, Jason, who was turning thirty-two tomorrow. Then she paid with plastic, gave out a couple of autographs and sank with her dripping parcel into the back of the car.

  Quite apart from the spectacular money (which, frankly, left her cold), the only compensations for starting her particular work at dawn were riding to and fro from her job in a studio car and being able to do so before the morning and evening rush hours. Even had her celebrity not proved a problem with the other parents, she preferred to keep meetings with Andrea and Peter Maitland to a minimum. While she was often far too tired to do much more than kiss Jasper and admire the latest soi-disant painting, she made a point of at least being in the house when his nanny brought him home. Candida found her nannies through Lady Canberra’s, an agency that specialised in tireless, healthy Australian girls who replaced each other each year and so had no time to grow overly fond of child, husband or house. Her nannies never drove Candida’s car, although it went unused during the day. Instead, she had bought them a customised jeep, safe for driving Jasper to kindergarten and parties, practical for carrying out the heavy shopping duties that fell to them in his absence. The agency insisted on a weekday off for its girls so, once a week, Jake would drop Jasper off and Candida would pick him up. At least, she would park her car across the road and he, well trained, would slip away discreetly and get in.