Little Bits of Baby Read online

  While Perdita sucked and slopped, Candida tried, as she always did when breastfeeding, to relax and think of cool white spaces. She succeeded for a few minutes but then Perdita stopped to draw breath. Candida looked down at her and felt herself blush hotly to the roots of her hair. The softly panting daughter’s stare was condemning an idea that had barely formed in the mother’s mind.

  Twelve

  A week later Jake was walking the few hundred yards to their local church to greet the first arrivals. Candida was having problems fitting Perdita into the ancestral christening gown. Thrilled at the sudden revival in their children’s respect for faith and tradition, and at the prospect of a party, both sets of in-laws had descended. All four grandparents had arrived early and had come to the house instead of waiting at the church, as directed. The grandmothers were cooing and meddling around the furious candidate for baptism. Their husbands, each a dangerous shade of red, took turns at pushing Jasper on his swing. Jake was meant to have brought these three with him but had slipped out of the kitchen door without a gardenwards glance.

  The building was a Georgian one. At least, its shell was Georgian; the original insides had been burned down long ago by a discarded German bomb and replaced, with little eye for architectural sympathy, by a consortium of counsellors in the 1960s. Unversed, Candida and Jake had blithely assumed that any church would be free for a quick weekend baptism, and had set their hearts on somewhere rather finer than the St Thomas Community Centre, only to be made the ignominious offer, kindly meant, of a service shared with three other babies. The religious functions of Saint Thomas’s were now contained in a small, glass-walled box draped with orange hessian curtains and furnished with matching plastic chairs. The rest of the building housed a community hall and the local Citizens’ Advice Bureau. A large noticeboard in the portico where Jake stood to wait flapped with details of weekly events held there: Gay Self-Defence (Women Tuesdays, Men Wednesdays); something called Aerobicise; bicycle maintenance classes; sitar appreciation classes; eurhythmics (introductory Thursdays, intermediary Friday) and Meditation Made Easy. The Woodcutter Folk (which Jasper wanted to join, apparently) took the place over on Saturday mornings. Across a poster for a concert by the Stockwell Glee Club someone had printed with a large rubber stamp in lurid green ink,

  Make the Switch!

  Drop the Bitch!

  Eat the Rich!

  Jake tucked this out of sight behind an immensely comfortable Indian’s invitation to join the way of truth.

  The Maitlands were the first friends to arrive. He heard the full-chested banging of an old Volkswagen engine, looked up and saw their much-patched, first-generation dormobile rolling to a halt beneath the dusty lime trees. He had not laid eyes on Andrea since Robin’s twenty-first birthday dinner, when she had tried to place him between two godparents and Robin had made a fuss and insisted he sit beside him. She had aged since then. She had let her hair begin to grey and had lost her firmness of outline, but she had still the kind of vigorous buoyancy that won children’s trust and made the more youthful of her contemporaries seem faintly overdone. Peter looked hot in his suit beside her. Robin was not with them. Jake thought of their secret squash games.

  The roles have reversed, he thought. Now I’m his bit on the side and this is his innocent wife.

  ‘Hello, Jake,’ said Andrea, taking his hand and drawing him closer. ‘How lovely.’ She kissed his cheek.

  ‘Mrs Maitland. Mr Maitland,’ said Jake. ‘It’s been so long.’

  ‘Peter and Andrea, now, I think,’ said Peter and winked.

  ‘I see you’ve still got the old dormobile.’

  ‘“Devon Caravette”, please!’ laughed Andrea. ‘Yes. It’s a collector’s item, now. Some total strangers asked to buy it the other day. I was in a car park somewhere. They said they were surfers. They were very brown, so I suppose they might have been. Too funny really.’

  ‘Is Robin not with you?’ Jake asked them.

  ‘Oh, of course. You poor thing. He’s the reason we’re here. You must be so worried,’ she said. ‘But don’t be. He’s only disappeared for a bit.’

  ‘Disappeared?’

  ‘Well,’ Peter went on, ‘not disappeared exactly. Just gone out. He’s been doing this all week. We wake up and he’s not there. Then he turns up halfway through the afternoon with a little bag from some museum or a bunch of flowers for Andrea and says he’s been for a walk. Not to worry. He’ll be here in time.’

  ‘I made sure he had the address,’ added Andrea. ‘And he’s bought himself one of those watches you don’t have to wind.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘From a man with a suitcaseful in Leicester Square.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘I won’t, then.’

  They stood between two pillars and stared briefly at the road.

  ‘Lovely looking church,’ said Andrea. ‘I’ve passed it so many times and I’ve never thought to get out and look inside.’

  ‘It’s a bit of a disappointment, I’m afraid,’ Jake told her. ‘I think it was gutted by fire in the Blitz, or something.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ She brushed a hair from Peter’s shoulder. ‘Is Candida inside?’

  ‘Actually, no. She was having a bit of trouble with Perdita’s dress – one of those long, ancestral things – so she asked me to come on and usher you all in. In point of fact I haven’t even seen the priest yet.’

  ‘Nice and relaxed,’ said Peter. ‘That’s the spirit.’

  They stood a little longer, then Andrea said,

  ‘Well, we’ll go on in and have an exploring session.’

  ‘OK,’ said Jake. ‘Our part is just inside on your left. You can’t miss it. It’s the bit with all the orange curtains and the concrete font.’

  Andrea patted his forearm, smiled at him with Robin’s smile and said,

  ‘So good to see you looking so well, Jake.’

  ‘Yes,’ added Peter, following her. ‘Fit as a fiddle as ever, I’d say,’ and he winked again.

  Jasper arrived next, buttoned at protest into a grey flannel suit with short trousers and a sky blue bow-tie. He had his grandfathers in tow, both looking the worse for wear and in need of a drink. Jake caught his father long enough to tell him that Jasper’s teachers were inside. Sure enough the two older men emerged in a while on their own and pottered around the side of the building with furtive chuckles and a flash of silver hip-flask. His father could drink like a sponge but had an unfortunate tendency to lead weaker tipplers on. After a while the pair returned, greatly relaxed, and proceeded to chortle over the community centre notices, one by one, back on common ground for the first time since the occasion when one of them had been paying so handsomely for the wedding of the other’s son.

  Several cars arrived in quick succession. The first bore Jake’s sister Tessa, who was to be a godmother, and her husband and toddler. They had given a lift to Tessa’s painter friend, Faber and his daughter Iras. (Jake was frightened of blind people and found he couldn’t look Iras Washington in the face, precisely because she was unable to return his gaze.) Then there was the priest. At last. He was a bouncy, overweight man in a collar and tie whom Jake had only spoken to by telephone. His tie was red leather, his crucifix a discreet gold lapel badge. He was late, he said, because none of the local shops stocked anything but birthday-cake candles. He did his well-meaning best to chuckle over the same things as the grandfathers then went inside to find candlesticks. The nanny, Samantha, came next with some Australian friends who had been helping her get things ready for the party. They were closely followed by Candida, a wailing Perdita in her arms and a grandmother guarding each flank. Jake told Candida that Robin had gone missing but she was already cross beyond caring.

  ‘Give him ten, then come in and we’ll start,’ she said. ‘After all, it’s not vital we have him in the church. It’s only a ceremony. He’ll still be her godfather.’

  Jake started to protest that it was precisely be
cause of Robin that they were bothering to gather together so untypically in the sight of God at all, but she had gone in, leaving him to wait for Robin, and the grandmothers to marshal their husbands in before them.

  When Robin did appear, in the ninth minute, it was on a double-decker. Jake failed to recognise him at first because of his beard. He only guessed it was Robin because, although he was in jeans and tee-shirt, he was accompanied by a young monk in a pale grey habit and sandals.

  ‘Sorry we’re late,’ Robin called out when they were still yards away. ‘Luke kept telling me we should take a taxi, but I knew there was a bus that came right past here so we just had to wait and see.’

  ‘He was right, of course,’ said the young monk. ‘Was he always right when … when you knew him?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jake. ‘As I recall. Hello, Robin.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Robin. ‘This is Brother Luke.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake!’ laughed Luke and nudged him. ‘Just Luke would be fine,’ he told Jake with a smile. Jake shook his hand.

  ‘Luke was sent by the Abbot to spy on me,’ said Robin. ‘We are horribly late, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Candida and Perdita already in there?’

  ‘Very.’

  Robin pulled a comic-apologetic face and took Luke’s elbow.

  ‘We’d better get in, then. See you afterwards?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Jake.

  He lingered to check the guest list for anyone else who should have arrived, Candida had written ‘P.O.’ for ‘Party Only’ by all the remaining names, so he turned inside. Robin had acted as though their separation were a matter of hours not years. Jake was uncertain whether to be hurt or touched. He decided on reflection to be hurt.

  Thirteen

  It was the first time that Faber had set foot in a church for anything but a concert or an exhibition since the funeral of a close friend in America some years ago, just before he’d adopted Iras. His house was a church of sort, (the Elim Temple of the Pentecost, no less,) but it was deconsecrated and so didn’t count. He was uncertain whether the St Thomas Community Centre should count either. The building had been cheaply divided up into office-like units. The chapel was little more than a foursquare greenhouse. Orange hessian curtains were clearly intended to dampen the acoustics and to stop the room from becoming too hot, but were draped in the wrong places, so failed in either duty. The altar was a pine table and the font, tucked in one corner, could have come from a nearby garden centre. He was to gather from a conversation with the priest over lunch that the complete lack of ornament in the place was due to the council’s original intention to use it as ‘multi-denominational Church of the World’.

  He spotted the Maitlands as soon as he entered. The obnoxious Jasper Browne was standing on the chair in front of them, telling what looked like a complicated story involving the picture he had just scribbled inside a hymn-book. Jasper raised the volume indignantly when Andrea turned away from his narration and saw Faber. She smiled and mouthed,

  ‘Hello!’

  Iras had insisted on coming out without her stick this morning. Thrown by the sudden violent change in acoustic, she clutched his arm as they crossed the church. Jasper broke off his story to stare at her and seemed on the point of making some unintelligent enquiry. Luckily his Aunt Tessa had finished gently berating her father about something and was coming across to claim a kiss from her nephew.

  ‘Jasper!’ she said, ‘What a grown-up suit!’

  With an understanding smile at Andrea, she swooped on the child, kissing his brow and bore him away to say hello to his uncle. Briefly transformed by vanity, he submitted.

  Andrea and Peter changed seats to make room for Faber and Iras.

  ‘Ignorant little boy,’ said Iras quietly, using ‘boy’ as a term of insult.

  ‘Hello, Faber,’ said Peter. He reached across to shake hands after which his wife kissed Faber’s cheek. Sat between them, Iras kissed the air in mimicry and received a kiss in turn.

  ‘That’s a pretty dress, you’ve got on,’ Andrea told her.

  ‘Is it?’ she said. ‘Good. Is this going to take very long?’

  ‘Not very,’ Andrea promised.

  ‘I thought you wanted to come,’ said Faber.

  ‘Well, I did. Quite. I’ve never been to a christening. What’s it for?’

  ‘Well,’ said Peter, ‘People who believe in the devil and think that babies need protecting from him ask friends of theirs to promise to fight the devil on the baby’s behalf.’

  Iras snorted.

  ‘Is that all?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, no,’ said Andrea, flicking through her old prayerbook, ‘they promise other things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Er … Let’s see.’ She found the appropriate page. ‘Because the baby can’t do the talking for herself they promise, in her name, to “renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh, so that they will not follow nor be led by them”.’

  ‘I see,’ said Iras, cynical beyond her years. ‘What then?’

  ‘Then they reaffirm their belief in God and Christ and so on – they have to be confirmed Christians …

  ‘Is Robin a confirmed Christian?’ Peter interrupted.

  ‘Now that you mention it, we never had him done. He was christened, of course, but when the school asked if he wanted confirmation class he said no – don’t you remember? But of course, he’s a Christian now. I think.’ A quick look of awful doubt spread across her face and she swept it aside with a smile and a brief sigh to Iras. ‘What else?’ she said. ‘Well … That’s it really. Except they promise on the baby’s behalf to “keep God’s holy will and commandments, and walk in the same all the days of their lives”. Then the Priest splashes the baby’s head and makes the sign of the cross on it with Holy water.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Water that he’s already made the sign of the cross over, I suppose. Water he’s blessed.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Iras, and stifled a yawn.

  ‘Then we go back to Perdita’s house and have a party,’ Faber told her.

  ‘Can I drink wine there?’

  ‘If you’re extremely good, I might let you have a thimbleful.’

  ‘Good. Do you mind if I read a bit now?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  Faber smiled over her head at Andrea as, with the air of one who has wearied of amusing her juniors, she opened her braille edition of Bleak House, found her place and began to read.

  ‘Where’s Robin?’ he asked her as the wailing of a baby announced the arrival of mother and child causing all heads but Iras’s to turn in reflexive, smiling unison.

  ‘Don’t know,’ muttered Andrea. ‘Poor baby’s hideous,’ she whispered then went on, ‘I think he’s gone for a walk.’

  ‘He’ll be here soon,’ Peter assured them half-heartedly, deep in a perusal of a copy of the parish notes.

  ‘He’s getting through so much pocket money,’ she muttered. ‘I wouldn’t mind – he’s looking for a job, after all – but he will keep giving it all away to people.’

  ‘What people?’ Faber asked.

  ‘Anyone. People in cafés. Sad people. Beggars, mostly. All those pathetic girls with dirty babies you see around Trafalgar Square. That’s why he’s always late. He empties his pockets to a succession of hard-luck stories then has to walk home. Too sweet.’

  ‘But a trifle irritating,’ Peter added.

  Andrea had paid several visits to the Elim Temple of the Pentecost since Robin’s return, to sit at Faber’s kitchen table and wail. It seemed that all the maternal concerns that she had kept in abeyance for the past eight years had returned on the same train as her son. She found herself worrying about the strength of his vocation, about where he was all day and whether he was eating enough, about whether she and Peter should not perhaps be more interfering, about the many ways
in which Robin had changed and the many ways in which, alas, he had not. On his side of the studio, Faber would continue to paint and, growing increasingly dissatisfied with this man he had still to meet, assure her that Robin was nearly thirty and therefore old enough to look after himself. Yesterday she had come around in the evening, ostensibly to show off the blouse she had just bought for the baptism, but actually to moan. And Faber had made her cry. He told her that it was too late in the day to be worrying about Robin, that, if she really cared, she should have intervened eight years ago instead of blithely accepting that yes, her perfectly healthy, intelligent, atheist son had suddenly decided to join a strange monastic community unrecognised by the established churches. She had cried, he had given her a gin and had ended up letting her telephone Peter to say that Faber had asked her to stay for supper. Now Faber watched the priest lighting candles and considered that, having been such a good neighbour all week, it was meet and right that he find himself in a church at the end of it.

  Candida was in place in the front row. Her mother and another woman of similar age and mould whom Faber assumed to be Jake’s, sat beside her, alternately trying to hush Perdita’s indignation and offering advice as to how the other could best do so. An enormous West Indian, whose suit gleamed in the sunlight and could barely contain him, had already run through the brief span of his devotional repertoire on the electric piano. He had played his version of I Vow to Thee my Country for the second time and was now starting on what sounded suspiciously like a Dusty Springfield number in a sort of devotional shawl. When a young monk came in accompanied by a skinny man with an Elizabethan beard, Iras had begun to hum along with the music rather too loudly. Faber’s assumption that the young monk was Robin was confirmed by a ripple of interest through the scant congregation and by Andrea, who reached across Iras to tap Faber’s leg and nod encouragingly in the new arrivals’ direction.

  They sat a row ahead, across the aisle. The bearded man muttered something to Robin and the two of them turned round, smiling, to look at Andrea and Peter. The parents fell to whispering as soon as their son had turned to the front again. The bearded man didn’t turn away. He had seen Faber and was staring. Faber stared back and was about to be offended when the spell was broken by Jake walking rapidly down the aisle between them to take his place by his wife. The bearded man glanced up at Jake then back to Faber, smiled at this invitation to conspiracy then faced the front. He had china-blue eyes, like a baby’s. With the lower part of his face masked in beard, their blueness and their small wings of laughter lines were thrown into sharp relief.