Tiny Acts of Love

by Lucy Lawrie

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I hissed at Jonathan, who was rubbing his hair dry with a greyish-white, fraying towel he’d found in the cupboard. ‘We can’t stay here!’

  ‘We’ll have to, Cassie-Lassie,’ he said.

  After negotiating the dark corridor and the holey floorboards once more, we found Tom downstairs in the kitchen. It was a large, country house-style kitchen, warmed by a dark green Aga. We knew that he’d made all the kitchen units himself from some rare and wonderful wood, and we made the appropriate appreciative noises.

  He was stirring something pungent on the stove.

  ‘I’m making a shellfish stew. I should have checked, actually – are you okay with shellfish?’

  ‘Lovely.’ Even the thought of shellfish made me shudder. Luckily I’d brought some of Sophie’s jars with me, so she would be okay. Maybe I could sneak a few mouthfuls of her dinner, under the guise of encouraging her to eat.

  ‘Actually, do you mind if I heat up Sophie’s dinner now?’ I asked. ‘We really should try and get her off to bed before dinner.’

  ‘Yes, go for it! And I need to get you both a glass of wine!’ said Tom, leaping over to a cupboard and pulling out wine glasses.

  Just then, the telephone rang in the hall, and Tom went out to answer it. We heard him saying, ‘Oh no!’ a few times and then he came back in, hands dragging at his cheeks.

  ‘That was one of my clients. Their fitted oak bookcase has just collapsed! It’s brought some of the plaster off the wall – and it’s a Grade 2 listed building.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he went on, grabbing his coat from the back of one of the kitchen chairs. ‘I’m going to have to go up there and sort it out.’

  I nodded sympathetically. He seemed in a real state.

  ‘My reputation is at stake, you see, because this is a top-drawer client – very well connected. My God, this is a nightmare. I’m so sorry. Do you mind terribly . . .’

  ‘No, of course not. You go on,’ said Jonathan, giving him a pat on the back.

  ‘Jody will be home very soon, I promise you. She’ll look after you. Just help yourself to anything else you need . . .’

  ‘Where are you going?’ I called after him as he swept out of the room.

  ‘Aberdeen,’ he called back over his shoulder.

  We heard the front door slam and stared at one another.

  ‘Aberdeen?’ Jonathan whispered, frowning. ‘That’s, what, a two-hour drive from here, at least.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll be back tonight, will he?’ I said. ‘I wonder what we should do with this shellfish stew.’ I went over to the Aga and gingerly lifted the wooden spoon, so that the stew slowly slid off it and slopped back into the pan.

  ‘You stir the stew, and I’ll heat up Sophie’s food,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘No, you stir the stew,’ I said, raising the spoon again, as if poised to flick the residue over him.

  He came up and grabbed me in a rugby tackle, lifting me off my feet. I squealed as Sophie looked on, her eyes wide and curious, her rosebud mouth slightly open.

  The phone started ringing again, but by this point I was flat on my back with Jonathan sitting on top of me, trying to prise the spoon out of my hand.

  ‘Get off me! Maybe we should answer that. Get off me!’

  ‘No. I’m not getting off you until you’ve tasted this stew. It may need more seasoning,’ he said with a wicked grin, trying to force the spoon towards my mouth.

  The phone went on to answer phone, and we heard Jody’s voice. ‘Sweetie? Are you there? Can you pick up? I’m so sorry but I’m going to have to stay at Mum’s. Vichard’s been sick and he’s got a bit of a temperature so I’d better keep him away from the other babies. Can you look after everyone? I’m really sorry. Give me a call when you get a chance. Bye . . . bye.’ She hung up.

  ‘Oh no,’ Jonathan said. ‘Vichard’s not vell.’

  ‘This is no joking matter, Jonathan! We need at least one host. Phone her back!’

  He took the phone, and tried 1471, but it was a withheld number. I checked my phone but couldn’t find a mobile number for Jody.

  ‘So we are now stuck in this hellhole by ourselves!’ Sophie, hearing the tension in my voice, began to howl.

  ‘Well,’ said Jonathan between wails, ‘remember – the hypno-birthers will be here soon.’

  Ah yes, the silver lining. A weekend alone with Molly and Dave.

  ‘You say that as though it’s a good thing. You do realise he was threatening to bring his lute?’

  While we waited for their arrival, I heated up Sophie’s dinner and fed it to her, spoonful by slow spoonful. Then, daunted by the prospect of the dormitory bathroom, we gave her a slippery, giggly bath in the kitchen sink.

  ‘Shall we just pop her into her car seat and go home?’ suggested Jonathan once we’d got her into a fresh nappy and pink-bunnied sleepsuit.

  ‘We can hardly just abandon the house with Molly and Dave about to arrive. We’re going to have to stay.’

  So we set up the travel cot in a warm corner of the kitchen, and Sophie went off to sleep easily for once, tired after the car journey and her novelty bath.

  ‘What are we going to do about dinner?’ I was getting hungry by now.

  Jonathan went and looked in the fridge, and came back carrying eggs, and milk, and cheese.

  ‘Omelette?’ he suggested. ‘I can always rustle up something for the hypno-birthers later. But I think we need to eat.’

  I nodded, and he began whisking up eggs. I found a grater in the cupboard and started grating the cheese.

  We sat opposite each other at the enormous wooden kitchen table to eat, while Sophie slept in her travel cot in the corner.

  I suddenly felt quite close to Jonathan – in this strange house, in this unlooked-for moment of solitude. Closer than I had done in a long time. He had been endearingly enthusiastic about making the omelettes, taking control of his environment with boyish delight, as if we were on a Famous Five camping adventure.

  In this bright halo of country kitchen cosiness I seemed to see things more clearly. Jonathan and I had been acting more like co-workers than husband and wife since having Sophie. And – even worse – we were effectively working in shifts. Because she didn’t sleep all that well, Jonathan would often send me off to bed at around nine o’clock, which was sometimes not long after he’d got in from work. He went to bed at around midnight, handing over responsibility for Sophie’s night-time shenanigans to me. Weekends were no better – often one of us would do the chores whilst the other entertained Sophie. No, it was hardly surprising that we’d drifted apart a little, that we felt like strangers moving around each other in the house. And it was hardly surprising that we were both stressed – me caught up in loops of horrifying worries, him with his inexplicable nightmares. But all this could be fixed, I was sure.

  ‘So how are you feeling about things?’ I began.

  ‘Fine. What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, since having Sophie. I was just wondering how you were feeling about things.’

  ‘Fine. What do you mean?’ he said again.

  ‘We haven’t really talked much, have we?’

  ‘It’s been pretty busy. What did you want to talk about?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just nice to have some time to talk, isn’t it?’ I said it with a satisfied sigh, as though an evening alone in a semi-renovated boarding school was the answer to everything.

  He shot me a questioning look.

  ‘How do you think it feels, being a dad?’ I continued.

  ‘Fine,’ said Jonathan. ‘Great.’

  ‘It’s a lot of hard work, isn’t it? More than I expected. I didn’t think the broken nights would be so hard, for one thing.’

  He frowned at me across the table.

  ‘What? What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said with an irritated sigh.

  ‘But it’s so p
recious, isn’t it – every scrap of time with her. When I was at Braid Hills Funeral Home the other day, I met this woman who was planning her own funeral. She’d actually taken her little daughter in with her. She’d obviously had chemo, her hair was all . . .’

  ‘Jesus CHRIST, Cassie!’ His fork clattered down on to his plate. ‘I’m trying to eat my dinner!’

  I put down my knife and fork, too, and stared at him. I felt as though the air had been knocked out of me. He pulled his face into a ghastly fake smile and tried to take it back.

  ‘Sorry, darling. Go on.’

  But then the phone rang. It was Molly, calling to say they’d got lost and had been circling around Cumbernauld for the last hour trying to find their way back on to the M9. When I explained that both our hosts had disappeared and that Shona, Paul and Elgin were stuck in London because of their meeting with the Home Secretary, she decided they’d cut their losses and head back to Edinburgh.

  Relieved of the prospect of having to play host to Molly and her family, we fetched our sleeping bags and pillows from the dormitory and settled down on the floor by the Aga. It seemed to conjure up a teenagey, sleepover sort of feel. How many years had it been since I’d lain awake with a friend next to me, talking for hours into the darkness? Probably not since Helen and I had shared a flat at University. I envied, in my younger self, that capacity for passionate, urgent exchanges. Suddenly it seemed imperative to feel that way again. I decided to ignore the fork-clattering warning signs and press on with my attempts to discuss dead parents.

  ‘You know your dad?’ I ventured.

  ‘Yeees.’

  ‘How did your mum cope when he died, having to bring you and Stephen up by herself? Did you have to help her a lot, being the oldest?’

  ‘Well, school kept us busy – rugby and all that. And during the school holidays Stephen and I used to go and stay with Oma and Opa.’

  I had heard this many times . . . about his fat jolly Dutch maternal grandparents, and his uncle and aunt with their six children. I had heard about uproarious games of hide and seek in their big house in the country, swimming in the lake every morning in summer, cycling through the flower fields in spring. And about the plays the children had written and performed on the verandah on warm evenings.

  As he launched into describing it again, I thought I could see, in his face, a flicker of the child he’d once been. The nine-year-old, the six-year-old, perhaps . . . an indefinable something to do with the curve of his lower lip, the stubborn set of his jaw. A child who’d had to grow up very quickly. I wanted to love all those of his former selves.

  ‘Oma and Opa sound nice . . . was your mum never tempted to move back to Holland to be nearer them?’

  ‘No – she just got on with it,’ said Jonathan, suddenly brisk again. ‘We all did. There was no choice.’

  What was he hiding, underneath this no-nonsense attitude? Images came into my mind: Jonathan sitting with his dad as he lay unconscious, wired up to monitors and machines; the day they’d spent in that timeless, twilight space between living and dying. My love, walking out of the hospital at dawn, blinking in disbelief at a world that was irretrievably changed.

  ‘It must have been awful, not being able to say goodbye in the hospital, with him being unconscious and everything. What was the last conversation you had with him, before it happened? Did you get any sense that he . . . knew, at all? That he was going to go, I mean.’

  ‘I can’t remember, Cass,’ he said pleadingly. At this point I should probably have registered that he sounded tired, and not at all like a teenage girl.

  ‘You must remember. Come on, I want to know. What was the last thing you ever said to him?’ My voice came out like a whiny, demanding child. I was pushing him too far, desperate to tap into something deeper within him before the moment slipped away.

  But then something went hard in Jonathan’s eyes; hard and final like a book slamming shut.

  ‘I think it was something along the lines of “I hate you, you fat, balding, freckly old arsehole.” Now, for the love of God, can we talk about something else?’

  *

  Tom came back at around six in the morning, and was horrified to find us curled up in our sleeping bags near the Aga. We had to make up some story about Sophie falling asleep in the kitchen (glossing over the question of how the travel cot had materialised there) and us not wanting to leave her. We didn’t want him to think we were ungrateful for the dormitory accommodation that had been offered, or the fly-graveyard bathroom.

  Unfortunately we’d forgotten the pan of congealed shellfish stew, which Jonathan had abandoned last thing at night outside the back door. We had to pretend that we’d eaten some, but had only taken very small portions, being anxious that Molly and Dave might be hungry when they arrived, or that Tom or Jody might return home unexpectedly, needing food.

  The atmosphere was a little cool, and we left later that morning since it was obvious that Tom wanted to get back up to Aberdeen to rebuild the collapsed bookcase. Jody had phoned to say that Vichard had been sick seven times in the night so it definitely wouldn’t be sensible to meet up.

  In the car, on the way home, I had an idea.

  ‘Jonathan,’

  ‘Yeeees.’

  ‘You know your mum?’

  He slumped dramatically in his seat. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Cassie . . .’

  ‘No, no . . . I was just wondering. You know how she went to stay with Stephen and Moira after they had the twins? Well, maybe she might like to come and stay with us for a while?’

  ‘With us? For how long?’

  ‘A few weeks, or maybe longer, depending on how it went?’

  ‘Well, yes. That’s a good idea.’ His voice went deeper, the tightness rounded out into approval. ‘You two have always got on so well. She could take the pressure off when you’re working, what with Sophie’s nursery pick-ups, and so on. And it would be company for you when you’re not working. It must be lonely in the house with just you and Sophie. Maybe she could even get up in the night for Sophie sometimes, and give you a proper night’s sleep. I know how tired you are.’

  This came as something of a surprise – I’d thought he hadn’t been listening.

  ‘Shall we just ask her to come for a few weeks, and see how it goes?’ I suggested. The idea of having easy company during those long days at home with Sophie felt like a weight slipping off my shoulders. But it was more than that. I sensed that Dita might provide an indirect way to bond with Jonathan. If he wouldn’t talk to me, perhaps I could get to know him from the outside in, by trying to understand the things that were important to him.

  Jonathan nodded, looking pleased. It was the sort of thing that pleased him; a domestic issue addressed, a mutually beneficial course of action agreed upon. We were safely back in our partner-parent roles.

  ‘I think your mother and I will have lots to talk about.’ It was a risky line, given the conversation of the previous night, but I said it in a teasing voice, with a sideways glance.

  ‘Yes, you can discuss my many failings. I must be out of my mind . . . three females in the house to gang up on me.’

  He shot me a strange little smile, and there was a flicker of connection between us as we turned on to the motorway slip road and headed for home.

  9

  If I had to pinpoint when things started going downhill, it would be one rainy Friday a few weeks later. Running on three hours’ sleep, I’d dropped Sophie at nursery, struggled into the office, and made it through the morning on a heady mix of adrenalin and coffee. Bobby Spencer, the Braid Hills employee, had sent a second formal letter of complaint to Radcliffe and I’d been ordered to draft a reply, responding to each of the points Bobby had made. But I’d hardly been able to read the words on the computer screen – they’d seemed to swim in front of my eyes. By lunchtime I was barely able to keep awake. Our team had a ‘learning lunch’ training session so there was no time to go out and buy a sandwich, but I went into the kitchenette area
to make another strong cup of coffee to take with me.

  The tiredness was overtaking my life, and there didn’t seem to be any end in sight, even though Dita had come to stay with us, as Jonathan and I had discussed. It wasn’t that she was unwilling to help – before she’d even put down her suitcase and taken her coat off, she’d offered to be on duty for Sophie that night. She’d waved away my half-hearted objections, claiming that she would enjoy that quiet time with Sophie in the middle of the night.

  The problem was, she proved to be such a heavy sleeper that she didn’t hear Sophie crying, either that night or any night subsequently. So I was still getting up continually – blindly offering milk, cuddles or reassurance, though sometimes none of those seemed to work.

  Dita, meanwhile, was happily convinced that Sophie had staged a miraculous turnaround, sleep-wise, since she’d arrived. She aired the theory that Sophie felt more settled now that she, Dita, was on hand to help out. Relaxed mum, relaxed baby, she’d said with a knowing smile. It seemed rude to shatter her illusions. Or to mention my own theory that the baby cries were masked, for Dita, by the sound of her own snores.

  ‘Wakey wakey, sleepyhead!’

  I jerked awake – I’d actually fallen asleep leaning against the kitchenette worktop, waiting for the kettle to boil.

  It was Malkie. God. Of all the times to run into him. I hadn’t seen him since that encounter in the street outside the office – the litigation department was far away on the second floor. There was no point in pretending I hadn’t been asleep, but I hoped he wouldn’t notice the dark circles under my eyes, or my flat wispy hair, which had still been wet when I’d rushed out of the house that morning.

  ‘Hey, you,’ I said. ‘What brings you to our basement realm?’

  ‘The upstairs microwave is broken,’ he said. ‘I need to heat this up.’ He was holding a yellow polystyrene container that looked as though it was from the takeaway around the corner. ‘Chicken piri piri baked potato,’ he said with a grin, opening the lid to release a hit of garlicky fumes.

  I pulled a face. ‘Oh God, Malkie. How can you eat such stuff?’