Tiny Acts of Love

by Lucy Lawrie

  ‘But what if that was the first he knew of it? What if it was the shock that killed him?’

  He’d been carrying this guilt around for twenty years. My love.

  ‘Well, what were the reasons that made you suspect? Surely if it was that obvious, he’d have known, too.’

  ‘I’m not sure. I can’t explain it. I didn’t know it was Mr Caravaggio. It’s just that I knew, in my bones, from sometime before I can even remember, that I wasn’t really Dad’s.’

  ‘Darling. If it is true, I think it’s very likely that he did know. And even if he didn’t, I think it’s not at all likely that he died from the shock of being told by you. But you should speak to Dita, if you can.’

  ‘One day, maybe, Cassie. It’s not going to change anything now. He loved me, looked after me, made God knows what kind of sacrifices for me, day after day, for fifteen years, and I destroyed it all in one clumsy, vicious swipe.’

  And then, here it came. The Jonathan Special. The pulling up by the bootstraps, the assertion of a position, the stepping over his emotions.

  ‘Look, either he died because of what I said or he didn’t, but we’ll never know. Either way, it won’t bring him back. I’ve gotten along fine for twenty years by not dwelling on it, and I don’t intend to start now.’

  *

  We all saw Dita off at the airport the next day. Jonathan had taken the day off work and he drove us there, Sophie wailing the whole journey, trying to squeeze her arms out of the straps of her childseat.

  While he parked the car, Dita and I got her bags checked in, and then took the escalator up to the food court. I bought some tea for us both and a couple of claggy muffins wrapped in cellophane.

  ‘Thanks so much, Dita – for everything. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you these past few months.’

  Dita tore a bit of her muffin off and gave it to Sophie, who partially dissolved it in her mouth before rubbing it into her pink flowery top.

  ‘Oh, I don’t feel I’ve been much use. Tony harassing us – that was all my fault. Ah, what a mess.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t your fault. And we’re really going to miss you.’

  ‘You know,’ she continued, eyeing me carefully. ‘I’ve got a little confession to make.’

  Oh God, this was it. I felt like putting my hands over my ears, running away. She should be telling Jonathan – and where had he got to, anyway?

  ‘Well,’ she continued. ‘I didn’t say anything before, because I wasn’t sure of my plans. But I’m actually coming back to Scotland in June, to stay for a while.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll be staying at Linlithgow.’

  ‘Linlithgow? You mean with Norm and Barbara?’

  ‘Well.’ There was a pause. ‘Not so much Barbara. She . . . ah, well she died.’

  ‘Oh no! God, I’m sorry.’

  ‘She . . . she died about five years ago actually.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Dita, I didn’t realise. Jonathan never said. I’m not sure he even . . .’

  She poured herself another cup of tea, and stirred a sachet of sugar into it. ‘He may not have picked up on it, no.’

  ‘So the trips to Linlithgow . . .’

  Her cheeks reddened. ‘Norm and I have become quite close.’

  Alongside the sincere relief that we had bypassed all discussion of Jonathan’s paternity, I felt a rush of affection for her. However messy her past with Frank and Tony, she deserved the chance of some happiness after all these years of widowhood.

  ‘That’s fabulous, Dita. I couldn’t be more pleased. You’ll have to introduce me.’

  ‘We’re hoping it’s going to be a long-term thing, but I guess we’ll just need to see if it works out. In any case, while I’m here I’d be happy to come over . . . maybe one day a week or something? To look after Sophie? Or I could babysit in the evenings so you and Jonathan could go out.’

  ‘That would be great.’

  ‘And you know, Cassie, there’s something else I wanted to say to you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I love being Nana Dita. I love that you and I have got so close. I’m grateful that you and Jonathan have let me into your life, so kindly and beautifully. But you’ve got a mother too. I just wanted to say that . . . well, your mother is a good woman. A bit tense perhaps. Slightly overbearing. Very controlling.’ She gave a little frown, a twist of the mouth, which made me want to laugh. ‘But she’s a good woman, nonetheless.’

  ‘Hmm. Yes, I know.’

  ‘I just think that . . . well, you and your mum might benefit from a good long talk.’

  ‘I’ve tried to talk to her about things . . . she just refuses to—’

  ‘You’ll have to make her, Cassie. You can do it. You managed to do it with Jonathan. The two of you are talking now, no?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘It takes so many different kinds of courage to love a person, Cassie. Nobody said it was easy. But you’re stronger than you think you are.’

  I leaned over and hugged her, holding her close against me for a few seconds. Sophie smacked her crumby hands on the high chair tray.

  ‘Ah Sophie, you want a cuddle too? Come to Nana Dita.’

  34

  ‘Aaaaa-choooo!’

  It was the following week and I was attempting to attend another session of the New Parents Discussion Group (the Friday morning session – with a different facilitator). However, Mabel, green-aproned supervisor of the crèche, was clearly not one hundred per cent well.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, love,’ she said after depositing the contents of her nose into a tissue. ‘It’s just a touch of hayfever.’

  March seemed early for hayfever. But I had psyched myself up for the session and was reluctant to miss it. And two other little boys were already there in the crèche, playing with a young blonde girl who seemed in good health. So I extricated myself from Sophie, said goodbye with a cheerful smile, and went next door to the Group.

  Two women were already there, chatting. I chose a chair on the other side of the circle and sat down.

  ‘Well, I did comb tea tree oil through his hair,’ one of them was saying. ‘But I didn’t like to use any of those harsh chemicals.’

  ‘Will that kill them, though?’ asked the other. ‘I’ve heard they’re a bugger to get rid of.’

  ‘Well, I had a quick look this morning. I couldn’t see anything crawling, certainly. Though he was still scratching quite a lot in the car, on the way here.’

  Quietly, I rose from my seat and returned to the crèche. I swooped up Sophie and left, with a wave to Mabel, who was busy blowing her nose again.

  Coming out of the front door, I nearly collided with someone who was on their way in.

  ‘Cassie!’

  ‘Paul!’

  It was River City Paul, Shona’s husband from the Babycraft group. He was carrying Elgin against his chest.

  ‘Are you . . . ?’ he began, glancing through the door.

  ‘Oh. I was going to the New Parents Discussion Group. But unfortunately there’s a lice infestation at the crèche.’

  ‘Oh, crikey. I think we’ll steer clear then.’

  We walked out onto the steps.

  ‘I’ll help you,’ said Paul. He strapped Elgin into his buggy, which was at the bottom of the steps, chained to the railings, and helped me carry Sophie’s buggy down.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Paul, ‘I think I’ll just give Elgin some milk. He’s starving.’ He sat down on the step beside the buggy and pulled a carton of baby milk and a bottle out of the bag he was carrying. Holding the opened sterilised bottle between his knees, he cut open the milk carton with a small pair of scissors and poured the contents in. Elgin’s hands waved for the bottle, and he grabbed it and sucked greedily.

  The street seemed to spin round a little. Dizziness again. I sat down next to Paul.

  ‘So has Shona stopped breastfeeding altogether now, then?’ I asked, with a nod towards the empty
carton.

  ‘Oh God, yes,’ said Paul. ‘Breastfeeding was destroying her – it was the reason she was referred to the Group.’

  ‘So Shona was referred to the Group . . . not . . . you?’

  ‘Oh yes. Except she can never go, because she’s usually in court in the mornings. So I go instead. I pick up any leaflets, tell her what topics they’ve discussed.’

  ‘Goodness. Is she okay?’

  ‘Yes. But she’s been on antidepressants since November. She just pushed herself far too hard. She was working full time, obviously, and up several times through the night feeding Elgin. Because he wouldn’t take a bottle from me during the day, he was always really hungry at night. And she just kept feeding him, because it was the only time she got to spend with him. On top of that, she was still expressing milk at work, three times a day, to keep up her supply, even though that milk ended up being thrown away, because Elgin wouldn’t drink it from a bottle. And she had to make up that time at the end of the day to keep up her billable hours, so she was working later and later. Eventually, she went to pieces. Just went to bed and didn’t get up for three days. Didn’t even call into the office. I had to phone in for her, didn’t know what to say.’

  ‘Paul, why on earth didn’t she say anything? I feel terrible. I was up at Glenallan House with her in January, and she didn’t say a word.’

  ‘She was a bit better by January – by that time she’d stopped the feeding, and had been on the antidepressants for a while. What could you have done, though, anyway? And don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t think she would have wanted to talk to you about it. She thought she was such a bad mother compared to you. The way you stepped back, with your career, working part time so you could still spend lots of time with Sophie.’

  ‘Well, listen. Tell her I’ll give her a call. We’ll meet up for coffee or something.’

  ‘That would be nice, she’d like that. But she’s back working full time now, of course, so it would really need to be at the weekend. And she’s got that court case coming up – the one about the woman with the alien tumour thing. So she won’t be around much.’

  Sophie had fallen asleep in her buggy. I reached across to pull the fleecy pram cover over her. Elgin continued to suck noisily at his nearly empty bottle.

  ‘And what about you?’ I asked. ‘How are you getting on?’

  ‘Actually, I’m fine. Things are going quite well for me. You know my blog, Dads Aloud? Well, I’ve expanded into a social networking website. For dads rather than mums, and particularly those who take on the main childcaring role. In fact, I’m going to be on a radio programme next week, talking about the whole breastfeeding/bottle feeding debate – giving the other side of the story, so to speak.’

  ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ It was wonderful to hear him speak with such confidence. I thought back to the Babycraft classes in Colinton, with the hippy-ish teacher and her flip charts, all of us too scared to speak. ‘I hope our Babycraft teacher doesn’t find out you’ve become an anti-breastfeeding campaigner.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it that,’ laughed Paul. ‘At least not out loud. Listen, do you want to go and get a coffee? We spend all day in town on Fridays so we can get a lift home with Shona.’

  ‘Great.’ I stood up, and the ground seemed to swim underneath me. I fell backwards onto the steps. ‘Ow,’ I said, rubbing my hip, where I’d bashed it against the stone edge.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yes. I just went dizzy there for a second. I get that sometimes.’

  ‘Oh, I used to get that,’ he said, unconcerned. ‘Are you stressed? You might be overbreathing. That’s what it was with me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Breathing too quickly and shallowly. From the chest rather than the diaphragm.’ He placed one hand on his chest and the other on his tummy, and breathed slowly in and out. ‘Happens when you get stressed . . . Too much oxygen . . . Too little carbon dioxide . . . Can cause all sorts of symptoms.’

  ‘What sort of symptoms?’

  He turned to face me. ‘Dizziness, tingling, chest pain. Christ, I can’t even remember them all. Feeling sort of strange and outside of yourself . . . even seeing things that aren’t there. The problem is, you can get so anxious about the symptoms that you actually overbreathe even more. I used to get it as a teenager.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Bullying at school,’ he said matter-of-factly.

  ‘That’s awful.’

  He shrugged a shoulder.

  ‘So what should you do?’ I asked. ‘Take deep breaths?’

  ‘No, that makes it worse. You need to breathe slowly and quietly. Here.’ He reached for my hand and placed it so that it was covering my mouth and one of my nostrils. ‘Sit quietly. Breathe from your tummy and not your chest.’

  I sat breathing like that for several minutes, Paul doing the same beside me. At first I wanted to giggle – we did attract a few curious glances from passers-by. But the dizziness passed. My head cleared. I felt tentatively hopeful, but also scared of being hopeful. For what if I really was ill? If I put down my worries, I might not be strong enough to take them back again, if I needed to.

  ‘Shh,’ said Paul. ‘You’re speeding up again. Just think slow thoughts.’

  But Elgin started crying, so we abandoned our slow thoughts and made our way down to Stockbridge. After a visit to the swing park and a trip to feed the ducks at Inverleith Pond, Paul and Elgin came back to ours for lunch and a play in the garden.

  It was easy to spend time with Paul. We talked when we felt like it, lapsed into long, companionable silences when we didn’t. He dropped more information about overbreathing into the conversation as he remembered it, and we practised the exercises during the rare moments when the babies were playing happily and independently. We covered other topics, too. We swapped tips about feeding babies, helping them to sleep and dealing with tantrums. Paul told me how he managed to get Elgin’s toenails cut, and gave me a recipe for pasta sauce with eight different hidden vegetables. I demonstrated the headlock technique I used to brush Sophie’s teeth, and gave him a list of three child-friendly restaurants.

  It almost felt like being with Helen – but different. Discussions between Helen and me had tended to centre around relationships and work, with a smattering of self-help-book psychological analysis, both of ourselves and other cases who merited analysis from afar. She wouldn’t have appreciated the finer points of baby nutrition, or the merits of baby art classes, which Paul and Elgin did every Tuesday, versus the (very optimistically named) ‘music’ classes Sophie and I had attended a couple of times.

  When it was time for them to leave – they were getting the bus up to Shona’s office – I suggested we should meet up the following Friday, too. Paul smiled shyly, and said that would be lovely. We stood waving at the door. Sophie’s body shoogled against me as she flapped her arms vigorously and shouted, ‘Byyyyyyyye! Byyyyyye!’

  It occurred to me then that, for all the ridicule Jonathan and I had heaped upon it, Babycraft might have served its purpose after all. After all these months of struggle, and worry, and not measuring up, I might just have found a friend. And maybe, if we were very lucky indeed, we could struggle, and worry, and not measure up together.

  35

  I went to see Jean and Gerry the following Monday after work. I’d worried about how they might be coping, in the aftermath of Gerry’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, but Jean ushered me in to the sitting room cheerfully, whisking my coat and my briefcase away and handing me a cup and saucer. Gerry was there, sitting in his usual chair by the fire.

  ‘We’ve started a list together – of things we think Gerry will still be able to enjoy, whatever the state of his mental faculties may be.’

  She waggled over to the bureau, then handed me a piece of paper with a beaming smile. This is what it said:

  ‘My Fair Lady’

  Bacon sandwiches

  I looked up, wondering what reaction was expected of me.

&n
bsp; ‘It’s not exhaustive, of course,’ said Jean apologetically.

  ‘What about sitting in the garden?’ I suggested.

  ‘Bubble baths . . .’ went on Jean.

  ‘And that raspberry sponge, wherever it’s got to,’ said Gerry. ‘I expect to be waited on hand and foot, you know, woman.’

  By the time Jean had come back into the sitting room with a tray bearing tea and cake, I had tired Gerry out with observations about the weather, and he had slumped back against the cushions, asleep.

  I gave Jean a desperate look. Now that she’d broached the subject of Alzheimer’s, I wanted to ask her a question but didn’t know how.

  ‘What’s the matter, love?’ she asked gently. ‘He’s an old man. These things happen. If it wasn’t this it would’ve been something else.’

  ‘But Jean.’ I paused as I tried to find the words. ‘How are you going to save your marriage?’

  She smiled and let me continue.

  ‘How are you going to keep loving him, when he’s not even . . . him . . . anymore?’ From my experience with Granny Woods, I knew what would happen. With each tiny thread of memory that was lost, another piece of Gerry would disappear. Until there was nothing left but a body.

  ‘The end of your life, darling, that’s not really the point. It’s not as if we have to wait until the end of the story to find out how it all turned out. Me and Gerry, we already know.’

  She crossed over to the couch where Gerry lay and kissed the tip of her right index finger, before touching it gently to his lips.

  ‘There’s always going to be a goodbye at the end, whenever you love someone. There’s no easy way, whether you’re young or old.’

  That’s what I had been running from all these months – the shadow of that goodbye. I felt it every time I looked at Sophie’s sleeping face; it was there in every moment that I loved her. But, even as I feared it, I knew that it held the moment down, stopped it from floating away with no consequence, like a wisp of a dream.

  ‘I’ll keep Gerry going as long as I can; I’ll be his memory, as far as I’m able. The list’s only a bit of fun, but it’s important, really. I’ll play him his favourite music when he can’t remember what it’s called. I’ll sit him in the garden among the flowers, with the sun on his face, so he can smell the lavender and hear the bees. I’ll keep him together, as long as there’s anything of me left.’