by Eve Chase
The baby sits in the middle of my thoughts and swats at them if they go in the wrong direction. For one, I keep forgetting to steal food. My knicker elastic no longer pinches or leaves a red mark. This morning my stomach actually rumbled. It suddenly feels possible that we’re not actually stuck being ourselves, either. Or trapped in the families into which we were born, like the plants in Big Rita’s terrarium, pressed against the glass. Families can form without blood ties. Good things can happen. You can walk into the woods and stumble across a beautiful baby, for example.
“Big Rita wants you!” Teddy bursts out of the trees. He’s only in his pants, and he looks hot and excitable and biscuit brown. “In the house. Come on!”
I jump down from the stump and run back into the garden to find Big Rita changing the baby on the lawn, making cooing sounds under her breath and pulling silly goofy faces. Seeing us, she stops, looking caught out, like she’d forgotten herself for a moment. She says Mother’s upstairs having a much-needed rest and we should all get out of her hair. How about a picnic?
Big Rita’s the one who needs to rest. She’s got purple rings under her eyes and never seems to stop scrubbing down work tops and scouring with the Brillo pad: “Babies need things to be squeaky clean.” But it feels like she’s trying to rub away something the rest of us can’t see.
After she’s ordered me and Teddy to put on our shoes, we set off. She carries the baby in her arms. “Like a big bag of spuds,” she says, but she won’t let anyone else do it. My job is to hold the wicker picnic basket and shepherd Teddy, who keeps darting off, trying to climb trees. As we walk through the woods, the buttery light thickens.
Teddy stops to pick up sticks because Robbie’s going to teach him how to whittle them—really just a ploy to visit Big Rita. Mother was delighted by this. “What a good idea. You don’t want to end up like your father, Teddy, a man who struggles to carve the roast!”
Her comment brought it all back, those disastrous family Sunday lunches, Daddy hunched over the gray leg of lamb, teeth gritted, sawing fiercely at the meat, like it was Don Armstrong, not lamb at all.
We pick our spot by the bank of the stream, where the blackbirds and skylarks shelter from the afternoon heat and sing on the highest branches. Big Rita throws down a holey old blanket. I arrange the cake on a plate, licking its jam filling off my finger. Teddy strips and jumps into the stream naked, making us laugh. Tanned to the shape of his pants, his bottom is bright blue white. The water comes up to his thighs, but it’s crystal clear, roping around him, the tiny fish scattering, weaving between his knees.
I change into my swimming costume under a towel, like I do in the school changing rooms, so no one can see my mouse-nose nipples and jiggly belly. I leap in, gasping at the blazing cold, and hide under the water.
Big Rita hitches up her cotton skirt and wades into the stream too. Very slowly, she dips the baby’s foot in, then out again. We hold our breath, waiting for her to cry. But she doesn’t. Her pretty monkey face grows intent and serious, as if considering this strange stuff, water. Again and again we dip her foot in, and she starts to gurgle with pleasure. We laugh. The sun beats down on our backs, baking us. Teddy dunks himself and emerges like a mad thing, his wet curls flat against his head. I forget about what I look like in my costume and just enjoy the tug of the water on my body. And it feels like it’ll go on forever—the sunshine, the yellow lilies lining the bank, the blue dragonflies, the hunk of sponge cake waiting in the wicker picnic basket. Or that I’m already remembering it from a distance.
After the picnic, Big Rita pats dry the baby with a tea towel, changes her nappy, and dusts her body with Johnson’s baby powder. She announces it’s time to go. “Too many midges. This place gets itchier the later it gets,” she says, fastening the poppers of the Babygro. Teddy and I protest: it’s the most fun we’ve had in ages. But Big Rita isn’t listening to us, only to the baby, who is gazing at her with enormous eyes and making soft ooh sounds, like she’s trying to speak. So we seize the moment of distraction and leap off the bank into the stream again, shrieking, the water spraying into our faces.
“For goodness sake,” Big Rita groans, fighting a laugh. She lays the baby on the blanket, next to the picnic basket. The baby reaches out and scratches the wicker with her tiny razor fingernails.
Teddy and I start swimming with the current, fast without trying. We’re soon quite far from Big Rita. The stream bed shelves and we plunge deeper into colder water. Teddy starts dog-paddling. I can hear Big Rita shouting something, but not the words, what with the water fuming into my ears and nose. I can taste silt at the back of my throat.
I’m still giggling when Teddy ducks. And I’m thinking, Wow, my brother really can hold his breath, when there’s a huge splash, an explosion of water, and Big Rita is in the stream, all legs and arms and floating wheel of skirt.
She lifts Teddy, gasping, to the bank, and asks him over and over if he’s okay. Teddy nods and coughs. Scrambling out of the stream, up the muddy bank, Big Rita squats next to him, dripping wet, her thick bra strap showing underneath her blouse. “Crikey, you gave me a scare.” She looks far more shaken than Teddy. “Don’t do that again.”
Feeling bad that I didn’t notice Teddy was in trouble, I glance back at Baby Forest. Something looks different. At first I can’t work out what. Then I realize she’s on the other side of the blanket, no longer scratching at the wicker basket, but on the opposite far edge, on her front, her toes digging into the grass. “The baby’s moved.”
Big Rita turns slowly and blinks, like she might be imagining it. Then she walks over, suddenly nervy.
I offer Teddy a piggyback and go to join Big Rita, my steps weaving under Teddy’s weight. “She’s crawling already. I knew she was super clever.”
Big Rita frowns and mutters something about the baby being too young to crawl. She glances around us, squinting into the trees. But it’s impossible to see anything because the bright sun makes the understory pitch-black. “I suppose she might have sort of flopped over and . . .” She shakes her head and stares at the basket, then the blanket’s frayed edge, as if they’re part of a puzzle she can’t solve. “I shouldn’t have left her. Not even for a second.” Then Big Rita does something she never does, not in front of us anyway: she kisses the baby’s head. “Let’s go.”
We walk on in silence. My back starts to ache from Teddy, who forgets to cling, half asleep, his chin resting on my shoulder. I’m glad to see the log stack through the trees, like an ancient monument. The garden wall. I peer up at Mother’s bedroom window, impatient to tell her about our afternoon. Her curtains are still shut. The glass looks misted. She must be very tired.
We walk around to the front of the house, chatting about what Mother might want to eat for supper. One: Marge’s haddock and egg pie. Iceberg lettuce. Two: a ham hock salad. Big Rita says we all need a good scrub in the bath before we go anywhere near the kitchen. And everything feels right and good and sunny again . . . until we turn the corner by the front gate. We all stop—time stops too—and stare, barely able to believe it.
A silver sports car is parked at a wild angle in the drive, swung in at great speed, to leave scarring skid marks in the gravel—and our golden afternoon.
28
Rita
You should never shoot a gun into the trees without knowing where the bullet will end up,” Rita says, repeating Robbie’s words. She’s still reeling from the sight of Don’s car, glinting malevolently in the drive yesterday, its dents a reminder of the thrill seeker who drives as he lives. Who probably shoots like that too.
“Is that right, John Wayne?” Don cocks the gun and fires again, the crack ricocheting into the woods, echoing in her eardrums. A distant tree showers its leaves. He turns to grin at her wolfishly, revealing the intimate pink tissue of his gums.
“The bullet may just keep going. To shoot safely, you have to know the bullet’s path.” She can’t
help relishing her recall of Robbie’s knowledge. “And you don’t.”
“I see.” He raises one eyebrow, in a way that manages to be both belittling and carnal.
Rita looks away and bends down to Teddy, who is enjoying the noise and threat of violence immensely. “Indoors,” she whispers. “Now.”
Teddy’s smile collapses. “But Don promised to show me how to shoot.”
“I’m not saying it again, Teddy.”
“But—”
Don winks at him. “Another time, little man.”
Rita watches Teddy as he stomps back to Foxcote, protesting about the lack of fairness, making a show of kicking up twigs to impress Don. He leaves the garden gate swinging. Bang. She needs to oil it or something, whatever you do with gates. Bang. And she suddenly remembers how she got up this morning and discovered it wide open, even though she always makes sure the house is as secure as it can be—given those holes in the wall—before she turns in. She also noticed the flowerbeds were crushed under the drawing-room window, and a trail of flattened oxeye daisies leading back to the paved path. She supposes it could have been a curious deer. She’d rather it was a deer. But her mind keeps twitching to Fingers, the albino Green Man. And then, with a shudder that travels down her spine, the sight of the baby yesterday, not where Rita had left her on the picnic blanket. As if someone had picked her up while she was watching Hera and Teddy. But surely the baby had maneuvered herself somehow. Rita must put it from the muddle of her tired mind.
“I wish you’d talk to me like that, Rita,” Don says, dispersing her swarming thoughts. His absurdly blue eyes spark under heavy, indolent lids, and he smiles at her in a way that suggests he’s mistaken her for a different sort of woman, someone more attractive.
He’s also stripped off his white shirt, entirely gratuitously—it’s not hot today—and a thick V of curly dark hair arrows down his tanned torso, as if deliberately signposting the bulbous bulk of his groin, its topography alarmingly obvious in his tight flared jeans. She tries hard not to look, but she’s got a feeling he’s aware of her effort, and it thrills him. “Do you slap buttocks as well?”
Her face heats. She shields her smarting cheek with her hand and glances back at the house, anxious that Jeannie, who is upstairs with the baby, might peer out her window and think she’s trying to linger alone with Don. Or, god forbid, flirting with him. (She can’t flirt, like she can’t dance, but Jeannie may not know this.) Still, she won’t leave until Don puts the gun away. “Please, can we stop the shooting now? Teddy might dart back here at any moment, and Hera’s always slinking off outside on her own.”
He laughs. “Amazed that girl can slink anywhere.”
She glares at him. “It’s not safe.” She can’t keep the anger from her voice. How dare he talk about Hera like that? And she hates this blood lust. Just as well that, for all his bravado and swagger, he doesn’t seem able even to shoot a squirrel.
“You can be safe when you’re dead, Miss Rita.” He aims into the trees and shoots again. More leaves fall. (Nothing dies.) “Anyway, Teddy needs to be able to handle a gun.”
Rita could have shot Teddy herself when, at breakfast, he’d delightedly informed Don, “We’ve got a gun in the biscuit tin. And shotguns in the cellar.” Don’s eyes lit up. He gave Teddy a soldier’s salute, holding on to a slice of toast. “You and me, Teddy. Hunters, eh?” And Teddy pretty much exploded with joy.
With a vulpine smile, Don disables the gun over his knee. “Happy now?”
She’s not. Yesterday, she calmed herself—and a near hysterical Hera—by saying that Jeannie wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the situation with the baby and would send him rapidly packing.
Today that seems rather less likely. She has had to keep the television on most of the morning to block out the noises erupting from Jeannie’s bedroom. Jeannie actually squealed, like a stepped-upon cat. (When Rita and Fred had made love, she’d been far too self-conscious to make any noise. Let alone squeal. Frankly, there was no reason to squeal.) At breakfast, like a bad dream, there was Don with his booming laugh, leaning back in the kitchen chair, his arms behind his head, revealing dense tufts of hair, like hedgehogs, under his arms. Worse, when Rita leaned over to put his cup of coffee beside him, she smelled . . . sex. Definitely sex. She can’t stop thinking about it.
She catches the same sweet-sour musk now and, with a flush of shame, remembers how last night, while she was damning the immoral transgression taking place a few steps down the landing, her body became hot. “Lunch,” she says curtly, and starts walking back to the house.
Don follows. He stamps and crunches through the undergrowth noisily, in contrast to Robbie, who makes barely a sound. “Shooting always makes me ravenous. What’s cooking, Miss Rita?”
“I don’t know yet.” Fish fingers probably. Hedgerow crumble. It’s been much harder to get to the shops since the baby arrived.
“You don’t know?” he gasps with mock outrage. “Isn’t that the point of you? Lists and menus.” He pauses. “Plotting.”
Heat rushes through her again: Jeannie has warned him. Don’s arrival will create another glaring omission in the notebook. She wishes the pages would write themselves, like an invisible hand on a Ouija board, then flutter across the world and slide, anonymously, under Walter’s hotel-room door in Africa.
As she walks through the garden gate, he touches her bare arm, a gesture that says, Wait. The tips of his fingers are surprisingly soft, like a small girl’s, as if he’s never chopped a log or scrubbed a floor in his life. She can smell the ripeness of the last of the summer’s roses going over. The tang of salt in his sweat. His skin. She can see the lines where the tropical sun has etched brackets around his mouth, the lips so full they expose their paler moist insides—she wonders where those lips have roamed, then sharply checks herself—and the pencil dots of morning stubble on his chiseled jaw. “The baby. I mean . . . Christ.” His face grows serious and his lidded eyes kind, blue as swimming pools, momentarily distracting her from who he is, what he’s doing. “Not the best idea, given the circumstances, is it?”
“Jeannie won’t let me call the authorities. She won’t listen to . . .” She can’t say the word sense.
“Well, I’m here now,” he says with a worrying note of permanence. His mood changes. The concern drains from his face, and it sets with something else, a ruthlessness that makes Rita instinctively step away. “That woman will damn well listen to me.”
* * *
“The baby’s not your problem, Jeannie,” says Don, making a show of pouring the tea into the chipped white china.
Walter’s probably never lifted a teapot in his life, Rita thinks, let alone poured Jeannie a cup, and she wonders if this is why Don’s doing it, trying to inveigle himself deeper into Jeannie’s affections.
“She’s not a problem, Don. She’s a gift.” Jeannie smiles down at the baby sleeping in the wicker vegetable trug on the kitchen floor. “Aren’t you, poppet?”
Don leans back in his chair. “My god, you are one crazy lady,” he says, with such a vexing mixture of contempt and affection that it makes Rita study her hands—and spot their bare feet fiercely caressing beneath the table, like mating otters.
Afterward, when they’ve gone upstairs for “a nap”—the sort that makes the ceiling plaster powder down—and Rita’s elbow deep in washing-up, Hera rushes in, sparking like a plug. “Who does he think he is?”
Teddy, sitting at the table, licking clean the crumble bowl, says, “Don’s a big-game hunter. He’s killed seven lions. He’s going to teach me how to shoot rabbits.”
“He’s just an idiot,” splutters Hera. “The rabbits will laugh at him.”
“Teddy, give me that dish. Thank you. And don’t talk nonsense. Now, go and play in the garden for a bit. There’s a good boy.” She glides the dish under the suds, wishing she owned some rubber gloves. Her hands feel ten years o
lder than the rest of her.
Hera presses against the draining board. “Make him leave,” she begs. As Rita suspected, the new sweet Hera was as delicate as a robin’s egg. And she’s cracked. “Please, Big Rita.”
She scrubs harder. She thinks of all the times in London she’s wanted to tell Jeannie to be careful. Confide that Don brushed against her body as he walked past, and once, to her mortification, called her Legs. But she never dared. She felt somehow complicit, guilty, even though she couldn’t work out what she’d done to encourage him. And it’d be reckless for any nanny to complain about such trivial things. Everyone knew it went on all the time, and pretty young nannies were wise to wedge chairs against their bedroom door handles before going to bed. You just had to keep your wits about you and your head down. Now she wishes she’d spoken up. “I’ll try.”
* * *
It’s tricky to catch Jeannie on her own. As the sticky afternoon drifts on, Jeannie and Don remain inseparable. A crackling electricity surrounds them. The way Jeannie looks at Don, so hungrily, it’s almost male.
In London they could never be this free. Nor would they dare. Not in front of the children. But here in the forest, inhibition appears to have been peeled off, like a silky dress. It’s fascinating, shocking, and she can’t rip her eyes away. They don’t notice her looking. She’s never felt more like a bit of furniture, a large kitchen dresser perhaps, gliding around on soundless casters.
She discreetly tugs back a curtain and peers out of the drawing-room window. Yes, there they are, outside on the daisy-studded lawn, sprawled on a blanket, the baby wedged between them. Two glasses. A wine bottle. Empty. They look like a young family—that’s the worst thing. She feels a jab of sympathy for Walter, followed by alarm. If he knew, she can’t bear to think what would happen. And if Marge sees them like this, she’ll know for certain what’s going on under Walter’s sagging roof.