‘It’s not as if she has to sing,’ Clara said. ‘She needs to get more work at that bookshop, if anything. I’m sure her nursery would be happy to have more of Bella.’
‘But she’s had such an awful time and Bella must be exhausting,’ put in Carlo. ‘You of all people ought to know what that’s like.’
‘So why don’t you ever babysit?’
‘Clara, you could always lend her your Mrs Clark,’ put in Juliet.
‘I’m happy to help, of course,’ said Fred, ‘but what if something important came up?’
‘I suppose she ought to find a proper babysitter,’ said Juliet. ‘Just in case.’
‘But they wouldn’t be family,’ objected Carlo. ‘It’s only ever been family.’
Clara said it: ‘And it’s always been free.’
Juliet babysat more often than the others, but preferred not to be left with Bella while she was awake. She was fond of the child but loathed the tedium of play. Fred could pretend to be a zoo full of animals, wind the musical box and sing twenty verses, the same verse, of The Grand Old Duke of York. Juliet grew terse and bored.
One night Mary was tucking up Bella. ‘Don’t be sad about Daddy. I can be sad for us both.’
Bella rolled over, turning her back.
‘What is it?’ Juliet asked as Mary returned to the living room, shaking her head.
‘What I can’t stand,’ she said, ‘is that Bella’s too young to grasp what’s happened but one day she will and then she’ll have to go through it all again.’
‘She seems to be doing very well.’
‘Exactly. She’s protected for now by not being able to know.’
‘To be honest,’ said Juliet, ‘I don’t know how much I’ve grasped it either.’
‘If she’d been younger, she wouldn’t remember him at all.’
‘We don’t know that for sure.’
‘But she’s almost three years old. She’ll remember just enough to have an idea of him.’
‘You’ll remember him for her, teach her about him.’
‘I’ve thought about that,’ said Mary. ‘Why make it worse?’
‘Because he’s her father! You have a duty … to his memory …’
Mary was surprised to see Juliet so upset. She remembered how self-possessed she had seemed at fourteen. Mary had turned up at the Clough house too early for a dinner party to which she hadn’t been invited – a seventeen-year-old tripping over her mother’s shoes and clutching a bottle of homemade elderberry wine. Tobias had been mending something on the lawn. She hadn’t met Juliet till later. Clara had been frightening enough.
Juliet meant to say something to Mary about finding a babysitter. This time though, she didn’t mind because Jacob, whom she had left in her bed at Khyber Road, was coming to keep her company.
He turned up at ten-thirty, annoyed because the Hugh Carmodie Trust Estate had little in the way of signs or lighting, and he had gone up and down two sets of stairs before finding the right place.
‘Did you get some work done?’ Juliet asked.
‘So so. The house is bloody cold, you know. As far as Khyber Road’s concerned it’s forever midwinter. I found that little fan heater under your bed but even that on full blast for hours barely took the chill off.’
‘That thing? It eats money.’
‘Didn’t Wally fix the meter?’
‘Allie. He tried to but said it just kept going faster and faster, although that might have been the speed.’
‘Poor old Wally.’
‘You should work in your room, at the Shipping Office.’
‘How can I? It’s full of stuff. Tania says the lease needs renewing and am I going to stay, as if I should know that. She’s always sniffing around, looking for things to report.’ This was another voice – so energetically complaining that Juliet feared it might go on all night.
‘To Barbara you mean? Tania said they were old friends.’
Jacob laughed. ‘Not exactly. Bar used to find Tania a complete chore but now she wants to be friends and so they are friends; she does it so well that Tania will feel as beholden to her as to a lifelong chum. I’ve never known anyone so assiduously connected.’ This pleased Juliet, more so when he added, ‘Not like you.’
‘I don’t know anyone worth connecting with, do I?’
As if this were a serious matter, ‘No, you don’t, do you.’
‘She turned up at the gallery. How was I to know? How was I to know that she’s in charge of everything now?’ Why did she sound as if she were apologising?
Jacob put his arm round her. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Arts Council. Tania. Your mother’s blanket.’
‘My mother’s what?’
Why was it so hard to ask? ‘Do you, do you, when you go to see your mother, does she?’
‘Oh, that,’ he laughed. ‘You mean do I get a lift with Barbara? Of course I do.’
‘Why?’
‘You know I don’t drive, not in this country, and the trains are terrible. There are never any cabs at the station. How else would I get there?’
‘But why does she go?’
‘God knows. She used to find any excuse not to.’
‘But you’re separated. Doesn’t your mother know?’
‘I’m sure she does.’
His fingers were in her hair; she tried to concentrate.
‘You haven’t told her that you and Barbara have separated?’
‘She’s had a stroke remember? And I do loathe the word “separated”.’
‘She’s your mother, not Barbara’s! Most people would think it peculiar, visiting her every weekend with your ex-wife.’
‘She’s still my wife. And what’s this “most people”? Surely you don’t care about most people … My mother’s not going to last much longer, you know, and if I didn’t go with Bar, I wouldn’t be able to see her.’
‘I can drive. I could hire a car and take you.’
Jacob laughed. ‘That’s very sweet of you but … no need.’
At eleven-thirty, they were struggling to watch a film. Whichever way Juliet bent the wire coat-hanger that served as an aerial, she could not get rid of the angry bars that leapt across the screen. Mary’s neighbours came home, rattling her front door as they slammed theirs. Juliet and Jacob listened to them discuss whether to have another drink or a cup of tea and what to watch.
‘Do they have to shout?’ Jacob asked, his face puckering.
‘They’re not. It’s just the walls.’
‘It sounds as if they’re in here with us. Perhaps I should put the kettle on for them.’
The brass clock belonging to the elderly couple above chimed on the quarter hour. ‘It’s like living under Big Ben,’ said Jacob, covering his ears.
‘Turn it up!’ the man next door demanded and the room filled with jumpy orchestral music. When Jacob went to fetch another beer from the fridge, he heard someone run a tap, cough richly and spit. He came back doing up his coat.
‘Are you cold?’ worried Juliet. ‘I could light the gas fire.’
Jacob had grown-up in front of a gas fire. ‘I hate gas fires, don’t you? Student bedsits and old people’s bungalows.’
A child was crying and Juliet suddenly realised, ‘It’s Bella!’
This amused Jacob so much that he lifted Juliet into the air and slid her slowly down again, pressed against his body.
‘I’d better go and see.’
But Jacob was kissing her and his hands were everywhere – in her hair, on her breasts, up and down her spine. How could anyone have so many hands? She struggled free.
Although Bella had gone back to sleep, Juliet knelt beside her and held her head so that the child would not hear what was coming through the wall, a man screaming: ‘You don’t make the fucking rules! There are no rules, you stupid bitch! Get it?’
In the living room, the gas fire was on and Jacob had gone.
When Mary had been waiting for Bella to be born, she walked each day in
Brompton Cemetery. Bella, who would grow to be almost as tall as her father, was already out of proportion to her mother. ‘Posterior oblique’, she was unable to get her head down into Mary’s pelvis where it would butt against her cervix and prompt labour to begin. She pushed Mary’s stomach up under her lungs, drummed her feet against Mary’s ribs, pinched Mary’s bladder and rounded out her long back against her mother’s strained spine. From time to time, Mary’s heart, forced to work hard, fell out of rhythm, lagging behind and then rushing to catch up, and Mary would panic because she thought she must be about to die, and then she would want to die rather than endure this until Tobias, stronger than everything, surrounded her.
The cemetery was the only open space nearby. It lay between the squares of South Kensington and Stamford Bridge football ground. Stamford Bridge’s east stand cast a long shadow over the graves and when Chelsea were playing at home, the roars and chants of the crowd bounced off the cemetery’s opposite wall and drifted back towards the stadium confusing those who were not familiar with this acoustic and making them wonder which direction they were heading in after all.
The central avenue of the cemetery was lined with colonnades. Below these lay the vaults of Victorian entrepreneurs, the new rich who had gentrified the city west of Kensington and to whom it had not occurred that there might come a time (so soon!) when there would not be enough family members to fill these shelves.
This symmetry gave way, as it did all over the city, to a disjunctive hotch-potch of developments. Plain stones told the stories of artists, inventors and theosophists. Broken columns and angels, fortified sepulchres and the truncated epics of the Crimean and Boer wars were interspersed with Polish and Russian Orthodox crosses with their graceful cyrillics. Indestructible granite with gold-painted lettering overshadowed crumbling green stumps and the wooden crosses stuck with plastic letters that Mary took to be temporary markers until she realised that most had been there for twenty years or more.
Mary liked to pursue her worst imaginings and made her way to the corner of the cemetery where there were more cherubs than angels, and where the crosses were tiny and set close together. She imagined her child as small as this grave or that, calculated ages and considered possible causes.
A week before Bella arrived, London experienced what came to be called a hurricane. Tobias slept through it as he slept through everything. Mary listened to the bang and crash and roar, so marooned in her pregnancy and lulled by hormones, that she simply observed to herself that the world might be ending.
The next day, Mary went to the cemetery. She chose the side paths that led to the more overgrown and interesting parts, and along which men strolled, slowly and deliberately, in hope of meeting other men. Mary tried not to notice how two strangers eyed one another and chose their turnings so that their paths might cross and cross again. The atmosphere, even on this damp late autumn afternoon, was erotic and tense. Beautiful men sat on tombs and were so still that, in the dusk, they might be taken for angels. Mary walked among them feeling not unlike an angel herself – elevated and sexless and free.
Several trees in the cemetery had been blown down the night before and in falling had so disturbed the earth that lids slid from tombs and graves were ruptured. Mary peered, but not too closely.
She looked up and realised that the light had gone, just like that. The men withdrew into whispers and shadows. Mary gathered herself – I am invisible, untouchable – and set off for the gates only to bump into Carlo. She giggled and he gave a small scream.
‘Mary George! Shouldn’t you be at home knitting bootees instead of here counting bones?’
‘I think I saw some …’
‘God, don’t. Me too.’
‘Part of your studies?’
‘Shall we head for the gate?’ He took her arm.
‘Careful,’ Mary shook herself free. ‘Think of your reputation.’
Carlo took her arm again, and Mary realised that he was unnerved. When they got close enough to the Fulham Road to see streetlights, they looked behind them and realised how dark the cemetery had become and hurried on to the gates, which were locked. Each month in winter, the cemetery’s closing time moved an hour earlier and that day, it had changed to five o’clock. Carlo and Mary pressed themselves against the railings. The rush-hour traffic was intent on itself and the few who hurried by on foot did not pass close enough to see or hear them. Carlo stepped back and looked up. The railings were fifteen feet high and topped with gilded spikes. He looked at Mary, spherical in her winter coat, and shook his head.
‘Let’s walk to the other end. The gate’s right on the road there so we’ll be able to get help.’ The more worried Carlo became, the more Mary felt in charge. It was a new feeling. Tobias would have scoffed at the open graves, and would have marched her through to the other gate. Carlo clutched her hand as she pulled him back into the dark. The central avenue had retained a little light and as their eyes adjusted, it began to seem once more like dusk rather than darkness. They passed an uprooted chestnut tree and a ruptured tomb.
‘Stop,’ said Mary, ‘I want to see.’
‘I’ve seen enough dead bodies, thank you.’ Carlo backed away. ‘When are you due exactly?’
‘Last Thursday.’ She was clambering over fallen branches. ‘Ow!’
‘Christ, what was that? Did your waters just break?’
Mary laughed. ‘Don’t panic. What sort of doctor are you?’
‘A doctor of people who lie neatly on tables not scattered about the place rotting and then, at the slightest excuse, it was after all just a strong wind, climbing out of their graves.’
Mary returned to the path and they set off again. ‘There were quite a few misbehaving people here this afternoon …’ She said it to keep him distracted.
‘Nosy cow.’
‘Can’t help it. All those young gods lounging about on tombs.’
‘While the old gods, the ex-gods, or those of us who never made god in the first place shuffle about looking desperate …’
‘All those tiny paths crossing –’
‘– and diverging.’
‘It’s like a village-hall disco. You know, people sizing each other up for the slow dance.’
‘Oh please! The village-hall disco where the queer gets lured out the back? That village-hall disco?’
Mary had forgotten that. She had woken up in Tobias’s arms at the age of seventeen and had not raised her head or looked about her since.
It had become properly dark now and while they continued to hold hands, they could not see each other’s faces.
‘Carlo?’
‘Yes?’
‘Being at the hospital all day, all that illness, cutting up bodies, does it make you want it?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Yes. And you?’
For a moment, Mary didn’t understand the question.
‘I mean … do you want it?’
She had lived with Tobias for ten years. She was pregnant. Did she want it? Did she want it with Tobias?
‘I’m so, um, absorbed …’
As they approached a side-gate held open by a frowning policeman, someone stepped onto the path in front of them and smiled at Carlo.
‘He can absorb me any time,’ Carlo murmured, taking them back into the lit world without embarrassment.
Since Tobias’s death, Mary had brought Bella to the cemetery most days, hoping that she might get the idea of death, just pick it up and so not need to have it explained. She introduced her to the marble figures and pointed out carved garlands, plastic flowers in vases set in varnished gravel, and wilted posies in jam jars. Mary directed her to smell cow parsley and elderflower, and lifted her up to see the lion, eroded and benign, who lay stretched across the top of the tallest tomb in the cemetery. Bella disappeared behind it and then came running back out shouting ‘Dad!’
‘What is it?’ Mary asked. A shadow, a rustle, a flicker.
‘Lift me up! Lift me!’ Bella shouted and as Mary did so,
she stretched to pat the lion’s nose. ‘Daddy!’
Mary settled herself on the grass beneath the lion with Bella in her lap. ‘Daddy!’ Bella said from time to time contentedly, and, as if they were having a conversation about him, Mary would answer ‘Dad?’ or ‘Daddy …’ or ‘Daddy!’ Why not?
‘Daddy?’
‘Juliet?’ She was the only one who had called him that, and not for years.
‘Daddy?’
‘What is it, darling?’
‘You sound tired.’
‘You phone in the middle of the night to tell me I sound tired?’
‘The thing is, I’m tired. That’s what I want to talk to you about.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I get … very tired.’ And she felt it then, too tired for words.
‘That’s not surprising, with your job and everything. And it’ll take us all some time to get used to things.’
‘Yes.’
‘So don’t worry. Go to sleep.’
‘Daddy, I can’t sleep. Not when I’m like this. The pain.’
‘What pain?’ His voice was gathering its professional energy.
‘You know how I always had a bit of pain, every month …’
‘Yes. Anti-inflammatories, hot baths, exercise, regular meals and rest.’
‘It’s got really bad and there are –’
‘Have you seen your doctor?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did he suggest?’
She gave him the list of pills. ‘…And they’re going to have a look inside. A scan, I think, and then something else maybe.’
‘I’m sure you’re fine and it sounds as if they’re taking all the right steps. Be patient, darling. Once they know what’s going on, they’ll be able to put you right.’
‘But it’s not just the pain, I –’
‘I know. It’s the same for all of us.’
An Irresponsible Age Page 8