One day, perhaps, one of her appointments would stick. She might be taken on to nanny the youngest of a family with a wide age range—more likely now than it would have been a generation ago, with almost Victorian spreads being achieved through divorces and remarriages and second and third families—so that by the time that child went to prep school older siblings might well have started a new generation for Laura to take over. Then she would simply stay, the family nanny, till her retirement, and that would have been her life, and ranks of sturdy young stockbrokers would attend her funeral. Apart from the children she looked after she seemed to have no existence at all.
Laura’s look, compounded by the absurdity of finding herself blushing before it, made Poppy babble.
‘It’s got to be Saturdays,’ she said, ‘because that’s when you can find people at home. Canvassing, you know, and meeting the party workers. I’ll have to talk to my daughter-in-law about it, but I’m sure … if you are, I mean. Anyway there’s a bit of time still. It’s not going to start till next month some time.’
‘Oh.’
Poppy heard the disappointment in Laura’s voice and realised she genuinely wanted the job, needed it. It was hard to imagine why. She must be drawing a reasonable salary—her agency would have seen to that. And living in with the family she’d have almost no expenses. Perhaps there was an old mother she was helping to keep in a home somewhere. Something like that.
‘Going to help Mrs Capstone, is she?’ said Laura.
‘Actually, no. Please don’t pass this on. I haven’t told any of the girls because I didn’t want Peony telling Mrs Capstone. Toby and Deborah are such friends, you see. It might be awkward. But there’s every chance my daughter-in-law will be the Labour candidate at the next election.’
The Miss Poppy! look was back.
‘Oh, it’s all right,’ said Poppy. ‘We’re terribly respectable, I promise you. I’ve even joined the party, though I’ve voted Liberal all my life. As a matter of fact my daughter-in-law did it all for me first time, but we aren’t all mad Militants, I promise you.’
‘There’s some of them will rob you blind,’ said Laura, one of those mysterious, dark, nursery warnings to which old-fashioned nannies give utterance, carrying all the force of generations of wrong knowledge. Poppy was beginning to wonder whether the convenience of having Laura to look after Toby on Saturdays would be outweighed by the resulting culture confusion inside that small skull when Nick, who had been quietly toeing one of the play-centre trikes up and down the path in front of the bench, left it with his usual and rather frequent whining whimper and ran to Laura. Poppy looked and saw Deborah coming down the path.
Poppy had been half-watching Deborah’s activities while she was talking to Laura. A few yards further along the path there was a structure known as the Wendy House, cuckoo-clock-shaped, with big eaves, painted blue and yellow. It stood near the bottom of a slope in the path, down which toddlers more adventurous than Nick used to free-wheel on the trikes. Deborah had commandeered the hut, and just as each child came to a halt she was darting out like a trap-door spider, seizing the trike and stuffing it through the door.
According to Janet, Mr Capstone was some kind of mysterious middle-European entrepreneur, so perhaps this was hereditary behaviour, an attempt to corner the trike market. Peony was nowhere in sight, though it was accepted that all minders had a duty to control the anti-social drives of their charges. Deborah had successfully bullied two tots off their machines with no more than the threat of a scream, and now, with a lull in the use of the slope, was ranging further afield for prey. Poppy rose from the bench and intercepted her.
‘Hello, Deborah,’ she said. ‘Have you seen Toby? Where’s Toby? I’ve lost Toby? Where can he be?’
Deborah didn’t answer her smile. Her calm blue eyes stared back in disdain at the obviousness of the subterfuge, then glanced beyond Poppy to where, by the sound of it, Laura was reassuring Nick of his rights to the tricycle. She hesitated. They’d had a really successful game of hide-and-seek round the climbing frame and in and out of the open-ended barrels only yesterday afternoon. Happy and involved, Deborah could be a perfectly reasonable, likeable child.
‘Oh, look,’ said Poppy. ‘There he is!’
Deborah gave in and followed her pointing arm. Toby had finished with the climbing frame and was rolling one of the barrels along the grass. He’d put a beach-ball into the barrel, and was trying to study its movement at the same time as trundling the barrel forward, but his co-ordination wasn’t up to the complexities of the posture and as Poppy watched he fell flat on his face. Deborah forgot about the tricycle and scampered across to help.
The empathy between them was extraordinary. Though both, for different reasons, had previously tended to behave as natural solitaries, there was a bond between them whose nature Poppy didn’t fully understand. Perhaps Deborah recognised that Toby was somehow not in competition with her, that his interests were such as she could not dominate, nor would he want to dominate her, while she for him had the fascination of glamour and strangeness. It wasn’t a unique relationship, of course—a kindergarten version of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe—and Deborah was a very pretty little girl. It was just surprising in babies.
At any rate it took no more than a demonstration trundle or two for Deborah to grasp what Toby wanted and start pushing the barrel while he crabbed along beside it studying the rotation of the ball. They ended with a bump against the larger slide. Toby prepared to shove the barrel back along its course, to give Deborah a chance to study the phenomenon, but she had spotted an unattended tricycle. She rushed off, commandeered it and brought it back. There was a slight Chinese-puzzle element in getting it past the rim of the barrel, and though Poppy could see how it would have to go she decided to let them work it out for themselves. They were still at it when Peony appeared.
‘Hello,’ said Poppy. ‘You don’t look that good.’ ‘Jesus, have I puked!’ said Peony.
Everyone had a tan that summer, but her skin was drab grey-brown and her eyes bloodshot.
‘Have you eaten something, do you think?’ said Poppy. ‘Hangover, mostly. My own fault. Shouldn’t of let him talk me into trying that brandy. Lethal, that was.’
The name of Peony’s Liverpool boyfriend slid conveniently into Poppy’s mind.
‘You had Randy down?’ she said.
‘Wasn’t him. Imagine Randy eating squid? He’d die! Jesus!’
Poppy could hear the note of smugness under the groans. At least Peony had enjoyed herself the evening before, whatever she was suffering now.
‘You’d better take it easy,’ she said. ‘I’ll keep an eye on Deborah. She’s no trouble while she’s got Toby to play with.’
‘Thanks a lot, Poppy. Listen, Mrs C. says I’m to take you back to tea one of these days. Some time she’s there. OK?’
‘So she can check if we’re suitable playmates for Deborah?’
There was something about the idea of Mrs Capstone which made it difficult to keep the mockery out of one’s voice, but Peony was in no state to notice. The children were happy for the moment with their barrel, so Poppy got out her copy of Floodlight and started to leaf through for language and word-processor courses, distracted by other possibilities. What openings were there, for instance, for a middle-aged, German-speaking, computer-literate dry-stone-waller in Central London? Peony dozed. The children rolled the tricycle in the barrel, and then each other, and then got in it together and wobbled it to and fro. Then they tried a variant of their yodelling game, using the barrel as a sound-box. Poppy began to listen with interest, and when Peony stirred she said, ‘Listen. Can you hear? I think Deborah’s taught Toby to sing.’
‘Uh?’
‘He’s not just yelling into the barrel. That’s a note. Of a sort. Are the Capstones musical?’
‘Her Dad is, though it’s not my idea. Stuff he’ll listen to—like cat
s being fried alive!’
‘Don’t! How are you feeling?’
‘Not so bad. What’s the time? Think I’ll take her home in a minute. You won’t say anything to Mrs C about me having a sore head, will you? Only she might ask, see. She’s like that. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea—she’s been ever so kind to me. She’s not like they say, Poppy—really not, not at home, anyway. Mind you, he gives me the creeps.’
‘I’ll give you my number, and then perhaps you or Mrs Capstone can ring me and arrange a day.’
When Peony moved to break up the game and take Deborah home. Deborah loosed a bout of screaming, the first of the afternoon, but not as piercing or prolonged as usual, and in the end she settled into her push-chair with a good grace. Toby pecked her goodbye and then meandered about for a while, eventually settling into the sandpit, where he became fascinated by the way that, as he dug, the soft sift from the edges of the hole slithered inexorably back down its sloping sides. Several of the Nafia were on the benches beside the pit, including Laura, who having through most of the summer rather pointedly set herself apart from the girls—the trained and disciplined career nanny as distinct from these unreliable fly-by-nights—had in the last couple of weeks completely changed her stance and seemed to be making a determined effort to belong. The girls, being tolerant, accepted her, as no doubt at home they were used to accepting older and slightly odd relations into their extended families. As Poppy approached she rose and came over.
‘You mustn’t mind me, Mrs Tasker,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot of very decent people of your way of thinking. I know that.’
‘Oh, good heavens, I’m not worried if you aren’t, and I’m sure Janet won’t be either. I’ll have a word with her tonight and we’ll talk about it again tomorrow, if you’re still interested.’
‘Shan’t be here tomorrow, Mrs Tasker. Got to take Sophie to the dentist.’
‘Oh, Lord, is she starting already? Why must they grow up so fast?’
Laura looked at her, then at Toby sturdy and golden in the pit, then at Nick, bleach-haired, patting sand into a bucket.
‘That’s the pity of it, Mrs Tasker,’ she said. ‘That’s just the pity of it.’
2
Next day was a return to the full blaze of summer, glare and inertia, bare brown torsos littering the grass, diversions from the usual route to the play centre in search of shade, a sense of tranquillity and well-being and thanks for such a season before winter. Almost all the children were out in the open, moving in random patterns in their bright Mothercare clothes. Poppy helped Toby inspect the climbing frame, then settled on a bench to try and work more seriously on Floodlight. She had only three more days to make up her mind about first choices and alternatives before the scrum and frustrations of booking in. She was distracted by Big Sue, Little Sue and Fran on the next bench. Fran was bringing the others up to date on the saga of her neighbour’s domestic affairs. Fran brought her own son, Jason, to the play centre, and usually the neighbour’s little girl, Winnie, as well, receiving an erratic token payment when the neighbour was in funds. The neighbour had a new man living with her, and a few weeks back her previous man—not Winnie’s father—had come back and broken up her flat and given her a thrashing, the police had been called and the man arrested. Yesterday he’d appeared in court.
This was one of the bonuses of bringing Toby to the play centre. Occasionally, amid the repetitions and banalities of the conversation Poppy would be given glimpses of other lives, or scraps of gossip and other social titillations. They weren’t often actually startling, though last year, before she’d begun coming, a girl called Jane had been working for one of the protagonists in a thoroughly English headline-making scandal involving sex, insider dealing, a viscount and a feud in a cricket club. Jane had left now, but Big Sue had told Poppy things about the case which hadn’t appeared in the newspapers. And more recently she’d heard Big Sue herself telling her friends about her previous employer, some kind of BBC executive, who’d been in the habit of coming home while his son was having his pre-lunch rest and trying to get Big Sue into bed with him. Big Sue was diabetic and earned her adjective but was still attractive in a creamy, cushiony way, so the episode was easy to imagine. Poppy was interested too in the conventions of these exchanges—suppose the man had been her present employer, would Big Sue have been so forthcoming? Probably not. She would have told Little Sue, and perhaps Fran, in confidence, Poppy thought, and that would have been it.
By now Toby and Deborah had joined forces. Deborah had commandeered the Wendy House again, and together they’d rolled a barrel over to it and jammed it endwise into the entrance, like the tunnel into an igloo, so that Toby could carry out a variant on yesterday’s acoustic experiments. Further up the slope Nell was helping Nelson use the slide, encouraging him to abandon himself to the pull of the earth and waiting to catch him at the bottom. Her love, his trust, were manifest in stance and gesture. Together they composed an idyll, sufficient to each other, Eden-innocent in the perfect afternoon.
The thought itself must have been the serpent. Poppy sensed a change in the mood on the bench next door. Fran had stopped her recital. The girls had been muttering, notes of doubt and warning, and now their poses stiffened. They were all three gazing steadily towards the clump of trees outside the fence, between the play centre and the pond. She switched specs to see what was bothering them, saw, and joined her stare to theirs. This was how you dealt with this problem.
Rapt in his own interest the man didn’t for the moment notice he was being watched. He was a silhouette, black as the tree-trunks against the grass glare and pond glitter beyond the patch of shade. He was slight, and was wearing a short, Burberry-style coat. He had a beard, but his other features were invisible in the shadow. He didn’t move. His stance, as he dragged on his cigarette and dropped the butt on to the ground, declared that this was not a casual passer-by, stopping for a moment to enjoy the pretty antics of the children as he might have enjoyed the bright-feathered ducks on the pond, but a watcher, serious, intent, motivated. He seemed to Poppy to be looking at Toby.
Deborah was inside the Wendy House, singing through the barrel. The round bulge of Toby’s nappy-padded overalls, where he knelt to call back into the apparatus, was all there was for the man to study. There were no other children near. Poppy concentrated her stare. Any moment now he would realise, turn and go. It always worked. They couldn’t stand the focused gaze of twenty women. This sort of thing had happened a couple of times since she’d been coming to the play centre, and then, though disgusted at the necessity, she had found the power of this communal weapon actually exhilarating. Now, with the man seeming to be particularly intent on Toby, she felt only hatred, fright and shock.
In less than a minute most of the enclosure, including some of the children, had joined the gaze. Without looking, Poppy was aware of the accumulation of energies. In her peripheral vision she saw someone wheel a push-chair through the gate, stop just inside and turn to stare too. Now the man’s concentration broke. He looked round, mimed a moment of bravado by tapping at his pocket as if for another cigarette and realising that he needed to buy a fresh packet, turned and walked away.
Poppy’s heart was hammering. She watched him dwindling into the sunlight along the path by the pond, his pale coat flapping at his hams. The coat looked newish. His walk wasn’t a derelict’s shamble. She tried to summon up the proper thoughts into her mind—just one of those things, poor sod, something must have gone badly wrong in his life, way, way back … (They should be painlessly done away with and buried six feet deep in lime!)
She shivered. The sun, so honest and strong ten minutes ago, had no warmth in it. She was aware of the girls beginning to talk again, a group of them now, five or six.
‘I’d like to see them all hanged, that sort.’
‘Hanging’s too good.’
‘If I got my hands on him.’
; ‘Probation’s all he’d get, till he actually went and did something.’
‘Cut their cocks off, first offence, that’s what I say.’
‘Got his eye on Toby, hadn’t he? You OK, Poppy?’
She looked up.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s just one of those things.’
‘Don’t be so bloody soft,’ said Big Sue. ‘Sorry, Poppy, but it makes me sick, that line. Pussyfooting around with psychiatrists. Not their fault. Jesus! I’d teach him a thing or too if I could get hold of him!’
She meant it, too, for the moment at least. Her big face was a mask of primal anger, the muscles bunched, the dark and usually rather dreamy eyes now hard and glittering.
‘Easy, Sue, easy,’ said Fran.
‘I’d cut their cocks off, then I might feel easy.’
There were mutters of agreement. Poppy said nothing and felt ashamed, partly at the feebleness of her liberal conscience in not attempting to reason with them, but more because in her heart she knew she didn’t believe that conscience either. She welcomed the distraction of Nell coming down the path, shoving the push-chair with one hand and with Nelson looking bewildered on the other arm. Nell’s face was set.
‘It’s all right,’ said Poppy, ‘he’s gone. He won’t come back. It’s just one of those things.’
‘See you tomorrow,’ said Nell and strode past.
Slowly the mood of outrage subsided. Those children who had noticed anything strange quickly forgot, and scampered and triked and dug and explored as usual. The girls split into smaller groups. Poppy forced herself back into Floodlight, marked possible courses and made decisions. Later on a policewoman turned up, summoned by the play-leader, George, on the hut telephone, and took statements. Poppy excused herself on the grounds of her poor distance vision and left early.
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