A Dry Spell

by Clare Chambers

  ‘Come on, let’s go to the park,’ said Jane, attempting the diversionary tactics recommended by all the childcare manuals. It was sunny outside with only a slight breeze. ‘We’ll feed the ducks.’ The crying intensified. ‘We might get an ice-cream.’ Pathetic, she thought. Craven capitulation.

  An hour later they were standing on the wooden bridge over the pond alongside half a dozen other mothers and toddlers, tossing large chunks of sliced loaf into the water, which was beginning to take on the consistency of gazpacho. A couple of bloated ducks skulked in the reeds at the bank, trying to dodge the missiles. Harriet was eating one of the crusts. She wouldn’t touch bread at home. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘There’s a kiss in the sky.’

  Jane looked up. Two aeroplane trails had chalked a white X against the blue. It’s really not so bad, she thought. This was one of her favourite places – about the only good discovery she had made since they moved. There was the narrow pond, which ran the length of the park – a mass of dropped litter and coagulated bread at one end, but green and glassy at the other, with lily pads and the odd freckled fish. There were tennis courts, unused all year round apart from the few weeks after Wimbledon when they were booked up from dawn to dusk; the children’s play area which had enticing yet safe equipment, and a café, at which Jane and Harriet were regular visitors.

  It was to the playground that the two of them now made their way, Harriet at a run, Jane following at a more dignified pace. Half an hour on the swings, half an hour in the café, fifteen-minute tantrum, home, twenty minutes’ colouring, pick up Sophie, forty-five minutes in the garden if I’m lucky and it’s fine, sponge painting if it’s not, then Guy will be home. Jane parcelled out the rest of the day in her mind; it was the only way to get through it. Every minute had to be accounted for and planned in advance. The moment Jane slackened off and let her attention wander Harriet would switch via boredom to downright aggression. She’d been caught that way too often.

  There were only half a dozen other children in the playground. It was easy to keep an eye on Harriet. I could almost have brought a book, thought Jane, though she hadn’t so much as picked up a book in months. Reading was just another of those pleasures associated with her previous, childfree life, which she had given up. There was no necessity for this, but Jane felt that, in the absence of overpowering maternal feelings, self-sacrifice was the one area where she could really shine. She had given up her job, her home town, her friends, her hobbies, going out, singing in the choir, smoking and finally reading. No one would be able to blame her selfishness when Harriet finally went to the bad, as she one day surely would.

  Jane looked around for somewhere to sit – not so close to the swings that Harriet would be encouraged to keep coming over and pestering her, but near enough to intercept her if she suddenly took off. The bench by the horse-chestnut was the ideal spot – Jane requiring partial sun and partial shade like a tender plant – but next to it, too close not to be acknowledged, was a woman lying on a rug beside a sleeping baby. The woman was wearing a long black skirt and matted jumper, even though it was the sort of early spring day when an optimist might chance short sleeves. Her long dark hair, which was swept up into a bulldog clip was thickly streaked with grey. An old mother or a young granny perhaps, Jane thought, though her demeanour wasn’t what Jane would have called grandparental. She was lying on her stomach reading the paper, a can of lager at her side and a smouldering cigarette in the hand furthest from the baby. How irresponsible, thought Jane, a reformed smoker, at the same time experiencing a pinprick of envy. Harriet would never have slept so conveniently at that age. The moment you tried to ease her towards the horizontal her eyes would have snapped open and she’d have been shrieking. As if reading Jane’s mind, Harriet, who had climbed unassisted into one of the kiddies’ swings, began clamouring to be pushed.

  Jane waved her assent and hurried over before the shouting turned to screaming. She gave the swing a few good, hard shoves and, when Harriet was safely airborne, made a dash for the kiosk. Something had given her a thirst. While the youth behind the counter poured her tea she read the advertisements on the cork board in the window.

  FOR SALE: Birdcage, cot mattress and Ford Fiesta wing mirror (left). £10 the lot.

  The owner must have extraordinary faith in coincidence to imagine that somewhere out there was a buyer in need of all three, thought Jane, smiling to herself. She glanced back at Harriet who had almost come to a standstill and was gearing up for another yell. She paid for her tea and fished the teabag out with a plastic stirring rod, leaving a pattern of drops across the counter to the bin. The polystyrene cup was rather too wide to hold its shape properly and kept threatening to fold itself into a spout and tip boiling liquid over her. I’ll bring a flask next time, she thought, calculating what that would save her in 50ps over the course of a season, when she noticed that the grey-haired woman with the baby was on her feet, hands on hips, looking impatient.

  ‘Will!’ the woman called. The baby at her feet stirred. ‘Will!’ This time more loudly. ‘Where are you?’

  Definitely a mother, Jane decided. That combination of exasperation and guilt in the tone was unmistakable. Besides, she had a gold stud in her nose, and she didn’t look nearly so grey from the front, quite dark in fact, and not that much older than Jane herself. She approached Jane, who was half way across the playground, tea in hand.

  ‘Have you seen a little boy – three years old, with dark hair and a red T-shirt,’ she said, not actually looking at Jane, but casting anxiously around her and then glancing back at the baby, still dozing on the blanket.

  ‘He’s not in the kiosk. Do you want me to watch the baby while you look for him?’ She wouldn’t have dreamed of leaving her own child with a stranger, but that didn’t prevent her from making the offer, which was gratefully accepted.

  ‘Would you mind? I won’t be long. He always does this,’ the woman added, taking off at a long-legged sprint for the gate.

  Well, if he always does it, why didn’t you take the precaution of keeping an eye on him? Jane thought, glancing automatically at Harriet before sitting down on the grass side of the baby. The shade had moved and a small drop of sunlight rested on his cheek. Jane positioned herself to cast a shadow across his face. ‘Don’t want you to burn,’ she whispered.

  Harriet, bored in her motionless swing and scenting fresh drama, clambered out and came running over.

  ‘Don’t wake him and don’t touch,’ Jane hissed, as the little girl dropped to her knees millimetres from the baby’s head, making him twitch violently and open his eyes.

  ‘He’s awake already!’ cried Harriet in delight.

  ‘Ssh!’ said Jane as the baby blinked and gave a few little bleats. ‘Look what you’ve done. Go and play.’

  ‘Can I hold him?’ said Harriet, patting him rather forcefully on the top of the head.

  ‘No. Leave him alone and he might go back to sleep.’ The woman will probably come back and find him bawling and accuse me of shaking him or something, Jane thought. ‘Harriet, go and play and I’ll buy you an ice-cream when the lady gets back,’ she pleaded.

  Harriet ignored her, bending over the baby until her fringe tickled his face, at which point he seized a good handful of hair and gave it a hard yank. Harriet screamed, inadvertently headbutting the baby, who started to wail. Oh Godalmighty, thought Jane, hysterically. Now he’s going to have a broken nose or a bloody great egg on his head. She pushed Harriet away. ‘Go away or you won’t get an ice-cream. Ever again,’ she half-shouted, picking up the baby and trying to pacify him and examine him for damage at the same time. Harriet finally obliged, taking advantage of Jane’s inability to chase after her, by performing dangerous stunts on the roundabout. The baby didn’t look too injured, but his face was so red and contorted with crying that it was hard to tell. Don’t come back yet, don’t come back yet, Jane silently urged the absent mother. Not until I’ve got him quiet.

  She struggled to her feet, holding the baby to h
er shoulder and rocking from one foot to the other, humming frantically. After a few minutes of this the cries subsided to a whimper, but the moment Jane relaxed he tensed up and opened his mouth again. He was surprisingly heavy for such a little chap, and hot too – Jane could feel rivulets of sweat trickling down her side under her shirt. She kept up the rocking and the inane humming, all the while trying to fix Harriet with a glare sufficiently menacing to stop her jumping on and off the moving roundabout. Ten minutes passed. Jane’s arms grew leaden. When she ventured to adjust the child’s position she saw he was asleep, tears sparkling on his eyelashes like dew on a web. She eased herself down on to the blanket, and having accomplished that without rousing him, dared to lay him beside her in the spot he had not long ago occupied.

  She wiped her damp fringe from her forehead with the back of her hand and plucked at her shirt. There was a damp patch on the front, whether from perspiration or infant dribble Jane couldn’t tell.

  Harriet was on the seesaw now. She had made a friend and the two of them were being pumped up and down by the other child’s mother. The source of Harriet’s sociability and confidence was a complete mystery to Jane. She allowed herself to relax and glance at the newspaper beside her. The cryptic crossword was half filled in, the margins of the paper littered with doodles and anagrams. It was years since Jane had done a crossword. Giving up newspapers was another of those small, frequently unnecessary sacrifices which had become a habit. She had never had enough time to read them when there were two children around all day, and it frustrated her to see them piling up, unread, clogging up first the coffee table and then the bin. She didn’t miss them. All that war and famine and child abuse. Better not to know. Nevertheless, crosswords seemed to inhabit a different, purer world. And you never lost the knack: it was like riding a bike. Jane picked up the pen. Five down. Well, that was Goblin Market for a start. And that long one would have to be Housemaid’s Knee. Quite forgetting herself, Jane started to fill in the clues, ticking them off as she went. The woman had left her handbag on the blanket, half open, which seemed to Jane to betray a reckless faith in human nature. But then one would hardly trust someone to look after a baby in preference to a wallet.

  Harriet came running over, her cheeks bulging with sweets that she had evidently extorted from her friend on the seesaw. ‘I want to go home now.’

  Jane filled in the last clue. Limoges. ‘Well, we can’t.’ Harriet never, ever wanted to go home. Jane usually had to prise her fingers one by one from the bars of the climbing frame and carry her, kicking, to the car. ‘We’ve got to wait for the lady to come back.’ Jane glanced at her watch. She’d been gone more than twenty minutes. She obviously can’t find him, thought Jane, her heart starting to thump. Maybe he’s fallen in the pond; maybe someone’s snatched him. What if she comes back without him, distraught? She dropped the pen she’d been holding as though it were a bloodstained knife. What if she comes back without him, distraught, and finds that I’ve been sitting here casually doing her crossword. What can I have been thinking of?

  ‘I. Want. To. Go. Home. Now,’ said Harriet, stamping her foot at every syllable.

  Jane ignored this. A brilliant idea struck her. She removed the outside cover of The Times and put it in her pocket, and had just refolded the whole paper into a neat rectangle when the woman reappeared, in no great hurry and hand in hand with a dark-haired boy of about Harriet’s age. Jane scrambled to her feet, smiling with relief.

  ‘I finally caught up with him right down by the other gate,’ said the woman, making no apology for having kept Jane waiting. ‘I think you and I will have to have a little talk when we get home,’ she addressed her son mildly.

  A little talk? thought Jane. A little wallop, more like.

  The woman picked up her handbag from the blanket and ferreted for her cigarettes. She put one in her mouth before turning the packet on Jane. ‘Do you smoke?’

  ‘No. It’s bad for you, apparently,’ said Jane drily.

  The woman affected surprise. ‘Now they tell us,’ she said, tossing the unlit cigarette into the bin beside the bench.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you found him,’ said Jane, looking around for Harriet who was now trying to walk up the helter-skelter.

  ‘Yes, so am I,’ said the woman. ‘Up to a point. Thanks for watching the baby,’ she added as an afterthought, as Jane turned away.

  ‘Come on, hometime,’ Jane called to Harriet, who had now reached the platform at the top of the helter-skelter and was barring the way down to a growing queue of impatient children. The little girl, a moment ago demanding to leave, now gave Jane one of her mutinous stares. It was an expression familiar to Jane, an especially hostile one which heralded the start of a lengthy confrontation which would involve, though not necessarily end in tears – not always Harriet’s.

  ‘Well, I’m going. Bye,’ Jane called. She had tried this bluffing routine before but it seldom worked, and more frequently resulted in a humiliating climbdown on her part, but she was damned if she was going to shin up the slippery bit of the helter-skelter and smack Harriet in front of all those other mums. Especially someone whose baby she had just been minding. I bet she doesn’t smack her kids, thought Jane. Just lets them run riot.

  It was only when she was through the gate that she allowed herself to look over her shoulder. Harriet had come down from the helter-skelter but was not following, indeed, she had her back to Jane and seemed oblivious to her departure. Blast. Now she would either have to sit and wait until she noticed, or whip up a temper and storm back to fetch her. Jane felt more weary than angry, and decided to wait by the hedge, out of sight, but still watching.

  Maintaining continuous surveillance through a foot of woody privet was not easy and required some dodging and weaving on Jane’s part. She was just thinking what a very undignified figure she would cut if she happened to bump into anyone she knew, and how fortunate it was that she was relatively new to the area, when a voice said, ‘You haven’t lost yours now, have you?’ and the black-and-grey haired woman appeared as if from nowhere, with the blanket over her shoulder, somehow managing to carry the baby, hold her son’s hand and eat an ice-cream all at the same time.

  ‘Ha-ha. No,’ Jane said, straightening up, embarrassed. But the woman had moved on, oblivious.

  In the meantime, after a few minutes of pushing an empty swing Harriet appeared to remember her mother’s existence and came running towards the gate. Jane watched as the child’s face crumpled with panic, as though just about to melt, and she experienced a moment of cruel gratification swiftly followed by shame and guilt.

  ‘Here I am. I told you to come, didn’t I?’ she said, stepping out from behind the hedge before Harriet had a chance to start crying.

  An unbelievable result, thought Jane, as Harriet scuffed along beside her. Out of the park without a tantrum or an ice-cream. And she felt a great surge of maternal self-confidence. A hearse was passing by slowly as they reached the road. Its roof was decked with pastel-coloured flowers, packed together like so many screwed-up tissues.

  ‘Mummy, look at that beautiful car,’ said Harriet, pointing. ‘Can I go in one like that one day?’

  Over my dead body, thought Jane, dropping down to Harriet’s level and hugging her tightly.

  5

  Hello, Nina. This is Hugo Etchells calling from Australia. I tracked you down through the University magazine and international directory inquiries. I was just phoning to say that I’m coming back to the UK this summer. For good. As soon as I can tie up a few loose ends here. I thought it would be nice to meet up again and talk about Old Times. I won’t be needing accommodation or anything like that. I’m sorry you’re not there. I might try you again nearer the time. My number’s Sydney 969 9278 if you want it, but there’s no need for you to call back.

  Good, thought Nina. Then I won’t. She didn’t even bother to take down the number before she pressed the erase button, but against her will she had already memorized it. Sydney 969 9278; the more she
tried to forget it, the deeper it lodged. I won’t be requiring accommodation. Nina didn’t like that line. The very fact that he’d mentioned the subject showed that he must have considered her even briefly as a source of hospitality, and that struck her as presumptuous after so many years of silence. For good. She didn’t like that line either. If it was just a holiday or business trip a meeting could easily be avoided, though Nina was hard pressed to imagine what sort of business Hugo would be engaged in – drug running, perhaps?

  But if he was coming back to England to live after sixteen, seventeen years, he would have all the time in the world to pursue old acquaintances, and the thing about Hugo was his absolute determination in the face of any resistance. If she expressed enthusiasm and delight and put herself out to meet him, he wouldn’t show up; if she hedged and made excuses he would be on to her like a pack of hounds. She would come back from work one day and find him camped on the doorstep, overnight bag in hand; or in the sitting room, running an appraising eye over her possessions, and cross-examining James.

  James. She felt her throat constrict with fear. If Hugo ever met James the cat would really be out of the bag. She had always thought it no more than a possibility that when Irene was safely dead and beyond harm, and James was old enough to understand the value of a certain type of lie, she would sit him down and tell him everything. Now, thanks to Hugo, it looked as though this long-deferred moment had finally arrived.

  6

  In 1974 Nina had enrolled as a geography student at University College. London. She had spent the previous seven years at boarding school so the idea of ‘leaving home’ held no particular delights or fears. Her father was in the diplomatic service, and during her childhood had held posts in half a dozen different countries, the most recent of which was Kenya. By the age of eighteen Nina was well travelled, but rootless.