‘Oh, Granny! I – I don’t know what to say!’ There was a lovely little bracelet of linked cameos, some glittering diamond earrings and a flat gold brooch that proclaimed: ‘MIZPAH’.
‘Don’t say anything, then. I can see you like them; that’s enough. You can have this –’ she jangled the bracelet she always wore – ‘after I’m gone. Bernard gave me the three little Fabergé eggs on it.’
Her eyes went misty for a minute, then with a sigh she came back to reality and began heaving herself to her feet. ‘I’d best be off. Rose and the driver have been waiting long enough.’
‘Granny, what if Mother just follows you down there? She loves Devon.’
She gave her familiar cackle. ‘She’d never live in the same house as Rose – they don’t get on!’
‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘But what will she do?’
‘If she plays her cards right, that fool of a doctor might marry her.’
My heart lightened. ‘Oh, do you really think so?’
‘She’ll do the “brave little woman struggling to survive with the house being sold over her head” routine to perfection – that should fetch him.’
‘Granny, you are clever!’
She reclad herself in crackling black. ‘Still got enough brain cells to see me out,’ she conceded modestly. ‘But if it doesn’t work out, I’ve put enough aside to set Valerie up in a little flat. And you can come down and visit me for a weekend when I’m settled.’
On the doorstep she opened her huge umbrella and gave me a brisk peck on the cheek. ‘If Valerie phones, you don’t know where I am. I’ll send her the address when she’s stopped foaming at the mouth.’
‘All right.’
She prepared to move off. ‘Mother!’ she snorted suddenly. ‘Hah!’
‘Granny, you keep hinting things about Mother! Do you really think there’s something strange about—’
But she was already vanishing into the misty rain and only odd words carried back: ‘… talk again soon … visit … bye, dear …’
She’d done it again! Planted more vague doubts in my mind and then toddled off before I could attempt to pin her down.
‘Granny, come back!’ I yelled, struggling into my wellies. But by the time I’d run down the path the big car was pulling away. She waved to me regally.
I trudged damply back in, wondering if it was one of her odd jokes, after all. But no, her sense of humour isn’t that obscure.
The rain trickled down my back and the Incubus leaped like a fish in my womb. The phone rang.
Mother?
‘I’ll need only half a dozen eggs a fortnight now,’ I told Mrs Peach on the Monday.
‘Eggs is nourishing!’ she stated disapprovingly.
I told her that they were only good for you in small quantities, because of cholesterol, but she said she’d never heard of it, and wouldn’t feed it to her hens if she had, and anyway, eggs had never done her any harm.
However, with her lopsided face she’s hardly a glowing advertisement.
She added that I ought to eat a rabbit or two a week to build me up, but I brilliantly announced that I’d suddenly gone off all meat and felt queasy just at the thought of it.
Then she stumped past me into the living room without a by-your-leave.
‘Bloody hell!’ shouted Toby delightedly, abandoning a half-eaten monkey nut. ‘Bloody hell!’
‘Cunning old bird!’ crooned Mrs P. ‘Who’s glad to see old Mrs Peach then?’
The phone rang, so I had to leave them to their lovers’ tryst.
It was Mother again, and my heart plummeted into my turquoise suede loafers. I’m desperately afraid she’ll try to plant herself on me permanently now Granny’s gone, though at least when I hear her prim and proper voice on the phone, I realise that some of my worst imaginings about Granny’s hints are unfounded. There’s something she’s concealing about my birth, but I can’t believe it’s anything major.
‘Are you still there, Leticia?’ she demanded peevishly. ‘I’ve had a letter from Granny, and she’s quite safe, but completely mad! Do you know what she’s done?’
Mrs P. stumped silently past me at this point and let herself out. This is quite usual – I’m thinking of charging for parrot-viewing. But I missed most of Mother’s diatribe.
Mother’s anger had further been exacerbated by a communication from Mr Herries, informing her that the house is to be sold over her head.
I held the phone a little way away, feeling the baby turn and kick, and thinking how odd it is to look down and see your abdomen jumping about of its own volition.
The phone was still quacking. I looked at it, then laid it gently down in its rest, and when it rang again a few moments later, I ignored it.
It rang for ages.
I’m just too tired to be bothered at the moment … I could sleep twenty hours out of every twenty-four, if I didn’t urgently need to write quickly.
Mrs Deakin is a fund of knowledge about pregnancy and childbirth, but I wish so many of her stories were not so awful. Surely giving birth can’t have that many complications? Most of the stories end with absolutely blood-chilling phrases like, ‘… and there was so much blood the nurses were wading about in white wellies’. Or even, ‘… forceps the size of a horsedoctor’s!’
I’d like to have a natural childbirth, but under general anaesthetic.
Bess is not a very good mother and there’s a definite smell hanging round in that corner of the kitchen. I’m dying to do it all out with disinfectant, but I must control myself until the puppies are bigger. They’re really rather sweet …
I’ve had to start buying a daily paper again, just to put on the floor round the Aga (whichever publication is thickest).
Bess considers James to be a potential puppy-napper and growls whenever he walks round to the Shack. Her fur stands on end and all the puppies whimper.
Still no address from Granny.
Fergal: December 1999
‘This week I’d like all my parishioners to reflect on the text: Let him who is without sin cast the first stone …’
Nutthill Parish Magazine
Thanks, Vicar, I need a champion.
Mrs D. has given me some idea of the kind of rumours running like wildfire through the village since I was seen coming out of Tish’s cottage … not to mention James being seen on the same day with a bruised face.
Nerissa called just to tell me, ‘How absolutely ludicrous, Fergal honey, that anyone should think you’ve got a thing going with your poor old pregnant girlfriend, when all you’re doing is being sorry for her!’
Yeah, right.
Chapter 32: Tie-dyed
The puppies have opened their eyes! They all have identical milky blue ones: was Bess kidnapped by aliens?
Bob was enthralled by the sight and, do you know, his eyes are the same weird blue. Perhaps he’s an alien too?
Bess condescended to come out for a little run with me (though neither of us is up to much running) and we met James, who was in a mood of rather shame-faced truculence. He didn’t even ask how I was feeling.
Mrs Blacklock has made me send in a driving test application (the written exam comes first, but I’m not worried about that one), and I’ve booked extra driving lessons for after Christmas. I don’t know how I’ll manage if I haven’t passed before the baby arrives, but as I drove along during the last lesson, I suddenly had the exhilarating feeling it could be quite fun – but then I stalled three times at the traffic lights and the feeling vanished. I wish I could always turn left.
Fergal is back; Nerissa phoned especially to tell me, though goodness knows how she got my ex-directory number, unless she’d been riffling through Fergal’s address book.
‘I know he’s got the goods,’ she said conspiratorially, ‘because a friend saw him coming out of a jeweller’s. But I guess I’ll have to wait until Christmas.’
I hope I said the right things. I wonder if I can bear to live here with Nerissa married to Fergal and gi
ving me a running account of their wedded bliss.
One thing is for sure – I won’t be asking him to take me out for some driving practice! He only offered because he felt sorry for me, and I can manage by myself.
I can manage everything by myself.
Our annual Christmas card and present arrived from James’s parents in South Africa, plus a long, printed, round-robin letter about nothing in particular. If James has told them about our separation or my pregnancy, they don’t mention it. But at least I now understand why they don’t mind not seeing him for years, as I feel much the same myself.
The present is a small watercolour of wild animals round a waterhole. There’s a lot of dust, and a lion seems to be killing a zebra in the background. James can have it – it isn’t my cup of tea at all.
Alice, Howard’s girlfriend, called, suggesting we meet and talk over the situation regarding her sister, Wendy, and my ex-Significant Other!
I couldn’t see the point, but she was pretty insistent in a vague way, like a cobweb that wouldn’t brush off, so we met at a pizza place roughly halfway between us.
She was already there when I arrived, looking almost normal in jeans and a fringed Indian cotton top, tie-dyed.
The baby was asleep in a sort of plastic bucket seat next to her. It didn’t look much bigger, but it had a lot of indeterminate brown hair and was wearing a Babygro also tie-dyed in mustard and a rather bilious green.
‘Hi, Alice! Nice to see you again,’ I said with false breeziness, and she smiled vaguely. ‘Shall we order and then talk? I’m ravenous.’
I always am lately.
‘Your hair is red!’ Her mud-coloured eyes examined me with mild surprise.
‘It isn’t,’ I replied coldly. ‘Must be the light in here. James is the one with red hair.’
She blinked slowly, like something unused to bright lights, which she probably was, since Howard’s electricity is always being cut off.
‘I’m having the Vegetarian Special,’ she offered.
‘That sounds healthy – I’ll have that too. And a side salad and a chocolate milkshake.’
When we’d ordered, since she still didn’t seem about to burst into speech, I cast around for something to say.
‘What did you call the baby? I expect James told me, but I’ve forgotten.’ (James hadn’t told me – or even whether it was male or female, come to that.)
‘Mickey. We couldn’t think of a name, but when I saw those Mickey Mouse bibs I knew …’ she sighed dreamily.
‘Michael?’
‘No, Michael’s a boy’s name! We called her just – Mickey.’
‘How … nice!’
I’m certainly glad the bibs didn’t have Thumper or Pocahontas on them.
‘What did you want to talk about, Alice?’ I enquired, grasping the bull by the horns. (Or vegetarian nut cutlets, in Alice’s case.)
‘It’s Wendy, my sister. She saw you at the party. She wasn’t supposed to be there that night, but she came back – and she didn’t know you were pretty because James never said, so she was jealous.’
Quelling the urge to ask how Dear James had described me to Wendy, I said: ‘It was Wendy who used to make those silent phone calls to me, wasn’t it?’
She nodded. ‘I told her not to – it made James cross, but she even did it one night when he was there asleep, and he woke up and was furious.’
I began to see that Wendy had strong-armed her vacuous sister into this meeting. ‘What does she want?’ I asked bluntly.
Her eyes opened wider. ‘James!’
‘So? She can have him. I don’t want him.’
‘But she wants to marry him!’
You’d think the concept was obscene. Come to that, perhaps it is.
‘But does James want to marry her? I mean, he has a lot of very old-fashioned ideas, you know, about there being two sorts of girls: the ones you marry and the ones you don’t, and I’m afraid Wendy qualifies for the second category.’
‘Marriage is an outdated ritual …’ she murmured sadly.
‘He’d have to get divorced first, anyway, Alice, and it does take some time. Can Wendy hang on to him long enough to get him to the altar, that’s the question?’
‘She’s given up her fashion design course and everything! Daddy says she’s obsessed, and he’s furious.’
Obsessed with James? But I suppose if people can be obsessed with trainspotting, or collecting bits of perforated paper with pictures on … It just seems awfully odd of her, that’s all.
Before he went to seed he did have a sort of rugged Highlander look about him, but he was never exciting – or maybe no man was exciting after Fergal?
‘I still don’t see what you want me to do, Alice. If she wants James, it’s up to her.’
‘But since he found out about the baby he thinks you’ll want him back, because you won’t be able to manage on your own. And she says he keeps talking about his son! Archaic!’
‘He’s a middle-class reactionary bore,’ I agreed, borrowing at random from Howard’s store of stock phrases. ‘An unfaithful middle-class reactionary bore!’
Alice’s eyes slid away like evasive mud puddles. ‘She says the baby isn’t his, that you’ve been seeing someone else.’
‘She’s wrong.’
‘She says it’s Fergal Rocco’s.’ Her eyes furtively scrutinised my face, and some sort of spark flickered in them.
So Fergal can even animate the Undead!
The faint spark died away. ‘I don’t suppose it was really true, though? Do you know him?’
‘I did know him a bit, years ago, before he got famous.’
She lost interest. ‘So it’s James’s baby?’
‘Unless aliens did a Midwich Cuckoo on me, yes.’
We ate vegetarian pizza silently for a while and then the baby started to stir and mutter.
‘So if you really don’t want him …?’ Alice had evidently been pursuing some train of thought of her own. ‘What would make him marry Wendy?’
‘Shot-gun?’ I suggested flippantly. (Or, in James’s case, sot gun.) ‘Or she could try wearing neat little suits and smart shoes, and Big Hair … and have a son or two.’
‘Have a son?’ she echoed blankly. ‘Suits?’ Her lizard lips stretched over the word.
‘That’s how he wants his wife to look, but the sort of women he has on the side probably all look like Wendy.’
Good old Bendy Wendy.
‘He thinks a solicitor’s wife should be respectable and above reproach. Wendy would be a bit of a non-starter on both counts.’
Mickey now woke properly, turned red in the face, and produced an ominous smell.
Alice sighed and got up. ‘I’ll have to go and change her.’
I sincerely hoped she wasn’t going to do it there and then! However, she set off with the little plastic bucket seat, and the smell followed her like a dog.
After fifteen minutes, when they hadn’t returned, I went to the ladies to look for her.
She was the sole occupant of the pink, softly lit antechamber, and appeared to be offering Mickey up to the wall-mounted hand-dryer, like some kind of small sacrifice.
‘What on earth are you doing, Alice?’
‘Drying Mickey’s hair.’
‘Was it wet?’
‘Yes … It was so nice and warm down here, and clean, and Mickey’s hair needed washing, so I did it. And then I thought I’d dry it … The electricity’s off at home, and Daddy’s in Capri.’
‘I – is he?’
The mad logic of all this was mind-numbing.
The baby gurgled, seeming to like the feel of the warm air blowing on her head.
‘Yes. He thinks Howard should get a job.’
‘What on earth as?’
‘He’s terribly clever really, Tish – he could be anything!’
‘Yes, he could!’ I agreed heartily. An escapee from the Planet Zog seemed the most likely.
‘But actually, Howard and I are going to learn
craftwork and join a commune.’
Daddy would probably end up supporting the commune as well, if any commune was mad enough to include Howard and Alice among its numbers.
The baby’s hair was now dry, so we went back upstairs and collected our coats and paid the bill.
‘How are you getting home?’ I asked her, worrying about the baby, warm from the hand-dryer, going out into the cold December air.
‘Howard’s picking me up in the van.’
Just then a frisson of revulsion ran through the pizza house as something horrible flattened itself against the outside window.
‘I think he’s here,’ I told her.
‘Well, goodbye, Tish, and thanks for … for … you really don’t want him back?’
‘James? No, never ever again. If Wendy can get him, she can keep him!’
Howard leered at me, then without a word went and got back into his rusty little red van, leaving Alice to get herself and the baby in unassisted.
She put the bucket seat down on the floor by her feet in the front. I’m sure that’s illegal! And surely not safe.
It’s some slight comfort to realise that I’m almost certainly going to make a better mother than Alice!
I went to the antenatal clinic on my way home, where I sat with a lot of women expecting imminent triplets. They all had an air of bovine contentment that was very irritating.
Trailed back on the bus. I’m so tired of it – I’ll be glad when I can drive. Come to that, I’m so tired, full stop. And I expand visibly every day. Could I be expecting twins, and they’ve missed one?
I should be tethered in the sky somewhere with a slogan displayed up my side (if I’ve still got a side, that is).
The novelty of having puppies has definitely worn off for Bess, and she wishes they would all vanish; I only hope I don’t feel the same about the baby.
Fergal: December 1999
‘A Festive Fergal to warm you up for Christmas …’
Trendsetter magazine
Ho, ho, ho little girls – have I got a surprise for you!
Chapter 33: Christmas Spirit
Good Husband Material Page 29