‘No, it’s not. It’s nearly half past eight. That’s late for us.’
Hilary cut herself a finger, lay back against the pillows, chewing very slowly, so she could judge the taste and texture of the sponge. She had made the cake herself, even used an icing set to write a wobbly ‘Happy Birthday’ in pink on white. She thought back to a year ago – that swede and carrot hotchpotch she had made for poor Miss Pullen, then devoured as penance cake. She’d come quite a way since then, and not just in her cooking skills. She’d left behind that panicky insomniac – crop-haired, dressed in cast-offs – still pining for its convent, its safety net of rules; somehow found an identity, a self; even strengthened it these last few days, in response to Eva’s letter. Eva would approve of this offbeat birthday breakfast – red jelly and iced cake, washed down with Seven-Up. In the week they’d been at Tooting, they hadn’t yet had one conventional meal. She let Luke choose the menus. Not only was it easier, since he asked for things like Chow Mein from the takeaway, or peanut butter sandwiches, but it also meant he ate more. All meals were casual picnics, usually eaten on the sofa bed with the television blaring. This morning it was Boss Cat and the Smurfs.
Luke broke his ‘B’ off, wrapped it in a Kleenex, then stuffed his mouth with icing, talking as he chewed. ‘Now your cards. You’ve got – let’s count – one, two, three, four, five. Can I open them?’
‘Yes, do. My fingers are all sticky. What’s that really fat one?’
Luke tore it open, found a card, a bulky letter and a smaller envelope. ‘ “Love from Liz”, the card says. Don’t read the letter. It looks boring.’ He snatched it from her grasp, handed her the second card, instead.
‘Don’t be such a Boss Cat!’ Hilary grabbed the letter back, flicked through it very swiftly, righting an immediate surge of guilt, as Liz detailed all the presents she and Harry had for her – Christmas gifts still waiting for her visit, and now birthday presents, too – clothes from Di’s new shop, books and records, classy bits and pieces to mitigate the squalor of her flat. Her first instinct was to refuse, write straight back to Liz and say she couldn’t take so much, until she realised from the letter that Liz, too, felt plagued with guilt; that the presents were a way to quiet her conscience, minimise the growing gulf between them. In Liz’s view, she herself had everything – money, status, a gracious house, elegantly furnished, and now, at last, a definite (and romantic) wedding date – February 14th, St Valentine’s – whereas ‘you, my love, have landed up with zilch.’
Hilary refolded the letter, returned it to its envelope. No self-pity. Anyway, a lot of things which Liz had, she didn’t envy in the least. She had never wanted marriage – save to God – nor an expensive gracious home; preferred Eva as her model, Eva who had lived alone on boiled eggs and custard creams, rarely cooked at all, except for sudden generous dinners for her friends; chose to spend her money on books and outings, or saving whales and seals, rather than Homes and Gardens clutter. She glanced at her new ring – no crucifix, no pearls – just a cheap and gimcrack thing she’d discovered in the toy shop while Luke was picking out his glider. A toy ring, to help her play the game of being Mrs Craddock, and which could be discarded with the name.
She slit the smaller envelope, found a home-made card from Stephen, admired the bright collage of ships and cars.
‘Get a move on, Gee! You’ve still got four more left.’
She grinned at her old nickname; had told Luke just two days ago that she’d been ‘Gee’ at school, from the age of seven to the age of seventeen. He seemed to like the name, had used it ever since. It made her feel a child again, with Luke as her kid brother. She could love him as a brother. That brand of love was easier.
He was jumping on the bed now, endangering its springs, jabbing the last cards against her stomach. ‘One’s from Di and one’s from Dad. You’re lucky! He never sent my Mum no card. And who’s this third one from? I can’t read a word of it.’
Nor could she. The writing was a scrawl, and completely unfamiliar. She held it to the light. ‘Oh, it’s Charlie! Charlie Cook downstairs. He says “Forty’s nothing, wait until you’re sixty!” How on earth did he know?’
‘I told him.’
‘Luke, you rotter! Right, let me see your Dad’s now.’ She took the padded satin card, which showed three kittens in a basket, pink bows around their necks; a sentimental verse inside, wishing her sunny days and silver linings to any tiny cloud. Joe himself had written just three words – ‘Thank you’ and his name. She stared down at his writing, which didn’t seem to fit him, a timid spindly hand, which looked diffident, uncertain. The brief message meant a lot, though. It was the first time he had thanked her, either in writing or in person. She glanced back at Charlie’s card, pleased he, too, had bothered. Even the postman had wished her happy birthday, stopped to chat a while. She was slowly making friends. Some of Charlie’s ‘regulars’ had got to know her name, and the woman in the paper shop often had a friendly moan about the weather or the Unions. She liked the feeling that they were relating to her as her, and not merely as an appendage of the Kingsleys, as had always been the case at Cranleigh Gardens.
Yet she still had Liz’s family, as well. They had all remembered, even Delia. Luke was just squinting at her card, which he described as ‘squashed red flowers’. She scanned the reproduction of Monet’s Poppy Field, Delia’s sweeping signature inside. This must be a duty card, sent only on Liz’s orders. All the same, it touched her – as did the offer of free highlights any time she found herself in Berkshire. Impulsively, she slipped down from the bed.
‘I need the bathroom, Luke. Won’t be a sec’ She did need it, urgently, had drunk two cups of tea before the Seven-Up. It was also the only room which had a mirror. She’d been ignoring mirrors recently, fighting off her fear of being forty since dawn that morning when she’d woken to pitch darkness, aware that half her life was over, maybe more. Her father had died when he was only in his fifties. If she took after him in that respect, she was old, not middle-aged. She peered closely in the cracked and dingy glass; knew already she’d find her first grey hairs, had been trying to ignore them now for weeks. She counted them – just seven – and they didn’t really show. Her hair was still the wheaty colour it had been in her girlhood. Delia’s highlights had grown out now completely; no traces left of the chic and clever cut. It was child’s hair – thick and straight, but somehow she preferred it. She’d leave the grey hairs grey, leave the rest unstyled, not continue with the blonding or take up Delia’s offer.
She unlocked the door, about to leave the room, then suddenly dived back, turned the key again. She had to see the rest of her, somehow feared that she had aged, subtly but irrevocably, breasts sagging, waistline spreading, as if to mark the start of official middle age. She unzipped her dressing-gown, tugged her nightie off, shivering in the dank unheated room. She looked much the same as always – perhaps a little thinner – a bruise on her left leg where Luke had rammed it with his Thundertank. She touched one breast, felt it firm and girlish still. Robert would approve – her waist still well-defined, what he called her ‘thatch’ still blonde and crisp. She stroked her hand across it, remembering his hand, the pressure of his fingers, his high-flown compliments. It was the clothes which spoilt the image: a boring long-sleeved nightgown, and a new bargain-basement dressing-gown, bought for warmth, not glamour. Yet why should she be glamorous, dress for vanished Robert, or the editor of Vogue, rather than to suit herself or the cold climate of the flat? She and Liz had parted, not just geographically, but in more fundamental ways. Liz was seeking wealth and gloss, still trying to outwit nature, force her face and hair and figure to fit a glamorous mould, whereas she herself had renounced such futile struggles.
She leaned forward, touched her mirror-face, realised with a sense of shock that the high glass wall she had always felt surrounding her, had totally dissolved. It hadn’t needed shattering, with all the pain and danger of cut and bleeding hands; had simply melted, vanished. She was n
o longer cordoned off from other people, shut out from the world.
‘You was long enough,’ said Luke, as she returned to the sitting room, buttoning up her dressing gown. He was squatting on the carpet, prising lumps of icing off the now half-balding cake. She was tempted suddenly to hug him, just to prove she could, show the world the barriers were down. Yet she knew he’d pull away – squirming, scowling, embarrassed by the contact. Best to leave it for a while – next week, next month, next term.
‘Hey, no more of that icing, Luke. It’ll only make you sick.’
‘I’m never sick.’
‘What about last Monday?’
‘That was eggs, not icing. I don’t like eggs. They’re chicks.’ He dashed off to the bathroom, clutching at his jeans. He always left his visits far too late, sometimes right till danger point. Monday had been bad – vomit, then a puddle.
She removed the cake, collected up the dirty plates, the torn and scattered envelopes. Two cards missing: one from Robert, one from Luke himself. If Joe had never sent a card in thirty years of marriage, was it any wonder his son had failed to bother? She’d have to train him differently, as Di had done with Stephen. And as for Robert, she had his gifts already, and more important still had his views and insights; views she must impart to Luke, to supplement the teaching of the nuns. If she were acting mother, then Robert must be father, in the sense of influence, must point Luke to a wider world which would undercut the narrowness of one coercive faith.
She moved to the window, peered out at the sky. It seemed to threaten snow, pressing grey and leaden on the stained and steep-pitched roofs. She shivered, flexed her fingers. She had fit both the ancient oil stoves, yet the cold still seeped through cracks, thrust against the glass. She rubbed the steamed-up pane, looked beyond the roofs, to where the grey was slowly lightening into white; a white so intense, so potent, it seemed to eat into the obstacles which tried to interrupt it – telegraph posts or aerials or ugly factory chimneys, dissolving in its bleak but brilliant fight. She gazed higher still, up to Robert’s region, where the eye could pierce through barriers of sky and space and time, to a vastness and intensity she still could hardly fathom. Would she ever really grasp it or – still more difficult – impart some vaguest sense of it to Luke? She felt a sense of duty to the boy, to give him at least the barest intimation of Robert’s complex world, and to present it as a wonder, not a threat. She could hear him tramping back now, hear his tuneless whistle, the muttered ‘Shit!’ as he tripped on a torn patch in the lino.
‘Did you flush the loo, Luke?’
‘No.’
‘Well, go and do it.’
‘No.’
‘We can’t go to the zoo, then. What a shame. It opens in three-quarters of an hour, and I thought it would be rather nice if we were the first ones through the turnstile.’
Luke threw the last piece of birthday cake to a mangy-looking ostrich which appeared to be losing half its feathers. The bird bent and looped its long elastic neck, to investigate the offering, disdained it, minced away.
‘Fuck!’ said Luke, full volume.
Hilary dragged him from the ostrich cage, helped him zip his anorak, put the hood up for him. It had just begun to snow, light uncertain flurries which blew into their faces, made it hard to see. Many of the animals were confined to their enclosures; the zoo relatively deserted, trees leafless, flowerbeds bare, shivering birds huddled in their feathers. The lion-moat had frozen over, the lions shut up inside. She and Luke had seen them through the glass – the male snappish and bad-tempered, his harem half-asleep – not prowling wild, majestic, through their paddocks. The giraffes seemed sad and rigid, as if they had stiffened in the cold, no movement in their painted necks and legs. Luke was disappointed, especially by the total lack of rides. She should have phoned the zoo first, before making random promises. Camel rides and pony rides stopped in late October, and elephant rides simply didn’t happen, had been discontinued thirty years ago. Elephants were dangerous, could bolt with their riders, dislodge them, throw them off.
‘Why don’t they bolt in India?’ Luke enquired, disgruntled.
A keeper overheard him. ‘They do,’ he grinned. ‘There’ve been some nasty deaths out there, and one man I know lost both his legs.’
Hilary backed away, as if suddenly aware of all those warning notices: ‘These animals are dangerous’; ‘Do not cross the safety barrier’; that vivid coloured symbol of a bleeding bitten hand. Wild beasts all around them, wild nature pressing in. Only narrow bars and insubstantial cages between their naked human skin and those manes and fangs and claws. White teeth bared, black tongues coiled, huge mouths gaping open; powerful jaws which could smash and crush an antelope; killer paws which could stun and trap and tear. She could smell the reek of urine from a score of dens and lairs, the odour of soiled straw; hear the angry cries of birds of prey, their cruel hooked beaks ripping through warm flesh. She turned to Luke, as if for reassurance, took his hand in hers. He pulled away, wiped the hand, as if somehow she had soiled it, started striding on ahead.
‘What’s that?’ he asked, turning back a moment, and pointing to a cage with just three sides.
‘That’s for us,’ she answered, as she read the sign: ‘London Zoo Presents The Most Destructive Animal In The World.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘A cage for man. You can stand in there, with your feet in those two hollowed-out man’s footprints. Then you’re an animal yourself – the only one which kills its own species and destroys its own environment and …’ She broke off. Luke had already dashed inside and was grunting and grimacing through the wire; had hardly heard her pious little homily. Well, at least it had distracted him, and perhaps a pizza in the café would do much the same, besides providing shelter from the snow.
The pizzas were expensive, the coffee watery. They sat at a small table littered, like the cages, with discarded crusts, orange peel, the greasy uncleared debris from other people’s meals. Luke spat out an olive stone.
‘I want my Mum,’ he said.
‘She’ll be back.’
‘When?’
‘Quite soon.’
‘You’re just saying that, aren’t you?’
‘No, I’m not.’ Hilary laid her plastic fork down, leaned closer to the boy. ‘Look, my Auntie Eva went away, disappeared completely, didn’t write or anything. I had to wait a year, or more, but she still came back, didn’t she? Your Mum will, too – you see. She’s not even far away. Shall we buy her something, send it to her in hospital – something from the zoo shop – a biro with a lion on, or …?’
‘No.’ He gouged a hole in his pizza base, jabbed his finger through it.
‘Why not?’
‘She don’t write.’
Hilary added whitener to her coffee, watched it clog and curdle. Eva hadn’t written, either – not a second time – in reply to her own telegram which she’d sent four days ago. Four days wasn’t long, but even so … She’d expected some reaction by return, an amazed excited telegram, expressing Eva’s sheer delight that they could embrace as aunt and niece, meet freely without walls or grilles, stay together, live together, if only for a month. But perhaps her aunt was shocked, or simply preferred things not to change; was so accustomed to a captive niece, safe behind her bars, that the thought of her set free was somehow threatening or distasteful.
‘I’m cold,’ said Luke, abandoning both seat and plate, and ripping up his paper serviette. ‘Can we go home now?’
At least he called it home. She didn’t – yet – nor wish to spend her birthday afternoon in that cold but claustrophobic flat, with the winter darkness closing in, the growing silence as Charlie shut his shop.
‘Let’s stay a wee bit longer. The chimps are being fed in just five minutes, and we don’t want to miss that. Anyway, the snow’s stopped.’ She tied her woolly muffler round his neck, lent him her old gloves. He had refused to wear his own, refused to change from his thin and holey gym shoes.
They followed the sign for apes and chimpanzees, careful not to slip on the wet and treacherous paths. A party of Cub Scouts in their green and grey uniform were gathered round the chimps’ cage, waiting for the keeper. He strode in with a bucket, started scattering the food. All the chimps seemed suddenly to come alive, rushing, grabbing, pouncing; snaffling up celery and apples, fighting each other for sunflower seeds, banana; flinging husks and debris to the ground. The one large male was particularly aggressive, snatching food from females, swinging from the bars to attack the smaller chimps, threaten them with howls or ugly leers. A female with saggy drooping breastlets sat picking at her fruit, her huge pink naked bottom swollen like some grotesque diseased attachment. Several of the Cubs were already pointing at it, shrieking with embarrassment, distaste. Hilary read the notice tacked up on the cage, which explained the swellings as cyclical and sexual, appearing when the females were on heat, and acting as a signal to the males. She prayed Luke wouldn’t ask her what it meant, question words like ‘oestrus’, in a piercing public voice. Fortunately, he was round the other side, mercifully intent on a baby chimpanzee who was poking at a waterspout, trying to get a drink.
Suddenly, the male reared up, and she saw its thin pink penis, pointed at the end and now erect. It lunged towards the female, who struggled to escape, her shrill cries growing louder, her gait awkward, panicky. The male was bearing down on her, felled her to the ground, climbed on top, clung on. Hilary watched, appalled. The female seemed so passive, the piece of apple still clutched in one limp hand, her body pinioned by the male’s full weight, as it jerked and thrust, shot its semen into her, then suddenly withdrew, in the same abrupt and casual way as it had entered.
‘See that?’ said Luke, who’d come racing back, wide-eyed.
She nodded, tried to coax him from the cage towards the Reptile House. He shook free, pushed her arm away, pressed closer to the bars.
‘They was fucking, wasn’t they?’
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