Georgina stands by the mantelpiece and gazes down at her granddaughter.
‘She looks just like you, darling,’ she says to Fergus. ‘Same hair, same nose, even the way she curls her little fingers round her ear. You were exactly the same. A carbon copy.’
As she smiles indulgently, my hackles rise instantly. Ever since the day my daughter was born, my mother-in-law has insisted that she is a replica of her son as if I didn’t carry her everywhere for nine months, as if I didn’t contribute an egg and presumably at least some of her DNA. I know grandmothers are supposed to be proud, and I know, really I know, that she doesn’t mean to totally exclude me from the creation of my own child, but if she tells me one more time that holding Ella is like holding the daughter she was never able to have, I’ll … I’ll … I’ll nod politely and say ‘Really? That’s nice.’ Fergus knows how much this rankles with me.
‘Do you think so, Mum?’ he says sweetly, catching my eye. ‘I’ve read babies have to look like their dads when they’re born so that the father knows his missus hasn’t been playing away – a throwback to caveman days or something. But now she’s getting bigger I think she looks more and more like Kitty. She certainly has her spirit – and her beautiful smile.’ As he speaks he looks me in the eyes, the corner of his mouth just curled up.
Georgina scrutinises the baby for a moment longer. ‘Mmmm, maybe a little. Around the ears.’ It’s a small concession but a significant one, even if she has no idea that she’s made it.
‘It’s just occurred to me,’ she continues, ‘that she hasn’t seen her Grandpa Simpson in months. When’s he coming down, Kitty? We should have a little do for her, or something. I mean, we’ve never had a christening and it’d be nice. All of us could get together and you could put on a little spread?’
I stare at Fergus, my smile frozen in horror, and although he knows exactly what I think about that idea, he chooses to drop me right in it with an ever so slightly gleeful glint in his eye.
‘That’s a really good idea, Mum. Kits, why don’t call your dad in the morning and see if he can come down next weekend? Clare, you and Ted can come over too, and Mr Crawley and even the gardener, wossisname – Gareth, is it?’ He spreads his arms expansively. ‘I mean, the house is finished and it won’t be long until the garden is, so why don’t we celebrate – our new life as a family in Berkhamsted.’
Somehow the intensity in Fergus’s voice, the robustly optimistic note, tells me that for some reason he really wants this to happen, and as I don’t seem to have given him anything he wants recently, I lose heart in the protest I was planning. For some reason it is really important to Fergus that we show everyone how happy we are and how successful. Not for the first time, but maybe with new clarity, I can see that I’m not the only one of us struggling with this new life we’ve made for ourselves.
‘Well, I suppose I could make some sandwiches,’ I say cautiously.
Fergus eagerly jumps on my half-hearted assent. ‘Great, that’s settled then. You call your dad in the morning, and get Dora and Camille down. It’ll be great!’
On his last word Ella startles and wakens with wide eyes full of alarm. She takes one look at her grandmother and bursts into hysterical tears, probably coincidental but still a small victory. I scoop her up and instantly she’s wide awake, looking around her with wide, bush-baby eyes.
‘Aye dee!’ she says as if her evening is just about to begin. I look at Fergus.
‘You’d better get this lot home and I’ll work on trying to get her off again.
As Fergus bustles everyone out of the door he stops and drops a kiss on my cheek.
‘I’m sorry to land that on you, love, but you won’t have to do anything. We’ll just buy stuff from M&S.’ He pauses as Georgina helps Clare down the front step with the buggy and whispers, ‘I just want everyone to see how happy we are, to see how well we’re doing.’
‘Okay,’ I say with a half smile. ‘Okay.’
Fergus catches my fingers and squeezes my hand hard. ‘Because we are, aren’t we?’ he asks me, watching me closely with anxious eyes.
I press the palm of my hand briefly against his cheek.
‘Of course we are,’ I say.
Chapter Twelve
For most of last night, Doris Day sat on the end of my bed. She looked really lovely in a turquoise blue chiffon number that brought out her eyes.
‘Listen, Doris,’ I’d told her sternly. ‘When I’ve gone half mad sitting up in that chair, fair enough, I expect the musical hallucinations, but when I’m in bed asleep? It’s not really fair, is it?’
Doris had pressed her lips together and given me a slightly stern look.
‘All I’m saying, darlin’,’ she’d said in her soft husky voice, ‘is that you’ve got a lot to deal with right now, the baby and Fergus. Are you sure you can take on something as demanding as Calamity Jane on top of everything – it’s not an easy role, you know.’
She’d crossed her shapely legs, showing off a gorgeous pair of silver sequined evening slippers. ‘You know, I’ve had a lot of experience of this kind of thing, trying to strike out on your own and have a career. You’ve seen all those films I did with Cary, James and Rock, haven’t you? Even when I was playing Calamity it turned out the same. In the end I always realised that love and family are really the only important things, and all this gadding about playing at independence is just a sham.’ She’d leant in a little closer to me, a tiny smile on her shell-pink lips. ‘We’re women, honey – we’re meant for marriage and motherhood.’
‘But Doris,’ I’d protested, ‘you might have played all those parts, but in real life you were an internationally renowned film star, probably with as least as much power and money as all the men you ever knew! You played the part of the housewife – but that wasn’t you!’
Doris had pursed her lips and set her hands firmly on her lap, crossing her ankles under her many skirts.
‘And in the end I left all of it behind for my family,’ she’d said sternly, standing up and going to the window. ‘Well, darlin’, if there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that the heroine never sees sense until the final roll of the film. I just hope that you see sense in time, but after all, what will be, will be.’ She’d vanished into a haze of her own light, and I’d found myself sitting up in bed, blinking the dream away.
‘All right?’ Fergus had mumbled in the dark. ‘Talking, you were, in your sleep.’
‘I’m fine, go back to sleep,’ I’d said, wide awake now, my head full of Doris. Maybe she did have a point about one thing, maybe joining the Players was a bit too much to take on. But I couldn’t back out of it now, and anyway it was the only thing that I was doing in addition to my life as a mother, and many women had to work and parent, and a lot of them did it alone. It might have been different in Doris’s day, but things had changed now, things had moved on.
‘Sod off, Doris,’ I’d silently told the empty part of the bed where she’d been sitting. ‘I might not be able to have it all, but at least I can have some of it, whatever it is – so there!’
‘Right, we’re off.’ Fergus finds me still languishing in bed pondering last night’s dream. Saturday mornings have become the only few precious hours that I spend alone every week whilst he takes Ella out to do the weekly shop. I used to come with him, but now that he’s worked out that he can buy anything as long as it’s pre-prepared and microwaveable, he doesn’t need my input any more. He looks every inch the perfect and proud father as he stands with Ella perched on one hip, dressed up to the nines with her frilly hat on.
‘I thought you were going to Waitrose, not the Ritz,’ I say, suppressing a smile. Whenever Fergus takes her out he dresses her in her finest apparel.
‘We are, but she likes to look nice, and besides, there’s this shelf-stacker in the nappies aisle she’s got her eye on, flirts with him every week.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m sure she can do a bit better than a shelf-stacker,’ I say absently, stretching out my arms
and sitting up.
‘It doesn’t matter what he does, surely, if she loves him?’
I blink and look at Fergus. He seems to be genuinely defending our baby’s friendly overtures to a sixteen-year-old Saturday boy shelf-stacker.
‘She doesn’t love him, she’s a baby. Don’t be mad.’ I reach for my dressing gown and get out of bed.
‘I know that.’ Fergus pursues his entirely pointless point. ‘But say if she was older and she really did want to go out with a shelf-stacker, it wouldn’t matter if he loved and cared for her because surely his feelings for her are more important than anything. Money or possessions or anything.’
I frown at him, and hug both of them in one go.
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘But shall we worry about it in, oh, I don’t know, sixteen years?’ Ella gnaws happily on the end of a length of my hair, regarding me with her father’s intensely blue eyes. ‘I know, baby, we can take you out tomorrow – we could go up the common or to the Chilterns, couldn’t we, now that it’s practically June, up the beacon everyone keeps telling me about, and Ella can roll down some hills!’
One of the things that had occurred to me as I was trying to get back to sleep last night was that the three of us hardly ever did anything as a family. So far this year we hadn’t gone anywhere together, let alone had a holiday. When I thought of it I was rather surprised that Fergus hadn’t come home one day and told me he’d booked a family cruise round the Med, but that was probably my fault for expecting him to organise everything and maybe he thought that would be one expense too many after the house and the garden. I might not be Nigella, I told myself, but at least I can get us doing stuff together, stuff which doesn’t involve sitting in front of the TV or taking it in turns to get the baby to sleep.
Fergus looks surprised, pleased, guilty and miserable in turn until his face settles into morose.
‘That’s a lovely idea, darling but, well, I was about to tell you, I, um, I got a call on my mobile while you were still asleep,’ he says. ‘I’m really sorry, but there’s this big deal hanging in the balance and someone’s fucked up and, well … I’m going to have to go into the office tomorrow. I’m sorry, love.’
My shoulders sink and my heart plummets, and suddenly my own beacon – the two shining days that get me through the grey monotony of the week – blinks out and dies. I can’t face the thought of a lonely Sunday.
‘Not on Sunday, Fergus, please! I hardly ever see you as it is, and now you’re going in on a Sunday?’ I feel as if he’s just told me that he’s leaving me for good, as if he’s never coming back. No, wait, I feel as if he left me weeks ago and only now is it sinking in.
Fergus avoids my eye, disengaging Ella’s finger from my hair as I struggle and fail to rationalise my anger and put another brave face on it yet again.
‘I know, but there’s a really good contract up for grabs and we really need it, we really do. You know what we were talking about the other day? Well, this is my chance to iron out those worries and get everything back on track.’ Ella bucks in his arms but Fergus holds on to her tightly, keeping his eyes on me. ‘But some sodding graduate trainee was running the presentation through and there was a problem with the software and it’s been lost, a whole week’s worth of my work lost! The presentation’s on Monday so I have no choice but to go in and set it all up again. It’s lucky I’ve got it backed up on my PC otherwise I’d really be up shit creek.’ He briefly squeezes my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, but at least now it’s just a matter of setting it up again, and Tiff’s volunteered to come in and help me do it, so I should only be gone for half a day or so?’ Ella pulls off her hat and drops it on the floor.
‘Tiffany’s helping you?’ I say, instantly jealous. All this time I’ve been worrying about hanging out with the gardener a little bit, and he’s off to spend our one family day with his secretary without so much as a second thought. ‘Look I don’t care! I don’t care about your presentation or the graduate or anything. I just care about us being together, we need to spend time together, Fergus, surely you can see that?’ Fergus rolls his eyes, not really hearing me, or if he’s hearing me choosing not to understand. ‘You are never here, you get up so early, get home so late, and if you are here I end up handing Ella over to you just so I can have a fraction of a life outside these four bloody walls! When do we get time to be together, all of us, properly? Never! Please, Fergus, please don’t go, find someone else to do it. Please.’
Fergus bows his head and then shakes it.
‘I can’t get someone else to do it, I have to do it, okay? Not for laughs, I just have to.’ He looks at me pleadingly. ‘Come on, darling, don’t be mad with me. You know that the last thing I want is to have to go into work again on my day off, but I don’t have any choice. I have to go.’ His voice rises sharply with exasperation. ‘And anyway, if you’re so worried about me running off with another woman why don’t you, why don’t …’ he falters to a stop. ‘Oh, let’s talk about it when I get back.’ He turns on his heels and marches out of the bedroom door, Ella’s head bobbing cheerfully over his shoulder.
‘Why don’t I what?’ I shout, following him on to the landing as he walks down the stairs. Ella waves right at me as if to distract me. I’m not sure if it’s accidental or purposeful, but right now I ignore it. As he reaches the bottom, Fergus stops and thinks for a moment before looking back up at me.
‘Why don’t you ever want to make love to me any more?’ he says softly. ‘And before you say we do, yes, I know we do, at least once every two weeks when you’ve gritted your teeth and thought of England or whatever. And then you make it pretty clear that you just want it to be over.’ He looks away from me and kisses Ella’s curls before facing me again. ‘I haven’t felt close to you since that time in my office, and then, I don’t know, I think it was the situation that turned you on and not me.’
We look at each other for a beat, separated by a flight of stairs.
‘Are you saying that if I don’t sleep with you any more you’re going elsewhere?’ I say, able only to go on the defensive. ‘Have you forgotten that I gave birth to your daughter a few months ago? That it hurt me badly, that I got ripped pretty much from top to bottom. You don’t just get over something like that.’ My voice trembles but the more upset I become the harder Fergus’s face sets.
‘No, I haven’t forgotten that, and no, I’m not saying I want an affair, don’t make this about me … I’m trying to say that I miss you, Kitty. I’ve been trying to say it for weeks, but you’re always tired or you change the subject or something. I know marriage is about more than sex, but I’m working so hard at the moment and there’s so much I’ve got to deal with and even more than sex, it’s the intimacy I miss. When I come home I need you to be there for me, to be the person that loves me. But if I try to get close to you you shut off. You don’t let me in any more. For God’s sake, Kitty. I’m lonely.’
For a moment I see how ridiculous we must look, talking this way two floors apart, Ella bouncing patiently in her dad’s arms, utterly unaware of the maelstrom she has created in our lives.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, feeling injured and guilty. ‘I thought I’d explained. I thought you understood.’ I feel my stomach twist and contract, it seems as if no matter how often I try to tell him how I’m feeling, his blind refusal to acknowledge any kind of problem rebuffs all of my attempts. Fergus looks at me and I can see tears intensifying the colour of his eyes.
‘Don’t forget to call your dad,’ he says softly, and he walks out of the front door.
I stand for a long time on the landing until, despite the sun, the chill of the morning raises goosebumps on my flesh and I make my way along the corridor to the bathroom, somehow too numb to cry. Fergus and I have been half discussing our individual problems for a long time now, but have never once revealed our true feelings. Instead we’ve just skirted around each other with hints and half-truths, or in my case avoided it altogether. Steam begins to rise as I run the bath, filling it with wat
er as hot as I will be able to bear, and then, dropping my dressing gown around my ankles, I force myself to look at my reflection in the full-length mirror. I conjure up mental images of the person I was when I first met Fergus until she is standing behind me.
Well, to begin with, the hair that I used to pay to have cut, coloured and styled every three months, even though I couldn’t afford the phone bill more often than not, has grown far too long. It straggles in tangled curls to where my waist once was, heavy and dull, feathered with broken and dry discoloured ends. The oval face and pointed chin that Fergus used to love to kiss is now supplemented by a small pouch of fat that has appeared just underneath my jaw. The first time I caught sight of my profile in a mirror after this new arrival, I felt that I was looking at a stranger, or worse still, a version of myself who I had assumed was at least another ten years away, a version whose face was heavy and thick. Maybe if I’d seen my mum grow old it would be less of shock, but as Dad has always told me, I look just like her, except that now I’m older than she ever was, sailing into dark waters uncharted by memory or experience.
Before Ella I’d always wished that my breasts were a bit bigger and firmer. Now they are at least three cup sizes bigger than they used to be, with stretch marks that have gradually faded into silver lines along the top of them. They are softer now than they used to be, and less rounded. They used to be a symbol of my sexual power; now they are the ultimate symbol of maternity. Once they used be alluring and mysterious, now I have them out every five minutes and everyone in Berkhamsted from the milkman to the checkout girl at Smiths has seen them. The old me turns sideways so that I can better dwell on my body’s lost profile. Once I used to loathe the slight curve of my belly, which was never concave or even flat despite my sporadic bursts of various fitness regimes. Now it too is covered in a road map of stretch marks and it seems to hang from my hips in a white fatty wedge. I can hold it between my finger and thumb and it feels like I’ve had a cushion surgically implanted to keep me at bay from Fergus’s embrace.
After Ever After Page 20