Cuckoo

by Wendy Perriam

  He straightened the picture, so that Mother Foundress’s nose lay exactly parallel with the frieze beneath the whitewashed parlour ceiling. ‘Well, not just at the moment, Magda. It’ll only cause confusion.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘With whom.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Well, Frances doesn’t …’ Charles began.

  ‘What’s it got to do with Frances? She’s got your name already, hasn’t she?’

  He was staring at the leper in the same desperate fashion as the leper was staring at the Foundress. ‘Look, Frances isn’t very strong at the moment …’

  Bunk! Frances was the strongest woman in the world. She had Charles, didn’t she? – his name, his house, all his books and desks and beds and cash and … She was bound to be back home again, now she had her precious husband to herself, devouring him, building herself up on him, swallowing his body like the nuns did at Communion.

  Two more nuns were hovering in the background, fawning on her father, trying to lure him into church – well-fed nuns, stuffed to the ears with God. ‘Time for Benediction, Magda, and perhaps your father would like to come along?’

  He didn’t. Magda knelt alone behind the nuns, and watched his car zip along the drive, the two five-pound notes he had given her tucked down the bodice of her dress. So that’s what a name was worth. He’d bought her off, awarded her a tenner for giving up his name. He couldn’t be her father if she didn’t have his name.

  She picked up the small silver cross on the end of her rosary and held it like a pencil. ‘Magda Rozsi Parry Jones’ she etched across the pages of her prayer book. She could hardly read the name. The cross was blunt and hadn’t made much impression on the paper. She whispered it instead: Magda Parry Jones. It sounded wrong – poncy and affected. She took the cross and scratched it to and fro across the faint marks of the letters. It ripped through the frail paper, leaving a hole.

  She tried again. Magda Rozsi Kornyai. That sounded strange as well. It always had. Other kids didn’t have stupid foreign names no one could pronounce. OK, she wouldn’t have a name. You didn’t need one – didn’t really need a mother, come to that. Or a father. Or a dog. The less you had, the less they could take away.

  The priest turned round with a blaze of gold-encrusted vestments. ‘The Lord be with you,’ he intoned. There was always God. The nuns said if you had Him, you had everything. Lucky nuns!

  Magda grinned. She inserted the cross in the hole where her name had been, and twisted it backwards and forwards until it had torn through almost fifty pages of the prayer book. She joined her hands, as if she were praying, pressing them hard against her breasts, until she could hear the faint rustle of the bank notes tucked inside her dress. At least no one could take away the cash.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ Frances whispered to the lion. She had brought him out into the garden with her, to use as a pillow. You had almost a duty to be comfortable, when you were carrying another life.

  ‘I’m going to have a baby,’ she repeated, in case he hadn’t understood. She gazed around her. The whole lush garden was gloriously pregnant. Each pansy was a mauve and yellow uterus, every foxglove flower a purple cervix. The poppies had run to seed and their swelling pods were rounded, bursting ovaries. The golden rod curved over like fallopian tubes. Even the geranium leaves were foetus-shaped. Everything was budding and burgeoning into life, bees pollinating, small green apples plumping into full-term heaviness.

  She stretched out on the bare brown patch Ned called the Earl of Rothmere’s croquet lawn. Ned himself was out all day, at a weekend summer school on Icelandic Sagas. But better to be alone and becalmed in Acton, than buffeted by storms at Richmond. She had told Ned that Charles was abroad again, and had packed a suitcase full of bits and pieces, including the lion and extra vitamins. Ned’s garden was a jungle and his house a disaster area, but it didn’t matter any more. Nothing mattered except her swaggering uterus. She was a woman now, at last – sanctified and special. It was like receiving the Stigmata – pain and radiance combined. She had outlawed the pain for the moment, so that she could savour the full holy bliss of motherhood. Of course there were problems, so many and so complex, her mind trembled to confront them, but Ned was teaching her to leave problems, as he left the washing-up. Neither really mattered. She’d have the baby his way, not agonizing over guilt and paternity, but revelling in something she had wanted all her life. She wouldn’t stifle it with lists and schedules, or expensive, unnecessary equipment, nor martyr herself with terrors and regrets. There wasn’t even any rush. She had nine languorous months to change and blossom in.

  She turned over on her back and stared up at the swollen white clouds. Even the sky was pregnant, labouring to give birth to an overdue sun. Rilke stalked across the grass and sprang on to her stomach.

  ‘Not there,’ she grinned. ‘That’s reserved!’

  It was almost shameful how jubilant she felt, mooning about like some Mills and Boon heroine, in tune with all creation. She wasn’t a career girl any more, but the highest sort of lowest woman, all womb and sentiment. Even her fantasies were disgracefully unoriginal – Ned pacing up and down the hospital corridor, minutes before the hushed Leboyer birth, with its soft lights and mystic music, the first cry, the first champagne. Well, perhaps not champagne, not on Ned’s salary, but that was a detail. She might have twins, triplets even, her photo splashed across the Daily Mirror. No, she didn’t want publicity, not with Charles’ mother and the narrow-minded Golf Club crowd.

  Best not to fill in the fantasies. There were too many complexities if she fleshed them out – awkward unromantic details like inlaws, illegitimacy, divorce, division of property, puerperal fever, complications of birth. She’d just be, for a change, live in the moment, as Ned encouraged. It was an almost revolutionary idea. With Charles, there had never been a present; only a strong-box of a future, a vaulted old age. She and Charles were always looking forward, waiting, expecting – when their annuities matured, when inflation eased, when a rival retired, or a senior partner died. Even the baby had been a future prospect – when the house was finished, or the mortgage paid off, when they’d established their careers … But now she had leap-frogged Charles’ system and launched the baby as a here-and-now reality. Ned would say, ‘Don’t ruin it with fears for the future or regrets about the past, just savour the moment of it.’ She closed her eyes, felt the sun sink into them, Rilke hot and heavy against her leg. She tried to remember her mantra, some strange gobbledigook which sounded like an opera singer’s exercise. Ned had been teaching her to meditate. She hushed the cynical, mocking voice that scoffed at him – Charles’ voice, which saw the life-force as a pound sign – and sought to sandwich herself between all creation, to become one with the sun, the cat, the grass, the summer afternoon.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she murmured. ‘Now, here, in this garden, at this moment.’ A DC 10 screamed over. She ignored it. She could feel the baby growing inside her, imperceptibly, like grass.

  ‘Frances, for Christ’s sake, get up. It’s raining.’

  Frances opened one eyelid a crack, and shut it hastily. A large, dark cloud was looming in front of her – Charles in his iron-grey suit, with a black umbrella over him. Cold, accusing drops of rain were stinging her bare legs, sneaking down her neck. Charles had brought rain on purpose. His influence reached even as far as the Meteorological Office.’

  ‘You’ve no right to be here, Charles.’

  ‘We’ve got to talk.’

  ‘We keep talking and it never gets us anywhere. I’ve told you not to come.’

  ‘It’s hardly your role to tell me what to do. If you don’t want me here, then please return to Richmond. It’s high time you came back and faced your responsibilities.’

  ‘I am facing them. That’s why I’m here.’

  Silence. Charles had suddenly collapsed, like his own umbrella. He was squatting on the grass, thin, stiff, closed in on himself, the rain spitting o
n his suit. She picked a lupin from the border and stuck it in his jacket.

  ‘Charles …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let’s not fight. Our anger affects the universe.’

  ‘Christ, Frances, you’re impossible! Every time I try to reason with you, you churn out some pathetic mumbo-jumbo. The flower-child thing is twenty years out of date.’ He snatched the lupin from his buttonhole and held it awkwardly. He was like a suitor, on his knees to her, flower in one hand, rolled umbrella in the other. ‘I came to take you out to dinner.’

  ‘You came to reason with me.’

  ‘Can’t we do both? I booked a table at Croft’s.’

  Croft’s was fossilized Charles – his ancient and illustrious Club. He rarely took her there. It was reserved for top clients, a male sanctuary, private and inviolable.

  ‘Let’s eat here. I’ll do you scrambled eggs.’

  ‘I had scrambled eggs for lunch, scrambled eggs for breakfast, and scrambled bloody eggs for last night’s so-called dinner. I haven’t had a proper meal since you left.’

  ‘Poor darling! There’s not much here, either. Ned seems to live on tins. I could probably rustle you up some baked beans or …’

  ‘I never want to hear that man’s name again, and as for setting foot inside his house …’

  ‘Well, let’s eat outside then. A picnic in the garden.’

  ‘In the pouring rain? I’m soaked already. It’s bad enough having to chase after you over the whole of W3, without catching pneumonia on top of it.’

  She laughed. It was easy to laugh when you were pregnant. ‘Do you know, Charles, you’re really rather comic.’

  He shot up his umbrella, as if he were firing a rifle, and disappeared beneath it, stomping round the side of the house. He suddenly looked small – old, defeated, bowed.

  ‘Charles!’ she called. He stopped.

  ‘I’ll come.’

  He didn’t turn round. She ran after him and squeezed beside him under the umbrella. She was laughing again. ‘So long as I can have the biggest steak they’ve got. I must admit I’m sick of beans, myself.’

  His blue streak of a Bristol looked as if it had lost its way in Mayfair and landed up at Acton by mistake. She eased herself into the soft suede upholstery, draping her damp skirt in front of her.

  ‘Aren’t you going to change?’

  ‘No need. If you put the heater on, I’ll be dry in two ticks.’

  ‘Yes, but I thought perhaps … another dress?’

  ‘What for?’

  Damn it, didn’t she know what for? You didn’t go to Croft’s in some shapeless sack more suited to a Hackney stall-holder than a director’s wife. She looked pregnant already, her neat, girlish figure swamped under cheap pink seersucker. But he dared not argue. The days and nights without her had put their cold hands around his throat and slowly squeezed, until he was left choking and retching with outrage, shock and murderous jealousy. He had forbidden such feelings ever to come near him in his life before, but they had sneaked up on him and grabbed him unawares, held him down, while he shouted out for a wife who wasn’t there. It was humiliating, horrible – and worst of all, uncontrollable.

  He stopped outside the Club and glanced across at her. She had her hands cradled on her lap, tuned in only to her own womb. He was shut out from all that growth and mystery, as he had been with Piroska. Fumblingly he leaned over and tried a tentative embrace. The girlish shape was still there, underneath. If anything, she was even slimmer. He felt her stomach, flat and innocent, sloping down to the slender thighs.

  ‘Listen, Frances, are you absolutely sure you’re pregnant?’

  ‘Of course I’m not sure …’

  He heard the windscreen wipers almost startle with relief.

  ‘Not your sort of sure. Pregnancy tests and signed statements from three Harley Street laboratories and a nationwide broadcast from the Queen’s gynaecologist. I just feel pregnant. It’s a gut thing, intuitive. Oh, I know you’ll scoff. You always insist on data and statistics, but I’ve started looking at life differently. It’s feelings that count, not your universal Rule of Reason.’

  ‘God almighty, Frances, this is the most critical problem we’ve ever had to face in our entire married life, and you’re resorting to gibberish. You don’t get pregnant merely by feelings.’

  ‘No, that’s not what happened.’

  He winced. ‘All right, let’s have dinner and discuss it then. Perhaps you’ll be more rational over a decent claret.’

  He whispered to the head waiter to change their table, seat them in the darkest corner, where they could hide away. He’d never been seen there with a woman in no make-up and bare legs. He tried to lose himself in the menu, but the veal was sauced with some sod’s semen, and Clomid had curdled the vichyssoise. There were no prices on the wine list, no vintages, only ‘day thirty-two’ printed over everything. He glanced around furtively, to make sure no one was listening. The place was half empty – it was early yet.

  ‘Look, let’s get down to hard facts, Frances. According to my reckoning, it’s day thirty-two.’

  She almost hugged him for getting it so right. It was day thirty-two, but she always felt she was the only one in the world who knew or cared. Day thirty-two meant four days late, and that was the most precious, incredible, terrifying thing she could possibly imagine. She was never, ever late. Her period started on day twenty-eight exactly, and had done since the age of thirteen and a half. And always in the morning. She could almost set her watch by it. But this month – nothing. She’d inspected herself at least a hundred times, checking and re-checking. No stained pants, no drop of blood, no pre-period pain. On day twenty-nine, she had ordered extra milk. On day thirty, she panicked and took six hot baths and three double gins. Still nothing. On day thirty-one, she hovered between hope and horror, spent the morning in Mothercare, comparing prams and prices, and the afternoon in tears. On day thirty-two – today – she had accepted the inevitable. She was pregnant, indisputably, so she’d damned well enjoy it.

  She had almost succeeded, until Charles turned up – and all the horrors with him. So long as he kept away, she could concentrate on having Ned’s baby Ned’s way. But Charles brought complications – not only guilts and fears, but a reminder of all the things she missed and needed: steak, standards, security and strength. She looked across at his stern, sculpted features, his pained, prosecuting eyes. He was toying with the brown bread and butter which had come with his salmon mousse. His Club was almost part of him – the fine china and Georgian silver; the jealously-guarded membership, with instant recognition of a member, and suspicion of any stranger, even a guest; the low-key, reverential service; the impeccable address. He’d been coming here for years. The food was good, but not that good – he came for something else – old-fashioned standards, attention to detail, the solid continuity of tradition.

  She loved him for his standards, for his own fastidious good manners. He was nibbling on a finicky morsel of crust. Ned would have stuffed the bread whole into his mouth and then kissed her through it; dolloped tinned spaghetti rings on to chipped and dirty plates, or eaten straight from the saucepan.

  ‘Four days overdue hardly constitutes a pregnancy,’ Charles was saying. Even the way he spoke was careful and melodious. Ned dragged words through hedges.

  ‘No.’

  It wasn’t just a question of days. Admittedly they had been the longest and most frightening of her life, but she’d known she was pregnant almost the moment she conceived. It was something precious and primal you felt deep inside. You didn’t count it on calendars or prove it with tests. It was a subtle sacred blossoming, which took you over and transformed you. There was nothing you could do to counter it, oppose it. You were only the receptacle, the instrument.

  Her wine had arrived, decanted into a Georgian claret jug, and mixed liberally with homage. Charles was drinking a Mersault-Charmes ’71. He waved away a posse of grovelling waiters.

  ‘We need something m
ore definite to go on. What about your charts? Isn’t your temperature meant to stay up if you’re pregnant? Is it up?’ He was still talking in a whisper, as if they were planning crime or lése-majesté.

  ‘Well, sort of.’

  ‘Sort of? Frances, you simply must be more precise.’

  How could she tell him that she hadn’t done the charts? Staying with Ned made it more or less impossible. What excuse was there for fussing with a thermometer, when you were clearly in the pink of health? She’d tried to pretend, one morning, that she was sickening for ’flu and had to check her temperature, but Ned had rushed around with steaming hot Ribena, and by the time she’d swallowed that, it was up in any case.

  Rathbone insisted that you took your temperature before eating, drinking, talking, moving, but he hadn’t calculated on having a Ned around. As soon as she woke, Ned was there, feeding her Ambrosia rice pudding out of the tin, or asking her opinion on Icelandic verb endings, or balancing his teacup on her navel. How could she lie still and silent for a full five minutes with a thermometer stuck in her mouth, when Ned was laying siege to all her other orifices?

  ‘You’re so extremely vague, Frances. It seems ridiculous to disrupt our whole existence, when we haven’t got a shred of proof.’

  ‘We don’t need proof. I simply know I’m pregnant. My whole body feels quite different.’

  ‘How could it, Frances, after only four days?’

  ‘It does, that’s all. Anyway, if you want statistics, there are plenty as far as Clomid’s concerned. Very encouraging ones, I might add. In one study of women taking it, twenty-four per cent of them conceived, and they weren’t even ovulating before they started on it. And in another group …’

  Charles pushed his plate away. He didn’t want a second helping of statistics. Even without them, he felt a stab of certainty, like a bone stuck in his throat. Sixteen years ago, he’d had the same conversation with Piroska. He had scoffed then – used almost the same words: ‘It’s merely stress, that’s all. Wait another week or two. Of course you can’t be pregnant.’