Cuckoo

by Wendy Perriam

  Balls! His wife had gone. Her small, soft hands were curled only around her womb, or some other swine’s filthy private parts. He kicked at a clump of daisies, decapitated their simple, smiling heads. He mustn’t give in to this spinelessness, this wallowing self-pity. Frances was best forgotten. At least Laura was still sitting there beside him. He must woo her, recapture her, stand up to Clive, refuse to let him win. If some sexless nincompoop with thinning hair and a handicap in double figures could bribe her with five bedrooms and a swimming pool, then he must offer more.

  ‘Look, Laura, I know things have been difficult, but just give me time. It can still work out between us …’

  ‘Can it?’ Laura broke the noose around his neck by plucking the largest daisy from the chain. ‘Let’s find out.’

  She tore off one white petal and tossed it in the air. ‘He loves me,’ she chanted.

  The countertenor’s strange, metallic voice was shrilling from the balcony:

  The cuckoo then on every tree

  Mocks married men, for thus sings he,

  ‘cuckoo’.

  Laura wasn’t listening. All her attention was concentrated on the tiny white flower-head.

  ‘He loves me not.’ A second petal fluttered to the ground.

  ‘Loves me.

  ‘Loves me not.

  ‘Loves me …’

  Charles was mesmerized by her soft, mocking voice. How could there be so many petals on a common daisy? White flags of surrender littering the grass. The warning bell was sounding from the theatre, above the chorus of the song:

  Cuckoo, cuckoo! O word of fear,

  Unpleasing to a married ear!

  He shivered. A spiteful wind was blowing off the river and the sun was all glare and no heart. He had no desire to return to Navarre – it was a vain and empty kingdom, and a cold one.

  ‘Loves me not,

  ‘Loves me …’

  Stupid game! Laura’s voice was like an incantation. There was one last petal on the mutilated daisy – only one. Slowly, teasingly, she pulled it off, handing him the scalped stalk.

  ‘Loves me not,’ she whispered. He could smell the pollen on her fingers, and her Benson and Hedges breath.

  The final bell was pealing across the garden, mixed with the still insistent chorus:

  ‘Cuckoo, cuckoo! O word of fear …’

  Charles turned away, head down. He couldn’t endure that last act of the play, with its savage peasant songs, its jeering cuckoos. Laura took his arm, steered him back towards the theatre.

  ‘Come along, darling, we don’t want to miss it, do we? I doubt if there’ll be much Shakespeare in Johannesburg!’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Frances was shelling peas. She dropped the last empty pod in the waste bin, and laid out thirty-five green peas in a horizontal line – a chart, a menstrual cycle, made of peas. She counted them again. She was right – thirty-five. Day thirty-five. One week overdue. A hundred thousand years overdue. How did giraffes endure it, with fifteen-month-long pregnancies, or elephants, with six hundred days to count? The way she felt, the baby should be born by now, and yet it was still only a pinhead, smaller than the smallest unripe pea. And still fatherless. How could Ned be the father of something he didn’t even know existed? She had tried to tell him, practised openings to spring on him when the moment was propitious. It somehow never was.

  ‘Ned, how would you like to teach a son to fish?’

  ‘Ned, guess what I found behind the gooseberry bush this morning?’

  He’d laugh, grab her round the waist and say, ‘I’m your baby, give me a breast to suck.’ Or, ‘Let’s call it John Dory, after the fish.’ He wouldn’t take her seriously. He never did. That was one of the problems. It was fine to live his larky, lazy way, when there were only the two of them, but a child changed everything. She didn’t want her precious baby shoved in an orange box with a cat on top of it, or its Farex used for bait. And how would she ever dry its nappies, when the airing cupboard was purple and fermenting with home-made sloe gin? It wasn’t easy to turn a man like Ned into an instant pre-packed father. He complained when she defrosted the fridge – claimed it disturbed the lugworm – and refused to discuss wallpapering the bedroom. So long as she was in his bed, he argued, why should he care what was on the walls? Sometimes she submitted, and they lay indolent and sweaty all day long. It was as if she had wallpapered over all the doors and windows and they couldn’t get out. Ned was the world and there wasn’t any other – no wars, no weather forecasts, no share reports nor parliamentary crises. It seemed strange to her, later, that a cabinet minister had died, or Israel had threatened Egypt, and she hadn’t known or cared. She almost liked not caring. Strange how quickly you could sink into grubby apathy, the soft, delicious centre of your own abandoned world, switching off the universe, turning worktime into bedtime, playing at being full-time layabouts. It wasn’t, after all, so difficult to renounce deodorant and dental floss, or eat chocolate cake for breakfast, or share your pillow with a self-opinionated cat. At least it wasn’t hard until the nights. So long as Ned was over her, or under her, stopping her thinking with his childish, cheerful banter, telling her she was Salome and Venus and Bugs Bunny and the Blessed Virgin, then she didn’t agonize. But when his breathing deepened, and he rolled away from her, to sleep, absurdly, on his stomach, then the small, niggly voices, stifled all day long, began to shout and hammer in her head. Why did he always feel so small inside her? Why did he come too quickly? Why did he pee with the bathroom door wide open and talk above the plash? Why was he idle and untidy, feckless, fatuous? Why wasn’t he more like Charles? No, not like Charles. Then, he wouldn’t push his face between her thighs and linger there over a four-course lunch, or use Werther’s tail to do crazy, tickly things across her breasts, or sauté mashed bananas with marshmallows and feed her from the frying pan. Charles didn’t perform Icelandic war-dances stark naked in the kitchen, or stick daisies in her pubic hair, or draw golden-syrup kisses on her porridge. Why couldn’t she be Franny and settle for Ned and the syrup? Or, give him up and be a thoroughgoing Frances?

  It was so confusing being half of two different people, warring with each other and wanting half of two different men. Sometimes she hated all the halves – theirs and hers, the whole complicated mix-up. It was like that game she’d played as a child – ‘Heads, Bodies, Legs’, each painted figure cut into three. You had to try to fit them back together, but you got some strange permutations on the way – a layabout’s mouth with a paragon’s penis on the end of it, a dirty fishing hat straddling a pair of Gucci shoes.

  That’s what her baby would be like – a hybrid. Now that Charles had refused to have anything to do with it, it remained a cross-breed, a monster, swelling in the nights, until it was a giraffe and an elephant inside her, accusing her of adultery, recklessness, betrayal. But if only Ned accepted it, it would shrink and mellow. It might still be a mongrel, but a happy, harmless one, with a name-tag and a home. Why was it so impossible to tell him? In old romantic movies, the woman didn’t even have to spell it out. She merely reclined on the sofa, a beatific smile playing over her stomach, a fragment of white knitting fluttering in her hands. The man entered, their eyes met – sobbing violins, throbbing chords, et cetera, and he knew. Ned wouldn’t. She’d tried the sofa and the knitting, and all he’d said was, ‘Shove up, love, you’re hogging all the cushions. And if you’re knitting me a sweater, does it have to be white angora?’

  She eased up from the kitchen bench. One last forgotten pea-pod was lurking at the bottom of the basket. She slit it with her thumb. Inside, just two tiny peas, identical and perfect. Twins. She’d have to tell him. You couldn’t inflict twins on a man with a one-bedroomed flat and an out-of-work airing cupboard. She would break the news tonight, over a celebration dinner. Ned had gone down to Dover to try out a new Penn casting reel. She’d welcome him back with boeuf Bordelaise in the oven and a baby in her womb. No, not boeuf Bordelaise. She’d renounced her fancy Oppenheimer
style of cooking, in favour of a new Ned simplicity. No more salmon soufflés or juliennes of ham, but pasta and tinned pilchards, which saved time and fuss and money. The Gospel according to Ned – though she wouldn’t take it too far. The Simple Life needn’t mean squalor and slumming, or baked beans from the can. There new ménage must be a compromise, with the baby as the symbol of it. It had already united her and Ned, and they must follow up the process. She wouldn’t ask too much. They needn’t even move. She could merely renovate the flat and tame the garden. Ned’s pad, with Franny’s stamp on it. The same with dinner. They mustn’t toast the baby in spam and chips, or lobster thermidor, but something in between. Simple soup and unpretentious chicken casserole. She threw on her mac and went to buy a Tesco’s frozen chicken, no free-range Fortnum’s darling, but a base-born cut-price broiler.

  Burnt chicken was baser still, she thought, as she turned the oven lower, and scraped charred onions off the bottom of the casserole. Ten o’clock and Ned hadn’t even phoned. He was always late.

  In nine months’ time, he’d probably miss the birth. ‘Sorry, love, couldn’t make it. Had a mermaid on the line!’

  She smiled. He drove her crazy with his tomfoolery, his unpunctuality, but somehow he always managed to atone for it, when he kissed her entire body from right temple to left toe, or turned boring, basic things like shins or vertebrae into new erotic zones. He couldn’t perform like Charles, but he bounced into bed with such exuberance that all her warning lights switched off and she swooped straight into overdrive. Sex with Charles was technically impeccable, but silent and controlled. He never took risks, or ventured out of lane. And there was no engine noise. Charles never purred or roared or hooted, as Ned did, never let her see his pleasure, let alone hear it. He must always be the stiff, munificent benefactor, the driver at the wheel; she the grateful passenger. It was quite a new experience to have Ned beg her to stroke his feet or squeeze his balls, and then yell, ‘Christ, you’re bloody marvellous, woman!’ when she did it right. There was joy and power in giving.

  Charles refused to be distracted from the road. Sex took his total concentration for the carefully calculated period he allotted it, and then it was back to verticality and work. But Ned stretched it out in all directions, made whole days horizontal as well as nights, interrupted kisses with date-and-banana sandwiches, told her fishing stories in the middle of a come. There was no structure, no timetable, just sex sprinkled over everything, like sugar.

  So, how could she accuse him, when he accorded Dover beach the same lingering, day-long treatment? At least, when he did arrive, he’d probably be triumphant. Easy to slip a tiny baby in, when he was wreathed in ten-pound turbot. She only hoped he’d got a decent catch. Whatever happened, she mustn’t be impatient. That would ruin everything. She could always use the waiting-time to rehearse her lines. She decided to keep them simple, like the meal.

  ‘Ned, darling, I’m going to have your baby.’

  She slipped gracefully into a broken chair, and tried it out aloud. ‘Ned, darling, I’m going to …’

  ‘Grub up!’ shouted a familiar voice. ‘Full bag! Fish supper! Frying tonight!’

  Ned barged through the door, festooned with four dead dabs and a still-expiring dogfish, and kissed her through the lot. The reek of Dover breakwater swamped the smell of chicken. ‘Sling a lump of butter in the pan, love – I’m going to cook you Neptune’s feast!’

  She dodged a scaly tail. ‘Let’s save them for breakfast, darling. I’ve already made a chicken casserole.’

  ‘Christ, Fran, I didn’t flog all the way to Dover for plastic battery hen. Fish must be cooked the day it’s caught. Fresh fried dabs are a knockout! Here, chuck over the butter and it can be melting while I clean the little blighters.’

  ‘But the chicken’s ready, Ned. It’s been ready hours, in fact. I was expecting you at eight.’ It had been something of a trauma cooking anything at Ned’s, when there were tin-tacks in the spice jar instead of peppercorns, and half of last year’s Christmas dinner still clinging to the oven.

  ‘Never expect an angler.’ He peeled off his anorak and flung it on the table, disturbing her flower arrangement. ‘OK, love, we’ll have the chicken afterwards. Fish course first, then poultry.’ He was dripping fishy water over the newly polished floor, bunging up the sink with scales and fins.

  ‘But I’ve made a soup to start with.’ A Ned soup: leek and potato broth, earthy and unsophisticated.

  ‘Better still. Soup, fish, poultry, pud. What’s for pud?’

  ‘Gooseberry crumble.’

  He hugged her. He was still in his waterproofs and he felt slimy like the bottom of a pond. She pulled away.

  ‘You don’t cook dab with their heads on, do you?’

  ‘Why not? More protein. Hey, where’s the salt? What on earth have you done in here? I can’t find a thing. The fridge is so bare, it looks like a toupee ad. Franny, you’ve springcleaned, you rotter! I smelt it as soon as I came in, or rather, I didn’t smell it. You’ve ruined the bouquet. It took me years to build up that je-ne-sais-quoi fragrance of cobwebs and vintage bottled cat, and now you’ve gone and doused it all with Cleen-o-Pine.’

  He was genuinely annoyed. She could hear it underneath the banter. He mustn’t be annoyed – not on the night she was going to invest him with his fatherhood. She tried to distract him, take an interest in his catch.

  ‘What’s that one?’ she asked, pointing to an evil-looking creature with a squashed back and a long whip-like tail.

  ‘Thornback ray. The little bleeder almost dragged me in. Watch out! Those thorns are poisonous.’

  All his fish looked poisonous. The charred aroma of her home-spun country sauce was outdone by the scorching smell of dab. Ned had left them to burn, while he scrabbled on his hands and knees, replacing the pile of ancient paperbacks on the bottom shelf of the larder. ‘Look, Fran, if I want to keep my Enid Blytons next to the Branston pickle, that’s my affair, right? Don’t interfere, or try to take me over. You complain that’s what your husband does to you. Well, I don’t need any Charleses in my life. I’m happy as I am. I don’t want Harpic sprinkled down my gut or my soul scrubbed out with Sqeezy.’

  He rushed back to the frying pan, scraped the blackened fish off the bottom, then doused them with cold water from the sink. He stood over her, the dripping, sizzling pan still in one hand, her left nipple in the other.

  ‘I want you, Franny – your crazy mixed-up cunt which isn’t sure whether it’s the Virgin Mary or the Whore of Babylon; your neon-tetra eyes. But I don’t want your Minit-Mop or your Brillo pads, or your prissy little War-on-Dust Campaign. Kiss me.’

  She did. Anything to stop him talking – she knew what would come next. ‘I don’t want your prissy little private-prescription, germ-free, Harley Street baby …’

  She continued the kiss as long as the smell allowed. She seemed to be nose-to-nose with the entire dead-and-living contents of the English Channel.

  ‘Shall I run you a bath?’

  ‘Christ, no! I’m knackered. Grub first, scrub later.’

  He plonked the frying pan in the centre of the table, grabbed a fork and skewered a dab on the end of it. It was black on the outside and still seeping water from the sink. ‘Here, take a bite of this.’

  ‘Ned, I’ve laid the table in the other room.’ She had found some semi-decent china in the cellar and scrubbed off years of grime, improvised a clean white tablecloth out of a sheet. There were roses in a soup-bowl, paper napkins twisted into swans.

  Things must be simple, but there was no need to pig it. She mustn’t forget the compromise, the baby.

  ‘I’m too whacked to move. Anyway, they’re nicer eaten straight from the pan. Try a bit, it’s bliss.’

  He tore off a morsel with his fingers and popped it in her mouth. ‘Know something? When a dab’s born, it’s got an eye on either side of its head, but when it grows bigger, the eyes sort of move, and it ends up with two eyes together, on the same side. Crazy, isn’t it?
’

  Utterly crazy. The whole romantic evening had been shattered at a blow. Here was Ned, sprawling in his socks, smelling like Billingsgate, and spearing waterlogged flatfish from a frying pan. She’d planned low lights, hushed, tender conversation leading slowly but inexorably to the subject of paternity, not a clapped-out beachcomber explaining, with his mouth full, the ocular peculiarities of dab.

  ‘Ned?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you, darling, something important.’

  ‘Hold on a sec, I want some HP sauce – it’ll cover up the burnt bits. Where the hell have you hidden it? Christ, Franny, you’ve moved everything out of its proper place.’

  ‘Ned, I’m talking to you.’

  ‘Look, Fran, I’m not often angry, you know that. I’m an easy-going sort of chap, but I don’t like my house messed about. You’re welcome to share it, live in it, use anything you like in it, but not dismantle it and put it back your way. That’s what my wife tried to do and that’s why I left her.’

  Frances passed him the sauce bottle from its new home in the spice cupboard. She laid down her fork. ‘Your what, Ned?’

  ‘Look, forget it. I’m probably over-reacting. Let’s have the chicken now. It smells a treat.’

  ‘You said your wife.’

  ‘Yeah. Shall I get the plates?’

  ‘You never told me you had a wife.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t got one now. I told you, I left her. Want the last dab?’

  ‘You’re divorced?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Still married?’

  ‘Well, legally, I suppose, but …’

  ‘You never told me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I mean, I asked you about your life and past and … We went over things like that …’

  ‘Things like what? You’re making it sound like a sort of contract between us.’