Having It and Eating It

by Sabine Durrant

  On the way down to the parking garage, Jake said, facing away from me, “Do you remember when Fergus was born?”

  “Yes, of course.” I’d been thinking about it too. It wasn’t to this hospital, with its light and its art, that we’d come, but to another nearer us, a sprawling Victorian building with endless additions and corridors in which people seemed to wander about in constant confusion, amid a smell of fried food and antiseptic. We’d spent hours there, waiting for dilation, and then when things had sped up, I vaguely remembered a room and a bed and a midwife, but most of all I remembered Jake gripping my hand, allowing me to dig into it with my nails, proffering water through a bendy straw, and then his face when the baby came and his face again, when I was too whacked to do anything but watch, when he rocked him, held this little bundle in his lap and sang.

  “God, we were lucky,” I said.

  “Yes we were,” he said.

  He took my hand for a moment and squeezed it. And then the elevator doors opened, and he walked out ahead of me into the garage.

  When we got to Fran and Rain’s building, we parked on a meter and let ourselves in with their key. There was something very poignant about the state of their flat, about the fact that they’d let themselves out only that morning not knowing they wouldn’t be walking back in in a few hours time. There was a half-empty cereal bowl on the kitchen table, with dried muesli round the rim. A carton of milk had been left out by the kettle. And the button on the coffee machine was still shining orange: half a jug of viscous mahogany liquid waiting for a later that never came. The overhead light was on too—a weak beacon in a room full of slanting sun—as if they’d left when it was still dark. “Oh God,” I said. “Of course, it was raining.”

  Jake said, “The road was wet. She’d have braked in time otherwise.”

  Together, we cleared up the kitchen and made the futon in the bedroom—“God, how do they sleep in this?” gasped Jake, rubbing his back with the effort of bending—and tidied the sitting room, plumping up the cushions, emptying the ashtrays, straightening the copies of My Pregnancy into a neat pile on the floor by the sofa. There was a book of babies’ names on the television. A sheet of paper fell out as I picked it up to put it on the shelf. It was Fran’s birth plan—the one Jake had effaced earlier that summer: “Pethidine, Epidural, Emergency Caesarean,” it said. “Christ, Jake,” I said, showing it to him.

  Jake looked grim. He shook his head and closed his eyes. “I didn’t know . . .” he said, sitting down on the plumped cushions.

  I sat down next to him and put my arm round him. “I know,” I said. “Of course, you didn’t. Anyway, it was my fault. If only I’d gone with her. If only I’d picked her up in our car . . .”

  “It’s just one of those things that happens,” he said.

  We sat there for a bit and then I said, “Okay, suitcase, where do you think they keep it?”

  And Jake said, patting his thighs, “Stuffed under the bed . . . if I know my sister” and we got on with the business of packing her a bag.

  “Right,” Jake said, as he piled things in, “Pajamas—will this do?—bathrobe, underwear.” It touched my heart, his lack of self-consciousness, the big brother sorting out his sister’s briefs.

  Before we left, I popped back into the kitchen where earlier I’d noticed a packet of KitKats on the side. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and was suddenly starving. When I got there, the packet was empty. “Jake!” I called.

  “What?” he said from the bathroom where he was getting Fran’s toothbrush.

  I said, “The KitKats?”

  “Ooh, it’s funny you should mention them,” he said, poking his head around the kitchen door. “I was in the kitchen about five minutes ago and suddenly I felt weird and when I came to, there were crumbs all over . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “All right.” But I laughed anyway.

  When we finished, Jake went off to the police station to sort out Fran’s car and I went to Marks & Spencer to buy her fruit and cookies, and we arranged to meet later at the hospital. Fran had been moved to a bed on a ward when I got there. She was propped up in her cubicle, with the curtains drawn on one side. There was a bit of color in her cheeks, and her pupils looked more normal. She still had a couple of drips with her—glucose and morphine—and she still had her catheter tucked discreetly by the mattress, but they’d finished with the blood. She said, “They said I can go and see my baby soon. When Rain gets back they’re going to wheel me up in a wheelchair. I won’t be able to hold her, but I’ll be able to stroke her. Rain says there isn’t much of her you can touch, what with the nappy and the bonnet, which she has to have to keep the thing on her and . . . and the lines. Do you think you could find someone, Maggie, and ask them? See whether I can go now? And I’m going to start expressing milk and freezing it for when she’s bigger and can take it . . . Oh, Mags, thanks. Did you bring a blanket? Oh brilliant. And my pajamas.”

  I made her some tea and sat next to her for a while until Jake came. She was much calmer when he was there. She smiled at his jokes. And when he kept telling her that everything was going to be fine, she seemed to believe him. He’d brought her some magazines, which I hadn’t thought to do. And as we were leaving, he said, “Oops, almost forgot this,” and took something out of his jacket pocket. It was the book of babies’ names. “Here you go, Fran,” he said, putting it on the bed beside her. “You’ll need this.”

  It was early evening by the time we picked up the children. My mother was still chirpy when we got there. She had the Travel Scrabble out on the floor and was introducing Dan to the pleasures of the game. “Look,” she was crying as we came in, “Granny’s spelt INGRATE. No. No, Dan. No grabbing. No.” Dan was trying to mash the rest of the letters into his mouth.

  “That’s my boy,” I said. “You show her.”

  There was a flash of lacy stocking top as she got up off the floor. “You used to love Scrabble. Remember those lovely holidays in Cornwall?”

  “Yes,” I said, extracting a wet P and a tooth-marked Q, fending off an image of a hotel lounge, with crimplene chairs, a silent dining room. “I do.”

  I had picked Dan up and was holding his firm little body to me. He was jerking up and down, salmon-like, with excitement. “Umumamum,” he said. His hair was sticking up and I kissed it down. His head felt warm and smelled of kittens. He turned his mouth and held it open against my cheek. I wanted to absorb him. I wanted to hold him forever.

  Jake had wandered farther into the sitting room. “Christ,” he said. “I mean, gracious. What’s been going on here?”

  The back half of the room looked like a bomb had been dismantled in it by disposal experts in a hurry. There was a big dented cardboard box in the middle of the floor, trailing tape, and white polystyrene prawns all over the carpet.

  “Ah!” said my mother, coyly flirtatious for Jake’s sake. “The new television. It arrived earlier. It’s flat screen. DVD.”

  I left her showing him the finer points of Optimum Picture Control and went out through the kitchen into the garage where Fergus was helping Frank have a go at mending the old television. Fergus had a big Phillips screwdriver in his fist and an expression of such knitted concentration on his face it was like suddenly seeing him grown up. He looked so separate. My heart contracted. My stomach muscles tightened. I said, “Hello, chap.”

  Fergus looked up, and bounced down off the wooden counter, narrowly missing the inner workings of a manual lawnmower. “It’s my mummy!” he said to Frank, throwing his arms round me. “It’s my mummy.” Then to me, climbing up my body, using my arms as crampons, he said, “We had lasagna. And do you know? I liked it!”

  “Did you?” I said, kissing his nose, his eyes, his ears. I smiled at Frank. Frank in his overalls. Frank in his garage. Frank, surrounded by his tools and his gear and his long-term projects. Frank who had been here, I realized, for really quite a few years now and who looked as if he was here to stay. “Now, let’s get you home.”
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br />   Both children, exhausted by an afternoon of board games and appliances, went to bed without a murmur between them. Jake and I made cheese on toast and sat and ate it outside in the garden. The wooden chairs were slightly damp, but it was all right if you sat on your jacket.

  It was dark and still out there. Occasionally I felt myself shiver as if someone had opened the door and let a draft in, but it wasn’t cold. There were stars in the sky and a great big tangerine moon, an Edam without the skin.

  “Harvest moon,” said Jake. “Time to get the crops in.”

  “Gather ye what ye sow,” I said. And then wished I hadn’t.

  The moon was casting limbed shadows in the garden, which moved when the wind blew. The lights in the houses on the next street blinked at the same time. There was a rustle in some far bushes. It was loud enough to be a person. But then the next-door neighbor’s tabby streaked across the lawn, a patchwork Tom on a patchwork night, rattled over the fence, and was gone. Not a cat burglar, just a cat.

  Jake broke the silence. He said, “Maggie, thank you for everything today. I know Fran appreciates it. And . . . um . . . I was glad you were there. You know, it . . . um . . . made it easier for me having you with me.”

  “Of course, I was there,” I said. I touched his arm across the table. “I had to be there.”

  He’d changed out of his suit when we got back. He was wearing jeans and a soft blue sweatshirt that he’d had since school, washed so many times it was as thin as felt. He didn’t look that much older than when we’d first met.

  I said, “It just makes you think, doesn’t it? Your life is just chugging along and you’re in your own little bubble and something like this happens and it’s just bang, you realize how vulnerable we all are, how thin the difference between safe and not safe. At least, they’re both, they’re all, alive.” I squeezed the wooden table.

  “Thank God,” he said.

  There was a pause. He said, “I’d better go and ring Mum and Dad.”

  “Yup.”

  He got up to go, and then he leaned across the table and kissed me. “Sorry,” he said, pulling back.

  “It’s all right,” I said, looking up at him.

  There was a flicker across his mouth. “For a moment there I forgot that we didn’t kiss each other these days.”

  “So we don’t,” I said.

  “Look—” He rubbed his eyes and raked his hands through his hair. “I’m sorry things have been so strained between us. I’ve had my head full of work, and I know I’ve been irritable and distant. I shouldn’t have let it come between us.”

  “Maybe it hasn’t come between us as much as Claire,” I said.

  “Claire?” He looked taken aback. He sat back down.

  “There were clues,” I said calmly.

  “Oh. Clues.” He sounded more surprised than mortified. “But, is it really? . . .”

  I felt a wave of exhaustion. “Well, let’s not talk about it now. I’m too tired. We’re both tired. But I just want you to know that I know. We can talk about it another time, okay? And there are things I have to tell you. I wish I didn’t have to but . . .”

  Jake rubbed his eyes again, this time with his palms, and then looked at me. “I hated having secrets from you.”

  I said, “Me, too.” I was churning inside.

  Jake bit the corner of his thumb. “And there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you . . .”

  He sat back, crossed his arms behind his head. “Here goes . . .” He began. But he must have moved a fraction because a tendril from the climbing rose on the wall next to him caught in his hair. He moved to detach it. “Ow,” he said, getting it tangled in his sleeve. Then, he said, looking at me closely, “Whatever happened to that gardener bloke you found?” There was a quizzical expression on his face. “Did he disappear?”

  He turned away and was trying to extricate his sweatshirt without further damage. “Everything goes a bit mad in August,” I said.

  He freed his shirt, bent his head to inspect the little hole the thorns had made. “Anyway, where was I? Oh yes.” He gave an awkward laugh. “What I wanted to ask you . . . What’s that?”

  “What?”

  “That noise?”

  I leaned forward, with my ears straining. It was music, or a noise, like one of Fergus’s broken tapes playing backward.

  We both got up and went to the kitchen door where the sound got louder, still muffled but more regular. It sounded like a synthesized musical box. It sounded electronic. I was still nervous about Jake’s imminent inquiry, or I suppose my reactions would have been quicker. Jake had bounded down the hall and gotten to the stroller, folded up amid its usual wrapping and juice box detritus by the front door. Under it was the Safeway bag I’d packed earlier that day. Jake rummaged and I remembered what I should have remembered earlier: Pete’s mobile. It was playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The Four Seasons by Motorola.

  I leaped down the hall and grabbed it from him. “What . . . ?” Jake began.

  I pressed green. “Hello?” I said, turning my back on Jake so he couldn’t see my face.

  A voice answered. It was a female voice, posh, anxious, asking for Pete. Jake was looking at me quizzically. “He’s not here,” I said. “Try again tomorrow.” I pressed red. I was getting good at other people’s phones now. And then I switched it off.

  “What’s that doing there?” Jake said. He was standing right behind me. “Whose phone is it?”

  “Oh.” I thought quickly. I said the first thing that came into my head. “It’s Rachel’s. I borrowed it.”

  “Oh. But you said ‘he.’ You said, ‘He’s not here.’ ”

  “Guy. Rachel’s husband.”

  “Oh.” He must have been convinced because he seemed to forget all about it. He said, “Oh God, I’d better ring Mum and Dad before it gets too late,” and went into the sitting room. I went to bed before he got off, but I lay awake for a while, feeling hopeful for the first time in ages, running things over in my mind, thinking how to sort things out. Something else nagged at me too: the voice, the voice on Pete’s phone. I recognized it, but I couldn’t quite place it.

  Chapter 24

  It was a week before Fran and Rain’s baby came off the ventilator. For three days one or the other of us sat at the end of her incubator, stroking the square inch of flesh that wasn’t covered in bruises or a diaper. Early on the fourth day, Fran rang with the news that our niece was no longer “critical,” but “stable.” She’d been moved to the room next door, where they switched off the lights at night—a gradual movement toward normality. Fran had given her some milk through a tube from her nose into her stomach and she had digested it. She had actually held her—albeit amid a tangle of wires. She also told Jake, who had answered the phone, that they’d finally chosen a name. I was standing next to him when she told him. “Arabella!” he cried, rolling his eyes for my benefit. I let my jaw slacken in horror, but Jake started nodding his head, looking mollified. He put his hand over the receiver and mouthed, “It’s the name of the nurse.”

  “Oh,” I said, and felt sheepish.

  I’d gone in to see them every day. Fran was expressing milk for England and in need of much chocolate. Temporarily, she also seemed to have forgotten her principled belief in the right of all living creatures to freedom and dignity, not to mention her fear of mad cow disease, and had developed a passion for Marks & Spencer’s beef and horseradish sandwiches. So there was a catering job to be done and also a chauffeuring one: the Pritons had come down to be near their daughter and were staying in Fran’s flat. Stricken by my negligence during the Suffolk weekend, I was bending over backward to make them happy, ferrying them from the flat to the hospital to our house, for supper—nothing too spicy for Derek’s digestion—and back to the flat.

  Crisis, as ever, seemed to bring out the best, and the worst, in people. Rachel had been a brick. She brought around several ready-made meals: large casserole dishes, or tagines as she called them, awash with chic
ken and almonds (Claudia Roden), or saffron and cod (Jane Grigson), none strictly necessary in practical terms, but invaluable in terms of moral support. “You’re a good friend,” I said, giving her a hug at the door, and really meaning it.

  “Oh it’s nothing; I enjoy cooking,” she said, over her shoulder, nipping back to her car, which she’d left with its engine running in the middle of the road. “And you can fuck off,” she said to the man beeping her from behind. I liked her even more after that.

  Lucinda had also revealed hidden depths—or hidden shallows. She rang the day after the accident in a complete state, caused, it turned out, by a missing member of staff. “Maggie. Thank God I’ve found you in. Do you by any chance have another number for Russ?”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Russ. Russ the gardener. I’m desperately in need of him—the lawn is a total shambles and I cannot but cannot get through to him on his mobile.”

  “Oh Pete,” I said. “Er . . . yeah . . . Hang on . . . Sorry, we’re having a bit of a time of it here . . .” And I told her what had happened.

  When I finished, she said, still flustered, as if she hadn’t even listened, “Oh right. Oh dear. The number then?”

  “Thanks for the concern,” I said, after I’d put the phone down. Jake raised his eyebrows.

  “Never liked her much,” he said.

  Jake had taken the week off work. Things had eased off since the Kyushi deal and though there was trouble brewing at Pot Noodle—new flavor, new campaign—he’d decided after Fran’s accident to put all hot snacks on the back burner. “Family comes first,” he’d said. He’d said it in a funny voice, as if self-conscious with the sentimentality, but I knew he meant it.

  Fran wasn’t the only person happy to have him around. His mother, Angela, who was delighted with her new granddaughter, seemed even more pleased to have unrestricted access to her son. His birthday was only three weeks away and she spent every spare minute pinning sections of knitting to his chest. “Just make sure it’s not too tight around the neck,” I heard Jake say once in a moany voice, “or too itchy,” as if he was thirty-five going on eight.