by Marie Joseph
Old Gregory, the office pessimist, is in the cloakroom, and as I try to dry my hair with a paper towel, which comes to pieces in my hand as I rub, he tells me that he has heard there are to be two more redundancies that month in our costing department.
I feel my stomach slide downwards, the way it always does when the word redundancy is mentioned. I reassure myself that I am thirty years old, not forty-five, or fifty, the dangerous ages. I tell myself that I am indispensable and, like a whisper, comes my mother’s voice:
‘The graveyards are full of indispensable people.’
I go to my desk, and because my boss walks through to his inner sanctum at that very moment, I try to look efficient, capable, ambitious, young, but not too young, keen and responsible – which takes some doing all at one and the same time.
I work hard all morning to justify going home early, even though I have taken half a day of my precious leave. The rain streams down the window on my left. I think about Lucy working hard too, in our too small kitchen. She sticks out her tongue when she is concentrating, and I imagine her cutting bread into fancy shapes for the sandwiches, and writing place names for the table in her large and flowing handwriting.
We both seem to be working hard all the time these days. Me at the office, and at weekends decorating or building the patio; Lucy coping with the children, then sitting with me round the television, knitting feverishly, counting stitches, and wearing the smock-like pinafores she seems to have been wearing ever since we married.
What happened to the Paris weekends, the plays we were going to see, the winter overcoat I was going to buy that first year?
My boss comes out of his room and although I do not lift my head, I sense that he is watching me. I feel the sickening downward swoop of my stomach again as I wonder if he is weighing up the possibility of managing the department without me.
Five years ago it would not have mattered. Five years ago I could have laughed, and even emigrated. I could have managed on half of what I am earning now. I am a married man, I remind him silently. I have children who grow all the time, almost visibly, and I have a wife who, because she is never demanding, makes me want to give her the Earth. I grovel before him in my mind, and skip lunch to finish a report that could have waited until the next day. It is after two o’clock before I feel I can leave the office.
I have not had time to look through the window and see that, as Lucy said it would, the rain has stopped.
Lucy smiles at me when I go into the house and the children are just finishing their tea. There is a small boy with hair the colour of a copper warming pan piling sandwiches on to his plate, and Joanna showing off at the head of the table, sporting an imitation wristwatch on one arm, and a bracelet of poppet beads on the other. Her face is petunia-purple, and I exchange a look with Lucy and know we are both hoping that she will wait until her guests have departed before she is sick again.
Lucy copes beautifully with a child weeping silently into a sponge finger, and, glad to escape from the noise, I go into the kitchen, make a pot of tea, and take two mugs out into the garden. Mr Doom, the Punch and Judy man, is erecting his booth over by the hydrangea bushes, flanked by lettuces and the dark spikes of chives.
Now the children, bursting with food and renewed energy, charge out over the lawn, and Lucy, bending, arranges them in rows on the grass which she has covered first with two old blankets. She takes the little girl who has been weeping on to her knee, because apparently Punch terrifies her, and I watch her, surrounded by all those children, and I feel as responsible as if they all belonged to me.
‘First we’ll have a spot of magic,’ Mr Doom says, and the children sit up straight, knowing exactly what is coming next, because Mr Doom comes to all their parties. Lucy has provided him with a list of the guests, and he calls out, ‘Will a little boy called Samantha come and help me?’
The children shriek with laughter, because this is the joke they love the best, and he pretends to study the list again more carefully.
‘Ah, dear me. What I meant to say was, will a little girl called Andrew come out and give me a hand?’ And the children roll about on the blankets with glee.
Then the performance proper starts. Mr Doom disappears behind his curtain and, in his role of Punch, starts to bash his wife over the head. I know what is expected of me, and as Punch throws the baby out on to the grass I run forward, field it neatly, and pass it back.
Joanna is jumping up and down, screaming herself hoarse, and two little boys, encouraged by the scene of violence, fight a grim battle over by the fence, dangerously near a row of tomato plants.
The garden is alive with noise, bright colour, and the sound of children’s voices. A breeze lifts the purple-and-gold folds of the Punch and Judy booth, making it ripple in the sunlight. For what must be the tenth time I field the baby doll and then Lucy brings out the going-home balloons. Knowing the show is almost finished, the children desert Mr Punch and surround her, stretching out eager hands.
Now the party is ending. Mothers come, their faces tranquil from the short respite, nudging their children into murmured thank-yous and goodbyes. Over by the hydrangea bushes, Mr Doom takes down the booth and packs his equipment away in two coffin-shaped boxes.
Feeling unaccountably depressed, and hungry to boot, I start to clear the table, martyred and resigned, tipping all the cardboard plates streaked with jelly and fish paste and birthday cake crumbs into a bowl. On the patio I see Lucy thanking Mr Doom and paying him with the five-pound note I gave her to spend on herself, and again I feel the sudden upsurge of anger.
She is pale and looks tired, halfway to death. Flat-footed and walking sway-backed, she comes towards me.
‘I told you the sun would shine, didn’t I?’ she says, and I stop what I am doing and just stare at her.
The house seems very quiet now the children have gone. Abbie is underneath the table, feeding the dog bits of icing but eating the biggest bits herself, when Joanna’s face appears round the door, tinged with the familar shade of green.
I look at Lucy and I can’t describe the feeling, but it is as though, at that moment, I can see my life with her stretching ahead, some parts of it worry-filled, some parts sad, but most of it sun-dappled, the minutes heightened with fun and laughter, because where Lucy is, the rain in the morning will always be followed by sunshine in the afternoon.
‘D’you know?’ whines Joanna, ‘I’m going to be sick.’
I grasp her firmly by the elbow, propelling her towards the downstairs cloakroom. I hold her head and when it is all over, I kneel down and hug her hard.
‘It was a lovely party, wasn’t it sweetheart?’
‘D’you know, Samantha’s having one next week?’ she gasps, still out of breath with all that heaving. ‘I bet she doesn’t get as many presents as me . . . D’you know?’
But I was not listening to her. Over her shoulder I see Lucy smiling at me and suddenly I feel ten feet tall.
I don’t know what I know, I tell myself, but I know what I am, and that’s happy.
The Day of the Move
‘WELL OF COURSE, dear,’ Beth told her daughter, ‘of course I’ll have the children the day you move. I’ve never had them for the whole day before, and I’ll look forward to it. I won’t do a thing but devote myself to them. You won’t need to spare them a thought.’
‘It means bringing them over early,’ Dina said. ‘The removal men are starting at the flat at eight o’clock, and John and I want the children out of way well before that, so we thought I’d drive them over at about half past seven.’
‘Fine,’ Beth said. ‘That’ll mean Bill can see them before he sets off for the office. He’ll enjoy that.’
Dina’s face, behind the curtains of her long dark hair, was anxiously apologetic. ‘Actually, Mummy, they could be there when he comes home, too. I thought I’d bring their night things, and if it isn’t too much trouble, you could give them their bath, then all we’ll need to do is to bed them down in the new
house. Are you sure it won’t be too much?’
Beth laughed. ‘I admit to being their grandmother, dear, but I’m not exactly senile, and I did manage to bring you up, remember? It’ll be like old times.’
Dina’s voice was still tinged with unflattering doubt. ‘That’s fine then, Mummy. I’ll make a list of their routine for the day, and prepare the bottles for the baby. She has her sleep after lunch at the same time as Emma, so that means you’ll be able to put your own feet up for an hour at least.’
Beth was highly amused. ‘Good gracious, pet. I never put my feet up during the day. My fiftieth birthday is well on the horizon, don’t forget. I’ll cope beautifully, don’t worry, and if it’s fine I’ll take them to the park. They’ll like that.’
Dina still lingered on the doorstep, the babies strapped into position in their little red seats in the car at the kerb. ‘We just couldn’t have them around when we’re rolling up carpets and dismantling beds and things . . .’
Beth gave her daughter an affectionate hug. ‘Of course you couldn’t, and anyway, that’s what grandmothers are for. Surely?’
She waved them off, then closed the door and, humming softly to herself, stared for a satisfying while at her reflection in the hall mirror.
Her hair, newly tinted a fashionable shade of dark copper, sprang away from her forehead in a becoming style. She looked, and knew she looked, around thirty-nine years old, and enjoyed telling new friends that she was the grandmother of two little girls.
‘A grandmother! I can’t believe it,’ they’d say, and her ego would be boosted sky-high.
‘When I think,’ she told her husband that evening, ‘when I think about my own grandmother and how she looked, it really is incredible the way things have changed.’
Bill grinned at her. ‘I know, love. She’d probably turn like a top in her grave if she could see you in those sexy tights, looking about thirty-two.’
‘Thirty-nine,’ said Beth, at all times honest.
Seated opposite him at the candlelit table in the dining room – since Dina had married they were enjoying their new-found freedom, and always ate in the dining room, and quite often by candlelight – she passed him the shrimp sauce.
‘My grandmother’s hair always seemed to be coming down and wisping round her face, and her face was always shiny. She never, as far as I remember, wore anything but black, and she never went out. Worn to a shadow, that was my impression of her. At fifty she looked like an old, old lady.’
‘She did have eleven children,’ Bill reminded her, ‘and none of these modern gadgets.’
Beth accepted a refill to her glass of wine. ‘There wasn’t the Pill in those days, of course.’
Bill’s expression was more of a leer. ‘Or television. They had to find their own entertainment in the evenings in those days.’
‘Don’t be vulgar,’ Beth said. ‘I’m serious. It must have been terrible. No strained foods in tins, no automatic bottle-warmers, plastic pants, and no washing machines. There’s really nothing to coping with babies these days. No wonder our grandmothers just faded away.’ She sounded smug.
‘All the same,’ Bill said, as they set the alarm for the unearthly hour of six-thirty on the night before the move, ‘I hope the children don’t make any more fingermarks on the drawing room walls. I’d keep them in the kitchen if I were you.’
Halfway into her short frilly nightie, Beth gave him a scathing look. ‘You’re getting stuffy.’
Bill said nothing, but she could see that he remembered the state of their recently decorated drawing room the last time the family had driven over for Sunday tea. Crumbs, and buttery crumbs at that, trodden into the pale beige carpet, sticky fingermarks on the polished coffee tables, and even a potty taking pride of place on the goatskin rug.
‘You’re getting middle-aged,’ Beth told him, and climbing into bed, curled her feet into the warmth of his pyjama-clad legs.
After what seemed like a couple of hours’ sleep she awoke to the shrill sound of the alarm, and the sound of rain spattering.
Groaning, Bill stretched out an arm and switched off the alarm.
‘Don’t let me go to sleep again,’ Beth said, wrapping herself round him, and doing just that.
And at half-past seven exactly, a full thirty minutes after their usual getting-up time, the doorbell rang.
As if fired from a catapult, Beth shot out of bed.
‘Oh lord, it’s the children,’ she wailed, struggling into her dressing gown. ‘I told you not to let me go to sleep again.’
On the doorstep, Dina waited impatiently, holding Emma’s hand. She held out a basket overflowing with packets of cereal, a mammoth-sized parcel of disposable nappies and a one-eared rabbit.
‘Take this off me, Mummy,’ she said, ‘and I’ll get the baby and the rest of the stuff from the car.’
Obediently Beth led three-year-old Emma through into the kitchen, set the coffeepot to percolate, and hurled bacon and two eggs into the frying pan.
‘Me not like bacon,’ said Emma, staring solemnly out from the red hood of her quilted anorak.
‘It’s for Grandpa,’ Beth soothed, and through the open door saw her daughter deposit at intervals in the hall at least four blankets, a folding pram, a baby-walker, a baby-bouncer, a pink plush teddy bear, a folded rubber sheet, a carrycot, a pale green potty, a suitcase, and a collapsible chair.
‘Just getting the baby now,’ Dina called. ‘She’s a bit cross. She usually sleeps till nine.’
Flipping over a rasher of bacon with one hand and unzipping Emma’s anorak with the other, Beth called upstairs to say that breakfast was ready.
‘Haven’t time,’ Bill called back. ‘Just a slice of toast, please, love.’
The zip had stuck, and Emma watched Beth’s struggles with a look of distain.
‘Me not like toast,’ she said.
‘Talk about chaos back at the flat,’ Dina said, coming into the kitchen with a grizzling baby in her arms. ‘We hadn’t time to do any more than just get them up and dressed. Emma has cereal and an apple, and the baby her own cereal and her bottle. Where shall I put her, Mummy? She’s a bit hot. I’m sure she’s sickening for something. Do you think that’s the beginnings of a rash behind her ears?’
Receiving the wriggling bundle into her arms, Beth examined it.
‘Heat rash,’ she was saying firmly when a sudden crash from the hall startled her, and she turned round just in time to see Bill picking himself up from the carpet.
‘Who had no more sense than to leave – ?’ he began, coming through, a piece of tissue waving flag-like from a cut on his chin.
Beth hoped that the look she shot in his direction spoke more than volumes.
‘Dina will drop you off at the station, dear,’ she said brightly. ‘I know she wants to get back straight away.’
‘Chaos,’ Dina said. ‘Absolute chaos back there. How gorgeously tidy everything looks here, Mummy. You don’t know how lucky you are.’
‘Why have Grandpa got that paper on his face?’ asked Emma, her head on one side. ‘Me not like it.’
‘Oh, the toast,’ Beth wailed, trying to disentangle the baby’s fingers from her hair.
‘Forget the toast,’ Bill said grimly, ‘there isn’t time, anyway.’ He went to fetch his coat.
‘Cereal and fruit, and cereal and the first bottle,’ Dina said. ‘The baby goes down at ten as she’s tired, I know the carrycot’s a bit small, but if you stuff her in well, she’ll fit just for today. Tins of strained food in the basket, orange juice in the big bottle, and their pyjamas and dressing gowns are in the case in the hall.’
‘The one I fell over,’ said Bill appearing in his raincoat and with his briefcase underneath his arm. He tickled the baby under her chin, and, at a warning glance from Beth, did exactly the same to Emma.
‘Wave goodbye,’ Beth told a totally unresponsive baby and an ecstatic little girl now sharing the basket underneath the table with a disgruntled dog. ‘Then we’ll go upsta
irs while Grannie gets dressed.’
‘You’re sure you’ll be all right?’ Dina began, looking no more than seventeen in her washed-out jeans and with a bright scarf tying back her long dark hair.
‘Off you go,’ Beth said, pushing her towards the door, ‘and don’t worry about a thing. We’re going to have a lovely time, aren’t we, Emma? And if it stops raining this afternoon, we’ll go to the park and you can have a swing.’
‘Me not like –’ Emma began, but Beth closed the door quickly, and, telling her elder granddaughter to follow carefully, she carried the baby upstairs and into the bedroom with its unmade bed.
Halfway into her bra, with the baby deposited for safety in the middle of the eiderdown, she smiled at Emma.
‘Aren’t you lucky having a nice little sister to play with?’
With the speed of a well-trained cat burglar, Emma was already engrossed in going over the contents of the dressing-table drawer.
‘Me not like her,’ she said, as if she meant it. Then, wielding Beth’s new lipstick as if it were a crayon, she drew a scarlet gash inthe vague direction of her mouth. ‘Daddy hasn’t got bosoms,’ she said, staring hard at Beth through the mirror.
Quickly Beth finished fastening the bra, and pulled on a black sweater and slacks. From the eiderdown, the baby keeled over from a sitting position and started to cry.
Upending her, Beth took a red bead necklace from the open drawer, and dangled it within reach of the podgy fingers.
‘Pretty?’ she said, and was rewarded by a dazzling smile.
Dismissing the possibility of a wash as desirable but at the moment entirely unpractical, Beth picked the baby up in her arms.
‘Now we’ll have breakfast. You know how to come downstairs, Emma. Backwards way. All right, dear, bring the scent spray down if you want, but don’t squirt it.’
Eyeing the congealed eggs and bacon in the pan with distaste, Beth fed them to a grateful dog, sat the baby down on the floor, and started to read the instructions on a packet of cereal. Measuring the milk into a saucepan took all her concentration, and she turned round in time to see the baby’s jaws champing rhythmically on a small square biscuit from the dog’s bowl, and Emma methodically unthreading, one by one, red beads.