Half Broken Things

by Morag Joss

  Steph could hear through the open door that Sally was now talking back aggressively to whoever was on the telephone. She sounded slightly drunk. Steph could not quite catch the meaning, but as the hissing voice reached their ears, it seemed that Charlie was picking up the atmosphere, staring up at her with a kind of mourning in his eyes. ‘I know, I know,’ she told him softly, ‘but don’t you worry.’ She was praying to herself that it was not Philip at the other end of the telephone. What if the holiday had been a disaster and Sally was right now giving him his marching orders? It was just the way Sally would do it, she thought; full of indignation and certainty, as if Philip had all along simply been wasting her precious time. Heaven forbid that Sally might find herself without the diversion of a boyfriend and with more time and energy for her son. Just then the telephone was banged down.

  ‘Bloody bastard!’ Sally shouted down the hall on her way to the kitchen. ‘Want a coffee, Steph?’

  Steph had grown accustomed to proper coffee, not Sally’s brackish instant, but if she were being asked to stay and have coffee it meant that Sally was about to go off on one of her rants and wanted Steph there to listen. She called back that that would be lovely, and made a ‘yuck’ face at Charlie, who grinned. When she took him into the kitchen a few moments later she found her mug of coffee and Charlie’s bottle of formula waiting. But he was barely awake now, full to the gunnels with the last feed he had had from Steph before leaving to come back. He sucked his thumb in her arms, while his eyelids floated reluctantly down over his eyes and slowly up again.

  The orange teddy had been dumped on the floor and Sally occupied the chair where it had been sitting. She had a glass of wine in front of her and was eating pistachio nuts out of a box on the table. Steph slipped into another chair, glad that the bear was out of Charlie’s sightline even though he was probably too bog-eyed to notice it.

  ‘Oh, look at him,’ Sally said, with her head on one side. ‘Tired out.’

  ‘Oh, just glad to be back with his mum, I should think,’ Steph said. She made a point of coming out with this sort of rubbish. She took a sip of her coffee.

  ‘Oh, Steph-France,’ Sally announced, raising her glass and waving it in the direction of the nuts, ‘France is fantastic. They’re a third of the price over there, pistachios. Have some, go on. And the wine’s amazing. This was two quid a bottle. D’you like wine? Oh, I should have offered. You can take a bottle home with you if you like, we brought back loads.’

  ‘Oh! Oh, thanks!’ Steph smiled. She was getting quite choosy about wine, although not as choosy as Jean and Michael, who could hold quite long conversations about it. In fact at this time of day, she never drank coffee. Michael would usually be handing her a drink, probably champagne, about now. It was funny to think of Jean taking Sally’s bottle of plonk and considering whether or not it was good enough to cook with. She could picture her wrinkling her nose at the label, raising an eyebrow. and murmuring about some recipe or other. She smiled. ‘Well, we’ve had a very nice time, too, haven’t we, Charlie?’ she said in a rather bouncing voice.

  ‘Oh God. God, so did we!’ Sally drawled, stretching her arms up behind her head and lifting her hair. ‘Oh, God, the joy, not being woken up at six. And Philip, really- he’s fantastic.’ She looked away, yawning and rapt in some luxurious memory. ‘I’m bloody shattered, actually.’

  ‘Yes, a lovely time we’ve had,’ Steph said. ‘He was absolutely fine, ’cause he’s a good little baby, aren’t you, Charlie?’

  Sally gave a small snort and drew her arms back down onto the table, where they landed heavily. ‘That’s exactly what I said. On the phone just now. He’ll be perfectly happy, I said, he’s as happy as Larry with her. At this age they’re very adaptable, I said, but he doesn’t get it, though. His generation can’t.’ She slurped some wine.

  ‘His generation?’ Steph looked at her. ‘I did sort of wonder, I mean I wondered if that was… so it wasn’t…’

  Sally looked at her scornfully, as if Steph had not been paying proper attention. ‘That was Charlie’s grandad, miserable old sod. My father-in-law. He’s still on his campaign, ringing up and fretting. Been trying to get me all weekend, apparently. Like it’s a crime to go away! I mean it’s not like he’s ever on hand, he hardly ever bothers to come and see him- Charlie wouldn’t know his grandfather from the bloody Archbishop of Canterbury! But he’s all het up because I dare to have a few days’ break and leave Charlie with other people.’ She snorted again and filled up her glass. ‘He’s never once really asked about me. Doesn’t want to know how I’m managing. Because God forbid, what if I asked him to help? Oh, he’s not up for that. So just now I told him straight,’ she said, in a tone that left Steph in no doubt that she had, ‘straight out, I told him, your precious grandson is fine, as I keep telling you, but no, I haven’t a clue how your precious son is, because he doesn’t ring up here any more. He hasn’t phoned for three weeks, that’s the sort of father and husband he is. And you might as well know, I said, I’ve been away. On holiday. In France, and with someone else.’

  When Steph said nothing Sally went on, ‘I did. I just told him. I said you might as well know I’m seeing someone, and he’s a bit more clued up than your precious son. Clued up in every way. I did! I’m past caring.’ She giggled at Steph’s shocked face.

  ‘And of course that didn’t go down too well but I knew, you see, I knew he’d get all embarrassed and change the subject, and sure enough all of a sudden he’s back on his favourite topic: when are we getting Charlie christened. Been on about it since he was born.’ She sighed and drank some more. ‘Wants it sorted out before he goes off on holiday. I said I wasn’t taking that sort of pressure.’ She leaned back in her chair until it creaked. ‘Frankly, I preferred him when he was depressed. At least it kept him quiet.’

  ‘Charlie’s asleep now,’ Steph whispered. ‘Want to take him?’

  ‘Oh,’ Sally said, starting up and fixing a look of enthusiasm on her face. ‘Oh, sure. But what about his feed? Shouldn’t he be hungry? He hasn’t had his bottle.’

  Steph had got up and was now easing Charlie gently onto Sally’s lap. ‘He’s getting on for six months now. Perhaps he’s ready to drop a feed,’ she whispered. ‘He might not need so many. I’ll put this in the fridge, shall I?’ She tried not to show her distaste as she picked up the baby’s bottle. ‘He might want some later on, around ten or eleven. And then I bet he’ll sleep through.’ She smiled reassuringly.

  ‘What would I do without you, Steph?’ Sally said, looking down at Charlie.

  It was only as Steph was letting herself out quietly, trying not to pay attention to the now familiar, awful moment when she left him behind, that it struck her as odd that Sally should think it was Steph she could not be without, rather than Charlie. But Steph would be the last to complain. She would be back in the morning, and in the meantime there was a new and important matter to consider. Because she had decided, following the conversation about Charlie’s feeds, that it was time to think about weaning.

  ***

  Mr Hapgood- I never could call him Gerald- found a buyer. I went into the shop one day to find him smiling secretly and saying he had a surprise for me, which turned out to be an envelope with a hundred and seventy pounds in it. He had got an even better price for the clock than he had hoped, and how about coming through to the back for a cup of tea and a bit of a cuddle ‘to celebrate’. The ‘to celebrate’ bit seemed unnecessary because that was what happened almost every time I went anyway. Only the arrival of a customer would put him off, and there weren’t many of those at the end of weekday afternoons. Anyway, it wasn’t disappointment with the amount that upset me that day, or even with what Mr Hapgood immediately started doing (he was tending to skip the preliminaries by this time), it was the empty space where the clock had been standing all those months. Suddenly it wasn’t there. Of course it was silly of me to be upset and surprised. I knew it was being sold and now I had the money in my satchel, so how could I expe
ct the clock itself to be there? But I burst into tears. Because it suddenly seemed as if it were Father himself who had gone, rather than his clock. It felt as if I were just understanding it for the first time, that Father really had gone, as if one minute I had been helping him to sit up, supporting his head while he swallowed his tablets, and the next he had suddenly been wrenched away, leaving me with his water glass in my hand staring at a dent in the pillow, the empty blankets and a bedside table cleared of his spectacles and book of crosswords. At this point, you realise, he had been dead for over six months. Why was I so slow on the uptake? I don’t know. But the empty space on the floor at the back of Mr Hapgood’s shop was suddenly the most desolate place on earth. I stood and howled. Every single part of me ached because I wanted to see Father’s face again, and talk to him and hear his voice, and that empty space was telling me that I never, ever would.

  Mr Hapgood got rather flustered and said I was sixteen after all and he hadn’t forced me. When I could speak I said no, it’s not that. He was clearly very relieved. Then he said he knew what the matter was, and I was to dry my eyes. What a silly girl I was being, to think that just because the clock was sold he wouldn’t want to see me any more. I wasn’t to think that. In fact, the last thing he wanted was for my visits to stop. I promised to keep popping in. And I did. The space where the clock had been soon filled up with other stuff but in any case, for ever afterwards I always ignored that spot.

  Not long after that, Mr Hapgood sprang another surprise. This time there was no secret smiling and ‘celebrating’. Instead he sat me down and told me very solemnly that sometimes people have to do one thing when they might want to do another, that some things are just not meant to be, and that people have to accept disappointment and make the best of things. Well, this wasn’t exactly news, but he talked as if I hadn’t thought of it, and as if he were being terribly brave. I had an idea he was thinking I was being terribly brave too, but in fact I was thinking how young he sounded. That’s odd, I suppose, that I thought him young, but by then I think I was abnormally old. Anyway, all his ‘making the best of things’ didn’t seem to have much to do with me. The thing was, he said, he was getting married. He had been engaged for so long that he sometimes even forgot that he was, and I should forgive him if he hadn’t mentioned his fiancйe. They had been engaged for eight years, but what with his mother, and the flat above the shop being too small for all of them, he had stopped thinking they would ever actually tie the knot. Now finally, they’d managed to make a down payment on one of the new houses that were going up at Rectory Fields. They were getting a semi-detached with lounge and dining alcove, kitchen, three bedrooms, bathroom, he said, counting them off on his fingers. Lovely indoor toilet. But meanwhile, there was no reason for me to stop coming to see him. We could go on being very special friends. It was just that he respected me too much not to tell me the truth. I was The One, but the age difference, and a promise is a promise, and Veronica wanted kiddies. But he wanted me to keep coming to see him. I said all right, then. Congratulations, I said.

  Michael and Jean had been picking strawberries for days, since the middle of June. First they had eaten them just as they came, warm off the plants, or with cream and sugar. Black pepper had been tried. Then they had had strawberry ice cream. Then strawberry shortcake, and a strawberry mousse. By the time bottles of strawberry vinegar were maturing in the larder Michael and Steph were begging for mercy. With the fruit that was left, Jean announced at breakfast on the last day of June, she would make jam.

  They waited until the afternoon, after the sun had been on the strawberry patch all day, and together they picked the last of the crop. Under a canopy, Charlie in a white brimmed hat and white cotton clothes lay drowsy in a nest of white blankets at the end of the strawberry beds, presiding over the pickers like a large and rather viceregal fruit fairy, kicking arms and legs as smooth and golden as butter. His serious eyes, when they were not inspecting his hands to see if they had pulled anything more surprising than a trapeze of saliva from his mouth, would follow birds and insects, and from time to time he would chatter in reply to the others’ voices or to the sound of far-off buzzing- Michael had set wasp traps a good distance away from him. Every few minutes he or one of the others would rise from the picking and sink down onto the rug nearby to chatter back to him and put on more of his sun cream, or tickle him under the chin or touch his cheek with a stained hand, to make sure he was not getting too hot.

  After a time Steph stood up, groaning, and licked her fingers clean of strawberry gore. Clutching her lower back, she sauntered back to the house and returned with a tray with bottles of water and glasses, and a bowl and spoon. They plonked themselves down while Steph, sitting next to Charlie, mashed up two strawberries in the bowl with the back of the spoon and then, to Jean’s slight horror, added a few drops of breast milk.

  ‘Steph, are you sure, I mean is one supposed to…?’ She looked round at Michael for support, but he was simply gazing at Steph with that look on his face, the one of soft but total absorption that so often came over it when he watched her with Charlie.

  Steph smiled as the resulting pink paste disappeared into Charlie’s mouth. After a second’s astonished smacking of his lips and widening of his eyes, he opened his mouth for more. Within four mouthfuls he was laughing and turning the stuff over in his mouth. Everyone applauded. It was his first taste of anything besides milk, and because they had watched it together the event was, it went without saying, theirs alone, a private joy; nothing whatsoever to do with Sally.

  They went back to the picking. The strawberries mounted up in a large plastic bowl that Jean had brought from the laundry room. It was the end of the season. Most of the whole strawberries had lost their gloss and grown dull and deviant-looking; this was the riff-raff, the small, the reticent, late-forming and grudging fruit, and it was already almost too late. Some of the berries were so ripe that as they were picked they burst in the fingers and landed in the bowl as wet, scented rags. The warm heap of exposed flesh in the bowl would, within a very few hours, begin to mist over with a blue-green bloom of mould.

  Even though they discarded the rotten fruit and all the stunted berries that were almost white on one side, the quantity was almost threatening. Jean began to re-calculate the amount of sugar she would need. But there would have been even more strawberries, Michael said, if he had known more about them back in April.

  ‘In April,’ he told them when they had nearly finished, ‘you’ve got to nip off the first blossom, it encourages more fruit. I read it in one of the gardening books, only,’ he said, heaving the bowl of strawberries from the ground up onto his hip, ‘not until May.’

  Steph had already picked up Charlie and was following Michael back to the house, trailing his blankets on the grass behind her. So they were too far away to hear, that was all. They were simply too far away to hear, so of course did not reply when Jean said, dreamily, ‘Oh well, never mind that now, we’ve got plenty. And there’s always next year.’

  They could not have heard. They had reached the end of the walled garden, crossed the sunlit lawn and were moving between the borders of rose bushes into the jagged shadow of the corner of the house. Jean stared after them until they disappeared round the side. She thought, watching them go, ‘They didn’t hear me. So I could pretend that I never said that, that it was never even thought of, let alone said. I could pretend that, even to myself.’ She stooped down, ruffled through the clumped leaves of a couple of strawberry plants, with a hand that was shaking. She could hear her own heart beating. Finding nothing worth picking, she stood up again. She should go back to the house. There were things to do. There was no reason for her to stand out here, with the sun beating down, as if she were waiting for something. But then it came, as she knew it would, as she stood unwilling or unable to move, an old ache gathering weight somewhere inside her.

  ***

  Of course I never did go to university. Mother wouldn’t put up the money and in a
ny case, she said, she needed me at home. (By the way, I’m sorry to keep going back to Mother, and I’m not confessing anything in the sense of owning up to something I should not have done. She drove me too far.) The clock money paid for a secretarial course, and the rest went on my board, Mother’s point being that I had left school and until I was earning why should she stump up for everything if, after the course was paid for, I was still ‘sitting on a goldmine’. Hardly a goldmine. I began to get angry with Father for saying the clock would get me through college. I even began to wonder if by college he actually had meant Technical College, a year learning to type and file and do shorthand and organise the boss’s diary? If so, it was just cruelty on his part to have let me run on with thoughts of proper university. I could scarcely believe it of him, and he had always told me I could be a teacher, like him. But then his dying and leaving me felt like an act of cruelty also. All those years I spent thinking ill of him, of course I regret them now, but I was misled.