by Eve Chase
The elderly lady on the opposite table squints at us suspiciously. When no waitress appears, I walk to the beaded curtained door that separates café from kitchen at the back. ‘Hello?’
An attractive woman in her sixties swishes out, dusting off her hands on a black apron, which hugs her curves and is embroidered with the name ‘Casey’. I notice that the kitchen is incongruously papered with old movie posters before the beaded curtains clatter shut. She writes down our order on a notepad with great care and reads it back to me with a softly burred accent. I assure her it’s correct – plain scones, not fruit, that’s right; cream, yes – and wonder how ordering scones can be quite so complicated, then turn back to the table.
I start. The old woman has Annie’s hand clutched in hers. Annie’s backed into her seat, horrified. I hurry over. ‘Is everything okay?’
Annie shoots a save-me look.
‘She’s the spit! Looks just like her!’ The woman’s eyes seem to swivel in their sockets, hectic in the leathery folds of her skin.
‘I think there’s been some misunderstanding,’ I say, gently removing the old woman’s hand from Annie’s.
Casey hurries over. ‘Leave my customers alone, eh?’ she says to the woman, not unkindly. She rolls her eyes at me, as if to say, don’t worry, the old dear does it all the time. ‘Let me help you to the door, love.’ She affectionately takes the woman’s arm.
‘But …’ the woman protests indignantly.
‘Here’s your walking stick. Careful. That’s it. We’ll see you same time tomorrow. Your pot of tea and egg sandwich will be ready and waiting. On the dot. As always.’ She guides her out and mouths a smiling ‘Sorry,’ to Annie. She waves. ‘You enjoy the rest of your day now, Marge.’
But Marge doesn’t move. She stands on the other side of the window, staring at Annie, the swirled dimples in the glass distorting her baggy face, and something in me too. Only when the café owner smilingly shoos her away does Marge reluctantly turn and, hunched over, walking stick extended, tap her way down the darkening village street.
34
Rita
Marge ambushes Foxcote through the garden gate, armed with muddy stalks of broccoli, carrots from her veg patch, and a jar of pickles. Don quips, loud enough for Marge to hear, ‘Just as well my constitution’s been hardened on the Serengeti.’
Rita holds her breath. Don’s soft in the head if he thinks messing with Marge is a good idea. Nor is it likely to help that he’s sunbathing on the lawn in swimming trunks that leave nothing to the imagination. The baby sleeps beside them, wearing a nappy, her soft pudding belly rising and falling. (In a forest small things grow quickly: Rita swears the baby gets bigger by the hour.)
‘The child needs her blanket,’ Marge says accusingly.
‘Oh, dear. Has it got a bit nippy? There,’ Jeannie says, quickly rectifying the situation. ‘Nice and cosy.’
But Marge is not looking at the baby now. She’s zoomed into Jeannie and Don’s feet – their toes are just touching – and then, as if drawing an invisible line between them, the fading yellowy mark under Jeannie’s eye. Jeannie, sensing this perhaps, slips down her sunglasses, which were holding back her hair.
Too late, thinks Rita. Violence, after all, is proof Don is a lover, not a friend. What sort of friend smashes you in the face?
The broken veins on Marge’s cheeks blaze. She looks at Don with such frank loathing it makes Rita’s breath catch. It’s Teddy who saves them, leaping out of a tree and rolling across the lawn.
‘Heavens,’ says Jeannie, snatching up the baby. ‘Careful, Teddy.’
‘Ah, Man-cub.’ Don grins approvingly. He nods up at a towering pine swaying on the other side of the garden wall. ‘Now go and climb that. Show us what you’re made of, Teddy.’
Rita grabs his hand and pulls him up. No way is he climbing that. ‘Come on, Teddy. Let’s see what Hera’s up to.’
‘Don says –’ protests Teddy.
‘Don has no idea what he’s talking about,’ says Marge, more pugnacious than ever.
Don lazily scratches his stomach. His nonchalance puts Rita on edge. Don, she’s quickly learning, is a man who can accelerate from docile charm to aggression in seconds, like his car.
‘Do what Rita says. Inside, Teddy,’ says Jeannie, glancing at Marge, silently imploring her to say no more.
‘Doesn’t know trees.’ Marge lifts her chin. She snorts. ‘Doesn’t know guns neither.’
‘I’ll let the hunted animal heads that adorn the walls of my Chelsea flat know.’ His eyes are sparkling dangerously.
‘That’s enough,’ whispers Jeannie. She looks on the verge of tears.
Rita tightens her grip on Teddy’s hand and pulls him back to the house. Two days before Don leaves, and the question of the baby is settled. She’s started to pray that Marge is right and the Harringtons are able to adopt easily. The other prospect – the baby taken away, given to another family – is now too unbearable to think about.
‘Is this a good time?’ comes a voice from over the wall.
Something inside Rita clenches.
‘Robbie!’ calls Jeannie, clearly glad the fraught scene has been interrupted. She leaps up, smiling too brightly, baby over one shoulder. Her cotton dress sticks to the back of her legs. Even with Marge there, watching him like a hawk, Don grins at Jeannie’s bottom. ‘Do come in,’ Jeannie calls out.
Rita can’t breathe. She’s unprepared for Robbie, especially in the company of others. She dreads Don saying something. And she looks awful. She’s got a spot on her chin, weepy and adolescent, and bags under her eyes.
Ever since Hera told her about the poor Harrington baby, alive when she left the Primrose Hill house, Rita’s moved through her domestic tasks in a disembodied daze, her body leaden, her mind fidgety. She’s witnessed a lot of dawns. She can’t even be sure that Hera, over-tired and traumatized on the night of the birth, didn’t imagine the whole thing. Maybe she wanted to believe her little sister was alive so much that she saw movement that wasn’t there. Willed hope where there was none. Maybe Don wasn’t the baby’s father after all.
Nannies, she realizes, only get to peep inside a marriage – the content of the bathroom bin, the conversations that spill under doors, or stop suddenly when they enter the room – but they never really know. The Harrington marriage – and the family – is a huge intricate jigsaw, with too many missing pieces.
So many unanswered questions niggle. Does Jeannie know the newborn left the house alive? She suspects Jeannie was out cold and Walter persuaded the midwife to remove the distressing baby. She can imagine that, Walter being the controlling sort, especially if the baby was Don’s – unfortunately, this has begun to make a dreadful sense – and soon died at the hospital. But why? Of what? No one’s ever explained it to her – and it’s not something she dare ask.
Irrationally, she feels she might have been able to help. After all, she knows the power of a surgeon’s stitches, the way they can mend the most broken and twisted of bodies: she has scars like coat zips, more metal pins and plates than a junkyard. Maybe it’s different with a newborn baby, she reasons, with its miniature body, the workings fragile as a tiny Swiss clock. Still, if she were the mother, she’d have wanted to spend those last few minutes with her baby. She’d have kissed and hugged that poor doomed creature as it turned stiff and blue in her arms. It was still a dear human being. A tiny precious thing.
‘What do you think, Rita?’ Jeannie’s saying.
Rita startles, shocked that she’s still standing in the same spot on the lawn: her thoughts have travelled miles, yet only a second or two has passed. Everyone is staring at her oddly. She winds her scrambling mind back towards her, like a skein of wool. She blinks repeatedly. ‘Sorry?’
Don snaps his fingers and laughs. ‘And she’s back in the room.’
‘Robbie was asking if we had any use for extra logs?’ Jeannie frowns, puzzled by Rita’s absent expression.
‘Go on, Rita. Give Robbie a hand
bringing the logs in. I’ll take Teddy and keep him out of …’ Marge shoots an acidic glance at Don ‘… harm’s way.’
Stripes of sunlight stream through the gaps in the shed’s planks. The woodchip on the floor muffles the sound of their voices. She’s aware of him watching her as she moves logs from wheelbarrow to stack, then straightens and rubs her lower back, gracelessly, catching the tang of her own sweat. She seems to spend half her life bent over changing mats and she aches, the curse of the tall girl. ‘Well, that’s it, I think,’ she says. ‘We’ll not freeze in our beds this last week of August.’
He looks slightly sheepish and fights a smile.
From the garden, Rita can hear the baby starting to whinge. Call for her. The sound travels right under her skin, as it’s always done. She moves towards the door and reaches for the latch.
‘The thing is …’ he takes a breath ‘… I just wanted an excuse to come round and speak to you in private.’
The temperature in the woodshed rises. She colours. The conversation suddenly feels almost unbearably intense. ‘Oh, right,’ she says, struggling to sound casual. ‘Why?’
‘I don’t mean to speak out of turn, but you look a bit … a bit … trapped here. At Foxcote, I mean. Not in the shed.’ He grins, and her stomach swoops. ‘You’re free to leave the shed at any time.’
Rita lets go of the latch and studies the floor, scared she’ll give herself away. Her mouth is dry and, for some odd reason, tastes of burned toast. Trapped, yes. It feels like she’s caught in the air bubble inside a heavy glass paperweight. She looks up with a small frown. ‘Have you been spying on us, Robbie?’
‘Spying?’ He looks so baffled by her question – and hurt – that Rita immediately realizes that if someone is secretly watching them, it’s not Robbie.
‘Doesn’t matter.’ She feels bad. Presses her lips together. ‘Sorry.’
He steps a little closer. She catches the exertion of the log-lifting on him too, a salty musk. He smells exciting. Robbie lowers his voice. ‘Look, you don’t need to tell me nothing. About what’s going on. I don’t want to put you in a position, Rita.’ He pauses. She fights the urge to tell him everything. ‘But you don’t look happy, that’s all I care about.’ He fixes her with his warm direct gaze. ‘And … and you should be. You deserve to be happy, Rita.’
She bows her head, unable to hold that gaze because if she does she knows she’ll start to cry, like you do when people are unexpectedly kind and understand deep unknowable things about you without being told. ‘I’m dog-tired, Robbie, that’s all,’ she mutters.
‘You must be exhausted,’ he says, with such feeling it’s almost as though he’s moving around under her skin, and this makes her feel exposed and vulnerable, in a way she never was with Fred. ‘You don’t like this forest much, do you?’
She looks up. Her pupils are dilated, black and huge. ‘It’s beautiful, Robbie. But it’s not home.’
His Adam’s apple rises and falls. ‘And never could be?’ The question lands softly, devastatingly.
She realizes she can’t see his shortness any more, those missing crucial few inches. When she looks into his earth-brown eyes, they seem completely level to her own. And she wants to say, Yes, I could live here, maybe, just to see what he’ll say next, what unexpected course the conversation might take. But it’d be an insult to lead such a good man on. She couldn’t do it. ‘I don’t think so.’
They stand there in silence, digesting their fundamental incompatibility, letting it settle around them.
‘We go back to London in a few days. For the new school term.’ It sounds unbelievable even to her. She feels like she’s been at Foxcote for centuries, that she’s morphed into someone else here. Will she really soon be pushing Teddy on a swing in Regent’s Park? Feeding the fat London ducks?
‘I could still cook you dinner tonight?’ he suggests, his opportunistic cheekiness defying the sombre mood.
‘Dinner?’ She laughs. She can’t actually imagine having dinner with Robbie. In her mind, he forages for berries and traps rabbit and eats it raw, with the fur still on. ‘The thing is …’
‘You’ve got to wash your hair?’ There’s no bitterness in his voice. But some of his bounce has gone.
Oh, no. Does her hair look dirty? She flattens her cow’s lick with the palm of her hand. ‘It’s not that, just …’ She stops. Just what? The world won’t end! The children will survive without her. Marge won’t actually pickle Don in a jar – more’s the pity. Even Hera’s unlikely to try to burn the place down twice in one week. As her resistance to Robbie’s invitation inverts, like a current changing course, she feels an unexpected recklessness, a novel thrill, and her body starts to hum. What’s the worst that could happen? ‘Yes, please.’
35
Hera
The moment Big Rita’s gone Foxcote Manor feels unstable, like a tent without pegs in a gathering storm. From the drawing-room window, I watch her legs swing up into Robbie’s muddy truck. She looks happy, more like she used to, and is wearing her pink cardigan, which she never wears. It makes her look too pretty, less like a nanny. My fingertips tingle, like when you know something bad is about to happen. Just not exactly what.
I mooch around, trying to murder the minutes until Big Rita returns. Don lies on the sofa and blows cigarette smoke over Baby Forest, who is lying on a cushion, gnawing on her fist, waiting for Big Rita. I manage to pocket his lighter, a metal one, Zippo, a satisfying prize. He doesn’t notice.
Mother reads her book, her bare leg on a footstool, her toenails newly painted red. Teddy lies across the rug on his tummy and drops a net bag of swirly blue marbles from one hand to the other, making a gritty glass-crunching sound.
‘Feels sort of funny without Rita, doesn’t it?’ Mother observes, looking up from her book. It’s a romance, with a woman in a bodice on the cover, the sort of book my aunt Edie calls ‘kindling’.
‘Sort of liberating.’ Don tosses her A Look. Clearly ‘a nap’ is imminent.
‘She’ll be back soon, won’t she?’ Teddy has his worried face on, and I feel for him.
‘I don’t know, Teddy.’ Don stubs out his cigarette. ‘Could be Rita’s lucky night. She might roll back at dawn. Wearing nothing but oak leaves,’ he adds, grinning, like he might be picturing it.
Mother smiles, licks a finger and turns a page. ‘Well, I won’t complain if she does. She deserves a bit of fun.’ She looks up again and says firmly to Don, ‘Robbie’s terribly nice.’
‘Since when did women go for nice?’ yawns Don, rubbing his fingers through his stubble.
Mother’s lips purse slightly. She doesn’t look up from her book.
I don’t want Big Rita to fall for Robbie, and lose interest in us, but I think she could do with a nice thing happening to her. These last few days I keep catching her staring into space. And I’m pretty sure she was crying as she cooked lunch yesterday. She said it was the onions. But she was chopping celery.
Don lumbers up and wanders over to the drinks trolley. He picks up bottles, reads the labels and puts them down again with a chink. He shoots Mother another coded look.
On cue: ‘Hera, darling, could you look after Teddy and the baby for half an hour?’ Mother doesn’t say the word ‘nap’. She doesn’t have to. She springs up from her chair. ‘Marge made a mushroom soup. You can heat that up for supper. Give the baby a bottle. You’re so good at it.’
‘Okay.’ I suddenly know I’ll always remember my mother in her sky-blue dress and the baby cooing on the sofa, her dark eyes searching for Big Rita. The sound of glass marbles colliding in Teddy’s hands. Don muttering, ‘Where did I put that lighter?’ as he moves to follow Mother out of the room.
‘But you said you’d take me shooting!’ Teddy propels himself forward on the rug and grabs Don’s tanned ankle.
Don shakes him off, as if he were an annoying puppy. ‘Later, okay?’
In the kitchen, I warm up Marge’s soup on the hotplate while Teddy sits next to the baby in t
he trug and sings ‘This little piggy …’ and tugs at her toes. The soup tastes like how fungi smell, dank and earthy, the fat pale mushroom stalks bobbing about like bones. Neither of us can eat it, so we fill up on piles of cold apple crumble, swimming in a moat of cream. Teddy lets the baby suck cream off his little finger while I warm her bottle, flicking the milk on my wrist to check its temperature, like Big Rita does. But I’m not Big Rita. And the baby knows it, twisting on my lap, glancing from side to side so the teat keeps popping out, refusing to settle. We decide she may be happier in the drawing room. She isn’t.
For no reason, Teddy explodes into tears. The baby is so surprised by this outburst she stops whimpering and fidgeting and starts to feed, which is good.
‘What’s up with you?’ I rock the baby, like a dolly, as she drains the bottle, dribbling milk over the sofa.
‘I have worries, Hera.’ He struggles to get out the words.
I reach across and rub his shoulder with my spare hand. ‘Big Rita will be back soon.’
‘I miss Daddy.’ He sniffs, wiping his nose on his arm.
‘Daddy?’ I can’t let myself miss Daddy. There would be too many complicated feelings. Like when you mix bright colours and end up with that sludgy brown.
Teddy nods snottily. ‘I’ve tried to pretend Don’s Daddy. But he’s not.’
‘No, he really, really isn’t,’ I say, making the baby start. I lower my voice again. ‘You’ll see Daddy soon, Teddy. Big Rita spoke to him.’
And this is the problem. Daddy doesn’t know about the baby yet. I’ve started to dread the moment he finds out. What if he takes one of his ‘moral stances’ and makes us hand in the baby immediately, as if she were a purse found on the pavement? What if he doesn’t want her? Back in London, neighbours like the Pickerings will be waiting, peering over the fence, muttering about golf and dinner parties and who’s got the best gardener. How will a foundling fit? I simply can’t work out how we get from this point to that. I’m not sure Mother can either.