When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  “It’s all gone,” Dr. Hunter said when Reggie looked at her inquiringly.

  “Unfortunately,” Mr. Hunter said.

  “Bad investments, nursing-home bills, squandered on trifles,” Dr. Hunter said, as if the getting and spending of money were meaningless. “My grandfather was rich but profligate, apparently,” she said.

  “And we are poor but honest,” Mr. Hunter said.

  “Apparently,” Dr. Hunter said.

  Actually, Dr. Hunter admitted one day, there had been some money left and she had used it to buy this “very, very expensive house.” “An investment,” Mr. Hunter said. “A home,” Dr. Hunter said.

  The kitchen was Reggie’s favorite room. You could have fitted the whole of Reggie’s Gorgie flat into it and still had room for swinging a few elephants if you were so inclined. Surprisingly, Mr. Hunter liked cooking, and he was always making a mess in the kitchen. “My creative side,” he said. “Women cook food because people need to eat,” Dr. Hunter said. “Men cook to show off.”

  There was even a pantry, a small, cold room with a flagged floor and stone shelves and a wooden door that had a pattern of cutout hearts on the panels. Dr. Hunter kept cheese and eggs and bacon in there, as well as all her tinned and dried goods. “I should make jam,” she said guiltily in the summer. “A pantry like this begs for homemade jam.” Now that it was nearly Christmas she said, “I feel bad that I haven’t made mincemeat. Or a Christmas cake. Or a pudding. The pantry is begging for a pudding, wrapped in a cloth and full of silver sixpences and charms.” Reggie wondered if Dr. Hunter was thinking about her own Christmases when she was a child, but Dr. Hunter said, “Heavens, no.”

  Reggie didn’t think that the pantry was begging for anything, except possibly a bit of a tidy. Mr. Hunter was always rooting through there, looking for ingredients and spoiling Dr. Hunter’s neat ranks of tins and jars.

  Dr. Hunter (“Call me Jo”), who didn’t believe in religion, who didn’t believe in “any kind of transcendence except that of the human spirit,” believed most firmly in order and taste. “Morris says that you should have nothing in your house that you don’t know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,” she said to Reggie when they were filling a pretty little vase (“Worcester”) with flowers from the garden. Reggie thought she meant someone called Maurice, probably a gay friend, until she noticed a biography of William Morris on the bookshelf and thought, Duh, stupid, because of course she knew who he was.

  Twice a week a cleaner called Liz came in and moaned about how much work she had to do, but Reggie thought she had it pretty easy because the Hunters had everything under control. They weren’t housework Nazis or anything, but they knew the difference between comfort and chaos, unlike Ms. MacDonald, whose entire house was a “repository of junk” — bits of old crap everywhere, receipts and pens, locks without keys, keys without locks, clothes piled on top of chests, pillars of old newspapers, half a bicycle in the hallway, which just appeared there one day, not to mention the forest’s worth of books. Ms. MacDonald used the imminence of the Rapture and the Second Coming as an excuse (“What’s the point?”), but really she was just a slovenly person.

  Ms. MacDonald had “got” religion (goodness knows where from) shortly after her tumor was diagnosed. The two things were not unrelated. Reggie thought that if she were being eaten alive by cancer, she might start believing in God because it would be nice to think that someone out there cared, although Ms. MacDonald’s God didn’t really seem the caring sort; in fact, quite the opposite, indifferent to human suffering and intent on reckless destruction.

  Dr. Hunter had a big notice board in the kitchen, full of all kinds of things that gave you an insight into her life, like an athletics certificate that showed she had once been a county sprint champion, another to show that she reached grade 8 in her piano exams, and a photograph (“when I was a student”) of her holding aloft a trophy, surrounded by people clapping. “I was an all-rounder,” Dr. Hunter laughed, and Reggie said, “You still are, Dr. H.”

  There were other photographs on the notice board that charted Dr. Hunter’s life, some of Sadie over the years, and lots of the baby, of course, as well as one of Dr. and Mr. Hunter together, laughing in the glare of foreign sunshine. The rest of the notice board was a medley of shopping lists and recipes (Sheila’s Chocolate Brownies) and messages that Dr. Hunter had left to herself — Remember to tell Reggie that Joe Jingles is canceled on Monday or Practice meeting changed to Fri PM. All the appointment cards were pinned there too, for the dentist, the hairdresser, the optician. Dr. Hunter wore spectacles for driving, which made her look even smarter than she was. Reggie was supposed to wear spectacles, but on her they had the opposite effect, making her look like a complete numpty, so she tended to wear them only when there was no one else around. The baby and Dr. Hunter didn’t count, Reggie could be herself with them, right down to the spectacles.

  There were a couple of business cards on the notice board as well, stuck up by Mr. Hunter on returning from “working lunches,” but really it was Dr. Hunter’s notice board.

  A woman had come to see Dr. Hunter yesterday afternoon. She rang the doorbell two minutes after Dr. Hunter came home, and Reggie wondered if she had been parked nearby, waiting for Dr. Hunter to arrive.

  Reggie, the baby balanced on her hip, led her into the kitchen and went to tell Dr. Hunter, who had gone upstairs to get changed out of the black suit she always wore for work. When Reggie came back downstairs, the woman was examining the notice board in a way that Reggie thought was too presumptuous for a stranger. The woman looked a bit like Dr. Hunter, same dark hair that skimmed her shoulders, same slim build, a bit taller. She was wearing a black suit too. She wasn’t the Avon lady, that was for sure. Reggie wondered if she would ever have a life where she got to wear a black suit.

  Dr. Hunter came into the kitchen, and the woman took a card from her bag and, showing it to Dr. Hunter, said, “Can I have a word?” and Dr. Hunter said to Reggie, “Can you look after the baby for a few minutes, Reggie?” even though the baby was doing his suicidal starfish thing, his little plump arms held out to Dr. Hunter like he was asking to be rescued from a sinking ship. But Dr. Hunter just smiled at him and led the woman away into the living room and shut the door. Dr. Hunter never ignored the baby, Dr. Hunter never took anyone into the living room — people always sat at the big table in the comfy kitchen — and for a minute Reggie worried that the woman had something to do with Billy. She would be revealed as the sister of Bad-Boy Billy and would be cast out. Reggie had never mentioned to Dr. Hunter that she had a brother. She hadn’t lied, she had simply left him out of the story of her life, which was what he did to her, after all.

  The dog tried to follow, but Dr. Hunter shut the door in her face without saying anything to her, which was so not Dr. Hunter, and an exiled Sadie sat down outside the door and waited patiently. If a dog could frown, she would have frowned.

  After the woman left, Dr. Hunter had a funny, tight look on her face, as if she was trying to pretend that everything was normal when it wasn’t.

  Now there was a new card on the notice board. It was embossed with “Lothian and Borders Police,” a phone number, and a name, “Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe.”

  Reggie fed the baby a yogurt, not regular yogurt but a special organic baby yogurt, no additives, no sugar, nothing artificial. She finished it off for him when he lost interest in it.

  Outside, it was cold and damp, but in the kitchen it felt cozy and safe. There were no Christmas decorations up yet, just the Advent calendar they had bought on the baby’s birthday, but Reggie could imagine the scent of pine and clementines and log fires and all the other good smells that she was sure Dr. Hunter would fill the house with any day now. It would be Reggie’s first Christmas with Dr. Hunter and the baby, and she wondered if there was any way she could go about suggesting that she should spend Christmas Day itself with them rather than on her own or with the Hussains. Nothing against the Hussains or a
nything but they weren’t her family. And Dr. Hunter and the baby were.

  Sadie waited patiently at the side of the high chair. Every time the baby dropped any food, she licked it off the floor. Sometimes she managed to catch it in midair. She had a lot of dignity for a dog hustling for scraps. (“She’s starting to get old,” Dr. Hunter said sadly.)

  Reggie gave the baby a finger of whole wheat toast to chew on while she washed his bowls, by hand because she didn’t trust the dishwasher with them. The baby’s dishes were real china in an old-fashioned pattern. His toys were tasteful wooden ones — nothing garish or noisy — and his clothes were all expensive and new, not handed down or bought in secondhand shops. A lot of them were French. Today he was wearing the cutest-ever navy-blue-and-white-striped all-in-one (“his matelot outfit,” Dr. Hunter called it) that reminded Reggie of a Victorian bathing suit. He had a Noah’s Ark rug in his room and a night-light in the shape of a big red-and-white-spotted fairy toadstool. His sheets were embroidered with sailboats, and there was a framed sampler above his bed with his date of birth and his name, “Gabriel Joseph Hunter,” in pale blue chain stitch.

  The baby wasn’t afraid of anything except unexpected loud noises (Reggie wasn’t too keen on those either), and he could clap his hands if you said, “Clap your hands,” and if you said, “Where’s your red ball?” he would crawl to his toy box and find it. He had just yesterday taken his first wobbly but unaided step. (“One small step for mankind, one giant leap for a baby,” Dr. Hunter said.) He could say the word dog and the word ball and banky, which was his word for his most precious possession — the little square cut from a blanket that had been bought for him by Mr. Hunter’s sister before he was born, a pale green (“moss,” Dr. Hunter said) blanket to suit either sex. Dr. Hunter told Reggie that “actually” she had known what sex the baby was, but she hadn’t told anyone she knew, not even Mr. Hunter, because she “wanted to keep the baby all to herself for as long as possible.” Now the green blanket of which the baby was obsessionally fond had been cut down to make it more manageable. “His Winnicottian transitional object,” Dr. Hunter said mysteriously. “Or perhaps it’s his talisman.”

  It had been his first birthday a week ago, and, to celebrate, the three of them (not Mr. Hunter, he was “all tied up,” and anyway, “it’s not as if he knows it’s his birthday, Jo”) had driven to a hotel near Peebles for afternoon tea, and the waitress had made a big fuss of the baby because he was so gorgeous and so well-behaved. He had a small dish of pink ice cream. “His first ever! Imagine!” Dr. Hunter said. “Imagine eating ice cream for the very first time, Reggie.” The baby’s eyes almost popped out of his head with surprise when he tasted the pink ice cream.

  “Aw, bless,” Reggie said.

  Reggie and Dr. Hunter ate a whole plate of cakes between them. “I think I have a fat person inside me trying to get out,” Reggie said, and Dr. Hunter laughed and then nearly choked on a miniature coffee éclair, which would probably have been okay because Reggie had asked Dr. Hunter to teach her the Heimlich maneuver for exactly this kind of occurrence.

  “I’m very happy,” Dr. Hunter said when she’d recovered, and Reggie said, “Me too.” And the nice thing was that they really were, because it was surprising how often people said they were happy when they weren’t. Like Mum with the Man-Who-Came-Before- Gary.

  That was on the first day of Advent, and Dr. Hunter said that was a nice day to have a birthday on, even though she wasn’t religious. They bought the Advent calendar in Peebles. Peebles was full of all the kinds of shops that old people liked. Reggie liked them too, she supposed it was something to do with her old soul.

  The Advent calendar had chocolates behind every door, and Dr. Hunter said, “Let’s put it up in the kitchen and you can open a door every day and have the chocolate.” Which is what Reggie did, what she was doing now, holding the melting Santa-shaped chocolate in her cheek to extend its life while she dipped the baby’s Bunnykins dishes in the sink, squirting Ecover washing-up liquid into the hot water. Dr. Hunter didn’t use any products that weren’t ecological — washing powder, floor soap, everything. “You don’t want harmful chemicals around a baby,” she said to Reggie. The baby was precious, he was as valuable as the most valuable object. “Well, I had to go to a lot of trouble to get him,” Dr. Hunter laughed. “It wasn’t easy.”

  Dr. Hunter had to be careful because she had asthma (“Physician, heal thyself,” she said), which she got “from my mother.” She was always getting colds as well, which she said was because a doctor’s surgery was “the unhealthiest place on earth to work — full of sick people.” Sometimes, if Reggie was standing close to Dr. Hunter, she could hear a wheezing in her chest. The breath of life, Dr. Hunter said to Reggie. The baby didn’t seem to have inherited any of Dr. Hunter’s problems with her lungs. (“Dickens had asthma,” Ms. MacDonald said. “I know,” Reggie said. “I’ve read round the subject.”)

  There was no obvious evidence of Mr. Hunter’s sticky patch. The Hunters had a lovely house, two cars, and a fridge full of expensive food, and the baby wanted for nothing.

  Some mornings when Reggie arrived, Mr. Hunter behaved like a runner in a relay race, handing the baby over to Reggie so quickly that the baby’s little mouth and eyes went completely round with astonishment at the speed of the changeover. Then Reggie and Sadie listened to the mesmerizing sound of the huge Range Rover roaring away from the house in a crunch and spit of gravel, as if Mr. Hunter were a getaway driver. “He’s like a bear in the morning sometimes,” Dr. Hunter laughed. Living with a bear didn’t seem to bother her. Water off a duck’s back.

  Mr. Hunter and Sadie didn’t have much of a relationship. The most Mr. Hunter said to her was, “Out of the way, Sadie,” or “Get off the couch, Sadie.” She was “part of the package,” he said to Reggie. “You don’t get Jo without Sadie.”

  “Love me, love my dog,” Dr. Hunter said. “A woman’s best friend.” Timmy, Snowy, Jumble, Lassie, Greyfriars Bobby. Everyone’s best friend. Except for poor Laika, the space dog, who was no one’s friend.

  On other mornings, Mr. Hunter stayed at home and made endless phone calls. Sometimes he went outside so that he could smoke while talking. He wasn’t supposed to smoke, in or out of the house, but the phone calls seemed to drive him to it. “Don’t tell,” he said, winking at Reggie as if Dr. Hunter wouldn’t smell the smoke on his clothes or notice the cigarette butts nestling amongst the gravel.

  Reggie couldn’t help but overhear Mr. Hunter because he always spoke very loudly to the unseen people at the other end of the phone. He was “exploring new avenues,” he told them. He had “very interesting prospects on the horizon” and “opportunities opening up.” He sounded brash but really he was pleading. “Jesus, Mark, I’m fucking bleeding out here.”

  Mr. Hunter was handsome, in a rough, slightly battered kind of way, which actually made him more good-looking than if he’d been conventionally attractive. Dr. Hunter had met him when she was a senior registrar “at the old Royal Infirmary,” although he wasn’t from Edinburgh. He was from Glasgow, “a Weegie,” Dr. Hunter laughed, which was generally intended as an insult by people from Edinburgh, but maybe Dr. Hunter didn’t know that, being English. He had courted her for a long time before she “caved in” and married him. Mr. Hunter was “something in the leisure industry” but exactly what was unclear to Reggie.

  Dr. Hunter and Mr. Hunter seemed to get along pretty well, although Reggie didn’t really have anything to compare their relationship to except for Mum and Gary (uninspiring) and Mum and the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary (horrible). Dr. Hunter laughed at Mr. Hunter’s shortcomings and never seemed to get annoyed with him about anything. “Jo’s too easygoing for her own good,” Mr. Hunter said. Mr. Hunter, for his part, would bang into the house with a bunch of nice flowers or a bottle of wine and say, “Hiya, doll,” to Dr. Hunter like a comedy Glaswegian and give her a big kiss, and wink at Reggie and say, “Behind every great woman there’s some shite guy, Reggie, do
n’t forget that.”

  Most of the time Mr. Hunter behaved as if he couldn’t see Reggie at all, but then sometimes he would take her by surprise and be really nice to her and tell her to sit down at the kitchen table while he made her a coffee and tried to make rather awkward conversation (“So what’s your story, Reggie?”), although usually before she could start telling him her (not inconsiderable) “story,” his phone would ring and he would leap up and pace around the room while he talked (“Hey, Phil, howy’are doing? I was wondering if we could get together, I’ve got a proposition I’d like to run by you.”).

  Mr. Hunter called the baby “the bairn” and tossed him in the air a lot, which made the baby shriek with excitement. Mr. Hunter said he couldn’t wait until “the bairn” could talk and run around and go to football matches with him, and Dr. Hunter said, “Time enough for all that. Make the most of every second, they’re gone before you know it.” If the baby hurt himself, Mr. Hunter picked him up and said, “Come on, wee man, you’re fine, it was nothing,” in an encouraging but not very sympathetic way, whereas Dr. Hunter hugged him and kissed him and said, “Poor wee scone,” which was a phrase she had got from Reggie (who had in turn got it from Mum). When she said Scottish words and phrases, Dr. Hunter said them in a (pretty good) Scottish accent, so it was almost like she was bilingual.

  The baby liked Mr. Hunter well enough but he worshipped Dr. Hunter. When she held him in her arms, his eyes never left her face, as if he were absorbing every detail for a test he might have to sit later.