Cooee (22 page)

It seems as if she really thinks we have verifiably given Sophie the things of which we spoke, rather than simply speaking of them. Kate has always dwelt in her own special version of la-la land. Would that it were so easy! Would that I could have organised for Dominic to have a loving heart, for Kate to have some brains!

‘My own gift might seem an odd one,' says Kate. ‘I guess it isn't obvious, straightaway, as something you'd choose to give a child. But it just seems to me so important, I can't tell you. I'm not even sure what to call it. It's got to do, I suppose, with catching the wave, knowing the right time. That makes it sound like opportunism, jumping on the bandwagon sort of thing, but I don't mean it as purely an opportunistic thing. It's more like — well, catching the wave's the best way I can put it, I think. Seeing when something is the right time for something and trusting yourself to act on it.'

‘Don't die wondering,' says Gavin, helpfully.

‘That's it,' she agrees. ‘Don't die wondering.'

And on this note we disperse, drink, eat, chat, more or less awkwardly. I've been quite nervous about this occasion, as it represents the first time, really, that Steve and I have consented to meet each other as part of the family. It doesn't go too badly. We manage to have a conversation, or at least to be in the same conversing group, and neither of us positively scratches the other's eyes out. It has to be a good sign.

Max isn't a chatty man, but he's a bit quiet even for him in the car on the way home. It isn't until later, when we're sipping whisky in Rain's peaceful courtyard, that he refers to the afternoon, making his comment about Gavin. Then, to my surprise, he congratulates me on my family.

‘You have to be joking,' I say.

‘No, why?'

‘My family! Actually, love, I don't usually regard them as grounds for congratulation.'

‘I know. But you'd have to admit they all came up looking pretty good today.'

‘Did they?' I consider it. ‘In what way, would you say?'

‘Well, they'd all thought about it, hadn't they? They'd all tried hard.'

‘I did, too. I'd practised endlessly, what I was going to say. But then Henry pretty much said it for me, so I had to think about something else.'

‘Ah. I wondered what prompted the stage fright. You did well, Bella: that was a good present you gave her, especially if you thought of it at short notice.'

Max stretches out and contemplatively swirls the liquor and ice around in his glass.

‘Yours was pretty good, too.'

‘I hope it will stand her in good stead,' he says, seriously. ‘It's a dangerous thing to wish on someone, a sense of adventure.'

‘It hasn't done you any harm.'

‘No. Maybe not.' He smiles and leans over to me, strokes my arm, makes me tingle. ‘It didn't stop me from meeting you, anyway. That's been my biggest adventure.'

There's a brief pause, spent in mutual smug contemplation. It's one of the nice things about being one half of a happy couple, that you can do this sort of thing.

After a little while, I say: ‘I was surprised by what Dominic said, though.'

‘What bit of it?'

‘The bit about lacking self-confidence. I would have said it was one of the principal things Dominic absolutely doesn't lack.'

‘Truly?'

‘You surely don't think Dominic an unconfident person?'

‘Well,' says Max, ‘I haven't been given the opportunity to get to know Dominic very much at all. But I've never thought of him as particularly confident.'

I am baffled by this, and say so.

‘He didn't seem very confident today, though. Did he?'

‘Perhaps not, but I've seen Dominic in that sort of situation before — one, I mean, where he has to speak more or less publicly — and he always carries it off just fine.'

‘I thought he was feeling very exposed,' says Max. ‘I thought he was being forced to reveal more of himself than he wanted to. I suppose all of us were, but I think Dominic in particular found it uncomfortable, an invasion of privacy. He had to draw the curtain aside, didn't he? He had to let people in. He didn't like it.'

I mull this over.

‘But he's not unconfident,' I say, eventually. ‘He's not an unconfident person.'

Max shrugs. ‘You know him far better than I do, Bella, obviously. But I've never thought of Dominic as very confident. Confident people don't need to put up the barriers Dominic puts up.'

I'm genuinely puzzled by this. I see what Max means, but it doesn't square with how I think of Dominic. To me, he always seems as swift and strong and confident as an otter, a tiger, a hawk. How can Max think he isn't?

‘Don't worry about it,' says Max with a slight smile. ‘You look so anxious, Bella. There's nothing to worry about.'

I let it go, but it returns to niggle at me. Dominic: unconfident?

He certainly doesn't seem unconfident the next time I see him, which happens to be at his school's speech night. He picks up several prizes, makes a cogent contribution to a kind of mini-debate they offer as part of the evening's entertainment, and generally seems as untroubled as ever by attention. I mention this to Max (who doesn't come, as he thinks it tactless to inflict himself on Dominic at these occasions) when I return home. He nods, cheerily.

‘It's only that you said he was unconfident,' I say.

‘I'm probably wrong.'

‘But he seemed so much on top of everything, Max. I wish you could have seen him.'

I am bubbling over with undisguised pride: it's pleasant to have produced a child who so conspicuously achieves high standards in everything he attempts. A number of Dominic's teachers have made admiring remarks about him during the evening. Dominic himself, doubtless borne along and uplifted by his success, has even attained a degree of civility to me.

Max pours my drink and hands it to me.

‘I believe you, my darling Bella,' he says, with his charming grin. ‘No question.'

I lean back, kick off my shoes, relax. ‘You know what I was thinking? I was thinking, heavens, if Kate can have a child like Sophie, imagine what Dominic's children will be like.'

Max looks puzzled.

‘Well,' I say, suddenly realising that I'm not sounding kind. I like to sound kind, for Max. ‘What I mean is, I know Kate's lovely, and of course we love her very much, but in terms of beauty and brain power … well. You know what I mean.'

‘Kate's intelligent,' says Max, with a hint of shortness. ‘Kate's got a lot of perception, a lot of insight.'

‘Yes. Of course I agree.' (I don't.) ‘But …'

‘Look,' says Max, ‘I know Sophie's the most brilliant child ever to exist, but she isn't very old yet, Bella darling. Don't count too much on her intelligence and beauty, will you?'

I shrug. Somewhere, dimly, I intuit a degree of what one might almost call displeasure in Max's responses. But it's been a good night, and I don't want to dig too deep, or to enmesh myself in a tricky argument. Happily, I concede to his caution.

Soon, we go to bed and make love; and making love is as glorious and radiant as it always is. There seems no limit to our luck, our felicity, the extraordinary generosity of the providence that watches silently over us.

Part Three

So I moved into a new phase. If not a genuine fairy godmother, certainly a devoted grandmother.

Not long after Kate's little celebration for Sophie, Max and I went over to their house one afternoon. Max didn't usually come with me on these occasions. He derived great enjoyment, he said, from my new status, and he delighted in my pleasure with a tender and attentive mirth that moved me deeply; but he didn't find it necessary always to be there, hanging onto my sleeve. He was a very sensitive man, Max, and highly attuned to female responsiveness, feminine priorities.

He handled Sophie deftly enough himself — surprising, in a man who had never had children — but he preferred to see me holding her, to chuckle at my raptness and to encourage my captivation. He said that he thought it good for me to spend time with Kate, to strengthen my relationship with her at what he called a very special time — which it was — rather than insisting on being there all the time himself.

But on this day he drove me over, and stayed twenty minutes or so before going on to a business appointment — one of those mysterious business appointments into the mists of which he disappeared, debonair and unassuming, one of the appointments about which information was never forthcoming. Not that I sought such information, then or ever.

The previous day the demolition of the pool had commenced. A small swarm of men had arrived at an early hour and made themselves at home in our back garden. We'd already drained the pool. Jackhammers had noisily shattered the pale tiles and trucks had deposited neat slagheaps of filler earth around its perimeter. Before we left for Kate's, I remember, we conducted a brief inspection of the back. The cavity in the ground gaped roughly as if a bomb had dropped in it: it was hard to believe we had lounged around it, dived so hedonistically into it. It all looked awful, but Max was pleased that the work had finally started.

‘You won't know it,' he said. ‘Going to be brilliant. Instant garden. Nothing like it.'

Kate's cleaning lady was there, when we arrived. We had given her twelve months' worth of cleaning lady, Max and I, when Sophie was born: I remembered so clearly Kate's own infancy and the difficulty I had found in ordering the most trivial components of one's life in a halfway efficient manner. (Not that Kate hadn't managed pretty well. She took to motherhood, I must say, better than I had.) She was a nice lady, Charmian: she had badly dyed, tight auburn curls and a hard-bitten, scrappy, sinewy look about her, but she was soft as butter inside, and
gooed
and
gaaed
around Sophie as much as any of us did. She cleaned the bathroom a treat: I remember that.

Max had gone. Kate was on the phone to some friend who had rung. I was playing with Sophie. Charmian had just finished vacuuming and came into the living room. She tickled Sophie under the chin.

‘Goodbye, my precious,' she said. ‘I'll see you again next week, I expect.'

Sophie was lying on my lap. She cooed and waved her fists about.

‘You can certainly see the likeness to her grandfather,' observed Charmian.

‘Sorry?' I said. I didn't think Sophie resembled Steve in the slightest.

‘Even at this age, you can see the nose, I reckon. And the way her eyes are set. But specially the mouth. Your husband's a very good-looking man, isn't he? Striking. She'll be the same, I shouldn't wonder.'

I went to explain, laughingly, that she had it wrong, that Max was my husband but not Kate's father, and as I did so I glanced down at Sophie on my knees and the words — as the phrase has it — died on my lips. Died quite dead, all quite deadybones, as Dominic would once have said.

Sophie lay on her back, beaming up at us, and as I looked at her she gave a delighted little clucking noise and crinkled her nose.

I had seen that nose-crinkle before.

‘You hadn't seen it?' asked Charmian, misunderstanding my silence. ‘Likenesses are strange, I always think. Families often don't notice them: it takes an outsider to see what's right before your eyes. Funny things, genes. See you later.'

I said something. Charmian left. I continued to sit, Sophie beaming up at me.

I suppose I was slow. It didn't all fall into place immediately. Right in front of me it had certainly been, but that didn't mean I comprehended it rapidly. Comprehension was a tall order, at that moment.

But as I sat there, some of the pieces started to fall into place. I recalled Kate's new maturity, her unselfconscious indolence and her adolescent glamour, the new charge of sexuality flickering through her. I recalled the bikini, the hours around the pool. I recalled, quite specifically, the satiny way her skin shone when she climbed out of the pool. I recalled my week in Sydney.

It's always the oldest stories in the world that make least sense when they happen to you.

And this one made no sense at all. For against my memories of these things, against my enforced new interpretation of absences and silences, of laughter and glances, of intonation and gesture, stood all my experience of Max, all the experience of our love and my trust. My absolute trust.

It was not within the range of likelihood that Max had cold-bloodedly, deliberately deceived me. The understanding that we shared simply transcended that possibility. Max's kindness, his loyalty and generosity and openness and sweet nature — all his qualities came crowding into my head. It was not possible that this man had betrayed me. Not with the icy intention of betrayal. Not knowingly, not as a plan.

Yet betrayed I was. I gave my little finger to Sophie and she grabbed it, chuckling with that uncomplicated, entirely unmanipulative delight that makes babies such a joy. I drew it away gently and she pulled it back and stuck it in her mouth. She chuckled again, crinkling her nose.