Cuckoo (10 page)

She arranged her body neatly on the bed. Rathbone had advised her never to refuse him. If she cold-shouldered him at any time, he might be less eager in that all-important middle of the month. Charles walked in, naked except for his underpants. It was one of his quirks, always to leave his pants on till the very last moment, as if he were ashamed of what they hid. He had a tall, slim body, muscular and well-made. Not that she ever saw much of it. As soon as they were undressed, it was under the covers for both of them. She sometimes felt he'd have preferred to do it in his pinstripes.

She slipped off the bed to find a suitable cassette. Charles kept his cassette deck in the spare room, so that even their love-making was duly harmonized.

‘No, don't bother with the music, darling. I've got to talk to you.'

Frances clutched the Brandenburg Concertos like a shield in front of her. Charles never talked when he made love, always claimed it spoilt his concentration. It seemed strange to talk stark naked, anyway, ranged on opposite sides of the room as if they were about to fight a duel, the silence between them solid, like a piece of furniture.

‘Well?' she said, defensively.

Suddenly, he switched on the radio and Bartok roared into the room. He hated Bartok – all that bilge about the brotherhood of nations and the treasurehouse of peasant warblings. Even now, she could hear the gutsy folk rhythms bringing Hungary to Richmond; wild sweeps from gypsy violins stampeding through suburbia.

‘It's too loud, Charles, turn it down.'

He took hold of her instead and pulled her to the floor. He was breaking all his own rules – no Sleepeezee mattress or elaborate coaxing foreplay. Just the rough scratch of the carpet underneath her bare buttocks and his angry thing tearing in and out of her, and Bartok bawling on the dressing-table.

‘Frances, you've got to listen to me …'

‘How can I listen with this noise?'

He was thrusting harder, out of time with the music, wrenching her body into a discordant key.

‘I can't hear, Charles. And you're hurting.'

It was impossible to talk. His mouth was crushing hers. Behind her head, she could hear another voice, the suave bellow of the Radio 3 announcer, turned up to a hundred decibels. Bartok was over, and the roaring, booming Eton-and-Oxford larynx introducing a talk on modern physics.

‘Heisenberg declared that in their new designations as conjugate observables …'

‘Look, Frances, I didn't tell you before, but …' He was hammering into her, as if all the pent-up misery of the last few days had broken through a dam and come pouring out. This wasn't making love; it wasn't even sex, but some strange pagan rite, some terrible release. Fifteen years of bedroom courtesy and drawing-room control had snapped. He was rutting like an animal.

‘I didn't want to deceive you. I agonized for years …'

How could he talk and do it at the same time? She tried to exchange his voice for Heisenberg's.

‘Indeterminacy ruled that no quantum mechanical system could simultaneously possess …'

The whole of Surrey could hear this physics lesson. It was so loud, the room resounded with it, Heisenberg battering into her, along with Charles.

‘In fact I wouldn't have told you even now, if only …'

‘I can't hear a word you're saying, Charles.' She didn't want to hear, didn't like the words. They were making terrible black stains on her mind, like blots of ink, spattering a clean white page. Her head had fallen back against the skirting board. He was ramming it against the wood, pinioning her arms too tight beneath his own.

She tried to concentrate on the rational order of a measured world.

‘… this Platonic central order, with its universal symmetries, constitutes the rationale for a mathematical equation applicable to all systems of particulate matter …'

It didn't sound convincing in that barbaric roar.

Charles was almost coming. She could feel him revving up, slamming her spine against the floorboards. She tried to pull away, but he resisted. He was talking, explaining, yet coming at the same time. She closed everything against him, even her ears, refused to accept the irrational things he was telling her.

He was still thrusting, still coming, whispering now, almost incoherent. Across their coupled bodies crashed the last blaring words of the broadcast. ‘Thus, on the sub-atomic level, the traditional idea of scientific causality had been split apart.'

Everything was split apart. Not just sub-atomic particles, but their whole sheltered, blue-chip, pre-Einstein universe. Charles was slumped on top of her, wet and silent now, inert.

‘This talk can be heard again, next Friday morning, at eleven.'

‘No, Charles,' she shouted. ‘No! It can't be true. I simply don't believe you.'

‘Viv, I'm sorry to barge in like this, but …'

‘What on earth's the matter? You look completely washed out.'

‘I … haven't slept for two nights.'

‘Are you ill or something, Frances? There
is
a virus going round …'

‘It's Charles. He's … Look, it's rather confidential. Can we talk in private?'

‘Well, there's no one here except Midge and Rupert, and half a dozen cats. The only word Rupert understands is ‘‘more'', and Midge is ill in bed. Come in.'

Rupert was sitting on his potty, red in the face with effort. The remains of seven breakfasts were littered on the kitchen table, the sink an avalanche of nappies. Viv cleared a space among the bacon rinds and cleaned up Rupert on the table. His podgy fingers made patterns in the butter.

‘I was in the middle of feeding him when he started poohing. They time these things so badly! Mind if I continue?'

‘Not at all.' Frances averted her eyes as Viv unlatched one huge breast and hoisted it off her stomach. Rupert lost himself among the folds. He was over a year old, but Viv loved breast-feeding. She'd be offering the nipple to her fourteen-year-old, if inconvenient things like school hadn't come between them.

‘Go on, love, sit down. Now what's the trouble?'

Frances removed a half-chewed rusk from her chair-seat. ‘Charles has got a daughter.'

‘
What
?'

‘By another woman.'

‘You're joking.'

‘No. She's fifteen.'

‘Fifteen! But that's almost grown up.'

‘Precisely.'

‘But didn't you know? I mean where's she been, all this time?'

‘With her mother.' Her dark, passionate, tempestuous slut of a mother, who helped herself to babies without the little matter of a husband.

‘Frances, I can't believe it. Not Charles.'

‘Oh no, not Charles – that's what we all thought, didn't we? Charles is so faithful and upright and considerate and
busy
and … But he isn't, Viv. It's all a lie. He's a bigamist, more or less. I've worked it out. He must have conceived that baby less than a year before we were married, and she was born only weeks before the wedding. How on earth could he have gone ahead and married me, mixed up with all that? And then kept it a secret all these years.'

‘Frances, I'm stunned. I simply don't know what to say. Look, let me get you some coffee. You must be absolutely shattered.'

Frances turned away. Viv smelt of milk and unwashed babies. ‘No, Viv – thanks – I can't keep anything down. Do you know, I was sick when he told me. I couldn't stop vomiting. I knelt on the floor in the lavatory and shivered all over. And Charles just lay on the bed reading. He was actually reading, Viv. I saw him. A book on business management. I mean, how
could
he?'

Viv stowed her breast away and came over to squeeze her hand. ‘It was only because he couldn't face you, sweetie. He can't really have been reading. He was just trying to hide. He must feel desperate himself.' Rupert was screaming in deprivation. Viv turned back to him and stirred puréed prunes into cold porridge.

‘It was even worse the next day – yesterday, that was. Christ! It seems a hundred years ago. Charles took the morning off from work. He never does that – it's unthinkable – he's far too busy. I thought it was a sort of present to me, to make me feel better, give us time to talk about it all. But do you know what he did? He went straight out into the garden and started planting out spring cabbages. Forty or fifty of them, in dead straight rows. He just went on and on, in the pouring rain. You know how wet it was? Well, he didn't even notice. He had this measuring gadget and he spaced every seedling exactly eighteen inches apart. I watched him. He was soaked through and absolutely fixated on those cabbages. He grew them from seed in the greenhouse and he's been fussing over them ever since. He didn't even look up when I went out to him. He might as well have gone to work and been done with it.'

Viv scooped dung-coloured porridge from her housecoat and spooned it back into Rupert. ‘I'm so sorry, love. I only wish I could … Look, how on earth did you find out about it? I mean, if he managed to keep it secret all these years …'

‘He told me. Oh, he had to. The mother's dumped the child on him. She's going back to Budapest.'

‘
Budapest
?'

‘Yes, she's Hungarian. Came over at the revolution and has lived here ever since.'

‘So why's she going back?'

‘Oh, some story about her grandmother dying. Cancer or something. But there's more to it than that. The grandma's got a flat in Budapest and I think she wants to get her hands on it. She's sick of England, so she's making sure she's in at the kill. Decent flats are like gold-dust in Hungary.'

‘But why can't she take her daughter with her?'

‘That's what I said. But they don't want to disrupt her education. Magda's quite bright, apparently, and preparing for her O-levels. They think she'll get at least eight or nine. The system's totally different in Hungary, so she'd have to start a new syllabus, in a different language. If she stays where she is, Charles thinks she might get into university. The mother's all for it – she never had much schooling herself.'

That was only half the story. The better half. There was some rotten Romeo mixed up in it as well. Charles had been cautious, telling her only what he chose. But she could guess the rest. His Hungarian whore didn't want a teenager messing up her new little love-nest. Or maybe the man himself had refused to take her on. Miklos he was called – a fellow Hungarian. He wouldn't welcome a half-English love-child cramping his style, another man's brat, any more than she wanted a half-Hungarian one ruining her own life, even if it was her husband's child. What a sordid mess the whole thing was. That's why it hurt so much. She had always prized her marriage as impeccable and ordered, and now Charles had dragged it down in all this mire and confusion. Even the way he'd told her had made it so brutal. Blurting it out like that, when he was actually making love to her, lying on the floor. Magda's mother must have taught him things like that. Every time he'd been to bed with her, he'd brought the taint of that other woman with him. Perhaps he'd sometimes slept with both of them on the very same day, had her juices dripping from his body. How could she say all this to Viv; kind, shambling Viv who never had bitter, jealous thoughts, or felt like murdering a child she'd never seen?

‘Oh, Viv, if only …'

‘Coo-eee!' The front door creaked and slammed. Viv got up, Rupert still clinging to her dressing-gown.

‘Oh hell, that's Rachel. She's bringing some guppies.'

‘Bringing what?'

‘Guppies. Fish. Philip's hamster died, so we've got to make it up to him. Look, don't worry. I'll tell her you're not well.'

Rachel breezed in, with two jam jars and a grizzling three-year-old. ‘Hi, girls! Any coffee going? In exchange for half a dozen tiddlers and a water snail.'

‘Well, just a quick one, love. Frances isn't feeling too good.'

‘Oh, bad luck. Got your period? No, don't touch, Bella.' The child had opened Frances' bag and was fiddling with a lipstick. Rachel scooped her up and bounced her on her knee. If only she could cuddle a child, Frances thought, instead of hating it. Charles' child had been tiny once, like Bella – whining, maybe, but harmless, blameless. Even now, she was still a child, still innocent. Any other woman would accept her, love her even. Was she a monster to feel so hostile, a selfish bitch without the normal, decent, female sentiments? It wasn't easy. Bella was Rachel's own kid, not a faceless fifteen-year-old, living proof of her husband's infidelity.

It still seemed almost unbelievable. Everything had changed in just one evening – an endless evening of talking, shouting, arguing. She had done the shouting. Charles had clammed up almost as soon as he'd told her. And when, at last, she emerged from the lavatory, he was lying in bed in his pyjamas, with his hair combed, and his face composed, as if nothing had happened, as if the sex and the outburst and the shock of telling her had sobered him up, and the other, wilder Charles had disappeared into its cage. He was now all reason and self-control. She hated him for it. Breaking her life apart and not even raising his voice. And the way he said ‘my daughter' – it made her almost sick again. How could he have a daughter who wasn't hers as well? Another secret woman in his life, all these years, deceiving her and double-crossing her, and negating all the love and trust she'd thought they'd shared. How could he do it, a man so methodical and orderly, and who loathed deceptions, if only because they couldn't be tidied up and indexed? Did he have a notebook for the Other Woman – scarlet for lust – in which he noted down their couplings, the heart-breaking conception of their child?

‘Have a biscuit.' Rachel passed the tin across. ‘I adore these chocolate gingers.' Rachel broke a piece off and stuffed it into Bella's mouth. The child spat it out, examined it, and put it back again.