Cuckoo (12 page)

Other mornings, she'd looked out and felt a sort of wonder that everything was happening as it should, as if Charles had been put in charge of the whole universe – trains and planes running on schedule, delivery vans unloading bread and newspapers, postmen linking Surrey with Snowdonia, road sweepers keeping the entire planet clean. Her own shining house was somehow part of it, and Charles' work, his lists, his notebooks, all had their place in this cosmic harmony: clocks ticking, computers whirring, machines thumping and pumping, the whole earth, ordered, punctual.

But not the last two days. The busy world whirred on, but she was a piece chipped out of it. She had been rubbed out like an error, deleted from the timetable. Her day stretched in all directions, with no point to it, no boundaries. How could she ever have thought it worthwhile to toil across the golf course, or bother with committee meetings? And what was the point of eating and sleeping, when your husband had a mistress and a daughter? She didn't want to cook. Impossible to sit opposite Charles at the table, guzzling mouthfuls of cardboard
entrecôte
, when he'd betrayed her with that very same mouth.

But what would they do? Sit and drink their normal Tio Pepes? Talk about the weather? The usual platitudes seemed precious now.

‘Had a good day?'

‘Busy.' (Always busy.) ‘And you?'

‘Quiet.' (Often quiet.) ‘Nice lunch?'

‘Tolerable. Went to Simpson's with a couple of accountants.'

‘Hope you didn't choose steak. That's for dinner.'

Well, it wouldn't be, not now. He could get himself a sandwich, or go and ask Piroska to cook Hungarian goulash for him. Was that the woman's name? Something outlandish and fancy. And Magda Rozsi wasn't much better. People in their circle didn't have daughters called Magda Rozsi Kornyai. And what about their circle? How in heaven's name were they going to explain away a teenager? They could call her a niece, but Charles was an only child. And supposing Magda blabbed? Could they invent a deceased first wife for Charles? But why would he have hushed it up? You didn't hide legitimate daughters for fifteen years. All their friends would jeer and tittle-tattle. They'd lose their settled, precious way of life, their reputation as decent people who could be invited anywhere.

Every time she thought about the problem, some new dimension punched her in the face. Charles' mother, for example, his staid, sheltered mother who wouldn't even read the newspapers because they were full of ‘shocks and horrors'. Perhaps she'd take back all her furniture, or refuse to lend them her country cottage any more.

Frances sagged down in the chaise-longue, her body like a crumpled paper bag. She turned off the fire, and obediently the flames subsided. Was
she
an artificial fire? So that Charles was forced to find a red-hot Piroska, a blaze of Hungarian passion burning up his schedules and consuming all his rules? She didn't want to know. She walked slowly upstairs to the bedroom, with its whipped cream walls and rosewood furniture. The single beds looked cold and smug, as if they had never been ruffled in their lives.

She lay face downwards on the pillow and cried. She never cried. Tears ruined the complexion. She listened to the noise of her own sobbing, almost from outside it. A strange, animal noise. If only she could be more like an animal, abandoned and spontaneous, instead of imprisoned in her head. Animals cared for other creatures' offspring. Dogs suckled fox cubs and hens mothered ducklings. But what about the cuckoo? It laid its eggs in the pipit's nest, and soon all the other nestlings were pushed out and starved. That's what Magda would be – a greedy little cuckoo, commandeering the nest.

But she still had five days. Anything could happen in five days. Piroska might relent, or Magda refuse to live with them at Richmond, and run away and join a commune … She eased up from the bed and rummaged in her wardrobe, looking for the lion, the toy she had bought for her non-existent baby. The only baby now was Charles' – a stranger and almost grown-up. Even if they did conceive their own child, it wouldn't be a new experience for Charles. She couldn't cherish it as his first-born. That had been Piroska's privilege.

She took the lion back to bed with her. It had a friendly sort of grin, almost a Ned grin. It looked like Ned, in fact, the same streaked golden mane and greenish eyes. Charles had raised an eyebrow when he saw it. He never encouraged anything frivolous. In the early days, when she'd wanted a kitten, or a ball-game on the beach, or a nightdress-case in the shape of a giraffe, he'd made her feel childish and stupid even for asking; bought her a real leather briefcase instead, with a combination lock.

She sat on the counterpane with the lion cradled in her arms. Her head was like a child's tin drum, pounded by a hundred throbbing drumsticks. She couldn't bear to think. Wherever she looked, there was only chaos and deception. She swallowed four aspirin and an Equinil on top of them, and put herself to bed.

She dreamt she was climbing up the decks of a tall ship with no solid sides or rails, but only high, trembling scaffolding. She climbed higher, higher, higher; the wind screaming in her ears, the waves like foaming troughs. Everyone else was dying – pale and hopeless bodies cocooned in tight white blankets like larvae, stacked in rows. She stepped over and over them, and suddenly she was on the topmost mast, and a harsh light was stabbing her eyes and some terrible sickly smell shoved right up her nostrils, the smell of forced carnations. A double bunch, double-wrapped in cellophane, with Charles on the other end of it. And behind him again, that harsh ship's light, the bedroom light, assaulting her eyes.

His mouth was saying something. She tried to concentrate. Body and mind seemed to have drifted miles apart from each other, and she couldn't join them up. She shut her eyes and the smell of carnations swooped right inside her skull. She opened them again. Charles was bending over her, the cellophane rustling against the counterpane. Carefully, she watched the movements of his mouth.

‘Are you all right, darling?' it appeared to say. She nodded. The mouth moved again – she wished it wouldn't. She was so incredibly tired, she'd rather sleep than lip-read.

‘Look,' it was saying, hesitantly, almost desperately. ‘Piroska's had to leave immediately. The grandmother's had a stroke. I'm sorry to spring this on you, darling, but Magda's … er … downstairs.'

She wasn't a child. She had a full mouth and large breasts, and was five foot four, at least. She wasn't a woman, either. Her face was a blank on which nothing had ever happened, a child's face, smooth and blameless. Her eyes were large and dark, but the light had gone out of them. They looked inward and backward, as if they had followed her mother to Hungary. Apart from the mouth, she was nothing like Charles at all. Her hair was almost black, and hung wavy and tangled to her waist; his was fair and straight. Charles was tall, lean, upright, spruce, almost pollarded; she was broader and wilder, slumped round-shouldered at the table, her legs sprawled out in front of her. She wouldn't even look at him.

Breakfast had lasted for a hundred years and she'd still eaten only three dry scratchy cornflakes.

‘How do you like your egg?' Frances asked, at last.

‘I don't eat eggs.'

‘Bacon?'

‘Nope.'

‘No thank you.' That was Charles. Magda didn't show she'd heard him, just stared down at her plate – willow pattern, blue and white. She seemed to have run away from them and strayed into that willow-pattern world, hiding behind the windmills, slouching through the cold blue fields.

‘Do you like school?' Frances knew it sounded stiff, but couldn't think what else to say; felt dumb and paralysed.

‘No,' said Magda dully.

‘Would you like some toast?'

‘No,' the girl repeated.

Charles didn't say ‘no thank you'. Magda looked too miserable for that. How, in God's name, Frances wondered, was she going to get through the day? Well, they'd have to buy some clothes, for a start. Magda couldn't go out in those tatty frayed jeans and that torn man's shirt with half its buttons missing. She'd brought one pathetic bag with her, and that was mostly full of records.

‘Do you like clothes, Magda?'

‘Yeah.'

Well, that was something. She wondered if Charles would agree to elocution lessons. And certainly a change of school. His daughter needed polishing.

‘Would you like to go shopping today? We've got Dickins and Jones in Richmond. Or Top Shop – that's where all the teenagers go.'

‘I'm not a teenager.'

‘Of course you are, Magda.' Charles got up almost angrily, pushing back his chair. ‘I'm sorry, but I've got to leave. I'm meeting Oppenheimer at ten o' clock sharp and I can't be late.'

It was Saturday, but Charles still made appointments. This one had been fixed long before he knew of Magda's arrival. And yet Frances felt resentful. It was so easy for him to escape. How could she argue with an all-day conference at the airport? Charles was meeting his millionaire client and an international banker on a stop-over flight between Hamburg and Buenos Aires. Even daughters didn't disrupt that sort of sacred mission. She clutched at his sleeve.

‘Well, have a good day.' The formula again. Anything to keep him there.

‘And you.' A peck on the cheek. Would he kiss Magda? He seemed uncertain, made a movement towards her across the breakfast table, and caught his elbow on the marmalade. When Magda picked it up, her hand was trembling.

‘Clumsy old me!' Charles was trying to be jokey, sounded merely bogus. ‘No, don't see me off. You stay here and finish breakfast. I'll try to get back early.'

‘Early' for Charles meant seven or eight o'clock – a whole ten hours away. How would she survive that grey, aching stretch of time with a strange pale creature in the house, who said only no and no. They'd never even finish breakfast. Magda had spooned in two more cornflakes and held them in her mouth without swallowing. Frances got up and tried to speak to Charles with her hands, her eyes, anything – speak to him in code, in signs: don't leave us, cancel your appointments, we need you. He slipped a wad of bank notes into her hand. ‘Have a little lunch out. Buy some clothes. Get her hair done.'

She turned away, furious. Money healed everything for Charles. Carnations to cancel out adultery, lunch in Harrods to pay for a broken night. God! What a night, worse than the previous ones. She hadn't really known where Magda ought to sleep. The house was big enough, for Christ's sake, yet slowly they'd taken over all the rooms. Charles' study, Charles' workshop, her sewing-room, her dressing-room, the lumber room, the love-making room, the television room. There didn't seem to be a place for Magda. Finally she'd put her in the sewing-room, on the top floor. She rarely sewed these days.

‘It's nice and quiet up here.' (Out of the way, as far from us as possible.) And then she'd lain awake, regretting it. The sewing-room was small and faced north. Viv would have snuggled Magda into her own bed with half a dozen cats. Or at least given her the studio, a warm, spacious room which got all the sun. But there were precious things in the studio, the Mackmurdo chair, the two John Piper watercolours. And supposing Magda split Pepsi on the mid-Victorian patchwork?

Frances had tossed and turned in her own warm, expensive bed, listening to the silence. Charles hadn't even come upstairs. He was working on a complex tax return. Or so he said. She wished she'd kissed Magda goodnight. It had seemed impossible. If Magda had been three, she might have kissed her, wooed her with a teddy bear and read her ‘Goldilocks'. But Magda wasn't three. She had full high breasts, bigger than her own.

She had stood at the sewing-room door, trying to look calm and normal and welcoming. ‘Goodnight then, Magda.'

‘'Night.'

‘Got everything you want?' My house, my husband, my sewing-room.

‘Yeah.' Why couldn't Piroska have taught her child how to speak?

‘Well, goodnight,' she'd said again.

‘'Night.'

She'd still lingered, holding the door handle. It didn't seem enough to say goodnight. She'd offered Ovaltine, but Magda wouldn't touch it.

‘Hungry?'

‘No.' If only she wouldn't flatten her vowels like that. A foreign accent would have been preferable – charming even, and certainly classless.

The child must be hungry, however she denied it. None of them had eaten, only played at it. Magda had jabbed the food around her plate for an hour and a half, and all she'd swallowed was two peas and half a glass of water.

‘I'll be off, then. Sleep well.'

‘Yeah.'

Yeah. Oh yeah. Of course they'd sleep well, all of them. Charles escaping into his midnight calculations, she herself wondering why hugs were so impossible, Magda sobbing under the bedclothes.

Was the child sobbing? She sat up and tried to hear. The sharp cry of a night bird ripped through the silence, but nothing else.

She crept upstairs and listened outside Magda's door. She heard the laburnum tree shift and sigh a little outside the window, and a tom cat courting. She opened the door a crack.

‘What d'you want?' The voice was fierce, almost rude. It came from by the window, where Magda was standing, still dressed and wide awake. She wasn't crying. She looked as if she had never cried in all her fifteen years. Her face was stiff and wary.

‘You're spying on me.'

‘Of course not, Magda, I just wondered …'

‘Go away.'

‘I thought perhaps …'

‘I said ‘‘go away''.'

How dare a mere child tell her to go away in her own house. Rude, ungrateful little bitch! ‘Look, Magda, if you want to be difficult, please yourself. But we've got to try to live together. So you might as well …'