Cuckoo (19 page)

She abandoned her tea and walked upstairs. The lion was sitting on her bed, still grinning. ‘Ned,' she whispered miserably. She'd christened it Ned – the first name she'd thought of, really. She cradled it in her arms like a baby. Toys were so much easier, didn't make puddles or noises, or wreck the house or deflower the garden, or grow up. Dogs did all those things, and so did babies. Yet she couldn't give up trying to have a baby. Her life was constructed now round a sacred fertility rite. She dared not halt the whole complicated process, the self-important visits to the gynaecologist, the special calendar, the sense of mission. She dared not fail. Magda had become almost part of the process, the precursor for her own child. She knew somehow that she would have her baby, when she had come safely through the storm and fire of Magda.

She held the lion against her shoulder and walked with it to Magda's room. Even with junk on the floor and punk on the walls, it still looked elegant. Too elegant. She arranged the lion in the centre of the bed, tail curled around its body. She threw out the dead flowers and replaced them with a fresh bunch from the garden – cheerful easy flowers: roses, daisies, marigolds. She brought up the tin of cherry cake and put it on the dressing-table, with a bowl of shiny apples. The room still looked wrong – all frills, all substitutes. The kid wanted a flesh and blood animal, a real, red-blooded dog, not a stuffed, synthetic toy and a vase of flowers which would die within the week.

She could have said yes to the puppy. Too easy to blame Charles, when he'd only underlined her own refusal. Fundamentally, it had been a choice between Magda's happiness and her own convenience. No, not just convenience – safety, order, discipline, all the things she needed for her own happiness, even her survival. It was frightening to realize her
joie de vivre
depended on a set of rules, a wire cage of restrictions. She had nothing to give Magda, nothing solid, nothing real. She couldn't even hug her. Every time she tried, some new barrier reared itself between them and turned her arms to wood.

She stood rigid in the centre of the room. One rose had already dropped its petals on the bedside table. Even the lion looked older. She paused by the bed to stroke its curly mane. ‘Tell her I …'

She stopped. Pointless and ridiculous, talking to dumb animals.

That evening, Charles took her out to dinner, on her own. Magda had not returned. They studiously avoided the subject of pets; combining tolerable scampi and indifferent chocolate mousse with careful observations on the shadow cabinet's regional funding policy and the Richmond redevelopment scheme. Charles drained his port.

‘Fancy a stroll by the river?'

‘Well, yes, but haven't you got to work?'

‘Not tonight. It's your evening. I wanted to spend it with you, darling. To – er – thank you …'

‘What for?'

‘For having Magda. You've done a lot for her. And I know it isn't easy.'

She didn't answer, seemed to have lost her usual easy habit of responding to Charles. Resentment had clogged it, like lumps in a cream sauce.

The evening was close, almost stifling. Small, swollen clouds were building up across the river, and a greenish light oozed its way between sky and water. A cloud of gnats buzzed above their heads. They walked in silence along the crumbling path, stepping gingerly around the puddles. In the early months of their marriage, they had walked the same path, but Charles had held her hand then, and stopped at every bench to kiss her, in the dark. It was light now, a blazing summer evening, and people were only dozing on the benches or reading newspapers which shrieked of strikes, inflation. They wandered on to where the river widened and the trees grew closer, trailing their branches in the water and staring at their own reflections. Charles stopped and took her hand, looked furtively around, to make sure no one was watching. ‘I love you, Frances. You know that, don't you?'

She nodded.

‘Don't let things be different.'

She shook her head, watched his neat, imperious eyebrows draw down across his steel-blue eyes in a tense and wary frown. His brows were neither shaggy nor straggling, yet somehow they managed to dominate his face. Even when she was angry with him, she could still admire the way he was put together; each of his features carefully selected from Harrods and then set in place by a design consultant. Perhaps he was right – things needn't be different. Magda wouldn't stay with them for ever. They still had their own life, apart from Magda; perhaps even their own baby.

A couple strolled by, the young bearded man pushing a pram. Charles would never be a pram-pusher, but at least he could try to be a father. He'd done it once, for God's sake. But that was more than fifteen years ago, and with a Hungarian Earth Mother. Perhaps his sperm was tired now, worn out after years of jet-lag and tax conundrums. Or maybe she herself was too small, too cold, too old, and sperm only stirred themselves for hot Hungarian wombs.

But at least they could go on trying. It was absurd to swallow a fertility drug and then fail to be fertilized. How animal the whole thing sounded, except that animals got on with it, without all this fuss and bother. For them, it was becoming something of a chore. They hadn't even slept together since Magda had arrived. She hadn't wanted to, felt Charles was somehow polluted and defiled. Or maybe it was just a side effect of the Clomid. That would be ironical – to turn you off the sex you needed to conceive. She was taking her second month's dose now, and it made her feel nauseous, as if she were already pregnant.

Charles, too, had shown little inclination. Maybe it was guilt, or overwork. And yet he needed sex as a sort of safety valve, an indoor rugger match. She'd noticed herself how it sucked the aggression out of him and neutralized the electric shocks between them. Now it was all electricity. She must somehow switch it off and lure him back into the double bed.

She coaxed him over to a bench and put her arm around his shoulders. ‘You're right, Charles, we can't let Magda ruin everything. There's still us.'

He removed the arm, so she took his hand instead. ‘That's important,' she insisted. She could hear a magpie squawking at the top of a hawthorn bush, laughing at them almost. ‘Let's go home and …' She didn't say it, just made a gesture with her hands against his body. It wasn't the vital middle of the month yet, but she must get him back into practice.

‘What, now?' The magpie screeched with laughter.

‘Yes, now.' She inched her fingers up his forearm, kept them stroking up and down.

Charles frowned. ‘But supposing Magda's back? I know it sounds stupid, but I feel I can't perform if she's around.'

‘She won't be,' whispered Frances.

She wasn't. But the front door had been left wide open, and a new set of muddy footprints serpented the hall. Charles strode up the stairs to the studio and knocked loudly on the door. ‘Magda?'

No answer. Frances could hear her watch ticking almost apologetically in the silence, a tiny, golden sound.

Charles wrenched open the door. The bed was a heap of tangled blankets and dirty clothes. The exquisite Bawden watercolours had been taken down and flung on the floor, glass smashed and frames broken. The flowers were decapitated, lying in a pool of water on the stained and sodden desk. The lion was hanging upside down, its tail caught in the wardrobe door. And all over the new cornflower walls was written, in a bleeding crimson lipstick, ‘I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU.'

Charles closed the door again, quietly and deliberately, as if trying not to wake a baby. Frances listened to her watch, tried to make her mind a blank. Charles took her arm and let her downstairs. He poured them both a brandy in the Victorian smoked glass goblets. Neither spoke. Charles took a sheet of headed paper from the bureau and uncapped his pen.

‘I'm writing to the nuns at Westborough,' he said. ‘Accepting their offer of a place. After that, we'll …' He leaned over, touched her face, ran a finger down across her breast.

‘Go away,' she snapped, suddenly, irrationally. ‘Go away. GO AWAY!'

Hate you, hate you, hate you, pounded the hammer in Magda's head. Three A. M. and still wide awake. Hated cats, hated puppies, hated Bunty's stupid snoring. Bunty was sprawled beside her on the bed, wheezing through enlarged adenoids. Two cats were curled together at the bottom of the eiderdown, the new white puppy snuffling in a laundry basket. Hate you, hate you, hate you, shrieked the blue flowered walls, back on Richmond Green. How would she ever get it off? Lipstick was indelible, like hate. Perhaps they'd forgive her, if she offered to pay, but she hadn't any money except Charles' allowance and that was meant for ‘good' (boring) books and visits to the theatre. She hated the theatre. Frances had taken her to some stupid thing, where everyone spoke in poetry and you couldn't get ice creams. Frances had skin like the inside of a shell. She'd like to break the shell. Her own skin was coarser and there were blackheads round her nose. It would be nice to look like Frances. Frances didn't have dark hairs on her legs. She pulled up her jeans and peered at them. Disgusting. She hated hairs. That Miklos man had hairs all over him, even on his thumbs. She hated him, too. The way her mother called him ‘
szivecskem'
and used that stupid baby voice for him and kept ruffling his repulsive greasy hair. And then wasted all the money buying
beigli
for him, when they made do with plain bread and butter.

She turned over on her front. She was still fully dressed and the buckle of her belt dug into her stomach. She tore the belt off, flung it on the floor. She didn't believe all that crap about Grandma dying. ‘We're only going to Hungary for the funeral.' Fancy talking about a funeral when someone wasn't even dead! Grandma wasn't old enough to die. She'd seen pictures of her, a small fuzzy lady who always looked out of focus and had a second set of china teeth for Sundays. People didn't go to Budapest for funerals. They went because some hairy Jew had a
lakás
there, two measly rooms in some rotten little alley. He was going to nab her mother and shut her up in it, smarm his hairy hands all over her. His breath stank of pickled walnuts and he wore hideous shiny shirts. ‘We'll send for you,' he'd said, in that flabby foreign voice. ‘Later. We mustn't interrupt your English education.' It was a stinking lie. Of course he wouldn't send for her. And her education had been interrupted. She'd liked her old school. They had proper English sausages for dinner, not Hungarian
szalámi
which was crammed with bits of fat. And they'd just started judo and painting in oils.

Charles had taken her away, just like that, in the middle of her syllabus. He hadn't even asked. No one asked her anything – not the important things. ‘Would you like your bacon fried or grilled, Magda?' ‘How many of Shakespeare's plays have you read?' Oh yeah, they asked her junk like that all day long. But not whether she wanted to go to sodding Richmond Green instead of Hungary, or be ripped away from all her classmates, or share her mother with an odious little Yid. They hadn't even asked her whether she wanted fucking cornflowers on her walls. Lipstick-covered cornflowers. She wished she hadn't done it. Frances had searched through twenty sample books before she chose the flowers. Well, if the stupid bitch wanted to waste her time …

Frances wasn't stupid. She was fucking clever, spouted stuff out of encyclopaedias, and closed her eyes and went all trancey when she played the piano. Her own ma couldn't even play scales – or read French novels and German newspapers, and win at chess and golf and tennis and bridge, and all those other frightening Frances things. Charles was worse. He ruined mealtimes poking long boring words around his dinner plate, like those prissy wets on Radio 3 he took to the toilet with him. And if she didn't join in, he asked what was the matter, didn't she care about environmental thingummyjig, or something-something-something in the blah, blah, blah, blah …

It was easier with Frances on her own. Frances even smiled, sometimes, when Charles wasn't there, and they had fish and chips and ketchup in the kitchen, instead of sole Véronique off the poncy patterned plates. And Frances had given her a proper tape recorder, one that really worked, with fifteen blank cassettes and a leather storage box.

Fuck the lipstick! You couldn't ruin walls after fifteen blank cassettes. Perhaps bleach would shift it, or Vim, or nail varnish remover. At least she'd better try. But supposing all the flowers came off as well? If only she knew where Reggie lived, she could ask him for a piece of extra wallpaper to cover up the walls. But Reggie didn't like her. He'd tried to call her ‘Missy' and she'd sworn at him.

Fuck, fuck, fuck – they hated her to use that word. The muscle on Charles' face twitched in and out when she said it and he looked like a goldfish. She knew what it meant. Grown-ups made such a fuss about it, but it was only what dogs did. Or what Miklos did with her mother all the time. Grown-ups all lied, anyway. Even her mother lied. ‘We'll write to you every day, dear.' And she'd had two measly postcards. ‘We'll send for you to come and join us.' Oh yeah, in a million years when she was dead and her mother had a dozen disgusting black hairy babies, all identical to Miklos.

Frances lied, too. ‘You know I'm very fond of you, don't you, Magda?' Like hell she was! OK, Frances was decent to her sometimes, like when she was sick after the oysters. Frances cleaned it all up and sat with her for hours afterwards and put smelly stuff on her forehead. But she wouldn't be nice now – not after the lipstick. Frances would hate her now. She was sorry, in a way; wanted Frances to like her, call her ‘Pootle' like Viv did with Rupert. Frances was special. You had to be someone, before she bothered with you.

Sometimes she made brandy snaps with real cream in the middle, then it was OK, or showed you her collection of old silver charms and told you where each separate one had come from, then you felt almost safe, but the very next minute she'd turn on you and do her nut about a speck of dust on the mantelpiece, or why hadn't you used a fork to eat your pudding.