Cuckoo (28 page)

‘There's nothing very prize about you, is there? They'd have slaughtered you for beef by now, judging by your record.'

‘Frances, how dare you …' It couldn't be happening – these farmyard insults, this harsh discordant conversation. It must only be a recording. His life was measured and melodious. Even Johann Christian was jeering at him now, the smug, self-satisfied violas trifling with some fatuous phrase, soft-centred, out of harmony with the raucous dissonance of Frances' voice.

‘I do dare. I've been thinking about things while you were away – all sorts of things. And I've begun to realize …'

‘Where's Magda?' he asked suddenly, didn't want to know what Frances had been thinking.

‘She'll be back this afternoon. Viv's bringing her in time for tea.'

‘You should never have left her at Viv's all week.' If Magda had been in the house, Frances would have had to act the mother, not the whore. ‘I can't understand you, Frances. You object when I suggest a perfectly reasonable boarding school, yet have no compunction in getting rid of Magda on every possible occasion. I don't really know why I bother to consult you. She's my daughter, so it's I who should …'

Frances' voice was suddenly soft, conciliatory. She had picked up the silver teaspoon from the floor and was cradling it in her hands. ‘How do you know she is your daughter?'

‘I beg your pardon?' Charles stopped in his pacing of the kitchen, face to face with a skinny black knight, a framed brass-rubbing from the old church at Stoke d'Abernon.

‘Well, how do you? There's no evidence, is there? She's ruined everything between us, and yet you can't even prove that she's your child in the first place. You've probably never had a child. Why should you have had one by Piroska, if you can't have one with me? She probably slept with scores of men and told them all they were Magda's father. Magda doesn't look like you. She's dark and foreign and … Her father was probably some swarthy, illiterate Hungarian. She isn't even fond of you. If she was really your flesh and blood, wouldn't there be some sign of it, some bond between you?'

Charles groped towards the door. Christ, holy Christ, not that! The tiny crack of doubt he'd been filling in and patching up for fifteen years, now wrenched apart by Frances; all his careful, rational arguments shattered into pieces, nothing but a shrieking hole he'd never fill again. Her voice was like a drill boring into his defences, cracking his foundations, mocking him with the sniggering bassoon.

She was still drilling him away. ‘How does any man know if it's his child? Babies aren't born with a label round their necks, saying ‘‘X is my father''. A woman can sleep with half a dozen men …'

Charles shut his eyes. He could see only blackness, an abyss with half of Windsor filling it. ‘Can she, Frances?'

‘All right, even if I had slept with someone else, whose fault would it be? You're never here, don't care a jot about trying to have a baby. Perhaps other men do care – other men who aren't so busy and unavailable and selfish …' The music was dark now, limping into
largo
, wounded, mutilated.

‘So, you
do
admit it then – you did go to bed with that unkempt ignoramus at Windsor?'

‘He's not an ignoramus. He's got a degree and a diploma and he's teaching himself Icelandic, and writing a play and …' She was stabbing at the strawberry jam, ramming the teaspoon against the dainty, cut-glass dish, slopping jam on to the table-cloth. ‘Oh, I suppose that makes it better, does it? So long as he's educated and ‘‘our sort of person'', he can screw the living daylights out of me. But if he's a loafer or a layabout, or blue-collar material or E-stream comprehensive, or any of those other condescending terms you throw around, then it's a sin and a crime and a … Well, what about
you
, Charles, how many A-levels did your Hungarian whore have? Did you make her sit an intelligence test before you fucked her? Check up on her grades …?'

Charles gripped the table. Whore, fuck, screw the living daylights … Words Frances didn't even know, words squeezing between the music and wrenching it out of key. Something appalling and unbelievable had happened to his wife. She'd been turned from gold into base metal.

‘So you did go to that hotel at Windsor?'

‘No, it wasn't bloody Windsor. Though I suppose you'd have preferred it – a royal town with a castle and a safe Conservative majority, and all the shops ‘‘by gracious appointment to her Majesty'', and a four-star hotel with a top AA rating and a Michelin star. If you really want to know, Charles, it was a crumbling house in a squalid part of Acton, the sort of place they write ‘‘Pakis go home'' on the lavatory walls …'

She was crying into the fruit dish, her tears shining on the glossy yellow skins of the Golden Delicious. ‘I didn't want to, Charles. I wanted
you
. But you weren't there. You're never there. You drove me to it. I only went because …'

He put his hands over his ears, couldn't bear to hear. He tried to blot out everything, the coarse, disgusting details, the gloating jubilation of the flutes.

‘It wasn't even much good. Well, not the first time. After that it …'

The first time. The phrase dropped like a stone into the echoing black hole the room had become. How many bloody times could that filthy lecher do it in a week? A hundred, a thousand? Even the radio was stunned. The German voice had disappeared, swallowed up in a frenzied surge of applause, five hundred hands clapping, a roar of adulation from the disembodied Munich audience. He picked up the knife from the table and ran his fingers along the blade. Fury was spilling out of everything, running down the walls. He watched Frances' mouth making stupid, senseless sounds.

‘I must tell you, Charles, I must. You've got to listen, you've got to know what's happening.'

He turned his back, tried to stuff his fury in a drawer, tidy away jealousy and shock. But Frances was standing next to him, pulling at his sleeve, making him turn round.

‘Look at me, Charles. Listen. I did go to bed with him, but not only that …'

Applause was still thundering through the room. Charles sat down slowly, stiffly, as if he were an invalid. ‘Yes?' he said, seeing nothing save the pendant flashing on her neck. He shut his eyes, but it was still there, swaggering in front of him, like her preening, shameless voice.

‘I'm pregnant by him, Charles, I'm going to have his baby.'

The convent smelt of brown paper, a stale, boring smell, as if nobody had unwrapped it for a hundred years. The nuns had no hair and no bodies, only cut-out faces and flat, black robes which glided on castors. They never rushed. Nor ate, drank, slept, unbent or smiled. In the chapel, they chanted foreign languages and worshipped some naked oddball trussed on a cross. Their breath smelt of fusty flower-water which had never been changed.

Mother Cornelia had cold pebble eyes set in a crazy paving face. She was sitting in the ante-chapel, her black back ramrod-straight. ‘Well, my child,' she said, ‘you are called after a great sinner who became a great saint.'

‘Oh, yeah?' Magda kicked a lisle-stockinged foot against the prie-dieu.

‘Your religious education has been most unfortunately neglected. No, it's not your fault, we won't apportion blame. All we're going to do is put it right. That's why your father brought you here, before term started. To give us a chance to catch up with your catechism, before the other girls return. We don't want your classmates calling you a heathen, do we?'

‘Don't we?' Magda was jabbing at a loose splinter of wood sticking up on the prie-dieu.

‘Please try to concentrate, child, otherwise we're not going to get through the Proofs Of The Existence Of God. God doesn't expect you to take Him on trust. We can prove He exists, just as the sun exists, or you exist, or …'

Magda had broken the splinter off and was poking it under her thumbnail. ‘But supposing I
don't
exist?'

The mouth pursed itself into a smaller, harder pebble. ‘Magda, don't be insolent.'

‘I'm not. I've often thought about it. I mean, perhaps nobody exists. Perhaps we're all a sort of joke, or a shadow, or …'

‘That's blasphemous, Magda, to deny God's creation. God made you in His own image.'

‘But what's an image? Something that's nothing in a mirror and all the wrong way round. Anyway, Charles doesn't believe in God.'

‘Who's Charles?'

‘My father, of course. You met him, didn't you? He brought me down here.'

‘Oh, I see.' The stone face set a few degrees harder. ‘Well, we'll have to pray for him, won't we?'

‘Charles doesn't need praying for. He's got everything – cars and videos and stuff. He's even bought a computer chess game with more than a million moves, stored in a sort of brain.'

‘Magda, we're talking about God.'

Magda sucked at her thumb, which was bleeding from the splinter. ‘I'm not.'

There was a faint dab at the door. Nuns never knocked, did everything low-key; fluttered like moths, closed doors with velvet hands. A second, younger nun had entered and the two black shapes were whispering together, joined at the top like a double-bodied monster.

Mother Cornelia stood up. ‘Well, Magda, isn't that a strange coincidence? Your father's come to see you. We were just praying for him, weren't we? I'm afraid you'll have to tell him that we don't allow such frequent visits. He only brought you here three days ago. We have special weekends for visiting – just two a term. I'll let you see him this time, but not in future.'

Magda rammed the splinter further down her bleeding thumb. ‘I don't want to see him.'

‘Of course you do. All our girls love to see their parents.'

She watched as a drop of blood seeped slowly into the dark wood of the prie-dieu. ‘He's not my parents. I haven't got any parents.'

‘Magda!' The toad-coloured eyes darted in her direction. ‘That's quite enough. Right, we'll receive your father in the parlour.'

Swish-swish went the black robe in front of her. You always had to walk behind nuns. They were the brides of Christ or something stupid. Well, no one else would marry them, the way most of them looked. Mother Cornelia had a wart on her chin, raised up on a sort of stalk, and Mother Gregory had traces of a beard.

They had reached the parlour now. Parents were always dumped in there – a cold, unfriendly room which swallowed everybody up. All the furniture stood stiffly to attention, as if Reverend Mother herself was forbidding it to slouch. There were grotty wax grapes in the fruit bowl, and pictures of Popes smirking round the walls. The Popes all looked the same, in purple dresses and fancy hats, with small piggy eyes and fingers raised in a sort of fuck-off gesture. They weren't exactly women, but they weren't men, either.

Charles was the only man there. She could see his shiny black shoes and three inches of frowning grey pin-stripe. Her gaze stopped at his ankles. The nuns had taught her to keep her eyes cast down. (‘Only hussies look men in the face, Magda.') It was safer with Charles, anyway. If you started with his feet, it gave you time to prepare yourself, before you met the ice-floes of his eyes. She wasn't simply frightened of him, but proud of him as well. He was taller and richer and loads more important than most people's fathers. He'd flown on Concorde fifty-three times and had lunch with the Oma of Begin, and had written a book which had been translated into Japanese so that the pages read backwards. She liked being seen with him, longed to shout, ‘Look at him, he's my father!' when he marched into shops in his posh camel coat and barked, ‘Haven't you anything better?' to the quivering salesgirls, or ordered her French wine in restaurants and made the waiters pour hers first.

On the other hand, you couldn't touch him. His suits were made of steel, and inside his body he didn't have lungs and intestines and squashy, messy things like other people, but rows and rows of little drawers with labels on them – a sort of filing cabinet where his stomach should have been. He never hugged her and said ‘Wotcha Lollipop!' or bought her sherbet suckers like Bunty's Uncle Bob did.

Her eyes had reached his fat gold watch-chain, paused at the middle button of his jacket.

‘Say hello to your father, Magda.'

‘Hi.' It was not the sort of thing you said to fat gold watch-chains, but whatever you said, it was bound to be wrong. Charles was always on about split infinitives or erroneous prepositions and all that crap. Except this time, he wasn't even listening. He had turned his asbestos smile on to Mother Cornelia.

‘I wondered, Sister, if I could be alone with Magda for a while?'

You were meant to call them Mother, not Sister. Charles got it wrong on purpose. She was glad. She'd had enough of mothers – three in three months, and two of those had pissed off. First her own ma – oh yeah, she still wrote postcards – big deal, but the writing got larger on every one, and now it was only two lines and they were lies. ‘Miss you,
kedvesem
. Wish you were here with us.' Well, if she bloody wished that, why not invite her over and be done with it? It was only that rotten Miklos who kept her out. She didn't
want
to go, thanks, with him around.

Then, precious Frances had flitted off as well, the very day Viv had returned her to the Parry Jones ponce-house. Charles had come back from Nassau, and looked all brown and cross and sort of simmering.

‘Frances isn't well,' he'd said. ‘She's gone to convalesce.'

Bilge! Frances couldn't bear the sight of her, that's why she'd walked out. Who cared, anyway? She'd won, hadn't she, driven Frances from her own house? Now she could queen it in Frances' chair at breakfast, and mess about with Charles' video recorder, once he'd gone to work. And, in the evenings, she had him completely to herself. It was nice, the first few days. He took her to a restaurant where the steaks were as big as doormats and gave her a fiver without even asking. But a lot of the time, he was out, and even when he wasn't, he locked himself in his study and hogged the phone. Most of the phone calls were to poor darling Frances. She'd listened outside the door and heard him saying, ‘All right, Frances, if that's how you feel, there's nothing more to be said' … but he went on saying things. Once he'd said ‘goodbye' seven times – she'd counted – and still not put the phone down. When he came out, his face was all locked up, and he went straight to the stereo and played some horrible wailing organ music. And they'd sat there all evening, choking in it, like church.