Cuckoo (33 page)

Charles banged down his coffee cup. The warning bell was sounding and a disembodied voice urging them to take their seats. Laura squeezed his hand.

‘You could always accept the baby as your own,' she whispered. ‘Had you thought of that?'

Charles stormed up the stairs behind her. Of course he'd thought of it, and every other damn solution – resident nannies, early boarding school. If he wanted Frances, that was the price he'd have to pay for her. She herself had Magda to contend with.

No, Magda was a teenager, not a babe-in-arms. He'd never inflicted her infancy on Frances. No broken nights or piles of dirty nappies. Magda was just a visitor, and almost grown up. But Frances had a smelly, screeching urchin squatting in her body, kidnapping her life, her looks, her love, for at least another twenty years. Easy for Frances to talk about having both their children, as she'd done at Croft's, but in actual cool objective fact, she'd proved herself incapable of coping even with one. She was idealizing Magda because she was a hundred miles away. If the kid came home again, the rows would resume, and Frances' milk-and-water fantasies about their united family would dribble away in nagging and recrimination. The same with the baby – blissful when it was only a whisper of cells in her womb, but nine months on, there would be blood and puke and shit to contend with. Of course the tie with a child was precious and unique – he'd told her that himself. But it was the concept, the ideal of parenthood, rather than the endlessly bleating and excreting reality.

He glanced up at the stage. Somehow they had reached their seats, squashed between rows of dotards, sucking toffees and adjusting spectacles. How in God's name could he concentrate on one of Shakespeare's lighter comedies, when his mind was primed for a five-act tragedy, a battlefield, a blasted heath? His problems had even spilled on to the boards. When the curtain rose, Clive was up there, tripping about in purple knee-breeches and a fair moustache. The programme called him the King of Navarre, but only Clive would preen and pontificate like that. He and his Elizabethan gentlemen had vowed to abjure the company of women, and devote themselves to learning. He envied them. Women were not only a snare and a distraction, but a source of everlasting complication and deceit. No man could even know whether the child a woman bore him was genuinely his. All the guilt and obligation he'd felt towards Magda might properly belong to that legless, lecherous Jew the kid had mentioned.

The irony was, he'd tried to get rid of Magda, even when he believed she was his own. He'd branded Frances a murderer, yet it was he who had bribed both women to destroy their babies in the womb. Both had refused. When Piroska handed him that blue-eyed, puckered creature, wrapped in a blanket (‘She's got your mouth, exactly,' clucked the midwife), he'd felt horror and shame that this was the life he had wanted to snuff out. He tried to forget the incident, but somehow it had fuelled his guilt during the whole of Magda's childhood, and had finally persuaded him to take her in this summer, when Piroska returned to Hungary. But if she weren't his child in the first place, then the whole affair was doubly ironical, hopelessly confused.

Why, all delights are vain, but that most vain,
Which, with pain purchased, doth inherit pain.

He jumped. The actor had swept downstage, almost to the footlights, and seemed to be speaking to him alone, his sardonic blue eye fixed on Charles' own. He had all but forgotten he was at a play. The Kingdom of Navarre kept turning into Richmond Green or Streatham Maternity Hospital. The three French ladies he had been promised in his programme had all changed their names since it was printed. No longer Maria, Katharine and Rosaline, but Laura, Frances, Magda. Rosaline was almost Magda's double, the same dark, rebellious hair and secret swelling breasts.

Christ! If only he could exorcise his daughter – feel either simple love for her, or straight resentment at being made a fool of. But to desire the kid, for God's sake, he hardly dared admit it to himself. He had even taken to fantasizing about her, imagining her sprawled naked on her bed, or wearing only a wet, transparent T-shirt. Somehow, her body was always fused with Laura's, to form some tantalizing female paradox – the virgin seductress, the voluptuous innocent. It was shameful, decadent, and almost proof he couldn't be her father. Could any natural father stoop so low, mix his own daughter's body with his mistress's, and then enjoy them both? He glanced sideways at Laura, sitting rapt beside him, the pale foothills of her breasts teasing him in the darkened auditorium. She always wore her blouses unbuttoned to the cleavage. Magda chose harsh, mannish shirts and fastened them to the throat. It was only he who swapped her round with Laura, unbuttoning, revealing …

He leaned forward and fondled Laura's knee. He must make her real, disentangle her from Magda. Or banish both of them and try to concentrate. Laura would quiz him on the play, even quote from it. How could he confess he'd hardly heard a word? Hanging on to all that painted verbiage was like a drowning man pausing in his struggles to admire a sunset. Endless strings of empty words, gin-fizz emotions frothing out of cardboard hearts. Up on the stage, the king and his three young lords were already reduced by Love to dribbling fools, their vows forgotten, creeping through the undergrowth, composing sonnets. Junes and moons and panting bosoms of the deep …

Twaddle! Or was it? He himself had never composed a love-letter in his life. Was that a virtue, or a failing? He didn't even know. Business was such a burden at the moment, it was all he could do to write his monthly financial reviews, let alone a sonnet. Even now, he should be closeted with the President of Amalgamated Automobiles, not this besotted King of Navarre. Perhaps his energies were failing. Once, he'd had time to mug up all the plays of Shakespeare, prided himself on knowing every last scraping and scruple of the footnotes, even the textual variations between Folio and Quarto. Now he felt only boredom and distaste, watching those clowns mortgage their studies and seclusion for a farthingale.

It was all too close to home, for heaven's sake. Hadn't he been duped himself, in the name of love? Crawling after one woman at Croft's, playing truant for another, saddled with children who weren't his. Even Laura guessed. He had tried to discuss Magda with her on the drive down to Guildford, but every time she said ‘your daughter', he could hear the sarcasm glittering in her voice. Was every feckless father caught like this? You couldn't win. If Magda really were his child, then he was an incestuous swine to take her to his bed in fantasy, and if she weren't, then he'd not only been cuckolded, but squandered fifteen years of payments for her, in guilt and hard cash. The bills were getting steeper all the time. The nuns had sent the first account in advance, with extra charges for riding, tennis coaching, catechism classes. It hurt to have to pay for religious indoctrination. Though it wasn't the money he minded – he'd pay for anything, so long as he was sure the child was his. But how, in Christ's name, could any man be sure? If even Frances slept around, what hope was there that Piroska had been faithful?

Well, he wouldn't be fooled much longer. He'd contact Piroska and insist she took her daughter back. It was not impossible. She'd already written and hinted that there were thorns in her Hungarian bed of roses. Miklos' so-called wealth had materialized as three chickens and a goat, and the grandma was clinging grimly on to her life and property. Piroska needed cash. All he had to do was to make his cheque conditional. Bribery cost less than boarding school.

Maybe he'd even phone this evening, demand immediate action. He was weary of all the fuss and dawdle of foreign postal systems, the endless problems with a kid who had wrecked his marriage and shattered his self-esteem. He'd already lost Frances on account of her, and would lose Laura next, if he didn't get things moving. Magda must be transferred to Hungary – and fast. It was the only possible solution.

True, there were still all the problems they'd started with – schools, foreign languages, housing, Miklos. But Magda would cope. She'd have to. She was so damned miserable already, a move could only benefit her. He'd barter a generous cash allowance for her immediate summons to Budapest. A telegram, perhaps? Yes, why not? A telegram from Piroska sent direct to the school. Piroska was hopeless at letter-writing, and Miklos might even talk her out of it while she sat chewing on her pen. But a telegram was instant and dramatic. He could more or less compose it for her himself.

‘Found new flat and fine school. Stop. Longing to have you join us. Stop. Come immediately.' Not that he wanted to deceive the child. Perhaps he could find the flat and school himself, write to the Embassy, pull a few strings. Impossible – a Communist country, and Miklos breathing down his neck …

‘Miklos moved out permanently. Miss you darling. Plenty of room with Grandma for the two of us.'

No, he couldn't lie to the kid. Christ! It was complicated. He couldn't even concentrate, with those cretinous lovelords leaping about the stage, ranting on about Fevers In The Blood and Love Learned In A Woman's Eye. He'd rather compose a thousand sonnets than wrestle with the guilt and deception of a dozen pre-paid words. Whatever he did, someone would be hurt.

He'd always prided himself on coping calmly in a crisis. This gibbering indecision was completely out of character. It was women again, wrecking his system, undermining his strengths. Was there really any need for frenzied haste and subterfuge? After all, the kid was safe at school. Couldn't she stay there, and let the nuns put up with her, while he sorted out his other problems? He could wait till the Christmas holidays and take her to Budapest himself, in mid-December.

Frances would be four months pregnant by December – an obscene little bulge for everyone to jeer at. God Almighty! Every woman should be sterilized at birth. Laura was right, as she was so often. Of course it was safer never to risk a child. Perhaps he should settle for Laura and be done with it. No possibility of babies, then. A neat, uncomplicated, adult life, drawn up like a contract. Laura was a skilled businesswoman and would appreciate a fair deal, spelt out in all the small print. They could even live abroad, to avoid the scandal; retreat to a tax haven with a decent climate, and combine financial advantages with a quiet life. He didn't want marriage, not yet. He needed time, and one last appeal to Frances. But meanwhile, Laura must be primed and feted, kept in hand as a reserve currency.

If those damn-fool lords could woo and win a woman, then so could he. Shakespeare had lavished twenty thousand words on nothing else. There was Berowne, the cynic, even he converted now, pouring out his love to a cardboard tree. He tried to concentrate. If he couldn't write his own lines, the least he could do was listen to someone else's. It was all part of the wooing. He leant back in his seat and closed his eyes.

There was only one interval. A visiting troupe of lutenists were playing Elizabethan songs in the corner of the still closed and shuttered bar. Laura stopped to listen.

‘I suppose they're trying to compensate for a shoddy production,' she whispered. ‘Total miscasting all round. Don't you agree, Charles?'

He muttered something he half recalled from the
Sunday Times
review and tried to lure her past the countertenor, who was bewailing the pains of Love, in yellow velvet doublet and laddered hose.

‘I mean, fancy casting the King as a middle-aged bookworm, in spectacles. What's the point of his renouncing love, if he's past it anyway? Ice cream, darling?'

‘No thanks. Fresh air.' He must entice her out into the garden, safely removed from all refreshments and distractions. She was still gabbling on about unsubtle lighting and anachronistic costumes. He chose the most secluded seat and enthroned her on it. They could hear the strains of the lute music echoing from the upstairs window. It should have been an idyll – river rippling in front of them, feet wreathed in flowers, ears lapped in love songs. But somehow, it was only another cardboard set, another bad production. The sky was pock-marked with clouds, the river sluggish and sludge-brown, brash French marigolds shrieking at shocking-pink petunias. He turned his back on the monstrous modern building glaring at them from across the river, and tried to blot out everything but Laura's pale white hand.

‘Laura, darling, why don't you wear your new ring?'

He removed the silver band from its plush-lined box and held it out to her. Berowne would have gone down on one knee, but this was stockbroker Surrey, not rutting Navarre.

She wasn't listening, anyway. ‘What do you think of the Rosaline?' she asked, swatting at a wasp. ‘A little too coy for my taste. But then, when you've seen Dorothy Tutin in the role, no one else quite measures up.'

‘No, I suppose not.' He slipped the ring on the safe, largest finger of Laura's non-marriage hand. The left hand, the dangerous hand, was already weighted down with Clive's booty.

‘The set's not bad. Though I had my doubts about all those dead leaves. I suppose they're meant to symbolize the transience of love.'

Charles held on to the finger, pressed the tiny scratchy diamonds with his thumb. How could she keep jawing about symbolism, when he was more or less proposing to her? ‘Look, Laura, I want to make it up to you, not just with theatres and presents, but with time. You're right – I have neglected you. But I intend to change.'

Laura had plucked a blade of grass and was tickling his face with it. Her laugh was like a scalpel cutting through his skull.

‘Good God, Charlie, so love's labour
isn't
lost! I do believe wily old Shakespeare's made a convert of you. You sound worse than those love-lorn lords!'

‘Laura, I'm serious. You matter to me, darling, and I want to prove it. I know I've taken you for granted, but things will be different now. Look, why don't we try and go away together. How about a weekend in Paris? Sometime in October, when the crowds have gone?' If he promised her Paris, she might even swap the Mirabelle for Oppenheimer, this all important Saturday.