Her (10 page)

The scallops are a bit overdone and the duck is too bloody, but I compliment both dishes, bearing in mind how lucky I am. Then Ben tops up his glass and goes into the sitting room, and I fill the sink with bubbles while listening to a radio programme about farming subsidies.

Later that evening, I’m on the very edge of sleep when Ben comes to bed. My mind is just turning elastic, fantastical – I’m at the gorgeous point at which thoughts turn into dreams – when the light from the landing hits the bed, and I hear the water running in the bathroom basin. The water and the light are switched off. Then he slides into bed and I feel him reach for me, hear him whisper, conscious of Cecily asleep in the cot by the window.

I go along with it without enthusiasm or, to be fair, apparent reluctance, though secretly I resent – of course I do! – being stolen away from that glorious golden realm of possibility, just as it was within my grasp. The moment just before I go to sleep is often the highlight of my day: the letting go, the sense of becoming unreachable.

It’s an illusion, of course, as Cecily’s 3 a.m. teething cries demonstrate. I get out of bed. The room is chilly, but I’m already bathed in sweat triggered by that familiar hopeless panic:
Baby’s crying. Fix it.
She hasn’t got a temperature, but she won’t settle for a feed, and then she does, and I sit there in the yellow chair in the darkness, feeling hot and cold. Tired, wired. Lonely and yet never ever alone.

She reaches out, her arm in its soft flannel sleeve, her perfect fingers flexing, a pale star. She puts her hand on my arm and rests it there, warm, firm, exactly where it wants to be.
Happy, sad
, I think.

Over the next few days, the children throw off their illnesses. By the time Wednesday comes around, they’re fully restored, so much so that I am tempted to cancel. Twice I summon Nina’s number on my phone, and only a small-scale domestic catastrophe (custard boiling over in the microwave, Christopher poking post through the floorboards) stops me from calling her up and making an excuse.

What on earth was I thinking? Without seeing it, I know the sort of house Nina lives in: linen upholstery, delicate bowls and sets of
things
left out on low tables. She’ll prepare a meal that Christopher will refuse to eat. Cecily, overtired, won’t nap in the buggy, and all attempts at conversation will falter at the two-sentence mark. I brace for failure.

When she opens the door, I feel my disadvantages sharp as knives as I lug the buggy up the steps and coax Christopher – clinging doggedly to my thigh – into the hall. I’m sweating by the time I get everyone indoors; my face feels damp and shiny. ‘So good to see you,’ I’m saying, but I’m not seeing her, I’m only conscious of the chaos that I’m bringing to her house, the dirty-fingered toddler, the red-faced, ripe-smelling baby.

‘Look, Christopher,’ I say, once the front door is closed. ‘It’s Nina. The kind lady who found you when you got lost in the park. Do you remember?’

He pushes his face into my leg and mumbles something indistinctly.

‘Yes, well,’ I say, unzipping his coat. ‘It’s very kind of you to ask us round.’

She takes the coat, hangs it up, and then steps forward and puts her hands on my elbows and kisses me. Her hair brushes my face. A smoky sort of scent, figs and spices, sweet and complex and insistent. I’m not sure I entirely like it, but I imagine that’s the point. ‘It’s a pleasure,’ she says. ‘It’s nice to see Christopher again. Do you remember Henry, Christopher? He’s in the kitchen. He’s excited about seeing you again.’

Who’s Henry? Christopher pulls his head away from my leg and glances down the hallway. ‘He’s waiting for you,’ she says, and he looks up, doubtfully, so I say, ‘Yes, go,’ and then miraculously he’s releasing my thigh and inching away.

‘Cat,’ Nina explains. ‘You probably heard, Christopher was sitting outside my house when I found him, with Henry, the two of them just sitting on the step. So of course I stopped and asked him his name and rang the police straightaway. I can’t begin to imagine what you must have been going through.’

I can’t think of anything to say to that, so we stand around the buggy in silence for a moment; and then I say, ‘I’m sorry, I really must change her, her timing’s terrible,’ and Nina laughs and shows me into the loo, which has one of those wanky yet also somehow desirable overhead china cisterns with a long chain flush (probably reclaimed at vast expense from a boarding-school refurb), and an antique blue-patterned sink, and a row of huge chemists’ bottles on the windowsill. Cecily lies on the dresser, bathed in the red and green light cast by the giant flagons, staring up at them as I attend to her. I lean forward and we rub noses and she giggles, and then I pop her on the floor and wash my hands, using the French soap in a proper soap dish, a chunky white bar carved with a little sailor boy. While I’m rinsing my hands, I look at myself in the mirror, and see how flushed I am, and so I dab some loo paper over my face and into my armpits, blotting the evaporating sweat. It’s not just the humiliation of arrival; the house feels a little too hot. Then I fit Cecily on my hip and go down the corridor.

It’s huge, the kitchen, but more welcoming than I’d expected. Not quite so pared-back. Not quite as oppressively tasteful as I’d feared. Old tawny floorboards dimpled with the imprints of furniture scrapes and dropped pots, and blackly freckled with ancient woodworm. A rather beautiful modern rug in greens and golds. A linen press full of antique etched glassware. A pale grey jug filled with white freesias, petals translucent in the sunlight spilling over the table. A glass dome on a dish of decorated cupcakes: sugar flowers, hundreds-and-thousands, edible glitter. Radio Three, down low: Liszt or Chopin, maybe.

A large painting – a dim-coloured landscape of some sort – hangs over the fireplace at the far end, probably one of Nina’s, but I can’t get a good look at it from here. Christopher is on the floor, carefully stroking a black and white cat, who is reclining there like an emperor, just about tolerating the attention for now.

‘And this is Sophie,’ Nina says, ‘My daughter.’

Glancing up from the iPad, she half-rises from the table, politely lifts a hand, says, ‘Hi.’ Tall, loose-limbed, in skinny jeans and stripy socks, a hoodie with lettering on the front: I recognise the logo of a store that I’d be too intimidated to enter.

‘Do they let you out for lunch?’ I say, and she looks at me blankly, and Nina says, ‘Oh, it’s half term.’

Of course, she goes to the private school further up the hill. I’ve seen the kids streaming in and out of the wrought-iron gates in their yellow-trimmed blazers, in intimate confiding pairs and trios, or in larger, more febrile packs. Clumsily, because girls this age frighten me – I remember how unwaveringly assuredly judgemental I was at seventeen, how mercilessly I judged my mother and her friends – I ask the usual questions. She’s taking English, French and history. Applying to do modern languages. Year out, she thinks, au pairing in Paris.

‘You should tap Sophie for babysitting,’ Nina says. She’s busy at the kitchen counter, cutting and rinsing lettuces, drying them in a tea towel and throwing them into a large flat wooden bowl. ‘She’s quite experienced, aren’t you, Soph?’

Sophie tells me that she spends quite a lot of time in the holidays with her American half-siblings, Otto and Astrid. In London, she sometimes looks after a neighbour’s three-year-old. Also, her friend Tasha’s younger sister, who’s eight. She makes smiley faces at Cecily, who wriggles and gurgles in response.

‘I’m not sure, Cecily’s so tiny,’ I say, but even as I’m saying it, I’m thinking about how wonderful it would be, getting the pair of them down and then darting out with Ben for a few hours: to the cinema, or even just the Italian place by the tube station. Just walking there would feel like a novelty. Out in the dark, the winking lights.

‘Well, bear it in mind,’ says Nina, pushing back the sleeves of her jersey. The white cuffs of her shirt flash as she pours oil and vinegar into a jar, adds salt and sugar, screws on the lid and gives it a shake. Now she’s pouring the vinaigrette over the salad, reaching in, turning the lettuce leaves over and over with her bare hands, coating them. There’s something so careless and easy and straightforward about this; and – very distantly – familiar too, though I can’t remember who else does it. Perhaps a character in a book.

‘Can I help?’ I say, as one does, as if I’d be any assistance with Cecily on my hip, grabbing at my neckline. I fed her just before we left, and now she’s beginning to shade into nap-time irritability.
Oh, don’t be silly, it’s all under control, have a glass of wine
. I’d love one, I say, but first I’ll try my luck, see if she’ll go down to sleep in the buggy for a bit. Chances are she won’t, but.

Nina says I’m welcome to put her in Charles’s study, at the end of the hall, it’ll be quieter in there.

The study is muted, as plain and perfect as an egg. There’s nothing stray or random in here, nothing out of place: no paper drifting over the desk, no pens in pots, no pictures on the walls. Its asceticism is full of purpose. A plan chest, shelves of architecture books, a slimline silver laptop, a 60s recliner by the window overlooking the magnolia tree. I walk around the room with her for a bit, patting her back while looking at the architectural models in the Perspex boxes: a university campus, a museum in Vienna. I don’t know how to analyse the buildings, so my eye goes quickly to the tiny little people animating them, the students and tourists gathering for scale in the covered walkways and around the fountains, casting their miniature shadows. Cecily has gone quite still, so I release the blind, filling the room with a sub-aquatic dimness, and lower her in, fastening the straps and tucking the blanket around her. In the half-light, she tilts her face to one side and gazes at the wall: a hopeful sign.
Maybe it’ll work. That’d be a first.

Back in the kitchen, lunch is waiting. The dishes on the table are not, at first glance, Christopher-friendly – it’s all Middle Eastern-inspired, lots of aubergine and flatbreads and pomegranate seeds scattered on the salads – and I anticipate an embarrassing scene, but he is tempted by the little meatballs studded with pine nuts, and the herb-flecked couscous also goes down well, so I think:
that’s one less thing to worry about.
Well-rested and well-fed, Christopher is not bad company; the problems start when he’s running low.

We go back over that awful afternoon. Nina tells me about coming back to the house in the late afternoon, and finding Christopher and Henry on the step, ‘He seemed quite happy, he wasn’t distressed at all.’

Hearing his name, Christopher has cocked his head. ‘Do you remember, Christopher?’ Nina asks, ‘Do you remember, that afternoon you came here?’ and I hold my breath, not sure what I hope.

‘Jelly snakes,’ he says. ‘You said you had purple jelly snakes. But you didn’t.’

Nina laughs, tickled by the detail. ‘You’re quite right,’ she says. ‘I didn’t.’

‘And,’ he adds, ‘you said to leave the scooter. You put it in the trees.’

‘Scooter?’ she says. ‘In the
trees
? I don’t think you had a scooter, did you? I don’t remember that. Maybe it was someone else. But I do remember the jelly snakes.’ She tears a flatbread in two, reaches for the aubergine. ‘I wanted to get him into the house,’ she says to me. ‘It was getting cold, I had to ring the police. So I promised him jelly snakes and lured him indoors. What did I give you in the end?’

‘Smarties,’ he says. ‘A whole packet!’

‘Lucky,’ I say, and he wriggles in his seat, asking to get down. ‘Can we go to the swings?’ he asks.

‘Not now. Maybe when I’m finished,’ I say, my fork poised, but Sophie pushes back her plate and says, ‘Oh, I could take him, if you like. Just for half an hour or so?’

‘Really?’ I say, unsure if she means it, unsure if Christopher will agree; but he does.

The offer is made so casually, it’s barely even a kindness. And yet at this moment, at this point in my life, there’s nothing more appealing than being excused some of the endless responsibility. Five minutes, half an hour of not being in charge: it’s hard to explain how wonderful this can be.

I guess I wouldn’t mind being alone with Nina, so cool, so together, so inexplicably interested in me. Just for a bit.

Once Sophie and Christopher have left the house with their cupcakes, I let Nina top up my glass. I never touch alcohol at lunchtime. I drink and experience that pleasant slippage, the exuberant, dangerous sense that in ten minutes, or twenty, I might say almost anything.

As women must, we talk a little about partners: I tell her about Ben, TV, the gloom of the freelancing landscape, and I hint at the gnawing anxieties that accompany the drying-up of my earnings; and she says things aren’t great for Charles and herself either, though I sense she’s being tactful. This house and its location on this particular street don’t suggest financial insecurity. Anyway, it is somehow obvious that she makes, or has, her own money.

Out in the garden – as orderly and disciplined as the study – the sun comes and goes behind thin whipping clouds. The stone bench shines and darkens and shines again. Henry picks his way over the lawn, and vanishes into the shrubbery. There’s a patter of applause from the radio as the lunchtime concert comes to an end.

‘How was your show?’ I say.

‘I thought you were going to come to the opening,’ Nina says, reminded of some old half-forgotten surprise. ‘I told Marnie at the gallery to send you an invite. Didn’t it get to you? God, she’s hopeless . . . or maybe I got the address wrong. It went pretty well, thanks. I sold a few. That always helps.’

‘I’d love to see your work,’ I say. ‘I’ve googled you, I couldn’t find anything. I was thinking you must work under your maiden name, is that right?’

‘No – I use Nina Setting. My first husband’s surname, Sophie’s father. We were very young, I was just starting out. One of those rash idealistic decisions you come to regret quite quickly.’

I’m not sure if she means the marriage, or taking his name, or both, but it’s too soon to ask that sort of question.

‘That’s one of mine,’ she says, collecting plates and nodding at the canvas over the fireplace. I pick up my glass and walk down the room towards it. I’m anticipating the same blank nonplussed sensation that I experienced when I looked at her husband’s architectural models, but standing in front of Nina’s painting isn’t like that at all. I see it, but mainly I feel it: the slow endless friction between sea and sand and wind, the snap of salt in the air, the crooked stunted trees and the cracked earth of the track. ‘Wow,’ I say, leaning in to examine the lines and beads and planes of paint, scored with brushes and something else, something flatter and smoother: a finger, perhaps, or a knife. The painting dissolves into its structure the closer you get to it. I pull back, and it changes again. Eventually, I say, ‘It’s incredible. I love it.’