Her (4 page)

The look on her face.

No.

I email back saying it’s all a bit crazy, due date looming and all that, I’ll be in touch in the new year.

‘You should have said yes,’ Ben says one Saturday, as we’re finishing lunch.

‘What about Christopher?’ I ask.

‘Oh, there must be someone who could have looked after him for a few hours,’ he says, as if it might be that easy. ‘You need to keep your hand in, stay in contact. You’ll want to go back one day.’

I know I will, but I also know (as does he, secretly) it’ll be impossible. My professional life, at least in TV, is over.

In the old days, it wasn’t a disaster if I had three months on and two months off; it was nerve-wracking, for sure, but doable, just part of the game. When people rang, I could always make it work. Overnighters, 5 a.m. starts, last-minute dashes to catch the red-eye, unreasonable bosses making unreasonable demands: the price you paid for a job that rarely bored you. It seemed a fair deal at the time.

But now I know what happened to all those women I looked up to, the producers and directors who fell over the edge of the world just as their reputations began to take shape. It’s near-impossible to reconcile an only moderately successful freelance career like mine with family life. As we can’t afford childcare on retainer, we’ve decided that it makes more sense for me to stay at home – here, with the baskets of dirty laundry, the shopping lists, the appointments pencilled into the kitchen calendar – while Ben profits from the plum spots vacated by female colleagues. So this is my lot now. It was always going to come down to this, if only I’d thought about it hard enough. If I’d thought about it hard enough, would I have made the same choices? Yes, yes, of course. But still.

Christopher has been lifted out of his chair and comes over, putting his plump little hands out to me, as if he knows I’m feeling sad. I lift him on my knee and put my nose in his hair. It smells clean and dirty at the same time: like damp straw, like an animal that has been out in the rain. His hand in mine is sticky with vinaigrette and grainy with bits of shortbread. I try not to mind. I don’t mind, really. I blow in his ears, making him laugh and twitch, and then I whisper, very quietly, ‘You’re lovely, aren’t you?’ He puts his thumb in his mouth and leans back against me and when I glance up, Ben’s smiling at us both, and then he starts to clear away the lunch things.

‘You’re doing OK, aren’t you?’ Ben asks later, as we wait for the BBC4 procedural to start. ‘You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, if you felt . . .’

‘Of course I would,’ I say as the screen goes white.

I’m fine. I’m fine. There’s nothing to tell.

Atsuko comes back into the room. I hear her moving around quietly, the careful noises as she places my shoes by the door, washes her hand at the shallow basin, and opens her wooden box of bottles, which rattle as she selects the few she needs. All the little rituals. Like casting a spell.

She knows I don’t like to talk. Just the basics. ‘Is this OK for you?’

‘It’s great,’ I say, into the aperture. I’m facedown on the upholstered gurney, my cheeks and forehead pressed against the protective tissue shield. I close my eyes. The iPod soundtrack starts: the familiar loop of pebbles dropping into pools, wind chimes, sitars, Tibetan bowls, Bedouin drums, the noise of birds and surf and the rustling of leaves. Ersatz nature, the contemporary shorthand for relaxation.

The smooth heat of Atsuko’s palms and fingers as she sets to work on my shoulders, the diligent firmness which is almost, but not quite, painful.

I let my mind empty. I don’t think about Sophie, who comes home from school and swiftly leaves again, telling me she’s going round to Eva’s to work on an English project; or holes herself up in her room with her laptop, communicating (I imagine) with strangers in LA and Kuala Lumpur and Brisbane, who might be seventeen or twenty-seven or fifty-three. I don’t think about Charles, who is in Bristol overnight. I don’t think about the fact that my father’s in town, demanding some attention.

Cicadas, the drone of ethnic chanting. Atsuko’s fingers are steadily working towards the point I’m always conscious of, the tender spot just below my right shoulder blade. Knowing it’s coming – dreading it, but needing it too – I frown down into the aperture, bracing myself, tensing up. I can’t help it. ‘It’s too much?’ asks Atsuko, easing off. ‘Is it too painful?’

When I’m dressed, walking home in the dark, feeling the new chill in the air and the warm film of oil on my skin, my phone rings.
Paul
.

‘You are being elusive,’ my father says.

‘Am I?’ I say, turning into Pakenham Gardens. All along the street the bay windows are lighting up, displaying similar domestic scenes: the unpacking of groceries, table-laying, clarinet practice. I catch a glimpse of Monica and Tim Prewitt, evening newspaper and novel angled into the light, sherry glasses on the ottoman.

‘I’ve got a table at Marcy’s. I hear the fruits de mer is fabulous,’ my father is saying. ‘I was hoping I could persuade you and Charles to join me.’

‘Oh, tonight’s no good,’ I say, pressing the mobile into my shoulder, twisting the key in the lock and letting myself into the hall. The lights are off but Sophie’s coat is slung over the banister: she must be upstairs. ‘Charles is away and I’ve got plans, Bridget’s coming over for supper. I could do Thursday, if you’re still here then.’

‘I’m not in town for long,’ he says. ‘Bring Bridget too. Who is Bridget anyway? She sounds great. I’m sure I’d like her.’

I can tell he’s demob happy: off the leash, expansive, wanting an audience.

‘Oh, I don’t think . . .’ I say, but he has made up his mind: he’s summoning up all his relentlessly twinkly charisma. Just listening to him makes me feel tired. You have to be in the right frame of mind to spend time with my father, and I’m not in the right frame of mind tonight. Charles (who is, after all, closer in age to my father than to me) knows how to play him, and finds him moderately amusing. I’m not so sure.

‘You know we’d have fun,’ he’s saying. ‘Go on, ring her, see if she likes the sound of a very good table at Marcy’s and my undivided attention.’

I say I’ll see. And I don’t sell it to her. But Bridget, a friend since art school, thinks it’s a wonderful idea, certainly more wonderful than a Thai takeaway on the tall stools in my kitchen. She has always wanted to meet Paul. The other night she was about to go to bed when she realised
Crazy Paving
was on TV; she turned over to catch the backgammon scene, and the next thing she knew it was 2 a.m. Plus, you know: Marcy’s. Hel-
lo?

In the shower, I scour away Atsuko’s almond oil, my eyes shut against the deluge.
See the old man, get it over with. It might be fun.

While I’m waiting for the cab, I knock on Sophie’s door. ‘Not in,’ she shouts, so I push the door open a little and say, ‘I’m going out to dinner with Paul. He’s in town for a few days. You can come if you like.’

‘I’m good, thanks.’

‘I’ll put a pizza in the oven, it’ll be ready at half past. Don’t forget.’

She slouches over her desk, moving her arm so I can’t see what’s on the screen. ‘Homework,’ she says, heading me off.

I’m the last to arrive at the restaurant. My father rises up behind the stiff immaculate fall of tablecloth, palming back his hair, showing his teeth. The go-faster stripe of white at his temple; the shirred weft of the narrow silk tie gleaming like fish scales. His cheek, when it presses against mine, is smooth, cool, smelling distinctly of his particular scents: black pepper and lemon, the interior of expensive cars, the ministrations of a laundry service that returns linen banded in yellow ribbon.

Bridget reaches over to kiss me, mindful of her champagne glass and the candle in its smoked glass holder. ‘Paul’s just been telling me all about Jessica Lange and Robert Redford,’ she says.
Here we go
, I think.

‘Just making up a few stories,’ he says, signalling for a glass for me.

I wouldn’t put it past him. My father lives on the margins of reality, the magical shimmering point at which fantasy becomes fact. His whole life, when glanced at, looks rather like a dream: the talent, the lucky break, the success, the money, the houses. The wives.

From my perspective, that of the child at the edge of the room, it often appeared messy, wasteful, destructive; but my father was sustained by the excitement. Perhaps he felt it was no less than his due. Once, in my early twenties, I sat at the back of a private screening room in Soho – the insulated hush of the red velvet and the thick carpet, people juggling wine glasses and notebooks as they took their seats – and Paul came in, and stood for a moment at the front, talking with the director, and the two young women in the row in front of me bent their heads towards each other and whispered, and then one of them laughed, a small mirthless sound. Listening to that, I felt the familiar twist of pride and shame. There was a story there that I did not want to hear.

Bridget rotates her glass, catching the condensation with a finger. ‘But you’re still composing, aren’t you?’ she asks.

‘Oh, when something interesting comes along. If Vincent – Vincent Usher – asks, for example. Good friends. I’m too old to learn any new tricks.’ One of my father’s few failures, a decade or so ago, came when he wrote the score for a much-admired indie director making his mainstream debut. ‘He didn’t know what he was doing,’ my father complained privately. ‘He had too many choices, and he couldn’t see a way through them.’

He keeps himself out of mischief, he reassures Bridget: he’s still working on his choral symphony (he’s been working on his choral symphony for as long as I can remember, and occasionally when we’ve overlapped there I’ve seen the sheet music left out by the piano in his house by the sea: a sharpened pencil laid decisively across the workings, as if it’s all in hand), ‘and of course I have the little one to keep me busy. Nina’s half sister,’ he adds.

Bridget nods (
of course
!) and then they both look at me, smiling conspiratorially, as if I’m somehow responsible for this small person I barely know. I smile back. ‘How is Clara?’ I ask, obediently.

My father’s second shot at parenthood suits him. He has more leisure and patience this time around, and fewer distractions. Also, Delphine is more assertive than my mother was. She demands (as one senses she always has done, throughout her short and privileged life) and he obliges, indulgently, with pleasure.

He talks about Clara, and in between we place our orders, and the waiter brings us wine and bread and lays out the implements for taking apart lobsters, a surgeon’s arsenal, and the little finger bowls containing warm water and thin translucent wheels of lemon. My father describes the swimming, the reading, the pictures she draws, great sprawling panoramas unfurled over the kitchen floor like carpets of febrile hallucination: fishes with eyelashes, skyscrapers fitted with rocket boosters, gigantic spiders wearing high-heeled shoes.

Bridget finds all this charming at first, but she has children of her own, and he senses the exact point at which she starts to lose interest. ‘We were sorry you and Charles couldn’t visit us this summer,’ he says to me, setting to work on his fritto misto, crisp golden langoustines and whitebait and scallops heaped on utilitarian sheets of cheap grey greaseproof, the restaurant’s little joke at its customers’ expense. ‘You really should make more use of the house.’

‘Maybe in the spring,’ I say. For a moment, I think of the wooden louvres angled against the sun as it spins remorselessly over the series of white boxes. The pale gravel that hurts your eyes, the smell of rosemary and pine, and the sound of the sprinklers in the late evening, water pattering onto the floodlit lawn. The perpetual striving for that impossible extravagant green.

‘It would be nice there now,’ he’s saying. ‘All the tourists have gone, the light is fantastic in the autumn, you can get into any restaurant you like. Why don’t you fly down there for a week, take your sketchbooks?’

‘It’s a lovely idea, Dad,’ I say, ‘But Sophie’s at school. I can’t just take off like that.’

He supposes not. He asks after Sophie, now she has been mentioned, but he doesn’t have much grasp of teenagers. ‘Oh, Sophie,’ sighs Bridget, loyally. ‘So pretty, so together! I was never like that when I was seventeen, were you, Nina?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Although I’m not sure
together
’s the right word, exactly. Sophie’s a bit of a mystery to me at the moment.’

‘And how is Charles?’ my father continues, not really listening. ‘I saw the practice got a bit of attention somewhere or other a few weeks ago. One of the supps, Delphine pointed it out.’

‘There was a nice piece in the
Wall Street Journal
,’ I say.

‘That’s right. New museum in Chicago, somewhere like that. Looked like a packet of chewing gum to me.’ He makes an I-am-awful face at Bridget. ‘Charles is terribly serious,’ he says, raising his eyebrows for a new bottle. ‘It’s quite
fun
seeing Nina off the leash like this. Girl’s got to let her hair down sometimes.’

I smile in the way I’ve always smiled at my father’s remarks. He can’t help competing with my husband. He tried it with Arnold, too, but Arnold minded more, made more of it, came close to disliking him. Charles finds Paul funny, harmless. My father senses this, and hates it. So he’s always keen to get a poke in, when he can.

Now he asks how Bridget and I know each other. Naturally, he has forgotten what I told him on the phone. Bridget, who used to paint large disconcerting oils of bus shelters and underpasses and municipal roundabouts, and who was once shortlisted for a prestigious prize, talks sheepishly about her new venture: she’s trying to get a business together, drawing quirky portraits of people’s houses viewed from the street. Fanlights, window boxes, cats on steps, clouds reflected in dark glass. ‘They make a lovely gift when they’re properly framed up,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a few commissions. People at school, mainly. Money’s rubbish, of course, but, well, you have to keep your hand in.’ The embarrassment of this confession makes her anxious to change the subject. ‘But you must be so proud of Nina, really keeping it all going. Did you get to the show?’