Little Bits of Baby (21 page)

‘Heini, please,' he said.

‘Heini, then. A dear friend of my grandmother's. He's normally unget-atable in the Aegean, so we're honoured. Heini this is Gilda, my friend from work.'

‘Oh, I remember
you
,' Robin told her.

‘And this is Steve, Gilda's … Gilda's friend.'

‘Hi,' said Steve.

‘
Ja
,' said Heini.

‘Jake you know, of course, and this is Faber Washington.'

‘Now why do I know
your
name?'

‘You probably saw the painting on the landing,' said Faber quickly, and turned away.

‘Of course.'

‘And this is Robin, my childhood friend.'

‘Her granny brought you to tea once at my granny's,' said Robin. Heini looked puzzled. ‘At Charmouth,' Robin added. ‘You had very baggy shorts on and a panama and you insisted on getting the old motor-mower going to do the lawn.'

Heini turned to Candida for confirmation.

‘But this is not that little boy … Irma's grandson?'

‘Yes,' she nodded, ‘Robin Maitland.'

‘Ah so, the
holy
man!' Heini exclaimed and roared with laughter. ‘He sits by me,
ja?
'

‘Yup. OK, Uncle Heini,' said Jake, standing. ‘Darling, do you need a hand?'

‘No, it's all ready. Come in, everyone, and sit.'

They followed her, Gilda chatting busily to Faber, who she had suddenly recognised as someone everyone would soon be dying to know. Steve, lost, was feigning interest in geraniums. Jake rescued him, took him in earnest, and started telling him the story of a lemon-scented plant that was a cutting of a cutting once picked off by Uncle Heini for Candida's grandmother from a parent plant at Buckingham Palace. Steve thought this was meant to be a joke and the story got quite out of hand.

‘Now. Sit wherever you like,' Candida told them, ‘No bossy set places, except that I go here as it's nearest the door and Jake goes there because he understands the awkward legs.'

‘And Uncle Heinrich and I are going to sit together.'

When Candida returned with another bottle of wine for Jake to pour and her tray of carrot soup, she was pleased to see that she would have Robin and Faber on either side of her. Faber was still trapped by Gilda, Jake and Steve were busy boring one another, so she enjoyed her soup and hung on the edge of Robin's conversation with her ancient godfather.

‘So you became a monk?' said Heini.

‘Not exactly,' Robin told him.

‘But you spent eight years in a monastery?'

‘Precisely.'

‘He's been living on Whelm, Heini,' Candida offered. ‘You know? The little island?'

‘On Whelm, but not
of
it,' said Robin.

‘And you find England much changed?' Heini asked, dabbing some soup off his chin.

‘It's as though I've been asleep for a century,' said Robin. ‘Delicious soup, Candy. Nice and simple.'

‘Thank you, Dob.'

‘
Ja. Sehr gut
.'

‘Thank you, Uncle Heini.'

‘Perhaps I'm being paranoid,' said Robin, ‘but it's like some old science fiction film; the people I thought I knew have been replaced by near perfect replicas who pretend that nothing has changed.'

‘But now they all have the razor mouths and little mean eyes of sharks,
ja
?'

‘You noticed too! So I'm not paranoid?'

‘Why you think I move to a tiny island on the Aegean? So, it's too hot and my skin is like brown paper but,' Heini smiled seraphically, ‘no sharks. They don't even holiday there, it's too cheap for them. Nothing but dolphins.'

‘Have I got a mouth like a shark, Dob?' she asked.

‘Robin.'

‘Sorry. Robin. Have I?'

‘Well …' Robin smiled cruelly at her. ‘Not exactly, but you've grown a shark's skin.'

‘They can flay a man just by brushing past him,' added Heini.

‘I'm not sure I like that,' she said.

‘You couldn't help it,
Liebchen
. You had to survive.'

‘And how wonderfully you did it,' said Robin. ‘My old Candy, mud on her knees and sultanas in her pockets, now a mother of two, household name and national sex symbol.'

‘Candida,' she corrected him, but he had turned back to Heini.

‘It's not just friends,' he said. ‘Strangers have changed too. The streets are full of sharp young men with unkind faces and the girls … I went into a pub I used to like, over in Chelsea, and found myself in a sea of them, all blonde and about seventeen and it was all, oh, horrible, sex-and-money. No. Not even sex, it was just money and sex with money. Everything's gone hard and shiny and fast. Like that dreadful new magazine.'

‘
Capital
,' prompted Gilda.

‘Jake's doing the promotion for that,' said Candida.

‘No soul,' Faber put in. Then he caught Heini's eye and seemed to dive back into his talk with Gilda.

‘Has it changed or have I just got old overnight?'

‘Oh, it's changed,' said Candida, feeling obscurely riled. ‘We've all changed, but I think it's for the better. Now people do instead of sit around and think. I hated all that passive communing. You'll change too. If you stick it out. Could I have everyone's bowls?' She took the table's bowls and went to fetch the
noisettes d'agneau
while Jake poured wine.

Samantha was sitting in the kitchen watching a personal finance programme on the small television. She took the bowls from Candida and loaded them into the dishwasher. As directed, she had already arranged pretty circles of cucumber, mint and thin-sliced new potato on seven plates.

‘Want me to serve up, Candy?'

‘Yes, please, Sam,' Candida told her. ‘You could take it through for me. I'm just going up to have a look at Perdita.'

‘Right you are.'

Perdita was sound asleep. Candida looked at her long and hard before stroking her scant hair. Then she went to her bathroom, locked the door and took some small pills supplied her on a regular basis by a studio technician to whom she had once confessed stage fright. She sat on the edge of the bath waiting for them to take effect. She began to feel her blood hum through her and was suddenly as acutely aware of her posture and the arrangement of her limbs as if she had been watching her beauty on a studio monitor.

‘You want him so much,' she whispered and she could feel the breath hissing between her lips as they formed the words. ‘You want him but he's Faber's now. Look at me.' She looked in the mirror. ‘You are attractive, you are unavailable and, Candida, you are calm.' She stood, shook out her dress and stuck out her tongue. The coating on the pills had stained it blue. She scrubbed at it briefly with a toothbrush then let herself out and went back to join the party. ‘Sleeping like a lamb,' she told Faber. ‘Now tell me all about your Iras. Is it true she's actually writing a novel?'

She tried hard. She even did well. She gave Faber all her attention and drew out Gilda on her divorce. Once Samantha's summer pudding had arrived, she even swopped places with Jake and drew out Steve on the subject of his Hong Kong youth, which was really quite interesting. She was constantly aware of her childhood friend, however. His voice rose warmly above Faber's baritone and Heini's childish fluting and occasionally someone would call out to her, making her look across the table and see his teasing eyes on her reply. When at last she steered them into the drawing-room she could suffer it no longer. When Jake offered to fetch coffee she said,

‘No, you sit there, darling, you've had far too hard a day,' which raised a laugh. ‘Dob can help me,' she said, ‘now that he's one of the disapproving unemployed.'

‘Robin,' he said.

‘Dob!' she insisted. ‘We may have changed, but you haven't.' This raised another, less certain laugh.

He followed her to the kitchen.

‘Delicious grub,' he said. ‘You are clever – career and
haute cuisine
too.'

‘Well, Samantha made the pudding.'

‘The soup was best.'

‘Did you really think so?'

‘Yes.'

‘Good.'

‘You didn't need any help doing this at all. Did you?' He gestured to the tray where Samantha had already laid out coffee cups, saucers, sugar and milk before retiring, with a thriller, to bed. ‘Your slave had done it all already.'

‘We pay her a very tidy sum. But no, I just wanted to talk to you away from all the chatter.'

‘Oh, good.' He pulled himself up onto a work surface, popped some coffee sugar in his mouth, and sat up there, looking expectant. She filled the cafetière with boiling water then went to stand before him.

‘I just,' she said, looking down and tapping softly at his kneecaps with her knuckles, ‘I just wanted to say how happy I am about you and Faber. I think it's a match made in Heaven.'

He stopped playing, stopped teasing, drew her between his thighs and kissed her once on the forehead.

‘Thank you,' he said. ‘That's very, very sweet.'

‘I am attractive,' she thought, feeling his hands on her shoulders and smelling him faintly through his loose white shirt. ‘I am unavailable and I am utterly calm. And this hurts.' She pulled back and took one of his hands in hers. It was heavy with wine. ‘Welcome back,' she said and kissed the back of it gently. ‘Robin. Dob died, didn't he?'

‘Eight years ago,' he said. As she lifted the tray he jumped down. ‘Let me,' he muttered and took the cafetière from her to lighten her load.

‘Ah, caffeine,' said Steve as they came into the drawing room. ‘Just what the doctor ordered.'

‘It's decaffeinated I'm afraid, Steve.'

‘That's all right,' said Steve, crestfallen.

‘Faber and Heini are upstairs looking at the picture,' said Jake.

‘I'll get them,' said Robin.

‘No,' Candida was at the door before him. ‘Let me.' She gave him a discreet smile and he gave way.

Heini and Faber were standing on the landing before Faber's painting, the old man dwarfed by the younger. Each stared upwards and they seemed not to hear her approach.

‘I think it's time you talked to our mutual friend,' Heini said.

‘I don't see what business it is of yours.'

‘I hadn't seen him or you for several years until today but, as I say,' Heini went on, unruffled, ‘our friendship is mutual. He's very ill. He wants to see you.'

‘Did he say so?'

‘Not in so many words. But I understood …'

‘You don't understand anything!' Faber rebuked him and turned away to see Candida waiting at the head of the stairs.

‘Ssh,' she whispered, ‘You'll wake Jasper.'

‘A lovely painting,
Liebchen
. A truly lovely painting,' said Heini. ‘So much family feeling.'

He remained looking up at the canvas but Faber strode past Candida and down the stairs. Minutes later, as she and Heini stood watching her sleeping baby, she heard the sounds of young love leaving.

Twenty-Three

As Saturdays brought a rush of visitors, the Friends of the Hospital flower-stall had already closed for lack of stock. Peter scoured the local supermarkets and found a lurid bucketful of plastic-wrapped bouquets. He chose the least offensive, a thin clutch of freesia with a frond of unlikely fern, in the hope that at least it might still have some scent to it. Riding up to Marcus's ward in the lift, he tore off the plastic wrapping, chose a deep yellow bloom that had scarcely opened, and offered the rest of the bunch to the one person in the lift whose hands were empty.

‘Here,' he told him, ‘I only need the one.' The man looked at him with deep suspicion but accepted the flowers and was gingerly sniffing them when he left the lift.

Marcus's body had been taken over by machinery. He had a drip feeding his arm on one side and a tube, emerging from under his sheet on the other, was draining something from him into a bag on the floor. He was wired to a beige machine on wheels that clicked and hummed, and since Peter's last visit he had suffered the pain and indignity of having a pipe thrust down his throat by way of his nose.

A small, neat woman with short, falsely-chestnut hair and a plain silk blouse was sitting near to the drainage bag. She had found herself a table and had improvised an office. She had a portable telephone there, three sharp pencils, pens red and black, a desk diary and seven or eight thick, navy-blue files. As Peter knocked and came in, she was talking on the telephone.

‘No, I said via Hawaii and then onto Oslo … That is correct … I beg your pardon?… Yes, the moneys will be with Messrs Schwab for collection on production of suitable proof of identity.' She looked up, bowed to Peter as though their acquaintance were a long one, and said, ‘I shall need written confirmation by the eighteenth … Good …
Hvala. Nazvat cu kasnije … Da. Zbogrom
.' She set the telephone down and stood with a smile. ‘You must be Peter. I'm afraid we don't know your last name.' She shook his hand. ‘Dorothy Birch.'

‘It's Peter Maitland. You must be Marcus's “
ancilla constanta
”.'

‘Quite so.' She gathered up a pen and two files. ‘I'll leave you alone with him.'

‘Oh, please. Don't let me disturb you.'

‘Not at all, not at all,' she said. ‘I need to stretch my legs. I've been sitting for hours. He's much worse,' she went on, in a stage whisper. ‘That's why I've set up camp in here. I'll be on the fire escape if you need me. It's so very airless in here – the nurses will insist on keeping the windows shut.'

As soon as she had shut the door, Peter weighed down the pages of her diary with the telephone then opened a window wide.

‘Hello, Marcus' he said and kissed Marcus's forehead. ‘It's Peter.' He changed the flower water, threw out an already browning pink rose and set the new freesia in its place. ‘Marcus?' He watched the old man's slow breathing and listened through nine bleeps of the monitor. ‘Smell this,' he said. He took the freesia from its vase, wiping off the water drops with his sleeve, then held it immediately under Marcus's nose.