Sheltering Rain (13 page)

A drain who had to be a radiator. Dragging her feet like a schoolgirl, Kate walked slowly over to the young girl, who sat slumped in her cheap anorak, plastic shoes, and a pervasive stench of misery. She wasn't sure how she could help in the face of such momentous despair. And Maggie knew very well that the girl spoke no English. But with the bossily evangelical air of a Sunday school teacher, she just seemed to expect people to get on with it. Those with a will would find a way.

Kate took a deep breath, stopped a short distance away from the girl, giving her time to realize she was approaching, and then smiled, and gestured toward the baby.

“Hello,” she said. “I'm Kate.”

The girl, her hair scraped back in a ponytail, and faint bluish shadows denoting more than the young mother's customary lack of sleep, looked blankly at her and then glanced around the room, looking for Maggie, or one of the Chinese helpers.

“Kate,” she said, pointing at herself, aware that she was speaking too loud, like an imbecillc colonial expecting that volume alone would help the natives understand.

The girl looked at her wide-eyed and expectant. With a gesture as insubstantial as she looked, she shook her head.

Kate breathed deeply. What on earth was she meant to do? She didn't have that gift for putting people immediately at their ease. Most of the time, she felt too ill at ease herself.

“I'm Kate. I help out here.” she said, helplessly. Then: “What's your name?”

The resulting silence was broken by a burst of laughter from the other side of the room, and the rapid gunfire of scattered dominoes hitting a tabletop. The elderly players had concluded their game. Maggie moved among them, exclaiming and congratulating in Chinese, her sleek black hair obscuring her face as she leaned over to examine the board.

Kate turned back to the girl, trying to maintain her smile.

“Boy or girl?” she said, gesturing toward the infant, whose sleeping face was just visible beneath the layers of donated clothing.

“Boy?” She pointed at the man seated nearby, so that he looked at her with a sudden expression of distrust.

“Or girl?” She pointed at herself.

Oh, God, but she sounded like an idiot. Her smile now becoming painful to maintain, she moved closer to the child.

“Your baby is beautiful.” It was. They all were, when asleep.

The girl looked at her baby, and then back at Kate, clutching it slightly tighter to her as she did.

I'm going to give up, thought Kate. I'll just point her over toward the food table and let Maggie do it. I'm just not any good at this. She thought, briefly, longingly, of her empty home. Then suddenly, two words flashed into her brain, a mental echo; two words from her childhood, whispered softly from her amah's lips.

“Hou leng
,” she said, gesturing toward the child. Then louder: “
Hou leng
.”

The girl looked down at the baby and back up again. She frowned slightly, as if unable to believe what was being said.

“Your baby.
Hou leng
.”

Two sweet, soft words: Very beautiful. The international language of flattery.

Kate felt a surge of warmth. She could do this, after all. She racked her brains, trying to remember whether she had achieved the correct tones.

“Hou leng
. Very beautiful,” she said again, smiling with benevolent delight.

Then Maggie appeared behind her.

“What are you doing to the poor girl?” she said. “She doesn't speak Cantonese. She's from the mainland, you daft woman. She speaks Mandarin. She won't have a clue what you're going on about.”

T
all, slim, public-school Hamish was an unlikely partner for Maggie. People had been saying so for the eighteen years they had been married. It was not just Maggie's height, the dark, earthy voluptuousness of her, against his insubstantial pallor, or the noisy, Chinese immediacy of her and her children's emotions, set against Hamish's northern European placidity. It was just that she seemed too much for him. Too much for almost anyone Kate could think of, come to that. She was too loud, too upfront. Too sure of herself. Kate was fairly sure she had not changed one iota since adolescence. It was why Hamish adored her.

Kate, on the other hand, had changed with practically every man she had ever been with. It was the changes they had wrought in her that had determined how far she fell for them. With Jim, she had been the young, hip parent, had enjoyed the loose, loving way with which he had treated both her and her daughter, the way that for the first time since Sabine's birth, she had not felt entirely defined by her status as “mummy.” He had given her back some of her youth, she had thought at the time, lightened her up, enabled her to stop worrying. Taught her about sex. But then, when things had begun to go wrong, and she had begun to suspect, she had hated the person he made her become. Hated being that paranoid, unhappy wretch, begging for truth, desperately changing her appearance in an attempt to win back his attention from the unseen threat. And when he had finally gone, the sadness had been tinged with relief that she didn't have to be that person anymore.

When Geoff had moved in, she had been an older, wiser lover. She had not given as much to him, conscious of the need, this time, to hold something back. Yet he had given her everything. Everything he had, that is. With Geoff, she had become a grown-up. He had expanded her mind, talked to her about politics, and society, and made her look harder at the injustices of the world around her. If the comfort had outweighed the passion, then that had been fine, she had told herself. She was probably better with someone who kept her steady. With Geoff, she had learned to use her brain, and it had felt like growing up. And he had been so sweet with Sabine, never attempting to push himself on her, or play daddy, but simply providing her with this solid backdrop of love and wisdom.

But then, six years on, had come Justin. Justin, who had made her realize that there was a whole side of her that had lain dormant for years, and now insisted on bursting through to the fore. She was a sexual being, and he made her sexual, and once it had sprung forth, like a geyser, it refused to be subdued. No one had made her glow like he did; no one left her blushing, and walking giddily, like a drunk, at nine o'clock in the morning. No one had surrounded her with a virtual aura of sexuality, a fizzing cloak of pheromones, so that she found herself turning heads, drawing wolf whistles, even when dressed down. And she deserved it, didn't she? She had told herself, desperately trying to rationalize the hurt she was about to cause. She was allowed another chance? Why should she have to give up on romantic love at the age of thirty-five?

“Is this a thin-person conspiracy? While you've been sitting there dreaming, I've eaten nearly all the cheung fun.” Maggie, perched against the sink unit of the kitchen, waved her chopsticks vigorously in front of Kate's nose. “Just because you can't tell the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin doesn't mean you're not allowed to eat the food.”

“Sorry,” said Kate, pushing at her lunch as it congealed in the bowl. She had thought she was hungry, but her appetite, so erratic of late, had chosen again to disappear.

“Oh, God. Not lovesick still. Not the can't-eat-a-thing stage at . . . What is it now? Three months?”

“I don't know what stage I'm at,” said Kate, miserably. “Yes, I do. The guilty stage.”

Maggie raised a carefully plucked eyebrow. When Kate had revealed she was leaving Geoff for Justin, she had expected that Maggie, who had known Geoff longer, would automatically take sides. But it hadn't happened; Maggie, perhaps fittingly for someone apparently able to hold two conflicting points of view at once, also appeared to have a capacity to retain dual loyalty.

“The guilty stage? Oh, don't be so wet. For God's sake. You're happy, aren't you? Justin's happy? Geoff is, let's be honest, hardly suicidal. Not the type, with all that psychiatric training. Probably giving himself a good therapeutic talking to even as we speak.” She honked with laughter, sending a piece of noodle flying across the table.

“It's not Geoff. It's Sabine.” Kate paused. “I'm wrecking her life.”

Maggie took a last piece of paper-wrapped prawn, sighed deeply, and then pushed her bowl toward the overflowing sink.

“I see. So it's adolescent hell, is it? The girl-child giving you a hard time?”

“Not as such. To be honest, she hardly talks to me. But I can see it, written all over her face. She thinks I've ruined her whole life. And she hates me for sending her to stay at my mother's.”

“Now,
that
you can't blame her for, if what you have told me is at all true. But as for ruining her life, don't be so melodramatic.” She grinned at Kate. “Fine coming from me, I know. But come
on
, she's hardly an abused waif, is she?”

Kate gazed at her, desperate for reassurance.

Maggie held up one hand, and began ticking off her plump fingers.

“One: Is she clothed and fed? Yes. Too bloody well, if you ask me, all that ridiculous label stuff. Two: Have you ever brought anyone cruel into her life? No. All your men—well, both your live-in men—have absolutely adored her, not that the little madam has ever given them much back, bless her. Three: Was Geoff her real daddy? No, as she was at great pains to tell him on any possible occasion. Four: Will she leave home within the next few years and without a backward glance? Absolutely.”

“Oh, well, that makes me feel a load better.”

“Just being honest, darling. All I'm saying is that you worry too much. Sabine is about as well adjusted a teenager as you can cultivate around here. And I mean that in a positive way. She's bright, she's bolshie, and she doesn't take shit from anyone. You have no need to worry.”

“But she doesn't talk to me anymore. She just stopped talking.”

“She's just sixteen, for God's sake. I didn't speak to my parents for about four years, and there were two of them.”

“But what if it's because of me? What if she keeps on hating me?”

“You wait till she wants a car. Or a deposit on her first flat. The love will return, believe me. The love will return.”

Kate gazed out of the window at the gray frontages of Kingsland Road; the car stereo and hardware shops, the local cafés, grimy billboards and welfare offices that proved that no matter what the estate agents insisted, this “up and coming” area resolutely insisted on going no further. What made her think her daughter was going to be any better off in the cloistered, green acres of Kilcarrion? What good had they ever done her?

She toyed with a plump, pink prawn, pushing it on a solitary journey around the rim of her plate.

“Do you ever get bored of Hamish?”

She wasn't sure where the question had come from, but once it was out she realized she needed to know the answer. Maggie, her cup raised to her mouth, lowered it slowly and considered with equal levity her answer.

“Bored? Bored . . . I don't know if I get
bored
exactly. I sometimes want to throttle him. Will that do?”

“But what makes you stay together? You can't be happy all the time. Can you?” The last two words came out a little plaintively, so that Kate tried to turn them into a joke.

“Of course we're not happy all the time. No couple is happy all the time, and if anyone tells you they are, she's bloody lying. But you know that.” Maggie frowned. “What is this, Kate? Honestly, sometimes you can sound like a fifteen-year-old talking about relationships.”

“That's because I feel about as good at them as a fifteen-year-old. But what makes you stay together? What keeps you hanging around at the point at which you want to disappear?” The point, she thought silently, at which I usually disappear?

“What keeps us together? Apart from the cost of a good divorce lawyer and the fact that our house has hardly risen in value in five years? Oh, and those evil trolls masquerading as our children? The truth, Kate? I don't honestly know. . . . Yes, I do. It's that despite being a complete arsehole sometimes, crap with money, frequently drunk, and frankly not a great shag apart from birthdays and special occasions, I genuinely can't imagine being with anyone else but Hamish. Does that help?”

“I've never been in a relationship where I haven't imagined being with someone else,” confessed Kate, sadly.

“Oh, I'm not counting fantasizing about Robert Mitchum.”

“Nor am I. Oh, God. Robert
Mitchum
?”

“I know,” Maggie grinned. “He's my guilty secret. He just looked like he'd have been so
stern
, you know?”

“But I'm not counting sexual fantasies. I have always thought about being with someone else. I have crushes on other people and stuff.”

“You
are
fifteen. I knew it.”

“Oh, God, what's wrong with me? Why am I so bloody useless at relationships?” She hadn't actually meant to say it out loud.

Maggie began gathering up the empty bowls piled up on trays around the kitchen.

“Hate to say this, gorgeous, bearing in mind your current squeeze, and all that. But perhaps you just haven't met the right person.”

J
ustin rang at a quarter to seven, shortly before Geoff was due to arrive. Kate was grateful for his call, grateful that over the tinny telephone line the sound of his voice could still flood her with warmth and longing, reassure her that her decision had been the right one. It had been rather unnerving, her conversation with Maggie, even if she had brought it all upon herself with her overly introspective mood. Now Justin, ringing unexpectedly, put it all right.

“I was thinking about you,” he said. “And I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“Oh, I'm so glad you did,” she said, a little breathlessly. “I miss you so much.”

His voice sounded a million miles away. “God, I wish you were here. I can't stop thinking about you.”