After the Storm (36 page)

Markus was watching all this and he saw the old man’s evident distress. He took out a twenty-pound note discreetly and handed it to the old man, saying quietly, ‘Please, have a New Year’s Eve drink on me.’

The old man looked so pleased and he thanked Markus warmly as our bus arrived. We went up to the top of the bus and I sat next to Markus and Billy and was happy he had done that because it was a kind thing to do. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I was building a life with this gorgeous man. I felt blessed; I felt I had so much.

MAY

At lunchtime I sometimes drive to the street and sit outside the block where she lives. My colleagues make a big thing of going out to lunch together. They are a close-knit group. I do not like to go with them. They go to a pub on the corner of Primrose Hill, or to a café, which is hot and noisy. When I first joined the magazine Stephanie would invite me to come along. Now they know that I prefer to be on my own at lunchtime.

It takes me less than ten minutes to get to her flat from work. The block she lives in is near Baker Street and it is red brick, four storeys high and well kept. The flats look solid, safe and comfortable, a bit dull. The street is quiet in the middle of the day. There is a private dental practice there and I see people coming and going to their appointments. Sometimes there is a delivery van from Harrods or John Lewis. It took me a while to establish who their childminder was. After watching the building for several weeks I now know who she is. She is a young woman, in her early twenties, I would think. On one or two occasions I have seen her come out of the block with Billy in his buggy. She must take him for a walk somewhere. Or maybe she goes shopping.

Today I had only been sitting in my car for a few minutes when I saw her coming out of the block with Billy. I decided to follow her. I got out of my car and put money in the meter. I walked behind her. She stopped to put her shoulder bag into the tray under the buggy. She is quite short and big-breasted. She was wearing tight jeans that emphasized her round buttocks, white trainers and a bright blue top with white buttons down its side. She crossed the Marylebone Road and waited on the traffic island in the middle. I caught up with her there. The cars were three deep and the air was heavy with pollution. A rubbish truck drove by, emitting a sour smell from its back. I saw how it brushed against a cherry-blossom tree and unloosed a fall of washed-out petals.

She bent over the buggy. ‘Ooh, look at that big truck, Billy.’

Leaving the main road, she headed up a side road away from the shops. Perhaps there was a park around there? I stayed a few feet behind her, keeping quite close. She walked on past a grimy, unloved-looking church. I saw that she was turning into a large housing estate with four tower blocks grouped around a central square. The tower blocks were about ten storeys high and badly maintained. They had balconies on their inner sides looking onto a central patch of dried-up grass. Washing was strung along lines on some of the balconies. On every level black and white satellite dishes were screwed to the walls and pointed skywards. A dog sniffed around the outer perimeter of the square then lifted his leg to urinate.

This was her destination? What could she be doing here? She pushed the buggy confidently into the estate, under some concrete walkways, covered in graffiti, and over to a shabby little play area beyond the square of grass. Here there were two swings, a battered see-saw and a metal bench against the railings. No one else was there. I did not follow her into the play area, as it would have been too obvious. What would I be doing in such a place? So I walked into the estate as far as the walkway and watched her from the shadows. She settled herself on the bench and took her bag out. Then she adjusted the buggy so that it leant back more and arranged a shade over Billy’s face. He had fallen asleep.

She sat there for a few minutes, looking around. Then I saw a young man approach her. He must have come out of one of the flats. She stood up and they kissed. He put his hands on her bottom and gave it a squeeze. She pulled away, giggling. Then he sat down next to her. She offered him a cigarette, which he took. He was dark haired, unshaven and had olive skin. He looked as if he had just woken up. I thought he might be Greek Cypriot. They smoked and talked in a desultory way.

So this was how Kathy’s childminder spent her days – on trysts with her unemployed boyfriend. I wondered if Kathy knew that Billy was being brought to this estate for his daily walk. Almost certainly not; she would be the over-protective type. There would be all kinds of rules about no smoking in the flat or near the baby; instructions about his diet and sleeping regime. How trusting she was. How little she knew.

It was time to go. I walked back to my car and drove to the office. As I parked in the office car park I saw Philip Parr getting out of his big, flashy Mercedes. He walked over to me and did that thing of looking me up and down, which he always does.

‘Hi. How’s it going, Heja?’

‘Good, thank you. And you?’

‘I just went to a press launch at RIBA. They’re launching a new website of all the civic buildings of Britain. The photographs were so dull.’

‘Who did them?’

‘They’re getting enthusiasts all over the country to record their local buildings. I think they’ve been given some kind of style guide because they all looked the same: dreary.’

He pushed the office doors open for me and we walked up the stairs together.

‘I guess we’ll have to give the website some coverage, however second-rate the material. Need to keep RIBA happy! I’ll speak to Kathy.’

At the top of the stairs we parted. I went to my desk and he walked over to Kathy’s office. She was standing next to Aisha and I saw that she had seen us walk in together. I have noticed that Philip makes her nervous. She pulled herself up as he approached her and they both went into her room.

Stephanie looked at me as I sat down.

‘Lunch with the big boss?’ she asked, her curiosity getting the better of her.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not today.’

That should keep them guessing.

MAY

Most mornings I walk to work through Regent’s Park. Markus drives me to Great Portland Street and then he heads east to Clerkenwell. I enter the park at the south end and love the formality of this part of it with its unfolding vista of fountains and flowerbeds. It’s a serene oasis in the middle of London. From the formal gardens you cross the road onto the Broad Walk with the zoo on the left. Some days you hear these strange, demented squawks coming from the birdhouse.

Our offices are in Primrose Hill and the whole walk takes me less than thirty minutes. Today there was an unseasonal wind stirring the trees into a frenzy. I had no jacket with me and was walking fast to keep warm. A man with a pug dog and a golden Labrador was walking in front of me. The Labrador was pure noble dog, all fine head and loping walk. The pug, in contrast, was comical and looked as if he was hopping along the path, his short legs working very hard with never more than two feet on the ground at the same time. He made me smile. I suppose some of us are lucky to be born Labradors and some of us have to be pugs and make more of an effort to keep up.

Halfway down the Broad Walk I felt a sensation of defin-ite wetness between my legs. I stopped at one of the benches and sat down, looked down, surreptitiously opening my thighs, and to my horror saw a spreading circle of watery red staining my pale yellow trousers. I’m still breastfeeding Billy so my periods hadn’t come back – until today. The trousers were fine cotton and absorbent and I could imagine the blood seeping up at the back. I didn’t know what to do.

Either I had to run back to the ladies toilet in the park or carry on to work as fast as I could and sort it out there. I decided to carry on, trying to hold my bag in front of me to hide the stain. In fact, my bag is bright red leather, so it seemed like it was a bit of a beacon and I felt embarrassed and ashamed of my poor leaking body. There was the usual contingent of dog-walkers in the park shouting confident greetings to each other and I imagined their eyes boring into my back as a great red stain spread across my bottom. The last few yards to the office seemed much further away than usual.

I reached the glass doors of our building, rushed past the receptionist, up the stairs and straight into the Ladies. I put on a towel from the machine. There was no one in there so I took my trousers off and tried to sponge the blood out with cold water. This just seemed to make it spread further and the trousers were wet now as well as stained. I was close to weeping as I felt like a child again, confronted by an adult world that was too much for me to master. I wanted to stay locked in the toilet cubicle, hiding from my team.

Finally I got a grip of myself, came out and headed for my office fast. I saw that Aisha was wearing a long black cardigan. I asked her if I could borrow it and I felt better the moment I had it on. I was an adult again. I decided to go up the hill to Hampstead to buy a new pair of trousers and then I would drop in at my gym for a shower and change. Aisha and I had to reschedule the whole morning of meetings.

I tried to tell Markus about it this evening. We were sitting at the kitchen table and I was making stuffed red peppers for dinner. I was pulling out the pithy white skin and chasing that last tenacious seed that always gets caught under the dome of the pepper.

‘I don’t understand why you got into such a state,’ he said.

I put the red pepper down on the cutting board and tried to explain why it had made me feel so uncomfortable.

‘It was a bit like the shame a child feels when they wet their knickers at school. You know, you’ve drawn attention to a private bodily function.’

‘Even if someone had noticed, all they would think is that you’d had an unexpected period.’

‘Can’t you see that it was embarrassing?’

What did I want from him? Empathy, I suppose. He has extraordinary eyes, long and narrow and slightly tilted up at the edges, and the clearest, iciest blue, like arctic waters. He was sharpening the kitchen knives on the sharpening rod, moving the blade back and forth with grace and precision. He always looked as if he was in control of his environment and I admired his expertise as he sharpened the knives. I started to peel and crush some cloves of garlic.

‘Someone told me today that Heja in my team used to be one of Finland’s top news presenters. Heja Vanheinen. Have you heard of her?’ I asked.

He tested the sharpness of the blade against his thumb. ‘Yes, she was the anchor for the main channel.’

‘You never said. Why on earth would she give that up? I mean, something like that to work on the magazine?’

He shrugged, absorbed with the knife’s blade. ‘Helsinki is a small city, it doesn’t satisfy everyone.’

‘She just doesn’t strike me as someone who would be a television presenter, though. She’s a bit too much of an ice queen for British TV.’

‘She was much admired in Finland,’ he said.

I’d peeled far too much garlic and would have to throw some of it away.

‘So it’s odd she left that job. I don’t get it, do you?’

He opened the kitchen drawer and put the sharpening rod and the knives away, each in its allotted place.

And then he said rather coldly, ‘Why should you care?’

I felt rebuked by him and was instantly defensive. ‘Why shouldn’t I be interested? I work with her every day.’

Something has changed with Markus since I went back to work. We aren’t easy with each other as we were during my pregnancy and I wonder if he thinks I should have stayed at home with Billy. We talked about it and I felt sure he supported me going back to work. He’s become more withdrawn these days and our silences are getting longer and more difficult to bridge. We don’t giggle together any more. So I chatter on in my nervousness to try to fill the silences and I know this irritates him even more. And he has created taboos around certain subjects. He will never talk about his life in Finland and I know very little about how he spent the first thirty-six years of his life. I wish he would tell me more but I can’t push it. I think there must have been a major rift with his family as none of them came to our wedding.

Why did we marry? I did not expect it and, in fact, it was Markus who said that for the baby’s sake we should marry before the birth. He said that in order to be free you needed to know which of society’s rules you could break and which rules you had better observe. Hardly a romantic reason to get married. We had this low-key registry office affair, which upset my mum, who would have liked us to marry in a Catholic church with the full service. There was no way Markus would have agreed to that. I was heavily pregnant at the time and only close friends and family were invited.

My parents came over from Lisbon and my aunt Jennie was there and I was sure someone would come from his side, one of his brothers if not his parents. His only guest was his partner from the diving club, someone he has met since moving to London. Did he even tell his parents in Helsinki that he was getting married? There has never been any word from them, not even a card. When I asked him about it he was cagey and changed the subject.

We hardly spoke over dinner that night. The stuffed peppers were OK, but it was not one of my best dishes and tears were pricking behind my eyes after his earlier rebuff. I knew I was being over-sensitive. It had been a difficult day and he’d made me feel foolish. I wanted to tell him that Billy had pulled himself up into a standing position just before dinner. Now I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. His face had its familiar closed-off look.

Straight after dinner Markus went into his workroom. It used to be Aunt Jennie’s dining room. She never used it much and when Markus moved in with me he made it his own. He took out all the old furniture, ripped out the ancient carpet and sanded the floor. He painted the walls white. Then he built new shelves for his books and installed his drawing table and plan chest. He has hundreds of books and each one is lined up exactly at the front edge of the shelf in the most precise way. He has turned it into a very attractive if rather minimalist workroom. There’s his brown leather armchair by the door and I sometimes sit there and read while he works.