Everything and Nothing (7 page)

‘No, it’s nice. It was the right thing to do.’ Christian pointed to the bottle of wine he wanted, it seemed unlikely that he could get through this without alcohol.

Sarah was nervous, he realised; she kept on re-adjusting her scarf and he noticed the red rash creeping up under her chin like some sort of rampant ivy.

‘Anyway,’ she said, breaking a breadstick but not eating it, ‘new job?’

‘Yeah, I’ve been there nearly two years now.’

‘And it’s okay?’

‘Well, you know, as okay as jobs ever are.’

‘But you’ve done well.’

Christian tried to hear a note of sarcasm in her voice, but couldn’t find it there. He nodded and knew that he had to return like some semi-pro tennis player. ‘And what about you, what have you been up to?’

‘Well, I’ve mainly been living in Australia.’ She looked down and crumbled more of the breadstick. Their wine arrived and Christian poured them both a glass.

‘Australia. Wow.’ He wanted to leave. He had always hated anyone who went to Australia for anything other than a holiday.

‘Yeah, it was great.’ He could tell she wanted to say something and so he let the silence build. Sarah tucked her hair behind her ears incessantly. ‘After the, you know, miscarriage, I went back to my mum and dad’s for a while and then I thought, fuck it, I’m going to get on a plane, and I ended up in Sydney and I met someone and stayed for two years.’

Christian liked the sound of someone, it had been foolish to imagine she’d been pining after him. ‘Great. Did you work?’

‘Only bar work and stuff. It’s much easier to get by over there.’

Sarah chatted on about the weather and the standard of living and the beaches, stuff Christian had heard countless times before. It seemed implausible that he had nearly left Ruth for this woman. With the flip of a dice life took you on the oddest ride, up some ladders, down too many snakes. He could have had a whole life with Sarah, they’d have a two-year-old by now, probably living in some tiny flat somewhere because he had to give most of his money to Ruth, who would legitimately hate him. She could have even met someone else and he would feel lonely and jaded because of course most of their friends and relatives would have sided with her. He’d have two children he hardly knew, one who he’d never lived with, and he would have to take them on terrible days out to the zoo where they would all feel like crying. And then when Betty got older she would say to her future boyfriends that she didn’t trust men much because her father had got some girl pregnant when she was three and left her mother to bring her and Hal up alone.

And nothing would have been different with Sarah. He could see that as clear as the sun shining through the window from the street. They would have spent the past two years arguing about whose turn it was to take out the rubbish, or why he watched so much football, or who was more tired. It was sad to realise that no one was unique and who you ended up with was more down to circumstances than design. He longed to be at home, sitting on one of the uncomfortable sofas he always teased Ruth for buying only because they’d looked good, with Betty and Hal fighting and him and Ruth looking at each other and feeling for one tiny second like they were in complete agreement.

‘So what did you have?’

Christian hadn’t been paying enough attention to what Sarah had been saying. His pasta was offputting; there was too much of it in too small a plate, making it seem sticky when really it was perfectly well cooked. ‘Sorry, what did I have what?’

‘Boy or girl?

The question was appalling to him and Christian couldn’t imagine why she would want to know. ‘Oh, right. Sorry. Boy.’

‘To go with your girl. How perfect.’ The sarcasm was there this time. Should he apologise? Should he bring up everything that had gone on? Was that what she was expecting? He felt weary, it all seemed so pointless, nothing was going to be changed by ranting and raving, but maybe she needed to get something off her chest. Sarah, however, seemed to have had second thoughts and now she smiled. ‘Sorry, I am pleased for you.’

Christian toyed with the idea of telling her that Betty still never slept through the night or that Hal had never eaten one morsel of food even though he was nearly three and existed on an average of about twenty bottles a day. But it seemed too much of a betrayal to his family, as if sitting with Sarah wasn’t enough.

‘Anyway,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘It’s been great, but I’ve got a meeting at three and, you know . . . ’

‘Oh yes, okay.’

It was awkward leaving. Neither of them knew how to end it. Christian saw a pigeon with a broken leg in the gutter as they were saying goodbye and it looked so miserable he wanted to find a brick and bash it over the head. Its grey feathers were matted and it had a bald patch on its back and he worried that it had been abandoned by the other pigeons. As he watched Sarah walk away self-consciously he hoped she was leaving his life.

On his way back to his offi ce Christian checked his phone and saw he had three missed calls from Ruth. There would be a certain irony to something bad happening to a member of his family while he was having a disastrous lunch with his old affair. He called her back immediately and she answered in two rings.

‘Ruth, what’s wrong?’

Her voice cracked as soon as she heard him. ‘Oh God, it was awful. I’ve been trying to get hold of you for ages.’

‘What was?’ Panic rose like bile in his chest as he depicted terrible fates befalling his children, each racing heartbeat showing him a different image of terror.

‘The nutritionist.’

He relaxed. ‘Oh, of course, what did he say?’

‘I can’t talk now. You know, little ears and all that.’ Her voice shook and he could almost see her trying to hold herself together for the sake of the kids. She’d done a lot of that when Hal was a newborn baby. ‘I wish I hadn’t gone, though. The whole day’s been a disaster. I don’t know if I can do this any more.’

‘Do what?’

‘Be a mother.’

‘Come on, Ruth, calm down. Why don’t we go out to dinner tonight and talk about this properly, see if Aggie can babysit?’

‘I’m so tired, I don’t know if I’ve got the energy.’

‘Come on, just somewhere local. It’d be good for you.’

Ruth sniffed heavily down the phone. ‘All right.’

The death of the Brat had been a bad omen. Betty’s hysterics had only gathered momentum the further they got away from the scene of the crime. Nothing Ruth could say would calm her down so that by halfway there Ruth thought she might have a panic attack. The walls of the tube were too tight a fit and she was acutely aware of the bumps and grinds of the tracks. She wondered what she was doing, taking her children on this hurtling mass of metal deep underneath London. Everything seemed terrifying.

Betty had reduced herself to dull whimpering by the time they arrived in Oxford Circus but she was petulant and stroppy and hung off the buggy like a damp rag. The street was thronged with young girls waltzing carefree into Topshop, their skinny hips unscarred by child-bearing. Any of them could have been
Viva
models and yet the magazine was aimed at women like her. Well, not like her.
Viva
women juggled everything successfully, whilst also looking flawless.

The nutritionist’s offi ce was in a thin, tall building between Oxford and Regent Street and looked as imposing as a giant headmaster. Ruth had expected to press a buzzer and be shown up to a floor, but she was able to walk straight in and up to the reception desk because the nutritionist seemed to command the whole building. The receptionist gleamed, like a woman in a cosmetic surgery advert in the back of a magazine. Ruth felt grimy and under-nourished as she said Hal’s name.

Dr Hackett’s offi ce was bigger than her sitting room and furnished in a parody of the image of a successful private doctor, with gilt-framed paintings, a large well-polished wooden desk and two deep leather armchairs positioned on either side. He sat in front of two floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over a private garden which seemed an impossibility in the middle of the city. Ruth couldn’t hear any traffic noise.

Ruth had fixed Dr Hackett in her mind as a friendly, slightly hippyish but very posh man with longish grey hair and gangly legs which he would cross and uncross incessantly. Never had he been a paunchy older man with spectacles on the end of his nose and a ludicrously expensive-looking three-piece tweed suit. He also shouldn’t have been sitting on the other side of a heavy desk and he shouldn’t have looked so bored by the whole encounter.

As she sat down, Ruth could see herself and her children through his eyes so exactly the recognition hurt. Betty’s face was smeared and dirty and blotchy from the excess of tears; Hal looked nonplussed, stuck to her hip with a bottle in his mouth; and she looked too thin, with straggly hair and an air of neurosis resting on her like most women wore perfume. I’m not really this person, she wanted to say, you’ve just caught me on a bad day.

‘So, Mrs Donaldson,’ he said, ‘what seems to be the problem with your son?’

Ruth immediately felt defensive. ‘I don’t know if it’s a problem.’

The doctor sighed. ‘If it’s not a problem, then can I ask what you’re doing here?’ He made her feel stupid just as she supposed he’d meant to. She wondered how on earth he had ended up being a nutritionist.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that. I just meant we don’t know what to think.’

‘Please, put that down.’ Ruth jumped, only then noticing that Betty was pushing an enormous glass paperweight perilously close to the edge of the desk.

‘God, Betty, what are you doing?’ she shouted. Betty’s lip started to tremble. ‘Sorry,’ she said to the doctor. ‘Hal has never eaten anything solid. Ever. He lives on bottles of milk.’

‘How many does he have a day?’

The truth seemed suddenly untenable in this pristine office and so Ruth pointlessly lied. ‘About ten.’

‘At least they’re sustaining.’

‘Yes, but he’s nearly three.’

The silence was broken by the sound of Hal’s sucking. It could have been funny.

‘Do you offer him food?’

‘Every day. Every meal.’

‘Do you eat with him?’

Ruth rubbed the side of her neck. ‘No, not often.’

The doctor wrote something down. ‘Do you work?’

‘Yes, but my nanny is brilliant. She knows what to do. In fact, she’s recently planted a vegetable garden which Hal helped with because she read that if you get kids to see the whole process of growing food, they’re more likely to eat it.’

‘That’s not a theory I’m aware of.’

‘It’s not just Hal’s garden. I helped too,’ said Betty, slipping from her chair onto the floor and starting to cry. Ruth decided to ignore her.

‘And how’s the rest of his development?’

Ruth estimated she had about ten minutes before Betty launched into a full-scale tantrum. ‘It’s not great. He’s well behind where Betty was at this age. His speech is still quite limited and he doesn’t have many friends.’ Ruth thought she might cry. Her stomach felt as though it had been clasped in a vice.

‘Were you aware that refusal to eat can sometimes be a symptom of more serious physiological disorders?’

‘No, I wasn’t. Do you think Hal’s got something like that?’ She heard the pitch of her voice rising.

‘I’ve no idea. I have no reason to suspect that at the moment, I’m just saying it might be something we should explore further down the line.’

‘I want to go home,’ said Betty, from under the chair.

‘But are there any tests we can run?’

‘Not yet, Mrs Donaldson. One step at a time.’

You can’t do that, Ruth wanted to shout. You can’t dangle a piece of information like that and not follow it up. She wanted to stand up and shake the stupid man until he told her every possibility.

‘Have you tried not giving him bottles?’

‘No. My husband did suggest that, but it seemed too cruel.’

Dr Hackett looked at her over his glasses and a look of pure contempt clouded his features. ‘Cruel to be kind, I’d say.’

‘Mummy, I want to go. You said I could get a new Brat.’

Ruth looked down at her daughter sprawled on the floor, her face turning red as she worked her way up to a howl and momentarily hated her. ‘Not now, Betty, I’m talking. You won’t get a new Brat unless you behave.’

‘Do you work full time, Mrs Donaldson?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you heard of separation anxiety?’

‘Well, sort of.’ Of course, of course. How stupid of her not to realise that this too was going to turn out to be her fault.

‘When did you return to work after Hal was born?’

‘He was about five months.’ Ruth nearly apologised but managed to stop herself. She felt very hot.

‘Five months is a bad age to be separated from the mother,’ said Dr Hackett. ‘There are lots of key developmental stages that can get missed.’

Ruth’s mouth was dry. ‘Really?’ Why didn’t he ask when Christian had gone back to work or how much he was at home? Or if he had fucked his secretary whilst she was pregnant?

Betty was wailing. Ruth had a terrible urge to kick her. It reminded her of how she had lain in bed next to them when they were tiny newborn babies and wondered how she would stop herself smothering them with a pillow or throwing them across the room. It wasn’t that she had wanted to do it, in fact the opposite had been true. But it had seemed so unlikely that she was up to the responsibility it would take to sustain and nurture a whole life. Hal had fallen asleep on her shoulder and she could feel the sweat from his head seeping into her shirt.

‘Are you going to do anything about her?’ asked the doctor.

‘I’m afraid she has these tantrums. There’s not much you can do.’

She could see the doctor abandoning them to their fate. ‘The best I can suggest for now is that you start limiting his bottles. Stop offering him food. Then, when he gets hungry, give him some things he’d like. Biscuits are good, or chocolate cereal. The important thing is to get him eating, we’ll worry about the nutritional side later.’ He was having to shout now to be heard.

Ruth stood up. She had received the same advice from her very understanding GP, but she couldn’t take good advice even when it was given freely and without prejudice. Her limitations were stifling. She lugged Hal over to his buggy and strapped him in, then went to Betty and pulled her up by the arm, dragging her across the floor. It took all her energy to stop herself from smacking her daughter across the face.