First Aid (10 page)

She could see Peter now, awkward by the bed in the maternity ward. He went away for a couple of hours after Annie was born and came back again. She knew immediately that it was different from the earlier births, that he stood in a different relation to her. He looked like Rob, hardly older, just as dependable, but self-conscious, neuter, no longer connected. She was relieved when he vanished down the hospital corridor, leaving her to bury herself under the cotton cellulose blanket and float back up into a patch of light somewhere over the bed and the cot. She liked it up there. Afterwards, once she got back home, she argued herself out of the uneasiness, listened to a voice from within, resembling her grandmother's, telling her that women who'd just had babies didn't see straight. She got on with life, incorporating Annie's sleeping and trembly wailing into the existing lack of routine. She tried not to think that she had postponed freedom by ten years at least. She tried not to think about anything. But she wondered where he was when he seemed so late coming home. The unstable, post-natal way of looking at things kept coming back. She found herself adding and subtracting hours and fractions of hours and trying to reach a conclusion. She never worked out Annie's feeds like that. It had been easy enough for him to get the better of her. She'd never been good at counting or taking careful account of things. His carefulness was palpable, becoming more marked by the week, until, by a sleight of hand which still seemed grotesque, he slid from their conventional relationship to a different but equally conventional one and she was the one left looking excitable and unhinged.

Tara. She had got used to the name now, though she never used it in her grandparents' house. He had met her at work – the pharmaceutical company that had brought them to Kent in the first place. He had mentioned chemistry, or maybe electricity. Something boring. She couldn't remember now.

Dilys looked at the clock. ‘The man was coming over to service the boiler this afternoon.'

Jo said, ‘So what time is he coming?'

‘I put him off. He comes every August. The same man. A Mr Chambers.'

Jo took a deep breath. ‘Is there anything you'd like me to do for you while I'm here?' she said.

She glanced up at the high shelf that ran along the chimney-breast. It was overfull and the pale crockery looked dusty. ‘I could get on the steps for you. Wash the china,' she said.

‘No,' Dilys said. ‘Your grandfather and I can still manage. Thank you very much.'

AS SOON AS
Rob set foot in the house he said he wanted to go out again. He seemed to have forgotten it was lunchtime. He mumbled about having seen something that he wanted in a shop. Dilys asked Geoff what it was. Geoff said he had no idea; it was news to him. Jo could see this running on and agreed to go back with Rob in the afternoon. So Rob calmed down and digested the food Dilys had prepared. Scotch eggs, lettuce and beetroot followed by the remains of the apple pie, with ice cream this time. Geoff looked puzzled. He said he'd thought they'd all had a pleasant time together in the precinct. Annie had liked the water feature.

Once they had washed up and
Any Questions
was over, Dilys and Geoff sat down in the front room with a book and the newspaper and a biro for the crossword. The day had distinct parts to it. Jo, Rob and Annie went out. They walked down the street towards the main road where the buses passed. Jo said nothing until they drew level with the house two down from Geoff and Dilys's. The holding back was a habit from her childhood. This was the place where she used to start significant conversation with her friends, or allow reverie to begin. The house was different from the others, flat-fronted, having lost its bay in the Blitz. She had puzzled over it as a child and couldn't understand how, when rebuilding it, the Government had allowed it to look so different. Sixty years on, the bricks that had been used still looked raw and new. They had hardly weathered at all.

‘So what's all this about?' Jo said. ‘Grandad didn't know what you were on about. And honestly, if you're going to lie, learn to do it properly. It's no good being vague. Black and white trainers you should have said, or a Millwall T-shirt.'

‘But I don't want them,' said Rob.

‘Walk straight,' Jo said. ‘You keep bumping into the buggy.'

They got to the end of the street and Jo turned right along the main road past the Baptist chapel and the straggle of businesses that changed hands between one visit and the next. Nail beauticians and dubious jewellers who offered cash for gold. They altered the signage but couldn't afford to repaint. Only the dry cleaner had lasted.

‘Why are we going here, Mum? It's not the way.'

‘We're not carrying out this pantomime to the last detail, looking in an invisible shop for an invisible special offer. We'll have a walk now we're out. Go and have a look at the Thames.'

‘But what shall we say to Gran and Grandad when we get back?'

‘Grow up,' she said.

Jo knew she was snapping, but it was safe. She wasn't able to risk kindness.

They crossed the road at the traffic lights and turned immediately down a narrow passage. They moved abruptly out of the sunshine and into black shadow doubly cast by a disused industrial building on one side and a high wall topped with corrugated-iron sheets on the other.

‘There isn't a phone box down here,' Rob said.

Jo stopped. After the brightness it was difficult to see anything. She looked about. No, there wasn't a phone box.

‘You should have let us have mobiles,' he said.

‘Let doesn't come into it. When you can pay your bills you can have one. Anyway, Ella would keep hers switched off.'

‘You should find out if Ella's all right, though,' he said.

‘How do you suggest I do that?'

‘Call someone.'

‘I told you yesterday, she'll be fine. She goes her own way when it suits her, which is most of the time. Why is this different?'

‘Just check. See if she's gone back there.'

‘Back where?'

‘Home. See if she's there. Just see.'

‘She'll go to your dad's if she can't think of anything better,' Jo said.

‘Call him, then. Please, Mum.'

There were three notices on the wall behind Rob, each a different shape and in different lettering. Keep Out. Beware of the Dog. Warning, these Premises are guarded by a Patrol Room 24 hour manned. Jo read them in turn. They must have started with the simple one, then when they got trouble added the dog and when they got more trouble added the patrol room. So many defences for one tinny scrap yard. They cancelled each other out. The place was a pushover.

‘I'm tired,' she said. ‘We'll show Annie the Thames. Then we'll turn back.'

She could have spent the rest of her life standing in that dark place and she wouldn't have cared. She forced herself to walk. Rob dragged along behind.

She remembered how she had been at the age of twenty shortly before she got married and left home. In a kind of fog – though she hadn't realised at the time. She saw herself in a clingy blue dress with a slit at the side getting into Peter's car. Too tight, they had said.

She hadn't been her best at twenty. Escaping from Dilys and Geoff, not being Dilys and Geoff, had seemed enough. She had climbed what she had imagined was out of reach and had never noticed a mist come down. As a child, she had thought longer and more clearly. She had had plenty to think about – her mother, who had got clean away by dying; her grandma, who was a pervading presence. She had looked eagerly for well-defined people in between – people who occupied a specific space in reality and no more. There had been a woman in their road she'd thought about. She and Rob had passed the house as they walked to the main road. Mrs Delamare. Jo had never known her first name. She wasn't a neighbour that Dilys passed the time of day with. Dilys used to speak about her behaviour. This was to Geoff, of course, not to her young granddaughter. Overhearing her was Jo's first intimation that grown-ups behaved. She had been surprised. She'd thought behaviour was confined to children. Mrs Delamare's husband had left – gone, up or down the line, they'd said. Whether this was a euphemism, or he worked for the railway, Jo hadn't known. Asking often failed to clarify this sort of thing. The woman had had pretty hair, which Dilys used to say was dyed, though it probably wasn't. Soft and reddish it was, plenty of it. Not long after Mr Delamare's disappearance, a man had started to visit, arriving in the early evening, setting out in the morning. He had had a key, but he had never put the dustbin out on Sunday night. He used not to be there then, or on Friday or Saturday nights. Jo didn't think she had romanticised the love affair, though she had liked the way he locked his hands round the back of Mrs Delamare's waist to pull her to him and kiss her. Women's waists used to be smaller then. They were still encircling them with tape measures. Sexier than standing on the scales. What had interested Jo were the woman's solitary weekends. Mrs Delamare had worn old clothes and had looked serene, sitting on the front step on warm days. She used to come out in the morning in a frayed green kimono, not to grab the pint of milk but to smoke half a cigarette and blow smoke rings into the sky. Then late in the evening she did her cleaning and ironing with the lights on and the curtains wide open. She had treated her front yard and the road outside as unselfconsciously as the other neighbours did the back. The man used to come in that way. Jo had thought that was perhaps why she liked being out there.

No one else had done these things. And, apart from the man, there had been no visitors: no elderly relations, no Sunday lunches that made the whole street smell of burnt dripping and gravy. Jo used to try to work out how such a life could be arrived at. She had seen that it wasn't going to be easy. She had been very young, but she had understood the woman's peacefulness and where it came from. It had already been in her bones, waiting.

She had taken Felpo home after they had made love for the first time. He had moved in that same afternoon. It had been easy. He was four years younger than she was. He'd been a hospital porter and a barman and a courier. He'd lived in rented rooms and other people's flats and once in a loft over an egg-packing shed in Hertfordshire. He'd broken his arm jumping off a garage roof when he was ten and had salmonella from eating tuna from a dented tin. He ate everything apart from coleslaw. Jo had found out that much on their way from Lois Lucas & Son to the flat but she hadn't, at that stage, known anything else about him, neither the form-filling stuff, nor the tired particulars which are squeezed out of the question, What sort of person is he? These things explain nothing. Some people, although new to you, come with labels attached. They stick them on themselves, as large as sandwich boards sometimes. They want you to know who they are and where they come from. He wasn't like that.

She had often thought how it would be with another kind of man. Several other kinds of men, but all rolled up into the same difficulty. She had had a few propositions made to her since she had stopped being married. Not blatantly adulterous, which is what she would have expected, just weird. There was the man on the beach who beckoned and murmured ‘Lubberly lubberly'. And the man who came to sit opposite her and Annie in Bettine's café and offered her a tot of rum in her cup of tea. Then there were others who were less gross but who still carried desperation around with them like a mobile phone that was tucked away but inevitably started ringing. She hadn't seen these overtures as opportunities. They made her fed up. The easiness of something better she had known about, but only deep down, she hadn't been able to retrieve it. Different from the off-putting stories she could elaborate on indefinitely. The embarrassment of introducing a new man to Ella and Rob.

This is John, a straightforward, self-conscious, not entirely smitten bloke, who's just popped in for a drink/cup of tea/pee.

Here's John again. He's come for supper. Oh, a bottle of wine, how thoughtful.

Here's John. We're off to the pub. Could you baby-sit for an hour or so? (The presuming hand laid on her to guide her out of her own house.)

Here's John. He thinks he might be over the limit, so he's staying. (The presuming hand laid on her to guide her back in again.)

Felpo had his feet in between hers, while John was still checking to see if he'd locked the car. He made her brave. Perhaps she had already become brave. He arrived at the moment she was independent enough from her old married self to be able to pull it off.

Jo remembered the way he looked at her before he left the shop to deliver the leaflets for the Fun Run lady. It might have meant something. The sense was usually accurate; it just never guaranteed future events. Annie asked her about the man and the invisible tiger. She asked repeatedly. Jo thought about him as she talked but the thoughts didn't fit the words; the picture in her mind was entirely different. She supposed that that was what conscience was for, to stop such flawed conjunctions. She had never got the hang of any of that: peering into her own mind with the part of herself that was a cut above the ordinary, disapproving of what she saw and zapping it. The next stage would be to approve and admire the view. That couldn't be right. Ella said that if she talked about every sad idiot who came into Lois Lucas's, they'd be there all night. Jo hadn't expected to see him again but the following week when she was on her own in the shop he came back.

She was drawing, resting the piece of paper on an old atlas. She often drew when there weren't any customers. She heard the door of the shop open and shoved the paper out of sight under a newspaper. He came across to where she was sitting and put both hands on the table. Jo hadn't imagined him so near so soon, whatever she had got them doing later. She felt the solidity of it. She hadn't thought of him as possessing any. She looked up and he was standing there with the old-leaves smell of hemp and damp hair, which she remembered, hanging about him. He was wearing the same black coat and had the same woven bag slung over his shoulder. She knew he had come to find her. He didn't pretend he was collecting seventies vinyls, or old clock parts. Jo drew the blind and put the closed sign up. Two women were standing outside, one right up against the glass, pointing out an embroidered fire screen to the other. She looked startled when Jo erased her. The last Jo saw of her face was her mouth, thin lipsticked lines opening. There was a strand of dull light at the bottom of the blind but it went nowhere. She and Felpo sat close together on one of the tip-up seats. They pretended they were in the back row of the Ramsgate Winter Garden. He took her hand in his. They stayed true to the time and place for a while, making the moves authentic to darkened halls. They whispered and tried to keep quiet. Then the others left silently, the audience and the players, the band leader and the girl with the ices and boxes of chocolate assortments. They left and they never came back. The smell of tobacco smoked long ago was embedded in the plush. Jo had never noticed before.