Little Bee (22 page)

That
night we stood on the empty foundation at the end of our garden where Andrew
was planning to build his glasshouse, and we talked about
saving
our marriage.
Just the phrase is excruciating. Everything Andrew said
sounded like his
Times
column,
and everything I said could have been ripped from the agony page of my
magazine.

“At
what point did we forget that marriage is a commitment for life?”

“I
just felt so unfulfilled, so downtrodden.”

“Happiness
isn’t something one can pick up off the
shelf,
it’s something
one has to work at.”

“You
bullied me. I just never felt loved or supported.”

“Trust
between adults is a hard-won thing, a fragile thing, so difficult to rebuild.”

It
was less like a discussion and more like a terrible mix-up at the printers. It
didn’t stop till I threw a flowerpot at him. It glanced off his shoulder and
smashed on the concrete base and Andrew flinched and walked away. He took the
car and drove off and he didn’t come home for six days. Later I found out he’d
flown over to Ireland to get properly drunk with his brother.

Charlie
started nursery that week, and Andrew missed it. I made a cake to mark the
occasion for Charlie, alone in the kitchen one night. I wasn’t used to being
alone in the house. With Charlie asleep it was quiet. I could hear the
blackbirds singing in the twilight. It was pleasant, without Andrew’s constant
bass line of gripes and political commentary. Like the drone note of bagpipes,
one doesn’t really realize it’s been playing until it stops, and then the
silence emerges into being as a tangible thing in its own right: a
supersilence.

I
remember scattering yellow Smarties over the wet icing while I listened to
Book of the Week
on Radio 4, and suddenly feeling so
confused I burst into tears. I stared at my cake: three banana layers, with
dried banana chips and banana icing. This was still two years before Charlie’s
Batman summer. At two years old, what Charlie loved most in the world was
bananas. I remember looking at that cake and thinking:
I
love being Charlie’s mother. Whatever happens now, that is the one thing I can
be proud of.

I
stared at the cake on its wire tray on the work surface. The phone rang.

Lawrence
said, “Shall I come over?”

“What,
now?
To my
house
?”

“You
said Andrew was away.”

I
shivered.
“Oh, goodness.
I mean…you don’t even know
where I live.”

“Well,
where do you live?”

“I’m
in Kingston.”

“I’ll
be there in forty minutes.”

“No, Lawrence…no.”

“But why?
No one will know, Sarah.”

“I
know but…wait a minute, please, let me think.”

He
waited. On the radio, the continuity announcer was promising great things for
the next program. Apparently there were many misconceptions about the tax
credit system, and their program was going to clear up a good few of them. I
dug my nails into the palm of my free hand and fought desperately against the
part of me that was pointing out that an evening in bed with Lawrence and a
bottle of Pouilly-Fumé might be more exciting than Radio 4.

“No.
I’m sorry. I won’t let you come to my house.”

“But why not?”

“Because my house is
me,
Lawrence.
Your
house is your family and my house is my family and the day you come to my house
is the day our lives get more tangled up than I’m ready for.”

I
put the phone down. I stood quietly for a few minutes, looking at it. I was
doing this to protect Charlie, keeping the distance between me and Lawrence. It
was the right thing to do. Things were complicated enough. It’s something I
could never have explained to my mother, I suppose: that there are
circumstances in which we will allow men to enter our bodies but not our homes.
My body still ached from the sound of Lawrence’s voice, and the frustration
rose inside me until I picked up the phone and smashed it, again and again,
into my perfectly iced cake. When the cake was quite destroyed I took a deep
breath, switched the oven back on, and started making another.

The
next day—Charlie’s first day at nursery—my train was canceled so I was late
back from work. Charlie was crying when I picked him up. He was the last child
there, howling in the middle of the beeswaxed floor, smashing his little fists
into the play leader’s legs. When I went to Charlie, he wouldn’t look at me. I
pushed him home in the buggy, sat him down at the table, dimmed the lights, and
brought in the banana cake with twenty burning candles. Charlie forgot he was
sulking and started to smile. I kissed him, and helped to blow out the candles.

“Make
a wish!” I said.

Charlie’s
face clouded over again. “Want Daddy,” he said.

“Do
you, Charlie? Do you really?”

Charlie
nodded. His lower lip wobbled, and my heart wobbled with it. After the cake he
got down from his high chair and toddled off to play with cars. A peculiar
gait, toddling. A sort of teetering, really—my son at two—each step a hasty
improvisation, a fall avoided by luck as much as by judgment.
A sort of life on short legs.

Later,
with Charlie tucked up in bed, I phoned my husband. “Charlie wants you back,
Andrew.”

Silence.

“Andrew?”

“Charlie
does, does he?”

“Yes.”

“And what about you?
Do you want me back?”

“I
want what Charlie wants.”

Andrew’s laugh down the phone—bitter, derisory.

“You
really know how to make a man feel special.”

“Please.
I know how badly I’ve hurt you. But it’ll be different now.”

“You’re
bloody right it’ll be different.”

“I
can’t raise our son alone, Andrew.”

“Well,
I can’t raise my son with a slut for his mother.”

I
gripped the phone, feeling a wave of terror rise through me. Andrew hadn’t even
raised his voice.
A slut for his mother.
Cold, technical, as if he had also weighed up
adulteress, cuckolder,
and
narcissist
before selecting precisely the most apposite noun.
I tried to control my
voice but I heard the shake in it.

“Please,
Andrew. This is you and me and Charlie we’re talking about. I care so much
about both of you, you can’t imagine. What I did with Lawrence…I’m so sorry.”

“Why
did you do it?”

“It
was never meant to mean anything. It was just sex.” The lie came out of my
mouth so easily that I realized why it was so popular.

“
Just
sex?
That’s the convention, isn’t it,
these days? Sex has become one of those words you can put
just
in front of. Anything else you’d like to minimize at this time, Sarah?
Just unfaithfulness?
Just betrayal?
Just breaking my fucking heart?”

“Stop
it, please, stop it! What can I do? What can I do to make it right again?”

Andrew
said he didn’t know. Andrew cried down the phone. These were two things he had
never done. The not
knowing,
and the crying. Hearing
Andrew weeping over the crackling phone line, I began to cry too. When we both
dried up, there was silence. And this silence had a new quality in it: the
knowledge that there had been something left to cry over, after all. The
realization hung on the phone line.
Tentative, like a life
waiting to be written.

“Please,
Andrew. Maybe we need a change of scenery.
A fresh start.”

A pause.
He cleared his throat. “Yes.
All right.”

“We
need to get away from things. We need to get away from London and our jobs and
even Charlie—we can leave him with my parents for a few days. We need a
holiday.”

Andrew
groaned.

“Oh, Jesus.
A
holiday
?”

“Yes.
Andrew. Please.”

“Jesus.
All right.
Where?”

The
next day, I called him back.

“I’ve
got a freebie, Andrew—Ibeno Beach in Nigeria, open-ended tickets. We can leave
on Friday.”

“This Friday?”

“You
can file your column before we leave, and you’ll be back in time for the next
one.”

“But
Africa
?”

“There’s
a beach, Andrew. It’s raining here and
it’s
dry season
there. Come on, let’s get some sun.”

“Nigeria, though?
Why not
Ibiza, or the Canaries?”

“Don’t
be boring, Andrew. Anyway it’s just a beach holiday. Come on, how bad can it
be?”

Serious times.
Once they have rolled in, they hang over you
like low cumulus. That’s how it was with me and Andrew, after we came back from
Africa. Shock, then recrimination, then the two awful years of Andrew’s
deepening
depression,
and the continuing affair with
Lawrence that I never could quite seem to stop.

I
think I must have been depressed too, the whole time. You travel here and you
travel there, trying to get out from under the
cloud,
and nothing works, and then one day you realize you’ve been carrying the
weather around with you. That’s what I was explaining to Little Bee on the
afternoon she came with me to pick up Batman from nursery. I sat with her,
drinking tea at the kitchen table.

“You
know, Bee, I was thinking about what you said, about staying.
About us helping each other.
I think you’re right. I think
we both need to move on.”

Little
Bee nodded. Under the table, Batman was playing with a Batman action figure. It
seemed the smaller Batman was engaged in a desperate battle with an unfinished
bowl of cornflakes. I started explaining to Little Bee how I was going to help
her.

“What
I’m going to do first is track down your caseworker—
oh
Charlie, food is not a toy
—track down your caseworker and find out where
your documents are held. Then we can—
please Charlie, don’t
get those flakes everywhere, don’t make me tell you again
—then we can
challenge your legal status, find out whether we can make an appeal, and so on.
I looked this up on the web and apparently—
Charlie! Please!
If I have to pick up that spoon one more time I will take away your Batman
figure
—apparently if we can get you temporary resident status, I can
arrange for you to take a British Citizenship Exam, which is just simple stuff,
really—
Charlie! For god’s sake! Right, that’s it. Get out.
Now! Out of the kitchen and come back when you’ve decided to be good
—just
simple stuff about the kings and queens and the English civil war and so on,
and I’ll help you with the revision, and then—
oh Charlie, oh
goodness, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you cry. I’m sorry, Batman. I’m so
sorry. Come here.
”

Batman
flinched away from my arms. His lip wobbled and his face went red and he
howled, abandoning himself utterly to grief in that way only infants and superheroes
have—that way that knows misery is bottomless and insatiable—that honest way. Little
Bee rubbed Batman’s head, and he buried his masked face in her leg. I watched
his little bat cape shaking as he sobbed.

“Oh
god, Bee,” I said. “I’m
sorry,
I’m just a mess at the
moment.”

Little
Bee smiled. “
It’s
okay, Sarah, it’s okay.”

The
kitchen tap dripped. For something to do I got up and tightened it, but the
drips kept coming. I couldn’t understand why that upset me so much.

“Oh
Bee,” I said. “We’ve got to get a grip, both of us. We can’t let ourselves be
the people things happen to.”

Later,
there was a knock at the front door. I pulled myself together and went in
through the house. I opened the door to Lawrence, suited, travel bag slung over
his shoulder. I saw his relief, his involuntary smile when he saw me.

“I
didn’t know if I’d got the right address,” he said.

“I’m
not sure you have.”

His
smile disappeared. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

“I’ve
only just put my husband in the ground. We
can’t
do
this. What about your wife?”

Lawrence
shrugged.

“I
told Linda I was going on a management course,” he said. “Birmingham. Three
days.
Leadership.”

“You
think she believed you?”

“I
just thought you might need some support.”