Little Bits of Baby (31 page)

Peter and Jake had played squash that afternoon. Peter had heard about the firm's generosity to Faber and queried Jake's motivation. The game had ground to a halt as, watched by the curious few through the perspex rear wall, Jake opened his heart.

‘It was almost as though Faber had been blackmailing me,' he said. ‘He knew how badly I'd want that painting once I'd seen it. He knew I'd pay any price. It could almost have been an incriminating photograph or a clutch of love letters.'

Peter had apologised afterwards and said that it would have to be their last game.

‘Andrea was all right about it at first, but she's gone and left the choir and I think she's being a bit funny about things. You know?'

Jake knew this was untrue, but he was not greatly surprised. Since Robin's return, their games had come to seem slightly redundant for him too. Sending Peter away burdened by so full a confession of guilt brought a satisfactory full stop to the proceedings. Secretly, wanting to spare Peter's feelings, Jake had recently taken out a membership at a club with slightly more cachet and a more convenient address. An attractive colleague, younger and fitter than Peter, seemed keen to discuss a strained marriage and Jake had already challenged him to a match there.

Candida's orgasms were usually minor miracles of vocal restraint. Tonight however, as she wrapped her legs across the small of his back to control his rhythm, he almost told her not to wake the baby. Then, as she was retreating into her separate ecstasies beneath him, an image crossed his mind which wasn't hers and he too had trouble keeping quiet. He was quite used to fantasies about other people intruding between them – it was an experience they shared and she had dimissed it as ‘only natural' – but this particular, spectacularly effective fantasy, was socially inept to say the least. In the first years of their marriage she would, charmingly, use her last, panting breaths, to sigh that she loved him. As time took its cynical effect this was trimmed to a brief, if loving moan or an eloquent little sob of ‘Oh, Jake!' Tonight, with the perfect timing of an actress in some tired marital farce, she sighed, ‘Oh, Dob!'

A silence, fat with estimation, fell between them as he rolled to one side. She chuckled shortly then, as she rolled over into her precious, pre-dawn sleep, muttered, ‘Well that makes two of us.'

From then until shortly before her alarm went off, as he lay staring through the darkness to her side of the bed, he could almost believe she had read his mind.

Thirty-Seven

Peter and Andrea took it in turns to stop work after lunch once a week in order to bring the kindergarten accounts up to date, place orders with various suppliers of wholefood, paint, coloured paper and so forth. The idea was also to finish all the administrative work in time to have a couple of hours of precious free time before going downstairs to help the other see the children off with their parents. Andrea had just finished ordering a week's supply of salad ingredients and a sack of baking potatoes and was on her way to brave an end-of-season sale when she found Robin slouching at the kitchen table. He had more or less moved into Faber's studio now and Andrea was embarrassed at their mutual failure to talk about something so important. They never talked about anything important, come to that; Robin never stayed in the same room long enough. Now he seemed unusually deflated. She pulled out a chair and sat across the table from him.

‘Hello,' she said. He hummed by way of reply. ‘How are things?' she asked him.

‘Things are fine,' he said, looking at his hands.

‘Are you, by any chance, a bit bored?'

‘I am a bit,' he confessed. ‘I've seen everything I want to see, Iras is at school and Faber's working.'

‘Oh.'

‘Why aren't you?'

‘It's my afternoon off. I was just going into Chelsea. Do you want to come too?'

‘No thanks.'

‘You could always go down and join Peter.'

‘Could I?' He brightened.

‘Of course. He's getting them to build things with cardboard and glue. He can always do with a bit of help.'

‘I will then. Thanks, Mum.'

He rose briskly and went downstairs.

Why did I do that? she wondered. He was good with children – better than Peter, in fact, who could be a mite patronising with them. Peter had mentioned Robin's interest in teaching the blind. A friend of theirs, one of the old ones no longer greatly seen, was the principal at a specialist teacher-training college in Kent. Andrea had not told Robin this, uncertain whether he would welcome helpful interference.

She let herself out of the back door and was heading down the Chase when a taxi slowed beside her and a woman's voice called her name from its window. Andrea stopped and turned, raising her umbrella. It was the tidy woman with the dyed hair who she had seen at the funeral. Peter had told her the name but she had forgotten it. The woman, tidy as ever, all in grey today, asked the taxi-driver to wait and came to join Andrea on the pavement.

‘I nearly missed you,' she said. ‘You don't know me, although I have met your husband. I'm Dorothy Birch. I was Marcus Carling's assistant.'

‘How do you do?'

They shook hands. Miss Birch clicked open her slender briefcase and took out a small brown envelope.

‘Marcus asked that this be given you after the funeral but I lost you in the crowd. I'd have come sooner but things have been fairly demanding, as you might imagine.'

‘Of course,' said Andrea.

‘I'm afraid he did make a stipulation about it. I told him it was hardly fair since, after all, the two of you were complete strangers and your agreeing to read that poem was a great favour. Still, he was adamant so all I can do is pass it on and leave it to your discretion.'

‘I see. What was the stipulation?'

‘Well,' said Miss Birch handing her the envelope, ‘he asked that you spend it entirely on pleasure.' She fluttered her eyes slightly as she said this word, giving Andrea a glimpse of another Dorothy Birch, bold and sensation-seeking.

‘Goodness,' said Andrea. ‘I'll do my best. What fun! Thank you.' She looked at the unassuming envelope then raised it in a half-wave as the taxi took Miss Birch away into the Clapham drizzle.

Andrea had put the funeral from her mind easily, unattached as it was to the fibres of her ordinary life. Learning and reciting the poem had been fun, however. She could still remember it, word for word, and caught herself performing it in the bath or in the steam of the stove. She had resolved to learn more poetry, on the basis that it was good private entertainment and probably an early defence against senility. Being paid for her slim performance was an unlooked-for bonus. She paused in the shelter of an overhanging chestnut tree and tore the top of the envelope. It would be a mere financial gesture, she supposed, enough to buy a book, perhaps, or a record. She could buy a book of poetry. When she saw the sum involved her first reaction was to make sure that the cheque was hers and not that of some legatee given her by mistake. Her name was clearly printed on the first line. A neighbour trotted by, complaining of the weather. Startled into circumspection, Andrea took out her purse and stuffed the cheque behind the notes there.

Peter had received nothing and he was surely far more worthy of Marcus Carling's gratitude. The idea was probably that she should think of something that would be a treat for Peter as well as her. She looked at the lid of thick cloud that hung on the dreary vista at the bottom of the street and knew that she had to buy them a holiday somewhere. Somewhere hot. There was a travel agent on the Wandsworth Road which specialised in trips to the Caribbean. She hurried there and stood outside looking, as she had often done when waiting for a bus, at the visions of palm trees, white sands and adorable black children in its window. Martinique. Trinidad. St Lucia. Guadeloupe. The Grenadines. They could go for Christmas. She envisaged them lying on chairs in the shallow surf, glutted with fruit-flesh and glistening with monoi oil.

She sat herself before a sleek young West Indian in electric-blue mohair.

‘I want to go to the Caribbean,' she told her.

‘Don't we all, lovey,' said the woman and her colleague, unseen behind a filing cabinet, gave a short shriek of laughter. ‘How soon did you want to go?'

‘Let's see. Well, over Christmas.'

‘December twenty?'

Andrea looked at the woman's calendar.

‘It would have to be the twenty-first,' she said. ‘Any two weeks between then and January the seventh.'

‘And where were you wanting to go?'

‘Martinique or the Grenadines.'

‘
All
of them?'

‘I don't know. You tell me?'

The woman laughed kindly.

‘Let's start with Martinique. Is it just you?'

‘No. Me and my husband.'

‘OK. Two to Martinique.' She opened a file and began flicking pages.

‘Second class.'

‘Economy class. Mmm. Well, there's a flight leaving on the twenty-second, coming back on the fifth.'

‘That's a bit late. We start work again on the seventh and we'll need to get things ready. Couldn't we come back earlier?'

‘They're all booked, unless you just went for a week.'

A week in the Caribbean was better than none at all.

‘OK. A week.'

‘Have you got somewhere to stay?'

‘No.'

‘Well, we could arrange that. Let's see. Right. Here we are,' she found a chart in the file she was flicking through and ran a long red nail down a list of entries. ‘One week, staying at the Hotel Fort de France – that's central, lovey, very nice – double room, breakfast and the economy flight there and back.'

‘Sounds perfect. How much would that be?'

The woman named a price nearly twice the value of the cheque in Andrea's purse. Andrea hid her shock, nodded her head and hummed as though thinking it over. ‘I'll have to ask my husband first,' she said.

‘Don't be too long over it,' the woman said. ‘This close to Christmas, the places go fast.'

‘I'll get back to you straight away,' Andrea said, then rose and left, feeling a stupid fraud.

She slid the cheque into an envelope especially provided then fed it into a machine in the wall of their bank. The machine's mouth shut after it with an accusatory clunk.

‘Idiot,' it said. ‘Dreamer.'

She flagged down a bus and rode it into Chelsea to fight with the bargain hunters.

Thirty-Eight

When Peter was alone with the children he liked to fantasise that they were all his by a harem of women as varied as the small people around him. He had never shared this with Andrea. It was after all only a fantasy and not a plan. When Robin walked in he spoiled it all, reminding Peter that his true son was old enough to make him a grandfather. Peter went on from cynically considering that at least Robin had spared him grandfatherhood, to depressing himself with wondering how many of the noisily industrious infants around him had similar surprises in store for their parents.

Jasper Browne, whose behaviour became increasingly nervous with every passing day, greeted Robin with enthusiastic shouts of, ‘The Holy Man!' so when Robin asked if he could help, Peter sent him in Jasper's direction. The two of them were now hard at work on what seemed to be a cathedral of egg-boxes and cardboard tubes.

‘And what's this?' Peter asked as he went the rounds.

‘We're building Willum,' said Jasper proudly.

‘Whelm,' said Robin who was deeply involved in their creation.

‘Whelm,' repeated Jasper.

‘Keep up the good work,' Peter chuckled and patted Robin on the shoulder. Robin didn't look up but continued to scowl with the effort of stapling tubes together, sideways on, to make a bell tower. They had started work with glue, like everyone else, but Robin had grown impatient (as had Jasper) and as a grown-up he had been allowed to borrow a stapler. Peter carried the other stapler with him as he walked, stooping occasionally to help fix some aeroplane wing or catfish's whisker too heavy for glue to hold alone.

‘Do you want some music while you work?' he asked, when he had seen to everyone.

‘Yes, please,' they chorused, except Robin, who had fixed on the tower and was glueing on gutters made from plastic straws.

Peter put on a Duke Ellington record which always went down well then walked around with little paint trays and brushes, setting down four colours and a brush by each child. Robin seized on Jasper's paints as soon as they arrived and proceeded to paint Whelm sunflower-yellow. Peter had just shown Rupert and Robert how to make brown when he heard Jasper shout, ‘Windows. Let's do windows!'

He looked up just in time to see Jasper make a darting movement with a brush which made a hole where the west window would have been.

‘Stupid little git,' Robin snapped and brought a palette tray full of paint hard down on the child's head. Jasper promptly shrieked. The other children froze in horror then, as Robin stamped from the room and slammed an upstairs door, began to point and laugh.

Peter ran to the stairs and shouted for Andrea. The Fernandez sisters emerged from the kitchen to see what the laughter was about, saw Jasper, who by now was wailing, and bore him upstairs to the bathroom for a shampoo. Red, yellow, blue and black ran in alarming swathes across his hair and onto his shoulders. Blessing Andrea for having insisted they invest in full length ‘activity smocks', Peter gave up searching for either wife or son and ran back to the room. The laughter died and they all looked up to him for a cue.

‘Silly Robin getting cross like that,' he said.

‘Yes. Silly,' said Flora Cairns and the rest began to agree.

‘Come on, then, let's finish their church for them. Who's going to help me rebuild Willum?' Everyone shouted at once. ‘Right,' Peter stilled them. ‘We need stained glass windows. How many? One, two, three, four. Four down each side and a big one at each end. Do you all know what they look like? Mmm? Yes? Right. Here's a bit of paper each.' He hurried round the circle doling out paper. ‘Now if each of you decorates a piece of paper, all over one side, then we can cut them up into stained glass window shapes and finish Willum by the time Jasper gets clean again. You don't have to do pictures – just colour splotches will do, as long as they join up. That's right, Flora. Keep it dry, Louise, or it won't cut properly. That's it.'