Separate Beds (6 page)

They would have to talk about money.

Mental note
. First thing in the morning cancel family villa with large pool on Croatian coast for last week in July.

‘Family villa with large pool’ had been Annie’s attempt to weld the components of the family back together. It was big enough to accommodate them all … plus the extra bedroom was there for Mia. Just in case. But now she would never know whether turquoise water, meals on a balcony overlooking the bay and daily tomato and feta salads would have produced the right glue.

Jocasta would have no regrets. She didn’t like her in-laws much, never bothered to hide her feelings and regarded the family holiday as a chore. Yet an optimistic bit of Annie insisted on believing that the relationship between her and her beautiful daughter-in-law held potential.

Tom had teased her about it. ‘You two are never going to be best friends, Annie.’ Couldn’t she spot a reluctant recruit to the Nicholsons? ‘Look,’ he had said gently, when he realized that Annie was cast down by this, ‘she didn’t even bother to turn up when Jake told us they were getting
married.’ True. Jocasta had been glaringly absent when Jake had dropped his bombshell. A pin-sharp memory. The litter of Sunday papers, Tom and she drinking coffee in the sitting room, Jake leaping to his feet.

‘I’ve got something to say. Mum, Dad … Jocasta’s pregnant, and I’m going to marry her.’

The announcement had slipped from him with the quasi-defiant, quasi-bravado of the twenty-five-year-old who had suddenly grasped that he had to act forty. Then he had beamed, and joy had danced across his features – and Annie was tipped back to when a tiny boy had begged at every opportunity to sit in her lap and be read a story. (If she closed her eyes, she could still summon up the lemony shampoo fragrance of his hair.)

‘Jake, are you sure?’ she asked, with an odd sensation in her stomach.
Marriage. Grandchildren
.

Jake sobered up. The vigilant mother in Annie clocked that he was thinner than ever. He was also pale and strained, yet happiness was written all over him. So that was OK, she told herself.

Are you sure?
She addressed his back silently, as he stood waiting for Jocasta to arrive at the register office. When he turned to face his bride, sleek and svelte, despite pregnancy, in a tailored grey suit, his happiness had become almost palpable, solid, wrapping him like a piece of clothing.

Not that she and Tom saw much of Jake and Maisie. They retreated into the house in south London, secured by Jocasta’s banking salary, and only rarely ventured back to number twenty-two. Annie had hoped Maisie’s birth would shake them all together in an upsurge of family emotion. ‘What’s all the fuss?’ was a phrase that often fell from
Jocasta’s glossy lips and, in so saying, successfully stuck a pin into the excitement of Maisie’s arrival.

Annie had expected to be called to arms over babycare. She had pictured herself dispensing advice and taking charge of a shawled baby, soothing it in a way no one else could. She and Zosia had discussed stockpiling baby equipment and food, and how best to make a colicky baby sleep. ‘In my country, Annie, the grandmother is very important.’ As it transpired, Jocasta was far too efficient to fall back on a grandparent and the call never came.

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Tom, when Annie happened to mention it at one of their almost silent suppers. ‘You have a full-time job. Jocasta isn’t stupid.’

It didn’t stop Annie hoping.

Chapter Five

He never liked to say to others that he was proud of a piece of work, but he thought it privately. And he was proud of this one, plus it was one of his best pieces – which did not necessarily go hand in hand.

Jake inserted the photograph of the dining-room table into the ring-folder and labelled it: ‘English walnut. Seats 10’. Since he had started up Nicholson Furniture, some of his projects had proved tricky. But this one had come together in a single smooth, interlocking manoeuvre. The wood had been available, the timetable right, and the client had given Jake his complete trust – the sole instruction being that the table had to be in harmony with the Georgian carvers destined to sit at either end. It was the commission Jake craved, which left him free to indulge his visions unfettered. That was, he believed passionately, the only true way for the artist and craftsman.

Sometimes Jake had to stifle a smile as the businessmen, bankers and trustafarians leafed through his manual of furniture design and put together their dream table or chair with, say, Georgian legs, a Victorian top, finished off with a Carolean flourish. The jumble broke the rules and ran contrary to his instinctive urge to protect the integrity of a piece. But if that was what pleased a client, it had to be done, even if it hurt a little.

‘No need to be precious, Jake,’ remarked the ever-practical Jocasta, when he mentioned it to her. ‘It pays.’

To give an extra little puff to his ego, he riffled through the pages … Surely Jocasta could see that the gallery of tables, chairs, book ends and stands possessed a value over and above money?

A sketch of a desk was slotted into the final pocket – and he drew a sharp breath. Mia’s desk: sketched quickly and without hesitation. The design was a simple one with strong, contemporary lines that would please the eye and be as functional as possible – ‘Do one for me, Jakey. Please. None of your respectful, backward-looking stuff. Make me something to live with now.’

Amused, teasing, concerned (always concerned – with the starving hordes, the otter population and the plight of bees), her voice echoed breathily in his memory. The small, copper-coloured head, which matched his (the product of their father’s darkness and Annie’s fairness), and thin hands frequently colonized his vision. He was made from her, and she from him, and Mia was part of him. Just as his legs were part of him: always there and not considered that much – unless they were cut off as Mia had cut herself off.

He shut the ring-folder and added it to the nine others on the shelf above the desk.

It was late afternoon and almost dark. Aside from the relatively clean and tidy desk area where he talked to the clients, the workshop celebrated the aromatic mess of the woodsman. Stacked at one end was a pile of carefully selected stock. Cherry, walnut and rosewood, woods that were fabled and beautiful. The workbench ran the length of the windows and harvested the daylight. Racks of
shelving, containing his varnishes, smaller pieces of equipment and reference books, took up the opposite wall. In the bench drawer were his electrical appliances – wire, plugs, fuses – all neatly stacked and colour-coded. This was part of him too. Releasing the inner life of a piece of wood was as necessary to him as breathing, but he liked the idea of the potential power of electrical things and had learned how to deal with them. Plus he had figured out when he was quite small that if he found out about things like electricity he had a chance of impressing his father.

The lighting was subtle: Jake had insisted on that and, this evening, it played over the woods and the tools in a way that pleased him profoundly. Aesthetics were important to him – otherwise he would not have been in the business of crafting commissioned work: he would have gone into mass production and made a lot of money. So he quested continually for exactly the right wood, to understand how it would shape up, and how his skill could release its patina and resonance. This was a demanding process, necessitating time, judgement and faith, which, as Jocasta liked to remind him, did not produce enough money to keep a dog in biscuits.

‘Just wait,’ he promised her. ‘You’ll be surprised.’

‘That’s about the only certain thing,’ she snapped back.

Jocasta saw herself heading up the New Deal – successful working mother and wife – but without the self-consciousness of the early feminists, and he was proud of her toughness and vigour. ‘Just do it,’ she always said. ‘If clients want rubbish they want rubbish. Why agonize?’

Was she right about the dog-in-biscuits level of remuneration? He consulted the order book and a vague
question mark turned into a certainty. The orders were drying up.

The ring-folder stowed, he made his way towards the stacked wood for the last check of the week, sniffing at the dry sweet smell of shavings, the sharper acetone varnishes and the richer aromas from the oils. He placed his hand on the adze lying on the bench, its heft and smoothness fitting into his palm like a good friend’s greeting.

After flipping off the lights, he switched on the alarm, locked up and headed for Fulham and home.

The second he opened the front door of their pretty house, Maisie cried out from the kitchen. An already coated and booted Lin shot out from the kitchen into the hall. ‘There you are.’ She glanced pointedly at her watch.

He registered the annoyance. ‘I’m not late.’

She looked a little mutinous. ‘No, but I have a date. You can tell Jocasta that Maisie ate a good supper but she needs a bath.’

Jake would never get used to being instructed in his daughter’s routines by the posse of clock-watching girls hired to look after her. Lin was the latest in the line and, although Jocasta never got home until late, insisted on debriefing her through Jake or by note. ‘You can talk to me about Maisie,’ he reminded Lin. ‘Quite capable.’

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’m off. See yer.’ In a trice, she had disappeared out of the door.

When she saw her father, Maisie giggled and waited to be kissed and lifted up. Her head nestled against his shoulder like a baby bird’s and he blew gently into her ear, which made her shriek with pleasure. Bringing up a baby was bound to be hard … but he, Jake, had resolved to do it
right. He would come home every day in good time. He would read her stories. He would listen to her. He would say,
You are wonderful. You are pretty. Don’t you mind what anyone says about you
. He would never allow Maisie to become a stranger. He would never allow her to be frightened of him. He would do things with her.

‘Let’s build a crib together for Mia’s dolls,’ Tom had suggested to nine-year-old Jake. Jake remembered each word for it had been an interlude of pure happiness. ‘I’ll get the wood. We can do this together, Jake. Just you and me.’ It was begun in a rush of father-son fellowship – but never finished.

Jake carried Maisie into the sitting room and balanced her on his knee. ‘This is the way the farmer rides …’ He bounced her up and down. ‘And this is the way the lady rides … clip-clop, clip-clop.’

How miraculous she was. How on earth had Maisie acquired her smudged nose, hair like blonde candy floss, a tiny rodent front tooth and huge blue eyes? How was she the result of a night at a hotel in Positano with Jocasta when babies had been the last thing on their minds?

He glanced round the room. The previous nanny had been obsessively tidy but unloving. Lin was more affectionate but less tidy. A pile of toys had been left under the plasma screen. That evidence of carelessness would annoy Jocasta, who liked to come home to a house from which all traces of baby had been exorcized. In addition, there was the tell-tale discard of an empty DVD case –
High Noon
at a glance – plucked from Jake’s cherished stack, which meant Lin had been watching it, which she had been asked not to do.

He hauled Maisie on to his lap and tucked her up close. ‘And what have you seen, I wonder? Nothing disturbing, I hope.’ The marker shot up his worry index and Jake frowned. Until Maisie had activated it in a number of baffling ways, he had been innocent of the worry index. Now it was his daily companion and the innocence of his previous life had vanished. For instance: (a) how to gauge what a twelve-month-old baby could take in from
High Noon
? (b) If it disturbed her, what effect might it have, now and later?

He looked up: Jocasta was watching them from the doorway. ‘Hi. I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘You were occupied.’ She continued to observe her husband and daughter with that shrewd look of hers. Apparently satisfied, she unwound a pale green pashmina from around her neck, took off her power-cut jacket and sat down beside him. After a moment, she reached over and took one of Maisie’s hands. ‘Hi, baby.’ Then she leaned back against the cushions and shut her eyes.

‘Bad day?’

‘You could say that.’

‘You’re looking lovely,’ Jake said, with the uplift her beauty constantly brought him.

Jocasta treated her looks briskly and matter-of-factly. She neither fussed over nor dismissed them, accepting them as part of the package she had been dealt, along with her brains and ambition. She inclined her head. ‘Why’s Maisie still up? She should be in the bath.’

‘I wanted to spend some time with her. I thought you would too.’

‘Maybe.’ Jocasta plucked Maisie off Jake’s lap and kissed
her cheek. Maisie grinned. ‘Oh, my God.’ Jocasta thrust her back at Jake. ‘She needs that bath. I’ll do supper.’

So it was with some surprise that Jake, having bathed, dressed and played Maisie a selection of lullaby mobiles, which finally persuaded her to tuck herself into the side of the cot and close her eyes, returned downstairs to find that Jocasta was still in the sitting room and had made no attempt at supper. Instead, she had poured herself some whisky and was consuming it by the window.

‘Gone off duty?’

‘Maybe.’

‘I’m hungry. Get a move on,’ he said affectionately.

But Jocasta was disinclined to move. Eventually she set the heavy crystal glass down on the table. ‘I want to talk to you.’

‘Can’t we talk while we eat? Or can’t we manage both?’

The corners of her big red mouth turned down. ‘You’re no good at sarcasm, Jake.’ She squared up to him, and a frisson of alarm whispered through him. ‘But we have to talk.’ She seemed nervy and extra impatient as she paced the room.

‘Jocasta, whatever it is, it can’t be that bad.’ He held up his hands. ‘OK. I admit. I forgot to put the washing on.’

She swivelled around. ‘I’m leaving you, Jake.’

He grabbed the back of the sofa. ‘Have you drunk too much of that stuff?’

‘I wish.’

‘Not funny, Jocasta.’