The Other Half of My Heart (5 page)

Rufus thinks now that if he'd had time to see it coming, he'd have been able to do things differently. Richenda had threatened to leave him so often that he hadn't taken it seriously. It had always been a possibility, but, like winning the lottery, not a possibility to be planned for. They were all tired by baby Daisy's crying and worried about her future. They seemed to be scrabbling through one day to the next. He did, anyway. Richenda had lost no time in moving on. He remembers going to collect the rest of his clothes, a couple of months after he moved out, just after he had moved into the flat, and feeling the shock of seeing a glass of water on each of the tables at either side of what had been the marital bed. He hadn't said anything to Richenda, but she'd read him like a book. ‘I'm in a new relationship, Rufus,' she'd said, ‘and it's very early days, and it's Blake, and it didn't start until after you left, and you cannot possibly object.' He'd opened his mouth, but before he'd had a chance to say as much as a word, she'd held up her hand and said, ‘Actually, Rufus, not only do you not get to object, but you don't get to say anything about it at all.'

It was one of the few times that he had cried. He'd gone back to the flat and sobbed with shame and a belated, useless guilt. He had tried to resent Blake, to be furious with him, and it had been easy in the brandy-soaked darkness of 2am, but harder in the morning, through a hangover, with all of his faults staring at him from the bathroom mirror.

And now there is Bettina, who makes his life so much brighter. He has just extended his lease again so that he can stay in her eyeline, although if she knew this she would be horrified. There are better flats he could rent, closer to work, quieter, flats where the bathroom skirting boards weren't like the ones that annoyed him every morning, because they were made of plastic and not even properly attached. He will build his own house, one day. But he knows that his only chance of having a real relationship with Bettina is to be close, to barely move, to be the man in the garden who sits in silence, day after day, until, one morning, the song thrush lands on the arm he has draped so casually along the back of the bench.

But that is for later. Today is today and the immediate challenge is the discomfort he still feels around his ex-wife. Sometimes he wonders whether telling Richenda about the wave of regret that swelled through his life when they divorced would make a difference. But at worst, she would be dismissive, at best, sympathetic: and as Rufus doesn't want to be dismissed or sympathized with by Richenda, he keeps quiet. He follows her into the open-plan living and dining room that had been three rooms until he had had the walls between them taken down.

‘Morning, Blake,' he says to the man sitting in his place. It pleases him to be civil, because it fits with his idea of himself as a mature man who has moved on – and because he suspects it annoys Richenda no end. One day, he knows, he will give up this pettiness: he knows that he's being petty. One day. But not yet. Perhaps when he has built his house, or when he and Bettina are really a couple.

He had taken today off work to drive Kate and Daisy to Daisy's appointment at the cystic fibrosis clinic. Then the appointment had to be moved, but Rufus was booked on a client visit on the new appointment day. So after much overly polite textual to-ing and fro-ing between himself and his ex-wife, they had agreed that Richenda would move a meeting of her own so that she could take charge of transport to the hospital, but Rufus would take his day off anyway and take Kate and Daisy out on the original date. They were going to the soft-play centre and then out to lunch. That was the plan, anyway.

But then Kate comes downstairs in her pyjamas and says, blearily, ‘Sorry, Dad, we had a terrible night. We're running a bit late.' The most obvious sign of Daisy's cystic fibrosis is the cough that convulses her little trunk as her lungs try, and fail, to clear the too-thick mucus that her body makes. She was on antibiotics for most of the winter, including three weeks in hospital on a drip while her lungs fought an infection that made her pale and subdued. She had seemed stronger for a while, all the physiotherapy and exercise starting to take effect, and then she had picked up a spring cold from somewhere, and the great hacking horror of a cough that belonged in a body much bigger and more broken than a two-year-old's had come back with a vengeance.

Kate goes to have ‘a quick shower and wash her hair' – this means a wait of forty-five minutes at least, Rufus knows – leaving him with Richenda and Blake. And Blake is in his civvies, which means he isn't likely to be going to work. Rufus curses shift patterns and prepares to stretch fifteen minutes' worth of uncomfortable chitchat to fill three-quarters of an hour. Either that or he could offer to take Beetle, Kate's beagle, for a walk. But Beetle is flat out with Hope, Blake's greyhound, in the puddle of sunlight by the doors that lead on to the garden. Rufus can't take Beetle without offering to take Hope too, and he knows his limits. Picking up after his ex-wife's lover's dog is way beyond them.

As he rounds the end of the sofa, Rufus sees that Richenda is working, laptop on lap, legs stretched out and toes tucked under Blake's thigh. Blake is holding a sleeping Daisy. Of all of them, he seems to be the one with the magic touch where Daisy is concerned. She will abandon everything else – including her mother – when Blake is in the room, climbing up on to his lap with a book. She will nuzzle into his body and go to sleep, and look more relaxed than she seems to with anyone except Kate. She seems to sleep longer in Blake's arms, so after a fractious night he will be the one to hold her while Kate sleeps, or tries to catch up on her Open University course.

Rufus isn't good with babies, but he wants to be a good grandfather, and a good father too. So he has assigned himself practical roles. He's a driver, arranger of appointments, financial provider. He isn't really hands-on, but he's happy that no one seems to expect him to be, and that, as far as Daisy is concerned at least, they can all appreciate each other's efforts.

Every time he's presented with the reality of Daisy, Rufus is a little bit taken aback by her loveliness. Before he sits, he takes a moment to absorb her as she is now, pale white-blonde curls and smooth even skin, pale golden eyelashes and eyelids so fine that Rufus can see the blue-green veins in them. Her eyes, when she opens them, will show themselves to be the same colour as her mother's, ice-blue or grey depending on the light, huge in her face. Kate likes to dress her daughter in brightly coloured dresses and the pastel cardigans that Patricia, Daisy's paternal grandmother, knits. Today, she is also wearing striped tights and a pair of navy leather shoes with pink gingham hearts on the top. Rufus remembers buying them. In the shoe shop, Kate had led Daisy by the hand to see how she walked in them, then said, ‘Go find Pops' (the least-worst grandfather name that Rufus could find), and ten seconds later, there had been a laughing, stumbling toddler at his knee.

‘She gets lovelier,' he says.

Richenda looks up. She seems a little bit startled. Rufus wonders whether he has said such a thing, unbidden, before, and braces himself for Richenda to tell him, if he hasn't. But she just smiles, and says, ‘Yes.'

Blake says, ‘She sure does.'

There's a moment. A good moment. A moment of: none of us is quite sure how we are making this work, but we are, and we can be glad of that, despite all the reasons, good reasons, there are to dislike each other and to wish that we weren't all gathered around this sofa.

It passes. Richenda is all business again. ‘If you don't mind, Rufus,' she says, indicating her laptop, ‘I need to finish this.'

‘Of course not,' Rufus says.

‘Why don't you make yourself a coffee?'

Kate won't be anywhere near the shower yet. He may as well. He nods.

‘Would either of you like one?'

‘Thank you,' says Richenda.

‘If you don't mind,' Blake says.

I will do my best not to mind, Rufus thinks as he walks into the kitchen. There's a coffee-pod machine, which wasn't here the last time he came, and new mugs, floral ones, a bright contrast to the grey and cream and moss-green ceramics that he and Richenda had always used. The fridge is now covered in all sorts of family paraphernalia. There's a swimming certificate for Daisy, a page of Waitrose coupons, a shopping list. And there are photographs: Daisy, Daisy and Kate, Daisy and Beetle, Daisy and Kate and Beetle, Daisy and Kate and Richenda, Richenda and Blake, Richenda and Blake and Daisy. Swings, parks, ice creams. The London Eye. Rufus realizes that he has no photographs on display in his flat. The one of Kate in his office is years out of date, a studio portrait of her at sixteen. He resolves to bring his digital SLR with him the next time he takes Kate and Daisy somewhere, and start making a photographic record of his own. He can photograph Bettina, too; it can be a reason to get her away from her flat or his, and take them both out into the world. He imagines them standing outside a cathedral, or in a park, having taken a day trip one Sunday. He'll ask a stranger to take a photo, and they'll both smile, and Rufus will have a tiny anchor to keep him steady on the waves of his new life.

Rufus hasn't heard Richenda come into the kitchen. He's forgotten how she goes barefoot everywhere. ‘Let me know if you want copies of any of them,' she says. ‘I came to show you how the coffee machine works.'

‘I've got one at the office,' Rufus says.

‘Of course,' Richenda replies, as though this has slipped her mind, although she was never a regular at the office, not even when they were married. Rufus feels humoured. He takes mugs that he recognizes from the shelf, leaving the new ones where they are.

Kate is ready an hour and twenty minutes after Rufus arrived to collect her. Daisy has slept for most of that time, and Rufus read the
Throckton Warbler
from cover to cover once the conversation ran out. They switch their plans around and go to lunch first, where Kate is quiet and bleary, spending more time coaxing Daisy into eating than eating herself. Then they go on to the soft play, where all Daisy wants to do is to sit in the ball pool with her grandfather, who feels both honoured and humiliated. Kate drinks tea and reads a book from the sidelines, and so Rufus doesn't get the thing that he really misses – the conversations with his daughter. Though it had been tempting to see Kate's accidental pregnancy as a disaster, Rufus knows that he still has a child he can be proud of. There never seems to be a good time to tell her just how very impressed he is with the way she champions Daisy's well-being, and admires her pragmatic change of direction from a degree in geography at Oxford to an open degree at the Open University.

On the way back to Throckton, Kate and Daisy both fall asleep in the car. The traffic is slow and ill-tempered. Rufus doesn't dare put the radio on for fear of waking his two charges.

‘Sorry for being such lousy company, Dad,' Kate says when they get back. They are standing on the pavement, putting off the moment when they need to disturb the sleeping toddler. ‘I just had such a rough night.'

‘What did the hospital say about the cough?' In the same way that Rufus often forgets how lovely Daisy is, he also forgets the relentless hacking cough that has been the backdrop to their day. It's awful to listen to, and is made worse, somehow, because Daisy barely notices it herself.

‘We're going to see what the antibiotics do.' Kate sighs and rakes her hand through her hair. ‘It's not really a worry as long as everything else is OK and it doesn't get any worse. I'm keeping an eye. And I've asked to see the physiotherapist again, before her next clinic. We need to see what else we can try.'

‘Well, if you need lifts or anything just let me know.'

‘Thanks, Dad.' Kate puts her hand on his arm. He pulls her to him; they are the same height, now, but she hugs him the same way that she always did, sudden and tight.

‘You're doing a great job,' he says.

‘Thanks,' she says, ‘I try.'

‘I know you do.' Rufus manages to manoeuvre Daisy out of the car seat without waking her. She lies against his chest, heavier sleeping than waking.

‘Are you coming in?' Kate asks.

‘I'd better not,' Rufus says. ‘I think your mother and Blake and I have probably seen enough of each other for one day.'

‘OK. Thanks for a nice day,' Kate says, and kisses his cheek as she takes Daisy, who slumbers on, settling her cheek against her mother's shoulder with a snuffling yawn. She coughs, and both adults watch to see if she'll wake: Rufus puts his hand on her back and feels the little ribcage buck and shudder. Daisy sleeps on.

‘I'm glad you enjoyed it,' Rufus says. Blake opens the front door as Kate walks up the path. Rufus heads for home, for a bath, for dinner with Bettina, for the new life that isn't, yet, all that he had hoped it would be.

Bettina is at their usual table in the Italian restaurant, by the fireplace filled with a bundle of fairy lights. There's a lamp on the end of the fireplace that means the light is good enough to read by if she's on her own, which is why she always chose it, to begin with, and now it's ‘their' table by default. She stands when she sees Rufus; leans; kisses him on both cheeks, sits, and puts her book – one of her many tomes about breadmaking – under her chair. She watches him as he takes off his jacket and hangs it, carefully, over the back of his seat. The front of his shirt is a little crumpled. She likes him looking less than pressed, but has the sense not to say so. ‘How was your day?' she asks.

‘Tiring.' Rufus watches her as she settles down again. Her eyes are really beautiful, and he knows how her hair feels under his hands: springy, strong. He catches himself thinking: I suppose, if I'm middle-aged, my girlfriends are going to be older, too.

‘Me too,' Bettina smiles, ‘but nothing new there.' She pours him a glass of wine. His bathwater had taken an age to run hot, he'd nicked himself shaving, he'd spent fifteen minutes on the phone calming an irate client because, as he'd said to his office manager afterwards, it seemed that he couldn't even take one day off without everything going to hell in a handcart.