The Undertow (36 page)

“Dadda!” the baby says again.

She has other words now, but this one was her first. She seems particularly proud of it.

“The bathroom’s arctic,” Madeline apologises.

He dips his hand into the baby’s bath, trickles water down her round smooth alien body.

“Just the one kettle,” Madeline explains, “let down with cold water from the tap.”

He smiles up at her. “Good thinking.”

He occupies his study. He can be here quite legitimately until she calls him down for dinner. The baby sleeps in the room below. Her sleep fills the room like cushion stuffing, muffling, impenetrable. Downstairs, in the kitchen, Madeline cooks, sorts laundry, that kind of thing.

It is not a big house. His parents were astonished, really, at how little he could afford, at how little he was paid, after all those years training. They called it training, like a fellowship was an apprenticeship and not an accolade. Admittedly, the house is small, but there is air here, and space—vertical space, if not lateral. There are flights of stairs between its rooms, their occupants.

He can play a record here without disturbing anyone; in fact, he can do pretty much anything up here, because it’s his, the trade-off for everything else, for all that family obliges you to give up. This is what he gets out of the arrangement: one room. He traces a finger over the narrow spines of his albums. Not much money for luxuries any more; there won’t be till the child’s in school and Madeline can start back teaching. He tugs out the Beatles records—their greatest hits, his most recent purchases, now already two years old. He looks for a moment at the cover photos side by side. The same photographer, the same
shot, the only difference being the passage of six years, which writes lines upon the faces, grows hair, changes clothes, spirals people off in disparate directions, darkens everything. He slips the red album back in—not those early years, not
Help
. He can’t face that. He slides the blue one out of its sleeve, lays it down on the platter. He switches on the turntable, and sets the arm down with its careful click and hiss.

He should work. But as the familiar music scrolls out, he turns to the window, looks out across the back gardens. They form a reservoir of green between the houses. His tree—he owns a tree—sends its keys spiralling down into the garden every autumn, causing tiny ash trees to sprout within its shade. He mows over them when required to do so, beheading all the tiny hopeful shoots.

It was Madeline’s idea, the baby. It was her idea too, the name. Before the child was even born. Good for either boy or girl, she said, modern, androgynous, and yet with family tradition behind it. And then there’s the great Billie precedents: Whitelaw, Holiday. He went along with it, just like he went along with the whole thing because it was what she thought she wanted. The naming never felt quite right to him, though, never felt fair. It’s like she’d been born to affect some kind of reconciliation. You can’t burden a child with that: you can’t make a person then decide on what she’s going to be. She thinks people should just get along, Madeline does. Of course they should. It doesn’t mean they can.

Little Billie Hastings, with her belly like a boiled egg and her narrow little shoulders. Too much for her to carry.

Paper lolls from his typewriter. Grey typescript, carbon paper, then a grey smudgy copy underneath. He is supposed to be tapping away, typing up the manuscript. But Madeline can’t hear from all the way down there, as she clanks nappy pails and rattles the grill out of the cooker to look at the lamb chops. She’d type it up for him, with her fifty-seven words a minute, and her knack of deciphering his scrawl. But the typing up, finger after plonking finger, is as much a part of the process as the first long-hand draft.

Perhaps he should let her, though. Perhaps it would help. Them, if not the book. A shared project.

He sits down on the edge of his desk. A big Victorian desk, bought at auction, nudged and strained and scraped up the stairs. It’s like the tree. Like the bust of Milton. Like the settee in his office, its chintzy cover left crumpled and marked and smelling of sex. It proves him.

He will have to take a cloth, a handful of soapflakes. He’ll have to
be careful. He feels a shudder of disgust. At himself, at the notion of dabbing away stains from the College chintz.

Then, with a start, he sees Madeline come out from under the angle of the house, a laundry basket balanced on her hip. She makes her way down the garden, towards the washing line, which hangs with the fluttering white flags of nappies. She unhooks the prop, and the washing line droops down into her reach. He watches as she takes the corner of a nappy, and lifts it and holds the terry cloth to her face. He knows she’s testing its dryness. But. But. He feels his eyes filling. He watches as she touches the baby’s clouts, so recently wet and filthy and stinking, to her cheek. The tenderness of it.

The cloth is dry, it seems, because she folds it into a fat square, and lets it fall into the basket, and reaches for the next one in the row. He watches her as she empties the line. The way her sweater lifts and reveals pale skin, the gentle inward curve from hip to waist. His nose prickles; he rubs at it with his palm. When she lifts the laundry basket, and turns back to the house, he ducks away from the window. He sits down at his desk, and rereads the last line that he typed, and glances back at the manuscript’s inky scrawl. He reads back through his own handwritten words, but he can’t find his way through them, back into the argument.

He gets up, and picks his way downstairs, sideways, good leg bad leg. He stands in the kitchen doorway, and watches her fold the nappies, and says, “Can I help?”

That night, they eat lamb chops and pot barley and mashed potatoes in front of the fire. He tears the final bits of flesh off the bones with his teeth, observes her doing the same. When she takes his plate, he takes her wrist, and draws her down for a kiss. Then he puts the plates aside, and tugs her sweater up over her head, revealing her softened belly and her breasts, traced with silvery stretch marks, in their functional white bra.

She kisses him, tasting of lamb and mint. Her body is beautiful in the firelight. She is not a girl any more, he realises; she is a woman. It’s somehow daunting, the way that she’s grown up on him. He never knew that this would happen.

BILLIE TAKES HER
building society book from the bureau drawer. She has twenty-five pounds in her Junior Saver account. She takes knickers and socks and a clean T-shirt and a spare pair of jeans and by the time she’s rolled it all up together her Smurf bag is so full the seams are pulling themselves apart. There are little holes where the stitching drags against the fabric.

She works her smallest sketchpad in between the bundled clothes, thinking can she manage to bring her other things—her damaged, secret things. Her hare’s skull, staved in at the back like an eggshell. A leaf-skeleton hung with a thread from a twist of driftwood, turning slightly with her displacement of the air. Her dried-out newt, tiny as an insect, coiled like a dragon, its eyes dimpled and parched.

She looks down at her bag. There isn’t space. They’d get crushed. And her mum would notice, in an instant. Walk in the door, see Billie’s bleached-out collection of oddments gone, and know that she’d gone too.

Instead, Billie slips in a
4B
pencil and a sharpener. Their shapes are visible through the side of the bag.

She read somewhere—she thinks it might have been C.S. Lewis—that the best way to escape is not to climb out the window in the dead of night, but to saunter, in broad daylight, out of the front door. That way, if someone sees you going they’ll not suspect a thing. If you’re spotted halfway out of a window at three in the morning, chances are it’s going to look suspicious.

Billie has told her mum she’s going to meet up with Jenny and Claire, go shopping, and then see a film. It gives her a good four hours before anybody will even notice that she’s gone.

She knots the cords and slings her Smurf bag over her shoulder and clatters down the stairs and heads for the front door. No-one stops her. But her mum hears her, and leans out round the side of the kitchen door.

Madeline is drying her hands with a tea towel. Her hair is bundled up into a ragged ponytail. She wears a long skirt and flat canvas shoes. She tries to look like it’s all normal, but she’s not fooling anyone.

“Have a nice time.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t forget your key,” she says.

“I’ve got it.”

“Good girl.” Her mum gives her a smile, which makes her skin crumple up like tissue beneath her eyes. You can see that she’s been crying; she’s been crying for weeks. She just won’t admit it.

And this is what’s driving Billie mad. The floorboards are about to crumble, the roof to fly away. The walls will fall out flat like water-lily petals, and they will, all three of them, be entirely exposed to view. And they keep on pretending that everything is normal.

“See you,” she decides on, and clunks the door shut behind her.

She goes to the building society branch on the High Street, where no-one knows her.

“All of it, please,” Billie asks.

The woman has a flicky fringe sprayed into place with lots of hairspray—Billie can see the dried droplets of it hanging off the individual hairs like paint. The woman doesn’t make any comment on Billie’s withdrawal. She just slides a paper slip across the counter, asks Billie to sign.

Billie walks to the station, out at the back of Oxford. Crossing the river on Hythe Bridge Street she is caught there for a moment, watching the drip of weeping willows towards the water, watching upstream the men and women in big sweaters and jeans going about the business of living in their narrow boats. Big black buckets and knotted ropes and strapped-down jerry cans. A mottled hairy dog keeps a grave eye on things. It seems the best way to be here, if you have to be here—to be always ready to be gone.

• • •

The train ticket costs her three pounds and seventy-five pence, which is quite a lot, and she has to wait half an hour for the next train to London, which she does, sitting on her hands, bag resting on the seat beside her, arm still through the cord loops so that no-one can nick it.

A man sits down near her, and lights up a cigarette, and looks at her, and offers her one, but she looks away and pretends not to notice. He says something, and she gets up from her seat, and walks up to the steps, and up and over the footbridge, and down back into the ticket hall, and waits the rest of the half an hour there, keeping quiet on a bench, avoiding catching anybody’s eye in case it’s somebody that she knows, or somebody whom she doesn’t know but who knows her parents and would recognise her. She jumps every time the tannoy bings into life, expecting her train to be announced. Five trains are announced before hers, and on each occasion she feels a faint flicker of relief: it is not too late yet; she could just go back, and be home, and no-one will ever know that she was leaving, and maybe everything will be all right. But then her train is called, and when that happens there’s suddenly no question. She hares off over the footbridge and skitters down the steps and bolts through the nearest door before the platform guard slams it just behind her.

She makes her way down the carriages until she finds an empty seat. The train shunts into movement. There is no getting off now. The city peels away like a curtain, and they gather speed, pass the backs of terraced houses, suburbs, trading parks, and out into the fields. The woman opposite unpacks corned-beef-and-onion sandwiches, then carefully peels a hard-boiled egg, dropping fragments of shell into her clingfilm sandwich wrapping. She takes a bite from the egg, a bite from the sandwich, chews them together. It’s pretty disgusting, what with the smell and the sound of her chewing.

Billie weaves her way to the buffet car to get away from the woman’s lunch. She buys coffee and a four-finger Kit Kat. When she gets back to her seat the woman has finished her meal, and is reading a fat creased paperback. Billie slips the paper sheath off the chocolate bar, runs her thumbnail down the foil.

Granddad has always been on her side. He was when she was little, and he will be still. He made her that green aeroplane with the pedals. And it never mattered to him what she’d done, how cheeky she’d been, whether it was well past bedtime. She could always go to Granddad, and he’d lift her up onto his knee and defend her from all comers.

• • •

In London, she finds her way by the blurred recollection that comes from tagging along at her dad’s heels, hand clamped in his hand, an awareness of crowds and crush and the warm pelt of his moleskin or elephant-cord trousers, and the colourful abstractions of the Tube map, and the black line being the only one that’s needed, and the litany of names, Clapham, Balham, Tooting Bec. Her hands get dirty from nothing in particular.

She sits, swaying on the orange-mottled Tube upholstery, and nods with tiredness. She doesn’t know how she can be so exhausted—it’s as though just being moved from place to place causes wear upon the body—the drag away from home, like sucking your feet out of sticky mud. The gravity of where you’re from that doesn’t want to let you go.

Follow the black line right to the end. Climb up into the daylight and head—she blinks round, looking for a landmark, spots the green corner of the park—that way.

It turns out right. The park, with its tiny straggling river, and then businesses, and then playing fields. She turns up the London Road, and spots the cricket green, and is nearly there. She has flashes of memory: the place where pineapple weed grew between the paving stones, the corner with the scary dog. Like pebbles dropped thoughtlessly and years ago, for her to make her way back now. The pram shop with its yellow translucent blinds and the sweetie shop where they sell the best ice cream, and down Bramcote Avenue, and the cherry blossom is in bloom, and into Denham Crescent, and she’s there.

The house is as it always was. The green square of lawn neatly mown, fat-looking grape hyacinths and fleshy tulips in the borders. The single bow window curtained in swags of net and lace. It is all actually really and truly normal. So normal and unchanging that she reaches out to touch the front gate out of a simple need to connect with it, and it creaks. In the front window the net curtains lift in a sudden dark swoop, and she can’t see whoever’s looking out, just the pink hook of their hand around the bunched lace.