Half Broken Things

June

Oh, it was like a life from the pages of a magazine for a while. There was the weather. I don’t believe I have ever noticed the weather so much before. Here, the seasons get themselves noticed in a way that does not happen in towns, and by the time the summer really arrived I had developed something of a countrywoman’s eye for it. The garden burst into bloom, of course, a thing that I would have observed without much interest before I became the kind of person who would stick her nose into flowers and bring masses of them into the house. My choice of reading expanded out from the cookery books. In the library there were dozens of books on gardening. There was one in particular that had pictures and descriptions of just about every flower that grows in England, and I took it into the garden with me and learned the names of all the ones we had. I found that the Latin names went into my head and straight back out again, but even now in August I can still recite the common names of the flowers that came up in the garden in June. There were some I already knew, of course: fat daisies that were almost spherical like pom-poms, candytuft, forget-me-nots and wallflowers, catmint, and the peonies: both white and red ones, so many! I watched the peony buds swell like wet green fists in the rain and when they split open and the flowers came I could hardly get over them, they lolled on their stems like upended tutus, all those petals with their edges ripped into tiny points. And the colour! I wondered how that shade of crimson could be brought into existence without some juice deep underground in the root being crushed and distilled and sucked up to the very tips of the flowers. There were also Canterbury bells, columbines, leopard’s bane, bishop’s hat, foxtail lilies, Chinese trumpet flowers- every one a delight to me.

On and on it went. Birdsong woke me at five, and I wore the same three or four dresses over and over until they grew soft and familiar. I could feel something dancing inside me, all day long. It was my first barelegged summer since I was a girl, and I almost gave up on shoes. Mine had never fitted me, quite. Then Michael brought back for me and for Steph some espadrilles that he had seen on sale at the supermarket, which turned out to be just the thing. They were such a success he bought us several more pairs, all in different colours. Our feet were as happy as the rest of us.

One day when they were finishing breakfast Michael said, ‘Am I the only one who’s noticed? We’re all bigger.’

He looked round the table. ‘Haven’t you noticed it? We’re bigger.’

They always had breakfast late. They preferred to wait until Steph had been to Sally’s and returned with Charlie, by which time they were all hungry. Jean’s breakfasts had resumed their original lavishness. It did not matter that they seldom got round to doing anything else before about half past eleven; the days were theirs to spend as they chose. Steph smiled her sleepy smile, and nodded without speaking. She was sitting with Charlie, who had fallen asleep with his mouth open against her skin.

‘Speak for yourself,’ Jean said. ‘I may have filled out, a little. Cheek.’

‘No, I mean bigger. Not fatter, just bigger. In every way. As people.’

Steph sighed, shifted Charlie and buttoned herself back into her clothes. She didn’t really understand or care. She had some news for them, but she was enjoying, for the moment, having it all to herself. The pleasure of giving it could wait a little while, and anyway, she liked listening to them talk. They were always talking, these days. They just were words people, Jean and Michael, and really, she was not, never had been. What was different was that she no longer felt inadequate about it.

‘All right, I have put on a little weight,’ Jean said, complacently, ‘I suppose.’ She fitted well inside her clothes, now. ‘Is that what you mean? Isn’t that all it is?’

‘No, we’re bigger in every way.’

‘Not taller.’ That was impossible. Yet Jean began to wonder if he could be right. She liked the earnestness with which Michael would explain new things to her. She did not always succeed in seeing things differently, but she made a point of being receptive to all his ideas.

‘I mean,’ Michael said, ‘we take up the space more. Not that we take up more space.’ Jean and Steph raised their eyebrows at each other. ‘Don’t you see? We displace the space more, we breathe more air, we take more of everything, we’re more solid, we’re as solid… as,’ he waved one hand around vaguely, ‘as everything else here.’

Steph laughed. She laughed a lot, now. Charlie stirred and groaned, decided that the noise was familiar, and settled.

Michael looked at her. ‘See? That’s part of it. All that sound you make. It’s because we’re not just here, it’s because we’re in it.’ He gestured round the kitchen with both arms. ‘It’s like we’ve entered the walls. We’re so big we’re in the walls. Don’t you know what I mean?’

He hardly did himself, and perhaps it was asking too much for them to grasp it. Perhaps, he thought, it was impossible to understand unless you had first of all lived in Beth’s house in Swindon. Not that there had been anything wrong with it, certainly nothing that Michael had been able to explain at the time, and barely could now. Beth and Barry were proud of it; they had bought the house brand new, they told him, on the drive there from the children’s hospital. Michael had sat in the back of the car not really paying attention, because he was busy trying to get used to Beth in ordinary clothes. He had only ever seen her in her uniform and had somehow imagined that was the only thing she wore. In the slacks and jumper she had on now she did not seem quite the same person, although she chatted as before; even her hair did not seem properly her own. Michael sat watching the back of her capless head, feeling jaded and dismayed. Their house, they said, was on such a friendly estate. People’s doors were always open. You could see green fields from it, in fact the estate itself was built on a hillside, and you could even see it from the motorway. When Barry pointed it out (’See up there? That’s home from now on, son,’ he had said, and Beth turned in her seat with brimming eyes and squeezed Michael’s knee) Michael looked and saw half a dozen broken rows of semi-detached houses stretching horizontally across the landscape. In the distance they looked tiny, like dislocated, uncoupled container wagons from a derailed train, just like the toy ones from the fancy set that the boy in hospital had been given by his parents.

After that Michael had never quite rid himself of the feeling that he lived in a form of transport, only temporarily halted, or in a container, just a square vessel with thin walls and different compartments for putting things in. It turned out to be true that everyone’s doors were open. Beth’s were, usually the front and the back. She might be in the back garden hanging out washing or something, and some neighbour would arrive at the front, walk in and call out for her, and stride straight through and out the other side of the house as if the hallway were just a continuation of the pavement and the front path. Or Beth, looking from the sitting room window, would catch sight of somebody walking along and wave and yell, and rush to the door to tell them to come on in for a minute. Even the neighbourhood dogs ran in and out; one Saturday afternoon Michael, sprawled on the carpet watching football on television, suddenly heard behind him a noise like something frying in a very hot pan. He turned round to see a brown dog with an enthusiastic face peeing up against the doorframe, rattling the woodwork and carpet with yellow urine as if the sitting room were just a bus shelter or something. Michael had burst into tears. That particular incident seemed to generate even more droppings-in, callings-out and visits, full of explanations, apologies and finally gales of adult laughter. Never let it be said that Beth and Barry were the kind of people who couldn’t see the funny side.

Barry drove a long distance lorry, and he worked a shift pattern that Michael never got the hang of and that added to his sense of transit. Just when he felt sure that Barry was off working for four days he would walk in, or when Michael expected to find him at home, he would have vanished. Beth would try to explain, using words like earlies, split and doubles, until Michael stopped asking. Beth’s hours were easier to understand, but all day long at school on the days when she was at work Michael would feel wistful and anxious, picturing her in her uniform on the children’s ward. He could see all too clearly a boy just like him but not him, lying motionless on her lap with his head against her body, and it gave him a pain in his chest. He told the teacher about the pain and Beth was summoned to take him home, but after the third or fourth time and a visit to the doctor, Beth said, kindly as always, that it was not to happen again. He was getting to be a big boy, she told him, too big to be jealous. So Michael tried to shrink the feeling in his chest by shrinking into the house-container that he thought of as merely parked on the friendly estate where people’s doors were, alarmingly, always open. From the sitting room, whose huge flat window reached almost to floor level, he watched the traffic of neighbours, children and dogs, and looked out for Beth coming home. He still felt conspicuous, even though he had shrunk himself so much by now that he was almost managing to live in his allocated space without touching the sides.

‘The thing is,’ he said now, ‘we’ve expanded to fit our space. Even our voices are louder. Don’t you know what I mean?’

Jean thought about it. She knew the sounds of the house now. There was the faint rush of water as the washing machine filled or emptied that she could hear upstairs in the nursery, directly above the laundry room. There was the faint gurgle of the water softener, the creak of espadrille soles on the waxed upper floors, the friendly burble of music when someone, usually Steph, left the radio on in the kitchen. (She said that music helped her milk flow, it was well known, the same thing happened to cows.) Also, these days, Jean could spend hours in the house going about her tasks, and though alone, hardly for a moment would she be in any doubt about where the others were or what they were doing. She might hear a distant, mechanical cough and then the whine of the saw, and she would know that Michael was cutting logs at the woodpile behind the far wall of the vegetable garden. She would know that he was breathing in the smell of resin and the faint warm stew of the compost heap a few yards away. Sawdust would be flying in the air around him, and he would look up from time to time and see the world streaked and skewed by the plastic safety goggles, which would be making his face sweat. She might hear the chug of the mower, or the clack of the ladders against a wall and the rustle and snap as he pruned the climbers. From the other side of the house she might hear Steph at the pool chanting a counting game with Charlie, dunking and lifting him in and out of the water, or pulling him about with a lulling sing-song, as he perched, with her hands supporting him, on a massive, duck-shaped float.

Or there might be a very particular silence from the white plastic loungers (another purchase from the garden centre) on the grass in front of the kitchen windows. At such times Steph might be drawing something. She would only draw things she could see, a detail of the roof, a lavender bush, sometimes even an impromptu still life of whatever was to hand: an apple core, sun cream tube, sandal, or empty glass. But most often, she would draw Charlie. She filled page after page with silvery pencilled lines out of which emerged his little buds of toes, the coiled ends of hair slipping behind one ear, his closed eyes, the warm cheeks bulged in sleep, the fanning fingers and pink scoops of fingernails. Sometimes Jean would peep out of the window and see that Steph was dozing along with him, her drawing pad collapsed and pressed against her chest. Then, not wanting to disturb them, Jean would think to herself that it would make no difference if she vacuumed the kitchen tomorrow instead of this minute, or if she blended the herbs and nuts for pesto later on (she had gone from Larousse to the River Cafй by this time).

Sometimes she would hear Michael and Steph going about something together, talking in a continual, contented banter about the score of a croquet game, the amount of fruit to be picked, how slowly Steph read, how fast Michael did. Even, once, she heard them arguing gently about which one of them Charlie resembled more, stopping just short of actually using the words takes after. And then there were the shrieks, the calling out, the yelling from one end of the place to the other when one of them wanted the others for something, doors opening and closing, footsteps.

‘We make more noise,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you mean. Because we go about things just as we like. As if nobody is ever going to mind,’ she said, smiling at Charlie.

‘And nobody is,’ Michael said, as if his point had been proved.

‘Oh, by the way,’ Steph said, ‘Charlie’s staying the night.’

She had been waiting to tell them this, and now looked round with shining eyes. It was great fun, being able to tell people something that was going to make them pleased with her. She had never realised. ‘Aren’t you, little Charlie-arlie, little Charlie’s going to sleepy-byes in his cot, going to stay all night and be a good baby, aren’t you, Charlie?’ she crooned at him, drawing out both her pleasure and their surprise. ‘Sally’s got a boyfriend,’ she said. ‘She met him at work, he’s a lawyer as well, in her firm, he joined when she was on maternity leave. She goes on about it all the time. Philip. He’s younger than her. And she doesn’t know if she should tell her husband about him or not, she sort of wants to. I said she should wait a bit.’

She looked up at them importantly. ‘Anyway, the thing is she asked me to baby-sit. Ages ago. She’s asked me loads of times and I kept saying I couldn’t, so she got somebody else from the village, only tonight they’ve cancelled. So this morning she’s all desperate and I said I’d do it but it’d be better if we just kept him here instead of me taking him back for six o’clock and baby-sitting him there, better for her so she’s got lots of time to get ready, and he can sleep over here so she won’t have to worry about getting back afterwards or anything. ‘And,’ she smiled again, ’cause it’s a Friday, I said we might as well have him tomorrow so she can have a Saturday to herself for a change, we’ll keep him till six. So we’ve got him nearly a whole weekend.’

‘Are you sure she doesn’t mind?’ Jean asked. ‘She doesn’t see much of him in the week, are you sure she doesn’t mind us having him on a Saturday?’

‘If you ask me,’ Steph said with a knowing snort, ‘she’s dead pleased. She keeps asking if I think she’s lost the baby weight. And the other day she asked if it was true a man can tell when a woman’s given birth. If he could… you know… feel anything.’

‘Really!’ Jean exclaimed. She wanted to sound as if she were only pretending to be shocked but in fact she was, a little.

‘I said, as if I should know!’

‘What’s that got to do with you baby-sitting?’ Michael asked, wondering about the answer to Sally’s question and promising himself he would think about it properly another time.

Steph looked witheringly at him. ‘S’obvious. She’s obviously planning on bringing the boyfriend back tonight, isn’t she? If Charlie’s away she can shag him all night, can’t she? And probably all day tomorrow as well.’

‘Really!’ Michael cried, mimicking Jean. ‘Really, Stephanie! How can you use that word in front of Charles!’

‘Shagging? But that’s exactly what she’d say!’ Steph told them, laughing again, this time louder.

It was not exactly what Sally said. But she did say that it had been a treat having Charlie out of the house overnight. ‘Because if anything, Steph, since I’ve been back at work he’s been even worse at night. He’s still waking for a feed and he’s gone bloody backwards with the bottle, I’m up for hours with him. Don’t you think he’s gone backwards? Don’t tell me he takes the bottle for you.’

‘Well… you know, he might just be playing you up a bit. You know, just for the attention?’

‘Oh, don’t you start making me feel guilty! Bloody hell, I’ve got to earn a living, haven’t I? Aren’t I entitled to some fun and a bit of time to myself?’

‘Of course you are! I didn’t mean that. We’re happy to have him. I mean, we haven’t got your sort of pressure, have we? It’s easier for us. In fact my aunt says he’s ever so welcome to come again next weekend. Then you could have another peaceful night, couldn’t you?’

Sally accepted the offer. And on the weekend following that, Charlie was allowed to stay away for two nights, and after that it became the norm that on a Thursday morning Sally would kiss him goodbye and not see him again until Saturday evening. She made a point of saying that she was not enjoying herself, not entirely.

‘They’re chucking work at me like it’s going out of fashion,’ she told Steph. ‘If you ask me they’re trying it on- can she or can’t she cope with it now she’s got a baby, oh, they want to think it can’t be done. They’re waiting to see if I’ll go under, well, I’m buggered if I will. I can work all Thursday night if you’ve got Charlie, can’t I? I mean, if I wasn’t a single parent I’d have somebody to help me handle Charlie in the evenings, wouldn’t I? All I’m getting is what millions of people get. And if you’ve got him Friday as well, that gives me a bit of time with Philip, and I don’t see what’s so bloody unreasonable about having a bit of fun, do you?’

‘Of course it’s not unreasonable,’ Steph said, smoothly. ‘Charlie’s perfectly happy and that’s the main thing, isn’t it?’

‘Of course! There’s no reason to feel guilty about it and you know what? I don’t. People don’t understand that. I mean you should hear Charlie’s granddad- he was on the phone again, when am I going out to Nepal, when is Charlie getting christened, et bloody cetera. Christ!’

As Sally grew happier her house became even more untidy and the range of things left lying around widened. It now included many more pieces of makeup, sometimes squashed into lardy pink lumps on the floors or tabletop, wine bottles and theatre programmes, matchbooks from restaurants, a couple of books on hot air ballooning (Philip’s hobby) and, once, an unworn pair of black stockings that had been, as Sally explained to Steph, ‘ripped to buggery’ on their way out of the packet. Steph would clear up these things into prim little heaps that made Sally laugh.

At the end of June there was to be a hot air balloon festival near Deauville. Sally informed Steph, in what sounded like a prepared statement, that Philip had been very generous about Sundays, quite prepared to share them with a six-month-old baby who was not even his. He complained about it really very little, especially when, it should be remembered, Philip was five years younger than Sally and had no ambitions yet to be a father himself. So it seemed to Sally quite reasonable that he should now make it clear, of course in a gentle way, that he wanted to go to France without Charlie, just the two of them, leaving on the Wednesday and returning on Sunday the 29th of June. In fact it was not just reasonable, it was rather sweet and romantic, although it did mean that Sally now had to ask a favour. Not that she did so lightly. She had thought about it and discussed it with Philip. They both felt that it was terribly lucky that Charlie was not the clingy and difficult baby he had been a couple of months ago, and that Sally could contemplate leaving him with Steph for four nights with a completely easy mind.

I suppose I’m of that generation that is meant to believe that everything is worse than it used to be, including mothers. But they could be bad in my day, too. I’ve been painfully aware from an early age of how bad mothers can be. So it’s just in general that I think I don’t understand mothers (with the exception of Steph, of course) and not, as you might expect me to say, ‘modern’ mothers. Nor am I saying that Sally is necessarily a bad mother. She committed no sin; inattention is not in itself a sin, though I am of the no doubt old-fashioned opinion that there is considerable vanity in the belief that one can attend satisfactorily to so many things at once. But no, the puzzle is mothers generally. There’s no explaining them or, to be more accurate, there’s no explaining why the people who make the best ones are not necessarily the ones who have the babies.

Although I’m not referring to Mother, is that clear? I daresay Mother and I each blamed the other for our situation, and I am prepared to admit that I cannot have been without fault. No, I mean my own, actual mother, the one who (I like to think still) was killed in an air raid on Cardiff just before my fifth birthday, in 1940. The one who I am sure must have made the dress I was wearing on the day when Mother collected me from the children’s home and brought me on the train all the way back to Oakfield Avenue. The one of whom I do not have a photograph and cannot recall a thing, not the colour of her hair, the sound of her voice, nor the smell of her skin, nor the feel of my arms round her neck. It may even be a presumption that I ever did put my arms round her neck, but I cannot imagine I did not. Not knowing how that felt is what I most miss- and this is important, the point being that it is perfectly possible to miss something one has never had. It is not the contrast between having and not-having that is at the root of the pain. You simply go without and feel the lack.

In fact I don’t know why I think about necks and arms when what I recall most about that time is knees. Not even hers, my real mother’s, but Mother’s. That day we had walked from the children’s home to the station without saying anything. Mother carried my case in one hand and held on to the strap of her shoulder bag in the other. Was that why she did not take my hand? While we were in the waiting room I needed to go to the lavatory, so I raised my hand and asked to be excused. Mother pushed my arm down and said very quickly, ‘You should have gone before we left. What a waste of a good penny. And you’re to call me Mother.’

Then in the train there were Mother’s purple and white knees (like two not very meaty ham hocks, as I now picture them). It was freezing, and so crowded that there was nowhere for me to sit, so I stood next to her the entire way. My ankles were stinging with tiredness, and I kept lurching over onto the sides of my shoes until she told me I would ruin them. Sometimes I tried to lean against her knees just to take the weight off my legs, but they were too hard and wide, as clenched as fists, and she would move me off and tell me not to fidget. She did not take me onto her lap because she was knitting most of the way, something that had no colour. There was a bit of conversation in the carriage, I think about me, there was an atmosphere of slight congratulation; Mother behaved as if she had acquired something quite covetable that was nevertheless proving awkward to cart home, like a new ironing board or a stepladder or something. A lady told me she was sure I had a nice smile, would I not show her how nice my smile was? I think Mother was pleased at that, but she never stopped knitting. I remember watching the needles going up and down and from side to side, and I could tell she was doing it to fend me off.

Anyway, all that is beside the point. I don’t know why I digressed, unless it’s to show that I have never, at least not since the age of five, been starry-eyed about mothers. Yet I was taken aback that Sally handed Charlie over so casually. Glad, too, of course, because Charlie made us complete, but at the same time almost annoyed. It was no doubt perverse of me but I kept thinking, how could she? I would never, ever have let Michael be taken off by virtual strangers at that age. I told him so and I think he liked knowing that if he had been in my care he would not have been dumped with just anybody for any reason at all, let alone for a hot air balloon festival. What is that, anyway? Sally had her priorities all wrong. In fact it’s hard to believe she even thought of herself as a mother in the true sense. There’s some excuse, you see, for Mother (I see that now), who never actually gave birth to me, but none for my actual mother or, in my opinion, for Sally. Though I am not without sympathy for her. I do realise that she will be terribly upset.

Steph wheeled Charlie back to Sally’s house on Sunday evening trying not to mind that Sally’s holiday with Philip was over. Four days and nights with Charlie had been just long enough to get used to having him with her all the time, and he fitted so perfectly into whatever else they did, observing what they were up to with such amused interest, that sometimes it even seemed that they went about jobs just so that he could watch. The planting of her marigolds, for instance. They had been almost as much for Charlie as for Miranda.

The stock of Bill’s shop in the village had been expanding as the summer progressed; he had set out slanting tables outside from which he sold local fruit, vegetables and plants, spending long hours, when it was warm enough, sitting out there himself on a picnic chair with his newspaper. On Wednesday morning, walking Charlie back to the manor for his four day stay, Steph’s eye had been caught by trays of bright yellow marigolds. On an impulse she had bought three of them, earning Bill’s undying respect, and had taken nearly twice as long as usual to walk back to the manor with two of them wedged into the carrying shelf at the base of the pushchair and the third balanced on the front bar. While Charlie watched, she planted them out later that day in the shape of a wide letter M, over Miranda’s grave under Jean’s magnolia tree. Of course she got a little tearful, and Charlie watched her solemnly and almost seemed to understand.

But it was Sunday now; the marigolds had been watered in and were doing well, and it seemed a long time since Wednesday. Still, she would have Charlie back again in the morning, she told herself. But all the way down the drive and along the main road to the village she was thinking how crazy it was, all this ferrying back and forward to Sally’s just to leave Charlie there for a few hours overnight. Sally would be going back to work the next day, and Steph knew that on Monday night the old pattern would resume; Sally would barge in loudly, and she would have to be waiting to hand Charlie over to her again. It was becoming harder and harder to do. Even as she would be calling out ‘Hi! In here!’ in response to Sally’s crash of the front door, she would be silently begging Charlie to understand that she was not betraying him. She would nuzzle one more time into his neck and breathe in his ear that she would be back in the morning, but she could not bear to look at him closely for fear that she might see abandonment on his face. Giving him back at the end of each day felt pointless and inappropriate, especially as Sally more often than not did not stop yapping long enough to take much notice of him. When she did quieten down long enough to acknowledge that he was actually sitting on her lap, she seemed reluctant to break some train of thought of her own in order to pay him any proper attention. Steph sometimes wondered if she ought to remind her that she had spent the past nine hours away from her baby son and should be more delighted to have him back.

Steph reached the house and saw that Sally’s car was parked outside. ‘She’s back, Charlie,’ she told him as she unstrapped him from the pushchair and carried him to the door. ‘Never mind,’ she whispered, bracing herself to part with him.

She had to leave the pushchair in the front garden because the hall was too full of a freshly dumped consignment of new stuff. With Charlie in her arms she picked her way across the threshold, past Sally’s luggage, a plastic picnic box, supermarket bags, cases of wine and Sally herself, who was leaning against the wall with the phone at one ear, listening grimly to what must be a long speech at the other end. She squeezed up to let Steph by, ruffling Charlie’s hair and pouting at him. In the kitchen Steph came upon a huge, glass-eyed, orange teddy bear, perched up on a chair. It was wearing a leather balaclava, a fringed white silk scarf and a sash that read ‘Fкte de Deauville’. Charlie took one look at it and began to wail. Steph backed out and carried him into the dining room, where she set about changing him and getting him into his pyjamas. She felt she could hardly turn round without bumping into things; even though none of the fall-out from Sally’s trip seemed to have made it this far, there still seemed to be less space than before for her and for Charlie. The room itself seemed smaller, as if during the past four days the walls had been quietly and malevolently shuffling forwards and closing in. She realised that Michael had been right about getting bigger. In this house she felt the opposite of how the manor made her feel. Here, she wondered if she ought to try to shrink. She said little enough in Sally’s presence, but even the voice inside her wanted to make more noise and use up more air than this house was prepared to allow her. She felt as if even the taking of a deep breath would cause her to expand into some place she should not go.

Steph could hear through the open door that Sally was now talking back aggressively to whoever was on the telephone. She sounded slightly drunk. Steph could not quite catch the meaning, but as the hissing voice reached their ears, it seemed that Charlie was picking up the atmosphere, staring up at her with a kind of mourning in his eyes. ‘I know, I know,’ she told him softly, ‘but don’t you worry.’ She was praying to herself that it was not Philip at the other end of the telephone. What if the holiday had been a disaster and Sally was right now giving him his marching orders? It was just the way Sally would do it, she thought; full of indignation and certainty, as if Philip had all along simply been wasting her precious time. Heaven forbid that Sally might find herself without the diversion of a boyfriend and with more time and energy for her son. Just then the telephone was banged down.

‘Bloody bastard!’ Sally shouted down the hall on her way to the kitchen. ‘Want a coffee, Steph?’

Steph had grown accustomed to proper coffee, not Sally’s brackish instant, but if she were being asked to stay and have coffee it meant that Sally was about to go off on one of her rants and wanted Steph there to listen. She called back that that would be lovely, and made a ‘yuck’ face at Charlie, who grinned. When she took him into the kitchen a few moments later she found her mug of coffee and Charlie’s bottle of formula waiting. But he was barely awake now, full to the gunnels with the last feed he had had from Steph before leaving to come back. He sucked his thumb in her arms, while his eyelids floated reluctantly down over his eyes and slowly up again.

The orange teddy had been dumped on the floor and Sally occupied the chair where it had been sitting. She had a glass of wine in front of her and was eating pistachio nuts out of a box on the table. Steph slipped into another chair, glad that the bear was out of Charlie’s sightline even though he was probably too bog-eyed to notice it.

‘Oh, look at him,’ Sally said, with her head on one side. ‘Tired out.’

‘Oh, just glad to be back with his mum, I should think,’ Steph said. She made a point of coming out with this sort of rubbish. She took a sip of her coffee.

‘Oh, Steph-France,’ Sally announced, raising her glass and waving it in the direction of the nuts, ‘France is fantastic. They’re a third of the price over there, pistachios. Have some, go on. And the wine’s amazing. This was two quid a bottle. D’you like wine? Oh, I should have offered. You can take a bottle home with you if you like, we brought back loads.’

‘Oh! Oh, thanks!’ Steph smiled. She was getting quite choosy about wine, although not as choosy as Jean and Michael, who could hold quite long conversations about it. In fact at this time of day, she never drank coffee. Michael would usually be handing her a drink, probably champagne, about now. It was funny to think of Jean taking Sally’s bottle of plonk and considering whether or not it was good enough to cook with. She could picture her wrinkling her nose at the label, raising an eyebrow. and murmuring about some recipe or other. She smiled. ‘Well, we’ve had a very nice time, too, haven’t we, Charlie?’ she said in a rather bouncing voice.

‘Oh God. God, so did we!’ Sally drawled, stretching her arms up behind her head and lifting her hair. ‘Oh, God, the joy, not being woken up at six. And Philip, really- he’s fantastic.’ She looked away, yawning and rapt in some luxurious memory. ‘I’m bloody shattered, actually.’

‘Yes, a lovely time we’ve had,’ Steph said. ‘He was absolutely fine, ’cause he’s a good little baby, aren’t you, Charlie?’

Sally gave a small snort and drew her arms back down onto the table, where they landed heavily. ‘That’s exactly what I said. On the phone just now. He’ll be perfectly happy, I said, he’s as happy as Larry with her. At this age they’re very adaptable, I said, but he doesn’t get it, though. His generation can’t.’ She slurped some wine.

‘His generation?’ Steph looked at her. ‘I did sort of wonder, I mean I wondered if that was… so it wasn’t…’

Sally looked at her scornfully, as if Steph had not been paying proper attention. ‘That was Charlie’s grandad, miserable old sod. My father-in-law. He’s still on his campaign, ringing up and fretting. Been trying to get me all weekend, apparently. Like it’s a crime to go away! I mean it’s not like he’s ever on hand, he hardly ever bothers to come and see him- Charlie wouldn’t know his grandfather from the bloody Archbishop of Canterbury! But he’s all het up because I dare to have a few days’ break and leave Charlie with other people.’ She snorted again and filled up her glass. ‘He’s never once really asked about me. Doesn’t want to know how I’m managing. Because God forbid, what if I asked him to help? Oh, he’s not up for that. So just now I told him straight,’ she said, in a tone that left Steph in no doubt that she had, ‘straight out, I told him, your precious grandson is fine, as I keep telling you, but no, I haven’t a clue how your precious son is, because he doesn’t ring up here any more. He hasn’t phoned for three weeks, that’s the sort of father and husband he is. And you might as well know, I said, I’ve been away. On holiday. In France, and with someone else.’

When Steph said nothing Sally went on, ‘I did. I just told him. I said you might as well know I’m seeing someone, and he’s a bit more clued up than your precious son. Clued up in every way. I did! I’m past caring.’ She giggled at Steph’s shocked face.

‘And of course that didn’t go down too well but I knew, you see, I knew he’d get all embarrassed and change the subject, and sure enough all of a sudden he’s back on his favourite topic: when are we getting Charlie christened. Been on about it since he was born.’ She sighed and drank some more. ‘Wants it sorted out before he goes off on holiday. I said I wasn’t taking that sort of pressure.’ She leaned back in her chair until it creaked. ‘Frankly, I preferred him when he was depressed. At least it kept him quiet.’

‘Charlie’s asleep now,’ Steph whispered. ‘Want to take him?’

‘Oh,’ Sally said, starting up and fixing a look of enthusiasm on her face. ‘Oh, sure. But what about his feed? Shouldn’t he be hungry? He hasn’t had his bottle.’

Steph had got up and was now easing Charlie gently onto Sally’s lap. ‘He’s getting on for six months now. Perhaps he’s ready to drop a feed,’ she whispered. ‘He might not need so many. I’ll put this in the fridge, shall I?’ She tried not to show her distaste as she picked up the baby’s bottle. ‘He might want some later on, around ten or eleven. And then I bet he’ll sleep through.’ She smiled reassuringly.

‘What would I do without you, Steph?’ Sally said, looking down at Charlie.

It was only as Steph was letting herself out quietly, trying not to pay attention to the now familiar, awful moment when she left him behind, that it struck her as odd that Sally should think it was Steph she could not be without, rather than Charlie. But Steph would be the last to complain. She would be back in the morning, and in the meantime there was a new and important matter to consider. Because she had decided, following the conversation about Charlie’s feeds, that it was time to think about weaning.

Mr Hapgood- I never could call him Gerald- found a buyer. I went into the shop one day to find him smiling secretly and saying he had a surprise for me, which turned out to be an envelope with a hundred and seventy pounds in it. He had got an even better price for the clock than he had hoped, and how about coming through to the back for a cup of tea and a bit of a cuddle ‘to celebrate’. The ‘to celebrate’ bit seemed unnecessary because that was what happened almost every time I went anyway. Only the arrival of a customer would put him off, and there weren’t many of those at the end of weekday afternoons. Anyway, it wasn’t disappointment with the amount that upset me that day, or even with what Mr Hapgood immediately started doing (he was tending to skip the preliminaries by this time), it was the empty space where the clock had been standing all those months. Suddenly it wasn’t there. Of course it was silly of me to be upset and surprised. I knew it was being sold and now I had the money in my satchel, so how could I expect the clock itself to be there? But I burst into tears. Because it suddenly seemed as if it were Father himself who had gone, rather than his clock. It felt as if I were just understanding it for the first time, that Father really had gone, as if one minute I had been helping him to sit up, supporting his head while he swallowed his tablets, and the next he had suddenly been wrenched away, leaving me with his water glass in my hand staring at a dent in the pillow, the empty blankets and a bedside table cleared of his spectacles and book of crosswords. At this point, you realise, he had been dead for over six months. Why was I so slow on the uptake? I don’t know. But the empty space on the floor at the back of Mr Hapgood’s shop was suddenly the most desolate place on earth. I stood and howled. Every single part of me ached because I wanted to see Father’s face again, and talk to him and hear his voice, and that empty space was telling me that I never, ever would.

Mr Hapgood got rather flustered and said I was sixteen after all and he hadn’t forced me. When I could speak I said no, it’s not that. He was clearly very relieved. Then he said he knew what the matter was, and I was to dry my eyes. What a silly girl I was being, to think that just because the clock was sold he wouldn’t want to see me any more. I wasn’t to think that. In fact, the last thing he wanted was for my visits to stop. I promised to keep popping in. And I did. The space where the clock had been soon filled up with other stuff but in any case, for ever afterwards I always ignored that spot.

Not long after that, Mr Hapgood sprang another surprise. This time there was no secret smiling and ‘celebrating’. Instead he sat me down and told me very solemnly that sometimes people have to do one thing when they might want to do another, that some things are just not meant to be, and that people have to accept disappointment and make the best of things. Well, this wasn’t exactly news, but he talked as if I hadn’t thought of it, and as if he were being terribly brave. I had an idea he was thinking I was being terribly brave too, but in fact I was thinking how young he sounded. That’s odd, I suppose, that I thought him young, but by then I think I was abnormally old. Anyway, all his ‘making the best of things’ didn’t seem to have much to do with me. The thing was, he said, he was getting married. He had been engaged for so long that he sometimes even forgot that he was, and I should forgive him if he hadn’t mentioned his fiancйe. They had been engaged for eight years, but what with his mother, and the flat above the shop being too small for all of them, he had stopped thinking they would ever actually tie the knot. Now finally, they’d managed to make a down payment on one of the new houses that were going up at Rectory Fields. They were getting a semi-detached with lounge and dining alcove, kitchen, three bedrooms, bathroom, he said, counting them off on his fingers. Lovely indoor toilet. But meanwhile, there was no reason for me to stop coming to see him. We could go on being very special friends. It was just that he respected me too much not to tell me the truth. I was The One, but the age difference, and a promise is a promise, and Veronica wanted kiddies. But he wanted me to keep coming to see him. I said all right, then. Congratulations, I said.

Michael and Jean had been picking strawberries for days, since the middle of June. First they had eaten them just as they came, warm off the plants, or with cream and sugar. Black pepper had been tried. Then they had had strawberry ice cream. Then strawberry shortcake, and a strawberry mousse. By the time bottles of strawberry vinegar were maturing in the larder Michael and Steph were begging for mercy. With the fruit that was left, Jean announced at breakfast on the last day of June, she would make jam.

They waited until the afternoon, after the sun had been on the strawberry patch all day, and together they picked the last of the crop. Under a canopy, Charlie in a white brimmed hat and white cotton clothes lay drowsy in a nest of white blankets at the end of the strawberry beds, presiding over the pickers like a large and rather viceregal fruit fairy, kicking arms and legs as smooth and golden as butter. His serious eyes, when they were not inspecting his hands to see if they had pulled anything more surprising than a trapeze of saliva from his mouth, would follow birds and insects, and from time to time he would chatter in reply to the others’ voices or to the sound of far-off buzzing- Michael had set wasp traps a good distance away from him. Every few minutes he or one of the others would rise from the picking and sink down onto the rug nearby to chatter back to him and put on more of his sun cream, or tickle him under the chin or touch his cheek with a stained hand, to make sure he was not getting too hot.

After a time Steph stood up, groaning, and licked her fingers clean of strawberry gore. Clutching her lower back, she sauntered back to the house and returned with a tray with bottles of water and glasses, and a bowl and spoon. They plonked themselves down while Steph, sitting next to Charlie, mashed up two strawberries in the bowl with the back of the spoon and then, to Jean’s slight horror, added a few drops of breast milk.

‘Steph, are you sure, I mean is one supposed to…?’ She looked round at Michael for support, but he was simply gazing at Steph with that look on his face, the one of soft but total absorption that so often came over it when he watched her with Charlie.

Steph smiled as the resulting pink paste disappeared into Charlie’s mouth. After a second’s astonished smacking of his lips and widening of his eyes, he opened his mouth for more. Within four mouthfuls he was laughing and turning the stuff over in his mouth. Everyone applauded. It was his first taste of anything besides milk, and because they had watched it together the event was, it went without saying, theirs alone, a private joy; nothing whatsoever to do with Sally.

They went back to the picking. The strawberries mounted up in a large plastic bowl that Jean had brought from the laundry room. It was the end of the season. Most of the whole strawberries had lost their gloss and grown dull and deviant-looking; this was the riff-raff, the small, the reticent, late-forming and grudging fruit, and it was already almost too late. Some of the berries were so ripe that as they were picked they burst in the fingers and landed in the bowl as wet, scented rags. The warm heap of exposed flesh in the bowl would, within a very few hours, begin to mist over with a blue-green bloom of mould.

Even though they discarded the rotten fruit and all the stunted berries that were almost white on one side, the quantity was almost threatening. Jean began to re-calculate the amount of sugar she would need. But there would have been even more strawberries, Michael said, if he had known more about them back in April.

‘In April,’ he told them when they had nearly finished, ‘you’ve got to nip off the first blossom, it encourages more fruit. I read it in one of the gardening books, only,’ he said, heaving the bowl of strawberries from the ground up onto his hip, ‘not until May.’

Steph had already picked up Charlie and was following Michael back to the house, trailing his blankets on the grass behind her. So they were too far away to hear, that was all. They were simply too far away to hear, so of course did not reply when Jean said, dreamily, ‘Oh well, never mind that now, we’ve got plenty. And there’s always next year.’

They could not have heard. They had reached the end of the walled garden, crossed the sunlit lawn and were moving between the borders of rose bushes into the jagged shadow of the corner of the house. Jean stared after them until they disappeared round the side. She thought, watching them go, ‘They didn’t hear me. So I could pretend that I never said that, that it was never even thought of, let alone said. I could pretend that, even to myself.’ She stooped down, ruffled through the clumped leaves of a couple of strawberry plants, with a hand that was shaking. She could hear her own heart beating. Finding nothing worth picking, she stood up again. She should go back to the house. There were things to do. There was no reason for her to stand out here, with the sun beating down, as if she were waiting for something. But then it came, as she knew it would, as she stood unwilling or unable to move, an old ache gathering weight somewhere inside her.

Of course I never did go to university. Mother wouldn’t put up the money and in any case, she said, she needed me at home. (By the way, I’m sorry to keep going back to Mother, and I’m not confessing anything in the sense of owning up to something I should not have done. She drove me too far.) The clock money paid for a secretarial course, and the rest went on my board, Mother’s point being that I had left school and until I was earning why should she stump up for everything if, after the course was paid for, I was still ‘sitting on a goldmine’. Hardly a goldmine. I began to get angry with Father for saying the clock would get me through college. I even began to wonder if by college he actually had meant Technical College, a year learning to type and file and do shorthand and organise the boss’s diary? If so, it was just cruelty on his part to have let me run on with thoughts of proper university. I could scarcely believe it of him, and he had always told me I could be a teacher, like him. But then his dying and leaving me felt like an act of cruelty also. All those years I spent thinking ill of him, of course I regret them now, but I was misled.

After college I was never out of work, Mother would have to concede that. I kept the money coming in, not that secretaries earn much, and I was there at the end of every day. I fed her the usual things at the usual times, making sure that nothing on the plate had a noticeable taste. Anything that might be described as having what I now consider flavour she would have refused, because she did not like anything unexpected in her mouth. She said anything with a taste came back on her. Steamed fish, mashed potato. Semolina. Yes, I looked after her and I was never out of work, and before I knew it, those two facts were all I had to put in place of achievements, not that they added up to enough to be proud of. Nothing in the actual work I did, in any one of the places where I was employed over the years, interested me in the slightest. Most of the time I scarcely noticed what I typed or took down in my shorthand pad or filed away or said politely on the telephone. I was a pleasant enough colleague, I think, not difficult or hostile, but I did not care one way or the other about the work that went on, and over time that becomes indistinguishable from mental dullness. I could be relied upon to do as I was asked, nothing more. It seemed enough to me. Ditto at home with Mother, although I did develop what she called a ‘nasty sarcastic streak’. I know what she meant. I could sometimes come out with remarks that were rather bitter-sounding. And sarcasm without wit (which I have never possessed) comes across rather sourly. Without quite realising it, I became sour.

I had long, long since stopped going to Mr Hapgood’s, of course. Once or twice towards the end I saw through the glass bit of the shop door that there was a woman with dyed blonde hair behind the counter, and on those days I walked on home. Gradually I stopped even looking to see if she was there and didn’t go near the place. Mr Hapgood had grown a little distant, anyway, by then.

Incredible, you will be thinking, that she could even think of carrying on with that awful man, even after she knew he was getting married? How could anyone be so naПve? But it wasn’t naПvetй, quite, although I was as ignorant and unwise as the next provincial schoolgirl in 1951, and out of my depth. If you think depravity’s involved, I’m not even sure I was much less depraved than he was. But there was more to it than that. I had been lonely since Father died and at the end of every school day my heart sank at the thought of going home. At least going to Mr Hapgood’s put that off for an hour. At least, in the smoky back of the shop, I got a welcome of sorts.

And I think I was overwhelmed by something else, a sort of knowledge that had been growing over the years, more in my bones than in my brain, a thing I just knew without noticing I’d been learning it. So when I told Mr Hapgood that yes, I would keep coming, it felt not like a decision that I was making but like a reflex reaction to a blow that I had been expecting. It was quite clear and unsurprising. The fact was that with Father gone, I had nobody. Nobody. The feeling this gave me was unbearable, as if I were made of something weighty but without colour or life, like damp ashes, so worthless I could be swept into a sack and tipped out somewhere and never be missed. So I would have clung to anyone who stopped me feeling like that. I would have stuck to anyone who wanted me, and I was in no position to much mind who they were, or even what it was they wanted me for.

So for a time Mr Hapgood was a kind of intermittent relief from that feeling. But when that episode finally closed the feeling came back, of course, and I managed to live for years and years either feeling it or in danger of feeling it, so it turned out not to be unbearable after all, in the strict sense. I bore it, I even learned to pretend it wasn’t there. But I’ve done enough of that now. I cannot bear to feel like that ever again, not now that I have been truly free of it, living here.

It was my own fault, that day of the strawberry picking, letting a mention of next year slip out of my mouth, but it helped me. Because when that unbearable feeling stole over me again, as I stood there, after I had watched them walk away from me, that was the moment when I knew I would do anything, I mean absolutely anything, to keep us all together.