Читать книгу Baby Love - Louisa Young - Страница 11

But that was in another country, and besides the wench has changed. Now, and in England, there is no ‘not going home for a while’. Home exists. Home is not just me, wherever I happen to put myself. It’s my loved and protected place, my own little sceptred isle. I built it on the safest ground I could recover, in that panicky time, dreaming and lecturing myself in images of trees and compost and roots and how the rigid dies and the flexible survives, but the earth must be good when the winds are high. For six months I had the same Elvis song on my mind: I’m not an oak, I’m a willow, I can bend. Things will shift around you anyway, whatever you do, and you must allow for it. I always thought, in my girlish dreams, that safe ground was love, romantic married love, the everyday realistic kind, and that from that ground grew roses round the door. Perhaps it is and they do. I wouldn’t know.

But I know what safe ground is not. Safe ground is not what I have. What I have is not safe ground. Despite the true true love in my house, underpinning is constantly necessary. You cannot underpin your house with falsehood. Well, of course you can’t. So you must do it with truth. No matter that you don’t like the truth. No matter that I don’t like the fact that Jim is Lily’s father, or that he wants to see her. No matter that I don’t like him.

So my first response to Jim’s request, straight anger at him, was neither here nor there. Jim is a fact, Jim is not doing anything wrong in the long run. Wrong by me, yes, but not actually wrong. Which made me even angrier.

No mention of the three years I have fed her, paid for her, loved her. No mention of the first six months when I couldn’t really walk, and of what my parents did for us then. No mention of why he never wanted her to be with him before. No mention of his complete lack of interest in her – oh, no, he sent her a present once. A bottle of Postman Pat bubble bath. He doesn’t even know she has eczema. Doesn’t even know she can’t even use soap without her skin erupting into an unbearable heat and itching that has her trying to claw it off, and raking flakes off beneath her fingernails. Hasn’t heard the crunching sound of compulsive midnight scratching. Doesn’t know that I change her sheets every day when it’s bad. Hasn’t seen the bloodstains, the tiny scars made by four little nails tearing, a miniature bear’s claw, on her shoulders and her legs and her arms. Doesn’t even know that it’s quite hard to explain to a two-year-old (as she was) why she can’t have her present. I poured out the bubble bath and put her medicinal bath oil in the bottle. But it wasn’t pink. Oh, the tragedies of small lives. I considered adding cochineal. But would that make her skin worse? Or dye her pink? I made her a pink mermaid tail, covered with sequins like a dance costume. I killed her mother.

*

I had followed Neil’s advice. Jim never turned up at the hospital. Mum and I sat there waiting for him, talking through what Neil had said.

‘I should look after her, shouldn’t I?’ I said. Mum said I needed looking after myself.

‘In the long run.’

‘We’ll all go home, and we’ll all see how it goes,’ said Mum. Sometimes she gets firm. Sometimes her little fears drop away and in the face of something big, she becomes big. She was a teacher. She can make me feel like a little child.

‘Your father and I will make the parental responsibility application, and we’ll all stay put a while, and when things have settled we’ll see how they settle. It’ll be better coming from a couple.’

‘Why can’t we just have her!’

‘We can’t because we can’t. She’s the law’s. But they’ll see it our way. Neil says we have a good chance. Don’t you worry, not now.’

They were still telling me to rest my leg when I lost all my patience in a rush, and hobbled upstairs to the baby unit, soul racing on ahead, and said, Look, can she come out, please, please, please, is she ready, can we take her? Mum and Dad came up after me. A nice kind devoted family, trying to triumph over tragedy, wanting to take their baby home.

Mum had been in every day. The nurses liked her. The doctors liked her. They felt, as much as hospital staff can allow themselves to feel, for our tragedy. One little junior nurse cried whenever she saw Lily and had to be moved to a different ward. So Mum was there and I was there and Dad was there and Jim was not.

Neil said he had seen him, and he had not heard about what had happened. It seemed unbelievable. Apparently he had sobered up and imagined that Janie was taking a break and decided to let her stew a little before fetching her home. It had happened before. I think he was glad it had happened then – gave him an excuse not to be around for the birth. Like so many hard men, Jim can’t take anything really hard.

Neil said I was never again to ask him not to tell someone something. ‘Your girlfriend’s dead, by the way, only I’m not meant to tell you.’ Well, Jim must have found out sooner or later.

I was all for just taking her, once she was off her tubes. I was going to sneak upstairs on my crutches, tuck her inside my leather jacket, and ride her home on the Harley with my sick leg dangling in the wind. Never mind that the Harley was a write-off, that I could hardly walk, that the hospital authorities would chase me up, that it was a truly idiotic scheme. I was on drugs. It seemed a great idea to me. Mum repeated her mantra. Neil said no, and organized a little meeting at the hospital.

We sat in a greenish room. Pigeons were nesting somewhere outside the aquarium windows and their babies’ caterwauling sounded like serial murder. There were fag ends on the floor and plastic chairs that you couldn’t wrest apart from each other. My leg hurt. Mum looked as if she were in shock, Dad looked determined, Neil looked worried. God knows what I looked like.

We told them that Jim was out of the picture, not interested. He hasn’t even been here, we said. They said they would have to make inquiries, let him know. We said why? Anyway he does know. He knows she was pregnant. He knows how long pregnancy takes. He knows our phone numbers. If he’s interested let him come and ask. It’s not as if they were married. What rights did he have? They said someone had to find out. We said let whoever is interested find out. We said that formal adoption procedures were being put into place. We said that Mum and Dad had applied for parental responsibility under the Children Act 1989. We said the court would sort it all out but in the meantime Lily should be with her granny. Neil blinded them with legal science. They were understaffed. We were there. Dolores kissed me as we left.

So we took Lily home, and she was ours. A member of our family. Out into the world, out of intensive care, safe and to remain so. The only fly was when Jim rang me, a month after she was born, the day we got home to Mum’s.

‘Hello, Angeline,’ he said, sounding serious and sober. I could just picture him: clean shirt, clean-shaven, his bog-brush hair brushed, his face pink. Jim is a very big man and specializes in bonhomie. He used to wear tartan trousers when he was younger, but he doesn’t think it appropriate any more. He used to be quite funny before he got a job and started taking himself seriously. He’s quite good at his computers apparently. Men like him; women find him attractive, even now – well, then – when his face was already going a bit blobby. He worked out, but the flesh was creeping up though he was only, what, thirty-three. When he’s angry his face goes red and he shouts and shouts and shouts. He’s a bully. He drinks too much and cries when he apologizes. I don’t imagine that he’s changed. I’d like to be able to tell you what Janie saw in him but I don’t really know.

‘Hello, Jim,’ I said. I was quivering. Anger and fear. It’s a bad combination.

‘I suppose we ought to talk,’ he said.

‘Don’t see why,’ I said.

‘It’s mine, you know,’ he said.

‘It?’ I said. ‘Yeah.’

‘I heard it was a girl.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She is.’

‘She’ll need to be registered,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ I said. I was so glad Mum hadn’t answered the phone. She didn’t know the half of it, but she knew enough.

‘Call her Jane,’ he said.

‘Fuck off,’ I said. Janie had chosen Lily. Lily for a girl, Edward for a boy. If he didn’t know that he didn’t deserve to know.

‘Well,’ he said.

I said nothing.

‘I don’t know why you’re being so high and … sorry,’ he said.

I said nothing.

‘You’ll have to put my name on the birth certificate,’ he said.

I said nothing. Then, ‘yes’.

Well. It was true. You can’t dodge truth. Janie didn’t. And I can’t.

‘I insist,’ he said.

‘I said yes,’ I said.

He began to blurt: ‘Look, it’s not been easy for …’

I hung up.

Mum was furious when I told her. Dad nearly blew a fuse. He stormed out of the house, and came back half an hour later saying, ‘She’s right, you know.’

‘It doesn’t seem right,’ said Mum. But it was true. So.

*

So I rang Jim the morning after I saw Dizzy and told him he could come. I told him I would not tell Lily that he was her father. I asked him as a favour not to tell her himself.

‘Just come and see her, see how it goes, see what is going to happen, and tell her later. If you bugger off again how will it be for her?’ (‘Yes, you have a daddy, here’s your daddy, oh, yes, but you won’t be seeing him again.’ This is me fantasizing about the result I want, for God’s sake. The best possible result.)

‘What’s the point of that?’ he wanted to know. I tried to explain.

‘Angie,’ he said, ‘I’m not doing this on a whim. I want to do it. I’m not going to disappear again. Three years is a long time and things have changed. I’m her father and I want to be her father. It’s not anything personal against you and if you could stop being so prickly for a moment and work with me for Lily’s benefit …’ (He’s had counselling. He’s been talking to a social worker or something. That’s not his voice.) ‘… I would tell you that I appreciate everything you’ve done for her …’ (he appreciates what I’ve done? It’s not for him to appreciate that … who is he to appreciate what is done for Lily?) ‘… but things are going to change now. I’m sorry if it upsets you. I have every right to … visit my daughter and I intend to use that right. And my wife is coming too.’

Wife.

It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to make notes of our telephone calls, of what he said. Perhaps even tape them.

‘I’ll tell her that friends of Janie’s are coming. Please don’t tell her you’re her father.’

‘You’re asking me to lie to her.’

‘Please don’t tell her. She’d be upset.’

We arranged that they would come on Wednesday at four. This was Sunday. Just coming to tea.

*

Cooper kept ringing me wanting to know how I was doing. I started to hate the answerphone. I told him I was on the case but I wasn’t. I was starting to think that I really didn’t like what was going on. Not to fuss about it, of course not. I don’t fuss. Usually. I just get on with things. That’s what women do. Then occasionally you start to feel a little powerless. My least favourite feeling.

I made the mistake of trying to imagine what Jim was going to do. Wasted a lot of energy that way when I should have been concentrating, getting some work done.

I did become something else after the accident. I put together all the notes and things I’d written when I was in North Africa, dragged out my intellect from where I’d parked it after doing my degree, and wrote a book about the history and culture of Arab dance through western eyes. It was full of beautiful pictures and wild stories and did rather well, and now I am known to be the person who knows about belly dancing, harems, women in Islam, Orientalism and almost anything else in that direction that a journalist in need of a quote, or a researcher in need of a radio guest, might want. I work from home, my time is my own and I make a decent living.

Why do I feel I am writing this down in an affidavit?

*

Lily was on edge. I think she smelt it. She was excited about the visit. Friends of Mummy’s!

‘People who knew her, and want to see you. But you know lots of people who knew her, Granny and Grandpa and everyone …’

You can’t lie to children. It’s one of the great true cliches. She knew damn well this was important, because she saw it in my face and heard it in my voice.

They arrived exactly on time. Jim looked older, fatter, more unpleasant. There’s a certain nasty look that prosperity gives to some faces, and he had it. The wife was small and dark with neat hair. Early thirties, well looked after. I couldn’t make her out. She looked almost as if there were nothing to her – nothing to make her herself, rather than just anyone. Just small, neat, dark femininity. A sort of cipher, in expensive clothes.

I showed them into the kitchen. I had thought so hard about this and now all I could think was, ‘I wish we’d met somewhere else’. I felt a profound unease at not being able to read the wife at all.

‘My wife,’ said Jim. ‘Nora.’

Nora. Nora. Well that tells me nothing at all. Hey, stranger, who the hell are you and what are you doing here?

She smiled, a closed smile. I put the kettle on. What else?

Lily was upstairs. She’d said she didn’t want to come down because some friends of her teddy’s mummy were coming round. I called her. I was Judas. That woman there replaced my sister in this creep’s affections and they want you … I don’t know what they want of you but they want you.

Lily came down slowly, bringing the teddy, looking at the floor.

Jim’s face was set, still.

Nora looked up at her and started to laugh.

‘Oh, what a little darling!’ she exclaimed. Lily is a darling. A dark golden creature, with long dark hair and curving golden cheeks. She’s quite like an animal: furry, tempestuous on occasion. Clever, kind, but won’t be patronized. I suppose she got her darkness from Jim, but the quality of it was so different. His is Celtic, hers is like blondeness made dark. Like honey.

‘Hello, Lily,’ said Jim. He held his arms out as if to hug her. Nora leaned forward to take her arm. These fuckwits know nothing about children. Lily went behind my legs, twining like a cat. I sent her ‘hate them’ messages through my knees, and regretted them, and didn’t regret them. It is wrong to make a child hate her father. With any luck she’ll hate him of her own accord.

Nora looked at me as if she expected me to shoo Lily off my legs and into their arms. Expect on, sunshine. I did nothing. Lily twined, and wanted to climb me. I picked her up, put her on my hip, went to a chair on the far side of the table, and pushed a plate of biscuits towards them. What the hell do they expect?

‘What a beautiful little girl,’ said Nora again. Lily didn’t look at her. Jim looked as if he couldn’t believe that I wasn’t even going to say ‘come on, darling’, as mothers do whenever they ask their children to betray themselves.

Nora was flummoxed. She looked at Jim. Jim looked at me. Nora looked at me. Lily looked at the stitching on my shirt. Almost visibly, Nora fell back and regrouped.

‘I brought you a present,’ she said to Lily’s back. Oh, so it’s going to be like that.

The present, like the clothes, was expensive. Harrods bag, tissue paper, little tag (wrapped by shop assistants, at a guess). Lily uncoiled enough to accept it, and murmur thank you.

‘Aren’t you going to open it, then?’ said Jim, in a Father Christmas voice. Lily looked at him for the first time. He flushed. With his face so determined and his voice so fake I considered sympathizing with him, but decided against.

He has a wife for Christ’s sake! They can have their own damn child!

Lily pulled at the tissue paper.

‘Here, let me help,’ said Jim, suddenly standing and coming round the table. Lily pulled the package away from him. He sat down, squashed. So small, and yet so effective when it comes to squashing people four times their size.

It was a Polly Pocket Fairy Princess Ballroom; pink, plastic, spangly, shiny, with electric lights that worked. It had four little dolls a quarter of an inch high with fairy dresses on, and wings. It had a balloon that went up and down, with a basket you could put the dolls in. It had a dancefloor that spun round when you turned a tiny silvery knob. The whole thing closed up into a pink star-shaped handbag that you could carry with you wherever you went. It was beautiful. Lily gazed at it.

‘Thank you,’ Lily murmured, and climbed down between my feet to play with it on the floor.

Nora wanted more than that.

‘Do you like it, Lily?’ she said, calling down to between my knees.

‘Yes,’ came the reply. Nothing more.

Nora looked at Jim again. I touched Lily’s head gently, and said, ‘I’ll make some tea.’ They couldn’t leave immediately and actually I didn’t want them to. I wanted them to see exactly how difficult, uncomfortable and completely out of their depth this situation was. I wanted them to know in their blood that Lily was nothing to do with them; to present them with a clear view of the shining armour that encircled the two of us, protecting us and hiding us yet at the same time revealing with brilliant and brutal clarity that secrets and intimacies and love such as they could never hope to know dwelt within. I wanted them to go home crying.

Lily shuffled herself and the new toy over to be between my feet at the cooker as I poured the water into the teapot. ‘Move back, love, it’s hot,’ I said, but she shook her head. I moved the teapot to the very back of the work surface. I will not be faulted.

After shuffling back with me to the table, not looking up, she jumped up and whispered to me that she wanted to show the ballroom to the teddies, and ran upstairs.

‘She seems a very affectionate little girl,’ offered Nora. Yes, to me. I murmured a nothing.

Jim’s face was set again. He too had prepared, and had had no idea what would happen.

‘Love’s not automatic, you know,’ I said suddenly. ‘It’s not like eyes meeting across a crowded room. You have to earn a child’s love.’ I stopped just as I realized that my words might come over as a comfort, rather than a gibe.

Nora took them as comfort.

‘I’m sure we will earn it. Won’t we, darling?’

Won’t we, darling. Won’t we, darling. The mantra of the happily nuclear. I don’t hate their being happy. The happiness they have is not the happiness I don’t have. Anyway, I am happy. Quite. I think.

‘Uh, yes, yes,’ Jim said.

He wanted to see pictures of her as a baby. I pointed to one stuck in the door of a glass-fronted cupboard, then relented and handed it across to him. It showed her grinning and curly-mopped in front of a Christmas tree, a dark pixie aged about six months.

‘She’s so beautiful,’ he said. Then, ‘How’s it been? Practically? Financially, if you like?’

I didn’t like.

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘You go to work and everything? Who looks after her?’

Do I have to answer these questions?

Well I decided I would. My reluctance to do anything civil was apparent enough. I wasn’t going to give them actual ammunition.

‘I work from home. She goes to a nursery, and spends some afternoons with a friend’s children.’

‘But that can’t give you enough time, surely …’

‘It does.’ I work in the evenings sometimes, while she sleeps. But I’m not going to tell him that.

‘But you don’t have a nanny or anything …’

‘We don’t need one,’ I said. ‘Do you work, Nora?’

It turns out she is a travel agent. Turns out she is rather high up, actually, in travel agenting. Well, I suppose someone has to be.

Actually I am glad. Judges don’t take babies away from happy homes to give them to career women.

Lily’s voice came down the stairs: ‘Mu-um, I need you …’

‘Excuse me.’ I went up. She wanted to go to the loo.

‘Have the persons gone yet?’

‘No, love.’

‘Can they go soon?’

‘I hope so.’

‘I hope so back,’ she said. I smiled. ‘I love you,’ I said. ‘I love you back,’ she said. I wiped her bum and said, ‘Do you want to come down?’

‘You’re not my mummy but you are my mummy,’ she said.

‘That’s right, honey. Janie was your mummy but she died so I’m being your mummy.’

‘Who will be my mummy after you?’

‘I’ll always be your mummy if you want me,’ I said.

‘I want you,’ she said.

‘I want you back,’ I said.

‘Do they know my mummy?’

‘They did, when she was alive. Well, the man did. The woman is his wife.’

‘The lady.’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s not my mummy.’

‘No.’

‘Children have daddies,’ she said.

Not now. Why now? How does she know?

‘Yes, love.’

‘I haven’t got a mummy or a daddy.’

I hugged her. ‘You’ve got me and Grandma and Grandpa and Brigid …’

‘And Caitlin and Michael and Anthony and Christopher and Maireadh and Aisling and Reuben and Zeinab and Larry and Hassan and Omar and Younus and Natasha and Kinsey and Anna and …’ She was off on the game of listing the ones she loved. Reassuring herself.

‘And I love mummy even if she is dead.’

‘Of course. And so do I.’

‘And so do I.’

‘And so do you.’

‘And so do you. And she loves me too.’

‘Yes she does.’

‘And when she comes back to life she can come and live with us.’

‘She won’t come back to life, darling.’

‘But if she does.’

‘Yes, if she does. But she won’t.’

‘So I’ll live with you for ever and ever.’

What do you say?

‘Mummy?’

‘Yes, hon?’

‘If you have a baby in your tummy will it have a daddy?’

Oh, blimey. Maireadh’s pregnant and so’s one of the teachers, so it was bound to come out at some stage.

‘Yes, love. But I haven’t got a baby in my tummy.’

‘Can I borrow its daddy? If I want one?’

‘Do you want one?’

‘Yes.’

We went downstairs. Jim tried to play with the ballroom with Lily but he didn’t have a clue. Anyway his fingers were too big. After another fifteen minutes or so they left. The tea was cold, untouched. Like Nora, I thought, irrelevantly. Though presumably she wasn’t untouched.

*

If he wants regular visiting rights it will be very hard for me to get a court to refuse him. No one will accept now that he was violent. Nobody ever proved anything. He hasn’t been, to my knowledge, since Janie’s death. I could try to find out. Funnily enough, Harry might know. Harry always hated him. He might know. If there’s anything to know. Perhaps there is.

If he wants parental responsibility he will have to apply for it. Because they weren’t married, he has no claim on anything unless Janie or the courts give it to him. And she’s not going to, is she?

I have parental responsibility jointly with Mum and Dad. I have three years of looking after her. I have something he doesn’t have.

I don’t think I frightened them off for good. Each of them, separately, seemed to have something in them that meant they would cling on. The tidiness of her clothes and her dark head hummed with efficiency, achievement, the chosen object in the correct place, priorities listed, and carefully polished successes ticked off. She wouldn’t go for what she couldn’t get. But she doesn’t know everything. She doesn’t know children. Perhaps she is beginning to know the desire for them … mother-hunger. Mother-hunger would eat her alive. And those who are astounded by the force of mother-hunger when it hits them are not usually prepared for the force of the tidal wave that follows: the love of a child. The love of a child can destroy nations. Love for a lover is a game next to baby love.