Heaven's On Hold Read online

  ‘Look at it this way, Annie, if she’s out having fun she’s not bothering us.’

  ‘I know, but that doesn’t stop me wanting to give her a good shaking.’

  ‘Be grateful. Don’t let it get to you.’

  ‘She’s such a silly woman!’

  ‘Well, yes …’ Louise had agreed, and then added gently but pointedly: ‘In her way.’

  The ‘as we are in ours’ did not need to be articulated. But Annet had been more surprised to find that the redoubtable Coral took a similar view.

  ‘The old dear’s entitled to some fun – it may not be our idea of fun but she’s still entitled to it.’

  ‘It’s not what she does …’ Annet sought the right words to convey her feelings.

  ‘It’s the way that she does it?’ suggested Coral.

  ‘Something like that. The untruthfulness of it all.’

  Coral smiled. ‘ You’re a stern critic. Who’s truthful?’

  ‘You and Lou, for instance.’

  It was a dirty trick which still failed to rattle Coral’s composure.

  ‘We do our best – so far as each of us knows. It’s all an act of faith.’

  The perfect, easy reasonableness of this assertion coud not be denied, but had nothing to do with the conduct which made Annet want to wring her mother’s neck.

  Failing in love with David had been a shock, because it was so unexpected. On first meeting him at the charity AGM she had formed the impression that he was nice and intelligent enough, but risk-averse, an observer rather than a doer. And yet there’d been something seductive in his watchfulness. It conveyed sufficient admiration to be flattering, and enough detachment to be discriminating. She had also always liked that brand of looks – tall, rangy, slightly languid – and was attracted in spite of herself by his slow smile and his confiding way of speaking, in that crowded room, with his head bent slightly towards her. Her bold invitation to him to join her for a drink had been a sort of test – she was fairly sure he would decline, scared off by her forwardness. When he not only accepted but ran, as it were, with the ball, she was charmed in spite of herself. After Seth’s dour predictability (which to be fair had been exactly what was needed at the time) to come across a man who was not all what he seemed was a pleasing novelty. Of course she’d done her best to conceal her interest. She remembered with a cringe her bullish attitude on that first date – insisting on an expensive wine, taking her jejune opinions out for a walk, failing utterly to elicit his. Just the same, something happened.

  David had told her he was in love with her as they were coming down the escalator at Holborn after seeing a play at the Aldwych. He leaned forward – she was standing on the step in front – and simply said: ‘Safe journey. I love you.’ She hadn’t replied, or even turned round. They’d exchanged a quick kiss on the lips at the bottom, as the impatient travellers poured round them, and then they’d gone in their separate directions. The force and the significance of what he’d said only hit her as she strap-hung amid the rattle and roll of the southbound line. He loved her? He loved her! Overcome by a helpless smile, she caught the eye of a youth in combat trousers who stared back with withering indifference.

  Looking back, she assumed that at some point she must have said ‘I love you, too’ to David or that, if she hadn’t, he must have inferred it from her ready acceptance of the situation. She, who had long since decided she would never marry, now entered into marriage with a sort of passionate pragmatism. If this was what it took to be with David Keating for as long as they both should live, then this was what she would do. With David she felt herself to be, if not a nicer person herself, then at least a person redeemed by the understanding of one who was. His strength was in letting her be the strong one. The ten-year age gap between them gave an extra dimension to this arrangement: it allowed Annet to feel comfortable with David’s support. With Seth, who was her own age and who had watched her find her feet, she had in the end felt only impatience and irritation. She was also mindful of the fact that David had gone even further down the road of life without marrying, and was therefore taking an even greater step than her.

  As she considered this, and with the journey half over, she glanced at Freya, still spark out in the seat next to her. And now they were three. Quite distinctly so. She could not subscribe to the view that a baby was an extension of oneself and one’s partner. For her, the opposite was true. Freya had been almost shockingly her own person from the moment of her birth, that was one of the reasons they were rocked back on their heels. They were old to be having a first child – when they were gone their daughter would still have most of her life to live, and who on earth knew what she would do with it? Would she and David, confused novices that they were, be able to exert any influence during her formative years, let alone any that would extend into the future? Annet took leave to doubt it. She had the greatest difficulty in picturing herself passing on pearls of wisdom about life and love to her growing daughter. After all – she pulled a wry face to herself – what wisdom? It was less difficult to imagine David involved in a similar exchange: he, after all, was a listener par excellence, his strength as a father would be in absorbing the shocks, finding a way through. She wondered how they would be remembered as parents.

  This line of speculation brought her back to her own mother. Marina had ostensibly been thrilled to bits with Annet’s marriage to David. After all, here at last was concrete evidence of the right sort of happiness, involving a man, a woman, and romantic love. At the same time it ever so slightly queered Marina’s pitch. During the long years when Annet had so signally failed to be happy, and Louise (poor lamb) had made the best of a bad job, Marina’s crown as the great romantic had been secure. With the arrival of David, it received a nudge which their subsequent ten childless years had done much to restore, though Annet was by no means sure which posture her mother would be adopting today.

  It was soon made clear. As she unfastened the babyseat she heard the series of little wails, somewhere between a coo and a moan, which indicated the most intense approval tinged, perhaps, with a slight wistfulness that this was the first time she had seen her granddaughter and since she did not expect to see her all that often anyway.…

  ‘… let me see, let me see, let me see! Oh – look at all that hair, and she’s so like you darling – hello darling – may I take her out of this horrible thing?’

  ‘It’s a very useful thing, I don’t know what I’d do without it,’ said Annet. ‘Hello mother. Let me carry her in in this and then you can do what you like.’

  She walked steadily towards the open front door with Marina bobbing and weaving alongside.

  ‘But she’s so good – not a sound, not the tiniest peep!’

  ‘That’s the car. She can yell, believe me. As you’re probably about to find out.’

  ‘We-ell … She needs to give her lungs an airing from time to time, don’t you Freya? And that’s such a pretty name, whose idea was that?’

  ‘David’s. He and Tim cooked it up in the kitchen when they came to visit.’ She didn’t say that the name was one that had been on their list, she was feeling scratchy and uncharitable – the Marina effect.

  ‘So they’ve been up to see you … How were they?’

  Only Annet, or perhaps Louise, could have detected the smidgen of resentment in the first half of this question, and the hasty regrouping in the second. But even though the pushing of the guilt button had been on this occasion inadvertent, Annet was programmed to react at once to its minute, precise pressure.

  ‘Mags had got a pile of baby stuff together for us,’ she said as she put the seat down on the circular rug in the drawing room. ‘ I think they wanted to get rid of it as much as anything, still, it was kind of them.’

  She needn’t have worried about Marina, who was already battling with the clip and in serious danger of chipping a nail.

  ‘Here, let me, it’s a sod to undo.’

  As she took Freya out of the harness she awarde
d herself a pat on the back for disturbing her daughter – and so by definition herself – in her mother’s interests. But curiously Freya didn’t wake up, and gave every appearance of being content with the old-fashioned rocking treatment she was given.

  ‘Goodness, you have no idea how this takes me back, Annie, you were a dark little stranger just like this … but she’s so pretty, at such a young age … prettier than you were, do you mind my saying that? Of course you don’t, you’re her mother.…’

  Annet, perched on the arm of the sofa and dying for a drink, did mind. It was pathetic, but as with everything Marina said there was an underlying agenda which she found it impossible to ignore. A remark which in a different relationship might have been taken as an affectionately frank and teasing compliment to the next generation, was here a small calculated slight of the kind to which Annet was habituated but not hardened.

  ‘Mind if I get a drink?’ she asked.

  ‘Do, do, how remiss of me. I haven’t got any wine I’m afraid, but there’s plenty of everything else, and splits in the fridge.’

  This was another thing. Marina was the last person in the home counties, if not Great Britain not to have been touched by the wine revolution. Whether through choice, indifference or sheer affectation (Annet favoured the last), Marina still regarded wine as something one ordered with a meal in a restaurant or in the unlikely event of holidaying abroad. At home the available drinks, kept on a glass trolley in the living room, were sherry, spirits, or squash (fresh fruit juice and bottled water had been considered pansy extravagances by Miles). But whereas Annet kept in a supply of gin and dubonnet for her mother, the compliment vis-à-vis wine was rarely returned.

  ‘Thanks, I’ll get a G and T. Do you want your usual?’

  ‘Actually, I’ve got one on the go,’ said Marina without looking up from her granddaughter. ‘It’s on the side near the stove.’

  On the way to the kitchen Annet noticed the table in the dining room laid for four people. There was an appetising stewy smell in the kitchen itself, and potatoes lay immersed in cold water in a saucepan on the stove. A tumbler containing a good quarter of a pint of reddish liquid stood nearby as indicated.

  She returned with this, and a tonic from the fridge, to the sitting room and put it down on one of the RSPB coasters on the occasional table next to the sofa where Marina had taken up residence with Freya. As she poured her own drink at the trolley she asked: ‘So who else is coming to lunch?’

  ‘Louise and Coral, you don’t mind do you?’

  ‘Of course not, it’d be nice to see them. And,’ she added pointedly, ‘Louise will be able to tell me if Freya looks bigger.’

  This was intended to remind Marina that Louise had visited her in hospital, but Marina chose to place a different interpretation on the remark.

  ‘Why, is she not putting on weight? You know there’s no shame in a bottle, you can always—’

  ‘No, she’s feeding fine, I surprise myself. And yes, she’s been weighed and she’s gaining all right. It’s just that she’s probably changed since Louise saw her.’

  ‘Oh, of course, of course she will have done …’ Marina wasn’t giving an inch, her face was alight with grandmotherly feeling, held in place, Annet knew, to repel further awkwardness.

  She hadn’t actually expected her mother to accompany Louise. Marina didn’t care for hospitals – a common and understandable aversion in someone her age – but cared even less for occasions of celebration where the centre of attention was not herself. She would have liked an invitation to visit (hence the miff about Mags and Tim), but Annet preferred to take the mountain to Mohammed on the basis that it was easier to escape. Perhaps, she thought grimly, they deserved each other.

  ‘So has Coral taken the day off specially?’ she asked.

  ‘I think Lou said she was having a long weekend anyway,’ replied Marina dreamily. ‘Something to do with redecorating the bathroom.’

  Yet more evidence, reflected Annet, of the solidly conventional nature of her sister’s relationship. She could neither remember nor conceive of, a day when David had taken a day off on account of grouting.

  ‘Louise made some beautiful baby stuff for us,’ she said. ‘ She is clever.’

  ‘She is,’ agreed Marina. ‘ She always had nimble fingers. A clever auntie, your Auntie Louise,’ she told Freya.

  ‘That reminds me,’ said Annet, ‘ I think we shall probably dispense with titles.’

  ‘What, no aunties and uncles?’

  ‘Not unless they want to stand on ceremony, no.’

  ‘Well I’d like to be good old-fashioned Granny,’ declared Marina, taking a sip of her gin and dubonnet as if to dispel the least notion of old-fashionedness.

  ‘Fine. Grannies are different.’

  ‘And I’m the only one after all, aren’t I,’ continued Marina, ‘and Freya’s my first grandchild. And probably my last!’ She gave a worldly, resigned laugh, but Annet didn’t take the cue. ‘So I have the field all to myself.’

  This was too chilling a prospect to contemplate so Annet filled the vacuum with the first remark to hand. ‘ David sends his love.’

  ‘Yes, how is David?’ Marina’s brow furrowed in sympathy. ‘How’s he coping?’

  ‘He’s at work, mother. Business as usual.’

  ‘Has he been able to be of some help? Has Daddy changed a nappy yet, I wonder …?’

  ‘Of course he has. He’s perfectly competent, as you’d expect.’

  ‘Oh-ho, I wouldn’t expect anything, darling, after Miles. New men hadn’t been invented then, and even if they had he’d never have been one. I’m afraid your father was a man’s man to his fingertips.’

  ‘That’s true,’ agreed Annet.

  This topic was Marina-heaven. ‘But he was a strong man. If anyone had ever done anything to hurt me he’d quite simply have killed them. I truly believe that.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes I do. I know it. I suppose what I mean is that somehow we all get the person who meets our needs—’ she’d been talking to Coral again – ‘And I needed someone forceful and strong.’

  Annet struggled to reconcile this Heathcliffe-ish picture with her own memory of Miles: a large, florid man whose massive selfishness was only imperfectly disguised by his affability. It seemed to her that what Marina chose to characterise as the romance of their partnership was its essentially infantile quality. Each was prepared to accept, without question, the interpretation the other placed on themselves and to play along with it. Most of the time it was the man’s man and his popsy, but Marina seemed retrospectively to be shifting towards something more heavy duty and even less obliging.

  ‘I think we’re waking up,’ said Marina. ‘Yes, we are! And violet eyes, just look at them.’

  ‘I think they all have them at this age.’

  ‘They’re very often blue,’ conceded Marina, ‘although yours were more grey. But these are an astonishing colour, a true violet – like Elizabeth Taylor.’

  It was on the cards that, after such a long period of undisturbed sleep, Freya would go from nought to full-belt in record time, and she didn’t disappoint. Marina handed her over with a show of reluctance announcing that the others would be here soon so she had better attend to her culinary duties.

  ‘Will you be all right in here?’ she asked. ‘Or would you like to be somewhere more private?’

  ‘In here’s fine,’ said Annet.

  ‘Are you sure it won’t disturb you if the others come trooping in?’

  ‘There’s only the two of them, mother.’

  Marina fluttered her hands in apology. ‘ I don’t want to be held responsible for a colicky baby on the drive home.’

  The thought of Marina being held responsible for anything was beyond Annet’s compass. ‘You won’t be, I promise.’

  When Louise and Coral arrived five minutes later Marina greeted them with much important shushing which Annet put a stop to by calling out:

  ‘We’re in her
e, come and say hello!’

  She was holding Freya against her shoulder as they came in, and Louise at once said ‘May I?’ and laid claim to the baby. This carried none of the disturbing implications of the same proprietary gesture in Marina. Annet was struck afresh at the unforced femininity of her sister, so unlike Marina’s archness.

  Coral put her arm round Louise’s shoulders and said: ‘ Mind if I join the fan club? Lord … how did you manage to spawn such a princess?’

  Louise nudged her. ‘ Good gene pool, stupid.’

  ‘Silly me.’

  Louise went to the window the better to admire her niece, and Coral plumped down on the sofa next to Annet. She was a big-boned, tousled redhead with pale, transparent-seeming eyes. Before their steady beam Annet felt that she too became transparent. She was sure Coral was an excellent social worker, able to predict and analyse problems long before they arose.

  But all she said was: ‘She’s great. You must be chuffed.’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘When do you go back to work?’

  ‘Four weeks. David’s going to have a week looking after her on his own.’

  ‘Good for him. You can tell him if he needs any support, moral or otherwise, he knows where we are.’

  ‘I’ll do that.’

  From the kitchen Marina sang out: ‘ Won’t be long!’

  ‘Let’s go and see how Granny’s doing,’ said Louise.

  Coral hadn’t blinked. ‘Looking forward to going back, or blissfully addicted to motherhood?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Annet realised she hadn’t thought about it in those terms. Returning to work was a given factor. ‘ Neither of those, really. But I certainly feel different.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘It shows?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  She didn’t enlarge, but Annet’s curiosity was piqued. ‘In what way?’

  ‘You look …’ Coral narrowed her eyes … ‘softer. A bit bruised. More vulnerable. Rounder – nice.’

  Annet always sensed that Coral threw in these occasional suggestive remarks to test her – to see how she would react. It made her wonder in what terms they discussed her in private. Louise had always been a model sister – unselfish, dignified, unfailingly kind and discreet – and yet there was, as Coral proved, another side to the paragon.