Heaven's On Hold Read online

  ‘Maybe,’ said David. ‘I still think we should put it behind us. Try to forget it.’

  ‘We can hardly do that,’ snapped Annet, ‘when it was plainly our responsibility – our fault for allowing a young child to be in charge of our baby. What on earth were we thinking of?’

  She meant it was his fault, and was giving him the opportunity to admit as much. But he was afraid the fault might be much greater than she knew – and so sidestepped the issue.

  ‘We didn’t put Sadie in charge,’ he said, ‘we indulged her. With her parents’ blessing.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Annet with a sardonic smile. ‘We sure as hell have to accept that parents are always to blame in the end.’

  This he conceded was probably true, and on this grimly philosophical note discussion of the matter finally fizzled out.

  It nonetheless cast a shadow over Annet’s return to work. He brought Freya, heavily muffled in her cot duvet, down to the hall to see her off. At the eleventh hour, on the doorstep, Annet hesitated.

  ‘Pretty silly I know but I don’t want to do this.’

  ‘Yes you do.’

  She put down her briefcase and held out her arms. ‘Give us a go.’

  He handed Freya to her. It was early, the sky still grey, with a premonitory breath of frost. David noticed his wife’s hands, immaculately manicured, the nails painted a military scarlet for work, an asymmetrical silver ring he hadn’t seen for weeks.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said, ‘and we’ll see you later.’

  She gave the merest nod, holding it together with difficulty. Her size ten, dark-suited smartness reminded him of how far she’d travelled to get back to this point and he felt a familiar pang of love for her gallantry.

  ‘Come on, off you go.’ Gently he prised Freya away from her. ‘Being late on your first day back won’t help.’

  ‘No.’ She kissed Freya, David, Freya again. ‘ Y’all look after yourselves.’

  ‘We will.’

  He stood on the chilly threshold and waved her off. When he closed the door he sensed the whole realm of the place he called home, waiting for him – or more accurately lying in wait, to see what he was made of.

  Freya gazed up at him, her small body-clock ticking away relentlessly. It was barely seven o’clock. In honour of Annet’s departure he’d picked her up, although she hadn’t started to fuss. He realised that by doing so he’d probably deprived himself of a precious half hour of peace and quiet. It was their – Annet’s – usual practice these days not so much as to enter Freya’s room until the summons became impossible to ignore. He couldn’t put her back in the cot now her day had started. Wrily, he reflected that this might be the first and most valuable lesson of infant care: that it was always earlier than you thought.

  But, he reasoned, even if she couldn’t go back to her cot he could probably go back to his for a while. He carried the car-seat from the hall to the kitchen, and put her in it very gingerly in the hope that she might not notice. To his relief she remained quiet, squinting at her small red fists as he made himself a mug of tea. Then, carrying the tea well away from his body, he picked up the car seat in the other hand and took it upstairs. The decision remained whether to take her out of the seat and into bed with him, so risking disturbance, or place the seat with her in it somewhere adjacent. In the end he compromised and put the seat on Annet’s side of the bed, facing him, and with pillows on either side of it.

  He turned the radio on and heard the voice of a minister in trouble adopting that familiar of-course-this-is-unpleasantespecially-for-my-family-but-I-have-a-job-to-do-and-I-would-welco me-the-opportunity-to-do-it tone. David had never had much sympathy with philanderers and adulterers, particularly those public figures, like the minister, who should have known better, but this morning the whole thing seemed so removed from reality that he couldn’t even summon a little token disapproval.

  ‘… offered my sincere apologies to my wife, my children and my constituents, and they have been gracious enough to accept them. The Prime Minister, as you know, has given me his full support and I owe it to him to justify his faith in me and to discharge my responsibilities to the very best of my ability.…’

  How did people get to be so pompous? David wondered. Whence all the sonorous humility and sense of destiny? Were certain individuals born this way and drawn to certain professions because of it, or did they learn these dubious but useful skills on the job? Listening to the minister draw to a dying fall, he concluded that it must be a mixture of the two.

  The next item was one of those state-of-the-nation reports, this time on paid child-minders. The presenter – male and from Northern Ireland, a double-whammy of political correctness – pointed out that in Scandinavian countries the notion that a small child should spend most of its time with its mother was not just foreign but antipathetic. A child so reared would be considered deprived of essential socialisation, and its parents destructively burdened. Phrases such as ‘no-win’ and ‘coming and going’ flitted through David’s mind as he put down his empty mug on the bedside table and turned his attention to Freya.

  Annet had printed off an exhaustive list of requests, suggestions and instructions on the PC. It was a document as clear, comprehensive and carefully prioritised as any office spreadsheet. Reading it, David tried not to harbour resentful thoughts on the subject of the nanny’s proposed autonomy. She after all was a professional, he a mere father. Some of the list, to be fair, took due account of his techno-blindness and led him gently through the programmes of the washing machine: ‘ Do everything on G, but keep dark blues/reds/other separate’. Others dealt with the almost insultingly obvious: ‘Use the zinc and castor oil cream, not the nappy rash cream, it’s too expensive to use as a preventive measure.’ Friday, he noted trepidatiously, was ‘ baby clinic in village hall annexe, 2 till 4 p.m., better attend’.

  He understood, of course, that the list had as much to do with his wife’s anxiety as his own perceived incompetence. She did trust him, she knew he would cope and that all would be well – that was precisely the trouble.

  Not that he felt over confident. He had never given very much thought to time and the way it passed. That it passed differently on different days and in different places was axiomatic. He’d found that the week of Freya’s birth. And then ordinarily mornings were quicker than evenings, weekdays quicker than weekends and so on, perhaps because memory made them so. But now he was aware of time as a vast featureless space to be traversed without the benefits of landmarks or compass – to be made something of, from, as it were, a standing start. Also, he was sharing this uncharted waste with his daughter, who had no concept whatever of time as it was generally understood. Her needs had to be supplied more or less instantaneously while all the time aspiring to maintain a viable adult timetable.

  These musings induced a more charitable view of Annet’s spreadsheet. Perhaps after all he needed it in a far more fundamental and specific way. After all, here he was at eight-forty-five, still in his pyjamas, holding Freya, also in her sleepsuit, and lacking any immediate stimulus to action. It wasn’t Karen’s day, and there was nothing and nobody out there who needed him to put on a shirt and trousers and look lively.

  A warm dampness on his shoulder and a familiar cheesy smell alerted him to the fact that his daughter had regurgitated a small dollop of semi-digested formula. The impetus thus provided, he went upstairs and laid her in the centre of the double bed while he washed, shaved and dressed. She became fractious about half way through the first of these processes, and by the time he took her into her room to change her she was in full cry. He had her sleepsuit and nappy off and was attempting to function calmly against the wall of sound, when there came a long blast on the front door bell. Picking up the disposable nappy he placed it roughly in position, swathed Freya in a blanket and went down to answer the summons.

  ‘Thought I was right. Dads R Us?’

  It was Harry Bailey, in black jeans and a baseball jacket. ‘Just dropped
the old boy off at school,’ he explained, reaching out to ruffle the back of Freya’s head with his finger. ‘ Thought I’d drop by and offer a little male solidarity.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said David without warmth.

  ‘Went back to the coalface this morning, did she?’

  ‘Yes – oh – a couple of hours ago.’ He supposed he should be inviting Bailey in but he was wrong-footed by the sudden arrival of this self-confessed lover of children. Thankfully Bailey didn’t outstay his welcome.

  ‘Well best of luck,’ he said. ‘Tell you what, I’d rather have your job than mine. Give me real babies any day.’

  He got behind the wheel of his car and leaned out of the window. ‘You know where I am if you want a bit of kitchen-table therapy.’ He nodded at the crying Freya. ‘She’s giving it some, looks like you might need it.’

  David smiled thinly. ‘You never know.’

  ‘No need to ring, just turn up, they don’t know what time of day it is half the time.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The Mazda zipped away leaving a couple of puffs of exhaust hanging in the air like a fast car in a child’s comic-book illustration. When he’d gone, David realised he’d probably cut off his nose to spite his face. The mere fact of another person in the house – if not quite the male solidarity referred to by Bailey – might have helped the time to pass.

  He took Freya back upstairs and got her changed into one of the outfits from the daytime drawer. She was still at the stage when her trendier clothes looked faintly ridiculous on her. David liked her in the snug, simple ‘Swee’pea’ suits she wore at night. The straps of the microscopic pinafore dress he’d chosen stood up in loops, and the tiny red tights refused to stay put even when pulled up to her armpits. The inevitable result was that the garments seemed to be wearing her. He did the best he could, topped the whole thing with one of Louise’s hand-knitted cardigans, and kissed his daughter’s cross face.

  ‘One day my girl,’ he said to her, ‘you’ll break hearts in black velvet.’

  He then put her back in the car-seat while he tidied the kitchen. She usually had a sleep about ten, but it was half an hour off that now, and she was snickery. He’d picked her up again when the phone rang, and it was Mags. He was as pleased to hear her voice, at a safe distance, as he had been dismayed by the arrival of Harry Bailey.

  ‘How goes it?’

  ‘Nice of you to call Mags – not bad, but then we’ve only just started.’

  ‘David love, you’ll be fine, it’s only common sense.’

  He gave a short laugh. ‘Why do I take no comfort from that?’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mags, ‘now listen. Why don’t you bundle Freya into the car one day this week and come and see me? It’s ages since you were down here, and it doesn’t take long if you leave after nine in the morning and get back on the road about four, which you’d want to do anyway. As far as I’m concerned I can’t think of anything nicer.’

  For the first time David had a sense of how true this probably was. Mags was an old-fashioned company wife who ran a reasonably tight ship given the number of occupants, gave good car pool and brought business entertaining in on time and under budget. But with the whole brood now at school, even allowing for the hospice library, the scanner appeal and the servicing of a mind-boggling range of extracurricular activities, it was hard to consider how her days were filled.

  ‘That’s awfully kind of you, Mags … can I think about it?’

  ‘Of course, as long as you like, but do try. You’d be amazed how beneficial a change of scene can be.’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ he said with feeling. ‘Believe me.’

  ‘There you are then.’ Did he imagine a short intake of breath before she added: ‘ I don’t suppose you were able to shed any further light on the baby under the seat mystery …?’

  ‘No. To be honest, there was no harm done, so we haven’t tried.’

  ‘All very strange.’ She sounded relieved. ‘And very upsetting for poor you and Annet.’

  ‘Surprising, perhaps,’ he said.

  ‘I want to say, David, that I do understand, and I’m sorry if I was snappish.’

  ‘We all were.’

  ‘You with rather more justification than me.’

  ‘It’s all over and forgotten,’ he said firmly. ‘Look, I must go, but I’ll give you a ring tonight or tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, yes, we’ll have a word, off you go.’

  He put the receiver down and held Freya out at arm’s length. Her legs pedalled energetically. Her neck was getting stronger and she held her head up for a few seconds, albeit at a rather tortoisey angle, to return his stare. For a moment he had a sense of the daughter rather than the baby – his daughter, the schoolgirl, the teenager, the young woman she would be. He wanted more than anything to hang on to the sensation or at least a clear memory of it. He brought her face a little closer to his and gazed into the opaque brightness of her eyes, trying to distil something of the essence of her, that unique part that would become her grown-up, black-velvet self. But she at once reverted to discontented infancy, unwilling and unable to hold his gaze.

  He put her against his shoulder and fluttered his hand gently against her back.

  ‘So what are we going to do then?’ The ‘ then’ was added involuntarily, it was a meaningless, soothing suffix that he’d heard Mags, Karen and Marina, even occasionally Annet herself, use when addressing the baby. It was odd to hear it on his own lips. Did one naturally begin to do these things when you became a parent or was it, as he’d heard people say on television, a ‘learned behaviour’.

  Either way, Freya had no answer and her mood was not improving. Jiggling her abstractedly, he referred to Annet’s list. There were assorted commissions to perform in town, including the purchasing of a set of ‘cheap, stacking, white microwave dishes with lids’, dry cleaning to be taken and films to be collected. Also, he remembered, a couple of books on drawing that he’d got out from the library, now several weeks overdue.

  He looked at his watch: the time had snailed forward to nine-forty. By the time he’d got Freya into the car it would be ten to ten, and by driving slowly via a scenic and circuitous route he could make the drive last half an hour, during which time, with luck, Freya would go to sleep. If she did, he decided, he would contrive to leave her undisturbed for as long as possible, even if that meant driving round for a bit longer. He realised this was not a viable or sensible option on a daily basis, but his job as he saw it at the moment was to keep his daughter happy.

  Still holding her, he copied the relevant items off Annet’s list on to another piece of paper and stuffed it in the breast pocket of his shirt. Then he locked up, turned on the answering machine, and introduced the protesting Freya first into her all-in-one suit and then into the car-seat before discovering that the harness needed adjusting to accommodate the suit. The adjustments, made with Freya in situ, caused a further deterioration in her mood and David’s, so that by the time he’d been all thumbs with the car safety belt, started the car, and run back in to collect the cleaning and the film docket off the kitchen notice board, she was beside herself.

  The car did, however, have its usual calming effect. Halfway up the ridgeway road David realised he hadn’t brought a spare nappy with him, but this small risk, weighed in the balance against the huge one of his daughter waking up again, counted for nothing, and he pressed on.

  This was a very different drive to the one he’d undertaken early on, in Annet’s car. The Volvo was as powerful, but heavier and less nippy, and there was no temptation to speed. The threatening scintilla of frost had gone now, to make way for an indeterminate autumn day, of dim colours and soft edges. This most homely of the Home Counties was sodden and quiescent, nothing much on the roads, nobody much about – nothing much doing, in fact. David had to remind himself that while he was here, driving at thirty miles an hour, cornering like a nonogenarian, with the radio turned down to barely audible, other people were out there in
what he now saw as the heady maelstrom of the workplace, subject to pressures, organising meetings, demanding pay rises, fiddling expenses … Even idle talk in office corridors (of which Border and Cheffins had more than its fair share) seemed, from his new, outsider’s perpective, to be a hectic and influential activity.

  Not that this marginalisation was entirely unpleasant. As he cruised along the crest of the ridgeway he began to see himself as part of another, broader and more tranquil constituency. The ‘out there’ crowd might be the waves and the white horses, but the ‘back here’ people were the tides and the deeps. Happening upon this metaphor gave him great satisfaction.

  The radio was playing some ballet music that he recognised but couldn’t identify: a seductive melody full of unashamed sentiment and tremulous, swooping glissandos. Greatly daring he turned the volume up slightly. He glanced at Freya but she remained profoundly, soothingly asleep.…

  What happened next was so sudden that for a split second he thought that the noise – the synchronised blare of engine and horn, the shrill gibber of brakes – was his doing, and automatically turned the volume knob backwards. But in the same second, with one hand still off the wheel, he smelt the tyres and felt the crude shock of the wing mirrors colliding as the other car, coming from behind, missed him by inches. In a vortex of terror he pulled the wheel over with his right hand, hauled on the handbrake with his left, pushed the brake to the floor, but he still seemed to mount the verge at terrifying speed, the car juddering and bounding, a heap of metal out of control.

  When it finally stopped he was shocked to discover he’d travelled several hundred yards from the point of impact. Sweating and trembling he looked over his shoulder. Behind him were twin arcs, like a black rainbow, on the road, and a churning wake of mud and torn grass marked his sickening progress over the verge. Of the other car there was no sign except mirror-image skid marks swirling back and forth in ever shallower parabolas before being reabsorbed into the calm tarmac.