Heaven's On Hold Read online

  A confidence he sadly lacked as he contemplated his own new world. He put the bag at the foot of the stairs and followed Annet with the car-seat. She was sitting at the wooden picnic table on the terrace, her chin resting on her hands.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yes thanks.’

  ‘Cup of tea? Coffee?’

  ‘Tea sounds good.’

  He tried to see her face. ‘Sure you’re all right?’

  ‘I’m fine …!’ she protested, still without looking at him and with a scratch in her voice.

  He retreated to the kitchen and placed the car-seat in the middle of the kitchen table. He was sure there were probably all sorts of strictures on this matter, but it was a large table and the baby was tiny and sound asleep.

  He filled and plugged in the kettle. Everything felt very strange. It was unusual for them both to be at home at five-thirty on a weekday without some specific reason. But then – he glanced anxiously at his daughter who now seemed to be moving slightly – they did have a reason. It was just that he didn’t know what the prescribed actions were. He and Annet, two intelligent, assertive adults in late and early middle age respectively were on hold, waiting to react to the demands of this minute and (to them) alien, lifeform. Since her birth four days ago he’d experienced moments of pure elation during which he shouted silently: I’ve got a daughter!’ But they had always been when he wasn’t with her – to do with the idea and the future, rather than the reality and the here and now.…

  Annet came in as he was pouring the tea. In spite of the mugginess of the day she had her arms folded as though she were cold.

  ‘Oh – she’s waking up.’

  ‘She did seem to be twitching a bit.’ He handed her her mug and they sat down at the table with the car-seat between them: its tiny occupant, rather elevated, seemed to dominate them in what David couldn’t help seeing as a symbolic manner. In an attempt to get into the spirit of things, he asked: ‘ Does that mean it’s time for a feed?’

  ‘I should think so. Yes – it certainly feels like that.’ Annet touched her breasts speculatively as she said this and David felt a wholly inappropriate pang of desire. It was the first time he’d allowed himself to notice how impressively swollen she was.

  ‘Is it uncomfortable?’ He was unable to keep his voice completely steady.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Hard and lumpy.’

  He stretched out his hand. ‘May I?’

  ‘Be my guest.’ She took his hand and placed it over her right breast. It was taut, and hot to the touch – like so much, different from before. ‘See what I mean?’

  ‘I do …’ He permitted himself a tentative stroke. ‘Poor you.’

  ‘A perfectly natural state, as I keep telling myself. What women throughout history have had to put up with.’

  There was a stain of bitterness in her voice, and although she hadn’t pushed his hand away he withdrew it, rebuffed by her mood, the desire anyway quite gone. The baby began to make little testy grunting sounds, and its face beneath its small round hat became red. They sat staring at her over their half-finished tea. Annet glanced at her watch.

  ‘I haven’t a clue what there is for supper.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that, there’s stuff in the freezer.’

  ‘Not that I’m hungry.…’

  ‘You must eat properly.’

  She closed her eyes and placed her finger and thumb against her lids. It was a gesture he recognised, of mild exasperation. ‘ David.…’

  ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to treat you like an invalid.’

  ‘It’s OK. What I’d really like is a stonking great gin and tonic’

  ‘Have one!’ he said, eager for normality.

  ‘I’m not sure it’s a good idea – I shouldn’t be feeding mother’s ruin to our infant daughter.’

  ‘Haven’t, I read about nannies dipping dummies in brandy, or something?’

  With her hand still to her eyes she gave a short laugh. ‘I don’t know … have you?’

  ‘Something like that. It’d probably just help her to sleep.’

  As if in protest the baby let out a cry, wavering but imperious: a terrifying expression of utter frailty and need. Which they, David supposed, were there to assuage. To his enormous relief Annet took charge, standing up and unfastening the harness. The baby flexed and writhed between her hands as she lifted it, its face crimson. When Annet took off its hat David could see a pulse beating strongly between the still-open plates of its skull, beneath a tissue-thin covering of pink skin and downy hair. The cries intensified.

  ‘Anything I can do?’ he enquired.

  She gave him one of her dark, gimme-a-break smiles. ‘I don’t think you have the technology, darl.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ He couldn’t keep the relief out of his voice.

  ‘I’m going to sit in a comfortable chair, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘You do that.’ He got up too, trying to look and feel more energetic than he really was. He felt completely exhausted, with no good reason. The day had been trying, but it had at least been short, and unlike Annet he’d had four nights of uninterrupted sleep. He was at a loss to know what was wearing him out.

  ‘I’ll organise supper,’ he said.

  ‘Good plan.’

  She stopped on her way out of the room. ‘Do we have any stout?’

  ‘Stout?’

  ‘Guinness, that sort of thing? That’s supposed to be good for nursing mothers.’

  ‘Not that I know of. Want me to get some in?’

  ‘No, no, it doesn’t matter … It was only a thought, I’m not that desperate for alcohol.’

  She went. The baby’s cries receded as she carried her into the drawing room, and then ceased as, presumably, it fed. To take his mind off this David assembled some things for supper – a packet of smoked salmon, three eggs, some single cream, a granary loaf. He went out on to the terrace via the back door and snipped off some parsley and chives from the clumps growing in pots under the kitchen window. He was a perfectly adequate cook, acknowledged by both of them to be rather better than Annet, whose strong suit was not in the domestic arts, and yet he felt slightly nervous. It was as though some ancient unreformed biological chauvinism ruled their house, with Annet the undisputed female life force, secure in her fecundity while he ‘a mere male’ – how he hated that expression – dithered in the kitchen. He was all thumbs, he seemed to be able to hear at least half a dozen clocks ticking, in different rooms in the house. His own territory felt strange to him.

  To cover his awkwardness and fill the silence he turned on the radio. It was tuned to the local BBC station (a sign of the times, Annet didn’t care for it) and there was a phone-in in progress about a proposed halfway house for the mentally ill and whether it would mean local children were at risk. The ignorance, prejudice and poor command of English displayed by the callers were nothing short of lamentable. He was embarrassed, by them and by his own snobbishness, but he left it on as he chopped chives and beat eggs, and soon there was relief in the form of the excellent Marti Webb singing ‘ Tell Me on a Sunday’.

  Or it would have been relief had he not been swept by a completely unexpected, rush of emotion. ‘Take me to a park all covered with trees …’ was the precise moment at which he felt his Adam’s apple lurch and his whole face suffuse with a rising tide of tears – something he hadn’t experienced since childhood. (Not even, he reminded himself, at his daughter’s birth, when so many younger, braver fathers had warned him he would be completely unmanned.) He wasn’t at all sure what had caused it now. The peculiar purity of the singer’s voice, the lilt of the tune, the wistful stoicism of the words – the power, he conceded, blowing his nose on a sheet of kitchen towel, of cheap music.

  What he needed to do was to go and embrace his wife and baby, instead of standing here in an emotional taking over the chopping board. It was Annet who had introduced him to this song, and the eponymous album of which it formed a part. Ages ago, when they first met.
He turned it up slightly. ‘Take me to a zoo that has chimpanzees.…’

  He walked firmly to the drawing room. His wife’s dark head rested on the back of the sofa. ‘Remember this?’ he said. ‘The closest we came to having a song.’

  But with that filmic, cartoon-quality that real life so often had she was asleep, and the baby too, its tiny, perfectly chiselled mouth encircling but not holding the nipple from which a bead of translucent greyish liquid emerged. Rebuffed, yet again, by the perinatal imperative, David delicately drew his wife’s shirt over her nakedness, being careful not to cover the baby’s face.

  Back in the kitchen the beaten eggs had developed a sticky film and the butter in the saucepan had become a fizzing, tarry slick.

  Two hours later the baby and Annet awoke, in that order. By that time David, having fielded several phone calls from exuberant friends and relations and fended off potential visits for the time being, had all but fallen asleep himself on a hard kitchen chair. With the cup of rest dashed from his lips, he felt utterly dire. Thick-headed and dry-mouthed, he wiped out the caramelised contents of the saucepan and prepared to launch a second attempt on the scrambled egg.

  He heard Annet going upstairs and called: ‘ Everything all right?’

  ‘Yup … just going to change her.’

  ‘Anything I can do?’

  ‘Come and keep me company if you like – see how it’s done.’

  ‘Good thinking.’

  This time he checked that everything was switched off, and placed the smoked salmon, and the egg bowl (covered with a plate) in the fridge before going up to the baby’s room.

  They’d spent quite a bit – in his private view an outrageous amount – making this room nice. Their thinking had been that it shouldn’t be a nursery as such, with all the twee frightfulness which that implied, but their child’s room, in which their own taste would prevail in a custodial capacity for the time being. The dominant colour was a pleasing wedgwood blue and David had done up the Victorian washstand which had been sitting in the garage, and bought a willow-pattern bowl and jug – repro, but none the worse for that – to go with it. On the bottom shelf were all the tubes, jars and bottles which the baby industry insisted were necessary for the maintenance of infant hygiene. In the hearth, with its Arts and Crafts tile surround there were dried cornflowers and grasses, and the curtains were a blue and terracotta print. The divan in the corner was covered in a large (it puddled on the ground), and beautiful Afghan throw in shades of indigo. It had been impossible to find any infant bedding not covered in wince-making bears or moppets, so Annet had persuaded her sister Louise to make up some small duvet covers, and a lining for the Moses basket, in the same colour scheme.

  The only picture in the room was one of David’s own, a pencil portrait of Annet done not long after they married. He liked the drawing for the very reason that Annet wouldn’t countenance its being displayed downstairs: it conveyed something of her fierce, well-disguised vulnerability. He wasn’t even sure how he’d achieved it, but it was there, something to do with the mouth in particular.…

  However, as he entered the room this evening the tranquil adult decisions and choices of the past months seemed a ridiculous irrelevance. Reality was biting, and likely to draw blood. The baby, now yelling fit to be tied, was on a plastic mat on the divan bed, while Annet struggled to mop up what looked like several pints of runny mustard with handfuls of wet wipes. It was one of those laugh-or-cry situations, but there was no doubt to which Annet was closer.

  ‘Could you get me something to put this lot in?’

  He glanced round. Their forward planning had not included the capacious pedal bin demanded by the situation. There was a wicker wastepaper basket, but without a lining.

  ‘David—!’

  ‘Hang on.’

  He ran down to the kitchen and unwound a series of bin liners from the roll in the drawer, the baby’s persistent screeching sawing at his nerves as he did so. He returned to find Annet standing with her hands held up like a surgeon waiting for operating gloves. She pointed with her foot at the pile of stained debris on the floor.

  ‘There you go,’ she said, ‘present for you. Can you keep an eye while I go and wash my hands?’

  ‘Of course.’

  With extreme caution he turned one of the binbags inside out, picked up the rubbish using the bag as a glove, and turned it back out the right way. The baby’s rasping complaints continued. She seemed to be in some sort of furious altered state from which it would be impossible to retrieve her. Annet had replaced the disposable nappy, and greatly daring he picked her up. It was only the third time he’d done so and her squirmy smallness unnerved him all over again. He tried cradling her in his arms, but this most traditional of attitudes didn’t seem easy for either of them. The baby was too tiny to cuddle or grip firmly and her unrestrained arms and legs waved about like those of an upturned beetle. When he lifted her to his shoulder her head lolled back, then forward, on its pliable stalk of neck, prompting first the fear of injury, then that of stifling her against his chest. When Annet re-entered the room he was holding their daughter in front of him on his palms, like a tenor with a musical score. Her crying was unabated.

  ‘So what do we think?’ he asked in what he hoped was a reasonably light-hearted way which didn’t confer the whole responsibility on his wife. ‘Hungry again?’

  ‘I can’t believe that. And she’s clean. Their needs are simple and few at this age.’ She sounded far from confident. ‘I think I’ll wrap her up and put her in the basket.’

  To his intense relief she took the baby from him, swathed her in a primrose shawl – he believed it was the one crocheted by the mother of Karen, their cleaning lady – and laid her in the Moses basket. She seemed to rest on the narrow mattress like the pupa or chrysalis of some giant and extremely vocal moth. Annet stood with folded arms gazing down, and he went and laid his hand on the back of her neck. He felt an inexpressible tenderness for his wife’s uncharacteristic anxiety and lack of competence.

  ‘How about you?’ he asked gently, rubbing her neck with his thumb. ‘ You hungry?’

  She gave a little shrug.

  ‘Well,’ he went on, ‘you said there isn’t much else we can do. Why don’t I go and get supper going, we could both do with something to eat.’

  ‘OK.’

  He went to the door. She hadn’t moved. ‘You are coming down?’

  She nodded. He escaped.

  Downstairs he poured himself a Scotch. It was reviving just to get a little further away from the crying. But he couldn’t quite enjoy it until Annet joined him a couple of minutes later. She had brushed her hair and it was damp at the roots where she’d splashed her face.

  I’ll get some Guinness in tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘Mackeson would be even nicer.’

  ‘Mackeson it is.’ He stirred the eggs. ‘Anything for now?’

  ‘Just this.’ She filled a lager glass with tap water. ‘Got to keep my fluids up.’

  He stirred. Annet drank thirstily, and refilled. Upstairs, the baby cried.

  The eggs reached a critical stage, that point where he could turn the heat off and they would finish cooking on their own. He took the saucepan off the ring and sprinkled in the chives and parsley; removed the smoked salmon from the fridge and divided it out on their plates. Bread and butter, knives and forks and napkins, he had already laid out on the table. Annet watched him, but her air was fretful and distracted, and as he was about to dish up she left the room, saying abruptly:

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t leave her like this.’

  So the Moses basket sat on another of the kitchen chairs between them while they attempted to eat. Or at least, he did. Annet managed a few small, uninterested, intensively-chewed mouthfuls before picking the baby up and putting her to the breast once more. David continued manfully, but the food might as well have been sawdust. The clock proclaimed it only eight o’clock, but the three of them seemed to inhabit some parallel di
mension, separated from friends, relations and all the signs and landmarks of normal everyday life. It might have been any time, any season, any meal. He was relieved when the phone rang again and he had a reason to leave the table.

  He took the receiver off the wall mounting near the kitchen door.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘So how’s the paterfamilias? Changing nappies like a goodun?’

  It was his younger brother Tim, wealthily wived and four times a father in Chichester. It was a measure of David’s state of mind that he was actually quite pleased to hear his voice.

  ‘Hello Tim. We’re all fine, thanks for asking. But then we haven’t been back for more than a few hours.’

  ‘I know, I know …’ Tim chuckled. ‘But it feels like a lifetime, right?’ Tim’s eldest was sixteen, and he affected some of the verbal mannerisms of the young.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘No, because Annet’s probably within plate-chucking distance.’

  ‘Not at all. She’s feeding at the moment as a matter of fact. We all are.’

  ‘Am I disturbing?’

  ‘Not me, I’ve finished.’

  ‘Good. No, look, I’m really pleased for you. Mags said I was a lazy bastard not to have called before and she’s quite right – by the way she wants to know did Annet get the flowers?’

  ‘Yes – I’m sure – hang on.’ He turned to Annet. ‘They want to know did you get the flowers?’

  ‘They were great. I’ll be writing.’

  ‘No need for that,’ said Tim in his ear. ‘Early weeks are enough of a bugger without bread and butter letters. Anyway, Mags intends coming up for a private view as and when.’