Heaven's On Hold Read online

  ‘Of course. You too I hope.’

  ‘I do as I’m told. You and I can nip off for a pint of best while they talk post-partum politics.’

  David felt suddenly bruised by Tim’s well-meant blokiness. ‘Maybe. Anyway, give us another ring before you come.’

  ‘Christ no, we won’t turn up unannounced. And we won’t bring the kids either, you’ll be relieved to hear—’

  ‘Not at all—’

  ‘Because there’s another half hundredweight of baby kit Mags want to unload on to you, and there won’t be room for anything else in the car.’

  ‘That’s kind.’

  ‘It’s called clearing the loft, if you ask me … No that’s not true, it’s all good stuff and we want you to have it. If it’s not to Annet’s taste she can rock round to the Oxfam shop, it’s hers to do what she likes with.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘How is the new arrival, anyway?’

  ‘Very well, as far as I can tell. I’m not much of an expert as yet.’

  Tim chuckled. ‘Nor do you want to be, take it from me. It’s like cars, know too much and you’ll have nothing more to do with them.’

  David felt uncomfortably caught between his instinctive resistance to this theory, and the paucity of his experience compared to that of Tim.

  He hung up just as Annet disengaged from the baby and adjusted her complicated bra and the front of her shirt.

  ‘Let me take her while you finish your supper.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘I’d like to,’ he lied.

  ‘Hold her sort of up, if you can, there’ll be some wind.’

  He managed much better this time, and even enjoyed the silken feel of his daughter’s eggshell skull against his neck, and ventured a kiss.

  ‘Tim was doing his battle-scarred veteran number,’ he said.

  ‘I guessed. Yuk, this is cold.’

  ‘Let me do you some more egg.’

  ‘No, I’m not all that hungry …’ She put down her fork. Her shirt was still unbuttoned to the waist, and the unaccustomed depth of her cleavage with its pulsing tributaries of blue veins was in contrast to her drawn and exhausted face.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘it’s not some sort of competition. Tim and Mags are Tim and Mags and we’re us, and this is our daughter, and our home, and our business.’

  ‘Of course. You gathered I didn’t retaliate.’

  ‘The thought of being patronised by Mags … I think I’d spontaneously combust.’

  ‘I know. But she won’t. Her heart’s in the right place.’

  ‘Yes –’ She looked away for a moment and he knew she was struggling. ‘I’m just worried in case—’ Another working silence.

  ‘In case what?’

  The silence stretched. The baby belched up a puddle of curds and whey on to his lapel, there was a faint, cheesy smell. He held her against him with one hand and placed the other on his wife’s shoulder.

  ‘Darling?’

  She shook her head, and when her voice came out it was a shaky whisper. ‘ In case my heart isn’t.’

  ‘It will be,’ he said, awed by the bleakness of her honesty. ‘Of course it will be.’

  The baby was quiet, so they went to bed, with the Moses basket on the ottoman in the bay window. They both felt it was a little soon for her to be far away in her own room. David wrapped his arms around Annet, who remained armoured in her nursing bra, and they fell asleep quickly.

  When David was disturbed by the baby’s agitated grunting he had no idea what time it was nor how long they’d slept for. They’d brought the electric nightlight through from the baby’s room to obviate the need to turn on anything more, so the bedroom was bathed in a crepuscular half-light. He looked at his watch. It was just after eleven. They’d only lain down an hour ago. He told himself sternly that there were parents the length and breadth of the country sharing this moment with them, that it was perfectly normal and natural and no one ever needed as much sleep as they thought – but it was still a miserable shock.

  Annet stirred. ‘Oh God … I’m coming.’

  ‘It’s all right, I’ll bring her.’

  ‘Thanks.…’

  The baby was hitting her stride, beginning to cry in earnest. David almost tripped on the collection of cushions which Annet had cleared from the top of the ottoman. He moved them aside with his foot, but missed one and picked it up. For a moment he stood paralysed, clutching the cushion, looking down at his daughter’s furious face that seemed two-thirds mouth. It was difficult at that moment to imagine that he might ever draw her portrait. Or, indeed, that he would ever draw again.…

  ‘David – what are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. He dropped the cushion. ‘Coming right up.’

  Chapter Two

  It was David’s intention to stay awake while Annet fed the baby, to provide some moral support. He began well, propping up the pillows so that they could both sit comfortably, and putting his arm round her shoulders. But the faint, rhythmic sucking sound, and the comforting knowledge that crying would be out of the question while a nipple occupied their daughter’s mouth, acted as a soporific. The third time his head dropped heavily forward he was unable to lift it again, and sleep engulfed him.

  When Annet nudged him awake he was ashamed to discover his head resting against her shoulder, his mouth open, like a baby himself.

  ‘Damn—!’

  ‘That’s all right, would you take her while I have a pee?’

  ‘Yes, of course.…’

  She swung her legs out of bed. ‘You can change her if you like.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘You saw, it’s not difficult.’

  It wasn’t, in principle. The design of the disposable nappy was an exemplar of functional simplicity, and his daughter had mercifully not produced another mustard-like evacuation, but was only damp. And yet he made a complete hash of it. He couldn’t seem successfully to unite the inert pad with its self-stick strips to the baby’s tiny red body and jerking limbs. He squeamishly avoided touching the scabby stump of her umbilicus, and sprinkled powder from a great height as he’d seen Annet do. After applying thick, white goo to her private parts he found he had so much still on his fingers that the strips wouldn’t stick. He removed that nappy and wiped his fingers clean on it; put another one beneath her only to discover she’d peed on the mat; all was awash.

  Annet appeared in the doorway.

  ‘All right?’

  ‘I will be,’ he replied without conviction. The baby emitted a querulous squawk.

  ‘Just wrap her up loosely and lie her on her side in the basket.’

  ‘Got it.’

  She disappeared and he heard the enviable flop and rustle of her getting into bed and pulling the duvet round her. So vividly did he empathise with these comfortable, comforting actions that he might almost have fallen asleep standing up, if his daughter hadn’t begun to cry in earnest.

  Even more cack-handed in his anxiety not to disturb Annet he nonetheless got the next nappy on. It seemed huge and ill-fitting, but once he’d pulled the baby’s nightdress down over her purplish feet, that didn’t show. When he picked her up he noticed the back of the nightie was slightly damp, but decided against attempting to change it. Babies of this age were used to a certain amount of dampness, surely, it went with the territory.

  The crying found another gear and took on that persistent, nerve-fraying quality he was beginning to recognise. Annet’s voice came from the bedroom.

  ‘David – what’s the matter?’ There was no mistaking something accusatory in her tone.

  ‘Nothing I can’t handle.’ What was he saying?

  ‘Bring her in here.’

  ‘I will in a moment. You get some sleep.’

  ‘She was feeding for ages, she can’t possibly be hungry.…’

  ‘Exactly. Don’t worry about us.’

  Annet tailed away on a token protest, somewhere between a mumble and a moan. Claspin
g the baby against him with one hand David closed the door, and then picked up one of the new, smoothly folded cellular blankets from the bar cot. He dropped it on the divan, spread it out, then laid the baby on it and wrapped her up. With her wriggling fragility contained and bulked out by the blanket she was more manageable and even cuddly. Holding her with greater confidence he began to hum tunelessly against the side of her head, ‘Take me to a park, all covered with trees, Tell me on a Sunday please …’ There was a recitative-ish bit in the middle of the song that was quite beyond him, so he just kept repeating the chorus. Lots of people, Annet included, had told him he was tone deaf, but his faint nasal sounds seemed not only not to bother his daughter, but positively to soothe her. He stood near the window, swaying and humming, and over a period of about ten minutes the pattern of her crying changed, the tone became less furious, the interstices longer. It became of paramount importance to him to quieten her completely, to be able to lay her in her basket contented and asleep. He pictured himself telling Annet: ‘She was a bit crotchety, but I got her off.…’

  After a further fifteen minutes she was quiet. Her head drooped passively in the crook of his neck. His sense of triumph was, he knew, quite out of proportion to the scale of the achievement. He had after all done no more than thousands of lone teenage mothers in tower blocks with a fraction of his advantages did on a regular basis, and yet he was full of a tender elation. He was reminded of something he’d read, long forgotten till now, about how people trained birds of prey, a process known as ‘ watching’. The falconer and his charge would sit together through the night, the man remaining resolutely awake until the exhausted bird at last fell asleep on his wrist. The trust implicit in this was the basis on which all subsquent training took place.…

  Problems remained however. In his haste he had failed to clear up as he went along. There were two discarded nappies on the floor, along with the used wipes, and a puddle of urine lay on the changing mat, only contained by the mat’s raised edge. He was fearful of putting the baby down in case he broke the spell.

  Gingerly, he scooped the two sides of the mat together in his right hand and lowered it to the floor. Then he picked up the wipes and the nappies and dropped them on top. It was the best he could do for the moment.

  He switched off the light and crept back to the bedroom, rolling each foot heel-to-toe and carefully avoiding the one and a half weasel floorboards on the left centre of the landing.

  Annet seemed to be sound asleep, but as he came in she asked in a fairly normal voice: ‘Everything under control?’

  ‘Yes.’ He whispered, wanting, in every sense, to keep the peace.

  ‘Thanks, darl.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  He knew she was probably less awake than she seemed. Even when sleeptalking she sounded fearsomely incisive, and at busy times he’d known her organise whole phantom meetings in her sleep, asking for chairs to be moved and so forth. As her breathing signalled unconsciousness, he slipped into bed, still holding the baby. It was one a.m., but the long night, which had appeared such a threatening prospect, now seemed warm and protective, he almost didn’t want it to end. He felt he had achieved some kind of personal breakthrough. In bed with his sleeping wife and child, he considered he was performing the proper function of the paterfamilias, keeping watch over their slumbers.

  And curiously, he was no longer tired himself, but calm and alert. For the first time, he allowed himself to look back over the events of the day at work.

  The girl had to go, but that hadn’t made it any easier. Telling someone they weren’t up to the job was not something he relished, and to make matters worse she was a lovely girl – nice, well-mannered, pretty in an unfashionably rounded, wholesome, pink-and-white way. She ought to have been called something like Joyce, or Trish, but her name, improbably, was Gina: Gina King. The sort of name you glimpsed on dog-eared cards in London phone boxes. He knew when he’d said his piece as gently as he could, and closed the door after her, she would just about make it to the Ladies before bursting into tears. And she hadn’t even been around long enough to have acquired a real office friend, male or female, to whom she could unburden, and who would take her part, and exult in rubbishing him from arsehole to breakfast time. He suspected she still lived with her parents, and very probably had a boyfriend of whom they approved, but who had so far failed to shake her composure. According to his scenario both parents and boyfriend would be sympathetic to her plight in a vague, uncomprehending sort of way.

  In the great scheme of things at Border and Cheffins her dismissal was no great shakes. She was full young and had simply failed to come up to scratch during the probationary period. He’d had far more agonising confrontations when he’d been involved in ‘human resources’ (horrible term) at his previous, larger company – honourable, hardworking victims of downsizing in their middle years, who had every right to expect security … high fliers who’d come a cropper over gender politics … people sitting there telling him they’d found out they only had a limited time to live, and wanted to spend it with their family … All stuff for which he’d had neither the stomach nor the aptitude and which had got him in the end … But it was a long time since something had affected him as much as the letting go of Gina King. With this girl he had a sense of someone who had lived till now a dim life of sensory deprivation and who had, through the unlikely agency of Border and Cheffins, Country Property Agents, experienced an unprecedented degree of movement, light and colour. Even as he uttered his carefully chosen words of dismissal – thanking her for her contribution, emphasising the positive, wishing her well in the future – he’d known he was banging the lid back down on the tank.

  The situation wasn’t helped by the knowledge that he had selected Gina King from a shortlist of six, all of whom on the face of it might have been better suited to the task. Charmed, he had stuck his neck out and cast against the role, and this unpleasantness was the result.

  Doug Border had warned him, sort of. ‘It’s those hand-knits, isn’t it? You can’t beat a nubile figure in lambswool.’

  They were having a drink in the Marquis of Granby after work on the day of the interviews, and the remark had touched a nerve.

  ‘That had absolutely nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Well you may be a man of iron, David, but I plead guilty to susceptibility.’

  ‘She struck me as having some nice qualities—’

  ‘Oh she did, she did.’

  David pressed on. ‘She was polite and softly spoken, and whatever you say about the jumper she was smartly and appropriately dressed. And she really wants the job. There was a kind of—’ he sought the right word – ‘a kind of respect about her that you don’t get so much of to the pound these days.’

  ‘Respect?’ Doug raised an eyebrow over his glass. ‘She liked you.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t that … I mean I wouldn’t know if she did or not, and anyway it’s irrelevant—’

  He was stopped in his tracks by Doug’s chortling laughter.

  Annet, of course, had asked him about his choice at the time.

  ‘Did you find someone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And will she do? Silly question I suppose, you wouldn’t be taking her on otherwise.’

  ‘She’ll more than do. Basic skills at least as good as the rest, computer literacy fine, and a very pleasing manner.’

  Annet darted him one of her scowly amused looks. ‘ Which means – what?’

  ‘Pleasant and polite,’ he replied firmly, determined not to be wrong-footed again. ‘Not as fearsomely self-aware as some of these young women. Interested more in other people than herself. A little old-fashioned, which is no bad thing.’

  ‘What a paragon. Sounds too good to be true.’ Annet had kissed him to show she was teasing. ‘Right up your alley, darl.’

  And so it had proved, at least for a week or so. Gina moved about the outer office not terribly quickly, but quietly and to good effect, leaving a faint tr
ace of wholesome cologne on the air – violets or lily of the valley. At lunchtime she took a tupperware box from her desk drawer and disappeared outside somewhere. Border and Cheffins had a small back garden but it was strictly for show, and there was no park nearby, David couldn’t think where she got to. On the Friday of her first week, he couldn’t resist asking.

  ‘Have you found somewhere congenial to have lunch? This is a nice area but not exactly packed with green spaces.’

  She actually blushed. ‘I go and sit by the fountain.’

  He was puzzled. ‘I didn’t know there was one.’

  ‘In the Formby Centre.’

  ‘Oh yes!’ He nodded. The Formby was the local shopping mall, about a quarter of a mile away. ‘Good idea.’

  He wasn’t well acquainted with the Formby, but he retained an impression of the central plaza (as it was grandiosely known) as a meeting place for booze-ravaged down-and-outs and those underage hangers-on in training for the job. The knowledge that Gina King took her lunch there redeemed it somewhat in his eyes, and the following Monday when he needed to draw some cash, he found himself heading for the building society hole in the wall in the Centre rather than the slightly closer one at his own bank branch.

  On his way in as he crossed the plaza, Gina was nowhere to be seen. There were two rheumy-eyed chaps with fiery complexions sitting on the ground, their backs against the wall that surrounded the fountain, and a fat girl singing a cappella – ‘The water is wide’ – with a mongrel lying on a greasy anorak at her feet. A spotless elderly couple sat on a nearby bench consulting a map of the town. In spite of her unpromising appearance, the girl had a nice voice, true and resonant, and he dropped a pound coin on to the anorak, which she did not acknowledge.

  On his way back from the cashpoint he saw that the girl had joined the two tramps on the ground and they were sharing a bottle of cider. The dog on the anorak had its eyes rolled soulfully their way, as if hoping for a drop. So the singing had just been a ploy. David hoped he hadn’t unwittingly and with the best of intentions added to society’s problems, then reprimanded himself for his pedantry – he’d put his money down because he liked the song, its use was nothing to do with him. The neat couple had gone, leaving the seat empty. It was only as he walked on that he spotted Gina King from the corner of his eye: she was perched on the wall on the far side of the fountain, eating from a bag of crisps, the tupperware box open on the wall next to her.