Heaven's On Hold Read online

  Mags gave a little sighing laugh and shook her head. ‘The poor things. I do feel for them at their ages. Particularly David. It can’t be easy.’

  ‘They’re doing OK,’ Tim said flatly. His thoughts were turning fondly towards the office and real life.

  ‘Of course they are, I never meant to imply … But you must admit they do look exhausted.’

  ‘Well – remember what we were like? I kept falling asleep in meetings.’

  ‘Yes …’ Mags laughed again, silently, but bouncing her shoulders up and down which Tim found dire. ‘Poor old David …!’

  Tim shot her a cold look which she didn’t see. So she fancied David – so what? There were at least half a dozen women he saw every day about whom he fantasised, and of those at least three would not have thrown him out. His wife’s elephantine coyness annoyed the hell out of him.

  ‘Don’t you worry about David,’ he said. ‘ He’ll live.’

  Between six and nine David and Annet passed the baton back and forth. He cleared up while Annet fed Freya. He bathed the baby while she threw stuff in the washing machine. Bathing, though he had done it before, terrified him – his arm and wrist were throbbing with the effort of supporting his small, slippery daughter in the correct way, and when he’d finished the tension in his back took several minutes to unlock. Aching all over, he looked on as Annet fiddled about with their daughter’s vest and nightie and wondered exhaustedly why the designers of such garments thought so highly of minute ribbons.

  ‘You’d have thought they could have come up with something better.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Other than those fiddly ribbons. For doing up baby clothes.’

  ‘Such as?’ She raised her voice pointedly over Freya’s yells.

  ‘I don’t know … Buttons? Poppers? Velcro?’

  ‘Beastly uncomfortable, darl – think of having a button sticking into you if you couldn’t move. And velcro’s horrible bristly stuff. Tapes are baby-friendly.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ He decided this was not the moment to suggest that parent-friendliness was also desirable.

  ‘Anyway.’ Annet wrapped Freya in her yellow shawl, picked her up and held her out unceremoniously for him to take. ‘All done.’

  It wasn’t, not by a long chalk. The screeching continued for the best part of another two hours, ceasing only during those periods when Annet fed her daughter with an increasing air of desperation, muttering, ‘I hope to God they’re right about demand dictating supply.’ As soon as each feed was over it seemed only to have added to Freya’s agitation. During one of them David lit a fire in the drawing room. It was far too early in the year for one, really, but the evening had turned chilly, and besides he saw the cheery flames as a promise of comfort and relaxation to come. But as soon as the nipple popped out of her mouth Freya started up again.

  ‘Integris viribus …’ he murmured to himself.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Annet tapped brisk, edgy fingers on Freya’s back. ‘You know darl, either I’m going deaf or you’ve started talking to yourself.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No, what did you say just then?’

  ‘Integris viribus. It was forever cropping up in Caesar’s Gallic wars. It means “ with vigour unimpaired”.’

  Annet gave her dark grin. ‘Who were they talking about – Caesar?’

  ‘No, the poor bloody infantry. They were always sent back into the fray integris viribus—’ he pointed – ‘like that young lady.’

  ‘And her poor bloody parents!’

  It was another one of those borderline moments and he knew which way his wife would go unless he rescued her.

  ‘Here’s an idea,’ he said. ‘ You go and run yourself a big hot bath. There isn’t another thing you can do for her. I’ll walk her around and catch some of the news. She might even fall asleep.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  He took the baby, knowing that Annet’s snappishness was as close to weeping as she would allow in front of him. When she’d left the room he began walking up and down, up and down in front of the fire trying to impose some order and rhythm on the confined chaos of their lives. Freya’s crying remained resolutely out of sync. His own pacing reminded him of a zoo animal’s sad, mindless stereotyping, but having once begun he was afraid to stop because it might, just might, have an effect in the end. Even when the fire needed a log he managed the operation in easy stages. Two paces, bend the knees, take the log out, two more paces, turn. Two paces, bend the knees, put the log in place, two more paces … He remembered reading in some magazine, back in the sixties, that this was how bunny girls were taught to serve drinks, to avoid over-presentation of breasts or buttocks. Some bunny – he laughed sniffingly to himself.

  Incredibly it worked. Or perhaps inevitably – Freya would have fallen asleep anyway out of sheer exhaustion. In any event, David felt a warm surge of satisfaction as his daughter’s head rolled gently against his collar bone as he continued to walk. With extreme care and delicacy he looked at his watch, and saw that nearly half an hour had passed.

  Being careful to maintain the same pace he went upstairs. The bathroom door was open and the light still on. A steamy fragrance hung in the air of the landing. He switched off the light and walked across to the nursery. Annet had tidied it – it bore none of the traces of the evening’s skirmishes – but she wasn’t there.

  He re-crossed the landing to their bedroom. He was satisfied with this, his second small triumph and wanted Annet to share in it.

  But she was spark out, on the bed. She wore her pale blue towelling bathrobe and a pair of white sports socks. Her hair was damp. She lay on her side with both arms stretched out in front of her, her nose between them, like a cat.

  It was odd, after the bustle and stress of the day and the clamorous exchanges of the evening, to be standing here in the still, silent house, awake while his wife and daughter slept. He felt a pang of loneliness, but also of quiet pride: this was what it meant to be the head of a family.

  He savoured the sensation for a moment and then carried Freya back to her bedroom and laid her with exquisite care in her Moses basket. The crucial moment, he knew, was when her face separated from the warmth of his neck – he could almost feel the cool emptiness himself. But she made only one involuntary bend and stretch, her face growing pink for a second, before she relapsed into deep sleep. He lifted the blanket from the foot of the basket and laid it lightly over her, tucking it down the sides of the thin mattress.

  Going back downstairs he ran, as though sprung from a trap. He’d been worn out, drooping with fatigue, but not any more. He fetched himself a beer from the kitchen. In the drawing room the fire burned merrily, and he switched off the TV and put on some Bach, storming with energy and detail.

  Conscious, almost guiltily, of being truly happy for the first time in days, he went to draw the curtains. The back garden was full of a windy, flickering darkness. Dry leaves skittered across the pool of spilled light beyond the window, and disappeared. There were no visible stars, only a lurid peep of light between ragged clouds.

  The drawing room ran from the front to the back of the house. The village was on the whole poorly lit, but on the corner opposite, its head bashfully half-hidden between the branches of a large chestnut, was a streetlamp. As David was about to draw the curtains he noticed a figure standing beneath the lamp. There was nothing remarkable in the figure except its stillness – the shadows of the branches streamed across it like waterweed over a stone.

  Briskly, he closed the curtains.

  Chapter Four

  David had heard the phrase ‘separation anxiety’ – a smart new expression, he considered, for good old-fashioned homesickness – but not experienced it until that first morning he went back to work.

  He was wrong, he discovered, it wasn’t homesickness. It was a malady which began afflicting him before he’d left home, and evaporated once he’d gone. They both tried to make light
of it, to treat it as though it were nothing more than a partial return to the status quo. But everything had changed and they both knew it. He’d not been aware of a new routine developing, but now it appeared that it must have done, because as he showered and shaved and put on shirt, tie and suit he felt himself the odd man out. The shock of the new had blended into custom without his noticing. It was he who was pulling away, doing something different, breaking stride. This was most apparent when he went to say goodbye to Annet. She was feeding the baby in the kitchen, with Radio Four in the background, the cafetiere on the table between his empty mug and her half-full one, and was wearing her dressing gown. Next to her soft, worn towelling, his suit made him feel stiff and armoured, though against what he was by no means sure.

  ‘This is weird,’ she said.

  As she said this she didn’t raise her head from contemplation of her task, so David bent his own awkwardly to place a kiss on her mouth, and to drop another on Freya’s head. ‘ It is rather.’

  ‘What am I going to do here all day on my own?’

  ‘You’re not on your own.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘She’s kept the two of us fairly busy so far.’

  He had intended this to be consoling, to mean that Annet wouldn’t be at a loose end, when that was what she hated most: as he pulled out into Gardener’s Lane he realised it might have sounded like an awful, smug warning. On the other hand, he calculated, his wife was the most formidably capable person he knew, so it was hardly likely she would be overwhelmed by the responsibility of looking after a tiny baby.

  It was still odd to be leaving her there. There was a passing-place on the single-lane road that climbed the hill out of Newton Bury towards the ridgeway, and he pulled over for a moment and looked down at the village. From this distance the place had a Tiggywinklish aspect, the rooftops tightly clustered and peeping between trees, the aerials and satellite works invisible. Although he couldn’t make out Bay Court he could pinpoint its position, and tried, unsuccessfully, to picture Annet down there going about her maternal business. It was impossible. As he rejoined the road again he reflected that with all due respect to the dignity of motherhood, the stage it provided was simply too small for her. He was a traitor for going, and a bastard for feeling relieved.

  He must have left a tad early, or driven a tad fast – whatever the reason, he beat the eager beavers to pole position in the car park, and was at his desk by eight-thirty.

  The moment David had left, Annet was poleaxed by loneliness. She had never, since they moved out of London, confronted a day completely alone in the house, or at least not a day over whose direction she had no control. She knew that in theory she could do as she liked – she was demand feeding, she had a car, she had no one to answer to except herself – and yet she felt buried alive, abandoned. She cried.

  She cried non-stop for about five minutes, and when she did stop it was not because she’d pulled herself together, but because she was all cried out. Throughout this humiliating episode Freya, sated, slept tranquilly in her arms. When the storm had passed, Annet put her in her basket and carried the basket upstairs to the baby room while she had a bath.

  Gazing at herself stretched out in the water beneath an archipelago of bubbles she determined to get back in shape. You couldn’t do it all at once, she realised that, the Canadian Airforce programme would have to wait, but first steps must be taken. She’d been given a leaflet before leaving hospital with a regime of ‘mums’ muscle-tighteners’ that had made her lip curl with scorn, but once out of the bath and back in her dressing gown she dug out the leaflet and followed its instructions. Dismayingly, she found several of them quite difficult, particularly those pertaining to the pelvic floor. She was shaken by her apparent feebleness. Would these weakenings and loosenings be permanent? Would David no longer sigh with pleasure on entering her, and cry out in ecstasy at the end? Did motherhood signal the end of her as a sexual being? A reference to ‘ stress incontinence’, especially prevalent it appeared in older mothers, caused her to go cold with apprehension. Was she then to wet herself every time she coughed, or laughed, or ran for a cab …? The dismalness of these possibilities nearly started the tears again, but she fought them off by redoubling her efforts.

  She was composed, dressed and wearing eyeliner when the arrival of Karen exactly coincided with Freya waking up.

  ‘This is what I’ve been waiting for – may I come up and see?’ called Karen, already halfway up the stairs.

  ‘Be my guest.’

  Annet went out on to the landing to meet her.

  ‘Here she is. Karen, Freya, Freya, this is Karen.’

  Karen’s welcoming grin was almost as wide as her outstretched arms, giving Freya up to her seemed the most natural thing in the world.

  ‘Hello Freya, aren’t you gorgeous, look at all your hair, just like your mummy …’ Annet watched a little wearily as Karen chirruped and fondled with practised ease. Karen, Mags, her mother, not to mention an entire monstrous regiment of friends and colleagues waiting in the wings, knew that here was an area where their own experience far exceeded hers, and they were going to make the most of it.

  ‘Want a coffee before you start?’ she asked, only slightly pointedly.

  ‘Lovely… is there time?’ Karen followed her down the stairs, still doting away. ‘Ah, bless, she’s so beautiful, what does your husband think?’ In his absence David was always referred to in this way rather than as ‘Mr Keating’. Annet had pulled just sufficient rank to remain ‘ Mrs Keating’ on notes and messages, but this appellation was never used to her face.

  ‘He’s delighted. A little nervous, of course.’ She was in all fairness about to concede that they both were, but Karen jumped in on this familiar territory.

  ‘They are, aren’t they?’ she agreed, swaying comfortably from side to side while Annet put the kettle on. ‘ I remember Don, he used to hold Julie out in front like a tray, like this—’ she demonstrated – ‘but he got over it. You wait till you‘ re on number three … only joking!’

  Karen was a couple of years younger than Annet, though she didn’t look it, and already a grandmother (courtesy of Julie), which she also didn’t look. She was a cheerful, energetic, uncomplicated woman with good legs and a sound marriage to Don in spite of the mocking way she talked about him. She was a voracious reader of every kind of fiction from schlock romance to Booker hopefuls and had a Rita-ish propensity to put them all on the same level. Issues about comparing like with like did not concern her – it was enough for Karen that they were all books. Annet thoroughly approved of this attitude, and they’d had some lively discussions when Annet was at home packing reading matter for an overseas trip. Karen’s all-time favourite was Wuthering Heights.

  ‘So what are her other names, then?’ asked Karen, as though Annet were deliberately withholding information.

  ‘She hasn’t got any at the moment.’

  ‘Never mind, Freya’s lovely – is that Scandiwegian?’

  ‘Yes, I believe so. It’s one of my husband’s choices.’

  ‘Goddess or something, right?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Well,’ said Karen, handing the baby back in order to take delivery of her coffee, ‘you might as well aim high. Now then, where would you like me?’

  There seemed to Annet that there was both too much to do and not enough. She supposed that this was what people meant when they talked of parenthood being tiring. She was moving more slowly and less frequently than she would have done, say, at the office, but her legs were heavy and her brain sluggish. There were far fewer demands being made on her time and energies, and yet the one that existed was absolute, so she was in a continuous state of low-level alert, quite different from her sharp, proactive work mode.

  Listening to Karen bustling about, and staying out of her way, she wondered why she’d asked her to come back so soon – she should be doing the housework herself. Last week, wanting to be left in peace, she and
David (mainly David) had seen to it. On the other hand, it was boring as hell, and in her present state she wouldn’t have got round: Bay Court was a big house. Plus, and here she was guilty of the professional woman’s self-interested manoeuvring, she didn’t want to lose Karen, so it was probably better not to mess her about.

  In spite of, or perhaps because of, the background domestic activity, Freya slept and slept. Annet put washing in the machine, answered some mail, and finally gave in and called Major Events in Bayswater.

  ‘Hello!’ exclaimed her junior colleague and court jester Piers, as if she were calling from some obscure foreign country (which in a sense, she thought grimly, she was). ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Fine. Well – different.’

  ‘I bet!’ Piers was the super-efficient scion of a lord lieutenant, with the amiable unsinkability and camp manner of one who had no need to work. ‘Lady of leisure, is it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. It takes a bit of getting used to, being the first resort.’

  ‘God, I can imagine. Or rather, I can’t. I do remember my mother saying the first one was utterly dire—’ he pronounced it ‘dah’ – ‘and she’s not a woman given to exaggeration.’

  ‘Freya’s no trouble really—’

  ‘Freya? Is that what you’re calling her? That is just so fab!’

  ‘We like it. Piers – what’s the in-tray looking like?’

  ‘Surprisingly OK. You are indispensable, of course, but it’s still silly season so only the occasional letter is flooding in. The world of conferences and exhibitions is holding itself in readiness for the great autumn push. Or your return, whichever comes the sooner.’