Cuckoo Page 15

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For having Magda. You’ve done a lot for her. And I know it isn’t easy.’

  She didn’t answer, seemed to have lost her usual easy habit of responding to Charles. Resentment had clogged it, like lumps in a cream sauce.

  The evening was close, almost stifling. Small, swollen clouds were building up across the river, and a greenish light oozed its way between sky and water. A cloud of gnats buzzed above their heads. They walked in silence along the crumbling path, stepping gingerly around the puddles. In the early months of their marriage, they had walked the same path, but Charles had held her hand then, and stopped at every bench to kiss her, in the dark. It was light now, a blazing summer evening, and people were only dozing on the benches or reading newspapers which shrieked of strikes, inflation. They wandered on to where the river widened and the trees grew closer, trailing their branches in the water and staring at their own reflections. Charles stopped and took her hand, looked furtively around, to make sure no one was watching. ‘I love you, Frances. You know that, don’t you?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Don’t let things be different.’

  She shook her head, watched his neat, imperious eyebrows draw down across his steel-blue eyes in a tense and wary frown. His brows were neither shaggy nor straggling, yet somehow they managed to dominate his face. Even when she was angry with him, she could still admire the way he was put together; each of his features carefully selected from Harrods and then set in place by a design consultant. Perhaps he was right – things needn’t be different. Magda wouldn’t stay with them for ever. They still had their own life, apart from Magda; perhaps even their own baby.

  A couple strolled by, the young bearded man pushing a pram. Charles would never be a pram-pusher, but at least he could try to be a father. He’d done it once, for God’s sake. But that was more than fifteen years ago, and with a Hungarian Earth Mother. Perhaps his sperm was tired now, worn out after years of jet-lag and tax conundrums. Or maybe she herself was too small, too cold, too old, and sperm only stirred themselves for hot Hungarian wombs.

  But at least they could go on trying. It was absurd to swallow a fertility drug and then fail to be fertilized. How animal the whole thing sounded, except that animals got on with it, without all this fuss and bother. For them, it was becoming something of a chore. They hadn’t even slept together since Magda had arrived. She hadn’t wanted to, felt Charles was somehow polluted and defiled. Or maybe it was just a side effect of the Clomid. That would be ironical – to turn you off the sex you needed to conceive. She was taking her second month’s dose now, and it made her feel nauseous, as if she were already pregnant.

  Charles, too, had shown little inclination. Maybe it was guilt, or overwork. And yet he needed sex as a sort of safety valve, an indoor rugger match. She’d noticed herself how it sucked the aggression out of him and neutralized the electric shocks between them. Now it was all electricity. She must somehow switch it off and lure him back into the double bed.

  She coaxed him over to a bench and put her arm around his shoulders. ‘You’re right, Charles, we can’t let Magda ruin everything. There’s still us.’

  He removed the arm, so she took his hand instead. ‘That’s important,’ she insisted. She could hear a magpie squawking at the top of a hawthorn bush, laughing at them almost. ‘Let’s go home and …’ She didn’t say it, just made a gesture with her hands against his body. It wasn’t the vital middle of the month yet, but she must get him back into practice.

  ‘What, now?’ The magpie screeched with laughter.

  ‘Yes, now.’ She inched her fingers up his forearm, kept them stroking up and down.

  Charles frowned. ‘But supposing Magda’s back? I know it sounds stupid, but I feel I can’t perform if she’s around.’

  ‘She won’t be,’ whispered Frances.

  She wasn’t. But the front door had been left wide open, and a new set of muddy footprints serpented the hall. Charles strode up the stairs to the studio and knocked loudly on the door. ‘Magda?’

  No answer. Frances could hear her watch ticking almost apologetically in the silence, a tiny, golden sound.

  Charles wrenched open the door. The bed was a heap of tangled blankets and dirty clothes. The exquisite Bawden watercolours had been taken down and flung on the floor, glass smashed and frames broken. The flowers were decapitated, lying in a pool of water on the stained and sodden desk. The lion was hanging upside down, its tail caught in the wardrobe door. And all over the new cornflower walls was written, in a bleeding crimson lipstick, ‘I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU.’

  Charles closed the door again, quietly and deliberately, as if trying not to wake a baby. Frances listened to her watch, tried to make her mind a blank. Charles took her arm and let her downstairs. He poured them both a brandy in the Victorian smoked glass goblets. Neither spoke. Charles took a sheet of headed paper from the bureau and uncapped his pen.

  ‘I’m writing to the nuns at Westborough,’ he said. ‘Accepting their offer of a place. After that, we’ll …’ He leaned over, touched her face, ran a finger down across her breast.

  ‘Go away,’ she snapped, suddenly, irrationally. ‘Go away. GO AWAY!’

  Chapter Eleven

  Hate you, hate you, hate you, pounded the hammer in Magda’s head. Three A. M. and still wide awake. Hated cats, hated puppies, hated Bunty’s stupid snoring. Bunty was sprawled beside her on the bed, wheezing through enlarged adenoids. Two cats were curled together at the bottom of the eiderdown, the new white puppy snuffling in a laundry basket. Hate you, hate you, hate you, shrieked the blue flowered walls, back on Richmond Green. How would she ever get it off? Lipstick was indelible, like hate. Perhaps they’d forgive her, if she offered to pay, but she hadn’t any money except Charles’ allowance and that was meant for ‘good’ (boring) books and visits to the theatre. She hated the theatre. Frances had taken her to some stupid thing, where everyone spoke in poetry and you couldn’t get ice creams. Frances had skin like the inside of a shell. She’d like to break the shell. Her own skin was coarser and there were blackheads round her nose. It would be nice to look like Frances. Frances didn’t have dark hairs on her legs. She pulled up her jeans and peered at them. Disgusting. She hated hairs. That Miklos man had hairs all over him, even on his thumbs. She hated him, too. The way her mother called him ‘szivecskem’ and used that stupid baby voice for him and kept ruffling his repulsive greasy hair. And then wasted all the money buying beigli for him, when they made do with plain bread and butter.

  She turned over on her front. She was still fully dressed and the buckle of her belt dug into her stomach. She tore the belt off, flung it on the floor. She didn’t believe all that crap about Grandma dying. ‘We’re only going to Hungary for the funeral.’ Fancy talking about a funeral when someone wasn’t even dead! Grandma wasn’t old enough to die. She’d seen pictures of her, a small fuzzy lady who always looked out of focus and had a second set of china teeth for Sundays. People didn’t go to Budapest for funerals. They went because some hairy Jew had a lakás there, two measly rooms in some rotten little alley. He was going to nab her mother and shut her up in it, smarm his hairy hands all over her. His breath stank of pickled walnuts and he wore hideous shiny shirts. ‘We’ll send for you,’ he’d said, in that flabby foreign voice. ‘Later. We mustn’t interrupt your English education.’ It was a stinking lie. Of course he wouldn’t send for her. And her education had been interrupted. She’d liked her old school. They had proper English sausages for dinner, not Hungarian szalámi which was crammed with bits of fat. And they’d just started judo and painting in oils.

  Charles had taken her away, just like that, in the middle of her syllabus. He hadn’t even asked. No one asked her anything – not the important things. ‘Would you like your bacon fried or grilled, Magda?’ ‘How many of Shakespeare’s plays have you read?’ Oh yeah, they asked her junk like that all day long. But not whether she wanted to go to sodding Richmond Green inste
ad of Hungary, or be ripped away from all her classmates, or share her mother with an odious little Yid. They hadn’t even asked her whether she wanted fucking cornflowers on her walls. Lipstick-covered cornflowers. She wished she hadn’t done it. Frances had searched through twenty sample books before she chose the flowers. Well, if the stupid bitch wanted to waste her time …

  Frances wasn’t stupid. She was fucking clever, spouted stuff out of encyclopaedias, and closed her eyes and went all trancey when she played the piano. Her own ma couldn’t even play scales – or read French novels and German newspapers, and win at chess and golf and tennis and bridge, and all those other frightening Frances things. Charles was worse. He ruined mealtimes poking long boring words around his dinner plate, like those prissy wets on Radio 3 he took to the toilet with him. And if she didn’t join in, he asked what was the matter, didn’t she care about environmental thingummyjig, or something-something-something in the blah, blah, blah, blah …

  It was easier with Frances on her own. Frances even smiled, sometimes, when Charles wasn’t there, and they had fish and chips and ketchup in the kitchen, instead of sole Véronique off the poncy patterned plates. And Frances had given her a proper tape recorder, one that really worked, with fifteen blank cassettes and a leather storage box.

  Fuck the lipstick! You couldn’t ruin walls after fifteen blank cassettes. Perhaps bleach would shift it, or Vim, or nail varnish remover. At least she’d better try. But supposing all the flowers came off as well? If only she knew where Reggie lived, she could ask him for a piece of extra wallpaper to cover up the walls. But Reggie didn’t like her. He’d tried to call her ‘Missy’ and she’d sworn at him.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck – they hated her to use that word. The muscle on Charles’ face twitched in and out when she said it and he looked like a goldfish. She knew what it meant. Grown-ups made such a fuss about it, but it was only what dogs did. Or what Miklos did with her mother all the time. Grown-ups all lied, anyway. Even her mother lied. ‘We’ll write to you every day, dear.’ And she’d had two measly postcards. ‘We’ll send for you to come and join us.’ Oh yeah, in a million years when she was dead and her mother had a dozen disgusting black hairy babies, all identical to Miklos.

  Frances lied, too. ‘You know I’m very fond of you, don’t you, Magda?’ Like hell she was! OK, Frances was decent to her sometimes, like when she was sick after the oysters. Frances cleaned it all up and sat with her for hours afterwards and put smelly stuff on her forehead. But she wouldn’t be nice now – not after the lipstick. Frances would hate her now. She was sorry, in a way; wanted Frances to like her, call her ‘Pootle’ like Viv did with Rupert. Frances was special. You had to be someone, before she bothered with you.

  Sometimes she made brandy snaps with real cream in the middle, then it was OK, or showed you her collection of old silver charms and told you where each separate one had come from, then you felt almost safe, but the very next minute she’d turn on you and do her nut about a speck of dust on the mantelpiece, or why hadn’t you used a fork to eat your pudding.

  She made such a fuss about her house. No one was allowed even to breathe in it. There were so many bloody things, you could hardly move. In their own flat, back in Streatham, they’d only had sensible stuff, beds and chairs and things, but Charles and Frances had freezers and dishwashers and microwave ovens and electronic tumble-driers and rôtisseries and charcoal grills. And they didn’t have just one of everything, but two. Two cars, two pianos, two tellies, two stereos, two bathrooms, and three toilets, four radios, and fifteen bloody clocks. She’d counted the clocks. They all belonged to Charles – he collected them. Fifteen clocks, and he wouldn’t agree to one piddling puppy.

  Charles’ study was so crammed with gear, it was like a shop. He had three pocket calculators and a mini computer, and a quartz digital watch with an alarm and a calendar, and a video tape recorder and a … The whole house was one sodding great machine, cold and shiny, and full of faceless factory inspectors, like that dump her mother worked in, where you had to wear a sterile uniform and even your hair was shoved into a net. Charles and Frances were Chief Inspectors, poking their noses into everything and pouncing on it – hands, nails, hair, underwear. ‘We don’t cut our toenails in the drawing-room, Magda.’ ‘Nice girls change their pants every day, Magda.’ OK, so they’d given her a racing bike with five gears and cantilever brakes, but what was one lousy bike, when they had all that cash? You had to be so bloody careful all the time. They’d jump on you for nothing, or nag you into some fucking stupid chore like cleaning silver. Why buy grot that needed cleaning in the first place? Viv never did. And Viv didn’t make you wash the bath out, or use a butter-knife, or turn puppies into dangerous monsters.

  Charles had lied about the dog. Yeah, even he lied, her own saintly father who ponced about like God’s elder brother. ‘The puppy probably won’t survive in any case,’ he’d frowned. ‘Not after a drowning.’

  It hadn’t bloody drowned. She’d saved it, hadn’t she? He’d like to see it drown, that was obvious.

  ‘Fuck you, Charles!’ she’d shouted and he’d gone all white and tight and goldfishy again. Other kids didn’t call their fathers Charles. She’d called him Dad once, and Frances had gone spare. Dad, dad, dad. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He wasn’t a dad, anyway. Dads grew up with you and brought the coal in and mended things. He’d lock her up, if he found the lipstick. Or send her packing. She didn’t want to go away. Well, back to her ma would be smashing, but that was impossible, and she’d rather stay in Richmond than be stuck in some hostel, or a prison. At least she had her bike and her tape recorder in Richmond, and Bunty was close by. She poked Bunty in the ribs and her breathing changed key. They couldn’t send you to prison for writing on walls. ‘Bunty?’ she whispered.

  ‘Mmmmmm …’

  ‘Do you know what gets lipstick off?’

  ‘Oh, cold cream or cleansing milk or something. Shut up. What’s the time?’

  ‘No, not off lips, off walls.’

  ‘Magda, go to sleep, it’s the middle of the night.’

  ‘I can’t go to sleep. I’ve put lipstick all over Frances’ walls.’

  ‘What?’ Bunty grabbed at the blankets and pulled herself up. ‘She’ll kill you.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ Magda stared out of the window. There was only one curtain. The other one had been taken down three months ago for patching, and never been replaced. The moon was a mean little sliver, sneaking behind the trees. ‘There’s just a chance they haven’t seen it yet. Your mum phoned Frances to tell her I was staying here, so they may not have bothered going to my room.’

  Bunty yawned. ‘Oh, you mean, it’s only your room. I thought you meant the whole house.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Bunty. My room’s bad enough, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s ‘‘yes’’, Bunty, not ‘‘yeah’’.’ They both giggled, clutched each other.

  ‘Mum’s got a book downstairs. Sort of household hints and stuff. Mrs Parry Jones gave it to her last Christmas. It might tell you how to get lipstick off.’

  ‘Bunty, quick, where is it?’

  ‘Ssshh, don’t wake the whole house. Can’t we leave it till the morning?’

  ‘No, we can’t.’

  They crept downstairs to the kitchen and Bunty dug out the book from the bottom of the cupboard, where it had been abandoned with half a dozen gumboots. She propped it open on her knee.

  ‘Wait a mo – it’s alphabetical. Lampshades, lentils, here we are – lipstick. ‘‘How to make your own lipstick. Melt 3 oz Peruvian basalm …’’’

  Magda grabbed the book from her. ‘Let’s look under ‘‘stains’’. Beer, biro, bird droppings – ugh! OK, I’ve found it now. ‘‘To remove lipstick stains from fabric, dab with carbon tetra-something, then wash in soap and warm water.’’’

  ‘You can’t do that with walls. The paper’ll come off.’

  ‘Fuck! All right, let’s look under ‘‘wallpaper’’. Hold on �
� here it is. ‘‘To remove greasy marks from wallpaper, rub stain with fresh white bread or with a soft India rubber.’’ Christ! They must be joking.’

  Bunty stretched out in a chair and shut her eyes. She was still yawning. ‘Lipstick isn’t greasy, anyway.’

  ‘‘Course it is, fathead. It’s made of shark’s oil or something. Look, get me some bread.’

  ‘Oh Magda, you can’t start eating now. It’s the middle of the night.’

  ‘I’m not eating. I’m going back to Richmond.’

  Bunty wrapped her nightdress round her knees and tucked her toes under. ‘But you told me you’d never go back – told Mum the same as well.’

  ‘I’ve got to remove the lipstick, Bunty, before they find it. I’m going now and I’m taking every cleaner I can find – bread, India rubber, soap … everything.’

  ‘You can’t go out in the pitch dark.’

  ‘Why not? I’ve got lights on my bike, haven’t I? It’s only five minutes’ ride, in any case.’

  ‘But the house will be all locked up.’

  ‘I’ve got keys.’

  ‘But what about the bolts? And burglar alarms and things?’

  ‘They don’t bolt the little side door. It’s only locked, and I’ve got a key to it. And the burglar alarm isn’t on at night. I’ll just creep in – they won’t even hear me. My room’s at the back.’

  Bunty unwrapped her toes again and lumbered to her feet. ‘All right. I’ll get the bread.’ She hacked a chunk from a large farmhouse loaf and wrapped it in a dish-cloth. Magda was collecting tins, jars and cartons of every household cleaner.

  ‘I daren’t use ours. Mrs Eady would notice – she measures everything. Half of these haven’t been used for years. They’ve gone all hard and crumbly.’

  Bunty found her a headscarf and a duffel coat from an anonymous collection in the cloakroom, then helped her wheel her cycle round the front. The sky was already lightening, greyish round the edges now like a mouldy plum. The slice of moon had been cut so thin, it looked as if it would break.