Cuckoo Read online

  She rummaged in her bag and found the small white tablets Rathbone had prescribed for her. ‘CLOMID‘ said the label. They looked more like humble aspirin than a wonder fertility drug. By some strange coincidence, it was exactly the right day to begin the course, the fifth day of her cycle. Perhaps it was a sign. She swallowed a tablet with a glass of milk. Milk – with any luck, she’d be ordering more in future. She screwed up her note to the milkman and started another.

  ‘Please ring.’

  Chapter Two

  There were lions everywhere. Real, fierce ones with ravaging jaws and roars like the doorbell. The largest beast pealed mercilessly into her left ear. The sound of a maddened, hungry doorbell. It was the doorbell …

  Frances groped out her hand and grabbed a tail. The lion was sleeping upside down beside her.

  ‘Hell!’ she muttered. ‘The milkman.’

  She pulled on her Harrods house-coat and loped downstairs.

  ‘Coming!’ she called through the locked door, struggling with stiff bolts. She hardly dared look up. She felt like the Princess in the fairy tale, face to face with her frog prince.

  First, she saw his shoes. Scuffed black lace-ups from Freeman, Hardy and Willis. Her eyes moved slowly up towards his trousers – grey turn-ups with a hole in the knee, brown plastic belt, navy nylon anorak. A small man, a thin man, but what about his face? Adonises could be pint-sized. She took a deep breath and jumped from grubby grey collar to flabby white face. Three warts, two faded eyes and a gingery moustache. It was the only hair he had. His peaked United Dairies cap covered only half of his shining bald head. Yul Brynner? No, Yul Brynner was a he-man. This was a shrimp. And not even pink. A dead shrimp, pale and bloated. He looked as if he’d been drinking too much of his own pallid milk.

  ‘Yes, madam?’

  They still said ‘madam’ on Richmond Green – one of the reasons Charles chose to live there.

  I’d like you to sire my baby. No, she couldn’t say that. ‘I wondered if you had any … yoghurt?’

  ‘Strawberry, blackcurrant, or mandarin?’ His voice sounded like gravel plopping through porridge. Perhaps he had a younger assistant, one of those cherubic boys with soft skins and golden hair. Colette had extolled the virtues of the youthful male. But was it safe to father children under age?

  ‘Strawberry, blackcurrant, or …’ He began his litany again.

  ‘Lovely weather, isn’t it?’ Frances smiled her best blue-chip smile. Anything to keep him there. She glanced in the direction of the milk float – there didn’t seem to be a boy. Only a mangy dog sniffing at the bottles. ‘I mean, it’s surprising to see the sun after all that rain.’

  He grunted. ‘Or we do have the plain. That’s a penny cheaper.’

  Perhaps he had a day off, and another, younger fellow took over, a Kevin Keegan, or a Bjorn Borg. ‘Of course it is July. I suppose we should expect a little sun.’

  He took a step backwards. ‘So you won’t be wanting yoghurt, ma’am?’

  ‘Er … no thanks, not today.’ She closed the door. No yoghurt, no strawberry-flavoured baby. The whole thing was utterly ridiculous. Even if he had been Adonis, what on earth could she have done? Asked him in and demanded a free sample of his double jersey cream? Told him she was doing a market research survey on South Thames milkmen and would he please strip off? Mr Rathbone should have sent her a handbook on how to seduce milkmen, like the instructions he enclosed with her temperature chart. She knew those off by heart: take the temperature every morning, by mouth, before rising. Do not eat, drink, smoke, talk, move, breathe, before recording it. Start a new line on the first day of every period and plot the graph for that month. A dot for every day. She’d grown accustomed to her little dots – her start to the day, like Charles’ exercises or the Morning Service.

  Every time they made love, a small neat circle went around the dot. She was often tempted to add a few more circles. They never seemed quite enough. Either Charles was away, or exhausted. He refused to rush it, was a perfectionist even in the bedroom. No snatched five-minute snacks, but a four-course meal with all the trimmings.

  Apart from the paucity of circles, the charts were perfect. Some women had erratic charts, so Rathbone said, with temperatures rising and falling completely at random, but hers were as neat and orderly as her life. Twenty-eight-day cycles to the minute, the little dip just before ovulation, the one-degree rise exactly on day fourteen. Up and down it went, exactly as it should, and in and out went Charles’ thing (work permitting), following its curve. And absolutely nothing happened: no continued rise denoting pregnancy, but down again, start again, new line, new chart.

  The trouble with the charts was that they killed all spontaneity, more or less ordered you when to make love, when to abstain. And if Charles was away on those few vital, fertile days, she felt almost bereaved. In the last year alone, she had followed him to outlandish and unlikely places, just so they could put a circle round the dot. Once, they were grounded in Alaska with engine trouble, followed by a blizzard, and Charles was so upset about missing his International Tax Conference in Hawaii that he couldn’t even get it up. Another time, she’d spent seven rain-sodden days trailing round the Isle of Man, trying to prise Charles away from three hundred identical accountants, and eventually collapsing with ’flu and pharyngitis (and still no circles round her dots).

  She couldn’t really blame Charles. For almost eighteen months now, they’d done it on the right days, and she had stayed on her back for thirty minutes afterwards, with her legs stuck up in the air (Mr Rathbone’s Holy Writ again). And still no results – except backache and lost sleep.

  Frances scanned The Times and nibbled on her starch-reduced roll. Two gold stars. Charles liked her slim and well-informed. She’d planned a round of golf today. Laura had taken time off and was collecting her at ten. She felt a dart of envy. When every day was more or less a day off, freedom lost its flavour. She didn’t even feel like golf. Once, it had been crucial to drive a ball cleanly down a fairway and two-putt every green, but now it seemed absurd to lavish all that ardour and attention on a tiny white ball. When Laura knocked, she was still dawdling through the paper in her house-coat.

  ‘Good God, darling, have you gone down with the dreaded influenza?’

  ‘No, I’m just a bit ungolfish.’

  ‘Impossible! Look, have a cup of coffee and you’ll feel better.’

  ‘I’ve had three and I feel worse.’

  ‘Well, make me one, then. To tell the truth, I’ve only just crawled out of bed myself. Do you know, Frances, this is the first time I’ve ever caught you in your nightie! If that indefatigable spouse of yours ever had a free minute to communicate with lesser mortals, I’d tell him what wicked things you get up to when he’s three thousand miles away.’

  ‘Yes, it’s my chatting-up-the-milkman gear!’ With Laura, you had to be flip.

  ‘Frances, if you’re going to have a fling, for goodness sake aim high. A diplomat, or something. Far better perks, and a decent pad to do it in. Personally, I just wouldn’t fancy a milk float. All those empty bottles banging against my breasts.’

  Frances tried to smile. It was all talk with Laura. She spattered her conversation with wild allusions to her tempestuous life, yet most evenings she was closeted with Clive and half a dozen poodles, in front of Nationwide.

  ‘Laura, do people really have all these affairs?’

  ‘Which affairs?’

  ‘Oh, come on, you know what I mean. You can’t pick up a women’s mag these days without some article on ‘‘Why You Need a Latin Lover’’ or ‘‘How To Stop Your Husband Finding Out’’. It’s credible, until you bring it down to actual individuals. I can‘t imagine Mrs Eady with a lover, even an Anglo-Saxon one. And what about Viv? Does she have affairs?’

  ‘Can’t you use the word in the singular, darling? You talk about affairs like eggs, as if they came in dozens. I should have thought one affair was more than enough for anyone.’

  ‘Well, one, then
. Does Viv have even one?’

  ‘How should I know? You’re closer to her than I am. I doubt it, frankly, with all that surplus avoirdupois. Unless, of course, she’s found a fellow with a fat fetish.’

  Laura was a bitch. She wasn’t slim herself, but it was the sort of flesh you called voluptuous, rather than obese. She pushed away the sugar bowl and prised open the tiny silver snuff-box which held her saccharin. ‘Frankly, I think it’s all a ploy, darling. A hidden plug for male superiority. You know the sort of line – now women are liberated, all they want is men.’

  Frances frowned. ‘But most of those articles are written by women. The liberated kind.’

  ‘Oh, half of them are probably men in drag. Haven’t you noticed how androgynous most women’s libbers are? Facial hair and baby slings. The poor male ego has taken such a bruising recently, they’ll stoop to anything just to shore it up again. Frankly, it tends to put me off them. There’s nothing sadder than a drooping ego.’

  Frances glanced across at her. Laura’s elegant long legs had been dipped in sheer black silk, and were crossed provocatively at the thigh. Her three-inch heels lengthened them still further. Even when she changed into her golf clothes, the men still goggled. Laura loved it. She lapped up men like cream, then spat them out again.

  ‘Quite honestly, Frances, I haven’t bothered with affairs since I drew up a balance sheet on them. You know, pros and cons. The pros took two lines, and the cons four pages. I simply can’t be fagged risking syphilis, BO, boredom, trichomonas, guilt, or cancer of the cervix – to name but a random few.’

  Or pregnancy, thought Frances. Laura had been sterilized ten years ago, as casually as if she’d had her hair cut. She herself had been shocked when she heard. Sterilization seemed a violent act, a desecration, almost. She knew all the arguments, of course – over-population, strain on natural resources, wrong to bring a child into a wicked world. But that was only talk. Women didn’t get their tubes tied because harvests had failed in Bangladesh, or Peking was stock-piling the Bomb. Laura wanted to keep her leisure and her looks, her independence, her freedom to travel, her glossy, streamlined job. Frances almost envied her – just to be that certain. Laura never agonized. She knew what she wanted and she got it.

  Frances removed a wilting carnation from the stiff flower arrangement on the table. ‘Do you think Viv …?’

  ‘What about her?’ shouted a voice from the hallway. Viv had let herself in, the back way, and was standing panting at the door. ‘Sorry I’m late. Midge refused to go to school. She crawled underneath the hall seat and clung on to the legs. It took three of us to prise her out.’

  ‘Little monster,’ muttered Laura, who regarded children as a lower form of life. Strange, thought Frances, how children wormed their way into everything. Women who didn’t have any were set apart, put in a special category, frigid, selfish, spoilt. It was true they were less restricted – their lives weren’t swallowed up in rose-hip syrup or school bazaars, or parcelled out among a dozen grabbing hands. All the same, it seemed a strange basis for alignment. Viv was friendly with the most unlikely people, simply because they had a school or a Brownie pack in common, whereas she was lumped with Laura, on the arbitrary basis that neither had a child.

  In fact, she felt pulled between the two. Laura’s elegant, untrammelled life was not unlike her own. The difference was that Laura enjoyed it. Her glass and concrete office and her Homes and Gardens house (complete with rich, phlegmatic husband) apparently fulfilled and satisfied her, so that she didn’t yearn for children, or that elusive Something Else. And, yet, she didn’t want to be a Laura, with a padlocked womb and a solid silver locket in place of a heart.

  Neither did she want to be a Viv – an overweight earth mother who had run to seed. Yet Viv lived far more fully and unselfishly than she or Laura ever could. Viv had five kids and a heart big enough to fit them all. Viv was warm, real, safe, easy, comfortable. And – Laura would have added – stolid, slovenly and boring. Chewing-gum on chair seats and marbles dropped in cornflakes packets. When Frances thought about her own child, it never looked like Viv’s, with their runny noses or filthy fingernails. It never had rashes or earache or diarrhoea, or answered back, or was stupid at arithmetic. She relied on Charles to produce a model infant, something she could stand on the mantelpiece and admire like a flower arrangement.

  And yet Charles had produced nothing, whereas Viv’s David had fathered five, and he was away even more than Charles – a sales engineer with three-month stints abroad. Viv snatched her babies from him between electronic equipment exhibitions in Frankfurt, or customer conferences in Singapore, and then set about having them as casually as other women had summer colds or dandruff. Eight months gone with Rupert, she’d dug up their wilderness garden, single-handed, and transformed it into a sand-pit for the older children. Now, it had reneged into a wilderness, but that wasn’t the point. What was astonishing was Viv’s slapdash attitude to pregnancy itself. It seemed too sublime a condition to treat so cavalierly. If she herself were pregnant, she knew she would view her body as the Temple of the Holy Ghost, yet there was Viv wedging that sacred bulge into the bowels of the motor mower or squeezing it underneath her oily, stalling Volkswagen.

  Even now, she looked enceinte. (Although she wasn’t. The bulges had stopped with Rupert. David had insisted that number five be their finale, and had doubled his stint in Singapore to underline the point. He was still there now, leaving Viv a widow until October.) She sat slumped in a chair, in one of her old maternity smocks, bunched around the middle with what looked like a piece of hair ribbon. The fragile Sheraton strained stoically beneath her eleven stone.

  ‘Playing golf in your nightie?’ she grinned, plugging her mouth with a chocolate biscuit, as if it were a deprived and hungry child.

  ‘She’s betraying us with the milkman, Viv!’ Laura wrinkled up her twice-remodelled London Clinic nose. ‘Rating United Dairies above the Royal Mid-Surrey Golf Club is almost certainly a treasonable offence.’

  ‘Oh, Laura, do stop. If you want to know, I’ve actually decided to go and get a job.’

  ‘A job, darling. But you’ve only just stopped working.’

  ‘No, I’ve been idle for over a year. It doesn’t suit me.’

  ‘Idle!’ There was a faint groaning sound as Viv bounced forward on the chair. ‘You must be joking. You and Charles don’t know the meaning of the word. I’ve never known such a pair of eager beavers in my life – so many committees and commitments, I have to book a year ahead just to have coffee with you.’

  ‘So it’s back to the world of the plunging bosom and the plummeting hem. Well, old Peters will be glad. He always fancied you.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Laura. Anyway, I’m not going back. Not there. It’s too much of a strain, with all my other activities. I just want a little job.’

  ‘What, like reorganizing British Rail?’ Laura spooned cream into her second cup of coffee.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ said Viv. ‘You don’t have to work at all. You don’t even have the excuse of escaping from the kids. If I were you, I’d loll around drinking schnapps and reading Mills and Boon.’

  ‘With the occasional breathless little foray into United Dairies,’ added Laura.

  Frances escaped into the kitchen to make more coffee. Everything was joke and chatter with her friends. She burned to examine motives and morality, or probe into philosophy and purpose, but it was one of the rules, not to be too serious. There were whole layers of life, waiting and wasting underneath, while they all frothed and frittered on the surface.

  ‘What sort of job do you want?’ Viv shouted through the open door.

  ‘Oh, I thought I’d work in a florist, or something.’

  ‘You’re nuts, Frances! You’d be bored stiff in a day. All those dreadful damp daffodils and people weeping over wreaths.’

  ‘Well, what can I do? I don’t fancy teaching. I don’t want anything too arduous …’

  ‘How about a traffic warden? You�
��d look fantastic in the uniform. And you could give me special permission to park outside Sainsbury’s.’

  ‘Get a fun job,’ urged Laura. ‘You’ve been so bloody serious all your life. It’s time you broke out. How about a croupier? Or a bunny girl?’

  ‘What, with my figure? They don’t take 34As.’ Back to the silly chat again. She felt like screaming at them, laughed instead. ‘Anyway, Charles would go berserk.’

  ‘Charles needn’t know. I read about a girl the other day, a diplomat’s daughter. She took a job as a high class courtesan, and her father thought she was having music lessons. He even dropped her there each evening, with her Chopin.’

  Viv gulped down her fourth chocolate biscuit. ‘Shouldn’t we set off? Or I won’t get my eighteen holes in before it’s time to meet the kids.’

  ‘Sure you’re not coming?’ asked Laura.

  ‘Positive.’

  When they’d driven off, she wished she’d joined them. Golf was probably no more absurd than anything else in life. At least it had rules which couldn’t be broken. The other rules seemed remarkably fragile. Middle-aged wives are faithful to their husbands. Middle-class graduates take serious jobs. But were they? Should they?

  She spread out the local paper and last night’s Evening Standard. Scores and scores of jobs she couldn’t do: computer operator, laboratory technician, tool maker, chef patissier. What was one paltry arts degree and ten years’ experience in public relations, compared to this ocean of skills she knew nothing of? She didn’t want to go back to the fashion world. Oh yes, it was well paid and well regarded, but such a trivial world, where bitchy people took fatuous frivolities desperately seriously. She wanted something in which steel-souled philanthropists got to grips with life-and-death emergencies. A missionary, a bomb-disposal expert, a lion tamer. She grinned at the lion which was squatting on a kitchen stool. It already seemed a friend.