These Days of Ours Read online

  More clapping, but Charlie wasn’t quite finished. ‘Come back, Becca,’ he said, as she beetled off to fill glasses and make personal comments. He laid his arm around her shoulders, as if to anchor this vivacious vision to his side. ‘Most of you know what we went through before Flo came along.’ The atmosphere changed, the smiles turned tender. ‘We’ve had a cot ready since 1997.’

  Behind her, Kate felt Julian smother a sigh. Raised in a family of stiff upper lips, he abhorred such sharing. Recently she’d noticed him avoiding Becca; he was, Kate suspected, bored of the constant battle for ‘ownership’ of Kate that Becca waged. Any minute now he’d start lobbying to go home.

  ‘I always knew my wife was one in a million but I didn’t know she was brave and determined and . . .’ Charlie smiled. ‘I’ve run out of superlatives. It’s all thanks to Becca’s refusal to give up that, after losing two dearly wanted babies, we have Flo.’ He sounded slightly strangled now, and the room willed him to carry on. ‘My wife and my daughter. I’m proud of you both. I’ll look after you both. Always.’

  Kate wiped her eyes as she clapped with everybody else.

  Stooping, Julian said into her ear, ‘Becca certainly is one in a bloody million, thank the lord.’ He ignored Kate’s rebuking elbow in his ribs. As Becca approached them, fielding congratulations and compliments, he whispered, ‘I tell you, that baby is glue. Flo’s holding that marriage together.’

  ‘I don’t agree,’ murmured Kate as Becca pushed through the throng. The glue was the miscarriages. Both times Becca had been reduced to a wordless lump of suffering, clinging to Charlie, all her vitality gone. The pain caused by the first little life losing its foothold inside Becca just before the wedding had been redoubled when it happened again, just two months after her impulsive disclosure on Millennium Eve. Charlie put aside his own grief to comfort his wife. Having seen her well-hidden fragility, Charlie was bonded to Becca.

  ‘Do you approve of my conservatory, Julian?’ Becca was coy, certain of herself. ‘Reclaimed brick floor! Green oak frame! I love it when the sun streams through the glass like this. I don’t know how you townies cope, living in filthy old London.’

  ‘The same filthy old London,’ said Kate, ‘you lived in for your whole life until two months ago.’

  ‘I suppose it’s different,’ said Becca, turning away to adjust an arrangement of driftwood and candles, ‘when you’re childless.’

  Stuck for a response, Kate watched Becca pounce on another knot of guests, checking their champagne levels, beseeching them to make another circuit of the buffet table.

  ‘I’m sure she didn’t mean that to sound so . . . harsh,’ said Kate as she took off her hat with a great sense of relief and followed Julian into the cottage’s quaint kitchen where the booze was laid out.

  ‘There you go again.’ Julian rifled through the massed ranks of bottles for the good stuff, the bottle he’d brought. ‘Making excuses. Your whole family bends over backwards to accommodate Becca.’ He caught sight of his reflection in the window. Kate saw the momentary pause as he checked his hairline. Julian was horribly conscious of its retreat, like a slow tide. Kate told him it suited him and Julian told Kate she was only saying that to make him feel better. When he checked himself out in shiny surfaces she wanted to take him in her arms, reassure him, but that would mean she’d noticed and Julian would hate that. ‘Becca’s the only person I know who’s simultaneously top dog and underdog.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Kate, gazing about her at the other female guests and wondering when did handbags get so gigantic? The more chic contingent looked as if they’d brought everything they owned to the christening. ‘But that’s just Becca. I don’t mind.’

  ‘See!’ Julian was exasperated. Holding the bottle by its neck, he led Kate outside.

  The garden – or gardens as Aunty Marjorie preferred – clung to its summer glory, a watercolourist’s delight of greens and blues and deep pinks. A piñata hung from the gingerbread eaves of a summerhouse. Multicoloured bulbs snaked through the willow branches. When Kate had invited Becca to take what supplies she needed from the shop’s stockroom, Becca had filled her car. Spotting her prey, Kate hurried across the grass, self-conscious in her oyster-coloured dress. The saleswoman at Harvey Nichols had assured her that ‘nude is so now’, but Kate felt as if she was streaking. ‘Charlie!’

  Charlie turned and smiled, knowing what she wanted. ‘Here you go.’

  Accepting Flo, Kate marvelled again at the baby’s warm denseness, like a bowling ball in a nappy. She loved Flo with fierce simplicity: nothing compromised Kate’s feelings of delight and protectiveness. ‘When will she start looking like you, Charlie?’ she laughed.

  ‘It’s only fair she looks like Becca,’ said Charlie. ‘She did all the hard work, after all.’

  ‘Nice speech.’

  ‘It was a bit icky. But Flo makes me a bit icky.’

  ‘Me too.’ Kate nuzzled the pink face, breathing in Flo’s baby smell of mingled vanilla, mud and farmyard. ‘You look as if she kept you up all night again.’

  ‘Gee thanks.’ Charlie rubbed the back of his head, making his dark hair stand up on end. ‘You’ll spoil me with all these compliments.’

  ‘At least you have an excuse for the bags under your eyes.’

  ‘You’ll always look seventeen to me,’ said Charlie. ‘Mind you,’ he added, ‘you looked really old when you were seventeen.’

  ‘Bloody cheek!’

  ‘Seriously,’ said Charlie, ‘you haven’t changed a bit.’

  ‘That’s so sweet. And so untrue.’ Kate’s features had asserted themselves, as if her real face had arrived after years of regrettable experiments with eyeliner and bronzer. ‘We all change.’

  A small white ball of animated fur ran past, yapping.

  ‘Jaffa!’ shouted Charlie. ‘No! Don’t—’

  ‘Too late.’ The dog had pelted straight into the new pond. ‘What is Jaffa?’ asked Kate. ‘I keep forgetting.’ Was he a shih tzu crossed with a poodle? Or a poodle crossed with a pekinese?

  Monitoring Jaffa’s doggy paddle to safety, Charlie sighed. ‘I think he’s a cross between a lamb and a cushion. The animal’s an imbecile.’

  ‘Becca says he’s a brilliant guard dog.’

  ‘The only thing he barks at is his own reflection.’

  A shout carried across the garden. ‘Hey, Chas!’ a bumptious guest shouted. ‘Is that loo roll ad your latest masterpiece?’

  ‘Yes! That’s mine!’ shouted Charlie, adding you pillock in an undertone. ‘I never thought,’ he said, ‘I’d be writing scripts for puppies playing with toilet paper.’

  ‘It’s my favourite commercial. Poodles. Bog roll. It’s like a mini Harold Pinter.’ Despite – or perhaps because of – Charlie’s disdain for advertising he was a success. Headhunted again to a newly formed agency, he was powerful enough to insist on working from home two days a week. The long commute was the only way Charlie could make Becca’s dream of a rural idyll workable. He knew, as did Kate, that Becca would have a new dream before long.

  ‘You’re allowed to be proud of what you do,’ said Kate.

  Charlie didn’t look convinced.

  ‘How’s the book?’

  ‘Coming along, you know.’

  ‘Could I take a peek some time?’ Kate hadn’t read Charlie’s manuscript since what were now the olden days, when they’d gone out together. ‘If you don’t mind, that is.’ It’s an intimate thing, to read words when they’re fresh, when they’re still attached to the writer; until recently Kate wouldn’t have dreamed of making such a request.

  The loss of the babies had not only bound Kate ever tighter to her cousin but also, inevitably, to Charlie. Gradually, Kate and Charlie rediscovered much of their old affinity. Neither Julian nor Becca protested: Kate had underestimated them.

  Now it seemed laughable that once upon a time Kate had held back from such banter with Charlie in case it unsettled their other halves, challenged the status quo.
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br />   The status quo was not so easily threatened. After that initial, juvenile partner-swap, they’d all hunkered down for the long haul. It struck Kate that all four of them were ‘stayers’, made of similar material to her parents, who had never dreamed of leaving each other, despite their ups and downs.

  As rooted in his marriage as the willow tree on the edge of the lawn, Charlie wouldn’t now recall what he’d written to her in that other life, but his cold turn of phrase was impossible to expunge from her memory; it was as word perfect as the Shakespeare she’d studied at school.

  Not everything that looks like love is love tripped as easily off her tongue as the Hear my soul speak line from The Tempest, both quotes as archaic and irrelevant as the other.

  ‘Here, take this starlet to meet her public.’ Kate relinquished Flo, who was muttering bubbly sweet nothings to herself. ‘Bask in her reflected glory.’

  The baby was greeted with exaggerated joy as Charlie strolled around the garden, showing Flo off to all and sundry.

  ‘Look at Charlie.’ Kate’s mother had been keeping Julian warm for her. ‘He’s a natural.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he just whip out his nipple and breastfeed?’ said Julian, shocking his mother-in-law. Some guests had already drifted away. Julian looked pointedly at his watch.

  ‘There’s no need,’ said Mum, ‘for talk of nipples.’ Happily stout, she’d embraced midlife wholeheartedly, running towards bad perms and elasticated waists as if they were old friends she’d been expecting. ‘Your dad,’ she said, ‘was like that with you, Kate. Couldn’t put you down.’

  ‘Where is Dad?’ Kate resolutely ignored the desperate, covert signals Julian was sending out that it was time to go.

  ‘Having a sit down,’ said Mum, patting her hair, her dress, her garish jacket into place with her endlessly fluttering and fussing fingers. ‘He gets so tired.’

  ‘Dad?’ Kate baulked. ‘He’s last to bed and first up.’

  ‘He was,’ said Mum. ‘The years take their toll on all of us.’

  Disliking this picture Mum drew, Kate steered the conversation to safer ground. ‘Becca’s doing wonders with this garden, isn’t she?’

  Julian let out a discreet sob of boredom.

  ‘It’s a credit to her,’ said Mum, always ready to praise her niece. ‘Why you don’t have a garden I can’t think, Kate. You and Julian paying all that money for that flat and all you’ve got is a silly balcony . . .’

  That was the trouble with mother/daughter chatter; with Mum there was no safer ground. Contrariness was her default setting. Especially when it comes to me.

  ‘Gosh,’ said Julian. ‘Is that the time?’

  ‘Have you changed your hair?’ Mum inspected Kate’s fringe, flattened by the regretted hat.

  ‘No. Why?’ Kate put a self-conscious hand to her head, steeling herself.

  ‘It looks nice.’

  ‘Oh.’ Kate grinned. A compliment!

  ‘For once.’

  Count to ten, Kate advised herself. She and Mum were constantly cracking, yet never broke. She envisaged herself dashing about with sticky tape, endlessly repairing, endlessly making good. It stood to reason that this eternal, rolling dissonance – it never flared into anything more specific – had to be at least fifty per cent her fault. However hard Kate tried, they always ended up in the same place. A place of mild discontent, of petty grievance and pointed words.

  With that in mind, Kate felt able to broach a forbidden subject. I could be as nice as pie all afternoon and she’ll still wish I was more like Becca, so I may as well do some work on Dad’s behalf. ‘Mum,’ she said, hoping her gulp wasn’t audible, ‘we need to talk about Dad.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Mum’s face was all vigour.

  ‘I mean,’ said Kate, cowed by that expression, ‘why don’t you give your blessing to his China trip?’

  A small groan escaped Julian: the groan of a man who knew he wouldn’t escape any time soon.

  Kate was carefully casual. ‘Now that you’ve got your caravan, and Dad’s about to retire, you could even go with him. Marriage is about compromise, after all.’

  Kate’s own marriage was a see-saw: lately she’d sensed or maybe just suspected a pulling away in Julian so she’d made more of an effort. Not just in the bedroom – although she was astounded at the effect a red basque had on Julian’s state of mind – but by listening when he talked about the nuts and bolts of the property world. She would nod and ask pertinent questions, watching how his aristocratic face, drawn from a template that stared out of portraits in stately homes, would flush as he talked her through the latest deal. He didn’t return the favour but she didn’t expect that; Kate’s career was small potatoes compared to his. Secretly, Kate preferred the immediacy of her party supplies emporiums, where she satisfied small needs and there was a justice to each transaction quite unlike Julian’s massive profits and macho jubilation at having ‘won’.

  Mum trembled as she said, ‘Don’t you lecture me, madam. You and Dad might be close but you don’t know everything. Things are different now.’ She screwed up her lips, as if trying to keep in something dangerous. ‘Very different.’ The moment passed and she said, ‘Ignore me, love. I’m worn out.’

  ‘That’s because you’re always down here, helping Becca out.’ Kate didn’t understand why both her mother and her aunt flew constantly to Becca’s side as if she was dealing with quintuplets. ‘Maybe if you spent more time with Dad and—’

  ‘Spend time with Dad?’ Kate’s mother interrupted, insulted. ‘Dear God, if you knew the half of it.’ She disappeared, pushing brusquely through Flo’s fans.

  ‘Right.’ Julian rubbed his hands together. ‘You managed to upset your mother even more quickly than usual, so we might as well go.’

  ‘Thanks for the support.’

  ‘I’m joking, silly,’ said Julian. ‘Not about going home. I’m deadly bloody serious about that.’

  ‘Kate!’ Becca descended on them, her face flustered. ‘There you are!’ she said, as if her cousin had been hiding. ‘Could you pick up some empty glasses? Put them in the dishwasher?’

  Before Kate could answer, Julian said, ‘We’re guests, not staff.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Kate.

  ‘But I do,’ said Julian, turning away, grabbing a glass from a passing tray. ‘Not that it matters.’

  Diligent, Kate toured the garden with a growing stack of glasses. Seeing Charlie and her dad confabbing on a garden bench, she put them to one side and played truant.

  As she approached, she heard her father say, ‘She’d be so proud of you, Charlie.’

  ‘She would,’ agreed Kate, perching on the arm of the seat, leaning against Dad. They all looked at Flo, happily playing with Dad’s tie, and thought of the grandmother she’d never meet.

  It had been a classic alcoholic’s death. A year earlier, on a mellow early autumn day like this one, Charlie’s mother had slipped on the stairs and plunged to the bottom, lying against the door her son had to force open after two anxious days of getting no response to his calls. He’d half expected such a calamity all his life but that didn’t seem to soften the blow. Charlie had sunk into a morass of guilt and anger and, most shamefully and only whispered to Kate, relief.

  Becca, embedded so firmly in her own family, the epicentre of a web of relationships, had sympathised with his grief, but found it harder to empathise with the aftermath. Charlie, with no blood relations left, felt himself sticking out in the universe like a sore thumb. Becca seemed grateful for Kate’s willingness to talk and talk around the subject with Charlie once she’d exhausted her own compassion.

  Maybe because she’d lived through Charlie’s youthful realisation that he had to parent his own hapless mother, Kate got it. She understood the ins and outs of Charlie’s complex remorse and furthermore she understood how it formed the platform for his love for Flo.

  The child was his. Flo was tied by blood to her orphan daddy who had never known his own father. When Ka
te sensed the profundity of that connection, it had been the turning point in the rediscovered harmony with her old friend. It was to Kate that Charlie had whispered, desperately, Let’s hope Death takes some time off, now.

  ‘Flo reminds me of your mum,’ said Kate’s dad, taking her on his lap.

  They all knew that to be untrue, but Charlie smiled.

  The shoulder Kate leaned against was bony. ‘When,’ asked Kate, ‘are you going to resist Mum’s diets, Dad?’ Kate couldn’t allow him to age; she’d been trying not to notice the slackness of his face, the diminishing of his frame. His one good suit hung loose on him. ‘Step away from the crispbreads and low fat cheese.’

  ‘I’ve demolished a few slices of cake today,’ said Dad conspiratorially. ‘You and Becca were up all night baking, I hear. Whatever happens, you’ll always have each other, you girls.’

  ‘That’s a bit maudlin, Dad,’ said Kate. ‘For a christening.’

  As talk turned, inevitably, to the Yulan House orphanage, Kate listened patiently and without much real interest to the news of the foundations being laid for the new wing, and the fresh push in fundraising it would need. Kate’s mother was unaware that the bright new website, featuring smiling photos of Jia Tang and her growing clutch of charges, had been funded by Dad: for the sake of Minelli harmony, it must stay that way.

  The whitewashed compound outside Beijing didn’t feel real to Kate. It was so foreign, so other, in the sharp sunlit images she saw only on the screen of her Dad’s iPod. ‘Lovely,’ she said, absent mindedly, as Dad showed her yet another shot of yet another squealing child dashing about a dusty yard. Her days and her thoughts were so thoroughly accounted for on this small patch of home turf that she had nothing left over for her father’s pet project.

  Not so Charlie, it would seem. ‘Remember when we ran the marathon together to raise money for the kids?’ asked Charlie. ‘How much did you raise last year? A grand, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Nearer two.’

  ‘How come you didn’t run it this year?’