Maggie Gee - The Ice People

‘You’re lucky to have a son. But it’s women’s business, looking after children.’ And then he began to complain incoherently how now there were more and more male nannies, which once again had passed me by. ‘They call them ‘‘mannies’’, instead of nannies. Mannies, I ask you! It’s … humiliating. One of my best friends is training to be one!’

‘It was Sarah who kept me abreast of things … I love my wife.’

‘You mean, you got married? In the twentyfirst century?’

‘Well — yes.’

There was evidently little point talking to Riswan.

All the same, he was a loyal friend who had covered for me after the baby was born. And any friend now seemed valuable. When Riswan suggested I go along to his club, the Scientists, I agreed. ‘But not just yet, Riswan. I still have a few things to sort out with Sarah.’

In fact, my despair had been premature. Her arrangement with Sylvie was not a success, despite their ‘shared aims’ and ‘deep mutual understanding’ and ‘desire to support each other as mothers’ (to quote from a thinly disguised account of her life that Sarah had so smilingly delivered on her new programme, Modern Living, as if it had happened to three other people, as if nobody real had been hurt, abandoned).

Sylvie had wanted to have sex with her. That was the long and short of it. (Whereas Sarah, I suppose, preferred sex with her doctor.) In theory Sylvie respected Sarah’s refusal, but in practice she sulked a lot and left the washingup and sat at the kitchen table weeping, while her son beat Luke up in front of his mother in an eager, professional way.

I’d learned my lesson. I listened to Sarah. It took a long time, with a lot of repetitions. Women do tend to repeat themselves, but of course a man must never say that. Her doctor, it turned out, had been ‘a control freak’. Well, naughty old him! But I held my tongue. I was kind and thoughtful, and suppressed my glee. I told Sarah she could always come back. In effect, as it happened, she already was back, nearly every evening when she wasn’t working, and when she was, she left Luke for the night. A new, muddled happiness descended on us.

Luke hardly slept and was often ill, but he was a startlingly clever, fairylike child, laughing and crying at things we couldn’t see, beating his head on the walls, sometimes, his blue eyes suddenly filling with tears, running to either of us equally. Light as a mayfly, up into our arms. He had Sarah’s eyes, her mother’s blonde hair, my dense curls, Samuel’s long limbs, and his lips were full, my lips, our lips … I sometimes found myself hunting ghosts, searching Luke’s face as I had once searched my own, that long ago day, in the bathroom mirror, hunting the hidden lines of Ghana. But he was thin and pale as a child of glass, and his eyes were weak and slightly unfocused. His heart had a defective chamber, which the doctors had promised could be repaired later, and his asthma, alas, was more severe than most children’s. And he had allergies, because of all the drugs. But considering everything, he was pretty healthy.

‘It’s so wonderful to have you back,’ I said, lying beside Sarah, hardly believing it, stroking her beautiful chestnut mane, short and thick now as a glossy pony’s, pulling its tendrils across her jawline, stroking the long moist curve of her neck, then down to her belly, still soft from the baby, and lower to her tangle of dark red hair, warm and wet where we had just made love, though we’d used contraception, at her insistence. ‘My wife,’ I tried; I hardly ever said it. ‘My darling wife. I knew you’d come back. I think you just went mad with grief. Those bloody doctors, and Luke being so ill.’

‘I wasn’t mad,’ she said, lightly. ‘I just felt trapped. No one listened. I didn’t know how to get out of there.’

‘The window wasn’t a good idea,’ I said, unwisely. I felt her stiffen: I seemed to have lost my touch with humour.

‘This is only temporary, you know,’ she said. ‘Just till I can find somewhere for Luke and me.’

‘Oh,’ I said glumly. But I didn’t believe her. Melville Road was convenient for her work, and things were going pretty well between us. It felt right, the way life was meant to be, sharing our child, our food, our bed. After a few months she seemed to settle.

There were days and nights of almost perfect bliss. She could not breastfeed, because of the long time when Luke had been too ill to be with her, so both of us shared the bottlefeeding that went on until he was nearly two. I liked to watch as Sarah fed him, the way the level of the milk slowly dropped, and as it dropped, his lids began to flicker, his blueish lids began to quiver and droop, and by the time she finished his transparent lashes were a faint fringe of silver on his sleeping cheek. I liked to hold the bottle myself, to imagine that as Luke sucked the milk my strength went into him, and my love.

Because of his frailty, Luke slept in a cot at the foot of our bed till he was nearly three. I loved to wake up and hear him cooing to himself, and later singing nursery songs in a remarkably clear, steady voice, talking to himself, or counting his toes. Then there was the morning when he managed to climb out, to scale the bars and get on to our bed, a triumphant day because it had once seemed that his arms would always be too thin for climbing, his large heavy head too much for his neck.

‘Time for a room of your own,’ said Sarah, ‘My big strong boy,’ and put her head on my shoulder. And the three of us hugged, wordless, proud. She grew her hair again; it may have meant nothing.

Luke made us laugh with his invented words, his invented friends, his bubbly farts, the way he plastered avocado on his eyebrows or used Sarah’s makeup bag as a hat. Each new word he learned entered our secret language, became a secret joke and source of pride for a precious few months, till it faded, forgotten. I took so many photographs the camera died.

I wanted this happiness to go on forever. I tried my best; perhaps I tried too hard. I put her work before my own. It was Sarah who gave Luke his regular medicine, sighing, sometimes, as she ticked the chart with its long row of columns every morning. But when Luke was ill it was I who stayed home and cared for our child, fretful, whiney, speckled with fever and frighteningly hot. I stroked the eggshell dome of his forehead, and poured the medicine that cooled him down.

Sometimes she thanked me, more often not. Perhaps I needed her to be grateful. Sometimes she seemed almost angry with me, as if the mere fact of my dogged presence excluded her, or pointed to her absence. Sometimes she swept home from the studio in the middle of the night to find me and Luke fast asleep on our double bed, with the screen still on, ‘as it has been all day, I bet it has’, though how she knew that was a mystery, the floor scattered with crumpled clothes and toys and halfeaten plates of nursery food, and she’d order me to carry Luke through to his room ‘so he can go to bed properly, for heaven’s sake’, while she set about grimly cleaning the flat.

‘I mean, do you have to mess everything up?’

‘I was looking after Luke. I mean, someone has to.’

‘You’re trying to say I’m not a good mother.’

‘You’re trying to say I’m a dirty scumbag.’

‘No —’ She crumpled, looked ashamed, let me put my arms around her.

‘Okay, then. But I’m doing my best.’

‘I’d like to look after him. The sodding screens …’

I saw her resentment, sensed the danger.

She said she didn’t want another woman in our flat, so I hired a manny, with her approval, one of the new breed of male nannies Riswan had been so sniffy about.

Ash Vijay was a great success with us both, for I had been getting behind with my work, and now Luke was older variety was good for him. He adored our manny from the first, partly because Ash always brought with him the other child he was caring for, a little girl called Polly, slightly older than Luke. Polly couldn’t have looked more different. She was dark and rosy with shining skin, unusually sturdy, glowing, lively.