Louisa Young - Baby Love

‘You’re asking me to lie to her.’

‘Please don’t tell her. She’d be upset.’

We arranged that they would come on Wednesday at four. This was Sunday. Just coming to tea.

*

Cooper kept ringing me wanting to know how I was doing. I started to hate the answerphone. I told him I was on the case but I wasn’t. I was starting to think that I really didn’t like what was going on. Not to fuss about it, of course not. I don’t fuss. Usually. I just get on with things. That’s what women do. Then occasionally you start to feel a little powerless. My least favourite feeling.

I made the mistake of trying to imagine what Jim was going to do. Wasted a lot of energy that way when I should have been concentrating, getting some work done.

I did become something else after the accident. I put together all the notes and things I’d written when I was in North Africa, dragged out my intellect from where I’d parked it after doing my degree, and wrote a book about the history and culture of Arab dance through western eyes. It was full of beautiful pictures and wild stories and did rather well, and now I am known to be the person who knows about belly dancing, harems, women in Islam, Orientalism and almost anything else in that direction that a journalist in need of a quote, or a researcher in need of a radio guest, might want. I work from home, my time is my own and I make a decent living.

Why do I feel I am writing this down in an affidavit?

*

Lily was on edge. I think she smelt it. She was excited about the visit. Friends of Mummy’s!

‘People who knew her, and want to see you. But you know lots of people who knew her, Granny and Grandpa and everyone …’

You can’t lie to children. It’s one of the great true cliches. She knew damn well this was important, because she saw it in my face and heard it in my voice.

They arrived exactly on time. Jim looked older, fatter, more unpleasant. There’s a certain nasty look that prosperity gives to some faces, and he had it. The wife was small and dark with neat hair. Early thirties, well looked after. I couldn’t make her out. She looked almost as if there were nothing to her – nothing to make her herself, rather than just anyone. Just small, neat, dark femininity. A sort of cipher, in expensive clothes.

I showed them into the kitchen. I had thought so hard about this and now all I could think was, ‘I wish we’d met somewhere else’. I felt a profound unease at not being able to read the wife at all.

‘My wife,’ said Jim. ‘Nora.’

Nora. Nora. Well that tells me nothing at all. Hey, stranger, who the hell are you and what are you doing here?

She smiled, a closed smile. I put the kettle on. What else?

Lily was upstairs. She’d said she didn’t want to come down because some friends of her teddy’s mummy were coming round. I called her. I was Judas. That woman there replaced my sister in this creep’s affections and they want you … I don’t know what they want of you but they want you.

Lily came down slowly, bringing the teddy, looking at the floor.

Jim’s face was set, still.

Nora looked up at her and started to laugh.

‘Oh, what a little darling!’ she exclaimed. Lily is a darling. A dark golden creature, with long dark hair and curving golden cheeks. She’s quite like an animal: furry, tempestuous on occasion. Clever, kind, but won’t be patronized. I suppose she got her darkness from Jim, but the quality of it was so different. His is Celtic, hers is like blondeness made dark. Like honey.

‘Hello, Lily,’ said Jim. He held his arms out as if to hug her. Nora leaned forward to take her arm. These fuckwits know nothing about children. Lily went behind my legs, twining like a cat. I sent her ‘hate them’ messages through my knees, and regretted them, and didn’t regret them. It is wrong to make a child hate her father. With any luck she’ll hate him of her own accord.

Nora looked at me as if she expected me to shoo Lily off my legs and into their arms. Expect on, sunshine. I did nothing. Lily twined, and wanted to climb me. I picked her up, put her on my hip, went to a chair on the far side of the table, and pushed a plate of biscuits towards them. What the hell do they expect?

‘What a beautiful little girl,’ said Nora again. Lily didn’t look at her. Jim looked as if he couldn’t believe that I wasn’t even going to say ‘come on, darling’, as mothers do whenever they ask their children to betray themselves.

Nora was flummoxed. She looked at Jim. Jim looked at me. Nora looked at me. Lily looked at the stitching on my shirt. Almost visibly, Nora fell back and regrouped.

‘I brought you a present,’ she said to Lily’s back. Oh, so it’s going to be like that.

The present, like the clothes, was expensive. Harrods bag, tissue paper, little tag (wrapped by shop assistants, at a guess). Lily uncoiled enough to accept it, and murmur thank you.

‘Aren’t you going to open it, then?’ said Jim, in a Father Christmas voice. Lily looked at him for the first time. He flushed. With his face so determined and his voice so fake I considered sympathizing with him, but decided against.

He has a wife for Christ’s sake! They can have their own damn child!

Lily pulled at the tissue paper.

‘Here, let me help,’ said Jim, suddenly standing and coming round the table. Lily pulled the package away from him. He sat down, squashed. So small, and yet so effective when it comes to squashing people four times their size.

It was a Polly Pocket Fairy Princess Ballroom; pink, plastic, spangly, shiny, with electric lights that worked. It had four little dolls a quarter of an inch high with fairy dresses on, and wings. It had a balloon that went up and down, with a basket you could put the dolls in. It had a dancefloor that spun round when you turned a tiny silvery knob. The whole thing closed up into a pink star-shaped handbag that you could carry with you wherever you went. It was beautiful. Lily gazed at it.

‘Thank you,’ Lily murmured, and climbed down between my feet to play with it on the floor.

Nora wanted more than that.

‘Do you like it, Lily?’ she said, calling down to between my knees.

‘Yes,’ came the reply. Nothing more.

Nora looked at Jim again. I touched Lily’s head gently, and said, ‘I’ll make some tea.’ They couldn’t leave immediately and actually I didn’t want them to. I wanted them to see exactly how difficult, uncomfortable and completely out of their depth this situation was. I wanted them to know in their blood that Lily was nothing to do with them; to present them with a clear view of the shining armour that encircled the two of us, protecting us and hiding us yet at the same time revealing with brilliant and brutal clarity that secrets and intimacies and love such as they could never hope to know dwelt within. I wanted them to go home crying.

Lily shuffled herself and the new toy over to be between my feet at the cooker as I poured the water into the teapot. ‘Move back, love, it’s hot,’ I said, but she shook her head. I moved the teapot to the very back of the work surface. I will not be faulted.

After shuffling back with me to the table, not looking up, she jumped up and whispered to me that she wanted to show the ballroom to the teddies, and ran upstairs.

‘She seems a very affectionate little girl,’ offered Nora. Yes, to me. I murmured a nothing.

Jim’s face was set again. He too had prepared, and had had no idea what would happen.

‘Love’s not automatic, you know,’ I said suddenly. ‘It’s not like eyes meeting across a crowded room. You have to earn a child’s love.’ I stopped just as I realized that my words might come over as a comfort, rather than a gibe.

Nora took them as comfort.