Fay Weldon - She May Not Leave

This is Martyn’s moment to tell Hattie that he may well be getting a big hike in salary, and the financial imperative is removed from the issue, but he does not. If this is the new Hattie he wants her.

Martyn goes into the spare room to check on Kitty and finds her sleeping peacefully in a cot in the space between the single bed and the wall. Her hair has been brushed and lies snugly against her cheek. She is a fair, round-faced, well-filled-out baby. He loves her intolerably.

The spare room has been re-arranged to its advantage: the desk from the kitchen where it held nothing but out-of-date newspapers, run-out pens, elastic bands the postman left is now under the window, and a small bookshelf rigged up above it – English Language for Foreigners, Dancing Towards Self-Awareness and Child Development Studies – that one from the New Europe Press. He’d reviewed it for Devolution when he was in charge of the book pages. There’s a state-of-the-art laptop on the desk. How has she afforded that? His own is old and keeps crashing. This one obviously functions.

Kitty’s clothes, neatly folded, and all the paraphernalia that goes with infant care and has previously littered the living room, are now laid out tidily along one set of shelves. Agnieszka’s own belongings seem to be minimal: he looks in the drawers and sees a few neatly folded undergarments and thin pastel sweaters. Nothing is black, nothing is fancy. Reassured, he goes back into the living room.

‘We could go to bed,’ he says, ‘before she gets back.’

‘All right,’ Hattie says to his surprise and follows him into the bedroom, as if it were once again the world before Kitty, before pregnancy. They have the bed to themselves: the clouds in his head clear. He groans, she moans. In the next room, the baby does not wake. They hold each other tight for at least ten minutes before the real world intervenes.

Martyn wonders if he should tell Hattie about the article that Harold obviously wants: the endorsement of the chip butty – a soft white bread sandwich with fried chipped potatoes, well salted, for the filling – as a source of approved pleasure, the Government deciding its electoral advantage no longer lies in health and the self-abnegation that goes with it. He decides not to, because Hattie is hot on nutrition and will only bring up the subject of his father’s early death and the contribution paid to it by the chip butty, and he would rather she did not. They stay in bed and are asleep before Agnieszka returns.

In the unaccustomed peace of the morning, Martyn sleeps longer than anyone else in the household. He reckons he made a full eight and a quarter hours. He bounces out of bed naked and remembers he must now put on a dressing-gown before going to the bathroom. The dressing-gown is not on the floor but on a hanger, and to hand. Putting it on adds a feeling of ritual and security to the day. He shaves. The washbasin has been wiped, and the taps polished and the little knot of hair where the basin drains has been removed, so the water leaves quickly and no soap scum or detritus is left behind. The drying washing is still over the racks in the bathroom but has been shaken out and pegged not just flung over the wires.

Martyn sees Agnieszka for the first time, and understands that to call her Agnes – which he had been planning in his head, as a last defiance – would be inappropriate. She is a careful person and needs a careful name. She smiles sweetly and with a degree of humility, and says she is pleased to meet him: ‘Mr Martyn, the man of the house.’

Does he like an egg for breakfast, and if so, scrambled, fried or poached? Hattie is eating a boiled egg, the first of two, from an eggcup and not one of Kitty’s plastic rings. Kitty is in her high chair, well surrounded by pillows for safety. She is trying to manage a spoon and beams at her father, her mother and Agnieszka with equal pleasure. But Martyn and Hattie are new to babies: this amiability is symptomatic of the seven-month child. Soon she will become more particular and shield her face to any other than the favoured few, and weep if presented with anything unfamiliar.

Hattie and Martyn believe they are raising an extraordinarily and peculiarly talented child, of course they do: really all they are doing is raising just another human being, but one who is going to shove them back into the past a whole generation. Already they are not the ones coming in but the ones going out.

To Kitty, hard-wired to charm and annoy in equal measure the better to thrive, her parents are the means of her survival, bit-part players in her life, grand-parent fodder for the children she will have, if everything goes right. But she does love them. She loves what is familiar and those who do her bidding.

The first of the au pairs came to us in the winter of 1963. Her name was Roseanna. In those days I, Frances, and Serena pooled our child-care resources. If my children, Lallie and Jamie, were more often in the Caldicott Square house than hers, Oliver and Christopher, were in mine, it was because that was what the cousins chose. Her house was bigger, though mine was warmer.

My house was tall and the staircase wide, only one room on each of the four storeys, and a bathroom squashed beneath the roof. Serena’s and George’s house was one of those late-Georgian pillared double-fronted affairs, not detached, but presenting a unified face around the Square. In those days they were dilapidated and unheated. The basements were damp because the Fleet River ran underground. My peculiar house, known as The Tower, had a curved brick façade, and was squashed in between the regular-looking buildings. Some speculative builder had miscalculated his measurements back in the 1820s, and a later one filled an unproductive gap.

Serena and George owned their house. I rented, and Serena often had to help me with the monthly payments. I sometimes resented the fact that she saw me as some kind of extension of herself, and that what was hers by right was mine as well, but at least she never seemed to expect me to be grateful. Nor did George have to be consulted: Serena earned her own money.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.