Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog

‘Is she all right?’ Ray asked and Ian nodded and said, ‘As far as I can make out.’ Kitty took the little girl from Ray and wrapped her up in a clean blanket. ‘There, snug as a bug in a rug,’ she said, holding her in her arms. The girl didn’t stir. The solid weight of the child felt so lovely. Imagine if she was yours to keep, to hold like this every day. Kitty Winfield brushed her sleeping daughter’s hair from her face .

‘Will you take her?’ Ray said.

‘Take her?’ Kitty echoed. ‘For the night?’

‘For good.’

‘Mine? To keep? For ever?’ Kitty said.

‘Ours,’ Ian said.

A couple of weeks later, over a nice candlelit dinner at home, Ian poured her a glass of wine and said, ‘I’ve been offered a job in New Zealand, I thought it best if I take it.’

‘Oh God, yes, darling,’ Kitty said. ‘That’s perfect. We can leave everything behind, start again where no one knows anything about us. You are clever.’

A plague upon this howling! The wild waters roaring in her head. Tilly had run out of Bluebell Cottage, abuse from Saskia echoing in her ears, got into her car and driven off. She wanted to go home. She needed a train, trains were in stations, the station was in Leeds. Something horrible had happened to Tilly in Leeds but for the life of her she couldn’t remember what it was exactly. Something to do with a child. A child, a poor, poor child. A little black thing in the snow. Her little black baby.

When she had kissed her lovely Nigerian man at Leicester Square tube station, he said to her, ‘Shall I call for you tonight, perhaps you’d like to go to the cinema, perhaps some supper afterwards?’

‘That would be wonderful,’ Tilly said.

‘I’ll call for you,’ he said. ‘About seven.’

She spent the whole day thinking about him, wondering what to wear, how to do her hair. She was absolutely useless in rehearsal but she didn’t care, her heart was skipping. She got home at six, got ready in a terrific rush and then stood at the window looking down at the street, waiting for a glimpse of her handsome new man.

Was still standing there at eight, at nine. At ten she knew he wasn’t coming. Understood he would never come.

It was only much later that she learned that he had got lost. He had never written down her address, thought he could easily find his way back to her flat but once he was in Soho he realized he had mistaken her street. He had wandered up and down and all around the houses, looking for some familiar landmark, some reminder of where he had been the night before. He had even tried doors and got short shrift because of his colour, except from some of the ladies who had cards above their doorbells. Nearly midnight when he gave up and went home.

The next day he tried to track her down again. He had done the rounds of the theatres asking about her and in one someone directed him to Phoebe, about to go into a matinee performance of Pygmalion . He recognized her from the party at the embassy. She told him that yes, she knew Tilly, in fact Tilly was her best friend and had told her all about the previous night’s ‘tryst’, and ‘I am afraid I am the bearer of bad news,’ she said, her hand sincerely on her heart, or where her heart would have been if she had had one. Phoebe went on to inform him that Tilly had realized, in the cold light of day, that she did not want to see him again. It had been a mistake, she had been carried away. ‘You understand?’ Phoebe said. He did. ‘So sorry,’ Phoebe said, ‘that’s the beginners’ call, I must go.’

‘I was looking out for your interests,’ Phoebe said, sitting by her bedside in hospital after she had lost the baby. ‘Sometimes you can be rather foolish.’ Silly Tilly . ‘It would only have ended in disaster, Tilly.’

It had already ended in disaster.

When she felt stronger she paid a visit to the Nigerian embassy, she had to apologize to him, explain about her treacherous friend. There was a man on reception but what could she say to him? ‘You have someone called John who works here?’ The man on reception looked at her with something like contempt, rather like the nurses on the maternity ward, and said, ‘We have several people working here with that name. I would have to know his surname.’

What could she do? O, the cry did knock / Against my very heart! She trudged home in the rain, defeated. Perhaps both of them gave up too easily. She had always thought that of Princess Margaret and Captain Townsend. Duty over love. What nonsense. Love should always come first. It wasn’t as if Princess Margaret had been necessary to the country in any way. Quite the opposite.

Perhaps she wouldn’t have lost her baby if she hadn’t lost his father. Perhaps it was the stress she was under. She had started to buy things, mittens and bootees. She kept one of the little mittens for years, at the bottom of her bag, until it disintegrated. Silly really.

It was hair-raising on Leeds station, so many people rushing backwards and forwards, their faces grim, everyone running for trains, impatient with each other, with themselves. Jolting and jostling. No manners!

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces. It was all make believe, wasn’t it? Reality itself was nothing. Words, everything was made out of words, once you lost the words you lost the world. The howling tempest all around her. At sea in a high wind. The men on the trawlers, their bodies spiralling through the cold icy waters, after their brave little ships were torpedoed. Down, down, down, to the seabed. Those are pearls that were his eyes . Treasure in the deep.

She had that funny feeling of darkness again, of the curtain of Northern Lights before her eyes. She was on a ship ploughing through the dark waters. All about her was desperation. The spars breaking, the mainmast cracking, the sails hanging in rags. The figurehead of the ship was a naked baby howling in the wind. There were babies everywhere, hanging on to the rigging for dear life, clinging to the sides of the ship as it began to sink into the icy, oily sea. Tilly must save them, she must save them all, but she can’t, she is going down with the ship. Mercy on us! We split, we split!

And then suddenly there she was, like a ray of light, a port in a storm – the little ‘Twinkle,Twinkle’ girl. On the station platform. Her wings crushed, a poor little butterfly, a bedraggled fairy, flitting amongst the crowd ahead on the walkway above the platforms. Tilly had been given a second opportunity to save her. Someone should do something. Tilly should do something. Be bold, Tilly! Be a bold girl!

Courtney. The name came unbidden. ( Would you just shut the fuck up, Courtney, you’re getting on my tits! ) ‘Courtney,’ Tilly whispered, her voice suddenly hoarse. The girl turned her head and looked at her. ‘Courtney,’ Tilly repeated more confidently this time. She smiled and held out her hand. Courtney walked towards her, put her little hand in Tilly’s old one as if she were obeying invisible instructions. Tilly remembered her dream, the feel of the velvety rabbit’s paw in her hand as they flew. ‘Come with me, darling,’ Tilly said.

Tracy was clad in Harry Reynolds’s dead wife’s clothes. Marks & Spencer trousers with an elasticated waist and a tunic top decorated with a jungle design that would have allowed her to step into the rainforest and become invisible. No rainforests in Leeds. Courtney, trundling along beside her, had got the better end of the deal, but only just – sporting Ashley’s cast-off denim pedal-pushers and a Peppa Pig top. On top of them she insisted on wearing the rags of her fairy dress. So much for Harry Reynolds’s idea of ‘decent clothes’, they looked like homeless people, but that was OK, no one was interested in homeless people.