One For My Baby Read online

  His new life in some other part of the city is beyond her imagination. She doesn’t understand how he got there, why this happened, when the world-sized hole in her life started to form.

  When she comes off the phone she is smiling—a smile that is there for her protection, a smile as rigid as a bulletproof vest.

  My mother and I have an early dinner at the Shanghai Dragon.

  This is not a normal night out for us. Apart from the summer holidays of my childhood—bed-and-breakfasts in the seaside towns of southern England when I was small, the tourist canteens in the hotels of Greece and Spain when I was bit bigger—we have not spent a lot of time together in restaurants. Surprisingly for a woman who gets so much pleasure from feeding one thousand brats every day of the school year, my mother prefers ‘my own cooking, in my own house’.

  But since my father went away, she is not eating very much and that frightens me. Always slim—where my dad’s life as a working journalist meant his waist size increased with every passing year, one extra pound per annum being the general rule—she is starting to look hollow-eyed and gaunt. I know that part of that is a lack of sleep because I hear her wandering around downstairs in the middle of the night as I toss and turn in my own bed, my own solitude. It is also because there are no more real family meals to prepare, because there is no more real family.

  But my mum seems happy when she gets her first look at the Shanghai Dragon.

  ‘Very nice, dear,’ she says, admiring a grotesquely deformed root swimming in a jar like the outcome of some abominable scientific experiment. I now see that the dark nooks and crannies of the Shanghai Dragon are full of these roots. ‘Very nice indeed.’

  Joyce emerges from the kitchen. She looks at my mother admiring the things in jars.

  ‘You like?’

  ‘Lovely!’

  ‘You know?’

  My mother squints at the jars. ‘It’s ginseng, isn’t it? The real thing. Not the capsules and pills that you buy in a chemist.’

  Joyce smiles, pleased with my mother. ‘Ginseng,’ she says. ‘I can’t pull the sheep over your eyes. Yes, ginseng. Good for stress. When your body tired. When your body sad.’

  ‘I could do with some of that,’ my mum laughs, and I feel like hugging her.

  ‘Please,’ Joyce says, indicating the empty restaurant with an expansive gesture, asking us to choose a table.

  The atmosphere in the Shanghai Dragon at six is very different from the mood at midnight. There are no drunks. Apart from my mother and me, there are not even any customers.

  While we eat our Peking duck, my mum doing better with the chopsticks than I expected as we load our pancakes with spring onions, cucumber, plum sauce and duck, the Chang family are also eating their dinner at one of the tables in the takeaway section. All the tables in the Shanghai Dragon have a white tablecloth apart from one. This is where the Changs eat their meals.

  The entire family is there. George is spooning soup noodles from a huge bowl into six smaller bowls. He has his grandchildren next to him, the small boy on one side and the girl on the other side, both of them expertly wielding chopsticks that look far too big for them. The children’s dad, plump Harold, is noisily slurping noodles as though he has to do it within a certain time limit. His wife Doris is eating more slowly, but with her face so close to her bowl that her glasses are steaming up. Joyce barks instructions in Cantonese—at her husband, her son and his wife, and especially her two grandchildren—between checks to ensure that my mother and I are all right.

  I realise how much I envy the Changs. I envy their closeness, their sense of belonging, the unbroken quality of their lives. Their completeness. Looking at them together makes me feel sad. But not really sad. It’s a kind of longing. Because I was once part of a family like that.

  The Changs have dispersed by the time we pay the bill—George and Harold into the kitchen, the children and Doris to the flat upstairs. Only Joyce remains to welcome the first of the evening rush.

  When we leave she pushes a brown paper bag into my mother’s hands that I know contains something to help my mum with all the things that are wrong in her broken world.

  ‘My gift to you,’ Joyce says.

  What did Rose see in me? She could have had the pick of any lipless wonder in her firm’s office. Why did she choose me?

  Because I’m a nice guy. That doesn’t sound like much—it sounds like the kind of thing that women say they want, just before they go off with the spunky hunk in his Maserati. But Rose wanted a nice guy. And she picked me.

  It’s true. I was a nice guy. I always fell in love with the women I slept with, even when love was neither requested nor appropriate. I could never fuck around without feeling. A lot of the things that young men do without thinking were beyond me. Because I had listened to too many Sinatra records. Because I always wanted a trip to the moon on gossamer wings rather than a quick shag. Because I was looking for the one.

  She saw something in me. Something that was worthy of love.

  But niceness is finite. It’s like money and youth. It ebbs away when you are not looking. It leaks out of you. Look at me now. I’m nowhere near as nice as I used to be.

  I don’t want to give up on life and love and all the rest of it, but I can’t help myself. It’s because life and love and all the rest of it have given me a good hiding. Life has made me feel like death warmed up.

  I’ve lost my faith and I don’t know how I can ever get it back. Because I still miss someone. And because I will always miss her.

  Is that okay, Rose? Is it okay to miss you?

  nine

  It is the dead part of the afternoon but the private members’ club is still full of soft-looking men and hard-looking women lingering over their drinks and talking about projects that will probably never happen.

  Just like my father.

  If you ask me, my dad’s new love is a project that will never get the green light. My old man and his girlfriend—something tells me they are going to be languishing in development hell. Just a hunch.

  ‘You’ll come to the wedding, I hope,’ he says.

  I look at him, hiding behind a still mineral water in his Soho club, nervously hunting in the free bowl of Twiglets. I can’t quite tell if he is trying to provoke me or if he is completely insane.

  ‘Whose wedding is that?’

  ‘My wedding. My wedding to Lena.’

  ‘Oh, did you get a divorce?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Did you even get a divorce lawyer?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Then maybe it’s a little premature to start playing “Here Comes the Bride” and chucking around confetti, don’t you think? Maybe it’s a little early to start sending out the embossed invitations and ordering the cake.’

  He leans forward, trying to keep this between the two of us.

  ‘I’m just attempting to make you see that this is serious,’ he says. ‘You act as though it’s laughable.’

  ‘You’re mutton dressed up as ram, Dad. That’s not funny?’

  ‘What would be funny would be if I wanted a woman my own age. But why would I want someone that looks like me?’

  ‘Like your wife, you mean?’

  ‘I love your mother, Alfie. Always did, always will. And I intend to take care of her.’

  ‘All heart, aren’t you?’

  ‘But passion dies. It does. You don’t believe me because you never got the chance to find out.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And I’m sorry about that, Alfie, I truly am. I loved Rose. You know that.’

  It’s true. My dad loved Rose. He broke down at the funeral. Right at the end. He just fell to pieces.

  ‘Passion fades away, Alfie. It turns into something else. Friendship. Affection. Habit. That’s enough for some people. And for other people, it will never be enough.’

  I call for the bill, sick of talking to him, but he insists on paying. What a big shot.

  When we are out on
the street he puts a conciliatory hand on my shoulder and, although I make no move to touch him in return, I can’t help but love him. He will always be my father. I can’t imagine ever replacing him with a better model. I am stuck with him.

  ‘I just want one more chance for happiness,’ he says. ‘Is that so wrong?’

  I watch him move off through the narrow streets of Soho, a good thirty years older than most of the people here, all sipping their designer coffee and eyeing each other up and letting the afternoon drift by, all these youngish people with time to waste, and I feel a surge of enormous pity for my father.

  One more chance, I think.

  Doesn’t he know? Doesn’t he get it? Doesn’t my father understand anything?

  You get one shot at happiness.

  The funeral was all wrong.

  I had been to funerals before, but they were not like this, nothing like it. The funerals of my three dead grandparents were nothing like the day we buried Rose.

  Too young. Not just her. The mourners were too young. In their twenties, most of them, friends from school and the old neighbourhood, mates from university and the shop. Many of them looked as though they were going to a funeral for the first time. They had probably never even buried a grandparent. One or two of them might have lost a goldfish or a hamster. And they were in shock. They didn’t even own black ties—that’s how absurdly young they were. They didn’t know what to wear, how to act, what to say. It was all too soon. Too soon. I knew how they felt.

  I was in the front car with Rose’s mother and father and I couldn’t find the words to comfort them because there were no words. It was worse than that. There was no bond. We were already strangers, we were already slipping from each other’s lives. The bond between us was in the car ahead of us, in a pine coffin covered with three wreaths of red roses. One from Rose’s parents, one from me, one from my mum and dad. Separate wreaths for separate grief.

  The cortege reached the small church on top of a little hill. Below us the fields of rural Essex were covered in yellow. Fields of rape. A terrible name. Why can’t they call it something else? Because I still can’t look at those yellow fields of April without thinking of the day we buried Rose.

  A vicar who had never known Rose talked about her qualities. He had tried his best, this vicar, he had talked to friends and family and me, so he spoke of her humour and her warmth and her love of life. But it was only when Josh climbed the steps to the plinth that I felt as if it meant anything.

  ‘The words of Canon Henry Scott Holland,’ he said. ‘Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.’

  I held myself together because it was worse for Rose’s parents, this quiet man and his kind wife who had been so proud of their lawyer daughter, this decent man and woman who I had spent Christmases with and who I would probably never see again. I held myself together because it would have been shaming to place my loss above their loss. They were doing the worst thing in the world. They were burying a child.

  ‘Call me by my old familiar name,’ Josh said. ‘Speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone, wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.’

  There was none of the comfort that you clutch at when you bury someone at the end of their life. Josh did his best. But this black day had arrived fifty years too soon. Nature had been violated. And although I tried to make sense of the words I was hearing, although I tried to tell myself that it was worse for her parents, all I could think was one selfish thought—I want my wife.

  ‘Let my name be ever the household word it always was. Let it be spoken without effect, without the ghost of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was—there is absolutely unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well.’

  It was a bad moment following the coffin out of the church, feeling all those eyes on me, feeling all that pity that I didn’t want. But I held it together while we were walking behind the coffin. And it was a bad moment when Rose’s parents were holding each other by the graveside and her oldest friends were starting to come apart. But I held it together at the graveside.

  It was only when the funeral director—there are no more undertakers—took me aside and softly asked me if the wreaths were to be buried with the coffin or kept for the graveside that I began to unravel.

  ‘All with her,’ I said, ‘bury it all with her,’ suddenly overflowing with helpless tears.

  Not for myself or for her parents or even for Rose, no, but crying for the children who would never be born.

  I always get a jolt of surprise when I enter my nan’s tiny flat. One little box in a block of sheltered accommodation, it’s as fashionably minimalist as any local restaurant or art gallery, all white walls and creamy blankness, a study in trendy emptiness. Damien Hirst would be right at home in my nan’s flat. One look at this place, and Damien would want to chop my nan in half and stick her in a jar of preservative. Not that my nan is trying to keep up with the cutting edge of interior design. A few years ago the stairs got too much for her in the home she had lived in for over fifty years, the Oranges For Christmas house in that East End banjo, and this white flat is where the council put her. She refused to move in with my parents.

  ‘I value my freedom, love,’ she told me.

  The TV has the sound turned down and Sinatra is playing. It’s Sinatra at the Sands with Count Basie and the Orchestra, Frank’s finest live album, in my opinion. My nan is a habitual player of Sinatra records. She is not really all that interested in music, but I know Frank reminds her of my granddad. No, it’s more than a reminder, hearing Sinatra swagger through ‘You Make Me Feel So Young’ or ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ or ‘The Shadow of Your Smile’. It’s a kind of communion.

  Among all the souvenirs from other people’s holidays—my nan is keen on grinning Spanish donkeys and leering leprechauns—there are lots of family pictures on the mantelpiece. Rose and me on our wedding day. Me as a child. Me as a baby. My parents on their wedding day. Her own wedding day—she is black-haired and smiling, a beautiful young woman, a woman who shines—on the arm of her husband, my granddad. But the white flat remains stubbornly indifferent to these signs of life. My nan just hasn’t had the endless years to impose her personality here the way she did in the old place. As I watch her shuffling around the kitchen, laboriously making us some tea—she forbids me from making it as I am her guest—I wonder if she ever will.

  ‘He was here,’ my nan says. ‘Yesterday. With his fancy woman.’

  For some reason I am dumbfounded.

  ‘My dad?’

  She nods, smiling grimly. ‘With her. His fancy woman.’

  ‘He brought Lena? Here?’

  ‘His fancy woman. His bit on the side. Bit of crumpet. Bit of skirt. His tart.’

  I am glad that my nan is not siding with her son in the dismantling of our little family. She still comes round to our house for lunch on Sundays. Either my mum or I deliver a bag of shopping once a week. We talk on the phone every day, even when we have nothing much to say. We are all pretending that our family is still intact, and I am comforted by that pretence. But something stops me from smiling and nodding at these slanders on Lena.

  ‘You really liked her a little while ago,’ I say. ‘Lena, I mean. You thought she was okay.’

  She snorts. ‘Young enough to be his daughter. What are they going to do? Have a baby?’ Another snort. ‘He won’t be able to pick it up. The old goat. Do you want a biscuit?’

  ‘No thanks, Nan.’

  ‘Chocolate digestive or custard cream?’

  ‘Not for me, Nan.’

  ‘I’ll just bring some in case
you change your mind,’ she says. ‘That marriage hasn’t been right since her last loss. You know. Miscarriage. If you dip them in your tea, they go all soft. Do you have sugar? I can’t remember.’ She laughs with delight, shaking her head. ‘Sorry, Alfie. It’s my old timer’s disease.’

  ‘What did he want?’ I say, helping her to cart the tea and biscuits to the low table that faces the television. She doesn’t mind me helping with this bit. ‘I mean, of course he wanted to see you. You’re his mum. But what did he want?’

  ‘To explain. To explain everything, he said. And he brought her with him. Bold as brass. Sitting there holding hands, they were. Like some kind of courting couple. I said—I’ll have none of that in my house. None of your holding hands business. They brought me a box of Quality Street. And then she went and had the strawberry. Bloody cheek. He knows I like the strawberry. I can only eat the soft ones.’

  I can believe that my nan has given her son and his girlfriend a hard time. My grandmother was endlessly tolerant when she was visiting my parents. She contemplated all manner of strange phenomena that she has never had any truck with in her life—au pairs, exercise equipment, foreign food, bestselling books—with a benign smile.

  But in her own home she makes all the rules and expects you to obey them.

  ‘He says he loves her.’

  ‘Men say a lot of things. You can’t listen to what men say. Men will say anything to get what they want.’

  ‘He says he’s not coming back.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have him back. I’d kick him out. If he came back. I would. If I was your mum, I’d be hoping he came back so I could kick him out. I mean it. I knew something was going on. It’s ridiculous.’

  Ridiculous is one of my nan’s favourite words.

  ‘I’m worried about my mum,’ I say.

  ‘He’s disgusting.’

  Disgusting is another one. She gets a lot of mileage out of ridiculous and disgusting.

  ‘She’s lost without him. She pretends she’s not, but she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She put so much into him.’