He gazes at her, sitting before him, and feels again this keen, irreversible loss and wants to ask her if she might consider growing it again, for him, and how long it might take and would it look the same?
‘What kind of effects?’ he asks, instead.
‘You know,’ she says again, moving her arm so that it covers the page more effectively. ‘Various ones.’
He can see that the effect of the shorn hair is meant to be gamine, Puckish, like that girl in the film about Paris. But it doesn’t come off, with his wife’s round face, her flat nose. She looks like a Victorian convalescent.
‘Make sure you mention the mass migrations from countryside to town,’ he hears himself say, ‘the emergence of big cities, and—’
‘Yes, yes, I know,’ she says, turning back to the desk, and is it his imagination or do her teeth sound gritted? Let me help you, he wants to say, let me try. But he doesn’t know how to say this without sounding what Aoife would call ‘a desperate eejit’. He would just like there to be one thing they were united in, one part of their life in which they stood shoulder to shoulder, as they used to, before—
‘And the railways,’ he hears himself say, and is it just him or is he employing the deep, authoritative voice he uses in the classroom – why is he doing that here, in the attic of his own house, to his own wife? – ‘the way they gave ease and speed of transportation, built by the Irish, of course, and—’
She scratches her head with a quick, irritated movement, goes to make a mark on the page in front of her but then pulls back the pen.
‘Also, I’d recommend reading—’
‘Hadn’t you better answer him?’ she interrupts.
‘Answer who?’
‘Hughie.’
He tunes his hearing beyond the attic, beyond his wife, and becomes aware of his son’s voice, calling, Daddy, Daddeeeeee, are you coming baaaaaaaaack?
When he’d first been taken to meet Claire’s parents, the thing he’d been most struck by was how nice they all were to each other. How extraordinarily polite, considerate. The parents called each other ‘dearest’. At dinner her mother asked him, if she could trouble him, would he mind awfully passing the butter? It had taken him a moment to decode the grammar of this sentence, to grope his way along its abstruse semantic loops. The father fetched a scarf (silk, with a pattern of brass padlocks) for the mother when she mentioned it was chilly. The brother talked voluntarily about the game of rugby he’d played that day at school. The parents asked Claire-Bear, as they called her, about her essays, her lectures, the dates of her exams. The food came in china serving dishes, each with its own lid; they helped each other to portions and then seconds.
It had amazed him. And made him want to laugh. There was no shouting, no swearing, no people flouncing off from the table, no silent brooding, no scramble for your fair share of potatoes. No spoons were thrown, no one picked up the carving knife, held it to their throat and cried, will I kill myself here and now? He didn’t think anyone in his family would be able to identify the vague area of his PhD, never mind get down the calendar and write the dates and details of his exams, never mind reel off a list of books that might be useful for him, never mind fetch those books from their library.
He found their enquiries as to what he was studying, how much teaching he did, whether he had enough time to devote to his PhD, induced a feeling of mild panic. He would have preferred them to ignore him so that he could eat as much as possible of the food, to stare round at the oil paintings on the wall, the bay window that opened on to a sweeping lawn, to absorb the revelation that he was sleeping with a girl who still addressed her parents as ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’.
But they would not give up. How many siblings did he have? What did they do? Where had he grown up? That his father worked in a bank seemed to satisfy them but the disclosure that he was going to Ireland over the summer seemed to cause surprise.
‘Michael’s parents are Irish,’ Claire said, and was it his imagination or was there a hint of warning in her voice, a slight wrinkle in the atmosphere?
‘Really?’ Her father turned his eyes on him, as if searching for some physical manifestation of this. He was seized with an urge to recite a Hail Mary, just to see what they would do. I am indeed, he would announce over the artichokes – horrible, inedible, spiked things they were – I’m a Paddy, a Catholic, a Mick, a Fenian, and I deflowered your daughter.
‘Yes,’ he said instead.
‘From Northern Ireland? Or southern Ireland?’
He struggled for a moment with the desire to correct Claire’s father: it’s the Republic of Ireland, he wanted to say, not southern Ireland. ‘The . . . er . . .’ he swallowed ‘. . . the south.’
‘Ah. But you’re not IRA, are you?’
His hand, carrying food to his mouth, stopped. An artichoke leaf hovered in mid-air. A drop of melted butter fell to the plate. He stared at the man in front of him. ‘You’re asking me if I’m in the IRA?’
‘Daddy,’ Claire murmured.
The man smiled, a quick, thin smile. ‘No. Merely whether you or your family—’
‘Whether my family’s in the IRA?’
‘Just an enquiry. No offence intended.’
He had Claire that night, at one in the morning, on her flowery bedspread, on the carpet, on the cushions of the window-seat. He gathered up the corn-coloured silk of her hair and held it to his face. He pumped away, eyes shut, and when he realised he hadn’t used a condom, he was glad, he was angrily glad, and next morning at breakfast he was still glad as she sat there, irreproachable in a sprigged summer dress, on a straight-backed chair, helping herself to scrambled eggs and asking her father if she could pass him anything.
He was less glad, three weeks later, when she came to tell him her period hadn’t come. Even less glad again when, a month after that, he’d gone home to tell his parents he was getting married. His mother had shot him a quick, assessing look, then sat down at the table.
‘Oh, Michael Francis,’ she’d whispered, her hand held to her forehead.
‘What?’ his father said, looking from one to the other. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘How could you do this to me?’
‘What?’ his father said again.
‘He’s knocked someone up,’ Aoife muttered.
‘Eh?’
‘Knocked someone up, Dad,’ she repeated loudly, lolling on the sofa, her flawless, fourteen-year-old limbs sprawling over the arms. ‘Impregnated her, put a bun in the oven, got a girl in trouble, done a—’
‘That will do,’ his father said to her.
Aoife shrugged a shoulder, then eyed Michael, as if with new interest.
‘Is this true?’ his father said, turning to him.
‘I . . .’ He opened his hands. This was not meant to happen, he wanted to say. She wasn’t meant to be the one I married. I was going to do my PhD, sleep with everyone I could lay my hands on, then go to America. This marriage and baby were not part of the plan.
‘The wedding’s in two weeks.’
‘Two weeks!’ His mother started to cry.
‘In Hampshire. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.’
‘Oh, Michael Francis,’ his mother said again.
‘Where in Hampshire?’ his father asked.
‘Is she Catholic?’ Aoife said, swinging her bare foot, biting a crescent from her biscuit.
Their mother gasped. ‘Is she? Is she a Catholic?’ She glanced across at the Sacred Heart that hung on the wall. ‘Please tell me she is.’
He cleared his throat, shooting a furious look at Aoife. ‘She is not.’
‘What is she, then?’
‘I . . . I don’t know. C of E, I’d guess, but I don’t think it’s a very important part of—’
Their mother lurched from the table with a wail. Their father slapped his newspaper against his palm. Aoife said, apparently to no one, ‘He’s gone and knocked up a Prod.’
‘Shut your bloody mouth, Aoife,’
he hissed.
‘Mind your language,’ his father thundered.
‘This will be the death of me,’ their mother cried from the bathroom, rattling the bottles of her tranquillisers. ‘You might as well just kill me now.’
‘Fine,’ Aoife murmured. ‘Who wants to go first?’
Hughie was born and the lives of Claire and Michael Francis were rerouted. Claire would have finished her history degree and taken up the kind of job girls like her did then after graduation: she might have worked on a magazine or perhaps as a solicitor’s secretary. She would have shared a flat in London with a friend, a place full of clothes and make-up. They would have taken messages for each other, entertained their boyfriends with meals put together in the narrow kitchen. They would have washed their smalls in the sink and dried them over the gas fire. Then, after a few years, she would have married a solicitor or a businessman and they would have moved out to a house like her parents’, in Hampshire or Surrey, and Claire would have had several well-groomed children and she would have told them stories about her bachelor-girl days in London.
Michael would have done his doctorate. He would have worked his way through the best-looking women in the city – and there seemed to be lots of them, all over the place, in London in the mid-1960s – the women in black kohl and polo-necks, the ones in floaty dresses, the ones in impossibly short skirts and long boots, the ones with hats and sunglasses, the ones with chignons and tweed coats. He would have tried them all, one by one. And then he would have got a professorship in America. Berkeley, he’d been thinking, or NYU or Chicago or Williams. He’d had it all planned. He would have sailed away from this country and he would never have come back.
But, as it turned out, he had to abandon his PhD. It wasn’t possible to support a wife and child on his grant. He got a job teaching history at a grammar school in the suburbs. He rented a flat off Holloway Road, near where he’d spent his childhood, and he and Claire took turns to heat baby bottles on the gas-ring. They went to Hampshire for the weekends and endlessly debated whether or not he should let his father-in-law lend them the money to buy ‘somewhere decent to live’.
He circles a wooden spoon around the saucepan, then tips the spaghetti hoops on to two plates.
Sometimes, when he catches a distant expression on his wife’s face, he wonders if she is thinking about the house she might have had. In Sussex or Surrey, with a lawyer husband.
He is careful to keep the hoops clear of the toast on one plate – Hughie won’t eat if one type of food has contact with another. ‘No touching!’ he’ll yell. Vita’s he heaps on top of the buttered toast. She can and will eat anything.
He is just setting the plates in front of their respective chairs when he feels something butting his leg, something solid and warm. Vita. She has come in from the garden and is knocking her curly head into his thigh, like a small goat.
‘Daddy,’ she croons. ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.’
He reaches down and lifts her into his arms. ‘Vita,’ he says. He is, again and for a moment, completely the person he is meant to be: a man, in his kitchen, lifting his daughter into the air. He puts down the wooden spoon. He puts down the pan. He wraps his arms around the child. He is filled with – what? Something more than love, more than affection. Something so keen and elemental it resembles animal instinct. For a moment, he thinks that the only way to express this feeling is through cannibalism. Yes, he wants to eat his daughter, starting at the creases in her neck, moving down to the smooth pearlescent skin of her arms.
She is arching back, wriggling her legs. Vita has always been an earth-bound child; doesn’t like to be held. Her favoured form of affection is a hug around the legs. She hates to be off her feet. She’s always had a solidity, a firmness to her body that Hughie never had. Hughie is a sprite, a light, reedy being, his too-long hair flying out behind him, diaphanous, an Ariel, a creature of the air, whereas Vita is more of a soil-dwelling animal. A badger, she reminds him of, perhaps, or a fox.
With a sigh, he puts her down, whereupon she proceeds to run around the kitchen table, shouting, inexplicably, ‘Happily ever after,’ over and over again, with a variety of emphases.
‘Vita,’ he says, endeavouring to talk at a normal volume over the noise, ‘Vita, sit down. Vita?’
Hughie wanders in and slumps at his place at the table. He picks up a fork and toys with his spaghetti hoops, the orange sauce of which is cooling and congealing. He frowns, looping one, then two, then three hoops on to a tine of his fork and Michael Francis is torn between telling him that he’s sorry it’s spaghetti hoops again and telling him to eat up now.
Last time his mother visited – she comes every two weeks but only for a cup of tea, refusing to stay any longer because she doesn’t want to ‘put Claire out’ – she’d remarked at a dinner such as this that, for a man with a full-time teaching job, wasn’t it surprising how much cooking he did? Claire had been in the living room but she’d heard. He knew she’d heard by the way she slapped down the book she’d been reading.
‘Vita,’ he tries again.
Vita prances around the table, naked, dust-smudged, chanting, ‘Happily ever after. Happily ever after.’
Hughie smacks a hand to his forehead and slams down his fork. ‘Shut up, Vita,’ he hisses.
‘You shut up,’ Vita shouts back. ‘You shut up, you shut up, you—’
He seizes hold of his daughter as she dances past him and holds her above his head, kicking and yowling. He has, he knows, two choices at this point. He can go stern, tell her to behave, to sit down this instant. This has the attraction of venting some of the frustration that’s been building in him all day long, but the danger is that it will backfire and that Vita will take things up a notch or two. Or he can joke them out of the stand-off. He decides to opt for the latter. Quicker and less risky.
‘Gobble, gobble,’ he says, pretending to eat Vita’s stomach. ‘I’m a monster and I’m going to eat you up.’ He hoists her into a chair. ‘I’m so hungry that unless you eat your food I’m going to have to eat you. You’re only safe if you’re eating.’
Vita laughs but – magically – stays on her chair. He holds his breath until he sees her pick up her fork.
‘What kind of a monster, Daddy?’
‘A big one.’
‘A hairy one?’ she shrieks.
‘Yes. Very hairy. Green hair all over.’ And because she’s yet to take a bite, he takes the fork gently from her grasp and inserts some food into her mouth as she is saying, ‘Have you got big teeth?’
‘Enormous. The biggest teeth you’ve ever seen.’
‘The shark,’ Hughie suddenly announces, ‘has several rows of—’
‘And claws?’ Vita says, spraying masticated pellets of spaghetti on to the table.
‘I was speaking!’ Hughie yells. ‘I was speaking! Daddy, she interrupted me.’
‘Vita, don’t interrupt. Wait for a gap. Yes, I have claws. Go on, Hughie, what does a shark have?’
‘It has several rows of teeth that—’
‘Do you live in a cave?’
‘She did it again!’ Hughie is shaking with rage. ‘Daddy!’
Claire chooses this moment to enter the kitchen. She has changed, he notices, into a skirt and a rather thin blouse, knotted at the waist.
‘Hello, darlings,’ she says. ‘Are you enjoying your tea?’
‘You’re going out?’ he says.
Her eyes are roving over the surfaces, the shelves, the floor. ‘Has anyone seen my—’
‘Mummy, Vita interrupted me twice,’ Hughie says, turning in his seat towards his mother.
Claire runs her hand along the cupboard top, stops, takes a step towards the back door, then stops again. ‘I’m sorry to hear that but you just interrupted me.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I didn’t interrupt you.’
‘You did. Just now. You need to wait for a gap.’
‘You never told me you were going out.’
&nb
sp; She focuses on him briefly. ‘I did. We’re watching an OU programme together and then having supper back here afterwards. I told you yesterday, remember? Did you happen to see my . . .’ She seems to give up on the idea of asking for his help. ‘Oh, never mind.’
‘Your what?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No, tell me.’
‘Daddy,’ Vita lays a hand sticky with tomato sauce on his sleeve, ‘do you have two eyes or lots of eyes?’
‘Nothing,’ Claire says. ‘Doesn’t matter.’ She picks up a cloth bag he’s never seen before from the floor and he catches the briefest glimpse down the front of her blouse, the lace fringe of her bra, the twin mounds of her breasts. It occurs to him that others might do the same, at this study group or whatever she said it was. ‘I’m off.’ She kisses each of the children on the hair. ‘I’m saying night-night now, sweethearts, because I may not be back until after you’re asleep—’
‘What time are you coming back?’ he asks.
‘Two eyes, Daddy, or lots of eyes? Lots of eyes in funny places, like on your arms or on your ears?’
‘Who’s going to put me to bed?’ Hughie says, in his neglected-orphan voice.
‘Later.’ Claire waves a hand in the air. ‘Not sure.’