What had come over her? Must have been that tuna sandwich she’d bought in town. But then she remembered that she’d been feeling below par for a while . . . ever since the wedding. And the rash hadn’t gone away yet. After rinsing her mouth out and smoothing her hair, she felt infinitely better. Back on the café trail, walking through the corridors, past rushing nurses and patients in dressing gowns and gurneys and wheelchairs, she had a strong sense that someone was staring at her, boring holes in the back of her jean jacket. She turned.
“No way. Stevie? Is that you?”
A familiar voice. Her cheeks flushed, her body recognizing his voice before her brain confirmed his identity.
“It
is
you!” Sam grinned, all curly ended smile and pinky-brown slithers of gum.
“What the hell are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be in New York?” Stevie, mortified that she might smell of puke, air- kissed him—
mwah mwah
—careful not to get too close.
“Aren’t you supposed to be lolling on a beach somewhere exotic?”
Stevie blushed again. “Thailand. But you’ve heard about Poppy’s baby? I . . . I came back early.”
“Little man.” Sam’s face fell. “I’ve been trying to navigate the ward for about half an hour. Thought I’d check up on him. I saw him the other day.” He felt he needed to qualify, fearful of intrud- ing into Stevie’s family business. “I was in the hospital . . .”
“Oh?” It was always really awkward bumping into people you knew in medical establishments, in case they were there for some- thing embarrassing.
“Nana.” Sam shook his head, a shadow of his springy hair like a puppet show on the glossy green wall. “She’d been ill. She died. So I’m over from New York for a few days to be with Mum.” He looked down at the floor. “To sort things out . . .”
Stevie put her hand to her mouth. “I am so sorry.” She knew how close Sam had been to his grandmother.
“She was ninety-four.” Sam smiled weakly and shrugged. “And she’d prepared herself. And, well, I suppose as far as deaths go, it was a good one. She was high as a kite at the end.” He nodded at the two closed doors she was about to pass through. “That’s the laundry room, dear. You’re after that elusive café, I bet. This way. Come on.”
Stevie and Sam escorted each other to the café, hands brushing as they walked. Stevie pressed the button of the vending machine and a gush of treacle-dark tea splattered over the rim of Stevie’s cup. They sat at one of the Formica tables and talked about Thailand, Sam eagerly demanding to know details. Stevie was ashamed to only be able to give perfunctory answers, explaining that she’d spent most of the time incarcerated in a five-star spa avoiding Katy Nor- ris, yes,
that
Katy Norris. “The husband’s flying back tomorrow.”
“Oh, right.” Sam looked puzzled and put his coffee cup down gently. “He’s still in Thailand?”
“Yeah, well. No point in completely wasting the holiday totally, is there?”
Sam shrugged, looking unconvinced. “I suppose.”
“So, how’s New York?” she asked brightly, swiftly changing the subject. “Lara mentioned you’d met up.”
“She did?” Sam drained his cup in one quick gulp. He spread his hands on the tabletop, as if to lever himself up. “Shall we head back? Fancy an escort to the ward?” He stood up and hitched the waistband of his jeans. “You’ll end up in Birmingham otherwise.”
“Lara?” Stevie tried to assume a cheeky look. “You were saying . . .”
He grinned. “She’s a lot of fun.”
So that’s the only information I’m going to get out of you? I’ll just have to interrogate Lara later, thought Stevie. “I miss her.”
Sam held the café door open for her. “But you’re coming over soon, aren’t you? Hasn’t she bought you a ticket or something?”
Carrying the drinks, they walked back to the premature baby ward, Stevie eyeing his left hand, strangely entranced as it swung by his side, manly and brown and so much bulkier than hers. She found herself so magnetized by Sam on this grim afternoon in the
green corridor, so drawn into his personal space, that she had to stop herself from walking into him. Sometimes their conversation would fall silent. They’d continue walking and would occasionally glance up and grin stupidly, happy to find each other accidentally in one another’s orbit.
Inside the ward, Poppy and Patti were just as she’d left them, staring at the incubator, Patti trying to persuade a nurse to put on her “Sound of the Womb” tape. The nurse said it wasn’t hospital procedure. When she saw Sam, Patti stopped midsentence, mouth dropping open.
“Sam,
darrrrrrling
!” The other incubator-watchers in the ward looked up sharply. Patti reached for Sam’s hands and held them. “Come here. Give us a snog. Oh, watch the tea!”
Sam grinned bashfully, kissed Patti and Poppy, and cooed at Tommy, trying to entertain him with goonish faces at the side of the incubator. Every so often, his eyes would flick back to Stevie— her round, pale face lighting up as she caught his eye. Then he would concentrate on the little bundle again. “You’ve grown, haven’t you, bro? Easy on the milk, now.”
Poppy smiled at Sam appreciatively. He was the only person who didn’t look at her tiny son and wince.
Tommy turned in the cot, setting off a loud beep. Poppy jumped up, color draining from her face. The nurse rushed over. “Don’t worry. False alarm.” She fiddled with the settings. The beeping stopped. The nurse looked at her watch. “Visiting time’s over. It’s quiet time for the babies now. Just mums, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” said Sam, leaping up. “Sorry.”
Patti stood up and rattled the keys to her old VW. “Poppy?
Come home for a bit. Have a long bath. You look beat.” Poppy shook her head, stifling a yawn.
“Come on, Poppy,” said Stevie, holding her sister’s hand. “I can look after the kids if you want to come back later.”
Poppy hesitated and looked at the incubator. “Oh, okay. Don’t want my other kids to forget they have a mother.”
“Lift?” asked Patti, looking hopefully at Sam.
Sam shook his head. “No, no, sadly not. There’s paperwork . . .” “Of course.” Stevie’s spirits dropped. “How long are you around?” “Just until Monday. We’ve got this big project going on at the
studio . . .”
“Oh.” Stevie felt irrationally hurt. “I’m going back to London tomorrow.”
There was an awkward pause, broken by Patti lurching forward to embrace Sam again. “Good-bye, Mr. Flowers.” Patti put a hand on Stevie’s elbow. “Come on, girls. Let’s hit the road.”
Stevie didn’t want to move, but the group around her disassem- bled. Sam leaned forward to kiss her lightly. He smelled of cooking and vanilla and human things, in complete contrast to the sharp clinical tang of the hospital. He smelled just right. She closed her eyes and forced herself to pull back.
She watched him walk down the corridor, pushing open the dou- ble doors with two fingers. His figure retreated in the rectangular frame of the doorway, until his foot, leg, back, head, and last jaunty spring of black hair disappeared from view.
TWENTY-SIX
Æ
“you hitting the sack already, dad?” asked stevie.
“I’m going home tomorrow. Don’t you want some . . .” She as- sumed an ironic American accent, to undercut the sentimentality that had no place in his liberal North Oxford household. “. . . like, quality family-time?”
Chris pushed his glasses farther up his nose. “I will pass. Your mother has other ideas anyhow.”
“
Jesus,
Chris!” snapped Patti, kohled eyes ablaze. “I’m not sug- gesting we watch reruns of
Big Brother
. It’s Scorsese’s biopic of Dy- lan. Don’t be so bloody highbrow. Oh, damn it, why don’t you just go upstairs and throw yourself into a good book?”
Stevie’s father drained his whiskey and clinked his glass back onto the unpolished, dull silver tray. “I might just do that.”
“
Plus ça change.
”
“Let’s talk in the morning, Stevie.” He kissed her on the cheek.
Stevie felt a prick of sadness that her father didn’t kiss Mum on the cheek, too. What was wrong with them? What was the point of all those years of marriage—what her mother had once unforgettably
described as “decades of compromise, peace negotiation, and exhaus- tive invention in the bedroom”—if you got to your mid-sixties and started to loathe the sight of one another. Shouldn’t they be enjoying the fruits of their old age—the free bus passes and Viagra or
some- thing
?
“I’m out.” Neil grunted, sliding off the sofa. “Hooking up with Toe.”
“But it’s
Dylan
,” pleaded his mother. “The main man. Come on, sweetie. Hang out with me and your big sis for a bit.”
“Let me think about that for one second.” Neil dug his hands into low-slung trouser pockets. “Er, no thanks! Nice to catch up with you, Stevie. I’m sorry about your tan. Better luck next time.” “Very funny.” Stevie smiled. “Have a bath one day soon, won’t
you?”
“Later.” Neil slammed the front door in a manner designed to make his mother click her tongue with annoyance.
“That boy . . .” Patti carefully rolled up the sleeves of her taupe Betty Jackson tunic shirt. “I’m worried about him, Stevie. He says he’s going out with Toe, but . . .” She frowned. “Oh, I don’t know. Last week he told me he’d spent the weekend camping with Toe near Wytham woods, but I’d seen Toe in Cornmarket on Saturday.” She bit her lip. “He’s lying to me, I’m sure of that. Why, I don’t know.”
“Mum, he’s twenty-two. He’s not going to tell you where he is, all the time. Why the hell should he?”
Patti looked hurt. “He used to.” “Maybe he’s growing up? Like, finally.”
“Possible.” Patti shrugged, defeated. “Now, how about a glass of something nice? Your father was given a bottle of bubbly at college from some keeno student or other. Shall we be naughty and open it?”
“I should think so.”
“Shall I get Poppy and Piers from upstairs? Or just leave them to chill on their own for a bit?”
“Leave them, Mum. They’ll come down if they want to.” “Oh, okay. One sec.” Patti disappeared into the kitchen.
Stevie heard the familiar sounds of the ancient fridge open and then shut, the creak of a kitchen drawer, the pop of a champagne cork. They were the sounds of her childhood, layered with the laughter of her parents’ drunk friends, the spicy pipe and cigarette smoke that used to thread its way through the gaps in the old floor- boards and into their bedrooms—a happy, reassuring adult smell.
Patti re-emerged with two glasses of champagne and a bowl of greasy peanuts. She sat down on a low-lying leather cushion, a torn relic from the seventies that had weathered being the height of un- fashionability throughout Stevie’s childhood only to emerge de- cades later, unbeknownst to her parents, the paragon of vintage hip. Patti sat crossed-legged, bare toes curling and stretching. Stevie noticed that her mother sported blue nail polish. “What’s eating Dad?” she asked, trying to forgive the choice of color.
Patti glanced at her pink glittery Swatch. “We’ve got a few min- utes before it starts.” She sat up straighter. “Your father? Usual grouchy self.”
Stevie trod carefully. “Things seem, well, a bit strained. A little less like the Waltons than usual.”
“Nothing gets past you does it, darling? Incense, hmmm, shall I light incense?”
“
Mum
. . .” God, she was annoying.
“Oh, okay . . .” Patti drew her knees to her chest, resting her chin on the hammock of linen, the flickering blue light of the telly revealing the age of her face, but not diminishing its dramatic
dark-eyed beauty. “Well, we’ve been married a long time, Stevie. You’ve all left home. I mean, obviously, right now we’ve got a full house, what with Poppy and the kids and it’s wonderful, it really is, I can’t tell you, to have laughter in the house again, a line for the bathroom. But most of the time it’s just me and Chris, this big rat- tling empty house, and that damn cat.”
“And that makes you hate each other?” Try a honeymoon in Thailand.
“We don’t hate each other.” Patti paused, chose her words care- fully. “It’s just that successful marriages need distractions. They need the dilution of kids or . . .” Reluctant to break the marital pact of privacy, she covered her mouth with the giant silver-and- stone rings on her left hand.
Stevie hoped her mother wouldn’t cry. She hated and resented it when her mother cried. She never felt grown-up enough to deal with the role reversal, even though it was something her mother had demanded since she was about ten years old when their mar- riage had developed its “rough patches,” as Patti had called them, as if referring to dry elbows. To Stevie, these rough patches had been barely endurable cataclysmic events when one parent would disappear for a few days (it felt like years) and her entire universe collapsed and she felt that somehow it were her fault. Weeping into a Judy Blume book at night, she’d told herself then that one day she’d have a “proper marriage.” A marriage like her school friends’ parents’ marriages. Huh.
“As time goes on, couples need a reason to be together. There has to be an objective that binds you together, something bigger than yourselves. Poetry, politics, children,
something
.”
“If that’s what you advise your clients, they might start asking for their money back.”
Patti laughed, shaking her head. “Don’t be silly, Stevie.” “You’ve got your friends, your work. Dad has the university, his
books. Can’t you professionally counsel your own marriage, for God’s sake? I don’t understand.”
Patti smiled gently at her daughter. “Nor should you.”
“But everything’s going to be okay, isn’t it?” she persevered, dis- liking the childish whine in her own voice.
Patti massaged her left ankle’s pressure points with her knuck- les. “In the end, whatever happens, happens for the best. Life’s nat- ural rhythm must take its course.”
“Translate?” Stevie felt a familiar feeling of rising exasperation.
Why was her mother so infuriating?
“Oh. Stevie, oh darling, I shouldn’t be telling you this. It’s not fair burdening your children. It’s me. I
want
. . .”