Never Mind Miss Fox (7 page)

“No one thinks you're an idiot,” Clive said. “Tom was just a bit sad, that's all.”

“Poor Tom,” she said with a gulp. “Oh, God, poor Tom…I'm such a bitch to him. Is he still here?” She lifted her head with a hopeful look at the door.

“No,” said Clive firmly. “He's gone to another party.”

“I've blown it,” said Eliot. “My birthday party. What a joke.”

“It was great,” said Clive, but it sounded lame and insubstantial. After a pause he added, “And I think you're great.”

There was no response to this and then in a small voice she said, “Do you?”

“Yes,” said Clive. He trusted the tone of his voice: avuncular; certain.
The poor little thing,
he thought,
being rejected like that.
He raised his eyes from the heap on the bed and looked around the room.

His eye was caught by the coat that Danny had given Eliot that day at the races—the only piece of clothing not in a tangle on the floor. It had been straightened onto a hanger and hung from the curtain pole. The sight of it struck Clive with as much force as if Danny himself had been standing in the room looking down at them with his tall certainty, his glamour and his fatal magnetism.
He's a total bastard,
Martha and Viv had said.

Clive felt weary, defeated and alone. “Good night, Eliot,” he said. “I'm going to head off home.”

But again the hand reached from its knitted blur of twigs and stretched towards him. “Don't go,” she said. “It's my birthday—well,” she corrected herself, “it was.” She shifted her cheek on the pillow. “So drunk…stupid…tired…” Her voice could only be a moment from sleep.

She tugged at Clive's hand and he sat down on the edge of her bed and looked at the formless tumble of her, lying there. “Shall I take your shoes off?” he asked. “Your feet'll be murder tomorrow if you sleep in them.”

“Oh, go on then.” It was a mumble. “May as well…Not going back downstairs.”

She was lying on her side and Clive reached round and pulled off her shoes, one after the other. He dropped them onto the floor. “You're wearing a dress,” he said in a slow voice, looking down at her. “I don't think I've ever seen you in a dress.”

“Whaddya think?” she slurred.

“Very pretty,” said Clive. With an absent-minded gesture he pulled its hem down over her calves.

After a little pause Eliot muttered into the pillow, “Don't say ‘pretty'; say ‘sexy.'”

There was a silence which to Clive was filled with noise. He looked down at her ankles, crossed on the bed, and the red marks her shoes had left on her feet. He moved his hand from the hem of her dress to her uppermost foot and with his thumb he rubbed at the bruised skin.

“…Feels nice…” came Eliot's voice, but it was just a murmur.

She did not stir again for a moment or two and Clive stared down at his thumb, moving to and fro across her skin, just an inch one way and then back, and away, and back. It seemed to be the only thing moving in the world.

“Mm,” repeated Eliot. “That feels nice.”

When he heard those words again, Clive instructed himself to stop this little movement.

Eliot still had the fingers of Clive's other hand clasped between hers. She did not let go but turned her wrist until their two palms were pressed together. Their fingers slid between each other's and linked securely into place. At the same time, with the smallest motion, she shifted her foot until it was not just resting under his hand but docked in his palm.
How did that happen?
Clive wondered, looking down.
I have not moved.

He seemed now to be holding her at two points, by hand and foot, and now she turned towards him, stirring and unfolding like a sheaf of papers at the breath of a breeze.

Back in the hall he found Danny, trying on one of Sabrina's straw sunhats and admiring his image in the hall mirror.

Seeing Clive's reflection in the glass behind him, Danny said, “Is Eliot all right?”

“Eliot?” repeated Clive.

“She was so pissed. I thought she might have made herself ill, or got in trouble—”

“Trouble?”

“—with her parents.” Danny adjusted the brim of the hat.

“I don't know,” said Clive. “I went up to have a slash.” When the throb of the lie had died away in the air he said, “I'm going to go home.”

“Are you? Me too.” With the hat still on his head Danny followed Clive out of the front door.

They stood on the pavement for a moment. Danny yawned a tiger's yawn and stretched. Clive stared at him, unseeing. All his faculties seemed to have been disabled; he felt like an automaton; he was not sure he could even have given a name to himself or to the day.

It was going to be a grubby sort of dawn. It felt cold to him now but the day would be hot. It felt clammy but he knew it would not rain. It was dark but soon the city would be pressed beneath the palm of a white, accusing sky.

He said, “I think I'll walk to Finchley Road,” and glanced at his watch. “It'll be the first train in a minute.”

“All right, mate,” said Danny. He stuck out his hand. “See you around.”

“Where are you going to go?” said Clive, curious.

“I'll walk over to my girlfriend's,” said Danny. “She's in Camden.”

Girlfriend?
Clive wanted to shout at him and punch him in the face.
Girlfriend?
“You should have brought her,” he said in a level voice.

“She's got kids,” said Danny, “and no one to babysit.” He raised the hat in farewell. “G'night.”

Clive crept to the station, foxlike, along the darkest gutters and gunnels of the pavement.

Stowed in his seat on the empty train he stared at his reflection in the opposite window, billowing and diminishing in the glass. At one moment his face was a monstrous distortion—the face of a cheat—and at another it had shrunk to a freakish pebble—the face of a coward. Guilt rattled at the carriage doors—leaped and snapped at the flying wheels—chattered in his ears—pounded at his head. The train swept through the tunnels.

What have I done? What have I done?

“Oh, no—” Blinking, fearful, Eliot had spoken afterwards as if she had only just woken and found him there. “Oh no—Tom; Martha—” She had shrunk away from him, furling the bedclothes around herself. “You've got to go…Go, please;
now.
If my dad or my mum…you've
got to go,
Clive—” Her voice had risen, tightened and trembled at the point of tears.

She had not needed to say it. Clive had known that this was no place for him to stay. He did not belong in that single bed, amid that heap of discarded clothes. In that little room a poster curled on the wall, luminous stars glowed on the ceiling and the coat glared down from on high like a hovering angel.

As Clive pulled on his shoes a heavy pulse beat in his veins and against his temples. He listened and was afraid, as if the sound was a footfall on the stairs.

On the train, when he closed his eyes, it was Martha's face he saw. If he tried to banish it there was his brother's, in its place. Tom's expression—desolate—as he had shrugged his way out of the door. “She likes that other bloke,” he had said sadly to Clive. “Your friend.”

Martha—Tom—Martha—Tom.

Eliot—Eliot—Eliot.

Emerging from the dark—pummeling through the suburbs—Clive was relieved to find his ballooning image erased by the dark rushing blur of cutting walls—violet brick; blue-green ivy—under a lightening dawn sky.

But try as he might to see it differently the world looked as damp and soiled as a pile of old laundry, waiting its turn for the wash. It might be doomsday out there. The sun might never come up.

Tom could not be certain why Eliot did not want to be friends with him anymore, but he guessed at the reason: “It was that man—your friend. Something must have happened, after I left.” His words clawed at Clive's insides.

Eliot stopped answering the telephone. Although her mother took Tom's messages and promised to pass them on, Eliot did not ring him back. Tom puzzled, suffered and agonized in turn. It was his first abandonment; he did not take it well. “I never should have gone home,” he said to Clive. “I'll kill that man if I ever see him again.”

“Poor Tom,” was Martha's comment, “but it was bound to happen. Eliot's trouble—I could have told him that.”

Clive knew about trouble. He knew what had happened. He knew how Eliot was.

Her letter arrived at College on the morning of his first exam; he collected it from his pigeonhole. He saw the handwritten envelope and thought it was a good-luck card.

When he had read the note he tore the paper into pieces, lengthways and crossways, and then scrunched the pieces into a ball with his fist. He dropped the bundle into a litter bin on the pavement. He stood and stared at the bin until a bus came past him too close and the blast of air made him stumble.

After having gaped and mimed his way through the exam, he wrote a letter in reply.

“You're back late,” said Martha in the evening when he returned. “How was it?”

“What?”

“How was the exam?” She looked at him again. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, fine. A bit tired. It was…not too bad, I think.” Clive had no recollection of what the questions had been, or how he had answered them. He marveled at this new person, this new Clive, who could cheat and lie with such fluency.

A second letter arrived just as exams were over. This time Clive recognized the slant of Eliot's writing and her blue felt-tip; a sharp tug seemed to loose his heart from its casing. He was on his way to celebrate with Martha but when he saw the waiting envelope he collected it and made a diversion to the public toilets by the town hall. He locked himself into a cubicle and stood with his back to the door.

The smell of disinfectant skinned his lungs and brought him to a new, acute wakefulness, as if he had been rubbed raw. Holding the note between fastidious fingertips—his pummeling heart colliding against his ribs—he read the contents:

Clive waited to see what would happen—perhaps he would weep or beat the wall of the cubicle with his fists—but the curious thing was that nothing happened at all. He stirred inside himself with a poker. Nothing but cold ashes. He felt exactly as he had before.

After a few moments he tore the letter into small pieces and threw them into the toilet bowl in front of him. Then he pulled the chain and stood and watched until they had all been flushed away.

E
veryone agreed that the stairs were dangerous, but Val pronounced them “lethal” and condemned the whole flat as “hopeless for children.” One Sunday afternoon Clive fitted a child's safety gate at each end so that a tottering Eliza would not plummet from the kitchen to the basement. The next time his mother asked him whether he had “done something about those dreadful stairs,” he was able to crow, “Yes, Mum, so you never need ask me again.”

“You've no idea what toddlers are like,” Val said. “They move like lightning.”

“What do you want us to do, chop off her legs?”

“Don't be silly. It's
those
stairs—they're too steep. The way they just fall out of the kitchen floor like that…It's not right; it's all upside-down. I'd feel better if the kitchen were downstairs and the bedrooms upstairs, like in a normal house.”

“It's normal for a flat,” defended Clive. “Stop fussing.”

Eliza did not move like lightning, Clive thought, she moved like a crab on roller-skates. Skeetering over the floor with amazing rapidity her gait was both crawling and walking; forwards and sideways. Bottom in the air, palms on the ground, one eye cocked towards him and one to the floorboards as if she were waiting for the starter's pistol. To watch her made him smile—but he had to be careful: if he took too much obvious pleasure in their daughter, it would set Martha's temper alight. “You wouldn't find her so bloody sweet if you'd sat on the bus for an hour with her screaming in your ear.”

Clive needed to take particular care this evening because he had some news for Martha which—although nothing to do with Eliza—he knew would spark her fury. Back early from work he waited for them in the kitchen, watching the street from the window, and prepared his announcement in his head.

“You're a lucky motherfucker,” Justin had said to him in the office that day. “You've scored the Manhattan trip: two nights in a hotel and everything on expenses.” Justin had been jealous. “It fucks me off,” he had said. “A trip like this is wasted on you: you're
married
with a
baby.
”

“So that's it for me, is it? No more fun of any kind?”

“There's no point—you can't enjoy yourself. All parents ever want to do, when they get away from their kids, is sleep.”

But after making further enquiries Justin had discovered a drawback which had set his mind at rest. “Bad luck, mate,” he had crowed. “You're going with Battleaxe Galacticunt.” This was his name for Belinda Easton, one of their seniors, in whom he had a peculiar ghoulish interest. “I bet she keeps her tights on when she's having sex,” he had once remarked.

It was not so much this comment—or the others like it—which made Clive want to hold Justin's face over a flame, but the yawning, dreary expectation of them: that Justin should slip so snugly into the role of office misogynist and that Belinda Easton, powerful and plain, should be his target.

Clive would have surrendered the trip if he could—he knew he would not enjoy it. He had never liked to go away, and least of all now. Seeing Martha yank the buggy up the front steps from the pavement, he turned with apprehension to the door.

The front door banged shut. He heard the sound of the buggy jousting with the bicycles in the communal hall. Martha's key turned in the lock and now the flat door flew open, striking the wall behind it with a smart, vigorous punch. Martha, taking no notice, pushed past its returning swing with the buggy's front wheels as if she were driving an icebreaker. She pummeled onward—“These fucking coats!”—and let the door slam behind her. The buggy was hung with straining shopping bags and inside it sat Eliza, squalling and squirming in her straps.

Clive hesitated for two beats—
one, two
—and then stepped forward to greet them. As he kissed Martha on her marbled cheek she said, “D'you know what's been the most useful thing about getting a First in Arabic from Oxford? Respect on the Uxbridge Road.” She might have been joking—she would have been once, when she had worked and he had been learning the law—but today, to be on the safe side, he said nothing.

He crouched to unbuckle Eliza who, stripped of her waterproofs and plonked on the floor, started scooting from one side of the room to the other, chuntering and muttering with relief and contentment. Clive glanced at the shut gate—
There's no point having it and leaving it open
—and Martha paced tight circles round the kitchen.

With cautious interest Clive inquired, “How was the film?”

Martha and Eliza had been to a “Cinemama” screening at the multiplex. “What film?” said Martha. “All I heard was screaming.”

“What about the other”—he had been going to say “mothers,” but instead he said—“parents?”

“Zombies and morons,” she said. “As usual.”

“They can't
all
be.” Clive tried to be reasonable. “Not every mother you ever meet.”

Martha gave a mirthless laugh. “Why don't you go next time, if you don't believe me? They're all about forty, for one thing, and they're so bloody grateful to have a baby it's
pathetic.
”

In the old days, Clive might have laughed at this.

“I'm so bored I think I'm losing my mind,” said Martha, her voice as bleak as winter. “It's killing me.”

“Come on, you're being—”

“What? I'm being
what?
” she challenged him, but he did not go on. “If I have to carry on doing this much longer I'll…” She left the threat open: a window through which she might fly.

“We always said after Christmas,” Clive tried to appease her. “It's not long.”

Martha was silent.

Clive went on, “It can't make that much difference, can it? We're all set up for January. You can't get a job between now and Christmas. What would you do?”

“I'd rather fold T-shirts in GAP than do this.”

Clive seemed to chew and swallow several other words before saying only, “You don't mean that.”

“Don't tell me what I do and don't mean,” snarled Martha at him. “If it paid more than getting a nanny, I'd do it. I'd clean the bogs at Terminal One on Christmas Eve if I thought it would get me out of this hell.”

A silence, then, “Please don't say things like that,” Clive begged her.

Martha walked out of the room.

She used to cry and say, “I'm a bad mother. I hate it. Why do I hate it?”

Clive had no answer to this question but he would try to placate her. “Neither of us knows how to do this. Everyone finds parenting difficult. Even Mum says the first year is hard.”

Once she shouted at him, all on one note like the blast of an oncoming truck, “Don't mention your fucking mother again!”

And once she said in a whisper, “You don't find it hard.” It was an accusation, and it was true. Clive was wonderful with Eliza; everyone said so.

This evening he gave Eliza her bath, kneeling beside the tub and sprinkling water from a toy watering can over her head and her tummy to make her laugh.

Martha spoke from the doorway. “I don't understand her,” she said. “I don't understand what she's saying, but you do.” She had been watching them.

Her voice startled Clive, who had thought she was upstairs, but he turned around and gave her a careful smile. She did not return it, saying only, “I thought I was supposed to be the one with language skills.”

“Come and join in?” pleaded Clive, wet arms dangling in the tub and shirt sleeves rolled over his elbows.

“No,” said Martha. Then again, more quietly, “No.” She shouldered herself off the wall and turned away.

After putting Eliza to bed Clive showered and then, weary, climbed the stairs to the kitchen. When she heard his footsteps Martha said, “You'll be wanting your dinner now, I expect?”

In the days when she had worked and he had been taking exams this had been a joke: “Where's my tea?” He had worked at the kitchen table every day—books spread out all round him and his head full of the law—and in the evenings he had been roused by the front door's slam, Martha's feet in the hall and her key in the lock. Into the room she would blow like a summer wind, dropping her bag on the floor and her hands on his shoulders, leaning down to kiss him. Her cold, fresh, outdoor face would be pressed against his—he could feel it now, the push of her grin—and she would growl, “Where's my tea?”

Now she was chopping an onion with a controlled but visible fury that quaked the air around her.

“We could get a takeaway, if you like?” He said it in a cautious voice.

“It's a bit late for that,” she said. “I've been chopping onions for a fucking hour.” She clashed the saucepan onto the hob and sparked the gas, over and over. “Come on, you little bastard,” she murmured at the cooker.

Clive breathed, in and out. “Let's have a glass of wine.”

When they had eaten in front of the television, Martha lifted the sash of the window and sat beside it to smoke a cigarette. Clive looked at her profile, staring out into the dark. Only one half of her face—that face he loved so much—was visible to him. Hesitant, nervous, he began, “I've got to go to New York.”

She turned her head, unblinking, like an owl on a branch. “What?”

“Just for a day or so. It's an American client. We've got to go through some documents…I'm just going as an assistant, really, to help the woman in charge of the case.”

Martha turned back to the window and inhaled a drag on her cigarette. “When?”

“The day after tomorrow. For two nights.”

“Lucky you,” she said. “Hotel, business-class flights, room service, pretty ladies bringing you things on trays…It'll be a real holiday.”

Clive said nothing. It was better not to; her calm tone did not deceive him. “When I get back,” he said, “let's go away for the weekend. We'll leave Eliza with Mum and Dad.”

“And give your mum another opportunity to tell me what a shit parent I am? No thanks.”

“She's never said that.” Clive kept his tone neutral. “All she said was that since you hadn't known your own mother it was bound to be more difficult—”

“I know what she said.”

That voice! Gravel thrown at a window.

Clive shut his eyes and continued, dogged, on his path. “Anyway, let's go away. Shall we? For a break. And some sleep. We could go to Wales, do some walking.”

“Wales?” she laughed. “Yes, when I'm sitting here with the baby I dream of going to Wales and walking up mountains.”

Clive took a deep breath. “Well, what would you like to do instead?”

He knew she would not reply. This was where the conversation always ended. They both knew what Martha wanted but the words were too terrible to be said and instead hung in the air like the smell of her tobacco smoke:
I want to run away; I want to leave you both; I want to have my life again.

She had run away once, but had come back crying in the morning to find Clive and Eliza breakfasting together as if she had never existed. Both had looked round, when they heard the door, with the same expression: cold and disappointed. It was the way her father had looked when she had come home from school with any grade less than an “A.”

“I knew you'd be back,” Clive had said. He had not meant to reassure but to punish. “Take over, will you?” He had put down Eliza's plastic spoon, got to his feet and left, shutting the door behind him with a careful click that said,
I can keep my temper.

The room had settled to quiet after his departure, mother and daughter staring at each other in silence.
She doesn't know me,
Martha thought, panicking. Then had come what she dreaded most, much more than not being recognized: Eliza had widened her eyes, trembled, glanced at the door and begun to cry in loud, dragging caws like a hungry rook abandoned in its nest.

These were the punishing moments that Clive did not see—moments that stretched into hours and days—when just to be alone with her mother seemed enough to make Eliza desperate and unhappy.

She hates me.
Martha could not keep this thought out. It circled her mind and came swooping in, plunging from the sky, when it found a way. It was a mad, stabbing thought! How could it be true? But it felt true, and with Clive gone to New York she could feel the shadow of that dark bird,
flick-flick-flicker,
as it passed over the house.

Val had eyed her with Eliza once and said, “They're very unrewarding, babies. It's better when they get older.”

Clive had protested, “How can you say that? Just
seeing
Eliza is rewarding.”

Martha held her tongue. She wished she possessed Clive's clarity of vision and, above all, his patience. He seemed to know everything about being a parent, and to find none of its duties dull.

He even seemed to know exactly what was wrong with his wife. “You're not depressed about having a baby,” he told her, as firm and decided as a doctor tapping an X-ray with his pen. “It's because of your dad.” As well as a diagnosis, he had a cure: “Sell the cottage.” He said this once a month at least. “It'll close that chapter. Then we can get a bigger flat, and you can get some help.”

Martha kept her temper with difficulty, for this was the flame which could set to blazes a full-blown argument: when Clive wanted to work, he got up and went to work; when Martha wanted to work, she was told she had to “get some help” and pay for it herself.

“The cottage,” she said through gritted teeth, “is worth more to me than a flat with a second bathroom.”