Never Mind Miss Fox Read online

  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?”

&
nbsp; “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.”

  “Well,” Clive said, “if you won’t do that, then—” He spread his hands. If you won’t help yourself, then I can’t help you. Clive’s gesture was as familiar as his argument—they both repeated these assertions to each other once a month.

  Clive had gone, now, in a taxi to the airport. He had pulled a wheeled case from a cupboard, asking, “Can I take this?”

  Looking at it, Martha had recognized a suitcase that had once belonged to her. When she had worked, she had flown in and out of the country so often that the case had never gone back in the cupboard—putting it away and fetching it out had felt like too much of a hassle. Since it was always either being packed or unpacked, in those days, it had shared their bedroom with them, like a baby’s cot.

  From the sanctuary of his Manhattan hotel Clive stared out at the city which unrolled away from his window to the pale, winter’s horizon. He had never been here before and here was everything: New York. He hovered in the air above a glorious, limitless, glittering planet, the same as his own and yet not. He considered the wealth of his position: separated from wife and baby and with designated free time. I can do anything I want.

  His imagination flared and died like a struck match. There was nothing he wanted; nothing he would do. He was obedient, cheap and reliable—it was why Belinda had brought him. “Please,” Justin had begged, his forehead resting on the desk and his eyes closed, “please. Do something bad, while you’re there. Something you regret. Something to tell me about when you get back. Something. Anything.”

  Behind Clive the hotel bedroom promised nothing: a bed tucked tight like a fancy napkin; a wipe-clean menu of television channels; a chained rail of coat hangers in an echoing closet. Pursed lips, clasped hands and a tight collar. Clive did not want to turn around and face it.

  Instead he leaned his forehead on the window and placed one palm beside his face, the fingers spread, as if he were making a forlorn, farewell signal to a person on the sidewalk far below. He thought of Eliza.

  That morning she had bumped from chair to table in the bedroom—tottering on two legs—fingers outstretched as if she were feeling her way to a light switch—and then pitched forwards and rumbled about on her hands and feet again. Clive wished he could take her everywhere with him and watch her, just for the pleasure of it. What would she be doing now? His heart tripped and recovered itself.

  Belinda Easton, who was now in the room next door, had two children of her own but Clive knew no more than that—he did not know their names or their ages. She did not speak of family or friends, only work. Once Clive had asked how old her children were and she had replied, “Enormous.”

  Clive wondered what she was doing this minute while he stood with his hand on the window. Sleeping? He pictured a water glass on the bedside table and her plain face twitching as she slept. All at once he felt absurd; embarrassed; peculiar, and he thought of Justin. “Mate,” Justin would have said, “you’re a dirty perv.”

  In a flurry Clive remembered his duty: not to waste this precious time away from home. He emptied his bag on the bed and made a mess of the room—this was what Justin would have done—before taking a long shower, using all the towels and wrapping himself in a heavy robe. He pulled beer and snacks from the fridge and flung himself onto the hotel counterpane to stare at the television and finger the remote control. This would have been the moment, he noted, when Justin would have watched porn and had a wank but Clive turned—with another kind of shame—to the news channel and lay in a soggy cocoon of linen and litter until it was time for his meeting.

  Sluggish and woozy he dragged himself off the bed and into his leaden clothes. He had eaten every snack in the minibar. Under his feet the carpet was a gravel of pistachio shells. In the bathroom he stepped into a puddle and cursed aloud. He heard a cough from the next-door bathroom: Belinda. He froze. She could hear his every movement and—what was worse—Clive could imagine hers. She might at this very moment be tucked up on the loo like a pixie, those famous tights bound around her knees and her face a
concentrating triangle. He tiptoed from his bathroom. On the edge of the bed he slumped into a defeated half-moon, peeled off his socks and filled in a laundry slip. It was almost more than his brain could accomplish. When he straightened up he heard his vertebrae click like a rosary and the dirty maggot of a headache wriggled up his neck. He did not want to go to work; he wanted to go home.

  Back in a taxi at the end of the day, Clive rehearsed the excuses he would use to get him out of a dinner-for-two with Belinda: headache, nausea, jet lag—the old favorites. He knew he was being cruel, but an upholstered booth in the hotel restaurant, piano tinkling in the corner, was an evening he could not face.

  He might have been prepared to be persuaded into a drink, but he was not given the chance: Belinda turned to face him across the slippery seat of the cab and announced that she would be spending her evening alone. “Room service, a bath and a movie on telly,” she said. “That’s what hotels are for.” She must have caught a glimpse of hurt in Clive’s expression for she added, surprised, “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Of course not—I agree. I think I’ll do the same.” Clive turned to look out of the window.

  “You? Stay in?” Belinda teased him. “Not likely. We all know what a player you are, Clive.” She was joking of course, and Clive laughed along.