One Day I Shall Astonish the World, page 7
Then the Detroit Spinners came on and Norma and I and all the Pavlou women and Timandra performed the dance we’d learned the night before and, as it came to an end, DJ Leroy said, ‘Let’s hear it for an unorthodox first dance!’
Norma was beside herself that the Pavlou family had made such a good account of themselves, golf-wise and beyond. Best of all, though, she behaved like a true friend to me, arranging and holding my schleppe, doing the dance, and being perfectly pleasant to Roy. It was all so unlikely and a reminder to me how life can turn around.
Ah, yes, and another thing. Remember the dear little old woman, who used to come into the shop and ask us to thread a needle for her and take a Malteser? She was there too, and it turned out she was Norma’s Pavlou grandmother, and when I asked Norma, ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’ she just said, ‘There was no need.’
Some months later, I was alert, awake, compos mentis, and back to my normal self within moments of the birth of our baby.
‘Hey, Mr Warren,’ I said to Roy, as I cradled our waxy newborn girl to my chest, ‘that went well, didn’t it?’
Roy did not respond, head bent, tinkering with his Canon Sure Shot.
Desperately wanting, needing, some acknowledgement for coming through with no complications apart from numb heels (a common side effect of a fast labour) – and so quickly he hadn’t even had to go out for a burger – I tried again. ‘Roooyyy?’ I said, and he looked up. ‘That wasn’t as gruesome as we’d expected, eh?’ and he’d nodded his head like some kind of doped-out hippy, ‘Yeah, no, good, hole-in-one.’ He got the camera up to his face and before I could arrange the hospital blanket over my nipples, he’d disappeared to the worktop and was questioning midwife Carol about the placenta, winning her round with scientific talk, and then Carol was posing, holding it up, like pizza dough, for a snap, and afterwards she wrapped it and dropped it into some kind of bucket, and Roy called over, eyes wide in squeamish delight, ‘Oh my God, Susan, you should’ve seen it,’ and not knowing quite how to respond, I shouted at the midwife, ‘How dare you pose with my afterbirth without my permission?’
Roy hurried to the bedside. ‘Sorry, love,’ he said, and looked at the baby.
‘I’m going to call her Honey,’ I said.
‘Who?’ said Roy.
‘The baby, who do you think?’
‘Oh, right, yeah.’
‘What’s that?’ said Carol.
I didn’t say anything, so Roy had to.
‘She’s calling the baby Honey,’ he said.
‘That’s nice,’ said Carol. ‘How is she spelling it?’
‘The usual way,’ I said. ‘What other way is there?’
‘Just that sometimes people go phonetic for that kind of name.’
‘Well, we’re spelling it the normal way.’
‘Like the sticky substance found in a beehive?’ Carol confirmed.
It had gone extraordinarily well, the birth, so why wouldn’t Roy say so? Particularly as he’d witnessed, on the ward later, a moaning woman named Richardine, who’d had a baby they were calling Eleanor, and a dozen stitches, and couldn’t stop vomiting, being presented with a garnet-encrusted eternity ring. He’d been more than happy to acknowledge that the wedding had gone off all right, and actually glossed over the awkward bits, like his mother listing all the times golf balls had injured or killed people. This continued through the early days, Roy not giving me so much as a nod. It was disheartening, and whatever the opposite of vindication is. Other than a few tiny hiccups – the pain of breastfeeding, that got worse and worse until finally Honey bit one of my nipples almost off with her gums, and I gave it up; the fact that my feet seemed to have grown half a size and my slippers were now pinching my toes; and I was suddenly afraid of mice – I was no trouble at all as a new mother, nor Honey as a baby. The worst thing, by far, was Roy’s determination not to congratulate or praise me, or to appreciate that we hadn’t had a three-day labour, that our baby hadn’t hated us on sight and I hadn’t torn to my anus. Not that I wanted praise for bouncing back with no detrimental after-effects and a completely intact vagina, but I felt it only right that he should feel lucky and blessed. In my post-partum annoyance I bombarded him with examples of the horrors he’d escaped thanks to my having done a good job.
‘What about your cousin Kirsty?’ I said.
‘What about her?’ said Roy.
‘Forty-eight hours in labour and a spinal anaesthetic, then the forceps, then the ventouse suction cup, and after all that, a caesarean, and then a huge white-haired baby with a two-year headache, and a profound failure to bond,’ I said. ‘And to this day he won’t have his hair brushed.’
Roy hated it, I could tell, but I continued. ‘What about Rosemary?’ I said. ‘Remember, she got it into her head that Alastair was a danger to baby Duncan, and waved a hockey stick at him if he approached the bed. He had to run for his life to a neighbour,’ I said, ‘surely you remember your mum telling us that?’
Roy didn’t remember, and just turned over the pages of a golf catalogue.
‘What about the woman up the road who had to wrap her breasts in cold cabbage leaves? or the couple from the MOT centre whose baby took against them and the grandparents had to take over until it could ride a trike.’
Roy continued leafing.
‘And baby Josh Williams who was allergic to Johnson’s Baby Powder and they couldn’t even have him smell nice,’ I said. ‘We’ve been lucky when you think about it, haven’t we, Roy?’
‘Very,’ he said.
When my mother arrived she jigged about with the baby in her arms, the happiest I’d seen her in years.
‘We’re calling her Honey,’ I said.
‘Oh, no! Poor thing. Well, I refuse to call her that. Who do you think you are? The Geldofs?’
And with that she was gone.
Norma arrived next and gave Honey a doll-sized hand-knitted cardigan with tiny cloth-covered buttons and I really hoped that in spite of her misgivings about Honey curtailing my academic progress and necessitating a marriage, there’d be a happy transformation, that she’d hold this baby and vow to look out for her for the rest of her life, like a penitent father in a film. But that didn’t happen. She didn’t want to hold Honey, she only peeped at her for a moment, laughed, and said, ‘Gosh, she looks just like W. H. Auden.’
And before I could say, ‘Better than Winston Church-ill,’ which I thought showed resilience and an intact sense of humour, Norma said, ‘By the way, the writer who compared women to empty museums filled with men’s art was Updike, not Fowles.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘That’s good to know.’
‘Anyway, how’s Roy bearing up?’ she asked, and I told her he was withholding praise. She drooped and shrugged elaborately. ‘They go crazy after an easy birth,’ she said. ‘They need a drama. If all goes well, and no one almost dies, they’re left with pent-up stuff.’ She gave a dozen examples, including the woman from the Well-Bread Bakery, whose husband, a gentle giant, turned argumentative after she gave birth while eating a full roast. He had a tantrum in Mr Big’s Menswear when they hadn’t any trousers long enough in the leg. He was also suspended from work after shouting at an American client for pronouncing Leicester ‘Ly-Sester’, and then refused to do a structural survey on a property belonging to a pop star, and they’d had to move to a smaller house in the end. All because she’d had an easy labour.
‘They shouldn’t really let men into the delivery rooms,’ said Norma, and I couldn’t agree more.
7
Roy and I were able to move out of his flat share and buy our first house in Brankham when his parents gave us a cash gift. At first they tried to put the one thousand pounds into a bank account for Honey. For driving lessons, said his mother, or the trip of a lifetime when she came of age. I was overjoyed and grateful beyond belief that they felt like this about our baby and could see ahead to a lovely wholesome future in which Honey might want to drive a car or go to Australia, and need exciting things. Roy, however, savaged them over it. This is what he said to his mother down the telephone:
‘What the hell are you thinking? She doesn’t need money, she’s an effing baby, we are living in a sh*t hole, I have to carry the pram up and down two flights of stairs every time Susan fancies an effing stroll. I’m working every hour of the bl**ding day to make ends meet, so seriously, if you want to give her something, give us the money now. Christ, Mother, we are desperate, are you insane?’
Pause, presumably while Roy’s mother defended herself.
‘No, Susan cannot rely on getting her job back at the sewing shop. If you really want to know, the sewing shop’s about to go bust.’
I listened at the door, perplexed by every part of this drama; that there was a thousand pounds in the first place, that I’d been stupid enough to celebrate it being squirrelled away for Honey. That Roy had seen Honey’s windfall from a whole other angle and had the courage to attempt to divert it away from her to us, without being devious. That the flat was a sh*t hole. That Roy was so stressed. That we were so poor. That the Pin Cushion was about to go bust – it wasn’t. And why say ‘two flights of stairs’ when there was only one? It was a lot to take in and I found myself swaying even though I hadn’t got Honey in my arms, and praying he would not let himself mention Hector not being Ted’s. He didn’t.
We received a cheque later that week and that resulted in us viewing properties to buy. I’d meet Roy at various small bungalows and semi-detached houses and we’d walk round opening cupboards and pretending not to like anything, and in this endeavour I found my spirit was weak. Sometimes Honey would need a bottle and I’d go and sit in the car, other times Roy would ask an awkward but very important question and the agent or vendor might say, ‘I’ll have to get back to you on that,’ and that would put the kibosh on it. One house though, Gracedale, was perfect. It wasn’t too covetable but had a nice feel about it; semidetached, in a slightly elevated position on a small estate of newish houses, sunny kitchen-diner that went out onto a small but grassy back garden, a pretty but steep front garden that, in my opinion, cried out for an alpine-style rockery, and a third, albeit small, bedroom that would do as an office. Brankham Drive had a park one side and the vast borrowed landscape of the University of Rutland on the other. Magnolia, holly and bay formed a green arch over the campus gates, which, even though it was a most ordinary street, gave it the feel of somewhere magical and glade-like. The sharp lines of the peach-coloured houses softened by all the greenery and the puckered concrete of the road danced with leafy shadows. There was also the coincidence of the house being called Gracedale and Honey’s middle name being Grace, and Grace being the name Roy would have called her if he’d cared enough to insist (it being his mother’s name).
I sensed that Roy liked the house too, but I had to tread carefully. Since being a father, Roy had become a tough but nervy detective, giving nothing away and always on guard. I’d learned to say nothing even slightly positive about any house we were viewing in front of the agent or vendor, even in whispers or behind their backs as they could mind-read and lip-read.
At a previous property, at the start of our search, I’d asked the estate agent fellow, ‘Is the garden south-facing?’ I was imagining myself grilling vegetable kebabs on a rudimentary barbecue, Roy sipping a beer while Honey splashed about in a tiny pool – and that unspoken image had apparently been clearly evoked by my naive question and, according to Roy, put the price up by 2K.
‘Why couldn’t you just keep your mouth shut?’ he’d asked me afterwards.
It made sense. It was the psychology of buying and selling and that, to be fair, was Roy’s game.
I could tell that Roy liked Gracedale. In the garden he looked at the sky and then vaulted up onto the fence to inspect the boundary. He called hello to the old lady next door, who we’d been told kept the hedges nice but had a cat, and then to my great surprise I saw him take a hard-boiled egg from his pocket, tap it on a fence post, peel it (careful to keep every bit of the shell), and start eating it. He held it out to me to take a bite, which of course I couldn’t, it being too risky. I’d inadvertently take the whole yolk or drop a crumb on the baby’s head. ‘No, thanks,’ I said and I smiled as he chomped, because I knew we’d live there then, I mean, who could possibly eat an egg in a garden unless they felt a sense of belonging and calm?
Two months later we moved into Gracedale and it was all going well for the three of us. For Roy, a single garage for his various pieces of motor-car equipment and golf clubs. For Honey, her own little bedroom, for which her paternal grandmother had funded top-quality bespoke curtains from Fenwick’s of Leicester, depicting animals and birds, in bright though not garish colours. And for me, a new mattress, a front-venting tumble dryer, vast shallow shelving for paperbacks and nick-nacks, and as I say, the university with its trees in copper and green and lime, its turrets and clocktower on my doorstep.
The one thing I wanted to change about the house was the front door, it being like a terrible hairstyle on an otherwise reasonably handsome person. Embossed in the ugliest and most bizarre pattern as if imitating a Georgian door but made from flimsy white plastic. Roy joined in with my condemnation for the first few days and I began imagining what door I might like instead, maybe pine, I thought, with reeded glass panels and brass door furniture. I even picked up a catalogue and browsed it occasionally.
During our first week at Gracedale I donned a headscarf, knotted behind, and feeling attractive and purposeful painted over the custard-coloured woodchip in the lounge with Dulux Apple White which was white with a very, very slight green tinge. I’d chosen it partly to tone with my still life of half a cabbage but mainly to cover the yellow, which had a dreadful reputation in those days. Perfectly happy people described feeling suddenly despondent, trapped and suicidal for no reason except moving into a yellow bedroom. I should have stripped the old wallpaper off really but, well, I didn’t, and as you might know, covering woodchip takes longer than painting straight plaster, on account of all the little dips and valleys that you didn’t even know were there, it’s a whole rugged landscape and requires a lot more paint. Also, at that time, I’d seen an advert where Ray Reardon vacuums the green baize of a snooker table with a Vax carpet shampooer and had suddenly felt squeamish about the carpets in the new house, the vendors having lived in it from newly built, and I couldn’t stop thinking of all the dust and assorted dirt trodden in daily by their three children. So I hired a machine from the dry cleaner’s, same model as Ray Reardon’s. Honestly, hiring that machine is, to this day, one of the highlights of my life. The filth that came out of those downstairs carpets had to be seen to be believed. I made Roy take a photograph but he didn’t do it justice. I had to do the whole downstairs twice – with a water change – upstairs being relatively clean due to a no-shoes policy.
The vendors were popping by to read the meters that same day, and I said to Roy, ‘Don’t whatever you do let them into the lounge. I don’t want Mrs Thing to see the Vax.’
And he said, ‘It’s no business of hers if you want to go nuts cleaning.’
And I said, ‘No, Roy! It would be mortifying.’
In the event, he couldn’t prevent it and in she came. Norma had popped in for a coffee and luckily she flung a dust sheet over the Vax, but Mrs Thing was offended anyway, by the paint.
‘We’d only just decorated this room when we put it on the market,’ she said.
‘Oh, I know,’ I said, ‘it was lovely, it’s just that yellow makes my husband depressed.’
‘Oh, dear,’ she said, alarmed, and looked out at Roy in his blue tracksuit top.
‘He’s read that tragic story about the yellow wallpaper,’ said Norma helpfully.
Some weeks later, I reminded Roy about us needing a new front door, but he’d changed his mind. It was, he said, ‘entirely unnecessary’ and after all the paint, the machine hire and new shelving for the garage, we were stony broke and couldn’t even afford a few plants for the garden. I was disappointed by this U-turn, and by the sudden realization that one partner could change their mind, and curtail a plan like that, and actually, by my secret petulance over so shallow a thing. I had a feeling I’d be irritated by that door for a long, long time, and I’m ashamed to say I have been. I look at it sometimes and think, a person designed that, and another person said, ‘Yes, let’s make a hundred of them.’ And a house builder said, ‘I’ll take four dozen for the new estate I’m building right by the university!’ And though I like our little house, its modesty and ordinariness, I have, since the day we moved in twenty-seven years ago, disliked that door and my daily dealings with it. I’ve had a recurring fantasy over the years in which someone (me) slots a piece of wood through the letterbox on a chain attached to the back of a car and drives off at speed, pulling the door off its hinges and dragging it along the road like a mangled water ski. It was a scene from a film, I can’t remember which, but it was very affecting.
The baby changed Roy and me, which was a shame, when you think that before Honey we’d tolerated each other’s every foible. I hadn’t minded Roy’s rocking rhythmically in bed even though I thought it a sign of insanity, nor his need to fall asleep entwined, his philosophizing golf, his putting one foot on the crossbar of my chair, and having his shoe touch my shoe in the pub to be connected in a group, his habit of saying ‘Mum this, Mum that’ meaning his mother, when he should say ‘my mum’ because she wasn’t the only mother on the planet. I’d found these things endearing, but now I found them needy and unattractive. His holding the edge of my coat as we walked, which was – when I think back to that slight tug – terrifically irritating, but I allowed because he had his awkwardness to deal with, and gripping the coat was tantamount to holding hands without doing it. But after Honey, I had a pram to push and I’m afraid I yanked my coat free, and in so doing perhaps I cast him adrift on a stronger tide than he ever would have attempted alone. Likewise, the idiosyncrasies of mine that Roy could suddenly no longer tolerate were just as fundamental to my well-being as his to him; my need to explain myself at length, to take a long run-up to any announcement or news, however mundane, my need to talk, to ward off silence and bad feeling. Now I think about it, Roy decided to deny me analysis and it started immediately, while still in the maternity suite at Leicester Royal Infirmary.
