After Ever After (6 page)

I don’t sleep. I lie under the duvet with my eyes tight shut letting the fizzle of exhaustion creep across my temples, listening for the faint sounds of Ella’s breathing on the monitor and waiting for the inevitable entrance of Mr Crawley and his cohort. They have a key, so when they do arrive I won’t necessarily have to get up, but Ella seems to be in love with Mr Crawley and I have found that whilst she is mesmerised by watching him work I can usually get four, sometimes even five, spoonfuls of fruit purée into her before she flings up her hands, arches her back and starts to growl. I can only call it growling. I’ve looked it up in The Book but I can’t seem to find it listed in the index, not under growling, aggressive animal noises or even experimentation with vocalisation. It’s just growling.

I look at the clock – 8.30 – and close my eyes.

I’m not sure how long has passed before Ella’s siren wail crowbars me awake, but I’m up and in her room before I’ve even opened my eyes. The cow jumping over the moon tells me its 8.32. As soon as she sees me she stops crying abruptly and breaks into a cheery grin, stretching her arms out in anticipation of being picked up.

‘Hello, pickle,’ I tell her. ‘Sleep well, did you? Because Mummy didn’t …’

She very helpfully holds her feet up for me as I change her nappy, examining her toes with the clinical interest she exhibits for every new-found object about her person. Bored with her toes she proceeds to cheerfully pick one baby wipe after the other out of the pack, delicately dropping it to the floor like a lady who expects her hanky to be returned to her by some dashing young man.

Below I hear the door slam and then Mr Crawley runs through the itinerary for the day with his apprentice. Ella suspends her actions in rapt attention at his voice before releasing her limbs in a carefree expression of joy, firing off a machine-gun round of baby laughter.

‘Wagawa!’ she says happily.

‘Wagawa,’ I agree with her, wondering if babies really ever do say ‘Agoo’ like it says in The Book and if they do, why doesn’t Ella and
why
does she growl?

The continuous background hum that is the absence where my mum should be amplifies for a moment and I actively wish she were here to ask. Fergus’s mum is not quite the same, particularly as I have serious doubts that she is human, let alone maternal in any way. In fact if it wasn’t for Fergus’s marked lack of any superpowers I’d say he had been dropped to earth in a meteorite and that she’d taken him in against her better judgement. Apart from anything else, how did Fergus’s dad ever get her to do anything as patently unhygienic as have sex with him? I mean, Daniel’s a sexy man, you just have to look at him to see it. Georgina looks liked she’d need a sterile environment and ten square metres of clingfilm to get it on.

I remember that Fergus told me about supervising Mr Crawley and quickly dress and take Ella downstairs.

Ella screams with joy at the sight of Mr Crawley and I hold back a scream as I watch young Timothy, Mr Crawley’s nephew or something, spread plaster dust across my kitchen.

‘Mr Crawley! This area is where I sterilise Ella’s stuff, you know, and feed her! I’m fairly certain her nutritional needs don’t include bits of brick!’

Mr Crawley appears from behind a worktop and looks at me down his aquiline nose, lifting an aristocratic chin.

‘I’m terribly sorry, Mrs Kelly. Timothy, clear that mess up at once and get upstairs and prep the bathroom.’

‘I’m terribly sorry, Mrs Kelly,’ Tim repeats in quiet tones, and picks up one of my dishcloths to address the mess. I smile and console myself with the thought of having a working bath and shower again and not having to wash myself inch by square inch in the tiny bathroom sink. Having made a half-decent job of clearing away his mess, Tim scuttles upstairs and I pour Mr Crawley a cup of coffee as Ella sits in her high chair and gazes at him with an adoration that would have Fergus spitting feathers if he knew.

Mr Crawley is unlike any builder I have ever met or seen or thought of as possibly existing. He’s posh. He’s very posh and terribly well spoken, as is young Timothy, who’s bordering on about eighteen and who I imagine won his role on the team by being expelled from the same local boys’ school that Fergus attended with Simon Shaw. For example, Mr Crawley has brie and grape sandwiches for lunch, and it is because of him that I had to unpack Fergus’s London flat coffee maker as he always refuses instant and had preferred instead to bring his own flask of Columbian coffee until I bought some in especially for him. He and Tim have fifteen-minute breaks twice a day, and at lunchtime (which is never longer than an hour and often shorter) they discuss the news in
The Times
or
play chess
. When I’m trying to make sense of it all I imagine that Mr Crawley once headed up an immense corporation and one day decided that the pressures of high finance just weren’t for him and packed it all in to become a builder. Or he was a Nobel award-winning novelist with insurmountable writer’s block or that maybe being a builder just pays better than either of those options. But one thing I do know: you’d only ever find a posh builder in Berkhamsted.

Whatever the reason, he is a nice man. Fergus, who hardly ever sees him, can’t believe this and routinely inspects his work looking for signs of shoddiness, and fully expects to be ripped off. I have no such worries; in fact the only thing I worry about is the day Mr Crawley packs up his belongings and moves out for good. How will I get Ella to take solids then? Besides, I’ll miss him.

I take Ella, sticky-mouthed and triumphant at her latest conquest over the dreaded spoon, into the living room to breastfeed her. I enjoy the weight of her in my arms and settle back into the sofa and listen to the noises of the house. The morning seems springlike and it reminds me of something. Oddly it takes me a while to search the memory out.

The year that Brian Harvey, the stereotypical builder, came to fix our roof.

I was six then and we lived on this estate on Stamford Hill, a big block of post-war flats. Not a high-rise but a maze of long buildings connected by communal balconies and no more than four or five storeys high. Yes, it was five I think, but anyway, we lived on the top storey and the roof leaked.

Dad had been on to the council to get it fixed for weeks and weeks but that was the seventies and nothing much happened very fast then, so one day he came in and told my mum he’d met this bloke down the pub who said he’d do it for a good price.

‘I don’t know, Don,’ my mum had said. ‘We should just wait for the council, shouldn’t we?’

It was a wet spring and it seemed to me that it rained constantly; pots and pans were positioned all around the flat but the worst of it was in my room. I used to like the tympanic symphony that played for me as I went to sleep, but Mum worried about my chest.

‘If we wait for them, we’ll be waiting until the cows come home and anyway this little one deserves a quiet night’s sleep in her own bed without fear of drowning!’ He picked me up as he said it and swung me under his arm. ‘Hey, little pickle? What do you think?’ And I laughed the same tinny machine-gun laugh that Ella does now.

We settled into his telly chair in time for
Doctor Who
.

‘I think we should get it fixed, Dad,’ I’d said, rubbing the palm of my hand along his stubble.

‘There you go then. Kitty thinks we should get this bloke to look at it. Don’t worry, love, it’ll be fine.’

My mum had regarded us both from the doorway and smiled, shaking her head.

‘Well, I can’t argue with both of you, can I?’ she’d said, and then she’d gone into the kitchen to make chips. I remember her peeling and cutting potatoes. Who actually makes chips any more?

The morning Brian was due to arrive I’d heard Dad getting ready to leave; it was still dark outside. He always left early, before six, to get to the bus depot where he worked as a mechanic. I used to imagine he was like Cliff Richard at the beginning of
Summer Holiday
. All singing and quiffs. I’d heard the murmur of Dad’s voice talking to Mum before he left and I’d closed my eyes and feigned sleep as he crept into my room and brushed a kiss against my forehead.

‘Love you, pickle,’ he’d whispered and finally I’d heard the latch on the door click to. I’d waited for a few seconds and then run into my mother’s room, leaping on to the bed.

‘Kitty! Good God, child, you’re like a herd of elephants!’ she’d said like she always did. I’d giggled as she’d pulled me under the covers to tickle me.

‘It’s early, darling,’ she’d said, winding her arms around me and curling me into the curve of her body. ‘Come on, let’s go back to sleep.’ I’d tucked my chin over the edge of the quilt and looked for faces in the turquoise peacock-patterned wallpaper, waiting until her breathing became even again. Then, once I’d known she was asleep, I’d turned around ever so quietly and watched her sleep like I did every morning. I’m glad I had that time to watch her in those days, because now I remember every little detail of her face: the soft brown wave of her hair, her wide and inviting eyebrows and the long gentle curve of her mouth.

Later that morning the builder had arrived, and if I had to put a finger on it, pinpoint a specific moment, I’d say that that was the day that she had begun to die.

‘Right, off you go then,’ Georgina says, eyeing up my ensemble of loose shirt and jeans as if I am wearing a red latex number and thigh boots. It’s not my fault that she’s the only grandmother in the world who pitches up for babysitting with her suspiciously still-red hair neatly coiffed and a figure-hugging top over a slim-fitting pair of suede trousers. It’s not fair, it’s anti the laws of the universe – I should be the glamorous one, not sodding Boadicea here. Someone should do something. I drag my attention away from her Cuban-heeled boots and zone back to whatever it is she’s talking about.

‘Break’ll do you good,’ she finishes, whatever it was, and cleaves Ella from my arms, beginning to rock her in exactly the way she doesn’t like to be rocked. ‘We’ll sort you out, won’t we poppet, we’ll teach you how to have a nap when Grandma says so.’

Ella looks exactly how I feel, and I search for any half-decent reason why I can’t go out.

‘Um, I’ve decided, we have, Fergus and I, that we aren’t doing that leaving them to cry thing. We don’t think its very kind?’ I say, anxiously picturing my little Titan howling her lungs out for hours whilst her grandma has a fag in the back garden. She’ll go all red and her face will be wet with tears and she won’t understand why I haven’t come home. ‘So I’d prefer it if you didn’t, you know, just leave her.’

Georgina sighs about as theatrically as a person can sigh. ‘In my day …’ she begins, but just at that moment Mr Crawley enters the room and Ella launches herself at him with the assurance and desperation of a trapeze artist escaping from a dragon.

‘I just wanted to say the kitchen is spic and span now, Mrs Kelly. I got Timothy to give the fridge a bit of a wipe out while he was there.’ He nods at the elder Mrs Kelly, who presses her lips together.

‘Thanks, Mr Crawley, that’s really good of you,’ I say. ‘Tim doesn’t want a job as a cleaner, does he?’ I laugh half-heartedly.

Georgina has already offered me the services of her cleaner, and my refusal to take her on has caused some kind of offence. Now she edges past Mr Crawley and makes her way to inspect the kitchen, calling out behind her, ‘Have you made up the bottles, then? I can’t be bothered with all that nonsense.’

‘Yes!’ I lie. In fact I have defrosted breastmilk, but as she is disapproving of breastfeeding at all it seems simpler to lie and pretend it’s formula.

I look anxiously at Mr Crawley and he leans a little closer to me and whispers, ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Kelly, I won’t let your little pickle cry on her own.’ I am so grateful that he is going to be here that I almost cry myself. He takes my hand and pats it. ‘And I’ve got a funny feeling that we’ve got
just
enough work on to mean that we shan’t be leaving until just after you get back. Now remember, you are going out to have some fun, there’s nothing to worry about here.’

I nod and repeat his words over and over in my head until I’ve collected my keys, kissed and hugged Ella until she squirms angrily for release and finally shut the door on Georgina singing, ‘And WHEN the bow BREAKS the BABY will FALL.’ I can picture Ella wincing.

When I get to the train station ticket office I have five minutes to spare, my carefully applied first-time-out make-up is halfway down my face, the heat is pulsating from my cheeks and sweat prickles my forehead.

‘London!’ I pant at the ticket office man, sounding maybe more desperate than I need to.

‘Travel card, madam? Single or return?’ I stare at him wondering who he’s talking to and then remember that I am a madam, and not the glamorous sort that goes to work in lingerie but the sort that is middle-aged and frumpy. I look at the clock; another minute ticks by. ‘Come on, come on, Kitty,’ I think to myself. ‘You know this stuff, you’ve lived in London nearly thirty years.’

‘Um?’ I look at him hopelessly.

‘Travel card,’ he tells me with kind authority, and I thrust one of Fergus’s notes at him hoping it will be enough, scooping up the change and the ticket and racing on to the platform just in time to make the foot-high leap on to the train before the doors close and it pulls out of the station.

I find a window seat and breathe, grateful that this off-peak train is almost empty except for some tracksuit-bottomed lads who are making their daily pilgrimage to Hemel Hempstead, Mecca of the terminally highlighted, in order to walk up and down the high street all day.

As the last remnants of Berkhamsted slide out of view I feel a moment’s panic about leaving Ella and force myself not to phone and see how she is, because I know that if I hear crying then I’ll be pulling the emergency cord and jogging across country to get back to her, and then Dora and Camille really will think I’ve gone insane. I sit back and let the rocking of the train calm my nerves. I’m shocked and a little guilty to find that once the train gathers speed I am excited; excited to be going home once again, to a place big enough that no one knows me, where I could feasibly head off down some turning and never come back again if I felt like it. Of course I’d never do that, but just to know I could is somehow freeing. I like the idea of belonging to no one, even if the reality of it scares me half to death. No, lunch with Dora and Camille is all the excitement I need right now, maybe more than, in fact.