THE HOUSE WAS beautiful. Like a harlequin’s coat it was put together through the love of friends. Annie and her housemates, for the price of a week in the country and warming bowls of soup, slept on our floor at Christmas and painted all the walls. A very nice local carpenter made us some doors and skirtings and a kitchen work-board. He made some window seats, which I varnished and fitted with cushions. We rushmatted the floors. I made patchwork curtains and took unashamed pleasure in what Jacob – damn him – called ‘the womanly art of homemaking’. Annie stencilled patterns around the fireplace, having no Roger over her shoulder to put her down, but only Mike, who helped. Jonathan, as Jane predicted, fished and typed, but also fed us all and praised. There were days when I thought we would freeze to death. For Christmas Jonathan bought me a thermal vest and men’s long Johns. Sally sent, with Annie, her hand-on carry-cot and countless Baby-Gro suits. Roger sent, in the post to Jonathan, some well-disposed reviews clipped from the newspapers. The baby was female, born by Caesarean section, suckled first under a plaster figure of the Virgin Mary and later at home on a mattress on the floor of our bedroom. I tried reading Jonathan’s novel as I fed her, but gave it up in favour of Emma, which is still my favourite. Jonathan, who did indeed bring me boiled eggs in bed, bathed her in a plastic washing-up bowl at the feet of my convalescent self. She was quite different from my other baby, being nocturnal, irregular and greedy in her feeding habits. We called her Stella, having been put in mind of it by Jane’s reference to Swift, which caused Jonathan to return to a favourite poem of his youth. Swift’s ‘Birthday Poem to Stella,’ which goes as follows:
Stella this Day is thirty-four,
(We shan’t dispute a Year or more)
However Stella, be not troubled,
Although thy Size and Years are doubled,
Since first I saw Thee at Sixteen
The brightest Virgin on the Green,
So little is thy form declin’d
Made up so largely in thy Mind.
Jane came, buttoned up once more in cashmere to keep out the wind and wearing her hair pulled back in a headmistressy bun. She drove me off to plant nurseries where she chose us the best of disease-resistant apple trees and a carefully staggered collection of shrubs and climbing things, so that our garden should have what she called ‘winter interest’. She bought us things to make fires in and things to make compost in, a set of tools and a very space-age mower.
‘Have them on me,’ she said, when we tried to pay her. She was terrific at getting a spade into the earth when it came to digging up rocks.
‘This needs cutting back in the autumn, Jont,’ she said. ‘Pay attention or you’ll have me back again in September.’ Jonathan wouldn’t ever come shopping with us, saying that he’d had enough of shopping with Jane in his childhood and couldn’t stand that class-bound way in which she barked at shop assistants.
‘I hate my accent as much as you do,’ she said, ‘and if I do bark at people it’s only because I’m so frightened of them, Jonathan. I’m not a poised and coping person like your Katherine.’
‘Her?’ Jonathan said, with equal disbelief.
‘Why do you think I had all my lovely babies?’ she said. ‘It was a way of ensuring that I never had to go out to work. You know me, Jont. I couldn’t have run a flower stall.’
‘You always played the piano uncommonly well,’ Jonathan said.
‘Could I have held down a job in the village hall thumping out the music for the Saturday ballet classes, do you think?’ she said.
‘Why do you knock yourself so much?’ Jonathan said.
‘Isn’t that what women do?’ Jane said.
‘Only until they read Spare Rib, Jonathan said; since setting up with me he had taken to reading the odd issue of this publication because I intermittently introduced it into our lives, but he didn’t care for it much.
‘That’s not for nice old ladies like me, is it?’ Jane said. ‘It’s for advanced young women.’
‘It’s for raped lesbians,’ Jonathan said. ‘Go and buy me some fucking apple trees, both of you.’ We did that, leaving the baby tied to Jonathan’s chest in a canvas bag – bought cut-price through the pages of Spare Rib – and came back, of course, to find her sucking frantically at the wool of his jersey in the vicinity of his milkless paps.
‘I like it here,’ Jane said, over her tea, while I fed the baby. ‘Jake was wrong about this place, wasn’t he? It suits you very well. I could stay here for ever. Rosie is determined to marry that young man, you know. I don’t like it one bit. That’s what I’m going back to – planning a wedding.’