Frances was shelling peas. She dropped the last empty pod in the waste bin, and laid out thirty-five green peas in a horizontal line – a chart, a menstrual cycle, made of peas. She counted them again. She was right – thirty-five. Day thirty-five. One week overdue. A hundred thousand years overdue. How did giraffes endure it, with fifteen-month-long pregnancies, or elephants, with six hundred days to count? The way she felt, the baby should be born by now, and yet it was still only a pinhead, smaller than the smallest unripe pea. And still fatherless. How could Ned be the father of something he didn’t even know existed? She had tried to tell him, practised openings to spring on him when the moment was propitious. It somehow never was.
‘Ned, how would you like to teach a son to fish?’
‘Ned, guess what I found behind the gooseberry bush this morning?’
He’d laugh, grab her round the waist and say, ‘I’m your baby, give me a breast to suck.’ Or, ‘Let’s call it John Dory, after the fish.’ He wouldn’t take her seriously. He never did. That was one of the problems. It was fine to live his larky, lazy way, when there were only the two of them, but a child changed everything. She didn’t want her precious baby shoved in an orange box with a cat on top of it, or its Farex used for bait. And how would she ever dry its nappies, when the airing cupboard was purple and fermenting with home-made sloe gin? It wasn’t easy to turn a man like Ned into an instant pre-packed father. He complained when she defrosted the fridge – claimed it disturbed the lugworm – and refused to discuss wallpapering the bedroom. So long as she was in his bed, he argued, why should he care what was on the walls? Sometimes she submitted, and they lay indolent and sweaty all day long. It was as if she had wallpapered over all the doors and windows and they couldn’t get out. Ned was the world and there wasn’t any other – no wars, no weather forecasts, no share reports nor parliamentary crises. It seemed strange to her, later, that a cabinet minister had died, or Israel had threatened Egypt, and she hadn’t known or cared. She almost liked not caring. Strange how quickly you could sink into grubby apathy, the soft, delicious centre of your own abandoned world, switching off the universe, turning worktime into bedtime, playing at being full-time layabouts. It wasn’t, after all, so difficult to renounce deodorant and dental floss, or eat chocolate cake for breakfast, or share your pillow with a self-opinionated cat. At least it wasn’t hard until the nights. So long as Ned was over her, or under her, stopping her thinking with his childish, cheerful banter, telling her she was Salome and Venus and Bugs Bunny and the Blessed Virgin, then she didn’t agonize. But when his breathing deepened, and he rolled away from her, to sleep, absurdly, on his stomach, then the small, niggly voices, stifled all day long, began to shout and hammer in her head. Why did he always feel so small inside her? Why did he come too quickly? Why did he pee with the bathroom door wide open and talk above the plash? Why was he idle and untidy, feckless, fatuous? Why wasn’t he more like Charles? No, not like Charles. Then, he wouldn’t push his face between her thighs and linger there over a four-course lunch, or use Werther’s tail to do crazy, tickly things across her breasts, or sauté mashed bananas with marshmallows and feed her from the frying pan. Charles didn’t perform Icelandic war-dances stark naked in the kitchen, or stick daisies in her pubic hair, or draw golden-syrup kisses on her porridge. Why couldn’t she be Franny and settle for Ned and the syrup? Or, give him up and be a thoroughgoing Frances?
It was so confusing being half of two different people, warring with each other and wanting half of two different men. Sometimes she hated all the halves – theirs and hers, the whole complicated mix-up. It was like that game she’d played as a child – ‘Heads, Bodies, Legs’, each painted figure cut into three. You had to try to fit them back together, but you got some strange permutations on the way – a layabout’s mouth with a paragon’s penis on the end of it, a dirty fishing hat straddling a pair of Gucci shoes.
That’s what her baby would be like – a hybrid. Now that Charles had refused to have anything to do with it, it remained a cross-breed, a monster, swelling in the nights, until it was a giraffe and an elephant inside her, accusing her of adultery, recklessness, betrayal. But if only Ned accepted it, it would shrink and mellow. It might still be a mongrel, but a happy, harmless one, with a name-tag and a home. Why was it so impossible to tell him? In old romantic movies, the woman didn’t even have to spell it out. She merely reclined on the sofa, a beatific smile playing over her stomach, a fragment of white knitting fluttering in her hands. The man entered, their eyes met – sobbing violins, throbbing chords, et cetera, and he knew. Ned wouldn’t. She’d tried the sofa and the knitting, and all he’d said was, ‘Shove up, love, you’re hogging all the cushions. And if you’re knitting me a sweater, does it have to be white angora?’
She eased up from the kitchen bench. One last forgotten pea-pod was lurking at the bottom of the basket. She slit it with her thumb. Inside, just two tiny peas, identical and perfect. Twins. She’d have to tell him. You couldn’t inflict twins on a man with a one-bedroomed flat and an out-of-work airing cupboard. She would break the news tonight, over a celebration dinner. Ned had gone down to Dover to try out a new Penn casting reel. She’d welcome him back with boeuf Bordelaise in the oven and a baby in her womb. No, not boeuf Bordelaise. She’d renounced her fancy Oppenheimer style of cooking, in favour of a new Ned simplicity. No more salmon soufflés or juliennes of ham, but pasta and tinned pilchards, which saved time and fuss and money. The Gospel according to Ned – though she wouldn’t take it too far. The Simple Life needn’t mean squalor and slumming, or baked beans from the can. There new ménage must be a compromise, with the baby as the symbol of it. It had already united her and Ned, and they must follow up the process. She wouldn’t ask too much. They needn’t even move. She could merely renovate the flat and tame the garden. Ned’s pad, with Franny’s stamp on it. The same with dinner. They mustn’t toast the baby in spam and chips, or lobster thermidor, but something in between. Simple soup and unpretentious chicken casserole. She threw on her mac and went to buy a Tesco’s frozen chicken, no free-range Fortnum’s darling, but a base-born cut-price broiler.
Burnt chicken was baser still, she thought, as she turned the oven lower, and scraped charred onions off the bottom of the casserole. Ten o’clock and Ned hadn’t even phoned. He was always late.
In nine months’ time, he’d probably miss the birth. ‘Sorry, love, couldn’t make it. Had a mermaid on the line!’
She smiled. He drove her crazy with his tomfoolery, his unpunctuality, but somehow he always managed to atone for it, when he kissed her entire body from right temple to left toe, or turned boring, basic things like shins or vertebrae into new erotic zones. He couldn’t perform like Charles, but he bounced into bed with such exuberance that all her warning lights switched off and she swooped straight into overdrive. Sex with Charles was technically impeccable, but silent and controlled. He never took risks, or ventured out of lane. And there was no engine noise. Charles never purred or roared or hooted, as Ned did, never let her see his pleasure, let alone hear it. He must always be the stiff, munificent benefactor, the driver at the wheel; she the grateful passenger. It was quite a new experience to have Ned beg her to stroke his feet or squeeze his balls, and then yell, ‘Christ, you’re bloody marvellous, woman!’ when she did it right. There was joy and power in giving.
Charles refused to be distracted from the road. Sex took his total concentration for the carefully calculated period he allotted it, and then it was back to verticality and work. But Ned stretched it out in all directions, made whole days horizontal as well as nights, interrupted kisses with date-and-banana sandwiches, told her fishing stories in the middle of a come. There was no structure, no timetable, just sex sprinkled over everything, like sugar.
So, how could she accuse him, when he accorded Dover beach the same lingering, day-long treatment? At least, when he did arrive, he’d probably be triumphant. Easy to slip a tiny baby in, when he was wreathed in ten-pound turbot. She only hoped he’d got a decent catch. Whatever happened, she mustn’t be impatient. That would ruin everything. She could always use the waiting-time to rehearse her lines. She decided to keep them simple, like the meal.
‘Ned, darling, I’m going to have your baby.’
She slipped gracefully into a broken chair, and tried it out aloud. ‘Ned, darling, I’m going to …’
‘Grub up!’ shouted a familiar voice. ‘Full bag! Fish supper! Frying tonight!’
Ned barged through the door, festooned with four dead dabs and a still-expiring dogfish, and kissed her through the lot. The reek of Dover breakwater swamped the smell of chicken. ‘Sling a lump of butter in the pan, love – I’m going to cook you Neptune’s feast!’
She dodged a scaly tail. ‘Let’s save them for breakfast, darling. I’ve already made a chicken casserole.’
‘Christ, Fran, I didn’t flog all the way to Dover for plastic battery hen. Fish must be cooked the day it’s caught. Fresh fried dabs are a knockout! Here, chuck over the butter and it can be melting while I clean the little blighters.’
‘But the chicken’s ready, Ned. It’s been ready hours, in fact. I was expecting you at eight.’ It had been something of a trauma cooking anything at Ned’s, when there were tin-tacks in the spice jar instead of peppercorns, and half of last year’s Christmas dinner still clinging to the oven.
‘Never expect an angler.’ He peeled off his anorak and flung it on the table, disturbing her flower arrangement. ‘OK, love, we’ll have the chicken afterwards. Fish course first, then poultry.’ He was dripping fishy water over the newly polished floor, bunging up the sink with scales and fins.
‘But I’ve made a soup to start with.’ A Ned soup: leek and potato broth, earthy and unsophisticated.
‘Better still. Soup, fish, poultry, pud. What’s for pud?’
‘Gooseberry crumble.’
He hugged her. He was still in his waterproofs and he felt slimy like the bottom of a pond. She pulled away.
‘You don’t cook dab with their heads on, do you?’
‘Why not? More protein. Hey, where’s the salt? What on earth have you done in here? I can’t find a thing. The fridge is so bare, it looks like a toupee ad. Franny, you’ve springcleaned, you rotter! I smelt it as soon as I came in, or rather, I didn’t smell it. You’ve ruined the bouquet. It took me years to build up that je-ne-sais-quoi fragrance of cobwebs and vintage bottled cat, and now you’ve gone and doused it all with Cleen-o-Pine.’
He was genuinely annoyed. She could hear it underneath the banter. He mustn’t be annoyed – not on the night she was going to invest him with his fatherhood. She tried to distract him, take an interest in his catch.
‘What’s that one?’ she asked, pointing to an evil-looking creature with a squashed back and a long whip-like tail.
‘Thornback ray. The little bleeder almost dragged me in. Watch out! Those thorns are poisonous.’
All his fish looked poisonous. The charred aroma of her home-spun country sauce was outdone by the scorching smell of dab. Ned had left them to burn, while he scrabbled on his hands and knees, replacing the pile of ancient paperbacks on the bottom shelf of the larder. ‘Look, Fran, if I want to keep my Enid Blytons next to the Branston pickle, that’s my affair, right? Don’t interfere, or try to take me over. You complain that’s what your husband does to you. Well, I don’t need any Charleses in my life. I’m happy as I am. I don’t want Harpic sprinkled down my gut or my soul scrubbed out with Sqeezy.’
He rushed back to the frying pan, scraped the blackened fish off the bottom, then doused them with cold water from the sink. He stood over her, the dripping, sizzling pan still in one hand, her left nipple in the other.
‘I want you, Franny – your crazy mixed-up cunt which isn’t sure whether it’s the Virgin Mary or the Whore of Babylon; your neon-tetra eyes. But I don’t want your Minit-Mop or your Brillo pads, or your prissy little War-on-Dust Campaign. Kiss me.’
She did. Anything to stop him talking – she knew what would come next. ‘I don’t want your prissy little private-prescription, germ-free, Harley Street baby …’
She continued the kiss as long as the smell allowed. She seemed to be nose-to-nose with the entire dead-and-living contents of the English Channel.
‘Shall I run you a bath?’
‘Christ, no! I’m knackered. Grub first, scrub later.’
He plonked the frying pan in the centre of the table, grabbed a fork and skewered a dab on the end of it. It was black on the outside and still seeping water from the sink. ‘Here, take a bite of this.’
‘Ned, I’ve laid the table in the other room.’ She had found some semi-decent china in the cellar and scrubbed off years of grime, improvised a clean white tablecloth out of a sheet. There were roses in a soup-bowl, paper napkins twisted into swans.
Things must be simple, but there was no need to pig it. She mustn’t forget the compromise, the baby.
‘I’m too whacked to move. Anyway, they’re nicer eaten straight from the pan. Try a bit, it’s bliss.’
He tore off a morsel with his fingers and popped it in her mouth. ‘Know something? When a dab’s born, it’s got an eye on either side of its head, but when it grows bigger, the eyes sort of move, and it ends up with two eyes together, on the same side. Crazy, isn’t it?’
Utterly crazy. The whole romantic evening had been shattered at a blow. Here was Ned, sprawling in his socks, smelling like Billingsgate, and spearing waterlogged flatfish from a frying pan. She’d planned low lights, hushed, tender conversation leading slowly but inexorably to the subject of paternity, not a clapped-out beachcomber explaining, with his mouth full, the ocular peculiarities of dab.
‘Ned?’
‘What?’
‘I’ve got something to tell you, darling, something important.’
‘Hold on a sec, I want some HP sauce – it’ll cover up the burnt bits. Where the hell have you hidden it? Christ, Franny, you’ve moved everything out of its proper place.’
‘Ned, I’m talking to you.’
‘Look, Fran, I’m not often angry, you know that. I’m an easy-going sort of chap, but I don’t like my house messed about. You’re welcome to share it, live in it, use anything you like in it, but not dismantle it and put it back your way. That’s what my wife tried to do and that’s why I left her.’
Frances passed him the sauce bottle from its new home in the spice cupboard. She laid down her fork. ‘Your what, Ned?’
‘Look, forget it. I’m probably over-reacting. Let’s have the chicken now. It smells a treat.’
‘You said your wife.’
‘Yeah. Shall I get the plates?’
‘You never told me you had a wife.’
‘Well, I haven’t got one now. I told you, I left her. Want the last dab?’
‘You’re divorced?’
‘No.’
‘Still married?’
‘Well, legally, I suppose, but …’
‘You never told me.’
‘No.’
‘I mean, I asked you about your life and past and … We went over things like that …’
‘Things like what? You’re making it sound like a sort of contract between us.’
‘Well, wasn’t it?’
‘Hell, Franny, one of the main reasons I was attracted to you was the fact that you made it so damned clear you weren’t available. You told me about your husband the very first instant I set eyes upon you, and you haven’t stopped embroidering on him, since. I’ve almost fallen in love with Charles myself, his brilliance and his business skills, his Ted Lapidus after-shave, his deodorant-impregnated socks. I knew I could never compete with a paragon like that. And, frankly, I don’t really want to try.’
‘What do you mean, Ned?’ She tried to sound cool and uninvolved, as if they were discussing sea conditions in the Channel.
‘We’re friends, Franny, lovers, good pals, but that’s all. I don’t want a wife or a housekeeper. I’ve had both and it didn’t work.’
‘But why didn’t you tell me, Ned?’ The baby in her womb was drowning, flailing.
‘Why should I? I didn’t want to launch into that messy, miserable business and dig the whole thing up again. It’s over – finished and done with. I should never have married in the first place. I’m a loner. You knew that, Franny. I never promised you anything or told you that I loved you. It’s safer that way. Neither of us has lost our heart or head. I always assumed you were Charles’ property – that was half the attraction. You were tied, tagged, accounted for, ringed like a homing pigeon. I don’t like girls when they’re single, or available. Oh, no doubt there’s some devious psychological explanation. My mother didn’t breast-feed me or my father wore a wig, but who cares? That’s how I am, and I’m happy with it. Look, we’re meant to be having dinner, aren’t we? Where’s this four-course feast you promised me?’
She got up automatically, surprised her legs still worked.
Someone had chopped them into pieces, floured them, and flung them in a casserole. She couldn’t even think. Her mind was a soup, mushy and diluted. Somehow, she’d never put Ned in any context, or let him have a life story. He was simply there, ready and waiting, to fit any of her fantasies – lover, confidant, playmate, Peter Pan. Father of her baby. It was partly his fault. He’d always played along with her, never answering any questions, treating life as a game. But she’d lost the game. She was pregnant by a man who didn’t even want to be a husband, let alone a father; who wanted to be free, untrammelled, single.
She tried to fix her attention on the blue and white squiggles on the cheap Woolworth plates. If she counted them like sheep, perhaps she wouldn’t lose control. But even the squiggles were dazed and trembling, submerging under scalding chicken sauce.
‘D … did you have children, Ned?’
If she lost the squiggles, at least she could still count peas. She knew there were more than thirty-five. One hundred and thirty-five. One thousand and thirty-five. Nine whole months of peas, stretching away to a fully-formed, deformed, unwanted baby. She continued spooning peas on to Ned’s plate, until they were overflowing in a relentless green volcano.
‘Hey, steady on! I know I said I was hungry, but …’
‘Did you, Ned?’
‘Did I what?’
‘Have children?’
‘Nope.’
‘Did you ever want them?’ She removed a sprig of mint from the potatoes, added a sprinkling of salt, a twist from the pepper mill.
‘Can we stop this conversation? I find it tedious. I don’t want to talk about my wife, or my mother, or my Serbo-Croat fairy godmother. I’m quite happy to tell you the difference between a bull-huss and a tope, or discuss the spawning habits of salmon. Mother Nature’s very odd, you know. Salmon live in the sea, but break their bloody necks fighting back to the fresh water they were born in, in order to spawn themselves. Whereas silver eel live in fresh water all their lives, and then go bananas swimming three thousand miles back to the Sargasso Sea to lay their eggs. What a cock-up! All that unnecessary travelling. Now, if a broody eel could swap with a pregnant salmon …’
Pregnant, broody – why did he have to use such cruel words? He was explaining, now, which fish spawned their young alive, and which laid eggs. She let him talk, through alternate mouthfuls of dab and chicken. Her face made roughly the right sort of responses, but she wasn’t listening. She was trying desperately to reassess the situation. She couldn’t live with Ned – that was clear – she couldn’t launch a baby on him, couldn’t even blame him. She’d lied to him, not only over the Pill, but in other, fundamental things. Even after Croft’s Club, she hadn’t said, ‘I’ve left my husband because he won’t accept your baby.’ She’d told him some fable about coming to stay, while Charles baled out a bank in Singapore. Just a few days; Charles wouldn’t know. She’d even played the poor abandoned wife. She was lonely on her own, with her husband always abroad.
Ned had pressed her, ‘Are you sure it’s safe? Charles won’t be suspicious?’ And she’d lulled him with false assurances. She hadn’t allowed Ned a life and a history of his own. Because he stressed the present, she’d abolished his past and kidnapped his future, taken him over and used him for her own purposes. Yet, all the time, she’d been using Charles as well. Even this Tesco’s chicken had been bought with Charles’ money, and all Ned’s deficiencies patched and supplemented, courtesy of Charles. She had never really accepted that her precious infant would go to Acton Primary, or that she’d have the baby in a crowded, noisy ward on the NHS. If Ned had been her basic cake, then Charles was always the icing on the top. But neither man would go along with her. Why should they? She’d chosen a game they didn’t want to play, and bent the rules to suit her.
She’d deceived herself, as well as them. Made up her own myth of Ned and swallowed it whole, assigning him the role of willing father, and expecting him to rewrite his entire life script, to fit her own needs. Or tried to believe that Charles would accept a child which wasn’t his, when she’d failed to do the same, with Magda. There was something really repellent about having to face the truth about herself, seeing Frances Parry Jones as an insensitive manipulator, instead of a misused martyr.
Ned was making patterns of peas, laying them out in the shape of a name, her name – Franny – with three broccoli kisses underneath.
‘Cheer up, love. You haven’t eaten a thing. Here – just eat the ‘‘F’’. F for my fabulous, fascinating, fantastic femme fatale.’
He picked up two tiny peas which formed the crossbar of the F, and trickled them between her lips. The twins. She almost choked.
‘You’re still my favourite, Fran. Don’t be upset by what I said. Just let things be. Don’t tidy cupboards or dig up wives. Remember the moment, comrade.’
She remembered it – the baby swelling, out on the summer grass. She still had the baby, but now it was doubly and permanently fatherless. Should she tell him, none the less? There was just a chance he might feel differently, when faced with a fait accompli. Even though she’d just admitted she was a manipulator, blind to other people’s needs, she still craved the baby like a drug. Her mind could analyse and censure, point out just how selfishly and stupidly she’d acted, but her body didn’t care. It was still murmuring ‘I’m pregnant, pregnant, pregnant’, lush and blossoming, back in the September afternoon.
Ned had abandoned the peas and was larding custard on to hot gooseberry crumble. ‘Let’s eat our pudding in bed.’
‘No.’ She struggled to her feet. The sick black night heaved against the dark uncurtained windows.
‘Please, Fran. I’ll have a bath, I promise. You won’t smell a trace of plaice. That’s a poem! D’you know, I’m the only living poet who …’
‘Ned, I’ve got to go.’
‘Go? Where? Why?’
It was suddenly so cold. Perhaps there had never been a summer afternoon. ‘Oh, I don’t know …’ Where, indeed? Where could a pregnant woman go? There was always Viv – she would understand. But relations with Viv had been strained since Magda had been sent away to boarding school. Viv had swept round to see them, begged that the child should live with her, instead. And all Charles had done was repeat, ‘Magda will be better with the nuns.’ He hadn’t even looked up from correcting the typescript of his latest new tax report. Viv had lost her cool, shouted at them both and rushed away. Frances had tried to mend the rift with a bread-and-butter letter, and a bunch of flowers. And then ignored her. It was the same with all her friends. She’d been so absorbed in herself and her predicament, she’d neglected and avoided them. She sometimes wondered if they really were her friends. She and Charles were always so busy, they treated friends like holidays – something you bothered with, if and when you could spare the time. Ned had taught her what true friendship was. He might be a loner, but he knew about caring and affection. Just-good-friends was everything with Ned. And she’d abused it. She couldn’t walk away without repaying him, without some tangible farewell, one last crazy romp in his crumpled, fishy bed.
She lay in it, naked, waiting while he ran his bath. She remembered all the times they’d clowned together in the bathroom, when he’d scrubbed her back and soaped between her toes, drawn patterns on her breasts with shaving soap, conducted with the loofah while he thundered out Salvation Army hymns. He was singing now, out of tune, murdering the time. Charles would wince. But why was she still destroying Ned with Charles? She was no longer in the luxurious position of having two contradictory but complementary men, one to atone for the other. There was no man now – she was alone, with only a half-formed baby in a sparsely furnished womb.
‘Shove over, love. I’m clean except for my middle upper back. Since you wouldn’t come and scrub it, I can’t guarantee it’s free from barnacles.’
He was so puerile sometimes, so stupid, it would be almost a relief to be alone. His constant bantering was beginning to annoy her, so that she almost longed for Charles’ high seriousness. Then, when she was back with Charles, she taunted him for being humourless. She wanted both of them, and neither. She moved over, almost to the wall.
He had brought his pudding with him, congealing gooseberry crumble in a dish which said ‘PUSSY‘. He daubed a blob of custard across the dark thatch of her pubic hair, then straddled her to lick it off. She felt his rough, familiar tongue spooning into her, licking her lips, going back for second helpings. Her mind shut off and she was only a sweetmeat now, a flesh-pot – milk and honey, gooseberries and cream. There was still the moment, even if it was the last crowning moment she would ever have with him. No one could take it from her. She knew now what it was like to feel and respond through every cell and pore. And, somehow, the baby was part of it. If she hadn’t wanted a child, she would never have known another man, never moved out of her haven, into the highway. She would have the baby on her own, and at least bequeath to it, from its absent and unwitting father, the importance of the moment. There was nothing else – only Ned devouring her as she shouted underneath him, only the flinging, furious now, slamming and soaring until it took over her whole body, her whole life.
She sank back, down, under, as Ned emerged, his face damp, his hair tangled.
‘You taste different, darling, strange.’ He dipped his fingers between her thighs, brought them out, dark and shining. ‘Look, Fran!’
She didn’t look. She had closed her eyes, still savouring the feelings, letting her body slowly spiral down.
He kissed her softly on the pubic hair. His lips were wet and scarlet. ‘You’re bleeding, darling. Your period must have started. Why didn’t you tell me you were due?’