Between Each Breath Read online

  He was ready to pitch in and guzzle, now. The wacky fertility counsellor referred to penetration as ‘the moment of integration’. Tonight this crucial moment was more self-conscious than usual, because of her inertness – he pictured the mating of beasts and thought of pig farms, then of something Milly had said over supper, about the global grocery business, about Asda being part of Wal-Mart, their immigrant workers washing Asda salads for peanuts, living in crowded squalor, Milly wanting to take snaps, to risk her neck in a big field near King’s Lynn or somewhere. Asda Asda Asda. Asdafuck. Walfuckmartfuckwaaal. He kissed her spine, the knobbly vertebrae, as he pitched forward and back, feeling that familiar, blissful frenzy as something faint trying to get through from a long way away, a kind of distant fizz – but nothing stronger, none of that overwhelming force which swept everything else aside, including stray thoughts of Wal-Mart and the pins and needles in his awakening arm and the cooling night air over his skin.

  He was relieved when she moved her head upwards on the pillow and began to sigh, to make little grunting noises in her throat, to say ‘Oh’ as his movements on her made her distinctive, lovely, fine-boned du Crane profile shift up and down, her thinnish shoulders bared enticingly from the silk, exposing the dot of tiny black mole by the BCG jab, the scoop of the clavicle where water would always pool in the shower. He loved his wife. He loved the fact that she was forty-one. He loved having sex with her. He loved her heritage blood. He loved the way her poshness showed through and the fact that she was so rich and yet he could be doing this with her, the whiff like stables thickening from under her arm, the lemony homeopathic toothpaste on her breath.

  ‘Do it, do it,’ she said, her eyes still closed, her face thrust up on the pillow, her fingers scratching her exposed neck. ‘But don’t talk.’

  He hadn’t said a word, in fact. Unless they were so close, these days, she could read his thoughts.

  He failed to deliver, in the end. He had to stop, it was no good. Milly, however, had yelped and screeched as if being murdered, and for longer than usual. Jack thought this was followed by a muffled thump on the wall, Edward’s side, but it might have been his thumb next to his ear on the pillow.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Sustainable yield,’ she murmured, smiling faintly. ‘Rapid renewables. Life-cycle cost.’

  ‘I’m really sorry. Maybe it doesn’t work when I rape you.’

  ‘It does for the Grove-Careys.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s rape,’ said Jack, rather shocked at her flippancy. He was exhausted. He felt he’d been squeezed dry in some way.

  ‘Think whatever you like,’ Milly said, so quietly it was almost a breath. ‘Men always have done. But don’t think you can do whatever you like.’

  She settled again, without a goodnight kiss, under the sheet. Jack left it. He thought it best not to query what she meant, not aloud. He didn’t get to sleep for a long time, and it wasn’t only the sudden coolness of the night air on his shoulders.

  ‘It’s going to be very tricky. My wife’s very suspicious. The neighbours. This mustn’t all blow up in our faces. For Jaan’s sake.’

  ‘For yours?’

  ‘For yours, too.’

  ‘You care about me, do you?’

  ‘Kaja, of course I do.’

  The connection wavered under static. Her voice came back, stronger.

  ‘Same time in the park, with Jaan? Monday?’

  ‘Sure. That’s no problem. But not coming to the house.’

  ‘So it’s just once a week?’

  ‘To begin with.’

  ‘He loved his lesson with you. He doesn’t stop talking about it.’

  ‘Let’s start with just the park and footie and stuff, OK?’

  ‘That’s not enough for Jaan.’

  ‘It’s better than nothing, Kaja. I can take him to the Toy Museum and the London Eye and things. We’ll work out the money this week.’

  ‘Pay me away, you mean?’

  ‘Eh? Say that again.’

  ‘Nice for you. See you in the park. By Peter Pan.’

  She put the phone down before he had time to reply. He was nettled. He was definitely beginning to find life a bit of an egg-juggling act, something he wasn’t used to.

  He pressed his tongue on the rubbery soapishness of a wine gum. Lime. His least favourite. He was sure they were putting more sugar in.

  He wasn’t used to it at all, no.

  Somehow, grey Hayes had blended into the sweeping lawns and beeswaxed floors of the Royal College, and from then on in – it was all fairly easy. Scaffolded by the music world, by Milly and everything she came with, he’d never looked back, or down. He’d spent four or five hours a day practising the piano up to his early twenties. That didn’t leave much time to be a wild boy, to roam, to knock up against the hardness. Now it was too late to learn.

  He was quite glad of the hospital, it took his mind off things. He still liked being called ‘gorgeous’ by Nurse Susan. He read the Daily Mail to his mother, avoiding the nasty or the distressing or the right-wing rants (which didn’t leave much else), and spooned Actimel into her as once she’d spooned baby food into him. Her wrists were still in plaster, she was sweating under the skull brace, her life was being lived on the fifth circle of hell. ‘Lovely weather, but a bit uncomfortable,’ she’d say. The wizened old man in the other single room next door cried out like clockwork every two minutes. That was all he did. Raise himself up, shudder, and cry out with unbelievable force and volume as if someone was stabbing him. No one ever closed his door.

  ‘Poor man,’ said his mother. ‘I do feel sorry for him.’

  At home, Jack fiddled about with Waters of the Trip Hazard or walked on the Heath, trying to elucidate the score in his head. His lower back ached, he sat badly in his special chiropractic chair, he went on eating too many wine gums and felt sick, anxious and depressed. He reinstated the timp bombs, but as an inner headache. No way could you not have them thumping at some point. The trees were shedding their leaves in warm air, the squirrels looked confused. He heard a cello, in a velvety second position in C, and rewrote the beginning entirely.

  Edward Cochrane came round with a bottle of Bollinger’s just as Milly got back from work on Friday evening. She invited him through. Jack was reading the Mozart biography at the table under the plum tree at the other end of the garden. Marita was cooking a typical Venezuelan dish, so he had nothing to do. He closed his book as Edward approached over the lawn, but didn’t get up. He had shifted, unsurprisingly, from disliking Edward Cochrane to thinking he was of less value than a steppedin dogpile.

  It was the last day of September, but summer hadn’t noticed. The falling leaves were an irrelevance.

  ‘What’s this in aid of?’

  ‘I only drink champagne these days,’ said Edward.

  Milly pulled up two chairs. She believed in loving thy neighbour, whatever.

  ‘We need glasses, Jack.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have got them on the way?’

  ‘You want me to get them.’

  ‘No no. I’ll get them.’

  ‘I’ll wait to open it,’ said Edward. ‘Gagging for it though I am.’

  Marita was singing to herself in the kitchen, in Spanish. Things smelt good through the hatch. The extractor fan wheezed away – he was supposed to have seen to cleaning its filter a year ago. He fished out the glasses from the dresser in a little threnody of clear crystal notes. On his way back, stepping onto the long lawn, Jack heard someone hammering. It was his own blood, doing something funny in his ears.

  Edward popped the bottle and slopped the coruscating foam into the glass with practised ease. A car alarm was whining over the sluggish air, calling its master.

  ‘Here’s to wine, women and song,’ said Edward.

  ‘Here’s to incredibly sexist men who bring bubbly,’ said Milly.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Jack. ‘Here’s to climate change. Allowing us this.’

  ‘Puh-lease,’ Milly
said.

  ‘And to absent loved ones,’ added Edward, with a sniff.

  They drank.

  ‘Heard from her?’ asked Milly.

  Edward shook his head. ‘Me wants the address of your corker, Jack,’ he said. ‘Pronto.’

  ‘My corker?’

  ‘The Estonienne. Bound to be skint. Even if she’s not on the game.’

  ‘On the game?’

  ‘Don’t be drippy. By the way, did you read about her compatriot, this Estonian prossy who thought she was marrying a seventy-two-year-old squillionaire in Surrey, who turned out not to be? Lived in a loathsome little rented flat. Way below the poverty line, probably. She stabbed him when the cash ran out. Spent it on furs and jewellery. Claims it was an accident. Rather amusing.’

  ‘I hadn’t,’ said Jack.

  Milly was studying her glass.

  Edward sniffed and said: ‘Run this past the focus group, lads. I’m barely forty, I’m rolling around in my house like a dried pea in a tin, I’m about to be a divorcee, I earn a truly disgusting amount of money, not even counting the bonuses. What do you think? The wee lad just has to pop next door for a tinkle on the ivories. Oh go on, give the nod. Say it’s charity. Old Europe meets New Europe. All that.’

  Jack said, trying to ease his neck, ‘She’s already got someone. A French-Canadian banker.’

  ‘Bugger,’ said Edward. ‘I was honestly quite gone on her. Love at first sight. Plonk.’

  ‘A French-Canadian banker?’ repeated Milly.

  Jack had no idea where he’d plucked that one from.

  ‘By the name of Raoul,’ he nodded. ‘French Canadian. He was a guest at the hotel where she works. There was this conference a few months ago and she was working on the buffet and met him over the pineapple slices. He’s trilingual and loves Arvo Pärt.’

  Edward and Milly were staring at him.

  ‘And Flaubert,’ he added. With every extra embroidering he felt powerful, avenged. ‘That bit about bracken in the stirrups. Madame Bovary.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about him,’ said Milly.

  ‘Oh piss,’ said Edward. ‘I really thought it was anything goes, the way she looked in the porch.’

  ‘The way she looked?’ Jack felt he might leap on his neighbour and tear his throat out like the zombies in Shaun of the Dead, a film he’d seen five times.

  ‘Hungry for love,’ said Edward, ‘as long as it comes with a big fat nest egg.’

  ‘You’re certainly big and fat,’ sighed Milly, who’d had a bad day with photovoltaic panels.

  ‘I don’t think she’d appreciate your observation, somehow, Edward. It’s maybe something to do with self-respect and dignity.’

  ‘Come on, Jack. She’s an utter fucking bomb. He drools over her, in secret,’ he said, leaning towards Milly rather drunkenly.

  Milly said, staring into the shrubbery next to her, ‘Edward, grow up.’

  ‘Can’t. My father committed suicide when I was fourteen.’

  ‘What?’

  Edward looked at each of them in turn with an air of conceited triumph. ‘Didn’t I ever let on? Hanged himself from a hook in the garage. Careless with money. I was away at school. Wellington. The Master himself told me – it was fine, he was terribly sensitive and all that. Frightful bore because it meant I missed the fives selection. The bloody funeral!’

  Milly was aghast. ‘Edward, that’s so really, really awful. Really sad.’

  Jack was annoyed. It meant he couldn’t hate him any more, or not cleanly. ‘So you can’t grow up,’ he said.

  ‘No. Never cried about it. I’m screwy. Sicko. Lilian kept telling me this over and over and over. In psychological Shit Street, me.’

  ‘Did you love your father?’ asked Milly, head on one side in the concerned position, apparently much more animated now.

  ‘Away all the time, didn’t really know him,’ said Edward, raising his eyebrows like a clown. ‘That’s the pain. That’s why I’m stuck. Didn’t really know him, did I?’

  NINE

  When he saw Kaja and Jaan next to the Peter Pan statue, waiting for him, he felt like running away.

  ‘Hiya! Been waiting long?’

  ‘It’s no matter,’ said Kaja. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Jack. ‘OK, Jaan, is it catch or footie?’

  ‘Cricket,’ said the little boy, very serious but trembling with excitement, his head bent right back to look up at the adult he didn’t yet know was his father.

  ‘Cricket? Of course. Stupid me, I forgot to bring a set along. I’ll bring one next time. Meanwhile, we’ll practise fielding and bowling.’

  Jack had been useless at cricket at school, and hadn’t touched it since. His enjoyment of it was purely as a spectator – or rather, as a listener. Fortunately, he’d brought along a tennis ball instead of the big red airy one that was too light. The weather was grey and sultry, this time, without a breath of wind.

  ‘He watched the Ashes competition,’ said Kaja. ‘There’s a Bulgarian with a TV in the house. We could never work out any of the rules.’

  Kaja was sporting a long T-shirt with a neatly printed slogan: Not All That It Seems. Her gymnast’s straight back and firm shoulders stretched it tight over her breasts.

  ‘A Bulgarian?’

  ‘Yeah. Why?’

  ‘Dunno. He’s a nice guy, is he?’

  ‘A woman, actually. She’s a friend, now.’

  A Japanese couple came up and asked Jack to take a photo of them in front of Peter Pan. Jack had trouble including them and the statue, being too close inside the railings, and had to crouch down like a war photographer, angling up. The couple laughed. He’d been about Jaan’s age when he’d first seen the statue. A much higher statue, then.

  Once Kaja had left them, Jack showed Jaan the fairies and rabbits and squirrels forged into the tree stump, their bodies polished to a shiny bronze by ninety years of touching fingers, the fairies’ wings beautifully corroded by verdigris.

  ‘Peter Pan never grew up,’ he said. ‘He was a fairy who took a girl called Wendy to Never-Never Land. This is where he first landed.’

  The corner of Jaan’s mouth puckered, producing a large dimple.

  The trouble with Kensington Gardens was that everyone looked vaguely familiar. It made Jack nervous as he threw and caught the tennis ball. People – generally the foreigners – smiled as they passed. He realised Jaan was rather cute, enthusiastically failing to catch the ball most times, his dark tousled hair giving him a bit of a scamp look, until you saw the seriousness of his expression.

  This is my son, he was thinking.

  They walked along the wide path by the Serpentine to buy an ice cream, kicking at newly fallen leaves, trying to catch the ones that were still so briefly in the air. Jack had an old postcard up in his study, showing the same view in 1911. Nannies with perambulators and boys in knickerbockers or dressed as girls, girls in lacy bonnets. He bought Jaan a double cornet, which looked enormous in Jaan’s miniature hand and reduced his face to something out of an old shaving-cream advert. Jack had no tissues on him and didn’t know what to do.

  ‘Lick it all off with your tongue,’ he suggested.

  The tongue couldn’t reach more than a little circle around the lips. Taking a corner of his soft cotton shirt and kneeling down to Jaan’s level, he held the boy’s shoulder and wiped his face clean, avoiding the actual mouth. The smell and stickiness of the melted ice cream was unpleasant, but the passive gratefulness of the little face touched Jack profoundly. He wiped his shirt-flap on the warm, dense grass of the lawn. He wanted to return Jaan as he’d found him.

  He winked at him. ‘What a kerfuffle, eh?’

  Jaan produced a dimple again, this time looking him in the eye.

  When Kaja got back, Jack told her he’d like a word in private. She said something in Estonian to Jaan, who kneeled on the grass with the tennis ball while his parents sat together on a bench a few yards away, out of earshot.

  ‘He still d
oesn’t know who I am, does he?’

  ‘No. Just my friend. I’ll tell him soon.’

  ‘I like being with him. It’s working. I’ll give him a piano lesson at Howard’s or hire somewhere. Not at home. I’ve got this horrible neighbour and my wife might come in. She’ll ask you questions.’

  ‘He wants to see you more.’

  ‘Well, he can see me a couple of times a week.’

  Kaja snorted. ‘Two hours a week?’

  ‘To begin with, Kaja. We’ve got to go carefully on this one. I really like seeing him, don’t get me wrong. I like seeing you, too,’ he added, heart hammering suddenly.

  She folded her arms. ‘He’s your son. He’s not a piano pupil. He’s not your little hobby or your club.’

  ‘I didn’t say he was my hobby!’

  ‘You’re his dad. You can’t do this. It’s easy as pie, isn’t it? You just take that little bit you want. Fine. That’s not being a dad.’

  They sat on the bench in the warm sun and Jack felt it was all very unfair. Jaan was rolling the ball from hand to hand, on his own on the grass.

  ‘Your wife is called Milly, yeah?’

  Jack nodded.

  ‘She sounded nice and understanding, on the answerphone.’

  ‘That’s pie in the sky.’

  ‘It’s what?’

  ‘She’ll explode if I tell her. We’ve been trying for a kid for years. I can’t risk it. It’ll be gloves right off.’

  ‘Then I’ll go back to Estonia with Jaan. I’ll tell him about you when he’s eighteen. Are you surprised?’

  ‘Well, a bit.’

  ‘There’s a guy I know, on Haaremaa. I was at school with him. He went away to university and now he’s returned. He’s a carpenter, works hard because he’s really a good carpenter. He’d be a good father to Jaan. Jaan likes him a lot.’