I suddenly felt conscious of my designer jeans and gray cashmere sweater, de rigueur weekend wardrobe in New York but hardly the kind of outfit to blend in on a Monday morning in Trafalgar Crescent.
“Mitch doing nights. Very hard,” said Kasia, “He gets very …” She struggled to find the word, but you need to have a mother tongue phrase book in your brain to find a euphemism for Mitch’s behavior. “Out of sorts” was the one that sprang to my mind most quickly; I almost wanted to write it down for her.
“You don’t need to fucking apologize for me.”
“My sister, Tess, was a friend of Kasia’s,” I said, but my voice had become Mum’s; anxiety always accentuates my upper-class accent.
He looked angrily at Kasia. “The one you were always running off to?” I didn’t know whether Kasia’s English was good enough for her to understand he was bullying her. I wondered if he was a physical bully too.
Kasia’s voice was quiet. “Tess my friend.”
It was something I hadn’t heard since primary school, standing up for someone simply by saying
Mitch was sprawled in an armchair; I had to step over his legs to get to the door. Kasia came with me. “Thank you for the clothes. Very kind.”
Mitch looked at her. “What clothes?”
“I brought some baby things round. That’s all.”
“You like playing Lady Bountiful then?”
Kasia didn’t understand what he was saying, but could sense it was hostile. I turned to her. “They’re just such lovely things and I didn’t want to throw them away or give them to a charity shop where they might have been bought by anybody.”
Mitch leaped in, a pugnacious man intent on a fight, and enjoying it. “So it’s us or a charity shop?”
“When do you get off from your macho posturing?”
Confrontation, which used to seem so alien to me, now felt familiar territory.
“We’ve got our own fucking baby clothes,” he said, going into a bedroom. Moments later he came out with a box and dumped it at my feet. I looked inside. It was filled with expensive baby clothes. Kasia seemed very embarrassed. “Tess and me, shopping. Together. We …”
“But how did you have the money?” I asked. Before Mitch could explode, I hurriedly continued, “Tess had no money either, and I just want to know who gave it to her.”
“The people doing the trial,” said Kasia. “Three hundred pounds.”
“What trial? The cystic fibrosis trial?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I wondered if it could be a bribe. I’d got into the mental habit of suspecting everyone and everything connected to you, and this trial, which I’d had misgivings about from the very start, was already a soil rich with anxiety for seeds of distrust to take root.
“Can you remember the person’s name?”
Kasia shook her head. “It was in envelope. Just with leaflets, no letter. A surprise.”
Mitch cut across her. “And you spent the whole fucking lot on baby clothes, which it’ll be out of in weeks and Christ knows there’s enough else we need.”
Kasia looked away from him. I sensed this argument was old and much worn and had broken any joy she had once felt in buying the clothes.
She accompanied me out of the flat. As we walked down the concrete steps in the graffiti-decorated stairwell, she guessed what I would say if we were fluent in each other’s languages and said, “He is father. Nothing change that now.”
“I’m staying in Tess’s flat. Will you come round?”
I was surprised by how much I hoped she would.
Mitch yelled from the top of the stairwell. “You forgot this.” He threw the suitcase of clothes down the stairwell. As the case hit the concrete landing, it opened; tiny cardigans, a hat and baby blanket lay strewn across the damp concrete. Kasia helped me to pick them up.
“Don’t come to the funeral, Kasia. Please.”
Yes, because of Xavier. It would have been too hard for her.
I walked home, the sharp wind cutting across my face. With my coat collar pulled up and a scarf around my head, trying to protect myself from the cold, I didn’t hear my mobile, so it went through to message. It was Mum saying Dad wanted to talk to me and giving me his number. But I knew I wouldn’t call him. Instead, I became the insecure adolescent who felt her growing body was the wrong shape to fit into his completely formed new life. I felt again the smothering rejection as he blanked me out. Oh, I knew he’d remembered our birthdays, sending us extravagant presents that were too old for us, as if trying to accelerate us into adulthood and away from his responsibility. And the two weeks with him in the summer holidays, when we tarnished the Provence sunshine with our reproachful English faces, bringing our microclimate of sadness. And when we left, it was as if we’d never been. I once saw the trunks where “our” bedroom things were kept—stowed away in the attic for the rest of the year. Even you, in your optimism for life and capacity to see the best in people, felt that too.
