14. Willow
— ? —
Willow
The terms were mine and I wrote them down, which Alicia Harvey told me to do, and which felt insane until the first time I needed them.
Three afternoons a week. He collects from the gate, not the door. He brings him back by six. He does not come in.
I read them out down the phone and my hand was shaking and I was furious with my hand about it.
“Yes,” Michael said.
“I haven’t finished.”
“Sorry. Go on.”
“He does not come in.”
“Yes.”
“That’s it. That’s the list.”
“Right.”
“You’re not going to argue about any of it?”
“I’ve got a lot I’d like to say,” he said, “and all of it is me asking you for something, so no.”
Michael agreed to all of it before I had finished reading, and did not negotiate one word, and I stood in Ruth’s hallway afterwards feeling obscurely cheated, because I had prepared for a fight and had nowhere to put it.
Congratulations, I thought. You’ve won an argument nobody had.
He was early on the first one. He was so early that I watched him sit in the car at the bottom of the lane rather than come up and be early at me, which I chose not to have a feeling about.
At two he came up. Archie went off his head.
“DADA!”
“Hello, mate.”
“DADA!”
“I know. I’m here. I’ve been here for a bit actually, I was just in the car.”
“Why?”
“Because-” He glanced at me. “Because I was early.”
“Why?”
“That’s a very good question and I’d rather not answer it in front of your mother.”
“Why?”
“Because your mother is extremely quick and I’d come off badly.”
“Why?”
“Mate, you’re better at this than my board. They’d learn something from you.”
Archie accepted this completely, on the grounds that none of it meant a thing to him, and took hold of two of his father’s fingers and started pulling.
“Come.”
“I’m coming.”
“Mama come.”
And there it was.
“Mama’s staying here, baby.”
“Mama COME.”
“Archie.”
He let go of Michael and came back and got hold of two of my fingers as well, and then stood in the gateway between us like a very small bailiff, and would not move, and would not be picked up, and would not be distracted by the offer of literally anything.
I looked at Michael over the top of him. Michael looked at the ground.
“I’ll go,” he said. “We can do tomorrow instead, it’s not-”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Willow, I’m not going to stand here and make you do a thing.”
“You’re not making me do anything. He is.” I got my keys off the hook. “There’s a crab in the pond he’s been going on about since Tuesday. We’ll do the crab and then you two can go and I’ll walk back.”
“There’s a crab in a pond?”
“There is not a crab in a pond,” I said. “There’s a thing in a pond and he has taken a view on what it is.”
“Has anybody argued with him about it?”
“I argued with him about it and I lost comprehensively.”
There was not a crab in the pond.
There was a stone, and the stone had a shape, and Archie had committed to it early and was not the sort of man to walk it back now.
“Crab.”
“That’s a rock, mate.”
“CRAB.”
“Right,” Michael said, and got down on his knees in the mud in pants that cost more than Dee Coffin’s monthly rent, and looked at the stone with enormous seriousness. “How long’s he been here?”
He said something unintelligible.
“Has he got a name?”
Archie thought about it.
“Mama. Crab.”
“I’ve seen the crab, baby.”
“Crab sad.”
“Why’s the crab sad?”
Archie looked at the stone and then at his father and then at me, and something went across his face that was too old for him.
“Crab on own,” he said.
Michael did not look up. His hand stopped in the water and then started again.
I sat on the bank and let them get on with it, and I would like to say I was thinking about the filing, or about Alicia Harvey, or about anything sensible at all.
I was watching my husband’s shoulders.
He has a way of going down on one knee to a two-year-old so his face ends up underneath the child’s rather than over it, and he does it without thinking about it, and I had forgotten.
He got mud up to the elbow. He asked follow-up questions about a stone.
When Archie fell in, which was inevitable and which I had already decided not to prevent, he had him up out of it before I was off the bank, and did not once look at me to check whether I had seen him do it.
He was not performing it.
He has been performing everything for weeks, and I have been counting the performances, and this was the first hour since the dock where the man was simply doing a thing because it was the thing in front of him.
He is exactly like this for one afternoon and then Rotterdam rings and you’re back where you started, I thought.
“He needs changing,” Michael said.
“There’s a bag in the trunk of my car.”
“There’s a bag in the trunk of mine.”
I turned around.
“Since when?”
“Since the first day. There’s a bag, and spare shoes, and one of those things you clip on the seat.” He was not looking at me; he was getting mud off Archie’s knees with the hem of his own shirt. “I didn’t want to have to ask you for anything.”
Something went through me that I did not enjoy.
“Who packed it?”
“I did.”
“Michael.”
“I did. Pia offered and I told her not to.” He got the last of it off a small knee.
Don’t you dare, I thought. Don’t you dare be like this at a pond.
“Right,” I said.
They stayed out until nearly six and I did not walk back.
I stayed at that pond for the whole afternoon, and at some point Michael sat down on the bank at the other end of it, and for a long while nobody needed to say anything, and Archie moved between us with handfuls of wet gravel like a man distributing invitations to a party only he understood.
“Can I ask you something,” Michael said, “and you can tell me to get stuffed.”
“Ask.”
“Is the boiler behaving?”
“That’s it? That’s the question?”
“That’s the question.”
“It’s behaving.”
“Right. Good.” He picked something out of the gravel and put it down again. “Dee said it wouldn’t and I’ve been lying awake thinking about it.”
“You’ve been lying awake thinking about my boiler.”
“I’ve been thinking about your boiler,” he said, “a very great deal, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t examine that too closely.”
A pause. Archie threw gravel into the water and shouted at it.
“He’s had two ice creams,” Michael said eventually.
“He hasn’t had any ice creams. There isn’t an ice cream within a mile of here.”
“Levi came past on the road. Levi had ice creams.”
“Levi came past.”
“Levi was extremely surprised to find us here,” Michael said, “in a way I found quite theatrical, and then Pia rang me before he was back on the road to ask about nothing at all.”
“God, they’re not subtle.”
“Pia asked me what the weather was doing.”
“She can see the weather.”
“She can see the weather from her kitchen window and she rang her brother to ask him about it,” Michael said, “and then she said no reason.”
And I laughed, and he heard it, and he had the sense not to look at me, which is the single most intelligent thing that man did all season.
At the cars I got Archie into his seat and Michael stood behind me holding the wet shoes.
“Same time Thursday?”
“Thursday’s fine.”
“I’ll bring the shoes back washed.”
“Don’t wash the shoes.”
“They’re covered in-”
“Michael, if you wash the shoes I’ll have to have a feeling about the shoes, and I’ve had enough feelings for one afternoon.”
He put his hands up. “No washing.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll be at the gate.”
“You’ll be at the bottom of the lane in the car, and then you’ll be at the gate.”
“That’s between me and the car,” he said.
“One more thing.”
“Go on.”
“He said the crab was sad because it was on its own.” I did not plan to say it and I said it anyway. “I didn’t put that in his head, Michael. I’ve been very careful about what goes in his head.”
Michael stood very still in the lane.
“I know you have.”
“Do you?”
“Willow, he’s two and he’s happy and he’s clean and he’s fed and he’s had a whole afternoon about a rock. There’s one person doing that and it isn’t me.” He shifted the shoes to his other hand. “I know exactly what you’ve been careful about.”
I shut the door. Archie was already going, head tipping over, the way he does after water.
And I stood there in the last of the light with my hand on the roof, and I let it out, because I had been holding it since two o’clock and I had run out of places to put it.
“Why weren’t you like this when I had you?”
He did not move.
In fairness to him, he did not say he had been. He did not say work, or Rotterdam, or the board, or his father, and every one of those was sitting right there, and all of them were partly true, and he did not reach for any of them.
He stood in a lane holding a pair of wet shoes and looked at me.
“I don’t know,” he said.
His jaw moved. “But I’m not going to make one up for you. You’ve had enough of those.”
Then he put the shoes on the wall, and got in his car, and went, and I stood in the dark outside my dead grandmother-in-law’s house and thought, oh no.