Bread and Chocolate Read online

  ‘Oh,’ she said, absorbing that information. She climbed into her bed and he tucked her in, feeling as if he were acting a part in some idealised nursery scene. She looked very angelic. When she raised her little face for a goodnight kiss she smelled of soap. He touched the soft petal of her cheek with his lips, feeling as if he were too old and self-indulgent to approach such pellucid innocence.

  ‘Can we go to the sea again tomorrow?’ she asked.

  ‘We didn’t get to the sea today,’ he pointed out.

  She smiled contentedly. ‘Can we try again tomorrow?’

  ‘All right.’

  Downstairs, he poured himself a large Scotch with a splash of water. Normally he would drink half a bottle but tonight he thought he would have only one glass. There were things to put away: toys and her shoes, which were sandy. Her little socks were discarded on the stairs. To his surprise he did not resent the chores. He felt rather contented. He tidied up and then dropped into his chair and switched on the television. He had a warm sense of having a home, rather than merely somewhere to live. He had a little girl sleeping peacefully under his roof; a nestling in the stone nest.

  The telephone rang. ‘It’s me,’ said Zoë. ‘I can come down on Friday night. I thought I’d take the train and you could meet me in Plymouth. I’ll leave Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘There’s a complication,’ he said.

  ‘Oh?’ She was instantly suspicious. ‘What sort of complication?’

  ‘My niece is staying with me for the summer. She’s four.’

  ‘Poor little sod,’ she said rudely. ‘Does she drink whisky?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘No trouble, and you’re welcome to come. Take a taxi from the station, I can’t get out to collect you.’

  ‘I had a rather …’ She dropped her voice into a husky drone which someone had once told her was seductive. ‘… I had a rather adult weekend in mind. Can’t you farm her out for two days? Get her back when I’ve gone?’

  He thought it odd that in one day his views had changed so completely. ‘She’s not a puppy, I can’t put her in kennels,’ he said abruptly. ‘If you want to see me, you see her too. This is her home for the summer. I’m not throwing her out just because you’ve got a spare weekend.’

  ‘Oh, screw you then!’ she shouted and slammed down the phone.

  He waited a moment and then quietly replaced the receiver. He sounded out his own mind for regret and found none. He took up his sketch pad and started to work on the sharp wicked robot face of his planned statue. Nothing came. Instead he doodled a set of attractively rounded and speckled pebbles.

  Next day they set out for the sea again, and once again they were waylaid by the extraordinary variety of pebbles. This time they decided to amass all of the white pebbles on the beach and built them into a dangerously unstable pyramid. They played until sunset and then he lured her up the steps to the cottage, by counting them. It was an unsuccessful exercise since Katie could count no more than three. He taught her the numbers up to ten, and felt a pleasing sense of virtue.

  It was more than a week before they exhausted the pleasures of the pebble strand and finally arrived at the sea’s edge. The tide was high and Katie stood beside him solemnly watching the waves wash in and out. He knew her well enough now to see that something was puzzling her. After nearly half an hour of silent contemplation she turned to him:

  ‘Where’s the machine?’

  ‘Machine?’ He was startled. He had been thinking of his proposed statue, which was not progressing at all. He had a plan for it now: pincer arms and a sharp dead face, but he could feel no enthusiasm for it. He would never start sculpting until he could feel powerfully that it was the right thing, the only thing to do. This time the surge of energy was slow in coming. He wondered if the even routine of Katie’s days were sapping his spontaneity. He wondered if he were becoming boring: a child-bound housewife.

  ‘Where’s the machine?’ she repeated. ‘The wave machine.’

  For a moment he could not think what she meant and then he laughed aloud. She had been brought up in a town, she had only ever seen waves made in a swimming pool with a wave machine. She was too small to understood that the machine was trying to reproduce the real movement of the sea. She had mistaken the mechanical copy for the real thing. When she met the reality – the gently shushing waves of the calm sea – she looked for a synthetic explanation.

  ‘There isn’t a machine,’ he said, smiling. ‘The sea moves like this all on its own.’

  She had a delightful chuckle. Her eyes narrowed and her smile, with the endearing gap at the top teeth, widened. ‘Silly Mike,’ she said confidently. ‘Of course there’s a machine. I’ll find it for you.’

  She took him by the hand and pulled him to his feet and they set off along the beach looking at the red stone cliffs and under the larger pebbles, inspecting cave entrances and rock pools. ‘It’s somewhere here,’ she said certainly. ‘It’s got to be. To make the waves.’

  For the rest of that summer that was her project. They still collected stones, and when the tide was so low that the small sandbar was exposed they built ornate and beautiful sand castles. He enjoyed working with sand so much that he started to puzzle out a way of using it in his art. But every day Katie searched for the machine which made the waves.

  The phone call, at the end of August, came as a shock. ‘Tom’s coming out at the weekend,’ Veronica said. ‘They think it was a virus, after all, not an allergy. He’s miles better anyway, thank God. I’ll collect her tomorrow.’

  Dismay clutched at him. ‘No hurry.’

  ‘Darling, she has to start school!’

  ‘I forgot.’

  ‘You can have her again in the holidays, if it’s been such a success,’ she offered sarcastically.

  He thought for a moment. ‘D’you know, I would like that.’

  Veronica laughed. ‘Who’d have thought it?’

  They took a last ceremonial walk on the beach together.

  ‘You don’t mind going to school, do you, Katie?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said confidently. ‘Not now I can count.’

  She slipped her hand from his grasp and ran ahead. It had been a high tide in the night and there were new and interesting beachcombings. He gathered up driftwood as he walked behind her; the driftwood, the pebbles, the fluid complex movements of sand sculpture – he could not think how he had missed it before.

  ‘Mike!’ she suddenly screamed. ‘Mike!’

  His heart missed a horror-struck beat. ‘Katie!’ he yelled and raced towards her.

  She was dancing with excitement. Half-embedded in the sand, with rust spotting the chrome, was the thrown-away grille of a car radiator.

  ‘Here it is! Here it is!’ she shrieked.

  For a moment he could not think what she meant and then he realised that it did indeed look very like the vents for a wave machine set into the edge of the sea.

  ‘To make the waves! To make the waves!’ she crowed. ‘I knew it was here!’

  He crouched down beside her so that her bright eyes were level with his own. ‘But isn’t it rather small, Katie? To move the whole sea? To shift the whole of the ocean?’

  She shook her head solemnly. ‘Something doesn’t have to be very big to make a lot of difference,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, Katie,’ he said lovingly. ‘That’s very true.’

  The Magic Box

  I awoke in the half-light of morning, a moody monochrome as if it had been carefully lit by an expert. I raised myself on one arm and looked at Mark fast asleep, his perfect profile, his tousled hair. The bed dipped beneath my pregnant heaviness and he stirred and said something in his sleep. I felt a moment of utter dread, in case it was her name, in case he was dreaming of her. I froze, hardly daring to breathe, in that painful tension which I had learned in the past hard year when he had told me that he loved her, and that he would leave me.

  He had not gone. I had won. I screamed and then cried