Daniel Isn’t Talking

‘Behind what?’

‘Behind the others.’

Everyone else we know sent their children to daycare, then to nursery as soon as they could get them out of nappies. But Emily shows no interest in school. When I walk her past the busy playgrounds, full of rushing children and squeals of laughter, the barking shouts of the footballers, the rhythmic chants of the girls with their jump ropes, she gives me a look as though to warn me off even the suggestion she be imprisoned in such a place. Rooms filled with primary colours, desks stocked with jars of coloured pencils, will not attract my daughter. Emily prefers instead to fax to her father’s office pictures she makes of Pingu, the penguin from the Swiss cartoon. She weighs bananas at Tesco’s, mashes bread for the ducks at Regent’s Park, visits pet shops where she names each and every animal, even the crickets, which are only there as food.

Stephen does not approve of this no-school business. The government has recently issued some kind of report indicating that children who go to pre-school perform better throughout their primary years. The day of the announcement, Stephen brought home the newspaper and flung it on to the kitchen table, which was being used as a Play-Doh factory, covering up all our good monsters with the Independent.

‘Hey, don’t wreck our stuff,’ I said.

‘Your stuff,’ he laughed.

‘Well, Emily’s stuff, I mean.’

‘Have a look at this,’ he said, pointing at the article.

The googly eyes came off one of the monsters and I stuck them back on. I glanced at the headline on the newspaper and nodded, then found another monster to adjust.

‘Read,’ Stephen said, and went upstairs to change.

Later, when Emily and Daniel were asleep, he told me he’d made appointments with three different schools and that we were going to visit these schools, ask the appropriate questions and get Emily’s name down on at least one of the registers.

‘She will perform better if we start now,’ he emphasised.

‘You make her sound like a trained seal,’ I said. ‘Anyway, what do school kids learn that make them “perform” better? Certainly they do not know how to use fax machines or make a chair out of papier mâché.’

That was one of our rainy-day projects, the chair. Emily and I made it out of a broken broom handle and chicken wire left over after that rather dangerous – I thought – pond in our garden was covered. We layered the chair with runny glue and newsprint, then painted it pink and yellow. It’s lopsided; it smells a little; it might be a health hazard. But I feel it indicates our daughter’s creative genius, so, even though it attracts a persistent insect I cannot find in my British flora and fauna book, it stays.

‘They learn to read and write,’ answered Stephen.

‘Not at four.’

‘They play with other children.’

‘Emily plays with other children.’

I didn’t tell him that the previous afternoon at the park she kicked a boy in the head because he was rushing her as she climbed the ladder for the slide. Apparently, she stood on his hand, too, which may or may not have been deliberate. The kicked child’s nanny was nowhere to be found and I had to carry him around the playground as he cried, searching for the nanny, which meant I left Daniel in the swing seat on his own. When I returned I found an older child swinging Daniel too hard, as he screamed hysterically. That would have been worth a pill or two, but I wasn’t taking them then.

Now Stephen holds my head in his hands, massaging my temples, squeezing together the lobes on either side of my skull, tracing my hairline with his fingernails.

‘Tell me what hurts you so much,’ he says to me.

‘Those fucking drugs you gave me,’ I say. ‘God, how does anyone in your office work on those?’

I can hear his laugh above me. ‘I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.’

‘I’m so worried,’ I say. ‘Worried about the children.’

‘You just need some help. More than that useless cleaner.’

‘Veena. She’s not useless. She’s my friend.’ Veena is a philosophy Ph.D. candidate. She is terrifically smart, and good company, but is in fact terrible at cleaning a house.

‘Well, the last time I saw her she scrubbed the skirting boards until you could eat off them but left the kitchen sink full of dishes.’

‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘Veena doesn’t like dust.’

To be honest, Veena is a little weird about dust. She runs a damp cloth along the tops of doors and the back of chests of drawers. She has a special duster she uses for radiators, one she made herself and which she says she should get a patent for. ‘Such a lot of terrible dust you have,’ she says. If she manages to get beyond polishing the picture frames, she might actually run a vacuum cleaner. ‘You are having need of tile floors and shutters, not all these thick carpets and flouncy fabrics gathering dust,’ she has told me. When I protested to her that in every Indian restaurant I’ve ever been to there are nothing but flouncy curtains with complicated pelmets, she made a face and told me London dust is very nasty stuff, plus nobody bothers to wash such things in this country.

‘Why not a nanny?’ asks Stephen now. He is using his most gentle voice, his most loving hands.

‘No. The only thing I like is being with my children.’

‘Then why are you so miserable?’ he sighs. ‘It’s ridiculous.’

But it is not ridiculous. I have read how animals react hysterically, sometimes even violently, in the event of imperfect offspring. One night, while watching television, I saw the awful spectacle of a wildebeest born with the tendons in its legs too short. The legs would not straighten and the newborn calf buckled under the clumsy disobedience of his faltering limbs. Five minutes was all it took for a cheetah to find its opportunity. The wildebeest cow circled her crippled calf, bucking and snorting and running her great head low at the lurking cheetah, who seemed almost to gloat at this unexpected opportunity of damaged young. She ran at the cheetah, but the cheetah only dodged and realigned itself closer to the struggling calf. The mother then tried distracting the cheetah, enticing it to chase her. Trotting gently before it, inches from its nose, the wildebeest offered in lieu of her offspring the sinewy meat of her own buckskin hock.

‘Turn it off,’ I told Stephen. He was sitting in his favourite chair, his feet resting on Emily’s playtable, his dinner on his lap.

‘What? Right now? Let’s just see what happens to the calf!’

I took the remote control and pressed the button as though it were a bullet to the cheetah’s heart. ‘I know what happens,’ I said.

3 (#u1a50b7e6-746b-5efd-8cb8-6f90f779f9ff)

Stephen’s surname is Marsh. His Uncle Raymond has a family tree that shows the history of the Marsh family right back to a sprawling black-and-white farmhouse in Kent where I was once brought on a sunny August afternoon in order to observe the origins of this great family to which I am wed. The house was a low-ceilinged maze of musty rooms added on over centuries, charming but archaic, a difficult house that needed constant repairs to its thatched roof and, because of planning restrictions, lacked a garage or a paved road to its entrance, which was through a field of cows. The house was impressive, even if it did require a monstrous amount of attention just to remain habitable, and turned my thoughts immediately to such things as lead poisoning and water-borne diseases. What was I supposed to learn from it? I didn’t understand. ‘Ah, you wouldn’t,’ observed Stephen’s father, Bernard, ‘as you come from a country of immigrants.’

Now the family seat, so to speak, is a post-war brick house in Amersham. It has two bedrooms and a large, anonymous living room with a textured ceiling and lots of ugly brass lamps on the walls; but they can cope with this house, while the other was too much for them now that they are in their later years. Because Bernard is forever spilling tea on the floor, they’ve laid a dark, patterned, low-pile industrial carpet from one end of the house to the other. I am a fan of their new-found practicality, having been subjected to endless numbers of competitively designed terraced houses and roomy flats throughout London. They are owned by Stephen’s colleagues, all of whom have recently had to sell their two-seat sports cars in favour of five-seat Volvos, now that they’ve become parents. As beautiful as I find the fireplaces and polished floors, the thick plaster undulating gently up to vaulted ceilings with all their fine moulded glory, I cannot help being preoccupied with thoughts of inadequacy, as I am indeed a daughter of immigrants. My father, now dead, was the illegitimate son of a Jewish violin maker.

‘Interesting carpet,’ I whisper to my sister-in-law, Catherine. ‘It reminds me of something. Airport lounge? Pub?’

‘I can’t help but think Mother has been the victim of some sort of textile crime,’ says Cath, studying the gold-and-maroon pattern on the floor. ‘And they’ve got the garage stuffed with remnants in case Dad spills.’

Cath is unmarried at thirty-four, which gives both her parents great cause for concern. She’s a doctor, a GP, tall and magnificently built, with thick hips and a powerful tennis arm. Having been made to play cricket with her brothers on beaches, to kick footballs into nets on school holidays, and play tennis on unkempt lawns at the old house for most of her childhood, she has an athlete’s presence. She is my one ally in this family and I adore her.

‘Would you like somewhere to deposit that lad of yours?’ she asks now, nodding at Daniel, who sleeps in my arms. Like his mother, he has odd sleeping patterns that seem to defy the ordinary government of day and night. He will have about five hours from midnight and then a few hours in the afternoon, but only if someone holds him during the nap. Otherwise, he wakes and cries, arching his back and screwing his eyes shut as he howls. No amount of rocking or lullabies or cooing in his ear will make any difference at all. The only place he will sleep other than in my arms, is in the car. I should be a taxi driver, for all the senseless miles I clock in the early hours.

Cath says, ‘I’ll take him. Or perhaps we should give David something to do.’ Stephen’s brother, David, has been parked in front of the cricket the whole of the day, leaving his seat only to visit the buffet lunch, the majority of which was supplied by his wife, who remains mostly in the spare bedroom with a migraine. Their three boys, outside on the small frozen lawn, have been kicking a football for hours against the side of the house. Once in a while Tricia comes out of the spare bedroom, screams at them to stop, then goes back into the bedroom. Meanwhile, David wrings his hands at the Test match, which appears to be taking place somewhere hot. The players are all in wide-brimmed white hats, their noses covered in zinc oxide.

‘I’ll hold on to him,’ I say. If I hand him over surely Cath will notice how much heavier he has gotten, how much bigger. It isn’t that I don’t want Daniel to grow – nothing of the sort – only that I don’t wish to draw attention to how immature Daniel can seem, such a big boy and yet still sleeping in his mother’s arms.

The lunch consists of several Marks & Spencer’s quiches, a plate of sausages for the children, a green salad and several bowls of variously dressed cold dishes. I brought Cornish game hens in a complicated sauce, which was a mistake. As usual I tried too hard and my effort makes me look as though I’ve turned up to a child’s birthday party in a Chanel suit. I don’t know why the game hens, arranged on a platter of roast potatoes and watercress, are just so wrong for this family lunch, but they are. I understand why Emily doesn’t like them, however. She thinks they look like the corpses of Easter chicks.

‘No soggy vol-au-vents from you, then,’ says Cath, eyeing up the platter. ‘Very impressive.’

‘I would think they are overpriced, being mostly bone,’ says Stephen’s mother, Daphne. She looks hard at the game hens, pursing her lips with a mixture of triumph and disdain as though to say she is not fooled by appearances, nor impressed by oddities such as these half-sized birds.

‘I was told to bring quiche,’ shrugs Tricia, dropping two dissolvable aspirins into a glass of water, then stirring the bubbles with her finger.

‘These are quiche,’ I say cheerfully, pointing at the game hens.