Daniel Isn’t Talking

But the game hens grow cold, remaining for the most part on their nest of watercress. And my profiteroles are also a disgrace, being passed over for the blackberry crumble with Bird’s Custard and a summer pudding, still slightly frozen from the box. Why do people with so much money fill themselves with such garbage? Is it some English eccentricity I will never understand?

Stephen leans toward me, whispering, ‘You know, if you ate more, you might grow breasts again.’

‘Stephen, don’t be vulgar,’ says Daphne. Like a schoolboy standing at a closed door with an inverted cup, she misses nothing.

‘I’m sorry, dear,’ says Stephen’s father, sitting in his chair. He has not moved for many hours, and is engrossed in the cricket. ‘Were you talking to me?’

‘No, Dad, Stephen was just being himself,’ says Cath, rolling her eyes.

But at least Stephen defends my game hens. He finishes off two, declaring them ‘charming’ to anyone who cares to hear. I fumble with my plate, trying not to disturb Daniel, who sleeps all through lunch. Lying across me on the couch, he looks more like a puppet for a ventriloquist than a boy. In the end I find it is too much trouble to eat, and anyway, I’m not hungry.

‘Sit with me,’ I ask Stephen.

‘I am sitting with you,’ he says, from the other side of the room.

Daphne steps through the house with a regal air. She wears a floor-length woollen skirt, a crisp high-necked blouse. I am too casual in chinos and a jumper. But then, last time there’d been such a gathering, I showed up in a silk skirt and heels, only to discover they expected me to go on a ‘family walk’ through half the Chilterns. I should have known I had it wrong this morning when we were dressing. Stephen polished his shoes before we got in the car.

‘Why don’t you put that child down?’ says Daphne now, looking with mild disapproval at her sleeping grandson.

‘He’s attached to me,’ I whisper, at which she gasps.

‘You have a very odd sense of humour,’ she says, moving away.

Her next complaint is how fat her elder son has become. ‘You need to make time for the gym, dear,’ she tells David, perched momentarily beside him on the armchair, like a visiting bird.

David doesn’t look away from the TV screen. He’s the only one who seems to like the profiteroles and has no intention of being distracted from them, or from his cricket. ‘Too much on at work,’ he says dismissively. Then he points his fork at the profiteroles. ‘Did you make these things?’ he asks me.

I shake my head no.

‘Bloody good,’ he says. Like most men of his type, David is under the impression that women cook to gain compliments from men. When we don’t cook, but instead buy food, the compliment is forfeited, unrequired. I have been instructed by my mother-in-law on more than one occasion always to admit to baking a dish from scratch, regardless. ‘Up to and until they see the bar code, it is yours,’ she told me. I am not seeking to impress but rather to deceive. If I can present a reasonable lunch, then the rest of my life is similarly ordered. That is my statement, an If/Then statement. The logic of ordinary housewives. A complete lie.

‘They don’t look like something you’d make,’ says Daphne, glancing from David’s bowl to me. ‘Though I suppose someone had to make them. What I want to know is how they get the cream into that incy-wincy, tiny little hole?’

‘With a gun,’ I say. Something about my tone startles everyone in the room. Stephen, David, and Daphne look at me all at once now, blinking. Raymond, who is in a corner with a book on the history of London, stares at me over his bifocals. Stephen’s father rustles from his chair as though woken from a dream. ‘A pastry gun,’ I add, trying to smile.

In fact, I bought the profiteroles that morning at a pastry shop while cruising with Daniel, who would not go back to sleep no matter how much I drove. The pastry shop is run by a group of young Italian men who I gather are somehow related. At 5 a.m. they are in the shop, preparing for the day. The shop has dark shutters, newly painted white brickwork, spotlights that shine out to the pavement. I could hear voices inside, smell the dough, the sugar. Stumbling inside, I surprised them all. They tried to tell me they were closed; then suddenly a short man in baggy black trousers and what might have been a pyjama top charged out from the kitchen at a pace. He was older than the others, their father, perhaps. His hands were wet, his beard unshaven. He was balding in a pattern that made him look as though he had a huge forehead. He saw Daniel, with his blond hair and his favourite train, and stopped at once, wiping his palms on a towel tucked into his belt.

‘Yeah, OK,’ he said, waving us inside. Maybe he thought we were homeless or the sad outcasts of domestic violence. He opened the door, glancing down the road one way then the other, then shut it again. The others shrugged, going back to work. I sat on a stool and watched them roll out pastry, unload boxes, whip up cream. I couldn’t understand much of what they said to each other in Italian, but I understood they were figuring out if I was American. While Daniel picked dough from the floor, I bought box after box of pastries they gave me for next to nothing. I answered questions like, ‘Why Americans drink so much bad coffee?’ and ‘Why Americans like so much to have wars?’ Their own coffee made my head spin. I was more interested in breathing its steam than in drinking it. How long could I stay there? I wanted to stay for ever. But Emily would be awake soon. It was time to go. ‘I’m sorry I disturbed you,’ I apologised from the doorway. The sky was streaked with pink and orange, the traffic increasing by the minute now at 6 a.m. ‘Come back, Miss America,’ one of them called. The older one saw me leaving. He came from the kitchen barking orders at his sons. His face was hot, his shoulders enormous for so small a man. I noticed his fingernails coated in flour, a wedding ring that dug into his flesh. I smiled at him. ‘Come back another time, signorina,’ he said.

For the occasion of this family lunch, Stephen’s uncle Raymond has brought the Marsh family tree, which is the size of a school map and requires careful folding. Raymond is a lonesome character with a vast lap and many chins. He moves by use of a cane, which was his father’s and which he wishes to bestow upon Stephen or David when the time comes, which, at eighty-four, is not far off. Beside him, on the edges of a floral settee, is Daphne, who smiles into the family tree, this great canvas of alien names. As always, she seems impressed by the intricate detail of children produced by assorted, untraced females added on to the Marsh lineage by means of tiny crosses from Raymond’s fountain pen. She’s been to the beauty parlour to have her hair set in curls. Between glimpses of the enormous family tree, she admires Emily’s hair, which you cannot get a comb through, but is nonetheless completely natural, flocked in ringlets that drape down her neck.

‘Where has all your lovely hair gone?’ she asks me now. When Stephen met me I had wavy blonde hair halfway down my back. I’d published some essays in a literary review and I don’t know if it was the hair or my budding journalism career that got me invited to that party in London where we met. ‘I’ve heard about you,’ he said, walking with me along the Strand. This was certainly not the case, but I didn’t mind. ‘I’ve heard about you, too,’ I told him. He was far too sure of himself with a woman. It unnerved me. ‘Well, about people like you,’ I added, then listened to him laugh. I was wearing my hair loose, cascading around my shoulders like a shawl. He told me later how he longed to put his hands in my hair, his tongue in my mouth.

Now my hair is just ordinary, straight, shoulder-length, half the thickness it used to be. I’ve done some articles on a freelance basis since having the children and may, one day, return to work. But that’s not what is on my mind these days.

Daphne says, ‘I mean, what did happen to your hair?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say truthfully.

‘Did it fall out?’ she continues.

I don’t answer this. I’m not even sure it’s a question.

Daphne says, ‘Do you think it is because of …?’ She makes a little motion with her hand.

‘Stress?’ I say. She shrugs. Time to draw this to a close. ‘Could be hormones,’ I tell her. ‘You know, sex hormones.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she says, pursing her lips as though we have just spoken of something about which she greatly disapproves. ‘They are such nuisances.’ She turns now to Raymond, clearing her throat. ‘I see you’ve spelt Took correctly. So few people can, and yet it is very much an English surname, you know.’

Took is her maiden name. She spies it in the lower edge of the map. Indicating with a bony, arthritic finger that does not point exactly where she intends, she smiles.

I am there, too. My name on the Marsh family tree: Melanie Lavin. An addition to the name Stephen James Edward Marsh. But I notice that I am only pencilled in. Why am I only pencilled in?

Leaving Daniel on Stephen’s lap, I make my way to the loo, passing Cath, who is looking at books on the ornate, glass-fronted shelves in the hallway.

‘Somewhere here is something I want to read,’ she says, studying the titles. ‘Statistically speaking, that is.’

‘I’m only pencilled onto the family tree,’ I tell her. ‘Though I notice the children are in ink. Are they expecting an annulment, do you think?’

Cath laughs. ‘I don’t know how anyone stays married to my wretched brothers. If I were Tricia I’d have more than a migraine, I can tell you. I’d have a settlement by now. You’re better off with Stephen. At least he speaks.’

‘It’s not even dark pencil. It’s as though they got some feather-light lead and just scratched in the suggestion of my name.’

From behind us comes Daphne’s voice. ‘I heard that!’ she says, tottering through the narrow hall with Raymond trailing behind. ‘And the reason for pencil is that you were written in at the time of your engagement. Very simple explanation. You make such a fuss without understanding the why of things.’

‘The why of things, Mother?’ says Cath, coming to my defence as she always does. At the wedding she slipped me a Valium and told me her prescription pad was available to me at any time. Perhaps I ought to use the opportunity of this family lunch to mooch some Prozac, those small wonder pills. But I’ve grown suddenly shy of any sort of drug, having been traumatised by the mystery pills Stephen gave me. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ says Cath. ‘They’ve been married five years.’

‘Yes, but if you remember, they had a very brief engagement and there had been that long-standing girlfriend, Penelope, and it caused us to wonder if Stephen might just change his mind.’

‘Oh, for Godsakes, Mother,’ Cath snorts.

Daphne draws her chin back, lifts her finger as though testing the wind. ‘You don’t know how many times he changed his mind before, dear. Your brother can be dead set for one thing, then suddenly turn. So rather than ruin Uncle Raymond’s lovely tree we pencilled in Melanie’s name.’

‘How ridiculous,’ says Cath.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say.

‘We’ll put your name in ink right away,’ says Raymond. He takes a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, wiping his brow in a flustered manner. ‘I do apologise.’

‘I thought you didn’t go in for family trees and tradition,’ says Daphne, sizing me up with her cloudy grey eyes. ‘But I suppose people change.’

Bernard, having heard the argument, arrives in his slow, faltering gait, with something he feels needs to be said. ‘Stephen was with Penelope for many years. She was practically one of the family,’ he tells me with authority. He suffers from a lung condition so that his speaking voice is filled with wheezy sighs, but he means business. ‘Not that you aren’t one of the family,’ he adds quickly. ‘Don’t be silly.’

‘Daddy, sit down,’ urges Cath.

‘Are you happy now?’ Daphne asks me.

Meanwhile, Stephen and David watch the cricket. Emily draws heads for the game hens, cuts them out and sticks them into the opposite cavity to where the head goes, announcing to anyone who cares to hear that we will wake her brother if we keep arguing like this, and that he will scream.