Waiting for sunshine, p.11
Waiting for Sunshine, page 11
‘That’s great, Sunny!’ Nina said. ‘Clever girl!’ and the child gave a shy smile and inched closer to Chrissie, who reached for her and pulled her up onto her lap. For a moment Nina scrutinised the two of them, as if she was sizing them up for a portrait.
‘Beautiful,’ she said. ‘Just beautiful. I’m so happy for you, Chrissie. And look, I wasn’t sure if I was going to say anything, but that West Ham strip is beyond the pale, so I’m going to risk it.’
‘What?’ Chrissie asked. ‘Oh, please, tell me you have a solution.’
Nina dipped into her rucksack, and brought out a sleeveless tie-dye dress in indigo and white, which she held up for inspection. Sunshine looked quizzical.
‘That is mine?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Nina said, looking at the dress as if it was just as new to her as to Sunshine. ‘Is it yours, Sunny?’
She nodded emphatically. She pushed herself off Chrissie’s knees and started to tug off her shorts, and Chrissie said, ‘Wow,’ and left her to it, until the child looked at her and said, ‘You can help me, Mummy?’
‘You bet,’ Chrissie said.
‘I love the way she asks a question,’ Nina said. ‘It’s very commanding.’
Sunshine raised her arms and Chrissie pulled the shirt off over her head. ‘There goes Dagenham Motors,’ she said. ‘Now, where’s Sunshine’s dress?’
‘There,’ Sunny said. She pointed, so there could be no mistake, then raised her arms again in readiness. Her body was compact and perfectly formed, pale as cream, heart-wrenchingly slender but somehow strong too, like a tender sapling, with all that hidden vigour stored away for the task of growing.
Chrissie dropped the dress over the child’s outstretched arms, and it fell into place, soft and fluid. It came to her knees. It was beautiful in its simplicity.
‘There you are,’ Chrissie said, and Sunshine nodded gravely and said, ‘Yes, there I are.’
8
Diana and Doug came to visit, having booked three nights in a smart hotel near Regent’s Park, a good half-hour’s drive from the flat. Each day they arrived no earlier than ten o’clock, so that – as Diana put it – the turmoil of breakfast would be over, and if she said ‘Put that child down’ once, she said it a hundred times. Never had Chrissie felt so at odds with her mother; never had she seen, in such sharp relief, her father’s compliance, his preference for an easy life. When Diana was elsewhere, he’d whisper urgently to Chrissie how difficult she was being, how unsettled she’d seemed, how he wished she could just relax and enjoy life instead of seeming all the time to fight it. But when Diana was in the room, telling Chrissie that she was a soft touch with no idea how to give a child parameters – well, Doug was a veritable clam.
‘We don’t like to tell Sunny that she’s naughty,’ Chrissie said, more than once. ‘Instead, we ask her not to do what she’s doing, and point out why,’ and Diana would snort and say, ‘Who’s in charge here, then? There was no asking a three-year-old, back in our day. You told a three-year-old to behave, and in no uncertain terms.’
Stuart said, ‘Let it pass, Chrissie. You’ll not change her mind and she’ll not change yours,’ but it was easy for him to say: he wasn’t the focus of Diana’s judgemental remarks; he wasn’t part of the prickly Stevenson dynamic. It seemed to Chrissie that Diana felt conflicted by the presence of Sunshine – who knew why? – and this then made Doug a little uncertain how to behave, although he couldn’t help but be jolly, tickling her and blowing raspberries on her bellybutton at bath time. Diana hung back, watched from a distance, made remarks such as, ‘Don’t get her giddy, Doug, or she’ll be up all hours,’ and, ‘That silk rag can’t be hygienic.’ She didn’t know about its significance to Sunshine, because Chrissie simply couldn’t trust Diana with the information when her mood was so combative. When Chrissie said, ‘Mum, please, just be nice,’ Diana gave her small, humourless laugh and said, ‘You’re very thin-skinned, Christine. Are you getting enough sleep with the child in your bed?’
Small distressing cameos from her own childhood began to come back to Chrissie in fragmented pieces. A taffeta party dress, furiously cut into ribbons with pinking shears by Diana because Chrissie complained it was scratchy. Her mother’s red nails digging into her wrist as she pulled her from a game in the garden. And did Diana once slap the back of Chrissie’s legs for showing her knickers in the street, in a handstand? Did Chrissie have red welts on the back of her thighs for a day or so, or was that a borrowed memory, someone else’s story? She was convinced these things had happened until she shared them with Stuart who, never having heard the stories before, found them difficult to believe.
‘She slapped the back of your legs?’ Stu said, hesitantly, as if she was speaking a new language, and Chrissie said, ‘Yeah, that was a thing, then, “I’ll slap the back of your legs” or, “I’ll flatten you.” They were normal threats.’
‘Flatten you? What the heck? You’ve never told me that before. So, she hit you?’
‘Yes,’ Chrissie said, then, ‘No, well, sometimes, but hardly ever. Look, I’m not sure. It’s just, seeing her, hearing her, in this context – it brings back odd memories.’
She stopped sharing them then; his doubt and her uncertainty made her feel she was doing Diana a disservice. And anyway, Stu didn’t mind his mother-in-law; he found her amusing, and direct, and sometimes the things about her that made Chrissie bridle only made him laugh. So what if she didn’t want Sunny’s grubby fingers on her white silk blouse? Everyone was different, he argued, and the sooner Sunshine realised that the better. He could see Chrissie’s point, he’d say, could see why she might feel under attack, but he liked to give people the benefit of the doubt, and nobody could ever suspect Diana of not loving her daughter. ‘She’s just tough, is all,’ Stu would say. ‘She’s old school.’
Diana was charming to Stuart, though; all her adult life, she’d generally appreciated men more than women, and her manner towards him was lightly flirtatious, brightly attentive. ‘Your mother does like an audience,’ Doug said, not unkindly; almost proudly in fact. He and Chrissie were looking at Diana and Stuart in the back garden through the window of what had been the dining room and was now a playroom. Diana was regaling Stu with an anecdote, leaning forwards in her deckchair to tap him on the knee, then tipping back her head and laughing at his response. She was aware of her powers, aware that she still turned heads. Slim, groomed, always well-dressed in her capsule collection of narrow linen trousers and silk shirts and cashmere cardigans. Today she wore a large-brimmed straw hat against the sun, and a chiffon scarf around her neck and décolletage, which she was determined to protect from the dreaded crêpe effect. She still exuded her trademark glamour, her sixties Hollywood style. Once, before he’d met her mother, Chrissie told Stuart that Diana was only ever truly happy in the moments after being mistaken for Anne Bancroft, so when he was finally officially introduced, he’d said, ‘Ah, we meet at last, Barnsley’s answer to Mrs Robinson,’ and Diana had laughed delightedly and said, ‘Well, don’t get your hopes up, you’re not my type,’ which Stu and Doug found funny, and Chrissie found revolting.
‘Neither of them are paying the least attention to Sunshine,’ Chrissie said now, to Doug. They both looked at the child, who was filling a plastic bucket from a sandpit, and talking to herself.
‘She’s all right though,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t need constant mollycoddling.’
Chrissie folded her arms. ‘I didn’t say she did.’
Doug put an arm round her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. Outside, Diana tipped her hat so that the brim cast greater shade across her eyes. Stuart said something to Sunshine, but she didn’t answer, just kept up her industrious digging, and her private conversation, and Chrissie laughed and said, ‘See that? She’s giving him a taste of his own medicine.’ She knocked on the window, and all three of them looked round at once. Sunny waved, Stuart grinned, and Diana gazed with detached interest at Doug and Chrissie as if she’d never seen them before in her life.
Nina came again while Diana and Doug were there, and pretended she was meeting Sunny for the first time, which was almost awkward because Sunny obviously remembered the kind lady who’d given her a new dress. She was wearing it when Nina arrived, and she said, ‘Look!’, and held it out at the hem, but all Nina said was, ‘Very pretty, little kitten, don’t you look lovely!’ and the moment passed.
Chrissie called that garment The Dress That Changed Everything, and she thought it could end up as a song title. From the moment she put it on, Sunny had forgotten her fixation with the West Ham pyjamas and the little terror T-shirt, which were now shunned in favour of brand-new clothes, of which there were very few, because Brendan Cassidy had instructed them not to buy lots of lovely garments before she arrived, and to dress her just the way Barbara had, for at least a couple of months. But Diana and Doug had come bearing a pale-pink dress with a full skirt and a smocked bodice, and a deeper pink cardigan with mother-of-pearl buttons, the kind of outfit that Chrissie herself might be seen in, in photographs from her own infancy and childhood. The only garments Chrissie and Stu had bought before Sunshine came to live with them were a pair of denim dungarees, a red and white striped T-shirt, and some white denim shorts. They’d expected to buy more after the Whitstable purdah came to an end, but then Nina had unwittingly ended it early, by tapping into Sunshine’s delight in anything new. The purple holdall remained unpacked in the bedroom she still hadn’t slept in and Brendan had said he’d leave it be for a while, in case she regressed, but then Barbara and John could have it all back.
‘Brainwash some other kid into supporting the Hammers,’ Chrissie said, and Brendan said, ‘Damn, you’ve rumbled us,’ and they’d both laughed. She liked him, he’d grown on her, but still, she hadn’t told him they were having visitors. This seemed too great a flouting of the terms and conditions, even to Chrissie’s rebellious spirit. She still saw absolutely no harm in it, still thought – most of the time – that she was a better judge of Sunshine’s needs than the adoption team, and anyway, it was only Nina, and her own parents … and yet sometimes, at arbitrary points in the day or night, she was ambushed by the horror of being told they couldn’t keep her. Stu said, ‘I’d like to see anyone try and take her off you,’ and when she confided her fear to Diana, she only laughed and said, ‘Take her off you and give her to whom?’ which was a valid point, but felt more undermining than supportive, as if the only reason they would keep Sunny was because there were simply no other feasible alternatives.
Everything improved when Nina came, because despite all the complaints she made about Nina’s proximity to Chrissie and Stu and her involvement in their lives, Diana was more relaxed in her company, and when Diana relaxed, everyone did. Nina knew Diana very well, and had a special gift for dealing with her; she combined flattery with a kind of earthy humour, and on this occasion, she brought her Nikon and a tripod, and held a photo shoot in the open-plan back room, where the afternoon sun lit the walls and floor with a honey glow. Diana loved to be photographed. The camera was her friend; there was barely a bad shot of her in existence. Something about the symmetry of her features and her bone structure, and a certain knowingness from her long-ago shoots with modelling agencies and film scouts – how much to dip the chin, turn the head, place the feet; she never looked caught out.
‘Is it boring, being so bloody gorgeous?’ Nina asked her. ‘I mean, don’t you sometimes long to be just ordinary?’ She was snapping away while Diana sat immaculate and glossy on a simple wooden chair, her slender legs crossed, with Sunshine sitting side-saddle in her lap, now wearing the new pink frock, patient, demure, as if some of Diana’s poise had rubbed off on her. Diana laughed, and Nina captured it, a beautiful laugh, eyes flashing, her face alive for the lens, and Sunshine, as still and solemn as a baby owl. Nina took dozens of other photographs, but this was the one Diana chose, when the prints were ready. She didn’t want any of the ones of Chrissie and Stu, with Sunny larking about in their arms. Diana was irritated that they hadn’t changed out of their jeans and T-shirts, and that Chrissie hadn’t brushed her hair.
‘This is how my hair is supposed to look, Mum,’ Chrissie said, dragging her fingers through it and pulling an ironic face in the mirror. ‘The Chrissie Stevenson trademark.’
‘Ridiculous,’ said Diana. ‘You’re thirty-three, and now you’re in charge of a child.’
‘Have some decorum,’ Stu said, grinning at Chrissie.
‘Precisely,’ Diana said, and she patted her chignon, as if she needed to check it was still there.
‘Why don’t you call Sunny’s bedroom her playroom?’ Nina suggested, over lunch. ‘Leave the bed in there, obviously, and let her befriend it in her own time.’ So later, she and Sunny looked together at the toys currently stowed downstairs, and together they carried up a basket of Duplo and another of plastic animals, and Nina said, ‘We’re building a zoo; we’ll call you when it’s finished, OK?’ by which she meant, take a break, and it was surprisingly pleasant, thought Chrissie, to sit in the living room with Doug and Diana, talking about this and that, while Stuart picked at the strings of his guitar and the murmur of Sunshine and Nina’s conversation drifted down to them: small, contented particles of sound. For forty-five minutes, Chrissie left them to it, then couldn’t resist going up to Sunny’s room, where she found the child busy squashing animals into their Duplo pens, and Nina beside her on the floor, examining the photograph from the memory bag.
There was a profound, distorted silence, as in a dream, or under water. Chrissie had the advantage, in that she had three seconds to stare at Nina before Nina realised she was there, but it didn’t feel advantageous; it felt like the end of the world. Nina looked up and said, ‘Chrissie, I—’, but then Sunshine realised Chrissie was there, and her face broke into a happy smile and she said, ‘Look, Mummy, mine zoo,’ and there was nothing to be done, but admire it. Nina stood up.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, but Chrissie couldn’t speak to her, not yet. She heard Stu bounding up the stairs two at a time, and she thought, oh, thank God, because his presence would be a line of defence between herself and the way she was feeling. He looked in the room and said, ‘Wowee, check out that menagerie,’ and Sunshine said, ‘Zoo, Daddy.’ She sat back from her labours with a satisfied sigh, and he dropped down onto his haunches to get a closer look and saw the photograph on the floor, the memory bag beside it, and immediately registered the strange energy between Chrissie and Nina, one kneeling, one standing, neither able to speak. He looked at Nina.
‘Hey,’ he said, amiably, ‘what’s the story?’
She shook her head; her expression was almost sullen. ‘I just thought I could have a quick look, with no harm done,’ she said.
‘And there isn’t, right?’ He looked at Chrissie.
‘Let’s not do this,’ Chrissie said.
‘Do what?’ Stu said. He smiled and winked at Sunny, who tilted her head and made a strenuous effort to close one eye, but could only close both.
‘Let’s not pretend that this is fine,’ Chrissie said.
Obviously, it wasn’t the end of the world. Just because Chrissie felt that way, it didn’t make it true; certainly, nobody else thought so – even Stuart truly struggled to understand what was so controversial about Nina proving to be nosier than they’d realised.
Sunshine was oblivious to the ripples of tension between the grown-ups. She was tired after all the attention she’d received, and now she was drifting off on the sofa, her thumb plugged in, Silky bunched up against her cheek in her free hand. Nobody raised their voice, for what was there to be angry about? But still, there were all these layers of hurt and unhappiness, the day felt ruined, and Chrissie longed for everyone to leave so she could try to explain to Stu the betrayal she’d felt, when she saw Nina studying that photograph. Nina couldn’t adequately explain it. She said, ‘I was fascinated to see the bag, to see what was in it, and I knew you weren’t ready to share it, that’s all,’ and Chrissie said, ‘Then you should have waited until I was,’ and this was irrefutable.
Meanwhile, Diana was stirring her own whirlpool of drama by being deeply, theatrically wounded, because until this point, she’d known nothing about this bag of bits and bobs from Sunshine’s past. Nothing at all! And it was surely no less a betrayal, she said, that Chrissie had told Nina about it but not her, Diana, the child’s grandmother, for heaven’s sake.
‘Why must you be so secretive?’ Diana asked Chrissie, sharply, but quietly, so as not to disturb the child. ‘Why must you play Nina off against me in such a way?’
‘Hey,’ Stuart said, keeping it calm, keeping it friendly, ‘Chrissie doesn’t play those sort of games, Diana; she’s done nothing wrong,’ and he pulled Chrissie towards him and kissed her on the temple, which turned Diana to stone for a while. Doug was hopeless and helpless, and kept glancing miserably between his wife and daughter, his discomfort palpable, at a loss what to say or do, and Nina had her coat on and was packing up her camera lenses when Chrissie suddenly said, ‘Oh, fuck it, let’s just show everyone the bag. I don’t care any more; it’s just stuff,’ and Diana, speaking for the first time in fifteen minutes, said, ‘Christine! We did not raise you to use the F-word,’ and this, at least, made Chrissie laugh.
Stuart fetched the bag and passed it over for inspection, then sat with Chrissie on the sofa, his arm round her shoulder. Sunny sat up, stared sleepily around the room, then swivelled herself around and lay down again, her head in Stu’s lap. He combed her curls with his fingers, and she shivered and sighed and dropped back into sleep. Chrissie closed her eyes too, and listened to her parents and Nina, as they examined the bag, the little note with its pretty penmanship, the cardboard box the record had come in, and the photograph. Nina still looked sad, and when she said, ‘I’m really sorry, Chrissie,’ she received no reply, but she had the framed photo in her hand, now, and she didn’t try to disguise her fascination. Her creative eye was drawn to the scene, although, really, you didn’t need to be a professional to appreciate the artless beauty of the girl, the child, the sheltering oak.
