Little Bits of Baby by Patrick Gale Page A

came home, only you didn’t see him. I did though, because I was watching, and he’s been there for ages.’
    â€˜Never mind. I expect he’s just another funny-man.’
    â€˜Like the one outside the station with all the plastic bags?’
    â€˜Yes. Now go and see if Samantha needs help in the kitchen, there’s a good boy.’
    Jasper abandoned his car and ran downstairs to his nanny while Candida carried on to her room.
    The house was one of sixteen in an early Victorian square in Stockwell. The square was making up for its maiming at the hands of wartime bombs with an ostentatious flurry of self-improvement. A firm of builders and a pet decorator were forever being passed from recommending hand to hand within the residents’ association. The Browne’s house was Jake’s, bought when Candida was a rising researcher and he won the bulk of their daily bread. Stockwell would not have been Candida’s first choice, or even her third, but she had come to appreciate its charms and had recently consoled herself by purchasing the bomb-site adjoining Jake’s property. The square was too close to the council tower blocks for the playground in its centre to be a suitable haunt for Jasper and his friends; Candida proposed to extend her garden over the land she had bought to give them more room for a climbing-frame, a swing and, just possibly, a very basic swimming-pool. She had also applied for and won planning permission to build a garage with a staff flat on top. When the children were too old for nannies, she would redecorate the flat and bring her mother to live there as a babysitter. Or Jake’s mother; whichever won the race for widowhood.
    She shut herself in, rapidly stripped, draped her dress into the pile for Samantha to take to the dry cleaners, then walked in her knickers to the bathroom. She washed off all her make-up, cooling her face and arms with a cold flannel and dabs of scent, then pulled out the sort of clothes she would never parade for Candida-Thackeray-relaxes-at-home photographs. She tied her hair away from her face with a piece of rather stained white silk and slipped into an incredibly cheap but flattering tube of creamy cotton she had bought while shopping in dark glasses for Samantha’s birthday. Then she remembered to peer out of the window to look for Jasper’s ‘funny-man’. Her first reaction was an involuntary, out-loud, ‘Oh no!’ her second was to dart behind the curtains where she could peer unspotted, her third was to replace half of the make-up she had just washed off.
    There was no mistaking him, even with his beard and longer hair. She had not expected him to look so normal. She had not expected him so soon or so unannounced. Then she reflected that this was no longer the Middle Ages and monks would not be expected to swelter through hot weather in thick woollen habits. She also decided to be touched at her childhood friend’s naive assumption that she could be paid impromptu visits in mid-week and found in.
    Why didn’t he come and ring the doorbell? Perhaps he had missed her return home. (Impossible.) Perhaps he had merely come to spy out the lie of the Land of Marital Bliss; see where she and Jake had ended up. (An idyllic afternoon had been spent with him when they were thirteen, trailing their biology teacher for hours to see what precisely she did on her weekends.) She ought to ignore him. She ought to draw the curtains and take a couple of hours’ rejuvenating sleep before changing for dinner. She flung the window up so hard the sash weights clunked in their shafts.
    â€˜I don’t believe it!’ she shouted. ‘It is you, isn’t it?’ He just smiled up and wayed. It was him. He never shouted in public places. For once the playground was deserted. He was sitting on a swing, long legs stretched out before him. He had lost weight; it suited him. ‘Will you come in or shall I come