Half Broken Things

she left the chocolate in her pocket for later and walked in smiling, pulling Charlie from Sally’s hip or lifting him from whichever location he had been dumped in while Sally tried to organise herself. Without speaking, she would fill and switch on the kettle, and then she would track down whatever it was that Sally was at that moment most frantic about not having immediately to hand: often her keys, the briefcase, her diary, a pair of tights, her other shoe. On bad days, it could be her first cup of coffee, the vital papers she had been working on last night, a tampon, and once, a new bottle of shampoo (it being, apparently, a surprise to the dripping, naked Sally that the bottle she had finished the day before and left in the shower was still empty the next). Then Steph would shoo Sally upstairs (or better, out of the door, on days when she was halfway ready to leave on time) and settle in a kitchen chair to feed Charlie, always ready to whisk him away from the breast and plug his astonished mouth with the bottle if she heard Sally begin her clattering and swearing descent down the uncarpeted stairs. When the door had finally closed behind her, Steph would keep the smile on her face until she heard Sally’s car start up and drive away.

At the end of the day Steph would be waiting, still smiling, when Sally banged in shouting that she was bloody knackered, dumping her briefcase, bag, keys and usually also carrier bags of shopping in the hall, and walking out of her shoes on the way into the kitchen. Charlie would be bathed, in a clean sleep suit, and fed; Steph always placed an empty, apparently drained bottle of formula on the table next to her elbow. Steph would rise, sit Sally down, deliver Charlie into her lap, make her a cup of coffee and, because Sally usually asked her to, pour her a glass of wine as well. If not actually asleep, Charlie would be sleepy enough not to mind how his mother’s arrival shattered the peace, and would drop off gratifyingly in her arms.

Steph was pleased that she did not have to say very much at the end of the day, beyond confirming that Charlie had been ‘absolutely fine’. In between slurps of coffee and wine, Sally would talk as if she had been forcibly gagged for hours, throwing out what sounded to Steph quite manic and incomprehensible details of the day’s confrontations: with colleagues, clients, pedestrians, idiots in shops, but also with machinery- chiefly computers and telephones- as well as the traffic and the weather. Although neither of them realised it, it was Steph’s very stillness that stimulated Sally into such torrents of speech. Because just in case there were something judgmental in Steph’s silence, Sally filled it with authoritative babble about how impossible life was and how she was managing to overcome its many obstacles. It sounded simply like an impassioned and colourful account of Sally’s heroic daily struggle with a world hostile to intelligent, well-qualified lone mothers, but the implication was that this was a struggle that a humble childminder knew little of and would be unequal to, and so had no cause to be smug about. Into her patronising commentary Sally continued to drop expletives and throwaway revelations so personal that Steph was further robbed of any power to reply. But Steph, though she did not become more talkative, grew not to mind. Sally seemed to speak this way to other people too, she learned, when Sally, answering the telephone and blaring down it (obviously in reply to a polite enquiry about how she was), gave more information about her cystitis than Steph could imagine anyone would need to know, then returned to the kitchen and reported that that had been her father-in-law, miserable uptight bugger.

***

It was while we were turning the place upside down looking for a sewing machine that Michael came across the silver picture frames that I’d torn the photographs out of in January. After I’d burned the pictures I’d put the frames away and hardly thought of them. He said we ought to have some of our own family pictures, and of course he was right. So he sold more of the old books and bought a digital camera. I had no idea what was meant by digital (I still don’t) but Michael laughed and said it was all done by computers and that he didn’t even need film! Sure enough he spent a couple of sunny afternoons taking pictures and he actually developed them in the study. I’d always thought you needed a dark-room. Michael did explain- he said he was new to it himself but if you spend a bit of time on a computer it’s amazing how fast you pick it up and in any case the computer tells you what buttons to press half the time- but the details escape me. I’ll never understand it. There were some lovely shots of Charlie and Steph, the garden, and even some not bad ones of me. You don’t notice how you change until you see a photo of yourself, do you? All that hair I have now! It has grown bushy as well as white and thick, but I fancy it suits me. When I noticed my hair in those photos I thought back to that night in the cellar and the label on the wine bottle, and saw how far I had come in a few months. Steph had taken some pictures of Michael, too; so we are all there, somewhere or other; the pictures are all still here, in their frames, all over the house. Steph and I had great fun trimming them for the frames and sticking them up all round the place. The very best one of Charlie was too big for any of the frames, though. That’s the one that’s still on the door of the fridge, under a toy magnet shaped like a carrot that Michael picked up at the garden centre.

Oh, yes- the garden centre. Well, I had begun to think seriously again about a tree for Miranda’s grave. In fact that was another thing. It became easier to talk of Miranda. We all learned how, even Steph, we helped each other, persevering even when it was difficult. Not that we can ever speak of her casually or without longing, even to this day. Still when her name is mentioned, more often than not one or another of us weeps. But there is a certain sweetness in that. We learned to speak of her often, always fondly and sadly, and one day I told them about my idea of a tree. They both said very firmly that I should have it. There was a rather florid Edwardian dinner service that we none of us cared for and agreed we could spare. We never used it, preferring the very thin, plain white porcelain. So I got my tree. I sent Michael off to the garden centre with careful instructions and he brought back a very large magnolia that we planted all together.

Michael had been amazed by the garden centre. It turned out he had never been to one before (well, why would he, with no garden?) and it was a revelation, all those tender shoots, just waiting to be put in the ground and allowed to thrive. He thought he would like to plant a proper vegetable garden. Everything he needed was there, he would only have to buy the seedlings and put them in. I can see it now, how his face was shining. He was already taking a pride in this garden, which existed at that point only in his mind. It was yet to be planted, but just the idea of keeping us supplied with fruit and vegetables for the summer made him proud. I at once encouraged it, so he picked out some more things we could do without (I left it to him this time to choose what- I knew he would be sensible). I believe it was more furniture from the bedrooms. He filled the walled garden with row upon row of fresh, bright little plants, and he tended them every day. There was no end to the care he took with them, and he kept the lawns cut and the flowerbeds tidy, too. We were all in a kind of heaven- not sitting about on clouds, you understand, but busy doing things that made us happy.

I do not think we were ever afraid that it might not last, but perhaps we were half-expecting that somebody would come and try to spoil it. I do know that we acted extremely quickly to stop Shelley.

The weather grew warmer. One morning Sally told Steph, unnecessarily, to be sure to put on Charlie’s sunblock, which Steph took as approval in principle that she might take Charlie out and about in the pushchair. That evening Steph told Sally that she had taken Charlie up to the manor to ‘meet my aunt’, omitting to mention that Charlie had, in fact, spent every single day there so far. The following day, Steph made a point of saying that she had taken Charlie there again and that he had enjoyed the walk up the drive, and she brought back a lemon cake for Sally ‘with best wishes from my aunt. She’s great at cakes’. After that Steph filled a vase with buttercups that, she explained, Charlie had been charmed to see growing in one of the manor paddocks. The next day she reported how ‘my aunt’ had been reading his baby books with him. Then Steph had a brainwave.

The following day, instead of taking Charlie up to the manor, she got Michael to come down to the house after Sally had left. Together they blitzed the place, resisting the temptation to throw most of Sally’s junk away, instead cleaning round it and tidying it into more rational arrangements. That evening Sally arrived home not just to the silent, smiling Steph and a bathed, fed and sweet-tempered Charlie, but also to a pine-scented and gleaming house. It was still cluttered, but there were at least enough clean surfaces to allow her to walk in and put her things down without having to move other things first, and then find places (by shifting other things) for those things she had picked up in order to make room for the things she had come home with. She seemed slightly confused by the tidiness, but grateful. She even offered Steph a glass of wine but Steph, anxious to get home and feeling fairly sure that she was unlikely to enjoy the Cфtes du Rhфne that Sally was uncorking, declined, and slipped off.

‘Sally,’ Steph said the next morning, ‘you don’t mind me taking Charlie up to the manor, do you? I thought it’d be nice to have him up there and save messing up the house. Now it’s all nice, shame to get it all, you know.’

‘No, I don’t mind, you take him, it’s fine,’ Sally said, slightly absently, looking round the kitchen. The wine bottle she had emptied the night before stood on the draining board. ‘But he does live