Little Bee

Charlie started nursery that week, and Andrew missed it. I made a cake to mark the occasion for Charlie, alone in the kitchen one night. I wasn’t used to being alone in the house. With Charlie asleep it was quiet. I could hear the blackbirds singing in the twilight. It was pleasant, without Andrew’s constant bass line of gripes and political commentary. Like the drone note of bagpipes, one doesn’t really realize it’s been playing until it stops, and then the silence emerges into being as a tangible thing in its own right: a supersilence.

I remember scattering yellow Smarties over the wet icing while I listened to Book of the Week on Radio 4, and suddenly feeling so confused I burst into tears. I stared at my cake: three banana layers, with dried banana chips and banana icing. This was still two years before Charlie’s Batman summer. At two years old, what Charlie loved most in the world was bananas. I remember looking at that cake and thinking: I love being Charlie’s mother. Whatever happens now, that is the one thing I can be proud of.

I stared at the cake on its wire tray on the work surface. The phone rang.

Lawrence said, “Shall I come over?”

“What, now? To my house?”

“You said Andrew was away.”

I shivered. “Oh, goodness. I mean…you don’t even know where I live.”

“Well, where do you live?”

“I’m in Kingston.”

“I’ll be there in forty minutes.”

“No, Lawrence…no.”

“But why? No one will know, Sarah.”

“I know but…wait a minute, please, let me think.”

He waited. On the radio, the continuity announcer was promising great things for the next program. Apparently there were many misconceptions about the tax credit system, and their program was going to clear up a good few of them. I dug my nails into the palm of my free hand and fought desperately against the part of me that was pointing out that an evening in bed with Lawrence and a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé might be more exciting than Radio 4.

“No. I’m sorry. I won’t let you come to my house.”

“But why not?”

“Because my house is me, Lawrence. Your house is your family and my house is my family and the day you come to my house is the day our lives get more tangled up than I’m ready for.”

I put the phone down. I stood quietly for a few minutes, looking at it. I was doing this to protect Charlie, keeping the distance between me and Lawrence. It was the right thing to do. Things were complicated enough. It’s something I could never have explained to my mother, I suppose: that there are circumstances in which we will allow men to enter our bodies but not our homes. My body still ached from the sound of Lawrence’s voice, and the frustration rose inside me until I picked up the phone and smashed it, again and again, into my perfectly iced cake. When the cake was quite destroyed I took a deep breath, switched the oven back on, and started making another.

The next day-Charlie’s first day at nursery-my train was canceled so I was late back from work. Charlie was crying when I picked him up. He was the last child there, howling in the middle of the beeswaxed floor, smashing his little fists into the play leader’s legs. When I went to Charlie, he wouldn’t look at me. I pushed him home in the buggy, sat him down at the table, dimmed the lights, and brought in the banana cake with twenty burning candles. Charlie forgot he was sulking and started to smile. I kissed him, and helped to blow out the candles.

“Make a wish!” I said.

Charlie’s face clouded over again. “Want Daddy,” he said.

“Do you, Charlie? Do you really?”

Charlie nodded. His lower lip wobbled, and my heart wobbled with it. After the cake he got down from his high chair and toddled off to play with cars. A peculiar gait, toddling. A sort of teetering, really-my son at two-each step a hasty improvisation, a fall avoided by luck as much as by judgment. A sort of life on short legs.

Later, with Charlie tucked up in bed, I phoned my husband. “Charlie wants you back, Andrew.”

Silence.

“Andrew?”

“Charlie does, does he?”

“Yes.”

“And what about you? Do you want me back?”

“I want what Charlie wants.”

Andrew’s laugh down the phone-bitter, derisory.

“You really know how to make a man feel special.”

“Please. I know how badly I’ve hurt you. But it’ll be different now.”

“You’re bloody right it’ll be different.”

“I can’t raise our son alone, Andrew.”

“Well, I can’t raise my son with a slut for his mother.”

I gripped the phone, feeling a wave of terror rise through me. Andrew hadn’t even raised his voice. A slut for his mother. Cold, technical, as if he had also weighed up adulteress, cuckolder, and narcissist before selecting precisely the most apposite noun. I tried to control my voice but I heard the shake in it.

“Please, Andrew. This is you and me and Charlie we’re talking about. I care so much about both of you, you can’t imagine. What I did with Lawrence…I’m so sorry.”

“Why did you do it?”

“It was never meant to mean anything. It was just sex.” The lie came out of my mouth so easily that I realized why it was so popular.