Michael had brought back a vanload of food and over the next week or so we all grew strong again. But in no time at all the need for money reared its ugly head again. We weren’t hungry any more, but we found there were other things we needed. Steph admitted that she couldn’t bear her clothes (the things she had from my wardrobe were, in truth, much too old for her, and she was tired of borrowing Michael’s shirts). She wanted to make herself something to wear, she said, and it wouldn’t be expensive. That’s fair enough, she’s young, and these things matter especially if you’re pretty, as Steph is. Her shape had changed, so she needed things that were looser. She had noticed that we had lots and lots of white sheets made of real linen, scores more than we ever used, and white linen would be just right for summer clothes and she knew how to make what she wanted. She didn’t even need a pattern, she said, just thread and a few buttons and a sewing machine.
Well, we hunted high and low for a sewing machine, even in the attics, but there wasn’t one. I thought it odd, but there you are. Although our money situation was much better, with what Steph was earning and with my rise in salary, we still did not have the wherewithal for big purchases like that. Never mind then, Steph said, but we could tell she was disappointed, and it was such a modest request. So Michael and I surprised her. One day when she thought he had just gone shopping for food, he came back with her sewing machine. I had told him, you see, to take a pretty little brocade-covered button back chair from one of the other bedrooms, and a pair of watercolours of Venice, and get what he could for them. It’s marvellous, our sewing machine. You can even do embroidery on it. Steph was delighted and said she would learn how to sew CHARLIE in big letters, and customise all his T-shirts, but in fact she’s never got round to it. But she set to work on the linen sheets while I minded Charlie. (Charlie, even if I say so myself, took to me from the start, and even though I couldn’t feed him myself, he was very happy in my care.) Steph worked quickly, so that after only a day or two she had made some pairs of pyjama-like trousers and simple tops, a wrap-round skirt and some dresses. Everything was loose and summery, draping and elegant, in simple shapes and layers that allowed her to move easily and gracefully. Michael could hardly take his eyes off her. But she only wore her linen clothes here, never to fetch and return Charlie. She wore a sort of uniform of navy trousers and floral blouses for going outside.
Steph got used to arriving at Sally’s to find both her and Charlie in a state of fractious semi-undress. During the first week she had walked into the house each day eating a bar of chocolate that she bought from the village shop on her way past. (She very soon got, with her chocolate and her change, a ‘you all right, then?’ from the man in the shop, whose name was Bill. And as a regular customer she was no longer invited to buy the bargain tent, which was still for sale.) But very soon Steph sensed that her chocolate-stopped mouth diminished her authority in Sally’s eyes and, more importantly, she realised that authority over Sally was going to be the key to success. So 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.