The Umbrella
The minute they arrived at the adventure playground, Roger’s two sons charged up a long ramp and were soon clinging to the steel netting that hung from a high beam. Satisfied that it would take them some time to extricate themselves, Roger sat on a bench and turned to the sports section of his newspaper. He had always found it relaxing to read reports of football matches he had not seen.
Then it started to rain.
His sons, aged four and five and a half, had refused to put on their coats when he picked them up from the au pair half an hour before. Coats made them look ‘fat’, they claimed, and Roger had had to carry them under his arm.
The older boy was dressed in a thin, tight-fitting green outfit and a cardboard cap with a feather in it: he was either Robin Hood or Peter Pan. The younger wore a plastic holster with two silver guns, a plastic dagger and a sword, blue Wellington boots, jeans with the fly open, and a chequered neckerchief which he pulled over his mouth. ‘Cowboys don’t wear raincoats,’ he said, through a mouthful of cloth.
The boys frequently refused Roger’s commands, though he could not say that their stubbornness and pluck annoyed him. It did, however, cause him trouble with his wife, from whom he had separated a year previously. Only that morning she had said on the phone, ‘You are a weak and inadequate disciplinarian. You only want their favour.’
For as long as he could, Roger pretended it was not raining, but when his newspaper began to go soggy and everyone else had left the playground, he called the boys over.
‘Damn this rain,’ he said, as he hustled them into their hooded yellow raincoats.
‘Don’t swear,’ said Eddie, the younger boy. ‘Women think it’s naughty.’
‘Sorry.’ Roger laughed. ‘I was thinking I should have got a raincoat as well as the suit.’
‘You do need a lovely raincoat, Daddy,’ said Oliver, the oldest.
‘My friend would have given me a raincoat, but I liked the suit more.’
He had picked up the chocolate-coloured suit from the shop that morning. Since the early seventies, that most extravagant of periods, Roger had fancied himself as a restrained but amateur dandy. One of his best friends was a clothes designer with shops in Europe and Japan. A few years ago this friend, amused by Roger’s interest in his business, had invited Roger, during a fashion show at the British Embassy in Paris, to parade on the catwalk in front of the fashion press, alongside younger and taller men. Roger’s friend had given him the chocolate suit for his fortieth birthday, and had insisted he wear it with a blue silk shirt. Roger’s sons liked to sleep in their newly acquired clothes, and he understood their enthusiasm. He would not normally wear a suit for the park, but that evening he was going to a publishing party, and then on to his third date with a woman he had been introduced to at a friend’s house; a woman he liked.
Roger took the boys’ hands and pulled them along.
‘We’d better go to the teahouse,’ he said. ‘I hope I don’t ruin my shoes.’
‘They’re beautiful.’ said Oliver.
Eddie stopped to bend down and rub his father’s loafers. ‘I’ll put my hands over your shoes while you walk,’ he said.
‘That might slow us down a little,’ Roger said. ‘Run for it, mates!’
He picked Eddie up, holding him flat in his arms like a baby, with his muddy boots pointing outwards. The three of them hurried across the darkening park.
The teahouse was a wide, low-ceilinged shed, warm, brightly lit and decorated in the black and white colours and flags of Newcastle United. The coffee was good and they had all the newspapers. The place was crowded but Roger spotted a table and sent Oliver over to sit at it.
Roger recognised the mother of a boy in Eddie’s nursery, as well as several nannies and au pairs, who seemed to congregate in some part of this park on most days. Three or four of them had come to his house with their charges, when he lived with his wife. If they seemed reticent with him, he doubted whether this was because they were young and simple, but rather that they saw him as an employer, as the boss.
He was aware that he was the only man in the teahouse. The men he ran into with children were either younger than him, or older, on their second families. He wished his children were older, and understood more; he should have had them earlier. He’d both enjoyed and wasted the years before they were born; it had been a long, dissatisfied ease.
A girl in the queue turned to him.
‘Thinking again?’ she said.
He recognised her voice but had not brought his glasses.
‘Hello,’ he said at last. He called to Eddie, ‘Hey, it’s Lindy.’ Eddie covered his face with both hands. ‘You remember her giving you a bath and washing your hair.’
‘Hey, cowboy,’ she said.
Lindy had looked after both children when Eddie was born and lived in the house until precipitately deciding to leave. She had told them she wanted to do something else but, instead, had gone to work for a couple nearby.
The last time Roger had run into Lindy, he had overheard her imitating his sons’ accents and laughing. They were ‘posh’. He had been shocked by how early these notions of ‘class’ started.
‘Haven’t seen you for a while,’ she said.
‘I’ve been travelling.’
‘Where to?’
‘Belfast, Cape Town, Sarajevo.’
‘Lovely,’ she said.
‘I’m off to the States next week,’ he said.
‘Doing what?’
‘Lecturing on human rights. On the development of the notion of the individual … of the idea of the separate self.’ He wanted to say something about Shakespeare and Montaigne, as he had been thinking about them, but realised she would refuse to be curious about the subject. ‘And on the idea of human rights in the post-war period. All of that kind of thing. I hope there’s going to be a TV series.’
She said, ‘I came back from the pub and turned on the TV last week, and there you were, criticising some clever book or other. I didn’t understand it.’
‘Right.’
He had always been polite to her, even when he had been unable to wake her up because she had been drinking the previous night. She had seen him unshaven, and in his pyjamas at four in the morning; she had opened doors and found him and his wife abusing one another behind them; she had been at their rented villa in Assisi when his wife tore the cloth from the table with four bowls of pasta on it. She must have heard energetic reconciliations.
‘I hope it goes well,’ she said.
‘Thank you.’
The boys ordered big doughnuts and juice. The juice spilled over the table and the doughnuts were smeared round their mouths. Roger had to hold his cappuccino out in front of him to stop the boys sticking their grimy fingers in the froth and sucking the chocolate from them. To his relief they joined Lindy’s child.
Roger began a conversation with a woman at the next table who had complimented him on his sons. She told him she wanted to write a newspaper article on how difficult some people found it to say ‘No’ to children. You could not charm them, she maintained, as you could people at a cocktail party; they had to know what the limits were. He did not like the idea that she had turned disciplining her child into a manifesto, but he would ask for her phone number before he left. For more than a year he had not gone out socially, fearing that people would see his anguish.
He was extracting his notebook and pen when Lindy called him. He turned round. His sons were at the far end of the teahouse, rolling on top of another, larger, boy, who was wailing, ‘He’s biting me!’