‘Shall I take her in the pool?’
‘She came in with me this morning... but she loves it. It wouldn’t do her any harm to go again.’
Charlie squatted down beside her. ‘Daddy’s home, little one,’ she said. But to Libby, our little one, the words themselves meant almost nothing. Her mental development had slowed to a snail’s pace after the age of ten months, when her skull had been fractured. Peter, who had been five then, had lifted her out of her pram, wanting to be helpful and bring her indoors for lunch. But Charlie, going out to fetch her, had seen him trip and fall and it had been Libby’s head which struck the stone step on the terrace of the flat we then occupied in London. The baby had been stunned, but after an hour or two the doctors could find nothing wrong with her.
It was only two or three weeks later that she fell sick, and later still, when she was surviving a desperate illness, that the hospital doctors told us she had had a hair-line fracture at the base of the brain, which had become infected and given her meningitis. We were so relieved that she was alive that we scarcely took notice of the cautiously phrased warnings... ‘We must not be surprised if she were a little late in developing...’ Of course she would be a little late after being so ill. But she would soon catch up, wouldn’t she? And we dismissed the dubious expression, and that unfamiliar word ‘retarded’.
During the next year we learned what it meant, and in facing such a mammoth disaster had also discovered much about ourselves. Before the accident, our marriage had been shaking towards disintegration under the onslaughts of prosperity and success: after it, we had gradually cemented ourselves together again, with a much clearer view of what was really important, and what was not.
We had left the bright lights, the adulation, and the whoopee, and gone to live in the country, where anyway both of us had our original roots. Better for the kids, we said; and knew it was better for us, too.
Libby’s state no longer caused us any acute grief. It was just part of life, accepted and accustomed. She was treated with good humour by the boys, with love by Charlie, and with gentleness by me; and as she was seldom ill and seemed to be happy enough, it could have been a lot worse.
It had proved harder in the end to grow skins against the reactions of strangers, but after all these years neither Charlie nor I gave a damn what anyone said. So maybe Libby couldn’t talk yet, couldn’t walk steadily, fed herself messily, and was not reliably continent: but she was our daughter, and that was that.
I went into the house, changed into swimming trunks, and took her with me into the pool. She was slowly learning to swim, and had no fear of the water. She splashed around happily in my grasp, patted my face with wet palms and called me ‘Dada’, and wound her arms round my neck and clung to me like a little limpet.
After a bit I handed her over to Charlie to dry, and played water polo (of sorts) with Peter and Chris, and after twenty minutes of that decided that even Evan Pentelow was a lesser task master.
‘More, Dad,’ they said, and, ‘I say, Dad, you aren’t getting out already, are you?’
‘Yes,’ I said firmly, and dried myself sitting beside Charlie on the rug.
She put the kids to bed while I unpacked, and I read them stories while she cooked, and we spent the evening by ourselves, eating chicken and watching an old movie (from before my days) on television. After that we stacked the dishes in the washer and went to bed.
We had no one else living in the house with us. On four mornings a week a woman walked up from the village to help with the chores, and there was also a retired nurse there who would always come to look after Libby and the boys if we wanted to go out. These arrangements were Charlie’s own choice: I had married a quiet, intelligent girl who had grown into a practical, down-to-earth, and to her own surprise, domesticated woman. Since we had left London she had developed an added strength which one could only call serenity, and although she could on occasions lose her temper as furiously as I could, her foundations were now built on rock.
A lot of people in the film world, I knew, thought my wife unexciting and my home life a drag, and expected me to break out in blondes and red-heads, like a rash. But I had very little in common with the sort of larger-than-life action man I played in film after film. They were my work, and I worked hard at them, but I didn’t take them home.
Charlie snuggled beside me under the duvet and put her head on my chest. I smoothed my hands over her bare skin, feeling the ripple deep in her abdomen and the faint tremble in her legs.
‘O.K.?’ I asked, kissing her hair.
‘Very...’
We made love in the simple, ordinary way, as we always did; but because I had been away a month it was one of the best times, one of the breathtaking, fundamental, indescribable times which became a base to live from. Certainty begins here, I thought. With this, what else did one need?
‘Fantastic,’ Charlie sighed. ‘That was fantastic.’
‘Remind us to do it less often.’
She laughed. ‘It does improve with keeping...’
‘Mm.’ I yawned.
‘I say,’ she said, ‘I was reading a magazine in the dentist’s waiting-room this morning while Chris was having his teeth done, and there was a letter in it on the sob-stuff page, from a woman who had a bald fat middle-aged husband she didn’t fancy, and she was asking for advice on her sex life. And do you know what advice they gave her?’ There was a smile in her voice. ‘It was, “Imagine you are sleeping with Edward Lincoln”.’
‘That’s silly.’ I yawned again.
‘Yeah... Actually, I thought of writing up and asking what advice they would give me.’
‘Probably tell you to imagine you’re sleeping with some fat bald middle-aged man you don’t fancy.’
She chuckled. ‘Maybe I will be, in twenty years’ time.’
‘You are so kind.’
‘Think nothing of it.’
We drifted contentedly to sleep.
I had a racehorse, a steeplechaser, in training with a thriving stable about five miles away, and I used to go over when I was not working and ride out with the string at morning exercise. Bill Tracker, the energetic trainer, did not in general like to have owners who wanted to ride their own horses, but he put up with my intermittent presence on the same two counts as his stable lads did, namely that my father had once been a head lad along in Lambourn, and that I had also at one time earned my living by riding, even if not in races.
There wasn’t much doing in August, but I went over, a couple of days after my return, and rode out on the Downs. The new jumping season had barely begun, and most of the horses, including my own, were still plodding round the roads to strengthen their legs. Bill generously let me take out one of the more forward hurdlers which was due to have its first run in two weeks or so, and as usual I much appreciated the chance he gave me to ride to some useful purpose, and to shake the dust off the one skill I had been born with.
I had learned to ride before I could walk, and had grown up intending to be a jockey. But the fates weren’t kind: I was six feet tall when I was seventeen, and whatever special something it took to be a racer, I hadn’t got. The realisation had been painful. The switch to jigging along in films, a wretched second best.
Ironic, to remember that.
The Downs were wide and windy and covered in breathable air: nice and primaeval still, except for the power station on the horizon and the distant slash of a motorway. We walked and trotted up to the gallops, cantered, galloped where and when bidden, and walked down again, cooling the horses off; and it was absolutely great.
I stayed to breakfast with the Trackers and rode my own horse afterwards with the second lot round the roads, cursing like the rest of the lads at the cars which didn’t slow down to pass. I relaxed easily in the saddle and smiled as I remembered how my father had yelled himself hoarse at me — ‘Sit up, you bloody boy. And keep your elbows in.’