Occasionally Good

“Erik won again,” Iain lied to Claire when he arrived home at half-past. “I lost ten quid. He cheats. I’m sure of it. Oh, my phone.” He swept it off the sideboard, slid it into the pocket of his battered old Harris tweed jacket.

“I found it in the bathroom,” Claire told him.

“What a long day it’s been,” he replied, yawning. “I’m off to bed. Is that the baby?”

Claire had been sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea when she heard Iain fumbling for his key on the doorstep. She walked, almost jogged, through the front hallway to let him in before he became impatient and rang the bell. “Ta,” her husband said. He had smelled of smoke and bitter and Boots No. 7 face cream. He had told the untruth about his defeat at darts and vanished upstairs with his reclaimed phone. That was the last Claire would see of Iain for some time.

~

One month old

Claire could not carry a tune. Iain laughed at her if she sang along to the radio in the car; it was a little joke between them. When their son William was a few weeks old and woke for a midnight feed, Claire changed his nappy and bathed him. It made him sleepy, she thought, though the baby book, and her own mother, disagreed. She did not sing William to sleep, her with her awful voice. Instead, Claire tapped Radio Four into her phone, lowered the volume to a deep murmur, and in the blue-and-white checked glider from John Lewis, she put the baby to her breast. Her right nipple still throbbed a little when William latched on, but the warmth of her son on her skin compensated for the pain. How lucky she was, she thought. The stitches had dissolved and the discomfort would vanish too, soon, said the midwife. “Book at Bedtime,” intoned the continuity announcer, and then a woman’s voice began to read to her. Today something about Henry the Eighth. Sir Thomas More, an Anne, and a Catherine. Claire knew the story from school, everyone did, but she knew to expect a twist in the tale, or it wouldn’t be broadcast. Divorced, beheaded, died, she thought. In a year or so, Claire could read aloud to William at bedtime, she thought. Divorced, beheaded, survived.

At 12:48, the shipping forecast came on, for the benefit of sailors and fisherman and insomniacs. “Viking. Cyclonic, mainly north-easterly, three or four, increasing five in north later. Slight or moderate. Fog patches. Moderate or good, occasionally very poor.” Before motherhood, if Claire by chance happened on the programme, with its jabberwocky phrases and mysterious geography, she changed over, but now she thought of the report as their lullaby, hers and the baby’s. She liked the broadcasters’ voices, the way they remained steady regardless of the forecast. Even cyclonic conditions failed to alarm them. Tonight’s conditions were read by a low-voiced woman. Through wind, sea state, weather, and visibility, she never varied her pace or stumbled, though perhaps she might, some stormy night. Claire listened much more closely than she had to the tale of the Tudors. Her attentiveness kept her from falling asleep as she glided back and forth, holding William close in the night-time dark. The rims of Claire’s eyes stung with the effort of staying open. William's were closed. All his limbs clinging to her like a starfish to a rock. He wasn’t asleep. Not quite.

She could hear Iain in their bedroom, next door; he snored, though he denied it when Claire told him so. “He should hear himself now,” Claire murmured to her little son. “Your noisy daddy.” Iain hadn’t liked the idea of the baby sharing their room and now Claire realised he had been right. This numinous time, this wakeful pocket, belonged solely to mother and child.

~

When she was a child herself, Claire and her brother went to their nan’s after school and had their tea there and did their lessons and stayed until their mother collected them when her shift at the chicken factory finished. “Do they make chickens in a factory?” Claire’s little brother, Peter, asked. Claire, to her later regret, only laughed at him.

Their nan sometimes listened to the shipping news, on the BBC longwave radio station, because Claire’s granddad had been a fisherman of cod way back when there were so many fish in the North Sea that no one could imagine their vanishing. Claire’s grandmother knew what the radio announcer meant when he said things like cyclonic, variable four, or falling slowly, and sometimes her hands would still in the suds, her breath catch. She would look at Claire, who stood waiting with the tea towel for the next plate, and say, “Ah, your old nan, pet. What am I like?” It had happened that one day, long before Claire, her grandfather’s boat did not return to Whitley harbour. It was a day that started fine, her nan would say, and ended rough.

~

Three months old

William cried at a little past midnight and Claire, who had fallen asleep on the sitting-room sofa waiting for Iain to come home, climbed the stairs. She gripped the banister to keep her balance. She lifted her son from the crib and settled with him in the extravagant glider. She rocked and fed William. Now he snuffled, his nose crushed into her breast, and she listened to the forecast. A low-voiced woman read tonight’s news. “North Utsire, South Utsire. Variable three, becoming south or south-east, four or five later. Slight or moderate, occasionally rough. Thundery showers. Good, occasionally very poor.” Claire pondered the “very.” How poor did it have to get before the sailors surrendered and came in to shore, or tacked to calmer seas? The waves in stormy weather grew high and frightening, like cliffs. Claire wondered whether the broadcaster had children, and if so, whether she always spoke to them in the same soothing voice she used on air. Claire imagined her own son becoming a fisherman someday, out on the North Sea, reliant on the shipping forecast to bring him safely home with his catch. Cod, probably, if cod still swam the seas when William was grown. Now he lay sleeping (almost) in her arms. The baby’s flower of a mouth let go of her breast but remained puckered, ready to suck. Time to put him in the cot. Claire gathered her muscles to rise up when she heard the front door slam; Iain, finally home from dinner. He had explained earlier in the evening that he and a few others from the history department had to take a visiting professor out for a meal. “Where will you take him?” Claire had asked.

“Her,” Iain corrected. “Carciofi. The new place just before you get to the park.” Claire puzzled a moment because she had seen that new place, when she went walking with the baby attached to her chest, and she thought it was called something else, something like “car seats,” and then she understood.

“Oh,” she said, and Iain looked at her, enquiring. “Nothing. Just, I’ve seen it, and it looks very nice. Enjoy.” She smiled and reached up to kiss his cheek, feeling relieved that she had figured out her mistake before betraying it to Iain. He would have laughed, and riffled her hair, and said, “Oh, darling,” and she had found, lately, that she did not want her hair mussed by her husband.

Now the baby stirred at the noise of his father’s arrival and turned his head toward her again. Claire sighed, sat, and glided some more. William, a fisherman! Not likely. She touched the soft fontanelle on top of his head with her lips.

~

Before she married, Claire had worked at Northern Dairies. Every week, the two other women in the front office invited Claire to join them on their Friday night out, and she always said she couldn’t make it. Claire’s was a temporary position, a placement as part of her Level 3 National Vocational Qualification in business administration. She didn’t really belong. “You have to come tomorrow,” said Sharon, the bookkeeper, one Thursday. “It’s Lizzie’s birthday.” Claire dipped her head and made sure to bring a card in the morning.

“What, no chocs?” Lizzie said, accepting the envelope. Lizzie’s job involved everything Sharon didn’t do, and the two of them sometimes squabbled about the boundaries. Claire learned to keep out of the way and to accept the tasks that neither woman wanted, like phoning customers who owed money and negotiating with the garage over repairs to the milk floats. She filed paperwork that no one looked at as digitization gradually overtook the office. There were two desktop computers, a printer, and a second-hand photocopier that constantly went wrong. Ringing the repair service became another of Claire’s tasks.

Lizzie slit open Claire’s birthday card using a paperknife that had bull’s horns sticking out the top. She glanced at the colourful image of a bouquet and, without reading the sentiment inside, said, “Lovely. Ta. And you can buy me a drink tonight.” She looked at Claire through well-lined eyes. A challenge, not an invitation. It was a kind of initiation into office life, Claire saw, finally.

“’Course,” she said, dropping her handbag into the bottom drawer of the gray-green, industrial desk she occupied. At coffee time, she bent down to add a coat of lip gloss (just the right tint for you, the chatty girl at the Boots cosmetics counter had said, someone she vaguely knew from the village), and at the same time she checked her purse for money. Enough to stand a round, plus return bus fare. She called her mother at noon, before unwrapping her sandwich. Her mother’s break had been at eleven and now Claire could be sure of leaving a message rather than having a conversation, or an argument.

“Mum,” she said. “I’ll be late home tonight. Office thing.” Her mother wouldn’t be happy but nor would she want to spend the money calling back. “Please don’t worry. It won’t cost much.” She tried to think how much was left in her account. She had a week to wait until payday, and had yet to write the cheque for her share of rent and groceries. With deliberation she ate the whole sandwich, even the crusts, and decided to save the packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps until later. When Peter was little, he had called them “salt and vigenar,” she remembered with a tiny pang. At least she had dressed nicely enough for a night out, in her pencil skirt and tallest shoes.

She hoped the others would not suggest a taxi, and they didn’t, but they did decide to stop for chips and gravy at the curry place, giving Claire very little margin for the rest of the evening. She might end up having to get a minicab home. The cobbled road made walking in heels a risky business, and they formed a line of three, holding each other by their elbows. The yellow pools of light cast by faux gas lamps gave the row of shops a haunted, Victorian cast, as though Jack the Ripper might spring forth. Claire knew this part of the town only from Saturday shopping expeditions, when muffled sunshine revealed shoals of used condoms in the gutters.

Sharon got the first round—three large pinot grigios—and asked Lizzie what she saw in her boyfriend. “Jay-sus. Don’t hold back,” Lizzie said. “I ask you.” She swallowed half the wine and shook her head so her straight, brittle hair flew. The ends hit Claire like pinpricks. “He’s good in bed,” she told the others, and shrugged. They laughed, and the fabric of the evening, for Claire, relaxed, like her tightest jeans after their first wearing.

“I sure hope he’s got you a nice prezzie for tonight. Wrapped, too.” Sharon said. She finished her drink.

“My round,” Claire said to the other two. They took pity on her poverty and asked only for an orange squash and a lemonade. She stood up from the sticky wooden chair and stepped backward, heard shouts, felt something fly into her hair and roll down her neck. She twisted round to see what had hit her, a bug, or a bird? Hands gripping her by both shoulders. “Oi! Get off!” she said but her voice was lost in a flock of rising curses— fuck, shit, hell, damn-- and suddenly she was surrounded by men. The one holding her shoulders let go and lifted up her hair.

“No blood. There’s no blood. Thank Christ,” he said. He turned out to be Iain.

“Here it is,” said another man, and he held aloft a steel dart with three red feathers in its tail.

“I’m going to kiss you,” Iain announced, and did, to surrounding applause. Claire withstood this attack as she had the dart, frozen, numb. The last time such drama had entered Claire’s life had been after her brother Peter’s head injury in Year Seven, which had completely altered his life. Altered the whole family’s life.

Iain stepped back, apologized, apologized again, and then said he would buy her a drink. He insisted on buying a round for all three women. “Don’t be daft,” he said, when Claire protested. “I nearly killed you. What are you having?” He brought them large white wines.

“Join us, then,” said Lizzie, smiling at him. “It’s my birthday.” Iain looked round at his own group, three men and one woman. They had abandoned their darts game and become involved in a conversation, and no one returned Iain’s glance.

“Thank you,” he said, “I would be honoured.” Lizzie and Sharon laughed at him. He dragged a chair over and they squeezed together around the small table. “Iain,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m so sorry,” he said again, turning to Claire, on his right. “We had no business mixing sharp objects with strong drink. We’re none of us any good at it. We’re historians. Of all people, we should know that.”

“You teach at the university, then,” Sharon said. “Your mates, too?” She looked at the table of Iain’s friends, where an empty chair sported a Harris tweed coat with leather patches sewn on at the elbows.

“Don’t hold it against us, please,” Iain said. “We’re fairly harmless.” He looked at Claire. “Though tonight was almost an exception. I’m so sorry.”

His apology, the fifth, or sixth, painted for Claire a picture of what might have been. She had never heard of anyone being wounded or killed by a bad darts player but surely it could happen. She imagined her mother hearing such news and suddenly she had tears in her eyes. Iain saw, too, and in a move gallant beyond her experience, pulled a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and handed it to her. “No, please. It was my own fault,” she said, “I got in the way.” She was afraid to mar the white square with her mascara and held it as the tears fell down her face.

“Go on,” Iain said. “Use it. Keep it.”

“Claire, silly,” Lizzie said, a little impatiently. “A miss is as good as a mile. You’re all right. And look at the time. Our bus goes in twenty minutes, girls, shall we make a move?” She stood, and Sharon, and then Claire.

Iain put a hand on Claire’s arm. “Stay, won’t you?” he asked. “You need a bit of time to get over the shock. I’ll be sure she gets home,” he said to the other women, as though they were her guardians.

A long time later, when Claire and Iain told people how they had met, Iain always made the story be about the dart. He would mention Eros (“Cupid,” he had translated for Claire) and his arrows. In Claire’s view, though, the story was about Lizzie and Sharon leaving her in the pub while they caught the eleven o’clock bus to Witton Moor.

~

He bought her a cognac, a strange, romantic drink, and one for himself. Iain’s friends left, wishing him a good weekend. He twined his fingers into hers. Claire felt the hot wiry spirit invade her belly and flow just under her skin. “I have to get home tonight,” she told him, before she melted completely away. “And the last bus goes at midnight.”

“Then it turns into a pumpkin?” he asked, and she laughed.

“I do need to get home. Really,” she said, feeling the thickness of his fingers between her own and the glow of the brandy like an aura around them.

“Do you have a child?” Iain asked, politely. Claire liked the intelligence of the guess and his directness, and she explained about Peter and his brain injury and how she needed to look after him on Saturday mornings while her mother worked the early shift and the day centre was closed. She did not usually tell strangers about her family.

Iain, who had already kissed her once, leaned into her and she thought he would kiss her again, but he passed her mouth and rested his lips on her ear. “Come back with me,” he whispered. “I’ll get you home before Peter needs you. Promise.” The buzz of his breath on her neck made her catch her own, and the skin tightened over her skeleton, as though she were being vacuum-sealed. She wanted to say yes, and she did. They walked, hands clasped, through the yellow streets to Iain’s tiny terraced house in the middle of town.

Claire awoke in a darkness edged by grey, first puzzled at the unfamiliar shape of the window, then remembering. She looked for the time and found Iain’s phone on the floor next to her bra. Five-thirty-eight. “Damn!” she said. “I have to get home. Iain.” He did not stir, which amazed Claire. She had an ear for any out of place sound, because of Peter. “Iain!” She touched him, lightly, afraid suddenly of waking him, of being seen. At the bottom of the stairs she found her bag, and her phone, with the number of a minicab company programmed in and seven percent battery left. She had to walk out of the house to find the address and when she did, the door closed and locked itself behind her. Her purse contained ten quid, enough to get home. She had not even left a note for Iain. What would he think? What did she think, for that matter? She got out of the cab at quarter past six. Her mother stood in the doorway of their council flat, dressed, furious. Claire’s phone had died when she tried to text. “I’m so sorry, Mummy. If you want my taxi, I’ll pay you back.”

“The bus will do for me,” said her mother. “I just hope he was good.” He was, Claire thought, through the sting of her mother’s words. She found Peter in the sitting room, watching something animated on the telly.

Claire spent Saturday and Sunday thinking about Iain. Might he be at the pub next Friday? Probably not. “We’re historians,” he had said, and she imagined having the courage to attend a history lecture. Would she be allowed? She had no one to ask. It occurred to Claire that all her school friendships had a fragility to them that had not survived into the real world. It had never bothered her. Her mother and her brother filled her life.

Monday rained, and Claire ate her egg sandwich and salt-and-vinegar crisps in the back room of the dairy while the others gathered umbrellas and crossed the road to the caff for jacket potatoes or hot soup. Lizzie had asked her about Friday night, first thing, in front of Den the supervisor and one of the milkmen, Michael, back early from his route and handing over the key to the float. Claire knew Michael slightly from school. “So, how was he?” Lizzie probed, tucking her handbag in her bottom drawer. “Our Claire pulled on Friday night,” she informed Den and Michael. “At the pub in Richley. That’s your patch, isn’t it?” she asked Michael. Michael nodded and gave Claire a mock salute as he left.

“Claire, we need another three hundred of these brochures. Can you call the printer? There’s a good lass.” Den the armored knight, rescuing her from the dragon.

“Well, come on, tell,” Lizzie said, but Claire had already dialed the number of the printing service. Between phoning and photocopying she kept out of the way until lunchtime.

Now, as she fished out the last crisp she heard the bell jangle over the main entrance to the office. It was still lunchtime but she thought she probably ought to go check the office, until she heard Den open his own door. “For me, mate?” he said.

“For Claire,” said a man’s voice.

Claire held perfectly still, crisp in hand.

“I only have her Christian name,” said the man, a young one, maybe a boy. “No surname.”

“No worries, mate, we’ve only got one Claire. And she is full of surprises. Put them here. Ta. Take this, yeah?” Claire heard the jingling of pocketed coins, and remembered her own voice, Friday night, saying “I work at Northern Dairies. In the office.” This sentence seemed to determine the course of her future.

Brandy, a bouquet, Iain’s fingers and her own. A dart. Small things. Lizzie and Sharon came back at one o’clock and stood in the doorway, awed. “They’re in their own vase,” said Lizzie. “That costs a bloody fortune.” Lizzie and Sharon decided Claire’s future, too.

~

Claire married Iain at the registry office in Richley’s High Street one Thursday afternoon in August, in the presence of her mother and Peter and a friend of Iain’s called Erik, another lecturer. “A mere anthropologist,” he introduced himself. “Not one of these fancy historians,” he said, grinning at Iain. Iain’s parents and brother had emigrated to Canada years ago, and he saw them infrequently. “Do they know we are getting married?” Claire asked, curious rather than alarmed. Iain had six weeks’ vacation allotted to him. He took two of them for the honeymoon, in Italy and Greece. “You have a passport, don’t you?” Iain asked her one morning in bed after they became engaged. She did, because of a school trip to visit World War Two battlefields. She had enjoyed the ferry crossing far more than muddy Dunkirk. Iain wanted to show her Italy and Greece for their honeymoon. It was Claire’s first time flying. She had imagined beaches, and purchased a new bathing costume, but ought to have brought sturdy walking shoes. Italy and Greece contained history, and most of it required viewing on foot.

By that time, Claire had finished her NVQ requirements and her posting at Northern Dairies. She settled herself and her small trousseau into Iain’s home and said she wanted to look for secretarial work. Erik told Iain about a vacancy for a clerical assistant in the anthropology department; Claire got the job. “Not much to choose from these days,” said the office manager. “The manager at Northern Dairies gave you a very good reference. He said you’re prompt and you can spell. Not like most youngsters these days, I must say. Twelve-week probationary period.”

~

Five months old

Tonight’s reader was a man. “Tyne. Dogger. North-east five or six, decreasing four later. Moderate or rough, occasionally slight. Fair to good.” Claire, disloyally she felt, rather preferred him to his female colleague; it seemed more fitting somehow for the men of the sea—and Claire imagined a ship’s crew as brethren all wearing yellow slickers and thick black wellies--to hear another male voice, reassuring them like a father. In a few years, not too long, Iain would take his son to the park and there they would kick a ball about. Someday William would have buddies, boys, then men, and they would joke and lark about, taunting each other, nevertheless essential to one another’s happiness. Unless William turned out to be different from other children, troubled, or troublesome. Would Claire know it if her son were peculiar, deviant in some way, or would she be blind to any fault? She thought about all the gruesome headlines in the papers. Some mothers spawned monsters. Sometimes the monstrous happened. She thought of Peter and bent to kiss the top of William’s silken head.

In her arms, the baby clenched his fists, sighed deeply, and rested his cheek on her exposed breast. Another minute and she could safely lay him down and return to her own bed, hers and Iain’s.

~

Claire had liked working in the anthropology office. The tasks varied from day to day, unlike the dairy. The students were her own age and could be kind when they needed something special done. Except for Erik, the academic staff ignored her at first, as though she were a new item of furniture, but after a few months they had occasion to ask her questions about herself, her origins, her husband. Some of them had heard of Witton Moor. “I know it,” said Erik’s wife, another lecturer. “It has a nice playground with a paddling pool.” Claire could tell by their accents that none were northerners, and that a good few came from abroad. For William’s birth they had chipped in and sent her flowers and a baby carrier she could strap to her chest. All of them had heard of Iain. “Your husband is hot stuff,” Erik told her once. “Going places, that man. Even if he is a historian.” They both smiled.

When maternity leave ended, Claire planned to go back to work when she could secure a place at the university daycare for William. The waiting list stretched for months. Her mother asked, “Are you sure? You could stay home with the little one, certainly, with Iain’s income…” Claire knew she was regarded in Witton Moor as a success, living in Richley, married to man who would one day be a professor. A historian. It made a nice change from pity, Claire’s mother said. They knew all about that.

~

Seven months old

William woke earlier than usual. Teething maybe, Claire thought. She listened to the midnight news and then to a portion of a book, this time about Joan of Arc. History everywhere. The shipping forecast at last, again read by the man Claire liked. “Humber. German Bight. Variable three or four, becoming south-easterly four or five, falling slowly. Slight or moderate, occasionally rough. Thundery showers. Moderate or good.” Claire pictured him drinking cold bitter coffee from a paper cup beneath the fluorescent light of a BBC studio. Not for him the high seas in thundery showers. Nor for Claire. She knew her own luck, warm and secure in a house on solid ground. Iain had come home in time to feed the baby cereal and applesauce before leaving again, to meet Erik at the pub. Erik was a new father too. He and his wife had adopted twins, Claire knew, although she had yet to meet them. Iain kissed Claire, wrapped his arms around her waist, and said, “You’re an armful, aren’t you? Maybe we can go shopping together when that baby weight is all off.” He said, “I’ll be home early. Just a pint. Maybe two, if Erik has time. We might want a go at the darts.” She had laughed, because darts had become another one of their shared jokes. It was half eleven now.

William gave a little squawk and Claire switched him to her left side. He settled immediately, but she waited for the wave of tiny tremors to go through his body, signaling the densest, deepest sleep. Was it REM, or non-REM? Claire could not remember the details, but she had read about it in an article she had photocopied for a class about sleep and human evolution. The phrase “sleep science” caught her eye. Mothers, she thought, must have been the very first sleep scientists.

~

Nine months old

“Thames. Dover. East or southeast five to seven, increasing gale eight for a time. Mainly fair. Moderate or good,” the reader intoned.

Which? Claire thought, suddenly annoyed. Moderate or good? There was a difference.

~

Eleven months old

William had his thumb in his mouth, humming at the same time, as though he were playing an instrument. Just one note, mellow, dozy. It was a new thing and Claire knew that he could get himself to sleep now. She might lower him into his cot, then go back to her room and creep under the duvet next to Iain. They could never speak at all of the phone call from Erik this evening. “Yes, sorry, Iain stayed in tonight,” Claire had lied to Erik when he rang Iain’s phone at ten-thirty. Claire located the trilling in the downstairs loo. “He’s a bit poorly and has gone to bed. I’m sure he meant to let you know.”

~

Claire concentrated on the shipping news. A fine forecast. “Sole, Fastnet. Variable, mainly westerly or south-westerly later, three or four, rising slowly. Slight or moderate. Moderate, occasionally good.” She thought about where her feet might take her after she tucked her son into his cot. They might walk to her bed and have her lie with her husband. Perhaps they would lead downstairs, out the front door, south-easterly, back to Witton Moor. Beyond, then to the North Sea, which tonight was moderate and even, occasionally, good. And then, who knew? Claire might try to join a fishing crew. A pitching, yawing vessel seemed exactly where she belonged, helping to haul aboard silver-scaled treasure. First, though, she would have to buy herself a pair of thick-soled wellies, to keep her footing on the slippery deck.