The Way We Were_ A Novel - Marcia Willett [30]
‘Wouldn't you like to go, sweetie?’ Angela is asking persuasively when Tiggy returns. ‘You like Big Ted and Jemima, don't you?’
Cat shakes her head, burrowing deeper, as if determined to resist any offer of anything pleasant, yet Tiggy notices that now the twins have gone she relaxes her grip and begins to look around her.
‘So how long are you staying?’ asks Angela. She crushes her cigarette carefully into the ashtray and picks up her coffee. ‘Nice for Julia to have some company.’
‘It's wonderful,’ agrees Julia before Tiggy can reply. ‘She's staying for some time yet. No plans.’
Angela raises her eyebrows. ‘How nice to be so free of responsibility.’
‘I'm between jobs,’ Tiggy says – though she can hear the lack of conviction in her voice and she is conscious of the mesmeric quality of the narrow dark eyes studying her. It is an effort of will to remain calm, staring back at Angela so as not to lose face or to give herself away.
‘Very lucky for me,’ Julia is saying. ‘The children can be exhausting and they adore Tiggy’
Angela begins to talk about the difficulties of raising children with a husband away at sea for so much of the time but somehow Tiggy can't concentrate. She is aware of the need to protect Julia from something, although she doesn't know what, and she frowns and drinks some coffee. Cat slips down from her mother's lap and is making her way around the table, her eyes fixed unwaveringly on Tiggy's face. Tiggy forces herself to smile but the unresponsive stare repulses her and she turns to Charlie, who is beginning to grizzle again. She lifts him out of his high chair and joggles him a little, picking up a toy to distract him, carrying him through to the sitting-room where Big Ted and Little Ted are singing a song. Tiggy sings too, dancing Charlie up and down while the twins laugh, yet all the while the sense of uneasiness persists and she goes back into the kitchen.
With a shock she sees that Cat has got hold of the little Merlin. Somehow she has managed to reach him down from the dresser though her hands are barely big enough or strong enough to hold the little bronze and she is examining him closely. Tiggy's reaction is instinctive and immediate.
‘Give me that,’ she cries. ‘Give it to me at once.’
Cat stares at her with a bright, almost malicious look, and deliberately drops the Merlin. Julia and Angela rise to their feet as if on strings, both speaking at once, and the twins come running in from the sitting-room. Charlie begins to cry, frightened by the shouting, and Cat sets up a prolonged whistling scream over which nobody could hear anything else. Presently Angela and Cat leave; Cat still screaming and Angela looking amused as if the whole business is rather pathetic and utterly beyond her comprehension.
The Merlin is retrieved, made much of by the twins and placed on a high shelf safely out of reach of any of the children. Shaken by her own reaction to the episode – and to Angela and Cat – Tiggy keeps apologizing to Julia.
‘I'm sorry’ she says wretchedly. ‘I can't think what came over me. Honestly I'm so sorry … I can't think why I felt like that, especially about a child. I just instinctively disliked them both on sight.’
‘I thought it was just me.’ says Julia. ‘Angela will go on about Pete with that smug smile all over her face, but I feel guilty about disliking Cat too. The trouble is that every time I make a real effort to be nice to her she does something really horrid. Look, let's have a drink,’ and she opens a bottle of wine and they sit together at the kitchen table until their spirits begin to rise a little.
Charlie has fallen asleep on the sofa under the window, with the Turk curled beside him, and the twins go upstairs to act out their own version of Play School with Andy's teddy and Liv's rag doll. It is much later when they are all set to walk down to the post office in the village that, after much searching, they find the twins’ pictures for their father. The two sheets have been torn again and again, screwed into tiny pieces and left in a pile beneath the table.