Bronya pointed to the contents. ‘What is that?’
‘What is what?’
She pointed again. I was for a moment alarmed that she might be about to dip her finger in.
‘Oh, that. It’s called crema.’
‘Is cream?’
‘No, is oil from coffee bean. Is very delicious.’
Why is it that, faced with a person with limited English, we end up talking in this pidgin variety, rather than setting a good but simple example of right usage?
‘You make like this – ’ She searched for the right word.
‘Purposely.’
She nodded. She was a quick study, and I suspect could have produced a passable cup if I had allowed her to try. I did not. I do better than passable, and I already resented the invasiveness of her desire to please, to know, and to participate. If I wasn’t careful, next thing I knew I would be making coffee for her, and then we would be having companionable lunches together. I needed her presence, but did not want it. Did not like the thought of her using even the downstairs WC, and had instructed the agency that she was to bring her own lunch.
I was making my way out of the kitchen – it was dangerous to linger – as Bronya began unpacking a bag of heirloom tomatoes, in their muted purples and greens, yellows and oranges.
‘What this?’ she asked, holding a large purplish one in her beefy hand, and thrusting it towards me aggressively, as if I had brought something dangerous into the room.
‘A tomato.’
‘Is not. I know tomato. Red.’ She looked at it again. ‘Is wrong. Gone off.’
I do not discuss vegetables with my cleaner.
‘Just put over there. On basket on table. Not in fridge!’
Lucy had a new best friend. This had already happened several times in her young life, for her feelings were both intense and shallow, like most children’s. Attached to a playmate, she was ferociously monogamous, but it rarely lasted. One year, propinquity bound her to a flaxen-haired waif called Jenny, who had joined the playgroup at the same time as Lucy. The two were as inseparable as five-year-olds can be, visited each other’s homes and begged to stay overnight, went to the park together in the afternoon and swimming at the weekends.
‘I love her so much,’ Lucy would enthuse, holding Jenny’s hand. ‘She’s my best!’
The next autumn Jenny was taken out of the group, because her mother could no longer afford it. Lacking its support, both mother and waif were desperate for Lucy to visit as before, or more than before. But Jenny was out of sight and nearly out of mind. Lucy had a new playmate called Gloria.
‘She’s my best!’ said Lucy.
At which point, clear that some response had to be made quickly, or Lucy would be forever lost to her daughter, Jenny’s mum – I never quite mastered her name, it seemed to come and go as frequently as she did, and on each of her reappearances I would have ask Suzy sotto voce what her name was – came up with a master-stroke and bought a puppy, a Shih Tzu called Milly, a bite-sized fluffball of vulgar gorgeousness, with a shaggy little face and an insatiable desire for company. It looked as if it had come straight from Hamley’s Cute as Fuck Dog Department.
Milly was wholly promiscuous, it even approached me skittishly on its sole visit to our house. I took an instant dislike to the creature, as tricky and licky as a schoolgirl on heat. I measured its stature, how far its stomach passed above the ground, and reckoned – the calculation was inexact, to be fair – that if I got my foot squarely under it, I could kick it at least three metres through the air.
‘How cute,’ I said, though even the besotted Lucy could sense my reservations.
‘She’s my best!’ she said happily.
The puppy ploy worked a treat, and Suzy was distinctly irritated by how easily manipulated her daughter was. ‘That bitch, she knew exactly what she was doing! Of course Lucy would fall in love with the mutt. Who wouldn’t? It’s like a paedophile offering sweets to kiddies, it ought to be illegal!’
Nothing to get heated up about, I counselled. Surely the dog was bought for Jenny, not Lucy? And why not? The little girl was now at home a lot, her best friend had abandoned her without a wave of farewell, and she needed a treat. It was quite the right thing to do.
‘Mummy,’ said Lucy, ‘I want to go to Jenny’s to see Milly. Please can I go? Please?’
‘But darling,’ said Suzy severely, ‘you don’t like Jenny any more, you said so.’
‘I don’t, she’s boring. But I LOVE Milly!’
It shouldn’t have mattered so much, but Suzy couldn’t reconcile herself to her daughter’s new obsession. Lucy visited Milly, dreamt of Milly, begged to go to Milly’s. One evening, as I read her a bedtime story, I noticed that she had a picture of Milly Blu-Tacked above her little desk.
She saw me looking over her shoulder. ‘Isn’t she dear!’ she said. ‘Do you want to see the pictures of her and me?’
‘Have you shown them to Mummy?’
‘I did,’ said Lucy. ‘But she doesn’t like Milly.’
‘Why is that?’
‘She says she’s too small. And she doesn’t like her name.’
‘Her name? What’s wrong with “Milly”?’
‘Not that name, silly. You know, her rude name.’ She giggled.
Lucy had quickly discovered a joke lurking there, which could cause a potent combination of merriment (hers) and irritation (her mother’s).
‘Don’t you just love her, Mummy?’ she’d say. ‘She’s a real Shih Tzu.’ A well-timed pause between the syllables of the dog’s breed, and you had: ‘She’s a real shit, Sue!’
Suzy found this mildly amusing the first time she heard it, but she was oddly prudish about our daughter’s language, and believed children ought not to swear, apparently forgetting that she’d been a foul-mouthed child herself. The fact that she swore constantly was an adult prerogative, which Lucy might look forward to. ‘That’s enough of that, young lady!’
‘A shit, Sue! Get it? Like a shit! And Sue! That’s funny, isn’t it?’
Later, I overheard her on the phone, apparently talking to the dog. ‘It’s me. It’s Lucy! I’m coming to see you soon. Did you miss me?’
She made some kissy sounds. ‘I do love you,’ she said, ‘I’ll see you soon.’ Before Jenny could regain control at her end of the call, Lucy hung up.
‘This has got to stop,’ Suzy said to me.
Only a week later it did. The sort of narcissist who thinks that everything that happens involves them would have felt responsible for the disaster. But neither Suzy nor I felt remotely answerable for Milly’s death, much though we had wished her to go away. Neither of us had warmed to the pooch, but it was quite impossible not to be moved by the tragedy.
Not Milly’s tragedy. There’s plenty of dead dogs out there, but I save my regrets for the demise of (a very few) members of my own species. No, this was Lucy’s drama, her first encounter with the death of anything more dear to her than a goldfish, and she – if I may be allowed an unfatherly thought – wallowed in her misery, indulged herself so utterly and so publicly that there was something luxuriant and performative in her grief. When she retreated to her room to be alone, for one reason or another, she fell silent.
She had no idea of death, of the brutal finality of it, the tearing physiological degeneration, the erosion of functioning, the inexorable return to dust. The unmitigated, unmanning awfulness of it. No, what Lucy – like all small children – reacted to was