The Right Man Read Free Page A

if you believe in breakfast, and keep it engaged
until bedtime. Coast along in fourth or pause to admire the view and some other
nippier vehicle will overtake you, probably picking up your passengers on the
way. I suppose it’s the same in any field of entrepreneurial work, which covers
almost everything these days since the privatizations of the late eighties. It
seems as if, traditionally, mothers and midwives knew what they were doing
keeping men away from childbirth. It’s not so much that men weren’t interested
in babies but that the women couldn’t afford to risk having their husbands lose
the plot, going all philosophical and sentimental on them, taking their hands
off the steering wheel of commerce when, as new mothers, they were most in need
of security and support, and money of course.
    Not
that I’ve gone completely soft or anything. Wood and Walters no. But no one
ever said on their death bed, ‘I wish I’d spent more time at the office’, did
they? Well, maybe my father, and that speaks for itself. To get where I am
required a finely tuned killer instinct and I don’t know whether I will be able
to stay here without it. Nowadays, for instance, when I put down the phone and
look at my watch, I’m aware of another timetable, running alongside my own: 12.30
p.m. nursery pickup — and, as of this September, 3.30 p.m. big school pick-up
—6.00 p.m. bathtime, 6.30 story and bed. The women in the office are pretty
good on the whole about me turning up later than I used to, and I leave early
now on three afternoons a week, whenever possible. Tilda’s got an
eight—year-old, so she’s the most sympathetic, but she has a live-in granny, so
it’s easier for her. Naomi got a bit stroppy at the beginning but that was fair
enough, I suppose; I was turning up zombified from lack of sleep and she had to
take the load, especially through Grace’s ear infection stage. She did badmouth
Liz a fair bit I know, but not to my face, to the others.
    The
trouble is, my concentration’s gone somewhere without a paddle. These days I
seem to have a sort of twenty-four-hour undertow of concern that something bad
might happen to Grace. It’s my fault she was born after all, I got her her
first break as ‘twere, she didn’t ask for it. She didn’t write in with hopeful
ten-by-eights asking to be taken on. Well, mine and Liz’s fault, obviously.
When she stopped waking through the night I just couldn’t get myself back into
uninterrupted sleeping patterns, so I started having these recurrent nightmares
about her. Funny how the system plays tricks on one. They’d always involve some
danger she was in which I would have to get her out of by putting myself in it
instead. A kind of Abraham and Isaac in reverse. For instance, we’d be walking
along the cliffs in Cornwall or somewhere windy, the path would be steep and
rerouted due to some of the cliff having fallen away. There would even be a
danger sign and a rickety clanking fence. Grace was at the edge, not being
naughty, just there, almost as if I had put her there. The limestone began to
crumble and tufts of gorse pulled away from the path. A loud sea below
competing with the roar of the wind in our faces. The ground beneath her feet
didn’t crumble fast but slowly enough to present me with the main dilemma of
the dream, almost as if it were written on the wooden sign. I would have to
throw myself over the cliff in order to spare Grace. The cliff only needed to
claim one of us. Would I throw myself to the shingle below? I would. Indeed it
was almost as if I had brought us to this dangerous point for that very
purpose. Some kind of primordial deal with the devil.
    And
that’s another thing, since the little bleeder was born I seem to have been in
touch with something elemental, something primeval. Some force which isn’t
about happy couples putting up wallpaper together like in the ads, or about
couples at all, something which is altogether unknowable, which is a