Crystal manoeuvred the double buggy into the lift, placing her foot firmly against the door to ensure that it did not close before she and her two children were safely inside. She had perfected this technique over the five weeks since she had brought her newborn daughter home from the hospital to their two-bedroomed flat on the eighth floor of a tower block in the Headington area of Oxford. She pressed the button to select the ground floor and waited as the doors closed and the lift began its descent.
The flat was far from ideal for a young family, but with house prices the way they were in Oxford, it was the best that they could afford. The alternative would have been to continue living with her father-in-law in his large house on the other side of the ring road. He would have been delighted to have them, she knew; and in many ways, the attic rooms that he had offered them were superior to what they had here – not to mention the large garden with a swing, climbing frame and even a tree house. But it was his house, not theirs. It would have been bad enough if it had been Eddie’s family home, but it was not even that. It was in fact his stepmother’s house, or rather the house that she had inherited from her first husband on his untimely death. True, she had insisted that they were welcome to stay as long as they liked, but she had her own teenage daughter to consider. No, it was better this way, even if they were going to be a bit cramped for a few years until they could save up for something larger.
It was all very different from the home in Jamaica that she had left, less than six months previously. Their house there had been a single-story building with a veranda at the front and a small garden at the back. Her parents’ house had been only a few streets away, next door to the church where her father was minister and her mother ran the Sunday School. Except during storms, the doors and windows were usually open and the distinction between indoors and outdoors became blurred. Here, apart from their small balcony, going outside involved this tedious journey in the lift, negotiating tricky fire doors that were inclined to swing closed as she let go of them to push the buggy and its precious cargo through.
Crystal sighed. It had been a wrench to leave the land of her birth and all her blood relatives in order to come to this strange, cold, dark country. When she had married Eddie – the exotic stranger from across the sea – they had planned to settle permanently in Jamaica. However, when, the day after she realised that she was pregnant with their second child, the computer company for which he worked closed down, taking his job down with it, it was inevitable that he would seek employment on both sides of the Atlantic. It was a bit of luck finding a job in Bicester, so close to where his father and stepmother lived. He could stay with them until he found somewhere for his small, but growing, family to live.
It had been another piece of luck that the hospitals in Oxford were short of nursing staff and willing to take her on to fill one of their vacancies, despite her imminent maternity leave. With their two salaries – and a generous gift of capital from Eddie’s father, which provided a deposit – they had managed to buy a flat in a block that had once been owned by the council. That was a start. They had got their feet on the bottom rung of the ‘housing ladder’ that everyone here seemed to talk about so much.
The lift stopped at the fourth floor and an older woman with a walking stick got in. she looked down disapprovingly at the buggy and stood as far away from it as she could within the confines of the lift.
‘Good afternoon,’ Crystal ventured nervously. ‘I don’t think we’ve met before. My name is Crystal Johns. I live on the eighth floor. Are you one of our neighbours? We haven’t been here long.’
She held out her hand and the woman took it, a little reluctantly, it seemed to Crystal.
‘Myra Knight,’ she replied. ‘No. I don’t live here. I’ve been visiting my son and daughter-in-law.’
‘Would that be Morgan and Shona?’ Crystal asked. ‘I’ve met them. Their little girl is about the same age as my Ricky.’
‘That’s right,’ Mrs Knight admitted, appearing to thaw slightly. ‘They said there was a new couple with a little boy moved in a month or two back.’
‘Well, it was February, so it’s three months now.’
‘And another little one, I see,’ Mrs Knight observed, nodding towards the buggy. ‘How old is …?’ she tailed off to avoid guessing the sex of the infant incorrectly or committing the monumental faux pas of referring to the baby as ‘it’.
‘She’s five weeks now.’
The lift stopped and the mechanical voice informed them that they were on the ground floor and that the doors were opening. Mrs Knight stepped out first and then put her hand on the door to prevent it closing while Crystal pushed the buggy through.
‘Thanks,’ she said gratefully. ‘It’s so difficult with the buggy being so wide.’
‘Well, both children seem to be being very good for you,’ Mrs Knight said generously. ‘Kayleigh always shrieks her head off in the lift.’
‘I expect it frightens her,’ Crystal suggested. ‘It frightens me sometimes seeing the doors closing all by themselves and feeling so shut in.’
They parted company at the entrance to the tower block and Crystal set off in the direction of the local recreation ground. She bent over the buggy and spoke cheerfully to her young son.
‘We’re going to the park, Ricky,’ she told him. ‘You’ll like that, won’t you? You can go on the swings and the slide and the see-saw.’
Ricky smiled and clapped his plump, brown-skinned hands in anticipation of the treat. He was a man of few words – ‘bopple’ and ‘bikkit’ to be precise – but, as his doting parents were keen to tell anyone who was willing to listen, he understood far more than he cared to let on of what was said around him. His mother smiled back into his eyes and then glanced towards her younger child.
Abigail, recently fed and changed, was sleeping peacefully with both arms lying above her head as if she were indicating surrender. Her surprising shock of red hair was standing up on end, contrasting vividly with the white sheet beneath it. The bright midday sunshine fell on her pale pink face, making her complexion look all the more pallid compared with the rich coffee colour of her brother’s skin. They made an odd pair, Crystal reflected as she conscientiously adjusted the sunshade attached to the side of the buggy to protect her daughter from the effects of ultraviolet radiation. She shook her head in amusement at the thought that this was something that nobody in her family had ever needed to consider before.
It had all been a bit of a shock when Abigail was born. She remembered with a smile the expression of amazement on the face of the midwife, who kept looking from her to the new baby and then to Eddie and back to the baby again. They had been the talk of the maternity unit – the black couple who had given birth to a white baby! Eddie had been so excited when he rang his father to give him the news. ‘You’ll never guess, Dad – she’s white and she’s got your red hair!’
Perhaps it was as well that they were living in England now. At least their daughter would not be the only white child in her class at school. And she had plenty of white relations here to prevent her feeling isolated in her own family. Eddie’s family had all been tremendously kind when she arrived shortly before Christmas the previous year. Peter and his wife had welcomed her into their home unreservedly. Eddie’s sister, Hannah, visiting from her home somewhere in the north of the country, had given her an array of second hand baby equipment, including the useful double buggy, that combined a transportable cot for Abigail with a pushchair arrangement for Ricky. Her children (a few years older than Ricky) were white too, but then she had married a white man, so it was less of a surprise. Genes were funny things. Presumably, Crystal must have a white, redheaded ancestor somewhere in her family tree, but neither she nor her parents had ever heard of any such person.