‘Anyway, if you do happen to find anything amiss…’ I said, putting my hand against the glass to stop her. I felt suddenly alarmed as if my visit might have repercussions for her once I had left.
‘Jean!’
We both winced this time and Jean all but scrambled for the inner door. I was on the point of turning away when her face loomed briefly again through the crack. She paused for a second as though daring herself to speak. Then changed her mind and was gone.
I found Cath in the garden, ankle deep in manure. For a woman who’d made hard work of a leisurely stroll back from the pub, she seemed an agile gardener. Despite the fag clamped between her lips and a certain amount of grunting, her spade sliced through the muck in rhythmic fashion. Even I, a novice in the garden, could recognize the effort that must have gone into transforming this arid patch of ground into a fertile bed of rich loam.
‘Well, if it isn’t the second Mrs De Winter!’ she said, ditching the fag when she saw me approaching and propping herself on her spade. I smiled doubtfully. ‘I’m about due a coffee break. Care to join me?’
I followed her down the herringbone brick path, geraniums frothing, cabbage roses swinging in her wake. Her garden seemed to be everything she wasn’t – lush and blowsy and feminine. I loved it.
She hoiked her boots off at the back door, and, seeing me bending to remove my own shoes, she tutted, and told me not to be daft. The kitchen, like the garden, was organized chaos – seedlings sprouting on window ledges, dog-eared cookbooks bowing a timber shelf. She had a good eye, I thought. The table and chairs, though rustic, had the patina of proper antiques and a cabinet of to-die-for vintage crockery took up most of one wall. I sat down on the old church pew in front of the window, and leaned back on a needlepoint scatter cushion embroidered with the words ‘Team Cunt’.
‘Well, I know what you mean,’ said Cath, when I shared my concerns about Jean and Gordon’s marriage, ‘he’s a bit of a sergeant major type, for sure, but they’re a different generation, aren’t they…?’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ I said, doubtfully. ‘He seems like a tyrant to me. Her children don’t get on with him either, she told me…’
Cath looked taken aback.
‘I never realized they had any,’ she said and I wondered whether Jean had just been feeling unusually chatty on the night she and I had met, or whether she had singled me out for her confidences on purpose. I shivered, and thinking it was the draught from the open door, Cath pushed it to with her foot.
‘Ah well,’ I said, taking a slurp of coffee from my Clarice Cliff cup, ‘just have to keep an eye, I suppose.’
‘Aye,’ agreed Cath, and soon we were chatting innocuously about fruit trees and badgers and parking headaches, both here and in London. She told me how a parking ticket had led to a chance encounter with a TV producer, which had in turn led to a regular gardening slot on daytime TV. I gave her a potted (and sanitized) history of my life in London and had a good old moan about Ethan and Gabe and how tricky things could be with stepsiblings.
She told me about the excitement there had been in the hamlet when the SOLD sign had appeared outside our cottage.
‘… Then nothing happened for ages, and when they delivered the skip, Min and Ray just went,’ she nodded grimly, ‘holiday home.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh well, you know, no one’d moved in, even though it was perfectly habitable and there’s all this expensive work being done – John Lewis deliveries. The usual signs…’
She narrowed her eyes shrewdly and I bit my lip in mock contrition, even though I had nothing to feel contrite about, not in that regard, anyway.
‘… But then Min buttonholed Nick on the lane,’ Cath went on, ‘and he told us you were moving here. Cue rejoicing.’
‘Rejoicing…?’ I said.
‘Well, relief, anyway. And of course, speculation, because we’d met Mister, but where on earth was Missus?’
I closed my eyes against a rush of memories…
… a bright room, the smell of plug-in air freshener overlaying a less pleasant institutional tang of disinfectant and nylon carpet. Breeze from a child-locked window stirring vertical blinds, the chains between them tinkling like Buddhist bells. A single bed and next to it on the bedside table, a plastic jug filled with water and a plastic-wrapped plastic glass. A paperback book, its spine unbroken, and a copy of Grazia still pristine. The creak of the plastic-covered mattress beneath me, as I lifted my head off the pillow, and squinted at the hazy figure entering the room.
‘Hello, Karen,’ she’d said, and it was as though she was speaking to me from twenty leagues deep, through breathing apparatus, ‘I’ve brought your medication…’
‘… High-powered job; foreign travel, power suits,’ Cath was saying when I zoned back in. It took me a moment to register that she was describing the woman they’d expected me to be.
‘We decided you’d sweep in at the last minute and tell Nick you hated the kitchen tiles and he’d have to change them…’ she chuckled.
‘You must have been sorely disappointed when I turned up!’ I said.
‘Relieved, my dear, relieved.’
We talked about books after that and cooking and about our neighbours, guardedly at first and then less guardedly. Her take-off of Douglas Gaines had me weeping with guilty laughter. At last, when she was rolling her seventh consecutive cigarette, she told me about her girlfriend Annie, who had died of ovarian cancer.
‘Oh, don’t look like that,’ she said, seeing my face grow solemn. ‘She’d have hated that. Wee lassie packed more life into her thirty-eight years than I’ll get if I live to be a hundred. She’d have cracked you up. She did me…’ she shook her head fondly, ‘the mouth on her…’
And seeing the expression on Cath’s face, I thought for one mad shameful moment that I’d willingly die right there and then if I thought Nick would remember me with a look like that.
‘What do you miss most about her?’ I asked timidly. She threw me a quick glance, as if weighing up whether our brief acquaintance could bear the burden of such intimacy, then pulled on her cigarette until it was down to its cardboard filter, held the smoke in her lungs for what seemed an age, and exhaling, said, ‘The person I was when I was with her.’
Cath looked down in apparent surprise at the dimp between her dirty fingertips and with a smile and a shrug, pushed it into the soil of a nearby plant pot.
‘Damn!’ I said, glancing at the clock on her kitchen wall. ‘My clay’ll be rock hard!’
Even then, she kept me for another ten minutes quizzing me about my pottery project and it wasn’t until I was back on the lane that I remembered I hadn’t asked whether her car had been tampered with. Then again, it didn’t seem so important any more. So what if someone had slashed Nick’s tyre. Shit happened. I knew that better than most. But I knew now I had someone to turn to when it did. I had a friend.
I caught the clay just in time. It was starting to dry out but I ladled palms full of water onto it and set it spinning again. Once I had coaxed it back to life, I thrust my thumb gently into its slippery centre and hollowed it gradually, lovingly, into a bulbous vessel, about ten inches high and eight in diameter, tapering to a slender neck. It wouldn’t have made a vase because it would barely have fitted three blooms. It wouldn’t have made a storage jar, because you’d never have got anything in or out. It was a pot to no purpose, a pot of nothing – just as I’d meant it to be.
Holding my breath, I rotated the wheel very gently and slipping the wire under the base, carried my pot, balanced precariously on its bat, over to the drying rack. It was a humble thing really, a prototype, but already I was itching to make another. I reached for my phone to see if I had time. I expected it to be two thirty – three at the latest. It was twenty-five to six. No wonder I felt faint – I’d had nothing to eat all day.
I dialled Nick’s number, puzzled not to have heard from him already. It clicked straight to voicemail and I hung up quickly before t
he familiar message could kick in. ‘Nick Mulvaney here, can’t get to the phone right now. You know what to do.’ No, I didn’t know what to do, that was the problem. What were you supposed to do when a recording of the voice you woke up to every morning still turned your guts into a smoothie? OK, so he was on the tube. That was something. I summoned the train timetable to my mind’s eye. He’d most likely make the 6.04 from Paddington.
I glanced down at my clay-streaked jeans and gave my underarms an experimental sniff. I could just about get the dinner on, have a quick shower and still be at the station in time to meet him.
Heading back to the cottage, I almost tripped over a plant pot upended on the flagstones near the front door, a casualty of the wind, I assumed. Roots and earth had collapsed through the cracked terracotta and my little olive sapling was snapped in two. This morning I’d have seen it as an omen – clear proof that the forces of nature, the elements themselves – were conspiring against me. Now, it scarcely registered. I swept the debris to one side, so Nick shouldn’t have to walk through it, and made a mental note to re-pot it tomorrow.
The kitchen was a mess. I’d meant to get back to it sooner, but the day had got away from me. The sink was full of washing up and the compost bin had attracted a swarm of flies, which were taking it in turns to dive-bomb my dish of marinating steaks. I could have sworn I’d put it in the fridge. I frowned, trying to think back through the labyrinth of the day’s events, but it was hazy and unreachable as all my memories seemed to be these days. I knew what Nick would say, ‘It’s those bloody happy pills,’ but that wasn’t it, I was sure. He hated that I was still taking them because they were a reminder of my mental fragility, which he loathed not only because it was inconvenient and embarrassing, but also because he felt responsible for it. I’d tried to tell him it wasn’t that – that Jude got brain fog, too. That it was a common side-effect of the menopause. Anyway, it scarcely mattered now. What mattered was getting my shit together.
I knew I ought to have rinsed the meat under the tap and started again with a fresh marinade, but Nick could get tetchy if dinner was late.
What the eye didn’t see, I thought, and covered it with a clean tea-towel.
By the time I’d got things ship-shape and put some spuds in the oven it was six forty-five. I had just enough time to shower and get glammed up before I went to meet him. I awarded myself a small glass of wine for being a good and sane lady for a whole day and took it upstairs with me. Stopping off on the way to turn on the shower (it took an age for the water to run hot), I went into the bedroom, stripped off my filthy clothes and dialled Nick’s number again. I liked the idea that he would pick up in a carriage full of commuters, his tone, inevitably curt and impersonal, and that I should be here, alone and naked. I imagined saying his name, telling him what I’d like him to do to me when he got home. I swayed my hips a little, in time to the ringtone, thinking of his hands on me, inside me…
Voicemail again.
Oh well, the signal could be dodgy until you cleared Reading…
All the same, I was beginning to get the familiar nag of anxiety, of distrust. I fought it back, took another sip of wine, jabbed out a quick text message: ‘Cant waIT to see you whaT tine meet train? XOXO,’ and pressed ‘send’.
By now steam was billowing out of the bathroom. I propped the phone on the bathroom shelf where I should see it flash if he rang and stepped into the shower. Hot water thundered on my head and the alcohol took its effect. I felt faint, but pleasantly so – as if I were being purged. I bent down to reach the shampoo and was overcome with dizziness. Squatting there in the shower tray, trying to summon the energy to stand again, I felt a dragging sensation in my inner thighs and looking down, saw a red tadpole swim out of me and elongate into a dash, a line, a strand, before being whisked away in an eddy of water. Damn. Nothing for five months and the one night it really mattered, this…
By the time I was soaped, shampooed and rinsed, I couldn’t see out of the shower at all. I made a porthole with my fist in the steamed-up glass and cursed when I saw the message alert on my phone. I stumbled out of the cubicle and snatched it to within an inch of my face.
‘Sorry babe, fuck up with the bid. Back tomorrow now. Call you in the a.m. X’
It seemed then as if it had always been inevitable. As if Nick’s text had been waiting in the ether and I had somehow willed it into my inbox through my own neediness and fear. I went through to the bedroom and stood at the window, hugging my towel around me, watching the sky turn gradually from sapphire to cobalt to navy, my pale reflection in the glass growing more visible with each subtle change of hue until by the time dusk had fallen, I could see myself almost as if in a mirror – rats’ nest hair dribbling water onto slumped shoulders, eyes like craters in a greyish moon. However hard I tried to keep up, it seemed Nick would always be one step ahead.
Here I stood, where they had stood, arms entwined, heads touching. Except that they hadn’t. I had conjured the whole thing from fear, from dread; from a sense of unworthiness. Just as I was doing now when I thought of them clinking glasses at the Malmaison, or romping in a four poster at that Hertfordshire Spa – the images so vivid I might have been watching them on TV. This was the rat-run of the mind; the obsessional thought-maze that the psych had warned me about. This paranoia, not Nick, was the problem.
I lowered the blind and plopped down on the end of the bed as if someone had cut my strings. I’d like to say what I felt was despair, but it wasn’t even as powerful as that. It was a nothing feeling. As if I didn’t exist; as if I shouldn’t exist. As if I were in the way. The temptation to crawl under the duvet and write the evening off altogether was overwhelming. But I’d left candles burning downstairs and the steak was still out on the work surface. I should eat. Self care. That was important. That had been the ‘take-away’ from all that expensive therapy I’d had. How could I expect Nick to love me if I didn’t love myself?
I didn’t bother to change out of my dressing gown, but put a comb through my hair so I shouldn’t feel too much like an inmate. The house felt suddenly huge, downstairs a very long way away. Rivulets of water dripped off my wet hair and down inside my robe. Glancing in the landing mirror as I passed, I looked blurred and insubstantial – transparent, almost. I wondered if I might actually be dissolving. Is personhood contingent on place? Because here, now, in this house where I didn’t belong, I felt like a ghost. The night felt more real than I did. It leaned in now, breathing its heady scents through the open window – sweet perfumes of nicotiana and stock but beneath them, the rotting reek of silage. It was as if a monster had dined on human flesh then freshened its breath with a parma violet…
Telly. That’s what I needed. Canned laughter, adverts. I switched it on. The news. I picked up the remote to change the channel and then felt bad and left it, turning up the volume so that I could hear it in the kitchen, the reporter’s voice plummy and compassionate. ‘Rashida lost three family members in the raid…’
At least now I didn’t have to do any driving. I could take the edge off. I sloshed some wine into a fresh glass, took a slug, lit the gas and put the griddle pan on it. I hoiked one of the baked potatoes out of the oven, tossing it from palm to palm, then dumping it onto a plate, next to a handful of salad. The pan shimmered with heat. I stabbed the smaller of the steaks with a fork and was lowering it in when I noticed what I thought was a thread from the tea-towel clinging to it. I made to pluck it off and it moved. A closer look revealed three, four, five such threads, wriggling over the surface of the meat. Bile came into my throat and I flung the steak back into the dish beside the other one, the surface of which, I could now see, was alive with tiny maggots. By now, the pan was smoking filthily. I grabbed its cast iron handle and had moved it to the back burner before my brain registered the searing pain across my palm. I stared down, bewildered and then thrust my hand under the tap. Water bounced back in my face and at the same moment, the smoke alarm went off. I groped my way to the back door and fl
ung it open, wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my dressing gown and then, standing on tiptoe, stabbed at the alarm with my outstretched finger. Just as the kitchen alarm peeped its last, the one in the living room kicked off.
The noise was an assault now, an affront to the holy darkness that shrouded the house, a siren telling the world that a madwoman lived here, who couldn’t keep a steak fresh, let alone a marriage. I was starting to panic. Water still clung to my eyelashes, blurring my vision and the urgent screech of the alarm seemed to fluctuate wildly in pitch and volume. It felt like the outward manifestation of my own inner turmoil and I wanted it to stop. It was too high to reach on tiptoe, not quite high enough to make it worth fetching a chair. I flung myself repeatedly at the off button, jerking and flailing with each attempt, so that my reflection, glimpsed side-on in the black window pane, pop-eyed with effort, dressing gown gaping, resembled a corpse bouncing on a gibbet.
The alarm raised a last chirrup of protest and then stopped. Gradually the bland burble of the TV reasserted itself – its volume though loud, still a murmur to my poor deafened eardrums. The MacLennan family from Leicester had saved a grand total of fifteen pounds sixty-eight by replacing their favourite food brands with own-brand substitutes. Mum and Emma seemed thrilled to have got the household budget back on track. She was wearing skinny jeans and a SuperDry T-shirt. She looked nice. So nice, so normal, so comfortable in her domesticity that I wanted to cry, but I knew if I started I wouldn’t stop. I had just collapsed, exhausted, on the sofa when I heard the back door close; not slam, as if blown by a gust of wind; close, as if shut behind a person entering.
9
In the moment it took to register the sound of the back door closing, certain among the day’s events – the slashed tyre, the upended plant pot, the mysteriously peripatetic steaks – came back to me like emblems in a half-forgotten dream. It seemed obvious in hindsight that they had not been the annoying coincidences I had persuaded myself they were, but deliberate acts of sabotage – calling cards, no doubt – for the visitor who had just walked into my kitchen without seeing any need for stealth.
The Move Page 7
