Carole lifted her cheek for a kiss.
"Dad never told me. He didn't say you were coming—"
"Does that matter?"
"No," Carole said. "No, of course not."
"Look," Martin said, "I'll go away. I'll go out and come in again, later. Would that suit you better?"
Carole said tiredly, "Don't be silly, darling."
Martin took the kettle out of her hands and ran water messily into it at the sink.
"It shouldn't matter, should it, what time I come? This is my home, isn't it?"
"Of course—"
"Or am I going to get another lecture about my complete failure to get my act together and leave home and be independent?"
"Stop it," Carole said.
Martin carried the kettle across the kitchen and banged it down on its base.
"I could do with a bit of support sometimes."
"Darling," Carole said, "I went to sleep by mistake and I've only just woken up and I wasn't expecting you. That's all."
Martin grunted.
"I don't really feel like tea," Carole said. "I don't know why I was filling the kettle. Shall we have a drink?"
"I'm not drinking."
"Good for you."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means," Carole said tightly, opening the cupboard to find a whiskey tumbler, "that I admire you for your restraint."
"Sorry," Martin said. He took the tumbler out of her hand. "I'll do it for you."
"That's OK—"
"I'll do it," Martin said. He crossed the kitchen to where the spirit bottles stood on a lacquer tray. Carole watched him splash whiskey into the glass. And down its side.
"Water or soda?"
"Water, please," Carole said. She tried to smile. "You should know that by now."
Martin picked up a mineral-water bottle.
"I should know a lot of things. Shouldn't I?"
"Darling," Carole said, "please try and forget that I didn't know you were coming. Please forgive me. You know you're welcome any time. Why else would you still have a key?"
Martin's shoulders drooped a little. He handed her the whiskey tumbler without looking at her.
"Sorry."
"There's some juice in the fridge," Carole said. "Bring it into the sitting room." She reached past Martin to tear off a paper towel from the roll on the wall. Martin watched her wrap it round her wet whiskey glass.
"When'll Dad be back?"
"Any minute."
"I might wait then—"
"Wait for what?"
"Well, wait to say what I've got to say."
Carole looked at him. She took a swallow of her whiskey.
"Oh."
Martin shrugged. He went over to the fridge and swung the door open.
"Is it important?" Carole said.
Martin didn't turn round.
"You could say so."
"If it's important, darling," Carole said, "then it's going to be a bit difficult to talk about anything else while we wait for Dad, isn't it?"
Martin put a carton of juice on the counter, lifted it to drink out of directly, remembered, and opened a cupboard for a glass.
"I guess so."
"Well, then."
Martin turned round slowly and leaned against the counter. He crossed his ankles and stared at his feet. He was wearing peculiar modern trainers, black canvas with wavy soles and elastic gussets. Carole found herself wondering how much they had cost.
"Mum," Martin said, "it didn't work out."
Carole rearranged the paper towel round her whiskey glass.
"What didn't?"
"Danny's company."
Carole went very still.
"Your friend Danny? The one you invested in?"
"Yup."
"It didn't work out. You mean it's failed?"
"He did his best. He worked all hours. But it's been the stock market and September 11th and stuff. It was all against him."
"So you've lost your investment?"
Martin nodded. His head was still bent.
"Was—was it much?"
Martin nodded again.
"How much?"
There was a pause. Martin crossed his ankles the other way.
"Everything."
"What do you mean, everything?"
Martin sighed. Carole put her glass down.
She said again, "What do you mean, everything?"
He mumbled something.
"What?"
"My flat. Everything."
"Your flat?"
"I re-mortgaged it to give him the money."
"You didn't!" Carole said.
Martin shouted suddenly, his head jerking up, "Mum, Danny is a friend!"
"Sorry," Carole said. She turned and picked her glass up again. "Sorry."
"I know it's a bit of a shock. It's a shock to me."
"Yes."
"I've known for a week. For a whole week. I've known I've got nothing left except my job and you know what I feel about that."
"Yes," Carole said. Her hands were shaking again.
"Sorry, Mum."
She shook her head. She put a hand out to him.
"It's all right, darling, it's all right. It's just—"
"I know."
Carole let her hand fall. She took a swallow of whiskey.
"What a pity."
"What a waste is what you really mean," Martin said.
"That too."
"Don't you want to start on all that stuff about my education and your hopes and investment in me?"
"No," Carole said.
"Well, thanks for that anyway."
Carole closed her eyes.
"You say everything's gone. Or going."
"Yes."
"Well." She took a huge breath and opened her eyes again.
"Well, darling, is there anything Dad and I can do to help?"
Martin said sourly, "Sound as if you mean it, for a start."
"I do mean it."
"There—is, actually."
Carole waited.
"And?"
"You won't like this."
She smiled. She felt her lips tight against her teeth.
"Try me."
"Can I move back in?" Martin said. He raised his head and looked straight at her, straight at her tight small smile. "Just until I get myself a bit sorted, can I come back home?"
Through a tapering chink in the curtains, Connor could see the reddish London night sky. Every so often, there was a tiny light across it, maybe a star, or a plane. Or his imagination. He didn't like what his imagination did when he couldn't sleep, didn't like how disproportionate it got, how it played tricks and tried to frighten him. His usual comfort on these occasions was to focus on Carole, warm and steady and sleeping beside him, a palpable reminder of the reality and reliability of things. But tonight was different. It was different because Carole wasn't asleep either and because she wasn't her body exuded tension and unhappy preoccupation, instead of repose and reassurance, and these silent agitations conveyed themselves to Connor in a way he found very hard to bear indeed.
It had been an awful evening. Heaven knows, over the last twenty-eight years they'd had too many awful evenings either with Martin or on his account, but this one had been unusually upsetting. And it had been so horrible because—Connor couldn't pretend otherwise—Carole herself had been out of control, out of her senses, out of—what was the phrase?—out of order. Connor had got back from the Hurlingham full of the satisfaction of having narrowly beaten Benny Nolan in three sets to find Carole and Martin propped up in the kitchen glaring at each other in an atmosphere of indescribable disharmony. He'd taken a deep breath and ushered them both into the sitting room and re-filled Carole's glass and got himself a gin and tonic and made Martin go through the whole pathetic, inevitable saga of Danny's failure and Martin's involvement in it. And then he'd heard Martin out, on his pitifully threadbare plans for the future, which included—even Connor's heart sank here�
��the proposal to return to live at home for six months, and he'd just been about to reply in as measured and calm a way as he could when Carole lost it, just lost it, went from a standing start of self-control to a hundred miles an hour of pure fury in a single second.
They'd just gaped at her, her husband and son. They'd sat there, eyes and mouths open, and watched her while she screamed and gestured and spilled her whiskey. Connor had never seen anything like it in his life before, never seen anyone lose it like that, and certainly not Carole. And what made it worse was that it was extremely difficult to know exactly why she was going on like this, exactly what her deep, furious, unhappy trouble was. Of course it was irritating to think of Martin returning to disturb the civilized order of their lives, and of course it was worrying that he'd lost so much money and in a venture anyone with half an eye could have told him was doomed from the outset, but neither his hopelessness nor his lack of judgment justified an outburst quite like the one they were witnessing. It was terrible, horrifying. There was something about it, Connor thought now, staring at the chink of reddish light, that was unacceptably primitive.
He turned his head on the pillow to look, apprehensively, at Carole. She was lying stiff and straight on her back, and he could see in the dimness that her eyes were open: he could just see the glint of her eyeballs. He wondered if she'd been crying again. She'd wept bitterly that evening, wept until her face was raw and shiny and she could hardly speak for the paroxysms that gripped her throat. After Martin had gone—he'd clung to his father, briefly, in the hall, with a fierceness that he hadn't shown since he was seven—she'd shut herself in the bathroom and Connor, miserably pacing outside, could hear that she was crying still, crying and crying with an intensity that Connor supposed meant she had no words left to express the depth of whatever it was she was feeling. When she came out of the bathroom at last, he didn't try to speak to her, he merely guided her, as if she were ill, to their bedroom and left her there, with a nightcap and Radio 3, while he went to restore some order to the sitting room and his own mind.
But the latter proved impossible. Here he was, three and a half hours later, as awake and agitated as he'd been since he got home. Playing tennis with Benny seemed to have happened at another time, in another life. He took a breath.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Of course," she said. Her voice was still thick, after all those tears.
He hesitated.
Then he said, "I don't want to upset you any more, and I know Martin is a great disappointment to you—indeed, he is to me, in many ways—but don't you think you were a bit hard on him this evening?"
There was a silence. Carole rubbed at her nose with a tissue.
Then she said, with surprising clearness, "Yes."
Connor raised himself on one elbow. He smiled at her in the dimness.
"That's my girl."
Carole rubbed her nose again. She didn't look at him.
She said, "It's not about Martin."
"What's not about Martin?"
"Why I got in such a state tonight. I mean, frankly I don't much want him back here, and I don't think you do either, and it's typical of him to risk everything for someone unreliable, but that—well, I can bear that. I mean, it isn't as if there's anything new there, it's just more of the sad same."
Connor stopped smiling.
He said, more tensely, "Well, if it isn't Martin, what is it? What on earth could induce you to behave like that?"
Carole laid her arms straight down by her sides, like a figure on a tomb.
"The past," she said.
"The past? What in heaven's name could there be in our past—"
"Not our past. My past."
Connor sat up straighter. He found himself consciously reaching for his dignity, as he used to do in his working days when it became necessary to issue a reprimand.
He said, in a voice he hoped was more relaxed than it sounded, "Perhaps you'd better tell me. Perhaps you had better explain."
"Yes," she said, "I better had. In fact I should have told you years ago."
"But I thought you had," he said, his voice shaking now with something very close to fright. "I thought you'd told me everything, about Rory, about the abortion—"
"There wasn't an abortion," Carole said.
Connor stared into the dark room, across Carole, across what had always seemed entirely secure into something he didn't want to look at, at all. He wanted to say something, to speak in a way that brought things back to the familiar, but he couldn't. He couldn't utter, he couldn't do anything but wait, wait entirely helplessly, unacceptably, at Carole's mercy. She stirred a little and gave a tiny sigh.
"There wasn't an abortion," Carole said again. "There was a baby."
CHAPTER NINE
Betty and Don had run their bed and breakfast for twenty years. They'd started it after Don had his accident in the factory and was registered disabled, and Betty said that if she was going to have to give up work to look after him, they might as well think of something they could do together, instead of moping about at home, drawing the dole and wanting to cut each other's throats.
"I'm not having your bad back turning into the family pet," Betty said. "I'm not having you thinking about it and talking about it all the time. It's bad enough we've both got to live with it."
Don, who was in considerable pain at the time, having been half crushed by a forklift truck driven by a boy so hungover he could barely see straight, thought of pointing out that his back was hardly his fault, and decided against it. It was hard on Betty, after all, hard to leave the retail trade which she loved, hard to have to come home and play nursemaid. He hitched the elastic corset belt he was now supposed to wear even in bed a notch tighter, and said with only mild sarcasm that he'd do his best to remember that he was actually as fit as the days he'd played scrum half for Northsea Rugby Club.
It was Cora who'd suggested doing bed and breakfast; Cora, Betty's younger sister, who was eking out a living teaching adult-education classes in pottery and ceramics. Cora was the artistic one in the family, with an eye for color and no head whatsoever for figures or practicalities. Betty used to despair, and disapprove of the hand-to-mouth way Cora led her life, with no money put by for the future, and no insurance, and an inclination to spend what might have fed her for a month on a piece of arty rubbish that wasn't fit for more than the bric-a-brac stall at a jumble sale. But Cora could come up with ideas, now and then, ideas of surprising inventiveness, and when she said why not turn Number 9, Woodside (not a tree in sight) into a bed and breakfast, and call it Balmoral because of Betty's passion for royalty, and Don's fondness for Scotland, they knew she was onto something.
Over the years, Balmoral had been a respectable little earner. It had given them a modest living and, more importantly, an occupation. Quite a lot of their guests, mostly businessmen, were regulars and Betty found she could adapt the patience she had needed for customers in shops to an obligingness about the way guests liked their eggs or their pillows. The lift they installed on the stairs for Don proved rather a draw, even a source of mild fun and games. The whole enterprise became more difficult, of course, when Mother needed a home, and looking after, but at least that had been a question of adapting rather than changing outright. Mother had, too, been infinitely more civil to the guests than she ever managed to be to her own family, so in her own way she'd become rather an asset, a kind of crochety fixture, whose presence lent a small air of stability, and therefore of home, to the place. When Mother finally died—it took her six years and three false alarms—Betty found it strangely hard to do anything commercial about her room which was, you had to face it, the least prepossessing room in the house, being small and narrow and ground-floor and next to the kitchen. Whatever you did, the smell of frying seeped through the wall to cling immovably to the curtains and carpet. Mother, of course, had liked it. That was typical of Mother, to like only the element in her living conditions that nobody else would have put up with. B
ut then, perverse should have been Mother's middle name.
It was all this really, Mother's being gone, and the room being full of drawbacks and memories, and Betty missing that sense of family that Mother had provided, despite herself, that made Betty offer the room to Cora. She'd always felt protective of Cora, not just as a younger sister, but because Mother bullied her so, especially after the baby, and because Cora couldn't seem to stand up to Mother, couldn't stand up to anyone much. But that was Cora really, sweet-natured and soft and always inclined to blame herself, even when things weren't really her fault. She'd always been sympathetic, too, able to imagine herself into someone else's shoes. In fact, if Betty hadn't had Cora there when she'd realized, after four miscarriages, that this baby thing just wasn't going to happen, she wondered what she would have done. She couldn't believe how good Cora was to her then, how strong, how understanding. And when you thought about what Cora had been through herself, it made her conduct all the more extraordinary. Betty had never forgotten that. She might have inherited Mother's sharp tongue, but she wasn't going to harbor the same hard heart. She would offer Cora Mother's room because, despite her funny clothes, her funny ways, her uselessness with money and form-filling, Cora was her sister, Cora was family.
At the back of her mind, too, there was something else, something uneasy. She had a feeling—no, more than that, a nasty little knowledge—that when Cora had really needed her, over that business with her own baby, Betty hadn't helped. It wasn't that Betty hadn't sympathized, hadn't felt for her, hadn't tried, in a way, to stand up to Mother on Cora's behalf, but she knew, in her heart of hearts, that she hadn't done enough. It was only later, when she knew she was never going to have a baby of her own, that she even began to see what it had been like for Cora at sixteen, dominated by other people, shouted at, reprimanded, cajoled, persuaded, threatened, until, at last, she'd agreed to give the baby away. And Betty hadn't been with her then, hadn't really tried to be with her. Cora had gone off to Scarborough, and got a job in a hotel as a chambermaid, and Betty hadn't tried to follow her, to see her. Not for three years. Not until Cora wrote and told her she was doing pottery classes in night school and beginning to feel better.
All this had weighed on Betty down the years. Because of it, she'd never asked Cora to lift a finger to help her with Mother and never felt a morsel of resentment about it. In fact, she did her best to keep Mother away from Cora and, when Mother began on one of her tirades about Cora, all based on the assumption that someone who falls pregnant out of wedlock is automatically pathological, Betty refused to listen. It wasn't possible to shut Mother up, but Betty could, and did, leave the room, sometimes slamming the door behind her. As time went on, the basis of Mother's grievance became baldly plain, which was that her daughters, for one reason or another, had failed to make her a grandmother. When Betty shouted she'd had enough of this, Mother would shout back, "Girls should be good, women should be wives, and wives should be mothersl" and Betty would want to hit her in the face.
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