"Sorry, Ma. Bit difficult at the moment, I've had so much time off—"
"Of course."
"Anyway," Euan said, "you ought to do it alone. Mart wouldn't like me holding your hand. Who invented sibling rivalry?"
Carole laughed.
"You're right. Of course you are. It's just—"
"I know, Ma. It always is."
Now standing in the hall outside Martin's bedroom door and surveying with exasperation the growing heap of bags and boxes he had begun to pile up outside it, she felt an enormous weariness. There always seemed to be a mountain to climb, just now, and the scaling of one peak only led to another, and another. That was why, she supposed, people kept secrets. The moment they stopped, and confessed, was the moment their own control over whatever it was vanished and everyone else joined in, clamoring and criticizing and claiming their slice of the action. She took a step forward and raised her hand to knock on Martin's door.
The door opened. Martin stood there, wearing tracksuit bottoms, a Manchester United T-shirt and bare feet.
Carole said, almost diffidently, "I was just coming to see you."
"Oh."
"Were you on your way out?"
"Only to the kitchen. To get some juice."
Carole said, "Then perhaps I could talk to you. While you drink it."
Martin moved past her and headed across the hall.
"What about?"
Carole followed him.
"David."
Martin was by the fridge, his back to her.
"Thought so."
"Darling," Carole said, "nothing has changed, nothing in the way I feel about you or Euan or Dad."
Martin opened the fridge and took a carton of juice out of the door.
"Good-looking bloke."
"What's that got to do with it?"
"Isn't it gratifying," Martin said, tipping the carton up so that he could drink from it, "to have such a handsome son?"
"I have two already."
Martin snorted.
"Don't give me that."
Carole came closer.
"I didn't think about him. Not for months on end—"
"But you thought about his father."
Carole hesitated.
"Sometimes."
"And he looks like his father."
Carole looked straight at Martin.
"Darling, all that is over. You are my family, Dad is my husband, this is now and the future; that was the long, long ago past."
Martin slammed the carton back in the fridge.
"But it happened."
"Yes," Carole said, "I can't undo that. I can't. I've said sorry till I can't say it anymore. What am I supposed to do now, what more can I do?"
Martin swung the fridge door shut. He stood facing it a while and then he turned round.
"Get rid of him," he said.
"Get rid—"
"No," Martin said. "No, on second thought, I'll get rid of him. I'll tell him he's not wanted." He eyed his mother. "Is he?"
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A man a bit further down the railway carriage had been looking at Nathalie all the way from Birmingham New Street Station. He wasn't staring exactly, and he didn't look sinister or threatening, but he was obviously, frankly, interested. He had a heavy-looking, thick book, but he spent more time gazing at Nathalie than he did at its pages.
It was as if, Nathalie thought, he was trying to work something out about her. It was as if he had first noticed her because she attracted him, and then he'd noticed something else, something more elusive and beguiling than mere looks, and was held in thrall to it. She'd tried, once and unwisely, giving him a brief glance and smile, but he hadn't
responded or changed his steady, open gaze. He was plainly concerned with something much less commonplace than flirting.
Nathalie looked steadfastly out of the window. She too, had a book, but she couldn't even contemplate concentrating long enough to get through a single sentence. She wasn't, if she was honest, particularly surprised that the man should be looking at her: in fact, she was more surprised that everyone in the carriage wasn't
looking, that there could possibly be a person sitting within yards of her who couldn't see the difference, the difference between all of them in the accepted certainty of their lives and her, on the brink of this extra ordinary change in hers, this change that was going to bring solution and resolution and—and discovery. And yet it wasn't a change, in reality. The change had been all the years leading up to this moment, all the years when she didn't know who her mother was, didn't know that her mother cared so much. She kept replaying that first telephone conversation in her mind, with Cora crying, Cora asking so—so anxiously, if Nathalie was angry, if Nathalie could ever forgive her. When she went back through those minutes on the telephone together, Nathalie felt a surge of something so pure and strong and pleasing that she supposed it must be joy.
Elaine Price had offered to come to Northsea with her.
She'd said she often did that, often came to the first meeting just to get it started, just to help those first few moments when it was so dauntingly difficult to start on the business of repair and reconciliation. She said it was her practice to pull out as soon as she could, but that as these meetings were often an anticlimax, neither side daring to reveal their true feelings, it was usually a help to have someone there to help that daring along.
"If you hold back on emotion," Elaine said, "you'll hold back on progress."
Nathalie had been very sure that holding back on emotion would not be a problem. The problem, she thought, would be that there would be too much emotion, too little holding back. She wasn't sure she wanted Elaine there while she cried, and Cora cried, as she was certain they would; not because she didn't like and trust Elaine, but because this moment was going to be so supremely private that it should have no witnesses. There shouldn't, Nathalie told herself, be anyone present at a kind of rebirth; it wasn't
right or natural. Two adults who were going, in their separate ways, to remedy the great loss in each of their lives should be able to perform this precious and extraordinary ritual in an appropriate seclusion.
"Thank you," she said to Elaine, "thank you, really. But I have to go alone. I want to go alone."
She hoped Elaine had understood. She hoped that Elaine meant what she said when she had explained that she was no more than a midwife to a form of rebirth, that when it had happened she would step quietly back and attend to other clients, those clients who were always, always coming along. Nathalie hoped—though not to much effect, if she was candid—that in her exhilaration at what lay ahead of her she hadn't forgotten, somehow, to include Elaine in all she was thinking and feeling.
She glanced away from the window. The man with the book was, slightly disappointingly, now reading it.
He seemed to be reading it—so male this—with exactly the attention he had given to her face only minutes, probably, earlier. She pulled back her cuff to look at her watch and felt a sharp clutch of panic in her stomach.
In thirty-seven minutes the train would pull into Northsea Station, where Cora would be waiting on the platform wearing, she said, something red, or orange, and carrying flowers.
"Cornflowers, if I can find them," she said. "I love cornflowers. I've never seen them growing in corn, but I'd love to. Cornflowers and poppies in a field of corn."
Nathalie closed her eyes. For the last few weeks, there'd
been an image of herself that kept coming into her mind, as clear and precise as an old snapshot. She was six perhaps, or seven, wearing the kind of dress Lynne liked her to wear, a puff-sleeved, full-skirted dress with a smocked bodice and a sash tie. It was pink, or blue, something pale, and her hair was tied up on top of her head with a ribbon with long ends falling down to her shoulders. She had white socks on, and bar shoes, and she was standing in the back garden at Ashmore Road by a lilac bush, with her hands demurely clasped in front of her, as they had to be at the beginning of her da
ncing classes. She couldn't remember where this tidy and formal child had been going, but she knew where she was going to go now. It was a scene she had played over and over in her mind of the child with the hair ribbon and bar shoes stepping down off the train and holding her arms up to a woman in a red dress holding a bunch of cornflowers. In some moods, she could bring a lump to her throat, just picturing it.
She opened her eyes. Better not to think about that now, better not to hope and plan too much, better to look out of the window and see that, astonishingly, the gray-blue North Sea was only a hundred yards from the railway line, glimmering under a cloud-blurred sky. They must be close, very close. In fact, people were beginning to stir in the seats around her, struggling into jackets, stuffing newspapers into bags, adopting the wary, shuttered expressions necessary for abandoning the brief and blessed release of a journey for the pressures of daily life again.
"Northsea," the conductor's voice said over the speaker.
"Northsea next stop."
Nathalie stood up unsteadily. Oh, the terror of great moments, the terror of facing them coupled with the accompanying terror of having them somehow taken away.
She reached up to the rack for her bag, the bag containing her night things and a picture Polly had drawn—insistently, deliberately—of a large dog beside a small house and three tiny people with "For Cora" written at the top with the r's
backwards.
The train was sliding past houses now, gray-walled houses with gray slate roofs, and then a warehouse and a garage and a football stadium with craning lights rearing up above the stands. Then more houses, and a park, and railway lines running together and apart in a seemingly liquid sequence that made you dizzy to look at. And then the train slowing, nothing to stop it, gliding under the dirty glass canopy of Northsea Station, gliding along beside the platforms, beside the piles of mailbags, the luggage trolleys, the scattered passengers, the dog on a lead, the newsstand, the signs saying "Taxis" and "Toilets." And then, stop.
Nathalie grasped her bag. She stepped forward. In the aisle between the seats, the man with the book was standing looking at her.
"Good luck," he said.
She nodded. He made way for her to precede him and she went clumsily past, holding her bag up in front of her, down the carriage, out of the door down the steps, and onto the platform.
There was someone there, someone waiting, someone in an orangey-red garment, a loose, coatlike thing. She was holding flowers, but they weren't cornflowers, they were something ordinary, something like carnations, whitish-green. And this person wasn't mother-sized, this person was small. Tiny. You couldn't, Nathalie thought wildly, hug up to this person. You'd have to hug down.
"Hello, dear," Cora said.
It had taken determined courage to telephone Carole.
Marnie had performed all kinds of steadying rituals beforehand—folding the laundry, re-plaiting her hair, checking that Petey hadn't kicked his rug off during his nap—and had then made herself walk into the hall with resolute steps and dial the number David had given her. He hadn't
wanted to give it to her, of course, protesting that, as it didn't look as if there was much future in any of this anyhow, there was no point in Marnie joining in the dance.
But Marnie had insisted, holding out her hand as if he was a chastised child who had to surrender something he had stolen.
"If it concerns you, it concerns me. We agreed that, from now on. Remember?"
Carole had not sounded welcoming. David had told her that Marnie would be calling her, but she still managed to sound as if she had been caught out unfairly, and didn't like it. Marnie tried to remember all David had said about Carole's inability to deal with confrontation, which in turn would require great patience on the part of the confronter.
"I don't want anything from you," Marnie said. "I'm not after anything at all. But I'm his wife, so I'm involved." She stopped abruptly. She'd been about to say, "I can't be left out of this," but that was exactly the kind of thing she was schooling herself not to say. So she said instead, "This touches all of us."
There was a pause, and then Carole said reluctantly, "I suppose so."
She'd wanted Marnie to go to London. She'd suggested they meet for lunch somewhere, maybe in the restaurant of a gallery, a place, she implied, that was both acceptable and anonymous for women in such a highly charged situation to meet. But Marnie was ready for her. Marnie was having no truck with emotional airbrushing, not after having seen Nathalie, with the gloves off.
"You should see his home," Marnie said. "You should see his life, where his family is."
"OK," Carole said surprisingly. She sounded, irritatingly, slightly amused and not in any way taken aback.
"OK. I'll come to Westerham."
And now, here she was, in Mamie's sitting room, in one of Mamie's blue upholstered chairs, accepting a cup of Mamie's coffee and refusing one of Mamie's specially baked pecan squares. She was looking round her in a way Marnie couldn't fathom, neither avidly curious, nor indifferent, taking in the clean walls and polished floor and the books and pictures and the model child on the hearthrug with his fingers in his mouth and an ecologically sound wooden train set strewn around him. Marnie watched her, watched her gaze travel over the flowers in the stone vase, the photographs, the sofa with its unmistakable signs of having been jumped on more than sat on, and wondered what, if anything, she had forgotten.
Carole took a sip of coffee.
"Lovely."
"I come from a long line of coffee makers—"
"I meant the room. The coffee too, of course."
Marnie waited for Carole to say something to Petey.
Petey was, after all, being perfect, upright on his bottom with his blue stare fixed upon the visitor, his little boot-clad feet so charmingly thrust out among the decorative clutter of his train. But, apart from a brief greeting, Carole had appeared oblivious to Petey. So oblivious, in fact, that Marnie was beginning to wonder if she was avoiding looking at him because she couldn't bear to, because the sight of a small blond boy was too painful, brought too sharp a recollection.
Petey took his fingers out of his mouth and picked up the wooden train. He held it out, towards Carole.
"Thomas," Petey said.
Carole gave him a quick glance.
"He means Thomas the Tank Engine—"
"Lovely," Carole said again. "Lovely train."
Petey dropped the train, leaving his arm stiffly still in the air.
"Not Thomas," he said.
"No."
"Thomas blue," Petey said scornfully. He put his fingers back in.
"He's two," Marnie said.
Carole looked at her coffee.
"I'm rather out of practice at guessing ages." She took another sip. "I haven't had a two-year-old for over twenty-five years."
Marnie put her cup down on the floor by her chair. She disliked drinking coffee out of cups. Cups were for tea, English-style. Coffee should come in mugs, in pints and half-pints. But somehow, seeing Carole's hair and suede shoes, her conviction about the Canadian way of coffee had faltered and given up. Just as her resolve had given up about not changing out of her jeans, about not washing the kitchen floor. She had determined to do neither and then the recollection of what David had said about Carole's
clothes, Carole's flat, had weakened her.
"I expect David told you," Marnie said, "that Petey is the youngest of our children. Ellen is twelve and Daniel is ten."
She indicated a photograph on a bookshelf four feet away from Carole. "That's them, in Canada last summer."
Carole turned her head towards the photograph. She made no movement to lean to pick it up.
"Lovely."
"We spend each summer in Canada," Marnie said, "staying with my folks. It's a wonderful life for children."
"I'm sure," Carole said. She turned her head back again.
"I've never been."
Petey got slowly and carefully to his feet. Then he trott
ed across to Carole and stood by her knee, looking intently at her.
"Hello," Carole said.
Petey said nothing. Marnie looked at his solid small back in its striped T-shirt, at his smooth pale head, at his endearingly stoutly shod feet, and marveled that anyone could refrain from touching him.
"When my Martin was two," Carole said to Petey, "he liked tractors. Do you like tractors?"
Petey took a step back.
"Thomas," he said loudly.
"Of course—"
"Thomas!" Petey shouted.
"Don't shout, sweetheart," Marnie said.
Petey turned and went back to the hearthrug. He bent and picked up his train and then trotted purposefully out of the room with it.
"He can't go far," Marnie said, as if Carole cared.
"There's a stair gate."
Carole reached out to set her cup down. Then she leaned back and put her hands on the arms of the blue chair.
"Why did you want me to come?"
Marnie was startled.
"But that's obvious—"
"Is it?"
"Of course. You are David's mother and I am his wife and the mother of his children—"
"Oh," Carole said, lifting one hand, "I see all that. I see all the settled-ness, this house, this family establishment. But I could see that anyway, I could see that from meeting David.
David doesn't look like a man with no one to care for him."
"I should hope not—"
Carole looked at her.
"And you do care for him. Don't you?"
Marnie looked away. The plate of pecan squares, now softening in the sunlight falling through the window on to them, seemed suddenly forlorn, pathetic, a truly amateur gesture.
"It's not about that."
"No?"
"No."
"Then what? What is it about? Why did you want me to come down here?"
"I needed you to know something. I needed you to be very certain of something."
Carole clasped her hands together under her chin, her elbows on the arms of the chair.
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