The next day wasn’t much better. We had both hoped one day off would be enough and Holly would turn up for work as usual. She was too conscientious to be away for longer than was necessary.
“Have you called her?”
“No, not today, maybe tomorrow.” I knew she was at her father’s flat. I had walked round the previous night to see if there was a light in the window. I didn’t like to think that she had run away entirely. Or had gone back to Graham.
“Don’t you think it would be a good idea?” Linda could sound very condescending when she chose.
“No.” I didn’t want to argue with her. I wanted, so much, to go back to the Sunday we had all had lunch together, just before that phone call from Canada.
There were two jobs that only Holly knew about and that was to be my excuse when I went round to the flat on the morning of the fifth day. It wasn’t really an excuse, the work was getting urgent and no one but Holly had any idea about what was really required and we could hardly call the client. When she hadn’t called in by ten Linda and I argued about who should go to see her. It was one of the few arguments with Linda that I won.
She was at the flat. I knocked on the door, which was ajar, and when I got no reply tentatively walked in. There was the sound of a radio playing loudly and the overpowering smell of paint. I looked into the room with the desk, it was still there, the drawers still open and paper strewn around the floor, now organised into small piles.
I wondered what else she could have found.
Apart from the desk the flat appeared empty. All the furniture had gone. I walked back along the short corridor that linked all the rooms of the flat, into what had been the living room.
Holly had her back to me. She was sitting on the floor concentrating as she painted the skirting board. I watched as she meticulously painted along the edges and filled in between. It was easy to see what she was doing as she was replacing old cream with a lurid shade of orange. I looked around and realised that she had painted half the room in brown, orange and purple. I couldn’t believe she liked it, she must be trying to make some kind of statement.
She had still not realised I was there as I stood silently watching her.
When you walk through a storm
Hold your head up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark
She began to sing gently along with the radio.
At the end of a storm there’s a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of a lark
I waited silently watching her every movement as she painted.
Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Tho’ your dreams be tossed and blo own
She began to emphasise every syllable, making the familiar words ugly.
Walk on, walk o o o on, with hope in your heart
And you’ll ne ver walk a a lone
You’ll ne ver walk a a lone
She started to sing more loudly, tunelessly.
“Wo ork on Wo ork o o o on with hope in your heart
and You’ll Ne ver Walk a alone
Then she wasn’t singing, she was shouting a statement
YOU’LL NE E E VERWALK A A LONE.
She sat up, stretching. I noticed there were tears on her face, but she wasn’t crying. I really wished she had had a speck of paint on her nose and I could walk over and clean it off and we would kiss and make up.
It always happened like that in films.
“Shit! How long have you been here?”
“Not long. I didn’t want to interrupt you.”
She had seemed quite pleased to see me but then she remembered and grew cool.
“I was OK. You shouldn’t creep up on people.”
“I did knock but you didn’t hear me.”
“I’m busy.”
“So I see.”
“What do you want?”
“There’s some work no one can get on with until you tell us what’s needed. I’ve got the file here.”
“OK, I’ll make some coffee and we can go through it.”
We talked business whilst she boiled the kettle and drank the coffee. I didn’t mind what we talked about as long as we were talking about something.
“If that’s all I’ll get back to decorating.”
“Do you really like the colour scheme?” I had hoped that would lighten the conversation, she would say ‘No, it’s crap.” But she didn’t laugh or joke about it. She explained briefly that the decorators had had a sale “No one wanted those colours. There were cheap.”
I looked across at the tins, there were oranges and browns, greens and purples. Not more than one tin of any one colour. The flat was going to be disgusting when she’d finished. Perhaps that was what she wanted.
“What do I tell Linda?”
“What about?”
“About when you’re coming back to the office.”
“I don’t know.”
“If it’s me you want to avoid. I’ll stay away for a bit.”
“No it’s not that. I just need some time to get my thoughts together.”
“I thought we had something.”
“We might have had,” she ignored the importance of the admission he was making “but I’ve got to get this place fit to live in, and there’s so much paperwork to do and Ted thinks he can get the divorce going now so there’s all that to worry about, and…”
“Please Holly. Stop talking. Tell me. Am I wrong?”
I tried to explain to her how I’d felt since she had left Sandhey the other evening. I tried to apologise for having been so stupid, selfish and arrogant.
“I don’t want to lose you.”
“We’ve had nothing to lose.”
“I thought we had. I thought you could be thinking the same.”
“Well you’re wrong.”
“No I’m not.” I wasn’t going to let her get away with that. “I may not have a great deal of experience with women…”
“Like I have with men you mean.”
“No. That’s a cheap jibe and you know it’s not true. Stop deliberately misinterpreting everything I say. I haven’t known many women at all, but I do know when people like me and when they don’t. I have a lot of experience of people not liking me and you aren’t one of them.”
“Perhaps I’ve just joined them.”
I wanted not to believe her.
“We’ll have to sort something out then won’t we? At the office I mean.” I couldn’t believe she would want to leave. It was all just beginning to come together. “It’s all my fault. I’ll stay away. You go back in. You enjoy it. You’re good at it. We can be polite can’t we? Just not spend any time together anywhere else.”
“You’re sounding as if we’re breaking up and we were never together to break up were we?”
“Weren’t we?”
“It was close.” She admitted and I was sure I didn’t imagine the wistfulness in her voice.
She came back to the office the next day and through the rest of the Spring we managed to maintain some sort of a working relationship but when, at the end of the day, I went home or to the pub with Linda, Holly went home alone.
Neither of us liked it, we were both worried about Graham, but she wouldn’t listen to either of us.
No one enjoyed the work as much as we had through the winter. In those months everyone had pulled together and got on with everyone else but now there was less of a fun atmosphere, two of the girls decided they had had enough and gave in their notice and we had great difficulty in replacing them. One or two jobs didn’t go as well as they should have done and Linda had to visit the clients to promise that the same errors would not happen again.
It was inevitable that she would blame Holly.
I spent less and less time in the office and we found that, where we had always agreed about work and how it should be tackled, we were now arguing about just about everything. More often than not we barely spoke a word to each other throughout the day and, of
course, the business began to suffer and clients began to make other arrangements.
At the end of May Linda had had enough, she phoned me and told me to come into the office on Friday evening after the office shut, we had to talk. Everything had gone on long enough.
“But it’s my birthday dinner, I’ve got to be at home.”
“Tough.”
I turned up at six o’clock unsure what to expect. Since Linda had called I had been wondering what could be fixed by talking. I sat down opposite Linda and Holly. No one said anything for some time until Linda started the ball rolling by remembering the winter and how much fun we’d had and asking us to tell her why it had gone wrong. She asked a simple question. “What happened? You’ve never told me? You dropped me off that evening and you were both fine and then suddenly it’s all turned to shit. Why? I’ve put up with this for weeks now and the business is suffering. We’ve got to sort it out.”
“It’s personal.” I said.
“That much is bloody obvious! Is it fixable?”
“Probably not.” Holly sounded very definite.
“Stop me when I start going wrong. ‘Charles fancies Holly, Holly fancies Charles’.” She paused briefly and I was reminded of the section in the marriage service ‘or hereafter forever hold his peace’ when she continued “Neither of you have stopped me so that much must be true. What’s the problem then? Apart from the obvious fact that you’re still married Holly, but that’s never stopped anyone in the past.”
“It’s complicated.” I wasn’t prepared to explain.
“So you’ve said but it seems pretty damned simple to me.”
“Can I talk to Charles alone?” Holly seemed to acknowledge the need to sort things out. “OK. Linda?” I added my voice to Holly’s, we had spent weeks avoiding facing up to the way we were harming the business.
“Great! Communication at last!” and Linda left the room thinking all might now be OK.
Holly turned to me and told him what her problem wasn’t.
It wasn’t that I had ridiculed her for being stupid in marrying Graham; it wasn’t because I had known about her father and hadn’t told her; it wasn’t because she didn’t love me.
“Then for Christ’s sake Holly what is it?”
“Ever since I met Linda and the Forsters they’ve talked about your family. Carl is as much part of their family as he is yours and we all talked about you. I can’t remember a time when we didn’t know about you and Max and the rumours about your family and how you had always been in love with your Nanny. It was always a bit of a laugh I suppose. Carl was never part of it, don’t blame him. It was just a case of ‘everybody knows’. When I got to know you better I realised you felt a lot about Monika, loved her in some way I couldn’t understand – not as a mother, not as a sister, but certainly not as a lover. It was one of the interesting things about you. Graham always said you were gay but I knew that wasn’t true. Since New Year you have been so good and kind to me and I saw something in you I’ve never seen in anyone, certainly not Dad or Graham, and I was falling in love with you just as I knew you were falling in love with me. I was so jealous when Linda told me about last summer in Oxford. She told me how you slept together and all the boys accepted you as a couple. I couldn’t believe how hurt I felt and I had no right to. I was married to Graham, ‘we’, ‘you and I’ didn’t exist, but I was still so jealous. I really thought it would work out, I’d get divorced, we’d be free to get together and we’d live happily ever after. On Leap Day I nearly asked you to marry me. I could have made a joke of it if you’d said no, but I really thought you might say ‘yes’. But then Dad died and everything went wrong.”
She drew breath. I hadn’t moved and I knew I was looking at her as if she was the only thing in the world.
“And then that bloody photograph. I realised that evening that the only reason you loved me was because I am so like Monika. It’s Monika you really love. You’ve always loved her. I just remind you of her, I’m just a younger more eligible Monika.”
I couldn’t believe that she actually meant it.
I got up to cross the room to hold her but she shied away. “If we ever got together Charles, it’d always be Monika you were seeing.”
“No it wouldn’t!”
“It would! She was more important to you when you found out about Dad and Graham’s plans. She was more important to you then. What’s changed?”
How could I convince her? I had no idea. How could I explain what I really felt?
“So I’m going to leave the business.” She continued without waiting for me to find an answer. “I know I’ve let you down. I’ve let you both down. But I can’t go on being here with you or without you. I’m a complete mess. I haven’t been able to do anything. I haven’t touched the decorating for weeks. There’s still paint pots and rubbish all over the flat. I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t think. I can’t work. I’ve got to get away. Sort myself out.”
“It’s not Monika, it’s you.”
“I’m not listening. I don’t believe you. Linda! You can come in now.”
As Linda came back into the room she looked at my face and realised things had not gone the way she had hoped. She must have been convinced that we would get together and everything would be ‘back to February again’.
“I’ve got to leave Linda, I’m so sorry. I’ve learned a lot and there’ve been good times but I must leave before I ruin your business for you. You were doing so well before I came along! Get back to where you were before New Year. I’m so sorry. I’ve gotta go.”
And so Holly left us.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Oliver was surprised when he answered the phone and it was Holly, asking if she could stay with them in Oxford for a while; surprised and not a little worried.
They had talked about what they could do for her after the scene at Linda’s New Year’s party. Crispin had wanted to take Holly down to Oxford then, ‘out of harm’s way’ he had said. He said he thought it would be sensible to ‘get some miles between her and Graham’. But before he had had a chance to ask her Linda had offered her a job and she had agreed to stay up in Cheshire.
“You’re being stupid.” Crispin told his sister “She needs to get away and we’d look after her, make sure that little shit didn’t get anywhere near her.”
“She’s fine here. And she’ll have a job, keep busy. I’ll look after her.”
“At least let me talk to her, suggest it. You never know she might think it’s a good idea.”
“She doesn’t need options at the moment, She needs to know what she’s doing and,” Linda said firmly, “having a job and living with us is the best thing for her.”
“We can give her a job, she could help us out at the workshop.”
“She’s not going to want to work with all that grease and noise. She’d be far happier with us.
“Just because we’re engineering doesn’t mean the place is greasy and dirty. The exact opposite, we have to keep it clean and she’d love it.”
All his arguing made no difference, Linda had made up her mind and Crispin was given no chance to talk to Holly.
Now, four months later, Oliver and Crispin discussed what they could do.
“Who knows what harm has been done to her by working with Linda and Charles?”
“I told her it wouldn’t work. It was too soon. Holly needed a break and a few months with us would have given her breathing space.”
“The last thing she needed was Linda telling her what to do all day every day.”
“Well at least we can do something positive now.”
“Just don’t get too involved, will you Crisp? She needs friends not…”
“I know. I know. ‘Wait’. ‘Be patient’. You all always say that. Well one of these days…”
She had always enjoyed her visits to Oxford but she soon found living in Jericho and being part of that community was very different from being with students in a bed-sit. They agreed on their first
evening that the twins would share most of the chores in the house but Holly would do the shopping, the cooking and the washing up.
She loved walking into town every day to wander around the covered market talking to the butchers and the greengrocers as if there was all the time in the world. They had, at first, made the mistake of assuming she was a tourist but she soon let them know she knew the price things should be. Some mornings she would sit at a café drinking iced tea and listening to the real tourists discussing the country that, she realised, she now thought of as home.
For the first time in years Holly had time to herself, to do the things she wanted to do. She knew which pub the twins always had their lunchtime pint at and, if she felt like it, she joined them sitting in the cool dark bar looking at all the idiotic paraphernalia that was attached every square inch of the ceiling and the walls. But she knew that if she didn’t meet them there it wasn’t a problem.
They never criticised anything she did and she began to understand what it was like to be appreciated. After every meal the boys would thank her saying that was ‘the best meal we’ve had since, well, yesterday!’ It became a standing joke, one amongst many.
It was difficult for Crispin not to tell Holly how much he cared for her and how much he wanted to look after her. Oliver warned him to keep away until she was more settled ‘the last thing she needs is more complication in her life. Give her time. If it’s right it’ll happen if it isn’t it won’t.’
But Crispin found that very difficult as Holly walked around the house in bra and pants as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
“She’s practically our sister,” Oliver said, “she thinks of us as Linda’s brothers, almost her brothers, she doesn’t see you as a man, as such”
“Thanks.”
Oliver wasn’t sure he was being fair to either of them, but he wasn’t prepared to lose his brother to someone who, although perfectly friendly, didn’t seem to care about him especially anyway.
Most days Holly walked along the canal. She and Linda had often walked along the tow-path on their summer visits but they had never bothered to talk to the occupants of the houseboats. Now Holly began with cheery ‘good-mornings’ which soon developed into discussions about the weather and then conversations that would last as long as everyone wanted them to. It was cool alongside the canal and she loved talking to these people who knew nothing of her and wanted nothing from her as they sat in their deckchairs on the flat roofs of their boats and she idly watched the water coursing through the lock gates and out into the River Thames.
Walking Alone Page 26
