by Jojo Moyes
‘That’s the trouble, you see. None of us is.’
Vivi was wrenched from her thoughts.
‘He knew he was a pain,’ Rosemary began, her face turned to the french windows, ‘he knew he just got under everybody’s feet, that he made rather a mess. But sometimes it’s very hard . . . to let go of things.’
The teapot was burning Vivi’s hand. She put it carefully on the tray, forgetting to pour herself a cup.
‘Rosemary—’
‘Just because a thing is old doesn’t make it useless. It probably feels more useless than you know.’
Outside, one of the tractors was reversing through the front gate, preparing to back into the barn behind the house. They could hear the faint grinding of gears, overlaid inside by the comforting roar of the fire, the regular ticking of the grandfather clock.
‘Nobody thought your cat was useless,’ Vivi said, carefully. ‘I think . . . we all just liked to remember him when he was fit and happy.’
‘Yes. Well.’ Rosemary put her cup on the table. ‘No one ever imagines they will end up like that.’
‘No.’
‘Bloody awful state.’
‘Yes.’
Rosemary lifted her chin. ‘He bit me, you know, when the needle went in.’
‘The vet told me. He said it was quite unusual.’
Rosemary’s quavering voice was defiant: ‘I was glad he still had the strength – to tell everyone to go to hell. Right to the last minute . . . he still had something inside.’ Her rheumy old eyes fixed intently on Vivi’s with a meaning that was not lost on her.
‘Do you know what, Rosemary?’ Vivi found she was struggling to swallow. ‘I’m very glad too.’
Rosemary had fallen asleep in her chair. It was probably the emotion of it all, Mrs Cameron had said sagely. Death could do that to people. When her sister’s poodle had died, it had been all they could do to stop her throwing herself into the grave. But, then, she had always been silly over the dog, had framed pictures of it, and bought it coats and suchlike. She had it buried in one of those special cemeteries, would you believe? Did Vivi know you could even bury a horse in such places? Vivi had nodded, then shaken her head, feeling the old lady’s sadness seeping, like the damp weather, into the bones of the house.
She had a dozen things to do, several in town, including an invitation to a meeting of the local charity that administered the town’s almshouses, and for which Douglas had put her forward when they were first married. But, somehow, Vivi was reluctant to leave the room, as if Rosemary’s frailty since the death of her beloved cat had made her fearful for her. She hadn’t said any of this to Mrs Cameron, but the younger woman had seen something: ‘Do you want me to do the ironing in here? Keep an eye on things?’ she asked tactfully.
It would have seemed silly to explain her perturbation. Vivi had told her, with a determined briskness to her voice, that she thought that was a splendid idea. And, trying to brush off The sense of foreboding, she had gone to the utility room to sort out the apples she had put by for freezing.
She had been there, seated on the old tea-chest, dividing the plastic bags of apples into those for cooking and those too rotten to save, for almost twenty minutes, finding comfort in the mindless yearly ritual, when she had heard the doorbell, and Mrs Cameron whistling as she bustled down the hall to answer it. There had been a brief, muffled exchange, and Vivi, dropping a particularly maggotty example into a cardboard box, had wondered whether the lady who left the charity bags for filling had come a day early.
‘In here?’ She heard the voice, imperious and demanding, on the other side of the door, and Vivi, suddenly upright, flinched.
‘Suzanna?’
The door swung open and Suzanna stood there. Her eyes burnt dark in a face that was deathly white. There were blue smudges on each side of her nose and her hair was unbrushed, telling of some tumultuous night of lost sleep.
‘Darling, are you—’
‘Is it true? She ran away from Dad and had a baby?’
‘What?’ Seeing the scorching knowledge on that face, Vivi felt history leap upwards to swamp her, and understood that her previous sense of dread had had nothing to do with the cat. She stood and stumbled forward, sending apples spinning across the floor.
‘My mother? Was she talking about my mother?’
The two women stood in the little room, which was suffused with the smells of detergent and rotting apples. Vivi heard Rosemary’s voice, unsure whether she was imagining it. ‘You see?’ it said. ‘She causes trouble even after her death.’
Her hands hanging by her sides, she took a deep breath and made her voice sound steadier than she felt. She had always known this day might come, but she had never anticipated that when it did she might have to meet it alone. ‘Suzanna, your father and I had wanted to tell you for some time.’ She looked for her previous seat. ‘In fact, we wanted to tell you on Tuesday. Shall I get him? He’s ploughing up on Page Hill.’
‘No. You tell me.’
Vivi wanted to say that it wasn’t her story to tell, that the weight of it had always been too much for her. And, faced with Suzanna’s feverish, accusatory stare, that she wasn’t to blame. But this was what parenthood was really all about, wasn’t it? The protestations of love, that everybody had meant well, that they thought it was all for the best . . . the knowledge that often love was not enough.
‘You tell me.’
‘Darling, I—’
‘Here. Now. Right now. I just want to know,’ said Suzanna. There was a kind of desperation in her eyes, in her voice a crack of something sadder and stranger than Vivi had ever heard before.
Vivi eased herself carefully along the tea-chest, motioning to her daughter to occupy the empty half. ‘All right, Suzanna,’ she said. ‘You’d better sit down.’
The call had come when he had least expected it, on one of the few occasions that he had returned to the house that he had, for two short years, called home. He had walked into the echoing hall in search of his tweed jacket, trying not to think too hard about his surroundings, when the telephone on the hall table had sprung shrilly into life. He had stared at it for several seconds, then moved tentatively forward. No one else would ring him there. Everyone knew he no longer lived there.
‘Douglas?’ the voice had said, and at that low, heartbreaking enquiry, he found he had lost the ability to stand.
‘Where are you?’ he had asked, dropping on to the hall chair.
It was as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘I’ve been trying to get you for weeks,’ she said. ‘You are an impossible gadabout.’ As if they had been two people flirting at a party. As if she hadn’t broken him, staved in his heart and turned his future, his life, to dust.
He swallowed hard. ‘It’s hay time. Long days. You know.’
‘I thought you must have gone to Italy after all,’ she said lightly. ‘To escape this rotten English weather.’ Her voice sounded odd, offset by traffic, as if she were in a telephone box. ‘Isn’t it awful? Don’t you just hate it?’
He had imagined this moment for so long, had rehearsed so many arguments, apologies, reconciliations in his head, and now she was at the other end of the line. It was as much as he could do to breathe.
‘Douglas?’
He noted that his hand was trembling against his leg. ‘I’ve missed you,’ he croaked.
There was the briefest pause.
‘Douglas, darling, I can’t talk long, but I need to meet you.’
‘Come home,’ he said. ‘Come here.’ She had replied sweetly that, if he didn’t mind, she would really rather not. In London, perhaps? Somewhere they could talk privately?
‘Huntley’s fish restaurant,’ he had suggested, his mind stuttering into life. It had booths, where they could talk virtually unobserved.
‘Aren’t you clever, darling?’ she had said, apparently unconscious of the way a phrase, so easily discarded, could fan the flames of hope. Huntley’s it was. Thursday.
Now, four intermin
able days later, he sat in the booth at the back of the restaurant, the most discreet in the place, he had been assured by a waiter who had winked at him impertinently, as if he were on some assignation. ‘It’s for my wife,’ Douglas had said, coldly, and the waiter had said, ‘Of course, sir, of course it is.’
He had got there almost half an hour early, had walked past the restaurant several times, willing himself to resist the temptation to go in, knowing that the builders on the scaffolding above probably thought him unhinged. But there was a part of him that feared he might miss her, that fate would intervene and uncross their paths, so he bought a newspaper and sat there by himself, trying to stop his palms sweating, and wishing he could make the slightest sense of the newsprint in front of him.
Outside, a double-decker bus pulled laboriously away from the kerb, its vibrations making the windows rattle. Girls flashed past in brief skirts, their brightly coloured coats incongruous against the greys of London skies and pavement, incurring muffled catcalls. He felt briefly reassured that she had agreed to meet him here, a place where his suit didn’t feel provincial, straight, in modern lingo, a place where he didn’t have to feel like an amalgam of all the things she had chafed against.
‘Anything to drink, sir, while you’re waiting?’
‘No. Actually, yes. Just some water, please.’ He glanced towards the door, as it opened to allow in yet another slim dark woman. The bloody restaurant seemed to cater for no other kind of customer.
‘Ice and lemon, sir?’
Douglas shook his paper with irritation. ‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ he snapped, ‘however it comes . . . will be fine,’ he said, collecting himself. He smoothed his hair back from his face, adjusted his tie, and tried to regulate his breathing.
He hadn’t told his parents he was coming – he had known what his mother’s response would be. She had refused to allow Athene’s name to be spoken in the house since the day he had told of her departure. He had moved back home several months previously, leaving the Philmore house like the Marie Celeste, exactly as she had left it, down to the ashtray she had filled with her lipsticked cigarette butts. The staff were on strict instructions not to change a thing.
Not till he knew.
Not till he knew for sure.
‘Actually,’ he said to the waiter, as he arrived bearing a glass of water on a silver tray, ‘get me a brandy, would you? A large one.’
The waiter had looked at him for a second longer than suggested completely deferential service. ‘Whatever you say, sir,’ he had said, and was gone.
She had been late, as he had known she would be. He had finished that brandy and another in the half-hour that crept by after their allotted meeting time. When he looked up from the newspaper to see her before him, the alcohol had already started to blur the edges of his anxiety.
‘Douglas,’ she had said, and he had stared at her for several minutes, not quite able to cope with the reality of her, the fleshed-out version of the spectre that had, for almost a year, haunted his dreams. ‘Don’t you look smart?’
He had glanced down at his suit, fearful that he might have spilt something on it. And then he stared at her, aware that he was overstepping some invisible boundary but unable to stop himself.
‘Do let’s sit down,’ she said, with a nervous, teasing smile. ‘People are beginning to stare.’
‘Of course,’ he had muttered, and shuffled back into the booth.
She looked altered, too, although it was impossible to say whether this was because the Athene of his memory, his imagination, was a perfect creature. This woman opposite, although beautiful, although irrefutably his Athene, was not quite the goddess he had become used to picturing. She looked tired, her skin a little less polished, a little more strained than it had once been; her hair was swept into a haphazard chignon. She was wearing, he noted with a jolt, a suit she had bought on their honeymoon, which she had decided after one wearing was ‘an abomination’, and sworn to throw away. Next to the brightly coloured creations of the girls out on the street, it looked old-fashioned. She had lit a cigarette. He noticed, with some relief, that her hands were trembling.
‘Can I have a drink, darling?’ she said. ‘You know, I’m absolutely gasping.’ He waved over the waiter, who looked at her with mild interest. It was when he caught the man staring ostentatiously at her left hand that Douglas realised, with a lurch, that she no longer sported her wedding ring. He took a sip of his own drink, trying not to think about what that might mean.
The important thing was that she was there.
‘Are you . . . are you well?’ he asked.
‘Fabulous. Apart from this awful weather.’
He tried to glean some clue from her appearance, to muster the courage to ask the questions that revolved remorselessly around his head. ‘Do you come up to London much?’
‘Oh, you know me, Douglas. Theatre, the odd nightclub. Can’t keep me away from the old Smoke.’ Behind her voice was a brittle gaiety.
‘I went to Tommy Gardner’s wedding. Thought I might see you there.’
‘Tommy Gardner?’ She blew smoke dismissively through painted lips. ‘Ugh. Couldn’t stand either of them.’
‘I suppose you must have been busy.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I was.’
The waiter brought Athene’s drink, and two leatherbound menus. She had ordered a gin and tonic but, when it arrived, appeared to lose interest in it.
‘Would you like to eat?’ he said, praying she wouldn’t want to leave immediately, that he hadn’t already disappointed her.
‘You order for me, darling. I can’t be bothered to read my way through all those choices.’
‘I’ll have the sole,’ he told the waiter, reluctantly tearing his glance from his wife long enough to hand back the menus. ‘Two soles. Thank you.’
There was a strange disquiet about her, he noted. Even though she was perfectly still, as languid as she ever had been, there was a visible tension in her, as if she were strung between two taut wires. Perhaps she is as nervous as me, he thought, and attempted to quell the leap of hope prompted by this thought.
There was a painful silence as they sat opposite each other, occasionally catching each other’s eye and raising tight, awkward smiles. In the booth beside them a group of businessmen burst into raucous laughter, and he caught the faint raising of Athene’s eyebrows, the look that said they were simply too ridiculous for words.
‘You didn’t even talk to me,’ he said, trying to say it lightly, as if it were a mild reproach. ‘You just left a note.’
There was a faint clenching of her jaw. ‘I know, darling. I’ve always been useless at those sorts of conversations.’
‘Those sorts of conversations?’
‘Let’s not, Douglas. Not today.’
‘Why didn’t we meet at Dere? I would have gone to your parents’ house, if you’d wanted.’
‘I don’t want to see them. I don’t want to see anyone.’ She lit a second cigarette from the first, and crumpled the now empty packet in her hand. ‘Douglas, you wouldn’t be a darling and order me some more ciggies, would you? I seem to be out of change.’
He had done so without demur.
‘You are a dear,’ she murmured, and he was not sure if she was even aware what she was saying.
The food arrived, but neither of them had the appetite to eat. The two fish sat balefully in congealing butter until Athene pushed away her plate and lit another cigarette.
Douglas feared that this suggested her imminent departure. He couldn’t wait any longer. He had nothing left to lose. ‘Why did you call?’ he said, his voice cracking.
Her eyes met his and widened slightly. ‘Aren’t I allowed to speak to you any more?’ she said. Her attempt at coquettishness was hampered by the strain round her eyes, the fleeting glances she kept casting towards the front of the restaurant.
‘Are you waiting for someone?’ he said, suddenly filled with fear that He might be there too. That this migh
t all be some elaborate ploy to make a further fool of him.
‘Don’t be silly, darling.’
‘Don’t “darling” me, Athene. I can’t do this. I really can’t. I need to know why you’re here.’
‘You know, it’s lovely to see you looking so well. You always did look marvellous in that suit.’
‘Athene!’ he protested.
A woman had arrived at their table, the cloakroom attendant. He wondered, briefly, whether she was about to tell them that there was a call for Athene, and what he would do if she did. It would be Him, of course. Should he snatch the phone ? Demand that the other man leave his wife alone? Or what?
‘I’m sorry, madam, but your baby’s crying. You’ll have to come and get her.’
It was several seconds before he had taken in what the woman had said.
Athene stared at him, something raw and unguarded in her face. Then, composed, she turned back to the woman, her smile perfectly poised. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘Could you be a dear and bring her to me? I won’t stay long.’
The girl disappeared.
Athene took a long drag of her cigarette. Her eyes were glittering and unreadable. ‘Douglas, I need you to do something for me,’ she said coolly.
‘A baby?’ he said, one hand clamped to the top of his head.
‘I need you to look after Suzanna for me.’
‘What? A baby? You never—’
‘I really can’t discuss it. But she’s a good baby. I know she’ll adore you.’
The girl arrived with the child, almost concealed by blankets, whimpering as if in the aftermath of some terrible storm. Athene stubbed out her cigarette and reached for her, not looking at her face. She jiggled her absently, watching Douglas. ‘Her pram is at the front of the restaurant. It’s got everything she needs for a little while. She’s no trouble, Douglas, really.’
He was incredulous. ‘Is this – is this some kind of a joke? I don’t know what to do with a baby.’ The child had started to fret again, and Athene patted her back, still not looking at her face.
