by Lucy Diamond
‘Hello!’
‘Welcome!’
‘Lovely to see you!’
The adults’ voices rang out through the drowsy suburban air. The children hung back, apparently struck by shyness at the sight of their cousins, apart from Oscar, who folded his arms across his chest. ‘Your car is very dirty,’ he commented.
‘And so it begins,’ India muttered under her breath to Dan, her smile as bright and shiny as the miniature chrome jaguar, poised mid-leap on the bonnet of her brother’s (spotless) car.
‘Do you ever wonder,’ mused India over dinner that night, ‘if you are in the right life? If somewhere along the way you took a turn you shouldn’t have and, if you’d just made another choice instead, your whole world would be completely different?’
She was asking the wrong people, she realized, as soon as the words were out of her mouth. Because here they were, in Nick and Petra’s beautiful airy kitchen, with its big windows letting in the last of the day’s honeyed light, drinking delicious and no doubt cripplingly pricey wine, while all five children shrieked and laughed in the garden. What was more, they had just put away an exceedingly good meal consisting of two roast chickens, tossed green salad and a couple of trays of fragrantly herbed diced potatoes, all of which Petra had knocked up with Zen-like serenity. Of course these two didn’t feel they were in the wrong lives! They probably didn’t know what it meant to make a bad decision. Meanwhile, her own husband was looking hurt and defensive, as if he was wondering whether he had been included as one of India’s mistaken turns.
‘I mean,’ she went on hastily, ‘I’m not saying anything’s terrible about my life as it is right now – so you can get that worried look off your face, Dan – but take my work, for example. I can’t even remember why I took on the business now. Sleep-deprivation madness, it must have been. I thought I’d give it a whirl until I had a better idea . . . but I’m still there, shaking my bloody maracas. The better idea never happened. Not in this universe, anyway.’
‘So you think that, in another universe, you’d be doing something you enjoyed more?’ Petra ventured, a small frown creasing her forehead. Even when she was frowning, she appeared beautiful, with her angular cheekbones and long elegant neck. (In another universe I’d look more like you, Petra, India managed to stop herself from blurting out with an envious sigh.)
‘You could see it the other way round – in another universe, you might be on the dole,’ Nick pointed out, ever the pragmatist. ‘A terrorist bomb could have wiped out your street.’
‘Thank you, Captain Optimism,’ India said, rolling her eyes.
‘Nick!’ Petra remonstrated.
‘England could have been knocked out of the last World Cup in the first round,’ Dan put in glumly. ‘Oh no, wait – that did happen, didn’t it?’
‘I’m just saying, you can get bogged down with all these “what-ifs”,’ Nick said. He’d been tipping back the booze all afternoon and his face was a mottled brick-red as he filled their glasses once more. ‘And what for? You’re in this life – and from what I can see, it looks a pretty decent one – so what’s the problem?’
‘There’s not a problem, I just meant – oh, never mind.’ Now India felt churlish, as if she’d been ticked off for moaning about her ‘pretty decent’ life. (Pretty decent, indeed. She wondered how he’d class his own golf-playing executive lifestyle, and reckoned it would be quite a lot more generous than ‘pretty decent’.) ‘I just find it interesting, that’s all, to wonder. What other versions of me might be doing. Petra – you must have thought the same, haven’t you? If you hadn’t saddled yourself with my brother, you could be . . . I don’t know. Shacked up with someone good-looking and clever, for instance. Joking!’
Petra looked confused. For all her general Scandi perfection and wholesomeness, she didn’t have much of a sense of humour, India remembered too late. ‘But I want to be with Nick!’ she cried, reaching across the table for his hand. ‘He is good-looking and clever. And I don’t want to be doing anything else.’
Oh dear. The conversation was sliding away from her, and now India’s last comment sounded bitchy when that had really not been her intention. ‘I was joking,’ she repeated, noticing that her brother wasn’t smiling, either. ‘It was more that . . . Look, I saw this horrific crash just after my birthday, all right? A car smashing into a shop, right in front of me. People seriously injured, everyone screaming. And since then—’
‘Here we go,’ muttered Dan.
‘And since then, I’ve been thinking: what if the car had hit me, rather than the other people? How come I was spared like that, unhurt, when—’
‘Hardly spared,’ her husband pointed out. ‘This wine is excellent, by the way, Nick.’
It was no good, they weren’t playing along, and India finally ran out of steam. ‘Oh, never mind,’ she said, defeated, and feeling as if everyone was annoyed by her. She glanced out of the window, to where Oscar appeared to be dragging Kit around by his ankles, and wondered if she should intervene. As the youngest of three, Kit was able to put up with a certain amount of rough and tumble, but there inevitably came a point where he couldn’t cope and would crumple into tears. Added to which, his older siblings, heartless to the core, would not be dashing to his rescue any time soon, she predicted.
‘It’s a Garrus Rosé, Château d’Esclans,’ Nick replied. ‘More like a white Burgundy really – it’s widely regarded as the best rosé these days. It’s one I got from our wine club a few months ago, and we liked it so much, I ended up ordering a case. Are you in a wine club, Dan? I can recommend ours, if not.’
‘No,’ said Dan, carefully avoiding looking at his wife, who refused to buy any wine that cost more than six pounds, on principle. ‘We’re not in a wine club.’
Petra at least took pity on India. ‘Well, I think I’m going to make the decision to find the cheesecake,’ she said jovially. ‘I hope that will not be a wrong turn.’
India smiled back. ‘That definitely sounds like a right turn.’
‘A right turn and a good decision,’ Dan told Petra, twinkling.
‘Good decisions, bad decisions, everyone makes them,’ said Nick. Of course he had to have the final word. ‘Everyone’s life is constructed by their own set of decisions. For example, I could have decided not to attend a particular client dinner one night – but I did attend, and I met Petra. Likewise, Petra had the chance to study in the States or in the UK – but she made the decision to come here, luckily for me.’ He glanced fondly over at her, where she was getting bowls from a cupboard. Then he turned back to India and his eyes narrowed slightly, making her wonder if he was remembering her comment about Petra choosing a better-looking husband (which had been a joke!). Nick was nice enough, as brothers went, but if there was one thing he hated, it was people laughing at him. When they were much younger he had sometimes been cruel to her, if she’d dared tease him. ‘As for you—’ he began, and India had a sudden premonition of doom.
‘Exactly,’ she interrupted, not liking the way he was looking at her. ‘And Dan and I might not have got chatting at a dodgy house-party that time, and all the rest of it. This is what I’ve been trying to say.’
‘Or you might not have gone to university,’ he went on, his voice alarmingly silky, his eyes hooded. ‘You could have stayed at home and—’
‘Well, yes, quite,’ India said loudly, fearful of where this was leading. There was a dangerous glint in his eye and she jumped to her feet, desperate to head him off, fast, before he went any further. I know you, that glint said. Don’t forget that. ‘I’ll just check on the kids,’ she said, walking briskly towards the back door. ‘Kit, are you okay?’ she called for good measure as she went out. ‘Gently with him, Oscar!’
The air was starting to cool outside, with shadows silently gathering in the corners of the garden. India shivered as she stood there for a moment, her back to the house, not wanting to return inside until she’d regained her equilibrium. What had Nick been about to say just
then, before she’d interrupted him? Was he seriously about to dredge up the darkest moments of her past at his middle-class dinner table, detonate her marriage on a whim, when he’d been sworn to secrecy all those years ago? Oh my God, she thought, feeling the alcohol buzzing around her, as she imagined her husband’s face. The Burrells had never since spoken of that summer, when she’d been a heartbroken teenager and her parents had seethed with barely suppressed disapproval. Nick had been at university by then anyway, so he had missed the worst of it, and she’d hoped – foolishly, admittedly – that he might even have forgotten about the saga. But if her instincts had been right – if he’d been on the brink of hauling the whole sorry tale back up, in order to make some kind of point (Don’t you dare insinuate I’m not clever and good-looking, in front of my wife!) – then she would have to tread very carefully around him.
‘What are you doing, Mum?’ asked Esme just then and India jumped, realizing she was still standing there in the darkening garden, staring anxiously into space.
Act normal. Give it your best shot. She forced herself to smile, even though she could see that her daughter must have furtively applied several coats of mascara behind her back – Petra’s expensive Estée Lauder stuff, as well, she bet – and now her perfect sister-in-law would probably judge India on that, too. ‘I just came out to say that it’s time for pudding. Did you all hear? Pudding! Come and wash your hands.’
Her announcement was greeted by exuberant cheers and then a charge for the kitchen, with India hurrying to keep up with them. Safety in numbers, and all that.
She woke in the night with a start, having dreamed about Robin for the first time in ages. He still appeared to her like this every now and then – fixed, as if in amber, at eighteen with his tousled brown hair, his rockstar white jeans and clumsy eyeliner, his body as wiry as ever. The disturbing thing about these dreams, as far as India was concerned, was that she was always kissing him, and they would always rip off each other’s clothes in a very X-rated way. Occasionally she had woken up panting, convinced she’d just had an orgasm in her sleep, and would glance across at her husband, sleeping beside her in the bed, and feel a stab of guilt at her own treachery.
Robin Fielding. They’d met in sixth form, where people had just about stopped calling her ‘Barrel’, thank goodness (she had been a bit chubby throughout school; no, it wasn’t a particularly witty nickname). They had sat next to each other for English Lit and bonded over their shared feelings for Ted Hughes (good), David Bowie (a genius) and overbearing parents (his were religious, hers just strict). Robin could be caustic and liked to argue – rumour had it he’d been expelled from his last school for fighting. He introduced her to smoking dope and obscure psychedelic bands, and sometimes wore black nail varnish, just to wind up his dad. Oh, how India had loved him. How hard and breathlessly she had fallen. She would have done anything for Robin; she would have thrown herself off a motorway bridge if he’d asked her to, set herself aflame with lighter fuel, tattooed his name across her body, anything at all. It had been mutual, too – a furnace of passion, heady and all-consuming. He would break out of his house in the middle of the night, pick flowers from random people’s gardens and leave them on her doorstep. He had once punched a boy for calling her fat, and had to go and see the head of sixth form because the other boy’s nose was broken. He had written her love-poems, even, his soul laid bare on lined paper torn from an exercise book; she had kept them under her pillow at night, reading them so many times that the paper became soft.
Nobody had ever written a love-poem for her since, obviously, apart from her children, occasionally, under duress for Mother’s Day, but that wasn’t the same. Dan was a good man, sure, a lovely husband, and she wasn’t knocking him at all really, but he was the sort of bloke who, if pushed to express his feelings for her with pen and paper, would come up with a dirty limerick and expect her to think herself lucky. ‘Look, I’m a plumber, not frigging Shakespeare,’ she imagined him saying in exasperation.
Anyway. Whatever. Here she was in bed with Dan, who might be crap on the poetry front, but who was safe, solid and dependable nonetheless, who had given her three beautiful children and put up with her whims and moods. Robin was ancient history and had never been settling-down material – there was no way the relationship would have survived the grown-up years of living together and paying bills, all the boring stuff that was the real test of a partnership. The past was the past, and it should stay there.
She rolled over in the dark, feeling uncertain and, for some reason, unhappy, wishing they were at home instead of here. Wishing, too, that she could feel a bit more secure, more content with her lot these days, instead of glancing sideways at the what-ifs all the time. She needed to start counting her blessings, making gratitude lists and remembering that she was lucky, actually, and had a perfectly good life, so there.
Just then she heard soft footsteps along the corridor outside. The slow, wary creak of the door. ‘Mum?’ It was Kit, clutching his old bear, light from the landing spilling around him as he hovered on the threshold in his Chewbacca pyjamas.
India propped herself up in bed, guessing already the cause of this night-time visitation. ‘Are you all right, love? Was it a bad dream?’
He stepped towards her, still muddled with sleep, his dark hair sticking up on his head. A whiff of ammonia came leaking through the darkness and she tried not to sigh. Oh no. Here we go again. When she’d made a point of reminding him about having a last wee, as well. ‘Is Kit still not dry at night?’ Petra would cluck in the morning, all sympathy, and India hated herself for knowing that she’d feel ashamed.
‘Never mind, pet,’ she said, heaving her legs out of bed and reaching to put her arms around him. This was her real life, she reminded herself, not teenage sweethearts and other people’s families; it was time to stop all the nonsense and come back down to earth. ‘Come on, let’s get you sorted out.’
Chapter Twelve
Back when they were schoolgirls – Jo sixteen and Laura twelve or thereabouts – Laura had once overheard a conversation that had stayed with her ever since. She’d been in the girls’ loos at the upper school, fluffing up her blonde hair in the mirror and almost certainly adding another ozone-killing blast of hairspray, when her attention was caught by the sound of her own surname. There’d been a high window slanted open in the bathroom, she seemed to remember, one of those uselessly small windows designed to prevent students from escaping, and the voices – male, teenage – had come floating through.
‘Yeah, what’s-her-name – that Nicholls girl – she’s pretty fit.’
Laura had frozen, hairbrush in hand, as she caught her own eye in the mirror. Who, me?
‘What, Jo Nicholls? Are you kidding? I saw her playing netball the other day, legs like tree trunks. The ground was practically shaking.’
‘No! Not her. The fun one. The blonde. Can’t remember what her name is.’
‘Oh yeah, I know. Laura.’
‘Yeah, Laura. She’s well fit.’
The fun one. It had stuck in her mind, that phrase; she had felt it settling around her shoulders like an attractive sort of cape, and she liked the way it fitted. Who wouldn’t want to be the fun one? she’d thought, preening, unable to help exchanging a knowing smirk of satisfaction with her reflection. She could afford to be the fun one, too, being the younger, dafter sister who didn’t have to worry about stuff. Especially because she knew it would all get taken care of by sensible, responsible Jo, who was, as a result, far too busy to care about trivial things like her own thighs and what boys might say about them.
Even as an adult, the phrase had remained key to how Laura viewed herself. I’m the fun one, mucking up my exams because I’m going to house-parties and snogging boys. I’m the fun one, giggling in interviews, playing up to the dizzy blonde stereotype, always up for a night out. I’m the fun one, never taking life too seriously, making people laugh. ‘She walks through life on the bright side of the road,’ Matt had said
in his wedding speech and Laura’s eyes had welled up at his unexpectedly poetic turn of phrase.
But suddenly, almost imperceptibly, she had stopped being the fun one. Somehow or other, she had become a person whose side of the road was now darkened by clouds, whose own husband had given up on her. How could you be fun when you felt like the weight of the world was pressing down on your shoulders, like your emotions were constantly in danger of erupting?
And now look at her, knocking meekly at her mother’s front door on a Saturday morning because she couldn’t stand being at home any more, when Matt had said he thought they should give up on the baby plan. Frankly, this was all very far from her definition of ‘fun’.
The night before, after he’d said those terrible things, she’d reeled out of the pub and walked blindly through town, barely stopping to check for traffic as she crossed each road, just stumbling forward, dazed with shock. She’d ended up in some awful bar, drinking whisky on an empty stomach (she didn’t even like whisky) and then, on the way home, some guy had tried to chat her up – yeah, because she was such a catch, obviously, pissed and on her own, eating a bag of chips in a bus shelter. She’d ended up bursting into tears on him, clinging to his arm and telling him she only wanted a baby, that was all, why wasn’t anyone letting her have a baby? – which proved to be a very effective way of getting rid of an unwanted admirer, at least.
Once she’d finally made it home, she’d found Matt pacing about, desperately worried about her (‘Why was your phone off, Laura? For goodness’ sake!’) and she’d thought for a brief, bright moment that this might be the turning point, that she’d be able to talk him round. He loved her, didn’t he? He’d been worried about her! But no. Still no. The more she tried to persuade him that IVF or another fertility treatment was the best way forward, the more he dug his heels in. He was a Pisces and she knew full well that you couldn’t tell a fish which way to swim.
