Life Begins

by Amanda Brookfield

  ‘Oh dear, I suppose you will. Would tea help? I was just going to put the kettle on.’

  ‘Indeed it would. Tea. Fabulous.’

  ‘And toast?’

  Henry groaned and clutched his stomach. ‘Toast. Heaven.’

  ‘Won’t be a tick.’ Charlotte tugged the window shut, pulled on some socks, got halfway downstairs and then – in the interests of decorum – went back up in search of her jeans. Ten minutes later they were seated opposite each other at the kitchen table, with a plate of buttered toast, an assortment of jams and the cottage teapot, which was in the gimmicky shape of a square cow and impossible to pour.

  ‘Allow me – years of practice. It needs one sharp tip.’

  Charlotte giggled as Henry’s attempt resulted in a pool of spilt tea even larger than the one she had managed. ‘I’ll get a cloth.’ She trotted over to the sink then let out a cry of annoyance as a mild irritation in her left eye sharpened into real pain.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing. Something in my eye. Toast probably. Hang on.’ Charlotte tugged at her upper lid, then blinked furiously. ‘There, that’s better. No, it isn’t.’ She blinked harder, her eye streaming. ‘Bugger, I need a mirror.’

  ‘No, wait, let me take a look.’

  Charlotte, one hand over the afflicted eye, was already halfway to the door but Henry blocked her path. ‘I’m good at this sort of thing. I even have a clean handkerchief – voilà.’ He pulled a crisply folded blue hanky out of his back pocket and shook it with a flourish. ‘Keep still now… Look left… Look right… Up… Ah, there we are… there… Don’t move… don’t…’ Henry, steady-handed with the sharpest scalpel, willed the tremor from his fingers and knees as he pushed the lid upwards. He had located the tiny offending black speck, but could see only her eye – her beautiful eye – a Catherine wheel of greens and browns and blacks. And the first image of her that morning was still clouding his vision too, the tumble of hair as she pulled on her jumper, the glimpse of her ribcage through the flimsy material of her nightdress.

  Charlotte, waiting patiently, face tipped up, like a most dutiful patient, was at first merely uncomfortable. Then, like the tiniest breeze changing direction, she became aware of something different, something not right – not right at all. Henry was looking into her eye and she was trying to look at the ceiling, trying now not to blink, focusing on the antics of a fat fly trampolining near a cobweb. All was as it had been, and yet… not. For there was suspense suddenly, suspense and expectation and an atmosphere so thick she could have sliced it. Charlotte was still registering this change, hoping it would disappear back into the invisible, baffling place whence it came, when Henry, having deftly removed the speck with a corner of his handkerchief, cupped both hands round the back of her head and groaned, ‘Charlotte… Oh, God, Charlotte.’

  For a moment Charlotte couldn’t speak. Henry’s eyes, magnified a little through the lenses of his glasses, were closed, the lids trembling. The sight, so vulnerable, so obvious in its expectation of physical bliss, was curiously moving. He was going to kiss her and part of her wanted him to. Yes, it did. Dear sweet Henry, who had spent three selfless days fathering Sam and tending her, showing the pair of them what they had never really known. Family holidays with Martin had been such battlegrounds, with poor Sam caught in the middle, the reason, often, for the arguments and the solace when they spun out of control.

  Henry had an appealing mouth too – Charlotte had thought so more than once – generous, playful, agile, perfect for kissing. More importantly he was nice, really nice. And if he liked her in this astonishing, unexpected way then did she – the independent, no-strings party – really have to take on the huge, painful responsibility of pushing him away? Life was such a mess. Surely one could justify grabbing happiness where one could, squeezing the joy out of each second, living for the moment? Wasn’t that precisely what she had vowed to do?

  Henry, sensing the possibility of reciprocation, murmured her name again and pulled her face towards his. Their lips were barely an inch apart when two things happened in quick succession: Charlotte, coming to her senses, jerked out of reach and Henry’s phone rang in his trouser pocket.

  ‘It’s Theresa.’ He stared bleakly at the handset, not answering.

  ‘I’ll speak to her, shall I?’ Charlotte snapped.

  ‘No… I…’ Henry carried on looking at the phone although it had stopped ringing. His shoulder was still throbbing where Charlotte had pushed him away: firm, sharp as a gunshot. ‘Charlotte, being with you has been… I…’

  ‘You,’ she hissed, ‘are an idiot. As am I.’

  ‘No, never you, never…’

  ‘Oh, Henry, grow up and stop playing games. I came down here in good faith, with no agenda except a break with Sam. It never occurred to me that – my God, all that dancing around us, all that pandering… I don’t even have the words to say how it makes me feel.’

  ‘Charlotte.’ Henry’s knees had finally given way and he was supporting himself against the old pine dresser that had belonged to his mother and still displayed what had been her favourite cut-glass vase. ‘Charlotte, my feelings for you – I thought you knew… I thought that you… these last few days…’

  ‘Feelings?’ Charlotte snorted, too angry to care about being kind. ‘And what about Theresa’s feelings? She doesn’t deserve this, Henry, and what’s more, I know you love her, I know it, because I’ve seen it over years and years – seen it and been jealous of it, because although I loved Martin once, it went wrong through his total lack of ability to be faithful,’ she spat the word, ‘and though I’m glad to be unmarried because of how hopeless and mutually horrible that made us, I have lately realized the size and scale of the thing we managed to throw away. And if I could get it back I would – I bloody would.’

  Charlotte stood clenching and unclenching her fists, breathing hard, her eyes burning. Now call Theresa back, for God’s sake. It might have been urgent.’

  ‘Urgent?’ Henry gripped the edge of the dresser, struggling to accommodate this new horror alongside Charlotte’s shattering hostility: all that vulnerability, all that intoxicating neediness, where had it gone? But she was absolutely right – for Theresa to call at eight on a holiday morning, it had to be pretty important. He turned away to make the call, dreading to hear his wife’s voice and what she might detect in his.

  Charlotte was on the doorstep, shivering with aftershock rather than cold, when Henry came rushing out of the kitchen waving the phone. ‘It’s not me Theresa wants, it’s you. Your phone was off.’

  ‘No, it’s not, it’s just the signal,’ Charlotte muttered, too sickened still to look at him.

  ‘It’s your mother, Charlotte.’

  ‘My mother?’ He had her attention now. ‘My mother?’ she repeated, as Henry hovered, chewing his lips, his face flexing in an unreadable mesh of emotions.

  ‘I’m sorry, but apparently she’s had a fall. Here.’

  Henry retreated to the bike while the two women talked. It was still parked on its saddle next to the barn, the inner tubes hanging limply out of the tyres. Slowly, carefully, miserably, he teased and stretched them, using his clever doctor fingers to search for holes. The collision of fantasy and reality – Charlotte’s revulsion, Theresa’s call – had been like the worst physical pain. It was with him still, in the pump of his heart and in the sensation of standing not on the cottage’s gravelled drive but on two separating tectonic plates; his life had cracked down the middle and he was astride the widening chasm, certain to tumble into it, to lose everything he had ever wanted and held dear.

  The mist had cleared, revealing the flat brown and green counterpane of the fields and the gauzy grey-blue strip of the sea beyond. Turning his back on the stricken bike, Henry stared till the colours blurred, wretched that not even such a well-loved sight could offer comfort.

  Chapter Eleven

  On Sam’s second birthday I buy a set of Mickey Mouse-themed paper plates, cups, napkins and
hooters from the supermarket. Five small playmates from Tumble Tots are coming to tea and I have made a cake that sagged so badly on cooling that I filled the hole with Smarties, smothered it in icing and called it a treasure chest. The camouflage is to satisfy the beady eyes of the other mothers: Sam is still too young to recognize a pirate, let alone his booty. Squirming for release from the supermarket trolley, he is enthralled into silence not by the papery images of the cartoon mouse but by the crackle of the cellophane encasing it.

  The beauty of my child still takes my breath away. His hair is white blond, with a gully of frizzed ringlets running from his crown to the nape of his neck. Martin likes to joke that they make him look like a girl and should be cut off. But the ringlets, especially, make me weak with love. I would sooner hack at my own hand than cut them off. On the rare occasions that Sam is sleepy, he winds his fingers through them while his mouth chomps on his left thumb. Martin enjoys remarking on this too, saying he’ll grow up with a bald patch and buck teeth and should have the habits trained out of him before it’s too late.

  I know Martin only means to tease, but these days I find it harder to laugh. We’re not on the same, effortless wavelength we once were. Before Newcastle it was Birmingham and before that Leeds. The computer companies are changing, getting larger, but we need more money, more space. I lack sleep and friends. Bella stayed in Australia and Eve, seeking her fortune in America, is rarely in touch. Sometimes I feel as if I only really have Sam.

  I pause at the checkout to consider this, wondering whether to worry, whether such feelings are normal after eight years together and the vortex of mothering. Martin would like more sex, I know that, but often I am too physically crushed by fatigue to respond (colic, teething pain, ear infections, eczema, croup – Sam leaves nothing out in the gamut of possibilities to offer disturbance).

  ‘He’s gorgeous!’ exclaims the checkout girl, cocking her head at the trolley where Sam, having bitten through the wrapping is now sucking the napkins. ‘Hello, gorgeous.’ She waves and Sam, kicking, offers an obliging smile.

  But we made love that morning, I remind myself, pressing the worry away as I unload the bags and Sam into the car. Wary, as ever, of disturbing our boy, still parked at my insistence for convenience) at the bottom of our double bed, we touched and moved with some furtiveness, but a glimmer of the old, effortless closeness was there. Afterwards I said sorry for so seldom being in the mood and Martin said he understood and not to worry. I explained also, for the first time, how – with my history – being a good mother meant the world and he said he understood that too.

  Later, downstairs, while Sam banged his spoon against the sides of his high-chair, spraying blobs of baby porridge across the wall, I straightened Martin’s tie fondly and reminded him of the birthday tea. He kissed me on the lips, saying he wouldn’t miss it for the world, then made Sam wave and gurgle one of his ‘bye-byes’ before offering a valedictory thumbs-up at the lumpy treasure chest, now sprouting two candles and a spangled sign saying, ‘You Are 2!’.

  Yet when the party starts he is not there. The women offer reassurance and sympathy between attending to full nappies and tantrums. I want to wait for Martin, but time is racing and noise levels rising. My friends pick at the finger food, exchange anecdotes about minor domestic dramas and say, ‘No hurry’, but they have to be away by five. It’s no big deal, I tell myself, swallowing analgesics for a pounding head before giving up the wait and embarking on a search for matches. It’s no big deal,’ I say aloud, smiling defiantly at the faces round the table, as I pluck Sam out of his high-chair and bolster his baby puffing at the two little flames.

  I’m surveying the debris of the party when Martin rushes in, pushing the hair from his eyes, his tie flying over one shoulder. He is apologetic but cheerful, full of quick-fire talk about late trains and overrun meetings. He would help clear up, he says, but he has to work. There is a possibility of promotion, to London, if he doesn’t make a hash of things with his new boss, Fiona, a first in Maths from Oxford, a PhD from Harvard and sharp as nails. Talk about being kept on one’s toes. He takes his briefcase into the sitting room and then, when Sam’s tears of exhaustion grow too loud, stomps impatiently along the hall to our bedroom and closes the door.

  A promotion might mean a house instead of a cramped flat and I want that badly, even if it means another move. A play room, a garden, an extra loo. I think of these things as I scrape the soggy remains of the cake into the bin and cajole Sam into the bath.

  Suspicion arrives later that night, quietly, like a thief, tiptoeing in search of valuables. It is the suspicion not of infidelity – not yet – but of emotional desertion. To miss a birthday tea is a small crime; it is the ease with which it was missed that hurts – no phone call, no real attempt to atone, just talk of work, promotions and his big-brained boss. With such priorities how can there be room for love, either for me or Sam? I move closer, nuzzling the little forest of curls on the patch of neck under his hairline, seeking reassurance. But there is no response, only Martin’s own skin-smell and the faint scent of something else, something sweeter – the new body-wash, probably, that I bought for the shower.

  I roll away and close my eyes, blinking them open in an instant when the first snuffles come from the cot. Everything is as it should be, I tell myself. My world, since Martin entered it, is safe. And yet I am aware of a new alertness that has no connection to the patchy sleeping patterns of our child. It is an alertness to danger – of patterns repeating, of losing love, losing Martin.

  ∗

  Sam ducked past the barn window, climbed over the gate he was supposed, always, to open and close, and picked up a hefty branch, which he thrashed as he walked. He felt bad about his granny, but probably not as bad as he guessed he was supposed to feel. A broken bone was serious, of course, but the fact that she had done it slipping as she got out of the bath conjured unwelcome images of her old-lady body, wobbling and slithery, sprawling on the tiled floor. He wasn’t sure he could have brought himself to touch her as Prue, the poor cleaning lady, had presumably had to while they waited for the ambulance.

  Spotting a sturdier, leafless stick, Sam flung aside the branch and picked it up. It had an end as sharp as a tent pole and growths hanging off it like pendulous fat grey warts. Sam shook it and charged a squirrel, which scampered up a tree, causing two large black birds to erupt out of the branches in a frenzy of flapping that made him jump. ‘Fuck you,’ he shouted, pointing his mouth at the sky as the birds shrank to pinpricks. ‘Fucking fuck you.’

  Sam knew he would have felt better about his granny (i.e. worse) if it hadn’t been for the other stuff, the stuff just before the phone call. His mum and George’s dad, in each other’s arms. If he hadn’t seen it through the open door of the kitchen with his own eyes he wouldn’t have believed it. In fact, even though he had seen it, Sam still couldn’t believe it. If such things could happen the world made no sense. If such things could happen, he wanted no part of them.

  George’s map turned out to be pretty useless, arrows and curves supposedly indicating a big dip in the dunes near a broken tree; but there were several broken trees and loads and loads of dips. Sam searched for a bit, studying the map from different angles, wondering if he had got the sea muddled with the sky, until a woman in wellingtons, using a ball-thrower for a muddy-legged Labrador, asked if he was lost and could she help. He shouted no and ran back the way he had come, then dived behind one of the steepest dunes when she wasn’t looking. Peeping out, Sam watched the waves pushing and pulling along the shore, leaving rings of foam and straggles of seaweed. He could still make out the clear double path of his footprints embedded along the edge of the water where the sand was heavy and damp. In contrast, the sand in the dunes was dry and silky cool, spilling into the indentations his body made the moment he shifted his weight.

  After the woman and the dog had gone Sam rolled on to his back and swished his arms to make angel wings. Overhead the sky was like a domed ceiling, impossib
ly blue, impossibly huge. It’s just a planet, he told himself, with no god, no rules. It didn’t matter that he had divorcing parents and a mother who kissed other people’s fathers. It didn’t matter that his granny had flopped like a fish on a bathmat and that, with his dad too busy, apparently, to take him in, he would almost certainly end up enduring the horror of accompanying his mum to visit her in hospital.

  ‘If only Theresa was in London,’ Charlotte had wailed between phone calls, her mood of general despair worsened by having to hold the handset at odd angles to get a signal and the fact of his father’s work crisis. Sam, unable to imagine ever wanting to see George’s mum or George’s dad – especially not his dad – ever again, had chosen that moment to grab the hideout map and slip out of the back door.

  He closed his eyes and pressed the back of his head into the sand. There was only one person he really felt like seeing, one impossible secret person who almost certainly hadn’t got his latest letter and who would probably laugh if he told her what had happened. Sam opened his eyes and squinted as the sun slid out from behind a cloud and beamed into his face like a torch. He sat up, scratching the grit out of his hair. Rose wouldn’t laugh. He knew she wouldn’t because she wasn’t like other kids. She knew when things were serious, what could be made fun of and what couldn’t. Rose didn’t have to be told that life was shitty because she knew already.

  When Sam arrived back at the edge of the field they were both there, hands cupped round their mouths, hollering his name. Hearing the terror in his mother’s voice, Sam broke into a run and waved his arms. A few minutes later she was clasping him and kissing him and calling him stupid and saying in a weird, strangled voice that they needed to pack up the car and get going.