Henry clenched his mobile. Standing in his own kitchen, he could easily have found Jarvis’s number, but he was in too much of a lather to think about such things. Theresa had set off so early on the school run that he had found himself with this unexpected breathing space – a bubble of quiet in which to address, at last, his plan of calling Charlotte. It had been hovering over him all week, surging and fading, depending on how busy he was and the level of his own inner calm. ‘You’re meeting Theresa today.’
Yes. We’re having lunch at Santini’s. If the food’s good and not too expensive I might decide to have my fortieth birthday dinner there. Why? Were you thinking of joining us?’
‘Charlotte… please.’
It occurred to Charlotte to hang up. Just in case he was on the verge of saying something truly awful – about liking her or wanting to see her again. But then it also occurred to her that he might simply be trying to apologize.
‘All I want,’ Henry blurted, ‘is for you not to tell her anything about what happened – please, Charlotte. Things haven’t been great, you see, so she might just… Look, don’t tell Tess anything, okay?’
No apology, then. No renewal of affections either, which was good. Charlotte hesitated, needing to think rather than because there was any pleasure to be had in prolonging Henry’s evident discomfort. What if she asks me something outright?’ she offered at last.
‘Oh, my God, she wouldn’t, would she?’
‘Henry, she’s your wife. You’ve just told me you’ve not been getting on too well. Maybe she suspects something. Maybe she thinks something happened in Suffolk. How do I know? All I can tell you is that, for reasons I’m not prepared to go into right now, I’m not a huge fan of the bare-faced lie.’
There was a long pause. ‘But if she doesn’t ask, you won’t say anything?’
‘No. I’d already decided that.’
‘Right.’
She could hear him breathing out.
‘Thanks.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
Charlotte stuck out her tongue at her reflection as she tackled her hair. She stabbed roughly with the clips and grips, not minding as she nicked her scalp, wishing she could turn the clock back to the time when Henry had been safely boxed as Theresa’s clever, slightly bumbling husband and she the disaster-prone friend.
By the time she was ready to leave, however, her good spirits had resurfaced. Guilt was robbing Henry of common sense. Theresa was as she always was. Since the shouting through the car windows they had enjoyed several thoroughly ‘normal’ phone conversations, covering a range of matters that included the maddening inefficiency of telephone companies and whether to make a fuss about Martin’s request vis-à-vis his and Cindy’s concert. On Theresa’s advice she hadn’t, with the happy result that Martin had offered to collect Sam straight from school the following Friday to give her a clear run to prepare for Eve and mah-jong. Charlotte was looking forward to the lunch enormously, not just because it seemed wise to fix on some plan for her hateful milestone birthday but because she was keen to move off such mundane matters and confide some of the other, much more seismic, things that had been going on in her life. Like the business of her father, and the miraculous new peace with Jean – subjects that required the intimacy of face-to-face contact as opposed to the impersonality of the telephone. And there was the Dominic Porter thing, too, of course, if she could muster enough courage.
Jasper was waiting for her on the landing, lying across the bottom of her bedroom door like a draught-excluder. As Charlotte set off down the stairs he followed, in the tumbling near-somersault fashion necessitated by his short legs and the deep Victorian stairs. ‘I suppose you’re coming too,’ she muttered, shaking her head in amused despair as he scuttled ahead to take up his do-or-die pose by the front door. Charlotte paused to smile, understanding suddenly how deep attachments could form with such creatures – to be waited for, to have one’s company sought, it was sheer flattery, no matter how dumb the animal. As she bent down to scoop up the morning’s post, it occurred to her to wonder suddenly how on earth Jean could bear to be deprived of such attachment, and in the distressing aftermath of her accident too, when one might have assumed she needed it most… Charlotte froze, post in hand. It didn’t make sense. And the phone not working. That didn’t make sense either. Something was wrong.
Dropping the letters on the hall table, she embarked on a proper whirlwind search for the cleaner’s number, flinging papers off shelves and out of drawers, riffling through notebooks and old diaries. Not finding it would mean driving to Kent. She searched harder, propelling herself with thoughts of Jason’s dismay if she were to cry off her morning shift, and Theresa’s, if she cancelled lunch. Leaving a paper-trail of mess, Charlotte eventually found herself back at the hall table, all set for a final desperate rummage in its two small brass-handled drawers. Instead, her gaze was drawn to a crooked second-class stamp on an envelope sticking out from the bottom of the pile of post. Near it – misaligned so as to be too near it – and clearly visible, was the last half of her surname, written in her mother’s unmistakable hand, with real ink and letters so shaky that, as Charlotte stared at them, her heart for some reason gathered speed.
Gently, she tugged the envelope out of the pile, fighting the faint but growing conviction that her world, so recently righted, was about to be overturned again. The flap was tightly gummed. As Charlotte teased it free, the feeling of dread grew, but alongside it there was also a burgeoning, almost sweet sensation of surrender. Why fight anything any more? Maybe a part of her was that lost little girl still and always would be. Some lives zigzagged off course and others didn’t. She had as much hope of righting such mysterious imbalances as abseiling up one of the rainbows sprouting out of her garden fence.
When the door slammed Henry hastily abandoned his phone, reached for a glass from the draining-board and turned on the cold tap. A moment later Theresa, marching into the kitchen, experienced a moment of equal surprise. She had come back for Matty’s ballet shoes, she explained, stretching across him to turn down the tap, which was splashing up his suit front, and wasn’t he going to miss his train?
‘Headache,’ Henry explained, tapping his temple and swigging the water. ‘Came back to take something… Might still catch it if I run.’ And run he did, out of the front door and up the street, only remembering as he hurled himself, along with a couple of other late arrivals, between the sliding doors of the eight thirty-two, that he had forgotten his phone.
Theresa, in a fluster about the shoes, acutely aware of her daughter still strapped into the unlocked car, late for school, but also – with her winning grin and plaits – a prime target for child-snatchers and paedophiles, bounced around the ground floor of the house ransacking plastic bags and backpacks. She had seen the ballet shoes somewhere that morning – seen them, thought they must be remembered and forgotten about them. It was only because the ‘somewhere’ turned out to be between the fruit bowl and the biscuit jar that she spotted Henry’s mobile. Less easy to understand was why, with the pumps found and her haste so urgent, Theresa paused not only to pick up the little phone but to press the buttons taking her to the information entitled ‘last number dialled’.
She emerged on the doorstep several minutes later, moving in a manner so obviously drained of haste that Matilda stuck her pig-tailed head out of the car window to scold, ‘Come on, Mummy, come on.’
‘Good shower?’ Eve asked lazily, rolling over to study her new lover through the tumble of her hair, enjoying the sight of the miniskirt of a towel that stopped several inches short of the bulging muscles above his knees. His torso was glistening still with water, flattering the dark triangle of his chest hair and the smooth muscled panels of his stomach. Watching him move around the bedroom, opening drawers and riffling through a rail of shirts, it was clear to Eve that he was deliberately showing these assets off. So he’s vain, she thought, rather enjoying the observation, since there was little she didn’t know abou
t vanity, and in her experience a man who cared about his appearance could be trusted to conduct himself in other ways that she judged important – hygiene, manners, the right outfit for the right occasion. Yes, this one would do very nicely. ‘So, no time for a quickie, then?’ she teased, keeping her voice low and full of playful disappointment as the torso disappeared inside a lemon shirt.
‘Sorry, babe.’ Tim grinned at her in the wardrobe mirror, sticking to the task of doing up the shirt buttons even though he would far have preferred to be tearing them apart. A good lay was so exactly what he had needed. And she was just his type, saucy, confident, full of surprises. ‘I’d love to, but I’m late as it is.’
‘Too bad.’ Eve levered herself upright, tucking the duvet under her arms as she dropped her phone back into her handbag and plucked out her lighter and cigarettes.
‘Ah,’ Tim wagged a finger, ‘not in here, if you don’t mind.’
‘Open the window, there’s a darling. Then you won’t notice.’ Eve placed a cigarette between her lips, snapped open her lighter and inhaled with a groan of satisfaction. ‘Like I said last night, my sins and I come as a package – all-or-nothing, non-negotiable.’ She watched through half-closed lids as Tim, with a show of amused reluctance, obediently opened the window. As a reward for this compliance she leant out of bed to blow a yet stream of smoke in its direction, making sure in the process that the duvet slipped down to her waist.
‘You’re terrible,’ said Tim softly, pausing to admire the sight.
‘I know.’ Eve lay back, stretching both arms above her head invitingly. ‘Show me again how terrible I am…’
‘Baby, I can’t. Later.’
‘Who says I’ll still be here?’
‘You did,’ Tim reminded her, laughing. ‘Until Friday, you said.’
‘Ah, yes, Friday, when I see Charlotte. I’ll have to wear dark glasses and a big hat in the meantime.’
‘Not on my account.’ Tim flung a tie round his neck. ‘Like I told you, as far as I was concerned, things on that front never really got going.’ He worked at the tie until it was a fat, loose knot, sitting just below the top button of his shirt.
‘You look good.’
‘Thanks… So do you, come to that.’
Eve got out of bed to tap her ash out of the open window, trailing the duvet like an extravagant ballgown. Unable to resist the sight, Tim crossed the room to kiss her, unravelling what he could of the bedding in the process. He didn’t even mind the smokiness. He was too thrilled with how everything was going, that he hadn’t lost his touch after all. He still couldn’t believe his luck – such a woman dropping into his life on Charlotte’s doorstep of all places. Although Eve had to take the credit for charging after him to exchange phone numbers, promising to be in touch after the visit to her brother. A woman with balls for a change, a woman who knew what she wanted. Tim had waited for her phone call like a palpitating teenager.
Eve put out her cigarette on the window-ledge and leant out, enjoying the morning sun on her face. She tossed the stub at a bush, but it rolled short on to the jutting rectangle of Tim’s neat, empty patio. ‘But if I bump into her, I’ll have to come clean, obviously.’ She threw the sentence over her shoulder, studying Tim carefully. He was back in front of the mirror with a comb now, smoothing the sides and stabbing for a messier look on top, presumably to disguise the small patch where the hair was thinning.
She had been thoroughly entertained by his account of the brief fling with Charlotte, how her old friend had got too clingy, obliging him to call a halt. And Sam’s dear little note asking him to change his mind (prompting the non-starter of a mercy mission, which she had so unwittingly interrupted), that, too, had been delightful. The idea of being adored and looked out for like that by a child – even a sulky one – intrigued Eve. It had even made her wonder, momentarily, whether she should consider getting her tubes untied to produce a similarly loyal and devoted little darling of her own. But then, right from the beginning, Charlotte had been so sickeningly smitten by motherhood and Eve knew she never would be: the squawks, the smells, the puke, the neediness – she had watched first Charlotte and then various other friends go through it in repulsed bafflement.
Tim had paused in his grooming. ‘Whatever you think best, babe, though she was pretty cut up.’ He pulled a face.
‘I’il be careful, then,’ Eve promised. ‘And I will be here when you get back,’ she called, snuggling back under the bedclothes as he bounded down the stairs.
With the weather mostly clement and business brisk, Santini’s had recently opened its rear doors to a large, paved courtyard, attractively hemmed in by mossy stone walls and ripening thickets of honeysuckle and clematis. There were eight tables in all, each with an attendant heater, weighted tablecloths and large, solid canvas umbrellas, sporting the same green and gold stripes that blazed from the canopy outside the restaurant’s front entrance. That Friday it was too warm for the heaters and the brollies were splayed by way of protection against the sun, offering such an effective carapace that the long, low bulge of charcoal clouds on the skyline amassed unseen, stretching and gathering energy as stealthily as a cat preparing to stalk its prey.
Theresa, observing them from her bedroom window, had changed into a thicker long-sleeved top. She had seen the Volkswagen, too, parked in one of the few spaces right outside the restaurant, one window left slightly open on account of the little dog, which had had its paws up against the glass as she walked past. But at the sight of Charlotte seated under the furthest of the canvas umbrellas, her chin resting on the tops of both hands as she studied the menu, Theresa murmured an apology to the waiter guiding her to the table and ducked downstairs to seek refuge in the ladies’.
Avoiding her reflection in the rows of mirrors, she perched on a small velvet chair next to a vase of lilies and dabbed her hot forehead with a tissue. Her mother, on the phone, had advised restraint, maintaining cool, keeping her counsel, waiting and seeing, but to Theresa it was clear that a turning point had been reached and needed to be acted upon – albeit in her own time when the moment was exactly right. She could enjoy that luxury at least, of deciding when to bring the edifice of her life tumbling down. In fact, after so many weeks of exhausting uncertainty and fuggy suspicions, getting the whole business finally out in the open would be a relief. She took it steadily as she proceeded back up the stairs, then strode with as much purpose as she could manage across the restaurant’s polished stone floor.
Charlotte grinned and stood up long before Theresa reached the table. She was waving the piece of paper she had been studying – not the menu at all, but what looked like a letter. From her mother, Charlotte explained, her face still creased with smiles as they exchanged kisses, breaking her chatter only to agree, exuberantly, to the waiter’s suggestion of champagne.
Champagne? Theresa managed a nod and a frozen smile as she sat down. Her head felt heavy – full – because of the question coiled inside, a hair’s breadth from release. Are you and Henry having an affair? Yes, that would do it. The difficulty was the follow-up. Take him. Give him back. Finish it. Carry on. Fuck off. The possibilities were really too endless.
‘So the letter explains that she has gone away somewhere,’ Charlotte was saying, ‘on her own, which is, of course, remarkable, given her enfeebled condition, but she says she’s managing fine, give or take the occasional dousing of her plaster, and that she’s realized it’s all an attitude of mind. I can’t tell you the relief – you wouldn’t believe the state I got myself into this morning. I was so sure something awful had happened… I mean, it is odd, of course, but she has every right to go where she pleases and I honestly cannot remember the last time she went anywhere, except to walk the bloody dog. Although Jasper isn’t actually bloody at all but really rather sweet, and when she takes him back I have a feeling I’m going to miss him terribly – far more than Sam, whom I thought would be so thrilled to have the loan of a pet, but who has taken barely any notice. On top of all tha
t–’ Charlotte paused to sip her champagne ‘–she appears to be trying to give me some money.’ She flapped the letter again, pointing at a sentence and reading out loud, ’“The enclosed is for you to do with as you choose.” A cheque in other words.’
‘Wow,’ offered Theresa, taking a long, steadying swig from her glass.
‘Except,’ continued Charlotte, laughing, ‘the silly old thing forgot to enclose the enclosed, so I’ve no idea how grateful to be. And since she’s gone away somewhere secret I can’t even ask, for the time being, and maybe I shouldn’t anyway – I mean, it would be a bit awkward, wouldn’t it? Although we’re getting on so much better… I can’t really explain it, but last week, after the hospital, I was dreading it so much but, looking after her, something happened– a sort of connection. I’ve been dying to tell you because it led – at least I think it did – to her telling me this most incredible, unbelievable thing about…’ Charlotte, having slowed, came to a halt at last. She had been talking with imbecilic speed and selfishness, she realized. Poor Theresa looked like some bewildered creature weathering a storm. ‘Forgive me, I’m gabbling. There’s just so much stuff I’ve been bursting to tell you. Sorry.’
‘No, go on,’ Theresa urged, impressed with her own sureness of tone. ‘You and your mum getting along at last – that’s great. Wow,’ she repeated, with less conviction, pressing her champagne glass back to her lips.
‘You are my closest friend,’ said Charlotte, quietly, sufficiently reassured to reach for Theresa’s hand and keep a tight hold of it while she confided the discovery that the man she thought of as her father had married her mother when she was already pregnant out of deep friendship and a gallant desire to offer social respectability rather than passion; that from what she could gather her own existence was the result of a one-night stand with a married man who had died without ever having been made aware of the consequences of his infidelity.
Life Begins Page 29
