‘But you missed being a Marine.’
‘Less and less, over the years.’ He looked at me curiously. ‘Have you ever thought of enlisting?’
‘Me? You’re joking, right?’
‘No.’
I snorted and looked away. We were sitting by the window but you couldn’t see out for condensation. I rubbed a view hole, trying to displace the anger I felt, trying to look like I didn’t care that he’d got me so wrong. It had started to rain and I remembered Jade didn’t have her coat. I silently cursed myself.
He touched my hand and I jerked back, shocked, like he’d pressed a burning cigarette against my flesh. I looked at him and he smiled crookedly, as if he’d realised he’d slighted me and was trying to make amends. Carl used to have the same realisations, the same sense of knowing when I was hurt or disappointed in him. Sometimes he’d try teasing me out of myself; he’d tickle me and we’d start play-fighting, end up in bed. I pressed my lips together, struck by grief as I was a hundred times a day.
Quietly Mark said, ‘Steven, the time I spent in the marines was the happiest time of my life. I had purpose, direction – respect –’
‘I don’t need to wear a uniform to feel respected.’
‘Well that’s good. Good. Good for you.’
‘I do a useful job.’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘A job that doesn’t involve killing people.’
He laughed. ‘Hopefully not.’
‘You think I don’t have any ambition –’
‘Do you have ambition?’
I couldn’t face him. I wanted to say yes – my ambition is to be you, to live your cool and tidy life. I imagined being his shadow – less than that – being with him without being seen so that he couldn’t hide from me. I would see everything of him then and it would take my mind off this weight of grief that no one could be bothered to care about or even notice. So there – that’s my ambition, to be wound up in him, to forget my useless self.
I made myself look at him and he gazed back, this soft, understanding look that makes you want to confess the worst thought you ever had because if you did you knew he would help you. I had to bite my lip to stop myself blurting something ridiculous and degrading. And all the time he watched me, making me wonder if he realised the effect he was having.
Gently he said, ‘Steven, why don’t you come and have supper with me tonight?’
From the corner of my eye I saw Jade put her crayon down. She tugged at my sleeve. ‘Daddy, I need a wee.’
When we came back from the toilets Mark had paid for the teas and was standing by the door. He said, ‘It’s raining. I’ll give you a lift home.’
Chapter 18
Ben slept until late afternoon and then went into his study to work on the paper he was about to publish. He’d explained briefly what the paper was about but, knowing how squeamish she was, he’d smiled. ‘I won’t put you off your supper, don’t worry.’
She’d protested that she was interested. He’d laughed.
She ironed his shirts. She thought about their visit to the hospital later that evening, how it would disrupt Nathan’s hypothetical bedtime. Lately it wasn’t so hypothetical, lately she had got him down at around six thirty. The evening would stretch ahead of her. She would watch TV alone. Ben didn’t watch television, except occasionally when he was too exhausted even to speak. Even more occasionally they’d eat their tea in front of Eastenders or Coronation Street and she’d feel like he’d made an extra special effort to fit in with what she was used to. It was an uncomfortable feeling, as though he was humouring her. Boredom radiated from him, making her shift restlessly, unable to concentrate on the stories. She’d think of her Mam and Alan who never used their dining table but always ate on the sofa, one at each end, the remote controls for the telly, the video and the satellite box between them, TV Quick open on the day’s listing. Behind them the unused table reflected the lamplight, a pyramid of bright green porcelain apples placed in its exact centre.
Watching television alone was boring. She’d taken to having long baths, if Nathan allowed, or reading the newspapers Ben had delivered but never had time to look at. She liked The Guardian on Mondays and The Times on Wednesdays. She’d begun to look out for certain columnists, women who wrote about what it was like when your boss got too demanding or your friends longed for babies/husbands and you didn’t, or vice versa. She found such writers laughable, they made her feel as if she had done something right with her life, although she was sure that wasn’t their intention.
Ben had said once, ‘I’m more old-fashioned than most men my age. Does that bother you?’
‘Depends how you’re old-fashioned.’
‘I don’t want my wife to work. Susan worked.’
Secretly she’d been pleased. She hated her job as a bank cashier. All the same she’d made a stand to test him.
‘What if I want a career?’
He’d raised his eyebrows. ‘As?’
That as? It had made her feel stupid. She had let the subject drop and he never mentioned it again. As soon as they knew she was pregnant, only a few weeks after their marriage, he suggested she gave up work. Her morning sickness had lasted all day and was horrible and she’d agreed at once.
Kitty hung the last ironed shirt in Ben’s wardrobe. She went to the window and looked down on the rainy garden. When Nathan was older – soon – she would take up gardening. She pored over the catalogues that dropped out of the Sunday supplements and imagined planting fruit trees and bushes – plums and quinces, gooseberries and currants, old-fashioned fruits she could make jam from. She fancied herself making jams and chutneys. She fancied a greenhouse and a vegetable patch and a physic garden like the one Ben had taken her to see at Kew. He had laughed at her idea of having a smaller-scale version at home. ‘I may have to burn you as a witch. As a surgeon I have to take a hard line.’
‘Medicine isn’t just about bones,’ she’d told him.
Being thought of as a witch appealed to her but she kept its appeal secret from him. She fantasised about making potions that could erase memories, whole months and years of memories. She would serve him wine laced with this concoction and wipe Susan from his mind and heart and it would be like clearing a tenacious weed from a path.
One Sunday, early in their relationship, Ben had taken her to meet Simon. As Ben parked the car and she was about to get out he had said, ‘Dad’s old, he can be tactless – blunt, I think he terms it. Just smile. Remember he’s trying to shock you.’
But Simon had been lovely. ‘He’d turned on the charm,’ Ben said later, ‘he’s probably fallen in love with you.’ As they were leaving, the old man had taken her hand. ‘My dear, come and see me on your own – two’s company and all that. We’ll have tea together and I can tell you all his secrets.’
‘I don’t have any secrets, Dad,’ Ben had said dryly. ‘You’ll have to invent some.’
‘Oh, I shall! Will you come, Kitty?’
She had told him she would.
She had been shy at first because it seemed so strange to be a guest of a boyfriend’s father, grown up and sophisticated, middle-class, she supposed. He had served her tea on the lawn – he always sat outside if the weather allowed, he told her – and he had walked her round the garden, showing her the roses his wife had planted. The sky clouded and began to spit. He took her inside, into the sitting room where she hadn’t been before, where the sideboard and mantelpiece were crowded with family photographs. Ben and Mark looked out at her from gaudy school photos, two little boys smart in green blazers and maroon ties; as teenagers with longish, seventies-style haircuts, but still smart and slightly nerdy. Ben in cap and gown, smiling between his proud parents; Mark in uniform, alone and deadly serious. She hadn’t met Mark then, and she’d picked up the photograph and looked at it more closely.
‘Handsome boy, isn’t he?’ Simon said.
She’d glanced at him, blushing as though she’d been caught out making eyes at anothe
r man. ‘Nearly as handsome as Ben.’
Simon laughed, delighted and surprised. ‘Good girl! Very well said!’
Next was the photograph of Ben and Susan on their wedding day. For this picture Simon came to stand a little closer to her. Gently he said, ‘What do you make of her?’
‘She’s lovely.’
He took the picture from its place a little behind Mark’s photo, only to put it down without care so that it was almost hidden. ‘Now,’ he said brightly. ‘Let’s have another cup of tea before you have to go.’
Later that evening Ben had asked her how her meeting had gone. She had wanted to say that she’d seen his wedding photograph and that he looked blissfully happy to be married to such a woman. She wanted to ask him if Susan was taller than he was, because it seemed from the picture that she was, a little, a centimetre, maybe. She wanted to ask how he felt that day, if he’d been nervous, if he’d been sure of her and certain she would arrive on time, or dreading her lateness, the sick fear – no matter how remote – that she might jilt him. Had Mark been his best man? Or had he chosen a fellow doctor, repeatedly asking him if he had the ring, pestering him for the time, to the exact minute. Where had they gone on honeymoon? Was it to a grand hotel, champagne on ice beside the vast, four-poster bed she pictured them in? She wanted to ask if he had loved his first wife madly and passionately but shallowly, hoping that he had and that it was the kind of blazing love that had quickly burnt out. Most of all she wanted to ask if he missed her still, half knowing the answer, half unsure.
Instead she had asked only how Susan had died, timidly, ready to suffer his pretence of not hearing her even as he made it clear she mustn’t repeat the question. But he had said, ‘She had an ectopic pregnancy. There were complications no one could have foreseen, an infection that took hold after surgery.’
‘She was going to have a baby?’ She was incredulous; the very idea of it made her feel giddy with jealousy.
‘No, sweetheart.’ He sighed as though he was explaining it for the tenth time to one of his thicker students. ‘The pregnancy was ectopic – outside the womb. It was never viable.’
Viable. Her jealousy lessened and became manageable.
She went downstairs and prepared Nathan’s bottle to take to the hospital then stacked the dishwasher, going into Ben’s study to hunt for stray coffee cups. He wasn’t at his desk as she expected; he had switched off his laptop but left the French window open and she went to close it. She peered at her reflection in the dark glass.
She was too skinny, flat-chested, with too short, elfin hair, the cut Ben liked best. She thought of Susan – of the photographs she’d seen of her – and remembered that at her own wedding she had overheard someone say that she was the exact opposite of Ben’s first wife. It had been just before she and Ben were to take the floor for their first dance and she was inside a toilet cubicle, a bit drunk, struggling with the long skirt and net petticoats of her wedding dress. She had paused, standing stock-still to listen, her skirts around her thighs, but nothing else was said. Not that it mattered. She knew that she was Susan’s opposite, not only in looks but in every way.
From his study doorway Ben said, ‘Kitty?’ He was holding Nathan in his arms, both of them dressed ready to go out, Nathan wearing the navy velour cap and matching suit that he had just about grown out of, clothes she never dressed him in any more but were still in his drawer. She told herself that Ben couldn’t be expected to be up-to-date with his baby’s wardrobe. He smiled at her. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Two minutes.’
‘I know you don’t like hospitals –’
‘Ben, he’s your Dad – don’t be daft. I’ll fetch Nathan’s stuff.’
Ben hesitated. ‘Perhaps you should stay here with the baby – we shouldn’t disrupt his routine.’
‘Simon wants to see him.’
‘OK.’ Miserably, he said, ‘Let’s go and get it over with.’
Mark emptied a bag of pre-washed salad leaves into a bowl. He would leave oil and vinegar on the table and the boy could dress his salad or not, as he chose. The table was set with cutlery and side plates and his mother’s napkins he’d found in a kitchen drawer, unused since her death. Holding the square of yellowing white linen to his face he had breathed in deeply in case it still smelled of her. There was only a faint mustiness.
He had dropped Steven off across the road from the tower blocks that dominated the centre of the estate. The boy had slammed the car door, lifting his daughter onto his hip before stooping down to the window so that Mark had pressed the switch to open it.
‘Thanks for the lift.’
‘Go, quickly, before you both get soaked.’
Already the rain had plastered Steven’s dark hair to his head, but all the same he seemed reluctant to go. ‘Tonight, then?’
Mark nodded.
‘About eight? Should I bring a bottle or something?’
‘Steven, go – get your baby inside.’
Mark had watched him run across the expanse of concrete towards the first tower, thinking how young he looked, no more than seventeen or eighteen, the little girl bouncing on his hip like a rag doll. He set her down as they reached the shelter of the tower’s entrance. Side by side they looked like brother and sister rather than father and daughter. Jade had held up her hand and waved to him, whether or not at Steven’s bidding he couldn’t guess.
He prepared macaroni cheese, making the best of what was in Simon’s fridge and pantry because he couldn’t face going to the supermarket, grateful as he often was that Joy had shown him the rudiments of cooking. ‘One day your wife will thank me,’ she’d told him. She had stood him on a chair beside the Aga; she had said, ‘Now, you watch – with enough butter to melt into the flour there won’t be any lumps – we just keep stirring like so…’ She’d closed her hand around his on the wooden spoon. ‘That’s right. Nice and steady as we pour in the milk. When Simon comes home it’ll be all ready and he won’t complain about the lumps because you did such a good job!’
When did she stop referring to him as Simon and start calling him Daddy? Grating the hard lump of cheddar he’d found in the fridge, Mark tried to remember. He thought that it had been around Ben’s eighth birthday, the first birthday to be celebrated in their new home. Perhaps this change had come about in case the hordes of children Joy had invited to the party thought them odd, teasing them for not having a Mummy and Daddy but a pair of adults called Simon and Joy. Joy hated to think she might inadvertently embarrass Ben and him.
He’d suspected Joy worried that she stood out amongst the mothers who waited at the gates of their private day school. She was older, tweedier, her salt and pepper hair set in the style she’d worn since the war. The other mothers wore mini-skirts or trouser suits and let their hair fall lose around their shoulders; some even wore jeans and looked very young, almost as young as the Mummy he was trying hard to forget and remember and forget again. He would look away from these mothers, keeping his eyes so obviously averted that Joy would glance back anxiously. She was afraid that he would be snatched away from her by one of Danny’s brothers, although none of those men had shown any interest in him or Ben. She seemed afraid of so much in those days behind her brave, cheerful front. Nowadays he only wondered how she coped at all.
Mark measured out the dry macaroni and tipped it into a pan of boiling salted water, remembering Joy, the precise, careful way she went about everything she did. He remembered his mother and Susan working together in this kitchen. Just as she’d shown him how to cook, Joy had set about teaching Susan too, but in a more light-hearted way, as though conceding that modern women had a duty not to know the things she knew about sauces and cakes and pastry. Joy had liked Susan and admired her because she had been a career woman too, once, for almost as long as she had been a wife and mother. Joy wasn’t disappointed, as Simon was, that Susan didn’t want children, but believed it was a brave decision. ‘I could never be so rational, never so free of my – what do they call it
nowadays? – biological clock ticking!’
Bubbles rose to the surface of the boiling water. Mark stirred the pasta, remembering how Susan had admired Joy in return. ‘An ideal mother-in-law – she doesn’t interfere.’
They had been in bed, of course – because what else did they do together but go straight to his bed – and Susan had sat up, resting her chin on her raised knees. He’d trailed his finger along the bumps of her spine and she’d glanced at him. ‘Joy’s in love with you, you know.’
He remembered how shocked he’d felt. ‘Don’t say things like that!’
Susan had smiled, infuriating him.
‘She’s my mother, for God’s sake!’
‘Ah, but she isn’t, Mark. Annette was your mother.’
‘Let’s not talk about it.’ He’d tried to pull her into his arms but she moved away. Sighing he said, ‘Can’t we have an ordinary conversation for once?’
She’d laughed.
She had stayed in London when Ben had moved back to Thorp and a consultant’s position in the hospital there. Thorp was a joke to Susan – it couldn’t be taken seriously. She had been convinced that Ben would come to his senses and move back to London. Mark had been convinced that his brother’s marriage would wither and die under such pressure, but it seemed only to flourish. ‘He doesn’t have to feel guilty about being at work all the time!’ Susan had laughed, as though astonished at his naivety. ‘And when we do see each other…’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘Of course you do! Of course you want to know how you compare.’ Kissing his mouth, she drew back to frown at him. ‘You’re very alike. Both wishing the other dead.’
A few days later Joy had visited him and he had taken her out to lunch. He’d imagined that she could smell Susan on him, that tell-tale blonde hairs clung to his jacket to give him away. But that afternoon Joy had seemed more preoccupied with the past. After lunch they had strolled to
Trafalgar Square and up the steps to the National Gallery. Looking over the square to Big Ben, she had turned to him.
Say You Love Me Page 20
