by Caro Fraser
It was just as he was coming out of the shop with the art deco silver photo frame which he had bought for Chloe that he saw Rachel. She was standing on the other side of the street, her hands thrust into the pockets of a dark blue woollen coat, and he wouldn’t have recognised her if she hadn’t, at that moment, turned to glance momentarily to her left. He remembered that clear, sad profile instantly. Even with her long dark hair tucked into her upturned collar he recognised her. He was filled once again with that delightful, poignant shock which he had experienced on first seeing her at the Names’ party. Then he remembered that she hadn’t exactly reciprocated his feelings of instant love, and had in fact turned him down when he’d invited her to lunch. He hesitated on the pavement, wondering whether he should speak to her. No, there was no point – she’d used the fact that she was married as an excuse not to go out with him. The chap was probably somewhere around, and he didn’t feel like standing in this bitter wind making small talk to the husband of someone he fancied and could not have. Besides, he couldn’t remember her name. That was always embarrassing. But then she turned and, before he could make his escape, she saw him, and smiled in recognition. Meeting her again was inevitable, he realised, and he raised his hand in greeting and stepped across the street. She looked very pretty, and he felt a heart-warming surge of rekindled lust as they shook hands, and a sense of relief when her name came back to him.
‘Hello! This is quite a surprise!’ he said. ‘Ruth, isn’t it? Sorry, I’ve forgotten your last name.’
She smiled. ‘It’s Rachel, actually. And I remember you perfectly. I even watched your last programme. I enjoyed it very much. What are you doing in Bath?’
‘Oh, spot of shopping. You too?’
She nodded. ‘I’m trying to find something for my mother. I’m hampered by a distinct lack of enthusiasm, however.’
‘Oh dear,’ he murmured. God, he did like that smile of hers. How could he have forgotten her? How could he even have been casting an eye at that Boxer woman when there was someone like this in the world? He suddenly had the feeling that she was on her own. There didn’t seem to be a hubby hovering around. ‘Why don’t we go and have a coffee? Maybe the warmth will inspire you. I’m getting frozen standing here, to be honest.’
‘That’s a good idea.’ She turned away, and he saw her reach out to the pushchair standing by the shop window. All he could see of Oliver were two fat red cheeks and staring blue eyes. The rest of him was covered in hat, mittens and blanket. Oh God, she had a baby. Well, what did he expect? Anyway, it wasn’t as though he was going to seduce her in a coffee shop. Still, it did hamper things, somehow.
‘And who’s this handsome young man?’ he hazarded, hoping that it wasn’t a girl. Didn’t look like a girl, but one never knew.
‘This is Oliver,’ said Rachel, smiling, and bending down to stroke his face. The baby smiled back at Rachel, then the smile faded to inscrutable blankness as he turned his gaze on Charles. Boy doesn’t like me, thought Charles. He knows I have designs on his mother.
‘Come on. There’s a place I know round the corner.’
In the café the windows were misted with steam, and the ubiquitous faint jingle of Christmas music filled the air.
‘Right,’ said Charles, setting down two cups of coffee on the Formica-topped table. ‘Tell me the story of your life.’ He spooned sugar into his coffee and stirred it.
‘Hmm. That wouldn’t make for very festive conversation, I can assure you. Who were you buying presents for?’
‘My daughter Chloe. She’s coming down on Boxing Day with her brother. I’ve already bought Nicholas his presents. A life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and a book about the Rossettis. Keen on that kind of thing, you know.’
‘You and your wife must be looking forward to seeing them both. How old are they?’ She was watching him musingly. He looked older than she remembered, more weather-beaten than he appeared on television, but still as attractive. She liked the way he smiled, the way it creased his face, lit up his eyes.
‘Twenty-four and twenty-two respectively. But I haven’t got a wife. Well, I had, in the dim and distant past, but she’s married to some stockbroker and living in Tonbridge. Serve her right, I say.’ Rachel laughed. ‘What about you?’ he asked after a few seconds. She glanced up at him quickly. ‘I mean,’ he added hastily, ‘have you bought your husband his Christmas present? You look like the organised type.’
Rachel looked down at her coffee. She could smile and say glibly, oh, yes, make something up, then change the subject. But somehow, with this man’s kind, curious eyes fixed intently on her, she could not lie. In the moment before she had turned and seen Charles Beecham outside the shop, she had been thinking about Leo, thinking of how barren their relationship had become when they could not make even the smallest token gesture of buying one another a gift. Last year she had bought him a book which she knew he wanted. It hadn’t been easy to find, but she had enjoyed seeking it out, enjoyed anticipating the pleasure it would give him. He had bought her a silver necklace. Only a year ago, and yet it seemed an interminable space of time. She looked up, essaying a smile. ‘Not exactly,’ she replied. ‘We’re not spending Christmas together, you see.’ The note of calm sadness in her voice touched him instantly. He paused tactfully, stirred his coffee, trying to think of something to say apart from ‘Oh?’ When he looked up again, however, he saw with a pang that her eyes were brimming with tears.
‘Oh God, look …’ He wondered what to do, how to console her, but could think of nothing.
‘I’m sorry,’ muttered Rachel, shaking her head and drawing a hand over her eyes. She sat very still for a few seconds and then took her hand away, blinking back the tears. She smiled shakily. ‘I’m sorry. Christmas can be such a bloody miserable time of year, can’t it?’
‘God, how true,’ said Charles earnestly. ‘I’m just going to pretend tomorrow’s an ordinary day, till the kids come down on Boxing Day.’ He spoke merely to fill in time, as his eyes searched her face. Then he said tentatively, ‘Do you want to tell me about it, whatever it is?’
Rachel drew in a deep breath and gazed at Charles. She badly wanted to talk to someone, and he looked so sympathetic and reassuring. ‘My husband and I haven’t been getting on too well recently …’ she began, and her voice trailed off. Then she suddenly laughed and shook her head. ‘God, that’s pathetic.’ She glanced down sadly at Oliver, sitting in his pushchair next to the table with a bottle of juice in his fists. When she spoke again her voice was flat, matter of fact. ‘My husband, you see, is bisexual. And promiscuous. Our lives have become somewhat fractured as a result. Well, you can imagine … But he doesn’t want to lose Oliver and he seems to think that we can live our lives together, but separately, under the same roof. That’s what he has suggested, at any rate. I’ve come down here to my mother’s to get away from him for a while. To try to look at it all dispassionately. Make some decisions.’
‘And?’
To his horror, her eyes began to fill with tears again. It wasn’t that he didn’t like women to cry – it just panicked him, he never knew what to do, whether to hit them, or hug them, or what. Charles sat there helplessly, watching as she cried quietly, her hands over her face. Two old women at the table opposite looked at Rachel and shot him accusing glances. It’s not me! he wanted to tell them. It’s nothing to do with me! He patted her uselessly on the shoulder and murmured, ‘There, there …’
Then her tears subsided, and she produced a tissue and wiped her eyes. Charles marvelled that there was no streaked mascara, no blurred lipstick. She even cries beautifully, he thought. And this husband of hers was clearly off the rails, and off the scene – for the moment, at any rate. He watched her, aware that she was about to impart her next confidence, and composed his features into sympathetic concern. All this must be a promising basis for something, he told himself. Shoulders that women cried on generally turned out to be good for other things.
Rachel sighed and went on. ‘I don�
�t think I should have come down here. My mother and I aren’t the best of friends, exactly, and she resents Oliver and me landing ourselves on her doorstep. I suppose I expected a bit more of a welcome. Anyway, she’s going out with friends tomorrow, and I just feel that maybe I should swallow my pride and go back to London.’
‘Do you want to do that?’ He rested his chin on his hands and sat contemplating her.
‘No. No, I don’t. It’s the last thing I want. So I think we’ll just have to sit it out in Bath for a few days.’
‘You can’t do that,’ said Charles, and sat back in his chair. ‘In fact, I have the solution. There am I, all alone in my house for the holidays, with no one to cook for or to talk to. Why don’t you come and spend Christmas with me? Go back to your mother’s, tell her you’re going, then just pack everything up and come home with me.’
She shook her head and laughed, sniffing back the last of her tears. ‘No, I couldn’t possibly … Thank you, but I—’
‘Why not?’ expostulated Charles. ‘Why sit all alone in Bath when we could be keeping one another company?’ She glanced up at him hesitantly, and he realised that she was probably remembering how he had asked her out the last time they had met. Hastily he added, ‘A purely platonic invitation, I can assure you. No hidden agendas. Just two people spending Christmas together. Well, three, actually.’ He turned and grinned down at Oliver, who immediately screwed up his face and began to cry. ‘I’ve got some people coming round for drinks this evening, just a mild pre-Christmas booze-up, but tomorrow will be restful and enjoyable, I promise you.’
Rachel smiled shakily. Why not? She liked this man; she much preferred the idea of spending the day with him than alone in her mother’s house. ‘All right,’ she said suddenly. ‘We’d love to come, thank you.’ And she reached down to unstrap Oliver and lift him onto her knees.
Charles was both surprised and pleased. He hadn’t thought she was the kind of person to do something on impulse. Too staid, too well brought up to agree to come and stay for a few days in the house of a man she hardly knew. But that was the good thing about television, you see. It was a kind of ready-made reference. They saw you on the box a few times and people felt they knew and trusted you.
‘Excellent!’ he said. He enjoyed taking charge. ‘After this we’ll go and find your dear mother a Christmas present. Then we’ll go and have a really good lunch somewhere. Then we go back to your mother’s, you give her her present and tell her you’re not staying. You pack up while I wait in the car, then you follow me back to my place.’
Rachel looked at him with hesitant doubt. It all seemed so simple and sudden. ‘Are you really sure you want us?’ she asked.
You, he thought. You, any time. But there was to be nothing like that. Charles was a romantic realist. If this was to be his next love, if this damaged, fragile, beautiful creature was to be enticed into his bed, then the next few days could be only the groundwork. This must all be taken slowly and surely, Charles told himself. This was someone worth waiting for. He looked from her to Oliver, and decided against smiling at him again. It didn’t seem to go down too well. ‘Absolutely,’ he replied. ‘I cannot think of two people whose company I would like more.’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Mrs Dean, as Rachel brought her things downstairs. ‘Here one minute, off the next.’ She jiggled Oliver and kissed him behind his ear, and Rachel reflected that this was the first time she had held him or been affectionate to him since they had arrived. ‘Who is this friend, anyway?’ She peered through the open front door to where Charles sat sprawled at the wheel of his BMW, lying back with his eyes closed, listening to the nine lessons and carols from King’s College on the radio and hoping that the police weren’t going to be out in force that afternoon, nabbing people over the limit, since he’d actually drunk the better part of the bottle of wine which he and Rachel had shared at lunch.
‘Charles Beecham,’ said Rachel, knowing that there was no possibility that her mother ever watched Channel Four, unless it was to watch the racing.
‘Shall I tell Leo where you are, if he rings?’
When her mother said this, Rachel suddenly realised that Leo and Charles must know one another – he’d been at the party, he was one of the Names. He was one of Leo’s clients! How could she have been so stupid as to not think of this before? Thank God, thank God, she hadn’t mentioned his name when they’d been talking. She hadn’t, had she? She was sure she hadn’t. And he didn’t know her married surname. Having told Charles that her husband was a promiscuous bisexual, it wouldn’t exactly do for him to discover that this same husband was the Names’ QC. Whatever she felt about Leo, she didn’t want to sully his career. ‘No,’ she said to her mother. ‘I’d rather you didn’t tell him anything. He won’t ring, anyway. I can promise you that.’
She kissed her mother, took Oliver, and strapped him into the car, then loaded the luggage. Charles’s car pulled away from the kerb, and then Rachel followed, while her mother stood on the doorstep, watching until they were out of sight.
An hour and a half later, Rachel was sitting on the cushioned window seat in Charles’s sparsely furnished drawing room, trying to make out the walled garden through the darkness, sipping a mug of tea while Oliver slept in his travel cot upstairs.
‘This is the most beautiful house,’ she said, and turned to smile at Charles, who was drinking his own tea in an armchair near the fireplace.
‘It was my brother’s, before he died. I thought I was going to have to sell up recently – nearly did, actually – because of this Lloyd’s business, but fortunately my series has been sold overseas, so I’m not entirely broke. Not yet. The trouble is, it’s a bit large for one bloke knocking about on his own, and I haven’t really got round to furnishing it properly. A lot of the rooms upstairs are still empty, and a couple downstairs. Even this could do with a few more bits and pieces.’
Rachel glanced around. She would love to furnish a room like this all on her own. The whole house. Leo had decided how the house in Hampstead should be – he had such exact taste, such firm ideas, that she had never really had much of a say. Maybe that was what she needed. Somewhere of her own. But she didn’t want to think about all of that right now.
Seeing the faraway expression on her face, Charles asked, ‘What are you brooding so mournfully about?’ then immediately added, ‘Sorry. Tactless question.’ He got to his feet. ‘Come and help me in the kitchen. Most of my friends are only interested in seeing how much of my alcohol they can consume, but I have to put out some food, just for the look of the thing.’
Later in the evening the house began to fill with Charles’s friends, drinking, smoking and talking, drifting from room to room. As he moved amongst his guests with champagne bottles and jovial remarks, Charles took a peculiar delight in glancing occasionally at Rachel, who was sitting once more in the window seat, talking to people, apparently enjoying herself. She was an enigma to his friends, inspiring speculation, and he feasted privately on the fact of having her here, of knowing that she would still be there tomorrow after they had all gone.
That night when she went to bed, Rachel felt as though some weight had been lifted from her. She was free for the moment from all the burdens of familiar things. Charles’s house was a haven, a nowhere place, and she was unutterably thankful that for the next day or two she could escape from the realities of her existence, and not think further ahead than the next few hours.
For Felicity, it was one of the worst Christmas Eves she had ever known. She had woken late that morning with a sickening hangover, scarcely able to remember any of the events of the night before, beyond drinking far too much champagne, trying to persuade Roderick Hayter to dance with her, and then being put in a taxi. She had woken beneath the duvet to find herself still fully dressed, her make-up smeared and smudged on her face, her hair bedraggled, her head aching foully. And then she had remembered Vince. Everything had come rushing back to her with depressing force. She had cried for half an ho
ur until she felt worn out and worse than before. Then she had got up, showered, drunk a few cups of black coffee, and had a cleaning blitz around the flat. That had been therapeutic. In the afternoon she had gone to do some last-minute shopping with her friend, Lorraine. It had helped, being able to talk to Lorraine about her break-up with Vince, but by five-thirty she was back alone in the flat, her headache worse than ever, facing the prospect of Vince coming round to take his belongings and leave her life for ever.
She changed out of her jeans into a skirt and a tight black sweater which Vince liked, having bought it for her birthday, and put on a careful amount of make-up. She wondered whether to pack his things up, as a gesture to show she didn’t care. But she did care. She cared very much. Each time she thought about what was happening, she started to feel tearful, but had to make the effort not to cry because it would make her face look awful. By the time seven o’clock came she began to feel jumpy. Every time a car pulled up in the street outside she went to the window and looked down. Not that Vince had a car, but if he was coming to pick his stuff up he would get one of his mates to bring him. She had left all his things in the wardrobe and drawers, hadn’t touched anything. Why should she go to the trouble of putting his stuff together for him?
At eight o’clock she sat down and switched the television on, but the banal and cheerful Christmas programmes only made her feel more wretched and lonely. She began to wish she’d taken Lorraine up on her offer of coming round to keep her company. She’d refused because she knew this was something she and Vince had to sort out alone, and because Lorraine was a bit nosy and morbid that way. She’d have enjoyed it too much.
