Someone in the audience yelled, ‘Hear hear’. Eleanor looked about her, seeming to lose her train of thought and making Nick angry at whoever had provided so ill-timed a distraction, even if it was well-intentioned. He kept his attention on her face, willing her on as she nervously picked up the thread, delivering a few thank-yous, followed by some fairly incomprehensible instructions for navigating Oxford’s one-way system towards Wolvercote.
Eleanor was surrounded as soon as she finished. Nick joined the queue for Trevor to sign his book, trying to focus on what he wanted to say to the actor. A second chance to meet a childhood hero. One didn’t get many of those in a life, let alone within the timespan of a single day. Out of the corner of his eye, he kept track of Eleanor, locked now in intense conversation with a group at the drinks table. At one point she caught his eye and he managed to offer a quick thumbs-up of congratulation. Eleanor seemed to smile, but looked away so quickly it was hard to be sure.
Nick drove at a steady seventy, trying to concentrate on the motorway rather than speculations about the party in Wolvercote, to which Trevor had kindly issued an invitation and which he had refused. Necklaces of headlights streamed in both directions, adding to the deep, visceral sensation of the distance between him and Eleanor growing.
Accepting Trevor’s invitation had been out of the question. Eleanor, Nick was certain, would have been horrified. She clearly hadn’t wanted him to know of the event that evening. It was only googling Trevor in the services that had put him onto it.
Whether attending the event had in fact been the right thing to do, Nick was now in grave doubt. Getting the chance to speak to Trevor, acquiring his signature in the book, had been a great pleasure. But seeing Eleanor again, first busy talking to other attendees, and then, with that touchingly clumsy reluctance, taking up her stance on the chair, had been deeply unsettling. All the things he had intended and failed to say during the abortive visit to her house that afternoon had started popping back inside his head, together with the growing, dispiriting conviction that she wouldn’t have been interested in hearing any of them anyway. The fleeting reference in her speech to what a difficult year it had been for her personally had only made things worse. His heart had wrenched, with a sense of privilege at being party to what those difficulties had entailed and frustration that he could not offer solace and reassurance.
The motorway snaked on towards Cheltenham, a winding river of light through a black sea. Nick shivered, turning up the heating. He felt the cold easily these days. And though southern England was still caught in its pocket of delicious autumnal warmth, the moment darkness fell there was the bite of real chill to the air. A proper winter loomed. His first in almost a decade. Inwardly a part of Nick quailed. It was another indication of the difference between missing his homeland and being immersed back in the reality of it. He had no regrets, yet, but many of his rose-tinted memories – from idyllic images of rural pubs and winding country lanes, to friendly attitudes and good television – were still receiving serious readjustment. England was a busy, overcrowded island with dodgy weather and a population as self-centred as any other. Even without the business of having to rebuild his life, Nick had quickly accepted that it was going to take some time to feel properly integrated again.
When his mobile rang, his first, absurd thought was that it was Eleanor. Instead, Donna’s voice came on the line, strident with its new permanent note of righteous indignation.
‘Where are you?’
‘Hello Donna. Are the girls okay?’
‘The girls are fine.’
‘Good. Well, I’m driving, so I shouldn’t really talk.’
‘I tried earlier. Where have you been?’
‘Look, if this isn’t urgent—’
‘I just can’t believe that you are going back to it, after everything you said. The whole fucking teaching business was just to wind me up, wasn’t it?’
‘No… I…’
‘Nat told me, and thank God she did, so don’t go giving her a hard time—’
‘I wouldn’t dream of—’
‘There is nothing I can do. Obviously. Nothing I want to do. Except to tell you that I think it was a pretty cheap way to behave – putting me through all that bull last year about wanting to give up doctoring – when it turns out you had no intention of quitting—’
‘But I did—’
‘Which makes me see that it was a deliberate ploy all along.’
‘Ploy?’
‘You have been plotting for years to leave me…’
‘No, I—’
‘But all I want to say is, don’t think that hiding yourself away in the UK means you can wriggle out of increasing maintenance to more decent levels. My lawyers know of the situation and I can assure you…’
Nick held the phone a little away from his ear and let her finish. It made him glad he was on the M40 in England, even if he had made a botch of that particular day. At least he could turn the phone off when he wanted. At least he no longer had to suffer the vibrating air of his wife’s anger, tiptoe round it, manage it.
When she had run out of steam, he said, ‘All those ideas about switching to teaching were genuine, Donna. But plans change. If they didn’t we’d be robots not humans. I have an interview for a consultant post and mentioned it to Nat. But I can assure you, that, whatever job I end up getting, whether it does in fact turn out to be back in a hospital or sweeping the streets of Cheltenham, I have no intention of reneging on our agreement as to what portion of my salary should go on maintenance to you and the girls. As I promised, I shall pay their part until they are through university, and yours up until such a time as you remarry, or until your share of my pension kicks in.’
She was silent for a few moments. ‘Right. Good. Just so long as we are clear.’
‘Oh, we are clear,’ echoed Nick bitterly. ‘Please kiss the girls for me.’
He tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. That he had started to miss his career had come as much of a surprise to him as anybody. It had been one of the many things he had planned to mention to Eleanor, she knowing better than most all about the early reluctance to follow in his father and sister’s footsteps. She knew too, of course, about the previous year’s mid-life career thoughts – the wild idea of returning to England to teach– because she was the one to whom he had, inadvertently, first confessed it. She hadn’t pulled any punches in her reply either, Nick remembered, smiling to himself at the recollection of her blunt response which, unlike Donna’s bitter and spiteful opposition, clearly stemmed from the desire to protect his interests rather than trash them. You are hankering after an idyll, nostalgic for something that never actually existed… hold fast to what you have. You never know when it might be taken away. She may have been writing from her sister’s email address, Nick reflected, but it had never prevented Eleanor from speaking her own mind.
His thoughts drifted to the shepherd’s pie awaiting him, crusty-topped with cheese, the meat moist and packed with mushrooms and carrots and peppers. Instead of hunger, he experienced a stab of shame. A forty-one-year-old man lodging with his mother, his personal and professional life – not to mention his health – in tatters, was hardly edifying. The ketchup bottle would be ready on the table, he mused grimly, the cutlery neatly aligned with a table mat, the pepper and salt sellers, a glass of water, alongside. The perfectly clean clothes he had left on his bedroom chair would have been laundered, ironed and returned to their drawers. She was pitifully glad to have him – desperate, in spite of his efforts at reassurance, to make up for not having guessed his marital troubles or flown to his bedside after his accident. His plans for moving out were advancing fast, but she didn’t like to discuss them. Part of it was sheer mother-love, Nick knew. But mostly it was because she was lonely. His sister, still unmarried and now an eminent neurologist in Sydney, had returned for their father’s funeral, but then quickly flown back to her other life.
The truth was, they had never been that close as a
family. How he was as a father to Natalie and Sasha could not have been more different. Nick clenched the steering wheel as the memory of the recent airport farewell with his daughters pounced. Nothing in his life had been as hard, not fighting for breath as the cold sea bubbled in his lungs, not forcing his legs to take the first agonising steps in the physio unit. At the security gate even Donna had looked momentarily stricken, her beautiful face convulsing in a fight for composure while Sasha and Natalie clung to him, weeping. Glimpsing her pain, Nick had, for one mad moment, entertained the notion of the pair of them trying again. But then Donna had switched her attention to her phone, and the despair and certainty that had brought them all to such a point washed back over him. Everything would work out, he promised his daughters, placing kiss after kiss on the tops of their heads, his own tears falling in their hair. He loved them. He needed to spend some time in England, but they would speak often and see each other soon. This was an interruption not a separation. They were not to be sad.
Nick took a hand from the steering wheel to swipe the tears off his cheeks. He missed his children. All the time. It was far worse than he had anticipated. There would always be lingering guilt, but the reasons for what he had done remained clear and strong: the need to distance himself from Donna and her controlling father had been important, but paramount was the desire to re-establish roots with his own country, to do what he could to lay the ground for his daughters to follow suit if they chose.
A van shot past, flashing its lights at his occupation of the middle lane. He had slowed to sixty without noticing it. Nick put his good foot down and sped on well above the speed limit, almost missing the slip road for Cheltenham and then having to swerve as something sleek and dark shot across the road in front of him. The car rocked briefly, terrifyingly, onto two wheels before thumping back into balance. Nick checked his mirrors, his heart pounding. By some miracle, the road in both directions had remained clear.
Life hung by such a thread, that was the thing. Bad luck, good luck, breathing, not breathing, it was always a hair’s breadth that separated the two. He crawled the rest of the way home like a learner, the blood still beating in his head, scolding himself that he, of all people, could have allowed himself to forget that, even for an instant.
30
Eleanor rammed her laptop into the front basket and tugged her bike out of the thicket of pedals and handlebars that had grown round it during her spell in the library. It had not been a productive session: three hours, and she had spent most of it fiddling with and then deleting paragraphs that had seemed perfectly acceptable a month before. It was two weeks since Trevor’s book party. Her teaching duties at the tutorial college were in full, enjoyable swing, but her treasured writing project seemed to have stalled. Applying for the Bodleian reader’s card, earmarking Friday mornings – her one decent slot of free time – had been her big bid to rectify the situation. Instead, if word count was anything to go by, she appeared to be going backwards.
She had woken too early, that was the trouble, Eleanor reflected crossly, bouncing her bike over the cobbles towards the cut-through to the High Street. Knotted in her bedclothes, her hair sticking to her face, she had surfaced before dawn out of a bad dream. The dream itself had been a mangle of things, as they always were, images slithering out of reach as consciousness took hold, although a couple of things had remained very clearly: Nick Wharton, for one, sitting with his back to her in a handsome winged leather chair, a fire crackling in the grate to his right, a set of lead-latticed windows to his left, casting a crossword of sunlit squares across the floor. She had been standing behind him, happy in the anticipation of being noticed. But when he turned his head, with a slowness that smacked of physical difficulty, or reluctance – it was impossible to tell which – she had felt the first stirrings of anxiety. And with good reason, since the face, when it presented itself, turned out not to belong to Nick at all, but instead resembled the blind-eyed, gnarled features she had always imagined for Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester, marooned amid his own loneliness and the charred embers of his once grand home.
‘Jane,’ he growled, ‘is that you?’
In her dream Eleanor had remained rooted to the spot. He had asked the question again, louder, more angrily, and for one terrible moment she had been tempted to say yes, that she was indeed Jane, out of sheer pity, because the poor man was so wretched and blind, but also because, in his maimed, unseeing state, there had seemed a fair chance he wouldn’t know the difference.
The bike jumped under her hands over the cobbles. The reason for such a mishmash of imaginings was laughably simple, Eleanor reminded herself. She had fallen asleep with her nose in Jane Eyre the night before, re-reading the novel being a part of her plan for kick-starting some life into that morning’s stint in the library. And though the shock of seeing Nick Wharton had not dented her resolve to discontinue their correspondence, the man was still, understandably, floating round her subconscious, causing unwanted and unwarranted mischief.
Being outside offered little immediate respite. The fresh warmth of early morning had turned muggy. They had edged into October, but still the Indian summer heatwave hung on, a foggy sultriness thickening daily between bitingly cold nights. The sky, murky when she had arrived at the library, was now filled with oppressive mountains of cloud, billowing round the city’s turrets and spires like thick smoke. A storm was coming, Eleanor decided gloomily, pedalling with her usual speed towards the Cornmarket, calculating that there was just time to grab a sandwich before her first afternoon class.
She went to the sandwich bar in the grid of alleyways near her tutorial college, a porthole of a place manned by two cheerful shouting Italians. A queue of people were snaking out of its entrance. Eleanor padlocked her bike and joined the end of the line, behind a wan little girl licking a blue lolly and clasping the thigh of a man wearing a set of big headphones.
When her phone rang, aware of the little girl staring, Eleanor turned away to answer it.
‘Eleanor, it’s Howard.’
She relaxed at once, leaning back against the sandwich shop window. ‘Howard. How are you? I can’t really talk. I’m in queue for lunch, then working all afternoon.’
Howard said something else, but she couldn’t make it out. She moved back into the queue checking the bars on her phone.
‘Sorry, but I don’t seem to have a great signal.’ The wan girl had lost interest in her and was batting ineffectually at a wasp busily trying to land on her melting lolly.
‘…your father has died.’ Howard’s voice burst through Eleanor’s mobile with sudden clarity. ‘Suddenly… this morning. I am sorry, Eleanor.’
‘He… This morning? How?’
‘The Bressingham just phoned. A member of staff found him in his chair. They are not sure yet of the exact cause, though they think it was a heart attack. They have everything in hand. They are going to get back to me. I said I would tell you.’ Eleanor could hear the tenderness in his voice, the recognition that despite everything, Vincent was still her father. He was her father and he had died. ‘Eleanor? Are you okay?’
‘Yes, I mean… I don’t know. I can’t really talk now. Thanks for telling me.’
‘I’ll call later, all right? When I know more.’
Eleanor slipped the phone back into her skirt pocket. She wanted some feelings but none came. She hadn’t been to The Bressingham since Howard’s kind offer to drive her there on Boxing Day. She had vowed never to go again and stuck to it. Eleanor folded her arms, acutely aware of her heart beating normally. The little girl was still batting at the wasp. The child was getting more frantic, the man ignoring her. It was difficult to watch. So difficult that Eleanor found herself reaching out to flick the insect away herself. She swung at it with the back of her hand, not only making contact but somehow managing to trap the creature between her fingers. Almost at once she felt a fizzing stab of pain. She cried out, shaking the insect free.
The girl squealed and the man removed his headp
hones. ‘What?’ He directed the question down at the little girl, making no secret of his irritation.
‘The lady got stung.’
‘I’m fine.’ Eleanor flapped her sore hand dismissively. In truth, the pain in her finger was piercing. She had never been stung in her life before and was stunned that something delivered by such a tiny creature, could have so much kick. Her hand appeared to be reacting badly too, swelling visibly. The finger that had been stung and the two on either side were like sausages. More inexplicably, she felt short of breath suddenly, so much so that she found herself falling against the sandwich shop window. She pressed both palms flat against the pane, staring down in some puzzlement as the colours spilling out of the rows of fat ready-to-go baguettes laid out before her – prosciutto, lettuce, tomatoes, eggs, tuna, cucumber, cheese – merged and ran like wet paint.
Maybe I am in shock, she thought. Maybe this is grief. No sooner had the idea formed it felt as if fingers were squeezing round her throat. In the same instant, the ground, hard, cold and smelling faintly metallic, slammed against her face. Under the flutter of her eyelids, a floating, wide, strange face briefly peered into hers, so close she could see the glossy dark tendrils of nostril hair. She wanted to speak but her throat had closed and appeared to be on fire.
If she could have spoken, she would have said, ‘I can’t see the sky. Please move so I can see the sky.’ But then blackness came and everything was gone.
Nick was almost back at his car when it occurred to him that it would be wise to visit the hospital toilets before embarking on the return drive to Cheltenham. After the interview, he had had lunch in the canteen with Peter Whycliffe, who had been the one to give him a heads-up about the vacancy. It had been a welcome surprise to find how easily they picked up after so much time, exchanging more details of their potted personal histories than their sporadic email contact had allowed and slipping straight back into the vein of relaxed dry humour that had connected them as young men. Nick had insisted on paying for the lunch by way of a minor thank-you and they had agreed to fix a date for a pub supper.
Good Girls Page 30
