‘Of course,’ Sally retorted, even though she hadn’t, deterred by a combination of grim certainty and sheer terror. She yanked up her school jersey. ‘Take a look for yourself.’
Felix, together with several curious diners at neighbouring tables, glanced at Sally’s midriff, identifying nothing very much amongst the crumpled folds of her school shirt and skirt. ‘Stop it for God’s sake,’ he growled, busying himself with sachets of sugar until their audience had lost interest. ‘In your letter – what you said about it being a way to avoid GCSEs – you were just joking weren’t you?’
Hearing the fear in his tone, Sally felt the tiniest tremor of power. She was on the point of ignoring it, of admitting that no matter how hard she tried she could not envisage herself in the role of willing teenage mother, that not one single stab of a maternal instinct had yet pierced the unattractive horror of her new circumstances, when the girl behind the counter called out a number and Felix leapt to his feet, returning with a full plate of fried food. ‘How can you eat?’ she said hoarsely.
‘Because I’m starving.’ He helped himself to several dollops of ketchup, the plastic bottle squelching rudely between his palms. Sally grimaced in disgust, not out of antenatal nausea so much as a deep sense of personal dismay that the father of her unborn child could think of his stomach in such harrowing circumstances. Two fried eggs were draped over a large piece of fried bread, next to a thick blackened sausage and several fatty rashers of bacon. She sipped her mineral water – chosen more because it seemed appropriate than because she liked the stuff – feeling suddenly very distant and fantastically cruel.
‘I’m not sure I believe in abortion, Felix.’
He stopped, swallowing slowly, his Adam’s apple dropping down his throat like stone. ‘If it’s about money, Sally, I’ve got enough…Dad left me some and I…’
‘And how much is enough?’ she snapped.
He put down his knife and fork. ‘Look, I know this is hard, that you must be feeling really shocked – but fuck it, so am I – ever since I got your letter I haven’t slept—’
‘Poor you,’ she sneered, aware that the deeper she waded into the cruelty the easier it became.
‘I came as soon as I could,’ he muttered. ‘And I don’t see any point in going through a charade about either of us having any options. It would be mad for you to have a kid. It would ruin your life as well as mine.’ He cut off a corner of fried bread, loading it with a ragged portion of egg and a wedge of bacon. ‘If you went ahead…well…I’m not sure I could ever forgive you.’ He stared at her defiantly, chewing hard.
‘Forgive me?’ Sally knew that her bravery was hanging by a thread. She had wanted to hurt him, but she had also longed to be comforted by him, to find some space for a shred of the intimacy which they had once taken for granted.
He reached into his jacket and extracted a long fat white envelope. ‘There’s some money here.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Three hundred pounds. I can get more if necessary. There are some good clinics in Brighton apparently – I’ve written down the phone numbers.’ He began fishing inside another pocket but Sally had already stood up.
‘You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?’ She picked up her satchel and violin. ‘Don’t let your tea get cold.’ And with that she made as grand an exit as she could manage, shouldering her way between the tight jaws of the café door. A minute later she hopped onto a bus heading back into town, though to which part exactly she neither knew nor cared.
It was only after a good ten minutes of senseless running that Felix accepted that Sally had somehow given him the slip and gone home. He could feel his meal churning unpleasantly in his stomach, forcing up burps that felt close to being sick. In a final act of desperation he bellowed out her name, only to swallow the final syllable and quickly glance round for fear that someone would think him mad.
By now it was gone five o’clock and getting dark. Street lights were flickering into life, their haloes of yellow light illuminating the moisture particles thickening the dank air. Felix made his way to a bus stop advertising the right numbers for Leybourne and propped himself against the inner wall of the small shelter parked alongside. He had already been home once that afternoon, only to find the car missing and the house empty. Remembering that these days his mother had a job and could not be expected to return much before six, he had conducted a desultory key-hunt under several flowerpots before dumping his bags at the back of the garage. His own set of keys had gone missing together with his leather jacket and forty pounds in cash during the course of a particularly unintelligible maths lecture the week before.
He must have just missed a bus Felix realised, as the queue beside him grew, snaking out of the shelter and for several yards down the street. Immediately next to him stood a pale stick of a girl with a pushchair. The baby had fallen asleep, a plastic bottle half filled with purple juice dangling out of one corner of its mouth by the teat. The girl’s thin lips worked alternately at smoking and chewing gum, while one foot absently rolled the wheel of the stroller. She looked bored and tired, Felix observed, watching from under half-closed lids and shuddering at the thought of such a fate befalling him or Sally. At the approach of a bus, the girl scooped the child in her arms and began grappling to dismantle the stroller. The baby, dismayed at being roused, writhed and howled in protest.
‘Could you give us a hand?’
Blushing at the realisation he had been staring, Felix responded at once, seizing the pushchair, which she had cleverly collapsed into something equivalent in size to a large umbrella, and one of her shopping bags. He stood back to let her get on first, feeling like a fraud, especially when she smiled in gratitude. Having stowed the bag and buggy behind her seat, he escaped upstairs, taking the steep steps two at a time in his rush to get away.
He had messed up big time, Felix reflected bleakly, staring out of the window into the damp night and thinking back over the afternoon. He had handled it all wrong, been so determined not to appear weak that he had only succeeded in being foul. Worst of all, the sight of Sally had made all the old feelings flare up again, erasing in an instant the messy end to the Christmas holidays and the pretence that he hadn’t minded being exiled in a vacuum of silence since the start of term.
The bus stop in Leybourne was ten minutes’ walk from home. Felix kept to the verge, heading into the face of the oncoming traffic, squinting at the glare of headlights and teasing himself with the idea of stepping into their path. While aware that he was confronting perhaps the grimmest turning-point in his life, a curious sense of detachment had descended. A detachment born of the conviction that Sally would see sense in the end and that the moment to panic in earnest had not yet arrived.
By cutting across the field round the back of the house Felix saved himself several minutes. The drizzle had stopped and the clouds, still visible in the darkening sky, were tinged with impressive streaks of pink. A smoky corkscrew zigzagged up from the Brackmans’ chimney, poking out from amongst the distant clump of trees. Felix took deep breaths as he walked, wanting to retain his new and fragile sense of calm. At the garden gate he paused, looking up towards the house. A big square of light was projected onto the lawn from the sitting-room window. He approached slowly, curious to glimpse his mother unawares but conscious that a face appearing suddenly at a window would be alarming. He edged forwards, his heart surging with sudden generosity at the magnitude of her problems compared to his, of the trauma of having to relearn the art of facing life alone.
Fired with such thoughts, a first glimpse of the scene in his own sitting room caused Felix to pull back in shock. The familiar figure on the sofa looked neither suffering nor solitary. Sprawled next to her was a dark-haired man whose face Felix couldn’t see. Although they were engaged in the blameless pastime of watching television, the sense of intimacy in their poses was palpable. The man had taken his shoes off and was resting his feet on the coffee table. While his mother was sitting cross-legged, as she sometimes did, nur
sing a glass of wine.
Felix backed away from the window, letting out a string of expletives under his breath, his heart racing in confusion. Though it occurred to him to run away, it was dark and late and there was nowhere to go. He walked briskly to the garage instead, retrieved his bags from where he had stowed them earlier in the day, and staggered to the front door. He should be glad for her, he scolded himself, pushing hard on the doorbell, the weight of all his problems now compounded by the sensation of being an unwelcome visitor to his own home.
Chapter Thirty-One
‘Who the hell can that be?’ groaned Frances, glancing at her watch.
‘Shall I go?’
‘No, I’d better.’ She put down her wine and unfurled her legs. It was the Thursday following their return from Paris, an excursion which, for all its hiccoughs and limitations, had ultimately tightened the cord of intimacy between them. After Frances’s early morning visit to his hotel room, they had not met until Daniel crept out from behind a station news-stand at the Gare du Nord and clamped both palms over her eyes. Having their return seats upgraded to first-class due to the happy circumstances of overbooking, put the seal on their delight at being reunited. They spent the journey making plans for the approaching week, each eager to make up for having let the other down. Although still somewhat ill at ease over her daughter’s state of mind, Frances was careful to avoid the subject of Daisy. In retrospect, it was painfully clear to her that she had over-reacted badly about Daniel’s behaviour in the flat and she had no wish to remind him of the episode beyond the necessity of apologising. Which she did, so many times that he ended up making her promise never to mention the matter again.
One of the most immediate results of this renewed commitment to each other was a lunch fixture with Daniel’s parents.
They had set off in Frances’s car that morning, leaving early because she was nervous and thus prolonging the ordeal by arriving only minutes after Mrs Groves had placed her stuffed chicken in the oven. They were much older than Frances had been expecting, with inscrutable expressions that betrayed no obvious reservations about their son’s choice of partner. After a while the degree of this reticence struck her as almost rudely incurious. Having braced herself for an ordeal comparable to their soirée at the Taverners, the experience was so painless and bland as to be fractionally boring. For the entire three-hour period that they were in the house, the conversation see-sawed between the progress of a recent international golf tournament and their opinions of an unsightly mast erected by a mobile phone company. Afterwards, although the original intention had been for Frances to drop Daniel back at his house, their new reluctance to spend time apart prompted them to retreat straight back to Leybourne instead.
At the sight of her son on the doorstep Frances experienced a reflex of pleasure followed closely by alarm. Not only because of the presence of Daniel in the room behind her, but because of the expression on Felix’s pale face. ‘Darling – what a surprise – I – you should have told me you were coming –’ She broke off to kiss his cheek and then caught sight of the heap of bags behind him. ‘Has something happened?’
‘You could say that.’ Felix glanced quickly over her shoulder for any sign of the man he had seen through the window, calculating, with a spurt of uncharacteristic slyness, that the presence of a third party might deflect some of the initial shockwaves of his bad news. ‘You might as well know, Mum –’ he broke off to drag all his luggage across the threshold, ‘I’ve quit uni. I’m not going back,’ he added, slinging in the last of his bags and kicking the door shut with a deafening slam of finality.
‘You’ve what?’ Frances could not conceal her dismay. ‘Whatever for?’
‘Hello Felix.’
The sight of Daniel Groves in the doorway of the sitting room stunned Felix into silence. Not simply because he recognised him as the driver of the grey Ford from whom he had hitched a lift in December, but because he was the very person he had spent a considerable portion of the previous week debating whether to contact. In the end he had been deterred both by doubts about seeking help from a virtual stranger, and by Sally’s letter, which had tipped the balance on his need to get home. ‘You?’ he said at last.
‘So you remember,’ said Daniel, stepping in front of Frances and extending his hand. ‘Good to see you again.’
‘Did you know Mum then – when we – at Christmas?’
Daniel laughed easily. ‘No, no. We’ve only become acquainted during the last few months. She tried to mow me down on my bicycle and is still trying to apologise.’
‘Daniel I think perhaps you’d better go,’ Frances murmured.
He held up his hands in mock surrender. ‘Don’t worry, I’m on my way. You two have obviously got lots to talk about. I couldn’t help hearing what you said, about leaving the university,’ he added, pulling his jacket off the bannisters and slinging it casually over one shoulder. ‘And I’m very sorry to hear it.’
‘Yeah, well,’ muttered Felix, subdued both by the curious irony of the situation and a sudden vivid image of this man having sex with his mother. Remembering the sticky lipped woman in the café and all the things he had once dreamed of doing with her, he dropped his eyes and took a step sideways so Daniel could get to the door.
‘I’m going to have to call a taxi,’ Daniel reminded Frances, frowning apologetically.
‘Of course, you haven’t got your car.’ She laughed nervously, turning to Felix to explain. ‘This morning we went on an…excursion together. I picked Daniel up from his house – I was going to drop him back, but I think perhaps in the circumstances…’
‘Go ahead,’ interrupted Felix, hating her faltering explanations and wanting only to have a breathing space for himself, ‘I’ll be fine.’
‘I suppose I still could. Are you sure you don’t mind Felix? It won’t take long. We’ll talk when I get back. Darling, are you certain you’re all right?’ She tried to touch him, but he dodged her hand with an impatient shrug.
‘I’m fine,’ he growled, kicking a bag out of his way. ‘No need to hurry, I’m not going anywhere, am I?’ After they had gone he parked himself in front of the television with a gin and tonic and a bag of peanuts, blanking out his troubles with the aid of a European football match.
By the time Frances returned he was on his third gin and feeling very much more sanguine about his immediate predicaments and life in general.
‘Now, what is all this about?’ she burst out at once, switching off the television and standing in front of the screen with her arms folded in expectation. A certain belligerence was called for, she had decided, in spite of – or maybe even because of – Daniel’s well-intentioned, but ultimately riling advice about how to deal with the situation during the course of his ride home. It had triggered uncomfortable reminders of Paris, of the implication behind his unsolicited opinions on Daisy, rubbing her nose in the fact that he was far closer than she ever could be to the preoccupations of her own children.
‘This?’ Felix made a big show of craning his neck to see the TV screen. ‘This was Real Madrid versus Man United. Nil nil, but a good match. I was hoping to see the end.’
‘Felix, no games please. To have taken such a drastic step as walking out mid-term you must have had some pretty good reasons. I believe I have a right to hear them.’
He levered himself upright with a scowl of reluctance. ‘It wasn’t working out. I hated the course. I hated being a student. It just didn’t feel right.’
‘Why didn’t you say something before? I might have been able to help. That’s what parents are for, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘It does matter. What are you saying?’
‘That you haven’t exactly been around much recently. I know it’s not your fault, what with Dad and so on – you’ve had to look out for yourself and stuff. I just haven’t felt I could talk to you about anything. It’s
like you’re on another planet. And now with…’ he had to force the words out, ‘…Daniel Groves and you together –’ he was blushing furiously, but pressed on, ‘I mean it is obvious you’re kind of tied up with each other.’
‘Oh dear.’ All Frances’s vague hopes of maintaining the pretence of mere friendship melted in an instant. She uncrossed her arms and put her head into her hands. ‘I – we – were going to tell you – when the time was right…’
‘Sure you were. Does Daisy know?’
‘No…I…’
‘But you’ve just been to Paris, haven’t you? No right time to tell her either?’ he sneered.
‘Felix, I can understand how you must feel – about Daniel usurping Dad’s place – but it’s not like that…it’s so different, there’s no comparison – nothing could take the place of what I shared with your father.’ She hesitated, letting this sink in before adding quietly, ‘He would have hated you giving up on university.’
‘That’s right, take his fucking part, like you always did,’ Felix shouted, slamming one palm hard down on the arm of his chair. ‘You always took his side against me – why stop the habit of a lifetime now?’
The shock of his anger punched the breath from her. For a moment she could not speak. ‘I…I did not take his side…I…I just…I tried not to interfere.’
Felix laughed bitterly. ‘Like I said, you never took my part.’ ‘I hated crossing him,’ Frances whispered, sinking to her knees on the carpet, ‘it never did any good.’
Felix let out another short laugh. ‘Oh yes, I know all about that.’ He stood up, so quickly that black specks danced before his eyes. ‘He was always on my back, always criticising, putting me down—’
‘The pair of you were going through a bad patch – it hadn’t always been like that – it would have got better, if there had been time…’
The Lover Page 21
