After a brief phone call explaining and apologising for the situation to Libby, she pulled a pad out of the kitchen table drawer and seized a Biro from the pot on top of the fridge.
Daniel,
Don’t tell me letters are for cowards. I am a coward, I know that.
But I have to be because if I see you I’ll cave in, muddle my attraction for you with all the other bigger, more important things.
Since Paul died I have been struggling to find myself, to see how I could carry on. Falling in love with you was, I thought, a wonderful, vital part of that process. But I was wrong. I have neglected my friends and family, who still need me very much. I have been selfish and mad and everybody is suffering in consequence. I don’t want to see you any more. It was always going to end one day. I see no reason to postpone the pain.
I will always remember you with fondness and gratitude,
Frances.
Please, please do not try to get in touch. It will only make this harder for both of us.
Knowing that her resolve might have faltered by the morning, and nursing vague hopes of stumbling across Felix, Frances sealed the letter in an envelope and slipped out of the house. Although it wasn’t actually raining, the night air felt heavy and damp. As she walked down the lane towards the post box she found herself looking upwards, straining her eyes for a glimpse of a star through the black gauze of sky. Picturing Sally, curled up in the corner of a bus shelter, or worse, she shuddered, dreading what role Felix might possibly have played in driving the poor girl to such states of extremity. She had lost her judgement over everything, Frances reflected wretchedly, thinking back to the many suggestions that all was not well in her son’s life and how adept she had been at ignoring them. She thought too of Daisy, feeling fresh waves of shame at her absurd jealousy in Paris and wishing she had made more progress towards understanding the trace of forlornness hiding in even the widest of her daughter’s smiles.
Before dropping the letter into the post box, she nonetheless could not resist giving a long last look at Daniel’s name, bidding him farewell in her heart, wondering if he would read the tenderness in the careful loops of her handwriting. Even with her hand deep in the mouth of the letter box, she held onto the envelope for a few last unnecessary seconds, prolonging the moment of parting.
It was only on retracing her steps back up the lane that Frances became aware of the smell of smoke drifting on the heavy air. As she walked it grew stronger, riding up with her towards the house on a breeze that seemed to herald a change in the clemency of the weather. By the time she reached her drive, the smell was so strong that she cut round to the back garden, curious to see which of her distant neighbours had felt compelled to light a bonfire at ten o’clock on a Thursday night.
Instead of the shadowy view she had expected however, the profiles of the landscape were black and vivid, illuminated by a central torch of light amongst the clump of trees beyond the river. The scene was so unexpectedly dramatic and splendid, that for a few moments Frances stared in awe, even as it dawned on her that the flames licking over the tops of the trees could only originate from the railway cottage. As the horror of the implications of this sank in, so did a sickening sense of inevitability, as if the slow disintegration of the day – of the fragile, flawed reconstruction of her life since Paul – had been hurtling towards that very moment. In the next instant she heard Felix, shouting to raise the alarm as he raced across the field up to the garden gate, his voice cracking with panic and excitement.
Chapter Thirty-Four
When Sally regained consciousness she was surprised to find Felix bending over her, his face sheeny with sweat, his hair sticking in strips to his forehead. His brown eyes looked smudgy with tears. Or maybe she was the one crying. It was hard to be sure.
‘There is no baby. False alarm,’ she said, her voice sounding all raspy, like it was coming from someone else. Her throat felt peeled raw and her gums sticky. Then the frame containing Felix was replaced by several unfamiliar faces and she felt strong arms slide under her legs and back. She smiled, pleased to be lifted out of the long wet grass where she had lain for what felt like hours, struggling with the confusion of being uncomfortably chilled yet bathed in a blast furnace heat that made her eyes sting. The next moment she was horizontal, a blanket bristling against her chin, being posted through the doors of a white van. Dimly aware that she was in the midst of a crisis, Sally sensed too that she had somehow arrived into hands that would take care of her, that the necessity of a full conscious reckoning of what was taking place had not yet arrived. A mask was placed over her mouth, injecting her lungs with sweet air and her head with disconnected recollections: the reedy screech of her violin, Joseph’s breathy whispering, the feel of his stubbled chin against her ear, not being pregnant. Having arrived back at this last thought Sally allowed her mind to hover there, luxuriating in the relief of it.
Daniel stayed far later than he intended, dining in college with an old friend and then talking for several hours before embarking on the journey home. The break, though brief, felt invigorating, both because it had provided much needed confidence for the tack he was taking on Signorelli and because a day’s deprivation of Frances had sharpened his eagerness to return to her. He spent the last part of the drive daring himself to call in at Leybourne. Only the thought of Felix prevented him. Not because he imagined for a second that the boy hadn’t worked out what was going on – he was evidently far too intelligent for that – but because the lad was clearly going through a hard time and having his mother’s lover bursting into the house in the small hours probably would not help matters. Besides which, Frances would go mad, Daniel mused, smiling to himself in quiet confidence at his abilities to soothe any such outbursts of insanity into nonexistence.
In spite of his late night, Daniel woke early the next morning, roused by the early March sunshine cutting through his thin curtains and a keen sense of purpose. Pulling on a sweatshirt, he padded downstairs in bare feet and a dressing gown in search of the kettle and the post, which he had kicked to one side on his late return the previous night. A few fresh letters had already been deposited on the doormat, together with that week’s copy of the Hexford Gazette. Yawning deeply, Daniel gathered the whole lot up and retreated to the kitchen.
He was squeezing his teabag against the side of his mug with a spoon when his attention was caught by a headline at the bottom of the front page of the paper.
LOCAL HERO IN LEYBOURNE COTTAGE FIRE TRAGEDY
Have-a-go hero, student Felix Copeland, pulled fifteen-year-old Sally Taverner to safety from the flames of a burning house on the outskirts of Leybourne village late last night. The main occupant of the property, forty-eight-year-old Joseph Brackman, was not so lucky and died in the inferno. Although arson has been ruled out, experts are still trying to establish what caused the blaze. A representative from the Council said that the property was known to be in need of rewiring and modernisation and that Mr Brackman had been on the point of being rehoused. Last night Sally Taverner’s parents were at their daughter's bedside, where doctors report her to be in a serious but stable condition. Speculation that their daughter was with Mr Brackman because she had run away from home was angrily denied. ‘We’re just thankful she’s safe and sound,’ said gift-shop owner, Libby Taverner, ‘and deeply sorry that Mr Brackman was not so lucky.’
Shaking his head in wonder that so much drama could have been packed into such a short absence, Daniel tipped back his chair to reach for the telephone, pinned to the wall next to the fridge. As he did so he caught sight of Frances’s writing amongst the still unopened pile of letters next to his mug of tea. He let his chair rock back onto all four legs with a clatter that seemed to echo round the kitchen. Several seconds passed before he could bring himself to open the envelope, his fingers already trembling with foreboding.
When the telephone rang, Frances, who had been up since five and was sitting alone at her own kitchen table, remained motionless. After four
rings her answering machine whirred into life. ‘This is Frances, please leave me a message—’
‘Frances, for God’s sake, what is this? Pick up the phone. I know you’re there. Pick up the fucking phone.’ There followed two, perhaps three seconds of silence. ‘OK, listen to this then. Yes, I do think you are a coward, perhaps the biggest coward I’ve ever met in my life. How can you think of ending everything with a…note? After all that we’ve been through, all that we’ve shared. I know not all of it has been easy, but I’ve tried my best. But clearly that means nothing to you. No, you want to brush all that to one side, like it never happened, and go back to your…your…safe, narrow, blinkered, timid –’ there was another short, exasperated silence. ‘Keeping life at bay is no way to live it, you know Frances. Someone once said – and I can’t for the fuck of it think who – that if people weren’t careful, life was what happened while they waited for their dreams to come true. Well, that’s not my style. I’m not going to hang around waiting for stuff to happen – I
– oh fuck, never mind.’
After the machine had clicked off, Frances stayed in her chair, staring hard at the patterns in the wood grain of her kitchen table, her fists clenched in her lap. In front of her was the same newspaper which had confronted Daniel. She closed her eyes, remembering again the fire, the chaos of sirens and heat and noise, Felix’s wild euphoria, the shock of seeing Sally, curled in the long wet grass fringes of the garden like a wounded animal. Frances clung onto the images, wanting to sear them forever across her mind, knowing that they were her only sandbags against the monotonous pulse of sadness now beating inside. They would always be a reminder of how fragile life was, how perilously close she had come to forgetting herself and losing all that she truly valued. Although Felix had not for a moment been in physical danger, and Sally turned out to be suffering from shock more than actual injury, it felt to Frances as if they had both had a narrow escape. As if they all had. Meeting the Taverners in the foyer of St Stephen’s hospital, they had clung to each other like survivors of a shipwreck, hugging and sobbing apologies and forgiveness, all of them sensing that the tragedy was a God-given clean slate for starting again.
While a comprehensive chronology of events had yet to emerge, it appeared that Sally had indeed met Felix after school, but only briefly. She had then responded to an impromptu invitation to tea from Joseph Brackman, following up on a friendship which seemed to have sprung into being as a result of the events surrounding the death of his mother. Although the local paper’s heroic claims were correct in that Felix had dragged Sally across the garden to a safer distance from the leaping flames, Sally herself remained adamant that Joseph had carried her out of the house. Which meant he must have gone back into the cottage afterwards. Like a captain going down with his ship. Or a man giving up, wading through the falling debris to his own fate. Frances shuddered, reaching for her tea only to find that it was cold. That Joseph appeared to have found some companionship during what turned out to be the final weeks of his life was for Frances the only consolation in the entire sorry business. The previous night, in some vague bid to atone for her own abandonment of the man, she had even found herself brushing the dust off the slim volume of poetry which had been consigned for many weeks now to the bottom of a stack of books under her bed. If she had hoped for revelatory answers to her neighbour’s psyche, however, there were none to be had. The poems were as incomprehensible as ever. She had fallen asleep soon after opening the book, waking in the early hours to find it lodged under her hip, its flimsy spine torn and the pages badly creased.
After a final glance at the newspaper, Frances folded the article out of sight, shaking her head at its half-truths and exaggerations, wondering what the whole story was and whether it mattered. That Felix had been made out to be a knight in shining armour would be no bad thing, either for his wilting self-esteem, or for fostering the warm relations now prevailing between themselves and the Taverners. He had spent nearly all the previous day at the hospital, fired up with concern for Sally and the patent relief of having their liaison out in the open. In the meantime, Frances had made herself useful by manning the shop for Libby, glad to have a busy Friday as distraction not only from the aftershock of the fire, but also from the temptation to hijack every passing postal van in a bid to retract her letter to Daniel.
Abandoning her cold tea, Frances went upstairs to get dressed. After tiptoeing past Felix’s open door she could not resist retracing her steps and peering inside. All that was visible was one large white foot protruding under the duvet and a portion of ruffled sandy hair between the pillows. Just like old times, she thought to herself, but realising in the same instant that it was nothing of the kind. The sight of all the memorabilia of his childhood – once prized pop posters hanging by threads of stale Blu-Tack, dog-eared war comics, Airfix models, plastic sporting trophies – suddenly made her inordinately sad. Even his hi-fi system, so treasured and well-used just a year before, looked neglected and outgrown. He had entered another phase of his life. They all had, she reflected sadly, retreating from the room.
While getting dressed she thought about her stoicism over Daniel’s phone call and managed a small stab of self-congratulation. It might take a while, but she would get over it. Like mourning a death, it would simply take time and the ability to let go. Struck by the irony of this last analogy, Frances gave the reflection in her dressing-table mirror a grim smile, drawing harsh consolation from the pink fatigue in her eyes and the haggard set of her mouth. She was doing the right thing, she reminded herself, not just because she would have more time for her old – her real – life, but because in ten years she would be fifty-three and Daniel thirty-six. Better to have the pain now than later. Better to have her cruelty than his, to be the author of the split rather than its victim.
She combed her hair back into a ponytail, scraping the teeth viciously against her scalp and fastening it so tightly that she could feel the hairs framing her face straining at the roots. After staring at her make-up bag she zipped it shut and closed it away in her dressing-table drawer, not wanting to soften the tight, austere look of her reflection, seeing it as a beacon of her new resolve.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Felix had never been very good with hospitals. The smell of disinfectant and floor polish turned his stomach. When Daisy had broken her collar bone, he had inadvertently diverted the spotlight of attention to himself by being sick all over a chair and his mother’s shoes; a reflex of protest which had been repeated so often during the course of consultations over his ears, that Frances used to warn new doctors of the possibility as soon as they entered the room.
Visiting Sally however, was different from the start. Pushing his way through the heavy entrance doors of the hospital late on Saturday morning, a copy of the Hexford Gazette tucked under one arm, Felix’s whole demeanour exuded confidence. Arriving in the ambulance had made him feel part of what had happened. The doctors and nurses had been gentle and informative, their happy prognosis easing the terror of the inevitable meeting with the Taverners which followed soon afterwards. Not even the smell of the place bothered him any more, he mused, casually thrusting his hands into the pockets of his chinos and rolling on the soles of his trainers as he followed the now familiar route to Sally’s ward. Just down the corridor from the main entrance was a small shop run by a lady with three double chins and a wheezy laugh. Recognising Felix from the day before, she gave him a little wave.
‘Getting better is she, your friend?’
‘Oh, much, thanks.’
‘A terrible thing, that fire. They say it was the council’s fault – prehistoric wiring. They should have moved that poor man years ago. It’s criminal, what these people get away with.’
Felix chose a packet of chocolate-covered raisins and a magazine with a waif of a model on its cover, wearing nothing but a vine leaf, blue lipstick and spangled eye-shadow.
‘She’ll be out soon then?’ the woman asked, handing him his change.<
br />
‘Tomorrow they say. Her lungs got a bit messed up.’
‘I should think they did, poor love,’ tutted the woman sympathetically.
Sally was lying on her side with her eyes closed. Her hair was all spiky and there were dots of pink in her cheeks. Felix stopped short of the bed, catching his breath, overcome by the urge to rip the bedcovers off and make love till the nurses called the security guards. He sat on the empty chair next to her and crossed his legs instead, looking round for somewhere to put his gifts. Her bedside table was laden with flowers and books and bottles of water.
‘Hey,’ said Sally opening her eyes.
‘I thought you looked beautiful then, with your eyes closed.’
She giggled. ‘I’d better get a guide dog then.’
‘Read this first. Fame at last.’ He handed her the newspaper and watched her expression change. ‘They’ve twisted it all round, I’m afraid, not mentioned what you said about Joseph.’
‘Idiots.’ Sally scowled impatiently and then grinned. ‘Have-ago-hero, eh? They’ll be offering you a knighthood next.’
‘Fuck off,’ he replied happily, snatching the paper back and rattling the box of raisins. ‘I bought you presents. These and this.’ He began reading a headline on the magazine. ‘Ten ways to achieving the perfect orgasm—’
‘Shut up.’ Sally pretended to pull the sheets over her head in embarrassment.
‘How’s your throat? Your voice sounds better. Not so husky.’
‘Shame. I liked husky.’
He pulled the chair closer and seized the hand nearest him. ‘Sally, I’m so sorry about…everything.’
The Lover Page 23
