It was probably mad to go to work, Charlie knew, but he had no desire to stay at home. In recent weeks Ashley House had felt almost hostile, perhaps because he was steeling himself to leave it, perhaps because his wife, his son, his mother seemed, in various ways, to be ranged against him. None of them was talking much about anything: it was all, as Charlie had said, on hold till they had got January out of the way. Yet the pressure of what they were not talking about remained intense to the point of intolerability.
If he did take the day off he'd have to start looking at the growing pile of estate-agent specifications on the hall table, which Pamela ignored and Serena refused to open. He'd have to face Ed, too, suffer the ignominy of the boy's disappointment when he crept downstairs mid-morning and discovered his father hadn't left for London. Ed would make himself scarce, no doubt, Charlie mused grimly, until it was time to set off for his washing-up job at the Rising Sun, which kept him out of the house most evenings, too, now. If they ever attempted a conversation it usually ended in an argument – sport, the weather, any subject, no matter how innocuous, had become a minefield. No, Ed didn't think Arsenal had a chance in the Premiership, no, Ed didn't think the sunshine would last… If each trivial disagreement hadn't hurt so much Charlie might almost have found it funny. Yet it wasn't funny, it was punishing. He was being punished, Charlie reflected bleakly, and all because the stupid boy wanted the right to be enslaved prematurely in some dead-end job to pay half his wages to the adolescent mother of his child.
‘Ha.’ Charlie spat out a mouthful of shower water, feeling for the millionth time the injustice of his position. And as for Serena – he spat again, hurting his tender throat – she was on Ed's side and always would be. While his mother was playing some sort of insane charade of her own, pretending still that she wanted to leave, when it was perfectly obvious that if she ever went to the Crayshott place she'd last as long as it took Peter and Helen to swing into the drive and unpack their suitcases.
Charlie turned off the taps and used a flannel to wipe a path through the steam in the mirror over the basin. Even he had to admit that he didn't look good: pasty face, red-rimmed eyes, jaw sagging instead of round. Not that anyone else would notice, he decided, spraying a mound of foam into his palm, then starting to swipe his razor across his cheeks.
‘You're not well,’ declared Serena, the moment he sat down at the kitchen table.
‘I'm fine.’
‘No, you're not. You look terrible. Have you taken anything?’
Charlie nodded, scowling as he attempted to swallow a mouthful of toast. Having longed for her attention, his instinctive response was to reject it.
‘You shouldn't go to work. You're very late anyway. Why not take the day off?’
‘I'm perfectly all right.’
‘You'll give it to everyone else.’
‘I'll wear a bag over my head,’ he snapped, seizing his car keys and leaving the table.
Inspired thus by a sort of rage, it wasn't until Charlie had parked the car and was trying, unwisely as it turned out, to run up the steps to the station platform, that he discovered he was truly unwell. He leant against the damp wall of the tunnel that connected the two sides of Barham's small station, breathing heavily, his head throbbing, close for a few moments to throwing up.
‘All right, Guv?’ inquired the station-master, hurrying past to greet the London train.
‘Yes… That is, no. Think I might be going down with something.’
‘Lot of flu about – I should get back home if I was you. There's chaos in town, anyway, by the sound of things.’
‘Is there?’ asked Charlie, weakly, dabbing his face, which was pouring with sweat. ‘Why?’
‘Some sort of explosion – a mate of mine just phoned. It's not even on the news yet.’ Charlie watched the man race on up the steps. There seemed nothing for it but to go home. The guy was right. There'd been such sensitivity about terrorism recently that even the most minor incident was bound to cause havoc. He turned and shuffled back to the car park, but then drove left, not right, out of the station with the aim of scrounging some antibiotics out of Dr Lazard.
‘It's a lovely day, isn't it?’
Elizabeth looked up from her marking to see the new business-studies teacher, Bill Jackson, offering her a friendly smile.
‘Yes.’ She glanced out of the staff-room window, which overlooked the playground. Bordered on two sides by farmland, she sometimes thought its Tarmac surface resembled a harsh black footstep on the countryside. That morning, however, thanks to the three giant oaks at the top of the nearest field and the buffeting winds of the weekend, it was a tapestry of leaves, the gold ones shining like sovereigns among the red and brown.
‘Someone said you had a son. Is he at the school?’
‘No, the college down the road – first-year sixth.’
‘That's nice.’ Bill flexed his fingers, making the joints click. ‘Mine have long since flown the nest. Like their mother.’ He made a face.
‘I'm sorry,’ murmured Elizabeth, picking up her pen. She made a comic face of her own, gesturing at her pile of work.
‘Would you… that is, after school one day… I was wondering if you were free… if perhaps you'd care for a drink?’ He had taken off his glasses and was chewing one end, clearly needing assistance to get the words out.
‘How kind. I…’ Elizabeth faltered, wondering if indeed she was free, not in the immediate do-I-have-a-spare-evening sense – she had seven of those each week – but in the not-being-committed-elsewhere sense. She wasn't committed, of course. She hadn't spoken to Keith for weeks. The one time recently she had cracked and dialled his number she had got a recorded message. The person you are calling is not available… Not available, no, but there. Alive. On the planet. This fact, which had once felt empowering, like a secret weapon, was beginning to wear Elizabeth down. Yet her memories of their brief time together were still so sweet that she couldn't bring herself to give up on them. ‘But I'm afraid I'm not free,’ she said at length, offering her would-be suitor a smile of apology.
‘Fine. Okay.’ The glasses were on again, settled back into the small furrow at the top of his nose. ‘If you change your mind…’ He blinked at her, his brown eyes, large behind his lenses, full of meaning.
Nice eyes, Elizabeth decided. She picked up her pen and tried to work, aware still, in spite of Bill's own pose of con-centration and the other members of staff milling round the room, of his attention, beaming across the room with all the intensity of a door-stepping salesman looking to get a foot in a closing door.
At break, standing near the oak trees on playground duty, she broke the rules again and tried Keith's number. I'm in demand, she wanted to say, and what are you going to do about it? But all she got was the same dispiriting message confirming his unavailability. Elizabeth tipped her head back and looked at the sky. It was a beautiful morning but very cold, particularly when the sun lost out in its battle for space between the huge clouds bulging on either side of it. Like giant ocean liners swamping a tiny sea, she decided dreamily, solid and slow. But as she looked, blinking away the tears teased from her eyes by the wind, she saw that these liner-clouds were moving at great speed and also changing shape every second, from ships, to dragons, to mountains, to the profile of an old lady to… Elizabeth dropped her gaze, giddy suddenly with the unsettling sense of being a pinprick on the face of the world, small and left behind.
Keith was clearly moving on, and so must she. If Bill asked again she would respond differently. She needed a companion. She was that sort of person – simply no good on her own. And it wasn't fair to rely on Roland: she had done too much of that already. And it was no longer possible anyway, given that her son's social life had recently taken off. In retrospect, it was the news about exhibiting his paintings that had clearly been the turning-point. Ever since, he had been out so much and so late that Elizabeth had felt duty-bound to deliver one of her rare parental lectures, warning that one unplanned baby in t
he family was quite enough and receiving a squirming scowl for her pains.
Dutiful lectures aside, Elizabeth was thrilled for the most part that her quiet son had found a reason to stop spending quite so many hours locked in his bedroom with his music and his easel. The old selfish sadness at the prospect of losing him was still there, beckoning like a hag with a crooked finger, but she had discovered lately that keeping busy rather than reaching for a wine bottle was the best way to combat it. She didn't drink at all during the week now. She went swimming instead. And she had started an evening class to freshen up her Italian. When the practice tapes bored her she wrote emails to Maria, who replied in comparably broken English, full of pleas for her and Roland to return to Umbria, as guests in her own house this time. No swimming-pool but plenty eating and horses to ride – you come quickly!
It took Elizabeth several minutes to absorb that something unusual was happening in the playground. Although there were still ten minutes left of break, the football had stopped. Several children, in defiance of school rules, had got out their mobiles and were huddling in groups.
‘Jimmy, Colleen, put those away. You know you're not supposed to –’
‘But, Miss, haven't you heard?’
‘Heard what? Colleen, if you don't put that away I'm going to have to confiscate –’
‘There's been a bomb, Miss.’
‘A bomb? What sort of bomb?’
‘In London. At a station. Loads of people killed, apparently. Jimmy's worried, aren't you, Jimmy? His dad works in London – catches the train every day. He's trying to call his mum, aren't you, Jimmy?’
Soon children were clustered around her, all talking at once. Between trying to find out what they knew and offering reassurance, Elizabeth thought, with a leap of the heart, of her younger brother. On the far side of the playground several members of staff had appeared, the head and Bill Jackson among them. She hurried over to them.
‘It's Charing Cross,’ said Bill, before she could ask anything. ‘The bastards have blown up Charing Cross. Morning rush-hour, bloody carnage. The head's thinking of letting the kids go home.’
‘I don't think he should do that. We should carry on, shouldn't we?’ Elizabeth glanced back anxiously at Jimmy and then at the scores of other children now talking into their phones and putting their arms round each other. A couple of girls were crying. She felt in her pocket for her own telephone, torn between calling Serena and the more immediate need to do something to assuage the hysteria growing in the playground. Charing Cross was safe, after all, at least as far as Charlie was concerned. He caught the train to Victoria and then… Which tube did he take? Oh, God, her own brother, and she didn't even know which tube line he took to work, where his office was. And there was Peter, too, of course. Elizabeth's stomach knotted again. How had she not thought of Peter? He was near Charing Cross, near the law courts, which were by the Aldwych, which was just along from the Strand, which –
‘How big was it, the explosion? Do you know?’
Bill shook his head. ‘Big enough. Like Madrid, they're saying.’ Next to him the head blew a whistle and the children froze, like a film freezing mid-frame.
‘Into the hall, everybody, please. I need to talk to you. In an orderly way, please, no running.’
Elizabeth, trying not to run herself, started a text to Roland, then didn't know what to say. She settled in the end for ‘Call me, luv Mum‘, wanting just the simple reassurance of contact even though she knew he was safe and sound a couple of miles down the road. It crossed her mind to call Peter but she didn't have his number on her phone. She'd check with Serena, she decided, the moment everybody was back at their desks.
Peter parked in the furthest, most discreet corner of the car-park and peered gingerly at the hotel entrance. Comfort Lodge, it was called, a nowhere place on a nowhere stretch of road, one of those he had driven past a thousand times with no thought other than what sort of travelling salesmen might be desperate enough to stay there. He looked again at the building. Paint was peeling off the window-frames. On the billboard advertising its name the L of ‘Lodge' was hanging at an angle under a spattering of bird excrement.
I'm not desperate, he told himself, knowing even as the thought crossed his mind that it was untrue. He was desperate, but only because he was in love. For the first time in his life, precipitously, madly, excitingly, Peter reminded himself, deliberately averting his eyes from the sign, not wanting its seediness to sully the energy – the purity – of the emotions that had impelled him to park under its shadow.
For a brief, dreadful time the previous evening it had looked as if the whole thing was off, a crisis made all the more difficult because it had blown up after he had got home, via a long, frantic text from Delia. She couldn't make lunch, after all. Something had come up. If they met it had to be much earlier, much closer to home. Peter had despaired, then checked his emails on his Blackberry only to discover that, due to the fabulous coincidence of both a client and a solicitor going down with flu, his meeting the following morning had been cancelled. He had a free morning! He could meet her anywhere she wanted. It was all falling back into place, as if it was meant to be.
Exultation had bubbled out of him for the rest of the evening. He had bounced Genevieve on his lap till she squealed, lounged with Chloe in the den, then fussed round Helen during dinner like a waiter at an exclusive restaurant. More wine? A little more salad? Should he wash up or dry? In the bathroom later, while she was safely dozing over her book in bed, he had got out his special little scissors and clipped the hair sprouting from his nostrils and his ears, then thumped his palm against his chest, not caring that he was behaving like some sort of sad, mad Tarzan, feeling only alive – vibrantly so, as if his system had been charged with chemicals.
He had left that morning before Helen (a goodbye peck on the cheek, a ruffle of his daughters' heads – it was so easy!) playing his Vivaldi tape instead of listening to the news. The opening movement of the Four Seasons matched his mood perfectly. The calendar might say it was autumn but it felt and looked to Peter like spring. He had opened the sun-roof and hummed along to the music, feeling the warm kiss of the heat on his bald patch as some sort of a benediction, a sign that whatever deity Helen had taken to conversing with was somehow smiling upon him too, for all his wickedness. Yet as he moved past the dilapidated hotel sign and up the entrance steps, Peter did not feel wicked. How could love be wicked? How could anything that felt so good be bad?
Jessica watched the events unfolding on television with a can of Fanta and a bag of plain crisps. There were bodies everywhere, bits of bodies too, though the cameras tended not to linger on those, focusing instead on the piles of twisted, smoking wreckage, interviews with not too gruesomely wounded survivors and accounts of the efforts of the rescue teams. It was awful, of course, but also, Jessica couldn't help thinking, very interesting. It made her feel as if she had something to do at last, something almost important. When one channel took a break from covering the atrocity she flicked to another, so she received all the statistics as they unfolded and had even seen some of the interviews several times. There had been, as far as the authorities could gather, a total of six bombs, two on an arriving mainline train, one on an underground platform and three at the station, designed, apparently, to go off as the rescue teams arrived. All the devices appeared to have been stuffed into backpacks; a substance called tidadine – a compressed form of dynamite – was thought to have been used, along, of course, with detonators. No organization had yet claimed responsibility but the view seemed to be that a shadowy group linked to Al Qaeda was behind it. Between reports on the carnage, there were statements from the prime minister, the leaders of the opposition parties and the home secretary who, trying to speak as he arrived at the scene, looked as if he might actually puke up his breakfast in front of the cameras.
By late morning, Jessica felt quite the expert.
‘Fucking nutters,’ said Maureen, arriving back from a morning job and
dropping into the chair next to the sofa.
‘There was this gross bit with a woman screaming,’ said Jessica, prompted by the scale of the proceedings temporarily to overlook the recent state of deadlock between them. ‘There was, like, part of her arm missing. It was gross. I mean, how much would that hurt, having your arm blown off?’
Maureen gave an exaggerated shudder, offered her daughter a cigarette, then snatched the packet out of her reach. ‘Oy, not you. I forgot.’
‘I bet you smoked when I was inside you,’ said Jessica, viciously.
‘I did not,’ she retorted, inhaling fiercely – gloatingly, it seemed to her daughter, as if she was sucking the last drops of a delicious drink through a straw. ‘At least, hardly at all.’
‘Oh, sure, like I'm going to believe that. I bet you puffed your head off all the way through. It's probably why I like it so much – I was probably born addicted.’
‘That's it, blame me, like you always do.’
‘Blame you? I like that. Oh, fuck, I can't be arsed with this, I really can't.’ Jessica snatched up the dog-eared paperback lying on the sofa cushion next to her and opened it. She wouldn't be able to read properly, she knew, not with her mum chugging in the chair next to her and the TV on. But she couldn't quite bring herself to retreat to her bedroom either, not with all that was happening. There might be other bombs, they had said, that hadn't gone off yet. As it was, a hundred and eighty people were already known to have died. A hundred and eighty. Whichever way you looked at it that was a fuck of a lot of bodies.
‘What are you reading now, bookworm?’
‘None of your business.’ Jessica flattened the book to hide the cover. It was called A Passage to India and she was well over half-way through. The woman at the library had recommended it. Jessica liked the story – a lot easier than the Virginia Woolf stuff – but was also finding it a bit old-fashioned: posh Brits with parasols and servants, worried about showing their legs or catching the sun. It was like reading about dinosaurs.
The Simple Rules of Love Page 41
