‘Well, of course I would have. You don’t just walk out of someone’s party. Don’t you think that’s just a little rude? You could at least have made an excuse or something. I mean, God, Laura – there I am trying to smooth things over after the last thing you did, and you just go and show us up all over again. Why, for God’s sake?’
‘I just didn’t want to be there.’
‘You just didn’t want to be there,’ he repeats back at me, incredulously. And we sit there, and we stare at each other. From down the hall in the living room comes the hyper-jolly laughter of kids’ TV.
‘James,’ I say tentatively, ‘you may not have noticed, but I’ve had a lot on my mind just lately.’
And straight back James says, ‘Oh, I’ve noticed all right. How could I not have noticed? You’re hardly ever here and when you are, God—’ He breaks off, he shakes his head, and he laughs that short, humourless laugh. Anger, hot and fast, shoots its way up my spine.
‘James, do you really think it so strange that I should want to put right some wrong that I did in the past? That I should want to help someone I was unkind to?’
‘I really wouldn’t know, Laura,’ James says, ‘but I don’t want it affecting us like this. Maybe you could do us both a favour and remember that we’ll still have to live in this town, long after your little project with the headcase has finished.’
I move before I think. I don’t think. I pick up my coffee cup and I hurl it at James. It hits him somewhere between his face and his chest and he reels back, scraping his chair across the tiles and yelling, ‘Jesus!’ The cup smashes on the floor, and there’s coffee everywhere, all down James’s chin and his front and the wall behind him. He’s got his arms raised up like he’s expecting something else to come flying at him, and he’s looking down at himself and kind of gasping – I don’t hang around to see what he’ll do; in seconds I’m up from that table and I’ve snatched up my bag and my car keys and I am out of there. I hear him shouting, ‘Laura!’ and the children calling, ‘Mummy!’ as I slam the front door behind me, but I don’t stop. I throw myself and my bag into the car and I am gone.
Though God knows where I am going.
I drive too fast, almost in panic. I can’t believe what I have just done. I’ve got my fingers gripping on to the steering wheel tight and my teeth digging into my lip, and I can hardly breathe I am so angry. He referred to me as if I belonged to him, and I don’t. He spoke as if I’d want to still carry on living as we do, but I don’t. I really don’t. But what kind of a hypocrite am I, telling him that I wanted to help someone I was unkind to? I didn’t want to help Heddy. I was coerced into it. All I really wanted to do was get her and her family out of my life again. And what James said, about my project with the headcase – well, that’s nothing worse than what I might have said myself just a month or so ago. What kind of people are we, James and I? What kind of lives do we lead? And what will hold us together now that the glue’s come unstuck?
There are two main roads out of Ashton – the one into London and the one out, westwards. I take the latter because it’s faster and I just want to get as far away as I can. I don’t even think where I’m going, and I’ve got nothing with me except my handbag. I can’t go far, but I can’t go back, either. I need a destination. In my bag I’ve got the keys to the Partridges’ house: I head there.
My anger’s fizzled out into a kind of low gloom by the time I get to Forbury, and I pull up outside Mrs Partridge’s and just stare at the place for a minute. Without curtains, and in the bright light of the day, the windows are black and empty. That mattress is still outside, and there are rubbish bags stacked up around the bin. One of them has been ripped open by the foxes and there are eggshells and teabags scattered across the path, and the For Sale sign has slipped over and is leaning to one side.
I sit there in the false comfort of my car and my heart slides. I mean, how bleak can one house look?
Mrs Day comes out from next door with a milk bottle and stops and gawps at me, so I feel I have to get on with things. I get out of the car and do my best to look composed and businesslike as I walk up the path. I pick up those eggshells with unwilling fingers and poke them back in the sack, knowing full well they’ll be dragged out again later. The teabags I leave; they’ve split as they’ve dried out, and their contents are smeared into the concrete like black tar. It is so weird opening that front door. No safety locks here; one turn of the key and the door flings open onto silence.
They’ve only been gone a couple of days, so there’s not much mail, just pizza leaflets and other junk. I pick it up, closing the door behind me, and there’s that smell again, that Partridge smell, left behind like their ghosts, here forever. I’m supposed to check the boiler, which clings to the wall in the kitchen, and the pipes in the airing cupboard upstairs, which are prone to leak. The boiler seems fine, if a little hissy. But I can’t help thinking maybe someone should have attacked this place with some bleach or something before they left; everything is coated in grease. Still, the new people will probably strip it all out anyway.
My shoes are loud on the hall floorboards, but Mrs Partridge left the carpet on the stairs because it was too old and worn to lift, and the sudden quiet underfoot is eerie in contrast; I find myself creeping up into the dark, afraid to make any sound. Every creak of the floorboards has my heartbeat picking up. It’s just so dark and so gloomy. What must it have been like for Heddy having to come up these stairs night after night, especially as a child? Especially after her dad had died, with the fear and misery of death lurking in the shadows. It is just too, too depressing. I remember how it used to freak me out, just looking up the stairs when I came round here. And I remember the first time I actually had to climb up them to the bathroom, when I was here for Heddy’s birthday, and how I was so desperate to get out of this horrible house and go home.
Heddy had no such option. For poor Heddy, this was home.
I check the airing cupboard and I’m about to go back downstairs – it feels so wrong, snooping around up here in the stale, fetid air. But a sudden noise stops me, a creak, coming from the main bedroom, where Heddy slept. And there it is again. I think that maybe a cat has somehow got in, or a mouse even, though the child in me is half-frightened into believing it’s old Mr Partridge’s ghost come back, looking for his family. It’s stupid to creep, but creep I do, and my heart is racing away like a jackhammer as I tentatively push back the door to Heddy’s bedroom.
They left that big old bed there, stripped of its covers. The mattress is stained and sunken from the weight of so much use; I try not to look. The huge wardrobe is still there too, emptied out now and with one door hanging open. This is where the noise came from; as I watch the door creaks and moves just slightly, feeble under its own weight. The carpet has gone from in here and I put my foot down on a woodlouse and feel it crunch underneath my shoe. I look down and see another scuttling away. The air is sour and oppressive with dust and sleep-sweat and other people’s memories. I can barely breathe. I picture Mrs Partridge, sitting on that bed, thin, worn hands clutching at the bedspread as she tells me about Heddy’s untimely birth. I see her eyes, over-bright, glistening with a lifetime of love and sadness as we sort through Heddy’s things and pile them up into boxes and bags, and again I feel myself so wrong, so useless, so shamed.
Your parents have always been very kind to us, Laura, and for that I am very grateful. I hear Mrs Partridge’s voice, the wooden politeness of unwilling need.
And I hear my own pathetic entreaty; I hear myself whining like a child. Why did you never tell them what I did?
Like I thought I’d got off the hook.
I close my eyes and I hate myself. I can never make amends for what I have done. Yet there is something else, something tugging at the edge of my mind.
I walk over to the window and look out and down. I see the mattress, the bin bags and the squashed teabags, spilling their insides on the cracked and broken concrete. But in my head I see myself, at s
even years old, nine years old, eleven years old, over and over, so reluctantly, so resentfully, forced up that path.
And I remember my dad once, when I objected, when I sat there in the car outside this house pleading, ‘Dad, I don’t want to call for her.’ I remember him leaning over towards me in the car and jabbing his pointed finger right in front of my face.
‘You, young lady,’ he spat at me, ‘do not have a choice.’
And I remember the unfairness; the anger, rising up inside, a simmering potent rage.
Your parents wanted the best for you, Mrs Partridge said. As I wanted the best for my Heddy.
Is that all?
Mrs Partridge must have known how much I hated being here. Just as she knew how cruel I was to Heddy. Did she really think that was the price to pay for their kindness?
Years ago I asked my mother why it mattered so much that I should be nice to Heddy Partridge all the time, and she gave me some strange, half-explained reason about Mr Partridge having worked for my dad, once upon a time. But what kind of reason was that for foisting such a damaging kindness upon the Partridges? And for forcing me, so obviously unwilling, upon Heddy?
Why did my parents do it? Could they really not see what was happening?
I go back downstairs and lock up the house behind me. In the car I check my phone, even though I know I’d have heard it if James had rung. That he hasn’t leaves me with a deep, slow dread. Though, of course, I should phone him. After all, I threw the cup. And I walked out. These things, I fear, are final. But what can I say? Somewhere at the sides of my mind I’m starting to think What will I do? Where will I live? And what about the children? Always, always, the children. But I cannot let these thoughts in. I cannot. Not just yet.
I don’t phone James, not even to tell him where I’m going. And I don’t phone my parents either, to warn them I’m coming. I just drive, picking up the M3 and then the A303, and joining the holiday crawl down towards Devon. I don’t know what I’m going to say to my parents when I get there. But I don’t think they were quite as kind as Mrs Partridge would like to believe, and I think there must have been something else binding Heddy Partridge and me.
TWENTY-FOUR
It’s a three-hour drive down to Devon at the best of times and this is a Sunday, in peak season. The A303 just crawls along, and I’ve plenty of time to change my mind.
But I don’t.
And as I drive I feel my marriage seeping further and further away from me. Across my shoulders, I feel the lightening of constraint. No more will I be an embarrassment to James. I can’t even think how angry he must be. First, all the social humiliation, and now this. And that I should walk out and leave him like that, dripping hot coffee and unable to have the last word – he won’t forgive that. Oh no. And he won’t clean it up, either. The coffee will be left where it hit, drying into the walls and staining them indelibly, a constant reminder of my faults.
When I eventually reach the village where my parents live, I almost do change my mind. I have to slow right down to drive through narrow lanes crowded with hedgerows and twee, flower-decked cottages, and I can feel my heart thumping hard in my chest, and the echo of that thump pulsing out behind my eyes. I almost feel sick. Tiredness, no doubt, from the drive and the stress, and I haven’t eaten anything since toast this morning. But it’s more than that. I actually feel nervous, at the prospect of turning up at my parents’ house unannounced and without the shield of my children to hide behind. And what am I going to say to them? I’m supposed to be coming here again in two weeks’ time with Thomas and Arianne – though of course that may change now.
Everything, I guess, will change now.
I can see their house, at the end of the lane, and I slow all the way down to a crawl. I think what an idyllic life they have for themselves out here. And I think how it must run in the blood, this need for perfection. How we carve it out for ourselves, how we build our own walls.
My dad is in the garden with his watering can, making the most of the late-afternoon sun. He glances my way as I pull up, but he doesn’t register the car as being mine, and he carries on again, tending to his plants. And so he is totally shocked when he looks up again minutes later to see me walking towards him up the path. I see that shock, and how it blanches out his face.
And I see him in my mind as I saw him the day I cut my wrist, the moment he looked up from his newspaper to find me standing in front of him with blood running down my arm. We never talked about that day; never mentioned it again, any of that stuff. We glossed over it, shoved it under the carpet, thinking there it would stay.
He puts down his watering can. ‘Laura?’ he says. ‘What’s the matter? Is it the children . . .? What is it?’
I shake my head. ‘Nothing,’ I lie. ‘I just wanted to come and see you.’ But I can feel my face beginning to dissolve.
‘Rita! Rita!’ my dad calls without taking his eyes off me. But he stands where he is, like he’s afraid to move.
My mum comes hurrying from around the back. ‘Oh, my goodness!’ she cries. ‘Laura! Whatever’s happened?’
‘Nothing’s happened,’ I manage to say. ‘I just thought I’d come and see you.’
I see my mum glance at my dad, very quickly, then she’s taking off her gardening gloves and telling my dad to put the kettle on and ushering me around the back. She was going to take me inside, but it’s just so lovely out there with the view and the sunlight sliding so mellow. So we sit at the garden table, my mother and I, while my dad goes inside to make tea, then brings it out to us, and then loiters nearby, in the manner of dads.
‘Does James know you’re here?’ my mum asks and I shake my head, and see her lips thin as she draws her conclusions. ‘Ah,’ she says, with meaning.
‘I’ve been spending a lot of time with Mrs Partridge, and with Heddy. Heddy’s out of hospital and they’ve moved now, to be nearer Ian. Just last week. I’m looking after the house till it’s sold. I did what I could to help them.’ I want her to pick up on what I am saying. I want her to read between the lines. And I’m watching my dad; he’s prodding about at some mini-tree he’s got in a pot there, and he’s listening. Anger is creeping in small beads through my veins, like ants on the crawl. I want their approval. All those years of being told to be nice to poor Heddy Partridge – well, I have been nice to her now. I want their approval, but I want to throw it back at them too. ‘Though I don’t suppose it could ever be enough.’
But my mum just says, ‘That’s good. Mrs Partridge has had a hard life and I’m sure it’ll be easier for her if she’s near her son.’ I see her glance at my dad. I see him deliberately avoid her eye.
Then my dad says, a little too bluffly, ‘Are they all right for money, the Partridges?’
And quick as anything my mum says, ‘I’m sure they’re fine.’ Then, as if she realizes she spoke too sharply, she adds, ‘We can’t go helping everyone who’s short of money. We’d have nothing left for ourselves.’
‘We’re not talking about anyone,’ my dad snaps back. ‘We’re talking about the Partridges.’ And he goes back to his little tree, snapping off the unwanted leaves with a hard, quick flick of his wrist. My mum glares at him, chewing on her lip.
The anger in my blood picks up a gear. ‘The Partridges, the Partridges,’ I say sarcastically. ‘Here they are back in our lives once again.’
My parents are not amused. My dad abandons his precious tree and stomps off around the side of the house, where there are, no doubt, more needy plants awaiting his attention.
My mum, in a voice that could crack glass, says, ‘Don’t you think that it’s time you phoned James?’ And what she means is: don’t come here causing trouble.
‘I don’t want to speak to him at the moment,’ I say evasively, and my mum purses her lips in disapproval.
‘Marriage isn’t always easy, Laura,’ she preaches. ‘Believe me, I should know. You have to work at it, constantly. But James has a right to know where you are.’
And
how could she ever understand that my marriage is part of the box that I’d wrapped myself into, lacing myself up to keep the demons away? Painting myself perfect, lest the truth might show through.
And that life is all undone now.
My mother finds some quiche and salad for me to eat for supper, which I do, with little conversation. And later, when she has given me a clean towel and a spare toothbrush and settled me into the spare room at the ridiculously early hour of nine o’clock, and my dad has stayed pottering around on the sidelines and so avoided having to speak to me again himself, she comes into me with the house phone and says, ‘I’ve James on the line.’
At least she has the grace to leave me again.
‘So now you get your mother to phone me,’ James states down the line, and this is it, then. I hear the coldness in his voice; the ties that bind us stretch and thin and tear.
‘I didn’t get her to phone you. She took it upon herself.’
‘And what the hell are you doing there anyway?’ he shouts in my ear. ‘I’ve got a meeting tomorrow morning. What am I supposed to do with the children?’
Oh, the things that really matter. I feel him drifting away. ‘I’m not coming back tonight, James,’ I say.
‘For God’s sake, Laura, what kind of a mother walks out on her children?’
‘That’s a cheap shot, James. I didn’t walk out on my children. I left them with you.’
And so he turns. ‘In the eyes of the law, you walked out, Laura.’
I almost laugh. ‘Are you threatening me?’ And when he doesn’t answer, but just leaves me hanging on with his loaded silence spelling out all kinds of doom down the phone, I say, as calmly as I can, ‘I’ll be back sometime tomorrow, I expect. For our children. I’m sure you can look after them until then.’
Still that silence. And then, sorrowfully, and as if it should really hurt me that he could think this, he says, ‘You’ve changed, Laura. You’re not the woman that I married.’
This Perfect World Page 25
