But I felt something when I heard good news about young people. Anger, mostly, that they were alive to celebrate. I couldn’t help catching sight of the usual beaming, lovely girls, captured on the front pages of newspapers as they opened their A level results. The twins’ results came soon after Miranda was killed. Molly went to their school and brought Miranda’s home as well as her own. They were good. Not brilliant, but good enough for her to have been able to take up her place at Loughborough. Molly’s were excellent, exceeding requirements. How they would have celebrated, and us with them. Miranda had had to work so hard, really slog, especially over biology. To get a C was a triumph. A completely pointless triumph, as it turned out. I hated those pictures in the newspapers.
So it wasn’t surprising that I didn’t know about Emma, a girl who had been in the twins’ class. It was Finn who told me. He turned up wearing a suit yesterday. The only suit he’s ever owned and it is too small for him. He had a tie, too, a tie I’ve never seen before and which I didn’t know he possessed (he’d borrowed it, of course). ‘Heavens,’ I said, and, ‘You’re not going for an interview somewhere, are you?’ ‘Been to a funeral,’ he said. I didn’t want to ask whose. He was irritated. ‘You must know,’ he said. ‘It was in the papers.’ I reminded him that I didn’t read newspapers, not even the local one. ‘Well, you should,’ he snapped. There was no point getting into arguments. As quietly as possible, I asked whose funeral. It must be somebody I knew, however vaguely, if he knew them well enough to go to their funeral. ‘Emma Carter’s,’ he said. I was shocked, and, in fact, it was a relief to feel shocked instead of indifferent.
I sat down, and Finn pottered about, looking in my fridge, taking an apple from the bowl on the table. He wasn’t going to tell me anything unless I begged for the information – his silence was a punishment, and I knew it. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, eventually, and ‘how awful.’ He nodded. Did I want to know how the poor girl died? No. But because I didn’t ask, and instead wondered how his work was going, Finn chose to tell me after all. ‘Suicide,’ he said. ‘An overdose. Left a note and everything. “No point in life …” etc.’ He sounded laconic to the point of callousness, but his act didn’t fool me. We stared at each other, Finn frowning heavily. ‘She was nice,’ he said. ‘She was popular too. It doesn’t make any kind of sense. It wasn’t as if there was anything wrong in her life. Her father said that at the funeral. He said it was “inexplicable”. The vicar said that as well, but he said her family shouldn’t feel guilty, it wasn’t their fault. But they think it was. You could tell. Just the look of them.’
Guilt? It wasn’t something we had had to suffer from, but maybe we should have done. I thought of what we might have been guilty of. Not knowing our daughter well enough? Not knowing how she really felt about Alex? Or perhaps more mundane things, of not at least ringing his parents as Don had wanted to, and asking about their boat and inquiring how competent Alex was to teach her sailing. But she was eighteen, she wanted to manage her own life. We would have looked fussy, as I’d told him, interfering. But we never talked about guilt. Strange.
Finn left me silent and somehow ashamed. I hadn’t known Emma’s parents well. The slight contact we had had through our daughters had long since ended. They wrote, I remember, after Miranda died. But I don’t recall what they said. The usual platitudes, I expect. I didn’t keep their letter. Should I write? No, it would be insulting, writing now, so long after the event (though I hadn’t asked Finn when that was). There wasn’t anything I could do to show my … my what? How I shared their distress and misery? But do I? I can’t, just as no one could share mine. They wouldn’t be interested in how shocked I was, in how I felt for them. They have enough to bear, without the weight of an acquaintance’s pity.
Yet there’s something wrong with that reasoning. I, of all people, know that. I should have been at the funeral. I should have read the newspaper. Finn should have told me.
*
Sports Day. Not a proper Sports Day – we don’t have those any more, goodness me, no – but I can’t help calling it that. We took the entire school to the running track and there were races, but with prizes for all, last as well as first. The children loved it, even the completely uncoordinated ones. Paige, surprisingly, was one of these. She’s tall and big and strong, but she can’t run for toffee, whereas skinny little Haroun runs like the wind. But as usual Paige didn’t recognise failure or defeat. I heard her telling Haroun the track was too short. If it had been the right length, in the end she would have caught and passed him. Haroun accepted this without question. They all got rosettes. Haroun’s was the only red one but Paige turned that into something to pity him for. ‘We all won, didn’t we, Miss?’ she added. ‘Not exactly, Paige,’ I said, ‘not exactly.’
*
The week is over. I didn’t need Judith to ring and leave that message on my answer phone. I was going to report Don’s absence anyway. Judith refers to it as his ‘suspicious disappearance’, but that is too melodramatic. It would sound as if we thought he had been murdered.
I tried to be brisk and matter-of-fact. I rang the police station nearest to Don’s address in the Green Lanes house and, of course, got the duty sergeant. I said I was concerned that my husband, who had been admitted to hospital last week after collapsing in the street, and then discharged himself two days later, had not returned to his current address and had not responded to phone calls. I simply wanted to register his lack of contact in case he’d had an accident or had collapsed again somewhere. The policeman could hardly be bothered to take down Don’s name, and then mine. He asked no questions, didn’t query my status as wife – I mean, didn’t ask if we lived together. He said a week was a very short time, and had I heard of the missing person’s bureau? I said, yes, I had. He suggested that I wait another two weeks and then think about contacting them. I thanked him.
Judith isn’t satisfied. She thinks we should be ‘doing something’. I asked what she had in mind, reminding her we’d had this conversation. ‘Look, Judith,’ I said, ‘I’m sure he is abroad. He’ll have gone off to follow up some so-called lead. His mobile may not work abroad. He’ll turn up soon, or phone one of us.’ She asked if I’d told Molly. I haven’t. But on that one she may be right. Molly still doesn’t even know about his collapse, and she would want to, I suppose. Would she? Being so far away? It’s hard to know. What could she do? Nothing. Worry, that’s all. It was difficult enough telling her that Don and I were separating, and that we were selling the house, but there was no choice about that, she had to be told. I dreaded her response, but she surprised me by taking the news, which I’d imagined she might find devastating, calmly. She said she could understand why this was happening, but she didn’t then go on to say what exactly she thought was happening. I’d like to have asked her, but I didn’t. She wanted to know if we were going to be divorced. I said no. We just needed to be apart. That was fudging the truth – I was the one who needed to be apart from Don – but she accepted it.
I didn’t e-mail her. I wrote a proper letter instead. It seemed more appropriate, sending such news privately, secure in its envelope. It will take a week to reach her and maybe by the time it does Don will have turned up (as I said at the end of the letter). She’ll phone me, if she can, when she gets it. I can’t calculate how upset she will be – her feelings towards her father have become so complicated. She’s far closer to me, or do I flatter myself? I don’t think so. If I had gone missing …
*
I met an old neighbour of ours in the street today, Miss Jackson. We never knew her well, but she lived two doors down from us and was part of the scenery. She had two rooms on the first floor and, when we arrived, was a sitting tenant, paying some ludicrously small rent. She used to stop me in the street and harangue me about her landlord who was forever trying to get her out. I’d sympathise, without knowing much about the situation, and desperately try to move on. Usually I’d be pushing the twins in their buggy when she accosted me, and she’d bend
down and peer at them and say, ‘What’s the pretty one called?’ I’d say I didn’t know what she meant, my girls were both pretty, and then I’d tell her their names again. Next time she stopped me, we would go through exactly the same irritating performance. I really didn’t like Miss Jackson.
Today, she blocked my path as I came out of the greengrocer’s. ‘You’ve moved!’ she said. ‘You’ve left the hill!’ I said yes, we had, and some time ago. ‘Well, it’s no wonder, I suppose, with what happened to your daughter, best to get away, start again, leave the memories. It was the pretty one, wasn’t it?’ It’s like some sort of test, this kind of thing: how does one deal with the Miss Jacksons of this world? I’ve always thought it best just to smile and say nothing and move on, but suddenly today I’d had enough. Her offence was slight and she is now an old woman of at least eighty, and she knows no better, and so on and so on, but I couldn’t help telling her that I’d always resented her description of Miranda as the ‘pretty one’ and that I’d had no intention of trying to leave the memories but that I’d taken them with me and loved them dearly and would never want to be parted from them. Then I turned, and almost ran home.
Doubtless, Miss Jackson will hear in due course that Don and I have separated, and the next time we meet she’ll have some gem of a remark to make about that. She loved Don. She was always telling me ‘You’ve done well there, he’s a gentleman.’ It became a family joke – if Don broke something in the kitchen, or let milk boil over, the children would chorus ‘You’ve done well there, Mum.’ He helped her with her shopping when he saw her struggling up the hill, carrying it right into her flat, and she took to coming to ask for his assistance on a wide variety of trivial problems from filling out forms to how to get a bus pass. He was her ‘pin-up boy’, she simpered. ‘You couldn’t have a kinder man,’ she would say, when he’d done whatever she needed.
I wish Miss Jackson could have seen how Don behaved during those months afterwards. He hardly spoke to me or the children. He would get up in silence, his face tightly closed, his eyes narrowed as though focusing on something no one else could see, and if we said anything to him there was not only no response but no acknowledgement that he’d heard us speak. He left for work, on the days when he went to his office at all, without any farewell, and he returned in the same mood. The only time we heard his voice was on the telephone, talking to other people about his investigations. I would rather have had furious arguments but these were rare and only took place when I cornered him and demanded some communication. He was a zombie, moving through the house in a sinister fashion. Was that kind?
Is he still kind? Has the kindness that Miss Jackson saw disappeared, together with so many other attributes? I can’t believe it has, but I can detect no trace of it now. But then Don isn’t really in his right mind. Wherever he is, whatever he is doing, whoever he is with, he isn’t the same. It’s the part of the tragedy nobody sees, except me.
7
MOLLY WAS SITTING on the doorstep, leaning against the glass doors, her legs stretched out and her feet resting on her bag. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t asleep – I could see her eyelids fluttering. Four in the afternoon. She’d known what time I would be coming home. I saw her from yards away, and I knew, there was no mistaking her. But I didn’t call out. I approached her softly. I wanted just to look at her before she looked at me. It would have been awful to cry.
It had all been planned. She knew she was coming back but didn’t tell any of us, wanting to avoid the emotion of being met at Heathrow. She said it was worth the aggro of making her own way into London to my flat just to adjust as she went along, in her own time. So much to adjust to, and all after travelling virtually twenty-four hours without a break. It pleased her that it was raining, that endless drizzle which never either completely stops, or turns into proper rain, on days like this. She saw everything through its haze, and it helped, she said. All the way in the bus she was staring through the misted-over window and seeing nothing.
She isn’t back for good. She’s been sent to make a report in person to the charity’s headquarters, telling them how things really are ‘in the field’, and she has lots of other tasks to carry out involving visiting various people and places. She’ll be busy, she says. It isn’t a holiday, though she can have some time off. Can I stay here? she asked. I was hurt that she thought she had to ask. Of course, of course, I said, it’s your home now. She looked at me oddly. It is, I repeated, of course it is.
*
She’s gone to see Finn and Judith. I’ve told her about Don (she left for London before my letter arrived). She didn’t seem shocked or upset. He’ll be all right, she said, don’t worry. I tried to say that I wasn’t worried, that it was Judith who was fussing, but she smiled and shook her head and said, ‘Mum, your middle name is worry.’ I watched her walk off down the street. She knew I would be watching, and turned and waved when she got to the corner. That’s what the twins did when first they started walking to school on their own, aged seven – they turned and waved when they got to the zebra crossing at the bottom of the hill, and then I watched them safely over the road. In time, of course, it irritated them, this watching-from-the-upstairs-window, but still they stopped obediently, turned and waved. I went on watching all the same, until they finished primary school and no longer took that route.
She’s lost even more weight. Not surprising, of course, with all that heat and the physical hard work. She’s really thin for the first time in her life, but not alarmingly so – it suits her. And she looks well, much better than when she left. Then, she still had those dreadful dark shadows under her eyes, and she was so pale it was frightening. Her clothes are the same as they always were, jeans and loose shirts. Unlike Miranda, she’s never had any interest in clothes. But she’s wearing an old jacket of Miranda’s. The sleeves are much too long for her. I didn’t comment on it but I was surprised she had it. When did she start wearing it? I’m sure I would have noticed if she’d worn it before she went to Africa, even in the state I was in. She saw me taking it in, of course, but she didn’t say anything either. When she zipped it up we smiled at each other.
She’s put her stuff in the spare room. She asked what had happened to the furniture which was in her old room: ‘Not that I care,’ she added. But I felt that maybe she did care, and would like to have seen the old pine chest of drawers, with most of the knobs missing, instead of this new white piece. Too late. It felt faintly embarrassing to watch her glancing at all the new stuff, though up to now I’ve been so pleased with it. ‘I hope I don’t muck the place up too much,’ she said, looking down at the spotless pale-blue carpet. ‘Must remember to take my shoes off.’ ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. She sat on the bed and fingered the coverlet, and I wished I’d never bought it. She was still fussing with it, and looking down at it, when she said, ‘Mum, did you actually tell Dad to go? To get out?’ I was shocked. I said that, of course, I hadn’t, I’d written and told her at the time what had been agreed and that it was all perfectly amicable. ‘You didn’t tell me exactly how it happened,’ Molly said. ‘There were no details in that letter.’ ‘I didn’t think you would want details,’ I said. ‘The important thing was …’ But she interrupted. ‘Of course I wanted details,’ she said, quite angrily. ‘I couldn’t imagine it, could I? I couldn’t think what must have been said. I thought of you and Dad, and the words I had to put in your mouths didn’t fit. Who said what, and where, where in the house, and what time of day, and what you were doing? … all that. What did you say?’
‘I can’t remember.’ I said that to Molly, and she raised her eyebrows and clenched her hands on the bedcover and shook her head. ‘Fine,’ she said, and sprang up and left the room. I trailed after her, repeating that I really could not recall the sequence of events leading to Don going and the house being sold. And I can’t. There was no point at which I asked him to leave. At least, I don’t think there was. It didn’t happen that way. I was the one who said I wanted to live alone, som
ewhere else. Surely I’d written that to Molly? But apparently not. Or she misinterpreted what I wrote. I just got to the point when I couldn’t stand Don, or the house, any more, but I did not ask him to leave. I did not turn him out. It all happened quite easily, smoothly. I’m sure it did. I must make Molly understand that.
*
Leaving Molly to go to school this morning felt strange. I peeped into her room, but she was sound asleep, a huddle under the duvet, motionless. She didn’t come in until after midnight, and all the travelling and change of climate is catching up on her. She was out with old school friends, at the pub, and then to a flat one of them has got. Tilly’s flat. Tilly was Miranda’s friend more than Molly’s. I’m longing to hear how she’s getting on, but when I came home Molly had gone out. There was a note on the kitchen table saying she’d be back about six, so I’m waiting for her. I’ve made her favourite dish – stir-fry prawns with coriander – or what used to be her favourite dish. It was such a pleasure shopping for the ingredients, making sure the coriander was fresh, then preparing it, and now I am looking forward to us eating together.
*
Molly walked to school with me this morning. Neither of us used the word ‘remember’. We went early, before any of the children would be making their way there. I’m nearer now, living in my flat, than I was in our house on the hill – it only takes five instead of fifteen minutes to get there. She’s the same height as me, our stride is the same length. There was no need to talk but I wanted to. ‘It’s changed, the school,’ I said, ‘it’s more mixed than it was in your day. ‘Mixed!’ she mocked. ‘What a word, Mum, what do you mean?’ I said mixed wasn’t the right word. What I meant was that it seemed noisier, rougher, more crowded, and that having a lot of children now who couldn’t speak much English gave it a different feel. She shot me a look. I told her I was just stating a fact. ‘That’s what everyone says,’ she said, ‘but they mean more than that.’
Over Page 13
