The Forever House: A feel-good summer page-turner

by Veronica Henry

  Belinda nodded. ‘I know only too well about the drinking.’

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘It was all a very long time ago . . .’ Should she tell Natasha the truth? Was what happened between Charlie and her relevant? Should his past be held against him?

  She looked down at her desk. It was ironic that she had the paperwork for The High House in front of her. The offer letters and the notifications for the solicitors: it was all going ahead. She looked at the picture of the house on the brochure, and remembered how much she had loved it. How much losing it had hurt. And that had been down to Charlie.

  Belinda thought if it were her, she would want to know.

  ‘I’m just going to give you the facts,’ said Belinda. ‘I’m not going to give you an opinion or tell you what to do.’

  ‘That’s all I want,’ said Natasha.

  She didn’t exaggerate, or paint Charlie any blacker than he needed to be. She just outlined the chain of events as they had happened.

  When she had almost finished decorating The High House, the carpets were laid on the first two floors, and three days later Belinda still found the smell of the rubber backing made her feel sick. A thought occurred to her. She stood in the hallway, looking at the black-and-white tiles, the cornicing she had picked out in white, the glittering glass lamp that shone its light over the Wedgwood-blue walls and thought ‘We’re going to be a family’.

  ‘Charlie,’ she called, holding on to the curl of newel post at the bottom of the stairs. And when he appeared from the kitchen, glass in hand, she told him her suspicions.

  He stared at her in disbelief. For a moment, she thought his expression was one of horror. It was just a split second, before his face broke into a beaming smile.

  ‘My cup of happiness is overflowing,’ he told her.

  Belinda couldn’t believe how lucky she was. She had the perfect house, the perfect job, and she was going to have a baby. Sometimes she felt overwhelmed when she looked at what she had. For all her planning, she had never imagined everything would fall into place so quickly.

  But for some reason, a few more weeks into her pregnancy, things began to go wrong. Rumours of a property crash meant that everyone was putting their house on the market but no one was buying. Richard Mortlake was putting the pressure on her and Giles to get some commissions in, but you couldn’t force people to buy. They had barely sold anything over the past few weeks. She hadn’t told them she was pregnant yet – she didn’t want to jinx it until her twelve-week scan – but she could see Giles looking at her strangely. And she overheard him talking to his father.

  ‘I think Puss has got a bun in the oven.’

  ‘Bugger,’ said Richard. ‘I don’t want to be forking out for maternity leave, only for her to push out another one in eighteen months. Bloody women.’

  Her mouth dropped open and her cheeks flushed red. She wanted to go storming in on them – sexist bastards – but she didn’t trust herself not to cry, because she cried at the drop of a hat at the moment.

  At least Charlie had more clients than he knew what to do with, judging by the amount of time he spent with them.

  And the house was a joy. Everyone who saw what she had done was green with envy. She insisted that it was because the house was already perfect, it had just needed all the awful things that had been done to it undoing, but she had a flair for just the right colour paint, the right amount of lighting, the little touches that lifted it from pleasing to spectacular.

  She was in the top bedroom, the one that was destined to be the nursery, testing out scraps of wallpaper against the light, when she felt the first pain. She thought it must just be a twinge – she’d read they were only to be expected, so she rubbed her tummy and shifted her position.

  Ten minutes later, she felt as if a knitting needle had been driven into her. She called Charlie repeatedly on her phone, but it went straight to voicemail.

  ‘Charlie? Charlie, it’s me – can you come home?’ That was all she could manage to say. There was sweat breaking out on her brow. She could hardly breathe with the pain. She edged her way down the stairs, clinging on to the bannister, then collapsed at the bottom. She just managed to dial the emergency services.

  In the back of the ambulance, she screamed with the pain. A paramedic tried to calm her while he did her obs.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  No one answered her. She could sense by the atmosphere this was an emergency. She heard the sirens go on. Tears and sweat poured down her face.

  Everything happened too fast but not fast enough. She was bundled out of the ambulance and put onto a trolley. There were faces above her as she was wheeled down endless corridors, the strip lights overhead glaring into her eyes. She could barely breath for the pain.

  ‘We’re taking you into theatre, love,’ said someone in a green uniform.

  ‘Charlie. Where’s Charlie?’

  ‘We’ve called him.’ Two people above her exchanged glances. They had masks on.

  ‘Where is he? I need him here.’

  They pushed through a set of double doors. The lights were even brighter. Someone took her hand and patted the back of it. But it wasn’t for reassurance. She felt something go in. Something sharp.

  There was a new voice. A woman. Calm. Authoritative.

  ‘Belinda? I’m the anaesthetist. I need to ask you a few questions. When did you last eat?’

  ‘Anaesthetist?’ She tried to sit up, in panic. A nurse pushed her gently back down. Everyone around her was working quickly, getting things ready. There were machines, numbers, noises. Pain. Oh God the pain.

  ‘When did you last eat?’

  ‘Where’s Charlie? What’s happening?’

  ‘We’re helping you, love, but you need to calm down.’

  ‘My baby. Is it my baby? Is my baby coming?’ It couldn’t be coming. It wasn’t ready yet.

  ‘Shhh, love.’

  ‘Sweetheart, can you count backwards from ten for me?’

  ‘No. I need my husband. I need him here. You can’t . . .’

  She felt ice in her veins. She looked at a screen next to her. There were green lines. They wavered, then melted into one and went black.

  When she woke, she saw the concerned and kindly face of a nurse hovering over her. She sat by her bed.

  ‘Oh love, here you are. You’ve been very lucky.’

  ‘What?’ Belinda tried to sit up but she couldn’t. She seemed to be connected to wires. ‘Where’s Charlie?’

  The nurse pressed her lips together. ‘We’ve tried to contact him. We’ve left messages.’

  Belinda tried to take this new information in, but her head was swimming.

  ‘So . . . the baby?’

  ‘I’m sorry, love. But like I said, you were lucky. You had an ectopic pregnancy.’

  ‘I don’t understand . . .’

  ‘The doctor will be here to explain now you’re awake. Try and rest, love.’

  Dark panic washed over her. How could something so terrible happen? How could Charlie not be here? The doctor came and his words washed over her . . . ectopic . . . emergency . . . general anaesthetic . . . Fallopian tube . . . The story he was telling her became meaningless, because she knew the only bit of it she needed to know.

  She had lost her baby.

  She’d drifted off, because sleep was better than being awake. She heard Charlie’s voice calling her name. She opened her eyes and he was there, next to the bed. He looked shamefaced and shambolic.

  ‘Didn’t you get my message?’

  He couldn’t meet her eye.

  ‘I was out of signal.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘I thought you wanted more wallpaper paste or something . . .’

  She turned away from him and closed her eyes.

  ‘How was I supposed to know?’

  ‘They phoned you from here. The nurse told me she’d spoken to you and you were too drunk to understand what she was saying.’

>   ‘It was a bad line. I was with clients. I’m sorry, Belinda.’ He sat on the edge of the bed next to her and patted her awkwardly. ‘Look at you. I told you to take it easy.’

  No, you didn’t, she thought.

  ‘Still, as long as you’re all right. No harm done, eh? You’ll just have to slow down a bit.’

  She stared at him. He didn’t know. He’d blundered in still drunk – she could smell it on him – and he didn’t have a clue. He looked down at her, his face red and sweaty.

  ‘Charlie.’

  ‘What?’

  She could only whisper it. ‘I’ve lost the baby.’

  He gaped at her. She shut her eyes. Where once she would have longed for his arms around her, now she wanted him as far away from her as possible. There was no comfort he could give her. Nothing would fill the emptiness she felt. She felt as if she could fall into the hole left inside her where her baby had been. She wanted to follow him, or her, into oblivion.

  *

  She took a fortnight off work to recuperate. She felt washed out and weak. She drifted around the house, getting on her own nerves. She didn’t feel like herself at all. She didn’t know how to address what had happened. She told herself she had to come to terms with the loss of the baby, but it was overwhelming. She sat in the nursery-that-wasn’t and endless tears seemed to leak from her eyes when she didn’t even think she was crying.

  She could get pregnant again, she had been told, but with the loss of one tube it might take time. And she wasn’t to try straight away.

  She didn’t want to try. The very thought of Charlie touching her was repulsive. She was shocked at how their loss had highlighted Charlie’s shortcomings. Every day he seemed to become more and more useless. How on earth she could have thought he was capable of anything more than pouring a glass of wine was beyond her.

  One night he got stuck into a bottle of gin in the kitchen and got even drunker than usual.

  ‘It’s all my fault,’ he told her. ‘The baby. I was scared. I didn’t know how to be a dad. I . . .’ He looked at her, and she knew she didn’t want to hear what he was going to say. ‘I wished that you weren’t pregnant. I kept thinking maybe it was a false pregnancy or something. I made you lose the baby. Because I didn’t want it!’

  She looked at him, snivelling in the kitchen, his eyes red, his hair a mess. He couldn’t have been further away from the twinkling, charming man she had met less than two years ago.

  ‘Charlie,’ she said, ‘I had an ectopic pregnancy. It was nothing to do with you or what you thought about it. You didn’t “make” it happen. So don’t try and steal my own bloody miscarriage from me. It is not all about you.’

  She went upstairs and that night he didn’t come up to bed. She had no idea where he slept and nor did she care.

  She had only been back to work for a week when Richard Mortlake called her in to his office. She hadn’t given any details about what had happened to her – just the euphemism ‘women’s problems’ was enough to make them recoil and not ask any more questions. She thought perhaps he was going to quibble about the time she had taken off, but she had a doctor’s note.

  He wasn’t quibbling. Instead, he told her she was being made redundant.

  ‘It’s this bloody property crash. I’m sorry. But we can’t afford to keep you on. We’ve only had one sale in the past fortnight.’

  It didn’t occur to him that there might be a correlation between her absence and the lack of sales. She looked at his smug face as he delivered the news. The Mortlakes would be all right. He was keeping his useless oaf of a son on. Of course he was. Did he know how many times she had covered Giles’s back? How much she had taught him? Didn’t he know that without her Giles was a glorified office boy? He had no rapport with clients, or any feel for what a property might be worth unless it was bog standard.

  She wasn’t going to go without a fight.

  ‘I suppose this is about you not wanting to pay for maternity leave.’

  Richard paled. ‘What?’

  ‘I overheard your conversation,’ she said. ‘When Giles said he thought I’d got a bun in the oven?’

  She smiled at him sweetly.

  Richard looked horrified.

  ‘You must have misheard,’ he blustered.

  ‘No, I didn’t. And I did have a ‘bun in the oven’. So I think you might find if I took this to a tribunal—’

  ‘Oh God, don’t do that.’

  ‘Well, in that case, shall we discuss my pay off?’

  Richard swallowed.

  ‘I imagine you will be quite generous?’

  ‘That’s blackmail.’

  ‘How is it blackmail?’ Belinda stared him out.

  ‘You’re taking advantage of the situation.’

  She shrugged. She knew she had the upper hand.

  ‘It’s up to you. I’m quite happy to sue you if I have to.’

  When she saw the size of her redundancy cheque, she laughed for the first time in weeks.

  She didn’t tell Charlie about her redundancy. She wanted to bide her time while she thought about what to do. And she didn’t want him to know about her pay-off. She knew if Charlie got wind of it, he’d rip through it in no time. He didn’t notice she wasn’t going to work.

  They were both in the same house, but they might have been in different countries. They were prowling around, lying to each other, biding their time, until something happened. Something would, Belinda knew. They were going to lose everything. She could feel it in her bones. But she didn’t have any fight. The loss of her baby had taken her spirit with it. She didn’t care about anything any more.

  *

  She was right to trust her instincts. The wine shop went bust. Of course it did.

  ‘It’s not my fault,’ said Charlie, and Belinda couldn’t even be bothered to roll her eyes, because of course it wasn’t. Nothing was ever his fault.

  She felt defeated. Gradually, everything she had worked and fought for was being eradicated. The baby was gone, her marriage was going – and she knew the house was next. Without her salary or his contribution, they couldn’t pay the mortgage. She was struggling to get work with another estate agent because they were all in the same boat with the property crash, finding it impossible to sell houses, so no one was taking on new staff.

  She wanted to wipe the slate clean and start again. This was purgatory, both of them in the house they had once loved and now couldn’t afford.

  They were skirting round each other in the kitchen one night. She had made a half-hearted effort to cook a spaghetti bolognese, but as she twisted her fork into her pasta and looked across the table at him staring glumly down into his bowl, she realised she wouldn’t care if she never saw him again.

  ‘I want a divorce,’ she told him.

  He stared at her. ‘We’ll have to sell the house.’

  She wanted to throw the Parmesan grater at him. ‘Of course we’ll have to sell the house, Charlie. We’ll have to sell it anyway. Neither of us is bringing any money in. You haven’t even noticed I haven’t been to work for the past month. That’s how interested you are in me.’

  He chewed on a string of spaghetti as he considered her words. She could see the cogs whirring in his brain.

  ‘I’m entitled to half. It was me who found this place. If it wasn’t for me . . .’

  Me me me me me.

  She got up and walked out of the room. She couldn’t trust herself. She had no respect left for Charlie. How could she not have noticed that everything was always about him?

  When they sold the house she walked away with fifteen hundred pounds. That was all that was left, after all the money she had put in – the deposit and the stamp duty – never mind all the work she’d done and the materials and labour she had paid for, because prices had plummeted since they had bought it.

  She felt sick when the solicitor phoned to tell her the final amount and transfer the money into her account. What a fool she had been. She was never, ever going to l
et anyone put her in that position again. She was never going to be answerable to anyone either. From now on, she was going to do everything for herself and no one else.

  She still had her redundancy money, which she’d squirrelled away. When Charlie had queried if she had got any, she faced him head on.

  ‘Don’t you dare have the gall to even ask,’ she said, keeping her voice level even though she wanted to scream. ‘Don’t you dare.’

  She had plans for that money. She wasn’t ready to put it into action yet, because Belinda was watching and waiting for the right time and the right place.

  The day they handed over the key to the house, she thought her heart was going to break. Charlie had vanished. The wine shop was abandoned. He hadn’t come home for a week. She walked through the empty house, saying goodbye to each room. She still felt pride at what she had accomplished.

  As she locked the front door for the last time, she looked up at The High House. She felt a million times worse about the loss of her home than the breakdown of her marriage. She turned and walked back up towards the high street with her head held high. No one could take away her achievement. She still had her wits and her unfailing courage. There might be a property crash, but no way was it going to last forever. And when things picked up, she was going to be ready.

  ‘I’m so sorry about your baby,’ said Natasha. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She was in tears. ‘Thank you for being honest with me. I really appreciate it.’

  Belinda smiled at her. Throughout her tale, she’d managed to stay composed. It was almost as if it had all happened to someone else.

  ‘What do you think you’ll do?’

  Natasha looked around the office.

  ‘I want to achieve. I want to do something I’m proud of. Like you have.’

  ‘Do you think you’ll go ahead with the retreat?’