by Celia Walden
His wife’s only response a strangled gurgle, he pushed on.
‘And it was always the same thing – ‘What are we going to do today, Dad?’ As though every day had to bring some new adventure. And I knew then that the normal his mum and I were happy with wasn’t going to be enough for Jamie. He wanted something special, and he got it. He got his beautiful wife –’ Ted smiled at Maya ‘– and children and house, and a job that was better than anything we ever hoped for. A partner in a top …’ his voice cracked, ‘… top London firm – mentioned in magazines and newspapers.’
From the corner of her eye Jill could see Jamie’s mother nodding vehemently through her tears. She had a vision of framed articles on walls – a kitchen fridge papered with ‘hasn’t he done well’ mementos – and a contrasting vision of the pieces that had appeared after his death. ‘I know that success was smeared at the end, or, or …’ Jill winced at the poignancy of this man scrabbling around for the right word to describe what happened to his son at the end of his life. ‘But today we don’t think about that. Today we think about everything Jamie achieved. And it wasn’t a surprise to us. Because I’d take him along to local jobs as a lad, you know, and I’d be there explaining to a client that more than likely the whole boiler was going to need replacing, and they’d get annoyed, you know: “How much is all this going to cost?” Well, right about then Jamie would always show up. “My dad can fix anything – you can trust him,” he’d say. And even then he’d have this effect on people. The men loved him, and the women.’ A curl of the lip, a hint of macho pride at his son’s success ‘with the ladies’. ‘And despite what he did, I know he loved us, too.’
When Mr Lawrence’s chin dropped to his chest and his shoulders began to jolt up and down, the minister came and whispered a few words in his ear.
‘No, I’m … I just want to say one last thing: we’ll always be proud of you, son. And we hope you’ve found peace.’
Throughout the passage from Ecclesiastes and the whole of Ed Sheeran’s ‘Supermarket Flowers’, Stan kept hold of Jill’s hand, giving it a little squeeze just before she made her way up to the lectern.
‘Mr and Mrs Lawrence, Maya, I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say that if I could take any of your pain from you, I would. But I hope there’s some comfort in knowing that everyone in this room shares it.’
Nicole was there at the back, third in from the aisle, as dark and distracting as a smudge on a lens, and behind the lectern, Jill shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
‘Everyone here has known Jamie in different capacities …’ Keep to a work context, she’d told herself the night before, and you’re safe. ‘And as someone who spotted his potential twelve years ago, brought him into BWL and worked closely with him throughout that time, I watched him grow professionally and personally. I saw him turn into a loving husband and father to little Christel and Elsa. I saw him work his way up from junior broker to partner.’ She cleared her throat. ‘But that thirst for adventure you spoke of, Mr Lawrence, was always one of his most distinctive features.’ Because you always wanted more, didn’t you, Jamie? Why? Was there not enough excitement for you in adulthood? Or did you just get spoilt – by your parents, women, success, me? ‘Then there was Jamie’s charisma, his magnetism, which was –’ exhausting, devastating ‘– noted by all who met him. When he was speaking to someone, anyone, they always felt like they were the only person in the room. That’s a rare gift indeed.’ And one you abused, Jamie, time and time again, to get what you wanted. ‘In a job like ours, where charm is so important, it gave him an energy and a power that propelled him forward.’ And made it all too easy for you to trample over others. She paused. ‘That beneath that glittering façade was a tormented soul is not something many of us ever suspected. But Jamie made his mark on everyone in this room while he was with us. And again, I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say that he will never be forgotten.’
CHAPTER 35
NICOLE
DECEMBER
‘He’s coming for you, he’s coming for you!’
The warning came too late. ‘Suzie Pong’, the stinking washerwoman Nicole had no memory of being in the original Aladdin, was already leaning across her and reaching for Ben’s hand.
‘Up you get,’ she screeched, the stubbled chin and smear of lipstick on her teeth visible up close. ‘I’m going to need an apprentice at my launderette, and you look just the ticket.’ Spinning Ben around from the waist to face the audience, Suzie Pong fog-horned: ‘Do we think he looks just the ticket, ladies, gents and non-binary friends?’
A chorus of yeses and a wolf-whistle drowned out her husband’s protests, and Nicole shrank back in her seat to allow Ben to be pulled out into the aisle and up on to the theatre stage.
‘Something tells me Daddy’s going to be made to look very silly,’ she whispered in her daughter’s ear. And when Chloe broke out into one of her manic cackles, baring that joyful jumble of mismatched teeth, Nicole felt her eyes well up.
All those years of listening to girlfriends cringe at the seasonal sentimentality that would floor them in Westfield or at the ice rink, when the first few bars of Wham!’s ‘Last Christmas’ came on, Nicole had never understood it. Until this year. Until she’d almost lost everything and had to claw it back, piece by piece.
When she’d first moved back home, those emotional swerves had derailed her several times a day. Strong enough to feel like vertigo, they came out of nowhere: when she was laying the table for three or trying to find a mate for a tiny star-print sock in the tangle of laundry still warm from the drier. When she picked up letters from the mat addressed to Mr and Mrs Harper. When, as she made her way up to the guest bedroom Ben had made her sleep in for over a month, she glimpsed the back of her husband’s neck as he edited content for the production company he was now contracted to.
All the things that had once made her feel trapped were now tangible reminders of what real happiness was. Because it wasn’t seeing her name go up on that reception wall alongside Paul and Jill’s after all those years or the first letter written on BWH writing paper, as it turned out, but something far subtler. And when, on a pub night out celebrating her partnership the previous month, her new PA had shown Nicole a tattoo she was in the process of having removed, she’d found herself fascinated by the fragments of black ink you could see being carried away, dot by dot, feeling that same purifying process was taking place within her. And that with Ben and Chloe beside her, the toxicity in her bloodstream would eventually be washed away.
Because of that, Nicole had felt none of the usual tightness across her chest when Ben had brought up their yearly pre-Christmas trip to the pantomime.
‘Of course we’re going,’ she’d insisted.
And how could Nicole explain that its banality was what made it so significant? More so even than their first night back in the same bed together, when despite the three glasses of Merlot Ben had perhaps deliberately downed at dinner, it had felt as though he’d had to force himself to go through with it, keeping his eyes fixed on a distant point on the bed post until he was done. But that Saturday afternoon at the panto – with all the bickering over whether or not Chloe was allowed Maltesers and the mad dash to the Ladies in the interval – Nicole felt that they were almost like everyone else.
‘Oh dear – this doesn’t look right, does it?’
Laughter filled the auditorium, and Nicole looked up at her husband on stage. Pinned to a washing line by two giant clothes pegs pulling his shirt shoulders up like a ventriloquist’s dummy, Ben was trying his best to look like a good sport. ‘Two worst words in the English language?’ he’d joked on one of their first dates. ‘Audience participation.’
Yes, Ben would be hating every second of this. In the way that couples who have been together a long time are able to catch waves of each other’s emotions, she could actively feel the loathing emanating from him. But knowing how much Chloe was loving seeing her father up there, Ben would grin and bear
it. And bearing with humiliation, Nicole now understood, was the greatest proof of love.
Just as gracelessly as he’d been yanked up on stage, Ben was propelled off again – ‘Let’s give it up for my apprentice! And send ’im off to the job centre’ – and whatever he whispered good-humouredly in her ear as he took his seat again was drowned out by a reprise of the Prodigy’s rave-rant ‘Firestarter’, the cast assembling on stage for their final scene.
‘Mummy, I’m hungry!’ Chloe whined as they filtered slowly down the theatre stairs and out onto the packed pre-Christmas streets of Hammersmith.
‘How can you be hungry?’ she marvelled, crouching down to zip up her daughter’s coat. ‘You’ve just put away a whole box of Maltesers pretty much on your own.’
‘She didn’t have much of a lunch. And there’s always the Christmas market?’
Following her husband’s eyeline and breathing in the sweet and savoury smells – churros, roasted meat and something hot, fruity and alcoholic – Nicole looked over at the colony of stalls across the road.
‘Let’s do it,’ she agreed. Then, spying a postbox, ‘I’ll catch up.’
The Christmas card had languished in her bag all week, and smoothing out its dog-eared corners, Nicole took a last look at the address – ‘Alex Fuller, Oak View Cottage, Albion Road, Marden, Tonbridge’ – and pushed it through the slot. ‘It’s just a rental, and tiny,’ Alex had told her. ‘So Mum’s got the bedroom and I’m on a sofa bed in the sitting room, but as soon as the divorce money comes through she’s going to buy us somewhere bigger. And it’s so peaceful out here, Katie’s even sleeping through the night! You must come and visit.’
Nicole had promised she would, knowing it would never happen, that it was the last thing either of them wanted or needed, and that anything more than an occasional call would only reignite painful memories. A little girl in black at her father’s funeral; two little girls who would be spending the first of many Christmases without their father.
But Nicole had developed a series of deflection tactics to banish Christel and Elsa from her mind, whenever they appeared. And taking Chloe’s gloved hand, they headed towards the steaming little encampment of Christmas stalls.
‘Do you remember last time,’ she said, grinning at Ben, ‘I got that crazy sense of smell?’
‘Remember? You’d know what I was making for supper before you were even inside the front door.’
And when their daughter asked ‘Last time what?’ they both knew she’d never let it go.
Pulling Chloe into a doorway, away from the fast-moving throng, Ben cupped her flushed cheek. ‘How would you feel about having a little sister – or brother?’
Their daughter’s eyes moved from Nicole to Ben and back again. Then the faintest shadow flickered around her brows. ‘And we would all live together? You, me, Mummy and my sister or brother?’
‘Of course, Chlo.’ Over their daughter’s bobble hat, Ben’s eyes met hers. ‘I’ll never let anything change that.’
Watching the pleasure in her husband’s face spread to their daughter’s, Nicole prayed for the millionth time that this baby would be just a few weeks late.
CHAPTER 36
JILL
‘Fifteen thousand hours – that’s how long these new energy-saving bulbs are meant to last.’
Lowering her Sunday Times, Jill glanced up at her husband from her curled position on the sofa. Stan hadn’t moved in the past half hour, and was still facing the houseboat wall, tinkering with the wire-filled hole above his head. Beside him, on Lady J’s mantelpiece, was the defective sconce he had determined to fix.
‘Which is great, but they’re never bright enough. So if that’s fifteen thousand twilight hours …’ She scanned the opinion page for her favourite writer, only to find him replaced by a suspiciously young ‘guest columnist’. ‘Anyway, the bulb’s never been the problem, has it?’
‘Nope. But I think I’ve finally worked out what was,’ he muttered, screwing the light’s rectangular backplate to the wall before taking a step back. ‘Only took me three and a half years.’
‘It hasn’t been that.’
‘It has.’ Stan turned to her with a smile. ‘Remember that weekend Prue and Alan came on board and we went down to Milton Keynes?’
‘And she kept losing her hearing aid.’
‘And we spent most of that last afternoon looking for the damn thing.’
‘Before finding it down the side of the sofa.’ Jill’s frown lifted. ‘Oh!’ She put a hand to her mouth. ‘You’re right. It was that weekend! That last night when it was raining and we had supper in here – you couldn’t manage to turn the damn lights on.’
‘Exactly. Been bothering me ever since.’ Stan nodded at the switch behind the sofa. ‘Do the honours?’
Reaching across the patchwork of papers surrounding her, Jill flicked it.
Nothing.
Stan groaned.
Jill chuckled. ‘Leave it. Come here.’ She patted the space beside her. ‘I’ll make a cuppa.’
‘No, no.’ Her husband had already turned back to the wall and started unscrewing the sconce. ‘I’m getting this sorted now. Those fifteen thousand hours are starting today.’
Jill reached for the property section, rolling her shoulders rhythmically back as she flicked through it in an attempt to ease the tightness across her chest: anything to stop her mind doing the involuntary sums. Fifteen thousand hours was what? Well over a year and half. Probably nearer two. That light had nothing to do with Stan’s annoyance or crossing something off his to-do list; he was doing it for her.
Accepting her husband was dying had turned out to be easier than talking to him about the life they were still living, and the first few slips – ‘We need to remember to prune that clematis early May, before the leaves start clogging the drain-pipe’, ‘Remind me to invite Steph next year’ – had been enough to make Jill leave whichever room she was in and lock herself in the nearest toilet until she could breathe again.
It hadn’t helped that Stan was able to laugh off these slips, and she’d warned him weeks back that any form of black humour wouldn’t just be lost on her but repulsive. Yet as Jamie’s death receded into the past, along with all the ugliness leading up to that single life-changing week, Jill’s orderly mind had found a kind of comfort in acknowledging that there would simply be a before – and an after. By the time the next home insurance bill came in and the gutters next needed cleaning; by the time that stupid fifteenthousand-hour energy-saving bulb went out, Stan would be gone. And God knows he had long ago made his peace with that.
That her husband had defied all expectations and made it to December was ‘a credit’ to her, Dr Jacks kept saying – although she was more inclined to put it down to the healthy life they’d shared: good food, long walks and all those decades of waterway air. But when they’d finally been given the go-ahead to take their Grand Union trip, three months after they’d planned, the doctor had taken her aside, handed her five pages of medical instructions and added, ‘You know people can be lulled into a false sense of security in cases like Stan’s – start believing we got it wrong.’ Here he’d paused. ‘Believe me when I say that I wish we had. But …’ He shook his head. ‘You know Stan’s very unlikely to make it to Christmas, don’t you?’ She’d nodded, swallowing the lump in her throat, and asked: ‘But the trip? You’re not saying we can’t go?’
Why that trip mattered as much as it did, Jill only realised on the first morning, when she and Stan awoke in a misty stretch of waterway near the Tring Summit. In the summer, the water was cluttered with ‘all inclusive’ three-day cruisers, but only hardened boaters like them would think to go that way in December. And apart from a single houseboat that looked as though it had fused with the riverbank it was moored to, so overgrown was one slatted side with moss and lichen, there was just Lady J.
Yes, the weather was far cooler than they’d hoped, cool enough to wake them both shortly after six that morning, but after filling
a thermos with coffee, helping Stan into his thickest fleece and heating up two croissants, they’d sat out on the rear deck beneath a blanket watching the orange wash of sky lighten to a nursery pink.
‘Isn’t this blissful?’ Stan had murmured.
And it was. But it wasn’t easy to live for the moment when every one of those moments was already a memory to be greedily stashed away: from jokes her husband made to mental snapshots of his speckled hands. Because if she could just amass enough, those memories might last her the rest of her life.
They’d drawn up a list of rules before they left London. No death talk was allowed – the last of the funeral details having been dealt with before they’d left, in any case – and no medical nagging permitted from Jill. Stan was a big boy who could remember his pills unprompted. He didn’t need Jill to fuss. Apart from a single pint with his steak and ale pie at their Half Moon lunch, there was to be no alcohol for him (the doctor had advised against it). And other than a half-hour mid-afternoon window during which Jill was allowed to check her emails and call the office if need be, no work was to be done or discussed. Before starting up Lady J’s engine, they’d shaken on this, and left Little Venice determined to stick to those rules.
Of course by day three and that Sunday, every rule but one had been broken. Jill had nagged Stan about his pills within hours. Had he remembered to bring them all? Even the ones by the kettle? Her husband had enjoyed his first beer before they’d even passed through Brentford, and as the waitress had taken down their lunch order at the Half Moon that day, Stan had looked over the menu at his wife: ‘You’re not seriously going to stop a dying man from enjoying a nice bottle of red, are you?’