by Helen Kitson
‘You’d think she’d died the way they’re carrying on,’ my mum said.
‘They spoilt her to hell and back, that’s the problem,’ my dad added, ‘and now they want something in return.’
‘Her presence is all they want,’ I said, treading carefully to avoid slipping on the frosty ground. ‘It was a bit rotten of her not even to send a card.’
‘Still, not much of a party, was it?’ Dad said. ‘They should have put us off if they weren’t in the mood for guests.’
I heard nothing from Madeleine until February when she finally bothered to send me a proper letter, although it said very little and mostly comprised a sad string of excuses for why she hadn’t been in touch sooner. Mrs Anderson came round to our house brandishing her own letter from Madeleine.
‘What am I supposed to think?’ she said, flapping the envelope in the air. ‘I can’t even write back, there’s no return address.’
I sat on the sofa with her while Mum made tea.
‘My only child,’ Mrs Anderson kept saying.
I felt for her, I really did, but at least we knew Madeleine was safe, and she had to come back sooner or later since she was due to begin her third year at uni after the summer. We could all tell her then how selfish she’d been.
‘Did she say much in her letter to you?’ Mrs Anderson asked.
‘Not much.’
‘She doesn’t even say when she’s coming back.’
Mum brought in the tea. I felt, as Madeleine’s oldest friend, it was my duty to sit and talk to her mother, but when Mrs Anderson started to sob, Mum said I’d best leave it to her.
It wasn’t until late July that Madeleine phoned me from Heathrow to say she was back in England and coming home.
‘Have you phoned your parents?’ I asked.
‘What? Sorry – tons of people here, I can hardly hear you.’
‘Your parents,’ I shouted. ‘Have you phoned them?’
‘Not yet. Listen, I don’t have much change left, can you go and let them know I’m back? I’ll get the train, so I’ll probably be home around seven or eight this evening. Gotta go – someone else wants to use the phone.’
I duly went round to tell Mrs Anderson I’d heard from Madeleine. At first she was silent, her lips pressed together.
‘I think she didn’t have much spare change,’ I said.
Mrs Anderson shook her head. She’d gone very pale. ‘Thank you,’ she said, her voice clipped, and shut the front door in my face.
Don’t shoot the messenger, I wanted to say, but I understood how she felt.
‘I know I should have made more of an effort to keep in touch with them,’ Madeleine said later, seated once again in my armchair. ‘There were reasons why I couldn’t – reasons I can’t even share with you.’ She took a bottle of duty free Finnish vodka from her bag. ‘No, I didn’t get as far as Finland, but a Swedish guy told me this stuff is the best.’ She poured some into two shot glasses.
For someone who’d spent the best part of a year travelling around Europe, she had precious little to say about her experiences. I’d been abroad only once, on a school trip to France. I wanted to know about the places she’d visited.
‘Let me know when you’ve had your photos developed,’ I told her. ‘I really want to see them.’
‘I hardly took any,’ she said. ‘Besides, it wasn’t really a holiday. I was working a lot.’ She was vague about this, too, saying she’d mostly done bar work, plus a bit of tour-guiding (she spoke good French and passable German). Nothing about her year out added up. I knew better than to press for details, but it irritated me that she refused to confide in me. Did I mean so little to her?
‘Did your parents blow up at you?’ I asked. ‘You should have phoned them. It was bad tactics to phone me instead.’
‘I know. And I do feel bad about that, but I couldn’t bear to speak to them.’
‘But now you have.’
She shrugged and sighed. ‘If I wasn’t their only child, I’m sure they’d have washed their hands of me. They keep saying they don’t understand me, but I don’t even understand myself. They want everything nice and straight, but it isn’t. There were things I had to do that I didn’t want anyone else to know about.’
That was as near as she ever got to explaining her lost year.
She claimed that the break had done her good, that she was looking forward to her final year at uni, but in the event she graduated with only a third-class honours degree. For a girl who’d been expected to ace a first this was a bitter disappointment, although Madeleine seemed oddly unaffected.
‘What does it matter?’ she said. ‘It was all wrong from the start. I’m glad it’s over.’
It was hard to believe a messy love affair was at the bottom of everything, but what else could it have been? She started to apply for jobs and her good A-levels, plus a glowing personal reference from our former head teacher, got her a post as a teaching assistant in a primary school. She was no happier than I in her work, and I disliked myself for feeling that I’d got what I wanted – Madeleine here, not in London pursuing some glamorous publishing career.
‘Don’t tell my parents, but I’m writing a book,’ she told me one evening while we were sitting in the pub.
‘A novel, you mean?’
‘It’ll probably be rubbish, which is why I’m only telling you. I wrote some notes for it while I was away; couldn’t get the idea out of my head. Have you placed anything recently?’
‘A couple of poems.’
Her novel was the only subject about which she showed any animation. The rest of the time she seemed strangely disconnected from the world around her. She did her job competently by all accounts, but evinced no ambition to move on to something better. Men asked her out, but to my knowledge she turned them all down. I even wondered if perhaps her crisis had concerned her sexuality; that the male lecturer had been a smokescreen. Her parents were hardly the most liberal-minded of people.
We met every weekend, and often she spent Saturday afternoons in my room, reading through my recent poems. She never offered to share her writing with me and I began to wonder if it was a figment of her imagination. She’d pour vodka into the shot glasses, a little ritual by now, although the Finnish vodka had long since gone and she was forced to make do with a regular supermarket brand.
Despite seeing so much of her, I felt I knew her less and less. Her interest in clothes had diminished to the point that she only ever wore the same pair of jeans and baggy grey sweatshirt, the heart-shaped locket her only jewellery. She’d been so ambitious, so full of life; now I felt she was hardly there half the time. She’d sit on the floor in my room, sipping her vodka, reading my poems avidly, but she rarely made any comment on them and I didn’t like to ask. I would read or type – she said she liked the sound of me typing. We spoke very little, for we had little to talk about. The shared confidences of our teenage years were gone.
She must have made some friends at uni, but she never spoke about them, never invited them to stay, never went to see them. Her life seemed to have shrunk, and whenever I tried to say this to her, all she offered was a bland smile.
‘I just can’t get through to her,’ Mrs Anderson told me. We’d bumped into each other in the newsagent’s. ‘Is she drinking too much, do you think? I’m sure she drinks vodka because it doesn’t smell.’
We walked back from the shop together, she carrying a blue nylon shopping bag, I with magazines and a bag of crisps.
‘She never seems drunk,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t drink much when we go out.’
‘She keeps saying, “I’ve got a job, haven’t I? What more do you want?” I only want to see her happy, and I don’t think she is.’
I thought this oddly perceptive of Mrs Anderson. Madeleine never wept, never moaned, never showed any signs of distress, but her mother was right: she wasn’t happy. Not sad, simply neutral. As if she didn’t care about anything or anyone.
‘Can’t you get through to her?’
Mrs Anderson said. ‘Girls tell each other things they’d never tell their parents, don’t they?’
Her desperation moved me, pained me, but I had to tell her that Madeleine was no more forthcoming with me. Naturally I didn’t tell her about Madeleine’s novel, the existence of which I strongly doubted.
‘Poor woman,’ my mother commented when I told her about my conversation with Mrs Anderson. ‘That’s the trouble with high achievers: people expect too much from them. Madeleine’s got herself a nice little job; most parents would be pleased.’
But Mrs Anderson was right: it was Madeleine’s lack of interest in anything that was so troubling. All the vibrancy seemed to have leaked out of her like sawdust from an antique doll.
‘Did you ever get those photos developed?’ I asked one Saturday. Surely she must have had them processed by now?
‘I never bothered,’ she said. ‘You should only keep photos of things you want to remember.’
‘Your mum’s worried about you.’
‘I know, and she needn’t be. I’m perfectly all right.’
‘Are you? Really?’
She laughed. ‘Of course I am. Everyone worries too much.’
‘About you?’
‘About everything. Stuff generally. Why does no one understand that contentment isn’t the same thing as happiness and that you don’t have to go around smiling like a maniac to prove your contentment to other people?’
‘Are you contented?’
‘It’s a work in progress.’
‘You used to have a go at me for letting go of my dreams. What happened to yours?’
‘They’ve changed. Sometimes you need to review them and see if they’re really what you want.’
This sounded to me like something she’d heard from the lips of a charming Frenchman as he passed a joint to her. Maybe she was right. Maybe what we were all interpreting as disinterest, lack of engagement, was simply Madeleine taking stock of her life and, as she put it, reviewing her dreams.
‘I would have liked to see your photos.’
‘Photos of someone who no longer exists,’ she said, and would say no more on the subject. She did, however, show me a picture of the man she’d been involved with at uni, the married lecturer.
‘The Lecherous Lecturer,’ she said.
‘Love in a Cold Climate. I know. I’ve read it.’ An ordinary face, but what can one tell from a photograph? ‘Do you still love him?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t think I feel anything for him. It’s the best way.’ Then she took the picture back and tore it neatly into four pieces. ‘Don’t look so shocked, it’s only a bit of paper.’
But I shivered and looked away, a little in awe of her, a little scared of her, and I think I understood then that, of the pair of us, she was the true writer, for she had the necessary splinter of ice in her heart.
Chapter Eleven
Perhaps I should have acted sooner to change my landline number, but the complications involved seemed insurmountable: so many people would have to be notified, and what if I missed an important call during the changeover? Was it even possible to change one’s number? It wasn’t as if I were being stalked, simply mildly inconvenienced.
At any rate I didn’t change my number and was unprepared for the next unwanted call I received. At first I assumed myself to be the victim of a crank call, for the person on the line didn’t speak. No heavy breathing, just noises indicative of someone trying to catch his or her breath.
‘Hello? Who’s there?’ I said, feeling foolish. An Indian call centre, perhaps. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ I muttered when no one spoke.
I was about to slam the phone down when a voice finally said, ‘Gabrielle Price?’ A voice I didn’t recognise.
‘Yes? Who is this?’ Silence. ‘What do you want?’
And then, sobs. Hardly the usual sort of nuisance call, and presumably not a wrong number, for the person had clearly spoken my name. I waited for the sobbing to subside.
‘Look, who is this?’
‘I’m Michelle,’ she said at last. ‘Michelle Poole. Russell’s wife.’
I gripped the receiver. What fresh hell was this? ‘What do you want?’
Sniffs, snuffles, the sound of a nose being blown. ‘I want to talk to you.’ Her voice nasal from weeping.
‘About what?’ A foolish question, but I had no idea what else to say.
‘What do you think? I know all about you. He’s told me.’
I raised my eyes and tried not to make my sigh too obvious. In her shoes I’d probably have wanted to confront my rival, too. Although I wasn’t her rival, not now, and really never had been.
‘It’s ages since I’ve seen him.’
‘He says he broke it off with you. Is that true?’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said. I didn’t care about Russell, didn’t want him, didn’t even have to deal with his presence now that he’d moved away. In the circumstances I was more than willing to paint the situation in the manner most likely to please his wife, the woman who did have to deal with him.
Her voice rose to a pitch that was almost a squeal. ‘He took you to Paris, didn’t he?’
‘I did go to Paris with him, but it wasn’t the romantic tryst you’re probably imagining.’
‘A dirty weekend,’ she spat. Well, let her. Her venom was pretty useless on me. ‘Women like you are a disgrace. You’re evil!’
She needed to vent. I understood that. I still winced, though. ‘It never amounted to much,’ I told her.
‘That’s your sort all over. You have your bit of fun, never caring who you’re hurting, and when he dumps you, you’re all “Oh, it was nothing!” But it’s not nothing to me!’
‘I’m really not the heartless bitch you think I am. I know what I did was wrong. There are no excuses. I never meant anything to him.’
‘You must have meant something. He’s never taken me further than Dublin. I’m sick of being a doormat, sick of it.’
Her words dissolved into sobs. I wanted to feel sorry for her, but an overwhelming wave of tiredness swept over me. I did feel sorry for her, but she didn’t really want to speak to me, she wanted a punch bag.
‘Are you still there?’ she demanded.
‘Yes, I’m still here.’
‘I’m too upset to think straight at the moment. I want to meet you, to speak to you face to face.’
‘There wouldn’t be much point.’ Almost amusing, perhaps, that both husband and wife were so desperate for my company. Except it wasn’t funny at all. It wasn’t even tragic; it was too mundane for that.
‘Are you scared to face me, is that it?’
‘No, I’m not scared, I’m just not sure what purpose it would serve.’
‘If I’m going to forgive him, I need to understand.’
What on earth was there to understand? A tawdry, unsatisfactory affair had petered out into resentment and bad feeling. Could she be made to believe that?
‘Please,’ she said. ‘We can meet in a café if you’re frightened I might attack you, although that kind of thing isn’t in my nature.’
I believed her. After the “dirty weekend” shot, I’d expected a tidal wave of four-letter abuse, but she seemed not to have enough spite to carry through with what she’d started.
‘All right, then, I’ll meet you, for all the good it will do.’
She told me when she would be in the area to visit her parents. ‘Russell won’t be with me,’ she said. ‘My parents never liked him.’ She said she could leave the kids with them for an hour or so to come and see me. Our venue was to be the café where I’d first met Simon.
‘Thanks, then,’ she said with another sniff when I agreed. Why did I not hesitate when I’d gone out of my way to avoid a confrontation with Russell? If I owed Russell nothing, neither did I owe anything to his wife. But I disliked Russell, despised his weakness. His wife was a different matter. A casualty, the innocent bystander who catches the shrapnel. I owed her nothing, therefore I felt no obl
igation to meet her, therefore it was in my gift to do so, and I chose to do it. Better the clean cut that drew blood than the wearying, bruising sense of obligation towards someone who no longer meant a thing to me.
‘You really will be there?’ she added, sounding like a teenager worried that her first date might stand her up.
‘I really will.’ Russell might let her down, I would not. A stupid thought. He was her husband, I simply the woman who had done the dirty on her. I knew only that I cared more about Michelle’s feelings than those of her husband. I would meet her, offer my wrists to her; the rest was up to her.
In the meantime, I had food to organise for the vicar’s little festive gathering.
‘Should we wear outfits?’ Simon asked.
‘Outfits?’
‘Waiters’ uniforms.’
‘You as crusty butler, me as frilly French maid? I don’t think so, somehow.’
‘Vicars and tarts,’ he said with a grin.
‘The only tarts they’re getting are the sort with vegetables in.’
I confirmed all the details with Mr Latham, and on the Wednesday morning before the event Simon and I set to making the quiches, piles of sandwiches, two salads and a lemon drizzle cake. Mr Latham said there was no need for traditional Christmas food apart from a few mince pies.
‘And you’ll probably end up taking those home with you,’ he’d said. ‘It’s one of the minor burdens of priesthood that one gets offered festive fare on a daily basis from the first of December.’
‘You’re getting paid for this, aren’t you?’ Simon asked.
‘He told me to keep a receipt for all the food and he’s paying us each £8 an hour for serving and waiting.’
‘He doesn’t need to pay me, I’m only going along for the fun of it.’
‘Fun?’
He shrugged and leaned forward to shut the kitchen window. ‘Research, then. If I’m going to be a writer, I need to experience as many different things as I can.’
How painfully he reminded me of my early ambitions, when I thought I could learn something about writing from listening to mundane conversations and scribbling them down verbatim.