These Days of Ours

by Juliet Ashton

  The bitter cold slapped them in the face. Time to get it over and done with. Kate’s breath was fog as she said, ‘What’s the matter, Bec?’

  One of her cone breasts dented, Becca said, ‘Nothing. Well. Everything.’ She threw up her hands. ‘You’re always good and I’m always . . . I’m bad, Kate.’

  ‘Nobody’s always anything.’ Kate didn’t like the idea of herself as a perennial goodie two shoes.

  ‘You’re going to hate me.’ She screwed up her face, as if in pain. ‘Why oh why . . .’ she began.

  ‘Why oh why what?’

  ‘Eh?’ Becca looked confused at having her train of thought interrupted. ‘Let me speak for once, Kate!’

  ‘Go on, then. Just this once.’

  ‘You are definitely one hundred per cent going to hate me. From here.’ Becca tapped her wig. ‘To here.’ She pointed at her feet.

  She seemed to mean it. ‘I could never hate you,’ said Kate. ‘Not unless you murdered somebody. And even then it would depend on who you murdered.’

  ‘I hate myself.’ No tears. Not one. This was a bad sign. ‘I had to do it, Kate. You won’t agree. But I did. I had to do it.’

  ‘If you have a confession, madam, get on with it.’

  ‘You have to know, right? And you have to say it’s OK. I feel so bad about it. I wake up in the middle of the night.’ Becca hugged herself in her outrageous gear, a goose pimpled superstar. ‘You have to absolve me.’

  ‘I’m not a priest.’ Kate’s skin prickled. She felt something heading for her, hard and fast. A comet. ‘Why the sudden urge to confess? Can’t it wait until you’ve sobered up?’

  Shaking her head as if such a suggestion was madness, Becca glared at her. ‘I’ve waited long enough. It’s eating at me. You’re the only person I want to tell, the only person I can tell.’ She closed her eyes, as if blocking out a vile apparition. ‘I thought I could bear it, but it keeps raising its head. I’m glad I’m a bit pissed. It’s the only way I’ll get it out.’ She opened her eyes, their expression fierce. ‘First, though, promise you won’t judge me.’

  That was too much to ask, even for somebody accustomed to Becca’s outrageous demands. ‘All I can promise is that I’ll try and understand.’

  Eyes wide in smudged mascara, Becca whispered, ‘Flo isn’t Charlie’s.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Kate’s brain went smooth; the meaning of the simple sentence simply wouldn’t click into place.

  Stamping her foot Becca said, ‘What do you think I mean? Charlie isn’t Flo’s dad.’

  Even though Becca had barely raised her voice those words were grenades. Both women glanced, paranoid, at the domestic tableau framed by the lit kitchen window.

  At the sink, Charlie stared out at them. Kate’s breath paused until he waved the washing up brush playfully.

  ‘Shit,’ croaked Becca. ‘I thought he heard. He can’t know. Not ever.’

  Kate felt burdened, stiff. Becca had dipped her in emotional cement.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking.’ Becca was defiant. ‘But I did it for pure reasons.’

  ‘You don’t know what I’m thinking.’

  ‘Charlie can’t have a child, Kate! He couldn’t give me a healthy baby, then he couldn’t give me one at all. This was the only way.’ No longer defiant, Becca was pleading.

  ‘Is it . . . are you having an affair?’

  ‘God, no. It was a one night thing.’ Becca revised that thought. ‘A three night thing. I don’t even have the guy’s number any more. He has no idea.’

  Circles within circles. Another victim of Becca’s freewheeling selfishness.

  ‘And Flo?’ asked Kate. ‘When are you going to tell her?’

  ‘Flo?’ Becca’s horror implied she’d never even considered that eventuality. ‘Why would I tell Flo?’

  Amazed she had to answer such a question, Kate said, ‘You mean why does a person have the right to know the identity of their own father?’

  ‘I knew,’ spat Becca, ‘you’d be mean to me.’

  ‘Then why the hell did you tell me?’

  ‘I wish I hadn’t.’ Becca was back in her comfort zone, hugging her resentments to her pointy chest, the aggrieved party.

  Sensing an eruption of some sort in the air, Kate battled her own feelings to soften her voice. ‘It’s good that you’ve got this off your chest.’ She was already nostalgic for a minute ago, the time before she Knew All. ‘But you can’t undo everything just by confessing.’ She moved towards Becca. ‘Listen—’

  ‘I’m tired of listening.’ Becca was, Kate could tell, tormented by her own misdeeds. She thrashed about, trying to evade the spotlight by accusing the nearest person – usually, and this time, Kate – of something equally heinous. ‘What makes you so high and mighty, Kate? Some of us screw up! We can’t all be perfect like you.’

  This is the whole family’s doing, thought Kate. There was a perpetual amnesty on Becca’s countless minor crimes. We’re all Frankenstein and this here is our monster.

  Becca stamped her foot again. ‘Nobody understands what it’s like to want a baby month after month.’

  ‘Plenty of people understand.’

  ‘But I needed a baby!’

  ‘For God’s sake . . .’ The self-pity was so thick Kate could almost see it lying across Becca’s shoulders like a mangy stole. ‘So many women – and men – feel the same. They go through hell and high water to conceive. But they don’t do something like this.’

  ‘It’s all right for you. With your shops and your pots of money and a flat straight out of Elle Decoration.’

  But I don’t have a baby. It was on Kate’s lips, and there it stayed. It was too personal, too intimate a fact to fling during a row.

  ‘And you have Julian,’ said Becca.

  ‘And you have Charlie.’ My Charlie. The possessive pronoun shocked Kate and she turned away.

  ‘I’ve made Charlie happy. You see him with Flo.’

  That was undeniable.

  Becca shook Kate by the shoulders. As if, thought Kate miserably, we’re in an eighties soap opera.

  ‘Please, please, you have to promise you don’t hate me. I couldn’t bear that. I’d die.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t.’ Kate was tired of the hyperbole. As if Becca owned all the strong emotion in the world and could model whichever one took her fancy. For many years, Kate realised, Becca’s happiness had been other people’s responsibility.

  ‘I would! I’d die. Your opinion of me means more than anybody’s.’

  Kate hung her head. She had, she realised, a sword in her hand. With that sword, with one sentence, she could end Becca and Charlie’s marriage.

  Charlie would never forgive such intimate deceit. Becca would disgust him. He would leave her.

  Their neat quartet would be lopsided.

  There may be a knock-on effect.

  Ripples . . .

  Adrenaline surged through Kate when she imagined a tomorrow that featured Charlie as a free spirit.

  His head was bent over the sink. It jerked up; Dad had entered the kitchen, holding Flo by the hand. Charlie picked her up and both men talked to the child, blowing suds from their fingers to amuse her.

  ‘I couldn’t hate you, Becca. But I hate what you’ve done.’ Even though it had resulted in the miracle that was Flo, Kate deplored Becca’s tactics, her belief that the end justified the means. She sighed and held out her arms.

  ‘Sorry. Sorry. I’m sorry.’ Becca wept in Kate’s embrace.

  The furrow in Charlie’s brow asked a question Kate answered with a wry face, as if to say Oh it’s only Becca being Becca. Charlie knew his wife could cry that zealously over a broken nail.

  ‘I’m sorry for being unfaithful,’ gasped Becca. ‘I’m sorry for bringing Flo into the world like this. I’m sorry for telling you.’

  ‘I’m glad you did.’ Kate held her tighter. ‘I’m a big girl. I can cope.’

  A lover of truth, a believer in its power, Kate could see no way to tell C
harlie this basic fact about his own life. It would destroy him: she used the word with full knowledge of its weight. Charlie would break into pieces. Flo was one of the building blocks of his existence. To Becca she said, ‘No more stunts like this. Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’ Becca began immediately to distort the lighting on what she’d done, changing it to a rosy glow. ‘It’s not all bad. Flo’s healthy and happy and we all adore her. Charlie and I didn’t have to go through any treatment. We—’

  ‘No! I’m not going through the looking glass to Wonderland with you, Alice. You lied to Charlie and you’ll lie to Flo all her life. Don’t dress it up.’

  ‘But you forgive me?’

  ‘That’s not my job. But I do understand.’ Kate also understood that Becca had handed her the magic formula to end her marriage to Charlie.

  It could never be used.

  The note throbbed in the pocket of her tunic. Rejected twice over by Charlie, she still wanted the best for him.

  The tea had gone cold.

  It was a kind thought from a nurse who’d noticed Kate’s woebegone face as she watched the curtains of the A&E cubicle whisk around her father, but the tea sat unattended as Kate went outside to make the necessary phone calls.

  First on her list was Aunty Marjorie. ‘Dash round to Mum’s, would you?’ Kate had asked. ‘So she won’t be alone when I ring her.’

  ‘Is he . . .’ Aunty Marjorie had said. ‘He’s not . . .’

  ‘Just a funny turn at the departure gate. They’re assessing him now.’

  There had been nothing funny about Dad’s turn. As Kate pillaged her handbag looking for their boarding passes, Dad had slithered from the plastic fixed seating.

  ‘He’s a bad colour,’ somebody said in the crowd that gathered.

  To Kate’s eyes, he had no colour. Her father was ghostly as she knelt and rubbed his hands, waiting for the ambulance. Inert, cold, he seemed dead, but Kate could feel the slender thread that tied him to her, a cord deep inside attached somehow to his heart. It was taut.

  ‘I’m coming right now,’ said Becca when she’d stopped swearing.

  ‘Nonsense.’ Kate was brisk. ‘You’re too far away. And Flo’s at nursery. There’s no immediate danger. Just stay there, yeah?’

  ‘You shouldn’t be on your own. He’s not going to . . . is he?’

  ‘Die?’ Kate tried the word for size and didn’t like it. It was time to be honest with Becca. ‘I really don’t know.’

  She was more honest with Julian. ‘He’s dying. This is it.’

  ‘You poor love.’ Julian sighed. ‘Christ, darling, I’m sorry.’

  ‘He’s in a nice room. Very modern. Everybody’s being lovely.’

  ‘How are you, though?’

  Kate heard the fear. They were approaching the summit that had glowered over their marriage. ‘I’m good.’

  Kate could cope. Because her dad was still with her. The thread was still tightly drawn. This bit, she wanted to say to Julian and the nurses who were treating her like bone china, is the easy bit.

  It was afterwards, when Dad was gone and Kate still had all this love but nowhere to put it, that would be the problem.

  ‘Go for a walk. Clear your head. This could be a long haul.’ Julian hesitated. ‘I’m about to leave for my meeting with the bank but I’ll cancel if you like. I could come and sit with you.’

  The dreaded bank meeting was too important to rearrange. ‘You go, darling. Give them hell.’

  ‘When you get home we’ll light the fire. A nice quiet evening on the sofa, just the two of us.’

  ‘Sounds perfect.’

  The hospital bled all over the local landscape. Escaping it, taking Julian’s advice, Kate kept checking her watch as she found a parade of shops.

  She knew there’d be no nice night on the sofa. Tonight would be critical. Kate would stay by her father’s side. By now she was accustomed to sleeping on a chair.

  Julian disapproved. ‘How can it help your dad to watch him sleep?’ he’d say. ‘He needs you fresh and rested, not exhausted.’

  She’d tried to explain. It was painful, yes, to see him in a hospital bed. It was also real. She grasped at these last events, the last snatches of togetherness. They gave her something she could never describe as pleasure, but which was a close relation. It felt right.

  The older Kate got – her twenty-nine years felt twice that today – the more she relinquished the quest for happiness. A quest for harmony, or maybe contentment, made more sense. Just as Dad had said.

  Browsing chocolate in a newsagent’s, Kate thought how often Julian had recently said I just want you to be happy. Like a mantra. That, he’d said, was the reason for keeping his financial woes hidden from her.

  You underestimated me, she’d told him. If he’d come to her sooner she wouldn’t have reacted with such horror to the landslide of final demands. Tackling them, drawing together the knowns and unknowns, whistling up bank statements, analysing data, Kate had noted his amazement at her competence. Who do you think you’ve been married to all these years? she’d laughed. A chain of eight shops across the south of England doesn’t build itself.

  Julian, it transpired, knew little about the nuts and bolts of the company that bore his name. Kate, who knew every lane and byway of her own set up, drew him a map of the tangled paths that had led him to the brink of ruin. Julian had ignored the day to day processes in order to concentrate on the bottom line. Profit was all.

  On their first night in the new house, sitting by an open fire, glorying in the three empty floors of severe Georgian beauty, he’d confessed, ‘I thought you’d leave me when you saw the mess my affairs are in.’

  ‘Idiot.’ She’d kissed him. They’d made quiet love on the reconditioned floorboards.

  A shop further down the street caught Kate’s eye. A laugh came unbidden. She could barely believe it. According to the sign on the door, it was five minutes to closing time. Kate finished her Bounty with one bite and pushed at the door.

  Watching her father through the window, Kate stood on the paving slabs outside his room. Her phone to her ear she coughed, rehearsing what to say when the other party picked up.

  Dad’s hands were so white they were blue. The veins stood out like cord pushing through his shrivelled skin. He was asleep, although that didn’t seem the correct way to describe his limbo-like state. She felt that he was levitating, between one state of being and the next.

  Her call went to voicemail.

  ‘Charlie, hi. You’ve heard by now, Dad’s been taken ill. Nothing drastic. Well, not yet . . . I have this feeling, though . . . Don’t tell Becca but I think this is it . . . Anyway . . . um, that’s all, I guess, so, well, bye.’

  The carefully nurtured reconnection was important to her. Charlie’s company was a haven where she was her best and worst self, where the giggling spiralled out of control and where she could off-load dark thoughts.

  Watching him with Flo had been an enduring pleasure. Now it felt like a brightly coloured snapshot that had fallen in the fire and was cracked and burned around the edges. Kate felt no temptation to enlighten him about Flo’s conception: it wasn’t her job. Flo was cared for, loved: as the saying went, it wasn’t broke, so Kate need not fix it.

  But still it rankled. If Charlie knew something so fundamental about Kate’s life, she would expect him to tell her.

  When they were teenagers, Becca had soundly mocked Kate for scribbling ‘KM 4 CG together 4 eva’ on a school book. Becca had been right to roll her eyes; KM and CG couldn’t even sustain a friendship. Kate missed Charlie even when he was right there in front of her.

  Returning to the room, Kate heard Dad say, ‘Could you . . .?’ He gestured at his pillow with a hand so crooked his wrist might have been broken.

  Deftly, efficiently, Kate plumped the pillow and made him comfortable.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’ He was crabby. He’d asked the same question five minutes earlier.

  ‘On her way.’

&nbs
p; Kate chattered a banal soliloquy. No point in bringing Dad up to date with the news; her serious minded father, who’d always had a philosophical take on world events, had lost his taste for politics, for anything that happened beyond the family. Sickness had shrunk him; Kate knew that it took most of his energy to maintain his poise. He’d barely registered the terrorist bombs that had ravaged London six months earlier, and had no comment to make on David Cameron, newly elected to lead the Tories and widely tipped to be the next Prime Minister.

  So Kate told her father that Mum had been to the cinema to see The Queen. ‘She didn’t think much of Helen Mirren. Far too attractive to play Her Majesty, apparently. Of course, Mum’s never forgiven the Queen for being offish with Princess Di.’ She updated him on Flo. ‘According to Becca, she’s gifted. According to Charlie, she can bang out Three Blind Mice on the xylophone.’ She leaned closer to hear what he said and agreed. ‘Yes, she is the prettiest little thing in the world.’

  ‘Book?’ croaked Dad.

  ‘There’s trouble at t’mill about the book, Dad. And it’s all your fault.’ Dad’s ill health had affected them all. For Charlie it had shed a sideways light on life’s certainties: it had shown him that there are no such things. Inspired, he’d handed in his notice and reapplied himself to his novel. ‘I think it hits Becca anew each morning that she’s no longer the wife of a jetsetting media hot shot. She can’t deny that Charlie’s in seventh heaven, sitting up in the loft, wearing an ancient jumper and writing his heart out, but she’s scared the money’s running out.’ Kate did her bit, jollying her out of her moods, asking Are you down to your last pair of Louboutins yet, Little Orphan Annie? There was never any question of Becca searching out a part time position around Flo’s nursery hours; such a suggestion would spark a glare that had been known to kill.

  A commotion in the corridor announced Mum and Aunty Marjorie who were unable to arrive anywhere without knocking things over and shouting.