‘Before dessert, a little fun.’ Helen stood up and handed something to the man to her left, then continued around the table, giving each diner a bejewelled mask, the Venetian design that sits on the nose and disguises just the upper half of the face.
Kate took hers.
‘Blue,’ said Helen. ‘For our novitiate’s beautiful eyes.’ She took Kate’s hand and kissed it.
Glad she’d been able to suppress her snort, Kate looked forward to telling Becca about the weirdo mistress of ceremonies.
‘Dessert,’ said Warren, ‘is always something special here.’ Behind his coal black mask his eyes glittered.
‘There’d better be custard,’ whispered Kate. ‘Or I’ll complain.’
‘If that’s what you want, Helen will arrange it.’ He didn’t seem to get the joke: Kate wouldn’t dream of asking for custard at such a table. He kissed her suddenly, and hard.
As her neck bent back, Kate felt the force of his mouth against hers, and swooned pleasurably. She pulled away, unwilling to kiss too passionately in company. ‘Later.’ She squeezed his leg.
He gave a little growl, more lupine than ever, and Kate felt something drop away deep inside her. A dessert lover, she would happily forgo custard to be alone with Warren. He was going to be wild when they finally escaped these peculiar friends he liked so much.
‘I must powder my nose.’ Kate stood. The twee language felt appropriate for the fin de siècle splendour of the house.
‘Hurry back!’ called her stoned admirer from across the table, her tiger-striped mask pushed back into her hair.
Nose powdered, Kate explored.
Mostly unlit, the house was a dark Pandora’s Box of jewel-like rooms with gilded cornices overhead and plush rugs underfoot. A door led to another door and another until Kate was on the terrace at the back of the house, grateful for the sweet fresh air she hadn’t realised she needed.
No light punctured the darkness in the grounds that wrapped around the house. Kate had driven through a tight tangle of lanes to reach it; it stood at the centre of its domain. She remembered how keen Warren had been to collect her in his sporty car. I like to get to places under my own steam, she’d insisted. He was an assertive man; he’d pushed. When Kate had pushed back, he’d liked it.
‘You’re an independent little thing, aren’t you?’ he’d said.
Kate didn’t know any other way to be. And she’d corrected him: ‘I’m not little.’
He’d liked that as well.
The others will be wondering where I am. Kate turned, but her feet were reluctant to leave the terrace. On the brink of a form of commitment to Warren, she was rooted to the spot. Drawn to the virile, attractive man, Kate also felt a repulsion she couldn’t explain.
Out of step with many – Becca for one – Kate took sex seriously. It was an emotional contract for her, something profound. She desired Warren; it wasn’t prudery that got in her way. It was something else. A subliminal Stop sign.
Kate, she told herself. Get back in there and jump on him. She needed to climb out of her rut. She was a mindless hamster in a cage, working all hours, breaking off only to babysit a goddaughter or visit a mother who picked a fight every time.
I need somebody to call my own. A man she didn’t have to share. One who returned her desire.
Such a man was only feet away. Stirred, back on course, Kate rooted in her bag for a breath mint as she hurried back across the terrace. Her fingers found paper.
Kate was heartily sick of that note. During the funeral she’d resolved to tear it into tiny pieces and throw it away, but in the vortex of grief and grim practicalities she’d forgotten. The damn thing certainly chose its moments to jump out at her.
But this is a new era.
Charlie, despite his feeble protests to the contrary, had settled down. The note was out of date. For all Kate knew, Warren would send her notes that would overwrite the wording of this frigid little rejection.
I’ll burn it! At the table, she would hold it to one of the candles. It would be just the sort of behaviour to amuse this kooky entourage.
Ferreting out the envelope, Kate was nonplussed by how it felt. Taking it from Charlie at the fancy dress party, she’d stuffed it into her bag without noticing; at the funeral she was in no state to realise, but now she saw that the envelope was thick, heftier than the flimsy note she’d returned to sender.
Opening it, Kate extracted two creamy sheets of watermarked paper, tattooed with lines and lines of Charlie’s distinctive handwriting.
Kate scanned the pages, concentrating hard.
Heat began to build in her stomach. She needed action, violence even. She needed to run. Kicking away her shoes, Kate took off, trying to outrun old news she’d just read for the very first time.
Tearing through the house, Kate took a wrong turn or two as she tried desperately to locate the party, to find Warren. He held a promise of something different to the unhappiness snapping at her heels.
Bursting through ornate double doors, Kate stopped at the sight of the table, lit in the centre of the shadowy room like a stage. All the players turned at the noise, their foxy masks giving them the look of startled animals.
Helen, still at the head of the company, appeared to be doling out dessert, smearing thick cream on the breasts of the flaky young woman who was stretched out, naked, among the overturned vases and sticky pools of spilled wine.
Bent over the woman, his lips to her body, Warren wore only his shirt.
Kate noticed, in the same second, the red weals on his buttocks and the whip wielded by a portly man who’d bored her earlier with anecdotes of his stamp collection. Both men’s erections rivalled the whip for rigidity.
‘Kate,’ said Warren. ‘Join us, gorgeous.’
The sacrificial offering on the table began to laugh, wildly.
Helen’s mask was white and feathered. ‘Kate’s shy,’ she said.
‘Trust me, Kate. It’ll be fun,’ said Warren. He took off his mask, tucked in his chin. It was the look Kate gave Flo when the child refused to eat her greens. ‘Oh dearie me. Have I misjudged you? I thought you were special.’ He held out his hand, as if all was forgiven. ‘Come on. We don’t bite.’
Like Cinderella, Kate fled shoeless down the dark sweeping staircase, not knowing if Warren gave chase. When the venerable front door refused to give she yipped in panic and tore at the latch.
Hearing her name, Kate turned.
At the top of the stairs, Warren held up a candlestick. ‘Don’t go. Please. Let’s talk, yeah?’
Kate pulled harder. The latch co-operated. The gravel was sharp underfoot.
In a moonlit lay-by, Kate turned off the ignition, crossed her arms over the wheel, and laid her head on them. She cried like a child, untrammelled and noisy.
Taking their natural course, the tears eventually receded, like the tide, leaving flotsam and jetsam in its wake. Kate folded out the creases in the paper.
Dear Kate,
I’m trying to make sense of this silence.
Becca has suggested I write to you and tell you how I feel, and that she’ll deliver the letter to you. She’s been brilliant.
Why have you stopped trusting me? I’ve always had friends who are girls. Whether you’re around the corner or on another planet it doesn’t make any difference to how I behave with them. I’m your boyfriend. Or I hope I am.
I love being your boyfriend. It’s great. I don’t want to stop being your boyfriend but I don’t want to hassle you either. I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to call or write or something but there’s nothing. You seem to have moved on. I knew you’d outgrow me one day but I didn’t think it would be this soon.
So it’s up to you. Because I know I still love you and you must know that too. A light that bright doesn’t just go out. But I don’t know how you feel. You have a proper job, you’re earning money and I know how ambitious you are. I nearly didn’t accept my place at Keele in case you got bored of having a layabout studen
t as a boyfriend. Is that how you feel? Do you want to move on?
For the record, here’s how I feel. I can’t even think of loving any other girl. You’re everything to me. I think of you when I wake up and before I go to sleep. I want to know you and love you forever. When we’re old I want to shuffle around supermarkets with you, complaining about prices. I want to go through all the good stuff and all the bad stuff at your side. I want to make love to you every day. I want to sleep beside you every night. I want to make babies with you. I want the lot. You make me greedy. You make me confident.
But if I don’t do the same for you, I understand. I don’t like it, I HATE it, but I’d never pin you down.
What I’m trying to say is, I love you, Kate.
Cx
Kate’s past was in a foreign language and she’d been working from a poor translation. Like the freaky party she’d just fled, her history was not as it seemed.
1995 was as vivid to her – no, more vivid – than yesterday. Kate could see herself and Becca in that shoe shop. She inhabited her younger point of view as nineties Kate stared down at her foot, the ankle skinny as a stem in the heavy lace-up under consideration. Kate’s body remembered its physicality. Lighter, with a higher centre of gravity.
Becca, her bob falling over her face, had asked the question so tremulously. Did Kate mind that she’d met Charlie for a coffee?
No wonder Becca had been tremulous. Present day Kate closed her eyes and punched the steering wheel.
I reassured her, said of course I didn’t mind.
The ravenous way Becca insisted she open the note Charlie had sent, that she read it right there and then had looked like concern.
It was fear, thought Kate. Fear that her scheme would fall apart.
The scrawled message Becca handed over in the shoe shop was a short and pithy dissolution of their relationship. Writing it, Charlie believed that Kate had already read his longer letter.
He thought I ignored this beautiful cry from the heart.
Their go-between, far from ‘brilliant’, had fooled them both, withholding the initial letter and only delivering the second, brutal one.
Time travelling again, Kate was at Aunty Marjorie’s fancy dress party, as Charlie handed her this declaration of his feelings, for what he assumed was the second time. Charlie, unaware that she thought it was his crushing rejection all over again, must have been astonished by the violence of her reaction.
I snarled at him.
Kate shook her head, rearranging her thoughts in the light of this new evidence. From now on she must stop referring to Charlie’s note – his second note – as a rejection. It was instead an acquiescence. Charlie’s surrender to the inevitable.
He thought I didn’t love him any more.
It was too late. The words, so carefully chosen, so very Charlie, had been robbed of their power by the passing years. By the time he finally put it into her hands at the fancy dress party it was no more than a poem.
The motorway was a black carpet, rolling towards London. Kate was desperate to get back to her flat and close the door behind her. Tomorrow she’d email Warren and bow out of his erotic fantasy world; tonight there was no space in her head for anything but the evil prank Becca had pulled so long ago.
In slow motion, as if her past was a cheesy TV movie, Kate saw young Becca handing over the momentous note to young Kate. I was unformed, embryonic. Kate had been unable to countenance a life without Charlie squarely at the centre of it.
Taking her exit from the motorway, the tick-tick of the indicator filling the car, Kate considered the flimsy nature of Becca’s plot.
One phone call would have blown it out of the water. A chance meeting on the street. Charlie casually recalling two notes instead of one. Kate recalled how she’d stared and stared at the phone, pride and doubt conspiring to stop her dialling Charlie’s number.
It couldn’t happen now. People were so interconnected with texts and Tweets: all it would have taken was one late night, drunken I love you come back and there would have been a frantic reunion.
But none of these tiny, ordinary things had happened. Becca’s gossamer structure, so typical of her hubris, was as sturdy as a castle. She didn’t even try to keep us apart! Kate was stupefied by Becca’s insistence that they remain a tight-knit trio. She was so sure of herself.
At each step of the way, Kate had colluded unwittingly with her cousin, reinforcing the bars of her own cage, making sure Becca’s deceit stayed hidden.
Finding their way back to cordiality, Kate and Charlie had played into Becca’s hands, roping off certain areas with the emotional equivalent of crime scene tape. When Charlie had finally broken through and handed her the original letter, she’d refused to read it.
Was he declaring himself to me afresh? Was he reaching out?
Anger glowed bright and hard within Kate, turning her heart to concrete. She felt white hot contempt for Becca, the flipside of which was pain. A horrible pain, such as Kate had never felt before; the product of a beloved confidante setting out to hurt her in cold blood.
If Kate had burned it, as planned, she could have gone to her grave without knowing.
But what do I know?
Streets shaped up through the windscreen. Kate was back to the stop/start traffic of town.
All she really knew for sure was that Charlie had loved her a long time ago.
Wrapped up in the past, at first Kate didn’t hear the phone. Stationary at a red light, she looked at the image taking up the screen. Charlie, Lucy and Flo sitting at a bistro table; Flo wearing Lucy’s on-trend sunglasses; Charlie waving; Lucy laughing so hard her eyes are slits. Flo looked thrilled to be out so late with the grown-ups.
Hope u r having fun with Wilhelm! Big kisses from us all but specially Flo xxx
The contrast between the wholesome scene and the debauchery Kate had left behind wasn’t lost on her. A pattern was emerging: an independent woman, more than capable of making sensible decisions, sleepwalks into situations because it’s easier to conform with the Greek chorus around her than listen to her gut.
Beyond the surface sexual attraction, Warren hadn’t interested her. He was, she could now admit, a bore. If he went missing Kate could tell the police only his approximate height and hair colour; she was unsure about his eyes. Blue? Brown? They could be tartan: Kate had never looked that hard.
Although after tonight I could tell the cops he was a swinger.
The commonplace lust Warren had inspired fell away the moment she saw him creepily play-acting over the spread-eagled body of that disturbed young woman, laid out like a buffet.
Kate didn’t want Warren any more than she wanted the other men she’d whistled up from the ether of the internet. Kate would, as planned, cancel the one date pencilled in for next week: not because she was ‘going exclusive’ but because, it was clear, love was not to be found online.
Or anywhere.
Love was not for Kate. It seemed simple for others. She knew people who had to fend off love, disentangling themselves from one liaison in order to dive, head first, into the next one.
For me, thought Kate, love is a pair of heels disappearing around the corner.
As the drivers behind her beeped their annoyance at Kate’s failure to notice that the lights had changed, alternative realities reared before her eyes.
A youthful Kate and Charlie making up. Falling back into step. Drifting, entwined, through their twenties. A low-key wedding on the spur of the moment. Perhaps no wedding at all. An adopted little chap underfoot. Sharing the cooking and bickering about whose turn it was to take out the bin.
It was a far more cosy scenario than sitting shoeless and tear-stained in a getaway car, the memory of Warren’s breath on her neck burning like a brand.
The cacophony of car horns brought Kate to her senses. With a karate chop, she changed the indicator and took a sharp right, in the opposite direction to her house.
Love eluded Kate for one simple reason: she alrea
dy had the only love she’d ever need. Charlie was a mountain, one she could not go over, round or through. He blocked out all the light.
Charlie had moved on, no longer the boy who wrote that note; he’d got over Kate because he had to.
Cold facts insisted she face them. Whatever Charlie meant by handing her the note at the party, when he finally left Becca, he hadn’t turned to Kate; he’d found somebody new.
Scrabbling for a tissue, Kate blew her nose. She coughed and shook her shoulders as the car passed familiar scenery. If love is not for me, she thought, I’ll stick to what I can see and touch and understand.
Kate had to grapple her life into a shape that made sense to her, not to her Greek chorus. She would focus on something simple and clean; a possibility emerged from her fog of dark thoughts immediately.
Untainted by crossed wires, Yulan House provided her with challenges and joy. It was mutually beneficial: Kate saw how her own efforts impacted on the children and staff. No potential for betrayal there, just a pure transaction based on respect.
Yulan House needed help. Kate needed purpose. What if I borrowed Dad’s dream? Her own boss in all senses of the word, with no partner or child, Kate was in a privileged position. She could make sweeping changes without seeking anybody’s permission. She could grab her tawdry, monochrome life by the scruff of the neck and shake it. Light-headed at the thought of paring down her business life and ramping up her charity work, Kate murmured ‘Come on,’ under her breath as she waited for the car in front to join a roundabout.
Before a new chapter could begin, before Kate could draw the dividing line between the day she knew nothing and the day she knew everything, there was a task to be taken care of. She champed at the bit, ready to expend her hectic intensity on this detail.
Slowing outside Becca’s gate, Kate looked up at the cottage’s lit windows.
I won’t knock. She would bang on the front door, like a bailiff. I’ll tell her I know.
Kate’s bare feet made no noise on the path. She stood at the door, devising several grisly modes of murder. The bloodier the better.
These Days of Ours Page 17