Grim-faced at the memory of her shame, still so fresh after so much time, Sophie crossed the landing back to her bedroom and dropped to a cross-legged position on the floor. It had been a bad couple of weeks. The sight of Maria Schofield, smug and sly in her big fur hat during one of Miss Brannock’s tours, had brought it all back to her: the whispering behind hands, the looks of pity and contempt, the utter humiliation when the man whom she had loved to distraction had returned to his wife and left her to face the vilification alone.
Closing her eyes and resting her hands palm upwards on her knees, Sophie tried to empty her mind of everything but light. To let everyday preoccupations float away. To breathe steadily and evenly. The manual suggested many other things as well, but she couldn’t remember them and didn’t want to interrupt the session by crawling to her bedside table to look them up. Palettes of colour swam before her eyes. Instead of relaxing she could feel herself tensing up. After a while she became aware of a tickle on the tip of her nose. Unignorable, irresistibly intense. She would try again later, she told herself, rubbing at it with a groan of relief and pulling on some jeans and a voluminous Sloppy Jo sweat-shirt. Seeing the time, she set off downstairs at a jog, the long strands of her wet hair streaming over her shoulders.
Matt pulled up the handbrake and succumbed to one of the many eye- watering yawns which had punctured the morning. The body clock that had so efficiently adapted to New York time was showing considerable reluctance to perform the same process in reverse. After a marathon performance the day before, he had sunk into a deep coma of a sleep around midnight, only to find himself fully awake again at four. As he twisted under the covers in the small hours, some of the old fears and uncertainties had returned. At each squeak of rubber wheels and every slam of a car door his heart had clenched, not hopeful as he had been during the early days, but terrorised by the thought of Kath’s return. He had nothing for her now, not forgiveness and certainly not his son. By the time he felt sleepy again, Joshua was cartwheeling into the bedroom to herald the start of a new day.
As they approached Sophie Contini’s doorstep, the sun popped out from behind a mountainous cloud, lending a cheerful sheen to the chipped window frames and row of patched slate roofs. She took a while to answer the door, time enough for Matt to register serious misgivings about this last- ditch attempt of his to broker something more amicable than a frosty truce with the person so clearly – so maddeningly – crucial to the success of his childcare arrangements. Josie had responded positively enough to his reassurances on the phone, brushing aside the purse fiasco with cheery brusqueness, but not without several references to the opinions of her mentor along the way. It had taken all Matt’s patience not to burst out that he cared only for Josie’s feelings in the matter, and that if she were ever to have a hope of making her own way in the world she would have to learn to break free from the clutches of her English teacher.
‘Mr Webster —’
‘For goodness’ sake, call me Matt – please.’
‘Come in.’ Sophie opened the door wider, offering him a brief smile before crouching down to talk to Joshua. ‘I’m glad you decided to come too. I haven’t got many toys but I do need some help in the kitchen. I hope you’re good at mixing.’
‘Can Lion help?’ he enquired, waggling his new companion in her
face.
‘He certainly can, though we’ll have to be careful not to get his lovely fur dirty. Come along and I’ll show you what needs doing.’
Matt followed, almost tripping over the legs of a large mahogany coat-stand and feeling somewhat superfluous. She led the way to the back of the house, where two rooms had clearly been knocked into one, creating a large, airy kitchen-cum-living room. A worn pine table, on which sat a full fruit bowl and several stacks of school books, occupied centre-stage. To one side was a deep, comfortably battered looking sofa, covered in bright cloths and huge scatter cushions. Although the overall impression of the room was orderly, every available surface – the mantelpiece, shelves and windowsills – was crammed with objects – pots of pencils, ornaments, candlesticks, tins and postcards. The walls were just as busy, covered from skirting board to ceiling with framed prints and huge collages of photographs. Behind the door next to a radiator was a rail of drying laundry displaying a pair of jogging bottoms, a pink T-shirt, a sweat-shirt, and several pairs of white pants, hung in perfect triangles between three equally white bras.
‘Coffee?’
Matt spun round, hoping that she hadn’t suspected him of scrutinising her underwear, but judging from the crease of disapproval on her face that she probably had. ‘That would be very nice.’ He smiled, wanting to set the conversation on the right track, wondering who had taken the place of the adulterous father Maria had mentioned.
‘How do you take it?’ ‘White no sugar. Thanks.’
‘I expect you would prefer juice,’ Sophie said, her voice softening as she turned to Joshua, who was already standing on a chair beside her wielding a wooden spoon, a large drying-up cloth fastened round his neck by way of an apron. ‘Now, let’s put Lion safely up there where he can watch’ – she gently propped the animal on top of a spaghetti jar – ‘while you set to work on this. Over here on the floor would be a good place, I think – lots of elbow room.’ Taking hold of a solid brown mixing bowl with one hand and scooping Joshua up with her free arm, she set him down on the ground. ‘See, it’s sludgy when it should be smooth,’ she explained, helping him jab at the mixture with his spoon. ‘It’s home-made play-dough. We can make it any colour you like. Well, almost.’ She began pulling little bottles off a herb shelf. ‘Green, blue, black, pink, yellow or orange. Like magic.’
Although pleased to see his son so beautifully entertained, Matt himself was feeling more awkward by the minute. She was behaving almost as if he weren’t there, as if she had no clue as to the purpose of his visit. Which was to make her into an ally instead of an enemy, he reminded himself, trying out another generous smile as she handed him his coffee, and being rewarded only by the faintest twitch of the broad mouth, of the kind bestowed upon a tiresome child.
‘About the purse.’
‘There’s really no need to go over it all again.’ She gestured at the sofa for him to sit down, before seating herself astride a chair at the far end of the kitchen table. ‘So long as Josie knows that she has your trust, that’s all that matters.’
‘Yes. And I think I’ve reassured her on that score. But … well, I wanted also to offer a proper apology to you. Being subjected to Louise on her high horse’ – he made a comic face – ‘is an alarming experience at the best of times —’
‘It didn’t alarm me.’ She gave a defensive toss of her hair, revealing a large grey stain of damp across the back of her sweat-shirt. The surface curls of her hair had dried first, but underneath the heavier tresses were still dark and black from the shower. ‘I just thought it was out of order.’
‘Yes, it was,’ agreed Matt wearily, beginning to despair at the persistence of her hostility. ‘She meant to help me, I think …’ He frowned. ‘My wife, Kath, is – was – a good friend of hers. Since she left Louise has been wading to my assistance on a regular basis. In some ways I feel rather sorry for her – she’s got a stuffy husband, too much money and nothing to do except supervise the au pair.’
‘God, do you talk about all your friends like that?’
‘No, I was only … what exactly is your problem?’ Matt set his mug of coffee down with such force that some of it slopped on to the table.
‘What is my problem?’ Sophie let out a sharp laugh. ‘I like that.’ She kept her voice sharp too, wanting to disguise the extent of her shock at his outburst.
‘I have tried,’ Matt hissed, glancing anxiously at Joshua, ‘to be friendly.’
‘I’m sorry it’s been such an effort.’ Her brown eyes flashed at him. Pulling a tissue from her sleeve, she leaned across and swiped away the pool of coffee round his mug. ‘Thank you, but I do not need befriendin
g. And from what I have seen of your life you have little need for …’ She stopped suddenly, catching her breath as if literally to swallow the remains of the sentence.
‘Oh yes?’ Matt folded his arms. ‘And what have you seen of my life?’
‘Nothing. I shouldn’t have-‘
‘No, I insist. What have you seen of my life exactly?’
She pushed her hair out of her face and blinked at him. ‘Look, I’m sure you’re a perfectly wonderful person and everything and I’m thrilled that you’ve taken on Josie, but it’s just that it really… annoys me’ – she clenched her jaw round the word – ‘that a man left alone with a child is seen as this endearing object of pity, that women, in particular, seem to relish the opportunity to come flocking to your aid. Whereas mothers, far more frequently abandoned by their men, left often with no job and several mouths to feed, are not given the time of day. I mean, look at you – you’ve got a good job, do-gooding busybodies like Louise and Maria Schofield queuing up to help you. You’ve got a great house, Joshua can go to any school you choose —’
‘That’s not true,’ interjected Matt, latching on to the easiest way to staunch this flow of vitriol. Wary of being overheard by their young audience, they were both talking in fierce whispers. ‘To afford a place like St Leonard’s for more than a few terms I’d have to sell the house. We don’t know if he’s got in yet, and even if he does I’m not at all sure I want to send him there because it struck me as stuck-up and élitist and I thought the headmistress was a pompous witch. But I’m afraid to say I wasn’t entirely inspired by the wonderful Broadlands either. Though I’m sure that you, and many like you, strive to do excellent work there, as a doting father of a somewhat troubled child I feel I have every right to want to entrust his care to an institution which I can be sure will nurture his every tentative step down the bumpy road towards attempting to become a well-adjusted unfucked-up human being.’ As Matt paused for breath the doorbell rang. For a moment neither of them moved. ‘How timely,’ he remarked, getting to his feet.
‘You don’t have to go,’ she said in a tight voice. The doorbell rang again, longer and louder this time.
Matt gave an unfriendly laugh. ‘But I think it wise, don’t you? Since I have failed spectacularly in my mission to improve community relations and the next in no doubt a long line of visitors sounds rather impatient. If you could prevent your own animosity from colouring Josie’s opinion of me, I would be grateful. She’s the best thing that’s happened to Josh since his mother left.’ He strode over to his son, still seated on the floor with the mixing bowl between his legs, surrounded by messy blue sausages.
‘We have to go home, Josh.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s lunch-time.’
‘Josh has made lunch. Look.’ He gestured proudly as his doughy creations.
‘Ah, yes, well …’
‘You could take them home and cook them,’ interjected Sophie, reappearing in the doorway followed by a tousled teenager with swarms of pink spots on his cheeks and a clutch of books under his arm. ‘This is Sean– he’s come for some help over his course work.’ There were mumbled greetings all round.
‘You could put them in this, Joshua,’ she continued with forced brightness, tugging open a drawer and yanking out a see-through polythene bag. ‘Then they’ll be safe. Fifteen to twenty minutes at no more than a hundred and ten,’ she muttered, clearly aiming the directions at Matt but not looking at him. ‘And remember, they’re for pretend eating only,’ she reminded Josh, deftly slipping the rolls into the bag and hoicking him to his feet.
* * *
It wasn’t until they were safely in the car that Matt remembered the lion, still perched on the spaghetti jar in the kitchen. He sat with the engine running, torn between the unappealing prospect of his son’s misery on realising he had mislaid his new toy and the equally unappealing notion of having to re-present himself on Sophie Contini’s doorstep. He had never met anyone who embodied so baffling a mixture of warmth and coiled resentment. Used to being regarded as a mild, affable person – too mild and affable, apparently, to sustain Kath’s interest – to be the focus of such impenetrable dislike was a new and unsettling experience. Even beyond the question of how it affected Josie, there was an unfairness to it that Matt could not help minding very deeply.
Lost in such thoughts, with Josh intently squeezing the bag to convert his blue sausages into more interesting shapes, Matt was caught off guard by the sight of Sophie herself, springing from her house in her socks, waving the missing toy.
He slowly wound the window down. ‘Thank you.’
‘Just caught you, then. I was worried you might have gone.’
‘No. We were plucking up our courage to come in,’ he said dryly, passing the lion to the back seat.
‘Look, I —’ She was dancing on her toes with cold and the wind was blowing her hair madly about her face.
‘Oh-oh, more visitors,’ cut in Matt, revving the engine and indicating a pair of girls hovering by the open front door.
She glanced round. ‘Oh, yes, they’re from my drama group. Look …’ She bit her lip, pulling the sleeves of her pink sweat-shirt over her hands, ‘What I said … I just speak my mind sometimes, that’s all.’
Not even an apology, marvelled Matt, giving her a final terse nod before accelerating away down the street and silently vowing to make no effort to cross her path again.
26
After such an inauspicious start to the day the thought of seeing Beth for the grand excursion to the zoo gave a considerable boost to Matt’s spirits. Their hasty lovemaking on Friday afternoon had been wonderfully intense and animalistic. Beth’s crescendo of groans during the course of it had been so uninhibited that he had even found a moment or two in the midst of his own, less articulated sexual ecstasy to wonder about the thickness of the walls separating them from her neighbours. In the shower that evening it had given him some satisfaction to note the faint circular bruises where her fingers had gripped his arms, and a bluish patch on his shoulder where she had sucked at his skin. He had an enormous amount to thank her for, he reflected fondly, not just for giving new hope to his emotions, but also for stepping into the breach on the physical side of things. For no matter how much his grown-up intellectual self might whisper that not having sex was the very least of his worries, Matt was well enough acquainted with the vagaries of his own psyche to acknowledge that romping on water beds with libidinous women was a crucial and effective method of charging depleted levels of self-esteem. It gave a spring to one’s step, a tingle of confidence quite unlike any other.
Lost in such thoughts, Matt barely noticed the heaviness of the Sunday traffic, nor the grey clouds, closing ranks overhead. Behind him, Joshua, replete from an early lunch, not of blue sausages, as he had originally desired, but of more conventional brown pork ones, slept soundly, his lion gripped to his chest.
Beth herself, stirring reluctantly from her bed just a few miles away, peered out at the grey sky through the chink in her curtains with less equanimity. Although curious to meet her lover’s child, she was also rather daunted by the prospect, and wished now that the pair of them were meeting alone, to sip cappuccinos in a café maybe, or share a bag of popcorn in a cinema. The fact that she had instigated the outing herself was, she knew, one of the more drastic signs that the bold take-it-or-leave-it attitude with which she had entered into the relationship with Matt was already in tatters; that, as usual, her hard post-marital armour was melting under the glare of a new love interest. Try as she might, the tactic recommended by her therapist, of letting a relationship idle, of seeing where it drifted of its own accord, just did not come naturally. She could not help wanting to fan every flame to its fullest potential, to push at the boundaries, to see if the intimacy would – if it could – lead anywhere other than between the silk linen weave of her sheets.
Beth sighed, letting the curtain fall back into place. Going into her en suite bathroom, she checked her roots in
the mirror before setting about preparing her face for the day. She had never liked zoos very much anyway, even as a child. All the most interesting animals seemed to be buried out of sight or caged at too great a distance for proper scrutiny. And it was going to rain, she observed, pulling back the bedroom curtains properly and exclaiming in surprise at the sight of Matt’s car reversing into a tight space in the street below.
‘The traffic was solid through to Vauxhall and over the bridge and then suddenly melted to nothing,’ he explained, standing somewhat sheepishly on her doorstep a few minutes later, one hand thrust into his pocket, the other running back through his hair in a hopeless attempt to keep the sweep of his fringe – long due for another cut – from flopping into his eyebrows. ‘We’ve done the last few miles in two minutes flat.’ As if suddenly remembering himself, he sprang forward and kissed her on both cheeks. ‘We didn’t catch you in bed or anything, I hope …’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she replied, tugging at the hem of her polo neck, hastily pulled on over a pair of smart chocolate-brown trousers. ‘And where is …?’ She peered up and down the empty pavement, wondering with a spurt of empathy if the child felt as nervous about the introduction as she did.
* * *
‘Josh? He’s in the car, asleep … we’ve had quite a busy morning.
Thought I’d leave him for a few minutes, say hello properly, maybe grab a quick coffee.’ He slipped his arm round her waist and kissed her on the lips.
‘Is that safe?’ she murmured, speaking through the kiss. ‘In the States people who leave their children in cars get arrested.’
A Family Man Page 20