Part of me was furious with him for ditching his friends for some psychotic redhead – not that I’d been jealous of Nina, of course – but mostly I was so pleased to hear from him that I said I’d be at his flat in half an hour.
When I got there he opened the door, and there was this little black and white ball of fluff mewing around his feet.
“Meet Winston Purrchill,” Ben said. “I adopted him from Battersea this morning. He was left there in a box with his mum and his brothers and sister. Apparently the mum was only a teenager when she had them – he’s a broken Britain kitten.” Ben scooped Winston up and held him next to his face and the kitten broke out into a thunderous purr – really quite remarkably loud for such a small cat. Ben had the same soppy, smitten look on his face that he’d had when he first met Nina, and you didn’t have to be an expert in human psychology to work out that Ben had replaced waif A with stray B, so to speak. I sat down and Ben put the kettle on and made tea, and I waited, making admiring sounds about Winston as he shimmied up my jeans with his tiny claws, and eventually Ben told me what had happened.
“I went round to Nina’s on Wednesday night, just like we’d arranged,” he said, “but she didn’t answer the door. I didn’t have a set of keys because she’d thrown them out of the window a couple of days before.” A shadow of pain passed over his face. “I was panicking in case she’d… done something stupid. So I broke down the door. The neighbours called the police and everything – we’d had a few rows recently and I guess they were just fed up with all the noise. But she wasn’t there. All her stuff was gone, her violin and her books and CDs and Monty the python and everything. I tried to phone her and left loads of messages, but she never called back and after a few days the number came up as unobtainable. I don’t have her parents’ number or any of her friends’ – you just don’t, do you?”
“No, I suppose not,” I said.
“I rang the Guildhall and tried to talk to her tutor or someone, but they won’t tell me anything because of the Data Protection Act. God, Ellie, I just wanted to know that she was okay.”
I refrained from pointing out that as far as I could tell Nina had never been okay. “I understand,” I said.
“Then yesterday I got this.” Ben reached into his pocket and took out a mauve envelope. How typical of fucking Nina, I thought, to write a letter when anyone else would have emailed or texted or whatever. He pulled out a flimsy piece of paper, and I swear, the room was instantly filled with the horrid, heavy scent Nina used to wear. If it wasn’t actually Poison, it should have been. He passed it to me, and I shuddered when I touched it.
“Dear Benedict,” I read, “It is over. I don’t have the words to say this without causing you pain, but there is someone else. Another man. Betraying you has broken my heart, and I know that my leaving will break yours. But there is nothing I can do – our love is too strong for me to control. Perhaps one day we will meet again and you will understand, even forgive me. But for now all I can do is say goodbye, and ask that you try not to hate me, and remember all the good times we had together. Nina.”
I can’t remember the precise words, but trust me, it was melodramatic tosh along those lines.
“So now I suppose it’s just me and Winston,” Ben said, and then he put his head down on the kitchen table and full-on sobbed, like a little boy.
I instinctively moved to wrap my arms around him and offer what comfort I could, but there was something about his desolation that made me hesitate. It felt like he was in a private place, where I wouldn’t be able to reach him – and wouldn’t be welcome if I tried. I stood up, touched the back of his hand gently, and put the kettle on again. When it had boiled I made tea – the bright orange builder’s stuff Ben likes, that will strip the enamel off your teeth if you don’t swallow fast enough – and once he’d had a few sips he stopped crying and we talked about Winston for a bit, then I went home. There didn’t seem to be room for me.
Ben seemed to get over Nina after a while. People do – broken hearts don’t stay that way (unless you’re Leona Lewis, of course. Moany cow). But he didn’t seem quite the same, and the way we were together certainly wasn’t. I was conscious of the gap Nina had left in his heart, a dark, empty place that I couldn’t imagine ever being properly filled by anyone else. We stopped having our delicious, drunken nights together that were supposed to mean nothing, but meant so much. Nina had changed Ben in some fundamental way, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that I truly, truly hated her for it. Maybe what I really hated was that she’d changed me, too. All this was a long time ago, of course, and Ben and I had become just friends, without the benefits, and I honestly didn’t think about Nina very often at all. Perhaps it would be different now, I thought, now that Ben had Claire and so much time had passed. Perhaps he could finally get over it all, properly. If anyone could banish the ghosts Nina had left in Ben’s heart, it would be Claire. But I still felt sick thinking about it all, and I said again to Alex, “Shit.”
Alex said, “Yeah, shit. But it gets worse.”
“What?” I said, feeling a sick jolt of fear.
“She’s got a kid,” Alex said. “He’s called Benedict.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
As soon as Alex’s call ended, my phone rang again. I didn’t want to give my new colleagues the impression that I was the sort of slacker who spends their Friday afternoon gossiping with their mates, so I almost didn’t answer. Then I saw that the caller was Dad, and remembered his missed, unreturned call from the other day, and hastily pressed accept.
“Serena’s in hospital,” Dad said without preamble.
“In… is she okay?” I asked. “Are the babies okay?”
“She’s okay for now,” Dad said. “But they don’t know how things are going to turn out over the next few days.”
With a frightening, shaky note in his voice, Dad told me that Serena had been up on a ladder painting a mural on the wall of Rose’s old bedroom, which was going to become the nursery (apparently she and Dad had had words about her doing DIY in her condition, but Serena had told him not to be such a silly old fart, and that she was pregnant, not ill, and a happy mum means a healthy baby), when she’d suddenly felt faint and overbalanced and ended up in a heap on the floor, surrounded by brushes and pots of Farrow & Ball and her stencil of smiling, chubby dragons and unicorns and wizards. This had been three days earlier, when Dad first rang me. I felt absolutely wretched with guilt.
“She said she felt okay, just shaken up,” Dad said, “but then yesterday she started having pains and bleeding, so we thought she’d better go in and get checked out. We told each other we were probably over-reacting but we were both worried as hell.”
“What did they say?” I asked.
“They say it’s placental abruption,” said Dad.
“Placental what?” I pressed the phone against my ear and started typing the phrase into Google, the way you do when you hear about medical stuff, even though no good ever comes of it.
“The placenta’s threatening to detach,” Dad said. “Normally they’d deliver the babies but twenty weeks is way too early and because they’re twins they’re small anyway. So they’re keeping her in hospital, flat on her back, basically.”
I quickly scrolled down my screen, and horrible words like haemorrhage and still birth jumped out at me.
“Shall I come?” I said. “I can get the train tonight and stay for the weekend? I won’t be able to do anything much but I could keep you company.”
Dad said, yes, please, and then he said, “Please will you let Rose know? I left her a message too but she hasn’t come back to me yet.”
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll be there about eight, okay? I’ll text you when I’m on the train.”
Dad said thanks and rang off, and I shut down my computer, glad to switch off the horrible words on the screen, exchanged the usual Friday formalities with my colleagues and headed for home.
How monstrously unfair it was, I thought, that poo
r Serena should be going through this, at risk of losing her precious, longed-for babies, while bloody Nina had not even rated the birth of her child as important enough to let his father know. Then of course I realised how silly and unreasonable it was to think that way, when Nina, vile as she was, presumably loved her son dearly, because mothers always do, don’t they, even when they’re deeply unpleasant people otherwise, or they’ve had the misfortune to give birth to one of those unattractive, pudding-faced babies you sometimes see. Just because Nina had treated Ben appallingly, didn’t mean she wouldn’t be a wonderful mother, I told myself – but I wasn’t convinced.
On the train I quickly tapped out a text to Rose, telling her what had happened and that I was on my way home, and she would probably want to pack a bag as well, but she didn’t reply.
If I’m being honest, I was quite relieved by the prospect of a weekend back at Dad’s with him and Rose. Although one’s supposed to relish the challenge of a new job and all that stuff, it’s actually a really isolating time. I was missing Ruth and Duncan and Russell and all the motley crew back at YEESH – the glossy denizens of Black & White were lovely enough in their way, but they were taking a lot of getting used to. I also hated the distance that had opened up between me and Claire and Ben. I wanted the two of them to make a go of things, I really did, but I was beginning to think that leaving them to it hadn’t been the best idea. And I’d restricted myself to checking Oliver’s posts on Facebook only once a day, and that hadn’t actually been all that difficult to stick to, as there is only so much emotion to be gleaned from reading about the FTSE 100, grain futures and the Ashes. I missed Rose most of all. It’s not like we’d made a habit of cosy sisterly evenings together with Eastenders and massive slabs of Fruit and Nut, the way sisters who live together carry on in books (as if! Rose would rather eat her own hair than a slab of Fruit and Nut). But over the years I’d sort of got used to her getting home at about ten each night and telling me about the glamorous time she’d been having at whatever launch or party or sale she’d been at, and her friends turning up for kitchen sups, and all the rest of it. Of late, she’d barely been home at all, because, I supposed, she’d been at Oliver’s. Thinking about them together left me with a hollow, sick feeling inside, so I avoided doing it, but, for probably the first time in my adult life, I was lonely. I didn’t like it one bit. I’d even thought about getting a cat, but Rose is allergic to them and the fallout that would ensue if she arrived home and found the flat full of allergens and fur on her black dresses didn’t bear thinking about. We’d go together to Dad’s, I decided, and rally round him in a sisterly way and we’d be a family again. I was imagining making and freezing loads of batches of veggie lasagne and stuff, and with a mad rush of blood to the head I even wondered if I could learn to crochet, and make little booties for Serena’s babies. Then I remembered my spectacular lack of success with Pers’s Camelduck, and I shelved that plan.
Anyway, I was feeling quite eager and positive when I fought my way off the train and hurried to the flat. I ran up to my bedroom, retrieved my overnight bag from the top shelf where it was languishing, and stuffed in a random assortment of pants and tops and toiletries. Then I took off my work suit and hung it carefully away in the cupboard. I put on a pair of the skinny jeans I’d chosen with Vanessa, and a plum-coloured cashmere jumper that I’d never worn before because it was dry-clean only, and I was standing in front of the mirror brushing my hair when I noticed there were two reflections of me. Two blonde-haired girls in designer jeans and dark, fitted tops. For a fleeting, disconnected second I wondered if I was hallucinating from stress, or if we’d suddenly acquired a resident ghost. Then of course I clocked Rose standing behind me in the doorway. With my new hair and new slimness, we were looking more alike than we ever had. Ghost or no ghost (and obviously there are no ghosts, and anyone who thinks there are is sadly deluded) it was really quite unsettling.
“I didn’t realise you were here,” I said. “Are you ready to go? We can get the six twenty train if we hurry.”
“I’m not coming,” Rose said.
“You’re not – what do you mean?”
“I’m not coming,” she said again, quite coolly.
“Look, Rose,” I said, trying hard to sound calm and reasonable, “I know you find it hard to get on with Serena. I know it must seem like a massive climb-down after what happened at Christmas. But think of Dad. These are his babies, they’re our half-sisters or brothers. He needs us there. Serena could die, she could literally bleed to death, or they could lose both the babies. If that happens and you aren’t there, think how terrible you’d feel.”
“Ellie, I said I’m not coming, okay? I’m not changing my mind and nothing you say is going to make me. I’m not a hypocrite and I’m not going to have some emotional hospital-bed reconciliation with Serena. I don’t like her, I never have and this hasn’t changed my feelings. She’s in hospital, she’s being cared for by professional people who know what they are doing, and my being there or not won’t make any difference to the outcome.”
“But it would make a big difference to Dad,” I pleaded. “And it would make a difference to me.”
“Sorry, Ellie.” Rose turned around and walked back into her bedroom.
I’m quite a level-headed person usually. I rarely lose my temper and I absolutely hate rows, but I’m afraid I lost it with Rose then. I stood in her doorway and shouted all kinds of horrible things at her – about how she never thought of anyone except herself, she was a cold-hearted, selfish bitch and if anything happened to Serena it would be her fucking fault. By the time I finished Rose was crying, but I didn’t care. I picked up my bag and walked out of the flat. I didn’t even miss the train.
“It’s bloody Victorian,” fumed Serena, lying back in her hospital bed, surrounded by her laptop, her Kindle, her phone, her iPad and her Wii – all the high-tech, streamlined gadgets I’d come to regard as as much a part of her as her spiky hair and sleek spectacles. In addition to all this, though, there were things that were totally alien to Serena’s character: bouquets of flowers, cards with a preponderance of pink and even a full-on fruit basket. “I thought that in the twenty-first century pregnant people could just get on with being pregnant, but evidently my stupid body and that wobbly stepladder thought otherwise, and so I’m stuck here for the foreseeable, and so are our babies. At least I hope they are.” Then the clean, elegant lines of her face sort of smudged and her clear skin was suffused with a horrid flush, and she let out a noise that sounded like, “Hnnnggg,” and started to sob. Dad said, “Angel, don’t upset yourself,” and Serena said between sobs, “Watch what you say, Luke, or you’ll fucking upset me,” and I thought it was about time I went for a walk.
It was weird, I couldn’t escape the sound of her weeping even when I stepped beyond the curtains surrounding Serena’s bed. She and Dad could easily have afforded a private room for her but, as Dad had explained to me in the car on the way to the hospital, Serena insisted that she and the babies would get no better care privately than they would on the NHS – or “our NHS”, as Dad told me Serena had described it. He was unable to keep a note of pride from his voice at Serena’s commitment to the welfare state, even in extremis, and I have to admit I shared it. Anyway, I walked down the ward a bit and thought I’d try and find somewhere where I could get a decent cup of coffee – fat chance, the NHS is wonderful in almost all respects, but Flat White it is not. So I walked towards the exit, a long, long way it seemed, with my heels clicking on the supposedly sound-deadening flooring. But I could still hear those awful, desperate sobs. I paused, wondering why I couldn’t make out Dad’s soothing voice any longer, and then I realised that the sound of women crying was happening in stereo, or whatever the version of stereo is when there’s many, many more than two sources of it. From behind each of the curtained-off cubicles came the sounds of women’s sadness – some whimpering, some quietly moaning, one actually keening in pain or fear: each voice expressing its own terror of l
oss.
Reader, I legged it.
I sent Dad a text saying that I’d see him back at home – he’d given me a set of keys – and I’d be around the whole weekend, but for now I felt there wasn’t much I could do. Then I dived into a taxi waiting outside the hospital door and asked the driver to take me straight to the local pub. In fact, I may even have said, “The Rose and Crown, my good man.”
I ordered a G&T, necked it in double quick time and ordered another. By then I’d calmed down a bit, so I took a look around to see if there was anyone I knew in the pub. The Rose and Crown’s a real local local, where you can happily sit on your own and have a drink and read a book without people thinking you’re there to get picked up. But generally you won’t be on your own for long, because you’ll bump into someone you were at school with or a mate of Dad’s or the woman who runs the Oxfam shop, or… It’s that kind of place. And sure enough, within minutes I was chatting away to Max the bartender, who’d somehow found out about Serena being in hospital and wanted an update. I left out the gory details, but told him that for now she was okay, although not out of danger. Then I ordered another G&T and a packet of cheese and onion crisps, because I hadn’t had any dinner and was suddenly feeling almost crazed with hunger, and just as I was ripping open the packet a voice behind me said, “Ellie Mottram!”
I was really glad I hadn’t had the chance to eat any crisps yet, because there, leaning in for a kiss, was Peter Barclay, the fittest boy in the sixth form, and he’d lost none of his fitness. He was tall – over six foot – and kind of rangy, with a slight gangliness about him that I remembered from school – you know how it is when boys suddenly shoot up and don’t quite know what to do with their hands and feet? Even though it was barely spring and still freezing, he had a bit of a tan, so I guessed he must ski or play golf or run or something. I hoped it wasn’t golf. He had lovely, even white teeth, his blue eyes were as smiley as I remembered, and his dark blonde hair still stuck up a bit on one side.
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