‘Well, if we did go the whole way, and had a civil partnership, and adopted a child, I’d probably be sacked anyway, so then I wouldn’t have to make the decision myself. God, I’m such a coward,’ he adds, sinking his head into his hands.
In an odd way, it’s a relief to find that someone else is struggling; Matt, of course, being the golden child, glides through this thing called life. The rest of us are stuck on the first page of its basic equations, trying our best to live up to the ideals of the world, without losing sight of who we are. And I have a flash of memory of the summer ritual in our house, which was that my mother would bake her annual cake, a project that would always fail. It wouldn’t rise, or it burned to a cinder, or it stayed eggy in the middle. And she would completely erupt, and rip up the recipe, and hurl the tin in the bin, along with the cake. And every year – in June it was, which is strange because none of us had a birthday in June – she would try again with a new tin, a new recipe. And, whatever she did, the cake never turned out as it should. The smell of burned batter would linger in the house for days.
‘If you ask me,’ Dylan says, ‘I’ll be better off with kids. And the love I once poured into the church I can now devote to children. My children.’
‘But what do you get? After twenty years, they walk out the door, and never come back. Not to mention the fact that they’ll probably hate you by then, anyway—’
‘Hate?’ Dylan stares at me, puzzled.
I blush and blunder on. ‘Have you really thought what having children means? You’re being so selfish.’
‘I’m being selfish?’ Dylan bellows.
Oh, my God – we are arguing. I grip the edge of the table with both hands. ‘You’re right. Forgive me,’ I beg. ‘I’m the selfish one here. It must be smoking this stuff. I’m really sorry.’
Dylan reaches out for me. ‘No, it’s my fault. I should never have let you try it.’
In silence, we each draw small piles of shells across the table into a cupped palm. We could be no more awkward around each other than if we’d just slept together. I move to the sink, and turn on a tap. The water comes out so forcefully that the jet ricochets off a spoon and sprays the front of my clothes. Dylan lunges for a tea towel and begins dabbing at my groin.
‘Dylan!’ I cry in pretend disgust, and wallop him on the bottom.
‘If only one of my parishioners could walk in now, I could say I ejaculated prematurely. Who’d call me gay, then?’
*
As I let myself into the house, I’m surprised to see a strip of light trimming the study door. I assumed Matt would have taken his paperwork to bed. He pulls open the study door from where he sits at his computer. ‘Heyyy!’ he says, softly.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask, after we kiss. It’s comforting to think he’s waited up. He takes hold of my hands and I crouch down between his knees. ‘What is it?’
‘One of the cats has been run over.’ His grip tightens. Matt found it beside the kerb in our street, lying as though having passed out after a squalid night on the town. The animal is now decomposing in a carrier bag in the back garden. Trusting in the importance of correct procedure, Matt has been trawling the local council’s website about the disposal of roadkill. ‘I rang Dylan, and he said you’d just left.’ I nod. ‘I’m sorry. Your father, and now this. How do you feel?’ he adds, looking not into my eyes but at my forehead, as if captivated by the activity in my brain. All I can think of are scenes in TV dramas when parents are told their child has died. I ought to feel grief-stricken. But I don’t. I feel triumph. My rival is dead.
‘Do you think she was in pain before, um, before she—?’
‘It wasn’t Tallulah, actually. It was Tim,’ Matt interrupts, softly.
Tim. Timid Tim. Daring for once to be adventurous – to be something he wasn’t. The pain in the back of my legs intensifies, making me gasp, and for a moment I hear a dreadful rushing noise in my ears. Hot tears drip down my cheeks. How could this have happened? And all the time the thoughts in my head are wild and jumbled up with fury, fury that the wrong one has died.
Chapter Fifteen
DYLAN INSISTS on conducting the funeral. I insist that the funeral be held after I’ve completed my new business pitch. The RSPCA in the meantime insists that the plastic bag containing Tim should be stored in the freezer. Which is why, on Monday night, Matt and I are forced to eat the defrosted home-made stew from the bottom drawer, even though the bottom drawer of the freezer contains, according to my laminated schedule hanging in the utility room, food only for Fridays. I make a mental note to buy another freezer.
*
I sit in the lobby of the headquarters of Keswick Ramsay plc. The building’s granite-clad exterior suggests commendable Scottish thrift. Inside, a triple-height atrium of chrome and dusky-pink marble hints at opulence and success. The subliminal message is of shrewd money-management.
Since my arrival twenty minutes ago, I have twice visited the bathroom. Now, in the lobby, sweat dribbles down the side of my waist under my blouse.
Suppressing my fury at Tim’s demise, or rather his sister’s suspicious survival, I am trying to be conscientious. The combination of my pitch, my track record in the industry and my reputation for persuading candidates to work for unattractive companies gives me a strong chance. I have an instinct for detail. Attending to details makes me feel safe.
So my nerves aren’t due to the imminent meeting. Rather, they are linked to a note I wrote my mother – as yet unsent, and currently polluting my briefcase, pending amendments or being torn up.
While Matt was placing the dearly departed in ‘Vegetables: Friday’, I was seized by a surge of venom, which no amount of logical thought would exhaust. The dozy boy, who rarely strayed further than his food bowl, had been crushed; the girl had lived. Something in the world had gone awry, and I found my rage displaced into rabid prose. I scribbled in the way one’s mind scrolls back through time, thoughts spinning off at tangents, so that soon the original starting point is forgotten. Matt, who approves of (no, champions!) emotional honesty, appeared once with a mug of strong black coffee, and massaged my shoulders, and then retired to bed to watch the golf highlights. Eventually, I stopped writing and read the pages back through. The words were lacerating, but they made no sense at all. They didn’t explain why today, as an adult, I feel so angry, so ruptured from within that I fear I will explode.
I didn’t crawl into bed until three o’clock, by which time I’d not only completed Wednesday’s business pitch, but also shredded the letter. Then I’d seized a postcard, and in one sentence informed my mother that we need to speak.
*
My name is being called. I stand up with purpose, and reach for my briefcase. Straightening, I come face to face with a man wearing the look of a train spotter on his first day at Clapham Junction.
‘Fergus,’ I say, with a weary smile. In a blink I take in the same pinstriped trousers, the same square buckles on his shoes. Thankfully, today he is without the lethal beaker of coffee, but even so, to my shame, at his approach I take a step back.
He’d sent me, as I knew he would, his résumé. No qualification, however small, had gone unmentioned (his certificates are framed and displayed, somewhere, I am sure). He observes closely the conventions of formal British speech and dress; he holds the gaze of a person when speaking; he remembers people’s names. My fantasy is that he spends so much time reading self-help books on how to get ahead in business that he leaves himself no time to make any progress.
‘So, Amber. May I ask, what are you doing here?’
Without waiting for my reply, he leans in and whispers that he’s been ‘doing the needful’. I take this to mean that he’s been having lots of meetings that he would imagine are interviews, but which are really chats with bored human resources staff.
As he stands upright once more, he steps back on to the foot of the receptionist from the directors’ floor, who has come to tell me that my meeting is further delayed. After apologies from both pa
rties, Fergus asks me whether I’d care for an early lunch (I’ll try not to spill my coffee this time). As he speaks, he hops, jack-knifing one thigh on which to balance his briefcase, searching for his coffee-shop loyalty card. I’m about to decline his offer when I catch a glimpse inside his briefcase. It is empty, containing nothing more than a few biros and a battered copy of Mr Phillips. I look up into his eyes – they are as wide and round as a seal pup’s, liquid brown and innocent.
*
Later that afternoon, inside Ginny’s flat, I wriggle my toes in the soapy water. I am trying to breathe deeply (in through the nose, out through the mouth), to banish a tightness in my chest. The coffee I had with Fergus made with real milk surely accounts for my discomfort. I enjoyed my time with Fergus. He has not yet informed his parents, whose son is ‘something oversized in London’, that he’s currently unemployed. So we are both hiding!
The presentation went well. The board like my suggestion of the one candidate whose Washington contacts would give the bank unfettered access to decision-makers in Congress. I can expect to hear by the end of the week.
Which leaves the unposted postcard. I feel faintly nauseous.
‘Why’, Ginny asks, ‘can’t you just phone your mother?’
‘Because,’ I begin, limply, then hesitate. What I want to describe is too subtle, too hard to pin down; how all my previous calls to my mother miraculously coincide with a visitor at her door (I can’t talk to you now). Telephoning is out of the question. I’m not prepared to suffer the humiliation of being so easily rebuffed.
Out in the street, the autumn evening air is unexpectedly icy. I hail a cab, and think again of Fergus. Inept, kind-hearted Fergus. The man defined by his chewed-up pens. His reluctance to tell his parents the truth might be amusing. It might encapsulate his shortcomings, those of a man unaware that his coffee had left a thick moustache of foam on his upper lip – indeed who chose his drink precisely because he thought ‘macchiato’ is pronounced like ‘macho’. But even as I want to laugh at him, in some sense I’ve started to wonder whether he and I aren’t frighteningly alike, especially in the way we’ve both worked hard to escape, to erect barriers to withstand parental assault by accusation. In short, to turn ourselves into other people.
I switch on the intercom and tell the driver what I’m looking for. Before long, he has pulled up at the kerb. I get out, leaving my laptop on the seat. Then I reach into my briefcase, retrieve the postcard and bring it up to the slot in the wall. I scan the list of collecting times. Behind me, a horn toots. Looking back, I see a red postal van urging my taxi to move along, eager to perform the seven o’clock collection.
I reread the sentence on the card one final time, and then drop it through the slot.
Chapter Sixteen
THE TELEPHONE CALL comes on Friday morning. Afterwards, I send Nicole a text.
I buy U thin caf. NOW
2 busy
+ blueberry muffin?
Done
Later, we order more coffees, two more cakes, before returning to our stools in the coffee-shop window. (We regret to inform you of the permanent closure as of today of the staff canteen. We wish to thank you for your custom and support over the years.)
‘When will you go, yaar?’ asks Nicole, twisting a rope of chocolate hair around her finger, and eyeing my latest muffin.
‘Early next week.’
‘That soon! Aren’t you nervous?’
‘Terrified!’ I push my cake towards Nicole. ‘A bit sick, actually. I need to write down everything I’m going to say.’
‘Thanks. I’ve got a real sugar craving at the moment. Nearly time of the month. Typical.’
I tell her how I plan to bake lots of sweet things for Tim’s funeral tomorrow – for the children, of course.
‘Why bother?’ says Nicole, her mouth full of refined inverted sugars. ‘Just buy it in.’ She swallows. ‘You always cook far too much food, anyway.’
I feel as though I’ve just been slapped – although Nicole does have a point. Why do I always go to so much trouble? Dylan’s hailing it a celebration of a life, when actually it’s a sodding party for a crushed cat.
Nicole polishes off my muffin. I can still recall the shock of watching her unpack pots of home-made chutney and green tins of Milo from her trunk in college. At the time, I was embarrassed for her, wondering what kind of mother imagines that food cannot be purchased away from home.
‘So,’ says Nicole, screwing up the paper case and dropping it into her coffee cup. ‘What are you going to say?’
‘I’m hoping to say very little, to see what gets revealed.’
‘So why have you got me here, apart from to gloat?’
‘I need your advice,’ I say, producing a plastic folder containing draft questions.
Nicole extracts her laptop from her grosgrain bag, and plugs it into a small socket at the far end of the counter. Then she tucks her chocolate column behind her ears and calls up a clean document. And over the next half an hour, united by a love of the well-timed, penetrating question to dismantle even the most defended personality, we construct a proposal containing just the right amount of flattery, deference and interrogation, finishing with expressions of warmth to seal a commitment. Certain relationships, we know, demand meticulous manipulation. Keswick’s will be proud.
‘Now it’s my turn for some T-L-C,’ says Nicole in a fake American drawl, as she slides the laptop between its grosgrain covers. ‘Do you think that if Dominic and I split up, I’d be sad? I mean, I know I’d be sad, but I’m sure I’d cope. Do you think I’d cope?’
I tap the pages of my questions on the counter top to line them up. ‘Are you about to?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘Well, I’ve been quite jittery lately. I thought maybe I was getting bored with him.’
‘Bored?’
‘Well, not bored exactly. But since Rex introduced the quarterly performance tables, we’ve been working so hard, the only time Dominic and I spend together is at the morning meetings.’
I look at her. Her beautiful skin appears for once to have lost its luscious bloom. Or perhaps it’s the lighting in this coffee shop. ‘Remember – quality not quantity.’
‘In which case, I know I’m bored! All relationships mutate over time.’
Out in the street, we rub cheekbones and go our separate ways: Nicole, to Boots for some aspirin; and me to my desk, to keep vigil.
As the afternoon wears on, a headache creeps down my neck and fans out across my shoulders. I assume I’m starting a cold. I think of borrowing some of Nicole’s aspirin. But I resist, trusting in the need to remain alert.
Because Nicole is wrong. Her theory is mere speculation. Not all relationships change. Some are wounds that weep without end.
Which just leaves the other telephone call. The one I’ve been dreading. Which never comes.
Chapter Seventeen
IN THE END, Jenny sings an extract from Fauré’s Requiem, in such a neck-prickling way as to make you feel she understands intimately something of the sorrow in the music; Eloise reads (I trust I won’t be thought biased here) a wonderful poem she wrote herself, rhyming ‘Tim’ with ‘Heavin’; Dylan delivers the liturgy with a catch in his voice; and David plies him with tissues for his allergy to cat fur. Privately I doubt that frozen cat fur has any potency, and detect more than a whiff of melodrama. Finally, just as the ache in everyone’s lower back reaches unbearable proportions, the crowd (which includes amused onlookers such as Nicole, who thinks all cats are mangy and has really only come to catch up with friends) take turns to sprinkle soil over the corpse. Then it’s inside for cake, and bread and butter.
Tallulah, I notice, has been conspicuously absent for some days. Perhaps she knows that I’ve been scanning eBay for a section on selling female cats. Look, I want to say (to anyone who’ll listen): she’s fickle. She’s the embodiment of conditional love. To engage with this creature would destroy
me. But I know to keep such daft thoughts to myself.
I hear Dylan in the room above start playing the piano, so I grab a plate of shop-bought (hey!) fondant fancies and go upstairs. He sits hunched over the keyboard, his unruly ginger curls bobbing metronomically. Emily and Eloise sit on the piano stool beside him and are enthralled, as though he’s a saint and they’ve been hypnotised by his halo.
Suddenly I notice that Matt is sitting on the sofa, a beer in one hand, his legs slightly apart, the beer can resting on one thigh. And Tallulah in his lap, nestling in the sacred triangle where I thought only I was allowed to go. Notwithstanding the question as to how she has slipped under my highly vigilant radar, what the fuck is she doing with my husband? He is a vision of contentment, a slight smile on his face, listening to the music and scratching the cat under her chin. Most cats would be sitting with their eyes half-closed, lost in the pleasure of the moment. Tallulah’s are wide open, staring directly at me. They spear me with a long lance of jousts won.
‘Aunty Amber’s dropped all the cakes on the floor,’ gurgle Emily and Eloise, sliding off the stool with such speed you’d have thought they’d been praying for something like this to happen all day. They pounce for the food at my feet, caring not that my shins are in the way. In my hand, at my side, rests an empty plate.
No one else reacts to what has just happened; to the way the world has just flipped inside out. Dylan carries on playing, and sneaks a quick drag of something hand-made. The girls have gathered up the cakes in the skirts of their dresses and are transporting the booty to under the piano. Matt takes a sip of beer, apparently mesmerised by scratching the cat. Only one pair of eyes remains trained on me, dominating the space between us. On my way down to the basement I have to stop where the stairs twist back on themselves to lean my head against the cool wall. Is this what it feels like to start losing your mind?
Once down in the kitchen, I find the women rinsing cutlery, and chatting. Serena looks up.
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