A few miles away Theresa was moving with rather more purpose between cupboards and a large suitcase that was filling fast. Dressing-gowns and slippers – the Cornwall house was draughty – toys and games in case it rained (it was bound to rain), wellingtons and macs, and at least one each of the various home-knit jumpers that had arrived in jiffy-bags during the course of the last year. Alfie and Jack would wear theirs, no problem, but George, at thirteen, was growing understandably resistant to sporting loopy-stitched, brightly coloured knitwear – even to please a grandparent whom he loved very dearly – while Matilda… Theresa sighed in fond despair at the thought of her six-year-old’s new, obstinate fashion-consciousness: since her release from the constraints of school uniform, she had taken to flinging clothes out of her chest of drawers each morning with the despairing petulance of a teenager. Only items that were pink or glittered were currently in favour; and since this basically limited her to her ballet outfit, and a couple of too-large garments from the dressing-up box, few mornings that holiday had passed without ructions.
Naomi, who had invited herself for tea, bringing the twins but not Pattie and staying well into the time Theresa had allocated for packing (she was leaving that night), had said it was mid-April, mostly sunny and so what if a child wore a tutu to the supermarket? Theresa had laughed and said so what indeed, apart from paedophiles and pneumonia and the fact that the tutu in question had a ‘handwash only’ label that added considerably to the already sizeable chore of family laundry.
And control, Theresa thought now, standing on the suitcase, which was too full. Not allowing tutus in the supermarket was part of keeping everything manageable, within the boundaries of a chaos she knew would swamp her if she let it, and, from the manner in which the twins had run riot during the course of the afternoon, appeared to be slightly in danger of overwhelming Naomi. Control. She would take it where she could, these days, she reflected grimly, kneeling on the lid and hissing curses as the contents bulged between the two sides of the zipper.
‘Need a hand by any chance?’
‘Henry… no, I mean yes – yes, please.’ She moved off the case and watched as her husband hoisted it on to their bed, using brute force to close the zip.
‘There we are. All set.’
‘All set. And you?’ Seven weeks and two days, she thought, seven weeks and two days since he has laid a hand on me. Lips, yes, in scattered pecks, before and after work, before and after sleep, avuncular, inadequate. And there had been no protestations about her going solo to Cornwall either, not one hint of a lament about considering or wishing he could abandon the wretched work blitz and come too. ‘Was Charlotte okay about you dropping the keys?’
‘Oh, yes, fine – absolutely fine. She thought it was hilarious that we’d all forgotten.’
Privately Theresa considered it ridiculously inept rather than funny on all their parts. Over a hasty sandwich lunch the week before, she had remembered to offer Charlotte advice on the final tricky leg of the journey, to apologize in advance for the idiosyncrasies of the boiler, but not once considered how her friend was supposed to get through the front door. Charlotte, busily cursing Dominic Porter for hijacking her perfect house and the increased demands imposed by her employer’s continuing ill health, hadn’t thought of it either. She had been full of a new, almost manic energy, babbling about moving on properly at last, about pieces falling into place, about her determination to make a go of staying where she was. She had been bullish, too, on the subject of the next mah-jong session, insisting she host it in spite of extensive redecorating plans and a possible clash with a visit from Sam’s long-lost godmother. She and Eve would play together, she said, so as not to muck up the numbers.
Theresa, who did not fancy the intrusion of an outsider into their comfortable little circle, unbalancing things, requiring politeness and effort, had momentarily caught herself missing the more familiar version of her friend: the one who needed constant support, counselling… pity. For years she had felt superior to Charlotte, she realized with some surprise – superior, smug, happily married, and she rather missed it.
It had been Henry who had first picked up on the omission of the keys, jangling his set in her face after Naomi had finally left, when Theresa was straining broccoli and wondering why she had committed herself to four hours of night driving when six, even in foul traffic the following day, would probably be infinitely less stressful. ‘Doh…’ Henry had exclaimed, doing an imitation of George doing an imitation of Homer Simpson, his eyes twinkling with satisfaction at having been the one to spot the oversight. He had then speedily – ebulliently, or so it seemed to Theresa – volunteered to phone Charlotte to sort out a handover of the offending items the following morning. His own plans involved travelling up by train the day after that and staying on for a few days after the pair had returned to London. The entire family had been talked through it so often, with such conscientious attention to detail, that Theresa could have repeated most of her husband’s phrases on the subject verbatim… He was going to hole up in the granny conversion in order to break the back of his latest paper, finding energy and inspiration, as he always did, in the holiday landscape of his childhood.
‘Hilarious?’ repeated Theresa, dully, pushing the word out through her reverie and damning the generosity that had prompted her to offer Charlotte the cottage in the first place, allowing the whole ridiculous situation to arise.
‘In fact,’ continued Henry, lightly, keeping his back to her as he lifted the suitcase on to the floor, ‘Charlotte suggested that instead of waiting a day and taking the train, I drive down with her in the morning when I deliver the keys, which makes sense if you think about it.’
Theresa, without having to think, could see that it made perfect sense; perfect, hateful sense. ‘Great. How nice of Charlotte.’ She followed Henry down the stairs, wrestling with the warring voices inside her head: one screeching the old instinctive wifely terrors, the other scolding the pointlessness of probing for phantom problems, making them exist in the process. There had been barren patches in their sex life before. It was no big deal. A marriage was a journey, a long journey through a constantly changing terrain, moods, phases, colours. It was in a permanent state of flux. Trust was the constant. And love, of course. ‘I just hope… I mean, I’m a bit worried that…’ she faltered.
‘Yes?’ Henry stopped in the door of the sitting room and peered at her over the rims of his glasses – not their usual smeary mess, Theresa noticed, but polished, showing off his deep ultramarine eyes. ‘What?’
‘… worried about whether you’ll be able to work… with them there distracting you. Wouldn’t it be better to stay here after all, with the house to yourself? You could take the phone off the hook and –’
‘It wouldn’t work,’ he cut in, then added more gently, ‘You know how hopeless I am at knuckling down to anything up here.’
‘And can you just leave a day early like that anyway? I mean, you’re so busy, aren’t you?’ she pressed lamely.
‘It won’t be a problem. I’ve already cleared the decks. Look, Tessy, if for some unfathomable reason you’d prefer me to stick to the original plan of taking the train, then for heaven’s sake just say so.’
‘No, you’re right, it wouldn’t make sense.’
‘Tessy?’ Henry took his glasses off, as he tended to during moments of high domestic drama, and squinted at her. ‘Are you okay?’
Theresa shuffled up against him, resting the side of her face against his chest, feeling the buttons of his shirt pressing her skin through his jumper, which was an old favourite and very thin. ‘I’m sorry. I’m het up about driving to Cornwall tonight, that’s all. I’m too tired – I should never have agreed to it.’
‘Well, go tomorrow morning, then,’ he suggested, sounding faintly exasperated.
Theresa pulled away, shaking her head ruefully. ‘No, you know what Mum’s like. She hates a change of plan. She’ll be sitting up with a torch, one of her home-made soups and
the biscuit tin. If I leave now we’ll be there by eleven,’ she added firmly, her brisk self once more as she yelled up the stairs for the children to gather any last-minute things and get down to the hall.
… And what on earth would Charlotte – especially in this new assertive grab-life-by-the-balls phase – want with her Henry anyway? Theresa mused, feeling much brighter as they sped along the A404, the travails of Harry Potter keeping two of her children spellbound while the other two slept. An absent-minded doctor with bad eyesight, a thickening waistline and an ever-so-slightly hairy back. She laughed out loud, prompting a look of baffled annoyance from George who was hanging on to every syllable about swooping death-eaters.
And what, for that matter, would Henry want with Charlotte? A woman who could muddle house-hunting and love affairs to a point of farcical implosion, one of his wife’s closest friends, for God’s sake? And if he was remotely interested, surely he wouldn’t be so obvious as to coincide with her in Suffolk? Of course he wouldn’t. The clashing lines in the diary had been proof of that, not evidence of scheming. Theresa slapped the steering-wheel. She was a fool, a bloody fool.
Ignoring the hoo-ha it caused from her two non-sleeping companions, she stopped Stephen Fry mid-flow and dropped her phone into George’s lap instructing him to dial home. ‘Safe journey tomorrow and I love you,’ she murmured, the moment Henry’s rumbling voice answered.
‘You too, Tessy,’ he replied. ‘You too.’
∗
Charlotte was having a good dream, a brilliant dream, of searching – not for the snide well-wisher note that had got her rummaging in boxes and transmogrified, much more usefully, into a general clear-out – but something infinitely better, much more important; something her dreaming self understood but she couldn’t. She awoke as the search seemed on the point of finding its object. In the pitch dark outside a lone bird had started a jaunty dawn sing-song, repeating the same pattern of sound, as if hoping to cajole some of its sleepier mates into joining in. Lying there, feeling thwarted, with the lovely dream quite lost, Charlotte found that she knew where the note was anyway, so surely that there was no instant need to leap out of bed and check. She laced her palms under the back of her head instead and spent a couple of minutes contemplating the quiet, unexpected upturn in her spirits during the two weeks since the nightmare that had begun on Tim’s spongy crimson sofa and ended with the humiliating vigil outside number forty-two Chalkdown Road.
The self-drama of it made her blush even now. But there was no doubt that through the awfulness something had been dislodged. Driving home, Dominic Porter’s expression of hopeless pity etched on her brain, what had begun as a feeble resolve had strengthened into something close to inspiration. Before she knew it there were ten black sacks waiting for a trip to the dump and a list of recommended decorators next to the phone. On top of which, her responsibilities at work had mushroomed to the point where, manning her shifts alone and with her Suffolk trip imminent, Jason had hired an assistant for her. The girl was called Shona and had so far proved keener to gossip about Dean’s illness (‘pleurisy, my arse’) than learn how to take credit cards or find book listings on the computer. She sometimes added to pressure rather than alleviating it, but Charlotte was aware nonetheless that the presence of this hapless aide made her feel contrastingly capable. Putting in orders, doing stock checks, changing the window, liaising with two local authors about book launches, she had begun to question how she had ever filled her time before. She was connecting with something properly at last, something other than Sam and worries about what other people thought of her and why the defining relationship of her life had lost its footing.
When the lone bird fell silent Charlotte slipped out of bed and padded into the spare room. In the bedside table there was a battered copy of Wordsworth’s Prelude from her college days, several paperclips, an empty ink cartridge and a biro engraved with the name of the first company Martin had worked for, when he had finally traded theatre directing for computers and a nine-to-five. The note was sticking out of the book, just as she had expected, between two pages smothered with messy underlinings and faded pencil notes. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven.
‘Mum, what are you doing?’
‘I might ask the same of you, young man,’ Charlotte retorted, with a smile, hastily popping the note back into its hiding-place and closing the drawer. Being young had been heavenly. It was supposed to be. Wordsworth had nailed that, just as he had nailed the sadness of losing such sensations – she had known that once, written essays on it, yet never imagined living it. ‘Are you hungry?’
Sam rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, like a child literally unable to believe what he was seeing. ‘Mum, it’s, like, four o’clock.’
‘I know, I know.’ Charlotte reached for the dressing-gown, an old one of Martin’s, that lived on the back of the bedroom door, spared the black sack only because she hadn’t seen it. ‘But I’m starving. That scrambled egg didn’t really hit the spot, did it? I was thinking…’ she stroked her chin, frowning ‘… maybe, given that we’ve got a long drive ahead, we could have two breakfasts, beginning now with some toast and honey – or jam – and I’ll have tea, but you might prefer hot chocolate. Fetch your dressing- gown first,’ she shouted, as Sam bolted through the door.
Charlotte switched off the light and left the room. She had needed to see the note again, if only to remind her of the tiny part it had played in her and Martin’s downfall. However deeply in love they had once been, there had been years of trouble, she reminded herself grimly, years of arguing, about Sam, about her suspicions, about Martin’s denials. The nasty message had merely been the proverbial straw alighting upon the camel’s back, collapsing something that was in a state of near-collapse anyway. The only unanswered question was the identity of the person who had ‘wished her well’ enough to write it. Martin had always denied all knowledge. For a brief while she had secretly suspected Jo, who had been very anti Martin at one stage and, working in the City, might well have spotted him wining and dining Cindy. But even that hardly seemed to matter now. None of it mattered. It was done with.
Charlotte took the stairs slowly, aware that happiness was a mercurial thing, that if studied too hard it had a tendency to slither out of reach. She focused instead on the lovely sound of clattering from the kitchen and of Sam whistling. It was a disjointed, tuneless twittering – Martin had kept his musical genes to himself – but, like the birdsong in the dark, it lifted her heart beyond whatever words even the mighty Lake Poets might have managed.
Chapter Ten
By the time Henry arrived Sam and Charlotte were parked in the hall with their bags, looking at their watches and trying to think of things they had forgotten. As the doorbell rang Sam remembered George’s map of the hideout, still sitting in the side pocket of his satchel, and raced upstairs.
Henry set down a heavy leather holdall and leant forward to plant a kiss on Charlotte’s cheek, pressing his lips so firmly that Charlotte, imagining the greeting over with, suffered momentary embarrassment when it became clear that he was expecting to offer the other side of her face the same compliment.
‘This is so kind of you,’ she murmured, wondering about the holdall and thinking it a little early in the morning for such social niceties. ‘To forget keys – and you’ve had to come by taxi,’ she cried, as his cab roared away. ‘How horribly inconvenient.’
Henry did not look remotely inconvenienced. He had his hands on his hips under the flaps of his brown corduroy jacket and was grinning. ‘Theresa has the car. She left for Penrith with the children last night. A tour of mothering duty,’ he added, pulling a face.
‘Yes, she told me.’ Charlotte was rummaging in her handbag for her purse. ‘I should contribute or something, and we’ll drop you back, of course, or at the station, wherever you need to go.’ She glanced again at the holdall. ‘I really should have insisted on coming via you to pick the stupid keys up myself, you having one c
ar – I never thought it through.’
‘Except that would have meant you beginning a long journey by going in the wrong direction and anyway…’ Henry hesitated ‘… I have a hatched a slight change of plan.’
‘Have you?’ Behind her Sam flew off the banister post and skidded towards the front door on the obligingly slippery hall rug. ‘Hey, Dr Curtis.’
‘Hello, Sam. How are you?’
‘Good, thanks.’
‘Great.’
‘A plan?’ Charlotte repeated.
‘Only if you don’t mind, of course, but I thought maybe…’ It was Henry’s turn to look at the bag, privately hoping as he did so that his small lie to Theresa wasn’t going to turn out to have been for nothing.
‘That you come down with us now – of course!’ Charlotte cried, clapping her hands together, genuinely thrilled at the prospect of adult company for the journey, not to mention an adult who would preclude the necessity of having to remember Theresa’s instructions about humpback bridges, pub signs and keeping to the left to avoid hazardous cattle grids. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself. It’s like forgetting the keys,’ she chatted, ushering Sam out of the front door and offering a string of thank-yous as Henry swooped inside gallantly to take charge of their bags. ‘I don’t know if Theresa told you but I’ve been so busy lately, with the shop and so on. My mind’s all over the place.’
‘Yes, she did mention it. She also said you’d taken your house off the market,’ remarked Henry, tugging a little more sharply than was necessary on his seatbelt at the unwelcome reminder of the estate agent.
‘Yes, I’d got it all wrong,’ Charlotte confessed gaily, returning a wave to Mr Beasley as they pulled away, ‘thinking that trying for a fresh start meant having to change the scenery when in fact it’s not about that. People say the same sort of thing when someone dies, don’t they?’
Life Begins Page 17