Escaping in the car to the supermarket the following morning, Charlotte let out a small scream, then a much louder one that made her eardrums vibrate. Sam had pleaded to stay with the Porters and Martin had sounded relieved. A rota of carers would make home visits but not until after the bank-holiday weekend. Which meant she had four more days to endure, FOUR MORE DAYS. A hushed conversation with Prue had offered the back-up of thrice-weekly visits, ‘If I’m paid,’ the cleaner had added, which was perfectly allowable, understandable and what Charlotte would have expected anyway, but which had nonetheless made her flinch. Where were the bridge friends, she had wondered, and the names on the church flower rota? When had that hectic phase been replaced by daily communion with no one other than a dog?
The screaming helped. And the supermarket, in a vast clean complex, fringed with coffee shops and aisles as wide as small roads, was somehow soothing too. Charlotte took her time, doing her best to resist the urge to shop for her own tastes, selecting products either with long sell-by dates or which could be stored in her mother’s tiny fridge-freezer.
Having paid, but wanting to defer the ordeal of returning, Charlotte steered her laden trolley into the most salubrious coffee shop and settled herself into a deep leather chair with a latte and a chocolate brownie. She was midway through them, flipping the pages of an abandoned newspaper, when she experienced the shivering sixth-sense certainty that she was being stared at. It took a minute to locate the source – not by the buns and the coffee machines, but behind her, at another table, with an equally laden shopping trolley parked alongside. Cindy. Charlotte, having swivelled, managed a grimace of a smile. Ex-wife bumps into ex-husband’s girlfriend – there was no etiquette manual for such encounters. She stretched the grimace for a moment longer, cursing the instinct that had prompted her to turn round.
Cindy’s smile was equally starchy. She had no paper to read, Charlotte noticed, and maybe because of that seemed even more at a loss than her. She was somewhat dishevelled too, with her hair scooped into a messy ponytail and, for the first time that Charlotte could ever recall, parading a face that bore not a single trace of makeup. And what on earth was she doing in Tunbridge Wells on Good Friday, with a shopping trolley, looking so out of sorts? Slowly, with mounting curiosity that was not entirely benign, Charlotte turned for a second look. Cindy smiled again, with more assurance, then stood up, reaching for her coffee cup. ‘I could join you?’
Charlotte hesitated, spellbound, not by the suggestion, although that felt bizarre enough, but by the clear view of Cindy, now that she was standing upright. A stranger, unacquainted with the carefully groomed, svelte creature who had stolen her husband’s interest, might not have noticed, but to Charlotte it was instantly clear that her ex’s new love was pregnant, not heavily so – there was just the beginnings of a swelling under her T-shirt – but enough to have filled out the once enviable indentation of her waist. It made sense, too, of the lacklustre look to her face, the dark circles under her eyes, the puffiness along her jaw – telltale signs that, Charlotte realized, had been in evidence for many weeks.
How quickly the world could turn… how unexpectedly. Somewhere, amid the surprise, Charlotte was aware of a pinprick of envy. It had taken several years to make Sam. ‘Okay, if you like,’ she replied tersely, gesturing at the spare seat opposite, too curious to refuse. Cindy, looking miserable, alone, pregnant, and wanting to talk to her. It was mystifying. She recalled the plangent voice that had answered Martin’s mobile back during the Sam crisis, sounding as sleepless as her, as lost. The memory produced a jolt of power. She, Charlotte, wasn’t lost any more. And she certainly wasn’t in the bewildering thick of pregnancy, with lank hair and a blotchy complexion, agonizing over some new, desperate rift with Martin. All that was for Cindy to deal with now and good luck to her. You reap what you sow, Charlotte reflected viciously, as Cindy sat down. ‘Quite unexpected, seeing you here.’
‘I’m staying with my sister.’
‘Ah. And I’m at my mother’s – she’s fractured her wrist.’
‘Oh dear, I’m sorry.’
So Martin hadn’t even mentioned it. Or they weren’t talking. Charlotte fiddled with her paper cup, torn still between the desire to put a speedy end to the encounter and a burgeoning need to know more. To be spending a bank holiday with her sister – no wonder Martin had sounded stressed on the phone. No wonder he had said he wasn’t up to helping out with Sam. All her suspicions about trouble brewing had obviously been correct. They were spending time apart and Cindy was pregnant. The condition was even more obvious now, from the way she had sunk into the chair with her legs slightly parted, as if in anticipation of the latter months when sheer weight would demand such inelegance.
‘I’m expecting,’ Cindy blurted. ‘That’s what I wanted to tell you.’
‘Gosh… actually, I did sort of think so.’ Her companion was such a picture of distraction – her eyes darting round the café, her thighs jigging together to some urgent, private rhythm – that in other circumstances Charlotte decided she might even have felt sorry for her.
‘I hope you don’t mind or anything.’
‘Of course not.’
‘It’s been terrible, actually, the most hateful sixteen weeks of my life.’
‘Really?’ Charlotte hoped she didn’t sound smug. There were so many memories popping inside her head, like bubbles, that it was hard to concentrate. Wanting to become parents had been part of the early, happy time with Martin – the shared longing, the common goal. It was with the actual pregnancy that the first hint of distance had come, she saw now, the creeping sense of separating wavelengths. Seeing Cindy so grey-faced and wretched was bringing it back to her. ‘It’s a difficult time. Poor you,’ she added, breathing hard, enthralled. Leopards like Martin didn’t change their spots. ‘I mean…’ Charlotte hesitated. It was Cindy after all. But a different, needy Cindy, she reminded herself, in the thick of something she herself was uniquely positioned to understand. ‘I know exactly what you’re going through,’ she gushed, giving up all resistance. ‘It was when I was pregnant with Sam that Martin first began to pull away from me. But, unlike you, I didn’t have a sister to take me in.’
Charlotte wondered whether her confidence stretched to patting her erstwhile rival’s hand. She felt fantastic suddenly, more than up to the magnanimity that this and any other situation might demand. Bring on mothers with broken wrists, the lecherous husbands of best friends, and employers with sneaky plans – she would despatch the lot of them.
Cindy had clapped a hand to her mouth and was rolling her eyes. ‘Oh, no, Charlotte, you don’t understand. I’m only staying with my sister because I’ve spent the last few weeks being crabby and ill and weepy and horrible and I wanted to give poor Martin a break. He’s been wonderful, just wonderful, in spite of being frantic at work – hard at it even today. Oh, God, here they come, bloody tears.’ She fanned her face with her fingers, as if hoping to blow the emotion back up her tear ducts. ‘I never meant for a moment to suggest… All I wanted was to tell you – felt it would be right to tell you in person – about the baby. We’ve only just started letting people know and Martin’s been worried you’d take it badly.’
Charlotte made a strangled sound, intended as a laugh.
Cindy was still talking, softly, steadily, as if the misunderstanding and the bout of crying had relaxed her. ‘I’m really sorry you got the wrong end of the stick. Of course I knew that things between the two of you weren’t right for a long time. In fact, Martin always used to say–’ She stopped abruptly, as if the context of the conversation, the identity of her would-be confidante, had suddenly come back into focus.
‘What?’ Charlotte had tightened every muscle in her body and was sitting on the edge of her chair, the grimace-smile back in place. What did Martin say?’
‘Charlotte, really, I shouldn’t have –’
‘Please tell me. I want to know.’
Cindy dabbed at her nose. ‘That he lost you to
Sam.’ She muttered the words round the side of the tissue, as if half hoping they might miss their mark.
‘But…’ Charlotte could hear the tremble in her voice, pushing through the tight muscles. ‘That’s pathetic – outrageous.’ She hung on to the edge of the chair, gripping it with the backs of her knees. ‘Lost me to Sam?’
‘Look, here comes my sister – I’ve got to go.’ Cindy grabbed the handle of her trolley and began, with manifest desperation, to try to manoeuvre it out between the café furniture.
Charlotte could see the sister coming towards them, tight jeans, white T-shirt, slim, blonde, a little younger, a Cindy clone. ‘Martin is a liar. He always was.’
Cindy spun, tears spilling again, her face twitching. ‘He isn’t. He’s honourable and wonderful and –’
‘Honourable?’ It was a relief to laugh properly. The sister had arrived and was looking concerned.
‘Cindy, what’s up? What’s going on?’
‘Yes, honourable.’ Cindy spat the word back at her.
‘Let’s go, babe,’ the sister murmured, tugging at the trolley.
‘Yes, honourable,’ Cindy repeated, turning back to Charlotte. ‘I could give you an example if you like.’
Charlotte stood up, folding her arms. She could feel her kneecaps vibrating. She dug her nails into her elbows. ‘Please, do.’
‘Years, it was, years… and he wouldn’t sleep with me because of you.’
All heads were swivelling in their direction now. Near the till a group of waiting customers had turned their backs on the cabinets of sandwiches and pastries and were watching with the expectancy of a ringside audience. The young man in charge of the coffee machines was leaning on the counter on his elbows, one finger stuck absently in his mouth, another fiddling with his earring, as if the entertainment so far had not been dynamic enough to engage his attention fully. The sister now had hold of both the trolley and Cindy’s arm, which she was pulling hard.
‘And you expect me to believe that?’ Charlotte hissed, her mouth dry. ‘Martin must have infected you with his lying. How sad. How pitiful.’ Her knees had vibrated to a state of peculiar numbness, forcing her to sit down. She was aware of Cindy shaking her head at her sister and the pair starting to move away. She had held her own, managed the riposte, but her thoughts were zigzagging violently, to the past and back again, reassessing, processing, trying to come up with a picture that made sense. Through it all, like the twang of a tuning fork, was the still indigestible possibility that Cindy had spoken the truth. Martin’s denials of infidelity, her disbelieving accusations – it had been the theme tune of their marriage, the pattern that gave it shape. Charlotte’s mind lurched. Of course, there were levels of infidelity – it didn’t need to involve actual sex… She tried to keep a grip on this thought but it slithered away, leaving instead, unbidden, a sharp image of the snide little note. A well-wisher. Like hell.
Charlotte seized her trolley and charged out of the café, apologizing as she dodged small children and glowering adults. They had reached the automatic doors. The sister was pushing the shopping and Cindy was walking alongside, holding on to the trolley with one hand and pressing the other protectively over the little bulge in her stomach.
‘It was you all along, wasn’t it? That anonymous note, it was you.’ Charlotte had intended rage, or indignation at the very least, but her tone, as she released the challenge, sounded merely pleading.
‘For God’s sake,’ began the sister.
‘It’s okay, Lu. What note?’
Charlotte, the energy, the certainty withering, had to explain again. ‘Obviously it doesn’t change anything, but I need to know,’ she ended hoarsely, ‘if you wrote it.’
Cindy hesitated, her expression a mask of calm, while privately she recalled her joy upon hearing of the sly message and – best of all – Charlotte’s reaction to it, kicking her beloved out, at last, into her arms. An answer to the longest prayer of her life, she even felt momentarily ashamed to have forgotten it. But when she spoke her voice was haughty and offended. ‘I would never have done that, Charlotte. If you knew me at all you wouldn’t even have asked.’
Charlotte watched the sisters disappear among the sea of parked cars. She was glad she had asked. For a moment she felt serene to the point of giddiness. She had had every right to ask. And it didn’t matter, she reminded herself. None of it mattered, not any more.
But it was hard to steer a straight course, with the trolley wheels twirling and snatches of the conversation coming back at her. He wouldn’t sleep with me because of you. Even taking levels of infidelity into account, it seemed an extraordinary possibility. Charlotte grappled with the wayward trolley, feeling all the while as if she was trying to keep a fix on her own memories. She had been the honourable one, hanging in there, forgiving the Cambridge genius and all the others… the ones before Cindy.
Charlotte unloaded the bags into the boot one by one, then drove slowly back to her mother’s house. After turning off the engine, she sat still for a few seconds, ignoring the twitch of the front curtains and the faint yelping of the dachshund. Of course Cindy would collude in defending Martin, of course she would. The gibe about Martin having lost her to Sam was part of it – a spiteful dig, designed to make her feel bad. Charlotte re-approached the accusation as she might a cliff-edge. She had loved Sam as any mother had a right to love her child. And no wonder, she reflected wryly, as the curtain was yanked rather than twitched and Jean’s face appeared at the window, anxious and frowning.
Charlotte offered a jaunty thumbs-up sign and got out of the car. Three more days of playing the dutiful daughter: it wasn’t much in a lifetime. It was actually a relief to have something else to attend to, something solidly practical, away from pointless speculating and the bitchy stirring of the hateful – pregnant – Cindy. She would give herself over to the situation, the need to be a nursemaid, instead of fighting it. Thus buoyed, Charlotte managed to wave again as she walked up the path, the plastic handles of the shopping-bags knifing into her forearms, then kept the lid on her impatience during the long minutes it took her mother to locate her stick and shuffle to the front door.
Chapter Thirteen
Sometimes Theresa hated that a decade of living in the same community made it impossible to set foot outside her front door without bumping into an acquaintance, but back in London that Easter Saturday, hurrying from the butcher’s to the florist’s, with Matty in tow, wobbling fearlessly between her stabilizers, she found herself positively scanning the street for familiar faces. Typically, there were few to be found, just a glimpse of Naomi in a passing car (Graham, at the wheel, had been the one to turn his head) and a nod with Charlotte’s neighbour, Mr Beasley, who was on his usual bench by the traffic-lights, watching the world go by.
It was all down to mood, Theresa thought. She wanted to engage with people because she was feeling good – about life, about herself, about Henry. The break in Cornwall had been just what she needed. Space, rest in the springy old double bed that swallowed her like no other, big unfussy meals, nothing to worry about except the children tramping sand into the house and whether they had had one ice-cream or three. It helped her recognize how much she managed in her London life, with four (five, if you counted Henry) sets of routines and demands crammed into every single day, not to mention her own meagre needs, squeezed among everybody else’s. No wonder things got her down.
Her mother, waiting, as predicted, with the soup and biscuits, had spotted it at once. Having shooed the children into their beds and splashed sherry into the mugs of soup, she had immediately asked what was wrong. Theresa had said, ‘Nothing,’ then burst into tears, babbling out her miserable suspicions about Charlotte and Suffolk between sobs. Her mother had listened, topped up the soup, announced, as if she had first-hand experience of the matter, that divorcées were a dangerous breed, then asked what Theresa’s deepest instincts told her about her husband’s feelings.
‘That he loves me,’ she had wailed, rai
sing her face from her hands. ‘And Charlotte… I like Charlotte, a lot, but she’s so terribly pretty and doesn’t seem to know it.’
‘Good. Then you’ve done the right thing and it will be all right… somehow. Don’t call him,’ she had advised next, fixing her daughter with steely eyes. ‘Don’t crowd him. There’s no phone down there anyway, is there?’
All of which had gone to pot with Theresa finding herself caught up in the chain of communication (the cleaner had got hold of Martin who, defeated by unresponsive mobiles, had called her) about Charlotte’s mother’s accident. Henry had sounded a little weird, but then so had she, probably, as indeed had poor Charlotte. Being summoned to a hospital bedside was a terrible ordeal, but worse, Theresa supposed, if the subject of the disaster was famously prickly and unlovable. Her heart – as well as rejoicing in the break-up of the Suffolk party – had gone out to her friend. And it had made her feel incomparably fortunate, too, to have a mother who was not only healthy, but warm and insightful, who, after the flurry of phone calls to East Anglia, had tapped her nose and smiled knowingly over the heads of her grandchildren.
Since then Henry had called several times, reporting frustration, mental blockage, the collapse of a section of fencing and the arrival time of his train that afternoon. She was right, he had added gruffly, reluctantly, about trying to work with Sam and Charlotte around: the whole project had been an unmitigated disaster.
A disaster! Unmitigated! Theresa skipped, even though she was now, temporarily, carrying the four-wheeled bicycle, her daughter, her purse and a weighty bag containing a large plucked turkey and two dozen sausages.
Sam, emerging first from the estate agent’s and seeing Theresa, ducked back into the doorway, bumping into Rose, who screeched and slapped his back.
‘It’s her,’ Sam hissed, pointing a few yards down the high street, where Theresa was now crouching between Matty and the bike, patting the little pink leather saddle in an obvious attempt to encourage her daughter to sit on it.
Life Begins Page 22