by Clare Boyd
Chapter Thirty-Two
Six years ago
It was Saturday morning. Francesca was exhausted, and desperate to stay in her pyjamas all day and all evening. But Robert had planned another night out.
‘No, please. Please can we stay in tonight?’ she begged.
That week alone they had been out to four events: one art gallery opening; one launch party, whose screening they hadn’t been invited to; one dinner party held by a distant and unpleasant school friend of Robert’s; and one Soho House drinks party, at which they had known nobody. Not one of the evenings had been anything other than draining and stressful. And every night after they had returned home, Robert had drunk too much whisky, been aggressive, and then crashed out comatose, having popped some sleeping pills. More than that, he had refused sex. Even when she had dressed up in some naughty underwear and begged him for it.
Francesca was not sex-starved. She was ovulating. She wanted a baby. This new desire had come over her suddenly, after a Sunday lunch at Byworth End, when Dilys had talked openly about trying for their third. It had been an eye-opener for Francesca, who realised they were two babies behind.
However, Robert was not throwing his heart into the process. The drinking was affecting his sex drive and possibly Francesca’s fertility, and the hangovers were definitely affecting her work. That week, the crew on set had been a bunch of sexist pigs of the old-school Pinewood ilk, pushing her to breaking point. Their banter had made her cry, when usually it would just make her cross.
Robert continued his relentless pleading. ‘Please, Fran. Just tonight. This guy is only over from LA for a couple of days.’
‘Why is it so important you see him?’ she whined.
‘Fran, he wants to finance my movie. And you’ll love his wife. They’re treating us to The Ivy. It’ll be fun.’
Furious, but too tired to fight with him about it, she threw a coat over her pyjamas, grabbed her sketchbook and some charcoals and marched out. She strode down Swain’s Lane to the Heath, and up to Parliament Hill, where she found a spot to cool off.
An hour later, Robert arrived at the bench where she was sitting. She glared at him and continued sketching. He sidled up next to her, trying to take the charcoal from her hand, tapping on the page like a child trying to get her attention.
She resented the pressure he was putting her under, not really because of the hangover, but because she hated that she was never able to stand her ground, that she had lost her free will.
Sitting there, on Hampstead Heath, in her pyjamas, she had an awakening. After five years of marriage, it had finally dawned on her that Robert’s time had become more important than her own. What he needed would always take precedence over what she needed. Enough was enough. She was thirty-five. It was time.
‘If I go tonight, we have to have sex every night for a week, and the same next month, and the month after that, until I am pregnant.’
‘If I have to,’ he teased, kissing her.
So, later on, she had dressed for The Ivy and pasted on a smile for the financier, and when they returned home, she and Robert had had sex.
When he rolled off her, she elevated her pelvis and thought of names for a little baby girl. A baby would bring them closer. A baby would make them happy. John and Dilys were happy. Tired, but happy. She and Robert could be, too.
Chapter Thirty-Three
John
John was lying back on the wicker sun-lounger in the garden drinking the best cup of coffee he had tasted in months. Steam rose from the grass at his bare feet, warmed by the September sun. A red butterfly danced around a pot of dahlias. The cushion behind him was slightly damp from the rain over the past few days, but it cooled the sore wounds across his skin.
After three days of solid writing, he had finished the final episode of series seven. Billy had won Poppy. The world had been saved. He had resolved the series. It was a sweet, tied-in-a-bow finale. There were no open ends or bittersweet hooks to set the viewers up for the next series. It was probably the last series of Billy Stupid that he would write. It had tumbled out of him. Just as his feelings for Francesca had done. He had opened his heart to her and he had been rolling on a high ever since. Laughing off tantrums and fights and general shenanigans from the children – and ignoring Dilys’ cagey, disengaged mood – he had cherished Francesca in his mind. Even the shock about the Seroquel, and all that his mother had hidden about Robert’s ‘sticky fingers’, was obscured, for the time being, by Francesca. She was like a shimmering jewel in a secret drawer somewhere inside him. Nobody knew she was there, nobody knew that he was thinking about her, nobody knew what had shifted between them. He planned to call her later.
And then a voice. ‘Darling?’
It was his mother. His stomach flipped over.
‘Mum?’
‘We’re back! We thought we’d surprise you.’
She appeared around the corner in a white shirt, crisp against her brown, freckled skin, followed by his father, who wore a deep tan and blue towelling T-shirt and board shorts.
He was not prepared for them. Her voice provoked an avalanche of mixed-up emotions. It dredged up his anger, pulling it out through his happiness about Francesca.
He could not find a way to greet them properly.
‘I told your mother we should have called,’ Patrick said, smoothing back his salt-and-pepper hair, pecking John on the cheek.
‘Nonsense. You don’t mind, do you?’ she cried, clinging to him as though it had been years that she hadn’t seen him, rather than a week.
‘It’s great to see you. You both look so well. Coffee?’
They settled at the end of the long teak table on the terrace. He heard about the friends they had stayed with and the swims in coves and the campaniles and churches they had visited. In the past, he would be gratified that his parents were enjoying the freedoms of their retirement, wishing he could ape that romance in his own marriage. Now, there was a gritty feeling in his throat, like a tickle, a hint of something unpleasant. He cleared it away with a small cough.
‘Are you coming down with something, darling?’
So much was running through his mind. There was Francesca, of course. But it was the image of Robert pilfering anti-psychotics from their uncle’s house that blanked out all else. How entangled had his mother been in his brother’s habit? How much had she really known? Was now the right time to bring it up? Would there ever be a right time to bring up such a thing?
‘I’m addled. I’ve just finished the series.’
‘Good, good,’ his father said, knocking back the last of his coffee, probably preparing to get going already. John felt sad about how distant his father had become since Robert’s death – or maybe it was before that. He couldn’t remember the last time they had shared any meaningful conversation. Maybe they had just never been close.
‘Tell me about the children,’ Camilla said, sitting back and settling in.
John told her a couple of anecdotes about their antics. Before, he would have enjoyed pulling at her heartstrings, and relished in the love and pride she showed towards them, but today it was forced. ‘Bea and Alice are obsessed with each other,’ he finished.
‘Darling Alice. She’s so happy with her cousins. How’s Francesca? Oh, we thought of them so often, didn’t we, Patrick?’ She sighed. ‘Especially when we were in Siena.’
‘Why Siena?’
‘When you and Robert were whippersnappers, we had many happy family holidays there,’ Patrick replied. John could see his eyes were watering. He was nostalgic about happy family holidays – how could he have been so ignorant?
His mother said, ‘Poor Alice won’t ever experience family holidays like that. I felt so desperately sorry for them.’
‘Francesca won’t be on her own forever.’
Camilla pursed her lips and glanced over at Patrick.
‘We wouldn’t want her to be, obviously.’
John’s chest tightened, and he tried to change course.
‘She’s settled well this summer.’
‘Paul’s a handsome chap.’ Camilla shot a look at Patrick, as though she wanted his support, and then added, ‘But he’s so different to Robert.’
‘And?’
‘Each to their own, I suppose,’ she replied. ‘I mean, I don’t care what he does for a living. Tinker, sailor, spy or a whatsit.’
‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy,’ Patrick mumbled.
‘Oh, shut up, Pat. You know what I mean.’
‘Mum,’ John chastised. ‘It’s got nothing to do with us.’
‘Well, we pay for that cottage, you know. If he moved in or anything, well, it would be everything to do with us.’ She laughed, but she was plainly not amused.
‘Moving in?’ John cried. ‘They’ve been an item for a month or so and now you think he’s moving in with her?’
‘Ah. So, they’re an item!’ she cried triumphantly. ‘See? I told you, Patrick, didn’t I?’
‘Mother of God, woman, you were the one who sent the poor fellow over there to sort out the mice,’ Patrick cried.
‘Bees,’ she snapped back.
‘Wasps, actually,’ John added, for good measure.
‘I don’t give damn if they were bearded dragons, and neither should you,’ Patrick retorted, probably having had a bellyful of Camilla’s griping at home.
John raised his hands in surrender. ‘I certainly don’t care who the hell she dates.’
‘I don’t give a damn, either,’ Camilla cried. ‘I adore Francesca and I want the very best for her.’
‘We all do,’ John said.
She sniffed. ‘But, if Robert knew. Imagine…’
He was swamped by anger, and dragged back to the disbelief and anguish of Robert’s death, as if Robert had died there and then, all over again; as if his mother had murdered him with her bare hands, right there in front of John. The yearning to see his big brother alive again hurt him physically. Fury surged up from his gut. He blamed his mother for how much he missed him. He wanted Robert to be sitting with them now, to hear his deep laugh, to see him rub his large hands together with a plan. John held in his vitriol towards his mother. It was unbearable to think that she had covered for Robert, that she had known all along about his thieving, that she had failed to get him the help he needed. Yet John was too scared to ask her the necessary – and potentially incendiary – questions about why she had kept it hidden for so long.
‘Robert would want her to be happy,’ John said, grinding his teeth.
Camilla cuffed her fingers around her wrist, strangulating the blood flow to her hand. She was so still, the butterfly John had seen earlier landed, wings together, on her shirt.
The butterfly darted away when she slapped her hand on the table. ‘It’s only been two years. Two years. Doesn’t she have any self-respect?’ She was shrill, her blue eyes ablaze with fury. ‘And, quite frankly, John, you’ve encouraged her. It’s unacceptable. Unacceptable. Do you hear? Grow some balls and tell her she can’t… she just can’t behave like this.’
When her mood turned like this, John’s normal breathing stopped, his airways constricted. He didn’t respond. Ever since he was a boy, his mother had had the ability to stun him with her sharp tongue and her contradictions.
‘That’s enough, Camilla,’ Patrick said, standing. ‘We’ll be on our way, John.’
They left, arm in arm, hobbling along as though his mother was an invalid, her body leaning into his father’s.
After any argument, she would be the same. If she was the one who was most obviously in the wrong, she would be the one to feel most hard-done by. Everybody was against her. Nobody understood her. Nobody cared.
John’s toes felt damp and cold on the flagstones.
In a rage, he swept his mother’s lipstick-marked coffee cup off the table. The cup clattered onto the flagstones without breaking. John pressed his hands into his face, trying to make sense of his mother’s outburst. The hypocrisy was mind-blowing. How did she have the ability to play the victim, when she herself was the aggressor?
Under her power, he was weak. A pathetic waste of space. He had spent his life cowering or running away.
The night by the poolhouse reared up in his mind.
‘Sorry, Mummy,’ John had said, running from her to the house.
Once inside, he had crept into Robert’s room. ‘Go away!’ Robert had mumbled from under his duvet.
‘But what was that man doing there?’
‘GO AWAY!’ he shouted.
And John had retreated, slipping back into his own bed.
He lay there, the sheets pulled over his head and his eyes squeezed tightly shut, nowhere near sleep, wishing that he had not been such a bad, bad boy.
In the morning, he realised he had wet his bed for the first time in his life.
Ashamed of himself, he had bundled the sheet and shoved it into his rucksack to take downstairs to the laundry room. As he was stuffing it into the washing machine, Valentina found him.
‘You want my job, chicky?’
He jumped to attention, tongue-tied, feeling tears push behind his eyes. The damp sheet was hanging out behind him.
Valentina bustled over and scooped the yellow patch of sheet into the drum of the machine. ‘We no tell,’ she said, pressing her forefinger to her lips.
He wondered how many other family secrets Valentina had been keeping over the years. All their lives, he and Robert had harboured the secret of the night-visit to the poolhouse. Thankfully, Robert had never coerced him to go out into the dark with him again, but John had heard Robert sneak out regularly. Only ever when his father was away. For this reason alone, John dreaded his father’s trips to Berlin. Underneath the surface, it had been a heavy knowledge that he and Robert had kept inside them. When his father was home, their mother’s cheating existed in an alternate space, as a separate entity to their parents’ happy marriage. While they did not talk about it, it had not ever become real. But the secret had been spreading and destroying them ever since, like a metastasising cancer. The original secret, like the first tumour, had spawned others; another generation of secrets, growing and killing the healthy cells. He imagined a tumour growing large in his own gut: his own guilty conscience. When was it going to stop? How was he going to cut it out? The opening up of the body, the first slice into the diseased organs, would surely provoke a fatal heart attack, an instant death.
Instead, John was settling for this slow, insidious destruction, daunted by the harrowing memory of that night, unable to confront those last moments with his brother.
John did not know which was a better way to go.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Five years ago
After the scene had been wrapped up, Francesca had taken herself off to the next studio to smoke an illegal cigarette and have a cry. Not for the first time the art director had yelled at Francesca, in front of the whole crew, for splattering a couple of drops of button polish onto a bathtub in shot, by mistake.
About halfway through her cigarette, John had appeared, with a dog-eared, rolled-up Billy Stupid script in his hand. He had climbed up next to her, onto the scaffolding.
‘Don’t let the bastards get you down.’
‘The bitch, you mean. No wonder those painters walked off the job.’
‘You’re not going to walk, are you?’
‘Honestly, I might do. I only bloody accepted this shitty job because Robert begged me to.’
‘You calling my creative genius “shitty”?’
‘Sorry. It’s not your script that’s shitty. It’s just I hate being on set while they’re filming. It’s stressful.’
‘You’re doing a brilliant job out there. Everyone says so. Behind your back.’
She smiled, enjoying the compliment. Robert had been excessively critical of her at home, leaving her feeling vulnerable, unseen.
‘Thanks, John. Sorry for saying it was shitty.’
‘Believe me, I cringe at my own lines sometimes.’
‘No!’ She chuckled.
Cut off from the world, in that big, cold studio, hyper from over-tiredness and the heightened tension on set, John started quoting some of his worst lines in the script in a silly voice. They creased up. Tears of laughter fell down their cheeks. Then their fingers had touched, just as they had in the cinema years before. Once their flesh had made contact, she couldn’t release her hands from his. Their fingers entwined, and she explored the sensations of their contact: his skin, his knuckles, his veins, the movement of his joints; the feel of him was rare silk, impossible to stop running between her fingers.
It wasn’t long before his hands moved up her arms, and to her face. He pushed her hair back and tucked it behind her ear. As he did that, Francesca lost herself. She was intoxicated by him. The flecks in his grey eyes, his blond frown, his shy smile. The importance of the rest of her life shrank to the size of a pin-prick. Her desire to kiss him became utterly irrepressible. Their lips met. If sunshine had radiated from them and beamed into the universe for the whole world to see, she would not have been surprised.
They had frantically pulled off each other’s clothes. Francesca hesitated, but not for long. The scaffolding squeaked and groaned, and they laughed about the noise, and about falling off, to their deaths. She thought it would be worth it. Thoughts of Robert were not even in her head beyond a fleeting spark of guilt. Nothing would have stopped her. Nothing.
Afterwards, they dressed, gingerly. The sordid reality of what they had done came seeping into their consciences.
‘That was a horrible mistake,’ John said, jumping down from the scaffold. ‘I love Dilys.’
Her blood ran cold. If he’d asked her to, she would have run away with him that very moment.
At the end of the day’s shoot, John turned up at the bus stop where Francesca was waiting.