Our House

by Louise Candlish

  ‘She hates them,’ Harry agreed. ‘Unless it’s when we’ve made her a cake with caramel icing.’

  ‘She’ll like this one. I’m going to have the house redecorated.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Today and tomorrow. So you’re going to stay at Grandma Tina’s for two nights and – this is the best bit – you get to have tomorrow off school!’

  Now they were pleased, or at least Leo was.

  ‘Did Mrs Carver say it’s allowed?’ Harry asked. For one so raucous, he was oddly keen on permissions.

  ‘Yes. I spoke to Mrs Bottomley and everyone is fine about it. So when I pick you up from school today, we’ll go straight to Grandma’s on the bus. We’ll call Mummy on the way, but remember, don’t say anything about the surprise. Or about having Friday off school. I don’t want her to worry.’

  I had booked my mother a week or so ago to (unwittingly) abet me these next days. Wholly approving of my decorating scheme, she’d offered to take care of the school run on Friday so the boys wouldn’t have to miss their lessons, but I’d fobbed her off. I couldn’t risk her dropping by the house and finding strangers moving in. Not with the boys. That was not how they should find out.

  After breakfast, I suggested Leo and Harry pick their three favourite things to take to Grandma’s. ‘I’ll bring them after school with your pyjamas and a change of clothes for your day off tomorrow.’

  Though it was an irregular request, they rose to the challenge, not noticing their father watching dismally from the door.

  ‘I need more than three,’ Leo complained.

  ‘I’ve only got two,’ Harry said.

  So I said Leo could have Harry’s extra one, Harry protested that he’d use his selections after all, Leo called him a selfish pig and I brought a halt to the argument by proposing we leave for school immediately and call into the bakery on the Parade for chocolate croissants.

  Just ignore how bleak and depraved and heartbroken you feel, I urged myself.

  It’s not real.

  *

  A passionate devotee of decluttering, Fi had purged the house regularly over the years, but it was still a gargantuan job to pack and remove our possessions. Even with two professionals to help me, it took all day to relocate the furniture to the short-term storage unit in Beckenham and to box up and deliver to the flat all our clothes and personal items.

  It was raining, of course, as if the gods were sobbing in protest at my wickedness – either that or they were helping keep the neighbours at bay. Very few came out into the downpour to ask what was happening and those who did swallowed my cover story with half an eye on their own dry hallways.

  Only an early-afternoon encounter with Alison taxed my nerves to any dangerous extent.

  ‘Not at work?’ I asked her, concealing my horror at her approach. Rocky was by her side – she’d just been walking him judging by her rain-slicked mac and wellies – and rather than tug her towards her door he settled obediently between us as if for the long haul.

  ‘I only work Monday to Wednesday, remember?’ she said. ‘Or at least I only get paid for those days.’

  Of course. She sometimes picked up the boys for us on Thursdays, Fi returning the favour on Fridays.

  ‘What on earth’s going on here then? You skipping town or something?’

  I gulped. ‘I’m doing some decorating.’

  ‘Decorating? Does Fi know about this?’

  I petted Rocky’s damp ears, praying I didn’t look half as stricken as I felt. ‘No, that’s the point. I’m surprising her.’

  ‘Looks like a serious job,’ Alison said, peering past her dripping hood to my removals van. ‘Why do you need to move stuff out?’

  ‘Because I’m doing the whole thing at once, we can’t move it from room to room.’

  ‘Can’t you just pile it in the middle of the rooms and cover it with sheets? That’s what we always do. Where’s it going?’

  ‘Just to a storage unit on the other side of Beckenham.’

  ‘Wow. This is quite an operation. When’s Fi back from Winchester?’

  ‘Late tomorrow night, but not back at the house until Saturday morning. It’s a very tight schedule.’

  She narrowed her eyes, twisted her mouth to one side. ‘It’s not tight, Bram, it’s impossible. Something on this scale takes weeks. How have you chosen the colours without her input? You’ve gone for rich blues and greens, I hope? None of those greigy mushrooms?’

  Was it normal to keep answering questions like this or would it be more natural to call her out on the interrogation? ‘Alison, you’d have been great in the Gestapo, has anyone ever told you that?’

  She laughed. ‘Sorry. I’d like to think Fi would be on Rog’s case if he pulled a stunt like this.’

  If she had any idea what a stunt it was!

  ‘She’s been wanting to redecorate for ages,’ I said, ‘as I’m sure you know, and an old colleague of mine is starting a new business, giving me a great rate. He’s inside now with his team, cracking on.’

  At this show of enthusiasm, a trace of indulgence crossed her face and she put a damp-gloved hand on my arm. She thought I was trying to win Fi back, had heard about Christmas, perhaps. ‘Bram, I hope this isn’t out of line, but you do know she’s away with someone else right now?’

  ‘I do. M—’ I caught myself. ‘Toby. Have you met him?’

  ‘Not yet. I think she’s waiting . . .’ Tact prevented her from continuing, but she needn’t have worried. Waiting till she’s sure it’s serious, I thought.

  That would be never then, because after tomorrow Casanova would be gone and the pain of a break-up would be lost in the horror of dealing with the loss of her home, the mystery of her children’s father’s disappearance.

  ‘I’ll let you get out of the rain. You want me to pick up Leo and Harry for you later?’ Alison offered.

  ‘Thanks, but I’m good. I’m taking them to my mum’s actually, it’s a bit chaotic here.’ I didn’t mention that I was keeping them off school the next day. The mothers of Trinity Avenue viewed a missed day of primary school as damaging to their offspring’s Oxbridge prospects.

  ‘Well, good luck. I hope it works,’ Alison said.

  I had the (perhaps mistaken) sense that by ‘it’ she meant something more than my decorating project and I indulged in a momentary fantasy of how things might have developed in a parallel narrative. There were people like her and my mother, and maybe Fi’s parents too, who would have supported a reunion – or at least not actively opposed it. If I’d kept my head down and waited it out, if I’d shown Fi I could change . . .

  Soaked to the bone by then, I went back inside and arranged for the last contents of her bedroom to be boxed and removed.

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:44:36

  It was a nicely traditional dirty weekend in Winchester, albeit midweek: sex and room service, punctuated by visits to the cathedral and strolls through the old streets with half a mind on Jane Austen and half on each other.

  I was tempted to tell Toby about the prescription pills, but I reminded myself that Bram was entitled to his privacy and, in any case, this of all times was not the right one to share with Toby my concerns about the mental health of the man who’d attacked him.

  When I spoke to the boys on the Thursday after school, I thought nothing of it when Harry said he had a secret.

  ‘A good secret or a bad secret?’

  ‘A good secret. A surprise.’

  ‘A surprise for Leo?’

  ‘No, not Leo, you!’

  ‘I’m intrigued.’

  ‘Daddy’s—’

  ‘Don’t tell me!’ I said, laughing, but in any case Bram had cut him off at the other end.

  Of course he had. In my naivety, I assumed it was some sort of ‘Welcome home’ cake – Bram was surprisingly willing to supervise baking – probably with blue icing and Maltesers, or failing that a portrait one of them had done of me at school, all sausage fingers and ears down by my shoulders.
/>   I imagined the swearing of secrecy as a lesson in trust, not an abuse of it.

  Bram, Word document

  Even for those who aren’t preparing to abandon their family to the wolves, there is a particular bittersweetness to the act of picking up your children from school.

  I discussed it with Fi once and she said that not only did she know the feeling but she felt it even more keenly than I did (she always said this: it wasn’t that mothers had the monopoly on parental devotion, they just felt it more keenly). She said it’s because small children are so unconditionally happy to see you at the school gate and yet you know, even as they’re bowling into your arms and nuzzling for treats, that one day, maybe not this year or the next but definitely sooner than you’d like, they will be embarrassed to see you there, or angry, or even fearful, because why would you come when you’ve been expressly forbidden unless there’s bad news of one form or another?

  She said, at least it wasn’t an abrupt or vicious blow, but an incremental detachment: every day they need you less until the moment when they don’t need you at all.

  If only Mike had come along later rather than sooner. If only he’d come when my sons no longer needed me, when saying goodbye was not the worst crime of all.

  On our way to my mother’s on the bus, I took a photo of them together and then a second with me between them. Though I’d be destroying the SIM, I planned to keep my phone for music and the small depository of images of the boys. As I took the picture, cajoling Harry into the smile that Leo delivered obediently, I was aware of a young woman watching us from across the aisle, thinking, no doubt, I hope I get a husband like that, a great father.

  Be careful what you wish for, sweetheart.

  I couldn’t stay at Mum’s long because I was meeting cleaners at the house at 6 p.m. Believing they would see me soon enough, the boys tried to dash off, groaning when I reeled them back for a last hug.

  ‘Come here. Before you go in, I want to tell you something.’

  They waited, only half-listening.

  ‘I love you and I will for ever. Never forget that, okay?’

  Then I kissed them in turn.

  They were puzzled, distracted, though the word ‘forget’ sparked an association in Harry, at least: ‘Dad, I forgot to bring my spelling book! I have to learn two from my list every night without fail.’

  I kissed him again. ‘I’ll find it for you and you can catch up at the weekend, okay? And if you can’t, just say you’re sorry and tell Mrs Carver it’s my fault.’

  I could tell he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t want to get me in trouble.

  ‘Can we go?’ Leo said, hearing his grandmother open the biscuit tin in the kitchen. And then she was there in the hallway with us, the open tin angled towards them, and they turned from me and I mouthed my last goodbye and closed the door and that was it.

  The last time I saw my sons.

  As I travelled back to Alder Rise, my brain wouldn’t allow itself to process what this actually was. To do so would be to render myself incapable of fulfilling the rest of the duties before me.

  I had planned to sleep at the flat, but in the event I stayed in the empty house, a sleeping bag spread out on the carpet in Leo’s room. I felt an irrational compulsion to guard it from intruders, though of course none were coming – at least not until the next day, when the legally sanctioned ones would be here. (They would meet their own share of agony these next days and weeks, I suspected. I understood about ripple effects, even if I had no emotion to spare for the outer rings of my own.)

  There was no satisfaction to be had from touring the denuded rooms, no avoidance of the reality of my asset stripping. If anything, staying overnight was a punishment; maybe I hoped I’d die of a broken heart in that sleeping bag on the floor.

  Enough wallowing.

  At ten, I phoned my mother to check that the boys were in bed.

  ‘You’ve just missed them,’ she said. ‘I let them stay up late because they don’t have to get up for school in the morning, but they’re asleep now.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you for everything, Mum. I’m sorry if I haven’t said that as much as I should.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.

  I hung up, thinking there was a comfort in those final words of hers.

  How do you say goodbye to your own mother?

  The answer is, you don’t. Because it’s kinder that way.

  46

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:45:48

  The last time I saw Bram, with my own eyes? It would have been on the last Sunday, Sunday the 8th, the noon handover at Trinity Avenue. Was there anything different about him, anything about his manner that augured betrayal – betrayal on a whole new level?

  There wasn’t. I’m sorry. He briefed me on the boys, asked how I was. I noted, and appreciated, the absence of any mention of Toby. Even now, when I try to make something significant of a small detail, I fail. It was raining and he had no umbrella? That could be a metaphor, I suppose.

  He was just Bram, or at least the creature Bram had become. When he left, I had the same feeling I’d had every Sunday and would no doubt have continued to have had the sky not fallen in: disbelief that he could have done this to us, sadness that he wasn’t mine anymore.

  A weekly interlude of irrational sentiment, I admit. But I wouldn’t be human if that didn’t make me a bit sad.

  Bram, Word document

  Fi, I’d said goodbye to in my own way – that is, without her knowing. (Very defining, you’re probably thinking.) It was Tuesday the 10th and I knew from the diary app that she was doing what she usually did on a Tuesday, which was arriving at Alder Rise Station on the 18.30 from Victoria and going straight home, where her mother would have fed the boys and umpired their latest battle. She emerged from the tunnel on the edge of the commuter swarm, scratching the skin by her right eyebrow, adjusting the shoulder strap of her laptop bag. She didn’t notice me there, didn’t sense me following her down the Parade (she didn’t even glance at the Two Brewers). On the corner of Trinity Avenue, she paused and turned her head. It wasn’t an image that was ‘special’: there was no breeze to flare her clothing, no serendipitously placed light to catch her in memorable silhouette. Nothing about her expression or posture betrayed the emotions she’d confessed to feeling on approaching the house after work: general excitement to see the boys, specific dread that they might be fighting, that her day’s labours were about to begin just as she needed to rest.

  She was exactly as she might have been any day at about that time. A woman with half her life behind her and the other half ahead.

  Which, I know, was an unfair place for me to leave her.

  *

  Before dawn, I returned to the flat for the last time. I placed the keys on the kitchen worktop, along with details of the storage facility and Harry’s spelling book, unearthed at the eleventh hour from one of the boxes.

  No note, no letter.

  All set, I texted Mike.

  As usual, he responded instantaneously:

  As soon as I get confirmation the funds have landed, Wendy will deliver new pp etc to the flat. Cheers.

  Cheers? Twat. I deleted the message, pocketed the pay-as-you-go phone, then picked up my pre-packed bag and left. I took a mini cab from the station to Battersea, where I had the driver wait while I posted a package through Challoner’s letterbox containing two sets of Trinity Avenue house keys (mine and the spares Kirsty kept for us, but not Fi’s or her mother’s – I hadn’t been able to engineer that). I told the driver to take me on to Victoria Station and messaged my mother en route to ask her to kiss the boys good morning for me and wish them a lovely day. I’d already briefed her that she should phone Fi direct to liaise about their return on Saturday morning.

  In the street outside the station, I removed the SIM from my official mobile phone, slipped it into a drain, then re-pocketed the phone. Careful to leave the pay-as-you-go turned on in order to receive the many further messages Mike would be sure
to send me throughout the day, I turned off the ringer and dropped it into the nearest bin.

  Inside, I found a cashpoint and emptied my bank account of its last funds, before buying a ticket for cash and boarding the next Gatwick Express train. It was 7.30 a.m., the incoming throngs already thickening. I guessed Fi wouldn’t be awake yet, even if the charlatan in bed with her was already checking his phone, eager for confirmation of his remarkable change in fortunes.

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:46:45

  ‘You keep looking at your phone,’ I said to Toby, over the hotel breakfast table. ‘Expecting a call?’

  ‘Just an email confirming something for tonight.’

  He had an important function that evening, an advance gathering of the Commission before an announcement the following week of the initial findings of their report. Transport executives from Singapore, Stockholm and Milan would be present, as well as government officials. Though he would need to leave Winchester after lunch, he’d arranged for me to keep the room and return to London as late as I pleased.

  God, what a patsy I was. I remember very clearly sitting there at the breakfast table when he’d gone to the bathroom, staring at the phone lying face down next to his cappuccino and consciously disregarding memories of Polly’s urging me to ‘dig for the truth’.

  That’s the problem with actively disassociating yourself from life’s cynics: you deprive yourself of their good advice.

  Bram, Word document

  At Gatwick, I bought a return ticket to Geneva with cash. (My thinking: a return is less suspicious than a single. On the other hand, is cash more suspicious than card? Then: neither is suspicious. Millions of people fly out of here every week and airport staff have seen every last quirk of traveller behaviour. Get a grip, Bram.)

  I used the self check-in, got through passport control without any trouble, and bought a mix of Swiss currency and euros with the cash I’d amassed.

  With no time left for self-doubt, I proceeded to the gate.

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:47:37

  As it turned out, it was I who got the pesky work call, when we were back in our room after breakfast gathering a few things for a guided tour of Winchester College.