Dennis was in the middle of checking his watch. ‘Nick Brown?’ he said, drawing his brows together. ‘He’s gone, hasn’t he?’
‘Gone?’
He nodded.
‘Finished here, certainly. I think he’s gone back to San Diego, hasn’t he, Colin?’
I watched Colin nod. Could feel Ruth’s eyes upon me.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh, right.’
‘Anyway, I think it’s David Harrington you need to speak to about the course. He’s taken over the scheduling and so on. His number should be on your letter. If not, give me a shout and I’ll get it for you.’
We watched them stride off across the shop floor and then I felt the pressure of Ruth’s hand on my arm.
‘Is that true?’ she said.
I shook my head. ‘I knew nothing about it.’ My voice seemed to have gone as well.
‘But – ‘
I got to my feet. ‘I knew nothing about it,’ I said again. ‘Nothing.’ I picked up the box of record cards. ‘Look, Ruth. D’you think you can take this lot downstairs for me? I need to go somewhere and weep for five minutes.’
She too was on her feet then, and jogging back along to my consulting room behind me. I was walking with giant’s strides, the tears sloshing so much in my eyes that I could barely see out of them any more.
Ruth closed the door behind us.
‘Gone?’ she said again. ‘Just like that! But didn’t he – ‘
‘Ruth I told you. I stopped seeing him. How would I know?’
‘Yes, I know, but –’
‘Oh, God, Ruth. I can’t believe it.’ I pulled a wodge of tissues from the box by the sink. ‘I thought I was going to be able to – oh, Ruth –’I wiped the tears away angrily. ‘Oh, God, Ruth! Gone. Just like that. Without even saying goodbye. I feel like I’ve been hit in the stomach.’
‘Oh, Sally,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. But I thought you’d already decided to –.’
‘I had. I have. I thought I’d do the right thing. I thought I’d be strong and – and now – Ruth, he’s gone. I can’t believe it. I mean I know it doesn’t make any difference, but – gone. I don’t even have a photograph of him.’
She put her arms around me.
‘Perhaps it’s the best thing,’ she said. ‘I mean, he was always going to be going sometime, wasn’t he? Perhaps it’ll be easier if he’s not here. Perhaps, you know, with Jonathan, perhaps things will get better.’
I shook my head and blew my nose noisily.
‘Not a chance,’ I said. ‘Not an earthly, Ruth. Things just got a whole lot worse.’
We went out to lunch soon after. I couldn’t eat, but I let her drag me off anyhow. I knew I’d feel marginally better once I’d escaped from work.
‘Bloody hell,’ she said, once I’d finished relating my sorry tale. ‘That’s certainly a shock. Oh, you poor thing. Listen, d’you want to come over and spend the evening with me tonight?’
I shook my head. ‘No, no. You go off to your concert.’
‘Bugger the concert. I –’
‘Ruth, really. I’ll be OK.’
She snorted at me.
‘OK? You call this OK? Look at the state of you! I don’t think I’d be OK if I’d just found out my husband had been shagging some tart for two years!’
Heads turned. I buried my face in the muffin she’d insisted on buying for me and wondered if being in a state was something I could adopt as a fashion statement so that people could get used to it and wouldn’t feel the need to comment on it all the time. ‘It’s not that,’ I sniffed. ‘I mean it’s all ancient history. It doesn’t change anything –’
‘Doesn’t change anything?’ She pushed her empty plate away and plonked her elbows on the table. ‘I don’t see how you figure that one out. It changes everything! I mean, all this time you’ve been banging on about doing the right thing, and he was cheating on you all along.’
‘But it still doesn’t change anything.’ I sounded like a stuck record.
‘Of course it does! It means you don’t have to feel guilty! It means you’re free, Sally. You have every right to –’
‘It’s not about rights, Ruth. It doesn’t work like that. Oh, I know it might work as a handy plot-twist in your stories, but this is real life. You can’t package it up so neatly. Oh, it would be all too easy to decide Jonathan’s affair somehow cancels mine out, but it’s all in the past. The real point is that he didn’t leave me. Didn’t leave us. So it doesn’t make me feel any better about what I’ve done, Ruth. Doesn’t make me feel I’ve somehow climbed a rung higher on the moral ladder. Doesn’t make me feel as if it suddenly gives me the right to leave him. It’s not about leaving him. It’s about tearing my family apart. It’s about the girls.’ I pushed my own plate away and stood up to gather my things together. ‘Besides, it’s all academic. It’s too late now anyway, isn’t it?’
She glared across over the table at me, then snatched up her own bag and stomped out into the walkway ahead of me, batting plastic weeping fig fronds out of her way and scattering startled shoppers.
‘Oh, will you stop all this self-righteous whimpering, girl! Listen to yourself! Your eldest is an adult and your youngest as good as. You carry on as though they were a pair of toddlers! D’you think they’d see it like that? Really? That it would be better for you and their father to hang around together in misery till you’re a pair of shuffling crones scowling at each other just because you’ve got some cock-eyed idea it’ll be better somehow? Better? Credit them with a little intelligence, for God’s sake! Don’t you get my point at all? God, Sally! Sometimes I wonder if you’re inhabiting the same planet as everyone else. You’ve been –’
‘Ruth,’ I said miserably, ‘you’re shouting at me.’
She whirled around and jabbed a finger towards me. ‘I know that, Sally. And I’ll tell you something else. If I didn’t love you so much I’d give you a bloody good slap as well.’
We went back to the office and I had a full afternoon’s testing ahead of me. Back to back patients and the reassurance of sameness. ‘And blink. And look up. And look down. And blink.’ Good. Hypnotic. Robotic. Thought-free. If I had to spend one more minute dissecting my situation I thought I might just lie down and die.
Chapter 29
Not dissecting my situation was beginning to look like the answer. The waves of sadness kept washing over me, but I knew I could cope if I just made an effort to ignore them. Wall to wall happiness wasn’t a right. Thursday. Friday. One day at a time.
But not ignoring them was not an option with Ruth around. She sought me out as soon as I got in on Friday morning, and insisted on knowing how I was. As friends do.
‘Miserable’ I told her. ‘Er, let me see. Heart-broken. Wretched. Empty. Yes, definitely empty. Lost. Sorry for myself. Discombobulated–’
‘Come again?’
‘It means disturbed. Disconcerted. But sounds so much better than either, don’t you think?’ I switched on the light box then went over to hug her . ‘I’ll live, Ruth, I’m sure. Thanks for asking. But end of consultation, OK? So. Tell me. How did last night go?’
Her face changed then. The furrowed brow of the concerned friend being replaced by a barely suppressed smile of happy bemusement.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, grinning. ‘I’m still too discombobulated to tell.’
I smiled too, taking my cue from her. ‘Why?’
She leaned across to shut my consulting room door.
‘There was no one else there,’ she said obscurely.
‘No one else?’
She shook her head. ‘No. Just us. Just Russell and I.’
‘What happened to all his mates then?’
‘There were no mates. Oh, he gave me some clap-trap about how he was supposed to be meeting up with them somewhere, but he didn’t show the least enthusiasm for doing so.’
‘Perhaps he decided it would be too much hassle. Were the band go
od?’
‘I don’t know. We never went.’
‘Never went?’
She shook her head again. She’d put her hair up in a spring clip, and little tendrils of it curled prettily around her chin. ‘We stayed in the pub all evening. And talked. And talked. And, well, talked, basically. Who’d have thought it? Me and him, talking! Anyway,’ she said. ‘That’s what we did. And we’re off for a curry this evening.’ She stood up and smoothed down the front of her skirt. Who’d have thought it,’ she said again. ‘Eh?’
Who indeed. ‘You and Russell?’ I said. ‘Not me, for starters. But now I think about it, why not you and Russell? Do you like him?’
She winked at me as she opened the consulting room door. ‘You know what, Sal? Derr brain and loudmouth and infuriating jackass that he is, I have to say yes, I rather do.’
Amazing how two people can live in the same house, sleep in the same bed, share the same bathroom and yet manage to co-exist on such a superficial level. Amazing, but do-able, obviously. But even as I consoled myself with the fact that I was but one statistic among many I wondered how well or how long we would manage it once Kate had left home as well. Would we begin taking an interest in bonsai? Get a budgie? I had a momentary vision of Jonathan taking up a new sport – bowls perhaps, or koi carp breeding or growing exhibition dahlias like Dennis did. Gradually replacing the possible with the actual. Anything to spare us the uncomfortable business of having to communicate about abstracts and thoughts. We would, it seemed however, have a chance to try it on for size.
‘You absolutely have to let me go, or I’ll die,’ Kate was saying on Saturday morning, in her usual considered and understated way.
She had returned home from sleeping over at Amanda’s with the news that six of them – four girls, plus Carl and Andy – had been invited to spend a week at Janine’s father’s friend’s caravan in Cornwall.
‘Newquay?’ asked Jonathan warily. ‘Isn’t that the place I’ve read about? All surfing and sex, I’ve heard.’
‘Oh, honestly, Dad,’ snorted Kate. ‘Where do you read this stuff? Please let me. I’ve been working so hard. I deserve a break, don’t I?’
As Kate had spent much of the preceding three weeks when she wasn’t out having fun, either in her bed or on her bed or on the floor by her bed or at Amanda’s – on her bed, no doubt – this didn’t hold a great deal of weight as a reason, but as I had been a teenager myself, I knew how debilitating such activities could be.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. He had not been a teenager. Not ever. ‘I’m not altogether sure the idea of you and boys on your own in a caravan is such a good one,’ he said. About as good an idea as his one of being on his own in a flat in London once a week, come to think of it.
‘Dad get real,’ she said. ‘Mum, tell him. I’m almost –’
‘Yes, yes. Nearly seventeen,’ he said testily. ‘As you never tire of telling us. But being nearly seventeen is not the same as being eighteen, and all the while you live under this roof –.’
Kate rolled her eyes. ‘What about Janine’s parents?’ I said. ‘Are they going to be down there in their caravan too?’
‘Over the weekend, maybe, I think. But what’s the big deal anyway? Janine goes down on her own all the time. They’re cool about it. It’s not like we’re going to be having orgies all day. Just hanging out and chilling and –’
Jonathan pulled a face that made it plain he considered the idea of hanging out and chilling to be just another variation on the same unsavoury theme. ‘Quite,’ he said. He picked up his paper. ‘I’ll think about it,’
Kate put her hands on her hips. ‘For, like, how long, exactly? I have to let Janine know by –’
‘Kate, I will think about it. End of discussion.’ He opened the paper and retreated behind it.
Kate tossed her hair back and stuck out her tongue, then flounced off out of the room.
‘I don’t see that it’ll be a problem,’ I said once she’d gone. ‘It’s hardly as if they’re going to be doing anything they haven’t had every opportunity to do already.’
I began clearing the breakfast things. The paper rustled a little. ‘May even have done already, in fact.’ It rustled a little more. ‘Could do perfectly easily anywhere, in fact. Jonathan I think there’s a trust issue here, don’t you?’ The paper was lowered. He looked at me grimly.
‘That’s your department,’ he said.
Which struck me, as I walked up to Kate’s room, as a great deal more pertinent than he knew. I tapped lightly on the door.
‘Well?’ she said. She was – quel surprise – lying on her bed. The poster I’d bought her at Tate Modern was now stuck above the head of it. It had an eerie, sinister quality about it. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to look at it without being reminded of horrible things.
I sat down on the bed beside her. ‘Kate, Carl is your boyfriend. So let’s be honest, shall we? We’re not just talking all mates hanging out together, are we?’
‘Mum,’ she said, groaning. ‘Do we have to do this?’
‘Yes,’ I said tartly, feeling all frazzled and tearful again all of a sudden. Could I really do carpet bowls and floristy and crosswords? Aunt Sally. That was me now. ‘We certainly do, young lady,’ I trotted out anyway. ‘Unless you’re about to tell me you and he spend your time playing scrabble. Kate, this is important. This is –’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, mum. We’ve had this conversation. Don’t ever take drugs and don’t ever get pregnant. I know, OK? I’m not a child, you know.’
‘I know, but –’
‘So you don’t need to give me a lecture on contraception, OK?’
‘I wasn’t about to tell you about contraception, Kate. God, if you don’t know by now you never will. I just wanted to…well. Kate, have you slept with him?’
She looked at the ceiling. ‘Not yet.’
And do you love him?’
She looked at me now. Her face was Drug U Like pink. ‘Mum, what is this?’
‘Well, do you? I just want you to think about it, that’s all. Just want you to, well… you’re only sixteen, Kate. I just want you to think about…well, just don’t be too ready to, well, get yourself too involved with…give yourself to someone if you’re not absolutely sure it’s what you want. You have a long life ahead of you – university, perhaps, and you’ll be meeting other boys, and I just would hate to think of you making a mistake that will –’
‘Mistake? Mum, we’re not talking getting engaged here, you know.’
‘Exactly, Kate. Exactly. Which is why I just think you should –’
‘Mum, it’s only sex.’ She sat up.
‘But it’s not only sex, Kate. Making love is –’
‘Sex, mum.’ She sat up. ‘Look, mum. What exactly are you trying to say? That I should save myself for Mr Right, or something? Be a virgin till I’m thirty? What?’
But I couldn’t articulate what it was I wanted to say, because I didn’t even know. Only that if I tried I’d start crying. So instead I rattled round her room gathering up socks and plates.
‘Just don’t do anything you don’t want to do,’ I mumbled finally.
She snorted. Then grinned. ‘Mum, like, when did I ever?’
On Wednesday morning I had to leave early because I had my induction morning at the Drug U Like area office. I left Kate packed and ready and refrained from starting up any more ditzy conversations with her.
‘It’s cool, OK, mum?’ she said, as I left. Which had to be good enough, I supposed.
The irony wasn’t lost on me that it had been exactly a week ago that I’d been making my way up to London to see Morgan. Exactly a week ago when I last lived in a state of blissful ignorance in the matter of my husband’s soap opera life. Exactly a week ago that everything had seemed so straightforward. Sad, but nevertheless straightforward.
An awful lot of thinking for someone who was supposed to be finding her way to a conference room in a b
uilding the size of a football pitch, and without benefit of a map. Which was probably why it wasn’t until I felt a tap on my shoulder that I was aware that someone was coming up behind me. That and the dense pink carpet of course.
‘Sally?’
To my distress, I had by this time begun to find the exact details of his face a little difficult to recall to mind, but the voice, clear and distinctive in the air conditioned space, was still as recognisable to me as the sound of my own . I spun around, stunned.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You lost?’
Nick. Here. Just standing in front of me. Looking at me. Smiling at me. Here. I swallowed.
‘I thought you’d gone, ’ I spluttered finally.
‘Gone?’
‘Back to San Diego. Dennis said you went back to San Diego last week.’
He shook his head.
‘Next week,’ he said. ‘I go Tuesday. Well,’ He smiled wryly. ‘I say Tuesday, but it’s at some god awful hour in the morning so it might just as well be called Monday. Still, hey – don’t sleep much anyway, eh?’ He raised his eyebrows enquiringly. Then , seeing my expression presumably, let the awkward grin slip from his mouth. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘he’s got his dates muddled. I’ve been here all week. You know. Tying things up.’
‘You are going back then?’
I felt cold. Despite the heat of the morning I could feel goosebumps on my arms. He nodded again. ‘Looks like it.’
‘Oh,’
‘I’ve pretty much decided against going for the HR development job here – well, what with everything… ‘
He shrugged. I shifted the strap on my handbag.
‘Yes. Well. Best thing. Back to see Will, and –’
I ground to a halt, upset beyond measure by this small intimacy. This little affirmation of closeness. I so wanted to hold him. Just once more.
He looked at me carefully. ‘How are you?’
‘OK,’ I said, snapping myself to attention. ‘I’m supposed to be going off on my Management training course in a fortnight. And I’m –’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ he said quietly. ‘I meant how are you?’ He stopped in the corridor. To see.
Straight on Till Morning Page 31