Every Vow You Break

by Julia Crouch

  ‘Bella! There you are! Mum’s going mental.’

  It was bloody Olly. He had spotted Bella through the fence and now he was calling right across the pool, his accent and his scolding tone causing every head to turn. Bella looked up and saw some of the mothers – all scrubbed complexions, no make-up and middle-aged before their time – look at each other and tut as Olly dragged Jack all the way around the pool towards her.

  ‘Want a swim, want a swim, want a swim,’ Jack chanted, tugging at Olly’s hand and leaning dangerously close to the water.

  ‘Shut the fuck up, Jack,’ Olly said, causing a collective intake of breath in the pool enclosure.

  Bobby blew his whistle and pointed at Olly. ‘No cursing.’

  ‘Chill, dude,’ Olly said.

  ‘Shut up, Olly,’ Bella hissed.

  ‘Oh look,’ Olly said, seeing Sean, who sat coolly eyeing him from the shallow end. ‘So this is where lover boy hangs out. Should’ve guessed.’

  ‘Give it a break,’ Bella said, under her breath. She really didn’t want him making a scene.

  ‘And Bella in her itsy-bitsy bikini.’ Olly leaned over Bella and snapped the strap on her top.

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘Mum’s incandescent. You said you’d only be gone for a quick swim and that was hours ago.’

  ‘Shit.’ Her promise to her mum had slipped so far out of Bella’s mind that it shocked her.

  ‘Anyway, she says might as well forget about the morning now. But you’d better be around this afternoon to help her clean up. You’ve got to look after Squirt now, so she can get on. He’s been a right pain in the arse too, because we can’t find Cyril.’

  ‘Why can’t you look after him?’

  ‘Things to do, people to see. And I had him all morning.’

  That Bella doubted. He looked like he had fallen out of bed a minute ago, all uncombed, unwashed and bum-fluffed round his chin.

  Olly handed Jack to Bella, who sat up and pinned him between her knees so that he couldn’t escape to the water.

  ‘She says you’re not to let him in the pool on his own, do put his sun cream on after and don’t take him in without his armbands on. The stuff’s all in here, and there’s a snack which he’s to have in about an hour.’ Olly threw a bag at Bella. ‘She says meet them in the diner for lunch at one. All the poofs and ponces are going to be there. Ta-ta.’

  He turned on his heel and left, giving Sean the finger as he passed behind him. If it hadn’t been for the seething mass of small bodies in the water underneath Sean’s platform, he would probably have pushed him in. But even Olly wasn’t that psycho.

  ‘Want a swim,’ Jack said, trying to escape from her legs.

  ‘All right. Just hold on a sec.’ Bella blew up the armbands and fitted them on him. Taking him by the hand – she loved the way he slipped his index finger into her fist – she led him to the shallow end, to get him into the water.

  ‘No unapproved flotation devices!’ Bobby blew his whistle, and clambered off his ladder, lumbering over to prevent Bella from letting her little brother go in the knee-deep water wearing dangerous English armbands.

  Thwarted, Bella thought. As ever.

  Seventeen

  ‘WE’RE DUE TO TAKE THE CAR BACK THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW,’ Lara said.

  ‘We can’t afford to keep it,’ Marcus said.

  Lara looked up at the wooden ceiling-fan as it swept round and round, stirring up the bacon-scented air in the Trout Island Diner.

  ‘How will we manage though, out here without a car?’

  ‘Something’ll turn up.’

  The time was quarter past one, and there was still no sign of the kids. Lara tried to relax. It was a rare moment when she and Marcus were together without anyone else around, but she was having difficulty finding things to say to him as they sat over two cups of horrible percolated coffee.

  ‘This is disgusting,’ she whispered to Marcus.

  ‘Shhh.’

  ‘Isn’t America supposed to be the home of good coffee?’

  The diner was furnished with chunky pine tables and chairs, with vinyl-padded booths running down one side, where Lara and Marcus had been seated. Near to them sat an elderly man with a glass of lemonade who looked up and nodded when they walked in, but who had since returned to his tractor catalogue. There were only two other customers: a young man in double denim slumped on a bar stool at the counter and a large woman of indeterminate age, dressed entirely in shades of brown – including a tan baker boy cap – who sat with her back hunched towards them over by the rear wall.

  ‘You must be the English folks then,’ the waitress said as she handed them two laminated menus.

  ‘That’s right.’ Marcus leaned over, turned on his smile and held out his hand. ‘Marcus Wayland, pleased to meet you. And this is my wife, Lara.’

  ‘Well hello! I’m Leanne,’ she said, patting her matted blond curls. ‘The others should be here any minute.’ She bustled off to her spot behind the counter to carry on her business of drying cups with a pristine tea towel.

  Marcus had arranged with James to join the cast of Set Me on Fire! for lunch. Part of the Trout Island Theatre Company deal, to compensate for the low pay, was that the actors had one meal a day in the diner and the company picked up the tab.

  Lara scanned the menu, which seemed to offer little else beyond fried meat, refined carbohydrates and sugar. ‘There’s nothing here I really want to eat,’ she said. She also had not the slightest appetite after the shock of the night before. Even her run had failed either to steady her nerves or to make her hungry.

  ‘Come on,’ Marcus said. ‘When in Rome.’

  ‘I’d be happy to tackle a Roman menu. But what is all this? Biscuits? With gravy? Sounds vile.’

  Lara was, it had to be said, in a foul mood. She was cross at Bella for disappearing to the swimming pool that morning, at Olly for not waking up until gone ten, and at Marcus for sitting around with his script when he had been the first to agree that a massive clean-up of the house was needed. And all of this mess of family now stood underscored by Stephen’s what-if. With those words came the hint of an alternative life which, had it not been for four cells joining and splitting, might have been hers.

  She had tried to work her irritation out on the house. So the kitchen was now clean enough for food preparation, the wooden floor and paintwork in the vast, dusty living room had been washed down and the rug-painted Chekhovian floorcloth beaten into submission over the porch banister.

  She had been on her knees, rolling it up to take outside, when Marcus wandered in from the porch swing seat, script tucked comfortably under his arm, to get a glass of water.

  ‘Aren’t you getting a bit carried away?’ he had said.

  But the undercurrent to the day had been, and remained, Stephen Molloy. She had always suspected that when he left so suddenly he had taken a piece of her with him. Now she realised his departure had simply put a part of her to sleep, to lie dormant all this while. And that part had been just woken up. Not gradually, like a princess after a long sleep, but slapped to consciousness, like a baby pulled blue from its mother.

  Everything now was coloured by that awakening.

  She saw, for example, that the reason she hadn’t let Marcus touch her recently was because she couldn’t bear the lily-livered sight of him. The way he had behaved when she had told him of her recent, blighted, pregnancy – banging his head, crying, not even considering the possibility she might want to let it continue into a baby – had led her to view him less as a man and more as another child that she had to look after. And she couldn’t make love to a child. That would be wrong in every way.

  The bleeding had provided a good excuse. Every night she would slip into bed beside him in her armour of underwear, pads and long T-shirt. Even now, as the flow seemed to have stopped, she hoped to spin it out for a couple more weeks.

  But today, in the glare of Stephen’s what-if, she couldn’t imagine how she could ever touch Mar
cus again.

  She watched him across the booth as he read the diner menu, a sunburned pinkness vibrant between his freckles and gingery beard growth. What once had been confident and attractive in him had decayed into a sort of paranoid vanity. She remembered his wooing of her – she so young and he so apparently sophisticated and seasoned. She so believed he could show her the world in all its glory that she handed herself entirely over to him.

  How she had adored him. His hair seemed full of flame back then. After their fourth month together, he got down on one knee and proposed to her. And she had accepted. Just like that, swept away by the romance of it all. The wedding followed in under four weeks.

  Lara realised now that she should have asked herself why, at thirty-one years of age, Marcus hadn’t shown a bit more sense.

  It was only at their small, almost secret, registry office wedding – Lara hadn’t invited her parents who, having met Marcus just the once, had amply implied that he was too old and not good enough – that she discovered the truth.

  His old school friend Rufus played best man. It was the first time Lara had met him. Where Marcus’s public-school demeanour had mutated into a generic actorliness, Rufus, a barrister in London, had retained every ounce of plummy hooray ingrained into him at Stowe.

  ‘I’m so pleased for you both,’ Rufus said at the budget reception in the Dirty Duck as he kissed Lara tipsily on the cheek. ‘I thought he was doomed to bachelordom after Sophie.’

  ‘Sophie?’

  ‘You don’t know about Sophie? Oops,’ he said, throwing a peanut into the air and catching it in his teeth. ‘You’d better ask Marcus. Me and my big mouth, eh?’

  ‘Who’s Sophie?’ she asked that night as they lay in bed in Marcus’s digs. They could afford neither the time nor the money for a honeymoon, since Marcus was in the middle of a run.

  He quite literally jumped.

  ‘Who told you about Sophie?’

  ‘Rufus.’

  ‘The bastard.’

  ‘He didn’t mean it. It just sort of slipped out.’

  ‘My arse it did.’

  ‘Who is she, then?’

  And, reluctantly, Marcus told her about the girl he had lived with since drama school and who, just eight months earlier, had left him for a younger man, an actor in the play she was starring in.

  ‘It was bloody at the time,’ Marcus said, aiming for sympathy. ‘I even thought about finishing it all. But,’ he added quickly, ‘in the end it was a good thing. Because if it hadn’t been for her going off with that little prick upstart, I wouldn’t have met you, and we wouldn’t be here now.’

  Lara might have been only a green nineteen, but she could see how things stood, and she had to hold her hand from slapping her forehead for being so stupid and so naive. Over the next couple of weeks she tried to convince herself that Marcus had fallen head over heels in love with her, but she couldn’t escape the thought that she was in fact his way of telling Sophie that he didn’t care, and that he could pull a young one too. Lara was just his rebound option.

  And it was just at that low point that the youthful Stephen Molloy came to Stratford, to join Marcus in the lower ranks of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

  ‘Ah, here they are,’ Marcus said, looking up from his menu as the buzzer in the diner door sounded and Jack pulled Bella in, followed by Olly. From the look of it, the twins had been arguing again.

  ‘Where on earth did you get to?’ Lara asked, moving along to make a space for them.

  ‘I went to find Olly—’ Bella started, but her brother cut in over her.

  ‘Lover boy was at the pool, in fact,’ Olly said, sitting down next to Marcus. ‘She couldn’t drag herself away.’

  ‘That’s such bollocks,’ Bella said.

  ‘Fella on the map?’ Marcus smiled up at her. ‘Watch out you don’t follow in your mother’s footsteps, or you might wind up with someone like she got stuck with me!’

  Bella said nothing and sat down, at the opposite end of the table to Olly.

  ‘He’s caught the sun,’ Lara said, looking down at Jack’s bright red cheeks.

  ‘I put sun cream on him after our swim,’ Bella said. ‘Olly should have put it on him before he took him out.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Olly said.

  ‘Well hello there,’ Leanne the waitress said, bringing a pitcher of icy water and three more menus to their table. ‘Pleased to meet you. How you doin’?’ She filled everyone’s glasses.

  Bella and Olly both just sat there, not responding, glaring at the red-checked vinyl tablecloth. Olly’s fingers drummed against the table top.

  ‘Stop that,’ Marcus said.

  ‘They’re all good,’ Lara said to Leanne, feeling she had to translate and intervene on behalf of her moody offspring.

  ‘Cool! I’ll be back in a second to get your order before those other guys arrive and the kitchen goes crazy. Just whistle when you’re ready.’

  ‘Mum, he dumped Jack on me and disappeared,’ Bella said, once they were on their own again.

  ‘Oh, Olly,’ Lara said.

  ‘I was hanging with my homies,’ Olly said.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Marcus said in an exaggerated English accent.

  ‘My dudes,’ Olly went on.

  ‘Morons, you mean,’ Bella said. ‘They look like a bunch of hillbillies.’

  ‘Keep your voice down, Bella,’ Lara said, looking around. ‘Cultural sensibilities.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Bella said.

  ‘Now then, what are you lot having?’ Marcus clapped his hands together. ‘Blueberry stack, bacon and maple syrup? Pizza burger and home fries?’

  In the name of research they each ordered a different dish from the menu. Leanne was just making her way across the diner with their plates when the door burst open and the place suddenly sprang alive with the sound of actors high from release from a morning notes session.

  ‘I can’t believe James didn’t notice that corpse,’ someone said.

  ‘I’d rather stick pins in my eyes,’ another person shrieked.

  ‘Watch out,’ Marcus said. Then he got up and swept across the room towards James, who was resplendent in a vintage rose satin smoking jacket over his customary white linen, a tan leather satchel bulging with papers and books tucked under his arm.

  ‘James darling,’ Marcus said. ‘How were the notes?’

  ‘Theatre bollocks alert,’ Olly muttered as Leanne put five laden plates down on the Wayland table.

  ‘Thank you,’ Lara said.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Leanne said, casting a stern eye over the twins, who were, it was clear, not doing politeness today. On her way back to the kitchen, the crowd of Trout Island players hailed her with the familiarity of tourists greeting natives.

  ‘There’s nothing green at all here,’ Bella said, looking at the food.

  ‘So that’s what biscuits are. Sort of savoury scones,’ Lara said, poking at the fluffy white objects on Olly’s plate.

  ‘They’d better be savoury, with all that chicken on the side,’ he said.

  ‘I put a rocket up their arses,’ James said to no one in particular. He took his place on the banquette next to theirs, and the other actors filled the remaining booths. ‘Waylands, did you meet Tony Marconi last night? He’s your Banquo, and he’s Heavy Dan in the musical.’

  ‘Ah, so this is your daughter then, Marcus?’ Tony said, shaking Bella’s hand. ‘We met last night, remember? Down by the pond?’

  Bella blushed and looked away.

  ‘And didn’t I spy you at the pool this morning while I was doing my fifty laps?’ he winked. ‘Hanging out with our best boy?’

  ‘Too right you did.’ Olly leaned back and unsmilingly watched his sister squirm.

  James stretched his arm up and waved. ‘Leanne, my darling, do you think I could have a coffee? Thank you my sweet.’

  Lara thought she saw the shoulders of double denim guy at the counter stiffen at the sound of James’s camp twang.

  ‘Oh my Gawd
, darling, what in hell’s name is that?’ Betty said, pointing to Lara’s plate as she squeezed in next to her. Today she had on a combination of lumberjack shirt, baggy Levis, five o’clock shadow and full high hair and make-up. She looked like Jane Russell on testosterone.

  ‘It’s supposed to be macaroni salad,’ Lara said. ‘But it looks more like a plate of curdled mayonnaise.’

  ‘Trout Island Five, here you come,’ Tony Marconi called over from his seat among a group of excitable young actors.

  ‘Trout Island Five?’ Lara said.

  ‘The number of pounds an actor gains working a show here,’ Betty explained. ‘We earn in calories.’

  ‘You don’t happen to know if we left Jack’s teddy bear at your place last night?’ Lara asked her.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you. The place looked like a bombsite when we left it this morning,’ Betty said. ‘I’ll ask Trudi to keep an eye out – she’s working her magic there all day today.’

  ‘Can’t we cancel tonight? My head,’ the tousle-haired boy next to Tony said, his heavy eyelids drooping over bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Doctor Theatre, darling,’ James said. ‘You’ll be marvellous. Thank you Leanne, thank you sweetness,’ he said as Leanne went around the tables pouring glasses of iced water.

  ‘You all drank far too much last night, children,’ Betty said. ‘You need to show a little more restraint. A little self discipline.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say,’ a long slender girl who looked like a young Natalie Wood said.

  ‘And what is that supposed to mean?’ Betty drew herself up and took a regal sip of her water.

  ‘You’ve had all those years of being the wild thing,’ the girl said.

  ‘All those years? All those years? What is that supposed to mean?’ Betty said. ‘You don’t know the half of it, honeys. I have worked harder with my little finger than you have with all your bodies put together. Discipline is my middle name, sister.’

  This set Olly off sniggering and Betty’s nostrils flared. It was hard to tell if she had meant her outburst as a risqué joke or a serious telling-off. Lara didn’t much understand theatre people, and all this noise and clamour was too much for her. She wished she were back alone in the dusty house, daydreaming and putting things to rights.