On the other hand, perhaps it’s nothing to do with me at all. They could have had a row just before we arrived, simple as that. I go to finish my gin spritzer and realise the glass is empty. Ben notices.
‘Top-up?’ He gives me a secret kind of smile that makes me want to kick furniture.
‘No, I won’t, thanks.’ There are wine glasses on the table. The last thing I must do tonight is drink too much.
The girls, Caitlin included, have understandably ducked the adult chit-chat and taken themselves off to the living room from where I hear the jangly signature tune of an American teen drama I can’t name coming from the TV.
‘You must be very creative, Hector.’ He’s been telling Ben about his latest projects, including the tree house, and Tessa moves to join them. ‘I admire anyone who has the vision to make something wonderful and unique. And the skill, of course.’ She gushes a bit, which may be the product of the shyness I’ve attributed to her.
‘I enjoy the work, that’s the main thing, don’t you think?’ Hector says. ‘Advertising’s creative, too, though. That’s what you do, Ben, isn’t it?’
‘I work for an ad company but I’m more on the accounts side,’ Ben says, with a reluctance that suggests the last thing he wants to do is talk about himself. As if he ever did.
Tessa calls the girls, and she and Ben ferry dishes to the table. Caitlin suddenly turns shy and wants to sit between me and Hector rather than with Zoe, Hazel, and Kitty.
Tessa smiles. ‘Sit wherever you like, sweetheart.’
‘Yes, I will,’ Caitlin says, causing Kitty to harrumph at her across the table. I send my eldest daughter a warning look.
Every taste has been catered for. There are vegetarian quiches, cold roast chicken breasts, a platter of ham, a steaming bowl of cheesy pasta, and a pyramid of dainty filo parcels with a variety of fillings.
‘The ones this side have chilli in them,’ warns Tessa. Accompanying the main dishes are bowls of salad, French beans, garlic and plain bread, and, to the girls’ delight, a huge dish of golden chunky chips.
‘Tessa, this looks wonderful,’ I say. ‘What a lot of trouble you’ve gone to!’ Now who’s gushing?
She looks pleased. ‘No trouble really, it’s all easy stuff. Anyway, I enjoy entertaining, when I get the chance.’ She throws Ben a loaded look which I can’t interpret. He responds, if you can call it a response, with a blank stare, and I’m thinking, don’t spoil this now. Let’s just get on and have a nice evening.
And we do. The talk flows easily, Ben the most taciturn of us all but I can’t say he’s unfriendly. The girls chatter away to each other, and by the time Tessa brings puddings – three types plus ice cream – Caitlin has moved herself to be next to Zoe, whom she has taken a liking to, and we’ve all shuffled good-naturedly round to accommodate her.
Tessa, her pale complexion turning faintly pink, raises her glass of sparkling water. ‘To family and friends.’
The adults raise their glasses in response, but for some reason, nobody repeats the sentiment.
‘That went well, didn’t it?’ Hector says, as we trail home in the semi-darkness.
There’s a smidgeon of relief in his voice that tells me he wasn’t looking forward to the evening any more than I was. My own sense of relief centres around Ben having behaved himself, which he more or less did, and Tessa being the perfect hostess and not letting her superior side slink through the cracks.
‘It was fine.’ I link my arm through Hector’s. ‘I shan’t want any more to eat for a fortnight, though.’
‘Or drink.’ Hector pulls a face.
‘God, I didn’t drink too much, did I?’
‘Of course not. Why do you say that?’
‘I only wondered.’ I’d not had any difficulty controlling my expression and body language, but that’s only my view from the inside.
‘You said we mustn’t say God,’ says Caitlin, breaking away from her sisters to skip back to me.
‘You’re quite right, love. I’m sorry.’
Kitty looks behind at us. ‘One rule for them, one for us.’ But she’s good-natured in the way she says it, and I know she’s enjoyed the evening.
‘Zoe drove me nuts!’ Hazel says, her face dark as rainclouds. ‘Tayler this, Tayler that. Like Tayler’s the only person in school who matters. La, la, la.’
‘Yeah, I noticed that, too,’ Kitty says casually, adding another stick to the fire.
Hector glances at me. ‘Let it go,’ I whisper. ‘It’s normal schoolgirl stuff. They were fine, Hazel and Zoe.’
Hazel overhears the last bit. She shrugs. ‘Zoe’s okay, I guess. She’s coming over one day next week, after school, if that’s all right.’
‘Of course it is,’ I say. ‘She can stay for dinner if she likes. Just let me know which day.’
And so, our social evening with the Grammaticus family ends on a pleasant note, and I have emerged unscathed.
Fourteen
TESSA
I watched her the whole time she was in my house. She wouldn’t have known it, but every word she spoke, every move she made, every flicker of her eyes depicting her innermost thoughts… I was there. True, I couldn’t interpret every tiny thing, but what was not clear I made an educated guess at.
And Ben, I watched him, too. Watching Ben is my specialist subject. He still holds a candle for her, would get her into bed as soon as look at her. And Fran? Oh yes, Ben still holds the same appeal for her. They hardly spoke directly to one another – whether by design or whether it’s a habit they can’t shake off, I don’t know. Whatever, the effect is the same. But it wasn’t hard to miss his glances when he thought she wasn’t looking, and the way he refilled her glass, almost as an afterthought. Casual, too casual. Oh, he fancies the pants off her, no doubt about it.
This, of course, was the main reason I brought them together, as a kind of test. I’ll be watching Fran even more closely now, while I consider my next move. The ultimate strike, my finale, I will save. She isn’t ready; her head has not yet been invaded to my satisfaction, her nerves not strung out to near breaking point, as mine once were.
If Fran knew all this, if Ben, too, realised how much I know, how much I understand, they would know that my actions are not only for my own sake but for theirs. The pair of them need saving from themselves as much as from each other.
Ben rescued me from my life as it was, and I will always rescue him. That is the deal.
Ben is quiet after the Olivers have left. He moves silently from dining room to kitchen, washes the glasses and the best china by hand, putting the rest in the dishwasher. I watch his face reflected in the darkened glass of the kitchen window, his expression pensive. This is one time when, if I was handed a key to unlock his thoughts, I would throw it away.
‘Leave that.’ I wrap my arms around him from behind, pressing my face to his back, inhaling his warmth through the cotton shirt. ‘I’ll finish it in the morning.’
He swivels round and smiles. ‘Nearly done. You go on up and I’ll follow you.’
It’s still early, not even half past ten. Zoe is in bed; she always falls asleep with her earphones in.
The message is clear.
We make love with indolent passion. I turn away straight afterwards so as not to see the distant look in Ben’s eyes.
Fifteen
FRAN
It’s almost midsummer’s day, although you’d never know it to look at the rain bucketing down, and I feel chilled to my bones. I pray to goodness it isn’t like this when we go to Cornwall in August, otherwise we’ll never hear the end of it from the girls.
Hector and I finally got round to having a proper discussion about the holiday, batted various options to and fro, examined our finances until we were squint-eyed, and then looked at one another and said, ‘Cornwall it is, then.’
‘We’re not very adventurous, are we?’ I said, as we bagged what seemed to be the last available cottage in the whole of the county, fingers crossed that it really is as cl
ose to the beach as it says on the website.
Hector gave me a wry look and slapped down the lid of the laptop. ‘What do you suggest? Lug three daughters and a houseful of stuff on board a ferry to some cheapo French campsite with smelly toilets? Interrail across the Alps with ten euros and a toothbrush between us?’
I laughed. ‘Now you’re being daft. I’d hate that sort of thing, we all would. At least the girls still think Cornwall’s cool, despite the moans and groans.’
We will have a good time; we always do. Except this year I can’t seem to summon any enthusiasm for holidays, or anything at all that doesn’t involve the familiar, the tried and tested. Our village, the vets’, the schools, and home, are all I need right now. Despite what I said to Hector when we were looking at holidays, I don’t want adventure.
Does that sound strange, coming from somebody who was clearly once in need of adventure and took the biggest risk of her life for it? I expect it does. But that’s me, a kaleidoscope of contradictions. Being with Ben made me lose my focus; sometimes I think it’s gone for good. Scary thought.
Mum Skypes one evening when Hazel and Caitlin are in bed and Hector has gone to collect Kitty from a friend’s house outside the village. Seeing my mother beaming at me from the screen reminds me there is one adventure I would jump at – a trip to New Zealand. But actually, visiting my sister and parents would be just another way of coming home, so perhaps not so bold.
‘How are you, Francesca?’ she begins, her brown eyes identical to mine peering out at me. ‘You look peaky. Are you looking after yourself? Are you getting enough fresh air?’
I laugh, and lower my glass of wine, out of shot. Fresh air was always Mum’s answer to everything – along with nutritious, home-cooked food, of course. When Natalie and I were children, at the first sign of lethargy or a sniffle we were cocooned in woolly layers, socks pulled up, hats pulled down, and either sent out to the garden to play, with instructions not to come in within the hour, or frogmarched to the park.
We were generally healthy children, rarely succumbing to whatever ailment was doing the rounds and hardly ever off school, so I daresay our mother knew her stuff. One of my failings as a parent is that I seem incapable of following suit, preferring to cave in to the duvet-on-the-sofa scenario rather than face dejected looks and loaded sighs. I’m referring to Kitty and Hazel here; Caitlin resorts to tears, not yet having learned her sisters’ more subtle pathways to the molten centre of my heart.
I hasten to reassure my mother I’m fine, and if I look peaky it’s only because, apart from the essential trips, the weather has confined me to the house for days. Mum, I am pleased to note, looks positively glowing and I tell her so.
‘Do I? I’ve not got my makeup on yet either.’ She chuckles, then falls serious. ‘Francesca, I do miss you, darling. I miss you all.’
‘Oh,’ I say, wrongfooted by the sudden switch in tone. ‘Well, it’s only natural. I miss you both as well, but you’re in the right place. We are all in our rightful places.’ I smile, more at my dumb response than anything. My mother smiles back and my heart judders.
This is so not what I need right now. Mum is the one who is guaranteed not to dwell on the unchangeable, nor to become over-emotional. My father has more trouble hiding his feelings, as I do. Except you learn to do that out of necessity, of course.
‘Is Dad there? Natalie and the boys?’
‘Natalie’s at work, the boys are at school.’ Of course they are; I remember it’s around ten in the morning where they are. ‘They’ll call another time, I’m sure,’ Mum says. ‘Ah, hang on, here’s Dad.’
My father’s kind face appears on screen, behind Mum’s. ‘Hey there, Sunshine! What’s new?’
Mum and I giggle. ‘What is he like?’ Mum says. She’s seems to have cheered up, for which I am thankful, for both our sakes.
I ask what they’ve been doing, then give them a rundown of the girls’ activities, Hector’s boyish passion for building tree houses – he’s gathered two more commissions by word of mouth since the first one – and relate an anecdote about amusing incidents at the vets’ surgery, exaggerating slightly for comic effect, as you do.
When the screen has turned black, I sit, wine glass in hand, listening to the silence in the house, my ear tuned for the welcome sound of Hector’s car, and try to analyse the way I’m feeling. A little sad, partly because of what my mother said, but by no means entirely because of that. Something else, harder to pinpoint, signified by a dragging sensation in my gut; a generalised anxiety that I can’t shake off, as if something bad is about to happen.
Was it an omen, that feeling? I don’t believe in such things. But the very next day I have cause to ponder the outlandish possibility that I’ve somehow been endowed with the dubious gift of second sight.
The rain has finally cleared, and a washed-out blue sky appears through the windscreen as I drive towards Honeybee Hall. Unlike Oakheart Academy, parking is easy in this countryfied area and I slot into a nearby space and join the horde at the gate. Caitlin’s little face shines a welcome as she spots me, her arms full of rucksack, PE kit bag, lunch box, and trailing raincoat. She asks for music in the car – it seems to calm her, help her settle after her busy day. She chooses her favourite album, Take That – made before she was born, which never fails to shock me – and we sing along as we go.
Parked in front of our garage, I gather up Caitlin’s possessions abandoned on the back seat in her eagerness to be home, and as I follow her through the front gate, I see her stop and bend down.
‘Oh look, Mummy!’
She points to a badger, a large one, lying across the lower of the two steps leading up to our front door, its nose nudging the concrete, fur parted and clumped by moisture, a glue of mud and leaves on its hind quarters.
‘Is he dead?’ Caitlin looks up at me, her eyes full of curiosity. Dead animals don’t upset her; she’s pragmatic about that kind of thing.
I put a hand on her shoulder and usher her round the badger and up to the door before she can start poking at the poor thing. Goodness knows what germs it harbours.
‘Yes, he’s dead.’ That much is obvious. I can’t see any sign of injury, but that’s often the case when an animal has been hit by a car – my first thought.
It’s not unheard of for a badger to wander down from the woods, but this is a no-through-road, a dead end. We don’t have passing traffic, and the residents drive slowly out of necessity because of the pitted, unmade road surface. In any case, if it had been knocked down, surely it would be at the roadside instead of coming to rest virtually on our doorstep.
The anxious feeling returns ten-fold, sending my heart crashing against my chest wall. I see dead and dying animals all the time, but it’s the context that’s changed. I don’t like this. I don’t like it one bit.
‘What shall we do with him?’ Caitlin says, her tone bright and conversational.
My question, too. After a moment’s thought, I fetch a pair of rubber gloves and a bin liner and unceremoniously shovel the animal into it. I knot the bag at the top and take it to the garage, Caitlin in close attendance.
‘There. Let’s leave him for Daddy to see to, shall we?’
‘Okay.’ Caitlin skips back indoors. ‘Mum? How did the badger die?’
‘I expect he got knocked down by a car,’ I say, though I still doubt this.
‘In that case, why isn’t there any blood on him, or any squashy bits? I didn’t see any blood, did you? Unless it was underneath him.’ She sounds almost disappointed.
‘I have no idea, Caitlin.’ I use my motherly-but-firm voice to allay any further questions. I’m too shaken to deal with any more right now.
Sixteen
TESSA
‘What did she want, the barmy woman?’
I’m so thankful Ben didn’t stir himself to answer the door to Mirabelle Hayward. Trust her to call on a Saturday. Trust her to call at all; I hadn’t factored a home visit into my dealings with her.
; ‘Nothing. Well, something, obviously. Nothing I could help her with.’
‘What, though?’ Ben’s unusual curiosity riles me, but I try not to snap.
‘She cornered me in the high street the other day, asking if I thought we needed a traffic calming scheme. It wasn’t just me; she was stopping everybody.’
‘But she happened to find out where you lived.’
‘She already knew. Everybody knows Rose Cottage. It’s the prettiest house in the village. By default, they know who lives in it.’
I’m winging it now, but by the half-satisfied, half-bored expression on Ben’s face, I’m convincing enough. I don’t remember telling Mirabelle directly where I lived, but obviously I must have mentioned it in some form or other, during our conversation in the café. Probably while I was busily feigning intimacy in order to gain her confidence.
‘My reputation goes before me. People know about the charity work I do. I expect Mirabelle interpreted that as community spirit. I told her I didn’t want to get involved.’
Ben slopes off to the kitchen and I hear the makings of lunch getting underway. It’ll be just the two of us. Zoe has gone to her new friend’s house, Tayler, the one I don’t like much. I take the opportunity to slip upstairs and have another dip into Caitlin Oliver’s pink notebook.
Mummy comes to meet me from school EVERY day. When she comes out of work. I REALLY LIKE Mummy meeting me. I feel best when it is Mummy. Daddy would be at his workshop then anyway. He is very busy making his wooden things. Mummy is never too busy to come and get me.
A loyal daughter. Mother-fixated, but they are at that age. Though, come to think of it, Zoe used to like her father meeting her from junior school. Seemed to think he was more of a status symbol than me. Or perhaps it was the rarity value. Predictable mother, always at her beck and call. Charismatic Dad, taking a well-earned break from an exciting job in the big city. Turning the heads of all the mums at the school gate, without even noticing. Or pretending not to. Which parent would you choose?
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