It was madness to pursue this line of thinking. They’d never get a night away. It was decent of her to offer, and in the absence of able and willing grandparents you had to accept all such help gratefully. And it was imperative that he and Jane have some time to themselves, before they lost the knack of confiding in each other altogether. It was almost certainly his fault, whatever ‘it’ was – something he’d said or done or failed to say or do, that had made her withdrawn and distant. A week ago they had even argued. It wasn’t a blazing row, exactly, since they wouldn’t permit themselves to shout in front of the children – more of a forty-watt affair. Still, enough to light up some dark corners.
It had started with a piece of ill-judged intervention from Guy in a stand-off between Jane and Harriet over a plate of uneaten cauliflower cheese.
‘I don’t like it. It looks like sick,’ Harriet was saying, making gagging noises. She had pulverized it with her fork, so that it did indeed resemble something freshly regurgitated. The cauliflower had given up its liquid and the cooling, curdled cheese now swam in a watery slick. Beside her, Sophie, who had finished hers and moved on to bananas and custard, was giggling encouragement. Jane stood over them in her wipe-clean apron, simmering.
Guy, who had been brought up on his mother’s frugal rations, and had to clear his plate just to survive, found this brand of misbehaviour the hardest to stomach. He had only that moment come back from a day-long conference, was still wound up from a crawl around the M25, and hadn’t had time to climb down to the sub-rational, knee-high values of family and home. ‘How dare you waste food when there are children starving?’ he said in his stern, headmaster’s voice, and, before he could stop to reflect, he had swiped the mangled remains of the meal from under Harriet’s nose and tipped it into the bin. ‘Now you can go to bed hungry like half the world and see how it feels.’
‘Thank you, Guy,’ said Jane with heavy sarcasm, over the noise of pounding feet and sobbing. Sophie, who tended to fall in with the prevailing mood, had followed her sister upstairs, also in tears.
In retrospect he could see that weighing in uninvited had been a mistake. He wouldn’t have dreamed of undermining any of his staff in that way but, while the realization was still dawning, he felt bound to fight his corner. ‘I had to do something. You were just standing there,’ he said, aggrieved.
‘It was my quarrel,’ replied Jane frostily. ‘I was dealing with it.’ She snapped on a pair of tight rubber gloves, as if about to perform surgery, and began spraying the kitchen surfaces with disinfectant, pumping the trigger vengefully.
‘Well, I’m sorry. But it drives me nuts to see food wasted.’ It was himself as a hungry child that he was thinking of with such indignation, rather than the starving millions.
‘I said she was to sit there until she’d eaten it all. I was carrying out a threat, for once, like they say in the books.’ Jane was pointing the nozzle of the spray at his chest as if holding him at gunpoint. He resisted the impulse to raise his hands.
‘I didn’t realize that. I was just trying to defuse the situation.’ There was a pause while Jane continued scrubbing the worktops. From the commotion upstairs it sounded as though something had been detonated rather than defused. His lips twitched, but Jane gave the determined frown of someone unwilling to relinquish the momentum of a good row.
‘I’m going up to bed myself anyway,’ she said, peeling off her gloves and leaving them inside out on the draining board like a couple of severed hands. ‘I’ve got a thumping headache.’
Guy glanced at the kitchen clock. It was only seven o’clock and he hadn’t yet eaten. ‘You should go to the doctor about your head,’ he said.
‘I don’t need to go to the doctor,’ Jane retorted, popping two paracetamol out of their plastic bubbles and swallowing them dry. ‘I know it’s only my period.’
‘Well, you could get that checked out while you’re there.’ Over the past few months he had become conscious of a phenomenon whereby Jane’s periods were lasting longer and the intervals between them growing shorter, with acute PMT expanding to plug the gap.
‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ Jane said in a shrill voice. ‘I’m perfectly normal. It’s everyone else who’s weird.’
‘I’m afraid that’s a contradiction in terms,’ said Guy, his sense of logic offended. ‘I mean it’s a perversion of the word “normal”.’
‘Perversion,’ said Jane in a triumphant tone. ‘Exactly!’ And she swept out, as if she’d tied him up in knots with her rhetoric.
Guy stared after her in astonishment. He honestly hadn’t a clue what she was on about. He made himself a cup of tea and a banana sandwich and ate them alone at the kitchen table. When he went upstairs, taking with him a forty-page document from the local education authority, Jane was sitting up in bed reading Jude the Obscure. So much for that headache, he thought, and then felt mean. She gave him a lukewarm smile, indicative of a truce rather than forgiveness, but by the time Guy returned from the bathroom, in the mood to be conciliatory, Jane had already switched off her reading light and had her back to him, feigning sleep.
‘I’ve got this report to read. Do you mind if I keep my light on?’ he asked. It wasn’t even dark outside yet: Guy could still hear the distant shouts of children playing in the street.
Jane sat up. ‘Of course not,’ she said, and proceeded to rummage in her bedside cabinet, finally producing a black sleep-mask of the sort handed out on long-haul flights. This was doubly bizarre as they had never actually been on a long-haul flight, but Guy was too taken aback to question its provenance.
‘It’s all right. I’ll do it in the morning.’ There was no way he’d be able to concentrate with her lying there next to him like Zorro. He moved to tap her on the shoulder, and noticed as he leant towards her a single coarse grey hair sprouting from her parting. It stuck out at an angle, as if shunned by the finer, glossier red hair beneath. It was at this point that he’d decided they had to get away.
It would be fine, he thought, as he locked his office and strolled across the car park to the bike sheds, giving a last wave to Mary in the office. The weather had been perfect – another scorcher – with cloudless skies and only the faintest suggestion of a breeze. Everyone was saying it was going to be a good summer. They would be able to go for a slow walk along the river, have a drink in the garden of some country pub, and watch the sunset. It would be one of those dramatic, flamingo-pink ones; he had it all planned. He would make her laugh as he used to when they first met, when every little thing that happened was the cue for a joke, when wit was a token of love, when mishaps were simply funny, valuable as anecdote fodder for the future.
Not long after they had started going out together Guy had taken Jane to see Tosca at Covent Garden. He wasn’t a great fan of opera, and neither, as it turned out, was Jane, but he had an idea that it would be a Grand Night Out, and just the sort of thing to impress a new girlfriend. As her contribution Jane had brought a box of rose and lemon Turkish delight in icing sugar, which they ate with a tiny plastic prong, like a date fork. She had been most particular to choose something that could be dispatched silently, without crackling or rustling or drawing attention to them in any way. They never saw the final act: when the lights went up for the interval Jane let out a strangulated yelp: her black dress and Guy’s best suit were dredged with fine white powder as if they’d been flour-bombed from the upper circle. Guy even had a clean, stencilled patch on his lap where the programme had been lying. They had laughed so much they’d had to leave, stumbling between the rows of seats, sniggering and apologizing, and leaving sugary hand-prints on the red velvet. That wouldn’t happen now. It would just be dismay, embarrassment, recrimination. ‘Look at my dress! That’ll never come out!’ ‘How am I going to get this suit clean by Monday?’ ‘I knew we shouldn’t have brought that stuff.’ ‘I don’t even like it.’
Of course he didn’t expect to live every day as though falling in love: it would be too much like suffering from p
rolonged vertigo, but it would be nice now and then to recapture that sense of dwelling carelessly in the present. Perhaps they would manage something like it tonight, if they made the effort. There was the scenery to be enjoyed, the food and each other, without responsibilities or distractions. He had even bought her a surprise present – outside birthdays and Christmas, something he hadn’t done for years. It was a little silky thing from Marks & Spencer. He wasn’t sure whether it was a slip or a nightie, but it had looked pretty on the hanger. In any case he hadn’t liked to thumb through the entire range in case someone took him for a pervert – an irrational fear: most of the other shoppers were sheepish men. ‘Can my wife bring it back if it doesn’t fit?’ he had made a point of asking the sales assistant. She probably would, too, he thought. Exchange it for something shapeless in heavy-gauge khaki. Anyway, she would be pleased that he’d bothered.
A saying, long forgotten, sprang into his mind as he cycled down the tree-lined path to the gate. ‘All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.’ He couldn’t remember now who had said it or to what it referred, but he liked its ambiguity. The reassurance was weakened, wasn’t it, by the repetition?
The road into which Guy now turned, usually choked with badly parked cars and women with pushchairs at this time of day, was quiet and empty. Apart from the boy, who was sitting on the wall opposite, listening to a Walkman, legs dangling.
‘Are you waiting for someone?’ Guy called affably, encouraged by the fact that what he’d imagined in a moment of paranoia to be a gun, was just a mobile phone.
The boy looked up warily from under his baseball cap. ‘No . . . Yes . . . Are you the headmaster here?’ He slid down off the wall as Guy approached, now wheeling the bicycle. Behind Guy’s head a sign like a For Sale board on a stake read St Anthony’s C of E Primary School. Headteacher: G.J. Bromelow, M.A.
‘Yes I am,’ he said. ‘Can I help you?’ The boy looked oddly familiar, though Guy was positive they’d never met.
‘You might be able to. My name’s James Osland.’
To Guy’s eternal shame, even the name Osland didn’t ring any bells at first. He had a sudden idea that he was going to be someone from the local paper wanting a quote about the frogs. Or worse, an irate frog-lover.
‘You’re not one of these animal rights people, are you?’ said Guy, glancing at his watch. He’d give him five minutes, maximum.
‘No,’ said the boy, looking bewildered by this accusation. ‘I think I’m your son.’
33
Jane sat in Erica’s sitting room, trying without success to muster the concentration required to play chess with Gregory, while Erica made tea.
It hadn’t been that hard to leave home: her overnight bag was packed in preparation for the trip to Marlow and the girls were already installed at Erica’s, building a camp in the bunk-beds. Harriet had burst into tears when she saw Jane on the doorstep, afraid that she had come to take them home. ‘Go away, Mummy. We don’t want you,’ she had cried, but Jane was too dazed to register the slight.
Guy’s voice had sounded strange and constricted on the phone: ‘Jane?’ She had known it was bad news from the first syllable. She had felt disaster, like the blade of a guillotine, hanging just above her head, and then he’d said the words and it had come rushing down, severing her past from her future, so that nothing would ever be the same again.
‘You missed a good move there,’ Gregory said. ‘You could have had my castle.’
‘Oh, sorry,’ said Jane, whose thoughts were elsewhere.
‘Jane.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Does fuck actually mean what they say it means?’
‘Er . . .’ Jane appealed to Erica, who was just coming in with a tray of tea and cake. She was wearing a black T-shirt and a pair of wide, white linen trousers, which bore the marks of past encounters with food, drink, non-washable pens and grubby infant hands.
‘Yes, more or less,’ Erica said serenely.
‘Oh, gross! I’m not saying that any more,’ said Gregory, pretending to retch.
‘Good. Now why don’t you clear off and play with your computer and leave Jane alone,’ Erica suggested, distributing the tea.
‘Check,’ said Gregory, ignoring her.
‘It’s all right, really,’ said Jane, politely. ‘I need a distraction.’ She had only managed to blurt out a summary of the catastrophe on the threshold while Erica was silencing the doorbell with a mallet, and then the kids had come swarming down. She had been forced to relate the details piecemeal, between interruptions. This wasn’t the sort of matter that could be discussed in front of an eight-year-old. Particularly an astute and inquisitive eight-year-old. An astute and inquisitive eight-year-old who was a pupil at Guy’s school. She slid her queen forward into the jaws of death.
‘Checkmate,’ said Gregory, pouncing.
‘Oh dear,’ said Jane, trying to sound disappointed.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, kindly, ‘there are loads of easier games we can play.’
‘I can hear water running,’ said Erica, inclining her head to listen. ‘Go and see what Will and the girls are up to,’ she instructed him. ‘I don’t want another flood.’ He slouched out, lower lip jutting.
‘So Guy didn’t know anything about this boy until today?’ Erica said, sweeping a pile of comics and lidless felt pens off the couch so that she could sit beside Jane. Yorrick was sitting in what looked like a dog basket at their feet, banging saucepans with a wooden spoon.
‘No. He said not.’
‘And you believe him?’
‘Well, yes. He wouldn’t have been able to keep something like that secret all these years. He’s just not a good liar.’
‘But he’s convinced the boy’s genuine?’
Jane nodded. ‘He didn’t seem to be in any doubt. He did have a one-night stand with the mother when they were students. The timing fits. We didn’t talk for long. He called me from James’s mobile phone – that’s his name, James.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘I don’t know.’ Jane raised her voice slightly. Yorrick was becoming more proficient with his wooden spoon. ‘He wanted to bring James back to meet me, and so that they could talk some more. I said, “Fine, come home, but I won’t be there.”’ She took a mouthful of scalding tea and gasped as it tore at the back of her throat. ‘I just can’t believe something like this can happen to me,’ she said, her eyes streaming with the pain. ‘I mean, he’s had this whole other family longer than I’ve even known him.’
‘Well, it’s not quite like that,’ said Erica. ‘It’s not as if he’s a bigamist.’ She stopped abruptly as Sophie and Harriet bounced in, almost tripping over each other. ‘Can we have a biscuit?’ they chorused, addressing Erica and ignoring their mother’s presence.
‘Not before dinner,’ Jane said automatically.
‘I’m afraid biscuits may well be dinner tonight,’ Erica said, following them out. She took a tin of chocolate bars upstairs and tossed handfuls through the open bedroom door, as though feeding sea lions.
‘What’s a bigger miss?’ Harriet could be heard asking.
‘What am I going to tell the children?’ Jane was thinking aloud as Erica came back into the room and shut the door.
‘Well, I suppose that’s something for you and Guy to work out between you,’ said Erica. ‘If you don’t make a big deal of it, they won’t. And as they grow up, they’ll forget they ever didn’t know.’
Yes, thought Jane. They’ll grow up and the world will intrude more and more, with all its ugliness, and they’ll forget what innocence felt like. ‘My whole marriage has been based on a mistake,’ she said, absent-mindedly dunking a piece of cake in her tea and watching it collapse to the bottom of the mug. From above their heads came the unmistakable sound of innocent children bashing each other. Seconds later there was the thump of feet on the stairs and Harriet appeared in the doorway with a tear-streaked face, her little shoulders heaving. ‘Soph
ie called me a stinky cat!’ she blubbered.
‘Ignore her,’ said Jane, offering open arms for a cuddle, but Harriet, apparently inspired by this advice, took off back upstairs at a run.
‘What was I saying?’ Jane asked, shaking her head. It was impossible to marshal her thoughts into any sort of order with these continual stoppages.
‘I can’t remember,’ Erica admitted. There were more clamorous voices and Harriet and Sophie burst in, jostling and shouting accusations.
‘She hit me!’ Sophie wailed, holding out a bare arm to reveal a pink slap mark.
‘Why did you do that, Harriet?’ Jane demanded. ‘I told you to ignore her.’ The two sisters had drawn apart and were glaring at each other, a pair of frowning trolls in little girls’ clothes. ‘Well, I don’t know what ignore means,’ said Harriet.
‘Listen, why don’t you go and play in the garden,’ said Erica gently, taking both girls by the hand and leading them from the room, ‘while I hide some treasure in the house for you to find.’ Within seconds of Erica throwing open the back door and ushering them outside, all their sorrows were forgotten. A moment later they were joined by Will and Gregory, who set about dismantling the rusting pile of bicycles, scooters, stilts and pogo sticks which sat out on the lawn in all weathers like pieces of modem sculpture. Erica’s garden was not large, but it was well stocked – indeed, crammed – with play equipment picked up from boot fairs and jumble sales, plus a few dangerous home-made items, like a tyre on a rope, which hung too close to the fence, and a slide made from a salvaged piece of motorway crash barrier. In the one flowerbed forget-me-nots and Californian poppies bloomed alongside various non-botanical specimens: punctured footballs, plastic frisbees and pieces of roller skate. The lawn itself was parched from the recent spell of hot weather.
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