by Sara Foster
8
The car in which Chloe and Alex sat in silence formed one tiny scale of the huge glittering snake that coiled around the M25 and slithered ever so slowly forwards.
They hadn’t spoken since Alex picked Chloe up from the station after work. Chloe was regretting that they had promised the weekend to her mother. On a non-travelling Friday evening they would meet at the station and spend a couple of hours in the local pub, indulging in idle chitchat with friends and neighbours they encountered there, and then head home for either a takeaway or an easy meal – pasta and salad, or something similar. They’d crack open a bottle of wine, sit companionably on the sofa, shuffling positions every now and again, limbs draped comfortably over each other’s bodies. She would perhaps put her hand up his shirt and rub the flat circle of hair on his stomach, and he would slide his hand up her blouse and cup her breasts and stroke her nipples. They’d stay that way until one of them couldn’t take it any more and made a definite move…
Had they really done that only last Friday? Just one week ago everything was normal. Just one night ago she’d sat at her dresser and stared at herself in the mirror, feeling so wonderfully thrilled with the way things were going. Twenty-four small hours later and here they were, wrapped within a leaden silence punctuated only by honking horns.
She looked across at Alex. He was grim-faced, one hand over the top of the steering wheel, the other resting on the gear stick. She had practised the first sentence – ‘Alex, about last night…’ – but she was still unsure how to follow it up.
Did she want to know? Yes, of course, but she was praying that the price she would pay for knowing wouldn’t be too dear. She was disconcerted to find she wasn’t sure she wanted her marriage shattered for one tiny item of knowledge. Men and women came into her office all the time to begin divorce proceedings, and the misery etched plain on their faces often brought her to the conclusion that secrets only became malignant when they stopped being secrets. A secret in itself was just a silent benign fact – unless it was released upon some unsuspecting person… wasn’t it? More likely she was just being a coward, she decided grimly.
She wished Alex would come out with an explanation himself. The fact that he hadn’t, and that he was so obviously affected by seeing Julia – still, a day later! – was terrifying her more than anything, more even than those horribly uncomfortable moments at the restaurant last night, which made her cringe when she relived them.
But even if they never saw Julia again, she had to ask. Otherwise, if Alex didn’t say anything, then this incident would rip the tiniest corner off their happy marriage, and she’d vowed to herself that she wouldn’t let little cuts become big holes. She saw the result of that every day at work – the smallest nuances in her clients’ voices, even the way they took a breath before beginning to talk, betraying all their anger and desperation and sadness.
‘Alex…’ she began, at the same moment as he leaned across and flicked up the volume dial on the radio.
He turned it down again when he heard Chloe’s voice.
‘Sorry. Yep?’
‘About last night…’ she began.
Alex stared straight ahead and said nothing.
‘Are you having an affair?’ she asked. She held her breath while waiting for the answer to come.
‘Bloody hell, Chloe,’ Alex spluttered, turning sharply to look at her, then swivelling back to the road when the cars started to slow. His knuckles clenched, blanched, against the steering wheel. A muscle twitched near his jaw-line. ‘No, of course not.’ His voice softened to become earnest and his face was pained.
‘Then how do you know Julia?’
‘Chlo, I really want to talk to you, but not like this… it’s a long story… She… Julia… I never thought that I’d see her again.’ Alex’s jaw was set tense and firm and his mouth was a thin line.
Chloe digested this, but persisted, ‘So were you in a relationship with her?’
Alex hesitated. He looked across at Chloe, then back at the road. ‘Yes, we were.’ He paused before adding, ‘But it seems like another lifetime now.’
Neither of them spoke. The cars in front of them sped up and Alex put his foot down hard on the accelerator. They raced forward, gaining momentum quickly, before realising the same cars were stopping again. Chloe thrust a hand out to steady herself for possible impact while Alex cursed and slammed his foot onto the brake.
The car lurched to a stop.
Chloe bit her lip and rubbed her stomach protectively under the coarse strip of seatbelt.
‘Chloe…’ Alex’s voice was gentle and he moved his hand across to caress the nape of her neck. It made her shiver and she looked up at him. ‘I’m so sorry. It’s nothing for you to worry about, but I want to talk about this properly, not in the sodding car, or in front of your mother. It gave me one hell of a shock, seeing her like that. Can we just wait till we’re alone?’ He waved his hand angrily at the traffic.
His words were something of a balm to her nerves. She looked at his face and saw his expression, guileless and caring, but still, she was wary.
‘I want to know everything,’ she told him. ‘I don’t see why you need to be so cloak and dagger about it.’
‘Because,’ Alex said slowly, his eyes fixed on the road, ‘what happened to her was beyond terrible.’ His voice cracked on the final words. He cleared his throat but the raw emotion was still present as he added, ‘I can hardly…’ He trailed off.
Chloe cursed herself for making them come up to her mother’s. They should have stayed at home where they could have talked. She almost told Alex to turn around, but as she thought of her mother’s sorrow-filled face the traffic began to speed up and Alex indicated for the next exit.
‘Okay,’ she said when he was no more forthcoming, alarmed at how quickly he’d got upset. ‘You can tell me later.’
‘Thank you,’ Alex replied, and Chloe heard the heartfelt timbre of his voice and leaned back against her chair, suddenly very, very tired.
9
The memories came in droves in the night.
Screaming – her own.
Shouting – everybody else.
As Julia half-dozed fitfully her remembrances held her down and whispered cruel things into her ears.
She saw her father’s face in the hospital, the light gone from his eyes. She saw him before that, at home when she had been a child, his strong, solid arms, a face full of lines that deepened into great crags when he laughed, his hands shaking slightly as he went about day-to-day tasks, his craftsman’s fingers thick and gnarled. Tinkering away in his shed, while her mother cooked for them all. The miniature garden in the wicker basket that he had made for her so that fairies might visit them, which had been a constant feature of her childhood, and which they had both continued to tend long after she stopped believing in magical creatures at the bottom of the garden. That miniature bucolic idyll had come to represent all the fundamental feelings that lay between them, shared without words.
She sat bolt upright with a pounding heart and tried to recover her breathing. Blearily, she wondered if the basket was still there in the garden; hoped fervently that it was. If it had gone, then, irrevocably, so had one more small part of her. But there was no way to find out without making that dreaded call home.
Gradually, she succumbed to a half-sleep again, until she was gliding through a Turkish beach resort, accosted by an old lady who spoke bad English but had kind eyes, who grabbed her hand, saying, ‘Wait, lady. I see man, he walk with you. Wait! Lady, wait!’ When she turned around the woman was frowning as though some invisible being were whispering something in her ear that was hard to understand. ‘He say you are lost soul.’ The woman turned big, heavily pencilled mournful eyes towards her, as if a hundred things suddenly made sense. Julia wanted to run from that knowing gaze, but it seemed the message wasn’t finished, and her legs were unaccountably heavy. ‘He say you lost somebody, but they will come back to you. So it okay,’ the woman smiled, te
ars in her eyes, bouncing Julia’s hand up and down in her own cold, gnarled grip. ‘They will come back to you.’
She came to again with a start, her whole body trembling. Was this a memory or a dream? She wasn’t sure – and that in itself frightened her. If it was more than a dream, then who was the message from? Her father? Who else would it be? And who did it refer to? Was it Alex, who had just come back to her in such an unforeseen and painful fashion?
She pictured her father’s face. Maybe he had forgiven her, now he could see everything up in heaven, and was paying the puppetmaster who dangled everyone’s lives beneath him so ruthlessly to do him this one big favour, to make the fates turn just once in the right direction. That way his daughter might become a truly earthbound person again, instead of just a wandering lost soul.
But then perhaps it was only a dream, came a cloudy thought, as her head grew heavier once more against the pillow.
Later on, in the hazy time between sleeping and waking, sleeping and waking, more things came back to her; things she had pushed away for years. She had separated her life into two halves – Before and After – although she knew the line was really a lot more blurred than that.
One image replayed itself over and over: of Alex’s twisted face as he walked away from her. That had been After.
But, now and then, there was also Alex’s kind face, peering down at her.
Before.
10
Chloe was already exasperated after a few hours with her mother. After Margaret had woken her at what felt like dawn, they had raced into town and spent twenty minutes driving around the multi-storey searching for the perfect spot, before Margaret phoned Alex in a panic to remind him to lock the house up when he went out. They made it into the shopping centre, only for Chloe’s mother to realise she’d left a voucher for Marks & Spencer in the car’s glove box, so they trudged all the way back again to find the voucher wasn’t in there at all – she had in fact carefully added it to the zip pocket of her shopping bag. Once they were inside M &S, Margaret headed straight for the accessories section, and spent half an hour wondering about a scarf there, before deciding she needed to come back when she was wearing her other coat to see if they matched properly.
And so it went on. All the time, Margaret wittered away, Chloe hardly getting a word in. Her mother hadn’t always been like this, she thought. She could recall a much more confident and self-contained woman, although it was only through the fog of childhood memory. But then something had happened, their grandmother had looked after Chloe and Anthony for a while, and it was after that that her mother had changed. But after what? The shadows of a memory began to float into the edges of her mind, and she felt her heart begin to race and pushed it back quickly. However, now its presence had been felt she couldn’t wipe it completely.
As they sat down for elevenses, Chloe’s mother took a good look at her.
‘You look a bit peaky, dear. Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine, Mum.’ Chloe set down their tray of steaming coffees and muffins.
‘Working too hard again? You must be careful. You know what they say – “all work and no play…”.’ Margaret chuckled to herself as she placed her plastic bags carefully on the seat next to her, and then fussed over which one lay on the bottom.
I’d have a damn sight more time to play if I weren’t driving up to the Lake District on a regular basis, Chloe thought. But she smiled back benignly.
They sat in silence for a few moments, before Chloe took a deep breath and announced without preamble, ‘I’m pregnant’, startling herself with her own bluntness. She hadn’t realised the secret had been crouched on her tongue, waiting to jump. As she immediately picked up her muffin and took a bite, she wished she could put her words on top and gobble them back up.
Her mother’s jaw had dropped.
I’ve done it, Chloe thought. I have finally shut her up.
No sooner had she thought this than Margaret rallied with a torrent of exclamations. ‘Oh my darling, I’m so thrilled… I’m so delighted. I can’t believe I’m going to be a grandmother… this is fantastic, wait till I tell June tonight -’
Chloe cut her off abruptly. ‘You can’t tell them yet…’ She paused and took a deep breath as she watched the confusion on her mother’s face, before adding, ‘Alex doesn’t know.’
‘Alex doesn’t…?’ Her mother tapered off and once again seemed lost for words.
Unbelievable, Chloe thought. Now she’d silenced her mother twice in five minutes. Alex would love this.
Immediately she felt miserable.
11
The rain didn’t seem to have stopped since Thursday, and it matched Alex’s mood perfectly. Wrapped up warmly, he was on his way to the village pub, a trip he’d taken regularly with Charlie on previous visits to the Lake District. It still felt strange to be heading there alone. Today he had intended to drown his sorrows while watching the football scores come up, but when he opened the door and the warmth of lights, laughter and air all hit him at once, he knew straight away he couldn’t stomach it. He let the door swing shut again, leaving him on the outside hunched against the cold as a couple of people stepped around him to get in. As a wave of noise and heat assaulted him for the second time, he strode quickly away, not really sure where he was going. He just knew he needed to try to clear his head, and the ice-cold air would help him more than the fug of the bar.
It wasn’t difficult to find a walking trail. A couple of minutes later he had hopped over a dilapidated wooden stile set into a fence, and was following a small stony path around the bottom of a hill. The rain splattered his face persistently, but it was welcome – cool and cleansing. His trainers were quickly soaked; he could already feel water creeping between his toes. He was breathing hard with the exertion of keeping pace with his feet, which seemed to have independently decided upon a brisk trot.
There was so much to think about that he didn’t know where to start. His mind was running around wildly in circles leaving chaotic footprints everywhere that he had no hope of following.
He’d thought he had it all figured out, but when it came down to it he had just been living on circumstance. He was angry and upset – with himself most of all, but little sparks flew off towards others. How could she just turn up after almost ten years without a word? And what wicked circumstance had allowed Chloe to lead him innocently into that restaurant, both of them unwitting victims of the hand of fate?
And Mark – in his wildest thoughts since Thursday, a lot of Alex’s anger had been directed towards him. They had never liked one another. He imagined Mark somehow finding out about what had happened back then, and bringing his new girlfriend, Julia, along just to spite him – but how the hell could he know?
The general consensus about the path of life was that it usually took time – days, months, maybe years – to effect change. Yet the twists and turns Alex’s world had taken boiled down to a few short moments. A missed underground train one afternoon. The police knocking on his family’s door in Leicester with news of his brother. Letting go of a hand just a fraction too soon. In fact, letting go at all.
He thought about his family: how much Jamie’s sudden illness had straitened the atmosphere of his home. His mother, Catherine, had become increasingly hesitant and nervous, while his father’s emotions were held carefully in check, but, like a leaky vessel, seeped out at odd moments. Geoff Markham had lost both parents while Alex was in his teens, then his sister had died of cancer a few years later, and he had remained sadly stoic but dry-faced throughout, yet Alex had once seen his dad cry in exasperation after he tried some DIY car repair and managed to damage the wheel’s axle. Once, when Alex’s frustration with his dad’s reticence had become apparent, his mother had told him that it was just the way he was made, and that it was what she loved the most about him – that it was refreshing when so many people were full of pandering, self-serving platitudes. This had made Alex take a look at his dad afresh, and for a while his lack of comm
unication hadn’t mattered so much – until Jamie was found wandering along a motorway in his underwear on a cool summer’s night when he’d been missing for two days, and was subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia. Because, at the time, Alex had responded in exactly the same way as his father: comforting his mother but unable to share the depths of his emotions with anyone.
Now, as he strode along the muddy path, he wondered if this thing the male Markhams had got – this inability to express themselves outwardly at appropriate moments – was some kind of curse. Perhaps it was a worse condition than his brother Jamie’s, as there was nothing they could take for it.
He began to pound the track so furiously that he could hear the quicktime thump of his heart. He was soaked – raindrops were everywhere, dripping off his nose, cascading over his eyelids, breaching flimsy barriers of hems and lining. But he didn’t care. He was thinking that the only time he had taken charge of his direction in life was with Chloe. But even that meeting had not been the chance accident she imagined it was.
He thought of Chloe, of her lovely selfless nature and her funny self-conscious habits – how his life had changed once he met her, from its endless dullish hues into a release of fresh colour. It had no longer seemed as if his soul mate had disappeared years ago, but rather that she had been waiting patiently all this time for him to relinquish the past and catch up to her. And until now, he thought he had moved on.
But in the past forty-eight hours everything had changed. It seemed you couldn’t just shrug off your past. It was attached to you like a shadow – travelling with you everywhere, catching up with you whenever you faltered. The only real option was to turn and face it; deal with it; be rid of it in such a way that you could be certain it wouldn’t reappear.
And that was why he had to find Julia. To talk to her. To understand. And to tell her just how utterly, utterly sorry he was. Yet he had an unshakeable feeling in the pit of his being that, whatever he did now, someone was going to get hurt. More than anything he wanted to protect Chloe, but he had made a promise, hadn’t he, and now that Julia was back in his life, he couldn’t just forget about that.