We stood in silence at the ticket machine as a resentful queue built up behind us. Mum jabbed a few buttons blankly.
‘It looks like Greek to me. What on earth does it all mean?’
‘Oh, God, Mother,’ I said, cracking. ‘Here, let me do it. First of all, do this up, though –’ and I zipped up the purse that, despite her strictures about muggers and thieves, Mum was waving around with cash aplenty poking out of it, much to the interest of a gaggle of lounging schoolboys at the next pillar. I punched the buttons and slotted in the money. When the ticket slid out and I handed it to Mum, she looked at it as if it was growing legs and trying to samba. ‘Well, whatever next?’ she actually said.
‘Oh MUM!’ I said in exasperation. ‘Stop acting like a caveman and get a move on. They had ticket machines when you were living here twenty years ago, don’t be so annoying.’ Chastened, my mother scurried after me, her Marks and Spencer Footgloves humming slightly on the rubber floor. The schoolboys straightened up with interest as we approached. ‘Alright then, muvver?’ asked one of them, elongated and slightly repellent, as only fifteen-year-olds can be.
Mum whipped round. ‘I’m not your mother, thank God. Go back to school, you ridiculous child,’ she said, and sailed on towards the barrier, where she presented her ticket to the guard and said, ‘I’m terribly sorry, I’ve no idea how to work these things, could you possibly zoom me through? Oh thank you so much.’
I slapped my hands to my cheeks. The teenage boy shot me a look of sympathy.
I knew we wouldn’t talk about anything serious on the Tube; my family delights in the art of repression and the idea of being emotional on public transport was beyond the pale. Kate once famously said to a screaming six-year-old Tom, when he banged his knee on the metal pole in the carriage, ‘Darling! Not on the Tube, please!’ As we stood on the platform, waiting for a train, I asked, ‘Have you started looking for somewhere else to live, then?’
‘No, darling. Not yet. But it shouldn’t be too hard, I hope. I bumped into Alice Eliot yesterday in Wareham. She thinks she might know somewhere that would be perfect.’
Alice, Kate and Mum were still friendly, even though Alice was responsible for bringing the Cradle of Evil (David) into the world.
‘Right,’ I said.
We were silent for a few moments as the crowd around us swelled.
‘Aren’t you going to ask about it, then?’ Mum said.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Sorry. That’s great, where is it?’
‘It’s a kind of bunga. In Danby.’
‘What?’ I said.
Mum shifted on her feet. ‘Oh, darling, a bungalow! Bunga. Anyway, Alice Eliot knows a dear old couple who are selling their house – they’re going into a retirement home. The son’s going to rent it out. Alice thinks it’d be perfect for your father and me. We’re going to see it tomorrow, actually.’
‘Renting? A bungalow?’ I said. It might have been a septic tank. ‘In Danby? Oh, Mum, are you sure?’
‘No, of course not,’ she said, surprised. ‘We haven’t seen it yet, but it sounds great. And we don’t…well, we don’t want to buy just yet. It’s thirties, art deco, pretty big. Lovely leaded windows, nice big garden. You and Jess would both have a room, and there’s lots of storage space. And…we’d get a sofa-bed and some camp beds for everyone else. I’m sure we could fit in whoever wants to stay. You know, for Christmas, and things like that.’
I swallowed. ‘Can’t you…can’t you rent somewhere in Wareham? A nice little cottage? Or buy somewhere?’
‘Nice little cottages in Wareham cost about as much as five-storey houses in Kensington, these days,’ Mum said.
‘But, Mum—’
‘Lizzy, darling,’ she said impatiently, ‘I know selling the house is horrible. It’s really horrible. But it’s going to happen. We have to leave. And we have to live somewhere else – unless your father and I take up residence in the hedge opposite Keeper House.’
‘I can’t…’ I said, my voice high and wavering.
‘I know, it’s awful,’ Mum said, putting her arm round me. ‘But it’s happening. Look.’ She paused. ‘I’ve lived in…ooh, about eight different houses in my life. More, probably. And I’ve been happy in most of them, apart from the flatshare in Bloomsbury with that Spanish girl who tried to get into bed with me. Ines. What a strange girl she was.’ I coughed. ‘Yes,’ Mum said, chasing her own train of thought, ‘But, darling, my point is that I’ve had three homes with Dad, and everywhere I’ve lived with him, I’ve been happy. We’ve made a home wherever we’ve been. So we’ll make another one wherever we end up. We’ll still be together, and that’s what matters.’
‘It’s not the same,’ I said sullenly, knowing I was behaving badly.
‘Thank goodness, here comes a train at last,’ Mum said. She squeezed my shoulder. ‘I know it’s not the same. But, darling, the reason you love the house is because we’ve all been so happy there. We’ll be happy somewhere else, you know. A home – oh, it sounds so trite but a home isn’t just bricks and mortar. OK?’ The train bellowed into the station.
‘I just don’t think it’ll ever be the same.’ I said. ‘We’ll always miss it.’
‘I know,’ said my mother, positioning herself in front of a door as it opened. ‘Sometimes I wonder, though…It – well, never mind.’
‘What?’ I said, checking my coat pocket for my Oyster card.
‘It’s not important. Perhaps you’ll see in time. Come on, darling, here we go.’
The Tube doors opened exactly in front of Mum. How did she know where to stand on the platform? I’d never been able to work it out. I shot a quick glance at her, but she was back in Lady from the Sticks mode again, staring up at the Tube map and calling ‘Lizzy! How many stops, then? Quick, let’s get these seats, oh excuse me, thank you so much!’ to various fellow passengers, and I knew the moment had passed.
‘How far have you got with the wedding plans?’ I asked, once we were sitting down and the train was on its way into town.
‘It’s going to be lovely,’ Mum said. ‘Chin and I have decided on a theme of pink. But not ghastly old-fashioned pink…’ here she hesitated, and I realized she was repeating parrot-fashion what Chin had told her ‘…more a sort of pale, vintage pink, pink and cream, really, so we’re having lots of pink and cream flowers. Chin’s got a lovely friend who’s a florist – Mando. He’s been just lovely. Strange, though.’
I’d met Mando the previous year. He wore sunglasses in March and put his hand on David’s thigh, and kept moving it up, so far up that David had to actually shift in his seat, then get up and go off and pretend to make a phone call.
‘That sounds gorgeous,’ I said. ‘And the roses along the kitchen wall will be out then – you can use them, can’t you? Perfect timing.’
‘Oh, no, Lizzy. Wrong pink,’ said Mum.
‘Wrong pink?’ I said. ‘You’re joking.’
‘Well, it all has to co-ordinate, doesn’t it?’
‘Hm,’ I said.
Mum yielded a little. ‘Those roses are lovely, yes, but we must have what we must have.’
‘Oh, yes, we must,’ I said. A thought struck me. ‘But I thought Chin didn’t care what flowers she had? She said pink at a wedding was bourgeois.’
‘She’s changed her mind.’
‘Oh, Mum,’ I said. ‘You’ve given her Wedding Lust, haven’t you?’
‘No!’
‘Well, you’ve made your bed,’ I said prophetically, ‘and now you’ll have to lie in it.’
She looked worried, so I changed the subject. ‘I spoke to Mike last week, did I tell you?’
Mum perked up considerably. ‘How was he?’
‘At home.’
‘Yes?’ Mum said, rifling through her bag to check its contents again. ‘What did he have to say for himself?’
Her tone was rather cool. I remembered Mike’s words: ‘Don’t upset the apple cart.’ ‘He was really sweet,’ I said. ‘You know Mike, he can sort t
hings out in your head for you – he knows just what to say.’
‘Yes, he does,’ said Mum. ‘That’s quite true. How’s Rosalie?’
‘Finding Mike a bit annoying. She was quite snappy.’
‘Hm,’ said Mum. ‘Well, she’s made her bed, hasn’t she?’
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘Well, in My Day one didn’t marry people after one had known them less than a month.’
‘Luckily for Dad, eh?’ I shot back, quick as a flash, then chuckled, with pleasure at my quick wit.
‘Watch out for that woman,’ Mum said, obviously nettled. ‘That’s all I’m saying.’ I hoped she might be close to telling me something juicy, but she merely shook her head. ‘Oxford Circus, here we are!’ she said, and stood up.
Outside, by the stall selling tourist tat on Little Argyll Street, we said goodbye. ‘I’m sorry I can’t come with you,’ I said.
‘I am too, darling, but we’ll see you soon, yes? You’ll be down before long, won’t you?’
She was already looking down the street, trying to make out the black and white mock-Tudor Liberty building. ‘Yes, yes of course I will,’ I said. ‘Look, I’ve really got to go now. Good luck with the bunga tomorrow, and give my love to Chin. Dad too.’
I watched her sail down the street, then turned and walked back into my London life.
FIFTEEN
And then, suddenly winter was over. A week later – one month after the sale had been agreed – I felt spring coming, one clear evening in early March. As I came out of South Kensington Tube station, I saw the florist on the traffic island opposite put away the pink and blue hyacinths, the irises and tulips, and look up at the sky, which was still just light. I took a gulp of fresh air, inhaled through my nostrils and knew that spring was on its way. It was hard to believe, after the long, long winter, yet impossible to ignore.
As I walked to the traffic lights, I shivered, wrapping my shawl around me against the chill: it was still cold. I knew when spring was coming at Keeper House because the cherry tree outside my window came into bud. In a month’s time, it would be at its best – a frothy fuschia riot of velvety flowers arching against the wall and over the edge of the lawn. Now, at this moment, it would simply look like a mass of tangled black branches. It was only from my window that you could see the tiny green buds that held the promise of summer. I wouldn’t be there to see it this year. Because of the solemn vow. And next year one of the Caldwells would be looking out of that window.
I stopped on the corner of Cromwell Road and searched for my invitation to the party. The V&A loomed ahead of me, dark and forbidding except for the floodlit entrance where a steady trickle of guests was streaming in. The wind blew my hair and I smoothed it back as I gazed up at the building ahead of me. I’ve always loved the V&A, ever since Grandmother read Ballet Shoes to Jess and me one wet summer at Keeper House. When it was raining, the Fossil sisters and their nanny would walk up Cromwell Road and go to the V&A because it was free and they were so poor. After Chin moved to London to do her fashion degree Jess and I (still quite young) were put on a train once a year to meet her for the day, and she would take us to the V&A. It was always a magical occasion, and followed a strict formula. We always got the Tube there and the bus back. We went to see the costumes and the Great Bed of Ware. As Chin sketched, her pencil rasping across the thick paper, Jess and I would gaze open-mouthed at brocade skirts as wide as four people, velvet bustles, silk bias-cut thirties dresses and chiffon prints, jabbing our greasy fingers against the glass and hissing, ‘That one! I like that one best!’ We always bought postcards of our favourite dresses. I have them still, a collection gathered over the years, and each dress looks strangely ghostly: an expressionless white dummy wearing a beautiful taffeta and silk ballgown that, two hundred years ago, a wealthy girl wore to dance at a party.
Afterwards Chin always took us to lunch, or tea, at Pâtisserie Valerie on Brompton Road, where Jess once famously insisted she could manage a Florentine and an éclair and was sick. Then, if there was time, we’d wander up to Harrods, and would walk through the Food Hall, licking our lips and grimacing alternately at sugared almonds in dear little glass pots or oozing, smelly cheeses.
When we got home, incredibly late (or so it seemed – probably it was only about nine o’clock) and dropping with exhaustion, we were allowed as an added treat a late supper at the kitchen table, in our pyjamas, something like soup or welsh rarebit.
The memory of all these things came back to me as I stood outside the museum. I hadn’t thought about our dream days with Chin for such a long time but lately, since Christmas, I’d started to remember lots of things from long ago. Our house in London, before we moved. How cold Grandfather’s hands were when we hugged him. Kate in brightly patterned headscarves. The wall by the tiny kitchen garden where a brick was missing and Tom hid his chocolate when he was small. And the last time we came to the V&A, when Jess and I were old enough to know it was the last time just because it was. Chin didn’t sketch that day: she was nursing a hangover and couldn’t hold a pencil without shaking, so she claimed. Instead, we went and looked at eighteenth-century silverware, which is one of the most boring ways to spend an afternoon, and as we trailed past yet another amazing filigree candlestick, I thought resentfully of the gleaming white mannequins in their dresses on the floor below unseen by me on this most looked-forward to of days.
The Monumental film for which this was ostensibly the post-première party, Always and Forever, was a film I’d had nothing to do with. It was also an excuse for us to throw a party – and we’d just had our best ever year. I had to go, and if I had been in a better mood I would have enjoyed it. There would be lots to drink, goody-bags, work pals and the chance of a cab ride home, but I just wasn’t in the mood.
Still, a party’s a party, and some people would be there from LA and New York whom I needed to talk to and might not see at the office. I was still flavour of the month, bizarrely, after my meeting with Fran in January, and all was going remarkably smoothly with Dreams Can Come True – Jaden’s suggestion for what had been Big Yellow Taxi. I knew it’d only last until something dire happened, like the child star we’d hired checked into teenage rehab for coke addiction, so I wanted to capitalize on it. Lily and Fran were going to be there together – incredibly, they’d been best gal-pals since the meeting. And Ash had been at the pub with our various work pals and Jaden, and I’d said I’d meet them there.
I’d been at home that afternoon, waiting five hours for a boiler repairman, who had claimed not to have received any of the fifteen messages I’d left at work, home and on his mobile asking where he was. My flat was still freezing. Last year, when this happened, David had known a great plumber, called Brian, I thought, who happened to be round the corner when we rang, came straight over and replaced a rivet valve something something, got rid of an air socket bubble, and coated the lagging with pipes or something again. I absolutely loathe that air of helplessness that afflicts perfectly intelligent girls just because they don’t have a boyfriend and I was determined I could sort this out by myself. I was going to. I do not know the intricacies of the boiler world, I told myself. It is not my profession. I will calmly and simply hire someone to facilitate this. Thus will my flat be heated. Only, nearly five weeks later I was on my third plumber and the flat was still freezing cold. That very morning a pigeon jumped up and down on my window sill as I was shivering and making myself a cup of tea. It seemed to be laughing at me, saying, It is warmer out here than it is in your flat.
What I ought to do, I knew, was email David, calmly and simply, and ask for Brian’s number. But perhaps subconsciously I’d broken the boiler as a means of contacting David so that was the last thing I should do, no matter how much I wanted to – no matter how much I longed to tell him what was going on with Keeper House, and that I was freezing cold, that Chin was being a nightmare about her dress being ready in time and that I was worried Ash might have started stalking Lola. And I wishe
d I could ask him about the fact there might be a job for me in the LA office, acting as liaison development executive for a year. Part of me wanted to go, and part of me was terrified by the idea. And I wanted to tell him that, although everything was good with Jaden, I still missed him so much that I couldn’t breathe properly sometimes when I thought about him, about what it was like with him.
So I didn’t email him, and the plumbing industry continued to ignore me, not that the two were linked of course.
As I went into the huge marble hall, dodging the disgruntled, smoking journalists outside, I could hear the party, a distant burble of noise. It’s fine arriving at parties late when you know everyone, less fine when you have to network and be professional. I squared my shoulders and walked past a battered old wooden angel, brightly painted, with a rather smirky smile. His right hand was raised in benediction.
‘Lizzy,’ said a voice at the end of the corridor. ‘Hey, I’ve been looking out for you.’
‘Hello, Jaden,’ I called, walking towards the light and the noise.
‘How about some pineapple juice? I’m having some. I don’t want to drink this evening and orange juice converts to sugar, then fat if you drink it late at night.’
The wooden angel’s smirk seemed to stretch a little wider.
‘Thanks, mate,’ I muttered, and hurried past him.
SIXTEEN
When he caught up with me Jaden kissed me. ‘Any good in there?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said, taking my arm and steering me gently past tombs and monuments. ‘The tie on the back of your shoe is undone and you’re going to trip over it. Let me do it.’ He bent down and retied the thin suede ribbon.
That’s what I like about Jaden – he’s surprisingly capable.
‘I was going out to get some air – it’s kinda hot in there. This way,’ he said, and propelled me into the crowded room. As I scanned the masses for Lily, Jaden looked at me calmly. ‘Why are you so late? Is it what we talked about last time? Are you feeling like you’re in Avoidance Strategy Mode?’
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