Her mother: that was another thing. Her mother who always seemed to ring at the wrong moment, after weeks of silence. Olivia and her mother had never been very tightly bound to each other, but after her father died Olivia had assumed she and her children would be a necessary fixture in her mother’s life. She’d been glad when her mother cultivated new interests; surprised and pleased when they took shape as a career. Now her mother wasn’t even in the country, half the time. She was spinning off into her own life, just like her grandson.
“D’you know, they’re way behind us in Italy,” her mother said now, sounding oddly distant at the other end of the phone, even though she was calling on the landline from her London flat. “It’s hard to credit, with such treasures to their name, but I suppose that’s the point. An embarrassment of riches. Anything less than priceless gets overlooked.”
“Three months in Florence,” said Olivia. “How lovely.” She could see her mother, stylish in her long black coat, standing in a Romanesque church surrounded by frescoes and conversing with a handsome Italian architect. She could pass for an Italian herself, elegant at sixty-five with her strong features and her tiny frame. Haloed by shafts of sunlight through stained glass, Olivia imagined, as she gave her opinion on the stonework.
“Not so lovely at this time of year,” said her mother, “but you can’t have everything.”
“Your mother,” said Robert, when Olivia related the conversation to him later – much later; there had been a problem with the trains this evening – “is remarkable.”
“In what way?”
Sometimes, especially when he talked about her mother, Olivia didn’t know how to interpret his tone of voice.
“In many ways.” Robert sat back a little in his chair and smiled at her. “Though not as remarkable as you, of course.”
“Rubbish,” said Olivia. She looked at the array of food on the table, the lamb tagine and the wide dish of couscous elaborately constructed from a recipe book Robert’s sister-in-law had given her last Christmas, and realised she wasn’t hungry any more. Too much cooking, she thought. They could just as well have had spaghetti bolognese too, and then she could have helped Angus with his homework. “What do you mean?”
“In the way she carries her responsibilities so lightly.”
“What responsibilities?”
Robert raised his hands, a comic gesture of surrender. “In the way she’s reinvented herself, then, if you prefer.”
“I don’t prefer at all. It makes me feel weary.”
Robert looked at her for a moment; she saw in his face a well-worn path, and she regretted sending him down it. It wasn’t what she’d intended for this evening: she’d had in mind those flurries of fresh air carried into their half-bare flat, the sense of space in those tiny rooms.
“You have decades ahead of you,” he said. “Your mother didn’t start on this conservation kick until she was – what, fifty-five?”
Olivia nodded. The future snaked away from her, furtive and unknowable.
“And you have plenty to show for your life already.”
Robert leaned across the table towards her. Olivia knew she should be grateful that he took the trouble to offer reassurance.
“I’ve made other lives,” she said, treason screaming inside her. “That’s not the same as making something of my own life.”
“You’ll always have your music.”
Olivia sighed. It was what he always said at such moments, and she knew he meant it sincerely. But the truth was more complicated: music is something you have to live, she wanted to explain. She’d tried to explain, many times. The fact that she’d once been able to perform Chopin’s revolutionary study or Bach’s musical offering wasn’t a consolation; it was like a garment she’d put away years ago, something she would never wear again.
She stood up, gathered the plates from the table. “It’s late,” she said. “You’ve got an early start. Let’s get to bed.”
Chapter 21
Sarah’s wedding reception was taking place at St Saviour’s College, where Guy had once been a graduate student. One November morning Olivia and Sarah went to meet the domestic bursar, a bald little man with a comically oversized moustache who treated Sarah rather like a wayward student.
“Two hundred,” he said, his hands on his plump hips, “is the very maximum we can accommodate.”
“That’s what I was told,” Sarah said. “It won’t be more than that.”
The bursar harrumphed, as if to say it wasn’t the first time he’d heard that story. Behind him, around him, the eighteenth century hall soared in graceful arcs. The ridiculous and the sublime, Olivia thought. She imagined the wedding reception as a scene from a costume drama, the bursar as a comic cameo.
“Will you be returning to the Combination Room after dinner?” he asked. “Coffee can be taken in there if you prefer.”
Sarah looked at Olivia. “People might like to move around, mightn’t they?”
“We usually find guests spill out into the grounds.” The bursar frowned. “Even in winter.”
Olivia suppressed a smile. Was he going to ask Sarah to insist her guests brought scarves and gloves? Perhaps they could line up their wellington boots in the panelled passage, like a primary school cloakroom.
Apparently oblivious to the bursar’s air of reproof, Sarah consulted her checklist of questions.
“Do you have signs to direct people to the lavatories?” she asked. “Will there be someone in the porter’s lodge to let in latecomers?”
Olivia felt a sudden sharp tenderness for her; for the way she ploughed on regardless.
“Naturally.” The bursar cleared his throat. He led them into the servery, where heated trolleys were lined up like engines in a shunting yard. “Will your caterer supply her own plate?” he asked, “or will you require ours?”
Since the visit to the lace shop, Olivia had been drawn gradually but irresistibly into Sarah’s wedding preparations. Out of kindness, she told Robert, but that wasn’t the whole truth. She had no daughters, no mother-of-the-bride flummery to look forward to: why not make the most of this opportunity? Why not absorb herself in the relative merits of florists and caterers? And the lace outing had sealed a bond between them. Despite her qualms about the wedding announcement, despite the way she and Eve used to sneer, there was something persuasive about Sarah’s approach to life. Olivia hadn’t felt the lack of Sarah’s friendship all these years, but she valued it more than she’d expected. It sometimes felt as though the last twenty-five years were being gradually rubbed out, and replaced by a version in which she and Sarah had always been the best of friends.
For one thing, Sarah filled a gap which Olivia had never fully acknowledged. It was easy, she thought, to be so absorbed by children, by the momentum of family life, that you didn’t notice the absence of friends. But since the night she’d met Lucy, Olivia had thought a lot about loneliness. The women she’d called friends when the boys were little had slipped out of her life, one by one. Now and then she would run into someone she’d spent hours with in that former existence, in the days of watching small children play and comparing notes on teething and tantrums. They’d recognise each other across a café or a cinema lobby, and they’d smile and exchange a word or two, and a look that conveyed quite clearly that intimacy wasn’t expected any more.
It wasn’t just the effect of time passing, Olivia was sure. It was as though the years of nappies and intractable tiredness were a secret it wasn’t polite to mention once you’d left them behind. As though the weaknesses revealed in that phase of life – the neglect of ambition, fashion and current affairs – might betray you unless you moved on, up, out, away. Most of those women went back to work and immersed themselves in other worlds, other friends, but piano teaching was a solitary occupation. No scope for office camaraderie for Olivia.
But here was Sarah, waiting, hoping, to start out on the path Olivia had already trodden. Sarah, who seemed as oddly bereft of female companionship
as she was. Olivia felt a strange sense of responsibility: she wasn’t sure why she was worried for Sarah, what she hoped to protect her from, but it gave her a mission. This was something she could do, someone she could help.
Sarah had been tentative at first, phoning on another pretext and dropping a visit to a marquee company into the conversation as if it were an afterthought. (“You wouldn’t believe the catalogue. Five different kinds of chair!”) But not for long. She didn’t work on Fridays; she called it her wedding planner day. After a couple of weeks, she assumed Olivia’s Fridays were her own too.
“Hello!” she would chirrup, usually early on Friday morning, before the boys had left for school. “What are you doing today?”
Olivia could have left the phone, of course; no one else rang that early. Instead she picked it up eagerly.
Later that morning, Olivia and Sarah sat perched on a log, watching the river idle past. Prompted, perhaps, by the bursar’s reference to wedding guests straying outside, Sarah had assumed they were free to wander in the grounds after their meeting. St Saviour’s was a little way out from the centre of Oxford and its gardens ran down to the river: gardens lovingly tended but not manicured, with some areas allowed to run wild. In a fringe of woodland, fallen trees had been left where they lay, creating impromptu seats with a view across the lawns in one direction and the river in the other. The water was glassy calm, a lone duck trailing its flawless V-shaped wake beneath the arching willows. On the opposite bank a dog run ahead of its master, its tail flying like bunting.
“It must be wonderful,” Sarah said, “to have such a well-established family.”
“What do you mean?” Olivia’s mind flitted first to her parents, to the cool, well-regulated life of her childhood. Her family, she thought, had been too slight to count as well-established. Only three of them: the hard-working father, the dutiful corporate wife, the solitary daughter. But of course that wasn’t what Sarah meant.
“Four sons, almost grown up,” she said. “You’re the uber mother. The definitive matriarch.”
Olivia laughed. “Hardly,” she said. But she was pleased, even so. She’d imagined Sarah was quietly horrified by her domestic situation: the noise; the general chaos.
“You’re very lucky,” Sarah said. “Not that I don’t appreciate what I’ve got – what I’ve had – but I envy you your fairytale ending.”
“You’ve got one too.”
“Who knows.”
Olivia looked at her, remembering that moment over lunch in Burford and seeing the same expression cross Sarah’s face now. She thought of her qualms about Sarah, grasped for a moment at something that hovered between them, and found something else instead. Something to do with her, not with Sarah. Despite the excitement, the magic of dressing up, she didn’t envy Sarah her fresh start. She ought to remember that. Whether or not she would choose the same path again, she was happy to have travelled this far along it. It was the next bit of the road that troubled her; the bit she’d never thought about.
“You need seven sons for a fairytale,” she said.
The words sounded more petulant than she intended. It’s too early for an ending, she was thinking. What about the rest of the story? Do I get to choose that? Do I have to work it out?
She picked up a conker from the path, turned it over in her hand and then threw it into the river. A ring of ripples spread swiftly across the surface then died away, leaving the conker floating, just discernible, in midstream.
Chapter 22
Sarah opened her car door onto a thin drizzle that had turned the swathe of tarmac behind the flats into a dark slick. She was late back from work tonight, and she was tired and hungry. In the short time it took her to walk to the front door, the rain laced her hair with a spider’s web of fine drops and insinuated itself beneath the collar of her jacket in a filmy trickle.
It was the Monday after a weekend at Guy’s house. The fridge was empty and the flat had a cheerless feel, as though it knew it was on the point of being abandoned. And Monday was running night: Sarah had spent last Monday evening at a dinner with Guy, and she knew she ought to go tonight. As she filled the kettle, she bargained with herself the way she used to when she was a child. If it stops raining, I’ll go running and buy fish and chips on the way home. If it doesn’t, I’ll go to Sainsbury’s and do a big shop.
She had taken enthusiastically to Guy’s suggestion that they should spend their honeymoon walking. Not climbing, he’d assured her; no ropes or pitons. They were going to New Zealand, where it would be high summer, to walk the Milford and Heaphy Tracks, at either end of South Island. They had several brochures about the landscape and the wildlife to whet their appetites.
Sarah wasn’t worried about the walking. She’d been on dozens of walking holidays over the years, and the terrain in New Zealand didn’t look so different from Europe. It was hardly the Himalayas, and Guy still wasn’t fully fit after his accident. Even so, there was something about marrying a sportsman that still made her feel a little awed. When she’d heard about a local running club that met regularly in the local park, she’d bought a new pair of trainers and gone out to join them. But as the weather grew colder her resolve began to flag. She’d always been an energetic person, but she’d never enjoyed exercise for its own sake and she wasn’t a natural runner. The Striders offered a cheerful sense of camaraderie, and the circuit of the park was pretty enough in daylight, but it took an effort of will to drag herself there in the dark.
While she drank her tea, Sarah sewed a couple of buttonholes on her wedding dress: tiny buttonholes, but not as dainty as Princess Diana’s, despite her best efforts. It would be going too far to say that her resolve was flagging on the dressmaking too, but it seemed to be taking forever to work her way down the back, and she still had the sleeves and the hem to finish. There were moments when she wondered whether the dress would be ready in time: thank goodness, she thought, for that wonderful veil, and the lace train that would cover a multitude of sins.
After the second buttonhole, she got up again to check the weather. The rain had stopped; the moon glimmered in a gap between clouds. Sarah’s heart sank, but a deal was a deal, she told herself.
Only a small straggle of Striders had gathered in the car park this evening, waterproofs over their running gear. Conversation was sparse as they warmed up.
“This is devotion,” said Mandy, a plump 35-year-old who always looked as though she was hating every minute, but was one of the most regular attenders even so.
“To what?” replied her friend Liz, and they both laughed and stretched their hamstrings and groaned.
“Is this the Striders?” asked a voice behind them. “I spoke to someone called Kevin. Am I in the right place?”
The voice was familiar. Sarah straightened up and found herself looking straight at Harry Matthews.
“Oh!” he said. “Dr Brewster.”
“Sarah.” She managed a smile; an unconvincing cover for the knot that had wound itself into her guts in that moment. “Not Doctor, anyway.”
“Are you one of the Striders?” Harry was wearing a T shirt and an old tracksuit. He was taller than Sarah remembered, his burliness less awkward without the tight suit he’d been squeezed into that morning at the clinic.
“Yes.” Sarah could think of nothing else to say. She pointed to the far side of the car park. “Kevin’s the one in the red jacket.”
Harry nodded, hesitated, put a hand briefly on Sarah’s arm as he passed. “Thank you.”
Sarah was glad to get going. The physical effort was a relief, she thought, pushing herself to keep up with the leaders as the group lengthened out along the first stretch, but it would have been better, much better, if she’d stayed at home this evening. She shouldn’t have played games with Fate again, staking her decision on the fluctuations of the weather. She’d almost managed to put Harry out of her mind: now she could see she was going to have to start all over again.
The park was almost empty, which was h
ardly a surprise. It was dark and cold, and the drizzle had started up again, just the slightest shimmer, as if the air was too saturated to hold any more moisture. A solitary runner passed in the other direction, wearing a blue Lycra jacket with a yellow streak across the chest; he raised his hand in greeting and ran on.
As they approached the cricket pavilion, settled into a steady pace by now, Sarah allowed herself to think back to that morning in the clinic, trying to get straight in her head what had actually happened. Harry might have felt awkward about it afterwards, she told herself, but surely the emotional power of the encounter had all been in her mind? He had comforted her; she had stayed in his arms longer than he might have expected. But then she had shaken his hand and thanked him for coming and said goodbye. He couldn’t have known how agitated she’d been afterwards. He couldn’t have known that she ran with the Striders, either: it was pure coincidence that he’d turned up this evening. She just needed to keep going, to keep a safe distance between them. She lengthened her stride a little, feeling the pleasurable ache of exertion in her muscles.
When the going was firm enough, the Striders extended their course by circuiting the water meadows on the far side of the park. Sarah had expected that they’d stick to the main track tonight, but at the corner near the duck pond Kevin led them off the path and down towards the river.
“Bit of mud,” he called over his shoulder.
Mandy called something in return that Sarah couldn’t hear, and Liz’s laugh floated past as they spread out across the turf. Sarah was tiring by now – the missed week was telling, she thought – but she wasn’t going to let up. If she pushed herself hard enough, it wouldn’t be possible to think about anything except the pain in her legs and her chest and the rush of blood and air.
They were nearly at the river when she slipped. There was some uneven ground, a patch of mud, and she slid a couple of feet and fell awkwardly. Almost at once, a small group gathered around her: Mandy and Liz, puffing, grateful for an excuse to stop; and Harry Matthews, kneeling at her side, putting his hand on her shoulder and looking at her with an expression of anguish out of all proportion to the severity of the situation. But perhaps not out of all proportion: when Sarah tried to move, a sharp pain shot through her ankle and up her leg. She yelped, then groaned as a second wave of pain clamped around the twisted joint.
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