The Big Five O

by Jane Wenham-Jones

  ‘You didn’t tell me you were going out to dinner with Mr Lees-Parker – you said it was someone from work! Why do you keep lying?’

  ‘I didn’t tell any lies,’ Roz said firmly. ‘I said someone I met through work. I met him through Charlotte when I was doing one of her houses for her. Which she pays me for, so that makes it employment.’ Feeling that that she was on her back foot, made Roz annoyed. ‘And I didn’t go into any further details because you said you weren’t interested!’ she said sharply.

  ‘Well he clearly has a more open relationship with his daughter than you have with me, because Lucinda knew all about it,’ Amy carried on regardless. ‘What you ate, what you talked about, everything …’

  Roz’s heart had started hammering unpleasantly. She took a deep breath and tried to stay calm. ‘Yes, we had a very nice meal and chatted about all sorts of things.’ Surely Jamie wouldn’t have repeated what she’d told him …

  ‘Lucinda was quite glad actually because she doesn’t like his girlfriend. Who apparently was waiting for him when he got back after seeing you.’

  ‘What?’ Roz was trembling now. Jamie had said he wanted to see her again. That he didn’t have a partner …

  ‘But I think it’s embarrassing. I don’t want you going out with my friend’s dad.’

  ‘Oh, she’s your friend now, is she?’ Roz snapped. ‘It’s up to me who I go out with, Amy. Jamie–’

  ‘Well, as long as you don’t mind sharing …’

  Roz swallowed hard, as her daughter continued to stare at her aggressively.

  ‘According to Lucinda there are women in and out of his house all the time.’ Amy raised her eyebrows. ‘Lucinda found this one on the doorstep and she had to put up with her for an hour before he got home. She said she was crying!’

  Roz stared back at her daughter in horror, trying to gather herself. Could this be true? What a bitter irony that would be – her pouring her heart out about a long-ago lover who’d been less than honest and all the time, he had someone waiting for him at home … She bent down and pulled the rest of the washing from the machine, breathing hard, turning her face away from her daughter’s gaze.

  ‘There was nothing for her to be upset about,’ she said, trying to keep her voice even. ‘It was just a friendly meal, nothing more.’ Roz stood up and carried the plastic basket to the door. ‘So there’s nothing for you to feel at all embarrassed about, either.’ She took another deep breath. ‘I won’t be seeing him again …’

  Roz sat on her bed, pressing her hands against her eyes, trying not to cry. She hated being at war with Amy – she missed their old closeness – and she hated how stupid, disappointed and humiliated this situation with Jamie had made her feel.

  He’d sent her a message saying he was really busy at work but he’d be in touch soon. She could text him right now and tell him to forget that, to never contact her again – but that would look as if she cared. If he did get back in touch and suggest another meeting she would ignore it. Or tell him she was too busy now. She thought again of his hand – strong and comforting over hers. How could she have got him so wrong?

  She wondered wildly if perhaps Lucinda had made the story up – jealous of her father seeing anybody else. But she felt instinctively it was true – there had been another woman waiting for him at home. And he certainly hadn’t called yet, had he?

  Roz spoke sternly to herself – she hadn’t been looking for a relationship. So why did she feel anything about what Jamie did? She’d managed this long without a man, and could do so for a whole lot longer. Nothing lasted anyway – she could hardly remember the passion she’d once felt for Marcus, could she? Except that at once she was flooded with memories. The way her heart would leap when she heard his voice on the phone – the wonderful warmth of lying curled into him in her bed, his chest solid against her back, his arms wrapped around her. ‘I am so happy here, like this,’ he would say. ‘If only …’

  They’d lived on if-onlys. Roz had often wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t had Amy, would it have gone on and on? Until he got ill perhaps …

  She saw the set of his chin in Amy’s, her daughter’s brown eyes were his too. Sometimes Amy looked quizzically up to the right when thinking in a way that was pure Marcus. Roz suddenly felt weary and sad. Of course Amy wanted to find out what she could. It was a marvel it had taken this long.

  Amy was lying on her bed, still in her school clothes, watching something on the iPad that was propped up against her knees.

  ‘What?’ she said flatly, as Roz stood in the doorway.

  Roz spoke calmly. ‘Your father’s daughters were called Joy and Victoria. They’d be in their late thirties by now. They could have married and changed their names. But it should be possible to track them down as we know the names of their parents.’

  ‘You said you didn’t remember.’

  ‘It’s come back to me.’

  Roz sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Can you put that down and look at me?’ She took a deep breath. ‘I understand you wanting to find your family but I want us to do it together. You have to remember that they knew nothing about me or you and it will be a terrible shock to find they have a half-sister. They may not believe you, they may reject you. If his wife is still alive …’

  Amy shrugged as if she didn’t care, but she put the iPad down beside her and rolled over to face her mother. ‘Why are you being helpful all of a sudden?’

  ‘Because I’ve thought about it and I’ve realised it’s not fair to withhold the information. But I want to be involved. I will find out the best way to go about things and we’ll both do it together and I will support you.’ She swallowed. ‘Because I love you.’

  ‘So what’s changed?’ Amy clearly wasn’t ready to soften yet. ‘Why wouldn’t you tell me all this in the first place?’

  Roz kept her bleakest thoughts to herself. Because it’s time and perhaps I’m not enough on my own after all. If anything happens to me, you might need more family …

  ‘I was trying to be protective.’ Roz put a tentative hand out and stroked Amy’s hair, letting her breath out slowly as Amy did not resist. ‘I didn’t want anyone to be horrible to you.’

  By the time Roz had shared everything, it was too late to cook. She went for fish and chips while Amy had a bath. She came back to find her daughter downstairs in a pair of pyjama bottoms and one of Roz’s t-shirts, putting cutlery and mayonnaise on the table in their small kitchen. Amy took the packages and began to unwrap them. ‘I am so hungry.’

  ‘Me too.’ Roz reached into the cupboard for vinegar and salt. ‘We haven’t had this for ages.’

  ‘What sort of food are we having at the party?’

  ‘Charlotte’s been in charge of that …’ Roz, grateful for a subject away from dead fathers and womanising dinner dates, chatted on about the sort of canapés her friend had ordered, and the finger buffet for later that Charlotte had not only designed the menu for but, Roz was extremely grateful to recall, paid for as well. ‘She really is so generous,’ Roz said.

  ‘Yeah I like Charlotte.’ Amy picked up a chip and dipped it in mayo. ‘It must be cool to have her as a mum.’

  ‘Oh, so I’m not in that category?’ Roz grinned as Amy pulled a face.

  ‘No, not really …’

  Roz washed their plates while Amy did some French homework, feeling a warmth inside when her daughter asked her to test her as she struggled to conjugate the subjunctives for pouvoir. It was a long time since Amy had asked her for anything except money.

  ‘We really must think about your birthday, too,’ Roz said lightly. ‘Sixteen! Have you any ideas?’ Hoping that the gifts on Amy’s wish list wouldn’t be too extravagant. She had managed to pay off a bit of her credit card but it wouldn’t take much to max it out again.

  ‘Some better hair straighteners maybe?’ Amy looked hopeful. ‘Would GHDs be too expensive?’

  Roz smiled brightly. ‘I don’t know. I’ll have a look.’

  They sat
on the sofa and watched part of a drama about a serial killer with a fetish for women’s toes.

  ‘Weirdo,’ said Amy. She shifted her weight so that her legs dangled over the arm and leant back against the cushions. Her voice was casually offhand.

  ‘Have you got any photos?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘Can I?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Roz went upstairs to her bedroom and opened the bottom drawer of her dressing table, feeling at the back for the square flat box she hadn’t opened in a long while. Underneath the letters and cards and old theatre tickets, lay the picture. She looked ridiculously young. He would have been she realised, about the same age as she was now …

  She took it downstairs and handed it to Amy. ‘You look a bit like him.’

  ‘No, I look more like you.’

  Roz smiled, and picked up the phone lying on the low coffee table. Two texts had come in. One was from Sherie saying she had to go to London now tomorrow and couldn’t meet at lunchtime.

  The other was from Jamie. Are you free for dinner on Friday? X

  No worries xxx Roz added a smiley to the reply for her old school friend and pressed send.

  Then with a glance at her daughter, who was now leaning back against her mother’s shoulder, still holding the photo, Roz re-read the second message and hit delete.

  Chapter 26

  Sherie let herself into her apartment, bone tired, and kicked off her heels at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Hello?’

  She slumped with relief at the silence, glad the workmen had gone for the day and she didn’t have to make either tea or small talk.

  She peered into her sitting room. The furniture was pushed back against the back wall, piled up on itself, covered with a dust sheet. The carpet was rolled back halfway across the floor, the floorboards still up in two places and the fireplace a gaping hole. The marble mantelpiece above was covered in a layer of fine reddish dust. Sherie ran a finger through it. Worth it when it’s finished, she chanted in her head, already sick of the upheaval, but trying to cheer herself with thoughts of being curled in the warmth in front of flickering flames on a bleak winter afternoon while winds howled, and wishing she didn’t feel so bleak herself right now.

  She stood on tiptoe to gaze in the dusty mirror on the chimney breast. She seemed to be looking older by the day. Numbers were a funny thing. Forty-five sounded old – it seemed so much more ancient than forty-four – whereas forty-six still seemed full of potential. At forty-six she had still been able to scrub up well, still seen the admiring glances of men around her, the occasional envious ones from other women. She’d felt at odds being forty-seven, but sanguine about forty-eight. Then the panic had set in. She’d felt she’d had to suck every last bit of joy out of every moment of being forty-nine – because soon she really would never be thought of as even vaguely young again …

  Sherie shook her head at herself. She knew most people would see her as obsessive and steeped in vanity. Sherie remembered one of her clients, Margie, throwing a huge party when she was sixty, with champagne and a Jazz band because she was ‘still here’ after surviving bowel cancer. ‘I am delighted to be growing old,’ she had said in her speech. ‘I hope to embrace seventy and eighty with equal vigour …’

  Sherie shuddered.

  She went into the kitchen, seeing the biscuits in the cat’s bowl but still no Marquis to greet her. Putting the kettle on, she opened the back door that led onto her private patio and the communal gardens beyond, and called him, using the special kissy, high-pitched baby-squeak form of his name that never failed to alert him. He didn’t appear.

  Frowning, Sherie made camomile tea and walked outside in her bare feet to sit at the wrought iron table. When she’d first got Marquis, she’d intended to keep him as a house cat, so afraid was she of anything happening to him, but he’d showed such determination to get outside, and displayed such obvious joy in bounding after insects and stray twigs that she’d installed a cat flap and made herself live with the constant low level dread that he would be run over.

  Three years on, he did not seem to stray out into Reading Street but stayed within the building’s grounds or hopped through the fence to the gardens further along the road. Sherie was relaxed about him now. He liked to go out and roam but he usually appeared moments after she did.

  As she sat, watching the bushes for signs of movement, her neighbour came across the lawn with a glass in her hand. Diane Wilson had bare feet too – she was wearing a long stripy summer dress, with an oversized cardigan. As she got nearer, Sherie saw she looked as tired as Sherie felt.

  ‘How are you?’ she called out politely.

  Diane Wilson shrugged. ‘Same old, same old.’ She stopped in front of Sherie. The glass contained ice-cubes and mint leaves and what looked like tonic. Mixed, Sherie would hazard from the way Diane was moving, with a hefty dose of spirit.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen my cat?’

  Diane shook her head. ‘He was out here this morning. Trying to catch a sparrow.’ She took a mouthful of her drink. ‘He missed it!’

  ‘Yes fortunately, he doesn’t succeed very often,’ Sherie smiled. ‘When he was younger he used to bring in field mice, but he seems to have calmed down as he’s got older.’

  Diane nodded slowly as if Sherie had said something erudite. ‘I like cats. Sometimes he comes in my kitchen – your Marquis.’

  ‘Does he?’ Sherie asked, surprised Diane remembered his name. She felt a small pang. ‘What does he do?’

  ‘Nothing really. Sits and watches me. I like that. I give him a little bit of ham …’

  ‘Oh, please don’t give him too much,’ Sherie was immediately anxious. ‘It’s too salty – cats shouldn’t …’

  ‘Only a tiny bit. He tried to take it out of my sandwich.’ Diane looked pleased. ‘It made me laugh. What can he have instead? Prawns?’

  ‘He really eats enough here–’

  ‘How old are you?’

  Sherie hesitated, thrown by the abrupt change of subject and the directness of the question. ‘Forty-eight.’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ the other woman was slurring slightly. ‘I’m going to be Fifty-six. Fifty-fucking-six – that’s almost getting my fucking pension …’

  ‘I thought you were younger,’ said Sherie honestly, wishing guiltily that she’d been truthful. ‘So I’m nearly fifty,’ she added, in atonement. ‘But they say it’s only a number.’

  ‘Yes, that’s bullshit isn’t it?’ Diane swirled her ice about and took another swallow. ‘It’s not only anything – it’s lines etched across your face and sagging flesh and becoming utterly invisible …’ She spoke in a sing-song voice that sent a chill through Sherie. ‘The ageing process,’ she drawled, ‘has got nothing to recommend it at all.’

  Sherie didn’t want to hear any more. She opened her mouth to excuse herself but Diane was still talking. ‘They say it brings wisdom but I knew more when I was young, didn’t you?’

  Sherie gave a small shrug. She had no appetite for a faux-philosophical debate with someone who’d been on the bottle all afternoon.

  ‘I must go in,’ she said. ‘Nice to see you.’

  ‘And very nice to see you too,’ said Diane as Sherie stood up. ‘My husband is having an affair and he thinks I don’t know,’ she added conversationally.

  Oh no please. ‘I’m sorry about that.’ Sherie was aware of how prim she sounded.

  Diane gave a derisive snort and waved a dismissive arm in the air as if warding something off. ‘He’s always doing it. They’re usually under forty.’

  Sherie stood in her kitchen doing her calming breath technique. She felt like a gin herself after that little lot. Supposing Diane had accidentally locked Marquis in somewhere? Suppose she had deliberately kept him? She went to the back door and called again, banging a spoon on his dish, a sound that had always been guaranteed to bring her beautiful silver cat running. He still didn’t appear. Fear gripped Sherie. Then she heard it.

&n
bsp; An unmistakeable mewing was coming from the direction of the hallway. Sherie rushed towards it. There was no sign of Marquis. She called again. Again she heard him cry. Sherie looked all around the sitting room, calling, lifting the dust sheets. Then she heard it again and her alarm deepened. Marquis was under the floorboards.

  Nate arrived within moments of her call.

  ‘Don’t panic,’ he said.

  Sherie tried to keep her voice calm. ‘He’s stopped crying now. He won’t answer me.’

  ‘He’s relaxed now you’re here. Probably having a snooze under there.’

  Sherie didn’t smile. ‘I can’t believe they left it like this.’

  ‘They were held up today when they thought there was a gas leak but they’ve fixed it.’

  ‘Oh my god, oh my god!’ Sherie clutched at her throat. ‘He might have been poisoned. That’s why he’s gone quiet. Marquis!’

  There was suddenly another mew and Nate put a hand on her arm, his voice reassuring. ‘Keep calm. We will get him out.’

  He lay down on the floor and put his arm into one of the openings, leaning in as far as he could go, making a small chirrupy noise.

  Then he sat up. ‘What have you got that he really loves to eat?’

  Sherie thought of Diane. ‘Ham.’

  ‘Go and get some then.’

  Sherie returned holding a packet. ‘This is naked ham from Waitrose – it’s got no nitrates.’

  ‘Of course.’ Nate nodded solemnly.

  ‘He goes mad for it.’

  ‘Give me some.’ Nate took a sliver of meat from her and dangled it from his thumb and forefinger. Then he was lying flat on his front again, down the hole up to his armpit. ‘Come on old boy – come and have this.’ There was another cry from the far side of the room – this time it was a long, plaintive wail.

  ‘He’s stuck, he’s lost …’ Sherie was close to tears.

  Nate stood up. ‘I’ll go and get some tools and take the board up over there.’ He put a hand briefly on Sherie’s shoulder. ‘If necessary, we can take the whole lot up.’ He paused at the door. ‘But I bet he’ll have found his way out by the time I get back.’