You and Me

by Nicola Rayner

  Charles sighs. ‘I mentioned it. Carefully. She says she went home earlier in the night – that she’d left South Kensington by the time it happened.’

  She would, I want to say, annoyed that he didn’t push it. Juliet has wriggled off the hook, as usual.

  ‘And you believed her?’ I persist, bolder than I’d normally be.

  He gives me a sidelong glance. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  He always sees the best in people. We are quiet for a moment, listening to the clinking of the canteen, the hiss of the cappuccino machine, the murmur of voices around us. I feel torn between irritation that Charles hasn’t taken Juliet’s proximity seriously and guilt about pushing the matter. I was there myself, after all, and it doesn’t make me culpable. But then I’m not Juliet – I didn’t have her twisted relationship with Dickie – or a history of hurting people. Not the way she did.

  ‘I think about Dickie all the time,’ Charles says quietly. ‘I dream about him too. As if he’s haunting me. Punishing me.’

  ‘Punishing you?’ My attention returns to the room. To him.

  ‘For not pulling him back; for not saving him.’

  ‘But Charles … you couldn’t have – it happened so fast.’

  The words slip out too quickly.

  ‘Accidents do.’ I take a scalding gulp of tea to slow myself down and check for his reaction. I seem to have got away with it. ‘Are you going to say anything? To the police?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I don’t think so. It wouldn’t be fair to Caroline. Anyway, maybe the CCTV will confirm one way or another.’

  Relieved, I take a bite of my brownie. I realise that perhaps I’ve brought up Juliet again to keep the focus off Ellie. But there’s nothing to worry about, I tell myself. There’s no way she was there that night. I swallow and change the subject. ‘Do you think Caroline’s drinking again?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He looks out at the room beyond us. ‘It’s complicated.’

  He pauses. An elderly couple make for the table next to us. She is using a walker; he carries the tray for both of them, a large pot of tea and a scone.

  ‘I mean grief always is,’ Charles continues. ‘But Dickie had problems. There were times when Caroline would call us in tears. He was such a complicated mix – he could be so cheerful, such fun. And then he had this dark side. We were at prep school together before Chesterfield, you know. We started on the same day. Friends all the way through. But if he fell out with someone – like he did with the housemaster’s wife – then that could be very bad for them. She was always on at him – “Dickie, pull your socks up; late again; brush your hair.” That sort of thing.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well, he took her cat. She really loved that animal. And he put it in the washing machine, set it off. She found it in there herself … I walked into the room at the time. It was terrible – the mess. Her shrieking. One of the worst things I’ve seen.’

  I put my brownie back on the plate. I imagine the woman, alone in that boys’ boarding house, surrounded by men. How the cat might have been her only friend. Her pleasure at tickling under his chin and waiting for him to purr. The way his paws would tread and catch in her woollen skirt but she wouldn’t care about the snags because they were worth it, to know he was content.

  ‘That’s …’ I can’t think of a word strong enough. ‘Wicked,’ I say. But it sounds childish. A word from a fairy tale. ‘Evil,’ I add, but that’s not much better.

  ‘I know.’ Charles’s grey eyes find mine for a moment. ‘She had her suspicions but I never let on when they asked me – “snitches get stitches” and all that – but it was a heavy secret to carry. She wasn’t the same afterwards. I saw her looking at us boys as if we were something to be scared of.’

  ‘I can see why.’ I stare at my brownie glumly. I don’t feel like eating now.

  ‘When I asked him about it, he said it was as if he was watching a stranger. An out-of-body experience. Like what happened with your sister. He said sometimes he just wanted to see what he could get away with. Maybe …’ he pauses; his gaze falls to my plate ‘… he hurt the wrong person. Maybe they decided to hurt him back.’

  I’m quiet. My mind flickers to Ellie again. Could Charles mean her – or someone Dickie had damaged more recently? I can’t bring myself to ask. I don’t understand how he could ever forgive Dickie, but I don’t want to ruin today by bringing all of that up. ‘It’s funny,’ I say instead, ‘I’ve been thinking about Ellie a lot at the moment.’

  As if I don’t always think about her a lot.

  ‘When I was staying the night at Caroline’s, I saw these drawings Dickie did. They made me think of that time at Chesterfield.’ I can’t say any more than that, but Charles will know what I mean. ‘They were horrible, his drawings. These strange underwater creatures with webbed feet.’ I shudder.

  It comes back to me, how that night I lay with my heart hammering in my chest, and when I fell asleep my dreams were haunted by what I’d seen.

  I shake my head. ‘I can’t help but think …’ I pause. I’ve never said this aloud to anyone. ‘I can’t help but think that what happened at Chesterfield made Ellie the way she was as an adult – so restless, so …’ I don’t know how to put it. I think of flibbertigibbet – a word I loved as a child – but that’s not right: Ellie was too much of a tomboy. Flighty is closer. ‘I got Rose a present – a pair of dungarees,’ I say instead, changing the subject.

  Charles waits for me to go on. I suppose at this stage it’s not a terribly interesting story.

  ‘But then,’ I continue, ‘when Ellie posted about it online, to thank me, Rose wasn’t wearing the pair I sent, but another one – in a different colour.’

  ‘Maybe she picked up the wrong pair.’ Charles shrugs. ‘Children have so many clothes.’

  I don’t seem to be able to convince anyone that this matters. ‘That’s what Caroline said. I guess it’s just carelessness.’ I give up, let it go.

  Someone in the queue knocks a plate to the floor.

  ‘Fran.’ Charles takes my hand for a moment. ‘Ellie loves you.’

  I feel the warmth of his skin on my mine. The years don’t matter. Just that Charles Fry is holding my hand.

  ‘I remember how close you were at school,’ he continues. ‘And she still talks about you with such fondness.’

  ‘I never see her.’ I want to ask him how she’s doing, what she says about me, but I can’t move, in case I break the spell. ‘I miss them so much. Her and Rose.’ How can I miss Rose, whom I’ve never met? But I can. ‘I wish I could make it right between us.’

  ‘Maybe you can. Just give her space. Let her work things out in her own time.’

  I look down at Charles’s hand on mine and remember how the rift had started long before that awful day three years ago – the last time I saw her – how Ellie’s pregnancy had made her secretive. Yes, it had started then – and, try as I might, I couldn’t bridge the gap between us.

  It seems selfish to say it but, for women like me, there can be a sadness to other women’s pregnancies. They remind us of the division between the mothers and the un-mothers – the unknown world the women we love are about to enter. How we’ll never really get them back.

  When I get home, I examine my hands to see if they look different now that they have been held by Charles, as if there will be visible evidence. It is a strange thing when something you have wanted for so long starts to happen. The world blossoms into a different place. The sky stretches higher above me, the ground sings beneath my feet. Even colours seem more vivid, I note, as I admire the shade of red Rose is wearing in Ellie’s latest post.

  It’s a photo of her peering into a shop window – another Rose reflected back at her in the fairy-lit glass. She’s wearing red wellies too, and a tiny red bowler hat with a white scarf and tights. Mother was funny about red and white together – particularly when it came to flowers. It was a superstition that came from her own mum who, as a nurse, associated the
colours with blood and bandages.

  Ellie was never particularly interested in photography but her pictures of Rose are exquisite – she frames them like a professional. Perhaps she always just needed the right subject. In the way it took Charles to come along to inspire my journals at school. Perhaps we’re all waiting for the right person to set us alight.

  You don’t need to be a mother yourself to see how good children are at doing that. Last time I went up to Whitby I shared a train table with a new mother and her baby. The woman was young and French, and perhaps that’s why it sounded so lovely as she crooned and sang – pointing out the landscape flying past to her baby when he grew restless, or jiggling him on her knee. In other circumstances, I might have been tempted to remind her we were in the quiet carriage but I could tell that she wouldn’t have cared, that there was nothing in her bubble of existence except this baby. And anyway he had softened me too, in the way babies do. They’re clever like that.

  It’s appealing, that love, the singularity of it: how it might save you – or promise to save you – from everything else. I notice in the shop how Brenda’s eyes are drawn to certain sights – a mother tying up a child’s shoe or picking up a toy from the floor and placing it companionably next to her baby. There’s a purity to this kind of love: the way it pushes everything else out.

  Perhaps that’s what I find in my passion for Charles. I return to my collection now, adding the latest items: a postcard I picked up in the National Gallery shop to remind me of this day and an empty sachet of sugar, from Charles’s coffee. There’s a smattering of granules left and I empty them into my palm, touch them with my tongue, where they melt like snowflakes.

  33

  I can’t stop looking at Caroline’s beer. She arrived at the café in Waterloo before me and ordered first and now I’m behaving as if I’ve never seen a pint before. It’s my fault. The café I suggested has morphed into a late-night drinking spot. I dropped in with Mother years ago and enjoyed a custard tart and a cup of tea, but now, after dark, it’s different. The lights have been dimmed, candles lit in jars on the small round tables, cocktail menus laid out. The pale features of Caroline’s face are shadowed in candlelight.

  ‘It’s nice to come for an adult night out,’ she says, looking around us at the speakeasy style of the place – old gramophones and bric-a-brac, fairy lights and bare brick walls.

  I wanted her to like the place, to admire it in the way she is, but the drink in front of her is so distracting that the thought of it has inflated like a balloon, pushing out everything else in my mind. Fiona was right, after all, and Caroline’s not even trying to hide it. But perhaps she trusts me in a way she doesn’t trust Fiona.

  The words on the menu blur in front of me, as I imagine the things we can’t talk about stacking up on the table between us. Fiona. Charles. Dickie. Her drinking. I wish we could sweep the secrets away. I wish we could start again.

  ‘How was your day?’ she asks.

  ‘It was fine, quite busy at this time of year. How about you?’

  ‘Lovely.’ There’s a flush to her cheeks, probably the alcohol. ‘It was my day off and we went swimming and then to Baby Boogie in the afternoon.’

  I imagine her driving around Ealing with Daisy in the back of the car. My eyes keep returning to the glass on the table, a ring of condensation gathering at its base. I know I shouldn’t be looking but it keeps drawing my gaze back.

  ‘We need to keep busy at this time of year,’ Caroline is saying, as if everything is just the same. ‘With Christmas coming up, it’s going to be difficult.’

  ‘I always find it hard too,’ I agree. ‘On my own.’

  It’s true. I struggle at Christmas. It’s the one day – as Charles Dickens demonstrated so well – that we can’t escape ourselves. Where the reality of my life is held up to me like a mirror – no Mother, no Ellie, no Rose. There’s so much I can forgo – so much I have forgone. Stockings and crackers and shared jokes and quarrelling over the meal preparations. Mother’s bread sauce recipe, which I inherited, handwritten on a yellowing scrap of paper, but which never tastes the same now she’s gone. I would give up every single Christmas accessory – all of it, I barter silently, if I could have them back.

  ‘We’ll be on our own too,’ Caroline says, turning the glass in her hand.

  Anger tingles in my arms, my belly. The fact that Caroline says, ‘We’ll be on our own,’ says it all. People like Caroline – with children and friends and full lives and Baby Boogie, they think they know what it’s like.

  But I’ve seen the photos on Facebook – her and Dickie in roomfuls of people with crooked cracker hats and ironic Christmas jumpers playing party games. Charades or the one with the cereal box on the floor that gets shorter and shorter (Fiona always wins). Dickie posted videos of them a couple of Christmases ago and I gorged on them while I sat on my own, making my way through a family-sized tub of Quality Street. If you stripped one person from those photographs, even the most important one, you’re still left with a roomful of people.

  ‘You have Daisy,’ I point out.

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ she says. ‘I need to be grateful for what I have. That’s the sort of thing I learned with AA.’ Then, ironically, she takes a gulp of beer. ‘Do you want to come over? Spend the day with us?’

  ‘Me?’ I almost have to stop myself glancing over my shoulder to check she doesn’t mean someone else.

  ‘Yes.’ She laughs. ‘Why not? Better to be glum together.’

  ‘But what about all your other people?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I don’t have other people. I’m an only child and my parents are gone now. Dickie’s parents are being kind, and I know they’d like to see Daisy, but they’re so far away in Scotland – I can’t face the journey on my own with a baby.’

  An image slips into my head of Caroline, Daisy and me around the Christmas tree. Daisy tearing open her parcel from me, settling herself on my lap to read one of the books I’ve given her, tipping her head back to look at me in the way she does. Then her face merges into Rose’s face and I blink the image away. I still haven’t entirely forgiven Ellie for messing up Rose’s present, in spite of her apologetic messages – both on Facebook and in email – for photographing Rose in the wrong dungarees.

  I’m sorry, sis. Life is so chaotic with a little one. She doesn’t quite say, ‘as a mother’, but the implication is there.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I ask Caroline. It strikes me as an astonishing invitation. ‘You don’t want to be with Dickie’s parents?’

  ‘That big old house.’ She shivers dramatically. ‘I’d much rather be in my own home, eating the food I want to. And being away from alcohol.’

  I glance again at her beer.

  ‘Oh, Fran.’ She puts a hand to the glass. ‘This is non-alcoholic.’

  ‘Oh.’ I begin to breathe again.

  ‘I wouldn’t do it,’ she says. ‘Not with Daisy. I promise.’

  ‘Of course,’ I say apologetically. I feel like a fool. ‘I’m not saying … I was just worried. That’s all.’

  She gives me a sad smile.

  ‘How long have you been sober?’ I ask.

  ‘About fifteen years,’ she says. ‘Since my early twenties. It started at university – I’m talking about the really committed drinking. The kind where you come around from blackouts not knowing where you are or who you’re with. I don’t know why it started exactly but everyone at Newcastle seemed to have so much confidence and I had none, and the only way I felt I could cope with it was by getting out-of-my-mind drunk. Then I could do anything.’

  I nod. ‘It’s difficult,’ I agree vaguely, thinking of my Open University degree and how things ended.

  ‘You know Dickie was at Newcastle too?’ she says. ‘We met once or twice at parties but I’m glad we didn’t get together then. We were both such a pair of wreck-heads. Of course, plenty of people are like that at uni so you blend in at the time, but you know you have a problem when you can’t
stop living like that in the years afterwards. You think everyone else is doing it too and then one day you wake up in your mid-twenties and you realise that all your friends have proper jobs and proper lives, and you’re sleeping in the garden, still drunk from the night before, and you didn’t even notice things changing.’

  No one’s ever spoken to me in this way – so open, so confessional. Ellie would share bits and pieces about her life outside the flat, but she always held so much back. I like Caroline confiding in me – it makes me feel special. Trustworthy. Perhaps, despite the secrets, it’s not too late for us to become real friends.

  ‘When I saw Dickie at that first meeting – a mutual friend had suggested he come to my group – he was so pale and shaken,’ Caroline continues. ‘I recognised him from university – a cheeky-chappie type with so much front you couldn’t see the person behind it. I knew he was keen on me early on and I was quite strict with him at first.’ She smiles. ‘But I think he liked that.’

  Those days when he was pursuing Ellie showed a different side of Dickie, too, something softer, gentler – I saw glimpses of the person I imagine Caroline fell in love with: someone doggedly loyal and anxious to please. Like the way he would time Ellie’s lengths. Perhaps something would have happened between them if the boys hadn’t lost that game.

  ‘Public schoolboys like a firm hand.’ I smile, but an unsettling memory closely pursues that thought. ‘Life could be quite tough at Chesterfield,’ I say, picking my words carefully. ‘I can imagine it did its own damage. It made monsters of all of us in one way or another.’

  Caroline nods. ‘I know Dickie was haunted by it in some ways – the things he did back then. There was some dreadful story about a cat he alluded too, and I know he never forgave himself for what happened with your sister.’

  I never forgave him either. I want to tell her that the dreadful thing he did to the cat was before Chesterfield, but I can’t let on that I’ve spoken to Charles. I glance at the couple at the next table, the way their hands are knitted together.