The wedding wasn’t till May, months away, and they didn’t have much to offer her, in November. When Bridget and Matt had got married Mum had already been ill, swaying at the registry office – it was why they’d done it quickly. Matt in his only jacket and Bridget in a cheap chain-store dress. Pretty, though: she still had it somewhere. His parents had come, nervous and modest, just like him, his mother – still alive now, though his father had died ten years earlier, bequeathing Matt his tools and his kindness – had worn a purple hat and beamed all the way through the ceremony and the quick two rounds of drinks at the pub after. This woman, the customer – menopausal and angry – wasn’t going to be beaming, Bridget could tell; she kept rounding on Bridget, her hands on some innocent piece of clothing, to explain another affront perpetrated by her future daughter-in-law. Bridget had just managed to persuade her into the cubicle with two sensible dresses and a duck egg blue lace suit when the phone rang.
Of course, it would be busy, because Carrie had a sixth sense like that. Once upon a time the phone would go when she was changing a nappy, now it would be when she was setting the alarm on the shop. She was oblivious, too caught up in her own stuff, but Bridget wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
Laura had taken the call on the shop phone and shrugged when Bridget mouthed, who? She took the receiver.
‘Hey, Bridge.’ A sniff. ‘Bridge?’
‘Hey, Carrie.’ She reversed into the doorway into the tiny kitchen. She could smell the woods in here, and glanced up to see the log.
‘You all right?’ she asked warily.
There was silence, then a sigh. ‘Sure.’ Airy – for about a millisecond, before Carrie launched into a litany of complaints about work – the web design company – finishing up triumphantly with, ‘The guy’s an arsehole.’ Bridget had long since stopped advising her little sister to be less confrontational: she always walked into another job, something completely different half the time. There was a pause, and she knew there was more, because pausing wasn’t Carrie’s style any more than backing down was.
‘What else?’ she said.
A deep breath. Then, sulkily, ‘Ella’s – well. Things are a bit tricky with Ella and me.’
Sweet-natured, feminine Ella, all eyelashes and lipstick; prone to singing and yelling. They’d been together three years. Ella seemed to love Carrie’s energy, her dash, her wiry schoolboy looks, melting adoringly against her in the Facebook pictures Finn showed Bridget. And Carrie looking almost bashful.
‘What have you done now?’ said Bridget. ‘Carrie?’
‘Why do you always think it’s me?’ Blustering.
‘It wasn’t?’
A longer sigh. Then, ‘Listen, I thought I might come and visit.’
‘Really?’ Her nerves jangled: Carrie meant chaos, she brought it with her, into their little house. Finn loved her for it, shaking things up, but he’d been twelve or something the last time she came to them. She’d managed to break one of Matt’s bikes on that occasion – for which he had forgiven her sooner than Bridget had.
‘What?’ said Carrie and Bridget could just see her, pale-faced and defiant, the little pointed chin up, on the alert for insult and rejection and going at it head on. ‘You don’t want me to come?’
It was always there between them.
She’d been nine when Bridget started the violin. Fierce little Carrie watching Bridget from the sidelines, watching her come back from a recital flushed and hyped. Carrie watching her stop eating, watching her hair fall out. Always bright, always inquisitive, tomboy Carrie. Bridget had told her she wasn’t good enough to play an instrument, that had been the beginning of it.
Then it had been Carrie angry with her big sister over the dinner table, when Bridget pushed the food around, when she hid it in her pockets. Angry when Bridget was hospitalised weighing five stone, and when Bridget threw the family into chaos. She’d raged against it, aged twelve and having to leave her school, her mates. ‘But I don’t see why.’ Bridget started to get better, the tide ebbed, but it left a changed landscape. It was how families worked: that was what Matt said, Matt who had no siblings but still knew, he watched. You think they’re fixed, but they shift.
These days the pattern it followed was Carrie pushing Bridget to scold her, and Bridget getting more and more conciliatory and Carrie raising the stakes, angrier and angrier. Over nothing, on the surface.
‘Of course I want you to come.’ And she did. Whatever else Carrie was, she was a distraction. And it would make Finn happy. ‘What, now? Today?’
‘I dunno,’ said Carrie, airy again, now she’d got the reaction she wanted. ‘Next week some time. Maybe.’
So Ella hadn’t actually chucked her out: that was something. ‘Well, just give me a ring to say—’
‘Got to go,’ said Carrie, and hung up.
The mother of the groom flung back the curtain of the changing cubicle and stood there in the pale lace suit, glaring. It was as if a rhino had got tangled up in someone’s curtains.
Bridget set the phone down. ‘So,’ she said carefully. ‘What do you think?’
But what with the bashful couple and the rhino and the teenagers and someone trying to sell her a range of scarves, she didn’t get time to think about Carrie or anything else herself until the late afternoon, and things slowed.
She’d been aware of Laura watching her, waiting for her chance to be nosy, and had headed her off a couple of times already. But then there was a lull, just after lunchtime and she found herself cornered in the kitchen. It was a confined space at the best of times, and with Laura in the doorway Bridget was trapped.
‘Cup of tea?’ said Bridget, warily.
‘Trouble, is it?’ said Laura, her head tilted sympathetically. ‘With your sister, I mean?’ She’d met Carrie once, two or three years before and even then, in her early twenties, had been disapproving.
Then, ‘No, no tea, thanks.’ Patting her stomach, complacent. As if tea might bring on labour, or acrobatics.
‘I hope not,’ said Bridget. Sometimes Laura made her want to scream. ‘She’s coming to visit, that’s all.’
But Carrie had known Anthony Carmichael. In passing, at least: peering curiously into the car when he brought Bridget home from the lessons. Her stomach knotted at the thought. If Carrie bumped into him, here. That man. What would she say? What would she remember? Call me Tony.
‘Family’s family, though, isn’t it?’ said Laura dreamily. ‘Nick’s always saying—’
‘Listen, Laura,’ Bridget interrupted. Because if she had to listen one more time to the wisdom of the sainted Nick, whom Laura had after all found online, not at a ball with a glass slipper in his hand, Nick who was just some smooth salesman not a Nobel prize-winner – and now Laura was gazing at her, puppy-like.
Bridget ploughed on. ‘Don’t you think – maybe, now that – now the baby’s going to be here any minute—’ Laura’s eyebrows drew together, a tiny wounded crease appearing above her perfect nose. ‘Maybe you might want to move to doing half days?’ Bridget concluded lamely.
Laura stepped back, uncertain, ready to be offended – but she was out of the doorway, at least.
‘That window,’ said Bridget briskly, stepping past her. ‘While it’s quiet, I’d like to get it finished off.’ And before Laura could offer to help, ‘You’ve been on your feet all day, why don’t you have a sit down?’
When Bridget, fastening the last tinkling miniature chandelier to the last piece of fishing line, stood up, triumphant in the window, Laura was still behind her humming tunelessly on the sofa examining her nails, her back to the street. With her blouse untucked from her skirt and her hair coming down, Bridget had knelt to extract herself from the display when he was there, walking past.
She didn’t even need to look up to know, for the sweat to break under her arms. Behind her Laura sighed but it might have been in another room, another world. Bridget couldn’t move. She looked up.
In a sheepskin coat, head high. Wa
lking on, not looking, not breaking step.
Just walking past.
And then she moved, reversing ungainly in her haste, and feeling the flush burn her neck, her face. Once out she stood up, pulling her skirt down, and turned her back on the street, unable to move further. Stood there in silence a whole minute, another, until even Laura registered something, putting the magazine down, turning, looking up at her. ‘What—’
Then, heedless, Bridget ran jerkily to the door and tugged it open, hearing the bell ping, loudly, to see him still just visible at the end of the street, jaunty, upright. He slowed – did the bell have to be so loud? – and she ducked back inside.
Laura stared up at her in astonishment. ‘Nothing,’ said Bridget, ragged, ‘I thought I – nothing.’ And walked jerkily, blindly away, into the stockroom where she closed the door behind her.
That night she couldn’t eat, not at all. Finn, blithe, innocent – happy – asked if she was all right and she said she thought she had a bug. He told her Phoebe was looking forward to coming on Tuesday. ‘Is it still all right?’
‘Of course,’ she said, stiff and bright. Matt pushed his glasses up his nose and reached to clear the plates. ‘There’s been something going round at work,’ he said. ‘I’ll sort this.’
She lay in bed with the light off, listening to the murmur of Finn and Matt in the kitchen. She saw clearly that everything could just slip, out of her control. She had to be very careful. Methodical: she went over the options again. Do nothing. Leave.
Go to the police.
Maybe he will just die.
She dreamed.
Chapter Six
Sunday
When Bridget woke up, later than usual and Matt already gone from the bed, she couldn’t remember the dream. Eyes closed, she felt the ghost of it still, moving in the dark spaces of her head – then Matt called up the stairs and she opened her eyes to thin sunshine and swung her legs, winter-pale, out of the bed.
They had their Sunday routines; maybe one day Finn would stop going along with it all but so far he’d always been happy. More than happy: it had always been his favourite day, revelling in staying in his pyjamas till midday. There would be a roast lunch which Bridget bought things for over the week: a joint of lamb, roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, mash. Garlic and rosemary and apples for crumble and carrots. They’d go for a walk while the meat cooked.
Finn loped round the kitchen with a bowl of cereal in his hand as Bridget sat at the table, peeling potatoes. He leaned down to give her a kiss, the milk slopping just to the brim. The bug had gone quietly unmentioned: I’m feeling better, she rehearsed, but no one asked. There was a pan with carrots already done and the tablecloth was out of the drawer, the glasses polished. The sun had strengthened, flooding through the big window and gleaming off the glasses.
Matt came in from the garage, cheerful and dirty with chain grease, and started to wash his hands. ‘Ready, then?’
They walked up the river towards Rose Hill in the wintry sunshine. The fields were soggy with rain but Finn ran ahead like a kid, laughing when his boots sent up a wet squelch. Bridget found herself setting their path at a careful angle to the university campus: the towers were visible everywhere, from their own back door on a bright day, and deliberately she now made them just a tall shadow on the edge of her vision, looking beyond them to the estuary.
The country park was dotted with Sunday walkers. She could see the outline of a man with a baby in a backpack, an elderly couple, a family with a floppy-eared dog going into the clump of bare trees at the foot of the slope.
Finn zigzagged slowly down ahead of them.
‘How’s work?’ she asked and Matt turned to look at her, quizzical. It wasn’t a question she asked. Could he hear anything in her voice? She was asking now because of Carmichael, Carmichael with an office up here, Carmichael her husband’s colleague: Matt couldn’t know that. Matt couldn’t know that since Carmichael had walked into the shop he’d been there, at the back of her every thought, while she was chopping carrots or opening garment boxes or talking to Laura about caesareans.
With Matt’s eyes on her the dream came back to Bridget. She had been lying in bed and she knew without looking that the man in bed next to her, the covers pulled up and covering his face, wasn’t Matt, it was Anthony Carmichael. Turning her head she could see the backs of his hands, the sandy hair on his knuckles. And Finn, not Finn now but the small Finn, three or four, had run in and begun to tug at the covers. Wake up, Daddy.
Don’t, don’t, don’t.
Now she smiled a stiff smile and Matt turned away and then they were looking up at the towers after all. They’d been there all along, only bigger, taller, dwarfing them all. He turned back to her and nodded gravely. ‘Work’s fine.’ Giving her a gentle squeeze. ‘Same old, same old.’ Happily.
She shifted, getting the towers back on to the periphery of her vision. Finn was jogging now, elbows up, straight down towards the copse.
‘He’s got energy to spare,’ said Matt cheerfully. ‘Nice, isn’t it?’ Not looking at her but smiling. ‘Him being like this.’
‘Do you think it’s the girlfriend?’ she said cautiously. Finn had never been difficult, but he’d been moody on and off for a year or more, frowning under the newly thick eyebrows as he came out of the bathroom, or monosyllabic under questioning. Now it was as if the sun had come out. She pushed her hands down into her pockets. ‘Phoebe?’
Trying out the name: this girl might become almost part of the family, calling for Finn, coming to tea. Phoebe.
‘Probably,’ said Matt, drawing his shoulders up. ‘It’s been known.’ He waved: Finn was spinning round and waved back. ‘At that age.’ She looked at him and he was smiling, awkward.
‘Were you like that?’ Bridget asked tentatively. She remembered Matt’s quiet determination, nearly twenty years ago now, waiting for her to answer when he had finally asked her if she’d like to go to the pub with him. ‘Just for a drink,’ clarifying, pointlessly. When she’d said yes he had just nodded, bobbing his head up and down quickly two, three times. He hadn’t done any skipping – but she might not have gone for a drink with him if he had.
‘Well, I was twenty,’ he said seriously. ‘When it happened to me. Not sixteen.’
She began to smile but up ahead Finn had finally run out of steam, breathless, and Matt was running down the hill after him. He had a characteristic running style, a steady economical jog.
It came to her that when she wanted to feel good, calm, happy, she thought of Matt in the garage on his knees in front of a bicycle, a box of tools and bike parts beside him and oil on his fingers. When he was fucking her he had the same focus, steady and careful. I love you, Matt. They never said it: if she said it now he’d know something was wrong.
They were at the trees when Bridget caught up with them, on the edge of a thick clump of silver birches where only the odd stray golden leaf clung to the black branches now, almost December, but before she could say anything Finn plunged in between the trunks to where a stream trickled across the foot of the copse. He’d always liked to splash there when he was small, in shiny red Wellington boots. It seemed a long time ago.
Then the floppy-eared dog was jumping up at Finn and the owners had come up to call it and they were all laughing, a father and mother about the same age as her and Matt, only rangier than them. A boy of about six or seven was trying to grab the dog’s collar and then his older sister, flossy hair under a beanie, long-limbed, gawky, was intervening. It was Isabel: she was Isabel and for one second she saw Bridget: the girl held her gaze.
In instant fear Bridget took a step back, wanting to hide somewhere, behind one of the silver tree-trunks too slender to hide anything, wanting to turn around, to bend and pretend to tie her shoelace, to run away. But then Matt was in front of her engaging with them, Finn was saying something to Isabel and before Bridget could do anything at all suddenly it was over. It was done and she could see their backs as they were walking aw
ay. And it was too late.
She should have taken hold of the parents, the tall, unmade-up mother with hair flying round her face, the lanky father in his cagoule, and said, Do you know what’s going on? Your daughter’s at risk. She’d been too frightened—
Of Matt’s face, if she did, turning, bewildered, to look at her, to see something, someone he didn’t recognise. Finn stopping and all the light and movement and happiness draining away. And Isabel: Bridget hadn’t needed to say anything to know what would happen to Isabel’s face because there’d been a look, before they stepped away from each other, that had contained it all. Don’t.
Something hit the side of Bridget’s leg, wet and heavy. She turned to see that Finn was laughing and at her feet was a soggy old football; he must have found it and kicked it at her. ‘Sorry, Mum,’ he made a face then, registering something about her, a momentary uncertainty flickered.
Bridget made herself smile. ‘Oi,’ she said, and she made herself begin to tell him off, joking, pushing at him so he had to turn and couldn’t see her.
All these tiny moments, their life. All these depend on nothing changing. Pretend he never came here, she doesn’t know him. It never happened.
Except now there’s Isabel.
‘Home,’ she said.
Back at the house she went through the motions, waiting till they’d eaten, the whole ritual observed minutely. The table laid, plates, cutlery, glasses, the right napkins, the timing. Yorkshire puddings and gravy and the warm kitchen smelling of roast lamb. Nothing must burn, nothing must go wrong. Nothing went wrong.
Matt was in the other room on the sofa searching for a movie to watch. Finn always helped her load the dishwasher.
‘Did you know that girl?’ she said, when his back was to her, leaning over the machine. Casually. ‘The one we saw this morning on the walk, the one with the dog?’
What We Did_A gripping, compelling psychological thriller with a nail-biting twist Page 4