The more she tried to work out what was going on in her head, the more confused she became. What if the baby arrived to a fanfare of unmitigated parental devotion and all the trappings of childhood he or she could want yet lacking in something much more vital, the unmitigated devotion of each parent to the other? What if she spent years trying to be the kind of wife Charlton wanted, and failed? Wasn’t it better to bale out now rather than exist in a permanent state of compromise and make herself and everyone around her miserable in the process?
Or would the baby change everything? Would she and Charlton wake up one morning and find themselves on equal terms, their expectations perfectly aligned? It seemed a hell of a responsibility to saddle a defenceless baby with.
And so she’d prevaricated, until one evening, during yet another interminable dinner party populated by Charlton’s male colleagues and their sweet but slightly dozy wives, Charlton suddenly stood up and announced to the assembled company that not only were they engaged to be married but that they’d jumped the gun a little – he’d winked at this point – and made a start on Dane Junior number one.
With the sound of applause in her ears, Juliet had thrown down her napkin, walked out and taken a taxi home. The next day, she’d packed her bags and headed back home to Brighton.
Her father had greeted her arrival with a brave smile which contained only a wisp of despair. Her mother had been shocked. What was Juliet thinking of, casting herself adrift from a catch like Charlton and with a baby on the way to boot? In her opinion, Juliet should have married him while the offer was still on the table and stop living in a dream world, an opinion steadfastly endorsed by Andrea, of all people. Juliet had felt ganged up against, but in a way it had given her the strength to believe in herself and do what she knew was the right thing, both for her and the baby.
Al had taken Aphra up to bed now. Karina plumped up her cushions, repositioned them behind her and stroked the tangerine silk mound of her stomach. ‘I wish this one would go to sleep for a bit. She’s kicking like mad.’
‘She? You know that now?’
‘Not officially. I didn’t ask at the scan.’ Glancing at the door, she leaned towards Juliet and lowered her voice. ‘I say she all the time, then it might turn out to be a boy, like casting a magic spell. I know I shouldn’t and I don’t really mind as long as it’s healthy but a boy would add a new perspective, you know what I mean?’
Juliet nodded, and whispered back. ‘Why the secrecy? Doesn’t Al know you want a boy?’
‘Goodness, no. He wants another girl. He’s made that perfectly plain. He won’t even discuss boys’ names.’
Juliet laughed. Gray looked over, caught her eye and smiled. She felt a rush of love for him. His mood had improved considerably over the past few hours, since they’d eaten, she realised. He’d probably rushed lunch, or not had any at all, arrived home starving hungry and dog tired and all she’d done was to wind him up. Well, she would try harder in future and she’d stop being so paranoid about his moods while she was at it.
Gray came over and sat down, Rachel and Clemmie having gone upstairs to play with the hamster. It was always a difficult choice for Rachel, whether to give in to the girls’ persuasion and spend time with them or to stay with the adults and risk being bored silly just in case she caught any snippets of interesting conversation. So far, the girls had won hands-down, but for how much longer? At least Rachel’s fondness for the Thornes family had outweighed any tendency to sulk over unwanted food. Hollow legs helped, of course.
Juliet poured Gray another glass of wine from the bottle on the table in front of them and handed it to him. They’d have to leave the car here and take a taxi home but it was worth it to see him so relaxed and happy, even if it was alcohol-induced.
A little later, Juliet went downstairs to help Karina make coffee. When they returned, Al and Gray were talking shop.
‘What’s the first thing to go when a company’s in trouble?’ Gray was saying. ‘Spending on staff training, that’s what. Why would they pay the likes of us when they can do it themselves? No, life coaching is the future and we have to run with that.’
‘I guess so.’ Al sounded sleepily non-committal.
‘So we need to partition off to make another room because it’s dashed inconvenient to have to clear up the office if you have to use that.’
‘The clients all pay the same, whether they get the consulting room or the office. In any case I thought you were all for taking your private clients “out and about”?’ Al drew quotation marks in the air. ‘Although I can’t see it myself, sitting on a park bench freezing your bollocks off while some poor devil with more money than sense rants on about how their mother scarred them for life by locking them in the coal-shed, and you’ve got nothing to do but pretend to be listening while you watch the dogs crapping on the grass.’
‘It does work sometimes, you cynical old sod. It triggers off buried memories,’ Gray said.
‘Yeah, and sometimes it gets you into a shed-load of trouble.’
What did Al mean by that? Juliet looked questioningly at Gray, only to find him avoiding her eye and looking at Karina instead. She decided not to pursue it – she was too relaxed and sleepy.
‘Supper was great, Karina,’ Gray was saying. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome.’
Gray turned to Al. ‘You’re a lucky devil. Not only have you managed to pick the most stupendously gorgeous woman on the planet – apart from mine, of course – you’ve got one who can cook as well. Just make sure she fills up the freezer before she drops the sproglet, that’s my advice.’
Karina burst into laughter. ‘You could have trouble with him when you get him home.’
‘I’m banking on it,’ Juliet said, laughing too.
9
There followed a string of dull, grey days when the trees did not stir and the pewter ribbon of the sea stretched between foreshore and skyline, its surface barely troubled by indolent tides. At night the sky was an inky blank canvas, the stars blotted out by a wash of low cloud.
Juliet felt unsettled and vaguely anxious, feelings she tried to shake off by working like a demon and mostly she was successful, until one afternoon she was standing at the bedroom window, gazing out at nothing in particular, and the same sensation hit her as she’d experienced in the mini-mart, as if someone was watching her. She felt her body tense and recoil, almost as if she had no control over her responses, but when she made herself look properly, there was no-one in the street apart from the postman delivering a parcel to the house opposite.
Stupid, letting her imagination run away with her. It was probably lack of sun. Or hormones. Gray’s mercurial moods didn’t help. At least when he’d been grumpy all the time she’d known what to expect but now he was either in what she thought of as solitary confinement - hiding away behind his computer, scarcely talking to anyone unless he had to - or as bright and brittle as a stick of Brighton rock, driving everyone crazy with jokes that made them all laugh precisely because they weren’t in the least bit funny.
‘You do still love me, don’t you?’ she said one night, after Gray made love to her so urgently and desperately it took her breath away.
His hands cupped her face gently. His eyes were shining, too brightly, in the semi-darkness, as if they were full of tears, but she couldn’t be sure. ‘Of course I do. You must never think I’ve stopped loving you, because I haven’t and I never will.’
Implicit in this response, she felt, was ‘trust me.’
‘All right,’ she said. Then: ‘Darling, what is it? What’s wrong? Please talk to me.’ ‘Trust me, too,’ she wanted to say, but she didn’t.
His face closed up again. ‘Nothing’s wrong. As long as I’ve got you, how could it be?’
To some extent it was reassuring. Gray needed her. He’d all but said so. She couldn’t be that bad, then.
‘You need your holiday. We both do,’ she told him, raising herself on one elbow and tracing the soft line o
f one of his eyebrows with her fingertip.
They settled into the spoon position, Gray with his arm around her, but she sensed his acute wakefulness even as she gave in to sleep.
Juliet’s current state of restlessness seemed to make her hyper-sensitive to the slightest change in the behaviour of everyone else and for much of the time she had the disconcerting feeling that the house was full of secrets.
Rachel was quieter than usual and strangely distracted. Juliet would look across the table at meal times and catch her, fork poised in mid-air and a far-away look on her face, as if she was no longer present and the real Rachel had been abducted by the fairies. For reasons unexplained, she had taken to rushing off to school on the early bus if she hadn’t managed to cadge a lift from Gray. Most of her evenings were spent closeted in her room and she spent so much time at Sarah’s she was practically an honorary member of the Schofield family.
Juliet missed her company but instinct told her not to make an issue of it - her daughter was entitled to her privacy. She, Juliet, had suffered from lack of that at the same age and she didn’t want the same fate to befall Rachel. Juliet had only to close her bedroom door and her mother would be knocking on it and coming straight in without being invited, ostensibly to ask if she was coming downstairs soon but really to check up on whatever she was doing. Consequently, Juliet kept a surreptitious eye on Rachel’s general health and well-being but otherwise tried to leave her alone.
Andrea acquired a look of almost manic determination as she careered through her days, her sights set wholly on the next meeting with the object of her affections. The unfortunate flip-side to this was that she kept forgetting to do things like turning off the bath taps or turning on the oven and once she went out and left the front door wide open and the house unattended.
At her solicitor’s behest, she returned to Harrogate for a few days to deal with matters concerning her impending divorce from Declan and to put some furniture into storage in preparation for the sale of the house. Juliet hoped this brief separation from her lover might prompt Andrea to regain a foothold on reality and see her romance for what it was, an affair with no future, but her hopes were in vain and on her return Andrea seemed intent on proving that absence does indeed make the heart grow fonder. It seemed she had only been in the house five minutes when she dashed out again, pausing only to shower and change and shove a load of washing in the machine which Juliet then had to take out and hang up.
‘That woman’s becoming a liability,’ was Gray’s wry comment, and Juliet was inclined to agree.
The phones in the house became weirdly intrusive, almost as if they’d acquired lives of their own. Rachel, not yet being allowed a mobile phone, took to smuggling the house phone up to her room and once when Juliet went upstairs to retrieve it, she came upon Rachel cutting off a call and looking extremely guilty.
Andrea’s mobile, which she kept on ring mode rather than vibrate in case, heaven forbid, she missed a call from her lover, frequently played its annoying jangly tune and since it was never in the same place as Andrea, had her rushing all over the house to find it.
Gray seemed to have developed paranoia where his mobile was concerned and was for ever snatching it up when a call came and jabbing frantically at the buttons to switch it off without answering, as if it would spontaneously combust unless he did so.
The mystery silent calls to the house phone continued, too, only now they came at unearthly hours like midnight or five o’clock in the morning. Juliet’s suspicions that they were something to do with Andrea had faded because of her friend’s lack of reaction to them and she supposed it was just one of those nuisance things – some pathetic heavy-breather who kept tapping in the same number. If that was the case, it was high time he picked on somebody else.
Gray seemed not to take her disquiet at all seriously when she raised the subject. Reporting the calls would be more trouble than it was worth, he said, and there was probably nothing that could be done, anyway. It was all very well for him, Juliet thought, since it wasn’t him who answered the night calls, it was always left to her. She didn’t like to leave it in case it was a genuine call and there was some kind of emergency.
Rachel’s suggestion that they should get a whistle and blow it hard down the phone seemed an attractive solution - until Juliet visualized herself ripping to shreds the eardrum of some innocent soul whose only crime was to be a bit slow off the starting blocks at saying what they wanted.
Juliet consoled herself with the knowledge that Frigiliana was only two weeks away. She understood now that it wasn’t because Gray had not consulted her over the holiday that she’d reacted the way she had. It was because she was afraid that being alone with him for that length of time might cause the true reason for his discontent to bubble to the surface and they’d arrive home with their relationship in tatters. Now she felt much more positive about it and was prepared to concede that Gray was right, that quality time together was precisely what they needed. The holiday she’d been dreading was beginning to seem like a lifeline.
One morning Juliet went downstairs to find Rachel and Andrea deep in conversation at the breakfast table. Rachel had the day off school because the teachers were on some sort of training jaunt, and Andrea was, for once, gracing them with her presence and accompanying mother and daughter on a shopping trip to stock up for their respective holidays. Juliet had decided to take the day off too - she’d earned it with the number of hours she’d put in lately.
‘You made loads of dosh at that conference place, didn’t you, Andrea?’ Rachel was saying. ‘What exactly is it you did and could I do it?’
‘That’s rather rude, Rache,’ Juliet said, tipping the crumbs from the cereal packet into a bowl since that was all that was left. ‘Why do you want to know anyway?’
‘We’re doing careers at school. We’ve got to get a portfolio together of all the jobs we’d like to do and how you get them.’
‘I don’t mind,’ Andrea said, ‘and it’s true anyway. I was on a good salary at Confer but don’t forget, Rachel, that wasn’t always the case. I worked my way up the ladder like everyone else.’
Juliet smothered a giggle, remembering Declan’s role in Andrea’s top speed ladder-climbing.
‘You could certainly go into personnel work – that was mainly what I did at Confer – but you’d need to study first, do some sort of business degree perhaps, and then there are specialist qualifications in personnel, or human relations as they call it now,’ continued Andrea, whose own qualifications consisted entirely of ‘O’ level Biology and Home Economics and a twenty-five yards’ swimming certificate.
Rachel wrote on her pad and drew a line. ‘What other jobs did you do, like just after you left school?’ She waited, head inclined and pen poised, as if she was conducting an interview with a prospective employee.
‘I was a trainee buyer in a big department store in London – it’s closed down now. Your mother was one as well. We lived in a hostel with the other girls - what a bundle of laughs that was, wasn’t it, Ju? Anyway, it didn’t work out too well so that isn’t something I’d recommend as a good career move.’
‘I couldn’t very well work there if it’s closed down, could I?’
‘No, being a buyer in retail, I mean.’
‘What was wrong with it?’
Juliet laughed. They’d had such high hopes, at least Andrea had. Several months in, it became clear that ‘trainee buyer’ was a euphemism for glorified shop assistant. Juliet didn’t much care – she hated the uniform and the hostel with its stringent rules and by then she’d spent enough hours traipsing around galleries and perching on walls with her sketch pad until her bottom was numb to know in which direction she should be heading. It hadn’t been easy, becoming an impoverished art student, and a mature one at that, but she’d been so amazed and grateful that the first college she applied to offered her a place that she’d happily swapped a paltry wage packet for an even more paltry grant.
Andrea, on t
he other hand, was sorely disappointed when it finally dawned on her that the store in question had no intention of allowing her to purchase so much as a packet of hair pins on their behalf, let alone the designer dress collection she had set her sights on.
‘My talents were not recognised,’ Andrea said, lifting her chin. ‘So I told them where to stick their job and joined a temping agency. I couldn’t type but I told them I could so I had to go to evening classes and pick it up as I went along.’
Rachel stopped writing – no mileage in that, obviously. She sucked the end of her pen. ‘What about being a vet? I’d quite like to be one of those.’
‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been one. You’ll have to look that one up on the internet.’
‘Yes, I can do that at Sarah’s when I go over later.’
‘Sarah’s again?’ Juliet was unable to resist the response. ‘You can use my lap-top to go on the internet, then you won’t need to go to Sarah’s. You can take it up to your room if you like,’ she said, resorting shamefully to bribery.
Rachel shrugged. ‘Might do.’
On Wednesday morning, Gray set off on a three-day business trip. He was running a series of management workshops at an IT company in Basingstoke, he said, pinning up in the kitchen the details of the hotel, the company and alternative contact numbers in case Juliet needed him urgently and couldn’t get through to his mobile. His earnestness in making sure she understood all this information made her smile.
Last night, knowing Andrea would be giving her all to the Clifton Players and Rachel having supper at River’s house after ice-skating, Juliet had planned a quiet dinner for the two of them when she hoped to steer the conversation away from the comfortable terrain of everyday matters and on to the potholed thoroughfare of Gray’s moodiness. She would be subtle, of course - asking him outright what was wrong was plainly never going to work. Perhaps if she tried to explain her own feelings, centre the problem around her rather than focussing on Gray’s shortcomings… well, it was worth a try.
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