The music has stopped, and there are voices closing in now. Lucy’s voice. Jake and his pals. Laughter. Feet on the stairs. They’re coming back down. Gabriel Ash scoops up the carrier from the table, then he lifts one hand and places it lightly on my shoulder.
‘Hmm,’ he says, and now there’s a ghost of a smile forming at the corners of his mouth. ‘You want to know something, Abbie McFadden?’
‘What?’
‘I wish I thought you did.’
It takes me a moment to digest what he’s saying. Except I fail to because I don’t understand what he means. ‘But –’
‘Hey, no worries, ’ he says quickly. ‘Maybe I don’t, as it happens. Forget I even said that, okay?’ He lowers his hand and then glances at the wall clock. ‘In fact, I think it’s time we left you in peace.’
*
It’s really far too hot for the boys to continue their practice without the windows open, but as Mr Davidson is now back from his round and pottering in his own garden, they have no choice but to either abandon it, or to slope back off upstairs and be fried. And I don’t doubt they will be because they’re half fried already, on account of the Lucy Loves Metallica effect.
They choose the latter regardless. Thumping up the stair treads two at a time, still joshing each other about who said what and when. At a loose end now until I have to pick Mum up at five, I go back out into the garden, intending to read the paper (and do my fiendish Friday puzzle before she gets her hands on it) but am unable to concentrate on it, as I’m still too preoccupied by what Gabriel Ash said to me just before he left. Brooding on it, in fact. What did he mean by suggesting I forget he even said that? Is there more to the situation with Hugo than I first supposed? Some dark and terrible secret that I’ve missed? There’s certainly something he’s not letting on, and I try to think if there was anything I saw in Hugo’s collection of bits and pieces that might give me a clue as to what. I can’t think of a single thing, but there’s obviously something on his mind. Something bothering him. First he’s wishing I knew what he was saying and then he’s telling me to forget it. I have a hunch that had we had a few more moments to ourselves he might have been about to impart a little more. A confession? It certainly had all the hallmarks of one. But a confession about what? About whom?
Chapter 18
‘AND THEN I HAD another thought,’ I tell Dee while we change into our swimming gear the following Tuesday evening. Badminton, and now swimming as well. What next? Between the fall out after Charlie and Dee’s ante-natal zeal, I shall be a gym rat before the year’s out.
‘What?’
‘I thought ‘Hang on a minute. When I mentioned his father, he shook his head’. Of course, I thought that was just, well, a sort of acknowledgement about how he was feeling, you know? But then once I got to thinking about it a bit more, it occurred to me that it might have meant he was referring to something else altogether.’
‘Which was?’
I pull the strap up on my swimsuit and start folding my clothes. ‘Lucy Whittall, of course!’
‘Lucy Whittall? What about her?’
‘That’s just the very thing I’ve been pondering. The way she was.’
‘What way was she?’
‘Well, hyped up, excitable. A bit manic. Well, sort of. I didn’t really think anything of it at the time – she’s that sort of person anyway, isn’t she? ’
‘Is she? She always looks pretty hatchet-faced on A and E.’
‘Well, she’s in role then, of course. And it’s all blood and guts. But that is what she’s like. Well, would seem to be from what I’ve seen of her, anyway. And it was a lovely afternoon, and they’d just been out for lunch, and I thought she was, just, well, jolly. Couple of glasses of wine on board. That sort of thing.’
‘But?’
‘Well, it was something Ben said afterwards. You know, Jake’s friend. Not to me, of course. They were just chatting about her, generally. And he used the word ‘wired’. He said she looked like she was wired.’
‘Which means what, exactly?’
I stuff my socks in my trainers and shove them in a locker. ‘Well, I don’t know for sure, of course. But isn’t it the sort of thing they say about people on drugs?’
‘What, you think she was on something? Stoned?’
‘I don’t know about stoned. Pretty much the opposite, I’d say. And it reminded me of something Candice said a while back. About how she’d been busted for cocaine a couple of years ago.’
‘Cocaine? Blimey. Lucy Whittall? You really think so?’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t know. And I’m not about to bandy the idea around, obviously. But when you sit down and think about it, it doesn’t sound that far-fetched, does it? It’s not like that sort of thing isn’t in the tabloids all the time.’
Dee’s now in her bikini. Pink with lime polka-dots. Though small still, her stomach’s already taut and smooth-skinned. I had two dreadful, much ruffled pregnancy costumes. How times have changed. And how nice. She looks great.
‘So you think it’s actually about that?’ she says, gathering up her own clothes. ‘You know, with him? That he’s stressed out because she’s taking drugs again?’
‘Well, it could be, couldn’t it? Given the history. Given all the stuff there’s been in the press about her.’
‘Oh, that’s dreadful. What a waste. I mean, if you’re right, that is. Are you going to say anything to him?’
‘God, no. It’s none of my business, is it? And it may not even be that, after all.’
‘But it does sound like he’s looking for a shoulder to cry on.’
‘Hmm,’ I say. ‘You might be right about that. But he’s not having mine. I’ve already been there, remember. With Charlie. And look where that got me.’
In bed with an already married man. In hot water. Which can be efficacious in the case of frozen shoulder, say, or chronic arthritis, or a collar bone injury, but is not something I’d like to find myself falling into any more. And I’m not sure, in any case, that it is as I’ve conjectured. I still favour the notion that Gabriel Ash is just coming to terms with how things were between him and his father. Affairs of the heart are too depressing to contemplate. And I contemplate more than enough depressing things already, what with living with Medea and all.
‘Hmm,’ says Dee now, as we exit the changing room. ‘You say that, but it’s hard to resist your basic personality type. You’re like me, you are. A Nurturer. You can’t help but want to help people.’
Dee is doing a part-time course in Applied Psychology at the moment. Ostensibly part of her Grand Career Plan, but in reality the degree she’s been slaving over for the past four years has been mainly a reason to get out of the house. But psychology is certainly pertinent to her situation, I guess. And useful. Perhaps I should study it too. ‘I hope I can,’ I say. ‘I’m fed up with nurturing people. You know what I’d like? I’d like to be nurtured. I’d like to be looked after for a change. It’s not even as if I’m even very good at it, am I? And it’s certainly not good for me.’
Which makes me think of my mother, who is, at this moment, with any luck, leafing through the details of Winding House Close, the latest retirement development on the list. Except that’s probably not what she’s doing. Far from it. She’s probably watching Eastenders, knocking back the sherry and practising her bumble bee breathing.
Dee tuts at me. ‘Er, what about Sebastian and Jake?’
‘I wasn’t exactly thinking of them.’
‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘Things getting on top of you at home chez maman ?’
I slosh through the foot bath. ‘Oh, no more than usual. We’re just terminally incompatible as housemates, that’s all.’
‘As you would be. She’s your mother. And you’re so different too.’
‘You can certainly say that again. What’s her category, d’you think? Imperious matriarch come despot?’
‘Hmm,’ she says again. �
�I think she’s probably a Performer.’
I laugh. ‘You really needed to read that in a book ?’
‘Actually, no. Thinking about it, she’s more a Go-Getter. Yes, that’s more your mum, I think.’
‘Is it? Well, fingers crossed then.’
‘About what?’
‘That she’ll hurry up and go-get a new place to live.’
But perhaps I’m wrong about the efficacy of my shoulder anyway, because when I come out from seeing my first patient on Wednesday morning, it’s to find that Gabriel Ash has cancelled his Thursday appointment, due, or so Candice says, to something coming up at work. What sort of something? A whirlwind? An earthquake? An untimely monsoon? Despite what I told Dee, I’m a little disappointed. It’s one thing to not want to get involved in someone else’s travails, quite another not to want to know. Or perhaps I’m just reverting to type, like Dee says. In which case, I must really try not to. He…she…them…it… all of it, frankly, is absolutely none of my business, after all.
What is my business, though I fervently wish it wasn’t – not this decade, anyhow – is the fact that I still have my mother in residence and not the teeniest inkling that that state of affairs is about to change any time soon. And the reason it won’t change is because I’m the one not changing it. Left to its own devices, it is a situation that could rumble on for ever, much like I’m inclined to suspect she will.
But harbouring such mutinous and unsavoury thoughts is no way for a grown woman to behave. What I should do, of course, is talk to her about it, tell her, except every time I gear myself up to do just that, I find I’m paralysed with anxiety about just what to say. It should be the easiest thing in the world, shouldn’t it? Talking? I can talk the hind legs off the most sturdily built donkey most of the time, so why this pathetic inability to communicate, when communication is the only sure way to resolve things?
Why does it make me feel scared?
‘Because you’ve always let her bully you, that’s why.’ So says Pru, with some feeling, when she calls me the following Monday. She’s taken to calling me lots since Mum moved here. We’ve always talked often, but never this often. And I know it’s because she feels guilty as well.
But what have we to feel guilty about, exactly? I keep asking myself that question, over and over, and have reached no sort of rational answer. And worse than my inability to get a handle on the guilt trip, is the fact that such musing is becoming dangerously counter-productive. Because despite all the doughty sentiments I so recently expressed to my sister, every time I open the box marked ‘reasons not to feel guilty about Mum’, out they keep popping, ever growing in number, like scarves or white rabbits or sausages or doves. Shame there’s no magician to wave a magic wand and – poof! – make them all disappear.
‘Well, that’s going to stop,’ I say firmly. I can always be firm when I’m talking to Pru. Just can’t seem to replicate it where my mother’s concerned. ‘As of now. I’m a grown woman, for God’s sake!’
‘Yes, exactly,’ she says. Then she makes a little sound that’s almost a ‘tut’. ‘Abs, you know, you’ve just got to be honest with her. What else can you do?’
Not ‘we’, I note. You. As in me, and not her. She – or rather Doug – has already made her position clear. For the first time since this began I feel a sense of real resentment that this burden has become mainly mine to shoulder. I know I shouldn’t – I did put myself in this position, after all – but I can’t help but think how unfair it all feels. I wish I had a husband to put his foot down about it. A Doug of my own to stand up for me. Which is not something I’ve found myself thinking in many a year. Often I’ve been glad that I haven’t any more. Mainly I’ve not been in a position where it’s mattered – not in the way it matters now. About this. But I mustn’t resent Pru. It’s not her fault we’re here. ‘I know I have to,’ I say. ‘But I just can’t bring myself to. Because it’s a conversation I just know is going to end in tears. Because she’ll want to know why. And I’m frightened I’ll lose it and I’ll tell her. In detail.’
‘Just tell her you need your own space.’
‘Just like that, eh?’
‘Yes. Just be firm. Abs, you have to.’
Just as she is being firm with me now. I sigh. ‘I know, I know. But it’s so much easier said than done, isn’t it?’
‘No, it isn’t. You just sit her down and explain that it’s not an option. You don’t have to get involved in reasons and reproachments and justifications about it. You don’t have to make it personal or dredge up the past. Look, I know she’ll turn it on big time to try and make you feel bad, but you’ve got to be tough. Believe me, you’ll feel so much worse a year down the line if she is still there. Just be firm. Tell her straight. All the while you don’t she’ll keep working away at you. Keep thinking it is an option. Which will make it all the harder when you do put her straight.’
I take this all on board and the more I do so, the more I realise that it’s just not the same for Pru as it’s always been for me. Where emotional blackmail enters into the equation I’m an absolute, category one, out-there-on-my-own wuss. Always have been. ‘I wish I was you,’ I say. ‘You’re so much better at standing up to her than I am.’
Pru laughs a little laugh. It’s both loving and knowing. ‘Of course I am,’ she explains gently. ‘Because I was the lucky one. I’ve always had you to look after me!’
And as she says so, I realise she’s absolutely on the button. She did, and she has, and it makes her so much stronger. But it also works both ways. ‘You’re very welcome,’ I say.
‘And you’re going to do it, yes? Just keep in mind that you’re an adult and a mother, and that you’re simply not prepared to let her have Seb’s room. Okay?’
‘Ok ay !’
‘How’s he getting on, anyway?’ she then says, obviously as anxious not to dwell on my problems any longer than I am. ‘Still having a good time, is he?
‘D’you know, I don’t actually know. I’ve heard nothing from him for a week.’
She laughs. ‘I think I’d take that as a yes, then.’
I laugh too, now. ‘Yes. You’re probably right.’
Friday. No, Abbie. You’re probably wrong.
Txt msg; Sorry 2 bother u – bin trying 2 call – has Seb been in touch at all? Jonx
Chapter 19
No. HE HASN’T BEEN in touch.
No Text message, no email, no postcard, no nothing.
Being both a law-abiding person, and also someone who pummels damaged limbs for a living, I try not to use my mobile while driving. Thus I ignored the two incoming calls that preceded this message, as I was on my way back from dropping Mum at Celeste’s house. Though when the text came – heralded by some nonsense noise programmed in by Jake – I decided to attend to it while I was held at the lights.
I read it again now.
Sorry 2 bother u – bin trying 2 call – has Seb been in touch at all? Jonx
As reading text messages of the kind Jonathan has just sent me are not generally conducive to driving with due care and attention, I then attend, as soon as is practical, to stopping the car. I pull up outside the hire shop on Caerphilly Road, where ranks of mini cement mixers and floor sanders and rotavators are always ranked neatly outside, gaily orange. Coaxing people of an entirely different species to my own to an excitable frenzy of lifestyle improvements and the notion that happiness is all about having a DIY project on-the-go at all times.
Oh, that it was. Jonathan connects almost immediately. ‘Mrs McFadden!’ he gasps at me, breathlessly. ‘Is that you?’
His voice is so loud in my ears that for a fraction of a second I think he’s not in Italy, but speaking to me from just inside the shop.
‘Jon? Yes, it’s me! I just got your text. What on earth’s going on?’
‘Oh,’ he says, sounding crestfallen. ‘I take it that’s a no, then.’
I am not liking the sound of this one little bit. �
��No, Jon. I haven’t heard from Seb. Should I have done? What’s happened?’ A thought occurs to me suddenly. ‘Have you two fallen out?’
‘No,’ he says swiftly. ‘No, no. Nothing like that. I’ve just, well, I’ve just sort of mislaid him.’
Even now I can feel stealthy tendrils of cold fear begin to tighten around my stomach. ‘What d’you mean – mislaid him? How? Where? Jonathan, what’s happened?’
‘Erm…’ he says. And I can almost see him scratching his head. ‘Well, we were at this disco –’
‘Where?’
I hear shuffling. ‘Um, I forget the name of the place. What’s the name of this place?’ He obviously has someone else with him. ‘Cervia. That’s it.’
Which means nothing to me. ‘And?’
‘And, well, we kind of got split up. We, er, met these girls and, like, I was with, er, Fulvia… and Seb was with this other one…’
‘And?’
‘And I assumed he’d gone off somewhere with her.’
‘Gone off? Gone off where ?’
‘I don’t know. They’re staying at this campsite and they thought they had some free pitches, and, well, I just assumed he’d turn up there with her later. Assumed that’s what he had done. Except he never showed. And when I called him this morning, his phone was on divert, and I haven’t been able to get hold of him since.’
All morning, then. All morning. What’s happened ? Remain calm, I think, thinking this. Remain calm. Remain rational. It’s only lunchtime. He’ll be asleep still. That’s all. ‘And he hasn’t called you ?’ Stupid question. Of course he hasn’t.
‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s like, really odd. We were supposed to be getting a train at ten.’
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