Out on a Limb

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  So that’s what Rob meant about Jonathan coming up. God, I’m so stupid. But this can’t happen. Surely. ‘Sebastian, you can’t possibly go galumphing back off around Europe – particularly eastern Europe – when you’ve just had major surgery. It’s not safe. Supposing something happens?’

  He’s unimpressed. ‘Come on, Mum. What’s going to happen?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know! But something might. You might get an infection. Your stitches might weep. You might –’

  ‘Mum, it wasn’t major surgery. It was just my appendix. Look.’ He pushes back the sheet and tugs at his boxers. ‘See? Almost nothing. Just two tiny holes. Honestly, Mum. Stop fretting !’

  I round on Rob as soon as we’re back in the hospital corridor. Bloody hospitals. I don’t care how great a job they did on Seb, I am all at once sick of the places. Not least because I’m sure they are making me sick. I’ve had enough hospital dramas and the last few weeks to script a whole series worth of episodes of that bloody A and E.

  What a difference an hour makes. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you warn me? Why didn’t you say something on the drive down about this?’

  He looks completely nonplussed. ‘Hang on, Abbie. Why didn’t you ? How was I supposed to know you had some plan on the go to whisk him back to Wales? It never so much as occurred to me for an instant. Why on earth would he do that when I’m just around the corner?’

  ‘Marseilles is hardly just around the corner,’ I snap at him.

  He doesn’t rise to it. ‘But still a good deal closer than Cardiff. Besides, he was due to be coming to me soon anyway. You knew that.’

  ‘Yes, I knew that. But that’s not till October. In the meantime he should be home. With me.’

  ‘Why, exactly?’

  ‘Because he needs looking after.’

  ‘Which is something I’m perfectly capable of doing.’

  ‘I know, but –’

  ‘Abbie,’ he interrupts me. ‘Just you hold up a minute. There’s no ‘but’ about it. You don’t have a monopoly on looking after the children, you know.’

  ‘But I’m his mother!’

  ‘And I’m his father.’

  ‘Yes, I know that, but –’

  ‘But nothing, Abbie. It’s entirely up to him what he does. He’s almost nineteen now. He’s an adult. You can’t keep him wrapped up in cotton wool for ever.’

  ‘I don’t keep him wrapped up in cotton wool! That’s a really unkind thing to say! And what the hell would you know about it anyway?’

  ‘Rather less than I’d like to. As well you know. Jesus, give me a break, will you? Why shouldn’t I take him home with me? Why shouldn’t I have the opportunity to spend some time with him, huh?’

  ‘I’ve never stopped you seeing him. Not once. Never.’

  ‘No, I know that. I’m not saying you have. I’m just trying to point out that I’m here, too.’ He has, I notice, adopted the look of a man who is all out of energy for taking things on. Taking me on. I know that look well. Perhaps it’s just as well we live so far apart. ‘Surely – surely, Abbie – we’re not going to have a row about this?’

  I blow my nose.

  ‘No. No, we’re not.’ Much as I wish it weren’t so, he’s absolutely right in everything he says. Infuriating though that may be. Except the cotton wool bit. I take exception to that. ‘Look,’ I say, because once I give it a nanosecond’s thought, I realise the whole taking exception to things thing is wearing a little thin, even for me. I’m tired. He’s tired. We’ve both come a long way. ‘I’m sorry, all right? It’s just that I assumed he’d be coming home with me and now he isn’t – and the two of you have obviously got things all sorted already between you – and you’ll be tootling back off to France with him, and I’m hardly going to see anything of him, and, well, it’s just been a bit upsetting. That’s all. I know it’s all exciting for him, and he’s keen to come and stay with you and start his work experience and everything, and I wouldn’t dream of making any sort of a fuss about it to him, but you can’t imagine the state I’ve been in for the last forty-eight hours – not knowing where he was, what was going on, what had happened…and now I get here and all’s well and the two of you have got everything organised already, and I feel utterly redundant and like he’s not even that fussed that I came in the first place, and –’

  ‘Come on. You know that’s not true.’

  I flap my hand at him. ‘Well, whatever. That’s what it feels like. And it’s all a bit hard to swallow, okay? I’m his mother.’ I crumple my tissue into a ball in my fist. ‘You’d be exactly the same in my shoes.’

  Rob puts his arm around me and squeezes my shoulder. ‘Actually, Abbie, – and please don’t take this the wrong way – you’re finding out what it feels like to be in mine.’

  The next morning dawns fine and clear and sunny and warm, and Sebastian is, or so Rob informs me once he’s spoken to the nurse at the hospital, going to be discharged at tea-time as planned.

  And I realise I’m not going to bother. I’m not going to bother being in a flap, a state, a mood, a huff, or any other permutation of self-centred nonsense, up to and including the taking of exceptions.

  He might be right, in any case. Perhaps I have wrapped the boys in cotton wool. Perhaps I have been too doting. But then, realistically, it’s very hard not to. When you parent alone for months and months at a stretch, you can’t help but overcompensate, even if you don’t mean to. Because all the time you’re conscious that you have to make up. Make up for the parent that’s not there. It’s only natural.

  So I’m not going to bother being cross with myself either. I can’t have been that bad, when all’s said and done, or else he’d be hot footing it back to the UK with me. Except he’s not. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t feel the need to. In the needy stakes, I am the champ.

  And I’m not going to bother feeling cross about Rob either. He’s quite right. I know last night I could have written an essay on the subject, but I really have no business being off with Rob. Much as it was his choice to go and live in France, up until the time that our marriage began expiring, it had been my choice as well.

  Well, not strictly. I’d always been happy where I was. But I would have gone, wouldn’t I? Yes. Of course I would.

  So we breakfast companionably and check out some leaflets, whizz down to the hospital and spend an hour there with Seb, then we have lunch in a five hundred-year-old restaurant in the Piazza, while he sleeps, take a whistle-stop tour round the (okay, yes, impressive) Basilica San Vitale, see more mosaics than a person can usefully ingest in one lifetime, buy some ham, some parmesan and some plump tortellini, have an ice-cream and a very small argument about art, then we head back to the hospital in the warm sleepy sunshine, and find Sebastian, as promised, has been pronounced fit to leave.

  Bar the hospital, and the fact that we’re five years divorced, you could almost imagine this day to be a cine-film excerpt from the swish Venetian honeymoon we never actually had.

  Almost, but not quite. But very pleasant, for all that.

  The original plan (there were clearly a number of plans originated before I got here) was that if Seb was discharged before Monday, which he has been, then we’d spend a further night at the Albergo Capello, and then Rob – along with Seb – would drive me to the airport, and then the two of them would head off, in his car, back to France.

  Except right now, that just seems plain daft.

  It w ould have been perfectly sensible had I been able to get a flight home from Bologna, but as I can’t (I have yet another flight booked, tomorrow lunchtime, from Venice), it makes no sort of sense.

  So I do something so ter rifically sensible and grown-up and unselfish that I manage to astound even myself. ‘Look,’ I say to Rob while we sit and debate it. ‘You have hundreds of miles to drive as it is. And there’s really no point in you two hanging about here for another night just to keep me company, is there? I think the best thing
would be if you two get going, and I hire a car to take me to the airport in the morning.’

  Hark at me, the frequent flyer.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ says Rob.

  ‘I’m quite capable, you know.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of suggesting otherwise.’

  ‘Exactly. So where’s the problem? If you set off now you can have half the journey done this evening, then you can stop off at a motel or something for the night and get some rest, and then finish the trip in the morning. Much more sensible than trying to do the whole thing in one go.’

  ‘Mum’s got a point, Dad,’ says Seb, about which I can’t help but have some issues. But they’re tiny ones. I’m only his mother. Not his leg.

  Rob ponders. ‘Well…hmm. Ah. Hang on. You got your driving licence with you?’

  ‘Of course I have my licence,’ I say briskly.

  Thus it is that I feel quite the independent woman when we finally (okay, and tearfully, in my case) part company. Though I have, if reluctantly, allowed Rob to sort my car out via his super speedy business person’s magic car hire arrangement thingy, I am now a lone woman in a small Italian town. I can perhaps take my book and amble down to a trattoria. Sit at one of the little candlelit tables in the piazza, drink Chianti. People watch. Star gaze. Soak up the atmosphere. Even go and visit Dante’s tomb, if I want to.

  I could but I don’t. I go back to my room. I write a long thank you letter to the man who saved my son’s life, which I will ask Gabriel Ash to translate once I’m home. Then I lie on the bed with a packet of breadsticks and watch a subtitled episode of Morse.

  At close to midnight, just as I’m dozing off, I get a text.

  Hiya mum. How ya doing? We nr a place called Tortona. Txt me tmoz. Nite nite. Love u LOTS xxxxxxxxxxxxx

  So then I howl and howl and howl. As you do.

  Chapter 21

  IT’S GETTING ON FOR five when I pull up outside the house, the gentian sky that accompanied my drive back from Bristol fast disappearing under a low dove-grey duvet of heavy cloud, which the first scouts of a threatening-to-be keen autumn breeze are prodding around irritably. I feel irritable too. No, not so much irritable as deflated, disenfranchised and denuded of spirit. After the soft hues of a sleepy late summer Italy, autumn, with its lengthening nights and leaden skies, seems suddenly very much here. As am I. All alone. Without Seb.

  Which is all so, so silly. Were it not for what had happened I wouldn’t have been seeing him anyway, would I? Not till after Christmas. Months and months away. This was a bonus. That he’s so well, even more so. This is what I must keep repeating to myself. Until such time as I start to believe it, at any rate. Which could be some time.

  But at least Dee’s car, a heartening splash of yellow in the gloom, is parked cheerfully just down the road.

  Dee herself, with Spike in her arms, is already out on the doorstep by the time I’ve parked my own car in Mr Davidson’s space. Her holdall’s in the doorway. She’s obviously in a hurry to be off.

  ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have waited,’ I tell her. ‘I told you not to worry. Spike would have been okay on his own.’

  Tim’s leaving for a conference in the States later this evening. I’m sure she’s anxious to see him before he goes. ‘I know,’ she says, taking my airport shopping bag from me and leading the way through to the kitchen. ‘But I couldn’t go without seeing you, could I?’

  But she does need to get a move on. I give her a hug. ‘Well, I’m here now, so just you skedaddle, okay? Thanks so much for everything.’

  ‘Seb’s okay?’

  ‘Remarkably so. They did the op laparoscopically. Pretty impressive stuff. He’s well on the mend.’

  ‘Obviously. They sure let him out pretty sharpish. I thought you’d be gone for the week!’

  ‘So did I. Well, a few days at least. It’s all been a bit of a blur, to be honest.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’ She inspects me carefully. ‘Anyway, how are you ?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  She looks at me through narrowed eyes. ‘Hmm,’ she says finally. ‘You sure?’

  Okay, so I’m not one hundred percent all right. Patently I’m not. He’s hundreds of miles away again. How could I be? ‘I’m fine,’ I say again. ‘But I wish I could have persuaded him to come home, Dee. It feels all wrong, him there and me here.’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘But you know, I’m quite sure his dad is perfectly capable of looking after him. Besides, it doesn’t sound like he needs much looking after anyway. He’ll be back to his usual self in no time, I’m sure.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘I’m just being pathetic, aren’t I? I want to look after him.’

  Dee pats my forearm. ‘Tell you what,’ she says brightly, ‘if it’s a spot of looking after you’re after, how about I call your sister and have her bring your mother back this evening?’

  ‘Er, no thanks.’

  ‘Precisely. You just enjoy some time to yourself. You must be shattered.’

  ‘I’m not too bad, actually. I slept on the plane. Oh, and these are for you. I was going to bring you some parmesan but I wasn’t sure about cheese in your condition.’ I start to pull out my purchases. ‘Though chocolate, is, of course, obligatory. So here’s these. Oh, and I couldn’t resist this.’ I present her with a bottle of balsamic vinegar and she laughs. ‘Oh, but this is mine, I’m afraid.’

  She picks up the bottle. ‘Amaretto. There’s nice.’

  ‘Present from Rob, would you believe?’

  ‘Oh, bless. That’s nice of him.’ Then she grins wryly at me. ‘This’ll be Malcolm, then, five years down the line, will it?’

  ‘Er…maybe not.’

  ‘Anyway,’ she says briskly. ‘Now I really better had get on. You sure you’re okay?’

  ‘I’m absolutely fine.’ I sound like a stuck record.

  ‘There’s half a roast chicken left in the fridge, if you’re hungry. And I called Tom’s mum to let her know you were on your way home.’

  ‘I’d better scoot straight round and get Jake, I guess, hadn’t I?’

  Dee shakes her head. ‘No need. He’s going to sleep over again tonight and go to school with Tom tomorrow. She said she’d drop his stuff round after school, if that’s okay.’

  ‘So it’s just me and Spike, then.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Enjoy the rest. Oh, almost forgot to tell you. Gabriel Ash called yesterday. I told him you’d be back tonight so he’ll probably call you later.’

  And then she’s off down the path with her daisy-patterned holdall. And it’s just me and Spike and the Amaretto.

  And the washing, of course. Having showered and unpacked my few things, I’m just coming back down the stairs with a basket full of Jake’s stained T-shirts and crusty socks when the doorbell rings. I go to answer it, the basket still tucked under my arm.

  I open it to find that Gabriel Ash, who seems to be carrying a small door, is standing on my front step. In pale jeans and shirt and yet another linen jacket, a pair of sunglasses hanging from the top pocket.

  He clocks my washing, my wet hair and my shock-horror jeans. (Mother: Abigail, how could you? Those jeans are absolutely shocking. How can you wear such horrible clothes?) He looks embarrassed. Or shocked? Or horrified? No. Just self-conscious. Which ought really to be my job. ‘Oh,’ he says, fiddling with his key fob. ‘Sorry. Is this a bad time?’

  I don’t know what other sort of time he imagines I’d be having with a kilo of fetid clothing under one armpit, for sure. I open the door a little wider, to be polite, and stuff a sprouting of boxer shorts a little further down the heap.

  ‘No, n o,’ I say, both surprised at his arrival and perplexed by his parcel. ‘Just pottering. Come on in.’

  ‘I did call,’ he says, stepping hesitantly with his flat pack over the threshold. ‘But I couldn’t get an answer. I assumed you must be en route. Anyway, I thought I’d look in on my way home, just in
case. Um…you know. See if all’s well.’

  I’m touched. Really touched. ‘That was thoughtful of you. Yes. Yes, everything’s fine. My son’s gone to stay with his father. He’s –’

  ‘Oh?’ he says, surprised. ‘He’s not come home with you, then?’

  I usher him into the kitchen, his comment threatening to make me feel newly bereft. Except now I have company. Which cheers me up lots. ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘He was due to be going to his dad’s soon anyway – he’s doing some work experience with him for a few months – so it seemed sensible for him to take him back with him. He lives in Marseilles. Er…’ I gesture towards him at the bin-liner-covered package that’s still standing to attention beside him. ‘Is that something you need to get off your chest?’

  He stands it carefully in front of him, grinning.

  ‘Not at all,’ he says. ‘My turn to be the bearer of gifts, in fact.’

  ‘Gifts? What gifts?’

  ‘Don’t get too excited. Nothing that thrilling. Well, it might well have been for someone at some point, I imagine. Think it belongs to your mum. Corinne found it while she was at the house re-homing the fish.’

  He strips the bin-liners off to reveal not an item of furniture but a life-size cardboard cut-out of my own dear mother, standing on one leg with her arms held aloft, doing some sort of bastardised, disco-style plie. Much lycra, much mascara, much gnashing of choppers. It was a promotional tool for when the video of Dance With Diana hit the shops. An unsettling thing for a daughter to be confronted with when popping in to Smiths for a Kit Kat, some Polos and the current week’s Jackie.

  ‘Good Lord, I had no idea she still had that,’ I say. ‘Hey, Jane Fonda eat your heart out, or what?!’

  It – rather, she – used to stand behind the door in the downstairs toilet when we were teenagers, to the terror of startled occasional guests and the enduring amusement of us girls.

  He folds out the tabs at the back to stand it up properly. ‘It was laid across the rafters in the garage, apparently. Corinne was going to chuck it, but it occurred to me that if your mum had kept it for that long, then she might want it back. Or you might. You know, family heirloom?’