by Alice Castle
‘He’s in a meeting,’ said Babs miserably. ‘I don’t really know what to do. I don’t mind waiting, but if I don’t know how long for… The car’s in a bit of a dodgy parking spot, you see.’
Beth sympathised. The parking situation was the pea beneath the featherbed of life in Dulwich. People bought more cars all the time; it wasn’t uncommon for households to have three or sometimes even four, with teenage children and nannies acquiring driving licences and cars with tiresome regularity. And there was never anywhere to put them, except squished bumper-to-bumper on every road, bursting out of every legal bay, piled up on wavy white lines, encroaching on bus stops, and even wandering onto the double yellows. It was like playing Grandmother’s Footsteps with the traffic cameras.
Beth thought for a moment. ‘Do you want me to give Jen a ring? See if she knows?’
Babs looked so grateful, Beth thought she might burst into tears of sheer relief. ‘Oh, would you? That would be amazing. I’ll just go over there, see if I’m getting a ticket…’
Beth wasn’t sure if the woman didn’t know that the traffic wardens didn’t circulate any more – it was all done remotely – or whether she was just giving Beth the privacy to ring Jen without her bête noire listening in.
She dialled quickly, taking a swift glance around the playground, just in case anyone was judging her for helping Babs out. But the press of mothers had thinned, and it was just a few standing around now – parents from Years 1 and 2 who were more indulgent about allowing their kids a last go on the play equipment with their friends before home time. With no homework at all in the lower reaches of school, and with their little prodigies not signed up yet for endless extracurricular stints, they usually had time to kill. And standing chatting in a windswept playground was more fun than watching mind-numbing children’s telly at home while defrosting plaice goujons (the closest most Dulwich mums could allow themselves to get to fish fingers) for the kids’ suppers.
Beth let the phone ring on, then heard the click that signalled it was going to voicemail. She killed the call, and sent Jen a quick text instead. It was another mystery. If Jen was really up to her eyes in a work project, it was just possible that she wouldn’t answer the phone. But most mums were pre-programmed to be extra attentive at school drop-off and pick-up times, even if they weren’t on duty themselves. No-one wanted a mix-up, and on occasions it did happen.
Just then, one conundrum was solved, as Jess came barrelling out of the school and ran straight up to Beth, hugging her briefly. ‘Where’ve you been then, missy?’ said Beth.
‘Had to stay behind and help clear up,’ said Jessica with an innocent look which, if she’d been Beth’s child, would have been the cue for a vigorous de-briefing. Staying late was the closest the cuddly Village Primary got to thumbscrews and the rack for bad behaviour. Jessica wasn’t a naughty girl, but there was something to be found out there, if you knew the buttons to press. Luckily for Jess, that was outside Beth’s job description. Just then, Babs bustled up.
‘Jessica, there you are, I was getting really worried about you,’ she said in a slightly high-pitched, stagey voice. It could have been an attempt to cover up her annoyance, or maybe it was her habitual way of communicating with children. Either way, it seemed unsuccessful. Jessica, who’d been so tactile with Beth who she didn’t know that well, suddenly switched into ice maiden mode and merely grunted at Babs, striding towards the school gates without a backward glance.
Babs, a little pink, watched her go ruefully. ‘The joys of step-motherhood,’ she said, widening her eyes at Beth.
Beth smiled in a slightly non-committal way. She had no doubt it was tough. But wasn’t that what Babs had taken on when she’d got involved with a married father? It was easy enough to say that Babs hadn’t known quite what she was getting into. As she wasn’t a mother herself, she could never have realised how difficult it might be to inveigle herself into the good graces of a hurt child. As Jen’s friend, Beth felt a pull to rush to judgement. But, she tried to tell herself, there were always many sides to a story. And she was beginning to think that Jen just might be as good at spinning a yarn as anyone.
‘See you soon,’ said Babs hopefully. Meeting a reasonably friendly face in the playground seemed to be important to her.
Beth thawed, and gave her a big smile. ‘Yep, probably tomorrow. Have a lovely evening.’
Babs scuttled off after Jess, who was now a rapidly retreating form trudging towards the car. As far as Beth remembered, Tim had moved to West Norwood after the split. The extremely pretty, Victorian-terraced marital home in Hollingbourne Road, on the way down into Herne Hill but still close to North Dulwich railway station, had been sold just before Jen’s wedding. It had reached a sufficiently good price to provide both the Camberwell coach house for Jen and a 1930s semi for Tim and Babs in Cheviot Road, West Norwood, which they’d been renting before. It wasn’t a perfect solution for either side, as each had had to move out of Dulwich proper, but both houses had their charms. Beth had a soft spot for the big bay windows and exuberant, rounded porches of the Cheviot houses, which were on the jolly side of Art Deco – though she’d never say so to Jen, of course.
She mused on what Babs was doing work-wise while she was suddenly having to step in for Jess. Perhaps she was working from home in the afternoons. She wondered how well that would go down with her employer, then realised she wasn’t entirely sure what sector Babs was in. It must be something fairly flexible, that was for sure.
Her ruminations were cut off by Ben erupting out of his literacy lesson with all the wildness of a ten-year-old who’s sat still for unfeasibly long stretches of time. Oh great, thought Beth. They were in for a rambunctious night.
Chapter Eight
Before Beth knew it, another week had been swallowed up and it was Monday all over again. Dropping Ben off had become a bit fraught, as she now had to dodge Tim, who seemed to be timing his trips with Jessica to coincide with hers. As she’d actively sought him out and chatted to him once, he now seemed to fondly imagine that they were best friends.
She sympathised, to an extent. He’d stuck it out for years in solitude as the playground baddie, and the way she’d shown a bit of interest seemed to have convinced him he could finally come in from the cold. But his wheedling poor-me personality was very unappealing. She also worried that, having briefly been at the apex of a love triangle, Tim had somehow convinced himself that he was enormously attractive and that Beth was the latest woman to fall for his charm. He kept favouring her with little winks that made her heart sink and her toes curl. There was also the important consideration that, even though events had moved on, mummies had memories like elephants and she was sure it wasn’t doing her reputation any good at all being seen chatting with a man clearly identified as a cheating love-rat.
Today, his eyes lit up when he saw her across the crowded asphalt and he started loping towards her. Beth, who was thoroughly fed up with discussing his job – he showed no reciprocal interest at all in her own work, or anything else about her – nodded to him briefly and all but cantered off.
***
Tim, who’d picked up a bit of speed when he’d seen that little mum dropping off her boy and had hoped to intercept her by the school gates, looked around wildly, before seeing her rapidly crossing the road by the chemists. There were so many of these other women standing around chatting, getting in his way, as though they didn’t have a care in the world. And they probably didn’t, he thought angrily. Certainly no bloody job to get off to. Part of him wished he could idle away his days, doing nothing like these squawking parasites. The irony was that they all looked down on him for having done the dirty on Jen. Well, she’d deserved it. Like many of them this morning, she’d totally let herself go after having Jess. Blobby stomach, too tired for sex, nothing but jeans. No man could stand that for long.
Babs, on the other hand… Well. She still knew how to get him going. Always looked the part. Put the effort in. Not an ounce of flab, and
stamina like you wouldn’t believe, thanks to the gym. Well, she couldn’t get there now because of all the childcare, but she had Jess to keep her fit. And though she was always banging on about having a baby of her own, she wasn’t going to get one… thanks to his vasectomy. She had no idea he’d had the snip, and he certainly wasn’t going to enlighten her.
As long as she didn’t discuss her ‘infertility problem’ with Jen, he was safe. And that was never going to happen, was it? For one thing, Jen was always public enemy number one as far as Babs was concerned, he’d made sure of that. Though he and Jen had certainly been getting on better lately, there was no reason why Babs should know.
At least Jen’d seen reason over redoing her will. He’d been a bit surprised. She’d remarried that lump of a man, Jeff, in seconds flat, and Tim had been sure that would be that, he’d never get his hands on a bigger slice of the capital tied up in the Camberwell house. By rights, a lot more of it was his than hers, but thanks to that cursed divorce lawyer, who would rot in hell if there was any justice in the world, she’d got a whopping fifty per cent. All right, it was what she was legally entitled to, but morally? Morally she should be scraping pennies off the pavement.
Anyway, he’d talked to her a fair bit over the past weeks about how she needed to be sure that Jess got everything she was entitled to, how Jeff didn’t need the money and could look after himself, unlike a little girl. Yadda. To be honest, it hadn’t sounded convincing even to his own ears, and he did think he had a way with words. But astonishingly, Jen had been receptive and had trotted off to a solicitor’s – behind her new husband’s back, Tim was sure. Looked like she was starting as she meant to go on – hiding stuff, sneaking around… virtually forcing a man to cheat. Well, Tim didn’t care much now he’d got the estate settled.
Where was that little mum, what was her name? Bess? She could move pretty fast on those wee legs if she wanted to, he thought with a harrumph. It was annoying, because he didn’t have her phone number and he’d been hoping to lumber her, well, sound her out, to see if she’d take Jess this afternoon. The truth was that Babs was getting a bit fed up with having Jess around so much, bleating about her work, as though her career actually mattered. They might be earning almost the same these days – and that was all due to pushy women’s libbers, in Tim’s view – but it was obvious to anyone with half a brain who was the breadwinner and who just wasn’t. But still, Babs probably did need the odd break from Jessica. She was getting to a tricky age, and he didn’t see why this Tess, or Bess or whatever her name was, shouldn’t provide some much-needed free childcare. If only she wasn’t so nippy. Oh well, he’d get her tomorrow morning.
***
As soon as Beth had crossed the road and got safely to Calton Avenue, a long way away from Tim’s lone figure, she slowed down, caught her breath, and pinged a message over to Jen, asking if there would be a cup of tea going in Camberwell tomorrow. The jaunty tone of her text was designed to disguise two things she was uneasy about.
The first was the wedding present. It now looked pretty tattered when Beth occasionally caught sight of it, stuffed in the Fiat’s glove compartment with an assortment of car detritus like empty sweet wrappers and ageing school notices shoved on top of it. She wished, oh how she wished, she’d remembered it that first time she’d called. Then, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to hand it over. Now, it was downright embarrassing because it was so late, and there either seemed to be a terrible atmosphere or Jen wasn’t there at all. She resolved that this time, no matter what was going on, she’d just give them the dratted thing and move on. It was a shame. A present which she’d chosen with a gladsome heart had now come to represent a bit of a millstone. But that wasn’t the present’s fault, or even her own, Beth realised. There was just something a bit off about the whole situation.
Which brought her neatly to the second issue that was worrying her. She still hadn’t got up the courage to mention the Tinder business to her friend. Though she’d been on the app several times in the quiet evenings when Ben was asleep and her freelance work had bored her to a standstill, she’d not seen Jeff’s profile pop up again. Whether that was because she wasn’t looking in the right place, whether he wasn’t on it any more, or whether she was just lucky, she didn’t really know.
The only certainty was that she still hadn’t had the courage to swipe right. Yes, she’d finally seen a couple of guys who weren’t completely hopeless. Just listen to me, she thought. Guys – that sounds so casual; she was making progress, definitely. She’d even considered sending them a message, fingers hovering over the letters, sentences being constructed in her head. But something was still holding her back.
There’d been a diving board at the Victorian swimming baths her primary school class was bussed to once a week. She’d never been on it. Even at that age, she’d been self-conscious, and once she realised that the overwhelmed teacher didn’t really notice if not all the thirty kids in her class were in the water, she’d lingered as long as she could behind the comfortingly closed saloon doors of the changing room, occasionally peering out underneath to see what the others were up to. Now, looking back, she was horrified that the teacher had never once carried out a simple head count. He could have left kids behind every week, or some could have drowned, unnoticed, and no-one would have been any the wiser. But those were the free and easy days before health and safety and risk assessments. On balance, she was glad that Ben’s class trips were more closely supervised than a chain gang of convicts.
Ah, she remembered those swimming sessions. The fierce tang of chlorine in her nostrils, the echoing shouts of the class, the reflections of the water bouncing on the walls, and then the ferocious splash when someone threw themselves off the diving board into the turquoise depths below. Every so often, one of her classmates would freeze on the end of the board, and either exhortations from the teacher, a crafty push from the kid behind, or an ignominious withdrawal shuffling back along the board past braver souls, would mark the would-be diver as a failure.
This was how Beth now saw herself. Much though part of her wanted to plunge into the dating pool, by far the bigger half was still shivering in the changing room, poised with the horrible, tight, pink rubber cap dragged over as much of her long hair would fit, not at all convinced that she really wanted to dip her fringe in those chemical waters. Back at school, it had been her friends dragging her out of the cubicle, persuading her to jump in the shallow end with them, who’d helped break her free. But she couldn’t expect that now. No-one, not even Katie, would want to come on a date with her to hold her hand. No, she needed to face it. She was a grown-up and she had to go it alone.
It was a thought that preyed on Beth’s mind all through the day and evening, and was still furrowing her brow as she drove off to Camberwell on the Tuesday to fetch Ben and Belinda’s lads. She set off ridiculously early as usual, but it wasn’t until she drew up at Jen’s door that she realised she’d never had a reply back from her friend to confirm their cup of tea together. She drew out her phone, stabbed at it, and looked at the text trail. Nope. Nothing. How silly of her not to have checked.
She couldn’t believe she’d been caught out again. The first time, she hadn’t even texted. This time, she’d done her part, but just forgotten to check that Jen was ok with the plan, too. She’d been so consumed with her own hypothetical problems that her mind had drifted off concrete plans for the here and now. She pressed the call button, and held the phone to her ear. It rang and rang. No reply. While she listened, she craned her head through the windscreen to look at the house. No lights visible, windows blank and dark. The street itself was deserted, a scattering of crinkled leaves here and there, the gutters piled with more. It was quite dark already.
What should she do now? Trudging round to the high street didn’t really appeal. For once, there was nothing she needed from Superdrug, and if she went to browse just to fill the time, she’d inevitably be tempted by fripperies she could manage without
and didn’t need to waste money on. The dwindling light meant it would be hard to sit and read alone in the car until the hands of the clock inched round to collection time. And, to her annoyance, she’d left her book at home anyway, so that wasn’t even an option.
She weighed things up. She could just go early to the tutor’s house and ask to sit there, but then she’d have to start listening to Billy and Bobby’s high-spirited chat before they even got in the car for the drive home. She wasn’t sure she could face an extra hour of that, which was possibly harsh, but she did have a headache coming on which definitely wouldn’t be helped by more time in their boisterous company. Ben seemed to cope with them all right, but he was a boy, and their age to boot.
Maybe, just maybe, Jen had a problem with her phone? Granted, the house looked deserted, but maybe not as dark as some of the others? Was there the faintest glow coming from somewhere? Maybe a light at the back? Her eyes now becoming accustomed to the gathering gloom, Beth peered more closely at Jen’s house.
She unbuckled her seatbelt, cracked open her car door, and stepped out onto the pavement, looking up and down the street. It was quiet, dark, and the air had that autumnal tang that betokened Hallowe’en and Bonfire Night just round the corner. She stepped up to the front door and rang the bell. As she’d more than half expected, there was no reply, the sound echoing in the empty hall. The house seemed to be breathing with her, waiting. But for what? Beth turned her back on the door and was contemplating marching back to her car and finding a café somewhere, when one of Jen’s wheelie bins caught her eye. It was out of alignment, a bit further forward than usual, and drew her attention to the garden gate.