‘Tell me what you can,’ he’d said to her, that first time. ‘Just don’t lie to me, Catrine.’
And all she had done was lie to him.
The glass door to the garden was slightly open; she could hear birdsong from outside. She cleared her throat slightly – still he did not stir.
‘Morning, my love.’
‘Catrine. Good morning.’ He glanced up and raised his coffee cup to her. ‘I’ll shut the door.’
‘No, it’s fine ajar like that. I like the birds.’
‘You did not sleep well.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘I’m sorry. Did I wake you?’
‘Only a little. Is it the new case? Or that young man who is so angry with you he smashes in windows? Or were you writing one of your histories again?’
‘All three.’ She opened the fridge, and, taking out some orange juice, poured it into a glass. Her hand wobbled slightly.
‘How does it go?’
She had always liked discussing her work with him. ‘It’s interesting, actually. Some Yemeni pirates are supposed to have scuttled a ship, but the Piraeus guys think it was an insurance job.’ The fridge door was open, humming. She stood gazing at nothing, orange juice in hand.
Davide put down his cup and pushed away his plate. ‘I didn’t mean the new case. I meant Grant Doyle. Whether you had uncovered why he is breaking into your house at night.’
‘I’m sure it was just a one-off,’ Catherine said.
‘None the less,’ said Davide, smoothing out his paper. ‘Did you speak to his solicitor?’
‘You haven’t said anything to anyone about it, have you?’
Davide shook his head, then stretched his hand over and clasped hers. ‘Only a few days to go, chérie. This time next week you’ll be on a train, with me, sipping champagne, we will eat together, just the two of us, no lumpen teenagers crouched – like this – over their screens, growling for money or food. And you will sleep, we will walk hand in hand through – ah, I’ll say no more, I don’t want to ruin the surprise . . .’ He raised his hand now so the palm was pressing against her palm, and pushed their hands upwards. She smelled lavender, musk, citrus, his smell. He kissed her, gently. ‘All these things, my love. You work too hard. And you remember too much. Try to forget.’
His taste, and the orange juice on an empty stomach, was like thick, gritty acid in her throat, her gullet.
She gave a small, tight smile. ‘Forget what?’ She saw him hesitate.
‘Your old life – who you were.’ They were still.
Catherine swallowed, and looked at him, as the warmth from his dry palm flowed into her, into her aching arm. ‘It’ll be over soon,’ she said.
He squeezed her fingers one more time and dropped his hands, brushing everything away. ‘It will. Now. I have been talking to Claude. He wants to know if we want their place on the Île d’Oléron at the end of the summer, for a week. Do you think –’
‘Yes,’ she said, immediately.
‘The children? Really?’
Claude was Davide’s cousin. His son, a romantic, languorous youth named François, was studying English in London for the year and they’d taken him under their wing. Carys and Tom loved him. He smoked, alone amongst virtually all other London teens. It gave him enormous novelty value and cemented his reputation with the children as a genuine eccentric. ‘The guy . . . he smokes. It’s absolutely wild,’ Carys told her friends. It was so unlike Catherine’s adolescence when if you smoked you were, just, without question, cool and that was that.
Catherine had helped him with his English, and with a troublesome landlord who gave way immediately on the points of property law he’d claimed were true when contacted by Davide’s fearsome barrister wife, thus earning her François’ undying adoration. ‘Tante Catrine,’ he’d call her, batting his long black lashes at her. ‘I am so grateful. Thank you.’
‘Will François be there? And Claude and Aurélie?’
‘Yes, all summer. They’ve asked us for a week, they want to thank us for looking after François.’
August – it was a lifetime away. She felt, for the first time, a sinking, dreadful, terrifying feeling. Black obscured her vision.
In the ensuing darkness she saw they would not go on that holiday, that it was all ending.
But she said brightly: ‘Definitely, I’d love to.’
‘It’s France again,’ he said. ‘You don’t mind?’
‘I like France.’ She smiled at him and took her hand away, to smooth his hair. ‘And I like having plans in place. Sweet François.’
‘He’s in love with you, that boy.’
‘François? He’s twenty.’
‘I don’t bring it up to find out if his age is the obstacle to you, chérie. It’s a statement of fact.’
Catherine rolled her eyes and turned the coffee machine on. ‘Will you make sure there’s food in the fridge for them for the weekend?’
‘He told Claude. He said you were a pearl.’ Davide was smiling. ‘Claude said to him: When we first met her, at Davide’s parents’, we called her the English Mystery, the girl who appeared from nowhere, who survived a plague of bees. This has fanned his ardour even more.’
‘It was a long time ago,’ Catherine said, pouring herself some cereal, sliding the paper towards her.
And then it started. A faint buzzing sound came suddenly towards them, growing louder all the time. A tiny thud.
‘It’s OK,’ Davide said, as his wife immediately slid from her stool, backing away. He stood up and strode towards the door. ‘It’s fine, chérie. I see them. I’ve got it. OK?’
‘Get – get it out. Please.’
It was a spring bumblebee, lurching towards her in a zig-zag. It was not a worker bee. It juddered angrily around the glass kitchen, flinging itself furiously against the panes.
The sound. It was always so much louder than one believed it possibly could be.
Catherine’s throat contracted, her eyes scratchy, her mouth dry. She backed herself up against the kitchen cupboards, flattening herself, palms digging into the handles. She stared ahead – she had learned closing her eyes made it worse.
‘I have it, Catherine. It’s outside. OK? It’s outside.’
‘Yes.’
She shut her eyes then, as he released the bee out of the cup. He closed the door and said quietly: ‘I shouldn’t have opened the door.’
‘It’s fine.’ She had to stand still for a moment, as the orange juice threatened to force itself up out of her throat.
‘I’m sorry, chérie.’
‘Davide, forget it. It’s my fault.’
Every summer ended with him begging her to get the extension demolished, replaced with brick walls and windows. And yet she always said no.
Sounds thundered overhead; Tom, lumbering down the corridor to the bathroom, growling at his sister, a high-pitched scream of outrage at something. Davide’s face was pale under the tan. These moments hit him hard; her vulnerability terrified him. She caught his hand again, clutching it so her knuckles were white, and there was a moment of silence between them, as their gazes locked. The great old diamond, Davide’s grandmother’s ring, flashed on her left hand: it seemed to catch and hold the morning light.
‘I wish I could stop it for you,’ was all he said, and his kind face was etched with the pain of loving her.
Catherine shook her head, her mouth set in a firm line, unable to speak. He sat down again, glancing up at her once, the two of them wreathed in their own private misery, the old routes. ‘I’m fine,’ she managed to say.
She had to force herself to eat the cereal, force her hand upwards, force the food, which formed into a hard bolus at the roof of her mouth, down her throat, force herself to keep chewing, swallowing, so that he stopped watching her, so that he could believe it might, just might be OK. All the time she was bargaining with herself.
It’s just been rather rocky lately. You’re not looking forward to today. She’s not real, Catherine. She�
�s not come back.
Afterwards, she went upstairs and threw up her breakfast, and felt much better.
An hour and a half later, Catherine swung the heavy front door shut behind her. Getting the kids to the bus stop was always a rushed panic during which Davide mysteriously vanished, leaving her to chivvy them out of the door and onto the bus. She was a little late, a little too hot, convinced her dress was on back to front, that a streak of foundation lay on the bridge of her nose. Carys, stomping out of the house ahead of her, turned and looked down at her mother’s feet.
‘Oh Mum,’ she said, in what Tom called her Help the Aged voice. ‘Those trainers again? They’re blue and fluorescent yellow. You look like a reject from a K-Pop band.’
‘I have to wear the sneakers till my toe’s all better. It’s fine.’
‘Sneakers.’ Tom sniggered. ‘Ohmigod dying. Who says that any more?’
‘Me,’ said Catherine. ‘I do. I say sneakers, Tom. Sneakers. Sneakers, SNEAKERS!’ She inhaled deeply as they passed Mr Lebeniah’s garden. ‘May is almost here, darlings.’ They stared at her. She thought of what lay ahead that day, what she had to do, and shook her head, willing the subject away. ‘Speed up, come on. Now, just to recap. Remember, Dad and I are going away next week, for three nights. It’s the bank holiday.’
They had almost reached the bottom of the road. Tom stopped, dropping his rucksack to the floor. ‘What?’
Catherine ignored him. ‘Judith’s going to pop over on Friday and make sure you’re OK. Saturday and Sunday François is coming to stay, I’ll leave money for a pizza.’
Carys had stopped walking too, and both of them stared at her with that look of teenage horror mixed with bemusement and some pity, once again, as though she was doing something utterly outlandish, licking the brickwork or playing a flamingo.
‘What do you mean, you’re going away next week?’ said Carys, eventually. ‘Where? Where are you going?’
‘Judith’s checking up on us? I’m not a child, Mother.’
Catherine kept walking. ‘You’ll miss the bus, both of you. I am going away with your father. I don’t know where –’
‘Although it’s clearly Paris,’ Tom said, sotto voce, unable to resist the family joke. ‘But still,’ he said, returning to the theme. ‘Ohmigod.’
Catherine said: ‘I’ve told you this before. Twice.’
‘Um, Mum,’ said Tom. ‘No, you haven’t.’
Catherine wondered sometimes if she appeared in the morning and talked in a made-up language from morning till night whether they’d notice. ‘I have, several times. Tom, remember you have an extra cello lesson tomorrow afternoon and Miss Talbot is coming at six –’
‘Miss Talbot’s a thief! If you’re not in the house –’
‘She’s not a thief.’
‘She bloody is. She half-inched a tenner off the hall table. And the silver photo frame, you know, the one that had that photo of you when you were younger that went missing – I’m sure I saw her nick it. Anyway, I thought we’d all hang out –’
‘Yeah, hang out together, do family stuff –’
‘That was my idea –’
‘Shut up, Tom, you’re such a suck.’
‘You shut up.’
‘You two are unbelievable, honestly,’ said Catherine, trying not to smile. ‘You never want to spend a minute of free time with me and Dad normally.’ A woman walked past, on the other side of the street, and Catherine looked up and around at her.
‘Who’s that?’
‘No one. Here we are.’ She stared up at the bus stop display board. ‘Yes. Three, three . . .’
Three, three.
Three, three, the rivals,
Two, two, the beloved girls,
Clothed all in green, O,
One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so.
She shivered. The children had not moved on. ‘One more reason you can’t go, Mum, is –’
Catherine said sharply: ‘Look, it’s your father’s idea. Not mine. Take it up with him. It’s an early anniversary present. Dad thinks I need a break –’ They stared at her, horrified. ‘Oh, never mind.’
‘Is it that Grant weirdo?’ said Tom, behind her. ‘Is it him, Mum? He sounds dodgy, I’d be careful.’
‘Sort of,’ said Catherine. She patted his arm, unexpectedly touched.
‘Someone at school knew him,’ said Tom. ‘Remember my friend Ali at school?’ said Tom. ‘He was talking about him yesterday. He said he boasted about stabbing that guy he killed. Dan? Hammersley? He was going around, like, bragging about it?’
‘Really?’ The road was busier, more pedestrians. Suddenly Catherine knew someone was watching her, could feel their eyes on her back. She looked around again, at another woman passing on the street: old, Chinese, pulling a trolley, and felt fury, an impotent, all-consuming anger. With herself. None of these women were her. She was ridiculous.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t be telling me this. We shouldn’t really be talking about it. Especially if he’s going to appeal. I’d rather not know.’
‘But,’ said Tom, ‘Ali, he said he’d seen him –’
‘Tom! Just be quiet. I said, don’t tell me.’
They were both scared, she could see. ‘All I meant was he doesn’t sound very nice, Mum,’ said Tom in a small voice. ‘I don’t want you to . . .’ He trailed off.
He’s not. He’s not nice at all and you are. She looked up – up, for her baby boy, who had been born three weeks early and only weighed five pounds, was taller than her now – into her son’s eyes. Then, again, always again, over his shoulder, at someone walking past. Always looking. Looking around.
It occurred to her, as she came back to the moment to find both her children staring at her that something had shifted inside her, something had irreparably broken and perhaps it would always be like this. She gazed at their faces in turn: Tom’s unformed, craggy angularity, his rugby-player’s frame, his soft hair and kind grey eyes – they were her dad’s. Carys, fluffy-haired, doe-eyed and Gallic, so like Davide, a sweet, true arrow, a disrupter, a force of nature. Nearly eighteen. ‘I have to do what I have to do,’ she’d been famous for saying as a determined three-year-old trying to leave nursery to walk back home, where she thought her mum was. ‘I HAVE TO DO WHAT I HAVE TO DO.’
The life they thought they’d had, the traditions she had built so carefully, the safe little world she had created for them, so, so gently. The babies she had cuddled, their warm backs pressing into her body as they sat in her lap, cross-legged on the floor at music classes, the smell of their hair, their faces as they slept . . . all the love she had given them, poured into them, trying to fill them with as much of it as she could, whilst she could, the horror all the time that at any time, it might be taken away.
‘Mum?’ said Carys.
‘Sorry. Just remembered something for work.’
They turned to each other and rolled their eyes and she kissed them both, glad of the sensation of physical contact, luxuriating in the smell of them. For now, she could hug them, feel their bodies, hold her daughter’s hand and tut at her bitten nails, stroke Tom’s hair – quickly – squeeze his arm.
‘Dad says you’re up for the Île d’Oléron this summer,’ said Tom, disentangling himself from his mother.
‘I’ll book the train tickets. We can stop over in Paris for the night.’
‘Maybe the place you’re going to with Dad will give you a discount for rebooking so soon.’
They all laughed, Catherine too loudly. ‘Don’t be mean about your father.’
‘Chérie,’ said Carys, a perfect imitation of her father. ‘I have booked for you a romantic weekend in Berlin. They speak no French there at all.’
Another bus went past. Suddenly Catherine was gripped with a wild desire to say: Why don’t we bunk off for the day? Let’s go and get a picnic and sit on the Heath, and then catch a movie, and have ice cream, and then go into town and dance and eat tapas. Let’s just . . . not
bother with school, or work, my darlings. Let’s just hang out.
Catherine said: ‘You know, when Dad finished at school, he went travelling, do you know where he went?
‘No,’ they said, their eyes lighting up – they loved stories of their parents’ childhoods, all too rare on her side. They knew about her being an unhappy child, and leaving when she was eighteen. About having long golden hair, not the mouse-brown crop she had now, and loving the hard grey waves, and the fresh air, and the woods that rose up to Exmoor and became vast, heather-covered plains studded with ancient cairns and beacons and windswept trees. She gave them enough information for them to know where she was from and made sure the family they knew was Davide’s large, warm, kind family in Albi who were welcoming but formal in their curiosity, never prying too deeply. She had once tried to explain Exmoor and had hopelessly confused Davide’s father, Albert. She found out afterwards he had told his relatives Catherine came from the birthplace of Peter Rabbit.
Tom nudged her out of her reverie. ‘Where did Dad go then?’
‘He went to the Canal du Midi. Up and down in a boat.’
‘How far from Toulouse?’
‘About an hour away.’
‘What about you, Mum?’
‘Me? I went – all over.’
‘After your A-levels?’
Catherine nodded. ‘After I got my results. I left and I never went back. Get your stuff ready, darlings, the bus’ll be here any moment. Oh yes. I drove through France to Spain, then I got the train back, went to Italy – Rome. Naples. Then – oh, I went all round and ended up back in France. I worked there for a bit.’
‘And that’s where you met Dad?’
She nodded, a small smile playing round her lips. ‘Yes.’ The cool spring air was delicious on her face. ‘Yes, in a café in Toulouse.’
‘You were on your own?’
The Beloved Girls Page 6