by Alyson Rudd
Vera liked to reminisce but as soon she tried, Lauren steered the conversation to the present. It felt like safer ground, and Bob was, in any case, keen for once to talk about his work and a Peter Stanning Memorial Fund that had been established to help disadvantaged kids through school and their accountancy exams. Lauren struggled to keep a straight face. How many kids were out there, she wondered, who, rather than dreaming of becoming an actor or a footballer, were hoping against hope for a big break in accountancy?
Instead she said, ‘Poor Peter,’ and Bob and Vera nodded.
‘Lovely chap,’ Bob said, although by now he really had forgotten what his boss had been like.
Vera, smoothing some crumbs from her lap, tapped her husband’s knee.
‘I’ve always thought he went missing because of love,’ she said. ‘I think he kept an affair so secret the police had no idea where to look for him and he kept his home life so secret from his mistress that she had no idea who he was or where he lived and so when he vanished she assumed he had, you know, emigrated, or decided not to cheat any more.’
‘She would have seen his photo in the paper, wouldn’t she?’ Lauren said.
‘Not every woman reads the paper,’ Vera said solemnly. ‘Or maybe she was…’ here Vera lowered her voice because the waiter was swarthy-skinned, ‘foreign.’
‘But what happened to him?’ Lauren said, trying not to smile.
‘Oh, how am I expected to know that?’ her mother said, cross that her theory was not in itself enough. ‘Anything could have happened to him. The point is no one knew where to look.’
Bob
In the end they drove straight from the airport to the beach. He took her hand and pulled her away from the path and into the pine trees. They walked for a while across the carpet of shed needles and the nutshells discarded by the squirrels until they reached a sandy patch of sunlight and sat down. In the distance they could hear a woman calling for a dog and further away still they could hear the whoops of children playing hide and seek.
Andrea drew her knees up to her chin.
‘I don’t like being here without Walter,’ she said.
He squeezed her hand.
‘Me neither,’ he said.
He decided to be honest. He hated to talk about Lauren and Vera but he had, he felt, no choice.
‘I’m not sure why I kept going,’ he said. ‘But people were kind and then Rachel and my sister took charge of me, I guess.’
Andrea took a deep breath.
‘So what’s the bit that’s freaking you out?’ she asked.
He had assumed it was obvious and he flushed slightly.
‘You are the same age as my daughter. Don’t you think that’s…?’
There was silence between them. Eventually she spoke.
‘It’s not creepy unless you let it be,’ she said. ‘I need to get home now.’
‘Of course,’ he said.
As they pulled up outside her home she kissed him on the cheek.
‘I’m sorry you lost your family,’ she said. She pulled her case from the back seat and walked towards the front door. He could see it opened before she reached it but he was already pulling away and he did not look back.
He fantasised as he drove home about coming clean with Rachel but what would be the point of that? He had read somewhere that people who confess to affairs do it to cleanse their soul and make themselves feel better rather than trying to be honest and fair with the people they have betrayed.
Rachel hugged him tightly.
‘I missed you,’ she said, laughing, as if it were a big surprise to her that she would have done so.
Even so, she had managed to move some furniture around and there was antique clock in the hall that had not been there before he left.
‘It needed the clock,’ she said sweetly but firmly before changing the subject to the charity ball she and Suki were planning.
‘You can make your new conference buddies buy a table and bring their wives,’ she said.
‘Yes, I’ll do that,’ he said, feeling cornered and miserable and hoping she would forget about his rediscovered colleagues or that the ball plan would fall apart.
But the ball grew like an aggressive tumour. The local paper got in touch, Rachel was interviewed about her battered and fearful wives. The picture they published was not of Rachel and Bob but of Suki and Rachel looking strident and empowered.
She showed him the tickets. They were very grand, stating a cocktail reception would be followed by dinner and then dancing to live music and that all proceeds would go towards Rachel’s Refuge. He badgered his clients in the hope that if he could sell one table Rachel would forget about the Spanish connection. After a few false starts, Eddie Hough, who ran a small chain of DIY stores, agreed to buy a table and provide a voucher for the auction. Bob could tell the DIY voucher was not quite the kind of item Rachel wanted for her glittering fundraiser but she was gracious in thanking both of them.
He dreaded her telling him she was a table short and that she would phone his old company herself if necessary. He dreaded Suki deciding theirs was a project that the rich Stanning family should support. Both women were too busy, though, to be so conniving, and he concocted a tale of a conflicting events which, in the end, he never needed to use.
He avoided the beach for a few weeks. Andrea’s voice played in his head. It was only creepy if he let it be creepy… but there was more to it than that. He was resentful that Andrea could be so vibrant, so alive. He had made the connection to his daughter and there was no way of reversing it.
Bob missed the place and came to the conclusion that none of this was Andrea’s fault, he could at least be civil with her, still walk with her and Walter perhaps, so he cycled seaward and came up against a throng of families. The beach was teeming with people, most of whom were licking at Mr Whippy ice creams. It was the school summer holidays and it was sunny. He felt far more exposed than when the beach was empty and concluded he would need a dog of his own if he were to walk with ease. In the meantime he clambered up the quietest dune and surveyed the landscape. The most fun was definitely being had by the under-tens and dogs. He half fancied an ice cream but was too self-conscious to queue up for one so he cycled home. He had a client meeting anyway.
Rachel was at the kitchen table sorting though some paperwork.
‘How’s the charity bash coming along?’ Bob asked her, hoping not to be told there was a glitch.
‘I’m so pleased with it all, Bob,’ she said, and for a few seconds she looked sweet and innocent and pretty rather than composed and mature and sleekly attractive.
‘How would you feel about us getting a puppy?’ he asked.
Vera
Bob was the least Machiavellian man in all Cheshire and yet his small act of kindness in inviting George for dinner had led to big things. George Stanning, a young man with the void of a missing father to fill, had expanded the firm so grandly and adroitly that it had divisions, and Bob was now managing director of its accountancy branch. Elsewhere there were mergers and acquisitions and new business initiatives. George was rather adept at spying a failing company that was merely suffering a blip, taking it over and brusquely nurturing it to profitability.
Vera, meanwhile, was the least aspirational woman in all Cheshire but even she could see that she and Bob had outgrown The Willows. If they lived in the Harpers’ house, maybe they could absorb the new car, the dinner invitations, more easily but they did not live there; they lived on one side of a dessert-spoon-shaped cul-de-sac which seemed to grow smaller by the hour.
Bob did not even hint at the differential in their lives, knowing that leaving The Willows meant leaving behind the adolescent perfume of Lauren, whose room remained her room, with a sheepskin rug that Vera took outside to shake every week, but Vera knew when he suggested hotels to guests, met them in restaurants, it was to avoid the tiny provinciality of their home. And so, one evening, she handed him two sheets of paper.
‘What do
you think?’ she said quietly. ‘Fancy viewing either of them?’
Bob deliberately remained equivocal.
‘If you think they are promising then no harm in it,’ he said but inwardly he rejoiced. It was time to move on. In a few days he would tell Vera they could afford much more than the price attached to the two houses she had shortlisted. Heck, he thought, we could afford to buy both of them.
Hope was now nine and found talk of moving house unsettling until Bob promised her a bedroom with an en suite bathroom. Hope had a friend with the same and had been impressed to the point of speechlessness.
Vera had just one request. She wanted a view. She was not too picky about what was in the view as long as it was bucolic and soothing, so as soon as details arrived of a Grade II listed house with woodland to its right, rolling hills to its left, a village pub to its rear and five bedrooms, three of which had en suite facilities, the deal was sealed. It took Vera a while all the same to comprehend that most of her new view also belonged to whoever bought the house.
‘We’ve never owned more than one tree Bob,’ she said, ‘and now we own a… a wood.’
‘A magical forest,’ corrected Hope.
‘Yes, a magical forest,’ conceded Vera although she knew real magic would be needed for her to cope well enough to pack up Lauren’s clothes and art, strip her room bare.
But help arrived in the form of Suki, who appeared with several large boxes all covered with a deep lacquer. Stencilled upon them were the words ‘Lauren Pailing’.
Vera was deeply moved. This was preferable to dumping Lauren’s things into any old cardboard box. The two women embraced.
‘Will you help me?’ she asked Suki.
‘I would be honoured to,’ Suki said.
It took them five consecutive afternoons not just because of the tears and need for breaks for cups of tea but because of the lingering over what Lauren had drawn.
‘I would never wear a skirt like that, it’s so matronly,’ Vera said of a sketch among many sketches of friends and family. ‘And I don’t understand why this puppy keeps cropping up. We never even discussed getting a dog. And look, here it’s me – it’s definitely me – but I have my arm in a sling. What a strange thing to imagine.’
The two women gazed at a series of small paintings of grand venetian blinds through which could be seen a blazing light. ‘What an imagination,’ Suki said, ‘there’s something religious in them, like an afterlife or something, and she was what, twelve, when she did these?’
‘I think she would have studied art at college,’ Vera said.
‘Undoubtedly,’ Suki said. Suki looked again at the drawing of Vera with a sling and realised it was a drawing of Vera holding, in the crook of her arm, a tiny baby wrapped in a cream blanket. She said nothing of it to Vera.
Lauren
Gregory tapped Lauren on the shoulder.
‘Let’s go for a coffee,’ he said. She felt mildly sick and wondered if she was being let go. Had she made a costly mistake on the camcorder advert?
He explained that he was setting up his own agency with three partners, including Tim, the voraciously ambitious account executive who never made small talk.
‘You’d want Tim on your side, not the opposition, every time,’ Gregory said.
He smiled. He could tell that she had not twigged what he was about to ask her.
‘We’d like it very much if you would join us at Pilot, Lauren. We cannot improve your pay in the short-term, but we’d match it, and we’d like to think before too long you’d be much better off financially – but more importantly you’d be part of something exciting. Thrilling. Yes, I’d call it thrilling.’
Lauren flushed with gratitude. Thrilling was right. This was the most thrilling thing to have ever happened to her and she stammered her thanks.
‘Have a chat to your friends, family first,’ Gregory said, ‘and also, come and meet the others. We’re having a drink on Thursday evening.’
The house was full when she arrived home but there was no one she felt able to talk the offer through with and for the first time she acknowledged that she was not the right fit for Luke. Whatever she said about her possible new job would sound self-indulgent to someone who spent every day either with the disadvantaged or discussing them.
She phoned her parents. Vera made a weak joke wondering what the chances were of her new office being in Chester but Bob was more practical.
‘I can tell you’re flattered, love,’ he said, ‘but it is a risk. You should ask for share options. You need to be tied in to future success because if there is a future it will be partly thanks to you.’
Lauren sensed he was right but her throat dried as she asked Gregory about shares.
‘Of course,’ he said as if she had asked if she would be allowed to use the bathroom during work hours. And that was that. Another beginning, she thought, although she wondered quite why she viewed it that way. It is, objectively, a progression, she told herself, but she could not shake the idea that she had been offered a fresh start.
The work consumed her. Gregory set a fine example. He was meticulous, energetic, enthusiastic. Tim was demanding but so astute it did not seem to matter. The remaining two partners were, having more existing wealth, less visible, but no less impressive when inside the small, stylish new offices on Charlotte Street.
Gregory had engineered a generous private health scheme which required Lauren to undergo a full medical and answer a plethora of questions. The scheme was so generous that elements of her pre-existing condition were covered and she found herself on a long course of physiotherapy for her knee, which made very little difference to the discomfort she suffered, but it was worth the try, she supposed.
The doctor asked her if she had any anxieties, irrational or otherwise. She held his gaze. It was so piercing and the examination had been so thorough that she half expected him to ask if, when she returned to her childhood home, she felt displaced.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to die, but I expect most people feel that way.’
For a short while the doctor babbled about the responsibility felt by an only child and gradually Lauren came to see that he only appeared perceptive because he covered practically every inch of a person’s body and mind. At some juncture he was bound, accidentally, to hit a nerve.
The day after she had helped map out a campaign for a pizza chain client, Tim pulled up a chair beside her.
‘They absolutely loved you,’ he said. ‘You’re very good at working out what clients want but do not have the capability of expressing for themselves.’
Before she could absorb the compliment and respond, he sprang up and dashed outside. She shook her head and smiled. He is a peculiar one, she thought, but admiringly, and then he reappeared.
‘Also,’ Tim said, ‘I’d very much like to take you to dinner either this Friday or Saturday evening. Could you let me know which, if either, is preferable?’
Again she smiled. Six months ago she would have worried if that constituted a date or a meeting but she could tell. This was a very busy man asking her out on a date.
He booked a boisterous Italian near Covent Garden where she ordered Scampi Provençale, her go-to dish on dates or meetings in Italian restaurants, as she knew she could eat it without splashing her dress or slapping spaghetti or tagliatelli onto her cheek or chin. She wore black. She hardly ever wore black. Why am I wearing black? she wondered and decided it was to signify to Tim she knew this was a date. A date and not a meeting. It was a good thing, she was sure. Tim did not seem sure even though it was a Saturday night, but why else would a man and woman in their twenties be together, her wearing black, him wearing an open-neck expensive grey shirt, on a Saturday night?
The waiter brought them coffee and Amaretti biscuits. Tim carefully unwrapped one, smoothed out the paper, made a cylinder and stood it lengthways on the white tablecloth. He then picked up the candle and carefully set fire to the tip of it. The flame glowed pink an
d when all that was left was a charred carcass, the paper soared delicately into the air.
‘Did you make a wish?’ he asked her, and she wondered whether that might be the first of a range of subtly romantic gestures or the sum total of what he could offer.
‘I take it you’ve been here before then,’ she said, ‘or do you set fire to most things in the hope they’ll look pretty?’
He laughed.
‘No, I’m not a pyromaniac very often, and yes, I have been here before. With a delightful blonde with big blue eyes and a tendency towards naughtiness. And her mother and my father. Lottie is my half-sister and she is a spoilt but not unpleasant ten-year-old who loves the Amaretti biscuit trick.’
Lauren thought it sounded so exotic, to be part of a complicated family with some kind of controversial history. Her only intriguing relative was Aunt Suki, and Lauren was not even sure why she thought her intriguing in the first place.
‘My mother has a mole on her forehead,’ she said in a half-whisper and then stared at her wine glass. Before Tim could respond, assuming he would have been able to respond, she added, ‘I do seem unable to handle too much alcohol. You should know that before even wondering if you want to eat out with me again.’
‘You and Lottie have so much in common,’ he said and Lauren felt a strange, flirtatious sort of comfort in being with him. As if he might even be her new family. She pinched the back of her own hand and warned herself against ever saying such a thing to her parents.