by Alex Day
‘Please, Mum,’ yells Luke, who’s jumping up and down behind his brother. Then Sam turns up, trailing a beach towel behind him, already prepared for a ‘yes’ answer.
Charlotte looks at me and waves her hands in a gesture of despairing acceptance. ‘I don’t think we’re going to be able to stop them, are we?’ she says. A good old-fashioned ‘no’ would have done it, in my opinion, but when it comes to her children, I don’t think Charlotte knows how to use that word.
In any case, the boys have already taken her response as permission granted and they melt silently away.
‘You were saying something,’ I say, leaning towards Charlotte in a way I hope inspires the sharing of confidences.
She shakes her head.
‘Was I? I can’t even remember. Whatever it was, it was nothing important.’
A silence descends, in which we are both lost in our own thoughts. I visualise the letter that arrived this morning, the all too familiar franking stamp. Not a debt collector, nor an accounts department. Instead, something that I’ve been dreading all my life; the researcher from the production company is tenacious if nothing else. It’s the third one I’ve received, forwarded courtesy of the Royal Mail from my old address in Barnes. I press my fingers to my temples where a sudden tension headache is pounding, then look back up and give Charlotte a bright smile.
I’ve no idea what she’s hiding but whatever it is, can it really be worse than what I am?
PART 2
Stars, hide your fires; let not light see my black and deep desires.
— Macbeth, William Shakespeare
Chapter 21
Susannah
Charlotte’s gone to Corsica after all, despite all the vacillating and hand wringing about whether she should leave Dan alone. I know that she was about to say something, to reveal something, when the boys exploded into the room with the force of a hurricane, begging permission to go swimming in the river. Once they’d disappeared she denied it. But I’d spotted the signs of a confession coming on. The lowered eyes, the husky voice, the contrite expression. I’d seen them all in Justin, after all, when he finally came clean about the extent of his debts and the trouble he was in.
And not just in him.
Because the thing is that, long before Justin, I’d been there before. My husband isn’t the first man who has abandoned me, nor the first who deceived and dissembled. Oh no, not at all. Even after all these years, I still think about him all the time … My first love. Mourning him, cursing him, missing him.
His name was Charlie.
I met him at university. He was sitting at the bar in the Malet Street student union building, incongruously drinking a pint of milk. Everything he did was unconventional, unusual, unique. I fell completely and utterly head-over-heels in love with him. He was my protest boyfriend, my beautiful, clever, funny, intelligent bad-boy from the rough end of Bristol, brought up in a tower block on the wrong side of the tracks by a drug-addicted and depressed single mother.
The first date we went on, he took me to Pollo Bar in Old Compton Street, famous for being the cheapest eaterie in town. Even now, I clearly recall the crowded space, rammed with booths in oxblood leatherette, all occupied by people talking at the tops of their voices. My eyes swivelled from side to side as I tried to take in the assault on my senses, the mural-covered walls and the dusty 1960s light fittings, everything shrouded in a haze of cigarette smoke. There didn’t seem to be any possibility of sitting down anywhere and it was hot as an inferno. Charlie ploughed on nevertheless and eventually, after much sliding sideways and avoiding legs and arms, we arrived at a narrow, twisting staircase that led down to a basement almost as packed as the level above. Formica tables and chairs jostled for position in the cramped, low-ceilinged space, all so close together there was scarcely space to move between them.
Somehow Charlie found somewhere for us to park ourselves. He ordered and the dish arrived within minutes, a huge, overflowing plate of spaghetti puttanesca, the sauce staining the yellow pasta strands red, forming the combined colours of a sunrise.
Or a massacre.
The waitress plonked it down between us, handing us both a spoon and fork wrapped in a translucently thin paper napkin.
‘The servings are big enough for two here,’ Charlie grinned. ‘No point in paying for one each.’
He picked up his fork, swirling it around and around in the dish until it was wrapped in a huge tomato-blood-spattered spaghetti bandage with multiple trailing strands, at which point he plunged it into his mouth. I watched, mesmerised, stabbing ineffectually at a few strands of pasta when he asked me why I wasn’t eating.
Despite how fast Charlie was ploughing through the food, it seemed to take forever for it to be finished. We forced our way out of the restaurant and onto the brightly lit, buzzing street. I’d been feeling choked by the heat and cigarette smoke and steam in the basement and I remember how relieved I was to take a deep breath of fresh air.
‘I should be going,’ I said.
‘Don’t you want to come back to mine,’ he replied, and it wasn’t a question.
Having sex with Charlie at his digs was awkward to say the least. He shared a bedroom with a pot-smoking philosophy student named Ptolemy who never seemed to go out but rather spent the majority of his time lying flat on his back on his bed, eyes closed, puffing on a joint. To any casual observer he looked like a complete no-hoper, a student who would – literally – burn through his grant and leave uni with no more qualifications than he started with. But of the two essays he’d handed in so far, he had achieved firsts in both, Charlie said, despite the fact that he never attended lectures. He was just naturally brilliant and the dope appeared to magnify his genius. In the end, he graduated with a first.
‘Like Coleridge and Shelley on laudanum,’ I suggested, hoping that the comparison with such literary heavyweights might help me convince myself that a more or less permanent bedroom companion was something other than inconvenient.
‘I guess,’ replied Charlie. ‘Although I think he takes his inspiration more from Bob Dylan.’
That night, the first occasion of love making, we had to throw Ptolemy out and make him go and sit in the kitchen. The flat’s sitting room had been turned into a bedroom for another two students, so there were four people living in a space designed for one or two at the most. Ptolemy thought it unnecessary that he should leave; he wasn’t interested in sex – it was too elemental and messy, too real. His interests were purely esoteric and never involved the intermingling of body fluids. We could do what we liked, he would take no notice. If we didn’t mind him being there then he didn’t mind us.
I most emphatically did mind. Ptolemy was duly banished.
‘The ice queen melteth,’ whispered Charlie in my ear after I had climaxed. I nodded, replete, a goal achieved, a triumph recorded. It was my first time.
After a few months, I moved out of my student accommodation on the Camden Road, a four-lane highway permanently choked with traffic, and Charlie and I moved into an apartment high above the Finchley Road, a six-lane highway permanently choked with traffic. We shared with the pot-smoking Ptolemy and a couple of other lads, cramming everyone in to save money. It was cramped and noisy and messy, and Marjorie, on her one visit, was horrified. Her righteous disapproval only made me more sure I’d made the right choice.
Charlie was my rebellion and as such no one, apart from me, was surprised when it didn’t work out.
He cheated on me and then left me for a petite and immaculate French girl he met on his year abroad. Clichéd, right? But true. All too true.
The betrayal was complete, the cruelty absolute. To be treated like that by the man I loved through and through broke my heart.
It took a long, long time to get over Charlie.
Eventually, nearly a decade later, I met Justin and began what was my second, and as it stands right now, last relationship. I’m sure my parents, brothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents and every member of my ext
ended family breathed a sigh of relief that I’d finally come to my senses, found someone suitable and sensible, and hopefully put the past behind me. My mother and father were on tenterhooks until Justin finally proposed; when he did so, they could hardly believe it was true. I don’t think I could, either.
After Charlie, it was hard to trust anyone.
So in Charlotte (a name, I note, that is often shortened to Charlie) I recognise all the signs of what suspicion does to you; I’ve been there myself. Now that she’s out of the way for a while I can do some digging, see if I can shed any light on what’s wrong, what it is that’s eating away at her. Sometimes she has a look about her, as if she’s petrified about what’s behind her. Every now and again she’ll glance over her shoulder and I know, at those times, that she’s not listening to me anymore.
It’s as if she’s being hunted.
And I too, because of Charlie, am being pursued.
Perhaps Charlotte and I are more similar than either of us realises. I look down at the letter in my hands, pulled out of the bunch of bank statements and circulars that have just been deposited on the doormat. The tell-tale franking stamp of the production company leaps out at me and, as always, it’s addressed to my maiden name. I don’t need to open it to know it’ll be from that researcher again.
I rip up the letter and bury it in the bin, pulling a banana skin and piece of cellophane over the top of it as if that will somehow diminish its power and weaken it, like garlic to a vampire. He’s obviously read about me, this researcher, in the newspaper reports from the time, of which there were many, some so lurid I could hardly recognise myself, and has mercilessly tracked me down. He doesn’t seem to know my married name or my current address.
But if he found me the first time, it’s surely only a matter of time before he finds me again.
Chapter 22
Susannah
Unlike the ne’er-do-wells of my past, Dan is as good as his word.
Three days after our weekend match and lunch at his house, he sends me a text asking if today is convenient for fixing the leaky tap. As it’s my morning off, I tell him not only am I in but I’m free to go to the hardware store with him, too. The boys are out on playdates and I had been planning to spend the time pulling together some chapters of my book, the idea for which has crystallised recently. It will be a compendium of British flora, along with each plant’s chemical constituents and the ways in which it can be used for herbal or medicinal purposes. I’ll include any instances where the plants have been used in fiction or real life for beneficial or malevolent purposes. I’m hoping it will be the sort of coffee table work that will really intrigue people, a casual read but also informative and interesting. I want to make inroads on my project when the boys are away on the oft-mooted Boys’ Own camping trip to the Lakes. But the tap badly needs some TLC and Dan’s offer is too good to turn down so …
He picks me up in the Porsche and there’s something pretty cool about pulling up next to the shabby white vans and battered Ford estates in the car park and sauntering across the hot tarmac to the shop’s open doors, all eyes upon us. I have to hide my delight in the novelty of it all, obviously. I’d like Dan to think such a lifestyle comes as naturally to me as it does to him.
Back at my house, he pulls out our £2 mixed packet of washers and some assorted tools he’s brought with him and gets to work. I offer him coffee but he declines. He doesn’t say so but I can tell he’s already clocked the lack of an expensive Italian coffee machine and realised it’s going to be instant. I pour him a glass of elderflower cordial mixed with sparkling water instead.
The job takes him no time at all.
‘There you are,’ he says, turning the tap on and off in a demonstration of how beautifully it now works. ‘No drips and you won’t have to use so much power on it now!’
Laughingly, I brandish my biceps to demonstrate that I’m strong enough. Then immediately regret it as I remember Charlotte’s ‘sturdy arms’ comment.
‘You won’t be needing those muscles anymore,’ jokes Dan. ‘It’s smooth as butter. Anyway, your sleek, toned physique has far better uses than forcing dodgy spigots open and closed.’
He turns away to tidy up the tools and the spare washers, his comment hanging in the air between us, images of what those better uses might be flitting through my mind.
‘I actually really enjoyed that,’ he continues as he pours various rubber circles back into the plastic packet, oblivious to the effect he’s had on me. ‘Using my hands, doing something practical – and useful. I wish I had the opportunity more often.’
I pull myself together, banishing the disturbing, delightful thoughts I’m having. He didn’t mean anything by his comment. But still …
‘From now on,’ he continues, wheeling around in my cramped, grotty kitchen and smiling broadly, ‘you can keep your strength and power for tennis. That’s where it can really come into its own.’
I laugh, slightly hysterically. I’m all at sixes and sevens, feeling a little overwhelmed. Dan’s been so kind to give up all this time to me, and his unexpected handiness is yet another string to his already impressive bow of talents. Plus, he’s kind and full of compliments and I really can’t fault him in any way. To have his attention and friendship is like being bestowed with some precious, rare gift and I can’t help but enjoy it.
He gestures towards the glass of cordial. ‘Is this for me?’ he asks, immediately assuming it is and reaching out his arm to pick it up. He drains it and licks his lips appreciatively. ‘Wow, that’s good,’ he says. ‘Homemade, I’m sure?’
I nod my assent.
‘Multitalented, as I say,’ he laughs.
‘Likewise,’ I jest, indicating his handiwork with the tap.
And then we’re both laughing and it feels so natural for him to be here, doing things Justin would have done (albeit with a great deal more nagging beforehand) and I stop feeling ashamed of my minuscule house and tatty decor. I am what I am – and Dan’s not judging me anyway. This is probably the most relaxed I’ve ever been with a man and the novelty value of that is a long way from wearing out.
The interlude with the tap fixing turns out to be one of the best moments of the next week or so and one my mind frequently returns to when I’m feeling down. The boys go off to the Lakes with Justin as promised and I’m left to my own devices. I have ample time to stress about the TV researcher, imagining him closing in on me, narrowing his search until, one fine day, he arrives at my door. Dan spends a couple of nights in London for work so I don’t even have him and his visits to the cafe to break the monotony, leaving me nothing to do but dwell on the past – and my fears for the future. Without my boys being around, I don’t even have the mundanity of endless meals and shopping and washing to take my mind off things.
For the first time, I truly envy Charlotte being able to escape to Corsica on holiday, to get away from it all. Of course, the reality is that I know this is not what happens. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.
On top of everything else, memories of Charlie continue to assail me, beckoned by Naomi bringing to the cafe fragrant bundles of herbs reminiscent of the fateful trip I took to visit him during his year abroad, the first time I ever encountered fresh coriander, basil, and thyme. The pungent smells of those plants will forever evoke recollections of the Mediterranean and Marseille, of meals cooked by Charlie in the apartment he shared with four ultra-glamorous French girls who took it upon themselves to teach him as much about French cooking as they could. Any man’s dream, right? But I was so naïve and trusting that it never crossed my mind that Charlie would stray.
Even when I went over to visit him, I didn’t realise straight away. It was only when I saw that those vixens rarely left his side, that they constantly surrounded him with their Ah, oui’s and their Je ne sais pas’s that it dawned on me. One, in particular, was leech-like in her dependency on Charlie, always needing him to help her to translate something for her English degree or to show her h
ow to make tea ‘ze Engleesh way’.
Her name was Josephine.
Charlie’s increasingly complex experimentation with haute cuisine needed a sous chef and I, evidently, was not up to the job. Josephine, of course, was. She was his ever-present acolyte, delivering his elaborate, herb-adorned dishes to the table with all the devotion of a religious ceremony. He pretended not to notice her adoration and when I brought it to his attention, he dismissed out of hand the very notion that she was making a play for him.
I abhorred her sexy accent, sexy pout, and sexy apparel. In the rising warmth of late April, she wore boob tubes and micro-mini skirts and ostentatiously washed her tiny, translucent underwear by hand in the kitchen sink, draping it alluringly over the Juliet balcony to dry where it was on full view to anyone in the sitting room. At a time when the only smalls England had to offer were of the sensible and practical Marks & Sparks variety, or polyester fripperies from a sex shop, the expensive but flimsy fabrics of her barely-there knickers and plunging bras were something truly exotic. And threatening. Those frith-froths of embroidery and lace were like bunting proudly proclaiming a celebration.
Or a victory.
I wanted to get away, to get out of the huge but claustrophobic apartment, far from all the fawning minions. I’d checked out a small hotel on the waterfront in Cassis; in the photos it looked charming, a whitewashed bedroom with muslin curtains that fluttered in the breeze, the window overlooking the picturesque cluster of pastel-hued buildings nestled around the harbour. A small beach nestled at the foot of high cliffs and, though the water would be too cold for swimming, sunbathing under a milky spring sun would be perfect for my English skin that hadn’t seen a ray since the previous August.