Life Begins (35 page)

‘She totally does,’ Rose replied, with her usual airy confidence. ‘Totally,’ she repeated, breaking into a trot as the school bell sounded, then turning to face him while she jogged backwards. ‘You know you’re my best friend ever, don’t you? For now anyway.’ She giggled. ‘Beat you to assembly, though.’ She spun round and took off in the direction of the main school building, like some ungainly spider with her long, thin legs, her school bag bouncing, and so slow – so beatable – that Sam allowed himself a few moments of compassionate hesitation before tearing past her with a Red Indian whoop of victory.

Jean made herself a cup of tea with the intention of taking it into the sitting room, then decided that a stick and a full mug couldn’t be managed. She hobbled back and drank it standing next to the kettle instead, slopping some on her dress because of the shakiness – the feeling of not-caring – that had taken hold. It shouldn’t have been too much to ask, to drink the tea at the desk, with Reggie’s ribbed gold fountain pen in her good hand, the writing-pad open and waiting, as inviting to human imprint as a fall of fresh snow.

And a broken wrist was probably just the beginning. The old-lady osteoporosis responsible for it would no doubt make other claims on her health and dignity as time went by. And now there was nothing really for company either, except the TV, and the brusque carer who had chivvied her through her ablutions that morning – eight more calls to make, she said – and bossy, bristling Prue who, even in
charge of a Hoover, had always reminded Jean of a strutting turkey with its neck feathers ruffled, too pumped up with indignation at her own troubles (the husband with the bad hips, the daughter with no husband and a sickly child) to extend any genuine tenderness towards the sufferings of others.

Prue had left a cottage pie, which was kind in theory but had not
felt
kind to Jean in the manner of its delivery – heavy sighs, an expression of martyrdom fit for a saint at the stake, and a concluding rat-a-tat of instructions about how it would stretch to two suppers if not tackled too greedily, if cooked and stored with sufficient care… as if she was talking to someone with dementia instead of a fractured limb, enjoying lauding her own relative robustness, as if it really was only pure financial necessity that had driven her to ring the doorbell every week for fifteen years. Jean had groaned with relief when the front door slammed, then looked round for the comfort of Jasper and remembered he wasn’t there.

Standing alone with her tea in the kitchen, Jean forgot again and turned sharply as something moved out of the corner of her eye. Yet there was nothing to see, except the pattern on her kitchen curtains, large silvery shapes on mossy green, flat and still. She put down the empty mug, conjuring an image of the bridge companion who had tried to put her off dachshunds – Camilla something. They were like rodents, the woman had claimed, snapping the cards neatly between shuffles, all sharp points and ratty tails. Jean had gone ahead anyway and found Jasper, tactile and loving from the moment of his arrival, hopping into her shopping basket if he saw she was going out, curling up under the hem of her counterpane like a little stowaway the moment he sensed it might be nearing the time for his overnight incarceration in the kitchen.

Jean breathed slowly as the ache of longing intensified, then receded. She thought she had prepared herself but, really, it was as if she had lost her own shadow.

But there were things to be done, she reminded herself, reaching for her stick and setting off towards the desk in the sitting room where the pen and pad awaited her. There were things to be done and life changed, not gradually but in sudden unforeseeable moments: Charlotte’s conception, for instance – terror, timidity, acute discomfort, over in seconds, but with a lifetime in which to live out the consequences; or the stupid stumble in the bathroom the week before – so slight, a misjudgement of a mere half an inch as she lifted her leg over the side of the bath, yet here she was, tottering round like a cripple. Once, not so very long ago, she could have put an arm out to steady herself, even against the steamed slippery tiles of the bathroom wall. Once, rather longer ago, the suppleness in her bones would have meant a bruise or perhaps a sprain at worst, even after the sliding and tumbling – arm first, knee second – on to the bathroom floor.

Jean, halfway down the passageway connecting the kitchen to the sitting room, paused to rest her forehead against the wall, recalling how once, even longer ago, before the brief promiscuity that had produced her daughter, there had still been the loveliness of hoping to live life well instead of making do. She squeezed her eyes shut, blocking out the songbirds on the wallpaper and seeing Reggie, carefree, handsome, the proverbial rolling stone, then the wizened undignified thing he had become at the end, labouring between each rattling wheeze until she’d wanted to grab the pillow, press it over his face and scream that it was time to let go, for her release as much as his. Ending well, there could be real virtue – real dignity – in that. Jean opened her
eyes and tightened her grip on her stick. She had done nothing to help Reggie manage it – but
she
still might.

And already she had achieved a lot, she consoled herself, dropping into the desk chair with a sigh and letting the stick fall to the carpet: she had made her peace with Charlotte – told her the awkward dark thing that had had to be told and seen the brave, mature way her daughter was already accommodating it; and darling Jasper had been taken care of; and both the carer and the turkey-faced Prue had swallowed the story about Charlotte returning to undertake nursing duties for the rest of the week. Most cunning of all, she had cut across Charlotte’s excited and endearing babble about leases and bookshops on the phone that morning to say that the line was crackly and definitely on the blink and she was thinking of calling BT. Yes, the stage was set and she was in charge at last, determined to exercise more control over the end of her life than she had ever managed in the living of it.

Jean reached for the pad, wrote the date and paused. Reggie had been the one for letters, when he put his mind to it.
So you weren’t mine, but I have always been your devoted father.
What a lovely line. No wonder Charlotte had flinched with emotion when she reached it. Seeing it for the first time herself, after steaming open the envelope on the eve of the grand trip up north twenty years before, Jean had flinched too – fear, jealousy, protectiveness. It was as if every weakness, every failure of her life had been compressed into a single instant.

It was extraordinary, she decided, starting at last to write, how one could
remember
emotions but no longer
feel
them; how, with time, the most ardent passions could be relegated to the cooler, safer storage of humdrum memory. All her fervour for Reggie, for instance, that had faded now, as had
the early secret hopes of what might evolve from his gallant, noble, mostly brotherly offer of marriage, not to mention the ensuing disappointment and dreaded jealousy, as first Charlotte, then the other women (wives, servant girls, he wasn’t fussy) stole his attention. It was exhausting even to think about. It had exhausted her at the time too, wrung her out, made her unlovable and powerless and quite unfit, probably, to be a mother. And yet she had clung out of old habit, old hope; clung on until suddenly there were the faltering lungs to worry about and a turning of the tables and Reggie needing her and the realization that the love that had compelled her to behave in the best interests of her daughter had other manifestations, too, no matter how reluctant she was to acknowledge them.

Jean stopped writing and frowned, wondering whether to tear the page off and start again. So soon, and the words –
the meaning – was going off the rails, finding paths she had never intended. She had meant to apologize, to explain, and say her farewells. And, of course, she had regrets, hadn’t she? Not telling Charlotte of her true beginnings, for one thing: that was truly regrettable. Poor Charlotte. But then… Jean ran the end of the pen along her lips as she recalled her daughter’s fragility, not just as a lonely, shy, self-conscious child (so painfully in need of playmates that she and Reggie had broken their hearts in deciding to send her away to school) but in the extremes of emotion that had characterized Charlotte’s adulthood – in pieces at Reggie’s death, ecstatic at meeting Martin, so caught up with Sam, and then increasingly miserable once more as marital distrust had taken hold. The years, flying by, had never been without their justification for silence. And how, Jean wondered suddenly, could one regret things that – given the same situation, the same information – one would do again?

She wasn’t thinking straight. She would be better off sitting up in bed, she decided, with the pad on her knees, the pillows propping her back and a full glass of water – heavens, she mustn’t forget that, or the stockpile of tablets that would need rummaging for at the back of her bedside-table drawer.

At London Bridge station that morning Henry paused in front of a flower stall. He remembered a thing on the telly once in which a philandering husband had been found out through a lavish, guilt-ridden bunch of flowers – such a sudden gesture of romance from a lifelong sceptic that the canny wife in the drama had been on to him at once. He wasn’t even a philanderer and his wife was still on to him, Henry reflected miserably, glancing at his crotch, then sideways in alarm at the unlikely possibility of an onlooker
following his train of thought. Everything was in perfect working order (he had taken the precaution of testing it several times since the shameful bedroom fiasco over the long weekend) and yet it seemed – Henry released a soft groan – no longer to be relied on when he was most in need.

Famous for his professional nerves of steel, for the steadiness of his long, delicate fingers under the pressure of bright lights and the highest human hopes, Henry could hardly believe the private demolishment he had felt at having tried and failed to make love to his wife. Terrified it might happen again, he had spent every subsequent night feigning exhaustion, then lying sleepless in the dark. To get to the brink like that, to be so full of genuine ardour and virtuous determination to re-embrace his wife, his marriage, for good… It was almost as if his system had, literally, been poisoned by guilt; that while his brain might be ready to erase the memories of an ill-founded, inappropriate desire to sweep Charlotte Turner off her feet (pathetically triggered, as he kept reminding himself, by late-night pity and a glimpse of faded bra), some separate, stronger part of him remained determined that the path to recovery could not be so easy.

Theresa, meanwhile, was unbearably quiet, unbearably kind, tiptoeing round his emotions and his body as if he had some terminal disease. They couldn’t speak, they couldn’t touch, and now there was the new fear of the girls’ lunch they were having that Friday when Charlotte might decide to blow everything sky-high anyway. Theresa had broken the news of this unhappy arrangement when Henry had been half out of the door that morning, her mouth still full of toast, her voice resounding with the new brittle cheerfulness that communicated distrust, hurt and the word’ ‘
Why
?’ as clearly as if it had been emblazoned on her forehead. They were going to treat themselves to Santini’s, she
chirruped, have a trial run for Charlotte’s birthday dinner. Wasn’t that a lark?

Henry had nodded heavily, thinking of tongues, loosened by wine and the terrifying, peculiarly female capacity for mutual emotional exposure. Charlotte, after all, had spent years pouring out her marital miseries to Theresa. So what was to prevent a handy switch of roles? All Theresa had to confess to was a certain unease, and who knew what might spill out? It was like waiting for a bomb to go off.

There were some roses in a bucket near his feet, dusky pink, interlaced with sprigs of white. Would Theresa raise her eyebrows like the actress on the telly? Or would she get that distant dreamy look in her eye that Henry had lately been remembering so fondly, the one he had once been able to conjure with a single word or caress; the one that had always assured him she was his for the loving, and would be until worms chomped them both into soil.

‘Anniversary?’

Henry spun round to find Martin standing at his shoulder. He looked impressively smooth-shaven and immaculate in a navy suit, offset by a crisp pink shirt and a tie of such shockingly electric fuchsia that Henry immediately suspected the handiwork of Cindy rather than Martin himself. ‘No.’ He managed a smile, colouring slightly.

‘Not the right time of day anyway, is it?’ Martin quipped, grinning, clearly on top form. He held up his wrist and shook out his watch from under the starched cuff, making a face as he registered the time. ‘Unless you’ve reverted to night shifts and are on your way home.’

‘Happily not. I was just looking… Some of these places sell out of the good stuff pretty early on.’

‘Yes,’ Martin murmured, eyeing his friend and the flower stall doubtfully.

‘Thanks so much for the party, by the way,’ Henry went on. ‘I don’t know if Theresa wrote but –’

‘Yes
, she did – thanks.’

‘Excellent, yes, she’s good like that, Theresa… but, seriously, it was a great do. And
you
look great. Clearly, things are going well.’