A Banquet of Consequences (7 page)

India went to her mother-in-law, who held her hands up in a
pleading gesture. She quite understood Caroline’s deep fear: that Charlie would also kill himself. She feared this as well. Her fear was what had kept her in place for more than two years till something
had
to happen to force Charlie to take action, and removing herself as his crutch and emotional whipping boy had been the only route she could take.

“He needs to get help, Mum,” India said. “He knows that, but he won’t do it. He says I’m his help—”

“You
are.
”

“—but you and I know that isn’t the truth. He’s lost most of his clients. He’s stopped leaving the flat. There’re days when he doesn’t even dress. He just lies on the sofa and stares at the ceiling. And when I ask him or try to talk to him or—”

“I know, I know.” Caroline wept, abject in her grief. “You’ve a right to a life that’s not like this one. But can you not see . . . ?” She had shredded her tissue, so she got another and pressed it to her wet cheeks. This action seemed to calm her because when she next spoke, her voice was altered, no longer pleading but reasoned and gentle as well. “Can you at least not file for divorce, India?”

“I have no plans to do that.”

“Oh thank God. Because, you see, he’s in pieces now that you’ve begun to date, and to go from that to receiving papers telling him you’re . . .”

But India didn’t attend to the rest because, in that moment, she understood. She’d told not a soul she was dating. She’d not yet said a word even to her own mother. So if Caroline Goldacre knew that she was seeing someone, there was only one way she could have found out.

Charlie had told her. He’d rung her and told her and, as she’d done for years, Caroline had rushed in to do the work meant for one of her boys.

But that wasn’t the worst of it, actually. For India also had never told Charlie that she was seeing someone. So if he knew, he’d been following her.

SPITALFIELDS

LONDON

The only real clues that Charlie Goldacre had that he hadn’t been out of the flat in two weeks were the rubbish bags and the fridge. The first were beginning to stack up in the entry like spine-slumped debutantes hoping in vain for a dance partner. The second was bare of everything but condiments, some mouldy cheese, three eggs, and a carton of milk whose odour suggested the way of wisdom would have been to pour its contents straight down the drain. Other than that, there was—at least to his eyes—nothing to suggest he’d been holed up inside what had once been his home with his wife since seeing her out with another man.

Prior to that, he’d had good days and bad days. While it was true that most of them had been bad, there had been mornings when he’d managed to muster enough energy to shove from his chest the hundredweight that seemed to flatten him to the mattress. On those days, he did go out. And while he found himself largely incapable of meeting with clients, he was able to walk the streets, to stare at his surroundings, and to try to make sense of stories he read in discarded broadsheets and tabloids on the occasions that he stopped for a coffee. But what he read, he quickly forgot, just as he also forgot where he had been and what he had seen.

Life continued around him. Traffic roared into the City in the morning and out of the City in the afternoon. Pavements were crowded with office workers, shop assistants, and skulking young men in black hoodies and jeans. The markets in Middlesex Street and Goulston Street continued to thrive. All of this seemed so curious to Charlie. His own life had ground to a halt, so it was difficult to take in the reality that for everyone else, the struggle went on.

That’s what it was, he’d decided. An eternal struggle to come to terms with realities that shifted from day to day. One day you were going about your business, secure in the illusion that you had arrived at the exact point for which you’d been aiming. The next day, you found yourself on a runaway train about to derail. He had known this was possible, of course, considering the years of study that had gone
into his making as a psychotherapist. But the level at which he knew it was the level at which he applied it to other people and not to himself. Yet he should have understood all along how fragile was the ice on which he had established his life because every human being’s life was a fragile thing. He should also have been prepared that at any moment his world would tilt on its axis in such a way that only by clinging desperately to a few familiar items within it would he keep himself from sliding off his personal planet and into oblivion.

After Will’s death, he’d clung to India. Then, when she’d left him, he’d clung to his remaining clients. When those tortured souls had finally moved on to find someone who actually listened to their weekly tales of woe instead of observing them blankly, he’d begun to cling to his home.

Art Deco, India had called it. Charlie, Charlie, we must have it! The smallest flat they’d seen, it was perfect crown mouldings and stunning bookshelves. It was pristine railings and hardwood floors and glossy tiles. It was Egyptian revival and razzle-dazzle, and they should have walked out of the place the moment after they had walked in. But she’d been desperate for it, and he’d wanted to please her after the extremes she’d gone to just to please him. To please his mother, actually. For it had seemed so crucial at the time that Caroline Goldacre approve of India.

What anyone else thought of Charlie’s choice of mate didn’t matter to him. But Caroline’s approval had been paramount. India had questioned this, but not enough.
Why
had she been so docile? he wondered. Why hadn’t she tried to fight him?

But he more or less knew the answer to this. One always ended up living to please his mother. One didn’t even see the change in oneself as pleasing her became a way of life.

He was thinking of this when he heard a key unlock the door to the flat. He was in the kitchen, where on the wall he had mounted a small whiteboard on which he kept a record of his daily activities. Prior to Will’s death there had been need for this, for Charlie was an inveterate volunteer on mornings or afternoons or evenings when he had no clients. He walked dogs from the Battersea home, he worked a suicide hotline—wasn’t
that
a bloody good joke, he thought—he
read to pensioners with failing vision in care homes, he helped a group of disadvantaged kids maintain an allotment south of the river. But these pursuits had become too overwhelming. One at a time, he’d given them up and when the flat door opened and he heard his mother’s voice calling out a quiet hello, he was in the process of erasing the last of them from the whiteboard.

He heard Caroline’s footsteps as she entered the sitting room. She would see that he’d been sleeping on the sofa and had he known she was coming, he would have hidden this evidence. She wouldn’t understand why he couldn’t bring himself to use the bed he’d shared with India. Indeed, until India had removed the last of her belongings from the flat, he could hardly bare to touch a single surface, so fraught with memories was everything for him.

He heard his mother sigh, and then she went towards the bedroom, calling his name. He didn’t answer as the flat was so small it would be a matter of five seconds before she found him. He was applying the thick felt rubber to the word
Samaritans
when she spoke behind him. “Why didn’t you answer me, Charlie? Turn round and let me look at you, please.”

She drew in a slow breath when he did as she asked. She shook her head as if to say, “Do not utter a word,” and she left him. But she was back soon enough and in her hand a mirror that she’d brought from the bathroom. She held it up before him and said, “Do it, please,” and he gazed upon what he didn’t wish to see.

He was hollow-faced, unshaven. His eyes—blue like his father’s and his maternal grandfather’s—were grimy with sleep and half ringed with purple. His hair was uncombed. And the rest of him that the mirror didn’t show was, he knew, not much better. For he couldn’t recall the last time he had changed his clothes or even had a shower, and his shoulders slumped habitually now while his chest caved inward as it had done for years in order to disguise his height to spare the feelings of his younger brother.

His gaze went from his reflection to his mother’s face. He saw love in her expression, and he tried to reflect that back to her as he turned the mirror in her hand so that she could look on her own image. He said, “What do they say? ‘Physician heal—’” but she cut him off.

“Don’t,” she said. “This has nothing to do with Will, and you know it.”
This
referred to the enormous amount of weight she’d gained since his brother’s death, rendering her moonfaced now, a once-slender woman taken to disguising her bulk with flowing garments and copious amounts of ethnic jewellery. She wore today a piece that he recognised as having once belonged to India. Caroline had taken it from the back of the bathroom door one evening. India had seen it on her later—so had he in fact—but neither one of them had said a word. God, he thought now. What was
wrong
with them when it came to his mum?

“What does it have to do with, then?” he asked her, turning back to the whiteboard.

“Cortisone, Charlie. For my hip. You know that very well.”

“Ah,” he said. “As you wish, of course. If fantasy cortisone injections ‘for your hip’ help you to deal with Will, then you must have them. But the truth is generally better. You’re eating your way through your grief, Mum.”

“And what are
you
doing, Charlie?”

Charlie chuckled uselessly and set the felt rubber on the edge of the whiteboard. “I haven’t a clue.”

He heard her place the mirror down on the table. He turned. She said, “Don’t let’s do this. It’s difficult enough for both of us without picking away at each other.”

He nodded. “Truce, then.”

She came to him and hugged him. “Best boy,” she murmured. “My second self, Charlie.”

That had been their secret. “We share a soul,” she’d told him. “I think that’s what happens with one’s firstborn.”

He’d allowed her to say this. He’d never pointed out that he knew the truth. And now, he didn’t say a thing. But still he tensed in the presence of her lie, and she must have felt this. She released him from her embrace and said, “Let’s talk. There’s much to say.”

She led him into the sitting room. There, before she said another word, she carefully folded the blanket and removed the sheets. Her nose wrinkled at the odour coming from them. She balled them up and did the same with the pillowcase that she removed from the
pillow. All of these things she took to the bedroom. She returned, sat, and gestured for him to do the same.

She looked round. She would, of course, see the differences in the room since the touches that India had supplied to make the flat their home were gone. When she’d removed the last of her belongings, she left only a photo in a frame, and it made a silent declaration of who she had once been. In the picture, they were on a rooftop terrace, drinks in hands and grins on faces. India wore a sundress, long earrings, and bright pink lipstick. He wore a striped shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He’d known her three weeks, and she’d not yet met his family, so they were idiotically happy. This is who I was before I changed myself for you, the photo announced.

No fool, Caroline saw this. She took up the picture and looked long at it. Then she carefully placed it back where it had been, on the table next to the sofa. She said, “We were too close. That was the problem.”

He said nothing. He knew she wasn’t referring to closeness to India but rather closeness to him.

“I should have done things differently. When you wanted me to have a key to this flat, for example, I should have said no. I should have said, ‘Your life’s with India now, not with your mum.’ That would have made a difference. I know I’m not the first mother who wanted to maintain close ties with her children, but I carried things too far. I saw India as
one
of my children once you married. I wanted a tie with her, and I failed to see that she didn’t need or want a tie with me.”

Still, he said nothing. She would have liked reassurance, he reckoned, a passionate statement from him that the breakdown of his marriage was not her fault. And it wasn’t. But he couldn’t muster the words to tell her this as doing so would open the door to confidences he didn’t want to share and others that he didn’t want to hear.

Caroline put her hand on his. “I’ve been to see her, Charlie. I had to be in town today anyway, so I went to the clinic. No, don’t say anything yet. I knew you wouldn’t want me to go. But once you told me she’d begun seeing someone . . . What else could I do? If there’s the slightest chance that I can make her see reason . . . You do see that I had to take that chance, don’t you?”

He knew he ought to be horrified: his mother going to see his wife in order to plead his case. But even beginning to carry their conversation in that direction felt enervating to him. So he did what he’d been doing with his clients before they left him. He merely stared.

Caroline’s grasp tightened on his hand. “She’s not been intimate with him. I asked her directly. What else could I do? She said he’s not even been inside her house, and she hasn’t the first clue where he lives other than somewhere in Camberwell. That should tell you a great deal.”

At that Charlie was aware of something stirring within him. He couldn’t put a name to it, but whatever it was, it gave him the energy to say, “What’s it supposed to tell me, Mum?”

“That nothing’s been decided, that this is just a period in which India needs to think things through just as you need to think things through. This happens sometimes. It isn’t the end of the world.”

“What it is is only a matter of time” was his reply. “India’s lovely. This bloke will want her. She’ll go along because that’s what India always does—she just goes along—and that will be that.”

Caroline rose from the sofa to walk to the window that overlooked Leyden Street. Right fist to her mouth, she tapped her knuckles against her lips. She was keeping herself from shouting at him, Charlie knew. Impatient at heart for things to go her way, his mum had a temper but she rarely let it get the better of her.