A Hidden Life (27 page)

For a long time, he'd used his mobile gingerly. He phoned someone. He received calls from some people, those few to whom he'd given his number. That was it. He knew about text messaging – you could hardly avoid knowing about something so ubiquitous – but would no more have dreamed of sending a text than diving off the end of Beachy Head.

Ellie had changed that. She had taken to texting and to mobiles in general and her handset, fully equipped with what she referred to as ‘all the available whistles and bells', was an elegant and very expensive silver rectangle with an unnaturally blue screen and a ringtone
which drew far too much attention to itself. An electronic version of Handel's
Water Music –
why would anyone need that blaring out every few minutes? It would have driven him bananas. His ringtone was as near to that of a normal phone as he could manage. When he first got a text from Ellie, he nearly jumped out of his skin. It happened during a meeting and amid profuse apologies he'd simply turned off the handset, vowing to return to it later.

There was no one he could ask. Phyl would have shown him how to read and answer his messages in a moment, but he certainly didn't want her to know Ellie was texting him. Perhaps it was the novelty, but he found this way of sending messages rather erotic: not a thought he could express to his wife. As it was, he was forced to consult the booklet that had come with his phone. It took him some hours but he worked it out in the end. For weeks now, he'd been laboriously tapping out little groups of two and three words but on the train back from Paris, Lou had introduced him to predictive text and that had changed everything. Now he was getting – well, you couldn't call it speedy – but certainly comfortable.

Lou had also shown him the vibrate thing – amazing! He opened the handset and read the message. He'd known as soon as he got it that it must be from Ellie because she was the only person who ever texted him. Briefly, he wondered how the mobile phone had altered adulterous habits of men and women. He deleted every message he received the moment he'd answered it, and just the other day, realized he had also to delete his sent messages folder, or someone could look at his phone and read every single word. Not that he was an adulterer and not that he had sent anything incriminating, but still.

dying 2 hear paris news fone me lunch next week xxx

Ellie didn't go in for punctuation and Matt assumed that there was supposed to be a question mark at the end of the message. And that ‘2' was an affectation. With predictive text it was only a matter of moments to write the whole word. He sighed and tapped in his answer.

Will phone tomorrow. Matt.

The triple x at the end of every text Ellie sent thrilled him, though she probably put kisses after every message she wrote. And maybe it was something everyone did. Certainly his messages to Phyl and
hers to him always had kisses added. Did they mean anything? Maybe they did and maybe not. He'd ring Ellie back, but could they really keep on having lunches? And what could he tell her about Paris? He'd come back from the trip feeling unsettled. Meeting his great-aunt had revived feelings in him he thought he'd forgotten years ago. It made him feel sad for his father in a way he'd never managed when John Barrington was alive. How hideous of Constance to do that: keep his letters away from him, for God's sake. He wasn't quite sure but it was probably against the law. She was tampering with Her Majesty's Mail. I'll never forgive her for that, Matt reflected. The more he thought about it, the more unkind an act it seemed to him. My mother was a bitch, he told himself and even thinking such a thing shocked him, but it was true. What she'd done to Lou had started off his process of disillusionment with his mother and this just confirmed that he'd been right.

Mme Franchard was frail. He'd spoken to Lou about the possibility of having her to stay, taking her to see Milthorpe House, and so forth, but in truth he didn't think that would ever be possible. She appeared to be soldered to the chair she sat on and you felt that if you moved her, she would dissolve into grey dust. Her mind was sharp enough, but he'd noticed how close to her eyes she'd held the letter and Solange had told him that she ate ‘not enough to fill a tooth'. Matt had wanted to ask what the financial situation was, and whether perhaps he might contribute something towards his ancient new relative's upkeep, but didn't feel it would be tactful on a first visit. Lou said she was going to go over to Paris again soon, but he'd have to see Mme Franchard as well. There might be ways in which he could make her life easier and he felt a duty to try and do that, at least.

His father hadn't been a great one for family. Whenever Matt had asked him about it as a child, John had deflected the questions, retreating into his ‘I'm a writer and can't be disturbed' persona, which now Matt suspected he put on like a cloak of invisibility whenever he wanted to avoid a subject. And I'm not much better, he told himself. He'd been surprised to see how shaken he was by the discovery of a great-aunt he'd never known about. Part of him was intrigued, amazed – and irritated that this new relation couldn't tell
him anything about John's mother to add to what he already knew, apart from filling in her background as a girl in France. For the most part, however, he was worried. Now that Mme Franchard was part of his family willy-nilly, he couldn't help feeling responsible. I'll have to go back, he thought. I could take Phyl for a weekend break, if it weren't for Poppy. Passing across the back of his mind like a shadow yet again was an image of himself and Ellie walking along the banks of the Seine and he tried hard to concentrate on Phyl. Me and Phyl walking along the banks of the Seine. Matt sighed. Why didn't his wife fit into the romantic cliché as well as Ellie did? Because I've not had a chance, he told himself, to get close to Phyl since Poppy arrived. Of course it was important for Lou to do this thing, whatever it was, that she was engaged in. He had a good idea of what it might be, because ever since her early childhood she'd been scribbling away in notebooks. She was no doubt writing a novel, and from everything he remembered about his father, this was a long and difficult process. What if she took a year over it? Two years? He squared his shoulders and decided to discuss the matter with Phyl that evening.

He glanced at his watch. It was nearly lunchtime. He'd go out soon and get something at the pub down the road. And I'll phone Ellie from the call box there and tell her about Mme Franchard. What must it be like for her, spending almost the whole of her adult life first separated from her sister and then only guessing at what must have happened to her? He'd often wondered what it would be like to have a sibling. Quite unbidden, he had a flash of memory – a day he'd forgotten came back to him in detail. They'd gone out together, Matt and his father, on a fishing trip. Neither of us liked fishing, he thought now, so why did we do it? He had no idea. Maybe it was a way of getting out of the house. In any case, there they were, sitting on the river bank in the sun. I had a hat, he recalled. A blue cotton hat and blue and white shorts which I hated wearing because I thought they looked girlish. How old was I? Six? Maybe seven – it was hard to remember. But he did recall most of the conversation. He'd asked his father, ‘Why haven't I got any brothers or sisters?'

‘Some people just don't. You're an only child. That's not a bad thing to be.'

‘Isn't it? It's a bit lonely, though. We could play together all the time, if I had a brother.'

‘I haven't got any brothers or sisters either.'

The silence that fell then lasted for what seemed to Matt like a very long time. Then his father sighed and said, ‘Well, I used to have a sister, but she died. Remember? I told you about it. We were all in a prisoner-of-war camp. During the war.'

Even at that age, Matt had heard of the war. He knew how horrible it must be to have a dead sister, but he was still quite sorry that he had never had a sister. He thought his father wasn't going to say anything else about it but then he spoke again.

‘Everyone said it couldn't be helped, my sister dying, but I felt … well, I did feel it was my fault, a bit, that she died.'

‘Why? Why was it your fault?'

‘It's complicated. You don't need to understand, really, and I don't think I could explain. I just felt – sometimes I thought I ought to have died instead of her. That's what happens sometimes when you're very sad. It changes what you feel about things.'

Thinking about that day, Matt wondered how much of what he was remembering was how it was, and how much he was inventing things that might have been said – no, it was reasonably accurate. He remembered feeling sorry for his father, sorry about the dead sister. He'd never asked him about it again, not from lack of curiosity but because he sensed that John Barrington was more comfortable not discussing it. He hadn't thought about that day for years, but when he was younger – probably before he met Ellie – the memory of it came to him from time to time, which was why he could see it all so clearly now. He wondered, briefly, what his father had meant. Probably he was experiencing a kind of survivor's guilt, which he knew was common: the feeling that you had no right to be alive when someone you loved very much was lying dead.

‘These are beautiful,' Nessa said, touching one of the handmade silk flowers that lay in one of the lined drawers of what looked like the kind of filing cabinet you saw in the offices of architects: lots of wide, flat compartments, about twenty of them. She and Mickey had
travelled down to Dorset together to visit someone called Clarrie Armitage (must be short for Clarissa, Nessa thought, or possibly Clarice) whose handiwork Mickey had spotted in a back number of
Country Life
at the dentist's. Clarrie turned out to be a middle-aged lady of the sort who'd always call herself that: lady, not woman. She lived in a small, semi-detached cottage in a pretty village. She wore her iron-grey hair in a bun, and her rather peasanty skirt in burgundy wool had flowers embroidered all round the hem in bright shades of purple and pale pink. A fisherman's smock-type top in pink cord didn't do much for her bust, which was just that bit too big for it. A V-neck would be so much better, Nessa reflected, as Clarrie led them into her studio where flowers at every stage of their creation lay on an enormous table which almost filled the entire room. The filing cabinet took up most of one wall and they'd been looking at its contents for the last hour. Clarrie might not know what was what in the flattering tops department, but her flowers were miraculously beautiful, every petal perfect, exact, and yet somehow not quite like the natural flower … lifted into the realm of art by some tiny detail: a whisper of glitter here, an edging of velvet there. The colours, too, were natural shades, slightly enhanced or modified, and because these flowers were made of silk, there was no limit to the palette Clarrie could use – and did. A black rose, silk trimmed with velvet, caught Nessa's eye. We can charge a fortune for something like that, she thought, and there'd be women flocking to buy it. In fact, Nessa was convinced that the more expensive a thing was, the more everyone would want to own it.

While Clarrie was in the kitchen making them a cup of tea, Nessa and Mickey discussed in whispers the possibility of stocking the flowers. They were nothing like the rest of the Paper Roses stock but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

‘She's the only one making them,' said Mickey. ‘We can't carry more than a very limited stock.'

‘Doesn't matter. Even if we have very few –
especially
if we have very few – they'll just fly out of the catalogue. Wait and see. We emphasize the handiwork. Maybe even a picture of Clarrie, making them. Exclusive. No two flowers exactly alike. You know the sort of thing.'

‘How much can we charge?'

‘Clarrie's price is £20 per flower. That's peanuts. I'd have thought £40 was reasonable.' Nessa frowned. ‘Even £50 is possible. Maybe we can persuade her to be exclusive to us, not to sell these flowers anywhere else. What do you think? D'you reckon she'd agree?'

‘She might. How many can she sell in a year? If we guarantee to take as many as she makes, and give her a better price for them than she's getting by going round craft fairs, then why should she refuse?'

Nessa sat down at the table. ‘She might not like the pressure that supplying us will put on her. She might not be able to fulfil orders.'

‘We've got to emphasize, then, that there's no pressure at all. She can please herself, make as many or as few as she wants to, and we'll sell them. She'll clean up. We're going to give her a lot more per flower than she'd get anywhere else.'

Nessa was already foreseeing a problem. ‘What if she gets fed up? Stops making them? Gets arthritis in the fingers …'

‘Then we'll have to stop selling them. That's the point about them. They aren't going to be on sale for ever. Clarrie isn't young. If we have a picture of her, anyone who wants to buy will get that message, subliminally.'

‘I'm not quite sure,' Nessa said, ‘that I believe in subliminal. I like upfront and loud and clear. D'you think she'll agree?'

‘We'll ask her. I do think they're stunning.' Mickey picked up the black rose and held it against Nessa's face, her fingers just touching the skin. ‘You look beautiful,' she said. ‘I'm going to buy this for you as a present – a cheering-you-up present. Clarrie will be pleased.'

At that moment, their hostess came into the room, carrying a tray laden with tea things. Mickey went to take it from her, and Clarrie carefully moved the flowers she'd been displaying to one side to clear a space.

‘Clarrie,' Nessa said, ‘we want to make you an offer.'

‘Getting a deal like that gives me a real kick,' Mickey said, as she drove through the village. The sun was setting. The sky was streaked with apricot and mauve, and puffy clouds were arranged along the
horizon in a pleasingly symmetrical way. ‘I feel like celebrating. Do you feel like celebrating?'