After Ever After (43 page)

‘You can’t forget about it, Kitty,’ Dora whispers. ‘You can’t, you have to tell … people. You have to tell Fergus, and the police. People. You can’t let him get away with it. It’ll kill you!’

I shake my head and begin trembling at the very thought of it.

‘No, Dora, please, please,’ I plead with her. ‘I can’t tell anyone. Fergus will kill him, it will tear us apart, he won’t ever be able to understand. Please, Dora. If Fergus finds out then Gareth has won. I was foolish enough to think that he wanted me, that he might even care about me, but he didn’t want me at all, he just wanted to destroy someone else’s happiness. He wanted to make me into nothing. If Fergus finds out then he’ll have succeeded.’

Dora shakes her head, her eyes bright with fierce anger. ‘You’re wrong, Kitty. Fergus would never judge you like that, he loves you. He’d be devastated, but …’

‘
No!
’ My voice rises. ‘You know me, Dora, better than anyone. You know I can do this. You know that if I try very hard I can just make it go away. Help me, okay, please just help me.’

Dora watches me silently for a moment.

‘If that’s what you want,’ she says at last. ‘But if that bastard does the same thing to another woman, what then? How will you feel then?’

I turn my head away from her. ‘I can’t think about anything else now, I just need to know if you’ll help me?’

Dora turns my face back to look at her. ‘Of course I’ll help you,’ she says. ‘And if I ever see him, I’ll fucking kill him.’

I know that she means it. The tension shatters as Ella’s shouts reverberate through the house.

‘I’ll go,’ Dora says quickly. ‘Can I go?’

I stare at her, wiping away useless tears. ‘Are you sure?’ I say, nonplussed, numbed.

‘Yeah, unless you think I’ll scare her or drop her or something?’ She seems to consider it a real possibility.

‘No, no. Go for it. She’ll need a change, though …’ I call after her, but she is already out of the door and taking the stairs two at a time. I take a deep breath and begin to make a list of everything I have to do today, just a normal, happy day like any other.

Dora hangs up the receiver and hastily scribbles an address on the back of an envelope with Ella sitting on her knee, attempting to chew the very same pen Dora is writing with.

‘My God, no wonder your mum’s gone fruit loops,’ Dora says to her as if she were conversing with a twenty-year-old. ‘You’re a mentalist. When do you grow out of this chewing thing and progress to, I don’t know, being interested in shopping?’

I watch them getting on like a house on fire in pure disbelief. I mean, I know Dora’s been through a lot recently, and I know she’s found the strength to pull herself back from the edge after taking smack again, but unless the road to Damascus cut across the Euston to Milton Keynes line somewhere between Harrow and Wealdstone and Kings Langley, I can’t see why she has suddenly decided to like, even appear to love, my child. Or any child for that matter. Must be some kind of genetic imperative.

‘Are you all right?’ I ask her as she sings Ella her own particular brand of nursery rhyme.

‘Me? Yeah, I’m fine. I’ve just realised that the whole godmother thing is coming round and I thought I’d better start campaigning, you know how it is. Don’t want that bloody Camille to get all the glory.’ She exchanges a frown with Ella. ‘Right now, how about …
Ride a cockhorse to dum de-dah dooo! La de da dee something da, flipperty floo
…’ she sings and Ella laughs her head off.

‘So, where is Hemel Hempstead? Sounds like the third ring of hell. There’s an NA meeting there today at eleven.’ She turns back to Ella. ‘
She shall have doooby-do something she stuuuufff!
Why isn’t there one in Berkhamsted? I mean, I have to get a sodding bus to get to this place and I bet they don’t even have proper shops. Honestly, the country.’

I smile apologetically. ‘It’s not far on the bus, the stop is on the high street. Will you be all right on your own because I’m supposed to be having a costume fitting at Clare’s, but I could postpone it and come with you …?’

Dora shakes her head. ‘No, don’t want some frumpy old mother and her kid cramping my style, do we Ells. I’ve yet to explore the sexual proclivities of the Home Counties. It could be a rich new vein … couldn’t it? Yes, it could, yes it could!’ She smiles stupidly at Ella.

‘Dora, please don’t get involved with another NA person. Don’t take it personally, but the ones I’ve met seem to be really shocking losers, or maybe that’s just your taste in friends. Find someone who’s, you know, normal, or at least bordering on it.’

Dora shrugs, looking momentarily crestfallen. ‘I’ve given up on relationships anyhow.’

She gathers herself up and sets Ella on the floor. ‘Okay, well, I’ll be off, then, to Hemel Hempstead. Wish me luck. If I’m not back by three call the police, tell them I’ve been kidnapped for my cosmopolitan taste and good shoes.’

I roll my eyes and Ella waves enthusiastically as we see Dora off. As she is about to leave she pauses in the door frame and looks at me hard.

‘I’m not sure I can pretend this didn’t happen to you, Kitty, even if you can,’ she says.

I smile brightly.

‘You can. You have to, for me, okay? It’ll be okay, I promise.’

I have never seen her look so sad as in that moment before she turns to walk away.

‘Come on you,’ I say to Ella once the house is empty. ‘We’ve only got an hour and half to get you ready and go less than half a mile down the road. It’s going to be very tight.’

In fact, it is two hours later when I finally ring Clare’s bell. I’m sticky, flustered and hot. The sunburn I picked up on the beacon has intensified and reddened as a cruel reminder and I feel uncomfortably huge in this summer shift dress that makes no effort to hold in my stomach or even give me a waist.

‘Helloooo?’ Clare’s greeting through the intercom seems oddly flirtatious.

‘Hi, it’s me. Kitty.’ I add my name as an afterthought.

‘Oh! Kitty! God, sorry, I forgot you were coming over. Come up!’ Her cheeryness seems to be edged with a touch of hysteria, and as I park the buggy and lug Ella up the two flights of stairs, it occurs to me that maybe she thought I was the man she was so excited to tell me about. Her front door is on the latch and I push it open to hear her finishing a telephone call.

‘If you want that, then don’t come back here! Okay, okay. I’ll see you later,’ she’s almost whispering. ‘Love you. Bye.’

I pause in the doorway, embarrassed to have caught her trysting with her mystery man.

‘Hi!’ I shout loudly, waiting for a second in the doorway before I go in.

‘Hiya. So sorry. Ted and I slept in and I’ve only just got up. I’d forgotten we were fitting your dress today. Actually, I’d forgotten what day it was. Tea?’

I put Ella on the floor and nod. ‘Mmmm, please. So am I going to meet him then?’

Clare avoids my eye. ‘Um, oh, eventually, I expect. I, oh Christ, I forgot. I’ve got no milk! How about a Coke and we’ll get started?’

I nod and smile as Ella and Ted begin their usual Mexican stand-off over Ted’s musical telephone.

‘Soooo, who is he then? How did you meet him?’ I call into the kitchen. ‘I’m so excited, and to think I was trying to fix you up! You didn’t need my help after all, you dark horse.’

‘Um, oh, he was … at the college when I did my course? We sort of knew each other a bit from around town and we just hit it off. We’re just keeping it quiet for now though.’ Clare comes back into the room and hands me a glass of flat Coke.

‘He’s not married, is he?’ I ask, scandalised, almost hoping the answer will be yes.

‘No! No, it’s just …’ The turmoil in Clare’s face seems to resolve itself. ‘You know me, I have about as much luck with men as … well, I don’t know, but not much luck, and I sort of feel that if I crow about it and how happy I am it’ll go wrong and I’ll be left feeling embarrassed again.’

I shrug. I understand how that feels.

‘Fair enough, as long as you’re happy. Are you happy?’

Clare’s face lights up. ‘Oh yeah, I am. Almost too much.’ She surveys me critically. ‘Right, now get your kit off. The dress is through there on the bed, so if you put it on and then come back out here I can start pinning it.’

For a moment, in the quiet environs of Clare’s plainly decorated, corporation-style bedroom, and after the acres and acres of baby-pink netting and satin have settled around me, I pause and look at myself in her wardrobe mirror. It’s a fairy-tale dress that Clare has made, and I’m certain that really she’s made it for herself. All of the other costumes have been loosely based around the film version of
Calamity Jane
, but this dress is purely Clare’s imagination made real. It’s her dress, the one she dreams of dancing with her Prince Charming in, and she’s had to make it for someone else. It looks wrong on me somehow. I mean it’s all the wrong size, but beyond that it clashes with my pale and burnt skin and dark hair. And more than that, its exuberance, its optimistic romanticism, is meant for someone else. Someone who still believes.

On Clare it would look fabulous.

‘Come on then!’ Clare calls anxiously from the next room. I guess she’s got a meeting planned with Mr Mystery later on.

‘Oooh, doesn’t Mummy look lovely?’ Clare asks Ella as I swish into the room. Ella responds by gazing up at me with a dumbfounded expression before returning to beating up Ted’s Tellytubbie with a wooden mallet.

I stand on a stool and Clare kneels at my feet as she begins to hem the dress.

‘So how are you feeling about Monday, then? Excited?’ she asks me through a mouthful of pins.

‘Um, excited? No. Sick and terrified? More than you can know. I fully expect to be terrible.’ I glance down at the dress. ‘It should be you, anyway.’

Clare straightens up and begins to pin in the waist.

‘Oh, you’ve lost a bit of weight since we cut this,’ she says with a smile.

I stare down at myself incredulously. ‘No I haven’t. I can’t have. Have I? Do you mean I was fatter than this?’

Clare grins, shaking her head. ‘You’re not fat.’

I smile, absurdly pleased with myself, and start humming ‘A Woman’s Touch’. After a while Clare chimes in with the harmony, and before we know it we are regaling our children with the full-length version, polkas around the room included.

We collapse on to her sofa full of laughter and Clare gives me the once-over with a critical eye.

‘You look like you’re born to wear this,’ she says. ‘Beautiful.’

‘Yeah, right tasty.’ Gareth leans in the door frame, his gaze lingering too long on my body. I take a step back, tripping over the hem of the dress.

‘Get out!’ I say quietly. ‘Who the hell do you think you are, following me
here?
!’ Get out, you’re not welcome.’

Clare looks from me to Gareth to me and then back again.

‘I know you fired him and all, Kitty, but steady on,’ she says with half a smile, and then to Gareth. ‘I thought you weren’t coming back till after?’

I close my eyes and hope that I’m dreaming.

‘Well, I wasn’t,’ I hear Gareth say. ‘And then I thought I couldn’t miss out on the chance to see my ex-boss in all her glory …
again
.’

Of course. Gareth is Clare’s secret lover. Somehow it seems inevitable that it should be.

‘Since when?’ I manage to say to Clare, turning my face away from Gareth.

‘Well, we’ve been “together” since the weekend?’ Clare allows herself a small shy smile. ‘I wasn’t lying to you, Kitty, I did meet him after my college course. He just turned up one day and asked me for a coffee and it went from there, didn’t it? And then things got a bit heated and we sort of just got together. Ted loves him.’

I stare at Gareth, shaking my head in disbelief.

‘You were with Clare when you, when we …?’

Gareth shrugs.

‘So? Anyway, I thought you wanted to keep it quiet?’ The insolent tone in his voice, the indifferent expression on his face, every single thing about him is intolerable. I wish I could find a way to hurt him with my loathing, but somehow I know he’s impervious to anything that I might feel.

‘What do you mean? What’s happened, Kitty?’ Clare asks me. ‘What were you doing with Gareth?’

I turn away, unable to speak, and pick Ella up. I have to get out of here, I have to get past him and get out of here
now
.

‘Nothing, nothing happened,’ I say, hoping that if Gareth cares for Clare at all he’ll want to make what happened go away just as keenly as I do.

‘Gareth?’ Clare’s voice is tight with anxiety. For a moment he seems to weigh the situation and I feel his eyes on me, waiting, just waiting, for me to look him in the eye. Finally I raise my face to meet his, and he can see me begging him not to tell her what happened.

‘No point in hiding it now, Kitty, is there?’ Gareth says almost lazily before turning to Clare. ‘Kitty and I fucked up on the beacon. You know, the same place I took you the day before?’

A moment of stunned silence ricochets off the walls.

‘How could you …’ I begin, and I reach for Clare.

‘You bitch, you stupid bitch!’ She slaps my hands away and screams in my face. Ted begins to cry and then Ella’s clinging on to the material of the dress, hiding her face from Clare’s wrath and shaking. ‘You just couldn’t bear it, could you, to see someone else happy!’ Clare lunges for me and I’m forced to grab hold of one of her arms and push her back a few inches.

‘Clare, listen to me, I didn’t know he was seeing you …’ It comes out all wrong.

‘Oh, so you wouldn’t have done it if you’d known, would you? You wouldn’t have cheated on your husband and your baby if you’d known? Well, how
big
of you.’ Clare breaks free of my grip and backs away from me. ‘Having everything not enough for you? Was that the problem? You disgust me. Get out. GET OUT!’

‘Clare, please,’ I say, trying not to look at Gareth. ‘
Please
! It wasn’t like that, I didn’t want to do it, he … he wouldn’t listen to me when I said I wanted him to stop … Clare, he…’ I can feel that with every fibre of his being Gareth wants me to say the word, he wants me to admit to what he already knows. I won’t give him the satisfaction.