After Ever After (44 page)

‘
Get out! Get out now!
’ Clare screams, and I pick Ella up and head for the bedroom. ‘Now, I said!’ Clare is hysterical, gasping for breath.

‘But my clothes?’ I say desperately. Gareth begins to move towards me, and in the confusion and the noise I’m not sure if he’s going to hurt me again or not.

‘I think you’d better go, don’t you?’ he says with a smile, and I just run past him, leaving the door banging open behind me; the last thing I hear is Gareth comforting Clare.

‘I wanted to tell you, darling, but she said I couldn’t. She was all over me and I just couldn’t stop myself. It was nothing, though. She’s nothing. You’re the one I want. She’s nothing.’

I’ve dreamt about walking into a classroom – or, when I was older, my office – naked, with everyone staring at me and covering their mouths with their hands. Eventually they can’t keep a straight face any longer and chuckles turn into giggles and then into guffaws and I look down and see my inadequate flesh laid bare for their ridicule. Palpitating white and goosebumped all over. Everyone’s had a dream like that.

However, I am fairly sure that no one in the thousand-, give or take a century, year history of Berkhamsted had rushed through its main streets and thoroughfares in a half-finished pastel-pink ballgown with a screaming and highly disturbed baby in a buggy. Heads did more than turn as I rushed by, wiping the tears from my eyes – they span three hundred and sixty degrees. People stood and watched me race past, murmuring to each other as I took a short cut past the British Legion and W.H. Smith’s. One old man reached out to me as I hurtled by.

‘Are you all right, dear?’ he asked. ‘Are you fund-raising?’

I shook my head and ploughed dangerously across the busy high street, fairly convinced that my visibility factor would never be higher, and cut up past the posh women’s clothes shop that Georgina practically funds one-handed and headed into this park, Butts Meadow.

I’m lucky, the schools have not quite chucked out for lunch yet and there’s no slouching parade of ruddy-cheeked boys in rugby gear filing back to their dorms nor the inevitable entourage of hiked-up-skirted comp girls flashing their highlights and jewellery at them in the hope of enticing something a bit different for lunch. There is just one woman plodding round the back of the park with her dog at her heel and that’s all. Sniffing, I wheel Ella into the children’s play area, and, lifting her out of her pram, settle us both on the swing, the skirts of the dress riding up around me like demented fairy wings.

‘Mummy’s gone and done it now,’ I tell Ella shakily, but she’s already asleep before the swing has completed its first inverted arc, and I worry that she’d rather be unconscious right now than awake with everything that’s gone on. ‘Daddy’s going to find out about what happened all the wrong way, and Mummy’s going to lose him.’ My voice wobbles and I add dramatically, ‘Don’t worry, though, I’ll make sure you two always see each other, all the time. You won’t miss out. You’ll be best friends.’

A woman, her hair bound up under an orange chiffon headscarf, comes out of the back of her house and peers at me conspicuously for a second, clearly debating whether or not a distraught young woman in a huge pink dress falls under her remit as the local neighbourhood watch co-ordinator.

‘Are? You? Okay?!’ She asks me the three questions loudly and slowly as if she imagines I might be foreign or mad or both.

‘Fine,’ I manage, and back it up with a snotty smile. The woman peers at me and opens her gate, which backs directly on to the park, before beginning a purposeful march across the field. As she gets closer, the awful truth sinks in. Underneath the scarf and despite the absence of make-up it’s clear that it’s Caroline, Director-Dictator, Human Megaphone Caroline.

‘It
is
you, Kitty Kelly? What on earth are you doing sitting on a swing in my costume like that! I have never advocated method acting, if that’s what you think you’re up to! What kind of publicity do think you’re garnering? Unlike Oscar Wilde, I am a firm believer in bad publicity and …’ She catches sight of Ella huddled amid the netted up blossom of the skirt that is bunched around my shoulders. ‘And frankly this kind of behaviour is intolerable,’ she whispers considerately. ‘You’d better have a darn good excuse, my lady.’

I push her to the brink of implosion by blowing my nose on the skirt, and turn my red-rimmed eyes to meet her face.

‘Well, I have as good as ruined my marriage and thrown away the only good thing that has ever happened to me, the man I love more than anything, except Ella.’ I had meant to say that I was fine and that I was just checking the gown for a range of movements, but it turns out I am too tired to make anything up.

Caroline sighs heavily and holds out her hands.

‘Give me the baby: you’d better come in for a drink and tell me about it, I suppose.’

I consider the options. Probably right now, at this very moment, Clare is imparting her new-found information to Fergus and my life is crumbling slowly away to nothing. For all these months I haven’t really even been sure if it’s the life that I’ve wanted or was even meant to have, and now that it’s going I can’t bear the thought of letting go of it. Caroline may very well scare both of us to death in her house, but whatever lies in wait there can’t be worse than what won’t be waiting for me at home.

‘Okay,’ I mumble, and I hand her Ella, who she hoists over one shoulder like a sack of sleepy potatoes.

‘Never had children,’ she informs me as if I couldn’t tell. ‘Never saw the point in them. Very untidy.’

Caroline’s house is rather different than I imagined. I imagined a regimented, tastefully decorated Victorian interior with the odd art nouveau theatre poster framed against Rennie Macintosh-style wallpaper. Instead it’s eighties peach and grey, furnished with a beige velour sofa, and the place is covered with magazines and newpapers, cuttings and clippings littering every surface including the floor. At first glance I can’t see any link in their content at all, they’re not even reviews of the Players’ efforts over the years.

‘Are you mad?’ I find myself asking her, presumably because my basic social skills have finally been eroded to nothing. ‘I mean, what’s all this … crap for?’ I gesture at the piles of paper as Caroline clears one of them off the sofa and on to the carpet before laying Ella gently down and wedging her in place with a brown velveteen cushion.

‘Mad? No, I am not mad in the sense that I’m insane. I am frequently quite angry, however. No, this “crap” is because I’m writing a novel. I cut things out, keep the things that interest me that I want to use as material. You can’t just make stuff up, you know!’ She self-consciously touches the headscarf which I can now see is hiding the plastic hairnet which in turn is covering a half-baked concoction of bright red hair dye. ‘We’ll have to sort you out in the ten minutes – I don’t want to go orange again. The last time I went too orange Colin got all uppity and attempted a coup. Tea or whisky?’

‘Whisky,’ I say instantly, and she hands me a gratifyingly large half-full tumbler.

‘Have you nearly finished it, your novel?’ I ask her, delaying the inevitable.

‘Oh, good Lord, no. I haven’t actually started writing it yet. Planning is the key. I’m planning it as we speak. Meticulously.’ She gestures to her personal paper mountain. ‘So, you gave in and slept with that Gareth chap, the scenery boy, did you?’ I blink and take another gulp of Tesco’s finest blended whisky. I’d always thought she’d be a single malt woman.

‘How do you know!’ I exclaim in a splutter as the back of my throat ignites. ‘Does everyone know!’

‘No, dear, but everyone knows he was after you. I suppose you didn’t see it for yourself whilst you were up on stage, but he watched you like a wolf tracking his prey. Those pretty eyes fixed on you just waiting, as if it were inevitable.’ She downs her whisky. ‘I must say, I’d hoped you wouldn’t go for his rather obvious Celtic charms. But I suppose young women are foolish.’

I look at Ella, so like her daddy in repose, and I feel like removing my heart and handing it over to Caroline now. I don’t want to be the foolish girl who fell for his obvious charms; that wasn’t me.

‘I didn’t,’ I say at last, weary now with the strain of pretence. ‘I didn’t give into his charms, he forced them on me. Even when I said no, he went ahead and did it anyway and I wasn’t scared, not really, or hurt or anything, so I wasn’t really sure what had happened, if it was his mistake or his … intention. But I do know I didn’t want it to happen and he didn’t care.’ I shrug miserably. ‘And now he’s managing to convince everyone that it was me that wanted it, and Fergus doesn’t know yet but he will, and he’ll leave me. He won’t even want to look at me, he’ll just go.’

Caroline watches me levelly for a long time, her hooded eyes apparently naked of lashes now.

‘So you must tell him the truth. Fergus first and then the police.’

I shake my head. ‘I can’t, Caroline, I can’t tell the police. Not days later when I’ve told no one what happened except for you … oh, and Dora. Like I say, there were no bruises, no marks, no evidence. I went with him of my own free will, I let him kiss me. The police won’t believe me, and neither will Fergus.’

Caroline taps the side of her glass with a long nail.

‘Well, my dear, you must tell Fergus the truth anyway, it’s the only thing you have left and it’s the only thing worth saying. If he believes you, then he loves you as much as you hope he does, because he’ll be able to see the truth in your eyes. If he doesn’t, then he was never the man for you. Another whisky?’

I shake my head as Caroline pours out another dram for herself.

‘But you’re wrong, he is the man for me. He is, but I don’t think he’ll ever be able to love me again after I’ve done something so disgusting. If I’d wanted Gareth, if I’d loved him, in a way it wouldn’t be so bad. But I let him use me, I let him use Fergus’s wife, the woman he cherishes, Ella’s mum, like a dirty magazine. Fergus will never get over that.’

We all jump as Caroline’s egg timer rings shrilly. Ella’s hand flies out in surprise but she doesn’t wake.

‘You didn’t let him do anything, my dear,’ Caroline says, poking at her headscarf. ‘And at the end of the day all you will have left is the truth.’ She reflects on her own words for a moment and then scribbles them down along the empty margin of a newspaper.

‘Are you going to put me in your book?’ I say sulkily.

‘Oh no, dear, my book’s about the dark secrets of Berkhamsted.’ She taps the side of her nose with her long, bony finger. ‘Now, off you go and get out of my costume. If you drop it into Sketchley’s this afternoon, I’ll pick it up and take it round to Clare’s for finishing, to avoid any nastiness. Okay?’

I stare at her and she waves a dismissive hand in my face.

‘Have you never heard the phrase “The show must go on?”’

Somewhat numbed by a combination of the Real Caroline Thames and whisky it occurs to me halfway down the street that she could at least have offered to lend me something a tad less conspicuous to wear home, but maybe she liked the poetic justice of it all. The thought of the fairy-tale princess arriving back to her crumbling palace to claim her true love … or something. I’m a bit pissed. I think she gave me a quadruple.

In any case, I feel as if this dress is really the only thing I should be wearing today on the last day of my dream of happiness. The intensity of the sun burns right through its faint gauze and I feel my skin prickle and pucker under its heat, stung, intermittently, by the various pin sticks. It is sort of like a fairy-tale version of sackcloth and ashes.

I thank God that I left my bag, with my keys and purse in it, in Ella’s buggy when I went up to Clare’s, and that I am able to let myself into the quiet cool of the hallway. I’ll sit down and have a long cool glass of water and think about what I’m going to do next. With some time and space to myself I might be able to find the right way, the right solution, a way to make everything better. The key is to not jump in without thinking.

I wander, shell-shocked, into the kitchen and for a terrible confused moment I thinks it is Gareth sitting there, but it’s not. It’s Fergus.

Fergus has beaten me to it. He’s sitting with the back door open, staring out at the garden, a glass of iced water in his hand, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck, his tie discarded.

‘Oh!’ I say softly. He lifts his head and, as he takes in my appearance, his face lights up with delight, but it’s a pleasure that is covering some other thinly veiled emotion.

‘My God! You always said you’d wear your wedding dress shopping and now you finally are! What’s going on?’

I can tell his bravado is false – his sweet smile stops short of his hurt and anxious eyes. My blood runs cold with fear and my mind races. Don’t rush in, don’t rush in. Take your time to think about what you are going to say …

‘Oh, this.’ I twitch at the skirt with nervous fingers and roll my eyes. ‘You’ll never believe it – I had this terrible fight with Clare, a stupid one really, and she threw me out. Why are you home?’

Fergus takes a measured moment and I hold my breath until I think my heart might burst with the anticipation and fear.

‘Today was the day.’ He shrugs. ‘I got in and Tiff was already gone. The stupid cow from HR was in my office packing all my “personal effects” into a box. It was like I had bloody died. I had to leave immediately. Six years I’ve been there, and I couldn’t even stay until the end of the day in case I ran off with some industrial secrets. They even took back my laptop. She told me the details of my redundancy package would be in the post and that I shouldn’t think of it as an ending but as a beginning. Oh, and that telephone counselling was available until the end of the month, after which I assume we should just go and top ourselves.’ He smiles wryly. ‘So I came home, only place left to go.’

I know that the relief I feel is a betrayal, but as I go to him and hold him all I can think about is that now I’ll have the chance to tell him how things happened my way, in my own time, before anyone else does.

‘I feel sort of free in a way,’ Fergus says in measured tones. ‘In fact, when I came in through that door I was really quite happy. I mean, so what if the house and the home I’ve worked my bollocks off to keep for you is going on the market in the morning? I’ve got you and Ella, haven’t I?’ I don’t hear the tightening in his voice until it’s too late. ‘That’s what I thought when I came in? I’ve got you, haven’t I, Kitty?’