Come Back to Me (5 page)

The memories came in droves in the night.

Screaming – her own.

Shouting – everybody else.

As Julia half-dozed fitfully her remembrances held her down and whispered cruel things into her ears.

She saw her father's face in the hospital, the light gone from his eyes. She saw him before that, at home when she had been a child, his strong, solid arms, a face full of lines that deepened into great crags when he laughed, his hands shaking slightly as he went about day-to-day tasks, his craftsman's fingers thick and gnarled. Tinkering away in his shed, while her mother cooked for them all. The miniature garden in the wicker basket that he had made for her so that fairies might visit them, which had been a constant feature of her childhood, and which they had both continued to tend long after she stopped believing in magical creatures at the
bottom of the garden. That miniature bucolic idyll had come to represent all the fundamental feelings that lay between them, shared without words.

She sat bolt upright with a pounding heart and tried to recover her breathing. Blearily, she wondered if the basket was still there in the garden; hoped fervently that it was. If it had gone, then, irrevocably, so had one more small part of her. But there was no way to find out without making that dreaded call home.

Gradually, she succumbed to a half-sleep again, until she was gliding through a Turkish beach resort, accosted by an old lady who spoke bad English but had kind eyes, who grabbed her hand, saying, ‘Wait, lady. I see man, he walk with you. Wait! Lady, wait!' When she turned around the woman was frowning as though some invisible being were whispering something in her ear that was hard to understand. ‘He say you are lost soul.' The woman turned big, heavily pencilled mournful eyes towards her, as if a hundred things suddenly made sense. Julia wanted to run from that knowing gaze, but it seemed the message wasn't finished, and her legs were unaccountably heavy. ‘He say you lost somebody, but they will come back to you. So it okay,' the woman smiled, tears in her eyes, bouncing Julia's hand up and down in her own cold, gnarled grip. ‘They will come back to you.'

She came to again with a start, her whole body trembling. Was this a memory or a dream? She wasn't sure – and that in itself frightened her. If it was more than a dream, then who was the message from? Her father? Who else would it be? And who did it refer to? Was it Alex, who had just come back to her in such an unforeseen and painful fashion?

She pictured her father's face. Maybe he had forgiven her, now he could see everything up in heaven, and was paying the puppetmaster who dangled everyone's lives beneath him so ruthlessly to do him this one big favour, to make the fates turn just once in the right direction. That way his daughter might become a truly earthbound person again, instead of just a wandering lost soul.

But then perhaps it was only a dream, came a cloudy thought, as her head grew heavier once more against the pillow.

Later on, in the hazy time between sleeping and waking, sleeping and waking, more things came back to her; things she had pushed away for years. She had separated her life into two halves – Before and After – although she knew the line was really a lot more blurred than that.

One image replayed itself over and over: of Alex's twisted face as he walked away from her. That had been After.

But, now and then, there was also Alex's kind face, peering down at her.

Before.

Chloe was already exasperated after a few hours with her mother. After Margaret had woken her at what felt like dawn, they had raced into town and spent twenty minutes driving around the multi-storey searching for the perfect spot, before Margaret phoned Alex in a panic to remind him to lock the house up when he went out. They made it into the shopping centre, only for Chloe's mother to realise she'd left a voucher for Marks & Spencer in the car's glove box, so they trudged all the way back again to find the voucher wasn't in there at all – she had in fact carefully added it to the zip pocket of her shopping bag. Once they were inside M&S, Margaret headed straight for the accessories section, and spent half an hour wondering about a scarf there, before deciding she needed to come back when she was wearing her other coat to see if they matched properly.

And so it went on. All the time, Margaret wittered away,
Chloe hardly getting a word in. Her mother hadn't always been like this, she thought. She could recall a much more confident and self-contained woman, although it was only through the fog of childhood memory. But then something had happened, their grandmother had looked after Chloe and Anthony for a while, and it was after that that her mother had changed. But after what? The shadows of a memory began to float into the edges of her mind, and she felt her heart begin to race and pushed it back quickly. However, now its presence had been felt she couldn't wipe it completely.

As they sat down for elevenses, Chloe's mother took a good look at her.

‘You look a bit peaky, dear. Are you okay?'

‘I'm fine, Mum.' Chloe set down their tray of steaming coffees and muffins.

‘Working too hard again? You must be careful. You know what they say – “all work and no play …”.' Margaret chuckled to herself as she placed her plastic bags carefully on the seat next to her, and then fussed over which one lay on the bottom.

I'd have a damn sight more time to play if I weren't driving up to the Lake District on a regular basis, Chloe thought. But she smiled back benignly.

They sat in silence for a few moments, before Chloe took a deep breath and announced without preamble, ‘I'm pregnant', startling herself with her own bluntness. She hadn't realised the secret had been crouched on her tongue, waiting to jump. As she immediately picked up her muffin and took a bite, she wished she could put her words on top and gobble them back up.

Her mother's jaw had dropped.

I've done it, Chloe thought. I have finally shut her up.

No sooner had she thought this than Margaret rallied with a torrent of exclamations. ‘Oh my darling, I'm so thrilled … I'm so delighted. I can't believe I'm going to be a grandmother … this is fantastic, wait till I tell June tonight –'

Chloe cut her off abruptly. ‘You can't tell them yet …' She paused and took a deep breath as she watched the confusion on her mother's face, before adding, ‘Alex doesn't know.'

‘Alex doesn't … ?' Her mother tapered off and once again seemed lost for words.

Unbelievable, Chloe thought. Now she'd silenced her mother twice in five minutes. Alex would love this.

Immediately she felt miserable.

The rain didn't seem to have stopped since Thursday, and it matched Alex's mood perfectly. Wrapped up warmly, he was on his way to the village pub, a trip he'd taken regularly with Charlie on previous visits to the Lake District. It still felt strange to be heading there alone. Today he had intended to drown his sorrows while watching the football scores come up, but when he opened the door and the warmth of lights, laughter and air all hit him at once, he knew straight away he couldn't stomach it. He let the door swing shut again, leaving him on the outside hunched against the cold as a couple of people stepped around him to get in. As a wave of noise and heat assaulted him for the second time, he strode quickly away, not really sure where he was going. He just knew he needed to try to clear his head, and the ice-cold air would help him more than the fug of the bar.

It wasn't difficult to find a walking trail. A couple of minutes later he had hopped over a dilapidated wooden stile set into a fence, and was following a small stony path around the bottom of a hill. The rain splattered his face persistently, but it was welcome – cool and cleansing. His trainers were quickly soaked; he could already feel water creeping between his toes. He was breathing hard with the exertion of keeping pace with his feet, which seemed to have independently decided upon a brisk trot.

There was so much to think about that he didn't know where to start. His mind was running around wildly in circles leaving chaotic footprints everywhere that he had no hope of following.

He'd thought he had it all figured out, but when it came down to it he had just been living on circumstance. He was angry and upset – with himself most of all, but little sparks flew off towards others. How could she just turn up after almost ten years without a word? And what wicked circumstance had allowed Chloe to lead him innocently into that restaurant, both of them unwitting victims of the hand of fate?

And Mark – in his wildest thoughts since Thursday, a lot of Alex's anger had been directed towards him. They had never liked one another. He imagined Mark somehow finding out about what had happened back then, and bringing his new girlfriend, Julia, along just to spite him – but how the hell could he know?

The general consensus about the path of life was that it usually took time – days, months, maybe years – to effect change. Yet the twists and turns Alex's world had taken
boiled down to a few short moments. A missed underground train one afternoon. The police knocking on his family's door in Leicester with news of his brother. Letting go of a hand just a fraction too soon. In fact, letting go at all.

He thought about his family: how much Jamie's sudden illness had straitened the atmosphere of his home. His mother, Catherine, had become increasingly hesitant and nervous, while his father's emotions were held carefully in check, but, like a leaky vessel, seeped out at odd moments. Geoff Markham had lost both parents while Alex was in his teens, then his sister had died of cancer a few years later, and he had remained sadly stoic but dry-faced throughout, yet Alex had once seen his dad cry in exasperation after he tried some DIY car repair and managed to damage the wheel's axle. Once, when Alex's frustration with his dad's reticence had become apparent, his mother had told him that it was just the way he was made, and that it was what she loved the most about him – that it was refreshing when so many people were full of pandering, self-serving platitudes. This had made Alex take a look at his dad afresh, and for a while his lack of communication hadn't mattered so much – until Jamie was found wandering along a motorway in his underwear on a cool summer's night when he'd been missing for two days, and was subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia. Because, at the time, Alex had responded in exactly the same way as his father: comforting his mother but unable to share the depths of his emotions with anyone.

Now, as he strode along the muddy path, he wondered if this thing the male Markhams had got – this inability to express themselves outwardly at appropriate moments – was
some kind of curse. Perhaps it was a worse condition than his brother Jamie's, as there was nothing they could take for it.

He began to pound the track so furiously that he could hear the quicktime thump of his heart. He was soaked – raindrops were everywhere, dripping off his nose, cascading over his eyelids, breaching flimsy barriers of hems and lining. But he didn't care. He was thinking that the only time he had taken charge of his direction in life was with Chloe. But even that meeting had not been the chance accident she imagined it was.

He thought of Chloe, of her lovely selfless nature and her funny self-conscious habits – how his life had changed once he met her, from its endless dullish hues into a release of fresh colour. It had no longer seemed as if his soul mate had disappeared years ago, but rather that she had been waiting patiently all this time for him to relinquish the past and catch up to her. And until now, he thought he had moved on.

But in the past forty-eight hours everything had changed. It seemed you couldn't just shrug off your past. It was attached to you like a shadow – travelling with you everywhere, catching up with you whenever you faltered. The only real option was to turn and face it; deal with it; be rid of it in such a way that you could be certain it wouldn't reappear.

And that was why he had to find Julia. To talk to her. To understand. And to tell her just how utterly, utterly sorry he was. Yet he had an unshakeable feeling in the pit of his being that, whatever he did now, someone was going to get hurt. More than anything he wanted to protect Chloe, but he had made a promise, hadn't he, and now that Julia was back in his life, he couldn't just forget about that.

No matter which way he turned, he couldn't see the right way forward.

It was only when he reached the end of the track, with densely packed trees blocking his progress in every direction, that he realised he must have strayed off course without even noticing. At the same time it dawned on him that to have any chance of finding Julia he was going to have to talk to one of the few people he disliked intensely. He only hoped Mark didn't feel as strongly about him, or he was already in trouble and he hadn't even started yet.

With a heavy heart he stopped walking and turned around to retrace his steps, hoping it wouldn't take him too long to find the pathway again.

The sun was low in the sky as they drove the few miles to June and George's. Chloe grimaced as it bored brightly into her eyes, and tried to keep her concentration on the road.

Alex was sitting beside her, silent, smartly groomed in a white shirt with a light blue check and dark blue jeans. Chloe's mother was behind them in the back seat, chattering away inconsequentially. Alex and Chloe had stopped replying to her a good ten minutes ago and she didn't seem to have noticed. It was like supermarket muzak – they tuned in now and again and the rest of the time it washed over them subliminally. The sweet stink of her mother's perfume – had she bathed in the stuff? – had overwhelmed Chloe when they'd first got in the car. She wondered if it was the pregnancy – she didn't normally get queasy from her mother's Elizabeth Arden.

After Chloe had made her verbal slip that morning, her mother had continually tried to talk to her about the pregnancy as they progressed through town, until Chloe had had to say quite rudely, ‘Can we just stop,' at which point Margaret had taken umbrage and stopped talking about anything at all, which meant the rest of the shopping trip had passed in a rather blissful silence. They hadn't got back until late afternoon, and so it had seemed a rush to turn around and get ready for their trip out this evening. Chloe just prayed that her mother would be able to keep quiet. Why had she entrusted her with something so important?

June and George's house suddenly rose to greet them as they topped a hill, and Chloe slowed and pulled into the driveway. The huge farmhouse door was open within milliseconds – June must have been watching for them through the letterbox, Chloe mused, as she got out of the car, waving and smiling.

June and Margaret greeted each other as though they were two old Dames reunited at the BAFTAs, and everyone watched and waited from the wings till the performance had finished. Then Chloe spotted George in the doorway and walked over to him.

‘How are you, Chloe?' he greeted her warmly, kissing her cheek. ‘And Alex.' He extended his hand and they shook firmly. George looked across at his wife and rolled his eyes. ‘You wouldn't think those two saw each other every Wednesday at the gardening club. Come on in.'

George led the way and they followed, Alex gently placing a hand on the small of Chloe's back as she moved forward. She was immediately aware of his touch and turned to him.
He was watching her, an odd intense look on his face, but as she smiled so did he.

This is unbearable, Chloe thought as she turned away. Why am I trying to read his every expression? This is my husband: we're best friends, soul mates – we instinctively know the other. How on earth has this suddenly become so hard?

 

Two hours later, after a feast of roast lamb and veggies and conversation dominated by gardening-club gossip from June and Margaret, they had all retired to the lounge. The men were swirling whisky around their glasses, listening as the older women held court. Chloe was exhausted. She kept watching Alex to see if he exhibited signs of tiredness, but he appeared fine. Mind you, she thought grumpily, he'd had a lie in, while it felt like she'd been up shopping since dawn. She'd managed to abstain from alcohol over dinner by saying she was driving. Normally she would still have had a glass, but she'd said she was tired so didn't dare indulge, and everyone had accepted that.

‘So, Chloe –' Chloe snapped out of her daydreaming as she heard her name – ‘getting clucky yet?'

Damn you, June, Chloe thought, noticing that her mother was watching intently. She glared at her, wondering if Margaret had been unable to keep her mouth shut for even half a day, but the woman gave an almost imperceptibly small shake of her head in reply.

‘A little …' she said hesitantly.

Alex came to life immediately. ‘Are you?' He leaned forward, leather chair creaking as he did so. ‘That's news to me.'

‘Happens to us all, Alex, sooner or later,' Margaret chipped in breezily.

‘Well, maybe, but we're not ready for that yet, are we, Chloe?'

‘Aren't we?' Chloe, stunned, looked at Alex.

‘Well, no. I need to establish my business more – and you've got stuff you want to do in the practice – there's no need to rush it.'

‘I suppose –'

Margaret cut in. ‘But there's never a perfect time, Alex. Remember that.'

‘I know.' Alex sounded irritated. ‘But Chlo and I need to feel solid and secure in our lives before we complicate everything with a kid. I'm just not interested at the moment.'

Margaret, her jaw slack, looked at Chloe. And Chloe, horrifyingly, felt tears spring to her eyes. She stared down at her tepid mug of tea. ‘Well, then,' she said, fighting her tears and the hot blush she could feel staining her cheeks.

When she glanced up, Alex was watching her in surprise, and she was sure he'd guessed. There had been an awkward silence for a number of excruciating seconds now, and he opened his mouth to fill it just as June said, ‘Well, poor Jeanna can't have any children. It breaks my heart that our son won't ever be a father.'

‘June!' George scolded crossly. ‘It's actually none of our business, and besides, our girls have produced enough between them to keep a primary school from going under.'

Alex's attention was still on Chloe, but he didn't seem shocked now so much as intrigued. Maybe he hadn't guessed at all.

Chloe avoided meeting his gaze, then sat back and closed her eyes. June was still talking about how Jeanna and Michael were planning to travel for six months next year, now that they'd come to terms with the news. Lucky old Jeanna, Chloe thought to herself, then immediately rubbed her tummy superstitiously and said silently,
I didn't mean it, baby. I didn't mean it.