Disclaimer (15 page)

When I turned away from the window Nancy was holding Jonathan’s penknife, Swiss army, another birthday present from us. Was he thirteen? Fourteen? Anyway, it was an age when we felt he could be trusted with it. She found his aftershave, squirted it into the air and sniffed; a last breath of our son’s scent. Why was she going through it all now? Pack it up, please. I wanted to get out of there. She held up a pack of cigarettes. Neither of us knew Jonathan smoked. His girlfriend, Sasha, wouldn’t have approved. She wasn’t the type. Perhaps he picked up the habit once she had left. I wonder where Sasha is now? Middle-aged, married probably. She was perfectly nice, all the same I wouldn’t have wanted Jonathan to end up with her. Actually, that’s not true. If she hadn’t gone home, if she had stayed in Europe with Jonathan, he would probably still be alive. And I would have done anything to have him still alive, even if it meant sacrificing him to marriage with an earnest, slightly humourless woman.

27

Summer 2013

Robert has found Catherine, although she is Charlotte, not Catherine. He glances at his watch. He has half an hour before he must leave to be in time for his first meeting, but he can’t stop reading now. He phones ahead and tells them to put it back an hour.

One night in Tarifa, that was all John had planned. One night in the cheapest hotel and then the ferry to Tangiers early the next morning. He was in pursuit of Orwell, Bowles, Kerouac, not love. But he heard her song and he was lost. He was easy prey to a woman of her experience.
A
woman who was a little bored.
A
woman who was looking for a bit of light entertainment to fill in a few days before she returned home to her husband. A woman who had a child, but a child who rather cramped her style. He was a useful disguise though, this child – he allowed her to disguise herself as a mother, a woman who no longer put herself first.
A
good woman. Such a clever disguise. Here I am, she cried from the rocks. Looking after my child. Abandoned by my workaholic husband. I can perform the part very well. See what I’m doing? My voice is gentle when I speak to my little boy. I smile.
A
lot. I smile a lot. He is such a bundle of energy; a live wire, my little boy. He is happy. Because I am a good mother. Oh, but how tiring he is. He must have my attention all the time, and it is so, so exhausting. I cannot look away for a moment, his voice always calling me: Mummy, look, Mummy, Mummy, Mummy. Look at me. Look at me. And she does look at him, whenever he demands it, and she smiles and her voice is patient, but it is a performance. Her patient voice carries, she makes sure of that, so that those around her in the café will take note of what a lovely mummy she is. Once in a while she glances round to check that her audience is paying attention. Look at me, she is saying, as loudly as her little boy, but she is cleverer than he. And John heard her voice, and he was lost. He couldn’t see past the spell she was casting.

He saw her light cotton dress trailing on the ground beneath her chair; her long, tanned leg, a shimmer of gold, stretching out from the split that ran from the top of her thigh – a deliberate split, to allow her to move freely inside her long robe. It was a robe which declared modesty but whispered at the heat beneath.

The image slaps Robert across the face. He has seen it in one of the photographs – a picture of Catherine with her leg stretched out from her beach dress. Sitting in a café with Nicholas. The author really hates her and Robert detects jealousy too, seeping through the pages. He wonders again if it could have been written by a girlfriend, but didn’t Catherine say she thought it was the father? He reads on.

Charlotte bought him a beer as a thank-you for helping distract her little boy into eating his supper. Afterwards he walked them back to their hotel; it was getting dark and he had nothing else to do. The little boy was quiet by then, sleepy, holding his mummy’s hand, and she and John talked, and he told her that he was leaving the next day to catch the ferry. She told him she was a bit jealous of his freedom, but her jealousy was light-hearted, not really meant. It was still early, and she persuaded him to wait downstairs in the lobby for her while she put her child to bed. It was his bedtime, but not hers yet, and she wanted to buy John a drink as a thank-you, and she would so enjoy some adult company. And he was flattered, at nineteen …

Robert’s hands are shaking. He holds one up and looks at the jittering fingers in surprise, as if he is holding up a specimen of something he has never seen before. Whatever he is about to read has happened. There is nothing he can do about it, and yet it holds a power over him as if, by reading it, it will happen all over again simply because he is there to see it this time. He reads on, like a teenager desperate to get to the sexy bits.

…
He was charmed by her shyness, her coy reluctance to let him see her naked. She had lost confidence in her body since becoming a mother, she said, and feared he might recoil at the curve of her stomach with its scar from where she’d been opened up and her son taken out, and that John would be used to younger, firmer flesh. And Sarah was younger, much younger, but he didn’t tell Charlotte this. Or that Sarah had been his only lover. Her nervousness emboldened him, and for a moment their roles were reversed, and she allowed him to feel as if he was the one in control, leading the way.

Her son was asleep, on the other side of the door. She had closed it. They were in the room she had shared with her husband. She closed her eyes as he lifted the flimsy cotton over her head, her arms held up as if she was a little girl being undressed for bed. She was wearing her bikini, still sandy from a day on the beach. He pulled the ties at each side of the bottoms and watched them slip to the floor, then he undid the top, a tie at the neck and one across her back, easily undone. She was naked, but he was still clothed. She didn’t help him undress, she didn’t touch him, she watched him, and he didn’t notice the hunger in her eyes. He was beautiful and he was a stranger, and she knew he was in her power. She persuaded him to postpone his trip to Tangiers for a few days, just until she had to leave …

‘Good book?’ Robert is startled. He feels as if he has been caught looking at porn.

‘Another tea?’ the waitress asks. Robert nods, yes, then no. He doesn’t know what he wants, incapable of a decision.

‘I’m fine,’ he manages, and reads on.

…
and what John didn’t understand was that what she really loved was the game: the secrecy of sneaking him up to her room, so that the hotel staff knew nothing, so that they still smiled and treated her kindly; the secrecy of seeing each other on the beach but pretending they were strangers. Even her son didn’t realize that the young man lying on a towel a few feet away from them knew his mother more intimately than he ever would. And John chronicled his passion; it would be something to treasure when he was back at home in the real world. He didn’t realize he would never see those photographs, never be able to look back at that time …

28

Summer 2013

Catherine had run after Robert, hoping he would stop. She ran out into the middle of the road and stood there in her dressing gown, watching until the lights of his car disappeared round the corner. She stayed out there for some time, waiting for him to reappear – sure that he would change his mind and drive home again. He didn’t.

She stayed up all night, hoping that he would at least phone her, but he didn’t do that either. She phoned him, leaving messages, which he ignored. She tried to imagine where he was, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t imagine his location, yet she could picture him reading the book – imagine which part he was reading and how it would make him feel. That was when the fury swelled up inside her at the violence of this attack. She couldn’t go to bed, she couldn’t even sit down. She couldn’t keep still, her body twitching. She paced up and down, boiling the kettle, making tea, swilling it down, then making more; waiting for him. She wanted to make him understand why she hadn’t told him. It wasn’t for her, it was for them. For Robert, but mainly for Nick. Her silence had been to protect their son and Jonathan’s death had sealed it. There had been no need for anyone else to suffer.

But Robert hadn’t come home.

It is light now and she is exhausted. Her limbs are heavy, weighted down like ballast, as if all the tea she has consumed has found its way into them, filling them up and making them heavy. She is a squishy, puffy, soggy thing. When she moves she can hear the liquid moving around inside her. Her head is awash too, buffeted by images she can’t control and memories that have been dredged up and won’t go away.

She wants to close her eyes and never open them again. Not to die, just to sleep for a very long time. She drags herself upstairs, lies on the bed and shuts her eyes. It is almost a relief that Robert knows – about the death, anyway. He has a right to know that much. She should have told him before. She should have told him everything before, but now she is too tired to think. It is lack of sleep, but it is shock too: the shock of Robert’s anger and his hatred towards her. She had not expected that and it frightens her to think of it, so she embraces the shock and allows it to numb her and close her down. It is not unpleasant to feel nothing. She will make the most of it while it lasts.

She is in a deep sleep when her phone rings. She grabs it, her eyes still shut, dragging herself back to the present.

‘Hello?’ She opens her eyes to check the number. No number, only the word
Call.
And no voice either, at the other end.

‘Hello?’ she tries again. And waits, and listens. They listen to each other, neither saying a word: he doesn’t need to; she knows who he is. He is waiting for her. He doesn’t say it, but she can feel it.

29

…
It was the sort of day where, if you weren’t careful, you could get very badly burned. The sun was strong, but a thin layer of cloud masked its ferocity, and the cooling wind lulled the ignorant into exposing their skin without protection. Charlotte was not ignorant. She had covered her own body in protective oil and was now rubbing cream into her little boy. He made quite a song and dance of it, they both did: Charlotte demonstrating what a conscientious mother she was, and her son, Noah, resisting his mother’s hands and complaining that the cream was stinging his eyes.

His shrieks were particularly grating that day, because Charlotte had a hangover. She knew she was rubbing harder than she needed to, irritated by her son’s wilfulness, and wanting to force him to submit to her own. He had sand on his body so it was as if she was stripping him down with sandpaper, and she was careless too with his face, cream catching on the eyelashes of one eye. She dabbed at it with a towel, but he was crying now and she felt like crying too. She just wanted him to go away. She wished she could enjoy one day, this last day, in the sunlight, with her lover.

John was still asleep in his hotel room, his cheap hotel. It had been five in the morning when he’d returned there after being with Charlotte in her five-star luxury. They had made love all night, her son asleep in the next-door room. The little boy hadn’t heard his mother’s sighs as her young lover pleasured her; he hadn’t heard the clink of their glasses as they drank together, and then made love over and over.

So while Charlotte wrestled with sun cream on the beach, John slept in. He slept well, like an adolescent. At nineteen, he hadn’t quite stopped growing, still exhausted by the demands of his own body, and by those that had been made on it the night before. Charlotte couldn’t get enough of him, she’d worked him hard. She knew her time was running out and though she had persuaded him not go to Tangiers, she would soon be flying home to her husband. She made the most of him that night, and she anticipated more the following, their last together.

She tried to play her part of Mother, but her performance that morning was lacklustre. She lay on her stomach trying to sleep while Noah dug with his spade. He chiselled away at the beach, while the wind, along with his excavations, sent gritty sand into Charlotte’s face. Enough, she thought, and finally said:

‘Ice cream?’

Noah stopped digging. ‘Yep, yep,’ he yapped.

Charlotte slipped her cotton dress over her bikini, put a T-shirt on Noah and, hand in hand, they left the beach.

As
they climbed the steps that led to the shops, John walked towards them. They passed each other, these lovers, and no one would have known they had ever met. His stomach slid with excitement, and hers with desire at the sight of his sleepy eyes and bedded hair. They almost touched, they were so close. They could smell each other and she breathed him in and smiled, but not at John. She was cleverer than that. She directed the smile meant for John at Noah. John knew it was for him though and Noah was taken in, pleased to see that Mummy was happy, and he smiled back, the little innocent. He was so grateful for that gift which wasn’t even intended for him.

John recognized Charlotte’s towel and placed his own a few feet away, as usual, making sure there were other bodies between them. Far enough away so Noah wouldn’t register him, but close enough so he and Charlotte could look at each other. Since that first day in the café, they had been careful about Noah. She didn’t want him to recognize John, she didn’t want Noah to get friendly with him, ‘In case he takes to you,’ she’d said, and she couldn’t permit that. She couldn’t have Noah mentioning anything to his father about the nice man they met on holiday, Mummy’s new friend.