Having It All (29 page)

As they joined the long queue of cold and exhausted shoppers waiting for taxis in Knightsbridge, Liz felt a small hand find hers and hold it. Gratefully she returned its pressure and looked down
and smiled.

And she saw that, no matter how she tried to hide it, as usual Jamie somehow understood the fact that something was wrong and wanted to do what he could to comfort her.

By the time Britt and Carla got back to their table David had already ordered the bill.

‘But we haven’t even looked at the dessert menu,’ Britt pointed out in amazement.

‘I thought you were worried about putting on weight.’ Britt missed the stinging irony in David’s voice. ‘I’m getting the bill because we’re
leaving.’

‘You may be. I’m not.’

‘Suit yourself. In that case you’ll have an audience for something I’d rather say in private.’

Britt grinned teasingly, confident she could handle whatever was coming. He’d probably had bad news from Bert at the paper. Maybe they’d given his job to the copy boy while he was
out at lunch.

‘I’m leaving, Britt. I’ve had enough.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you’re not. We’re going to Harrods to shop for our first Christmas together.’

But David’s face was stony and unsmiling. What on earth was the matter with him?

‘I heard what you told Carla.’

The smile slipped comically from Britt’s face.

‘I might have known this pregnancy was one of your schemes. Do you even fart spontaneously? No, you don’t even fart at all, do you?’

Slowly he stood up and leaned for a moment on the back of his chair. ‘I’m sorry if this is difficult for you. Of course I’ll give you any financial help you need, but I
can’t stand this ludicrous charade any longer. This baby means nothing to you. You have no idea of what loving a child means.’

‘Like you love your children, you mean?’ For once Britt didn’t think before she spoke. ‘You’ve only seen them once in three months.’

David’s face closed in on itself with pain and anger.

Realizing she was blowing it, Britt tried to retract. ‘David, I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry –’

‘Of course you meant it.’ David’s voice cut through her apology. ‘You meant to hurt me and you succeeded. As you pointed out, you never do anything by accident. Goodbye,
Britt. Don’t worry about my things. You can send them on later.’

Weighing up her options Britt decided her best course was to play it cool. There was nothing more guaranteed to turn a man off than a begging woman. Besides he wouldn’t really leave. Not
now. He was angry, that was all. She could have kicked herself about shooting her mouth off to Carla. But he’d cool down in a couple of hours.

Calmly she turned away from him and ordered a cappuccino. Without saying another word David walked out of the restaurant and headed up Knightsbridge towards Harrods.

Britt looked at Carla’s horrified face. ‘Don’t worry, I know him. He’ll be back later. Loaded down with guilt and Christmas presents.’

Liz looked out of the train window as Jamie slept, warm and trusting with his head in her lap. And as he lay there somehow his weakness and dependency revived her like a strong
drink. She glanced down at his small face, the dark hair sticking up as usual, short on top but with one single curl of long hair at the nape of the neck, an affectation she had started herself
when he was two and which he had stuck to firmly, a badge of his individuality, refusing every time she had tried to cut it. She had feared teasing at school but the other children seemed to accept
it and now it was part of Jamie. And as she stroked his hair she knew that whatever happened to her she could survive because of him and Daisy. Her love for them would always pull her through.

She might be terrified of facing life knowing that now David really had gone for ever and that she might always be alone, but still she had to be strong for their sake. And suddenly she
understood all those women who smiled bleakly from newspaper photos after their husbands had been drowned or killed in mine accidents. Even though you were screaming inside you had to be calm for
the children. But it couldn’t stop the pain and as she looked out at the darkening countryside and thought of how David might, even now, be shopping for Britt and the baby, she closed her
eyes for a moment and tried to blot out the agony.

And as her train pulled in at Lewes Station she realized she didn’t want to go home after all. The house would be dark and empty and she would still picture David sitting by the fire
playing snap with Jamie. Instead she would pick the car up from the car park, go and buy the biggest Christmas tree they could find, and then fetch Daisy from Ginny’s. They would stay at
Ginny’s for tea and bathtime. Then they would go home and decorate it together. She loved decorating Christmas trees. It was just the kind of treat she needed.

Humming ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’, she and Jamie marched in step towards the car park, feeling that perhaps life wasn’t so bad after all.

David swiftly walked the hundred yards from Harrods to the underground car park in Hans Crescent and filled the boot of the Mercedes with presents. For a moment he sat in the
dark silence and debated with himself. Then, finally, he turned on the engine and started to drive. When he came to the traffic lights at the top of Sloane Street he hesitated, glanced at the road
to Trafalgar Square which, if he turned east on to the Embankment, would eventually take him to Canary Wharf and Britt’s flat.

Instead he turned left along the Brompton Road and out towards the M4 motorway, which would eventually meet up with the M25, the first leg on the journey down to Sussex and to Liz.

As Liz’s train ploughed its way through the cold of late afternoon David glanced at the clock on the dashboard. Only another twenty minutes and he would be in Seamington.
And as he put his foot down, eager not to waste another moment, he felt an intuition that everything would be all right so strong it made him laugh out loud, so that the other drivers watching him
thought he was mad or drunk and for once kept to the braking distance required by the Highway Code.

For the first time in months David felt he was waking from an unpleasant and frightening dream in which he was lost and could see no way out, every way being barred, no light being visible, no
road to happiness clear. But now at last he could see the answer. It had all been a terrible mistake and it had been his fault. His place was with Liz and his family and he was going to make her
see that.

For a moment he allowed himself to imagine the scene that waited for him at Crossways. There would be a roaring fire, of wood not coal, and the house would be warm and aromatic with the scents
of fir and apple logs and maybe even mince pies. There would be a Christmas tree. He would knock on the door and Liz would open it with Jamie and Daisy beside her, and somehow, no matter how much
she protested he would persuade her that he was desperately sorry, and that she must take him back. Won over by the arguments he had not yet formulated she would open her arms and forgive him, and
they would have a happy family Christmas together. Impatient to be there, he started to drive even faster.

But even as he parked his car at the end of the drive he began to sense that something was wrong. He was still twenty yards away but there was no familiar smoke snaking from the chimney, pale
grey against the deep navy of the winter’s evening, as there had been in his imagination, and the deep silence of the countryside wasn’t cut by laughter or carols or voices coming from
the direction of the cottage.

Leaving the presents in the car he ran up the drive, trying to fight off the beginning of panic. The sound of his feet crunching on the gravel deafened him. Hearing an unfamiliar pounding he
stopped for a moment until he realized that it was his own heart.

And then he was there outside the dark and empty house. The pain in his chest was so intense that he thought he was having a heart attack. What a sublime irony that would be. The prodigal
returns and dies on the doorstep. But then as it passed he realized it had simply been the bitter mule-kick of disappointment. Liz and the children weren’t here.

As a faint desperate hope he tried the front door and found it double-locked. Liz never did that if she was simply going out for half an hour, only if she was going away. He remembered how she
had laughed at him when they first started coming here for double-locking the front door every time he nipped down to the village shop. ‘You’re not in London now, you know,’ she
would tease and he would laugh and deliberately leave the door wide open. But they never got burgled. Burglars were unimaginable in Seamington. Even they recognized the peace of the place and dared
not disturb it.

Then he had a sudden inspiration. His keys. Maybe he had his keys to the cottage with him. He ran back to the car and rummaged in his briefcase. Then he remembered where they were. In the small
drawer beside Britt’s bed.

He sat in the dark car and wondered where she might have gone. To Ginny’s? But then she wouldn’t have double-locked. To her mother’s? Of course, why hadn’t he thought of
that before. She must have gone to her mother’s for Christmas, instead of spending it alone here.

For a moment he considered driving over there now. Then he thought about Eleanor, with her cold patrician elegance and felt his nerve trickle away. Liz adored her mother and found her warm and
loving but David had never felt that that love had been extended to an outsider from the lower orders, a cuckoo from the North who had stolen their beautiful daughter from the banker or stockbroker
she should rightfully have married. And now he had compounded his crime by hurting her and abandoning her.

No. He couldn’t go there. And anyway it wasn’t the place to convince her of the justice of his case with her mother lurking in the shadows to remind her of the self-evident truth,
which he knew in his heart not to be true at all, not now, that he had hurt her once and could do it again.

Her mother would simply tell her, as any mother would, that she would be mad to take him back. Eleanor would not make allowances or be prepared to see that her daughter might, too, have had her
part to play in the collapse of their marriage.

Don’t do it, she would advise, don’t trap yourself in a masochistic relationship, you’re young, remember people don’t change, not really. Find someone else. A good man
who will make you feel safe.

But David knew her advice would be wrong. He was a good man and he could make her feel as safe as she wanted. If she would only give him another chance.

At least he would leave the presents in the porch and she would know he had been. Carefully he unpacked them and carried them down the drive. The festive pile looked incongruous in the dark
porch, as though they had been delivered to the wrong place. And looking at them he realized they made an eyecatching advert that the house was empty. He couldn’t leave them there after all.
He would have to take them away and bring them back after Christmas.

As he packed them up, he felt a strong urge to leave something, a note perhaps, to say that he had been. But what would he say? No, he needed to speak to her in person, to dismiss her protests
and convince her with his arguments and his love. And his best attack would be surprise.

As he got back into the car, it struck him for the first time that he had no idea where he was going. His dream had ended here, in front of the fire with Liz. And there is never provision for
failure in dreams, and so he simply hadn’t considered it.

Going back to Britt was out of the question, and if he went back to his own house, she would find him. If he took the phone off the hook, she would come and wait outside. He knew Britt. For a
split second the irony struck him that he was waiting outside Liz’s house, just as Britt would wait outside his. The eternal triangle. The cliché that had wrecked lives since time
began. When Adam and Eve were the only two people in the world, Eve had started something funny with the serpent.

What about friends? He must have some friends he could go to. But he realized with a shock that he had almost no friends close enough to descend on two days before Christmas. All his friends had
been shared with Liz, and by leaving her he had crossed himself out of their marital Filofaxes. For a moment he pictured the hastily covered-up horror and surprise if he turned up on Bert’s
doorstep in Pinner, like Scrooge on Christmas morning.

Then he remembered that there was somewhere he could go where Britt wouldn’t find him. And neither would anyone else. In a sudden panic he delved into his jacket pocket for his keyring.
Yes, there was the key.

He would spend Christmas alone. And he would think about the unthinkable: what he would do with the rest of his life if Liz didn’t want him back after all.

It was after six when Liz finally parked outside the cottage and carried Daisy, bathed and in her sleepsuit, upstairs to her cot.

When she came down she was hit at once by the emptiness of the place. She snapped on all the lights and opened the kitchen door to let the warmth from the Aga spread into the sitting room. Then
she knelt by the grate, glad that she had set the fire before she left, and put a match to the dried-out kindling, which crackled satisfyingly as the logs began to catch and spit and release the
faint scent of apple into the room.

She looked round at the Christmas decorations and the welcome wreath on the front door and couldn’t help smiling. Despite the cobbling and making good they’d had to resort to, they
didn’t look too bad. Maybe not quite like the photo in the magazine, but still pretty good.

She headed back out to the car and as she turned on the porch light something sparkled in the corner. As she bent down she saw that it was a short length of shiny silver ribbon, the kind used to
decorate fancy presents. She’d often watched the salesgirls deftly tie a gift up in this ribbon and then run the inside of a pair of scissors down the ends to make them curl like tiny
ringlets. How odd. Without thinking any more about it she put the ribbon in her pocket and went to help Jamie get the Christmas tree out of the car.