Having It All (36 page)

But after his final quarrel with Liz nothing seemed to matter. He had only thrown in the idea of a divorce as a wild card to see her reaction. And he had seen it all right. She had calmly picked
it up and played it.

And it was in this mood that he approached the signposts which offered him a simple choice: Central London or the M1 Motorway to the North.

He had no more than twenty seconds to decide and suddenly, irrationally, it seemed to him that everything, his future and all his hopes of happiness turned on this one simple decision.

Susannah took a firm hold on Liz’s hand and closed her eyes.

‘You also had a happy childhood. You lived in the country, on a farm with horses and chickens.’

Liz felt a creeping sense of unease. She
had
grown up with horses all right. For years her biggest, and only, thrills were on the back of a pony.

‘Your father took you riding when you were five. You fell off but you made him put you straight back on. He was proud of you.’

It was a memory hidden so deep that it took her a few seconds to unearth it. And there it was. A bright spring day in the Long Sally, the field next to the orchard. Her father had saddled up the
oldest and gentlest horse they had. But it still seemed vast and terrifying to the five-year-old Lillibet. For a moment the fear flooded back, as if she were astride him now. And then the
exhilaration as the horse trotted slowly forward and her father let go of her. Now she was really grown up! And then, unexpectedly, the terrifying sensation of falling and the long-forgotten thrill
of watching her father’s pride as she demanded to get back on.

As she came back to the present with a shock Liz realized that she was scared. She wanted both to run away and to remain rooted to the spot. But Susannah was still holding firmly on to her
hand.

‘He was proud of you then,’ Susannah said gently, ‘and he’s proud of you now.’

Liz looked up. Her father had been dead for ten years! For a fraction of a second she thought she felt an additional pressure on her hand coming from the clairvoyant but Susannah said nothing.
Liz thought about the father she’d loved so much, and experienced an unexpected sense of peace, untinged by the sadness she usually felt when she thought of him.

Susannah was talking again. ‘You’ve made great changes in your life. You felt like a butterfly in an iron cage, so you broke the cage. It took great strength. But it hasn’t
brought you the happiness you expected. You will have to make more changes still. But you will in the end be happy.’

Listening to Susannah, Liz finally understood why Mel had wanted to come today. The promise of eventual happiness, after painful struggle, was so reassuring that you were prepared to suspend all
rational instincts to believe it. You
needed
to believe it. And she saw that rather than encourage you passively to lay yourself down in the palm of fate, it made you more eager still to
fight for that happiness you’d one day been promised.

Feeling the weight of emotion on her, she consciously wanted to change the subject.

‘What about my love life. Is there a free spirit with a ponytail for me too?’

But Susannah didn’t pick up on her teasing tone. Instead she moved Liz’s hand fractionally in hers as if to unblock some energy line. ‘Two men love you and they will both hurt
you.’

‘Oh great,’ sympathized Mel, ‘no prizes for guessing one of them.’

‘But you’re strong, a survivor.’ She paused and ran a finger down Liz’s hand as if to double-check on some surprising fact. ‘One of them is at a crossroads in his
life. He could turn towards you, or away.’ She paused. ‘He is turning away.’ She opened her eyes and looked at Liz, her own cloudy and troubled. ‘Are you sure that’s
what you want?’

‘It’s nonsense, Mel, a bit of fun, that’s all!’

The freezing wind was clearing Liz’s head, and her familiar scepticism came back to rescue her.

‘And what about your father and the riding and Garth’s ponytail?’

‘Some form of mind reading, that’s all.’ Liz pulled her coat tightly round her as she felt the first snowflakes of winter on her face. ‘She may be able to tell what
we’re thinking now but there’s no way, absolutely no way, she could possibly see into the future.’

Ten minutes later David pulled out of the lay-by next to the roadsign and put on the left-hand indicator of his Mercedes. There was nothing to keep him in London, and he felt a
sudden longing to see Yorkshire again. Not to go home – he wasn’t ready for that yet, but to get out into the countryside of his boyhood. He would pick up a pair of walking boots, a
cagoule, maybe even a simple tent and sleeping bag. By tomorrow he could be on the tops watching the sun light up Nidderdale Edge.

Putting his foot down he felt an overwhelming sense that his past lay in the South and his future in the wider, wilder spaces of the North.

As she drove back to the cottage Liz put a cassette of The Lark Ascending in the car stereo to calm herself. It always made her feel peaceful and optimistic. It was ridiculous
to take what that Yuppie clairvoyant had said to heart.

David wasn’t at a turning point in his life. By now he would be back in London, chained to his desk as usual, editing his precious paper and deciding what dubious and exploitative stories
the nation should be treated to at their breakfast tables tomorrow. It would take more than a quarrel with her to prise David away from Logan Greene and hinder his progress on and up the corporate
ladder.

As the music soared, Liz forgot the cold dank day outside and pictured a late spring sky, so painfully blue you had to screw up your eyes to look at it, and heard the skylark swooping and
singing above the cornfields of East Sussex. In half an hour she would be home with Jamie and Daisy. They would have tea and her mother would cut them thick slices of her dark and fruity Christmas
cake.

At last she was back in Seamington. Home. Noticing with surprise that the village shop was still open she remembered they were running out of milk and stopped to buy some. To her annoyance they
only had homogenized plastic milk left, which was the one sure way to ruin a cup of tea, but at least it would do for the breakfast cereals. As she delved into her bag she realized her purse was
still in the car. Before she ran out to get it she dipped her hands into her pockets. Now and then she’d found a stray pound coin that way, and once a fiver. Her hand closed on something that
crackled and she pulled it out, mystified.

In the bright neon light above the small freezer she saw that it was the ringlet of shiny ribbon she had put there before Christmas. She was about to throw it away when she stopped for a second,
finally hit by its significance. She had found it in the porch just before Christmas. Exactly where David had said he’d left the presents.

A sudden image of David racing down from London with a bootful of gifts for her and the children filled her mind. He had been telling the truth after all. And she had shouted and sworn at him.
And on Christmas Day when he was alone at Logan Greene’s flat she had even accused him of ruining Jamie’s Christmas.

Promising to pay for the milk next time, she rushed out to the car, grabbed her purse and ran through the freezing night towards the old red telephone box at the other end of the village, next
to the matching pillar box, both graceful reminders of the solidarity of Victorian design. Opening the door she was catapulted back into the twentieth century by the four-letter graffiti and the
smell of urine. But at least the phone worked.

Fumbling in her purse she lined up a row of coins. She didn’t know how long it would take to say sorry.

When she asked to speak to the editor, she was surprised that they put her straight through. It was just after six, admittedly, and his secretary had probably gone home. After seven or eight
rings a man’s gruff voice answered which to her surprise she recognized as Bert’s.

‘Bert? Is that you? Did you have a good Christmas? Look, Bert,’ she had to shout somewhat as the line started to click and buzz, ‘is David there? I don’t want to disturb
him, but it is rather important.’

‘David?’

She couldn’t understand why Bert sounded so astonished. She hadn’t asked to speak to the Pope or Mick Jagger, just her husband.

‘Yes. David. My husband.’

‘But David’s gone.’

‘Gone where? Home?’

‘None of us knows. He went in to see Logan yesterday and handed in his resignation. We’ve none of us seen him since.’

Liz felt her heart stop for a moment then beat so loud it deafened her. David had walked out on the
Daily News
and come straight down to see her. And instead of finding out why,
she’d quarrelled with him and laughed when he’d suggested a divorce.

When she got back the house was empty, with the tea things laid out on the pine table on a white lace cloth. Her mother liked things to be done properly. She must have taken
them over to the swings.

She looked around the room at the familiar, loved objects, the small pieces of blue-and-white china, the old flowered chintz sofa, the cushions she’d made herself, the framed photos of
Jamie and Daisy without seeing any of them. David had gone, disappeared, no one knew where he was. She had tried Britt’s number, in an absurd way hoping that he would be there, so that she
would know where he was, but also hoping violently that he wouldn’t, because it would mean he had gone back to her.

But it had been an answering machine that had taken the call, and she noted with guilty satisfaction that the message no longer informed her that neither David Ward nor Britt Williams could take
her call at the moment. Only Britt’s voice remained, informing the caller that she was out at the moment and would call back later.

If he wasn’t at Britt’s, though, where was he? Gone abroad for a few weeks of R & R? No, David was too restless. By the second week of any holiday he was already buying all the
papers and starting to itch to be home. Where, then, for God’s sake?

She tried their house in Holland Park for the third time, but there was still no answer. And, even though she knew it was ludicrous, a technical impossibility, she was convinced that when she
dialled the number the ringing tone had a peculiar deadness, a kind of unused quality about it, that told her beyond doubt that no one was there to pick up the phone.

For a moment she thought of Mel and her endless pursuit of Garth, the unreturned messages clogging his answering machine, the piles of notes left on memo pads throughout London, and she wondered
if she should let it go. But surely this was different. She wasn’t pursuing David. She simply wanted to say sorry, and to admit that she had misjudged him. That was all.

To take her mind off it she switched on the television, realizing that now she was just a viewer, with none of the preoccupations of the TV professional, all she wanted from the telly was to be
entertained. The programme before was just finishing and suddenly she sat up, recognizing the names on the credits. It was the Agatha Christie series she’d helped cast all those months
ago!

For a moment she felt a wave of sadness that she never had the buzz of feeling she’d contributed to something in a lasting way any more. Looking after Jamie and Daisy was important and
often satisfying, she knew, but there was something so temporary in building Duplo castles that would be destroyed in ten minutes and baking cakes that would be devoured in a sitting.

Suddenly she didn’t feel like watching television any more. As she reached for the remote control an advert for lager caught her eye and she paused a moment. The ad showed a middle-aged
father and grown-up son playing football together. They were discussing the son’s impending wedding, which to his father’s disgust was on the same day as the Cup Final. The son, clearly
one of the elusive breed of New Men, just grinned and said it would be on again next year. ‘Kronenbourg,’ said the catchline, ‘a different kind of strength.’

Nonsense, thought Liz, half the guests wouldn’t turn up. Yet, there was something about the ad that stayed with her. And as she turned off the television and reached for her book, she
realized what it was. The father and son were Northern, and the ad was set lovingly in the industrial North.

And in that moment she knew, without a shadow of doubt, that that was where David had gone.

‘Hello, Betty. This is Liz here.’

Liz waited for her mother-in-law to get over her surprise at hearing from her for the first time in six months. As she waited for a reply, Liz pictured Betty sitting there in her neat little
home, every inch Hoovered to death, every surface sparkling, the air perfumed with the sickly artificial fragrance of Air-wick, one of which she placed in every room in case some unwelcome odour of
warmth or life dared to penetrate. The high point of Betty’s life so far had been winning the Mothers Union prize for having the cleanest kitchen units in Kettley. When she died, if they
opened her up they would find written on her heart, like Mary Tudor and Calais, ‘A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place’.

‘Liz? This
is
a surprise,’ and not a pleasant one, her tone implied. Liz felt a flash of guilt. She should have phoned a few times since she and David had split up. Betty
and Bill were after all the children’s grandparents. But she knew that when Betty had learned of the marriage break-up she no doubt instantly blamed Liz and Liz’s career and she
hadn’t been able to face Betty’s crowing tone of domesticity vindicated.

‘Betty, I was wondering if you had seen David lately?’

Betty instantly became defensive. ‘He’s very busy. He doesn’t often get the time. You know that. He’d come more often if he could, he always says so. Why do you
ask?’

For a moment Liz considered telling her the truth. But David was their pride and joy, the son who had paid off all their investment and become a success, one of Kettley’s most famous sons.
And if the price they paid was that they didn’t see him, then Betty at least found it an acceptable one. And Liz wasn’t about to burst her bubble by telling her that her pride and joy
had chucked in his job, abandoned his pregnant girlfriend, and taken to the road.