Life Begins (12 page)

‘You don’t really want to read, do you?’

‘Hmm?’

She put her mouth against his arm and blew till his pyjamas were wet and his skin burnt. ‘There,’ she said, smacking her lips with satisfaction. A hot potato, because I love you.’

‘Thank you, darling.’ Henry peered affectionately at her over the top of his glasses. ‘And would you still love me if I read to the end of the chapter?’

She smiled back at him, too comfortable, too sleepy to take offence. ‘Possibly.’ She turned on to her other side, bunched her knees up to her chest and closed her eyes. ‘By the way, Charlotte and Sam are coming next Sunday. I thought I’d do duck for a change… What do you think?’

‘Delicious.’

‘And I said she could use the cottage.’

Henry turned sharply. ‘When?’

‘Easter hols… a week.’ Her voice was slurred now. She was close to sleep.

‘Fine.’ Henry returned his gaze to the top of the page. He had not taken in a single word.
Sir William presented his findings to the House before returning to his club. Sir William
…
Sir William.
Henry squinted, focused and squinted again, seeing not the portly frame of the protagonist of his book but Charlotte Turner, slim, milky-skinned, auburn hair streaming, green eyes sad and hopeful. If he hadn’t
felt
her, he was sure he would have been fine. But he had felt her, for those brief seconds, in his arms. More importantly, he had felt the
need
in her and it had opened a door that he didn’t seem able to close: a door that led into a room full of fantastical scenarios. What if he had held her harder, or for longer, or seen her into the house, or helped her off with her coat, or offered to make tea or pour more wine or –

Henry rolled over and put out his bedside light. He was sorely tempted now to put his arms round his wife but she was lost to sleep – deeply, instantly, as was her wont. And it would have been wrong, anyway, he reasoned unhappily, to vent his pitiful, secret lust upon the very person it wronged. And where could such lust lead anyway, other than a catastrophe of multiple hurt? Theresa had betrayed him once and the pain of it, thirteen years on – if he concentrated – could still scythe through his heart. Forgiving her had been instinctive, then hard, but he had managed it. They wouldn’t survive something similar now. A drunken fumble, maybe, but not with Charlotte…
Charlotte!
Christ, was he losing his mind?

Henry fought the bedclothes in the dark, tugging and twisting until sheer exhaustion got the better of him and he fell asleep spreadeagled between the folds like a wounded combatant.

Bella takes a gap year, but I feel it would be nothing more than that – a gap, limbo, time to fill. On the advice of a teacher I apply, successfully, to Durham University to study English literature. My mother offers to drive me there. I pack the car the night before we leave, stuffing bedding round the boxes and suitcases, my stereo and a guitar I have bought but cannot play. My father watches from his chair at the sitting-room window where he spends most of the day now, a tartan blanket over his bony knees. His big hands, the fingers on the left stained a dirty yellow, twitch in his lap for the cigarettes he can no longer smoke. His breath is all wheeze; his eyes, dark and heavy-lidded, are withdrawing into their sockets.

Early next morning he is standing by the front door with a small bag at his feet. He is coming too, he says. It is a big thing, he wants to be a part of it. He swivels his gaze between my mother’s face and mine, the sunken eyes daring contradiction. I have to rearrange the car, forcing a space for myself on the back seat so that he can sit in the front. It is a long journey and I spend most of it staring at the back of his head, seeing the contours of his skull through the papery scalp and the dear tufts of silvery hair still doing their best to cover it. The space between his collar and his hairline looks so contrastingly soft, so absurdly young and vulnerable, that I long to press my hands there – anything to keep it hidden and safe.

Durham is more beautiful than I had expected, tall dark ancient stones interleaved with the smooth walls and extensive glass of modern buildings, like two time zones existing in parallel. The cathedral dominates the airspace with its vast square towers, a majestic point of reference that makes our cramped car, our lives, seem small. With its
aid I study the map and steer us in the right direction. I am nervous but cannot wait to locate my college and for the two of them to be gone. They are staying the night somewhere on the outskirts and planning an early getaway.

Stumped by double yellow lines, I wind down the window to ask for help from a round-faced girl in a duffel coat. She is called Eve, she says, and there’s parking round the back and is it my first term and what subject and see you soon. I wind the window back up with a full heart, recalling the hateful send-off on the station platform nine years before – that flimsy little-girl hope. I am so very grateful to be older, armoured, more prepared.

It is bitterly cold. I feel my father’s helplessness as he hunches his shoulders against the cut of the wind and watches the unpacking of the car. There are three flights of stairs to my room. My mother, a box of books in her arms, instructs him to take care, to use the banisters. I follow behind, the handles of my bags cutting welts into my palms. I see revenge in her energy and want to make up for it. By the top his breath is all rattle and squeak. My mother marches past, plunging back down the stairwell for a second load.

‘I have something for you,’ he says. He perches on the edge of the desk and reaches slowly, carefully, into the inner pocket of his jacket. Watching the delicacy of the movement, the fluttering fingers, I have the sudden overwhelming sensation – as sure as knowledge itself – that this will be our last farewell. There is a softness in his eyes that tells me he knows it too. ‘Something…’ He withdraws an envelope, plump and white, and studies it hard. I gawp at it too, my heart galloping. For I know what such envelopes at such moments can mean. I have read George Eliot and Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy: altered wills, deathbed confessionals, setting records straight. I know all the possibilities and feel ready and deserving of my chance to experience a version of them. My throat is tight – because he is dying and because I fear what this letter will say – but I am excited too. Closure. I lick my lips.

‘Open it later,’ he croaks.

I hug him tenderly, hating how tall I am in my heels, how robust my frame feels against his thin chest. I press my lips to his rough cheek, wishing I could transfer some of my youth and strength to make him well. I could not in all my eighteen years have loved him more and would tell him so if I could trust my voice.

As my mother, tight-lipped, flint-eyed, the leads of my stereo trailing round her ankles, re-enters the room, I tug open the top drawer of the Formica desk and drop the envelope inside. My knowledge of his betrayal has been a burden, but I know, too, that it has bound us in a secret, almost pleasurable allegiance. We are the circle that closes, my mother is the one on the outside.

Later, when Eve asks me round for a coffee I almost refuse. Her room is along the corridor from mine, a cosy den of lamps and wall hangings, posters and cushions. She talks about faculties, clubs and tutors, and offers fat fingers of home-made shortbread to accompany the coffee. I nod and smile, nibble and sip, guilty that I cannot focus.

Back in my room at last, I lock the door and light a cigarette before I approach the drawer. I inhale deeply, enjoying the giddy rush, the drama of the moment. The drawer sticks, then releases. I balance the cigarette on the edge of the desk and run my fingers under the flap of the envelope. The edge of the paper cuts my skin, but I ignore it, letting the drops of blood smudge where they will.

Inside there is an A4 sheet, blank apart from one sentence, and folded round four fifty-pound notes. ‘For extras’, it says, ‘love, Dad.’

I stare dumbly, then shake the envelope, as if some explanation, apology, defiance, regret, might yet fall out of it. The notes are crisp, fresh off the minier’s press, their edges sharp enough to slice more cuts into my skin if I was careless enough to let them. Down the corridor I can hear the quiet hum of music, footsteps and conversations as other students arrive. My room feels very empty in comparison, very silent, a world within a world. I fold the money into my purse and reach for the nearest box to begin unpacking.

The first object I pull out is my babushka doll, smelling strongly of the fresh coat of varnish that my father – in a pitiful quest for useful occupation – had recently insisted on applying. For a few moments I meet its bemused gaze, pondering that we are not so very different, with our selves layered inside, our carapaces to conceal and survive.

I plug in my stereo and pluck an LP at random from the box on the desk. Give me hope, help me cope, with this heavy load… I sing as I work, aware of the silent ebb and swell of my disappointment moving to a different, silent tune inside my head. Two hundred pounds will buy a lot of extras: fur-lined boots, guitar lessons, or a duffel coat like Eve’s to keep out the raw northern chill. It is generous and yet I feel let down. I had wanted so much more. Not many words, necessarily, but just enough to convey some acknowledgement of the truth upon which I had stumbled all those years ago under the scorched roof of the garden shed. There might have been allegiance, but there was such loss too, such terror; the tremble in my knees as I raced away across the scratchy grass, I can feel it still. Does he know that? Did he ever know that
?

I tear open my purse and look at the notes again, fighting a sudden dark fear – far worse than the disappointment – that they might constitute an attempt to guarantee my silence after he has gone. I turn up the volume, sing louder, letting the fear burn itself out. He would never think in such a way. He would know, surely, that my discretion has never had conditions attached, that even at the age of seven it was as much about protecting the fiction of my own life as his.

Cycling back from the gym, Tim let go of the handlebars for long stretches, steering with a combination of balance, willpower and the strength of his inner thighs. He felt exuberant, masterful, in control, as he always did after a good workout. It was Sunday and spring was in full flow, evinced by the flowers streaking past him, palettes of colour, tumbling over garden walls, from tubs and hanging baskets.

At the garden centre he was forced to resume control of the handlebars to avoid a woman trundling a wheelbarrow of compost bags and bedding plants to the open boot of a double-parked estate car. An empty, dripping jungle just a few weeks ago, the place was now swarming. The woman had a small child who was skipping dangerously round the wheels of the barrow, ignoring commands to stay on the pavement. Tim glared at the pair as he braked. Spoilt middle-class women with kids and cars they couldn’t handle, it was enough to make one want to mow them down. Charlotte was middle class, of course, but not in any way that he could see typical of the breed. It was one of the things he liked about her – that while she operated within a certain social milieu she did not seem, quite, to be a part of it. There was something lost about her, something lost and, perhaps on account of that, deeply appealing. In fact, Tim’s only real reservation about her was the shrimp of a kid, Sam. He had seen it time and time again: perfectly fun-loving women ruined by their offspring. Although with Phoebe it had been the
idea
of having children that had helped to ruin things. Before they had got married she had been as anti the whole business as he was. Two years in, however, and he was regularly checking the little pack of pills in her bedside drawer to check she wasn’t playing games.

But then, Tim reasoned, changing down a couple of gears for the steepish slope up the last section of his road, a woman who already had a child was far less likely to get broody, especially one who was on the verge of turning forty with a crap marriage to her credit and a glint in her eye that suggested she knew how to have a good time. Tim breathed heavily as he pumped the pedals. He had to have her. He simply had to. He was fed up of imagining it. He needed to make it real.

Once inside his house (a three-bedroomed semi, which had put on a thumping fifty grand in the three years since its purchase), Tim sought solace by masturbating quickly and fiercely as he stood under the pummelling yet of his power-shower, then sat down in his favourite armchair to draw up a plan of action. As was his wont when under pressure, he jotted his thoughts in the form of a list. Number-one priority, both from a work and a personal point of view, was Mrs Stowe. Having promised to consult again with her husband, she had failed to return his last few calls. If he could just keep the dialogue going, Tim was sure he could bring the situation round. Mrs Burgess, on the other hand, was coming along nicely. She had found an eager purchaser with no chain for her house and was now waiting for the results of the survey with a view to securing Charlotte’s. Hurrah. One tick in the box there.

Tim sucked at the water-bottle he had bought at the gym. A litre after exercise was his aim, though he seldom managed it. He preferred drinks with a bit of fizz and bite, the ones that forced burps between mouthfuls. But then he also liked looking younger than his forty-two years and was determined to do all he could to keep things that way. Water was good for the circulation and the skin and he had worked up a hell of a thirst. His stomach muscles were still pulsing from the push of an extra twenty repeats. He had fixed upon an image of Charlotte to see him through: naked and sitting astride him, the ends of her tremendous hair tickling his face, soft-mouthed and admiring. It had worked a treat.

The next thing for his list was Charlotte herself. She had called him back the previous weekend, but only to say she was ill. Various subsequent communications relating to the house had arrived through the channel of his assistant, Savitri. Where some might have confronted this with a
certain lowering of spirits, Tim, his self-esteem riding high on endorphins, viewed it merely as a new aspect of what was proving a hugely enjoyable challenge. He would call her that afternoon, he decided, play up the progress on the house, ask about the boy – yes, that would work – the bullying thing, and about
her
, of course. Tim paused to suck the end of his pen, musing on how best to play his hand. ‘Birthday 8 June,’ he wrote, after a few minutes, inwardly congratulating himself on having unearthed this gem of a personal detail from his work files. A beautiful divorcée approaching her fortieth, desperate to move house with a sulky son in tow and no distractions beyond board games with girlfriends and a part-time job with two puffs in a bookshop. Christ, if he couldn’t use some of that to his advantage he really was losing his touch.