Queen Mum (29 page)

After twenty minutes the visitor said he was leaving and Mrs Peterson said she’d walk with him, go down to the shop for some tissues. I waited till they were out of the door, then I made
my move.

He saw at once who I was. I’d been going to lean down and say, ‘What a shame you didn’t die last year,’ or ‘You bastard, I hope you’re in pain,’ but in
the end I just stood and looked at him till he cried. Then I went home and made the tea.

In the seat next to me, Juno jerked her head forward and snorted; so she had been dozing. ‘Was I snoring?’ she asked.

‘No. Not too much longer, now. Another half hour and we should be home. Do you want to call Tom and let him know?’

‘Sure. God, I need a hot bath.’

She rummaged in the footwell for my mobile.

‘Do you want to try Manny too?’

‘I tried him earlier,’ she said. ‘But there was no reply.’

‘When did you say he’d be back?’

‘Anytime,’ she said, the phone to her ear. ‘Oh, it’s ringing, shhh. Tom?’

In the event it was three days before Manny returned, and then it was me he came home to.

*

Manny was waiting for me in the nursery car park. I ran across and, never thought, just gave him a hug.

‘Thank God you’re here,’ I said into his neck. He smelt of Paco Rabanne.

‘Hmm?’

‘Juno must be so relieved, she’s had the most awful time. How long have you been back? Couldn’t you get a ferry any earlier? Or did you fly?’

He held onto me longer than I expected, and when he did let me go all he said was, ‘Can we go somewhere and talk?’

‘Home?’

‘Not yet.’ He checked his watch. ‘Can I take you to lunch, Ally?’

‘What about Juno?’

‘I need to speak to you first.’

‘What’s the matter? Has something happened?’

‘Nothing to worry about. I just need your advice.’

I think I knew even at this point something was very wrong, the way his eyes flicked past mine. But I thought I’d go along with it. This was Manny, after all, my friend.

‘OK. Let’s go to Algarve, it’s easier to park.’

‘Hop in with me, then we only have to worry about one vehicle,’ he said. ‘I can run you back here afterwards. Come on, it’ll be a lot less hassle.’

He took me by the arm like a Victorian gentleman and led me to his car. His cheeks seemed pinkish, slightly wind-burned. I wondered if the Ireland project had involved camping.

When he started the ignition the CD player blasted into life. I frowned, trying to place the sweeping intro; then the vocals started.

‘
Foreigner
?’ I asked him, amazed. I’d have soon as expected a Foreigner CD in Manny’s glove box as a live salamander.

He pushed the car into gear. ‘Great, isn’t it? I missed out on a lot of this Eighties stuff with moving backwards and forwards to France. I love this track. It’s kitsch but it
rocks.’

It rocks?

I said, ‘Juno’s been terrifically brave, you know.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yes. She has. Having to make all the arrangements for the funeral and look after the girls as well—’

Manny turned his head to me, his eyes wide. ‘What funeral? Oh, shit, not her mother?’

‘You didn’t know?’

‘No.’

‘She didn’t ring you?’

‘No, she fucking didn’t.’ He swung the car through a too-narrow gap. I fell against the door, someone bibbed their horn at him.

‘But didn’t you ring her? I mean, they have phones in Ireland, for God’s sake.’

‘Who told you I’ve been in Ireland?’

‘Weren’t you at a Celtic arts festival?’

‘Lord, no. Oh, fuck. How could she not tell me about her mother dying?’

He flashed a look of appeal at me but I didn’t know how to answer. I couldn’t follow this at all.

‘Haven’t you been back home yet, Manny?’

‘No. I told you, I needed to see you first.’

My heart began to thump.

‘All right, I’ll tell you why she didn’t let me know about her mother,’ he grimaced, taking a corner so badly that he bumped up onto the kerb momentarily.
‘She’ll have done it to make me look bad, I know the way she works. To make me look even more of a heel than I am.’

‘She phoned you, I know she did, she told me.’

Manny shook his head but said nothing. The car was full of ‘Waiting for a Girl like You’.

‘I don’t understand what’s going on,’ I said over the music.

The car swerved into a gap at the side of the road and Manny pulled on the handbrake, switched the engine off. Then he put his hands on the steering wheel, straight out in front of him. He had
on a khaki shirt I’d not seen before, Indiana Jones style, and he’d rolled the sleeves back. In a different moment I’d have wanted to reach across and stroke his forearm.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I could see as soon as you came over that Juno hadn’t told you what’s happened.’

‘What about?’

‘Me. I’ve left her, Ally.’

*

*

I could feel Juno’s pain slamming into me like the impact of a car crash.

‘For good?’

‘No. I don’t know. I felt I needed to get away and mull things over. I’ve been up in the Lakes, near Windermere, walking. The scenery’s so marvellous there, it really
makes you think inside yourself, kind of examine your interior landscape. Do you know what I’m saying?’

‘No.’ I was thinking, How could she not have told me this. ‘Interior landscape? Manny, what’s going on?’

He shrugged.

‘I wanted some time alone to take stock of my life.’

Tom says there’s no such thing as the male menopause. He says it’s just an excuse for middle-aged men to dick about.

‘Have you told the girls?’

‘I wanted to see Juno, talk to her before we said anything to Pascale and Soph. Ally, I thought you might understand. I’ve always thought of you as having tremendous emotional
intelligence.’

In spite of myself, my neck prickled. ‘Have you?’

‘Oh, yes. You, of all the people I know, you have real depth. I thought there was a chance you might understand what I can barely articulate for myself.’

‘I’ll try.’

He sighed, pressed his palms against the vinyl curve of the steering wheel. ‘I feel, if I carry on as I am, in the same life, I’ll have missed – experiences – people
– I want to interact with. If I don’t change direction, then I’ll know now where I’ll be in ten years’ time, twenty, thirty. And who wants a life like that?’

Me, I thought. ‘Can’t you find another job? Why does it have to be Juno’s fault?’

‘It’s not Juno’s fault. It’s about who I am. I’m looking on the break as a sort of relationship sabbatical.’

‘So you’re coming back.’

Juno on her own; it was unthinkable. On the other side of the windscreen, the first drops of rain spattered against the glass and trickled jerkily down. The CD wanted to Know what Love is.

‘I never intended to get married so soon,’ he said. ‘There were a lot of places I had in mind to visit first. Places less safe than Chester.’

‘You’re still wearing your wedding ring.’

He looked down at his hand and splayed his brown fingers. ‘So I am.’

‘You can go travelling when the kids are older.’

‘Ally, I’m tired of always doing the right thing. I married Juno when she got pregnant because it was the honourable course of action.’

‘But you loved her. You’d have married her anyway.’

‘I’m not denying that. People change, though. Juno and I don’t feel together any more. Haven’t for a while, now.’

Something, I don’t know what, made me ask, ‘Manny, has this got anything to do with Kim?’

‘I’m not sleeping with her,’ he said immediately.

Kim in her high-heeled boots, Kim dropping the bird into my bin, smiling. ‘Oh my God.’

‘It’s nothing like that. Ally, calm down, I’m telling you the truth. I am. I haven’t made any secret of the fact that I’ve seen Kim since the show, she’s so
interested in the arts—’

‘Like bloody hell she is—’

‘She
is
. She wants to learn. No one’s given her the time till now. Do you know how nice it is for me to be able to teach something to someone? To be with a person who
doesn’t know everything? It’s a friendship that’s opened me up. And she’s teaching me stuff too. It’s crazy, but the last time I took some videos over for her we ended
up having races on the boys’ Space Hoppers.’ He said this as though he thought it was an immensely clever thing to have done. ‘Don’t turn your nose up, it was fantastic fun.
We were laughing so much it was like we were drunk. Kim’s mad, she doesn’t care. She’s always dancing, just dances to the radio, anytime; she eats what she likes, where she likes,
when she likes, completely spontaneous. Juno has this need to be in charge all the time, it’s exhausting. And there’s more to life than having matching door plates and sitting down to
organic bloody courgettes.’

I thought of those happy mealtimes we’d all sat round their big kitchen table cracking jokes, me coveting Juno’s big Provençal salad bowl, someone’s smooth arm
stretching out and gold bangles clicking, the sound of wine being poured.

‘I think Kim’s very deliberate in what she does,’ I said coldly. ‘I got the feeling she was an extremely manipulative woman. Juno might fuss sometimes, but at least
she’s honest.’

Manny was shaking his head. ‘You haven’t got it at all, have you? You’re under the impression my wife’s some kind of saint.’

‘She’s been a damn good friend to me.’ I was swallowing constantly with nerves and fury. ‘The bottom line is, you want me to sanction what you’re doing, don’t
you? That’s why you wanted to see me. You thought you could justify yourself and, what, take the message back to Juno?
Ally agrees with me, you’re too controlling, the poor man needs
a break?
Eugh! You
can’t
be having an affair with Kim, she’s so, not nice—’

He struck the dashboard suddenly with his fist. ‘I just said I wasn’t, didn’t I? Jesus!’

He turned the key in the ignition. The music cut out, then blared again.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I’m driving you back,’ he said. ‘I’m clearly not going to get any sense out of you. I don’t know why I ever imagined I would. You’re Juno’s
clone, that’s all.’

He drove as though he was in a rally. We screeched into the entrance of the car park and he stamped on the brake so that I jerked against the seat belt and fell back. As I reached shakily for
the door handle, he said, ‘You think she’s so damn perfect? Well, I’ll tell you something, one of the things she’s done.’ I scrambled out but he leant across the
passenger seat and looked up at me with angry eyes. ‘Did you know she used to post in a bereavement forum for parents who’ve lost their children? I mean, pretending she was one? So what
do you think of
that
?’

I said nothing. As soon as I’d slammed the door, he drove away. There were tyre marks across the disabled symbol for days afterwards.

*

*

I drove straight to Juno. I imagined putting my arms round her slender waist while she wept on my shoulder; Manny and Juno on a park bench in Honfleur, surrounded by flowers;
Kim’s grinning face.

When I got there, she was done up like a Fifties housewife in a flowered pinny and a headscarf, bright as anything.

‘I had this idea, in the small hours, that I’d repaint the bedroom,’ she said, re-tying the scarf around her hair more tightly. If I wore something like that round my head
I’d look like Mrs Overall: Juno looked like Ann Blyth in
Kismet
. ‘So when I’d dropped the kids off I called in at Laura Ashley and got some stuff called Deep Cowslip,
it’s absolutely gorgeous, it’ll light up the whole space. But it’s a bigger job than I thought. I was hoping to have it finished by the time the girls came home, but that’s
not going to happen—’

‘I’ve seen Manny,’ I said.

*