Scissors, Paper, Stone (13 page)

‘If it’s an apology.’

‘An apology?’ Gabriel raised his voice in incredulity. He started speaking more quickly, so Charlotte knew he was genuinely furious and immediately regretted having made him so. Instantly, even though they were mid-argument, she wanted to turn round and apologise and smooth it over and make everything all right. She was scared of Gabriel being angry. Scared of what it meant about her. Scared of losing him because she made him so unhappy. Scared of being such a fuck-up that she would push away the one man she had ever truly loved.

And yet, she couldn’t explain it to herself, there was another side of her which wanted to push, push, push until she won the argument and forced him to admit he was wrong.

‘Yes, Gabriel,’ she enunciated his name with the precision of a schoolteacher talking to a naughty child. ‘An apology. How do you think I felt the other night when –’

He cut her off, shouting out his words. ‘Let me remind you, Charlotte, that you were the one who blew up in the middle of the evening without warning. You were the one who accused all my friends of slighting you or insulting you. You were the one who said how awful it was being “the other woman” and having to cope with awful me and my awful back history and my awful ex-wife. You always do this. You always make everything revolve around you –’

The injustice of this was so acute that Charlotte cried out, but Gabriel ignored her. ‘And it doesn’t, Charlotte. There are other people with other lives and other problems and they have shit to deal with, too. And I know you’re going through an awful time with your father and everything, and I feel for you, I really do, but it’s not a fucking excuse –’

‘Don’t swear at me,’ said Charlotte, because it was an easy point to score.

‘Don’t be so childish. My friends, although it might have escaped your notice, are finding this whole separation from Maya very hard too. They’ve known her for years. Of course they’re going to feel loyal to her. Of course they’re going to find it odd meeting my new girlfriend –’

‘Oh, so I’m your new girlfriend, am I? How many others have there been?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You should listen to yourself. You know that I love you. You know that. Why isn’t that enough for you?’

Charlotte, disarmed by his burst of emotional honesty, felt her throat stiffen and clog so that she couldn’t speak easily. ‘Why don’t you stand up for me?’ she asked, plaintively.

She could hear Gabriel exhaling deeply on the other end of the line. ‘How could I have done more? I’ve done everything I said I would. I’ve been totally consistent in what I’ve said to you. I don’t know how I can prove myself any more than I already have.’

‘It’s not about proving yourself.’

‘Yes, yes, it is, Charlotte. You constantly beat me over the head with my past. Well, it happened. I don’t like it, but there it is. It happened and I feel shitty about it and I wish I hadn’t done the things I’d done but I hadn’t met you then and I can’t carry on apologising. I can’t be the one who convinces you this isn’t going to fail. You have to do that yourself.’

There was a long silence, interrupted only by the soft dripping of the tap.

‘Are you in the bath?’ he asked and his voice seemed kinder, more his own.

‘Yes.’ Charlotte wiped away the tears that she noticed were running down her face. She hoped he couldn’t hear her crying. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

‘Look, you don’t need to be sorry. I know it’s hard. Especially with everything else on your plate at the moment.’

‘I’m sorry I’m so useless,’ she said, aware of how self-pitying she sounded.

‘Sweetheart, you’re very far from useless. I just wish you had a bit more faith in yourself. In us.’

‘I do have faith in us.’

‘Yes, but perhaps not enough. Not as much as I have.’

She wanted to make a joke, to inject a little burst of levity into the conversation that would bring Gabriel closer to her, that would make him laugh and love her all over again, but she couldn’t think of anything to say, so she just let his words hang mid-air.

‘I miss you, Charlotte.’

‘I miss you too,’ she said, depleted of energy. ‘Do you want to come over?’ Since moving out from the marital home several months earlier, Gabriel had been renting out a friend’s spare room in Pimlico. There was an unspoken assumption that Charlotte would never stay over. She got the impression from Gabriel that it wouldn’t be appropriate, that it would raise more questions than it answered.

‘No, that’s a nice thought, but I’m shattered. I think I might just head back and hit the hay.’

‘OK,’ she said, adding as nonchalantly as she could: ‘Where have you been tonight, anyway?’

‘Oh, just out with Florence. She called up at work today to see if I was free, so we grabbed something to eat.’

‘How is she?’ said Charlotte, brushing aside her welling sensation of mistrust.

‘Fine, fine. Good actually. She’s seeing a new bloke.’

Charlotte broke into a grin. ‘That’s fantastic.’

She turned on the hot tap with her toe and Gabriel laughed as he heard the water splashing. She felt warm again and hopeful and at the same time determined that everything from now on would be better than it had been before. She shut her eyes and listened to Gabriel’s voice and she smiled with relief. Her thoughts were once again back under control.

Charlotte

She had never been properly ill before. She had read about it in books, of course, about the onset of fever and the chills and the shakes that frail female heroines and governesses contracted when they had been out in the cold for too long without a shawl. But Charlotte had never had the flu, only colds and sniffles, and now here she was, aged twelve, finally suffering from her first unarguable dose of adult illness.

She felt obscurely proud despite the dizziness and the raging temperature, as if she was going through an important rite of passage into maturity. Her period had started a few months earlier, much to her alarm, because the only time Anne had tried to talk about ‘becoming a woman’, Charlotte had been so mortified that she pretended she already knew all about it from the girls at school. When the first specks of brownish-red appeared on her knickers, she hadn’t known what it was because it didn’t look like blood. She had ignored it for a while, stuffing her pants with layers of loo roll in an attempt to disguise the discharge. But then Anne had taken her dirty underwear from the laundry basket to wash and, wordlessly, passed her a packet of sanitary towels from the cupboard at the top of the stairs that she used to store indigestion tablets and packets of waterproof plasters.

‘Here, use these,’ Anne said, an impenetrable look on her face. Charlotte took them, feeling a blush rise up her neck. She was embarrassed but, at the same time, pleased that she was now a woman who could share these things with her own mother.

The flu seemed to be an extension of this. One had to endure pain to become an adult, Charlotte thought to herself as she lay in the evening duskiness of her bedroom, feeling hot and cold all at once. She was exhausted and yet unable to sleep because of a perpetual throbbing behind her eyes. Her throat was dry and scratchy. The light from her bedside lamp seemed too acute, too bright, so she reached across to switch it off. This slight effort gave her a spinning head and she lowered herself gingerly back down on to her pillow, eyes closed so that she didn’t have to think.

She wasn’t hungry but she knew she would have to eat something to keep her mother happy. Anne had gone out earlier in the evening to one of her fortnightly bridge evenings, leaving strict instructions that Charlotte had to try and digest something – anything – to keep her strength up.

‘Will you be all right?’ Anne had asked, peering round the door before she left.

‘Yes,’ Charlotte croaked. ‘I’m actually feeling a bit better.’ This was not entirely true, but Charlotte thought it was the sort of thing a grown-up ill person should say. She didn’t want Anne to go out but she knew she mustn’t say anything because she didn’t want to sound babyish. It was just that her mother was much better at looking after Charlotte than Charles was. She had a maternal sixth sense about the sort of things that were needed – a pint glass of diluted Ribena or a lavender-scented pillow to help Charlotte sleep or a bowl of home-made vegetable soup with soft chunks of comforting parsnip that melted softly on the tongue. And Charlotte had discovered that being ill brought out a protectiveness in Anne that was not normally in evidence. Over the last few days, it seemed that her mother had become noticeably more tactile. One of Charlotte’s favourite things was feeling Anne’s cool hand brushing across her forehead with its slightly roughened fingertips and the trace smell of lemony Fairy Liquid.

Standing at the door, Anne had smiled with an unusual tenderness, the creases on her forehead disappearing so that she looked almost pretty in the half-light.

‘Well, your father is here and can make you some supper. You must try and eat something.’

‘I will.’

‘Good. You’re an excellent patient.’ Anne turned away with a little wave of the hand and Charlotte was left feeling both proud and, all of a sudden, a bit alone. She sensed a small vibration of panic in her stomach and propped herself up on her elbows.

‘Bye, Mummy,’ she said, as loudly as she could manage so that her mother would hear it before she disappeared. She stared at the closed bedroom door, half-willing Anne to come back through it.

But instead, Charlotte could make out the sound of her footsteps going down the stairs and then a muffled conversation with her father in the kitchen below and the starting-up of a car engine and then she was gone.

She said she felt like toast for supper.

‘Nothing else?’ asked Charles. ‘Are you sure?’

Charlotte nodded.

‘All right then. A round of toast coming straight up. Do you want anything on it?’

‘Just butter, please.’

But then, after a few minutes of clattering downstairs, Charlotte had smelled an unmistakable acrid smoke and realised that her father had somehow managed to burn it, in spite of the toaster dial always being turned to the same setting. She heard him shout something and assumed it was a swear word. She tensed her shoulders and clasped her two hands in front of her mouth and started to pray that Charles would not be in a bad mood this evening.

‘Please, dear God, let Daddy be all right,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Please don’t let him be angry. Please protect him and make him into a better person and a better Christian.’

She breathed out in relief and then, as a guilty afterthought, added, ‘And please look after Mummy too.’

The praying was an odd thing. She had started it after being presented at school with a small, red Gideon’s Bible by a visiting speaker who came to tell them stories about long-ago children who had read and prayed each day and ended up living wholesome lives. The idea of this spiritual routine greatly impressed her and she felt excited to have been given a gift without it being her birthday or Christmas, so she left school that day with a favourable opinion of religion and, although neither of her parents went to church, Charlotte had begun to read a passage from her Bible in bed each night before she went to sleep. She liked the way the translucent pages felt underneath her fingers, like tracing paper. She found the ritual stilled her.

From that, it had seemed like a natural progression to start praying, but she knew it wasn’t right to pray for yourself or things you secretly wanted, so she generally asked God to protect her parents and thanked him for a wonderful home when so many others were homeless. Occasionally, she added in a reference to world affairs – the famine in Ethiopia or the terrorist attacks in Northern Ireland. She always remembered the rainforests and the animals in danger of going extinct because she was a member of the World Wildlife Fund and had a panda-shaped membership badge that was one of her most prized possessions. Charlotte found the process of praying extremely calming and often fell asleep in the middle of her recitations, waking up in a state of panic because she had forgotten to mention something that required her attention.

She was still praying – eyes squeezed tightly shut, hands pressed together – when she heard Charles walking up the stairs. She quickly unclenched her hands, the palms sticky with sweat. She was mortified at the thought of her father catching her at it. She knew that he would think it was silly and that she would be unable to explain it to him logically. She knew that he would be more approving if she told him she didn’t believe in God, but she couldn’t do that however desperately she sought Charles’s praise. It would feel wrong, disloyal somehow. It would feel sinful.

Charlotte felt her heart beating more quickly as his steps approached and mentally prepared herself for a polite exchange in which she would have to act gratefully for whatever food he had managed not to incinerate. She felt a tickle at the back of her throat and coughed to dislodge it, but then she couldn’t stop and she was still coughing when Charles walked through the door, crouching so as not to hit his head on the door-frame and precariously holding a tray in two hands. The tray made a clinking sound of trembling crockery.

‘Here we are,’ he said in a self-consciously cheerful voice that didn’t suit him. ‘Sorry it took a while. The first round of toast burnt. I think your mother must have changed the bloody dial setting without telling me.’