Scissors, Paper, Stone (21 page)

‘Don’t swear, darling,’ said Anne, witheringly. ‘It doesn’t suit you.’

‘Don’t call me darling,’ Charlotte countered. ‘It doesn’t suit you.’

‘I really don’t know why you’re so upset. You turn up, unannounced, in the middle of a weekday when you should be at work. You storm in and then you expect me to answer all sorts of personal questions –’

‘It’s not just about you, though, is it, Mum?’

‘My marriage is absolutely about me,’ said Anne with a stiff control. ‘It is about me and about Charles and it always has been.’

‘No, Mum, no,’ said Charlotte and her voice rose just as the tears started to trickle down her cheeks. ‘It was about me too. That’s the whole point.’

Without thinking, Anne stretched out her hand to wipe away the wetness from her daughter’s face.

‘Don’t touch me,’ said Charlotte, her voice hoarse. ‘Just don’t.’ She picked up her bag and walked out of the kitchen and Anne could hear the click-clack of her smart work shoes against the hallway floor and she knew Charlotte was walking away from her and yet there was something that stopped her following. She let her go. The front door slammed. The ham sandwich lay uneaten on the sideboard.

Anne picked up the butter knife, still greasy and smeared with yellow, and hurled it across the kitchen. Its handle thumped on the cupboard door beneath the sink. The knife rebounded, skittering across the red tiled floor before coming to a stop a few inches from her foot. She looked at it lying there for a long while.

Charlotte walked out of the house in tears, her breath coming in uneven, sobbing spurts. She hated crying in the street like this, hated feeling so pathetic and helpless. She had no tissue with her – it was the sort of thing Gabriel always had, neatly folded in his jacket pocket – so she had to wipe her face with the edge of her sleeve and this childish gesture made her feel even worse. She couldn’t understand how her mother could be so cold and simultaneously so desperate to be close to her. She knew that Anne loved her with a claustrophobic, almost cloying intensity but she also knew that this didn’t come naturally to her mother – rather, it was something Anne had acquired in the last few years as the realisation dawned that she hadn’t given Charlotte enough affection when it most counted. Never naturally tactile, Anne had taken to touching her at every opportunity – attempted hugs; uncomfortable kisses on the cheek; a tentative stroke of the arm that felt so horribly premeditated it made Charlotte shiver with a sort of distaste. It all seemed so insincere, as if Anne were trying to make up for lost time by giving her daughter all the built-up love at once; as if someone on a diet had denied themselves what they most desired for years and then, one day, decided to gorge on chocolate and litres of full-fat cream.

But co-existing with all this mad love was Anne’s startling capacity to remove herself, to choose detachment when faced with too much truth. Was it a defence mechanism? Maybe, thought Charlotte, but how could she stand it when her own daughter was standing there, crying, asking her for help?

By the time she got to her car, Charlotte had wiped away most of her tears and was able to see clearly enough to get the key into the door. She took a few deep breaths and told herself to calm down. It had been a curious lunchbreak, she thought to herself dryly: first the shock of seeing Maya, then that sudden serrated glimpse of long-forgotten memory, then the strange confrontation with her mother. No wonder she felt overwrought. She must try to collect her thoughts before returning to the office. She sniffed loudly.

‘Charlotte?’

She turned, half-expecting to see her mother standing behind her, arms outstretched in apology. But instead, it was Janet, dressed in a vast grey poncho that appeared to be made out of the sort of thick, South American wool sold in craft market stalls labelled ‘alpaca’. Janet, short and plump, seemed almost drowned in it. Only her round head and stocky legs protruded. The sight of her, with her uncertain smile and kind eyes and her ludicrous clothes, instantly made Charlotte feel better.

‘Janet,’ she said, hoping it was not obvious she had been crying. ‘How are you?’

‘Oh I’m fine, thank you.’ Janet beamed. ‘Have you popped in to see your Mum?’

‘Yes. There was a board meeting at work, so I, um, had a few hours spare.’

Janet nodded her head, her watery blue eyes never leaving Charlotte’s face. ‘That’s nice of you,’ she said. ‘I’m sure Anne really appreciated it.’

Charlotte snorted. ‘I don’t think so.’

Janet looked perplexed and then, without a word, an arm jutted out from beneath the capacious grey folds and she took Charlotte’s hand in hers. Janet was wearing thick, fingerless gloves and the wool felt scratchy against Charlotte’s skin, but not unpleasantly so. In fact, there was something about that simple gesture that was exactly right: just reassuring enough. Charlotte smiled.

‘It must be such an awful time for you,’ Janet said. And then, after a moment: ‘I hope Gabriel is looking after you?’

Charlotte was surprised that Janet remembered his name. She had never spoken about him to her. Her mother must have said something. She was obscurely touched that Janet had made the small effort to remember his name and to get it right.

‘Yes. He is. He’s been really great.’

‘That’s good. I’m so glad you have someone like that in your life – someone kind and supportive.’

There was a small silence.

‘Your mother loves you very much,’ said Janet, so softly that her words were almost blown away on the breeze, ‘even though I know she doesn’t always show it.’

Charlotte looked at her, both disconcerted and comforted by Janet’s atypical outspokenness. What an extraordinary thing to say, thought Charlotte. This woman whom she had always half-dismissed as a bit of a joke, a perfectly pleasant sort of busybody, a nice, lonely middle-aged woman on the lookout for friends, but not one that Charlotte would ever have imagined possessed this sort of insight. Perhaps she had underestimated her.

‘Anyway,’ Janet said, dropping Charlotte’s hand and briskly rearranging her poncho. ‘You and Gabriel must come round for dinner when you have a free evening.’

‘I’d like that,’ said Charlotte and she realised that she meant it. ‘I’d really like that.’

Janet was conspicuously thrilled. ‘Wonderful, wonderful! You let me know some dates that would suit you and I’ll get Anne round and we can make a night of it. I’m so glad I ran into you like this – I’ve been meaning to ask for ages.’

‘I’m glad too.’

‘Well,’ said Janet, stroking the front of her poncho as if smoothing down bobbles of fluff. ‘Well,’ she said again. A shaft of sunlight appeared from the drizzle-grey sky and glinted off the side of Janet’s spectacles.

‘I’d best get back to the office, Janet, but it was lovely to see you.’

‘You too, Charlotte. Drive carefully.’

Janet stood on the pavement as she got into the car. Charlotte waved at her through the windscreen and when she drove away, she could see Janet still standing there, a small grey blob of familiarity gradually receding into the distance.

Anne; Charles

The Trenemans were having a wine and cheese party. Anne had secretly been dreading the evening for several weeks, ever since Cynthia Treneman had popped round and knocked on the door, shouting ‘yoohoo’ in her irritatingly piercing sing-song. ‘Just wondering if you and Charles can make it round for a little soirée we’re planning,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be a wine and cheese evening. Terribly sophisticated!’ She laughed with a shrill tinkle. Anne tried to laugh along with her, but found that the smile stuck on her lips.

She had said yes to Cynthia because it was generally viewed as ‘the done thing’ to be sociable on this street. The neighbours, who were all young-marrieds with small or about-to-exist children, prided themselves on their extended friendship group. They turned up faithfully to bridge nights and birthdays, to dinner parties and housewarmings, to weekend barbeques and ironically themed Hallowe’en evenings. The same faces, smiling, smiling, chatting, chatting, holding glasses of tepid wine and making the same familiar jokes as if trying to convince each other they were still happy and urbane and cosmopolitan, still capable of drunkenness and flirtation and the unthinking excesses of youth, still at the heart of a swinging social scene when, in actual fact, they were like flies trapped in honey, sliding into the sticky morass of suburban normality.

Cynthia was a small, busty woman who wore twinsets in varying shades of pastel, always neatly accessorised with a single string of pearls, and discreetly dyed hair. She spoke in a series of exclamation marks and laughed through her teeth. When Charles and Anne had first moved to this street in Kew shortly after returning from their honeymoon, it had been Cynthia Treneman who was the first to introduce herself, bringing with her a bottle of Blue Nun wrapped up in tissue paper that appeared to be fragranced with a cloying floral scent.

‘To help you settle in,’ Cynthia had said, each syllable weighted down with an ingratiating meaningfulness. ‘Welcome to Carlton Avenue!’

Charles thanked her so profusely that Anne could not help groaning inwardly at his obvious insincerity, but Cynthia was charmed. Soon she was giggling and slapping his arm playfully with her bejewelled hand. ‘Stop it!’ Cynthia screeched, apropos of nothing in particular. ‘You’re so naughty! Oh, Anne, how do you cope with him?’

Not all that successfully, Anne thought to herself dryly. In the weeks and months since their wedding, Charles had increasingly set himself apart from her, becoming more and more aloof with each day that passed. It was not that he was unkind, exactly, it was just that he seemed to have no particular desire to spend much time in her company. At weekends, he would occasionally disappear for the day without explanation, returning for supper in a state of contained agitation. He would sit down at the table and eat vast quantities of food, washed down with glugs of wine, refusing to speak until he had finished, as if recharging himself. On one occasion, she had noticed small green burrs stuck to the back of his tweed jacket and she wondered if he had been walking somewhere in the countryside. On another, he had scaled the façade of the house and entered through the attic window. Anne had screamed when he appeared in the kitchen, terrified that he was a burglar.

‘Did you forget your keys?’ she asked, her hands shaking.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I just felt like showing it could be done.’

But at times, he could be extremely affectionate, surprising her with a sudden kiss between the shoulder blades as she washed up or presenting her with a small blue jewellery box containing a silver bracelet engraved with their initials. Both the disappearances and the demonstrative gestures came equally out of the blue so that, afterwards, Anne would always wonder if she had invented them. There was a randomness to his behaviour that she could never understand.

For the most part, Anne had learned not to question his mysterious absences for fear of pushing Charles further away or angering him unnecessarily. Instead, she convinced herself that all married couples needed their own space. The best that she could do for Charles was to allow him his and to be there when he came back. Besides, she reasoned, he was the breadwinner and he needed to be able to relax on his own terms – his job in the city was time-consuming and pressurised and allowed them both to live in four-bedroomed, red-bricked splendour within walking distance of Kew Gardens.

The house was Victorian and sat squatly on its haunches, set back from the road by a small patio dotted with stone flower tubs. The front door was patterned with dusky panels of stained glass and opened on to a tiled hallway. Off to the left, a green-carpeted sitting room with a bay window was dominated by a large fireplace and over-plumped sofas. The kitchen had a cream Aga along one wall and French doors opening on to a long stretch of lawn.

Anne had never entirely shaken the feeling of being a stranger here. The proportions of the house were so vast that it felt like being a child playing make-believe adult games, but Charles had insisted they would need the space when they started having children.

‘It’s a family home,’ he said confidently when the estate agent showed them round.

Anne smiled with acquiescence. She attributed the slight shiver she sensed on her skin when she walked the corridors to the fact that the house was filled with other people’s furnishings. It would be far more homely once she’d been able to make it her own.

But even after they’d moved in, Anne discovered that the sofa she bought at John Lewis – a neat two-seater upholstered in a cheerful, floral pattern – was swamped by the largeness of the sitting room. The comfortable armchair that her parents had given her, inherited from some long-lost aunt with a taste for battered leather, suffered a similar fate: it looked like doll’s house furniture in a giant’s home. In the end, the sitting room stayed more or less as it had been – green and grand and yet simultaneously stuffy, like a cordoned-off museum piece in a stately home – and neither of them used it much unless they had people round. It started to radiate the unmistakable mustiness of abandonment, the slightly stale scent of wood polish and damp carpets. The chintz sofa ended up in the kitchen. The leather armchair, Anne put in the smallest bedroom that doubled up as Charles’s study.

They had been living there for eight months and, in that time, had hosted only two social events for their neighbours, which Anne knew was generally regarded as a disappointing performance average. Most couples around here managed one dinner party every other month, interspersed with less formal gatherings where not-quite fashionable music would be played on record players and the food would consist of cocktail sticks threaded with cubes of cheese and pineapple. Of the two, Anne much preferred the latter because she knew they never lasted as long – it was perfectly acceptable to ‘make an appearance’ at one of these drinks parties before insisting one had to be somewhere else – but with dinner parties, Charles tended to linger into the early hours, getting progressively drunker and more sociable as the evening wore on, so that she often found herself hanging around far longer than she intended, attempting to catch his eye in a meaningful fashion that would not be interpreted as rudeness by the other guests. The evenings were never as fun as she was meant to find them.