Scissors, Paper, Stone (30 page)

Charlotte looked at him and smiled. He always sounded unnecessarily formal when he was nervous. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘None of it is your fault. I love you. I wanted you to know why I might be a bit bonkers sometimes.’

‘You’re not bonkers,’ he said with utter seriousness. ‘You’re the finest woman I’ve ever met. It’s the people around you who are bonkers. Christ.’

He started to chew on his fingernails, a horizontal crinkle appearing across his forehead as he thought. ‘Do you think,’ he started uncertainly, and then changed his mind. ‘Forget it, it’s none of my business.’

‘No, what is it?’

‘Tell me to shut up if I don’t know what I’m talking about.’

‘I promise,’ she smiled. ‘I’ve never had a problem telling you when you’re speaking rubbish.’ She took a sip of her coffee and the bitterness felt good in her mouth. She swallowed and could feel the hot liquid slide down her throat.

Gabriel cleared his throat. ‘I feel sorry for your mother,’ he said quietly. ‘What she did was awful – indefensible, even – but it sounds like your father bullied you both and made you act in odd ways and she was just too scared to resist.’

‘Mmm,’ said Charlotte, but she felt her stomach lurch to one side. Gabriel took her hand and kissed her fingertips.

‘Do you know how much I love you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m saying this because I love you. I’m saying this because it’s clear to me that Anne loves you. She loves you so much she can barely live with herself, with the guilt of what she’s done, and that makes her angry and clipped and bitter and someone who finds fault with everything around her.’

‘So why did she just ignore it?’ said Charlotte, and the effort of voicing the question that had haunted her for so many years made her shiver. She stared at the ceiling, her eyes tracing a crack in the plaster so that she did not have to look at him. She did not want to have to admit her own vulnerability. She was tired of crying. ‘Who would do that to their child?’

‘I don’t know, my darling. But perhaps she thought that was what you wanted.’ He fell into a brief silence. ‘Like I said, I haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Charlotte, because it was easier than saying anything else. She wanted to change the subject. ‘You know,’ she said quickly. ‘I feel so much better having told you.’

And it was true: she felt a calmness, a sense of sureness about herself that she had never before possessed. Although barely twenty-four hours had passed since her visit to the hospital, she felt her perspective had shifted dramatically. It seemed risible to her now that she had ever questioned her relationship with Gabriel when it offered her such unconditional love. It seemed, all at once, as though the answer to the past was not the past itself, but rather the future that she would build on her own terms. The future that was hers and Gabriel’s. Her parents had chosen their lives. Now, perhaps, she could choose hers.

It was such an obvious conclusion that she laughed – at her own blinkered stupidity, at her good fortune, at the joy of having this man in bed beside her.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Nothing.’

She put her coffee mug on the floor and then leaned over to kiss him.

Anne

Anne started the morning full of good intentions. She woke at 6.30, the muffled sunlight casting lemon-yellow shapes across her white duvet. From beyond the fabric blind, patterned with faint blue pastoral scenes, she could tell it was going to be a clear, warm day and this filled her with a cautious feeling of hopefulness.

As she got up, Anne found that she had unconsciously flung one arm outwards in her sleep, on to Charles’s side of the bed, and this troubled her. For weeks, she had kept faithfully to her edge of the mattress. This subtle but indelible encroachment of his space seemed somehow symbolic. She still had not made a decision about the conversation with Dr Lewis.

She swatted the thought away as she took off her nightdress and started thinking about all the things she would get done: she would finish painting the study; she would clear out the kitchen cupboards; she would start eating more healthily in a bid to lose a few pounds; she would take the car in for its MOT; she would talk to Charlotte.

The last of these duties loomed large and grey over everything else, giving her a feeling of almost perpetual unease and a shrinking sense of guilt that spread over her like liquid wax. Occasionally, she found she had forgotten all about it while doing some menial task like weeding the garden. Anne would be kneeling down on the slim padded green cushion, digging into the beds with a rusty trowel, and then suddenly remember there was something she should be feeling bad about. What was it? Oh yes, that was it: she had to make amends to her only child for being an emotional failure as a mother.

But by the time she had made herself breakfast – a slice of wholemeal toast with low-fat butter – and got the rollers and brushes out to do a second coat of emulsion on the study walls, Anne found herself overcome with an uncharacteristic lassitude. She sat on the sofa in the drawing room in her paint-spattered old jeans and one of Charles’s work shirts that had a frayed collar and an un-repaired hole under the armpit. It all seemed a bit pointless. She could feel a mild depression settle round her shoulders; a weighed-down sensation of slowness and self-pity. It gave her vision a glittering, uncomfortable clarity, like the start of a migraine.

Before the depression had a chance to take hold, Anne grabbed the car keys and drove to a nearby organic deli with the intention of stocking up on delicious, nutrient-packed provisions to kick-start her new healthier lifestyle. She almost never bought food there because of the shop’s overriding smugness. Each time she went in, she found herself muttering under her breath at the deliberately homely writing on the blackboards, advertising fair-trade quinoa grains at some outrageously high price and the free samples of blueberry smoothie sourced from an ecologically sustainable farmer in Suffolk.

This time was no different. Almost as soon as she got through the door, a cheery-faced sales assistant in a canvas brown apron offered her a cocktail stick pierced through a tiny sliver of purple broccoli.

‘No thanks,’ said Anne, unsmiling. ‘I like my broccoli green.’

The sales assistant laughed ingratiatingly. Anne walked on up the aisle, pulling behind her a shopping basket that had to be tugged like a trolley rather than carried in the normal manner. She wanted some fresh tomatoes and feta cheese to make a salad for lunch, but when she got to the cheese fridge, a pregnant woman with a dual buggy was standing in front, making it impossible to reach past. The woman was wearing a long, floating cardigan that looked expensive and sheepskin-lined boots that fitted snugly over her jeans. Her face bore an expression of worn privilege and self-satisfaction. ‘Millie, don’t do that,’ she drawled to one of the two blonde-haired toddlers in the buggy, who was poking the frosted edge of the lower shelf with her chubby finger.

Anne waited patiently, expecting the woman to realise she was there and move apologetically to one side. Instead, the woman spent several minutes trying to remember what cheese it was she wanted, rubbing her protruding belly absent-mindedly as she did so, and talking to her children in half-hearted tones. Anne felt herself seethe inwardly.

It was never like this when Charlotte was little, she thought. People simply had babies and then got on with it. They didn’t indulge them. They didn’t worry about pelvic floor exercises and yogic breathing and the possibilities of giving birth in paddling pools. They didn’t expect any special treatment and they didn’t spoil their children with excess attention and organic food and computer games designed to simulate tennis matches. They didn’t dress them in Oxfam-approved cotton and drive them around in safety seats strapped into the back of 4X4s with one of those nauseating yellow triangles suckered on to the back windscreen announcing the fact that there was a ‘Baby on Board’. And they didn’t expect everyone else to tiptoe around them, oozing gratitude for their astonishing ability to procreate.

They would have moved to let someone else get to a supermarket shelf.

The anger flickered dangerously in the pit of her stomach. She could feel herself about to give into it and had the overwhelming urge to lash out, to slap this woman in the face. But her rage dissipated almost as soon as she acknowledged it. She stepped back, impotent. Anne dropped her basket on the floor and walked out of the shop. The woman with the buggy turned round lazily, her glazed bovine eyes momentarily startled.

As Anne strode hurriedly towards the car, she found herself thinking about the mother in the shop. She wondered if that was where she had gone wrong with Charlotte. Was it that she had never paid her enough attention? Was she too concerned with Charles, too in love with him still, too obsessed with keeping his emotions on an even keel, too desperate to grab hold of the wayward threads that were un-spooling in front of her? Was that why it had happened? Was protecting the appearance of her marriage more important to her than helping her only child?

Anne had never told Charlotte that she loved her but that was not because she didn’t: it was that she hadn’t wanted her to be spoilt. The obviousness of her love seemed so self-evident that it would have been decadent to voice it. And now it was too late: Anne felt too much to be able to express it, to be able to cut through the decades of pent-up silence. She regretted not having told her earlier. She regretted it all.

The mildness of the day surprised her as she got into the driver’s seat. She felt herself break out into a sweat, the heat prickling uncomfortably down her back and gathering in a moistness at the nub of her backbone.

And then, she found herself internally voicing the unmentionable thought that she had stifled for years; a thought that cowered in the corners of her mind like the shadow of a coiled animal waiting to spring. Was it that she craved her husband’s love more than her daughter’s? Had she spent the last three decades desperately chasing the impossible, desperately attempting to make a man incapable of human warmth return her embittered love? Was that what her life had amounted to?

She already knew, in those slivered moments where she chose to acknowledge the truth, that Charles had never loved her, not really. But as she turned the key in the ignition, she realised with a shudder of hopelessness that Charlotte would never to be able to love her enough. Not now. Not given the things she had done. The things she had never said.

Instead of heading back home, Anne found herself driving into town, speeding down the Cromwell Road, surrounded by the thundering roar of lorries and grimy white vans. She turned right after the 24-hour Tesco, a giant edifice of fibreglass and concrete, filled with airless strip-lighting. Inside, she could make out the mini people pushing shopping trolleys who looked as if they never left the building but simply kept walking round and round on an endless loop, lulled by the oblivion of battered groceries and the dead-eyed swiping of checkout attendants.

She pulled up outside a brick building set back from a large roundabout, its windows covered with a greenish reflective sheen. She walked into the reception area. A red-haired girl of improbable lushness smiled at her, her glossy lips splitting like a nectarine segment sliced away from its stone.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Yes, I’m here to see Charlotte Redfern,’ said Anne. ‘She works at Finch & Bartlebury.’

‘Of course. And your name is?’

‘I’m her mother.’

The receptionist laughed tightly. ‘Oh, right. I’ll call through now. Take a seat,’ and she gestured gracefully at a series of brown leather cubes scattered around a glass table strewn with magazines.

Anne perched herself on top of one of the cubes, feeling acutely the lack of back support. Smartly dressed men in pressed shirts and women in spindly heels walked past her, each one an embodiment of youthful glamour and blow-dried style. They looked like extras in an advertisement for shaving cream or shampoo. Anne was embarrassed to realise that she was still wearing her ragged old painting clothes. She tried to cross her legs as elegantly as she could, but it was difficult to keep her balance on the cube and she felt uncomfortably out of place, as if she were a domestic tabby cat trying to fit in with a sleek tribe of jungle panthers.

She began to think it had been a bad idea coming here. She had worked herself up into a lather about nothing. She should pull herself together, take a few deep breaths, walk up to the receptionist and say that she had changed her mind, that she would come back later, then she could drive home without upsetting the soothingly predictable pattern of the day. She could deal with this all some other time. After all, they had dealt with worse things in the past by accepting them wordlessly and moving on in the spirit of shared compromise, hadn’t they? Sometimes, she told herself firmly, silence was the best way to cope.

Anne was just about to stand up and apologise to the redhead when she saw Charlotte walking out of the lift across the lobby. She felt her heart thud as she recognised her daughter: tall, lovely and yet still ineffably Charlotte, with her wavy hair, the harassed crinkle between her eyes and the rapid walk that indicated she was late, again. And yet, something had changed. There was, thought Anne, a self-possession about her daughter that she had not seen before, a sense of inner certainty. Perhaps it was simply seeing her in a professional context for the first time, but she looked both utterly the same and yet entirely different. She seemed – Anne searched for the right word – she seemed somehow calm, sure of where she was going.