Scissors, Paper, Stone (31 page)

The difference between this Charlotte and the Charlotte of a few weeks before was striking. It was not until this moment, in the lobby of this anonymous office building, that Anne realised how anxious Charlotte had been for months up to this point, how her shoulders had always been tense when she saw her, how her eyes had appeared strained, as if searching for something on a faraway horizon that she would never quite reach. Anne found herself blinking back tears. Why had she not noticed the muscled tautness of her daughter’s unhappiness before now? How had she not known that Charlotte could be this poised? What had changed? Her daughter looked, for the first time, not just pretty but beautiful.

‘Hi, Mum.’

‘Hello, Charlotte.’ Anne found she could not say anything else but just stood there, in her paint-spattered clothes with her greying hair tied back roughly with an elastic band and minimal make-up on her face, staring at her radiant daughter in total wonderment. How had she produced this fabulous creature? Charlotte was staring at her, her mouth set in a thin, unsmiling line.

‘This is a surprise. What are you doing here?’

‘I thought . . .’ Anne had no idea what to say. ‘I thought I could take you for lunch. If you’re not busy.’

‘Mum, it’s only 11.30.’

‘An early lunch, then. Or a coffee.’ Charlotte turned her head towards the big clock behind reception and checked it against her watch. She was wearing a silky pale peach-coloured top, the short sleeves lightly puffed at the shoulder like the wisp of a meringue. Anne noticed that the eczema on her arms had cleared up.

‘OK,’ said Charlotte. ‘But I’ve got to be back by 12.15.’

Anne saw that she was still not smiling and this gave her face an unnaturally surly appearance, as if she were concentrating hard on not giving anything away. Anne knew that look well: it was exactly what she had been like when doing her homework or when she was upset about something but not saying what it was. Anne had always thought the best thing to do when faced with Charlotte’s episodes of pensive cloudiness was to give her space until it passed. Perhaps, Anne thought now, she had been wrong. Perhaps this distance had been misinterpreted as callousness.

She reached out without thinking and placed the palm of her hand against the gentle curve of Charlotte’s cheek. It was warm to the touch, soft beneath the tips of her fingers. Charlotte looked momentarily shocked and then turned her face away, embarrassed.

‘There’s a café round the corner we can go to,’ she said, as if nothing had happened, and then she started to walk towards the door. Anne followed her, half-running to keep up with her long stride. She was unsure of what Charlotte was thinking and felt unsettled, almost panicked, about this unfamiliar uncertainty.

The café was old-fashioned, with cracked formica-topped tables and a blackboard advertising cups of tea for 40p. Almost all of the tables were occupied by large men in high-visibility bibs eating fry-ups and leafing through copies of the
Sun
. A few of them seemed to be speaking in Polish, their conversation peppered with guttural laughs and rolled Rs. The front window was fogging up with condensation. Behind the counter, a rotund middle-aged man and woman in matching aprons were taking orders.

‘Yes, love?’ said the woman as Charlotte approached to order.

‘Mum, what do you want?’

‘Oh, um,’ Anne felt herself begin to tip over into a slight panic. She felt foolish.

‘Mum?’ Charlotte was looking at her impatiently.

‘Do they do herbal tea?’

Charlotte rolled her eyes. ‘No.’

‘I’ll just have a normal tea, then, thanks. Milk, one sugar.’

‘The sugar’s on the table,’ said Charlotte dismissively, waving towards the chrome-topped shakers filled with yellowing grains.

‘So it is.’

Gingerly, Anne picked her way through the burly men and the clattering chairs until she found a small table in the corner. She slid on to a chair, carefully ensuring that her handbag strap was looped around one of the legs to prevent any theft. She twisted her hands on her lap as she waited, not wanting to touch any of the sticky-looking surfaces and not quite knowing what she should say. She felt her heart flutter nervously as Charlotte came across, carefully balancing two steaming mugs of tea.

‘Here you go.’ Charlotte passed her the tea, still unsmiling.

‘Thank you.’ Anne took a sip and burned the roof of her mouth with the scalding liquid. There was a protracted silence.

‘What are you doing here, Mum?’

Anne coughed lightly. ‘We haven’t spoken since . . .’

‘Since I came round on Wednesday.’

‘Yes, exactly and I suppose I wanted . . .’ she trailed off and let the sentence hang incompletely between them. She stared into her mug and brought it up to her lips so that she could see the shadowy contours of her hairline reflected in the murky brown as she drank the tea. Charlotte was looking at her coolly, her arms crossed. For a few seconds, Anne did not know what the dull ache was in her chest and then she realised she was frightened and that this sensation was slicked with a wet coating of sadness.

‘I suppose . . .’ Anne began softly, and the words choked out of her so that it felt as though someone were pressing down on her windpipe. She focused on her mug of tea, refusing to meet Charlotte’s gaze. ‘I wanted to say sorry.’

There was a long silence. Anne chewed her lip, determined to stop herself from crying. She wanted to say so much more but the air seemed to have hissed out of her lungs like a leaking tyre and she could not find the strength she needed to continue. She poured more sugar into her tea. The grains made a soothing sound as they slid gloopily into the liquid. Finally, she lifted her head and looked at her daughter. She was terrified that she would be met by anger or judgement or – worse – contempt, but instead Charlotte was gazing at her levelly and her eyes were softened by something approaching kindness.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, this time more loudly, although her mouth was dry. Anne’s face was clammy. She took a thin paper napkin from the table dispenser and patted her cheeks with it. The napkin felt strangely plastic and unyielding on her flesh. When she moved it away, she noticed that a streak of leftover foundation had made an orangey smear across the white.

Still Charlotte said nothing, and her silence seemed to contain both an accusation and an opportunity for penitence.

Anne thought back to that day, she thought back through the confusion of months and years, she thought back through the hints and implications, the never-quite-mentioned awfulness of it, she thought of Charles and how much she had loved him, how stupidly she had been unable to stop even when she believed he was a monster. She thought how much she had been able to forgive, she thought of the shock, the terrible, numbing, nauseating shock of that single moment in time.

She thought of turning and walking down the road, away from the car, away from the tears of her child and the strange, warped power of her husband, and she felt sickened by what she had done. She felt guilt; intense, painful, undiluted guilt, a guilt that bored into the heart of her like a drill pushing through a tender piece of earth, twisting into the depths of the soil towards a dark, viscous trickle of oil.

She was scared. Scared of what Charlotte thought of her and scared, most of all, of what she had done. She was scared of admitting her own awful liability in case it revolted her; in case she could no longer live with herself, with the knowledge of her own culpability. She was scared of how thoroughly she had convinced herself that she had done the right thing, of how she had been able to live for all these years by constructing a pretence so convincing that it became a substitute for her own feelings. She was scared at what she had become: a hollowed-out space filled with disillusionment.

She knew that she had turned into a person who could be bitter and mean and devoid of emotion. She could be cruel. But she also knew that it had all been the consequence of wanting to defend herself, of wanting to defend her family – such as it was – and, most of all, of wanting to protect her daughter by ensuring she never made the same mistakes. Charlotte would never waste herself on a brutal man; she would never define her life around the vortex of someone else’s power.

It had all been done for love. All of it.

How could she express all this here, in this café, with these Polish builders, surrounded by the lingering smell of frying grease?

‘Go on,’ said Charlotte, and her daughter stretched her arm out across the table and took Anne’s hand in her own. Anne felt the tears begin to stream down her cheeks.

‘I’m sorry for not helping you,’ she said, gulping for air in between quiet sobs, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had cried so much, so visibly and so uncontrollably. ‘I’m so so sorry, Charlotte. I did what I thought was best and I know how pathetic that sounds, how awful you must have felt when I walked away from the car that time but . . .’ She broke off. ‘You see, I don’t think I can be a very good person. I’m certainly not a natural mother. I thought I would be, I thought having a baby would make me complete and happy. I thought it would take away all the other stuff, that it would bring me and Charles closer together. It’s such a cliché, I know. But there you are. That was what I thought.’

‘And it didn’t happen like that?’

‘No,’ said Anne, wiping her nose. ‘But I loved you so very much, Charlotte, from the day you were born. You must believe that.’ She looked at her daughter desperately.

‘I do,’ Charlotte said softly. ‘I do.’

‘It’s just . . . he was impossible to live with. I lost myself. I lost my strength, my own sense of what was normal. I couldn’t do anything right so I chose not to do anything at all, and I know you bore the brunt of it but I was frightened and I was helpless because I didn’t want him to leave and I can’t explain it. I can’t explain why I still love him.’

‘You don’t have to,’ said Charlotte calmly. ‘He has a power over us. He always will. We want to be loved by him to the exclusion of everything else.’ She paused. ‘Or at least, we did.’

Anne looked up.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, he’s no longer a threat to us. He can’t do anything. He can’t show us love or remove it. I don’t miss him any more. It took me a long time but I don’t. I have Gabriel.’

‘Really?’ asked Anne, as if she couldn’t quite believe it. ‘I hadn’t realised how strongly you felt about him.’

‘I know. You made that perfectly clear.’

Anne lifted Charlotte’s hand up to her face and pressed it against her damp cheek, inhaling the faint scent of her perfume: figs and summer blossom and the headiness of wild thyme. ‘But only because I was worried about you. Only because I didn’t want the same thing to happen that had happened to me.’

Charlotte took her hand away, but gently so that it didn’t feel like a rejection. She crossed her arms on the table and dropped her eyes so that they focused on the grubby linoleum floor pattern.

‘You know,’ she said finally. ‘You should have spoken to me about it. About that day, I mean.’

Anne bit her lower lip so hard that she began to taste the metallic tang of blood in her mouth. She noticed that she had stopped crying and she dabbed underneath her eyes with the tips of her fingers.

‘I should have done,’ she said after a few seconds’ pause, her voice steady. ‘I suppose I didn’t for purely selfish reasons. I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened. I wanted to move on and ignore it and I thought we all could.’

‘But weren’t you worried about me?’ said Charlotte, her voice breaking. ‘Didn’t you think I could have been . . . harmed?’

‘No.’ The bald admission surprised them both. ‘I knew he wouldn’t take things further than a certain point,’ said Anne. ‘He was too clever. And he loved you too much. That was part of the problem, you see. Between him and me, I mean.’

Anne let the thought expand to fill the space between them. ‘And he was better after that,’ she continued. ‘He mellowed. He became more considerate. He had fewer dalliances. He never did anything like that again to you, did he?’

‘No.’

‘I told him that if he did I’d leave him and take you with me. He couldn’t bear the thought of it.’

‘Of losing you?’

‘No,’ said Anne, looking straight into her daughter’s clear blue eyes. ‘Of losing you.’

Charles

He felt like crying. There was a shadow he couldn’t quite make out, a black velvet swirl, unfurling like an explosive inkiness in a glass of water. He was trying to reach for it with his hands but he found he couldn’t move his arms. It was the most beautiful blackness. It seemed to be teasing him, dipping and rising before his eyes, coming close to him, almost close enough to feel, and then slipping away in a smooth, ever-shifting calligraphy.

If only he could just reach out and touch it . . . if only he had the strength to reach out and hold its softness in his hands and feel its precious warmth against him, feel the liquid blackness of it dripping through his fingers like slow-moving silt.

He wanted to cover himself in the blackness. If only he could get to it, lose himself in it, he knew it would make him better. He knew it was the answer to some question he no longer remembered.

He stretched forward and strained with all his might but still his arms would not move and the mesmerising shape gradually receded out of his line of vision, losing focus and solidity and dissipating into a thousand night-coloured granules.