Separate Beds (11 page)

Tom gave the toast: ‘Absent friends …’

There it was. The difficult, heart-stopping moment.

You never got over a child’s absence. It was the darkness, perpetually encroaching on the living present.

Tom rounded off the offices with ‘Happy Christmas,’ and held up a glass brimming with excellent claret. ‘And, of course, we must toast the cook.’ At that, he did look at Annie directly, and her breath was trapped deep in her lungs as it was when she climbed uphill.

Once upon a time her life had contained plenitudes – dance, music, deep, passionate emotions, and a quiverful of children. It still did, of course, but the quiver was a third empty.

Partly her fault.

Pinning the card to the noticeboard beside the fridge that evening, Annie murmured, ‘Watch over us.’

Chapter Seven

‘Mr Nicholson … Tom … thank you so much for coming in to see us. We enjoyed talking to you and we discussed your application very seriously.’ The chief executive of the magazine company was verging on elderly, perma-tanned and (Tom would swear) Botoxed.

‘Delighted,’ said Tom, with a sinking feeling. After several interviews such as this one, he was plugged into the vibes.

‘But we think that your experience has been a bit limited.’ The rictus, a.k.a. smile, stretching the CE’s lips would have looked more in place on a piranha. ‘The BBC, admirable though it may be, is a cushioned organization. We need someone who understands the marketplace rough-and-tumble at first hand.’

Tom bit the inside of his cheek.
Why the hell had the headhunter set him up for this? Why the hell had he allowed himself to be put forward? Why the hell had they seen him?
He glanced around at the plate-glass-windowed executive office – it was day thirty-six-without-a-job and he was astounded that his life and his work had arrived at this point. He got to his feet.

‘Naturally I’m sorry, but it was good to meet you.’

‘What’s this?’

Tom had returned home from the unsuccessful job interview, which had left him twitchy and humiliated, and was
arrested in his tracks by the sight of a new, alarmingly expensive range cooker preening itself in the kitchen.

He dumped his briefcase on the table with a bang. ‘Annie, have you gone mad?’

Annie half rose from the table where, if he knew anything, she had been waiting for the storm to break. ‘I think I might have.’

‘I thought we agreed … All the plans for the new kitchen were to be cancelled. You said you’d done it.’

‘We did. I did.’

‘Well, that didn’t arrive here because it just felt like it.’

‘They wouldn’t take the cancellation for the cooker. It was either that or forfeit the deposit.’

Tom glared at the cooker, which appeared to stare back, an assured arrangement of hobs, ovens and warming trivets. ‘You had plenty of time to tell me. Yes? More than enough time to beard me, the unthinking, uncaring dragon, in my den. The
unemployed
dragon. For God’s sake, you must have taken time off work.’

‘Yes. But I also took the decision not to waste our deposit.’

‘Are you sure? Wasn’t it that you wanted the cooker?’ Tom kept his tone even.

‘I wanted it, did I?’ A dangerous look flew into Annie’s eyes.

She was clearly taken aback by the accusation and he went in for the kill. ‘How much?’

She named the sum, and the breath whistled out between his teeth.

He bent down to examine a couple of scratches that had occurred during installation on the cupboards flanking it.

‘It was a lot of money to throw away,’ Annie had also
modified her tone, ‘at any time … but especially if you haven’t got a job.’

‘Throw that in my face, too.’ He straightened up. ‘Go on.’ He moved over to the sink and ran himself a glass of water. ‘This should have been a joint decision.’

‘I suppose so,’ she said indifferently, twisting her mother’s diamond ring around her finger. It was an old habit she indulged when she was tired – or at bay. ‘But I know you’ve got a lot on your plate.’

He pointed to the ring. ‘Bad night?’

She held his gaze, and the unhappiness in her grey eyes had never been so marked. ‘As it happens, yes.’

‘Oven on your conscience?’

Annie spread her hands flat on the table. The ring glittered and she seemed totally absorbed in its beauty. ‘And who didn’t warn me that you were frightened of losing your job? Who went to see the financial consultant without me?’

‘OK. OK. I was out of order.’

He inspected the cooker more thoroughly, and fiddled with a couple of the knobs. ‘You know, they never paint on the markings with long-lasting paint. It’ll wear off.’

‘Is that so?’

He turned on one of the hobs and a hollow popping noise filled the hush. ‘I haven’t told you things because you were unapproachable,’ he confessed. ‘I didn’t want to worry you. You were so busy with the hospital.’

‘I’m sorry you thought like that …’ she was growing angrier ‘… but what do you imagine I’ve had to put up with all these years while you set up camp in the BBC and proceeded to rule the world? You could barely be bothered to come home after the children got bigger.’

When Annie was angry the tip of her nose coloured. Normally the sight amused him. Not this time. ‘No more than your bid to succour the huddled masses. And how well did you look after your family? And, by the way, your nose has turned red.’

Annie looked furious. She hated being reminded of her nose. ‘Who are you to talk? The great communicator who can’t talk to his family properly. You should hear … Jake … on the subject.’ She folded her hands across her chest. ‘I did
not
neglect my children or the family.’

‘This bloody cooker.’ He opened and banged shut the door of the larger oven.

At moments like these Tom deployed the antidote of good memories – sweet ones, funny ones. Anything.

… Spotting Annie walking along the university causeway outside the library building carrying a heavy canvas satchel of books. The sun had been in her eyes, which made her blink. Her hair was piled high on her head, revealing the swoop of tender, unblemished flesh from neck to back, which he loved to touch. When she saw that he was waiting for her, she broke into a smile of such joy and pleasure that he’d thought his heart would crack …

Now he felt a sigh throttle up through him, from a deep, sad place.

Annie dancing. She had loved to dance.
The honeymoon dance
. Ridiculous. Sweet. How often had they made fools of themselves? Being silly, deep into being young … He had told himself he had a duty to dance until dawn, whether he wanted to or not, because his youth would pass.

Youth would pass
.

He had been right. Why didn’t she dance now? Why didn’t he?

Annie looked shattered. ‘You see, we’re at it again.’ She turned her head away. ‘We shouldn’t be. Not now. We should be facing the facts …’

She’s going to tell me it’s all over
. The thought went through Tom, bringing in its wake a physical anguish so biting it winded him. Finish to a marriage that had started out so bravely and jauntily? The subject had been aired between them. When had that been? Ah, yes, when they had quarrelled so bitterly over a ready-made stew Annie had served up at dinner party for Tom’s colleagues. It had not been a good meal, and he had been embarrassed by what he took to mean as her non-caring. He had accused her of not bothering and she had flashed back at him, ‘Do you know the hours I work?’ Added, ‘What happened to the man I married who wouldn’t have cared about the meal?’

Now, he was the one to hit out: ‘What facts? There are no facts, except you’ve bought a cooker we can’t afford and somehow neglected to tell me about it.’

… ‘We should leave each other,’ Annie had told him, as they had faced each other over the empty foil cartons of that disastrous ready-made meal. ‘And each take our bitterness elsewhere …’

‘Tom, I just want to help you sort things out. That’s all. Not quarrel over a cooker.’

… ‘Sorry, sorry’, she’d apologized, when things had calmed down, as she had tamped the cartons into the bin and out of sight …

‘Tom?’ She pulled a strand of her hair straight. ‘Answer me.’

‘Not now, Annie.’ He felt too weary and beaten to respond. ‘Not while I’m like this.’

She bit her lip. ‘No. No, of course not.’

She had been wrong not to tell Tom about the cooker, of course she had, and it piqued her that she had been so high-handed.

‘I shouldn’t have been angry,’ she confided to Sadie on the phone. ‘He needs help. I must be kind. And there are the children to think about.’

‘Here we go,’ said Sadie. The childless Sadie, who had scolded her on more than one occasion for being all things to the family.

‘It’s instinctive,’ Annie endeavoured to explain, ‘and you don’t mind, really. Putting yourself out for good reason has a purpose. It means a lot.’ However, as the children had become adults Annie, who had frequently sacrificed her own comfort for them, felt less sacrificial and a great deal tougher. Something to do with the thinning of her female hormones, which, she gathered, happened as you approached the fifty-straight before hammering down the highway to crotchety and demanding old age like Hermione’s.

But it was no excuse for taking advantage of Tom’s misery.

Sadie was on the case. ‘I expect you’ll be very British and tell me that you’d never kick a man when he’s down and it’s up to you to keep the show on the road.’

‘I don’t want to end not liking myself.’

‘What sort of reason is that?’

‘An important one.’

Annie climbed into bed, arranged the sheet and duvet comfortably around her and picked up a book from the bedside table. She was halfway through a history of the plague, which had excited her interest when she’d spotted it in a bookshop. She laid it on her knees. Once upon a time Tom had read poetry to her last thing at night. She would drowse as he read a Shakespeare sonnet, a sharp and funny Wendy Cope, or a tough, highly wrought piece of Auden or Eliot. The sound of his voice, the occasional flash of his pyjamas between her closed lids, his closeness –
their
closeness – had made her feel safe, and her love for him was almost a physical hurt. Sometimes he laid a hand on her cheek as he read. Sometimes she was curled up against him – and for ever after she associated the poems with Tom’s feel and smell.

She couldn’t remember precisely when it had come to an end. Probably around the time Tom was promoted to section chief – the beginning of his career climb and the gradual erosion of the intense, full-on accord of their early marriage, which had left Annie to bear the brunt of childcare.

Nostalgia for that discarded intimacy was painful. Without it, life seemed bleak and troubling. Without it, the plans she used to make for Tom, herself and the family were empty exercises. She laid the plague book aside, padded over to the door and propped it open. The light from Tom’s room shone under the door and she observed it thoughtfully.

Leaving the door open, she went back to bed, switched off the light and settled down.

Chapter Eight

It was mid-morning and the house was quiet but, Emily fancied, it had become a watchful place. It was as if the spirits of its occupants gathered behind their respective closed doors and listened out for each other.

She clopped downstairs from her room in clogs. Every step was familiar. Having lived here all of her life, Emily knew every grain of the floorboards, every ruck in the carpet. She found it difficult to imagine ever living anywhere else.

In the weeks since her father had been at home, there had been subtle, almost unnoticeable changes, but changes nevertheless. Now there were two of them ensconced at their laptops scouring the net for jobs. Spring was coming and it was growing marginally warmer and, occasionally, when Emily opened her window, where there had been silence she could hear the urgent click-clack of his keyboard directly below hers.

Tapping on her father’s door, she poked her head around it. ‘Hi.’

Tom was at the makeshift desk, which he had contrived with a bit of hammering and a sheet of MDF when he had moved into the room. Unsurprisingly, it was ugly and not very convenient. Piles of books and papers fanned around his feet. The window was open and, when Emily pushed the door wide, the papers threatened lift-off and he grabbed at them.

‘How are you doing, Em?’ He did not look round.

‘Seven applications in …’

Her father swivelled. ‘Who to?’

Emily reeled off a publishing house, a magazine company and a theatrical agency. Plus, the joker in the pack, Condor Oil, who were advertising for an in-house copywriter.

The last had caused her to wake, sweating, in the early hours. What if the near-impossible happened, the arrow hit the target and she found herself at an interview dressed up in office garb?

‘Condor Oil is offering a good salary and benefits.’ The remark was addressed more to herself than to her father.

‘Perhaps I should apply.’ He turned back to the screen.

‘And what are you doing?’

‘Oh, this and that. I’ve been checking up on your grandmother’s investments,’ he said, which surprised Emily for her father rarely discussed the family’s finances with her or Jake. ‘We rely on them to pay for the care home …’

She observed his back and was made aware again that the balance between parent and child was shifting in an alarming manner. The loss of his job had hit him hard, and he seemed so sad and shrunken in spirit. It wasn’t just her imagination that his sweater hung more loosely on him. Until recently, she had considered him pretty much invincible – the father who sat at the head of the table, who whistled in the garden and humped heavy objects around, whose job gave him a moral authority and glamour.

Putting what she hoped was a comforting hand on his shoulder, she bent over to look at the graph displayed on his screen. ‘And what’s this?’

When it came the answer was suspiciously nonchalant. ‘A bit of spread-betting on the banks. Nothing serious.’

‘Banks! You always say you want nothing to do with them.’

Her father’s voice sounded strange. ‘Might as well get some mileage out of the situation. Get one’s own back on the system.’