Separate Beds (3 page)

Her plate was almost empty but Tom had barely touched his. ‘You eat so fast, Annie,’ she could hear him say. These days it was a criticism, but once upon a time he might have added sweetly, lustfully, ‘More time, then, for other things.’ On that one, Sadie took Tom’s side, saying, with that characteristic little shake of her blonde head, ‘If you chew each mouthful fifty-two times you remain slim. It’s simple.’ What planet did these fifty-two-times chewers inhabit? Didn’t they have jobs or small children? How was it possible to spend so much of the day masticating?

More time for other things
… Like everything else, sex had its flowerings and nadirs. The long, delicious, subterranean episodes under duvets with Tom … or the wilder ones outside, when taking risks was easy, necessary even. The snatched, urgent, shuddery coming together while babies napped. Much later on, the perfunctory performances when Tom and she literally gasped for sleep, not orgasm, which always made them laugh. The gradual erosion of their emotional connection in favour of purely physical
sensation … then the gradual erosion of desire for each other. Then, since Mia … nothing. Or, rather, nothing truthful or meaningful. Or comforting or sustaining.

‘Sorry about the meal.’ Annie put down her knife and fork. ‘I didn’t have the energy to make anything. Hope you don’t mind.’

He didn’t look up. ‘I don’t expect you to cook.’

‘No, but I realize it’s expensive buying ready-made.’ She willed him to look up. ‘Tom, that’s one of the reasons I thought the kitchen needed a face-lift. It would prod me into action and I know you prefer homemade food.’

Impossible to place when exactly Annie had stopped enjoying being in the kitchen. Three children and a career had killed the urge to cook creatively (all that running around sourcing organic this and that). Then Mia had gone. Or was it that the overload in the media about cooking and cooks made her cross? Time was, she had immersed herself in the, frankly, almost pornographic prose of the best cookery writers, who described the texture of flaky pastry or the aroma of almond with precise and aching sensuality. She had read them, admired them but, when the going was tough, chucked them aside in favour of Mother’s Little Helper: the ready-made meal.

Time gone.

Have you, Annie Nicholson, taken happiness, sexual satiation and partnership for granted? Guilty as charged. She had taken for granted that, provided one stuck to the rules more or less,
things would be all right
. When they hadn’t been, the heart had gone out of her for cooking and suchlike. Furthermore, she suspected Tom felt the same. She must ask him. She really must ask him. Some time.

Tom was struggling with a forkful. Too much wine, she thought. It always took his appetite away. He had got what he wanted –
the job
– and the material advantages with it, but it hadn’t left him unscathed.

‘Tom,’ she said, out of the blue, ‘has it all been worth it?’

His head reared up. ‘Not now, Annie. Please.’

She speared a final flake of chicken on her fork and tried again: ‘About the new kitchen. It’s going to be nasty for a few days while they fit the units and I certainly won’t be able to cook. But we can go out to eat. Or we can have a good lunch at our office canteens and just snack in the evening.’

Annie couldn’t be sure, but had he winced?

In a few days’ time (the schedule having been carefully worked out so that it would be ready by Easter, the pleasant, slightly ramshackle kitchen, with its large table and creaky sofa, was due for evisceration. Fashionable Shaker units in pale cream would be installed, plus an immensely expensive French range cooker. With the latter, the salesman had pointed out chattily, it was possible to cook for ten, twenty … No problem.

Cooking for twenty? Had she lost her wits lusting over its gleaming hob, its cast-iron trivets and two ovens? She had no desire to cook even for one. It was going to be, she had told Sadie a trifle hysterically, the equivalent of the most expensive hostess trolley ever.

Tom’s glass was empty, and he helped himself to the last of the wine. ‘Annie …’

She stiffened. He sounded choked, troubled.

‘Phwoar! Am I wet!’ Emily, their youngest, burst into the kitchen, dumped a couple of carrier bags and peeled off a
sodden mac to reveal tight jeans worn with two expensive (as Annie happened to know) T-shirts and a bulky tweed scarf twisted around the neck. The look was writer’s chic, or Emily’s interpretation of it.

Unburdened, she swung around. ‘Hi, parents.’ A deposit of last year’s impacted leaves and mud fell from her shoe on to the floor. ‘Sorry, sorry …’ She wiped it up with a piece of kitchen roll, leaving a muddy smudge on the tiles.

Annie kidnapped the soaking mac and hung it over the boiler. Emily had been babysitting for a neighbour attending a parents’ evening. Tomorrow her daughter would board a school coach and help to supervise the fourth-form outing to a local swimming-pool. The day after that, she resumed babysitting duties with yet another neighbour. This was not a programme designed to inspire faith in Emily’s future earnings.

Please think, Emily
. Annie was deeply afraid that her daughter was condemning herself to a fretful, fractious existence. Then she scolded herself for lack of faith and vision and tried not to mind that, in the eighteen months since she had left university, the tally of Emily’s completed work added up to a short story published in
Metaphor
, a magazine with large literary pretensions and small circulation (Annie and Tom had bought up at least twenty copies and distributed them discreetly to friends and relations), and a novel that a couple of literary agents could not
quite
see how they might handle. ‘But it was a close-run thing,’ wrote the kinder one.

‘If it had been any good,’ a white-faced Emily had admitted a few weeks ago, ‘I’d be there by now. It means I’m no good.’

‘Listen to me, Em,’ Tom had intervened. ‘My publishing contacts tell me it’s nothing to do with you being good or bad. It’s to do with luck. And positioning. And how many celebrities they’re trying to buy that week. And who has had a good day or a bad day when they look at your stuff. Nothing more.’

This was Cynical Tom, who took a bow ever more frequently. The other side of him, Idealistic Tom, had every faith in his daughter and applauded her willingness to forgo a settled income and a career path. ‘There’s something heroic about it,’ he told Annie, mentioning in the same breath that he planned to give Emily an allowance to help her through the initial stages.

Now, in the soon-to-be-upgraded kitchen, Annie observed her husband. The raven’s plumage had dulled and she could no longer interpret the light in his eye – and there were reasons for that. They lived together, but not together. Thoughts of leaving Tom ran like an uneven seam under the everyday routines and, once or twice, had forced themselves to the surface. One of the worst crises had been after Mia left and an uncaring Annie had served up a rotten dinner to Tom’s colleagues. Reason for divorce, Mrs Nicholson? Answer: a tough stew. Yes? No? Almost. But that would have been too simple. The main reasons were too painful … impossible to discuss. Buried.
Buried
.

She pictured Tom and herself in a boat, paddling furiously in opposite directions. But not for very long because the picture winded her. Instead she chose to think that she and Tom had worked out a
modus vivendi
and it did them fine, much as the serviceable knickers and vest her mother had insisted Annie wear as a child had done fine.

‘How many pages?’ Tom was asking Emily.

Emily shook out a fake-leopardskin jacket from a Topshop bag and draped it over her shoulders. ‘How cool is this?’

‘How many jackets do you need?’ asked Annie, but secretly she was pleased that Emily had indulged in something so normal (and unnecessary) as shopping.

Emily settled herself beside her father. ‘Pages, Dad? Three.’

Three. Annie did the maths. If this latest novel, embarked on this morning, was approximately four hundred pages long, it suggested that The End would not arrive for another 133 days. And that would be the first draft – Emily had taken care to brief her parents that a minimum of three drafts was always necessary.

Tom put his arm around his daughter. ‘Title?’ Tender and caring as ever with his favourite child.

Emily raised a pair of cloned blue eyes to her father. Intense, molten desire to succeed burned in their depths, and Annie shuddered for her. ‘I’m working on it.
Time Regained
?’

‘Time bloody lost, you mean,’ Annie could hear Jake saying. She smothered a grin. ‘Think that one has been taken.’

‘Want some help, Em?’ Despite whatever was troubling him, Tom was putting himself out.

Emily leaned against him. ‘Thanks, Dad, but no.’

They were peas in a pod, those two, despite the adolescent storms and tantrums to which Emily had royally treated them. Emily had helped herself to a greater dollop of Tom’s DNA than the twins had – the blue eyes, raven-black hair,
set of the jaw, and the tiny characteristic gestures that mimicked her father’s. Other markers, even to the most unobservant, were their bouts of loftiness and of hysterical laughter.

Annie couldn’t help laughing. ‘You two look so sweet together.’

The phone rang. Tom disentangled himself from Emily and got up to answer it. ‘Jake … all well?’ He didn’t wait for an answer before he said, ‘I’ll hand you over to your mother. We’ll speak some time.’

‘Hi, Mum.’ Jake was his usual cheerful self. ‘I just wanted to report that Maisie’s check-up was fine. She’s absolutely spot-on average for a twelve-month-old.’ Annie listened indulgently as Jake chatted on. He planned to invite them over for tea on Maisie’s birthday – he and Jocasta had been talking about a holiday and he was
really
pleased with his current work-in-progress. He signed off, ‘Big kiss, Mum.’

Jake always made Annie’s heart feel lighter. In many ways he was like Tom used to be. Tom disagreed – ‘We’re chalk and cheese, Annie’ – and had once admitted that he never felt quite at ease with his son. It was true: something had gone wrong – or, rather, had never developed – between them. Annie remembered well explaining to a small boy clutching a teddy bear that his father was not coming home because he had to talk to lots of people at work. ‘But he never talks to me,’ said Jake. Since Jake and Jocasta’s marriage, and Maisie’s arrival, father and son had not seen much of each other at all.

And Mia?

Annie’s new-year resolution had been not to think of Mia. This was broken every day. Even the merest whisper
in her mind of her daughter prodded the wound. How was it possible, she asked herself, for the hundredth, thousandth time, that the dancing, coppery child, who had desired nothing so much as to please her mother, had ended up turning her back on them all?

Heavens … it had been only yesterday she was taking the children to swim in the noisy, chlorinated swimming-pool. There, a scarf bound (oh, futile gesture) around her head to stop the waterlogged air whirling her curls into corkscrews, she had released them into another element. First, a cautious romp in the paddling-pool, but as time passed, she, the mother, was relegated to a wary guardianship at the shallow end where she watched them bob and dive like downy ducks. Then came the day when she stood at one end of the pool and the three of them swam towards her. Little sleek otter heads. Thin bird limbs. Water churning in their haste to reach her. They were part of her, and again the thought scorched across her brain that if one of them was to die she would die too. Yet their new mastery of the water, the alien element, marked the beginning of a separation – which prefigured another kind of death.
For which, Mrs Nicholson, you had better be prepared
.

But not yet, she had prayed silently, as she knelt by the side of the pool to greet her excited, triumphant team with a big smile.
Not yet
.

That had been long ago and far away – a time when the family had still been whole. Annie got to her feet. ‘I’ll do the washing-up.’

Chapter Three

Annie ran hot water into the sink. She was not a slow learner. In fact, she was as smart as anyone who had successfully held down a senior management job in a major hospital, but it had taken her all of her forty-nine years to understand that people do not change. They tried to and they did their best, but the colour and shape of the building blocks could not be altered.

The boiler thumped while Emily rattled on, endeavouring to describe the difficulties of writing. ‘It
is
lonely, Dad.’ On the other hand, she was revelling in the idea of being an artist (albeit an unknown one): ‘It gives one
meaning
.’ Then, again, it put one in an impossible position: ‘The project seems so big. Even deciding which word to use seems too difficult.’ No doubt expecting the usual encouragement and soothing advice, which Tom dished out in spadefuls, she tucked her hand under her father’s elbow.

Tom remained silent.

Annie scoured a saucepan and decided to stick a toe into already choppy water. ‘Emily, I know your father feels differently, and I realize I’ll be up there with the great dictators of the world, but there is a strong argument that you should get a job.’ She paused and sent a sympathetic smile in the direction of her daughter. ‘Think about it. You’d feel less strained, you’d have a chance to look at the world. And, er, you could spend your own money in Topshop.’

Emily ignored her – nothing unusual in that. But Tom succeeded in confounding them both: ‘Your mother’s right. Maybe you should give it a break – get a job and come back to writing later.’

Annie swung round and sent him an old-fashioned look. Whatever else could be said about him, he was never flighty with his opinions.
Something’s happened
, she thought.

‘Oh,’ said Emily, and went very quiet.

Tom continued: ‘One should never be afraid of changing one’s mind. There’s an argument that you need more time to grow into your writer’s skin and to experience the world, rather than sitting at home.’