Someone to Watch Over Me (10 page)

‘It's not like that,' said Carrie irritably. ‘We just talk. He's still grieving for his dead wife.'

‘I'm not saying he isn't,' answered her friend. ‘It's just that I've seen him looking at you with those sad eyes of his. As if you might be the beginning of the cure.'

‘Listen chum,' said Carrie, spraying Mr Sheen perilously close to Jen's eyes and attacking the surface of the huge framed mirror behind the shop counter, ‘I'm nobody's cure. I'm still a mess myself.'

‘Maybe you could be each other's salvation,' said Jen, moving swiftly away before Carrie decided she needed another spray of glass polish.

‘It's not as if he isn't attractive. Needs feeding up a bit, but I noticed something that might have been quite a decent bum under that jumper he was wearing.'

‘I think you should focus less on my love life,' said Carrie, ‘and think a bit more about your own.'

‘Not that it is any of your business, but you are looking at a woman who this very night is meeting with an eligible bachelor of this borough,' replied Jen with a smirk.

‘What!' said Carrie, astonished. ‘You never said you were going out with anyone.'

‘Well, strictly speaking, I'm not, yet,' said Jen. ‘I met him online on one of those dating sites. I've seen his picture, but I haven't seen him in the flesh.'

Carrie was forced to cut short her questions, because the shop suddenly filled up with people. Half an hour later after a customer had asked to see pretty much every pair of earrings, agonised about each one and then left without buying anything, Carrie was finally able to resume her interrogation.

‘Where are you going? What are you wearing? What does he do?' she asked, agog.

‘Browns. What I've got on. Something in I.T.,' Jen replied economically, threading red ribbons through the holes punched in the
Trove
bags.

Carrie surveyed the sludge-green sack worn loose over fraying navy leggings that her friend was wearing.

‘You are not seriously telling me that you are going out on a first date looking like that?' said Carrie in despair. ‘Please let me choose you something else.'

After much begging and bribery, Carrie at last persuaded Jen to submit to a make-over. She was going straight to meet her date from the shop, so the transformation had to take place in the room at the back. Jen kept jabbing her elbows into the wall and swearing as she tried on dresses and Carrie had to keep darting out whenever she heard the doorbell ring.

After many visions and revisions and quite a bit of petulant behaviour, even Jen had to admit that the final product looked pretty damn good. She wore a beautiful skirt bordered around the hem with a pattern of boats and lighthouses and a shirt in exactly the same faded coral as the sails on the boats. The shirt fitted at the waist, making the most of Jen's ample curves, and the colour brought out the honey undertones of her skin and the amber streaks in her brown eyes. Carrie had forced her to bin her ragged ankle boots and replace them with beige fishnet tights and a pair of blue suede shoes with ribbon ties. She had also pulled back her unruly hair and fastened it with an elastic toggle adorned with a turquoise bird, leaving a few stray curls across her forehead. Finally, despite Jen's protestations, she had given her lashes three coats of mascara, dabbed a berry-coloured lip stain on her mouth and squirted Mitsouko down her cleavage.

‘Knock him dead, girl!' she called out to Jen's departing back and her friend gave an exuberant shimmy as she walked away, almost knocking down a man in an overcoat who stared after her as if he had never, in all his life, seen anything so splendid.

When Carrie got home there was the usual dump of junk mail and adverts on her mat and she gathered them up wearily as she went through the front door. At the top of the pile of vouchers for free pizzas and menus for Chinese takeaways was a yellow leaflet advertising the services of a medium called Simon Foster. There was a poor quality photograph of him that was so blurred he could have been anyone. She took a dim view of those that preyed on the misery of others. In her opinion, pretending to hear messages from the dead in order to scam people out of their hard-earned cash was nothing less than a crime. Carrie threw the whole lot into the recycling basket in disgust and went into the kitchen. While she waited for the kettle to boil she looked through the window at the darkened garden and couldn't imagine that it would ever be anything other than the hard, clenched, wintery thing it was now.

By midnight, despite repeated calls to her mother's mobile, Carrie had been unable to track her down. Just when she had given up hope of her arriving that day, the doorbell rang. Cursing, she grabbed her dressing gown and put it on as she raced down the stairs. Pam was on the doorstep surrounded by bags and with a large, expectant smile on her face. She threw her arms round her daughter.

‘My darling, you look wonderful! I've had a journey and a half and am in dire need of a stiff drink.'

Carrie stacked up the numerous bags in the hallway and wondered with a sinking heart just how long her mother was planning on staying.

The post fell onto the mat with a dull thud and Molly scooped up a handful of Christmas cards. With a little jolt of shock she saw a brightly coloured postcard amongst the white envelopes and knew immediately it was from Rupert. She recognised the oddly flamboyant handwriting, which seemed so out of keeping with his character. She thought it was strange how other details about a person could fade, but their handwriting was always instantly identifiable. Molly quickly scanned the message, which described Rupert's job working on a holiday complex on the north coast of California that provided yurts as accommodation. Yurts, he explained for Max's benefit, were shaped like tents but were made of wood and had proper beds inside. He had drawn a tiny picture of one in the corner of the postcard with a stick figure of a man standing outside the yurt opening with an arrow saying ‘me'. The postcard had a picture on it of fat leopard seals lolling on a beach by a hillside covered in some bright red cactus-like plant. After the initial shock of seeing it, Molly was reassured that he sounded positive, and she wondered if maybe the time he had spent away had done him some good. Perhaps he had been suffering some sort of extended breakdown and was now on the mend. Molly had a tendency to hope for the best in people. It was what made her a brilliant teacher, although it did nothing to protect her from the crushing disappointment she felt when people let her down.

Molly didn't tell anyone that Rupert had hit her. She spent the last night of their holiday huddled by the pool while Rupert drank himself senseless. On the flight back from Crete, she kept her foundation-covered face averted from his. She sat by the window next to Max who looked back and forth between his silent parents, knowing that something bad had happened but not really understanding what. His mother had explained her swollen and blackening jaw by saying that a wasp had stung her while she had been sitting outside having supper.

When they got back, Molly thought briefly about reporting what had happened to the police, but knew she wouldn't do it. She imagined what she would say on the phone and how they might answer her. She would be put on hold, with perhaps some soothing music to enjoy until she was transferred to a department where the officers were trained to ask the relevant questions. She imagined a room off the main corridor with a door that shut firmly and which had been decorated with a contrasting dado rail in a parody of home. She thought about the person they would send to sit with her in her own front room, knees neatly placed together, a cup held in a no-nonsense hand, the words kind, but the eyes looking around the room and at her, assessing her clothes, what she was saying.
What have we got here then? A vengeful wife who wants to get her own
back on a faithless husband? A fantasist? A madwoman?
Or
perhaps worst of all, a woman to be pitied. One who had the audacity to think that this wasn't the sort of thing that happened in marriages that started with tasteful throws and Umbrian honeymoons. Molly had always imagined, when she had thought about it at all, that women who let themselves be hit were creatures very different from herself. Becoming a woman whose husband hurt her was as strange and unlikely as becoming one of those shapeless forms under bits of boxes or in the doorways of office blocks that you saw in every major town.

Rupert's reaction to what had happened was to say nothing for the first few days and then get drunk and cry out his remorse in great big gasping heaves. He knelt at her feet, his face wet with tears, his mouth slack with contrition, and begged her to forgive him.

‘It wasn't me. It wasn't me,' he cried. ‘It was like there was someone else inside my body making me do it. And you know, Moll,' he said, rubbing his face with the back of his sleeve, ‘you know how to push my buttons, you really do.'

Molly remembered him as the quick bright fox and held him in her arms, as if he was a wounded animal, until he stopped sobbing.

For a while afterwards she thought of the sound his fist had made against her skin and the way he had stretched the fingers of his clenched hand out afterwards, almost thoughtfully, as casually as if he had caught his hand against the edge of a window frame. Then as the days and weeks passed Molly began to think she had imagined the whole thing, or at least its impact on her began to lessen. The more time that passed, the more outlandish it seemed that such a thing had happened to the pair of them.
She
wasn't the sort of woman that got hit.
He
wasn't the sort of man who would do the hitting. What Rupert had done to her somehow became less about his violence and more about the state of their relationship and therefore partly her responsibility. In the end, what she did was redouble her efforts to please him and to ensure that nothing irritated or upset him. As long as she maintained the equilibrium, Rupert was the old, easy Rupert, full of charm and life.

Then when Rupert finally admitted two weeks later that he had been sacked from his job rather than left it voluntarily, this seemed to her to be a perfect explanation of why he had behaved in the way he had. He had been under enormous stress and he had cracked, as anyone would under that sort of pressure. When she then found out after a phone call with the bank that he had maxed out three credit cards due to an online gambling habit that had got out of control, Molly did her best not to show him the utter terror the news plunged her into. How were they to survive, with a sizeable mortgage on their house and Rupert finding it difficult to get another job, when all they had coming in was the money she made if she was able to sell one of her paintings? The obvious answer was that she had to go back to teaching, and despite Rupert's protestations that it was unnecessary because he would surely get another job soon, she approached her old school and they were only too glad to have her back.

Keeping a promise that he had made to address his gambling problems and determined to atone for his behaviour, Rupert joined a local support group for people with addictions. He paired up with a sad-looking man with a ponytail who had lost his house gambling on scratch cards. He would come and pick Rupert up for their meetings and, despite repeated invitations from Molly to come in and sit down, would insist on waiting in the hall, his hands firmly jammed into the pockets of his coat as if he didn't quite trust them to do what they were told.

For a while they managed to hold on to the house. Molly spent all of the money left to her by her mother on the mortgage arrears. She painted as much as she could at the weekends and managed to sell a few of her paintings to a gallery in town. She sat at the kitchen table writing lists of numbers onto clean, squared paper, feeling that by doing so she could somehow take back some control. But in the end, despite all her meticulous totting up, despite the small, careful economies and pleas for more time, their home was repossessed. On their last night Molly lay awake, thinking about all the things that they had done and hoped for in the house. She thought about the day they had moved in; Rupert carrying her over the threshold like something precious, the two of them sitting on the stairs, eating fish and chips, looking happily at the blank walls. She thought about the days it had taken her to strip all the paint off the banisters and the tiny rowan tree they had planted in the first month, which was now twice the height of the shed. She remembered the way she had stood at the back door feeling the rain on her face as the pain of Max coming pushed through her.

Rupert was sleepless too. ‘I need you babe,' he said. He pulled her nightdress up and squeezed her breast hard. He held her by her waist, rubbing his erection against her belly. Although she wasn't ready for him he pushed himself into her with one swift movement. She shut her eyes and let him do what he wanted so that it would be over quickly. After he had fallen asleep she lay beside him, looking at his face half lit by the hall light. He moaned in his sleep and made restless movements with his hands as if brushing away flies. She felt something that might have been tenderness if she had been able to feel much at all.

A friend of Molly's had just inherited the house near Ely from an aunt who had died six months before and he was kind enough to let them live there for a nominal rent. He said he was planning on selling it when property prices looked like they were recovering, but until then they were welcome to it. Its isolated position meant that it was at least a twenty-minute walk from the nearest habitation, the small clutch of houses that made up the hamlet of Parson's Bridge. Its distance from Cambridge also meant an hour's drive into work every day, but Molly was grateful for a safe, affordable place to live while she tried to pay back some of the debt that Rupert had generated.

Although Molly's friend had cleared out most of his late aunt's belongings, it was still much as its previous occupier had left it. The kitchen had burn rings on the work surface and unclaimed keys hung from cup hooks which had been screwed into the Welsh dresser. One side of the house had a small lean to, roofed in corrugated plastic with a narrow shelf all the way round on which stringy geraniums balanced in yogurt pots.