Someone to Watch Over Me (11 page)

The first thing that Molly did was make the attic room into as nice a bedroom for Max as she could manage. She scrubbed the old lino floor and spread his familiar duvet over the knobbly bed. She placed all his toys onto the shelves and hung some curtains with red airplanes and silver trucks at the small leaded window. He had been upset by the move, first refusing to go, and then bowing to the inevitable with a resignation that broke her heart. On the day they actually left their home, he waited until they had loaded up the last of their stuff and then ran back into the house saying he had left something behind. When Molly went to find him five minutes later, he was wandering from room to room, unable to say exactly what it was he was looking for.

Rupert seemed very pleased by the new house, saying that he was able to breathe out here in the Fens where the skies were so big and the land went on forever, in a way he hadn't been able to for a very long time. He decided to take up photography again, something he had given up years ago.

‘I think that's why everything went wrong before,' he explained. ‘I was never really happy hemmed into an office. I'm a creative person and I think I got frustrated.' He spent his days roaming the area, taking pictures, and then tinkering with them on the computer in the small wedge-shaped room at the top of the house. He also took up fishing and the activity seemed to calm him. He sometimes met up with an elderly man who had lived in the area all his life and he taught Rupert how to make eel traps out of willow. The pair of them would explore the canals and drainage ditches in a flat-bottomed boat that slid through the water almost silently.

‘The landscape's beautiful, Moll. It's like it's waiting to be discovered,' Rupert said, and she was glad that he seemed happier. Her own happiness she didn't allow herself to consider. Every time she thought about her relationship with her husband her mind skittered away to hide in a shopping list or in how she was going to collect enough glass jars for everyone in her class at school to germinate beans. She thought that if she didn't dwell on it perhaps it would right itself like those drawings of Max's on plastic that you put in the oven that seemed, as they shrank, to bend in on themselves, to spoil, but which smoothed out miraculously when you stopped looking through the oven door.

Rupert seemed to be making a real effort to spend time with Max. At weekends he would sometimes take his son out and let him take pictures with his camera. Every evening after Max's bath he would read to him. Max's favourite was the poem ‘The Highwayman' by Alfred Noyes and he made Rupert read it over and over again. She could hear them saying the words together, relishing the gore and the tragedy.

‘
Look for me by moonlight;

Watch for me by moonlight;

I'll come to thee by moonlight,

though hell should bar the way!'

Jen was unnaturally quiet the day after her date. No amount of wheedling on Carrie's part could establish anything other than the rudiments of what had happened. Even strategic wafting of rose-flavoured macaroons failed to elicit a reaction. This was such uncharacteristic behaviour that Carrie suspected things had gone very wrong indeed the night before.

‘What was he like then?' asked Carrie. ‘Bit boring …? B.O.? Lives with his mum …? Obsessed with his collection of railway station signs …? Kept his small change in a flowery coin purse …?'

Jen shook her head pityingly at Carrie's blatant attempts to get a rise out of her, and carried on restocking the carousel with cards stitched with small silver charms to put into Christmas puddings. Carrie was concerned about the fact that Jen must have come into the shop at the crack of dawn – indicating either a disappointingly early night at home or a hasty first thing in the morning, pre-shower escape from his house. There was evidence of Jen's labours everywhere; she had filled a huge glass vase with berry-laden branches of holly and red and silver feathers, had built a teetering pyramid of bath cubes and had colour coordinated the rail of cashmere jumpers so that they now ran neatly from cream and the palest pink to chocolate brown and black via lilac, blue and burnt orange. Most worryingly of all, there were no signs of breakfast crumbs on the wooden floor that was redolent with lavender wax polish.

Giving up her attempts to get Jen to talk, Carrie decided to take advantage of all this silent industry and go into town and do some Christmas shopping of her own. Pam had indicated that she would grace them with her presence in the shop for a few hours and although all she ever did was fiddle with the merchandise as if she was in her own personal playroom, at least it meant that with someone else there the other person could go and replenish the stock or go to the toilet without leaving the shop empty. It only took Carrie twenty minutes to walk into the centre of Cambridge. The market square was illuminated by the somewhat sparse curtain of lights hanging down the front of the Guildhall and there was a seasonal smell of roasting chestnuts, pine-sap and urine. Two men who had hit Christmas early, or who possibly were simply drinking to forget the whole blasted thing, had settled on the step around the fountain and were heckling passing foreigners intent on buying union jack boxers or a plate adorned with Kate and Wills before they returned home. Carrie bought a bunch of mistletoe and four oranges studded with cloves, a book published in the fifties on how to make cocktails for Jen's brother and a little lime green jacket from the vintage clothes stall that she thought was perfect for her mother. She was just contemplating whether she should go in and try on the pair of patent leather boots that were glinting at her from the window of Office, when someone tapped her on her shoulder. Turning, she saw with a sinking heart that it was Rachel, a woman from Before Charlie, or BC as she thought of it to herself. She had met Rachel during the antenatal classes they had both endured in an overheated front room somewhere in Cherry Hinton. Carrie remembered that during the classes Rachel had been a harbinger of doom; constantly asking about worst-case scenarios and creating anxieties that had not been an issue before.

‘What happens exactly when the cord wraps itself around the baby's neck?' she had asked on one occasion.

‘Is it true that men are so repulsed by the vagina after watching their partners give birth that sex is never the same again?' on another.

Carrie and Damian used to snigger about her in the car on the way home, imitating the way her voice would go particularly high and posh whenever she mentioned body parts.

‘Are you
one hundred per cent
sure that even a VERY large penis, will not harm a baby in the womb?' asked Rachel. Carrie remembered how at this point the whole class swivelled around to look at Rachel's husband whose too short fringe gave him the look of someone permanently surprised, who was on all fours and mid-pant at the time.

Carrie was pretty sure she hadn't seen Rachel since the party one of the group had thrown six months after the last of them had given birth. They had lined their precious offspring up on a blanket-covered sofa and taken a commemorative photograph. Carrie could still recall the moment. Charlie had been in the middle, leaning against a cushion, his fists held up above his head as if in triumph.

‘Hello Carrie!' said Rachel. ‘I haven't seen you for years. How are you?'

‘Oh fine, fine,' said Carrie wishing she could disappear. She knew this conversation could only end one way.

‘I've had another since I saw you last. Got an eighteen-month-old little girl now too. We called her Florence. It took us a long time to get pregnant the second time. Turned out Pete's sperm was not crème de la crème. Evan's doing well, just started at St Faith's … how's Charlie? It was Charlie wasn't it?'

Carrie knew exactly how Rachel's face would look when she told her about Charlie. She had seen the same reaction in many other faces over the last three years. First, there would be incomprehension, which would be swiftly followed by stunned shock, then panic as the other person realised they would have to say something appropriate. Then finally, and lethally, the most crippling embarrassment would take possession. Along with the shock, the inability to know what to say and yes, the compassion, there would be relief. You had to know what you were looking for but once you did it was unmistakable.

‘Seven green babies sitting on a shawl, and if one green baby should accidentally fall, there will be six much safer babies sitting on a shawl.'

Carrie didn't blame them for feeling like this. She knew that that was probably how she would feel too. She felt her heart hammering in her chest and she thought that she might be having a panic attack, like the ones she used to have soon after Charlie went. For at least six months, every time she found herself in a large, relatively open space the most agonising fear would engulf her. It was as if she had no control over any part of herself and she felt as if her heart would beat faster and faster until it exploded. All she wanted to do now was run, but she was held to the spot. She was sure the other woman was looking at her strangely. How could she tell this person that she barely knew that her heart had been broken? What would explain the fact that she had suffered such a grievous loss and yet, to all intents and purposes here she was amongst the Christmas crowds, lusting after boots, behaving as if nothing had happened? Nothing she could say would make sense to her or to Rachel. Trying to explain any of it filled her with a mixture of weariness and disgust.

‘Oh, he's fine,' she said, her heart numb. ‘He's just great.'

‘We'll have to get them together one of these days,' said Rachel, rooting around in her capacious bag that no doubt held the requisite wipes and packets of raisins. The things mothers have in their bags, things that she used to have when she was a mother too. Rachel pulled out an envelope and a pen.

‘Let me just write down my number, and we can arrange to meet up in the New Year.'

It was amazing how politeness endured even in the most painful of situations. Carrie could feel her hand shaking as she took the proffered number. She could barely hold herself together enough to make the noises that were expected of her until Rachel at last released her and set off up the road. Carrie pushed blindly through the crowds, almost running in her haste to get away. She threw the piece of paper with Rachel's number into the next bin as if she was getting rid of the evidence. It was not simply the loss of someone you loved that stayed with you for the rest of your life, it was the loss of the person that you would have been if you had been allowed to have them forever. It was her fault, all of this. Her fault Charlie had gone. Her fault that her marriage had fallen apart. Her fault that she had become the sort of person who didn't even have the courage to name her loss out loud.

She stumbled on to King's Parade and despite the cold, felt sweat trickling down her back and gathering around her waist. She unbuttoned her coat and sat for a while on the wall outside King's College chapel where some men on scaffolding were cleaning the great windows in preparation for the Christmas Eve service that was broadcast around the world. Two women, their heads obscured by huge vases of white roses, were being led across the forbidden grass in front of the chapel by a third woman who was instructing them where to go in a loud voice. After she had recovered slightly, Carrie continued up the street. She had lost all heart for shopping and she knew she really should get back to
Trove
to relieve Jen, but some impulse drew her on. Her recent agitation had left her feeling disconnected and dreamlike and she walked in a trance along the pavement, oblivious to the chatter and the swinging bags of the people around her. She had the sense that she was out of step with everyone else, walking along a different trajectory. Amongst the usual small group of people who had gathered at the corner of Benet Street to look at the corpus clock, Carrie noticed a woman and a boy standing a little apart from the others. The woman was bending down, saying something to the boy who was staring with a kind of horrified fascination at the monstrous, time-eating grasshopper as it munched its way through another hour. Something about the way the boy held his mother's hand and listened to what she was saying to him made Carrie's heart shrink inside her. There was a quiet, unmistakable intimacy between them. It was the sort of closeness that she remembered with Charlie. She turned away just as the clock gave the terrible warning thud that marked the hour.

By the end of the autumn term Molly was completely exhausted. She had made cinnamon biscuits with her class and helped all of them to decorate the festive photo frames that were to be given to their relatives; she had dressed up as the smallest bear in the school Christmas production and had made everyone laugh by sitting on a collapsing chair; she had presented each child with a photo of themselves and written a special message on the back. She even found something kind to say about Grace Bennett who was a sullen girl who had never knowingly participated in any learning exercise but who had gloriously groomed hair.

‘Happy Christmas Grace,' Molly had written on the back of her photograph. ‘I have really enjoyed your hair accessories this term. You can do my hair any time you want.'

Molly was slightly late picking Max up, but when she arrived he was happily sitting on the floor playing with the childminder's youngest daughter Rosi. Kate Jefferies, who lived down the road in Parson's Bridge with her husband and two children, had become something of a lifeline for Molly. Not only was she an excellent childminder with seemingly limitless patience and a sure comic timing that children responded to, but the fact that she was genuinely interested in people meant that she not only knew what questions to ask, but more importantly, knew how to listen to the answers. She also thought nothing of having to keep Max longer than had been agreed if Molly got caught up in meetings at the school. Max had lined up all Rosi's soft toys and was making each of them dance in the hope that he would elicit one of the fruity chuckles she was famous for.