Stop the Clock (13 page)

A big fat white man with bad clothes and a receding hairline shuffled towards her. ‘I need some money . . . I need some money . . .’ he announced in a plaintive, singsong drone, as if stating a universal aspect of experience rather than begging for cash. She ignored him too, and walked quickly on.

El Desayuno was still there. She sat in a corner and sipped a cup of tea, and admired the lovingly cornrowed hair of the little girl sharing a bun with her mother at the next table. But there was no point getting sentimental about the care other people lavished on their children. She’d made her choice.

She opened up the copy of the
Post
she’d brought with her and flicked through till she came to her report about the inquest. It was illustrated with a photo of the Marches at home that Tina had arranged to have taken after the end of the first day in court. She’d felt awful, approaching them to ask about it; however often she had to do this kind of thing, it still bothered her to break the taboo against intruding into other people’s grief. But still, it was necessary to remember that often the bereaved wanted to tell the story of their dead. The Marches hadn’t minded; they had looked at her trustingly, gratefully even, and offered up a phone number, and she said the
Post
’s photographer should get in touch.

The photograph showed the couple sitting on a sofa; Mr March had his arm round Mrs March, and she was holding a small white christening gown on her lap. Their expressions were sombre and direct, neither solicitous of sympathy nor fearful of the public gaze; it was the look, Tina thought, of those who have been touched by death, and show the mark of it, whose hearts will always turn, from time to time, away from the living and towards the past, the lost, the what-might-have-been.

There it was, staring her in the face: courage. And here she was, carrying a last-chance-saloon baby that she was too afraid to have.

Her phone rang. Her first, uncharitable thought was: Oh no, please don’t let it be Natalie. I really can’t hear her birth story, not now . . . But then she saw it was work calling.

Shit! Had the Marches complained about her story? She’d been so careful. What could have gone wrong?

‘Tina.’ It was Jeremy. ‘Where the fuck are you?’

‘I’m on annual leave. You signed it off.’

‘Yeah, well, more to the point, where’s your bloody column?’

There was a brief, stunned silence while Tina lurched from guilt and apprehension to panic. It took her insides a moment to catch up with what was happening, as if she’d just plunged downwards in a lift.

‘I emailed it to you from home on Tuesday night,’ she said. ‘Are you sure it didn’t get caught in the spam filters or something?’

‘Even if it had, do you seriously think I’ve got time to faff about with the pissing IT department? You’ve got till half past to sort it out. If you can’t cope with doing an occasional bit of proper reporting as well as banging out the opinion stuff, it’s a poor bloody show. I thought you women were meant to be good at multitasking!’

And with that he was gone.

Tina took a deep breath and checked the time. Just gone eleven.

What the hell was she going to write? It was a complete lie that she’d sent something in earlier in the
week. It had crossed her mind, once or twice, but she’d put it off. And then she’d found herself at the inquest.

Jeremy had a point: it
was
a poor show. She’d screwed up. The column represented the culmination of a decade’s hard slog and ambition, and she’d forgotten to write it. She’d been distracted . . . no, worse, distraught. In the courtroom press gallery she had felt a sadness that was not only to do with the case, but was her own, inside her, at her core, the gathering weight of anticipated loss.

Just when her professional life was finally what she had always wanted it to be, her personal life had risen up and stabbed it in the back.

She got a notebook out of her bag, found a biro and started to scribble. Three paragraphs later, she decided she’d got the nub of what she wanted to say.

It took her a little while longer to pad it out and round it off, and by the time she’d finished dictating what she’d scrawled to the copytaker she was already quarter of an hour late for her appointment.

What next?

Should she call the clinic?

Well . . . probably. It would be the polite, the right thing to do. If she didn’t, they’d probably contact her . . . actually, she was kind of tempted to just turn the damn phone off.

But first of all she would text Natalie.
Great news! Can’t wait to see her!
Something like that. And then she was going to order something to eat . . . something with some vitamins in it . . . a steak, perhaps, with a tomato salad. Maybe pudding, too . . . She was suddenly famished.

The prospect of a leisurely afternoon had all the allure of unexpected freedom, and she was surprised by how happy and relieved she felt, as if she’d just had an unexpected reprieve. A great feeling of peace settled over her, as if, for the first time in as long as she could remember, she had all the time in the world.

‘SO,’ LUCY SAID,
‘I have some news.’

She had Matilda on her lap and was feeding her a bottle of formula. The light, warm weight of the baby resting in the crook of her arm, and the blindly trusting appetite with which Matilda was gulping down the milk, reminded her of how it had been when Lottie and Clemmie were small and looked to her for everything. It had been tiring, of course, and monotonous, but from time to time she had known with absolute clarity that her love was being returned, and that the mutual flow of tenderness was sustaining her too.

She could hardly remember now what Lottie and Clemmie had looked like as babies – each stage of their lives seemed to supersede the last, and it was always hard to picture them any other way than they were at the time. But she did recollect what she had felt for them, and the memory, which was bound up with the
smell of milk and baby skin, gave her the courage to finally broach the subject she had been avoiding.

She had talked about Ellen’s stroke and partial recovery and move to a nursing home, and Tina and Natalie had sympathized; she had explained that Hannah was living in Ellen’s flat and had found a lodger to join her, and they had accepted that without question. Probably everybody thought it was about time for Hannah to have a more independent existence.

Lucy had thought it was bold of Natalie to risk getting them all together after the last time, and Tina had been a little quiet, but perfectly friendly and not at all resentful. Probably Lucy should have said sorry first, but in the end it had been Tina who had made the first move, by ringing to apologize. Lucy had immediately reciprocated, and it seemed that a mutual decision had been made, at least for the time being, to pretend that nothing had happened. Besides, there was nothing like a new baby to sweep away old animosity.

Natalie and Tina were looking at her with surprise and pleasure. Oh God – they thought she was about to tell them she was pregnant.

‘Not good news,’ she added quickly. ‘Adam and I have separated.’

And now she was reminded of Clemmie and Lottie again at the moment when she had explained to them why Adam was no longer living in the house. Natalie and Tina were horrified, and she felt culpable, as if she had hurt them and let them down.

Natalie was the first to respond. She looked tired and pale, and there was a faint reek of Savoy cabbage
in the air from the frozen leaves she’d been using to cool her swollen breasts; she’d had problems nursing the baby.

‘But, Lucy, this is dreadful,’ Natalie said. She was sitting next to Lucy on the sofa, and turned towards her and rested her hand on Lucy’s, which was cradling Matilda’s head.

Lucy was suddenly conscious that she still had her rings on. But why not? Adam had given them to her. He might have gone, but they were still hers.

‘When did this happen?’ Tina asked. She was the picture of disbelief; eyes wide, eyebrows raised, mouth open.

‘Soon after I last saw you, actually, back in the spring. But it’s all very amicable.’ Why did she feel the need to reassure them? But she did. ‘Obviously, it’s been an awful time, but we’re getting through it. He’s seeing the girls most weekends, he’s letting me keep the house and the car, he’s supporting us financially, we’re all coping. So please don’t worry – at least, not
too
much.’

Tina gazed at her wonderingly, and then shook her head. ‘I can’t believe how well you’re dealing with this. You’re sure you don’t want us to come round and cut all the sleeves out of his suits or something?’

Lucy smiled in spite of herself. ‘He’s already retrieved most of those,’ she said, ‘and taken them off to Ollie Merrick’s. Remember Ollie? That’s where he’s staying, for now.’

‘OK, but if there’s anything else I can do,’ Tina said, ‘vindictive or otherwise, you let me know.’

She looked well, Lucy thought. Better in fact than the
last time they’d met – rested, and relatively relaxed, for someone who tended to run on nervous energy. There was something slightly different about her too, a coy, gratified, sensual quality, Mona Lisa-like, suggestive of physical fulfilment . . . Was it possible that she could be pregnant? But no, surely not.

‘Is it definitely over?’ Natalie asked.

Lucy hesitated, but only for a moment.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s a dead love, and I’m grieving. But I can’t bring it back to life.’

She thought about this later, on the drive back to Thames Ditton to pick up the girls from their playdate, and realized that it was true. Her marriage was history. But whatever the state of their union, Adam still somehow had to be lived with.

She saw him the next day, in the Royal Festival Hall. In the end he was only fifteen minutes late – not too bad, in the scheme of things – but she was fuming anyway. It wasn’t for herself that she minded, it was for the girls, so painfully hopeful and waiting, and then so delighted when he arrived.

Of course he was pleased to see them too – who wouldn’t be, greeted by such enthusiasm? But she was cool to him, and he looked wounded, as if she was somehow the one in the wrong . . . and then she had to turn her back on all three of them and walk away.

Seeing him always threw her and made it difficult to concentrate. Once she got to Waterloo it took a while for her to work out which platform she needed to get to the Sunnyview Nursing Home, which was round
the corner from the hospital where her mother had recovered from the stroke.

As her train pulled away from the station she thought how nice it would have been to spend a summer afternoon pootling round sightseeing with the girls on the South Bank. Instead, she was going to be incarcerated in Sunnyview.

But it served her right; Ellen had accepted that she was not well enough to return home and that Hannah was not around enough to look after her, but she rarely missed an opportunity to hint that Lucy might have seen fit to take her in. This had occurred to Lucy too, but no – with Adam gone, sooner or later she was going to have to go back to work herself; they were getting by for now, but she had to look to the future. And Ellen was still so sick, she needed round-the-clock care . . . and it didn’t come cheap.

She had made this point during several painful conversations with her mother, and eventually Ellen had agreed that they could let out her flat to cover the cost, but only if Hannah was one of the tenants, and kept an eye on the newcomer. Luckily, Hannah had been up for this and had spruced up the place a bit and found a friend of a friend to move in with her, so, from a financial point of view at least, Ellen’s needs were taken care of.

Ellen was quite capable of saying things like, ‘I’m so sorry to be a burden to you, dear. I know you wish I had died.’ Lucy knew that if she had to listen to such provocations on a daily basis, in the end they would turn into the truth. It was much easier to persuade
herself she was a good and loving daughter when she only saw Ellen once a week, and could summon up the energy to jolly her along.

To distract herself from these uncomfortable thoughts, she fell to eavesdropping on the conversation going on behind her. A girl was telling her friend, ‘I just really want to
do
something! Let’s do something, yeah? I don’t care what it is, let’s just go somewhere, have a little adventure, you know?’

The girl’s voice was slightly husky, as if she’d only recently taken up smoking, and was pitched at a volume that refused to acknowledge everybody else’s right to be indifferent. Lucy didn’t want to turn and look – overhearing was one thing, staring was quite another – but thought she was probably listening to someone who was prettyish, but not pretty enough to command attention without trying, and in her last summer before leaving home, perched on the cusp of womanhood.

How wonderful to be eighteen, with a future that was expansive, featureless and there for the taking – to be able to just
do
something!

When Lucy had left home for Bristol for the first time she’d gone by train. She had worried about leaving Ellen and Hannah behind, but she had also felt quite dizzy with freedom.