The Best of Times (52 page)

She had written to Luke, telling him she was very sorry, but she felt it was wrong of her to let him go on thinking she cared about him as she had. She had enclosed the necklace. He had called her, clearly very upset, had asked her to take time to think, to reconsider; he said he could not imagine life without her, that he needed her. “It’s not easy, this job, Emma, tougher than I’d thought; I’ve been really banking on coming home and seeing you at the weekends. Or like I said, getting you out here. It’s a really cool city; we could have a great time.”

But she stood firm, told him she was sorry, but she couldn’t see how it could possibly work out between them, and she liked him and admired him far too much to let him think she loved him when she didn’t.

She had been all right in the beginning, when Barney had told her about Amanda and that they must wait awhile. It had seemed the kind—indeed the only right—thing to do. But as time went by, she became increasingly anxious; she was in love with a man who, however much he said he loved her in return, was clearly deeply and tenderly concerned for someone else. Someone whom, until he had met Emma, he had wanted to spend the rest of his life with. And someone who, for whatever reason, had become his first priority once more. And the more she thought of herself dislodging that person, the more impossible it seemed; how could a brief affair, a flash of desire, replace that long, long time of being together?

It was a daydream, an acutely tempting fantasy: not for her—she had no doubt of the reality of her love for Barney—but for him. She should leave him to be with his Amanda, not be singing her siren song to him, luring him onto the rocks of a cancelled marriage.

For a few days, the very rightness of what she had done buoyed her up; she felt stronger, braver, a better person altogether. And then
the misery set in, and she knew she had been right. For Barney had not argued, had not fought for her; he had been quiet, gentle, very sad, while seeming to accept absolutely what she said.

It was over; and it was horrible. And … while knowing such a thought was foolish and she should disabuse herself of it, she really could not imagine ever feeling properly happy again.

• • •

“Barney …”

He was working late; it was quiet on the floor. She was standing by his desk, seeming to have appeared out of nowhere. He hadn’t seen her since their last confrontation—surprising in a way, he supposed, since they were in the same building … but then, the building contained at least five thousand of them.

He looked at her warily. She was looking rather unfamiliar, slightly nervous, her face pale, her lips unglossed, her hair hanging straight onto her shoulders. Tamara undone. This must be serious.

“Hello, Tamara.”

“Barney, this is … well, it’s hard for me to say … Barney, I’m sorry.”

If she had disappeared into a pall of smoke, leaving only her shoes and bag on the floor, like the Wicked Witch in
The Wizard of Oz
, he could not have been more astonished. He hadn’t thought
sorry
was a word in Tamara’s lexicon.

“I … I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Done what, Tamara?”

“Shouted at you. Accused you of … well, of what I did. The thing is, I know now Toby was lying to me. It wasn’t you who made him late. I went to see him last night. We had a long conversation. Basically, it’s over, Barney. We’re not … not having a wedding. It’s him who’s the shit. Not you. I know that now.”

“I see …” said Barney.

“Yes. I began to think and I thought … well, I realised that
you
were driving when you were stopped by the police. And they’d have Breathalyzed you.”

“They did.”

“And if you’d been as drunk as Toby said, you would still probably have been over the limit. So I said that to Toby and started really asking questions. And he … well, he suddenly gave in.”

“Really?”

“Yes. He told me everything. About … well, all of it, the other girl, everything. I said … well, you can imagine, I expect.”

“Think so.”

“I just told him I never wanted to see him again. And left.”

“Right …”

“The other thing is, I don’t know how things are with you and Amanda now, but she says you’ve been fantastic over all this, that she’d never have got through it without you. So … well, I promise you I’ll never say anything to her, ever.”

“Thank you.”

“Right. Well, I must go now. Night, Barney.”

“Good night, Tamara.”

He didn’t feel anything much, except very tired.

• • •

Charlie was being completely impossible. He was cold and insolent to his father and completely uncooperative with Laura, refusing to join the girls for meals, and locking himself away in his room playing with his Game Boy or painting the Warhammer models that were his new passion, sometimes late into the night. If Laura came in and told him to turn the light off and go to bed he shrugged and didn’t even answer. If she turned the light out, he would simply wait until she had gone downstairs and then turn it on again. He did the minimum amount of homework, and when his work came back with low marks he simply shrugged. He refused a part in the Christmas play and didn’t turn up for soccer practice.

When Jonathan and Laura went in for a parents’ evening, his year tutor showed them the reports he had from all his teachers, and they were horrified. The charming, high-achieving Charlie was suddenly being labelled lazy, uncooperative, and even disruptive.

“Er …” David Richards looked awkward. “I wondered … is there some problem that we don’t know about? All boys get a bit like this towards puberty, but this has been so sudden and such a great change, I feel there must be a rather more immediate explanation.”

“Well—” said Laura.

“No,” said Jonathan, “no problems at all. I’ll talk to him. Clearly it can’t go on.”

• • •

“Yes, clearly it can’t go on,” she said, glaring at him across the table of the restaurant where they had agreed they should talk, safe from Charlie’s sharp ears. “But I don’t see how we’re going to stop him. He’s just so horribly upset and it’s his way of telling us so.”

“Fine.”

“What do you mean, fine?”

“I mean, of course he’s upset. Unfortunately there’s not a lot we can do about that. And yes, I know it’s my fault. But if we can make him see that he’s damaging his own chances, then I think he may start behaving a bit better.”

“I hope so,” said Laura.

She didn’t think it was actually very likely.

• • •

“Fuck you!” said Charlie. “Fuck you, talking to me like that.”

“Charlie, don’t you dare swear at me!”

“I’ll swear at you if I want to. You’re awful. Horrible. Doing that to Mum, sleeping with that girl. How could you, how could you when Mum’s so … so good to you.”

“I know she is, Charlie, and I’m deeply ashamed of myself. Terribly, terribly sorry, and so sorry too that you had to find out.”

“Yeah, well, if you’re so sorry you might have thought a bit harder before you did anything so disgusting.”

“Charlie … if you could just listen to me for a while. I’m not asking you to understand—”

“Yeah? Sounds like it to me.”

“No, I’m not. All I’m saying is I’m desperately sorry, and I would ask you to—”

“To what? Forgive you, I suppose. For wrecking our family, ruining Mum’s life. How am I supposed to forgive that?”

“I wasn’t going to say forgive, Charlie. Just to beg you not to ruin your own life, your own chances by behaving as you are. I may have made a mess of mine, but you have everything ahead of you. Don’t—”

“I don’t care if I get expelled; I don’t care if I end up in prison. I can’t have the only thing I want, which is our family back like it used to be, and you’ve taken that away from all of us forever. I wish you weren’t my father; I wish …”

Jonathan walked out of the room and into his study. When she went in much later, to tell him how distraught Charlie still was, Laura could see that he too had been weeping.

• • •

Abi thought she would never forgive herself for what she had done that night to Jonathan: or rather, not to Jonathan, who had deserved every ghastly moment of it, but to his family, who had not. She had contemplated every kind of restitution, from writing to Laura to apologise to seeking out the children and telling them their father was a wonderful man and she was simply a very nasty, angry patient of his and she had been very cross with him. She was afraid none of it would work. The harm had been done; she could not undo it. She could only hope that it had not been too great. Especially to the children.

She was obviously a bad person to be able to do such a thing; she had to learn to live with that.

But seeing William again had upset her badly. She hadn’t forgotten
—of course—how great he was, how truly nice and good. But being confronted by him again had reminded her horribly vividly. She felt several miles back in the recovery process.

But … at least she’d ensured he couldn’t entertain any foolish fantasies about her. She’d made quite sure of that. It hadn’t been exactly easy, but she’d done it. By telling him how rotten she was, what she was capable of.

She had not allowed him to think for one moment that it wasn’t really so bad, that it was maybe not her fault, that her early life excused—to an extent—her behaviour. She had actually told him that dreadful night that she didn’t really buy all the crap about people being bad because bad things had happened to them. He had looked at her with those great brown eyes and half laughed and said, “Abi, how can you possibly say such a thing? Of course that’s right; of course people are influenced by how life’s treated them.”

She’d said it just felt like a cop-out to her, but she’d been finishing with him then; it hadn’t mattered what she’d said or what he’d believed. She’d been too distraught to care.

She had been beginning to feel better, to rebuild her life. She was looking for a new job, was thinking she might perhaps move into party planning, as it was called … well, it would be better than party wrecking … She knew she’d be good at it, and it looked like fun. (She’d told William about that, actually, and he’d said that it sounded great. God, he was so nice to talk to; he really, really listened and thought about what you’d said …)

Well, she’d advance down the recovery road again, no doubt. If life had taught her anything, it had taught her that. And the fact that she still missed William, really missed him … well, she should regard all that as some kind of a penance for the wrong she had done, not only to Laura and her children, but to William himself.

• • •

William had been equally upset by their meeting. It had been great in a way … they’d almost become friends once more. But it had made
him miss her horribly all over again; he felt like a reformed alcoholic who had had the fatal, dangerous last sip, and he was back in the misery of his addiction.

It was true, of course, what she said: she was not the person he’d thought; in fact—to be brutal about it—she fell extremely short of the person he had thought, and it would be very hard ever to quite trust her again.

But then, she had been honest with him in the end, brutally honest; she had not spared herself; she had not taken the liar’s way out and continued to deceive him. And that had been brave. She was brave: immensely so. It was a quality in her that William liked and admired. She wasn’t just tough—she was cheerfully so; she didn’t whinge about things—she just got on with them. And he missed her … horribly. And so he thought, Why not see her again? Without any illusions? The attraction had still been there; what she did for him hadn’t changed. Why couldn’t he live with the bad, enjoy the good, the sexy, the totally unsuitable, which was—he knew—so much part of the pleasure of her?

He swung from decision to decision, backwards and forwards, as he went about the farm and fed the cows—now in their winter quarters—and mended fences and hedges and drilled for winter wheat and delivered calves and checked on the drives and the birds with the gamekeeper, and changed his mind almost hourly.

What he needed, William thought as he lay most unusually sleepless in his extremely uncomfortable bed, was some kind of a sign that would make up his mind for him. Only … what was Abi practically bumping into him, quite equally fancy-free, and clearly pleased to see him, but a sign? Was he really likely to get another one? Almost certainly not.

CHAPTER 43