A Banquet of Consequences (8 page)

She finally said to the window, “Charlie, you must pull yourself back from the brink. You don’t have Will’s problems. You never once had Will’s problems, but even Will—”

“Don’t go to Will, Mum.”

“—was on his way to winning that pierced and tattooed creature Lily Foster back. And believe me, I was staying completely out of it, just as I will stay out of your trials with India.”

He shot her a look. She turned from the window and caught it on his face. She said, “Darling, I had to know where things stood between her and this chap she’s met. That’s all it was and now I’m finished. You have the information—it’s a casual thing between them and nothing more—and now that you know it, it’s time for you to step onto the pitch and get her back. You can’t just sit here day after day in this flat and wait for—”

“I can’t, Mum.”

“Of course you can.”

“Not India, but what happened. I can’t come back from it. I’ve tried. I’m trying. But I can’t shake it.”

She returned to the sofa. She sat close to him. She put her arm round his shoulders, and she smoothed his hair from his temple. She said quietly, “Listen to me, my dear. What you can’t shake isn’t Will’s death so much as the fact that you couldn’t help him. And you help so many people, Charlie. You help your clients but beyond your clients, just look at all the people you’ve helped through the services you do them. But you couldn’t help Will and neither could I and neither could any of the doctors he saw throughout his life because what was wrong at the heart of him went too deep. It was slowly killing him and nothing could stop it. He had his work, and that brought him a bit of joy, but in the end that wasn’t enough. Nor was Lily enough. Nor was I or your stepfather.”

“I should have had the skills. I
have
the skills.”

She turned his head so he had to look at her. “You spent your life being his most devoted brother. He took that from you when he . . .” She faltered then seemed to force herself to go on. “When he leapt from that cliff. But you must find something more to sustain you because if you don’t . . . Please, Charlie, you simply must try.”

Then she stopped talking. But he could tell that something was working its way up from deep within her. She finally said with what looked like an enormous effort to control her emotions, “I promised myself,” which broke her voice. But she held up her hand in a gesture that said she needed a moment to compose herself. Which he gave to her. When she was ready, she went on. “Please don’t forget that I, too, loved him. He was so long at the centre of nearly every effort in motherhood that I made. I took him to specialists, to child psychologists, to counselors, to psychiatrists. I found schools that I thought would work for him, and I got on my knees and begged your father to give me the money for those schools, which he would not do. For his own son, he wouldn’t do this, Charlie. And he—your father with all his talents—would not even perform the surgery that would have at least made Will less self-conscious about his ear . . . the terrible
deformity of it . . . the bullying that went with it. ‘For the love of God, Caroline,’ he said to me, ‘have you ever seen the
real
deformities out there? There’s not a thing wrong with him that
you
don’t emphasise to make certain he’s aware of it to the point of being a social cripple and why the hell are you doing this to him?’ I tried to pursue other sources but there were none and who was I anyway but a woman who needed to work just to keep food on our table. If Alastair hadn’t come along, we all would have ended up in the street.”

Part fact and part fantasy, but once again Charlie allowed it. His mother had her own grief at Will’s sudden death, and if it helped her to re-create the past in a way that painted a picture at odds with the memories he had of it, who was he—a bloody hermit in a flat he’d once shared with his wife—to deny her this? Besides, this tale she was telling got them off the subject of India and himself, so he wasn’t about to stop her.

She wasn’t to be derailed, however. “This isn’t about me: my troubles, my concerns, my feelings,” she said. “This is about you. You are all I have now, and I can’t stand knowing you’ve isolated yourself inside this flat, and I can’t bear thinking of you here alone. If I lose you on top of everything else . . .” She began to weep, then. “I’m
sorry
. I don’t mean to cry. But sometimes . . . Here’s how it is and I know you understand: Sometimes I want to die, because how much more pain is one person supposed to deal with? What I’m saying is that I
know
what you’re feeling. I feel it as well. And if I can’t help you . . .
Let
me help you. For God’s love, tell me you’ll do something to pull yourself back together.”

Charlie felt his gaze lock onto hers, and he couldn’t look away. Neither could he not recognise the agony that she was experiencing: a mother who had lost more than one child, and although she didn’t know he’d discovered this about her, he couldn’t tell her that now.

He said, “I’ll try.”

She embraced him. She said, “One step at a time is all that I’m asking, Charlie. You can do that, can’t you?”

“I’ll try,” he said again.

THORNFORD

DORSET

On its surface, an invitation to dinner was completely innocent, so Alastair MacKerron accepted it. Despite their relative positions as employer and employee, he told himself that they were really colleagues who would merely share a meal together, and if that meal was going to be served in the home of the employee instead of in a public restaurant, that was not of particular import.

Sharon Halsey had worked for the bakery for years. Widowed far too young at twenty-four years old, she’d raised two children in straitened circumstances and against all odds but with steadfast determination and tremendous success. One—the daughter—was now a cancer specialist in San Francisco and the other—a son—was a linguist in Strasbourg, and if their mum badly missed them now, the pain of their absence actually made her an outstanding part of Alastair’s professional life. For she liked to keep busy, did Sharon, and keeping busy meant growing his business. Because of this, she was the real reason he owned seven shops across the county, each one of them highly profitable.

She managed them, working a half day in each every week to keep in the picture of how sales were going and what was needed to supply their customers. She kept the books, she ordered supplies, she managed the wages, she hired and sacked employees. She allowed Alastair to do what he did best—the baking—and in doing so she took the burden of business ownership off his shoulders.

He admired her greatly although “Such a mouse of a woman” was how Caroline dismissively described her. But if Sharon’s self-effacing manner and her careworn looks made her seem like a mouse, she was firm of purpose, with endless ideas and equal energy. She’d worked for the bakery when Alastair purchased it, and he’d taken the previous owner’s advice to heart: “Whatever you do, mate, keep Sharon happy. A rise in wages? A new car? A bloody flat in Paris? You see to all of it and she won’t fail you.” She had not.

She lived in Church Road in Thornford, a village some eighteen miles from Shaftesbury. Once the ancient house of a thriving farm
that spread out behind it, her home now stood as part of a line of cottages, deceptive from the outside since it appeared too tiny ever to have housed more than a single individual. Inside, though, it stretched in both directions from a small stone-floored entry, becoming a quirky warren of rooms that, over time, had been transformed into sitting room, dining room, office, kitchen, playroom for children no longer there, and staircase leading to three bedrooms above. It offered a low ceiling, comfortable furniture, prints on the walls, lace curtains at the windows, and flowers from Sharon’s garden, although God only knew when the woman had time to grow them, so busy was she as she darted round Dorset making certain that MacKerron Baked Goods maintained its reputation for quality.

They met twice a month to discuss the affairs of the bakery, and today had been one of their meetings. During it, Alastair had mentioned that Caroline was off with Clare Abbott on business relating to Clare’s new book, and Sharon responded with, “Is she? Then why not come to dinner tonight? I’ve put a nice pork shoulder into the slow cooker this morning. I’ll share it with you.”

He’d said, “You’ll be wanting it for leftovers, won’t you?”

“But not
needing
it for that,” she said. “Come along, Alastair. I’m used to eating alone but you’re not. How long is she gone?”

“Caro?” He wasn’t entirely sure. More and more since Will’s death, they’d been going their own ways. They’d both taken his suicide like a brick to the head, but he’d been recovering from the grief more quickly. As would be the case, he told himself. He cared for Caro’s boys—always had done—but they were not his and he would never feel as a proper dad would feel, with a chain broken irreparably. Caroline didn’t understand this. She’d seen his recovery as a failure of his love for Will, and he’d not been able to persuade her otherwise. At the end of the day, it was becoming easier for them to avoid each other rather than look each other in the eye and weigh the value of what the other was feeling. He said, “I expect a night or two. They’re in London, but Clare’s got a home there as well.”

“Lucky Clare,” Sharon said, and she meant it truly, as he could tell. She didn’t have a bone of jealousy in her, nor did she possess the need to cling to a past in which she’d lost someone she loved. She wasn’t,
he thought, a bit like Caro. But even to think such a thing was deeply disloyal and if he was to dine with Sharon, he needed to keep Caro in his thoughts in a most positive way.

Sharon admitted him into the house, where the entry was scented with a large vase bursting with the roses she grew. Pink, they were, and so were her cheeks. She’d either used a bit of makeup in honour of having a guest for a meal or she was blushing.

She’d dressed a bit for dinner as well, and Alastair felt roughly hewn in her presence. She wore a sundress against the warmth of the summer, showing nicely browned shoulders with a handful of freckles speckling her chest and dipping into a modest shadow of cleavage. She had sandals on her feet, a thin gold chain round her left ankle—he’d never seen such a thing—and her legs were slimmer than he expected and a lovely toast colour with smooth firm skin. In contrast, he himself had merely risen from his usual afternoon nap and stepped into his regular bakery clothing of jeans so exposed to flour that their seams were permanently white and a shirt buttoned right to the throat as usual, although he’d rolled up the sleeves in a bow to the heat.

It occurred to him that he should have brought something along with him: flowers, wine, a cake. He hadn’t thought to do so. He said as much, and she shook her head. “Rubbish. We’re old friends—me and you—so we’re not about to stand on any ceremonies right from the start, eh?”

“Right from the start” should have made him question what he was doing in Thornford. But he took it as a mere chance of words meaning as little as he wished them to mean.

She offered him a drink. Summertime and she herself was having a Pimm’s, she told him. But she had a good lager if he preferred, cider as well, and there was gin. They’d have wine with dinner so he should know that. “I don’t want you to end up blind drunk on the side of the road,” she said with a laugh.

He chose the Pimm’s. He followed her to the kitchen to watch her make it, at her invitation. From there, they went to the garden behind the farmhouse. The fields of the original farm stretched out behind it, rich land onto which the village of Thornford had never intruded. They sat in lawn chairs next to a youthful laburnum tree, where long brown
pods hung bean-like from glossy-leafed branches, a lovely feature of the garden that she’d not added till her children were adolescents.

“I was always scared they’d eat the pods as little ones,” she said. “I’d have told them they’re poison, but you know how kids are. And if I’d lost one of them after already losing their dad—” And then quickly, “Pardon, Alastair. That was thoughtless of me to talk about losing a child. I’m that nervous is what it is. I don’t have guests to dinner as a rule. I’m also a bit sloshed.”

“You’re pink in the face, is what,” he said. Stupid, he thought immediately afterwards. Why had he never been able to speak easily to a woman?

“Am I?” she said. “It’s not the drink. I . . . Well, I used some blusher, and I generally don’t. I expect I look a dead scary sight if you’ve noticed it. Like a clown, eh?”

“You don’t look like a clown,” he told her. He took a gulp of his Pimm’s and then another and he hoped the spirit would loosen his tongue. When it did, all he managed was, “How long’s he been gone?”

She looked only momentarily surprised. She took a sip of her drink. “Kev? More ’n twenty years now.”

“You never said . . .”

“How he died? Gangrene.” And when she saw his expression of surprise and horror, “It was his gut. He had a condition he didn’t take care with, seeds and such getting trapped in these odd little sacs that formed in his gut. They got themselves infected. He was supposed to take care with what he ate and he never did and it killed him.”

“Christ,” he said.

“No one on God’s green earth should have to die like that. It took months as they carted him in and out of operating theatres, removing more and more of him, but still it came back.”

“How old?”

“Twenty-seven when he died.”

“Leaving you—”

She reached for his arm to stop him going further. “Alastair, it’s no matter. I mean, it
is
, but we all face something.” And then she added, “How’s Caroline coping? I’ve not seen her at the bakery in a good long time.”

Since Sharon was the one to introduce the subject, Alastair decided that no disloyalty was involved in revealing a few facts. More than three years since Will’s death and she’d not come back from it, he said quietly. She eats, she reads, and she watches the telly, he said, full stop. His fear—one among many that he had—was that she’d eat herself straight into the grave. Her two diversions were the Women’s League in Shaftesbury and her work for Clare Abbott. Praise God for that last as Alastair thought it was saving her life. It was, he admitted, saving his.