Flight (18 page)

For years after they split up it would keep her awake at night, agonising over what her father would have thought if he’d ever learned the real reasons for the failure of her relationship. He’d have had kittens. He’d have said,
That’s what happens when you give it away – you end up with a wrong ’un
. Despite not being a religious man, he’d never got over the fact that she was ‘living in sin’ with Doug, that Doug hadn’t made an honest woman of her – a
housewife
of her, no doubt.

Poor Dad
, Laura thinks now, recalling his deathly pallor towards the end, long after she had left Doug and started anew with Rob and Phoebe. He was dying, though it was not something Laura and her mother ever discussed in honest terms, behaving as though it was business as usual as he battled against the crushing weight of his illness, gasping for every one of his last breaths. On the final day, sitting beside his makeshift bed in the parlour while Mum was off brewing another round of tea, Laura had lied to him, knowing it was the end. However skewed his view of the world, of women, still she longed for his approval.

‘Rob and I are getting married,’ she’d whispered close to his face, before kissing him on the brow. ‘His job’s going well, and Phoebe needs someone to look after her until she starts at school. And all being well, Dad, you’ll be there to give me away?’

A flicker crossed his face; almost a smile. She forced a small laugh despite her tears, tears he would never see through his mask of agony.

‘I’ll have to get a few housekeeping tips from Mum, eh? You know how hopeless I am.’

With unbearable labour he spoke, his voice a rattle. ‘You’ll do fine, love.’

Laura squeezed his hand and left the room, to lock herself in the bathroom, where she sank to the floor and sobbed for the relationship they might have had, in another time, another place.

The route to Padstow is uncomplicated, and soon after she enters the town Laura swings into the car park at the front of the Metropole hotel, feeling a surge of relief as she spots Rob’s silver car parked in the far corner. She pulls up in a free space and switches off the engine, sitting for a few moments beneath the shade of a tree, her hand still resting on the wheel as she wonders what to tell him – to tell Phoebe – and feeling more uncertain than she’s ever felt about where this will all lead. She contemplates backing out again and driving home, back to the London suburbs, without stopping to say goodbye to Wren. But then what? The stuff of this weekend can’t be simply undone; they’ve opened the lid of this box now – surely they owe it to themselves, to Phoebe, to finish what they started… to look inside.

Laura arrived at Robert’s just before seven that evening back in 1994, and he stepped out on to the path before Laura had even come to a stop, his eyes unreachable. Laura drew him close, cradled his head to her shoulder and cried with him. Not in their entire history together had he needed her like this, called for her in his hour of desperation. It had always
been the other way round, always Laura leaning on
him
, and, as she stood in the cold autumn glow on his doorstep, the unfamiliar sensation of his need for her was crushing in its intensity.

Inside, the house seemed wintry, uninhabited, as if, in the few short hours since she’d gone, Wren had robbed the house of its light and warmth. The silence felt like a death. Phoebe was lying on her play mat, tugging at her socks. Laura went straight to her, lifting her high and smothering her in kisses; the baby girl laughed and waved, oblivious to the great hole in the room, the seismic shift casting fractures through their cosy world.

‘She’s bottle-fed now, isn’t she?’ Laura felt desperate to do something practical, to snap him from his darkness.

Flopping back on the sofa, Rob ran his hands over his trousers, his face in turmoil as he tried to retrieve the answer to her question. ‘Yes, mainly,’ he eventually said. ‘Wren’s been weaning her off over the past few weeks. Except for the last one of the day – she’s still breastfeeding at bedtime.’ Fresh horror crossed his face as he tried to anticipate the difficulty of getting Phoebe to take the bottle at night instead.

Laura raised a hand, urging him to calm down, and she shifted the baby to her other hip as she headed for the door. ‘She’ll be fine, Rob. You stay where you are, rest your eyes for a bit. I’ll take care of Phoebe.’

In the kitchen, she found clean bottles in the steriliser and carefully followed the pack instructions to make up some milk, while Phoebe watched from her bouncer chair, chewing on a finger rusk. Upstairs Laura bathed her, kissing her tummy as she dressed her in a fresh babygro, before turning the light low to settle in the feeding chair of Phoebe’s nursery room. At first the baby resisted the synthetic teat of the bottle, grizzling
and wrestling her head inwards as she sought her mother’s breast, confused by the change in routine. But eventually she took the bottle, and after five or ten minutes rocking gently in the darkness Phoebe allowed Laura to lay her in her cot, where she found her special cloth and the comfort of her thumb.

Softly treading down the stairs, Laura returned to Robert where he sat on the sofa, staring at the blank screen of the TV, his face scored in concentration. ‘There must have been something, Rob,’ she said. ‘Some clue that she wasn’t happy?’

He tore his gaze from the screen to look at Laura, now perched on the corner of the coffee table, and shook his head.

‘Did you argue?’

‘No.’ Robert closed his eyes and dropped his head against the back of the sofa. ‘
No
.’

Laura took his hand and kissed it, before opening the drinks cabinet to take out two crystal tumblers. She fetched ice from the kitchen and returned, pouring generous quantities of scotch and sitting at the opposite end of the sofa, pushing the glass into Robert’s resisting hand. ‘You’re in shock. Just have a drink, Rob.
Go on
.’

He drank the whisky, and several more afterwards, until his dazed façade began to slip, and the words came. Upstairs, Phoebe slept peacefully. Laura brought a tray of cold food to the coffee table, to sit cross-legged beside Robert, passing him crackers and Stilton and listening to him talk.

Rob pushed the crumbs around his plate, gathering them into a small mound. ‘Remember that first day in the canteen? Remember what she was like? Her quiet eyes – her laugh. Her laugh is still the most beautiful sound to me, Laur. I miss it. I miss her laugh.’

‘Rob, she’s only been gone a few hours. You’ll hear her laugh again soon enough.’

He rapped his knuckles on the glass of the table. ‘No.
I miss her laugh
. I haven’t heard it in months.’

Laura frowned, poured him another drink.

‘She stopped laughing, Laur – that’s the difference. She hasn’t laughed for the longest time. Since the baby. You tell me when you last heard her laugh.’

He must be wrong
, Laura thought, though she struggled to remember Wren being anything other than distant and humourless in more recent times. ‘Tell me about the last time you remember her laughing,’ she said, hoping he’d realise he was wrong, that things weren’t really the way they seemed right now.

‘I know exactly when it was. It was the day before she went into labour. We walked along the river – trying to bring the baby on – and we were talking about college and that party we had at Victoria Terrace right before we all moved out.’

Laura smiled, conjuring up an image of Mad Benji squatting in the flowerbed with his trousers round his ankles and a knitted tea cosy on his head. ‘It’s just as well we were moving out; they’d have evicted us otherwise. The mess we made of the flower borders!’

‘Wren said she’d gone into our bedroom to look for someone’s coat and found Professor Waite under a donkey jacket with Matthew Truss.’

‘No! Wren said that? She’d have told us, surely? Wasn’t the prof a married man – and I’m sure Matt had a girlfriend!’

‘They begged her not to tell, and, Wren being Wren, she didn’t say a word till years later when we heard that Waite had died. When she walked in on them at the party, old Waite was apparently wearing nothing but his beard and
horn-rimmed
specs – and Michael – well, she said she’d never seen such an enormous appendage in her entire life.’

Laura screamed with laughter. ‘But Matthew was a tiny little man! He was nearly as small as me!’

‘She said it was like a third leg.’ Rob smiled, his eyes filling up with tears. ‘And the thing is, Laur, we laughed when she told me this story; we leant on the railings looking down at the ducks bobbing along on the water, and we laughed so hard she thought her waters might break. And that was the last time. I haven’t heard her laugh like that in over six months.’ He looked into Laura’s eyes as she placed a light hand on his wrist. ‘I knew she was changing, saw it happening in front of my face, and I did nothing to help her, nothing to bring her back. I just got up each morning and went to work and came home as if everything was just the same as ever. But it isn’t – it wasn’t – and now she’s gone. I’m a fucking idiot.’

‘She’ll be back, Rob,’ Laura said, but in her heart she couldn’t be sure it was true. If it had been anyone else she’d have believed it, but not Wren. Not calm, consistent Wren. Everything she ever undertook, she did it with such certainty and resolution; and now she had gone. ‘And, until she does, I’ll be here for you. OK? I can let the agency know I won’t be back for a while – and I’ll be here to look after Phoebe until Wren comes home. OK, Rob?’

Robert placed his hand over hers and blinked once, a shattered, scotch-soaked curl touching one corner of his mouth. Laura helped him to bed, slipping in beside him and breathing in the ghostly scent of Wren as she drifted into dreams of lost children.

A rap on the passenger window startles her and she slaps the key-bunch to her chest with a gasp. It’s Phoebe, and she looks friendly at least. She cocks a thumb, telling Laura to
get out of the car. Laura doesn’t move for a few seconds, noticing again how grown-up Phoebe has become, how
self-assured
and calm. In that tranquil, determined way she has about her, she looks so like Wren, it’s uncanny. Laura steps out of the car and walks around the rear and into Phoebe’s arms, holding her tight.

‘I’m so sorry, Phoebs. It was selfish of me, running off like that.’

Phoebe pushes her away to look into her face, before grabbing her back more fiercely than before. When she eases away, Laura takes her hands and lowers her voice. ‘Phoebs – there’s so much we need to talk about.’

‘I know, I know,’ Phoebe says. ‘Dad and I talked all the way here in the car – he told me so much about my mum, stuff he’s never talked about before. About how you met, all those years you three lived together – about you and him growing up in Gatebridge. He even gave me this – ’ She reaches into the back pocket of her jeans to produce a passport photograph, the one taken near Camden Lock in their first year at college. ‘He’s got two – one of his own, and one – you won’t believe this – that he found under the floorboards in your old flat. Isn’t that amazing? He said I can keep this one, so now we all have one each. You, Dad, Wren and me.’

Laura smiles blankly, baffled by the idea of Robert returning to their old flat, to dig up their old photo. Why would he do that – why would he go there and not tell her, not take her too? It seems like weeks since they were last together, when in fact it’s been no more than a weekend.
So many secrets between us
, she thinks,
so many half-truths
. Her pulse races at the thought of that letter he tried to conceal, and she recalls his startled expression while he sat
and read it in the car… the lie he told when she asked him about it. She knows Wren isn’t telling her everything either, one moment warm and yielding, the next a closed door. And Phoebe – well, Phoebe is protecting another secret altogether. She focuses in on her goddaughter, who’s now looking at her with confusion and concern.

‘Laura?’

‘Phoebs, you’re going to have to tell your dad, you know. You have to tell him about the baby.’

Phoebe tries to break away, the colour rising to her cheeks, but Laura holds tight of her fingers, refusing to let her go.

‘Phoebe,
please
. I know about this. I’ve been there myself – just like you, pretending nothing’s going on, that everything’s fine – and in my experience these things rarely go away by themselves.’

Beyond Phoebe, across the drive, Rob appears in the hotel entrance. When he spots them, his face lights up and he breaks into a jog, his delight at seeing Laura clear. ‘
Shh
,’ Laura whispers locking eyes with Phoebe. ‘We’ll talk more later. OK? Don’t worry. You’re not on your own.’

This time it’s Phoebe who won’t let go, and when Rob sweeps Laura into his embrace Phoebe remains attached, allowing herself to be gathered up into the loving arms of her parents, back together again.

‘We have to talk.’

It’s the first thing Rob can think to say, and he immediately realises it’s a horrible cliché.

‘You don’t say, Rob.’ Laura pulls back and looks meaningfully at Phoebe, who laughs nervously, gives her dad a little shove. There’s something childish in their
awkwardness
, as they stand in a rigid huddle beside Laura’s car, three strangers to Cornwall gathered in a hotel car park. The autumn sun is high in the blue sky, and the smell of the coast is in the air.

Rob tries to smile, but finds his mouth won’t do what he wants it to. ‘So, you’ve seen her?’ He glances at Phoebe; she knows they are here to find her mother, it’s what Phoebe wants, but still, it feels unsettling to be talking about her so openly. ‘You’ve been with Wren?’

Laura looks from Rob to Phoebe, her expression that of stunned surprise. ‘I can hardly believe it myself, but she’s here. I stayed with her the past couple of nights. She’s only a few miles away, along the coast, living in a little cottage overlooking the sea – just her and her dogs.’

The heat drains from Robert’s skin, and he’s shocked by the power of his reaction. ‘She’s really here?’ He stares into Laura’s face; she looks drawn. ‘Did she ask about me? About Phoebe? Was she pleased to see you? Does she know – ?’

‘Does she want to see me?’ Phoebe cuts in, her fingers reaching out to tug at Laura’s sleeve, childlike. ‘Can we see her?’
Laura backs up against the side of the car. She turns her face towards the sky, releasing a slow breath. ‘Christ.’ After a pause she runs the heel of her hand up over her brow, appearing distracted by the passing traffic. She turns her attention back to Rob and Phoebe as she twirls her hair into a rope, casting it over her shoulder. ‘I haven’t thought this through at all.
We
haven’t thought this through, Rob. Phoebs, she doesn’t even know you’re here – in fact, as far as she knows, it’s just me. She’s different, Rob – she’s the same in certain ways, but she’s so different. I don’t know – I don’t know how she’d react if you just turned up. These past couple of days it’s been like chipping away at stone – and no, I haven’t told her everything about you and me. She knows we’re living together, and that I’ve been around for Phoebe – but I’ve been nervous about saying too much too soon. We need to be really careful not to scare her off.’

As Rob waits for Laura to continue, his phone buzzes inside his breast pocket, instantly bringing Ava to mind. He fumbles for the phone and looks at the message:
20% off this weekend at Pizza Express
. ‘Listen, Laur. We
really
do need to talk,’ he says again, ‘and not just about Wren.’ His mind is bursting with new information; he’s struggling to hold on to what matters most – to separate all these things, to pull together and pick apart the connections that thread between them. He has to talk to Laura about Ava, but he knows it will have to wait until he has her alone. Phoebe can’t hear this, not yet.

‘We
are
talking,’ Laura replies. She turns to Phoebe, confused.

‘No.
Us
. We need to talk. You and me.’

Phoebe’s eyes fill with fear and she crosses her arms, pulls in her chin. ‘What is it?’ she asks, lowering her voice.
‘What do you need to talk about? You two are OK, aren’t you? Dad?’

As one, Laura and Rob turn towards Phoebe, both reaching out to reassure her.

‘We’re fine, really,’ says Laura. ‘We’re all just a bit strung out. Right, Rob?’

Rob nods. ‘Right.’

‘We’ve been through worse, haven’t we? And we survived.’

Rob nods again, struck mute with the fear of their future, his senses returning to trespass on the raw wounds of those early days after Wren had gone.

For the first few weeks after Phoebe was born Laura visited every weekend without fail, and, while Rob could tell she was eager to bond with her baby goddaughter, he suspected she wasn’t exactly sorry to get away from Doug either. Weekends, she’d confided several years earlier, were Doug’s low point, the time when all restraint was abandoned, when his demons were most likely to make themselves known. It wasn’t as if he even had a proper occupation, a Monday-to-Friday job like the rest of them, yet still the weekend was when he was most likely to go on a bender, and Laura was only too glad of an excuse to be out of it.

‘At any rate, Robbie, you need me more at the moment,’ she told him as she emptied her rucksack out on to the spare bed, organising her few belongings before deftly taking over Phoebe duties.

And she was right: Rob did need her. What he probably didn’t entirely appreciate was that Wren’s need for Laura was even greater than his; he barely allowed himself to acknowledge the weak relief in Wren’s face every time her
best friend reappeared in their front doorway. Even a couple of weeks after Phoebe’s birth Wren was shadowy and slight, but the health visitor was encouraging, quick to put it down to the demands of breastfeeding and mild anaemia. She left them with iron pills, leaflets and a well-practised hug, and then they were on their own. And so, when Fridays came around and Laura arrived on the doorstep in a flurry of auburn locks and good humour, Rob couldn’t have been happier. Together they glossed over Wren’s passive mood, answering for her, telling her not to expect to run before she could walk, and during Laura’s visits at least she seemed to pick up a little. Simultaneously there grew an unspoken agreement that they would no longer discuss Laura’s own want of a child; while Phoebe was there to glue them all together, the system worked. Between them, the collusion was almost flawless.

When Phoebe was just over a fortnight old, Rob went back to work, having taken all the additional leave he could possibly afford in his position at the school. Laura stayed on for an extra night to help ease Wren into her first day without Rob, and that morning he left them together at the breakfast table, kissing each before pausing in the doorway to study them for a moment, his two oldest friends passing baby Phoebe between them as they ate. Together they sat, beautifully make-up-free in their dressing gowns, and they smiled, waved him away, told him to forget about them, to have a good day.

‘It’s like having two wives,’ he joked, and Laura told him to think again, threatening to lob the sugar bowl at him if he didn’t hop it quick.

As he eased out into the Monday morning traffic, and drove along the well-travelled route towards school, his
relief was overwhelming. He was out – out from beneath the stifling blanket of home life – of feeding and cleaning and changing and caring, of fretting and checking and making the best. Of broken sleep and unspoken fears. For those brief hours, from Monday to Friday, Rob felt entirely free.

Eventually, Laura takes control, and the three of them retreat inside for a hurried tea in the hotel bar, while they devise a plan for the afternoon ahead. Rob agrees easily. Somehow he senses he’s on Laura’s territory here, even though she only arrived in Cornwall a short while before him. But those few hours, those two nights make all the difference to their roles here. She’s seen Wren – talked to her – and with that advantage Laura is best placed to lead the way.

Phoebe is insistent that she will see her mother, no matter how she is received. ‘She owes me that much, doesn’t she?’ she asks Laura across the bright cotton tablecloth of their window seat. The waitress places tea for three on the table between them, along with a plate of biscuits. Phoebe reaches for one. ‘What’s the worst that can happen? She’s rejected me once. It’s not going to kill me if she does it again.’

Rob looks aghast at the thought. ‘Sweetheart? I know you’re putting on a brave face, but – ’

Phoebe stirs her tea with some force, and he knows to give in.

‘Eat something, Dad,’ she says. ‘You barely touched the sandwiches I made on the way here.’ And for the next ten minutes a silence falls over the table, as they eat their biscuits and drink their tea, each lost in their own private thoughts.

By mid-afternoon, under Laura’s guidance, Rob is driving them back along the coastal roads, in the direction of the
cottage, where they will deliver Phoebe, like a parcel, to Wren’s front door. Rob’s heart is pounding, his knuckles stretched pale at the wheel, and he searches his mind for something, something useful,
anything
reassuring to say to Phoebe, who sits in the back seat, gazing serenely from the window at the fields and coastline passing by. His eyes return to her in the rear-view mirror, and he knows from her resolute avoidance that she is aware of him looking, as she stoically buttons herself up to cope with whatever may come. She’s so like Wren in that way, it almost breaks him to see it. Some fifteen minutes later they turn into the narrow track leading towards Wren’s place and Laura indicates to pull over a little way down the lane, where she knows the car won’t be seen. The blue eaves of the cottage are just visible, peeking over the top of the hedgerow, the only indication that there’s a house there at all. The unfamiliarity of it all opens up inside him like a wound: to think that Wren is just beyond that border, that she’s been here, without them for all these years. Alone.

‘She won’t like it,’ Laura warns, twisting in her seat to face Phoebe. ‘Don’t let her – her seriousness – put you off. She’ll be shocked. She might even refuse to talk to you at all. Phoebs? Can you cope with that? Because we’re going to leave you here on your own.’

‘
Laura
, I’m an adult. I’ll be fine.’ As she says this, Rob detects the uncertainty in her voice, sees the tiny furrow of anxiety in her smooth young forehead.

Laura pauses to look at Rob in the seat beside her. He feels exposed, useless. She squeezes his hand before turning back to Phoebe. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘So, I’ll take you to the door, then your dad and I are going to carry on down this path to the car park at the end. We’ll walk out to the rocks, give
you as long as you want, or need – but if you’ve had enough, if it doesn’t go well, head down that way and we’ll meet up one way or another. You can’t go wrong; it’s just one road, straight down to the beach.’ She rummages about in her bag and hands Phoebe a ten-pound note. ‘Get yourself a hot chocolate if you have to wait around for us. There’s a kiosk in the car park.’

Phoebe takes the money. ‘Hopefully
she’ll
make me a drink, and then I can give this back to you.’

‘Hopefully,’ says Laura. She purses her lips decisively and opens the passenger door. ‘Let’s go.’

Rob remains in the driver’s seat as, hand in hand, Laura and Phoebe take the short walk towards Wren’s cottage. They hesitate just before the opening in the hedge, to turn and wave, and Rob notices for the first time just how much Phoebe has changed. She’s right, of course: she’s all grown up, and with some small sadness he realises that baby Phoebe is now head and shoulders above little Laura. The thought of Wren rejecting her now, of her not reaching out to gather her up as a mother should – it’s almost more than he can bear to contemplate. How, Rob wonders, will Wren see the infant in her now – how will she know that she’s hers?

Visions of newborn Ava expand in Rob’s mind, an infant discarded on a hospital ward, motherless, fatherless, a secret hidden across the years. He watches a line of birds as it slices the sky, and he cries out in self-loathing at the wall he has built up against the idea of her. This is his child; if he were to deny Ava, as Wren has denied Phoebe, how could he live with himself? The thought of her out in the world all this time, robbed of knowledge, is too cruel, too unjust. Slamming the car door, Rob heads down the sand-blown dirt track, scrolling through his phone until he locates the email
with Ava’s number attached. The wind snaps at the back of his neck and he pulls his collar up against the cold, dialling the number, keeping watch on the path behind, in case Laura should reappear.

Ava answers on the third ring. ‘Hello?’ she says.

‘Ava? This is Robert Irving.’ He’s aware how formal he sounds, so startled is he that she should have answered at all.

There’s a pause on the line before she responds. ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my
God
! I can’t believe it’s actually you!’ Ava sounds young, so much younger than the written voice of her emails. She can hardly contain her excitement, and Rob feels the thrill of her delight rushing at him. ‘Talk to me, so I can hear your voice!’

He laughs; it’s like talking to Phoebe at her most playful, or a couple of years back, before she headed off to university. ‘Goodness, this feels strange, doesn’t it?’ he says, suddenly self-conscious. They will remember this conversation forever; the sun is high and bright in the sky, the wind biting cold, every word they speak loaded with expectation. The enormity of the moment is not lost on him. ‘I meant to reply to your email earlier – you know, about meeting up some time?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’d like that, of course.’

‘You would? Oh, that’s such a relief to hear – I can’t tell you – I was really worried I might have scared you off, asking so soon after making contact. I mean, I’ve had my whole life to get used to the idea that I’ve got other parents out there – but you – well, you know what I mean?’

She sounds so gentle, so generous, and Robert feels like a self-centred idiot for fearing this contact, for his initial dread. ‘I was so sorry to hear about your mum, Ava. That’s tough
when you’re still so young. But it sounds as if she’s done a wonderful job raising you.’

‘Well, you know.’ She laughs again, this time awkwardly, nervously. ‘She was pretty ill for a long time, and I’d been wanting to track down my birth parents for years, but was too worried about how she’d feel. Not that I – ’

‘No, no, of course. It’s terrible to watch a loved one get ill like that. What about your dad – is he still around?’

‘Oh, yeah, I’ve still got my dad. He’s found it quite hard, since Mum, so I’ve been helping him to go through her things this weekend as he couldn’t face it. I’m actually up in the spare room going through one of her old suitcases now – that’s how I managed to get hold of that photograph.’

Rob’s stomach flips. ‘Photograph?’

‘Didn’t you get my last email? The one with the picture of you attached – at least that’s who I’m hoping it is! It’s the photo my birth mother left with her letter.’