Life Begins (3 page)

She walked fast but Sam skipped on ahead. There were red patches on the backs of his knees – a flare-up of his babyhood eczema – and a bruise on his calf. Charlotte hurried to catch him up, the self-pity displaced by the much more understandable and familiar sensation of guilt – for what she and Martin had put him through, for knowing only too well what it felt like to be the child of a cheating dad. ‘You okay, love?’

‘Yep.’

‘I thought maybe a Coke and a slice of chocolate cake at that nice café.’

It was a cheap ploy, Charlotte knew, but like many of the simplest stratagems it worked. The past could not be controlled – what was done was done – but the future, she reminded herself, was now more within her power than ever.

Sam’s face lit up as she had guessed it would – a treat in recent weeks and beautiful to behold, like curtains parting on daylight. ‘Let’s dump your bag in the car and walk. Or
maybe run,’ Charlotte cried, taking off down the street the moment the car door was closed, knowing he would overtake her in seconds, loving it that she could still astonish him.

There is a workshop – always – wherever we live; a dusky, woody-smelling room lined with shelves of small, sagging boxes, each containing different-sized nails, bolts and screws. Hanging along the wall above the workbench are hammers, screwdrivers and spanners, arranged in graduated order of size, the smallest so appealing that I long – as with the smallest of my beloved babushka dolls – to fold it tightly in my palm. Sometimes – the scenes merge – my father lets me sit on his lap to help tighten a piece of wood in the vice. I use both hands to work the heavy handle, then watch the tightening clench of the metal jaws as he finishes the job. Like teeth, he says, a monster’s teeth; and he presses his mouth to my neck and I squirm and squeal with that afraid-pleasure that comes so easily to a child.

The following Wednesday afternoon Sam ate tea with more than his usual methodical reluctance, cradling the side of his head on one hand and using his fork to spear too-large pieces of chicken and solitary slices of carrot and potato into a barely open mouth. Charlotte sat next to him with a mug of tea, resisting the urge to reprimand. They had already had a scuffle about not being able to eat in front of the television, which she had managed – within a hair’s breadth of caving in – to win.

‘I won’t be out for long. A nice girl called Jessica is coming to baby-sit. Are you okay with that?’

Sam placed a shred of carrot in his mouth and chewed slowly. ‘Whatever.’

‘Dad phoned. I’m dropping you there straight after school
on Friday as Cindy has the afternoon off. He said they might take you to the cinema. That will be nice, won’t it?’

‘I guess.’

‘School all right?’

He raised his head to look at her, his pale blue eyes flashing with scorn behind the straggle of his hair. ‘School sucks.’

‘Miss Hornby said you’re doing much better this term, that you –’

‘Miss Hornby is a spastic.’

‘That’s a horrible word, Sam. You’re not to use it about anyone.’

He dropped his fork on to his empty plate and pushed back his chair. ‘Can I watch telly now?’

‘Don’t you want a pudding – yoghurt or maybe a biscuit?’

He shook his head, sticking out his chin, reminding her momentarily – vividly – of Martin.

‘How about a yoghurt
and
a biscuit
while
watching telly?’

Sam knitted his eyebrows together, fighting her kindness, the softness of her voice, holding out. ‘Can I play on the computer?’

Charlotte drummed her fingers on the table, pretending to think.
‘Yes
, but only
after
eating and… let me see… I think that will require a hug too. A massive, gigantic one that no one else need ever know about.

Sam shuffled towards her and allowed himself to be held, while Charlotte felt a swell of emotion as strong as the one she had experienced when the doctor first tugged him free of her womb and placed him, tiny and slimy, in her arms. She put her nose into his hair, treating herself to an inhalation of the little-boy mustiness of his skin, feeding the animal need that had begun that day in the hospital, so instantaneous, so all-consuming that she had looked at Martin hovering by
the bed with a sort of wonderment that she could ever, until that moment, have had the remotest knowledge of what it meant to love.

An instant later Sam had wriggled free and was delving into the biscuit jar.

‘Did you have games today?’

‘Nah. Can I take two?’

‘Yes –
hey, let’s see that bruise a minute.’

‘What bruise?’

‘There, on your leg, and there’s another by your elbow. Two bruises.’ Charlotte tried to grab his arm, but he snatched it away and skipped out of the kitchen.

An hour later she was welcoming a pimply-faced teenager and Tim Croft into the hall, noting with mixed feelings the effort the estate agent had made on her behalf – his wiry light brown hair, lustrous from washing, his beard freshly trimmed, his large teeth gleaming. In place of the usual work suit there was a tan leather jacket, a black polo-neck jumper and faded blue jeans, tight enough to reveal either a natural athleticism or hard work at the gym.

In fact, he was quite attractive, Charlotte realized, tensing rather than relaxing at the observation as she ushered them into the dining room to meet Sam. Her own ablutions had been limited to a hasty bath, followed by a torturous scanning of her overcrowded wardrobe for an outfit that would appear presentable without communicating any suggestion of a conscious desire to please. Pulling faces at her reflection, feeling, with some disgust, like a teenager who had gone nowhere, learnt nothing, she had settled at last on a staid (too staid) pair of chocolate corduroy trousers and a cream top with mother-of-pearl buttons.

‘We – I – keep the computer in the dining room so I can see if Sam’s eyes are going square, don’t I, darling?’ Charlotte
chattered, trying to strike a tone that would make up for her son’s rude growl of a hello. ‘I bet you’re good with computers, aren’t you, Jessica?’ she prompted, peering over Sam’s shoulder, pleased to see it was dancing dots that were transfixing him, which meant a harmless football game as opposed to something sinister, like a chat room, whatever they looked like. Martin had been in charge of all that – child locks, spam blocks, firewalls and other ungraspable concepts that constituted technological health and safety. The extent of her own abilities, as Sam knew only too well, reached no further than websites and emails.

‘I’m not bad,’ Jessica replied slowly, exposing heavy rail-track braces that Charlotte suspected might account for the poor girl’s evident reluctance to speak.

‘Shall I show you round, then?’ she offered, fighting fresh doubts about the evening and her selection of the cream top, which she had forgotten had an infuriating habit of riding up to her ribcage.

‘Thank you, Mrs Turner.’

‘Excellent.’ Tim, clearly the happiest by far of their unlikely gathering, slapped his hands together and strode across the room to ask Sam who was playing who and where they stood in the league. Charlotte warmed to him, especially when – getting glimpses during the course of her guided tour with Jessica – she saw the hard time Sam gave him in return, his eyes not leaving the screen, his answers monochrome and monosyllabic. ‘The estate agent,’ he had snorted, when she confessed the identity of her escort. ‘What for?’ Charlotte had hesitated, stumped by the multitude of possible answers, all inappropriate (because I felt flattered and sorry for him, because since your father left the only male I have spent time with is you, because with the closure I so craved within reach I seem to have been pitched into a
baffling, maddening state of immobility, of back-sliding, of retrospection…).
‘Hab!’
Sam had spat the word into her silence, making his special gagging face as he bounded up the stairs.

‘Are you ready to go?’ Tim met her and Jessica as they returned to the hall.

‘I think so, unless there’s anything you want to ask me, Jessica?’ Charlotte murmured, smiling encouragingly at the girl, who had chatted very sweetly between having the fridge pointed out to her and receiving instructions about bath-time and bed. ‘He’ll argue about going upstairs, of course. So don’t give in, will you? He can leave his light on if he wants… He likes to sleep with it on. Not that I’ll be late –’ Charlotte broke off, flustered, with Tim cracking his knuckles and Jessica staring at her feet, both clearly dying to get on with things.

‘I thought we’d get out of town a bit.’

‘Did you?’ Charlotte gripped the buckle on her handbag and looked out of the window, straining to focus beyond the blur of her reflection to the neon lights of bars and shops streaking behind. Tim had escorted her down the street to a sleek two-seater she had never seen parked outside the estate agent’s. It was more like being in a cockpit than a car. Outside, what she could see of the world seemed equally compressed: huddled figures scurrying under the dark March sky, phones pressed to their ears, each absorbed in the tight, complicated package of their own life.
Relax
, she scolded herself.
Go with the flow.
After further doubts and several postponements, her expectations for the date were almost too low for disappointment. Fun, not love – how hard could that be? And if it went wrong she could relay it as a hilarious anecdote to her friends; prove to them, and
herself, that she hadn’t lost her sense of humour, that the long stint of playing the complaining wronged wife was well and truly past. Charlotte inhaled and exhaled deeply, releasing her grip on her handbag and noticing that the hard edge of the buckle had left a red ridge across her palm. Like a lifeline, she mused, determined not to let the nerves back in, a new, vivid lifeline, pointing who knew where?

Beside her, the padded leather steering-wheel made small swishing sounds as Tim slid it between his palms.

‘Don’t worry, not too far. We’re heading for Kingston. Are you too warm?’

‘No… I – Well, maybe just a little.’ Charlotte shifted her legs away from the island of controls while he pressed various buttons. She could smell his aftershave, a faint but penetrating scent of something citrus. Beneath his earlobe were three long hairs that he had missed with the razor. Every time he changed gear his elbow brushed against hers. The outline of his thigh muscles was surfacing visibly through his trousers as he worked the pedals. ‘Look, Tim,’ she blurted, ‘I think I might have given you the wrong idea – I mean, accepting to come out tonight. I never meant –’

‘I know.’ He shot her a grin. ‘Seriously, it’s fine. I made it difficult for you, didn’t I? Bulldozed you into accepting. I can be like that, I’m afraid, when I get an idea into my head.’

‘The thing is, I only recently…’

‘Separated? I’d worked that one out a while ago. I’m not long out of a relationship myself,’ he added smoothly, swinging off the main road. ‘Ten years, you think you’ve found your soul-mate and then
pfff,
’ he clicked his fingers, ‘you’re on your own, watering dead pot plants and watching crap on the telly and wondering what the hell happened to your life. You have to do something about it or you go mad.’

‘Yes
, you do,’ Charlotte agreed, liking him so much that
it was all she could do not to confide the going-backwards feeling, haunting her still, every time she had least reason for it.

‘So, I thought, why not have a drink?’ Tim continued. ‘Even with a girl who doesn’t fancy you. Even,’ he pressed on, unperturbed by Charlotte’s failure to interrupt, ‘if that girl is a client and every rule in the book warns against mixing business and pleasure. Ah, here we are.’ He braked sharply and turned past a wooden pointing arm carved with the words ‘El Ranchero’. A few moments later they had pulled up in front of two large wooden ostriches guarding a walkway to an empty stretch of decking and a large door. ‘A friend recommended it. One of those Spanish tapas places – nothing heavy, snacks and drinks. Just a bit of fun, eh?’ He leapt out of the car and gallantly opened her door, then jogged ahead to be able to offer the same compliment at the restaurant entrance.

The ostriches were hideous close to, crudely carved and so poorly attached to their moorings that their spindly legs juddered visibly as a gust of wind whipped across the car park. But Tim beckoned her towards the warm, bright interior with the confidence of a hotel doorman, and soon they were settled most comfortably on bar stools in front of chilled white wine and dishes of prawns, ratatouille and fluffy miniature tortillas. They talked easily and at length about houses; prices, streets, deposits, surveys. Tim had several funny stories about difficult clients and collapsing transactions, one in particular involving a milkman and a pet cockerel that made Charlotte laugh so hard she almost fell off the stool. And then, quite suddenly, when she was truly relaxed and off her guard, Tim announced that he had liked her from the start, that from the instant she had walked into his office it had been like a light going on. ‘It’s okay,’
he assured her hastily, patting her hand as she flushed and squirmed, ‘you’ve made it clear how you feel and I understand – I
respect–
that, but…’ he lowered his voice ‘… even as your friend I would like to know all about you, Charlotte Turner, or at least a
little
more?’ he pleaded, turning the confession into a joke by holding up his thumb and index finger as if indicating a tiny portion of something edible.

Flattered, her instincts softened by wine, at a loss as to what to make of this man with his twists and turns of tone, so
unknown
(so unknowable, as it seemed, after twenty years of no one but Martin), Charlotte countered feebly that there was nothing to tell and what about him? She found herself deciding in the same instant that the beard wasn’t so bad. At least there were no specks of oil or food in it; he had been careful about that, dabbing with a napkin between mouthfuls. He ate daintily, too, for a man, which she liked. Martin had gone into a sort of trance when it came to food, shovelling in forkfuls, incapable of sensible conversation until his hunger was appeased.