Life Begins (32 page)

But that night, after laying the table, Theresa was the one
who shook out the newspaper. War-zones, murder, injustice – the stories were torrid and varied. Yet she was too swamped in the story of her own life to care; a life that, in spite of her efforts, seemed somehow to be unravelling, behind the scenes, in a place that she couldn’t pin down. Out of kilter, out of control, draining. How, Theresa marvelled, had she ever found managing something as mercurial as a marriage easy? How, too, had she dared privately, smugly, to criticize separating couples for lacking stamina? Henry, for whatever reason, had grown unreachable. It wasn’t about staying power, it was about fissures too deep to see, a subterranean landscape that shifted every time she thought she had got close to understanding it.

Tim was surprised to see a woman crouched in the front garden, a woman in such a multi-layered frilled skirt and with so many beads and braids hanging off her arms and round her neck that he even wondered, momentarily, if Charlotte was being doorstepped by one of the travellers who had lately been loitering with smeary-faced offspring beside the local cash machine. Disconcerted, the speech he had been rehearsing scattering into nonsense, Tim stopped halfway through the gate, which had been fixed, he noticed suddenly, glancing at the gleaming new brass hinge. But when the woman stood up, he saw that she was sitting on a large leather holdall and that the layered skirt was well cut, stopping a few inches short of round, shapely calves and eye-catching toffee-suede high heels. ‘Are you after Charlotte?’ she asked, folding her arms and cocking her head at him.

Tim almost turned and ran back to his car, which he had taken the precaution of parking well out of sight, both for fear of alerting the object of his visit to his impending arrival
and because he had wanted to give himself the walk as a chance to change his mind. The woman’s question, so innocuous in its intent, bulged with significance. Was he after Charlotte? For reassurance, Tim groped for a line or two of his speech – the funny bit about children playing go-between, the light-hearted tone of
enquiry
that had felt so easy in his head. After all, Charlotte herself might appear at any moment and coherence would be required. But his earlier lucidity remained irretrievable and the woman’s cocked head and decidedly entertained expression demanded a response.
Yes
, but only on the off-chance.’

‘Like me,’ she squealed, with evident satisfaction, bracelets jingling as she clapped her hands together. ‘I’m not supposed to arrive until the end of next week – I live in America, you see – but my plans changed, as plans do, so I was ringing the bell on the off-chance. Except that Charlotte isn’t here and now it’s going to rain and I’ve got a brother to visit too.’

A silence followed while they both studied the sky.

‘We could wait together?’

Tim groped behind him for the gate latch, shaking his head. He had promised himself he would trust things to Fate and here it was – an empty house, a locked door. Stupid to have paid any attention to the message from the kid anyway, letting his feelings get stirred up again when he had been so close to burying them for good. It had been an endearing thing to do – he had never got the impression the boy liked him that much – but what did a thirteen-year-old know about anything?

‘I’m surprised she isn’t here, frankly, as I’m sure she said Sam’s summer term starts straight after Easter. Her son is my godson,’ the woman added, with evident pride. ‘I’m called Eve, by the way. Charlotte and I go back a long way,
a
very
long way. We lost touch for a bit, but then I decided to track her down – the wonders of cyberspace, eh?’ She rolled her eyes and then, in a bashful, tottering rush, came down the path to offer him her hand.

It was a very small hand, cold to the touch, and jammed with rings. She was fuller figured than Tim had realized, with a deep, openly displayed cleavage and a distinct swell to her backside, curving up towards a strikingly narrow waist that had been accentuated by a wide leather belt. ‘I’m Tim – Tim Croft.’

‘And what do you do, Tim Croft?’

‘I manage an estate agency,’ he began automatically.

‘I thought she’d taken the house off the market.’

‘She has… Look…’ he stammered ‘… could you, perhaps, just tell Charlotte that I came by?’

‘If I see her,’ murmured Eve, with a quizzical look. ‘I’m not going to hang on here much longer.’

Tim stuck his hands into his pockets as he sauntered back down the street, turning to offer a smile of surprise when the Eve woman called out an extra goodbye, waving so vigorously that he could see the bangles spinning down to her elbow.

Charlotte crossed her bare legs for warmth as she huddled against the gritty stone wall of the church and tried, for the umpteenth time, to block out sufficient quantities of gusting air to allow the lighting of a cigarette. Jasper, bored by so confined a location, tugged with fresh, surprising strength on his lead. Charlotte jerked it back, assailed as she did so by a wave of the old hatred for her mother – insisting she bring the bloody animal to London. How selfish, how inconsiderate, how… But her thoughts dried up at the recollection of Jean’s tremulous pleading for her to look
after him. It had, Charlotte knew, been an act of sacrifice, not selfishness. With her leg so bruised and her arm in plaster, Jean had explained, she was afraid that he would be deprived of too many of his daily pleasures. Prue, who tolerated him (tolerated
her
, if the truth were told, Jean had muttered darkly), would do the bare minimum, even if paid. He was small and old but he was energetic. He wouldn’t understand. He would spend all day whimpering. It would break her heart. If Charlotte could bear to have him just for a few weeks, until she had got her strength back…

They had been sitting across the kitchen table, Jean in her washed-out yellow candlewick dressing-gown, Charlotte in her nightshirt with a blanket across her shoulders, an old, stiff one that smelt of mothballs. They had met on the landing in the small hours, a pair of insomniacs who had never once talked to each other about not being able to sleep. Charlotte had suggested a hot drink and led the way downstairs to put the kettle on, marvelling still at the new quiet closeness between them, at the secular state of grace that had wrapped itself round her heart. The request about looking after the dog had followed soon after – unwelcome, inconvenient, but impossible to refuse. Charlotte had said, ‘Of course,’ and started rinsing out the milk saucepan, consoling herself with how pleased Sam would be and experiencing a stab of longing to see her son’s sunny smile.

When she turned from the sink, ready to suggest they return to their respective beds, she was surprised to find her mother shuffling back into the kitchen from the sitting room, her eyes unnaturally bright, her breath coming in small gasps.

‘What’s happened? Are you all right?’

‘Yes –
quite. Give me a minute.’Jean closed her eyes and
made a visible effort to breathe more slowly. ‘Oh dear,’ she said opening them and making her way to a chair. ‘I’m not going to be very good at this.’

‘Good at what?’ Charlotte had pressed gently, venturing a hand on her mother’s shoulder and then a stroke of the soft silvery hair… the hair she had washed. The new lovely feeling surged again, like a door opening, letting warmth into a cold room.

‘This.’ Jean put her hand into her dressing-gown pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. ‘Don’t blame me, Charlotte.’

‘Blame you? Of course not. Whatever for?’

‘I was trying to protect you.’

‘From what? Mum, what
is
this?’

‘Sit down, dear, would you?’ Jean patted the seat next to hers and sighed heavily. ‘That day Dad and I took you to Durham, do you remember?’

‘Of course.’ Charlotte, sitting now, started a smile, then didn’t dare to finish it.

Jean had put the folded paper between them and was darting glances at her – afraid, ashamed, timid – impossible to read, but leading nowhere good, Charlotte was sure of that. She knew, too, that what was coming was because of the new invisible bond between them – the open door – and it made her long to kick it back shut for good.

‘That day, he was so ill, wasn’t he?’

Charlotte waited. Her own version of the day, locked tightly inside, needed no expression. ‘That money he gave you… there was also this.’ The fingers of Jean’s good hand, the knuckles swollen with arthritis, the nails ridged and yellowing, had crept back to the folded piece of paper. ‘I took it out…’

Charlotte stared stupidly at the table. ‘You took it
out
?’

‘Kept it safe… I didn’t think you were ready… You were still so unsure of yourself, about to begin a whole new life. Don’t read it now, Charlotte… please not right now… Let me explain first. I kept it back because I
loved
you and knew how much you loved
him
…’ But Charlotte had already pulled the paper out from the unsteady grip of her mother’s fingers and was shaking it open. She was terrified but also full of a wild, happy curiosity. There were answers in life, after all. They just never came quite when one expected them.

Charlotte tucked herself closer to the church wall and sucked hard, tasting an unpleasant burst of sulphur from the flaring match. The cigarette tip glowed, then died. She took the packet of ten – bought from a roadside newsagent – out of her pocket and tried to put the cigarette back among its nine companions, but it broke, scattering shreds of tobacco, which were whipped away by the wind. Grinding what was left under her shoe, Charlotte remembered suddenly the bare, Blu-Tack stained walls of her college room and another cigarette balanced on the ugly Formica desk – such drama and then such anti-climax as the four fifty-pound notes fell on to her lap.

For a while, sitting at the kitchen table, with her mother talking quickly, breathily, explaining the background to her father’s words, Charlotte had felt okay. She had folded and reopened the paper several times, sliding her fingers along the creases. The blur of the first quarter of her life had come into focus. Everything made sense. And he
had
tried to tell her – the shock of that alone was almost euphoric. She had helped Jean to bed and hugged her tenderly, said it was all right and thanked her. She had even slept well and been busy and helpful all day. It was only
en route
to London, passing the run-down shop fronts and tenement blocks as
the suburbs thickened, that the feeling of being turned upside-down had taken hold, making it so hard to concentrate that she had wound down the windows and put a music station on at full blast to keep herself connected to the reality of the road and the purpose of her journey.

‘I wouldn’t have had you down as a smoker.’

Charlotte screamed and dropped the packet of cigarettes, then trod on it and on several of Dominic’s fingers as he scrabbled at her feet to pick it up. ‘Sorry!’ she gasped. ‘You gave me such a fright – your hand, is it all right?’

Dominic, upright again, the squashed packet handed over, made as small a to-do as he could of shaking his fingers, which were throbbing badly. ‘You scared me, too… and you appear to have a dog,’ he muttered, distracted by Jasper, who was springing between them. ‘I didn’t know. Sam never said you had a dog. I suppose you were walking it?’ he ventured, ramming his sore hand into his pocket and glancing up as two crows screeched their arrival on a crumbling window-ledge above their heads.

‘No, I… yes…’ Charlotte faltered at the impossibility of describing to anyone the state of mind that had driven her to stop short of the house and plunge into the churchyard, clutching the sorry little packet of Silk Cut. Sam, the Porters, the
normality
of the present had felt part of another world, a world with which she simply could not yet engage, not until she had had a little more time to… to do what exactly? To think, to absorb, to reconfigure. Yes, that was it, she had been
reconfiguring
her life, using information that, it was clear now, had been pressing at her consciousness for thirty-nine years, tugging and distorting her efforts to feel balanced and whole. ‘It’s not my dog, it’s my mother’s and, yes, it has made me late,’ she managed, with a Herculean effort to deliver a response appropriate to the circumstances. ‘For
which I can only apologize most sincerely when you’ve been so very kind already. I never meant it to get so late…’

‘It doesn’t matter. I tried to call you. Rose and Sam are still at the park. They won’t be back until seven. More importantly, how is your mother?’ Dominic added, satisfied that the dog had been the reason behind the eccentricity of a visit to a derelict churchyard, and turning to retrace his steps along the corridor he had made through the long grass. He could see where she had walked now, a chopped-up route round clumps of brambles and half-buried monuments.

‘Does the past matter?’ Charlotte blurted. ‘That’s what I want to know.’

Dominic, who had expected to be followed back to the road, with some cosy small-talk about ageing parents and fractured limbs, stopped and turned in astonishment. She was still standing against the wall, the back of her head and her palms pressed against the stone. She was in a state. She had been in a state the last time he had met her and the time before that and probably on the phone the previous week when she had called to ask if Sam could come and stay. She had scrambled through the broken fence not to walk the dog but to hide and be unhappy. She was miserable and messed up and should, at all costs, be given a wide berth. ‘The past always matters.’

‘Why?’ she countered angrily, as if they were having a heated argument.

Dominic shrugged helplessly. ‘I suppose because it makes sense of the present.’

‘But it’s all over and done with, gone – for ever – and different people remember it differently so it
doesn’t
make sense.’ Charlotte turned her head and pressed her cheek hard against the roughness of the wall. Her lips were trembling
violently, embarrassingly. The situation was intolerable and yet she could gain no mastery over it. The door on to the past had been flung off its hinges and she was now at the mercy of everything flooding through it. Meanwhile, this poor man standing in front of her, with his slightly too large nose and big brown eyes, had every reason to look puzzled. All he had wanted was for her to pick up her son after a visit that had stretched from twenty-four hours to
four days.
At the very least he would have been expecting a timely arrival and a thank-you box of chocolates. Instead, here she was skulking and ranting in a graveyard, no doubt confirming his earliest, worst fears about her fitness as a mother. In fact, he had every reason to go straight home and report her to Miss Brigstock or Social Services.