Someone to Watch Over Me (14 page)

Jen lived in a narrow house down a narrow street off Chesterton Road. Small but perfectly formed, it had one main living space and two bedrooms upstairs that were like cabins on a ship, with storage space cleverly engineered into every available corner. Even the treads of the tiny staircase had been converted into drawers to accommodate shoes. Jen's brother Paul, the owner of the house, had arrived the night before and had been alarmed by the number of ornaments the place had acquired whilst he had been away. When Carrie and Pam knocked on the door Paul was in the process of stoking up the log fire, while Jen was already dishevelled with the effort of preparing the dinner. Ensconced in pole position in front of the fire was a tatty-looking hound who Paul introduced as Enif, which apparently meant nose in Arabic.

‘I called him that because he has a really good sense of smell. He was hanging around outside King's Cross station and he kind of attached himself to me. I tried to lose him but he kept finding me. Enif is also a star from the Pegasus constellation,' said Paul as his new pet raised his head languidly and then settled back down with a weary air, as if he knew the accommodation wasn't up to scratch, but it would have to do.

Pam retired upstairs to one of the cabins for a rest at around the time when the issue of the washing up reared its head. In the lost hours between lunchtime wine and five o'clock cocktails, when Carrie and Jen were slumped on the sofa wishing that they hadn't eaten so much and wondering in a half-hearted sort of way whether they should perhaps venture out for a walk, Jen suddenly told Carrie that she was in love.

‘I think I am. I am … I think,' said Jen, distractedly stroking Enif's ear. He opened one eye and looked at her disdainfully.

‘The online man? The one you met for the first time on Friday?' said Carrie, looking at her friend's blushing face with disbelief. This was the woman, after all, who had sworn that the pair of them would do without men and eke out their last days in a fantasy Old People's Home, sitting next to each other in padded rocking chairs in a room with panoramic views, looking out at the sea, eating cream cakes and smoking lilac Sobranies.

‘He's not even my type,' Jen said, as if she couldn't quite believe it herself. ‘He has a first-aid box in his car.'

‘Have you slept with him?' asked Carrie, thinking that perhaps Jen, befuddled with Christmas booze and following a spell without a boyfriend, was suffering more from lust than love.

‘We slept in the same bed. But we didn't do anything. Just held each other. It was nice.'

‘He stayed all night?' said Carrie, knowing that if her friend had let this man wake up with her, it had to be serious.

‘Yes. He brought me breakfast in bed. He put the last shrivelled winter pansy from the garden into a little vase. It was so cute.'

‘Doesn't it seem a bit fast to you, Jen? I've never known you be like this before. So caught up. Since He Who Must Not Be Named in fact,' said Carrie, referring to Jen's philandering politician.

‘He's nothing like that prat. When you meet him, you'll see,' said Jen and got up to prepare some of her deadly cocktails, the recipe for which she claimed to have got many years ago from a bar keeper in Spain who had told her the secret recipe after a night of passion on the roof of his house. One cocktail in, and Carrie found herself thinking about Oliver. She wondered how he was spending his Christmas Day. She hoped he wasn't spending it with the dark-haired woman she had seen him kissing so passionately outside his house. She hoped that he was spending the day with aged relatives who were keeping him trapped in an overheated house.

On Christmas Eve Max was so excited that he almost made himself sick. He positioned and repositioned his stocking, unable to make up his mind which place was the easiest for Father Christmas to get to.

‘If I put it by the fireplace,' he explained earnestly, ‘then he might not know that it's mine, but if I put it at the end of my bed, then he might be worried about waking me.'

Once the dilemma of the stocking had been resolved by hanging it on his bedroom doorknob, he then couldn't decide whether to leave Father Christmas a glass of milk or wine. This was followed by the trauma of what exactly to write in his letter.

‘I want lots of things,' he said, ‘but I don't want him to think I am greedy. If I ask for only one thing, will he know that I'm only being polite?'

After Molly had finally persuaded him to go to bed, she poured herself a glass of wine and started wrapping presents. An hour later they were all piled up under the tree and she went upstairs to check that Max had fallen asleep. His face was peaceful and showed none of the anxiety his awake self was plagued with. He had made a path of comics lined with marbles that led in a straight line to where his stocking was placed at the end of his bed. He must have had a last-minute change of heart and moved it from the doorknob. His bed was covered in the paper snowflakes he had spent the day painstakingly cutting out and then attaching to all the windows of the house with bits of Blu-tack. Molly sat for a minute, listening to the reassuring sound of his breathing, and then stuffed the stocking until it was bulging with small tissue-wrapped gifts. Downstairs, she ate the mince pie and drank the milk Max had left out for Father Christmas, then took a deep breath and rang her sister who lived in Sydney and for whom she presumed a sunny Christmas Day had already dawned. She had never been to Australia, never even seen pictures of her sister's house and couldn't visualise the space her sister occupied, or where the phone was located, or what the light was like that surrounded her. It was like talking to a phantom. The phone seemed to ring for ages and then she heard her sister's voice, which didn't sound completely her own but which had an adopted inflection that served to emphasise the distance between them.

‘Hello Moll, Happy Chrimbo. What's the time there? Has it snowed? Is it even Christmas yet? I still can't get my head around it.' It was the usual rush of questions, designed to prevent the possibility of a pause.

‘Midnight, so almost there,' said Molly. ‘What time were you woken?' She thought of her two solid nieces with their hair in tight, neat plaits and matching zip-up tops, and couldn't really imagine them overcome with Christmas excitement.

‘We've just got up. We're opening presents after breakfast and a walk. I'm trying to teach the girls about delayed gratification.' It struck Molly that learning to delay gratification could be a dangerous exercise. If you became too good a student you might forget what it was you wanted in the first place. Twelve-year-old Delphine and fourteen-year-old Daphne had visited England with their parents a couple of years before and had remained largely impassive when faced with the best tourist attractions London had to offer. A trip on the London Eye, ice cream at Fortnum & Masons and the best seats in the house for
The Lion King
left them unmoved. The only time they manifested the slightest animation was on the escalator down into Oxford Street's Topshop. There, they became briefly flushed over the selection of zip-up tops.

‘I'm about to go to bed, just wanted to catch you before you went out. I hope you have a lovely day,' said Molly.

‘You too sweetie!' said Susanna, already moving on into her version of Christmas, leaving her sister behind. As Molly put the phone down, she wished that they shared more than a sense of duty. The ten years between them had meant that they had had largely separate childhoods, with Susanna always tantalisingly ahead. She had blazed the trail with boys and broken hearts and babies. She had always done it all already. She was the professional and Molly the amateur. When their mother became ill, Susanna's guilt at being thousands of miles away and unable to help had widened the gulf between them. Her feelings of inadequacy had translated into criticism of the way that Molly was managing things. It seemed that now there was no way back.

Molly was just drifting off when the phone rang, shockingly loud in the hallway. Befuddled with sleep, she fumbled her way down the stairs and picked up the receiver. At first there was nothing but silence edged with what might have been the sound of distant traffic, but then he spoke.

‘I just wanted to say Happy Christmas, darling,' said Rupert. ‘Can I speak to Max?'

‘It's three in the morning,' said Molly, peering at her watch. ‘He's asleep. I can't wake him now.'

‘Oh, yes, of course, I forgot,' he said, ‘I'm on American time. I'm sorry. Tell him Happy Christmas from me.'

‘I will,' she said, and then said nothing because she knew he hadn't finished. She sensed the same threatening quality in his silence as in the moments before he hit her.

‘You,' he said, his voice low but conversational, ‘you've ruined my life. You know that don't you? You've ruined my fucking life …'

Molly put the phone down on his voice, but carried its sound with her upstairs and into the bed which, despite assiduous daily airings, always felt slightly damp.

It was still dark when Max jumped onto her bed clutching his stocking. Molly wrenched herself from sleep and after tucking him warmly into the bed, made him promise he would wait and not start investigating his stocking until she had made herself a cup of tea.

‘You don't need tea on Christmas Day,' said Max, his fingers tracing the knobbly contours of the wool. ‘You can have sherry, it's quicker.'

The kitchen floor was icy under her bare feet and for about the fiftieth time she wondered why she so resisted the concept of slippers. Their cat, Toffee, a refugee from their house in Cambridge, stalked across the floor with well-insulated paws. Never the most serene of animals, the move had upset the creature deeply. She now spent her time moving restlessly from room to room, tail twitching from side to side, ears held back as if continually preparing to throw herself through a hoop of fire. It was only during the moth season of early summer that she ever seemed to relax. Catching, tormenting and then putting to a slow and agonising death the biggest moths she could find seemed to bring her some sort of release. The next day Molly would find the poor creatures glued to the corners of carpets, their wings shredded.

Clutching her warm mug to her chest, Molly returned to her bed where Max, unable to resist temptation, had already started disgorging the contents of his stocking. After a cosy hour of wind-up toys and chocolate coins, they went downstairs and Molly put in the turkey and peeled some potatoes while Max sat by the tree, gloatingly counting and recounting the spoils that lay under it. The floor was littered with the snowflakes he had made – Molly had to tell him that she thought that it might be nice if at least a bit of the carpet was visible. A teacher from Molly's school, a single parent, was coming over later with her two children and Molly wanted to be sure that everything was ready for the meal. Through the kitchen window she could see the sky, streaked now with pale light, the bushes and trees tipped white with frost. She put the radio on and the room filled with a choir and with Christmas and a sense that life, for all the obstacles it seemed to put in her path, was precious and worth celebrating. She cut neat little crosses in the bottoms of a bowl of sprouts so bright and green, they reminded her of spring.

Max loved all of his presents, particularly an electronic dinosaur fact file which gave the vital statistics of over a hundred of the beasts.

‘Guess the power rating of an Alb-ert-as-aur …'

‘Umm, don't know …'

‘56!'

‘Guess the intelligence rating for Mega-los-aurus …'

‘Umm, don't know …'

‘95!'

‘Guess the …'

‘Why don't you open another present, Max?' said Molly hastily, to stem the tide of dinosaur information. Max pulled out a parcel wrapped up in unfamiliar paper that was tucked slightly out of sight behind the tree.

‘Is this one from Father Christmas?' he said, beginning to unwrap it.

‘Oh, I don't know,' she said, ‘I can't remember who sent you that. Maybe someone at school.'

A pair of shiny red boxing gloves fell onto the carpet, along with a piece of paper. Molly picked it up and instantly recognised the writing.

‘Who're they from?' asked Max, trying to pull a glove over one sticky fist.

‘I'm not sure, darling, maybe Aunty Susanna. It just says Happy Christmas on the note,' she said and crumpled the paper tightly in her hand. Max gave up trying to get the other glove on and began to punch the cushions on the sofa.

‘Pow! Pow! Pow!' he crowed. ‘It makes the BEST noise.'

It felt as if the floor was slanting away from her. She knew with sickening certainty that Rupert had to have come into the house last night. The parcel hadn't been there when she had put all the other ones under the tree. When he had phoned in the early hours of the morning, he hadn't been in America at all. He had been close by.

On the 27th December Damian rang Carrie and asked if he could come to Cambridge and see her straight away. His voice sounded strange on the phone, as if he was holding himself back from saying something, and although she asked him repeatedly, he wouldn't say what the matter was. He was with her an hour and a half later. She was surprised by how thin he had become. There was even a bit of grey above his ears and she decided that it suited him. He was wearing clothes that she hadn't seen before; a maroon jumper that he would never have chosen for himself. He has met someone she thought, and was surprised by how much the notion hurt her. He kissed her on her cheek and then gently sat her down on the sofa. She knew then, that what he had to say was important. For a moment she felt a surge of joy, but then almost immediately, her heart stilled. She knew that Damian would have told her on the phone if they had found him. She wondered how her heart could still be working when it had taken such a battering and imagined it inside of her, all black and blue with bruises. She was thinking of this when Damian told her that the police had rung him that morning. It seemed that following the arrest of a man who had been accused of abusing his stepson, the police had found some images on his computer. One of the boys in the photographs fitted the description of Charlie.