Someone to Watch Over Me (3 page)

‘I'm fine, darling,' she said to Max, and pulled him onto her lap. She stroked his head, feeling the shape of it under her hands. After a while he wriggled away from her and lay back on the floor and so she got up and drew the curtains against the dark fields.

Carrie woke early on the day the shop was due to open. She switched on the light in the still-darkened room, threw off the quilt that covered her bed and put on the Chinese silk dressing gown that hung on the hook on the bedroom door. In a pre-Christmas bid to lose a few pounds to accommodate the feasting to come, Carrie had decided to start each day with a bowl of porridge made with skimmed milk and a few raisins. She was half hearted in her attempts to lose weight and at thirty-seven, felt she was approaching the time when she would in any case have to choose between her bottom and her face. She had a theory that after forty, the skinnier the arse, the more prune-like the face, unless you overdid the surgery and then you just looked weird. Carrie was tall and long legged and had a face that was at its most beautiful when animated. Her brown eyes were spaced a little too far apart, but her mouth was soft and full and her black hair fell straight and smooth across a wide brow. When she talked she often rubbed her hand across her forehead, as if trying to shape her thoughts before they escaped from her.

Carrie sat on the sofa to eat her porridge and contemplated the day ahead. She found that for the first time in three years, she felt something that resembled anticipation – although it was such a long time since she had felt it that she barely recognised it at first, mistaking the small flutterings as her stomach rebelling against the dollops of oats she was sending its way. She had filled
Trove
with things that were beautiful and had real value, not in monetary terms necessarily, but objects that had been made with care. It was the perfect place to get a present for someone else or to buy yourself a treat when you were feeling down. Carrie hoped that it would become somewhere that people wanted to linger and touch things. She had worked hard to get the balance right between providing a good range of new, quirky objects and old reclaimed things that had a patina and a story. She had also spent weeks travelling around looking at the work of craftspeople and artists. She had found a woman in Northumberland who created the lightest, silkiest scarves out of wool that had been dyed the pinks and burnt oranges seen so often in north-eastern skies. She had also bought several watercolours from a Manchester artist who had barely managed a civil word to her but whose paintings had immense charm. They featured small figures bent absorbed over tasks or walking in old-fashioned formation through dappled woods. Carrie enjoyed the hunt for treasure, particularly if she found it in unexpected places.

She had thought in the first white, dazed months after it had happened, that she would have to move from Cambridge. The town was too small; there was no way to escape the memories. But after a while she welcomed what she had been left. She also understood that she couldn't move. She needed to stay where she could be found. There was, in any case, something in the gloominess of Cambridge, in the oppression of grey sky and buildings that soothed her. It was a town made for mourning. She was familiar with the open land and the dark earth of the surrounding countryside, where the beauties were subtle ones. They had explored it together as a family; Charlie, head bobbing over Damian's shoulder and later, running on ahead to blaze the trail through flat fields of corn or along chalky dykes. Now when she saw Charlie's first wobbling cycle ride across the common, or caught a memory of his face just on the edge of laughter at the top of a swing, she was comforted. She didn't want to go to a place that he hadn't marked, just as she couldn't throw away the tubs of play dough still pitted by his fingers.

After rifling through her wardrobe and leaving piles of discarded clothes on her bed, Carrie eventually decided to wear her favourite pair of just tight enough jeans, black boots with buckles on the ankle and wedge heels and a green vintage jacket with large buttons and a velvet collar. She pinned a diamanté bow-shaped brooch onto her lapel and wrapped three strings of dark green glass beads around her neck. As she left the house, protected from the early morning cold in a huge scarf and beret, she saw a small blonde figure, dressed in a flimsy frock and minuscule cardigan, coming out of the door of the house opposite. This was at least the sixth different woman she had seen emerging from the premises. It was a constant source of wonder to Carrie how her neighbour managed to keep up with his demanding schedule. The blonde figure scuttled off into the half-light, and Carrie got on her bike and headed for town. The build-up of traffic had not yet begun along Mill Road. In another hour or so there would be a line of car windscreens framing pale, Monday faces. A woman with neatly curled hair was unlocking the doors of the Co-op. In the newly refurbished church someone was shifting a font on castors across the laminated floor.

Trove
was situated about fifteen minutes' walk from the centre of Cambridge and was tucked down a side street in a largely residential area of expensive Victorian terraces. It was in the middle of a small row of shops; a delicatessen whose clientele accepted the overpriced olives and mozzarella in exchange for the rakish charm of the owner who wrapped up their loaves of bread in tissue paper with exaggerated reverence, a greengrocer who had a tendency to use organic as his excuse for limp leaves and shrivelled carrots, a betting shop and small Chinese supermarket. Although the street was a little out of the way, it was on the main route into town and the shops benefited from the footfall of local customers.

Jen was there when she arrived, and had already turned on the feather-fringed lamps that were placed strategically around the shop. She had also sprinkled orange and clove oil on the radiators so that the place smelled delicious. She was engrossed in the task of dressing the old wire dummy that stood next to the racks of vintage clothes Carrie had sourced from charity shops, fairs, eBay and her own extensive hoarded wardrobe. With her head buried under the folds of silk, she struggled to pull the narrow-hipped dress down over the wire frame.

‘I didn't know you were going to get here so early,' said Carrie, taking off her scarf and gloves.

‘Gnnf … too excited to sleep,' Jen replied, the words muffled. She emerged from the fabric with her hair mussed and her eyes bright.

Carrie had met Jen at college on the very first day of term. She had been a young eighteen-year-old then with no experience of being away from home, let alone living in London, which seemed terrifyingly large and noisy to her and full of people who talked too fast or who looked at her strangely. She had seldom been to the capital and wasn't really prepared for the homesickness that engulfed her in the first months. Her mother had despatched her briskly at Coventry station with the words, ‘Remember, the best way to avoid loons on the tube is to sit with a bit of string trailing out of the corner of your mouth. Works every time.'

Although economical in her farewell, Carrie's mother, Pam, was devastated by her daughter's departure and remained on the platform, hidden from sight behind the newspaper stand in WH Smith to watch the train pulling out of the station. Not usually given to public displays of emotion, she found to her surprise that tears were running down her face and gathering inside the collar of her pink cashmere coat. To cheer herself up she went to John Lewis and bought three skirts, four pairs of shoes and a hat for which she had no wedding.

Jen was older than Carrie and had spent the previous two years travelling and working. She had seemed very sophisticated to the other girl who had attended one school, dated one boy and had been drunk only once, after drinking half a bottle of peach schnapps taken from the back of her parents' kitchen cupboard. Unlike Carrie, condemned to live in smelly university accommodation, Jen had also been the proud possessor of a flat in Clapham, bought for her by her father just before he had absconded to France with a young lawyer who worked at his firm. After knocking down a few walls of their chateau and indulging in the purchase of some enamel jugs, the young lawyer (who it turned out was somewhat susceptible to rashes) decided that Jen's father wasn't, after all, quite what she had expected and she returned to home to Surrey and set up a sanctuary for maimed hedgehogs.

Jen had looked after Carrie during that first year at university, advising her on how to acquire and then ditch various hapless young men who were drawn to Carrie's legs, lustrous hair and air of vulnerability. Jen herself had to beat men off with a stick. Dark and curvaceous, she treated the smitten youths who had the misfortune to succumb to her charms with ill-concealed contempt. In her third year, much to her mortification, she fell hard for a high-profile, married politician, who treated her with just enough disinterest to keep her frantic. She finally gathered enough strength to call a halt to proceedings when, on her twenty-third birthday, she found herself having sex with him in a restaurant lavatory again. The thought came to her that perhaps she ought to want something more meaningful from a relationship than being rammed against a sanitary towel disposal unit.

Although Jen had a very warm heart and had a real aversion to hurting small creatures, when roused, she was scary. The twinkle in her politician's previously sparkly blue eyes dimmed somewhat when he discovered that a rumour (planted into the ear of his demoralised secretary) had been circulating, describing details only his wife (and the five other young women with whom he had enjoyed white tiles and the smell of bleach) could possibly have known. Information such as the fact he had a penis that curved sideways and that he had a tendency to shout out random French words at his moment of climax was used by his political enemies to such good effect that he was never again able to stand up in public without some wise ass muttering ‘Brioches massive!' or ‘Le fanny de ma tante!'
sotto voce
.

After her politician, Jen steered well clear of any serious or lasting entanglements, preferring to remain firmly in control. Every now and again she would meet a bloke on a Friday or a Saturday night with good teeth or an affable smile and invite him back to her dusty flat, with its battered sofas and heavy velvet curtains. In the morning however, she would always wake alone, ready for a solitary walk on the common followed by two butter-laden croissants and a bowl of milky coffee. Throughout college and beyond, Jen looked out for Carrie. She scrutinised prospective boyfriends (‘Looks to me as if he might wear women's shoes on the sly'), doled out travel tips (‘Never stand behind a donkey'), and advised on the best job interview techniques (‘Look them in the eye and imagine them on the toilet'). In return, Carrie vainly tried to get her to have a decent haircut and dress in a way that showed off her ample breasts and tiny waist. Despite her best efforts Jen persisted in wearing droopy garments of the sort found on women who like to dress up as Anglo Saxons in their spare time and she stubbornly resisted any attempts at restyling her mop of curls. Over the years the two women stayed in touch, despite the fact they were often on other sides of the world and then other sides of the country.

Carrie smiled at the thought of what the two of them had been through. She was glad and grateful that Jen was still in her life. She looked at her watch. It was time to open the shop door for the very first time.

‘Come on, girl,' she said. ‘Let's open the doors to the hordes!'

Molly often woke with a sense of urgency; this morning it took her several minutes to realise that it was Saturday and there couldn't be anything that needed her immediate attention. Although she and Max had been living in the house for over a year she still wasn't used to its noises. The house was full of scratchings and creakings, as if the very bricks and wood it was made of were shifting uneasily. It was a house with a restless soul she'd decided, although the more prosaic side of her knew quite well that many of the late-night rustlings were due to rats. A couple of days after blocking a large hole in the edge of the kitchen floorboards with wood filler, the house had smelt unmistakably of rotting rat, a sweetish odour like overripe apples mingled with something more meaty and rancid. She thought that she had probably trapped a rat family beneath her floorboards. The smell didn't subside for almost two weeks, by which time she had almost become accustomed to it.

She stretched out underneath the pile of blankets she had heaped over herself. Some of the house noises were also due to a decrepit old boiler, which seemed to have a mind of its own. At the moment the temperamental creature was sulking and produced only enough heat to warm the very bottoms of the radiators. She hoped Max would sleep for a while longer. She knew that once he was up, she would have to marshal them both through another day. It was that exact time between night and morning when everything was holding its breath. When the new day seemed to hover in the distance, as if waiting for a sign.

Molly couldn't remember now exactly when she had stopped feeling happy. She sometimes wished that there was a way of recognising the end of things, so that you could properly acknowledge their passing. She always left rented holiday houses with a sense of ceremony. Thank you, she would say as she took a last look round. Thank you house, for giving us a good two weeks. I hope that I might see you again one day. She knew it was foolish and she would never say the words out loud, but it helped her to leave if she was able to mark both the happiness and its ending. She knew that being a mother set in motion a series of endings. Every child who was lucky enough to have a lap to sit in must surely also have a last time they indulged in this intimacy, but it was only when you looked back that you noticed that the last time had been and gone.