The Godmother (30 page)

“That's a lie,” said James Kent softly.

“A great big whopping lie,” I said, nodding.

“You know what?” James stood up. “Let's go for a walk and find somewhere to have coffee before we talk ourselves out of something that has barely begun.”

“I like the way you said that,” I said, standing up too.

“I like the way it sounded.” He paid the bill and we left. The old woman was still sitting in the corner chewing betel nut.

We stopped at a little Italian deli and had espresso and some gelato standing up at the counter chatting about less intense things. Another hour passed easily by, then the place started to fill up with rather large intimidating-looking kids. We made our way on to the street.

“A sea of school children,” I said, dodging a football, then a bike. James looked at his watch and swore.

“I've got to go,” he said. “I'm really sorry. Can I get you a cab?” he said, hailing one down.

“No, you take it, I've got the car.”

The taxi pulled up.

“Where to?” asked the driver.

“Baker Street,” he replied. “Sorry to leave so unceremoniously.”

“It's been really, really fun. Thank you for lunch, pudding, good chat. Go. I don't want you to be late.”

“Let's do this again,” he said. Without kissing me goodbye he climbed into the cab, which pulled out into the traffic and accelerated away in a rude cough of black smoke. I was a little deflated, I'd been rather hoping for a lengthy goodbye.

I walked back to my car. I had a million and one things to do, so I should have been grateful for a few hours to get my life in order, but I didn't fancy going home, and anyway, I needed to check on Helen, so I turned the car around. At the junction, my phone rang. I put the car into neutral.

“Hello?”

“Would tomorrow be too soon?”

Instant re-inflation. “No.”

“Great. How about dinner tomorrow night, then?”

“Dinner sounds perfect.”

“I'll book somewhere where pumpkins are welcome and get back to you.”

“Which reminds me, how did you get my number?”

“Your friend Sasha gave it to me.”

“She didn't tell me you'd asked for my number.”

“I didn't. She just put it in my hand.”

“Oh.”

“Well, I'd been looking for you for two hours, so she probably felt a bit sorry for me. Or perhaps she's just desperate to get rid of you and goes around pressing your number into the palm of any bloke with a forlorn expression on his face.”

“Perhaps,” I repeated.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps
.

“Was I the only one who called?”

“Yes.”

“Good. See you tomorrow, Tessa King.”

I hauled back my good feeling, but it wasn't all there. “Goodbye, James Kent.” I put the car back into gear, and accelerated out into Edgware Road.

The traffic was horrendous. Every cunning move I made to wiggle through the heavy afternoon traffic was thwarted by double-parked cars being loaded with children. I wasn't used to driving around the city in the mid-afternoon. If I had been, I would have known not to venture anywhere during the “school run.” It was a nightmare, so forty-five minutes later, stuck somewhere in Paddington, I called Helen. She didn't answer her home phone, or her mobile, so I turned the car round and headed for home.

Billy wanted me to get proof that Christoph was earning significantly more than he was telling the courts but she didn't want me to go any further until she was ready. I feared all my efforts would be in vain and Billy would never be ready. My friend the divorce lawyer spent his days screwing as much money out of people who at one point in their lives had stood in front of their friends and family and declared to love, honor and whatever the modern way of saying obey is. I asked him where that common ground had gone and he told me that what hadn't been eroded away by infidelity, unhappiness and neglect was demolished by the lawyers. I had attended his wedding a few years back, so I enquired after his own marriage. I was relieved to hear that it was going well, and asked him what his secret was. “I know how horrid divorce is, so I make it work, we make it work,” he said, then added, “but just in case, my assets are well protected.” I didn't think he was joking. He gave me a number of a private investigator who specialized in this field, but warned me he was expensive, although the expenses would be recouped if we won. There was no way Billy would go for that, so I had to be a bit more conniving. Christoph was clever, but he was also vain. I intended to get him on his vanity. I put a call through to Cora, who I knew would be at home with the nanny. It may be using an underhand source, but Cora knew things she didn't even know she knew.

“Hi, sweet pea, how are you?”

“Tired,” said Cora.

“Long day at school?”

“Uh-huh.” She coughed to make her point.

“That doesn't sound good,” I said.

“I've got bogeys on my chest.”

“Sounds like it. Have you been to the doctor's?”

There was silence. I guessed that Cora was shaking her head.

“Mummy at work?”

More silence. Cora nodding. Billy should have got a job in a doctor's surgery, instead of a dentist's. It would have been much more useful. Since food wasn't her thing, especially sugary things, Cora never had any trouble with her teeth.

“Just a quick question, then. Do you remember the postcard Christoph sent you with the picture of the boat on it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you still have it?”

“No.”

Damn it. My first lead was a dead-end.

“Mummy keeps it in her bedside table drawer inside a book.”

Oh, Billy. “Great,” I said, full of faux cheerfulness, “I need it. Clever Mummy for keeping it.”

Cora wasn't convinced, so I didn't bother trying to convince her. I was about to ask her to get it, but she had quite a bad coughing fit, and I had to wait a minute until it calmed down.

“Have you got any cough medicine?” I asked her when the coughing had subsided.

“Magda has gone to get some lemons.”

Gone to get…? “Who is with you?”

“She'll only be a minute.”

“OK, well, let's chat until she gets back.”

“I'm too tired to chat, Godmummy T.”

“OK. Take the phone, sit on the sofa and I'll tell you a story. OK?”

“OK.”

I heard her walk across the room, climb on to the sofa and snuggle down.

“Ready?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Once upon a time…” One minute turned out to be sixteen. My story waffled on, making no sense, with no obvious plot and no obvious finishing line, but it didn't matter, since Cora was asleep for most of it. I was grateful
for the lungful of phlegm the poor girl had because it provided me with a reassuring backdrop to my pathetic tale. As long as I could hear her breathing, she wasn't burning to death in a house fire, or being kidnapped, or choking, or swallowing bleach, or any of the millions of life-threatening things a household presents to a well-guarded child, let alone an unaccompanied one.

“Cora! I'm back!” came a distant voice. Footsteps. A crackle as the phone was lifted from Cora's hand.

“Hello?” I said loudly.

“Fuck.”

“Madga, it's me, Tessa.”

“Hello, Tessa.”

“You left Cora alone?”

“I had to get her something, she's been coughing and coughing. I thought hot lemon and honey would help.”

“But she's been on her own!”

“Billy sometimes does go to the shop on the corner. I was as quick as I could be.”

I liked Magda. She was honest and great with Cora, but it wasn't that quick.

“What's wrong with her?”

“A bug.”

Cora got lots of bugs. Billy said if she kept her off school every time Cora got a bug, she'd never be at school. It worried me. It worried me that she wasn't stronger. All that personality, in such a little frame. It would probably help if she ate better food. Saw the same doctor. Got out of London occasionally. All the things that were possible with a bit of extra money.

I told Magda about the postcard in Billy's drawer and waited while she went to get it for me. I remembered when Cora received that postcard. It fell through the letter box on Cora's seventh birthday. We were all amazed—Christoph never remembered Cora's birthday. Turned out he still hadn't. It was a coincidence. It was just a quick note saying that he wasn't going to make it back for half-term since he was still in Dubai on work and his family were going to come out and join him. It was a fairly cursory note, hurtful, but cursory. On the front was a picture of an enormous yacht. Christoph didn't send pictures of other people's yachts. It wasn't his style. He was showing off to Billy, letting
her know what she was missing, turning the knife while stoking the fantasy. It worked, too. She'd kept the postcard though it was addressed to Cora.

What I wanted was the name of that boat. Armed with that, I put a call through to Camper & Nicholsons, the best boat builders I knew of, and asked them how I would go about tracking down a yacht registered in the UAE. They were extremely helpful. I felt a real sense of excitement as my sleuthing started to reap results, so I rewarded myself with a glass of wine.

Halfway through pulling the cork, the phone rang. It was Francesca.

“Is this a good time to talk?”

“Hang on.”

I finished opening the bottle, poured myself a large glass, slipped off my shoes, and lay on the sofa.

“It is now.”

“I'm sorry about this morning.”

“No, I'm sorry, Fran, I should have told you.”

“You know I have always loved the relationship you and Caspar have. I wouldn't have survived if you hadn't taken him off my hands so often when he was younger. I realize that I can't have it both ways. He trusts you.”

“Trusted me.”

“I didn't tell him we'd spoken. He doesn't know I know about the speed, the police or the money he stole. I have given him the opportunity to tell me everything. I've put him on the train to stay with his grandparents until he's allowed back at school. I packed his bag and searched his pockets. If he had drugs on him, they were up his arse. We'll see what happens next.”

“You needn't protect me. I've been thinking too. Above all, you are my friend, not your son. You come first. He needs a good shake-up. Drop me in it if you have to, but get him to see sense.”

“Hopefully it won't come to that.”

Personally, I thought it already had. “What has he stolen from you?”

I felt her wince. “Nothing for sure, but too many things have gone missing. Money I could have sworn I'd left for a school trip, the laundry, twenty quid here or there that I thought I had in my wallet. I think the CD collection has been dwindling. And his has disappeared completely. My pay-as-you-go mobile phone. I thought I'd been pickpocketed.”

“Oh Fran, I'm so sorry.”

“Why is he doing this to me?”

“I don't think he's doing it to you.”

“He is.” Francesca sighed heavily.

“What have I got to do to convince you, to reassure you, that you are and have always been an exceptional mother to that boy? What you gave up for him, without prejudice, is still beyond me.”

“You sound like a lawyer.”

“I am a lawyer.”

Francesca sighed again. Or was it a sob? A quiet sob.

“Where's Nick?”

“Still in Saigon.”

“Everything all right?” I'd just been talking to a divorce lawyer who was never out of work. It got my imagination running on overdrive. I could hear Helen quoting that bloody poem at me:
do not distress yourself with dark imaginings
…Easy to say, not so easy to do.

“Yeah, we're fine. We're good. I would like a little more support from him on this one, but Nick just isn't that kind of man. He has many other strengths, but he can't do this one.”

“You are very generous to your husband.”

“As he is with me. When I get wound up because things haven't been put back in their proper place, completely unimportant things that get me incensed, he just calmly brings me down off the ledge.”

“You have always been an enviable team.”

This comment made Francesca fall silent.

“You don't sound so good. Do you want me to come over?” I asked. I checked my glass of wine. I wasn't over the limit yet.

“No. I don't think I could tell this to your face.”

“Tell me what?”

I waited. It was a legal trick.

I heard Francesca take a deep breath. “There was a time when Nick and I weren't doing so well.”

I wasn't expecting that.

“That's normal, isn't it? Even great marriages can't be fantastic all the time.”

“I met someone.”

Bombshell. I instinctively sat up on the sofa and placed my feet squarely on the floor.

“When?”

“Caspar was twelve.”

I relaxed. Many moons had waxed and waned since then and Nick and Francesca were still firmly together.

“I nearly left.”

“Left Nick?”

“I can't believe it now, but Tessa, what I felt for this man felt so real. I honestly thought I had made a mistake, that I had never felt for Nick what I felt for this man. It was utterly all-consuming. I was possessed.”

“But you've always been so, so happy with each other.”

“It takes a lot of work to be that happy. We got lazy, I guess. Someone once said marriage is like standing in a corridor lined with doors. You go off through your door, he goes through his, but at the end of the day you have to come back to the corridor, touch base, hold hands, because through every door are more doors, and beyond them, more again, and if you both go through too many without coming back to the corridor, you may never find your way back. That's pretty much what happened; it didn't take long, either.”

I hadn't really listened. I was still reeling. Fran had an affair. “Who was it?” “Doesn't matter who it was. None of it was real. Poppy wasn't talking, Katie was being an utter madam, Caspar was hitting puberty and I was lost. I met him in the doctor's surgery. I'd had a cough for months that I couldn't shift.”

“I remember that.”

“I was utterly depleted. Nick was off saving the world and I was nothing. Nobody. We started meeting for coffee. I was just grateful to have a friend who wasn't another moaning mother like me. He was a lecturer, you know I've always been attracted to intelligence. I fed off him. It would have been fine if I'd told Nick right from the beginning that I'd made a friend, albeit divorced, male and supremely clever, but I didn't. The secrecy of it started to take on its own life. Finally there was something more exciting in my life than nappies, the Mr. Men books and having doors slammed in my face and washing out Caspar's skid marks. Why can't boys wipe their own arses? Why can't men, for that matter?”

“Sorry,” I said, speaking at last. “Can't help you on that one.”

Francesca fell silent again.

“Are you sure you don't want me to come over?” I asked.

“No. Just stay on the phone.”

“OK.”

“I'm so ashamed, Tessa. That's why I could never tell you.”

“Fran, you don't have to tell me anything. It was a long time ago now, it's over.”

“I have to tell someone.”

Tell me what? Was there more?

Slowly, she went on. “I think I know why Caspar is doing this.”

Did teenagers need a reason to be hateful to their parents?

“Do you remember when I asked you to have Caspar to stay for the whole weekend? Nick was away and my mum had taken the girls.”

I'd had Caspar to stay quite a few weekends.

“I had gone back to college—”

“Oh yes, it was some weekend field trip or something, lecture course, I can't even remember what you were…” My voice trailed off. Studying, was what I was going to say. Was she going to tell me there was no weekend course?

“There was no course.”

“You dropped it, halfway through. I remember thinking it wasn't like you to be so flaky.”

“I mean, there was no course at all.”

“Oh.” That was a substantial lie to tell your friends and family.

“I wasn't thinking at the time. I got myself in way over my head.”

“How long did it go on for?”

“Six weeks. It ended that weekend.”

“Why?”

“I thought you'd know.”

“Me? Why me?” I stood up. I needed more wine for this.

“You brought Caspar home, that Saturday afternoon.”

“Did I?”

“You stayed in the car.”

“Did I?”

“Caspar must have let himself in with his key.”

I didn't like where this was going. “What happened, Fran?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

I poured more than I meant to into my glass. “This is the first I've heard of any of this.”

“So Caspar didn't tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“That he'd seen me.”

“No.”

“He didn't behave strangely when he came back to the car?”