The Last Time I Saw You (25 page)
Sunday doesn’t quite look like I thought it would. At eight a.m. I’m sitting at the kitchen table, the pages of the script spread out around me, giving it one final polish before it goes out to directors tomorrow. It’s gone back and forth between Flynn and me over the last few weeks—every time I think it’s finally done he comes up with one more nit-picking tweak that he’s convinced is pure genius.
My dinner with William has metamorphosed into a trip to Windsor Castle with Madeline with dinner tacked on at the end, a reimagining that is hard not to take as a slight. I haven’t spoken to him since we said a hurried goodbye at Branksome station a fortnight ago, communication limited to a few e-mails he’s sent from what seems like an endless merry-go-round of work trips. At least it’s meant my heart’s been forced to start catching up with reality—I’m going to be a godmother, a godmother he once shared a teenage cuddle with, and hopefully, given time, it will stop pining for a future that could never be any more than a fantasy.
I think I’ve done all the pining that any one person deserves to do in a single lifetime. At this precise moment in time Charlotte is ensconced in James’s bedroom, the Postbox safely dispatched on a stag weekend. The fact that I’m still putting my all into these tired pages is because it’s all the ammunition I’ve got left against her. A few days after that fateful trip to Pinewood Mary sent me a six-thirty a.m. e-mail.
Fancy a coffee?
it said, with the lone
x
of doom that I’ve come to dread. Honey called me an hour later to tell me to skip the office and go straight to the Charlotte Street Hotel, and I waited there, quaking, for Mary to arrive. Twenty minutes later she swept in, dressed in a scarlet kaftan and a miniskirt, leaving her sunglasses on for a disconcertingly long time.
“What’s wrong?” she said, her voice deceptively warm, a smile of faux concern on her face that swiftly evaporated., “I did think that the task I’d set you was relatively simple.”
And then she finally pushed her glasses up onto her head, turning that minesweeping gaze on me so she could study me for any signs of weakness.
“Has Flynn said something?”
“Flynn’s always got plenty to say for himself, but it’s you we’re here to talk about.”
“I didn’t mean to offend him,” I said, pleadingly. “I just wanted to help him make it the best it could be. I was trying to support him.”
“Support him? It’s a lovely sentiment,” she said, with a rictus grin. “I’m wondering if it’s
you
who might need the support. I haven’t talked to her yet, but I’m sure Charlotte would consider taking the whole thing over. She’s certainly going to need to calm his ruffled feathers.”
I knew from the way she said it, that it was a lie, that it was almost a done deal, Charlotte poised and ready to feast on my carcass.
“No!” I snapped, all tact burned away. “I mean, I can handle it. I’ll do whatever it takes.”
“Whatever it takes? Take a moment, Livvy. I don’t want you to turn around and find you’ve made another empty promise.”
It hurt when she said it; the idea that I’m a person who doesn’t keep her word. I pleaded with her, pledged my loyalty, while she simply watched me twisting on the hook.
“I do wonder if your friend’s—what happened—has hit you harder than you realize,” she said. “I can’t help thinking that you haven’t been yourself. Do you think you might need some time off to gather yourself?”
That was when I went into overdrive. I know how it works, weakness made flesh so it can be thrown back at you when things have reached the point of no return. Losing my job is not part of the plan.
“Okay,” she said eventually, her red sleeves flapping in the breeze like the wings of an elegant bird, her expression inscrutable. “There’s not long until he disappears back to the US. I hope you realize that you’ll have to give this absolutely everything you’ve got.”
She stared at me as she said it, challenging me to break, but I didn’t flinch. If one thing started to break, I don’t know where it would end.
William is late, a full fifteen minutes: if William time is like dog years then that’s the equivalent of three hours from a normal person. I stand in front of the mirror in the
hallway fiddling with my lipstick and trying to stop the left side of my hair from looking like a lopsided Princess Leia do. I’ve made much more effort with my outfit this time, but not too much effort—I’m trying to pull off something that straddles the shaky line between homespun and attractive. I’ve gone for a fitted blue corduroy skirt with a gray cashmere V-neck and the gold heart pendant that Jules gave me for Christmas. Once it’s close to half an hour I call him. Apart from anything I need to make sure I’m out of here before Charlotte starts draping herself around my kitchen.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, sounding harassed. “We’re actually just outside.”
“Oh! Okay, I’ll come down.”
He’s parked in a black Golf, and is standing on the pavement, the passenger door flung open. Madeline’s sitting there, a look of total fury on her face. I gingerly approach.
“Hello there,” says William, barely looking at me, their frustration like a heat haze that’s crackling between them.
“Hi,” I say, hanging back. Madeline’s fists are balled up in her lap, her cheeks aflame. Looking at her I feel deeply trepidatious.
“Hi, Madeline,” I venture.
“Go AWAY,” she snarls, not even deigning to look at me. I take a couple of steps backward, like a novice lion tamer stepping away from the cage.
“You will not speak to Olivia like that!” snaps William, voice sharp. Hearing his tone, how shaming it might be, makes me step a little closer.
“It’s fine,” I tell him, trying to make eye contact with her. “What’s wrong? I thought we were going to go to a castle.”
“Nothing,” says Madeline, folding her arms across her chest and staring determinedly into the middle distance, looking for all the world like a tiny little version of her dad.
“You need to get in the back seat this instant!” says William. “That’s Olivia’s seat.”
“I can sit in the back, it’s fine.”
“No!” shouts Madeline. “I don’t want you in my car. Go back to your house.”
Does she have some kind of sixth sense about me, an innate need to protect her mom’s patch?
“Maybe I should go,” I ask William. “She really doesn’t want me here.”
“No,” he says, loud enough for her to hear, voice steely. “She’s just taken leave of her manners.”
It’s like a red rag to a bull. Madeline rips open the glove compartment and grabs the contents, flinging them into the road, her face scarlet. “Right, that’s it,” says William, lifting her out of her seat and holding her arms by her sides. “You need to apologize,” he tells her, the vein at the side of his face throbbing. Madeline wriggles and screams, her red buckled shoes stamping on the pavement. I can’t bear it: her rage feels so justified, so understandable, that part of me longs to scream along with her. I should probably back away, leave them to it, but instead I crouch down so I’m at eye level with her. It’s no more than instinct: I’ve got no idea what to do now I’m down here. I swallow my nerves, telling myself how ridiculous it is to be this intimidated by a seven-year-old.
“What about the castle?” I ask her, though I can barely hear myself above her screams.
“I don’t want to go to stupid Windsor Castle,” she says, turning her furious gaze on me. “I already went to stupid church. It doesn’t even have any princesses.”
“How about if we went somewhere else?” I ask.
“With you?” she says, scorn in her voice. It takes all my self-control not to shrink away.
“If you’ll let me come.”
She pauses, sizes me up, like we’re two cowboys facing off across a Wild West saloon.
“Where would it be?”
Don’t fail me now, brain. Where would be near enough and fun enough to rescue what has so far been a very bad day?
“Brighton! There’s a pier, and a beach, and fair rides. And we can get them to make us doughnuts. They’re properly yummy and I can’t eat a whole bag on my own.”
I love those doughnuts. Even now James and I sometimes jump on the train and spend the day mooching around. I look up to his window, the curtains still drawn. Madeline still hasn’t replied.
“I will do that,” she says, eventually, her eyes narrowed, “as long as there isn’t a silly, boring castle.”
“Good!” I say, standing up, beaming at William, my satisfaction melting as I take in his icy gaze. “I’m sorry . . .” I say, uncertain.
“I appreciate your efforts, but I’d prefer you leave the parenting to the parent,” he whispers curtly, jerking past me to buckle Madeline into her car seat. I stand there, stung, on the verge of running back to the house and calling it quits. He’s right: I should’ve thought, but instead I just acted and left him feeling completely undermined—it’s not like I know how it is day to day, or what preceded her tantrum—he’s the one negotiating the barren reality of life as a single parent. Is it more than that, though—a barrier thrown up to remind me that this isn’t a job interview, that Sally’s death has not created a vacancy?
He gets into the driver’s seat and I sneak a peek at Madeline, sucking her thumb, for once seeming so much younger than her years. I don’t regret it, I tell him silently, hoping it somehow punctures his rigid cranium. There’s no sign it registers: his hands are tightly gripping the steering wheel, eyes fixed on the mirror, that vein still pulsing away, beating a tattoo through his fine, pale skin.
I’ve loved Brighton ever since James first took me there on my eighteenth birthday—I love the smell of the sea, I love the nausea-inducing rides on the pier, I even love the unromantically pebbly beach. We park in a big multistory near the seafront, and I step out, too mulish to make any suggestions about what we should do. William has been infuriatingly courteous throughout the journey, triggering a level of resentment in me that doesn’t make me like myself very much. I think it’s because I know that my resentment is about more than the last hour, it’s about what he cannot be for me, a fact that I’m still struggling to accept. He put on a tape of Enid Blyton stories for Madeline, which at least spared us from too much conversation—Timmy the dog’s intuitive woofing at swarthy gypsies was far safer.
“I’m hungry,” announces Madeline. “And I’d like my lunch to be a hamburger.”
She knows she’s got the upper hand; even a nonparent moron like me can divine that fact. William concedes, and then turns to me.
“Do you have any suggestions? You seem to be something of an expert.”
“I can think of a couple of places,” I say, addressing myself to Madeline, and lead them off toward the Lanes,
immediately starting to feel a bit ashamed of myself. The last thing Madeline needs is adults throwing silent poison arrows at each other—who knows how much of that she’s already had to endure? “Have you been here before?” I ask William, as cheerily as I can muster.
“I think I toured the university, but Durham won out in the end.”
Sometimes William sounds approximately one hundred and five years old. Maybe this is perfect. Maybe what I need is to start finding him ridiculous, devote myself to becoming the world’s best godmother and leave him to be picked over by whatever ghastly parade of young yuppies Trixie shakes out of her address book. But as soon as I think it, my body tells me a different story, reminds me how it felt to be pressed up against him in that tiny bed. I look at him, trying to sense whether seeing me again has brought it to the fore, but he’s involved in an earnest conversation with Madeline about a Dalmatian on the other side of the road. Normally I can tell if someone loves me too much or too little, but he’s got that same distant stateliness that his parents’ house had.
“Here we are,” I say, drawing up outside Browns.
“Excellent choice,” says William, and the three of us walk in, looking for all the world like a perfect little family. Madeline happily eats her hamburger, chatting away to both of us as if her furious tantrum was a figment of our imagination. “What was wrong?” I quietly ask William, as she reverently studies the dessert menu. I still feel a little scared of her, like she’s a bomb that might blow up at any moment, the detonator hidden from view. He shrugs, a bleak expression on his face.
“I don’t know, Livvy. Please don’t take it personally. That kind of thing has been a regular occurrence recently.”
Who was I to be so judgmental about how he handled it? I touch his hand for the briefest of seconds, and he reaches under the table, interlocking his fingers with mine, squeezing them in a way that makes warmth spread through my whole body. I look at him, then look away, feeling momentarily so close to him that it takes all my reserve not to reach out to stroke his face.
“Chip?” he says, nodding to his plate, giving me the sweetest of smiles.
“Thanks,” I say, grabbing one and smiling back.
“I want a chocolate brownie,” Madeline announces, stabbing at the menu with her finger. “And then doughnuts,” she says, turning to me, the world’s foremost doughnut oracle.
“Is that okay?” I ask William.
“Just this once it should be absolutely fine.”
The day ends up being sort of lovely. I say sort of because every second of it is infused with the awful absence of Sally, the two of them—no, the three of us—struggling to find a way to acknowledge her without being destroyed by the weight of her loss. Madeline manages it best. When I ask her if she wants to come on the swinging teacups she tells me that her mommy says tea is like fish wee, and she only ever drinks coffee. I can imagine that: Sally only liked things that gave her a kick. When she asks if we can go on the ghost train William looks stricken. “Mommy won’t be in there!” she tells him, looking at him like he’s a complete idiot. “She up in heaven with the other mommies who died.” We both stare down at her, and look at each other, but she’s already running off, heading for the queue. William strokes my hand again, and leans in.
“Thank you for being here,” he says. “Despite this morning’s performance, I promise you it’s an enormous help.”
“I’m glad,” I say. What am I to you, I think, or rather, what could I be? I hope he doesn’t see the question in my eyes.