The Loving Husband (22 page)

The wind had dropped, the sound of the far-off motorway was no more than a whisper for once and the light was low and eerie. At first Fran thought the smell was gone but then in the same moment she thought that the inverse was true, in fact it was everywhere, now, it hung in the air all around her and there was a sound, a kind of hum that went with it. She walked away from the house, across the cramped yard, around the low shed with its sagging roof and towards the big hollow barn.

It must be some trick of thermals or eddies, she told herself, the wind thrumming in the barn’s girders or the running water that lay invisible in the land, below the sight-line, it couldn’t be in her head, like the smell. Fran walked towards it. The floor was clumped black here and there with couch grass and thistles growing through the concrete, all four sides of the barn were gone but the roof rose dark and cavernous – if she took another step she would be underneath it. She stopped. Beyond the barn, through its girders, as her eyes adjusted to the grey dark Fran could see the short line of leafless poplars, unmistakable in their symmetry, only at their base was a patch of denser shadow. A car was parked there.

Fran felt the hair lift from her scalp, but she couldn’t move. Inside her something came to life and turned, a quick blind panicked squirming. The baby.

Then from behind her came the solid thunk of a door slamming, a gasp, footsteps and a high-pitched cry that carried across the muddy grass
. Mamamamama.

It was Emme. With the sound of her voice the rigor abruptly dissolved and Fran had turned and run, lumbering in the boots like an awkward animal, towards the house. Emme slammed into her as she reached the yard, the small head against her big tight belly, the arms flung round her, shoulders hunched up to her ears.

‘Nathan?’ called Fran over her, blindly. And then he was there, coming out of the darkness towards her. For a moment his pale face was a blank and then something shifted and let go and he looked human again, and weary.

‘What happened? You were
hours
.’ She couldn’t disguise the accusation in her voice.

‘It was the bad man,’ said Emme, breaking free just as Nathan turned away from them both and headed for the back door, one stride and he was inside, leaving the door open behind him.

‘Bad man?’ said Fran, reaching for her hand, and Emme hung her head, her lip protruding.

‘Daddy said don’t tell. Daddy had to make him go away. Daddy said he would call the police.’

When Emme pushed the plate away and ran next door Nathan had sighed, turning towards her. ‘Just one of those things,’ he said wearily. ‘It took longer than I’d thought.’

A drunk in a playground, was what it boiled down to. He’d taken her to a place he used to go when he was a kid, the far side of Oakenham, he said. It had taken him for ever to find it and when they got there it was a lonelier spot than he’d remembered.

‘Lonely?’ she said, wondering at that. Lonelier than here?

Nathan shrugged. ‘Overgrown. Tucked away behind houses.’ He’d looked thoughtful. ‘Not the kind of place they send their kids these days.’ He sighed. ‘Empty. That’s what I thought, anyway, but he was lying behind a tree, he was more or less comatose. You couldn’t see him straight away.’ He knitted his brow, staring into the grass. ‘I didn’t see him at all. It was Emme that found him.’ He pushed his empty plate back and looked away. ‘He’d pissed himself.’

Emme had run back in blithely halfway through. ‘Did you tell her? Mummy, he said Daddy was his friend only he didn’t know his right name and he was crying. He had wet on his trousers, Mummy.’ She made a face, glowering, put her fingers in her hair to spike it up. ‘He had crazy hair, Mummy. He had a big beard, he was big like a giant.’

‘He knew you?’ She waited for Nathan to answer.

He had laughed, that dry dismissive sound. ‘Drunks often think they know you,’ he said. ‘I persuaded him to get lost in the end. It took a while, he couldn’t walk straight.’

He leaned down, elbows on his knees, and Emme ran to him. She put a hand on each cheek and stared into his face. He looked back, expressionless. ‘He smelled bad,’ she said.

Fran quite quickly came to treat that whole evening as almost something she had dreamed. She consigned the smell and the hum, the bad man and the eerie light at the horizon, to things imagined or hallucinated, the uneasy by-product of pregnancy and loneliness and hysteria. The car parked under the poplars had seemed the most banal element of the dream, and the easiest to forget.

Walking round the side of the Victorian schoolhouse, Fran saw the children working at low tables through the glass. The woman who’d talked to her about Martin, the farmer and his wife and shit in bags all over the house, Sue, was there. She was sitting outsize and hunched over a table next to a child frowning down at an exercise book. Classroom helper: the thought did something nasty to Fran’s stomach.

Harry, Karen’s son, was on the table next to the window and he saw Fran straight away, his face lifted, eager, he made as if to wave but then sat on his hands instead, hunkering down out of sight of the teacher. He watched her, though, until she was out of sight round the building.

She’d left Ben in the car, asleep in his seat. She hurried.

Mrs Rayner was waiting in the reception area, gaunt and tired-looking. It can’t be great, thought Fran, looking anxiously around for Emme. Keeping school out here, nothing to see but a grain silo on the horizon, and the wind blowing horizontal from Siberia.

‘Is she all right?’

‘She’s fine,’ said the teacher, and sighed, removing her glasses and rubbing the bridge of her nose. ‘Under the circumstances.’

And in that tiny moment Fran saw how it began: social services, questions asked, reports filled out. Just doing her job.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘She just wanted to pretend things were normal.’ The woman softened, fractionally. ‘I should have kept her at home,’ Fran went on, obediently. ‘I’ll do that, until—’

‘Just give her a few days,’ said Mrs Rayner. ‘She’s with the school secretary.’

But at the door Fran hesitated. ‘I’d like to…’ she began. ‘I was thinking. I’d like to get more involved. Here, I mean.’ Rayner looked startled. ‘Classroom helper, I mean,’ said Fran quickly. ‘Help with reading. Spelling, you know.’

The headmistress looked taken aback. ‘But you won’t be…’ But whatever she had been going to say, she changed her mind. ‘Thank you,’ she said instead. ‘Yes. We’ll look into that.’ And bent her head quickly back over her desk.

Ben was still asleep when they got back to the car and Emme climbed in beside him obediently, leaning down to kiss his small hand lying limp in his lap, murmuring something to him that Fran couldn’t hear. She just shook her head when they got back to the house and Fran turned to look at her in the back seat. ‘Mrs Rayner said you were talking about the bad man, Emme. Darling?’

‘I just said that because I wanted to come home,’ she said, her mouth stubborn. ‘Can I watch Peppa Pig on the television, please?’

The house was silent. On the kitchen table was another one of Ali Compton’s cards, propped against the salt cellar. Now that she was gone Fran missed her. She turned around and locked the kitchen door and bolted it.

Emme ran past her into the sitting room and she heard a burst of chatter as the television came on. Fran set Ben just inside the hall in his car seat, asleep, and made a tray of Emme’s favourite food. Boiled egg, toast soldiers, little tomatoes, a chocolate biscuit wrapped in foil. A pear cut up into pieces.

After ten minutes, though, Emme padded past Ben into the kitchen where Fran had filled the sink and asked to be put to bed. A corner of the foil turned back and a mouse-sized bite taken from it, the rest untouched on the low table in front of the television.

It wasn’t even six, but it was dark outside. Fran read her three stories, and when she refused a fourth turned off the lamp and lay down next to her, looking at the light coming in from the corridor. ‘It’s all right, Emme,’ she whispered, and Emme’s head moved up and down, a small hand crept up and gathered her jumper in a fist, holding on. She lay still until the fist relaxed at last and Emme’s breathing was even and regular, thinking of Ben alone in the kitchen. How long did she have?

They needed her: she had to make it all right. She had to make it safe. That was all she needed to remember.

Ben was still asleep but his face was crumpled, as if he was in pain. What would happen to them if she couldn’t keep them safe? The grimace on Ben’s face faded, his small belly relaxed back in the padded seat. Fran stood up, moving stiffly at first, sink, dresser, table, dishwasher, one foot behind the other. Carefully she closed the curtains behind the sink. The bags of shopping were still on the floor where she’d dumped them. She started by putting the food away then moved on to the washing up.

The stack of bills and letters sat on the side, waiting, reproaching her but the waste bucket under the sink was beginning to smell, so she took it to the yard bins. When she came back inside there the pile still sat: she could just put them away, out of sight. She tugged at a drawer in the farmer’s Formica-topped units, they were home-made, thirty, forty years old. Nathan wanted them kept:
They’re practically antiques
, he’d said, looking at them with an emotion she couldn’t share or understand. The drawer stuck: she pulled harder. She could hear Nathan in her ear, exasperated,
Don’t
.

Out of the corner of her eye she checked, Ben in his car seat, still asleep, out of harm’s way, and then she tugged again, both hands. A fingernail splintered and the drawer flew free, spraying stuff everywhere, unopened bills, cards, photographs on the floor and on top of Fran as she staggered back and sat, hard, on the linoleum. The drawer landed on her shin with a crack and in his padded nest Ben gave a violent start and opened his mouth to wail. She lay back a moment, holding her breath, ready to sob herself with the pain in her shin, ready to lie face down on the dirty floor – but there was no cry and when she looked Ben’s mouth had closed again.

Righting herself, Fran got to her knees over the mess and began to gather it up. Standing then, with the pile crushed against her, she stopped. She had heard nothing, but she felt the cold on the backs of her legs and in that instant she realised that she hadn’t driven the bolt home again coming in from the bins, she hadn’t turned the key. She stopped, she froze. She couldn’t move.

On top of the pile of papers in her arms an old photograph with curled corners stared back up at her, a faded image. Behind her the door closed. She couldn’t turn around. She turned around.

‘Fran?’

The voice shook. It was Rob. At last. She took a step toward him, she looked.

He was so pale his eyes looked like black holes, the raw-boned hands that emerged from the sleeves of his all-weather jacket were freezing, trembling. It took her a second to understand that he was the one that was terrified, not her.

Awkwardly she stepped towards him and put her arms around him. At first he stiffened and then she felt his head rest on her shoulder. ‘It’s all right,’ she said.

They’d been together not more than a month when Nathan had introduced her to Rob, leading her through the etched glass door of a Victorian pub buried away out to the east. They’d passed windswept plazas of new-build apartment housing on the way, the glass and steel towers of the city visible over the river, but the pub had been passed over for development and forgotten, sitting humbly on a corner between thirties tenements.

And then there was Rob, squeezed into a velveteen corner with a pint in front of him, looking up, apologetic. Fran could remember the warmth she’d felt when Nathan said that, his hand in hers. It all felt so safe: the dusty down-at-heel gloom of the pub, the skinny best friend, not much more than a boy himself in his football shirt and anorak and oversized trainers. Poor Rob.

‘Here she is,’ Nathan said, and Rob hovered between standing and sitting, offering a hand. Nathan turned to the bar.

‘I’ve heard all about you,’ he said and she grimaced.

‘Do I pass?’ she whispered, apologetically. ‘Sounds like you’re the man I have to impress.’ And Rob had blushed and bobbed his head and smiled, quick, shy, unexpected, a wide child’s smile.

Nathan came back, his hands full of drinks, and setting them down said, ‘What do you think of her then,’ he said, ‘my fiancée?’ And she’d just grabbed the glass and taken a drink, because she didn’t know if it had been a joke. Barely a month and he was calling her that.

She couldn’t remember what they’d talked about: a build; some walking holiday Rob had been on. She remembered the look Nathan gave her though, a quick apologetic glance across Rob’s shoulders, then another one, exhilarated, when he saw she was up for it,
yes
.

Rob had just made to stand up and buy a round when Nathan’s phone had gone off and looking at it he had said to Fran, ‘Got to take this, sorry, work.’ Then to Rob, ‘It’s Julian.’ Rob nodding, barely breaking his stride towards the bar.

Whatever the call had been about it hadn’t taken long, because Rob hadn’t even set his round back down on the table when Nathan reappeared.