The Vows of Silence (2 page)

“It’s only one date.”

“Exactly!”

A part of her knew that Elizabeth was right. Helen had thought about it a good deal, once she had allowed the idea house room. She was fearful of being too much alone when her children had left home, she was too young to be in a rut, she needed to open herself to something new. All the same, to her, meeting someone through an agency or a dating website, or by answering an advert, was an admission of failure. And she wasn’t sure she even wanted to succeed. Besides, there was a stigma, when someone of her age did this.

“Rubbish,” Lizzie had said.

Of course it was a stigma. If she did—by remote chance—meet someone through a dating agency, and that someone came to be important, she would never be able to tell anyone how they had got together. She
would cut out her tongue rather than admit it.

“I don’t get it.” But that was Elizabeth and she was her daughter.

“I’ll send a text message and say I’m not well.”

“That is absolutely pathetic. For God’s sake, Ma, this is a drink in a pub—”

“A bar.”

“A drink. A chat. You can leave it there. Oh God, we’ve been through all this—if you get the feeling he’s a mass murderer, you send Tom a text and he’ll be there in five.”

“I won’t think he’s a mass murderer. He sounds …”

“Like a nice bloke.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“You must have wanted to go through with it earlier, you got ready hours ago.”

“Is this too dressed up?”

“No, it’s great. That wasn’t my point.”

There was a long silence.

“I do want to go. I want to. But I don’t want to. I just haven’t done anything like it before and it’s so many years since I even had an evening out with a man …”

Elizabeth got up, came round the table and gave her a hug, bending over her as if she were the mother, Helen the child.

“You look great and it’s going to be fine. And if it isn’t—so what? What have you lost? One evening.”

“
EastEnders
.”

“Well, that’s crap at the moment so there you are.”

Elizabeth settled down to
Eugénie Grandet
again. The room went quiet.

“Lizzie …”

“Mother—
go away
!”

She had retrieved the agency brochure from the waste-paper bin. But she felt uncertain about being interviewed by someone with the firm intention of matching her with a man on their books, particularly when she didn’t even know if she wanted to meet anyone at all.

Which was how she had come upon the website peoplemeetingpeople.com. Because she would admit to that. Yes. She would agree that she was a person wanting to meet people.

It was quite straightforward. You joined the site for a fee which was not too expensive, not too cheap. She had done that finally one evening when she was on her own. You went step by step. You didn’t have to commit yourself to too much too soon. She felt happy with that.

She put in her name—first name only—and age. The next stage was to narrow down the kind of “people” she wanted to meet.
Age group
. That was surprisingly easy. Between forty-five and sixty.
Marital status
. She ticked
Widowed
. Then
Divorced
. Not sure about divorced but so many people were now, and the reasons were less—what? Sinister? Worrying? She did not tick
Single
. Few really eligible men were still single after forty-five.

She entered her geographical area. Narrowed it down a bit.

Occupation
.
Professional
.
Media-related
.
Public services. Administrative
.
Business
.
Farming and countryside
. Almost any of those. She could probably find something to chat about even to a farmer. She ticked each box.

She had expected there to be more stages, more questions, but she was asked if she would now like to see photographs and brief details of anyone matching her outline.

She went to make a coffee. Somehow, photographs of people, real people, took it one big step away from being a game, made it serious, committed her.

No. It did not commit her. It was just photographs. And oddly enough, she was excited. Who would she see? What kind of men? They would probably all be bald. Or with huge bushy beards. Or small eyes. (‘Never trust a man with small eyes.” Her mother.) Or bad teeth. Or …

She took her coffee to the table, set it down and decisively clicked on the “Yes” button.

It was the first one. How do you tell that you like someone from a photograph? How do you know that you want to meet them?

He was fifty-two. He had brown hair. He had a warm expression. Slightly diffident smile. Nothing especially distinctive. But a good face. Good-looking? Yes, but not overwhelmingly handsome. It was his expression. Warm. Trustworthy. Yes.

She glanced at the others. One was out at once—the bushy beard. Another was too old. Perfectly OK but she couldn’t believe he was sixty or under. The last one was fine. Nothing against him. But when she looked back at the first there was no contest.

“
Click beside any photograph if you would like to know more about this person
.”

She clicked.

“
Phil is Head of History at a boys’ school. He has been widowed for five years and has two grown-up sons. His interests include cooking, cricket, books and ornithology. He loves his job and has many friends but since his sons left home he has felt the lack of a special companion in his life.

If you want to send your profile and photograph to Phil, click HERE.

If you would like to leave a voicemail for Phil, click HERE
.”

She clicked twice.

Three

“There is not any such word as plam.”

“There is
so
such a word as plam.”

“You’re making it up. Uncle Si, isn’t he making it up?”

“Mummy …”

“Don’t ask me,” Cat Deerbon said, dropping a handful of walnuts into the salad bowl, “you know I can’t do Scrabble.”

“You don’t ‘do’ Scrabble, duh. You play it.”

“Sam, how many times have I told you, ‘duh’—and especially ‘duh’ with that face—is incredibly insulting and you do not do or say it.”

Sam sighed and turned back to the board. “Plam,” he said, “is a word.”

“What does it mean then?”

“It’s … the sort of way Australian emu birds land. They go ‘plam.’”

Simon Serrailler stood up with a shout of laughter.
“Brilliant, Sam. I give you ten for Creative Cheating.” He wandered over to the other side of the kitchen and dipped his finger into the salad dressing. “Needs more lemon.”

“I doubt it.”

“And a pinch of sugar.”

“Why not make it yourself?”

“Can’t be arsed.”

“Mummy, Uncle Simon said—”

“I know, and it is a most unattractive expression. Don’t say it again, please.” Cat glared at her brother.

“You’ve got bossier. That’s Australia for you. Loud, bossy women.”

Cat threw a piece of lettuce at him. Simon ducked. The lettuce landed wetly on the floor.

“God, I love it. Love it, love it, love it.” Simon threw himself onto the old kitchen sofa. “I wish you knew what it was like when you weren’t here and those people were and I couldn’t come and—”

“You told us,” Sam said, tipping the Scrabble letters into their green drawstring bag, “how awful it was.”

“Yes, about a million zillion times.”

“So you missed us. That figures.”

“Si, will you open that bottle? Sam, please put the mats on the table. Hannah—”

“I have to go to the loo, I absolutely-scootly have to.”

“Mum, you have to stop her doing that, she’s always doing it, she does it to get out of things, she doesn’t need to go to the loo at all.”

“Stop whingeing.”

Simon rummaged in the drawer for the corkscrew. “You know,” he said to Cat, “it is “absolutely-scootly” typical of Dad. It really is.”

“He can see us when he gets back. Don’t make a thing of it.”

Richard Serrailler, Cat and Simon’s father, had announced that he was taking a holiday just when the Deerbon family returned from Australia.

“But he doesn’t go on holidays. He hates holidays. And what’s he going to do in Madeira for two weeks, for God’s sake?”

“Soak up the sun?”

“He hates sun.”

“He just didn’t want to make a song and dance about us coming home after nine months—he wants to pretend we haven’t been away at all, and by the time he gets back it’ll feel as if we haven’t. Actually,” Cat put the salad bowl on the table, “it feels like that already.”

“God, sis, am I glad you’re home.”

She gave him a brief smile, before bending to take the fish out of the oven. “Give Chris a shout, will you? He’s probably fallen asleep with Felix. Chris does jet lag like nobody else.”

But Chris Deerbon walked into the kitchen as she spoke, rubbing his hand through his hair. “I think I must have gone to sleep.” He looked puzzled.

“So long as Felix has too.”

“Half an hour ago.” He poured the wine into glasses and handed one to Simon.

“Here’s to home.”

“In Australia, we had supper outside nearly all the
time. We had barbecues on the beach. We had a barbecue in the garden, it went with the house. Everyone there has barbecues—they call them barbies, like Hannah’s puke dolls.”

“Wish you were still there, Sam?”

“Sort of.”

“I don’t,” Hannah said. “I missed my friends and my pony and my bed and I missed Uncle Simon most of everything.”

Sam made a loud sucking noise.

Simon looked round the table at them all. He felt a burst of pure and extraordinary happiness.

“Do you get a lot more money being a Detective Chief Superintendent?” Sam asked.

“I get a bit more.”

“Do you get to do more interesting things? More important cases?”

“Some. My really important cases are likely to be with SIFT though.”

“Why?”

“We get called in precisely because they’re important—”

“Serious Incident Flying Taskforce. I thought everything a policeman did was serious.”

“It is.”

“Then I don’t see—”

“Eat your fish, Sam.”

“Is it because they’ve had no luck solving them, so you’re their last resort?”

“Not usually. They might need more minds focused on something, if it’s very difficult. They might need a
detached point of view and a fresh eye, they might need us because their own resources are becoming overstretched—all sorts of reasons. The best thing for me about SIFT is that we’re out there
doing
, not sitting behind a desk. The higher you get in rank, the easier it is to get trapped in an office all day.”

“In Australia, the police wear fleeces and baseball caps.”

“Ever seen your uncle in a baseball cap, Sam?”

“He’d be cool.”

“This,” Hannah said, “is blah-blah boring talk.”

“Go to bed, then. You shouldn’t be at grown-up supper if you get bored with grown-up conversation, you should be playing puke pink Barbies.”

Cat sighed. The bickering between her son and daughter had got worse in Australia.

Wondering now if it was to be a permanent and tiresome feature of their relationship, she turned to her own brother. “Did we wind each other up like this?”

“No. Ivo wound me up. I wound Ivo up. Not you.”

Cat had spent two separate periods with their triplet brother, who worked as a flying doctor in Australia, and had come away each time feeling that they might well not be related at all. Ivo seemed to be from a different planet. He was brash, stubborn, opinionated, tough. She had left him both times with relief and some bewilderment.

“Dad,” she said now, her fork to her mouth. “I suppose that’s the answer. It was staring at me. Ivo is like Dad.”

“Could have told you that,” Chris said.

*

After the children had gone to bed, they opened another bottle and Mephisto the cat bumped in through the flap and settled on Simon’s stomach.

“Did this boy take to strangers living in his house?”

“Apparently he was absolutely fine.”

“Traitor,” Simon said, stroking him. Mephisto half closed his eyes. “How have they settled back to school?”

“Hannah strolled in as if she’d never been away. Sam a bit less easily. His class has split into different groups so he’s lost some of his old friends and there are new boys … but he’ll be fine. It’s sport, sport, sport now anyway—he was rarely within four walls all the time we were in Sydney.”

“You?”

“Oh, I was within four walls. Chris and I were working, you know.”

“I mean coming back.”

“Good. Great in fact.”

“OKish,” Chris said. He had been the one to press for them to take the sabbatical in Australia, the one who had extended it from the original six months. The one who had been loath to return. “But at least we’ve come back to find that, at last, the role of the GP is getting more recognition.”

“You mean double the money for half the work. No nights, no weekends, no bank holidays. Jolly nice—I take your point.”

Cat groaned. “Si, this is an area where angels fear to tread. We’ve had so many arguments about it we’ve
made a pact: Chris and I don’t discuss the new GP contract.”

Cat had always been bitterly opposed to agencies covering nights and weekends for the practice, other than on a locum basis to give her and Chris an occasional rest. She had come back ready to do battle to retain her right to visit her own patients out of hours, only to discover that not only was Chris against their taking that work back in-house, but so was every other GP in the area. It was impossible for her to do out-of-hours by herself and so, resentfully, she had had to concede defeat.

“For now,” she had muttered. “But I’ll find a way. I hate leaving my patients to the mercy of some doctor flown in from abroad at huge cost to cover a few nights here or even worse, someone on call from fifty miles away. It isn’t safe, it isn’t right, it is also over-stretching the ambulance service and over loading hospital A & E and it is not conducive to patient welfare and peace of mind.”