All the Hopeful Lovers (3 page)

But she still left.

Jack drinks his coffee alone in his bedroom and contemplates Chloe’s plentiful love life. Nice to have something to think about other than not thinking about Hannah. Chloe, so blonde, so blue-eyed, so smiling, has opened a window into his imagination and let in a shaft of bright sunlight.

Easy to imagine kissing Chloe. Easy to imagine that soft pliant body pressing against his own. And if she has amassed plentiful boyfriends, why not one more? Somehow the fact of her promiscuity makes him less afraid. This is not a simple matter. It’s not some notion that she’s ‘easy’ and so he’s in with a chance. It’s all to do with his own fragile self-belief. There would be very little shame in making a move on Chloe and getting rejected. He hardly knows her. It would all be casual and superficial. No investment, no risk of loss.

In this way Jack Broad conceives a plan for the Christmas vacation. He will re-make contact with Chloe Redknapp. Beyond that, who knows? At the very least he will gain, for a while, the return of hope.

He looks Chloe up on Facebook and is entranced. Everything about her is laughing, irreverent, bursting with life. There’s a picture of her in a bikini taken in the summer in Greece, her body so tanned and gorgeous, her head thrown back – the abandonment of it, the unselfconsciousness, the sheer sexual power leaves Jack giddy with longing.

He could leave a message on her wall, but what’s he to say? No, what he needs is a casual encounter, like last time, something that appears spontaneous. Shame that it’s winter now and she’ll be all covered up.

One step at a time.

When he comes downstairs later he finds his sister Carrie alone in the kitchen.

‘Where’s Mum?’ she says.

‘She went to London.’

‘That’s a bit sudden, isn’t it?’

‘She’s allowed a life, Carrie.’

‘So? Did I ever say she wasn’t?’

You can’t win with Carrie. Which is odd when you consider what a loser she is. Everything about her droops. Presumably she’s unhappy about something or other but Jack doesn’t know what and doesn’t ask. If Carrie wants sympathy she should stop getting at him all the time.

‘When’s she coming back?’

‘No idea.’

‘She must have said something.’

‘She’s gone to some exhibition. That’s all I know.’

‘Well, I’m not cooking dinner.’

‘Nobody asked you.’

‘What’s your problem, Jack? Why do you have to be such a boring creep all the time?’

Jack says nothing to this. Carrie makes him so angry he doesn’t trust himself to speak.

Maybe I should go out into the garden and smash plates.

‘Your house has an old man living in it,’ he says.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Your house on the swing tree walk.’

This has the desired effect.

‘My house? But that’s my house! No one lives there. What old man?’

‘I don’t know. I saw him in the garden smashing plates and stuff.’

‘Oh, no!’

To Jack’s surprise Carrie is genuinely dismayed. Her face crumples.

‘That was going to be my retreat,’ she says. ‘As soon as I’ve got money of my own I’m going to buy it and do it up.’

‘Yes, but only in your imagination.’

‘What do you mean, only in my imagination?’

There are the beginnings of tears in her eyes. Her brown hair falls over her squirrel’s face. She pushes it away with an impatient gesture.

‘I hate him,’ she says. ‘I hope he dies.’

Now she’s actually crying. Mortified, she leaves the kitchen. He hears her running up the stairs to her room.

Jack now realizes he’s come down to the kitchen because he’s hungry. He forages in the fridge for something to eat and finds a bowl of left-over apple crumble covered in cling film. He takes it up to his room. There, as he eats the chilled crumble, he taps search-words into his laptop. In this way he learns that Exeter University’s term ends on Friday, 12 December. Which is today.

So Chloe will be coming home any day now.

Belinda checks her watch as she drives back home to Plumpton. Just gone two. The post will have come by now, it gets later every day. Maybe some emails. No phone messages on the answerphone, no one does that any more.

That makes her think of Alex, her son, who she hasn’t seen for weeks. He’s living his own life in London, a life of which she knows nothing because he tells her nothing. Why should he? And yet this is the same longed-for baby she nearly died giving birth to, the same darling boy she held in her arms and kissed until she was half-drunk with ecstasy.

You want intensity, there it is. Nothing beats a first-born. Oh, Alex. Just ring me, you ungrateful little shit.

She swings the Range Rover into the yard beside the house. It’s a tight corner but she’s done it a million times. She goes in by the back door, through the boot room to the kitchen. Funny about front doors, no one uses them any more either.

I talked too much at lunch. Laura must think I’m an airhead. Why on earth did I tell her about Kenny?

As always, after she’s been talking about herself Belinda feels an afterwash of self-disgust. At the time the words just come pouring out, she can’t stop them, all it takes is a smile, a nod, any sign that her listener is sympathetic. Belinda knows her friends laugh at her. They say, ‘God, Belinda, you’re outrageous! You can’t say things like that!’ And she does, and they drink it in with sparkling eyes, and she comes home and feels like she wants to be sick.

I’m a party girl, that’s God’s own truth. I don’t do noble solitude.

The mail is all Christmas cards. The coming festivities fill her with panic and dread. Let’s not have Christmas this year. A crashing stock market, all those job losses, who’s feeling jolly? Give it a miss for once. Cut to January, and let’s get on with the long slow plod towards spring.

She turns on the radio and there’s Patti Smith belting out ‘Because the Night’. She moves about the kitchen half-dancing, mouthing the words, enjoying the feel of her body in motion. No one to see. Why not? Then because she’s dancing she has a sudden longing for a cigarette.

Christ I could murder a fag.

She gave up almost ten years ago now; hardest thing I ever did, they should hand out medals. But it screws with your complexion. Tom knows all about that. Smoking reduces the blood flow to the skin, dries it out. Plus all that puckering to inhale gives you mouth wrinkles. Mouth wrinkles!

Chloe smokes. Not much, but you can smell it on her hair. No mouth wrinkles yet but she better watch out.

Did Jackie remember to turn on the radiator in Chloe’s room?

Belinda goes up the back stairs to Chloe’s room and sure enough it’s like an ice-box in there. She turns on the radiator and lingers, looking round. The room hasn’t changed much over the years. All those mornings waking Chloe from indignant sleep to get her up in time for school. The daylight throwing a bright beam over the bed where the curtains never did quite meet. The way she slept, as if tossed onto the bed, her limbs all over the place. Her perfect skin.

Always grumpy in the mornings.

‘Are you awake, darling? Promise me you won’t go back to sleep.’

A grunt if I’m lucky. The cat curled up by her feet. Possum loved Chloe best, slept on her bed every night, until she got too old to make it up the stairs.

Chloe sitting beside me on the school run prattling away about nothing. God knows how many times I drove down that godawful road. But I miss it now. It was our time together.

The phone rings, making an echoey chime as the different extensions sound from bedroom, drawing room, kitchen, study. Belinda goes back down the stairs and takes it on the kitchen cordless.

‘Hello?’

It’s Michelle, Tom’s secretary. Tom’s going to be late home. After seven, half past at the latest.

‘Oh, honestly!’ exclaims Belinda. ‘He knows Chloe’s coming home today.’

In Chloe’s honour she’s got some fillet steaks for dinner, and plans to make a clafoutis using their own plums, picked, stoned and frozen in October. You’d never think it to look at her but Chloe eats like a horse. Always scrounging in the fridge, ice cream, soft-bake cookies, her diet is appalling. She can eat an entire tube of Pringles, sitting there tapping away at Facebook, one after another, until they’re all gone. Remarkable, in its way.

A car pulls into the yard. Belinda looks out of the kitchen window and recognises Lisa’s bright yellow Fiat 500, a car like a toy. Lisa gets out and reaches back into the car for a file. She holds the file hugged in her arms like a baby. Some of Tom’s medical records, presumably, for him to work on at home.

Belinda lets Lisa in the back door, closing it again quickly against the cold air. She finds she’s pleased to have company, which comes as a surprise. She’s never thought of herself as a lonely person, and even if she was, sad Lisa, single thirty-something Lisa, is hardly the companion she would choose.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ says Lisa, standing by the door, her body sagging as if she lacks even the will to resist gravity. ‘I was going to leave it in the garage. Then I saw you were in.’

She holds out the file, as if it confers on her a legitimacy that she herself lacks. Clinical photographs processed and filed by Lisa herself, one of the three women Tom calls ‘my crew’. They fuss round him like hens. Nice to be a man.

‘How about a cup of tea now you’re here?’ says Belinda.

‘That would be lovely,’ says Lisa.

She puts the file down on the kitchen table. Belinda fills the kettle and switches it on.

‘Michelle just called,’ she said. ‘Tom’s coming back late.’

‘He works too hard,’ says Lisa.

‘His choice. He’d better not be too late. Chloe’s coming home today.’

‘That’ll be nice. She’s a lovely girl.’

As she gets out the tea bags and the mugs Belinda feels Lisa’s sad eyes following her every move. She turns to look at her and catches a strange expression on her face: expectant, fearful.

‘What?’ she says.

‘Nothing,’ says Lisa.

It crosses Belinda’s mind then that it’s odd of Lisa to drive all the way here in the middle of the afternoon with a medical file. Why not give it to Tom in the office? If he needs to work on it at home he can always bring it back himself. But they spoil him, these women. Tom the dominant male figure in all their lives. A sort of office harem. They probably all get their periods at the same time.

She makes the mugs of tea in silence, waiting for Lisa to speak. She’s getting this feeling that there’s something Lisa wants to tell her.

‘Tom stays late a lot these days,’ Lisa says.

Her slightly protuberant eyes have a pitiful shine to them. Maybe she’s in love with Tom. Five years of devoted service and her faithful heart is breaking.

‘Yes,’ says Belinda. ‘Usually this is a quiet time. The run-up to Christmas.’

People don’t want surgery before Christmas because they don’t want to be in bandages for the Christmas parties. The busy time starts again in the new year.

She gives Lisa her mug of tea and Lisa holds it cupped in both hands as if she needs its warmth.

‘I shouldn’t be bothering you,’ she says.

‘Oh, I don’t mind. I’ve got nothing on till it’s time to pick Chloe up from the station.’

‘Karen said I shouldn’t come.’

Karen the office manager. The hen mother.

‘But you escaped anyway?’

‘Karen’s not in today. It’s Billy’s Christmas play this afternoon. He’s a three king. One of the three kings, I mean. Karen made his costume.’

She starts to cry.

‘Lisa! What is it?’

‘It’s not fair,’ she says, snuffling. ‘It’s not fair.’

‘What’s not fair?’

She blows her nose and dabs at her eyes, turning her face away.

‘Sorry. I’m being stupid.’

Now Belinda’s sure of it. One word from her and Lisa will pour out her unreciprocated love. She feels a flash of irritation. Tom never notices Lisa from one month to the next. Probably can’t even remember her name. Trots in, picks up the file of pictures she’s prepared so perfectly – it’s a highly-skilled job in its way, but everyone needs the human touch, the sense they’re appreciated – and trots out again without a word.

‘He can be a selfish bastard, I know,’ she says.

‘Do you?’ says Lisa. ‘Do you really?’

Again that look. She wants something to happen, but she’s afraid to make it happen.

‘Well, he’s a man, isn’t he?’ says Belinda.

‘Oh, yes. He’s a man all right.’

Please. Tom must have groped Lisa or something. It’s all a bit sad.

‘I suppose you know,’ Lisa says.

‘Know what?’

Now for the first time Belinda feels a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach.

What do I know?

‘Karen said of course you knew and it’s none of our business, but I said, what if she doesn’t? It’s not fair, us knowing and you not, it’s not right.’ The words tumbling out now, evidently they’ve been backing up in her throat, pushing at her mouth. ‘I mean, why should he be able to do as he likes? I don’t care what anyone says, it’s not fair, he shouldn’t do that to you, it’s not right.’

Now Belinda doesn’t want to know. Maybe she’s been not wanting to know for a long time. But it’s too late. Lisa wants her to know. She wants someone to share the suffering.

Lisa holds out her mug.

‘Do you have any sugar?’ she says.

Belinda gives her the sugar bowl and a teaspoon. Lisa sweetens her tea and stirs it and sips it, and somehow during this interlude Belinda realises they have moved beyond the point at which she can pretend not to know. She has entered Lisa’s world. It’s not fair. It’s not right.

‘Who is it?’ she says.

‘One of the office staff. He thinks no one knows.’

‘At the hospital?’

‘Someone in marketing. I don’t know who she is. I’ve never even seen her. She started in September. Works in the Portakabins.’

Someone in marketing in a Portakabin. None of it seems real to Belinda. She drinks her tea. She feels numb.

‘Was I wrong to tell you?’

‘No.’ What else can she say? Once you know, you know for ever. Lisa wants her to cry, but she can’t cry.

Lisa says, ‘Don’t say anything to Karen, will you? She says it’s none of our business.’

‘No. I won’t say anything to Karen.’

Alone again in the kitchen Belinda sits at the table looking out of the window at the bare branches of the willow by the pond. The bark is patched with yellow lichen, to make up for the lost leaves.

High piles of clouds are moving slowly across the sky, but you never see them move, you’d swear they were fixed, static, like the curve of the Downs on the horizon. Then your attention shifts and when you look again the clouds have changed their shape.

She feels cold. She pretended to be cold once, many years ago. Come over here, Tom. Sit by me and keep me warm. And we laughed, didn’t we, Tom?

Don’t think about that.

The sound of cars whining past on the Ditchling road. The hum of the freezer.

Almost three hours before it’s time to go to the station to meet Chloe. Things to do, but they can wait. Everything can wait.

Life on hold.