Barefoot in the Dark (26 page)

‘Only I was worried that – well, I was a teeny bit cross, wasn’t I?’

‘You were a bit cross.’ She laughed now. Properly. This was better.

‘But you’re sure.’

She laughed again. ‘I’m sure I’m sure.’

‘And I’m sorry, Hope.’

‘Doh! You said that already.’

A thought occurred to him. Suddenly. Hearing her laugh.

‘Hope, what day were you born?’

‘Twelfth of August. Why?’

‘No, not the date. What day of the week?’

‘Oh. I see. A Sunday. Why?’

He’d known without doubt that she would be. That she could never be anything else.

‘Because you’re sounding very bonny and blithe and all that stuff,’ he answered. ‘So does that mean I’m forgiven?’

He waited for her to laugh again, but she didn’t. The silence lengthened. ‘Hmm. What’s London?’ she asked eventually. ‘Anything exciting?’

As ‘exciting’ was one adjective he didn’t think h’d be using in relation to his work for some time, her question brought him up short. He wondered if he should tell her about it but couldn’t seem to find the right words. I’ve lost my job. I didn’t get my new one. I’m a failure. He couldn’t find the right thoughts for it, let alone the right words, with which to tell her he was none of the things she thought he was, but simply an ordinary man with few prospects and whose father was dying and who was needy and sad. He knew he wouldn’t feel like this forever. But right now it was like being impotent all over again, except worse. The sense of emasculation was so total. No. He wouldn’t tell her. He didn’t think he could cope with her feeling sorry for him. Besides, she sounded like she had more than enough on her plate.

‘Oh, nothing exciting,’ he said, breezily. ‘Just have to see a man about a job.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘In London?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Oh. Right. Is this something to do with the television thing?’

‘Er… nope. Something else.’

‘Oh.’

‘Hope?’

‘Yes?’

‘You know how sorry I said I was?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I still feel bad, you know.’

‘Jack don’t be. I told you.’

‘I know, but I’d feel a whole lot better about it if you’d let me say sorry properly. You know. Like with a glass of wine? Or dinner? Or… ’

‘Oh,
Jack
… ’

‘Oh Jack, what?’

‘I just… oh, God. There’s Iain for the children. Look. I’d better go.’

‘You didn’t answer my question yet.’

‘I know. I just… look, can I call you back, maybe?

He could hear her doorbell ringing.

‘No. Not until you’ve said yes.’

But she hadn’t said yes. She’d only said maybe. And refused to elaborate. She’d said she couldn’t do Saturday, but might manage Sunday. Though wasn’t sure. He’d have to call her back on Sunday. Then she’d bundled him off the phone.

He’d said he’d call her Sunday. It would just have to do.

The flat felt airless and gloomy when he put the phone down. As if it was not part of the real world but suspended in some sort of plasma bubble, with him trapped inside. It pressed in on him. He went into the kitchen and peered without much hope in the fridge. Nothing to eat and he couldn’t stomach another take-away. There was no point in trying to cross Cardiff yet to get to the hospice. Perhaps he’d better do that thing normal people did and pop down to Sainsbury’s to get some supplies. Yes. He grabbed his jacket from the hook and escaped.

Jack wondered how he would feel if his dad were not dying, but instead suffering from some chronic though not immediately life-threatening illness. Like mild angina (Lydia’s mother) or perhaps arthritis (Danny’s) or just the general wear and tear of ageing. The inevitable role-reversal that had offspring talking to their elderly relatives in loud voices and taking round flagons of soup.

He felt, sometimes, that he’d been cheated out of a stage. He would hear Hil in the office, railing endlessly about picking up her mother’s laundry, or collecting her prescriptions or taking her to see a stupefying stream of doctors, podiatrists, dentists and nutritionists. Sorting out her pension payments, having someone in to do her hair. Before the divorce, before his father’s diagnosis, before everything that had gone wrong in his life, he had blithely assumed that this would be his cross to bear too. Had he minded? He didn’t think so. He realised he’d sort of taken it for granted that Lydia would deal with the lion’s share of it, and that he’d have only a small but well-defined role. Picking his dad up to come for Sunday lunch with them, maybe. Helping in the garden – God forbid. Things like that.

But with his father’s diagnosis had come the realisation that, no, he probably wouldn’t be doing any of those things, and he didn’t know how to feel at all any more.

And then Lydia had divorced him and with that had come another realisation, that, as things stood – and, he felt at the time, were likely to remain – he would have no cause to feel aggrieved and irritable, because he’d have no-one to look after at all. No five-hour round trips to Llandrindod Wells like Hil had, no-one to be tetchy with. No-one to resent. He knew he should feel this was in some way compensation for the loss of both his parents, but it hadn’t felt so at the time. It didn’t feel so now. In fact, the sense of loss was growing ever more acute. He missed Ollie so much. Missed polishing his school shoes for him. Missed fixing his bike. Being alone was about feeling you had no-one to look after you, certainly, but that was only half the story. He wanted someone to look after. He
needed
someone to look after. Did that make him peculiar? He really wasn’t sure. But as he drifted around Sainsbury’s, his eyes fixed on and held a woman of about his own age, plucking apples from their spongy blue nests under the watchful eye of a largely critical pensioner in a wheelchair, and it made him feel empty at heart.

He avoided the confectionery aisle with great deliberation and bought a ‘Taste the Difference’
Duck à l’orange
for his dinner. Lonely. That was all he was. Nothing more dramatic or less ordinary than that. He picked up a blackcurrant cold remedy, too. He was coming down with something as well.

Chapter 27

It wouldn’t do, Hope kept telling herself, to get too excited. It wouldn’t do to get excited at all, in fact. Whatever her heart was telling her – and boy, had it been clamouring – it was her head she needed to listen to. And her head was telling her simply not to go there. Here was someone with a busy life, a big career – perhaps a job in London, even – and, most importantly, a man with a queue. A queue that was growing, perhaps, even now. The pity was that she couldn’t help it. It had become chronic. Like asthma. Or a tendency to boils.

‘You’re looking chirpy,’ her mother remarked, as she opened the front door to let her in.

‘I am?’

‘Most definitely. Stress obviously suits you.’ She sighed a rare sigh. ‘I wish it suited me. It’s good to see you, love.’

Hope had come to visit Suze. They’d kept her in hospital overnight when she was first admitted, and she hadn’t wanted to see anyone the first week. But the children would be coming home at the weekend, when everything would be back to normal. Everything bar the still potent unreality of it all, together with the fact that her mother was still staying with Suze, and the nightmare it had been organising her own children as a consequence.

But it had worked out OK. In some ways better. She’d been thinking long and hard since Suze’s ‘episode’ (which was what her mum had taken to calling it, so she supposed she should too). Yes, it had been a shock. How could it not have? But it had also been good for her. It was quite empowering to be sorting things out on her own at last. She’d spent too long since Iain had left, she realised, meekly accepting both help and advice: taking the easy option of letting her mother take charge of the children, of letting her new life be managed and cushioned, of letting Suze tell her what was best for all of them.

Her dependence, she could see, had been holding her up. She needed to take charge of her own life now. The childcare was tricky, and would remain so a while yet, but Maddie had been great about it, and she knew she would cope. The best thing was that she was beginning to feel stirrings of confidence again. She could make her own decisions regarding her children. She could make her own decisions regarding herself.

Hope had brought Suze a big bunch of tulips and, tiny though the action was, just the arranging of them in Suze’s kitchen, in a vase and in a manner of entirely her own choosing, was pleasing in a way that surprised her. ‘There,’ she said now, to her mother. ‘What do you think?’

‘Lovely, dear. Lovely. They’ll cheer her up no end. Shall I make some tea? While you go on up?’

It was strange to see Suze in bed. Hope tried, and failed, to recall a time when she had ever seen her sister-in-law anything other than fully dressed. There’d been a rare (and never repeated) Christmas when they’d stayed at Paul’s, ten years back, but even then, when they had surfaced at around five, Suze was already showered and dressed before broaching the lounge.

Yet here she was, her pale features naked of make-up, hair hanging loose, in jersey pyjamas, and with an expression of un-Suze-like vulnerability on her face.

‘How are you?’ Hope asked her, because that’s what you did.

Suze stroked the duvet. ‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she replied. Hope placed the tulips on the chest of drawers in the window. There were two men in the garden kneeling over mole-mounds. It looked a bit like an Easter egg hunt, she decided. She said nothing. Best not stir the waters further. ‘Actually I’m not, of course,’ Suze said suddenly. ‘I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. I feel like crying all the time. I feel useless and a nuisance and like I really have no business putting everyone to so much bother.’

‘You won’t feel like that for long,’ said Hope. ‘You’ll see. You’ll feel better.’

Suze clasped her hands together and laced the fingers in her lap. ‘Ah, but that’s such a relative term, isn’t it? Feeling better. Rather depends on what you’re feeling better
than
.’

Hope considered this a moment, smiling to herself. Yes, she knew that. But she had no idea what to say in response to it. They were all living with such questions just now, weren’t they? And there weren’t any answers. It would ever be thus. She could see that now. She perched herself on the edge of the bed and nodded. ‘I know.’

‘But I’m feeling better than I was yesterday, so, yes, you’re right. It’s progress of a sort. I’m going to start seeing someone, you know. A psychologist. She sounds nice. How about that, eh? Bit of a turn-up, don’t you think?’

The old Suze surfaced briefly, and a confrontational expression visited her face. But it was only for a second. Merely an echo. As if she’d suddenly remembered she didn’t need to do that any more. Hope could still find nothing useful to say. An affirmative would seem patronising. A denial even more so. This was new and strange territory. ‘I wish I’d known, Suze,’ she said instead. ‘I wish – I mean I always thought you had everything so sorted. If I’d the slightest idea you’d been – well, I wish I’d been able to support you better, that’s all.’

Suze looked at her more intently now. ‘You know, Hope, it really wouldn’t have made any difference. Not to anything. What’s wrong with me isn’t something someone else can fix – it wouldn’t have made any difference.’ She shook her head. ‘No, that’s not even true, is it? It probably would have made it worse.’

‘I don’t see how that can be.’

‘Because it would. Because it would have made
me
feel worse. Everyone knowing. Even my mother doesn’t, you know.’

‘Your
mother
?’

Suze shook her head. ‘It wouldn’t help. She’s so like me, you see. It would make her ill. I know it would. I’m her success story. I’m her reason for feeling OK about herself. She thinks I have everything. I
do
have everything, don’t I?’

Hope had only met Suze’s mother a handful of times. She’d seemed brisk, capable. A lot like Suze. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I guess most people would think so. I guess I would. But then I’m not you, am I? It depends what you want. Do
you
think you have everything?’

‘Indisputably.’ She raised a hand and fanned her fingers. ‘I have a lovely caring husband, two beautiful children, a perfect home, nice friends, good health. I have no business being like this, Hope. Really I don’t.’ She dropped her hand. ‘I’ve just never seemed to be able to help it.’

Hope wanted to offer platitudes. Sound encouraging. Tell Suze it didn’t matter. That they’d all rally round. But even as she thought it, she knew that would be wrong. She should say something else.

‘You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, you know. You’ve made a fine job of coping. Bringing up the kids. Supporting Paul…’

‘Ah. Yes. I’m very good at that. Getting on. Papering over all the little cracks. Pretending. But that’s all it is, Hope. A pretence. I’m not like you. I wish I could be like you. But I’m not.’

Hope smiled at her. ‘Me? I’m not much of a role model.’

‘Ah, it’s not for you to say.’

‘I’m sure you wouldn’t want my life. It’s
all
cracks with me right now, believe me.’

Suze lifted her hand again and waved it dismissively. ‘I don’t want your
life
. God knows, you’ve had such a tough time of it, Hope. That’s exactly it. Don’t you see? I just want your way of living it. Your indomitable spirit. To feel optimistic and jolly and spontaneous and energetic. To get on. To not fuss about things that don’t matter all the time.’

‘I’m not sure you’ve quite got me right there, Suze.’

‘Oh, but I
have
, Hope. I have. You just don’t see it at the moment, that’s all.’

Hope could hear her mother clattering up the stairs with the tea tray. Suze glanced at the open door, then clasped Hope’s hand tightly. ‘You know what I
really
want, Hope? I just want to be the sort of person who wakes up in the morning and feels happy for no reason. Like you do.’

It was this, more than anything, that lodged in Hope’s mind when she woke up on Sunday morning. Suze was right. That
was
her. That
was
what she was like. She’d just forgotten, that was all. Got sidetracked, and lost sight of who she was, because she’d been stumbling around in the dark for so long. So much so that when the first chink of light had appeared she’d been too fearful to let herself step into it. The dark seemed so much darker when you came in from the light.

Well, she’d had enough of the dark now. She smiled at herself in her dressing table mirror. Suze was right. She did have an indomitable spirit. She was still here, wasn’t she? She’d made it through worse, hadn’t she? So sod it. She
would
go out with him. Just for a drink. Once she’d got the kids settled and given them tea, she would get Emma round and go and have a drink with him. Why not? She had nothing to lose that she hadn’t lost already. She needn’t feel scared. Yes. That’s what she would do. And she would take it from there.

It was in this spirit of emotional courageousness that Hope now pressed the play button on her answer-phone. She’d only been out half an hour or so, to get food in for when the children came home. Which they’d just done. They’d all clattered in together. She’d even shouted a cheery greeting to Iain. Stopped and said hello. Asked him about work.

But her valour was redundant.

‘ that.
It’s Jack.’
Yes, she knew
‘I’m really sorry to have missed you. Look, about us going out this evening. Something’s come up Er…. look, I’m really sorry, but I don’t know how long I’m going to be, so… well, I’ll try and call you again later, OK?’

‘Who’s that man?’ asked Chloe.

‘Jack Valentine,’ said Tom.

‘Jack who?’

‘Jack Valentine. The man off the radio.’

She sloughed off her backpack. ‘What does
he
want?’

‘I dunno.’

‘What’s he want, Mum?’

Hope stabbed at the delete button. ‘Oh, nothing,’ she said lightly. ‘We’re just sorting something about the fun run, that’s all.’

‘Oh. What’s for tea, anyway? I’m starving. Dad made us walk miles. I hate going for walks. Why do we have to go for walks all the time?’

‘Because –’

Tom put on a silly voice. ‘Because that’s what
Rhiannon
likes to do.’

‘Well, she’s stupid,’ Chloe sniffed.

‘Don’t we know it. Hey, Mum?’

Oh, how quickly the gloss had worn off. She wasn’t sure if she was pleased or dismayed. She could see trouble brewing, but she could also go ‘hah!’ Except that she wouldn’t, because she didn’t much feel like it. ‘What?’

‘You know next time?’

‘Next what?’

‘Doh! Next time we go to Dad’s
,
of course.’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, do I have to, like, stay the
whole
weekend?’

‘Of course you do.’

‘But it’s so boring.’

‘You think you’d be any less bored here? Besides, he takes you to football. You love that.’

‘I know. But couldn’t you pick me up Sunday morning or something? I never get to see my mates any more.’

‘Hardly
,
Tom,’ Hope said. ‘You get to see them plenty. Besides, you have to. He looks forward to you going.’

‘No, he doesn’t! Well, OK, I suppose he does. But he still spends half his time holding hands with
her
and expecting us to run about finding acorns and stuff, like we’re babies or something. And I got mud all over my trainers.’

Hope knew this would be a circumstance of some gravity, and felt for him. ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ she said levelly. ‘But I do know your father does look forward to seeing you. Very much. He –’

‘Yeah, yeah. But couldn’t you just ask him if we could come home Sunday lunchtime? Tell him I’ve got homework or something?’

‘I don’t know, Tom. I –’

Chloe put her hands on her hips and pouted. ‘That’s not fair! If Tom doesn’t have to stay all weekend I shouldn’t have to stay all weekend!’

‘Yeah, you should. You’re nine.’

‘So what?’

‘So you have to do as you’re told. Doesn’t she, Mum?’

‘But that’s –’

‘Enough!’ declared Hope. ‘No more debates. I’ll think about it, Tom, OK? Right. How about the three of us go out for a pizza or something?’

‘What about Jack Valentine?’

‘What about him?’

Tom pointed to the phone. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be doing something this evening?’

‘No. No, we’re not. And I’m starved as well. Now. Dirty washing in the kitchen please and school bags for the morning. We leave in twenty minutes, OK?’

It felt so wrong not to be bringing wine gums. Jack felt naked as he stepped into the hallway of the hospice and accepted the pats and the sympathetic looks that everyone gave him. That were all part of the process of preparing for death. He’d done this before, of course but this was so different. He’d done it last time
with
his father. As a child and parent conjoined in mutual devastation and support.

They’d called him at four. You might want to come, they’d said. Nothing more. So he’d called Ollie, whose mobile had been switched off, and then Lydia, who explained that he’d gone round to a friend’s house. Jack hated to be told that Ollie had gone to ‘a friend’s house’. He wished she wouldn’t say that. It felt all wrong. He’d wanted to pick him up, but Lydia told him to go on to the hospice. That she’d collect Ollie from the friend’s house and bring him over herself.

And then he’d called Hope, but she wasn’t at home, and his heart had sunk to his boots.

Even though it was Sunday tea-time and therefore rush-hour in terms of visitors, the hospice was a place of almost palpable stillness. There were paintings on the walls of nymphs and snowy mountains. There were flowers – he idly wondered who came in and arranged them – low tables, and chairs, the latter naked of cushions, and Jack wondered, seeing them, just exactly who might sit on them. There were no magazines because the waiting to be done here was full-on, one-on-one, not social at all. Everyone holed up in their own private quarters, playing out their own private tragedies.

His dad, as was usual now, was dozy from the morphine, but stable again, they told him. Jack had come to regard the drugs they gave his father not as medicine but as Valkyries, caressing him while pulling him inexorably further away. His father responded to his touch, squeezed Jack’s hand in his own, and yet the effort of speaking was obviously all too much. Jack wondered if consciousness wasn’t a little like a cork bobbing on quicksand. So often, it seemed, his father would clamber free of it, make some lucid comment, and then sink into its embrace again.