Close Relations (37 page)

Jamie laughed. He felt vaguely sick. He had told Trev about his parents splitting up.
‘My Dad's a bit of a lad too, just like yours.'

‘Heard the one about the little boy and the little girl?' Jamie flung bags of potatoes into the trough. ‘She asks to see his thing and so he shows her and she says, “Is that all?”' He told Trevor the rest of the joke. Trev grunted; the nearest he ever got to a laugh. ‘I got it from my dad,' said Jamie.

Just then, when he looked down the aisle, he saw someone familiar. It took him a moment to identify the person; he looked different out of context. It was the blacksmith. He pushed a trolley. A child sat in it; another child, a little girl, walked alongside, picking her nose. With them was a woman. She looked at a piece of paper in her hand and said something to the blacksmith. He nodded obediently and fetched a bunch of bananas from the shelf. The woman frowned, shaking her head. He went back and fetched another one.

He used to live with somebody
, Imogen had said,
but it's all over.

Jamie felt a curdled satisfaction in his stomach. The slimy git, he thought. They're all at it.

‘Want to go out tonight then?' said Trev.

‘Only if it's somewhere exciting.'

‘Up to London.'

‘We haven't got any wheels.'

‘Oh, that can be arranged. No problem.' This was a long conversation, for Trev.

‘How?'

Trevor told him.

Robert had cancelled his Saturday tennis game and disappeared to London. Maybe to Essex. Louise didn't know. Her husband now had an official other life; he no longer had to lie. He said he would be away overnight. Maybe he was making arrangements to move in with this woman. A second marriage was being dismantled. Louise felt a brief wave of sympathy for her fellow-cuckold, the husband. Maybe he was suffering as much as she was. Then she stopped. Christ, the man had been living off her! She, Louise, had been bled dry to keep his business alive. Didn't he and his wife know where the money was coming from? Hadn't they thought to ask? The lies, the treachery . . . She had shared a house for twenty years with a man who had betrayed her, who had stolen her and her children's future from them. The panic returned; it felt like a blanket being shaken out in her gut.

She hadn't told the children about the money. She had told nobody. Her children had enough to deal with as it was. Their reactions, this past week, had been painful to watch. Imogen had been tearful and volatile. ‘I hate you!' she had shouted at Robert. ‘How could you do this to Mum?' She had shut herself in her room, or disappeared on long rides. She was deeply upset but at least it showed. What would happen, however, when she learned the whole truth?

Jamie, on the other hand, was more unsettling. He feigned indifference – in fact, feigned it so well that it was convincing. He spoke to his father quite naturally – off-hand, cool. ‘I've always wanted to get out of this dump anyway.'

On Saturday night both the children went out. Louise wandered restlessly from room to room. She gazed at the dead fireplace and the read magazines. She couldn't eat. She felt more alone than she had ever been in her life. For forty-two years she had been accompanied by others, by her parents, sisters and then by children, by her husband. Outside, the wind blew, whistling along the telephone wires. She couldn't bring herself to break the silence and switch on the TV.

Just then the phone rang. It was Rosemary Giddings, a woman who lived in the village. ‘Can you and Robert come to dinner next Thursday?'

Louise gathered her wits. The news hadn't leaked out yet; to everybody else, her life with Robert was carrying on as usual. At some point she had to put a stop to this and come out with the truth. Just now, however, she couldn't bear to speak it, especially to a woman she disliked.

‘I'm sorry, we can't.' She made some excuse – Robert going away, maybe. Later, she couldn't remember because then Rosemary said: ‘By the way, have you heard the latest gossip? Margot Minchin – you know, at the shop – she's packed up and gone. She's left poor old Tim.'

What happened next was something that Louise confessed to nobody as long as she lived. Even when she and her sisters had grown old, when events had lost their sting and been shaped into stories, even then she told nobody what took place on that Saturday night, in that spring when her life was disintegrating.

Soon after the phone call she changed her clothes. She watched herself pull on her red woollen dress, the one that clung to her breasts; she watched herself from a distance. She put on her coat and walked down the lane. It was nine o'clock. In the darkness the hedgerows rustled. The village green was ringed by scattered, lit windows; she felt as if she was out at sea and the land was somewhere she would never reach.

A light shone above the shop. She rang the bell. She waited. Tim appeared in the gloom of the shop. He unlocked the door.

‘Can I come in?' she asked.

He looked startled. She hadn't seen him since that night in the lane. She stepped into the shop. He closed the door.

She thought: I'm dreaming this. He has taken photos of me. He's a sad, creepy man. Robert calls him the Trainspotter.

But Robert was no longer there; he was only an amused voice in her ear. And as for the photographs – just now they seemed no more or less bizarre than anything else that had happened during these past two weeks.

‘I'm just making some tea,' said Tim. She followed him upstairs. She had never been in the flat before. Cilla Black chattered on the TV; an electric fire was pulled out into the middle of the carpet. The remains of supper was on the table. In the kitchen a kettle whistled.

‘I heard what happened,' said Louise. ‘I'm so sorry.' She looked around; there was something missing. ‘Has she taken the dog?'

Tim nodded. He turned down the sound of the TV.

‘She told you about me and my husband, I presume.' Louise tried to laugh. ‘We're sort of in the same boat, aren't we?'

Tim wore his old blue tracksuit. There was a growth of stubble on his chin; it made him look surprisingly raffish. She urged herself to find him attractive. He wore an unfamiliar pair of gold-rimmed glasses. Maybe he just wore them at home.

‘Do you mind me coming here?' she asked.

He shook his head. He took her coat and laid it over the back of the settee.

‘I just felt so lonely,' she said.

‘Are you warm enough? I could switch on the other bar.'

She shook her head. He went into the kitchen. She heard the clatter of crockery. On the TV, a blonde girl sat on a sofa. holding hands with a young man. They simpered soundlessly. The children were addicted to
Blind Date
; they liked sneering at the couples. So did Robert.

Louise smoothed down her dress. There was a ladder in her tights, on the knee. She hadn't seen it when she had pulled them on. She was eighteen years old again, sitting in a strange room, her insides fluttering. On Tim's supper plate lay the remains of a pork pie.

Tim came in, carrying a tray of tea things. As he lowered it the cups shivered.

‘You haven't got anything stronger, have you?' she asked. ‘I've been drinking whisky like there's no tomorrow.' She stopped – what a strange expression to use.

‘Of course.' He fetched a whisky bottle and two glasses. He stood still, looking at her. ‘I can't believe you're here.'

She smiled. ‘Nor can I.'

‘Water?'

She shook her head, took the glass and swallowed it in one gulp. ‘I feel really shitty. It wasn't me she left for – I mean, because of me?'

‘No. Of course not.' He refilled her glass. ‘It was nothing to do with you.'

‘Can you sit down?' she asked. ‘You're making me nervous.'

He sat on the settee, his knees pressed together like a virgin. How thin he was; how sloping his shoulders! Through his glasses he gazed at her. She imagined removing them and putting them on the table.

She moved across and sat down next to him. ‘I just wanted to be here,' she began. ‘What you said to me that night – well, it was so lovely. Just to hear words like that.' She recrossed her legs. Her tights made a faint, rasping sound. ‘It was so nice of you.'

‘What do you mean, nice?'

‘I thought about it a lot afterwards. What you said.'

‘You did?' He raised his eyebrows.

‘So I came here.'

He put his glass on the table. ‘I think you should go.'

‘It's all right. I don't want to.' She touched his hand with her forefinger. ‘You see, I don't have to any more.'

‘No, but I want you to.'

There was a silence. Louise fixed her eyes on the TV screen. Cilia Black giggled soundlessly.

‘You're making a bit of a fool of yourself, aren't you?' Tim got up. He straightened the ornaments on the mantelpiece. ‘It really isn't very nice. I expected better of you.' He turned to look at her. ‘I don't terribly like being used, you know. Even
by someone as delightful as yourself. Do you really think you can come in here and – it's not very nice.' He moved a china dog. His voice was trembling – from anger, she realised now. ‘I suppose you want to pay your husband back, it's some sort of tit-for-tat, something like that. So you snap your fingers for poor old Tim. I wish I could oblige but I really don't want to. Strange though that might seem.' He picked up her coat. ‘I think it would be best if we forgot this ever happened, don't you?'

Louise found it difficult to stand up. Her legs seemed to have liquified. Finally she got to her feet.

‘I think I'll stick to the photos, if you don't mind.' He held out her coat. ‘I know it's pathetic, but at least I'm not doing anybody any harm.'

It seemed a mile, the journey down the stairs and across the shop. Finally, she reached the door. Tim unlocked it and held it open.

‘I'm sorry,' she said, and stumbled into the darkness.

Until that Saturday night Jamie had committed no crime. As a child, he had eaten a Kit-Kat that his friend had stolen from the shop near their school in Chelsea. He had smoked dope, and planned to smoke a great deal more when he travelled around Europe that summer. His mother, in her haphazard way, had tried to instil some morals in him; his father, never. In October he was going to study psychology, which would no doubt acquaint him with the criminal mind. But he had never truly entered this area of human activity.

Ah, but how easy it was! He sauntered, with Trevor, past the parked cars. Trevor had straightened up; he looked purposeful, professional – more concentrated somehow, as if his molecules had bunched together. He seemed to know, intuitively, where to strike.

And now he did it. There was a grace in the way he stopped beside the Escort and looked around. He looked as if he had been bred for this moment, like an athlete when he
steps onto the track. It was dark; the street was empty. He fiddled with the door and then they were in. The interior was tidy; it smelled of pine deodorant.
Travelling salesman,
Jamie thought. Then he thought:
a Crime Victim
.

The engine roared into life; the very roar sounded lawless. They were off. Jamie was flung back. He hadn't buckled himself in; you didn't hot-rod a car and then strap yourself into a bloody seat-belt.

They drove out of High Wycombe. An oncoming car flashed them.

‘Lights!' hissed Jamie.

Trevor, who was stoned, fumbled at the dashboard. The headlights flared. Now they were speeding through an illuminated tunnel, hedges high on either side. They were plunging down a plug-hole; somebody had pulled the plug and they were off, spinning down.

‘Wicked!' Trevor snorted.

Exhilaration swept through Jamie; his balls tightened. He felt alive, down to his fingertips. What power! You broke in, you roared off, you just did it! He forgot everything: the confusion and the anger, sod it all. They roared past the darkened bulk of Tesco; they gave it the finger as they passed. The speedometer inched up . . . 80 . . . 85 . . . 90 . . .

Jamie shouted: ‘This is better than sex!' His few couplings, even they were blown away. Trevor was careering towards London. How glamorous he seemed, now, as he sat at the wheel! Jamie felt like a swooning female, Trevor's date for the night. He clutched the door-handle as they swerved around a corner.

And then something happened. Later, he couldn't remember what caused it. He was stoned, too. But now a gate was rearing up in front of them and splintering like matchsticks. Trevor cackled like a maniac.

‘Hey, watch out!' yelled Jamie.

A sea of mud rushed towards them. Jamie rammed his hands against the dashboard. He ducked. The car slewed to a halt.

Trevor giggled. He crashed the gear into reverse. The wheels spun.

‘Abandon fucking ship!' he shrieked.

Jamie flung open the door. ‘Women and children first!' He half-toppled into the mud.

He watched himself with curiosity as he picked himself up. See, like a cartoon character, he too sprang up, unharmed. He seemed to be in the middle of a ploughed field. He and Trevor ran, in great leaping strides. He turned to look at the car. The twin rods of the headlights shone in the darkness. The lit interior looked oddly homely.

‘Come on, dickbrain,' said Trevor. They stumbled across to the gap where the gate had been. Jamie picked his way through the planks of wood; he slipped in the tyre-ruts. His knee hurt; it must have hit the dashboard.

They ran up the lane, over the brow of the hill. Jamie paused for breath. The sky was suffused with the orange glow of London. Below lay the lights of a village. It was Wingham Wallace; he was only a mile from home.

The next week Louise went up to London to see her father. They had arranged to meet for lunch in a restaurant near Marble Arch. Why Marble Arch? She didn't know; her father inhabited a new territory now.