Life Begins (22 page)

Theresa, without having to think, could see that it made perfect sense; perfect, hateful sense. ‘Great. How nice of Charlotte.’ She followed Henry down the stairs, wrestling with the warring voices inside her head: one screeching the old instinctive wifely terrors, the other scolding the pointlessness of probing for phantom problems, making them exist in the process. There had been barren patches in their sex life before. It was no big deal. A marriage was a
journey, a long journey through a constantly changing terrain, moods, phases, colours. It was in a permanent state of flux.
Trust was
the constant. And love, of course. ‘I just hope… I mean, I’m a bit worried that…’ she faltered.

‘Yes
?’ Henry stopped in the door of the sitting room and peered at her over the rims of his glasses – not their usual smeary mess, Theresa noticed, but polished, showing off his deep ultramarine eyes. ‘What?’

‘… worried about whether you’ll be able to work… with them there distracting you. Wouldn’t it be better to stay here after all, with the house to yourself? You could take the phone off the hook and –’

‘It wouldn’t work,’ he cut in, then added more gently, ‘You know how hopeless I am at knuckling down to anything up here.’

‘And can you just leave a day early like that anyway? I mean, you’re so busy, aren’t you?’ she pressed lamely.

‘It won’t be a problem. I’ve already cleared the decks. Look, Tessy, if for some
unfathomable
reason you’d prefer me to stick to the original plan of taking the train, then for heaven’s sake just say so.’

‘No, you’re right, it wouldn’t make sense.’

‘Tessy?’ Henry took his glasses off, as he tended to during moments of high domestic drama, and squinted at her. ‘Are you okay?’

Theresa shuffled up against him, resting the side of her face against his chest, feeling the buttons of his shirt pressing her skin through his jumper, which was an old favourite and very thin. ‘I’m sorry. I’m het up about driving to Cornwall tonight, that’s all. I’m too tired – I should never have agreed to it.’

‘Well, go tomorrow morning, then,’ he suggested, sounding faintly exasperated.

Theresa pulled away, shaking her head ruefully. ‘No, you know what Mum’s like. She hates a change of plan. She’ll be sitting up with a torch, one of her home-made soups and the biscuit tin. If I leave now we’ll be there by eleven,’ she added firmly, her brisk self once more as she yelled up the stairs for the children to gather any last-minute things and get down to the hall.

… And what on earth would Charlotte – especially in this new assertive grab-life-by-the-balls phase – want with her Henry anyway? Theresa mused, feeling much brighter as they sped along the A404, the travails of Harry Potter keeping two of her children spellbound while the other two slept. An absent-minded doctor with bad eyesight, a thickening waistline and an ever-so-slightly hairy back. She laughed out loud, prompting a look of baffled annoyance from George who was hanging on to every syllable about swooping death-eaters.

And what, for that matter, would Henry want with Charlotte? A woman who could muddle house-hunting and love affairs to a point of farcical implosion, one of his wife’s closest friends, for God’s sake? And if he
was
remotely interested, surely he wouldn’t be so obvious as to coincide with her in Suffolk? Of course he wouldn’t. The clashing lines in the diary had been proof of
that
, not evidence of scheming. Theresa slapped the steering-wheel. She was a fool, a bloody fool.

Ignoring the hoo-ha it caused from her two non-sleeping companions, she stopped Stephen Fry mid-flow and dropped her phone into George’s lap instructing him to dial home. ‘Safe journey tomorrow and I love you,’ she murmured, the moment Henry’s rumbling voice answered.

‘You too, Tessy,’ he replied. ‘You too.’

∗

Charlotte was having a good dream, a brilliant dream, of searching – not for the snide well-wisher note that had got her rummaging in boxes and transmogrified, much more usefully, into a general clear-out – but something infinitely better, much more important; something her dreaming self understood but she couldn’t. She awoke as the search seemed on the point of finding its object. In the pitch dark outside a lone bird had started a jaunty dawn sing-song, repeating the same pattern of sound, as if hoping to cajole some of its sleepier mates into joining in. Lying there, feeling thwarted, with the lovely dream quite lost, Charlotte found that she knew where the note was anyway, so surely that there was no instant need to leap out of bed and check. She laced her palms under the back of her head instead and spent a couple of minutes contemplating the quiet, unexpected upturn in her spirits during the two weeks since the nightmare that had begun on Tim’s spongy crimson sofa and ended with the humiliating vigil outside number forty-two Chalkdown Road.

The self-drama of it made her blush even now. But there was no doubt that through the awfulness something had been dislodged. Driving home, Dominic Porter’s expression of hopeless pity etched on her brain, what had begun as a feeble resolve had strengthened into something close to inspiration. Before she knew it there were ten black sacks waiting for a trip to the dump and a list of recommended decorators next to the phone. On top of which, her responsibilities at work had mushroomed to the point where, manning her shifts alone and with her Suffolk trip imminent, Jason had hired an assistant for
her.
The girl was called Shona and had so far proved keener to gossip about Dean’s illness (‘pleurisy, my arse’) than learn how to take credit cards or find book listings on the computer. She sometimes
added to pressure rather than alleviating it, but Charlotte was aware nonetheless that the presence of this hapless aide made her feel contrastingly capable. Putting in orders, doing stock checks, changing the window, liaising with two local authors about book launches, she had begun to question how she had ever filled her time before. She was connecting with something properly at last, something other than Sam and worries about what other people thought of her and why the defining relationship of her life had lost its footing.

When the lone bird fell silent Charlotte slipped out of bed and padded into the spare room. In the bedside table there was a battered copy of Wordsworth’s
Prelude
from her college days, several paperclips, an empty ink cartridge and a biro engraved with the name of the first company Martin had worked for, when he had finally traded theatre directing for computers and a nine-to-five. The note was sticking out of the book, just as she had expected, between two pages smothered with messy underlinings and faded pencil notes.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven.

‘Mum, what are you doing?’

‘I might ask the same of you, young man,’ Charlotte retorted, with a smile, hastily popping the note back into its hiding-place and closing the drawer. Being young had been heavenly. It was supposed to be. Wordsworth had nailed that, just as he had nailed the sadness of losing such sensations – she had known that once, written essays on it, yet never imagined
living
it. ‘Are you hungry?’

Sam rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, like a child literally unable to believe what he was seeing. ‘Mum, it’s, like, four o’clock.’

‘I know, I know.’ Charlotte reached for the dressing-gown, an old one of Martin’s, that lived on the back of the bedroom door, spared the black sack only because she
hadn’t seen it. ‘But I’m starving. That scrambled egg didn’t really hit the spot, did it? I was thinking…’ she stroked her chin, frowning ‘… maybe, given that we’ve got a long drive ahead, we could have
two
breakfasts, beginning now with some toast and honey – or jam – and I’ll have tea, but you might prefer hot chocolate. Fetch your dressing- gown first,’ she shouted, as Sam bolted through the door.

Charlotte switched off the light and left the room. She had needed to see the note again, if only to remind her of the tiny part it had played in her and Martin’s downfall. However deeply in love they had once been, there had been
years
of trouble, she reminded herself grimly, years of arguing, about Sam, about her suspicions, about Martin’s denials. The nasty message had merely been the proverbial straw alighting upon the camel’s back, collapsing something that was in a state of near-collapse anyway. The only unanswered question was the identity of the person who had ‘wished her well’ enough to write it. Martin had always denied all knowledge. For a brief while she had secretly suspected Jo, who had been very anti Martin at one stage and, working in the City, might well have spotted him wining and dining Cindy. But even that hardly seemed to matter now. None of it mattered. It was done with.

Charlotte took the stairs slowly, aware that happiness was a mercurial thing, that if studied too hard it had a tendency to slither out of reach. She focused instead on the lovely sound of clattering from the kitchen and of Sam whistling. It was a disjointed, tuneless twittering – Martin had kept his musical genes to himself – but, like the birdsong in the dark, it lifted her heart beyond whatever words even the mighty Lake Poets might have managed.

By the time Henry arrived Sam and Charlotte were parked in the hall with their bags, looking at their watches and trying to think of things they had forgotten. As the doorbell rang Sam remembered George’s map of the hideout, still sitting in the side pocket of his satchel, and raced upstairs.

Henry set down a heavy leather holdall and leant forward to plant a kiss on Charlotte’s cheek, pressing his lips so firmly that Charlotte, imagining the greeting over with, suffered momentary embarrassment when it became clear that he was expecting to offer the other side of her face the same compliment.

‘This is
so
kind of you,’ she murmured, wondering about the holdall and thinking it a little early in the morning for such social niceties. ‘To forget
keys –
and you’ve had to come by taxi,’ she cried, as his cab roared away. ‘How horribly inconvenient.’

Henry did not look remotely inconvenienced. He had his hands on his hips under the flaps of his brown corduroy jacket and was grinning. ‘Theresa has the car. She left for Penrith with the children last night. A tour of
mothering
duty,’ he added, pulling a face.

‘Yes, she told me.’ Charlotte was rummaging in her handbag for her purse. ‘I should contribute or something, and we’ll drop you back, of course, or at the station, wherever you need to go.’ She glanced again at the holdall. ‘I really should have insisted on coming via you to pick the stupid keys up myself, you having one car – I never thought it through.’

‘Except that would have meant you beginning a long journey by going in the wrong direction and anyway…’ Henry hesitated ‘… I have a hatched a slight change of plan.’

‘Have you?’ Behind her Sam flew off the banister post and skidded towards the front door on the obligingly slippery hall rug. ‘Hey, Dr Curtis.’

‘Hello, Sam. How are you?’

‘Good, thanks.’

‘Great.’

‘A plan?’ Charlotte repeated.

‘Only if you don’t mind, of course, but I thought maybe…’ It was Henry’s turn to look at the bag, privately hoping as he did so that his small lie to Theresa wasn’t going to turn out to have been for nothing.

‘That you come down with us now – of course!’ Charlotte cried, clapping her hands together, genuinely thrilled at the prospect of adult company for the journey, not to mention an adult who would preclude the necessity of having to remember Theresa’s instructions about humpback bridges, pub signs and keeping to the left to avoid hazardous cattle grids. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself. It’s like forgetting the keys,’ she chatted, ushering Sam out of the front door and offering a string of thank-yous as Henry swooped inside gallantly to take charge of their bags. ‘I don’t know if Theresa told you but I’ve been
so
busy lately, with the shop and so on. My mind’s all over the place.’

‘Yes, she did mention it. She also said you’d taken your house off the market,’ remarked Henry, tugging a little more sharply than was necessary on his seatbelt at the unwelcome reminder of the estate agent.

‘Yes
, I’d got it all wrong,’ Charlotte confessed gaily, returning a wave to Mr Beasley as they pulled away, ‘thinking
that trying for a fresh start meant having to change the scenery when in fact it’s not about that. People say the same sort of thing when someone dies, don’t they?’

‘Do they?’ murmured Henry, his attention fixed on the long curve of Charlotte’s thigh through her jeans and the luxurious prospect of hours – days – with such sights readily at hand.

‘That after these traumas it’s always best to wait, let the dust settle and see how you feel.’

‘Dad hasn’t
died
,’ Sam snorted, untangling the wires of his iPod. Down the street he could see the postman, the bald skinny one with the earring who winked at him sometimes. It made him think of Rose, of his letter, on its way now, he hoped, to 13 Trinity Hill. Unless they’d moved already. Sam’s heart pounded. Could they have moved already? To that house his mum had raved about. All the houses in London and they had to pick the same one. She had been furious, but Sam had thought it incredible – and sort of nice, like a sign that he and Rose were meant to be special friends.

‘Hey, I thought you were safely plugged into that new machine of yours,’ Charlotte countered, knowing from the snort that there was no suggestion of Sam being upset. ‘Your father, as far as I am aware, is in perfect health.’

‘If he
did
die,’ pressed Sam, diverted from the possibility of wrong addresses, ‘would we be really rich?’

Charlotte laughed and rolled her eyes at Henry, who grinned back in admiration at her humour, at how well she seemed to deal with everything. He liked the way she drove too, he decided – steady, safe, unlike Theresa, who harried slowcoaches, exceeded the speed limit between cameras and generally made the curtailment of back-seat-driver assistance impossible.

‘No, Sam, we would not. You might get a little something, though – his watch or maybe even his precious record collection,’ Charlotte teased, glancing at her son in the rear-view mirror, loving the new ease between them, evinced most recently by the feasting on wedges of toast, dripping butter and honey on to their dressing-gowns as they kept their feet warm under the sofa cushions. They had watched two cricket teams in bright tracksuits on the other side of the world until Sam had fallen asleep and she had tucked his duvet round him, then retreated back to bed to await the shriek of her alarm. ‘Most of what there is would almost certainly go to Cindy. If you want to know more you’ll have to ask him, won’t you? Oh, my word, yes, Dad would love that,’ she concluded merrily, delighting in the fact of no longer needing Martin for money or anything else, of having left the intensity, good and bad, behind. He could leave his worldly goods to Cindy and good luck to him – if they lasted that long and Cindy didn’t end up scouring his credit-card receipts as Charlotte once had, scrabbling for evidence like a blind cuckold in the dark.