Lifesaver (16 page)

A rotund young woman in a huge pair of combat trousers and a too-tight t-shirt brought over my cheddar Ploughman's and Max’s sandwich. A worried expression instantly settled on his face.

‘Dad,’ he whispered, poking at the few strands of cress which decorated the plate. ‘I don’t like this stuff.’

‘Can I have it?’ I asked. I waited for the grateful nod, then pincered it off his plate in one small scoop straight into my mouth. ‘Yum. Cress,’ I said, chewing its gritty stalks with enthusiasm, although actually I couldn’t stand it. ‘Did you know you can grow it from seed, on paper?’

I was going to say ‘blotting paper,’ but then I thought that he might not know what that was. Or if in fact anyone even still used blotting paper. I was grateful to Crystal for providing some insight into the mind of the four year old, but it struck me how much I didn’t know. Max was older, by about seven or eight months, and anyway, boys were so different to girls. Crystal would probably have marched back up to the bar with the offending cress still on the plate, and said, ‘what the bloody hell is this? I asked for a plain cheese sandwich, not one with this
green shit
all over it.’

Then again, that might not have had anything to do with age or gender; more to do with Crystal.

‘We’ll give it a go sometime, shall we Max?’ said Adam. ‘I haven’t grown cress since I was a kid. It was such a buzz, wasn’t it -’ he turned to me - ‘watching the little seeds sprouting. You could practically see them grow.’

‘Yes, and then you made an egg and cress sandwich, with your very own home-grown cress—it
was
a thrill.’

Max nibbled a corner of his sandwich and looked unimpressed.

I ripped open my hunk of French bread and put some cheese and pickle inside it, although by then my appetite had vanished again.

‘So what do we need to do this afternoon?’ I asked, replacing it untouched on my plate. ‘Is there much left?’

‘Well,’ said Adam. ‘The good news is that I’ve got the commission for two more panels—I was hoping for three, but I don’t think we’ll have the funding. So, yes, there’s a lot still to do before term starts. Are you going to be able to come down again?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not.’ Wild horses wouldn’t have kept me away, I thought, gazing at Max.

‘Excellent. Our numbers have diminished quite a bit in the last week, so it’s great to have some fresh blood, as it were.’ He took a swig of his shandy, and pinched a bite of Max’s sandwich.

‘Oi, dad,’ said Max, but he was smiling.

Over on the red velour bench, I heard Mitch say to Serena: ‘I’m having my damp seen to tomorrow.’ When he didn’t get a response he added, in case there was any doubt: ‘Not my own
personal
damp, you understand.’

Serena, unsurprisingly, could not have looked less interested. Ralph and Margie were still conversing with such intensity that I wondered if I’d missed the fact that they were a couple. Odd that he seemed to have been flirting with me the other day.

‘So, what do you do, Anna?’ Adam suddenly said, looking intently at me.

‘Um—I’m an actor,’ I said, a little taken aback, although I’d already decided to be truthful, at least about my profession. ‘But I’m, well - cliché I know—
resting
at the moment, which is why I’ve got time to help with your project.’

‘Wow, that’s so interesting—I’ve never met a real actress before. What have you been in?’

I hated this question. ‘Oh, nothing too exciting. A few episodes of
The Bill
. I had the lead in a sitcom on BBC2 a few years ago, I don’t know if you remember it. It was called
Butterfinger
.’

Blank faces all round, Mitch and Serena included; although I could tell that Mitch was excited by the knowledge that I’d been on telly. He had immediately stopped talking to Serena, and tuned into what I was saying.

‘I’ve mostly done rep though, you know, touring the country. Plus a few West End musicals too.’

‘Awesome,’ breathed Mitch. ‘What, like
Chicago
and that, where you have to dress up in fishnets and stilettos, and do lots of them high kicks?’

Ugh. What
was
it with men and high heels? I wondered what Ken was up to; whether he was thinking of me as he sat in his office. Oh, it was Thursday, wasn’t it - no, he’d be coming back from Brussels. So he probably wasn’t thinking of me, in or out of high heels. I made a mental note to try and remember to put the bins out when I got home.

‘Well, I’ve never been in
Chicago
. I was in the chorus of
Les Mis
, though, but there certainly weren’t any stilettos involved in that.’

Adam was the only one who laughed. ‘I loved that show. I wonder if you were in it when I saw it? It was a while back, though—’95, maybe?’

‘No, I was in it for a few months in ’99.’ The year before I gave the bone marrow donation.
To your son
, I thought.

‘Did you go with Mummy?’

Max’s voice piped up at a moment when everyone else was silent, and his words hung in the air like out-of-season Christmas decorations. Glancing around, I noticed that all the others seemed to nonchalantly look up, waiting for Adam’s answer. There was something going on here, I thought, and if they didn’t know the details, they knew enough to be curious.

Not as bloody curious as I was, though.

Adam smiled, although he looked awkward and the smile didn’t crease his eyes. ‘Yes, I went with Mummy. It was a lovely evening. We had dinner first, at a Thai restaurant in Soho, and I tried to eat a banana leaf that turned out to be the wrapping for my dumplings, and not something you were meant to actually eat. It stuck in my throat and wouldn’t go down until the waitresses were on the verge of calling an ambulance—it was very embarrassing. But the show afterwards was fantastic…’

‘Where was I?’ Max was staring greedily at his father, and, although I could have been wrong, I got the impression that Adam’s wife wasn’t talked about all that often in their household. Maybe she’d run off with somebody else—surely, if it was him who’d strayed, he wouldn’t have sole custody of Max.

‘You weren’t even born yet, darling.’ Adam ruffled Max’s hair. ‘Have another sandwich, won’t you—you hardly had any breakfast.’ For a brief second he looked crushed and lonely. It was obvious that something bad had happened.

Mitch leaned over the table, picked up my left hand, and examined the four silver rings I wore, one on each finger. My guess was that his mind was still chugging along on a train of speculation about Adam’s marriage, for he suddenly said, ‘You married then, Anna?’

I resisted the impulse to snatch away my hand, and as I opened my mouth to say yes, my husband’s called Ken, something unexpected happened. In retrospect, I supposed it was because I’d been awash with such overpowering pity for Adam at the very point Mitch asked me the question - not that it was any excuse, and I’d be haunted to my deathbed by my traitorous words - but they just popped out. Once they were out, I couldn’t un-say them.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not.’

‘So how was your day?’ was Ken’s first question to me when he arrived in that night. It was reassuring to be back in the world of the givens: the scrunch of Ken’s key in the front door, the thud of his overnight bag hitting the hall floor, his footsteps seeking me out in my usual place at that time of the evening; socked feet up, in the corner of my beloved royal blue velvet sofa, watching television. A change might have been as good as a rest, but there was still a lot to be said for the comfort of routine. Even the sound of his mobile phone ringing—why did it always ring, the second he stepped through the door?—was welcome. Not as welcome as the way he switched the call off without answering it, though.

‘It was good, thanks. Yours?’

‘Not bad. Want a drink?’

‘Got one already.’ I waved my hand towards the half-full glass of wine on the floor next to me, but unfortunately Ken chose the same moment to lean towards me to give me an I’m-home kiss, and I accidentally swatted him in the face.

‘That’s a nice greeting,’ he said, backing off and rubbing his nose.

‘Sorry darling.’ I laughed at his rueful expression. ‘Come here.’

We kissed, and his arms encircled me, losing me in the scented remains of his day; the sweat of decisions, the recycled air of a plane’s cabin.

‘So what did you get up to today then? Been running?’

‘Not today… I took a deep breath. ‘Actually, you won’t believe it, but I’ve been helping make a mosaic mural!’

Ken raised his eyebrows. ‘Really? Where? How come?’

I twirled a strand of hair around my fingers and fixed my eyes on the television, trying to sound nonchalant. ‘It was a spur of the moment thing, really—I was just driving past this little hall and I saw a sign outside saying “Free Mosaic Workshop—No Experience Needed”, and I just thought, why not? You know I’m always banging on about wanting to do something creative. It turned out to be a community project, making a mural to go in an underpass by the station.’

Don’t ask me which station, or which hall
, I prayed, although I’d have been very surprised if he had. Ken had never really been a stickler for details.

‘Wow,’ was all he said, sliding his arms out of his jacket and unlacing his shoes. ‘Did you enjoy it?’

I helped him pull off his shoes, and watched him un-stick his socks from his feet.
My
socks never stuck to my feet when I took off my shoes; nor did they smell of Marmite, like Ken’s did. Perhaps it was a guy thing, like the way his jeans always wore thin in exactly the same place: just inside and to the right of the crotch. I found it hugely endearing; knowing those secret inconsequential things about him that—hopefully—nobody else did. It was sort of like having a priest hole in your house, or a den in the garden. Although I supposed that I wouldn’t hear an estate agent boasting to a potential client that Ken’s socks stuck to his feet when he took off his shoes…/span>

‘Yeah. You know, I really did. I’m going to go back again. It was fun. I made a basket.’

‘Great,’ he said, kissing me again. ‘It’ll be good for you, getting involved with something like that. Can’t wait to see the end result!’

Hmm, I thought. That might not be happening any time soon, unless you find yourself driving past Gillingsbury station. And it was fairly unlikely that Planet Music would be holding their next conference at the Gillingsbury Travelodge.

‘I’ll get you a glass of wine,’ I said, unfolding my legs and standing up, feeling better for having unburdened myself without actually having had recourse to a lie.

I picked up Ken’s shoes and was about to turn towards the kitchen, when a trailer for a new series came on TV. A familiar face filled the screen.

‘Bloody hell, I don’t believe it.’ I froze in my tracks, pointing at it with the toe of one shoe. ‘It’s Rosemary Gregson.’

‘
A major ten part drama based on the bestselling novel by Catherine Kirkbride,’
intoned the voiceover—funny how they never called them
minor
ten part dramas. Nothing ever changed—I still only had to look at Rosemary Gregson to want to punch her in the face.

‘Who’s Rosemary Gregson?’

I shook my head with incredulity. ‘She was in our class at Reading. Vicky and I privately voted her Least Likely to Succeed. I’ve never seen her in anything before so I thought we’d been proved right. To be honest, I thought she’d be a fat housewife with four kids by now. She’s got the voice of a guinea pig. We were convinced she must have been sleeping with one of the tutors to get on the course in the first place.’

‘The looks of a guinea pig too, in my opinion,’ Ken said loyally, although in fact Rosemary was quite pretty. She still had that English bloom, and short curly brown hair in the style of a young Elizabeth Taylor. At Reading she’d had the obligatory blonde Sloaney highlights—trying to model herself on Princess Di, as Vicky used to sneer.

‘I’ve got to ring Vicky,’ I said, dashing for the phone, without taking my eyes off the television set ‘.
.. starring Rosemary Gregson as the eponymous Annabel...’

‘Aaargh, not the starring role! Say it ain’t so,’ I muttered, speed dialling Vicky’s number. She answered straight away.

‘Vic, it’s me—you’ll never guess who I’ve just seen on—‘

She stopped me mid-flow. ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’

‘
What?
’ It wasn’t that I’d forgotten about our disagreement, but in all the excitement of meeting Max, it had downgraded itself in my head to an emotional hiccup, a mere misunderstanding. I had assumed the same would go for Vicky.

I vaulted onto the offensive immediately. ‘Why—because you’re going ahead with the -’ Just in time, I realized that Ken was listening, and managed not to compound Vicky’s disapproval of me.

‘It’s none of your business.’

‘Oh come off it, Vicky. Don’t be like that.’ I made a face at Ken, left the room and took the phone upstairs, all rancourous thoughts of Rosemary Gregson having flown out of my head. ‘I thought you said you needed me?’

‘I did,’ said Vicky, bitterly. ‘I needed you to be supportive, not all judgemental and biased.’

I felt so hurt that I could barely breathe. There was a moment in time, an extended second which seemed to be flagged up, bookmarked like a screenplay with an adhesive neon arrow pointing to a crucial pause, where I could have smoothed things over, apologized—although for what, I thought angrily: for losing Holly, for the miscarriages, for my gut-wrenching desire not to see another human life wasted? - but that second hung heavily then dropped away, swinging down the phone line into infinity, and the balance of our friendship tipped.

‘Well, I’m sorry if I’m bloody
biased
,’ I hissed at her. ‘What do you expect? If you’re looking for me to sanction the act of you killing your unborn child just because you’re not getting your ten hours a night sleep, then I’m afraid you’re on your own.’

I instantly regretted saying it. True or not, they were cruel words and she treated them with the contempt they deserved, cutting me off immediately. I was left listening to the the static silence of terminated conversations all over the city, to everybody else’s dropped seconds. Then I threw the phone onto the bed, with so much force that it bounced off the duvet and hit the wall on the other side.