Love and Devotion (63 page)

R.E.M.

 

 

 

 

At weekends, and when the children’s social engagements permitted, Harriet liked to sit up in bed and look at the view from her bedroom window. If she was really lucky, Carrie and Joel would bring her a cup of tea and a slice of marmalade toast. Her luck was in this particular bright and sunny Saturday morning and she was munching on a piece of toast while enjoying the sight of the canal and the field beyond where a light frost was melting in the sun. There were drifts of snowdrops along the towpath and their delicate flowers were swaying in the breeze. It was a perfect morning, Harriet decided.

A month had passed since she and the children had moved into number one Lock Cottage; a month too, since she had last seen Dominic and he had made those comments about never knowing all the answers, that life’s loose ends weren’t always tied up. His words still had an irritating resonance for her. At work she was so used to resolving, reasoning, evaluating, analysing, processing — thinking her way through problems — that she found it particularly galling she couldn’t do the same in her private life. She could approach Dominic’s revelations with all the logic in the world but it would resolve nothing. She had to accept she would never know what had really happened that night when Jeff and Felicity died. If Jeff really had been so out of his mind with jealousy that he had decided, in a split second of madness, to kill them both, he had taken the truth to his grave.

She knew, though, that she had to let go of the thoughts Dominic had planted in her brain. If she allowed them to grow she might well go mad. But what he’d said went a long way to explaining his episodes of inexplicable behaviour ; the unpredictable mood swings, the volatile outpourings. Of them all, Dominic had the most to live with. As long as she’d known him, he’d given the impression that he didn’t have a conscience, but it turned out he did. How he would learn to live with the knowledge that he may well have been instrumental in killing the woman he’d loved, Harriet didn’t know. He needed help, but she doubted he’d ever seek it. It wasn’t in his nature. She felt enormous pity for him.

As to him being Carrie’s father, whether he was or not was immaterial for now. It was one of those loose ends that had the potential to come together when the time was right. She had tried pushing Dominic that night in the wine bar, about there being a responsibility on his part if he was Carrie’s father, and had asked him if he wasn’t curious to know the truth. ‘What’s the point?’ he’d replied.

‘The point is, it could be important to Carrie.’

‘I’d be a hopeless father, Hat. I’d only screw her up. She’s better off always thinking Jeff was her dad.’

Despite the apparent indifference, he appeared, in his own way, to be adopting the role of avuncular uncle to Carrie and Joel. He’d sent them both cameras and photograph albums with instructions to fill them with pictures of things they thought he’d approve of. He’d also sent Harriet a book of Yeats’ poems. The accompanying card read:
Time to educate yourself! Best wishes from your oldest friend, Dominic.

‘What does he mean?’ Joel had asked. ‘Pictures that he would approve of?’

‘He wants us to think before we stick any old picture in our albums,’ Carrie had said, perceptively.

‘Well, I’m going to put a picture in of Tom and me in the garden.’

Tom was Joel’s new best friend. He was two months older than Joel and lived in the house three doors down the terrace of cottages. He’d made his first appearance the day they’d moved in, bringing with him a confident, breezy disposition and a bunch of flowers, along with his mother, who invited Harriet and the children to join them for a cup of tea and a slice of cake when they fancied a break from unpacking. It turned out Tom’s father, Stewart, was a programmer like herself and his wife, Diana, was a freelance graphic designer. Harriet took to them straight away; they were friendly and welcoming without being at all pushy. The perfect neighbours, in fact. Especially as their son Tom, who, although he attended a different school, was doing wonders for Joel’s self-confidence. These days Harriet nicknamed her nephew Motor Mouth. There was no ignoring him, either. He was suddenly an unstoppable cruise missile of self-discovery. How did the remote control for the television work? Why did the microwave hum? Why was there always fluff between his toes? Where did goosebumps come from?

But for all his questions, Harriet was only too delighted with the change in him. He still worried over the slightest thing, but she was getting better at winkling out his concerns and anxieties and dispelling them for him.

All in all, the move to number one Lock Cottage was proving to be the refuge she’d hoped for. It was as if, from the day they moved in, it had cast an aura of calm over their lives. Perhaps it was because it gave them all something new to think about.

Miles had been a godsend, too. Despite being so busy himself, he was always offering to help with any odd jobs that needed doing, and while she was quite capable of wielding a paintbrush or a hammer and a screwdriver, it was good having him around. The children enjoyed his company as well and he often had supper with them. He was joining them this evening for a Chinese takeaway after he’d finished work.

There had been a lot of cautious side-stepping around each other in the days after New Year’s Day, particularly on Harriet’s part. She kept thinking what Dominic had said about Miles and his feelings for her. Wanting to be sure just how she felt, she was determined to take things slowly.

Having rushed into things with Will, she didn’t want to make a similar mistake. Being with Miles made perfect sense, though. They had a shared history, were the same age, and best of all, she didn’t need to be anything other than herself with him. They’d even wandered the aisles of B & Q together!

Once they’d opened up to each other and had put the misunderstandings and embarrassing memories of New Year’s Day behind them, they were again able to talk more freely, just as they used to. She had showed him the decoded email that she had thought proved he had been Felicity’s lover. ‘Like the fool I am, I read it the way I’d been primed to. It never occurred to me that it could have been Dominic referring to that sweltering hot day in the cornfield. Your guilt had been so firmly planted in my head, I simply leapt to the conclusion I wanted to. I’ve been very stupid,’ she’d admitted.

‘No you haven’t. Given what Dominic had said, you interpreted the email in the only way you could. Anyone would have made the same mistake. And for the record, I got over my crush on Felicity a long time ago.’

‘I always suspected that you had a thing for her. What changed?’

‘I grew up.’ He then shyly confessed to having had a soft spot for Harriet for some years.

‘Why did you never say anything?’ she’d asked.

‘Don’t laugh, but I was also a bit scared of you. You were so fearless. There was always Dominic to consider too. I was convinced you preferred him to me. He was, and still is, the more dynamic and interesting of the two of us.’

‘Now that’s just the kind of talk I don’t want to hear from you ever again.’

She’d told him the reasons she’d got involved with Will, and in turn he said he regretted not being more forcible in making his feelings known to her before, particularly that day on the canal. ‘I’d been trying to pluck up the courage for weeks to tell you how I felt,’ he’d said, ‘and when you started asking me about what I wrote in my poetry, whether I wrote about love, I thought perhaps you were hinting that you knew how I felt. But then for no reason at all you went rushing off and the next thing, you and Will were organising a cosy evening out together. You couldn’t have made your feelings clearer, as far as I was concerned. I was crushed.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she’d apologised. ‘I was scared that you might tell me about your affair with my sister. I just couldn’t stand the idea of hearing you open your heart to me about her. I grabbed at the easiest and nearest thing to shut you up.’

 

The first time Miles kissed Harriet, Carrie walked in on them in the kitchen. ‘This isn’t going to be easy, is it?’ he’d said with a half smile as Carrie turned bright red, giggled loudly and thumped her way back upstairs to share the big joke with Joel.

He was right. Carrying out any kind of romantic manoeuvre was proving impractical. This didn’t worry Harriet too much, as the last thing she wanted was to rush into anything. She suspected Miles might see it differently because he had hinted several times that maybe she could arrange a babysitter - her parents, perhaps — and come to his place where they could be alone. But her parents had their own problems and she was reluctant to ask them to babysit just so that she could have sex with Miles. The juxtaposition was too weird for words.

As was the strained relationship between their respective parents. Eileen had extended the olive branch by speaking to Freda, but Bob and Harvey were definitely not in the mood for a reconciliation.

Not surprisingly, Harriet and Miles had spoken a lot about Dominic and how they were both worried about him. Without Felicity in his life, he seemed dangerously adrift.

Thinking of Felicity now, as Harriet watched a colourful barge chug steadily by her bedroom window, she recalled Dominic saying that Felicity had known him inside and out.

For her part, Harriet no longer felt as though she knew her sister. She’d become a stranger. It saddened her, but Harriet wasn’t even sure she liked the person her sister had turned into. She hadn’t been fair to Jeff, and her treatment of Dominic - a man who was obsessed with her - wasn’t much better; she’d kept him dangling by his heart strings for far too long.

Although Harriet didn’t really believe in heaven, she sent up a silent message to her sister. ‘It’s time to let Dominic go, Felicity. You couldn’t do it in life, but you must do it now or he’ll never know peace of mind.’

 

It was a while before Bob could look at his garden without being consumed by a humiliating sense of shame and sorrow. He couldn’t believe he’d destroyed something from which he’d derived such pleasure. The grief counsellor he was seeing said it was quite common to lash out at that which meant most to you when the chips were down, and he saw now that the therapist wasn’t only referring to the terrible madness that had overtaken him on New Year’s Day. The affairs he’d had — including the one he’d tried to have with Jennifer — had been a way of punishing poor Eileen. Subconsciously, he’d never properly grieved for those babies he and Eileen had lost, and he had blamed her for the miscarriages. Perhaps, more disturbingly, he’d also blamed her for not being able to keep Felicity alive.

The worst counselling session he’d had to sit through had been the one with Eileen present. The therapist had suggested she should be there and it was during this two-hour gruelling stint that they had openly discussed his affairs. He’d been devasted to learn that Eileen had always known about them and that she had suspected he’d met someone more recently. Humbled and broken-spirited he’d wept in her arms that night in bed - how could she be so forgiving? ‘I don’t deserve you,’ he’d said to her.

‘Don’t ever say that.’

‘But I don’t understand how you’ve stood by me all these years.’

‘It’s called love, Bob. No matter what, I’ll always love you.’

‘I’m a lucky man.’

I’m a lucky man ...
The words echoed in his head as he continued to stare at the garden, which he was now trying to put right. Only a matter of weeks ago he would never have thought he’d be able to describe himself as lucky, but he knew now that he was. His physical breakdown had been a blessing in disguise. He was now able to put his grief into context. It was still there, and would never go away entirely, but it was no longer the constant focus of his thoughts.

It pained him to know that Felicity had been so unhappy in her marriage, but nothing could help him to understand the relationship she’d had with Dominic McKendrick. How could she have been attracted to such a freak of nature? The therapist had suggested this was a typical father’s reaction to an unsuitable suitor. ‘But I accepted Jeff,’ he’d told her. ‘Jeff got my vote right from the start.’

‘That was possibly because he was entirely suitable,’ the quietly spoken woman had said, ‘a safer bet than the wild and dangerous man who had the potential to be a genuine threat to your love for Felicity. From what you say, Jeff was a quiet, thoughtful man; a malleable man perhaps. Very likely, you saw him as someone who would never outshine you in your daughter’s eyes.’

They had scarcely touched on his relationship with Harriet, but Bob knew there was a lot to be said on the matter. He knew also that he would be further shamed. It was rapidly becoming clear to him that he hadn’t been altogether fair to Harriet. He hoped that one day she would forgive him.

He was also glad that he’d never gone ahead and had a full-blown affair with Jennifer. With Eileen’s full knowledge he had written to Jennifer and apologised for his behaviour, to draw a line under the episode. By return of post he received a card wishing him all the best for the future. The therapist had suggested that his attraction to Jennifer had been more to do with the sense of freedom and independence she represented than the need for a sexual relationship.

It was with this new understanding in mind that he had a surprise in store for Eileen. He’d been planning it for the last few days and he hoped Eileen would take to it as much as the therapist seemed to think she would.

 

It was Saturday evening at Bellagio’s.

Gemma didn’t know whose idea it had been to go out for dinner, but she was glad they were here. It was good seeing her parents together like this. She wished Suzie was here to see it. Sometimes, late at night, when she couldn’t sleep, she imagined herself writing a letter to her sister, as though she was away on a long holiday rather than dead. In the imaginary letters she would tell Suzie everything that was going on: how school was going, how Marcel had stopped writing to her because he’d got a girlfriend, how Nana Ruby was having a hip replacement next week and that Mum was paying for her to go privately,
and
that Dad had actually kissed Mum when she’d told him what she was doing. It was quite something to see Mum and Dad getting on better than they had in years. Nana Ruby said it was a shame they couldn’t have done this ages ago, but that it was better late than never.