Made in Heaven (41 page)

Sleep arrived after what seemed like hours and when it did, it was even worse than being awake, staring into the darkness. She sometimes dreamed of Gray. When she woke, the dream evaporated and she couldn't recall more than fragments of it, which surfaced from time to time as she was working and working at the physical things that wore out her body and were supposed to stop her dwelling on the past too much, but were pretty useless at doing that. She was starting to forget what he
looked like. What he sounded like. Why had they never exchanged photographs? They could have sent one another photos by email, like the ones she'd sent him of her house and study, but somehow they'd never done so and now it was too late. How easy it was to leave things to another day when you thought you had all the time in the world. Now, she would have given anything, any money, just to gaze at a picture of his face. She'd tried to escape into words on the screen and found that none came to mind. She was incapable of expressing how she felt. When she opened her laptop, she stared at the image of Isis as a baby that was still her screen-saver and fell into a kind of stupor. One night, she had written to Gray. A long letter, spelling out everything in tedious detail. Vowing endless love. Justifying her behaviour. Trying to explain. When she read it over, it seemed to her so feeble and stupid that she deleted it at once.

‘Joss, darling,' Charlotte spoke again. ‘I want to tell you something. Look at me.' Charlotte was smiling. She leaned across the table and took Joss's hand. ‘I've looked after you since you were a child. You're like my own daughter. You know that, don't you?'

‘Of course I do. You've been my mother for years and years.'

‘Then I want you to know that you can trust me. Completely.'

‘What d'you mean? Of course I trust you … '

‘I mean … whatever you say to me when I ask you what I'm going to ask you will stay private between the two of us. I'd never tell anyone … anyone at all … what we say to one another.'

‘I … I don't know what you mean, Charlotte.'

‘I think you do. Graham Ashton. I want to know about you and Graham Ashton.'

Joss sucked her finger. She'd pricked it on a holly leaf as his name was mentioned and she was grateful
for the sharp pain. What could she say? She stared at Charlotte.

‘What about him?'

‘I've read your poems carefully, Joss. They're written by someone who's in love. I think … forgive me if I'm wrong about this, but I've been worried about you … I think you're in love with Graham Ashton. I'm almost certain he's in love with you.'

Joss put aside the garland and said, ‘I don't know what to do, Charlotte. I'm in agony.'

‘Tell me about it.'

‘I don't know if I can … I haven't – I mean, no one knows. The girls suspected something. They asked me about it and I fobbed them off. But it's true, Charlotte and I don't know what to do. It's … I've never … '

‘I'm going to make some tea,' said Charlotte, getting to her feet. ‘Start at the very beginning. Don't cover up, don't lie. Don't make light of things that are serious. Tell me everything.'

It was astonishing to Joss that it took such a short time to explain and unravel the enormous mass of feelings, doubts, lies, everything that she carried inside her. The complications of the relationship, of all the relationships, and especially the love: what it felt like to be swept away by the force of the passion were all laid out in a few minutes. She spoke and as the words left her lips she was filled with such relief that by the time she'd come to the end of her account she was weeping. Charlotte took a clean handkerchief from the pocket of her cardigan and handed it to her. ‘There. Good girl.'

Charlotte makes me feel like a child again, Joss reflected. As though I've handed over my troubles to a grown-up. She said, ‘No one else knows about this, Charlotte. Not the whole truth. The girls don't know that we're lovers. And no one knows he's left me now. He's never going to come back, Charlotte. What am I going to do?'

Charlotte sat for a long moment saying nothing. Then, ‘We don't know what'll happen in the next few months, Joss. Things change. What I care about is that you, Bob and the girls should get through this in a way that hurts everyone least.'

‘So I'm never to see Gray again? I just accept … this … my life as it's been so far. Is that what you're saying?'

‘Breaking up a marriage that's lasted more than thirty years isn't going to be easy, Joss. You've got to recognize that. I'm not saying it mustn't in any circumstances be broken up, and if you and Graham Ashton genuinely love one another … well, I wouldn't stand in your way. I'd help however I could, but the truth is: you're my main concern. You're my child. I have to acknowledge what's best for you, for your happiness, even though it might strike everyone else as … well, as though you're discarding poor Bob in favour of someone else. People can't understand these things from the outside. It's hard for them.'

‘It's academic at the moment. Gray's on his way to South Africa. I think Adrian was going to take them to the airport before he drove everyone up here. Gray's the one who's broken it off. He won't accept that I can't break my word to Zannah.'

‘But you might change your mind … '

‘You don't think I should, Charlotte, do you? I promised the girls I wouldn't.'

‘Well … a promise is a promise. You've made promises to Bob too … Those are less difficult, aren't they? But time will pass. The wedding … after that's over, things'll be different. With Zannah happy and settled, you won't feel as though you're unbalancing her, or reminding her too much of how she felt when she left Cal.'

‘But what about Em?'

‘She's so much Bob's daughter, isn't she? She's sure to be upset on his behalf. You have to expect it, Joss. You
have to accept that you can't do this without hurting them. Don't think you can.'

‘But I don't want to hurt them … Oh, God, Charlotte, why's everything so hard?'

‘You've got to be tough. One thing I learned in prison was this: unless it's going to destroy something you love and need, you've got to do whatever you have to, for yourself. Such a cliché, I know, but a lifetime is so short. So short. Some people would choose everyone else's good opinion of them over their own happiness. Don't be like that, Joss.'

Joss picked up the teacup from the saucer in front of her. ‘This is cold now. I'll make some more. And I think we could treat ourselves to a scone.'

For the first time in many days, she told herself, as she filled the kettle, I feel a little like myself. Like how I used to feel.

*

The plane was making a comfortable droning sound as it flew south. They'd been in the air for about six hours and now Gray was sleeping. Or he's pretending to be asleep so as not to have to talk to me, Maureen reflected. Well, sod him. He'd been behaving most oddly for a few weeks now and she'd said nothing. That, she'd found, was the way to deal with his moods. Very occasionally, he did go into a silent phase and walk around like a zombie. After a bit, the mood (or whatever it was) always lifted and he was fine again. South Africa would do that, Maureen was sure. It would cheer him up. Perhaps he'd been working too hard. Jon couldn't put the two of them up in his little flat and it was with some glee that she'd chosen the fabulous-looking hotel they were going to stay in. She'd found it on the Internet, and over the last few days she'd visited the site more and more often, staring at the turquoise water in the pool and drifting into daydreams of the two of them, stretched out on white sunloungers. She'd
quite got over her regret at not doing Christmas in Guildford. This was going to be perfect from beginning to end.

She thought of her best Christmas present, which she'd packed carefully in her luggage. Darling Adrian! How clever of him to think of such a thing! Matching camera phones. She'd give him one; he'd give her one. ‘This way, we can take pix of our respective Christmas dinners and send them to one another. It'll be great. And you can email all your friends with photos of that swimming-pool and make them really, really jealous.' Maureen smiled to herself. Her son knew her so well. But what a good idea it had been! She'd had special permission to open her present in advance, so that Adrian could teach her how to operate it. I can't wait to take some pictures, she thought. I should have packed the phone in my hand luggage.

Never mind, she thought. She reached into her bag and felt a pang of guilt at the extravagance that had made her splash out on a Mulberry. She'd hovered over the new
Bethany
, but decided in the end that
Bays-water
, in a delicious shade of pistachio green, was a better shape for her needs. It was years and years since she'd had such a holiday and some sort of celebration was called for. She stroked the leather – what a thing of beauty this handbag was! – and took out a printout of the wedding menus that Genevieve had sent her. She'd managed to pin down Zannah and Adrian to choosing desserts, and they'd been sensible and agreed with her, so there was no problem there. It would all, she knew, be amazing. She'd decided right from the beginning that you had to stay away from pork, because so many religions forbade it. Chicken was too much of a cliché and brought to mind things like ‘the rubber-chicken circuit' even though that was political dinners, so duck was a good substitute. Salmon would be popular and you had to consider how many people were veggies,
these days. Perhaps they ought to have another main course for them.

Maureen looked out of the window at the lumpy white clouds below the plane. Adrian would be in Altrincham by now with Zannah and the others. She tried to imagine what Christmas there would be like. Well, perhaps she'd see when Adrian sent her his photographs on the phone. It seemed to Maureen that the modern world was packed with things that worked by what she regarded as a kind of magic. I wonder, she thought, whether he'll have the sense to take a picture of their Christmas table. She was curious to see what it was like. She turned to Gray but his eyes were firmly closed. A little strange, at this hour of the morning … He was probably sleep-deprived. There had been an article about that in the
Daily Telegraph
only last week.

Since their conversation with Joss a couple of weeks before, Emily and Zannah had discussed what might or might not have been going on in their mother's life a few times and then, as though by common consent that there was no longer anything useful either of them could say, they'd stopped. Zannah had so much on her mind with the wedding arrangements that she seemed to have stopped worrying about their mother altogether. And now, buying presents, wrapping them, talking about who was going to be in Altrincham and when they were arriving and how long they'd be staying had pushed most other subjects out of the way. Even the wedding had taken a back seat, and Emily was grateful for small mercies. She'd begun to make some preliminary arrangements for the hen night, but nothing that took too much of her time.

Now they were in the thick of Christmas and although she'd been a little nervous about confronting her mother again, she had to admit that Ma seemed absolutely normal. No
angst
discernible anywhere, and Emily had had her eyes peeled at all times and her antennae out for signs of a broken heart. Everyone seemed to be behaving well. There could have been rows about many things. Magazines often spoke of the festive season being a minefield for all concerned, but the Gratrixes seemed to be having a great time.

Even the decoration of the Christmas tree the night before had gone without a hitch. Pa and Isis had undertaken to do it with no help from anyone else and they'd made a good job of it, although Emily could see that it took an almost physical effort on Zannah's part to keep from interfering. True, she'd probably have made it somewhat more artistic. Isis was obviously mad keen on hanging glass baubles in lurid colours and masses of tinsel on every available branch and Pa had generously decided to give her a free hand. There was a star at the top of the tree, and a fairy doll as well. Why not? Emily couldn't think of a better time than Christmas to over-egg every available pudding. That was part of the fun.

Now they were in the living room and the opening of presents was going quite well. The Gratrix family tradition, begun when she and Zannah were very small, was to gather straight after breakfast with a pile of everyone's gifts on the carpet at their feet. Then they took turns, youngest first, then round the room in order of age, to pick a parcel out of the heap, with everyone chiming in to admire what others had received. The process took ages, but no one minded. Mince pies were eaten, sherry was drunk and if anyone happened to receive a box of chocolates, the custom was to open it at once and pass it round. Every so often Ma left the room and went into the kitchen to put this or that bit of the dinner into the oven. Over many years, Joss had perfected her routine. Every component – turkey, stuffing, potatoes, sprouts, pudding – had been prepared the night before and needed only to be cooked. Various attempts to change the menu, do something different, be creative, had been resolutely vetoed by Emily and Zannah. Change was all very well for other things but Christmas dinners had to stay the same, always and for ever.

They'd nearly finished doing the Pile, as it was called. Drifts of gift-wrap lay all over the floor. Presents were carefully arranged by each person's chair. They'd
exclaimed over everything and – this happened every year – the gifts were pronounced the best ever. Adrian had just opened a present from Maureen. He held it up for everyone to see. ‘Well, I knew I was getting this but have a look everyone … I've promised to use it to send some shots of our Christmas to my mother in South Africa.'