Scissors, Paper, Stone (7 page)

‘I am in the middle of something, actually,’ said Charlotte, almost whispering. From across the room, Sasha, the perpetually nosy office secretary, strained to look over the felt-board partition like a meerkat scanning the landscape for food. Charlotte turned the swivel chair away from her.

‘Oh. Well, I don’t want to bother you.’ But the way that Anne said it managed to convey exactly the opposite – she employed a wheedling, semi-offended tone that always made Charlotte feel terribly guilty. It was at times like these that Charlotte wished she had a brother or a sister to share the exhausting obligations of being Anne’s child.

She blew her cheeks out silently so that her mother would not hear the resigned exhalation of her breath. She checked herself. Why was she being so unsupportive? Clearly, Anne needed someone to talk to, Charlotte told herself. Charles’s accident had taken them all unawares but Anne had seemed especially dazed by it. She found herself thinking of that strange morning, some months ago, when Anne had presented Charlotte with her engagement ring. She had never worn it. The mere thought of that unblinking ruby made her shudder. But clearly there had been something going on with Charles; something not altogether pleasant. She sat up briskly and resolved to be kinder, more patient, more willing to listen.

Charlotte clicked on her mouse and minimised the typed document she had been working on so that it shrank to a thin sliver of grey at the bottom of the screen. Sasha had dropped back behind the partition, her eavesdropping attempts clearly frustrated. Charlotte felt a small pang of triumph.

‘No, no, it’s fine, Mum,’ she said, deciding that the least she could do was to give Anne five minutes of her time. ‘It’s not too urgent.’

‘Are you all right?’

Charlotte tried to keep her exasperation in check. This was a familiar tactic of her mother’s, and the more she denied that anything was wrong, the more Anne became convinced she had uncovered some dark awfulness that Charlotte was not admitting to anyone else.

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

‘You’re sounding very flat.’

‘I’m at work, Mum.’

‘Are you sure that’s all it is?’

‘Yep.’

There was a pause.

‘You know, if you don’t want to talk to me you only need to say so . . .’ Anne let the sentence trail off.

Charlotte held her breath.

‘It’s absolutely not that,’ she said, with as much cheerfulness as she could manage. ‘How are you?’

‘Oh, I’m all right. Bearing up. The hospital visits are rather wearing, I must say. I think it’s the driving there and back that takes it out of me and, of course, Janet and I had to cancel our Paris trip so that’s something else to deal with on top of everything.’

Charlotte twisted the phone cord in one hand, mentally zoning out. Her stomach rumbled and she began thinking about what to have for lunch – there was a café she had recently noticed nearby and she wanted to try it out. It was a traditional London greasy spoon, of the sort that she thought had ceased to exist with the advent of coffee-shop chains and oversized bookstores with ‘break-out’ armchair areas. She started imagining a jacket potato with melted cheese and cheap mugs of strong tea and then she realised her mother was still talking.

‘. . . no idea about the prognosis. I always told him to wear that blasted cycling helmet. Always. But he was so stubborn. He’d never listen to me. Or to anyone, for that matter. Not an easy person, your father.’ She let the comment filter though and then added: ‘But then you know that already.’

They lapsed into a short silence. Anne’s conversations normally led this way – no matter what she began talking about, the subject matter would slide inexorably towards Charles. Charlotte was fed-up of hearing about her father’s shortcomings, partly because she was only too aware of them herself, but also because she thought that if her mother genuinely felt this strongly then she should have walked out years ago. It was as if the constant examination of Charles’s faults fed into Anne’s sense of self, enabling her to ignore her own. The familiar nit-picking seemed to have become integral to Anne’s own identity, as though she would cease to exist without being able to define herself in opposition to something. And while she clearly sought Charlotte’s sympathy for all that she had to put up with, the truth was that Anne was fuelled by her own unhappiness. She relied on it. Charlotte was pretty sure her mother wasn’t the easiest person to live with either.

She had never voiced these thoughts to Anne, but they skulked beneath everything Charlotte said; a shadowy, irresistible undertow that pulled her words out of shape and twisted her sentences so that nothing that came out of her mouth seemed able to convey how she genuinely felt. She tried to quell the frustration she felt tighten in her chest.

‘Mum,’ she said, as pleasantly as she could, ‘he’s lying comatose in a hospital bed.’

‘I know that,’ said Anne sharply. ‘I’m just saying, it’s been an exhausting few days.’

‘Yes, I know. But he didn’t have the accident just to annoy you.’

There was a lethal quiet on the end of the line.

‘Right, well,’ Anne said crisply, ‘there was a reason I was ringing you.’

‘OK.’

‘I’m clearing out the house and I notice there are still boxes of your stuff in your old room.’

Charlotte thought of her childhood bedroom, the single bed in the corner with the pink-and-blue duvet patterned with dancing figurines, the small cabinet piled high with books and the motley assortment of patched-up teddy-bears. She could smell it: the instantly recognisable aroma of lavender pillows and sharpened pencils and toast being made in the kitchen below. She felt her throat constrict with an inexplicable sadness.

‘Is there anything you want to hold on to?’ Anne asked. ‘If not, then I can take a load to the Red Cross, but there might be some things in there that you’d like.’

Charlotte dragged her mind back to the conversation. She knew she should be aghast that her mother was clearing out the house when her father was in a coma, teetering between life and death, but she wasn’t, not really. Anne had a curious capacity for detachment and Charlotte knew, from years of experience, that there was little point in trying to penetrate the carapace of her coolness. It was her way of coping. Charlotte held her breath. She sensed that Anne was issuing her with a challenge, was seeking to push her to the brink of something, to goad her into a reaction. She did not want to give into it.

‘No, don’t throw anything out. I’ll come round and sort it out.’

‘When?’

‘As soon as I can manage it.’

‘Well, it would be nice to know in advance.’

‘I’ll let you know,’ Charlotte replied brusquely. ‘Listen, I’ve got to go.’

‘Yes, yes, I’ve taken up enough of your time.’

Don’t rise to it, Charlotte thought. Just don’t do it.

‘Bye, Mum. Nice to chat.’

‘Bye, Charlotte. Do let me know when you’re coming round, won’t you?’

Anne hung up. Charlotte stayed motionless with the receiver pressed to her ear and listened to the reassuring crackle of the dialling tone for several minutes.

The rest of the day turned out to be an accumulation of petty irritations. She found that she could not shake the discomfort of her conversation with her mother or the thought that the family home was being disembowelled of memories, that Anne was somehow preparing herself for Charles’s permanent absence. She tried to talk herself out of such a fanciful notion, but once it had taken hold, she found that it coloured her mood so that every subsequent thought that passed through her mind disquieted her.

On the way back, she snapped at someone on the Tube for accidentally standing on her foot. She felt at once too hot and too cold, and when she walked down the stairs at East Putney station, she found that she could barely summon up enough energy to get to the bottom.

Charlotte was already dreading the evening: she was going to a private view with Gabriel and she could feel herself slipping helplessly into fractiousness.

She was determined not to have a row. As she got ready, she made a series of increasingly ludicrous bargains with herself: she would restrict herself to two drinks; she would let anything hurtful that was said skim over the surface of her consciousness; she would be mature and thoughtful and wise and she would tackle any issues that arose in the sobriety of the following morning. Above all, she thought to herself as she dabbed at her lips with a gloss that tasted like burnt caramel, she would rise above it – the whispered criticisms, the implied insults, the cold shoulders and the knowing half-stares from Gabriel’s disapproving friends – because she, Charlotte Redfern, knew that he loved her above all else.

‘Nothing else matters,’ he told her, sensing her unease as they climbed into the back of a black cab. ‘Stuff happens. People have to get used to it. Besides, it’s nothing to do with them.’ He took her hand in his and drew her over to his side of the seat. She noticed that he smelled faintly of toothpaste. ‘I love you above all else. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and she meant it.

As the cab juddered its way across Hyde Park Corner to the art gallery where one of his friends was curating the exhibition, she wondered about the truth of this. She thought she knew – at least in the sense that he told her so and she believed it, although it had taken her a long time to trust him. She had known Gabriel for two years as a friend before anything had physically happened between them, and much of that time had been taken up with circular discussions about how she could ever trust him. He had been married before – unhappily, of course – and came with a chequered personal history that involved a string of ill-conceived flirtations. There had been a couple of brief affairs with trivial blonde girls, although he assured her that they hadn’t ‘meant anything’; that they had been symptoms of his discontent rather than being worth something in their own right. Yet his capacity for infidelity made her instantly wary of him. At the same time, she was forced to acknowledge that she was falling in love with him, and could not reconcile the two concepts. Objectively, he was entirely the sort of man she least wanted to be with. But everything he said and did overturned her supposedly infallible preconceptions. He was unlike anyone else, so disarmingly honest about his own failings and so consistent in his devotion to her, that it was difficult to resist him and impossible to protect herself from all that he promised to be.

It had been a spontaneous reaction: a feeling, as soon as they met and shook hands and sat down in the shimmering heat of a July evening, of knowing all that there was to know about each other. Part of Charlotte hadn’t wanted to believe it at first because she didn’t trust her own judgement that it was happening. For so long, so many years, she had wanted to feel exactly this shared recognition and to call it love. Throughout her twenties, she had projected all she most desired on to a series of not-quite-right men. The relationships had lasted two years at the most because, no matter how hard she tried, nothing ever quite seemed to live out its initial promise.

She had come to believe that love was a matter of compromise and that everyone made a similar bargain – they just didn’t talk about it. At the weddings of her friends, she found herself both jealous of the occasion and astonished that anyone could actually go through with it. With every new church reading she had listened to about tree roots growing together, with each choked speech delivered by the misty-eyed father of the bride, with every first dance she had smiled and nodded through, with every scrap of confetti she had scattered on dampened tarmac, Charlotte became more and more convinced of the pointlessness of it all.

Her cynicism became its own worn-down cliché. When, last summer, her friend Susie had asked her to be a bridesmaid, she found herself dreading the prospect but said yes in spite of herself. Charlotte had been out to lunch with her mother when Susie called and, curiously, Anne had proved something of an ally.

‘Another wedding?’ Anne said as Charlotte slipped her mobile back into her handbag.

‘Yep,’ she replied, spearing an asparagus stem with her fork. ‘And another bridesmaid’s dress. Lemon-coloured taffeta if I know Susie.’

Anne smiled dryly. ‘It’s a phase. Everyone seems to get married at the same time in their twenties, but it will pass.’ She took a sip from her glass of wine and looked at Charlotte sideways. ‘There’s no rush, you know.’

‘I don’t know if I ever want to get married,’ said Charlotte, not convinced that she meant it. ‘No one can live up to the overblown romance of a wedding.’

She expected her mother to disagree and half-wanted her to tell her not to be so pessimistic but instead Anne stayed silent, twisting the stem of the wine glass in her fingers, her eyes focused on an indistinct point just beyond the bread basket.

‘I don’t think soulmates really exist, do they?’ Charlotte continued. ‘Marriage is a transaction of mutual imperfection.’

‘Oh Charlotte, where on earth did you read that?’

‘Nowhere. I just made it up.’

Anne sighed and raised her eyebrows, the way she always did when she disagreed with something but could not be bothered to say why.

‘So there’s no such thing as true love, then?’

Charlotte pushed her knife and fork together on the plate before answering. She sensed a hidden danger beneath the surface of the conversation but was not quite sure why. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, cautiously. ‘I think it’s mostly a question of finding a man that you like, who will be good to you, who is trustworthy and with whom you can develop a quiet sort of mutual affection. Love fizzles out. You might as well resign yourself to that from the beginning.’