Scissors, Paper, Stone (9 page)

Anne, who had never held down a permanent job, found that it was almost a relief to have something with which to fill her time other than the endless caffè lattes with Janet or the daytime soaps she pretended not to watch. There was a release, too, in not having to think of what to cook for supper. When Charles had been awake, the constant grind of coming up with a new combination of meat and vegetables had loomed over every single day, assuming grotesquely inflated proportions so that almost as soon as she woke up she would start tormenting herself with visions of lamb chops and green beans. Now, with Charles in hospital, she picked up whatever she felt like from a Tesco Express on the way home. She delighted in the oddness of her dietary whims. Once, she had eaten a packet of marinated tofu and two Braeburn apples and felt utterly content.

She visited Charles every day, so that the receptionists started to recognise her and wave her through without asking for the customary ID. It was a nice, private hospital with a river view over the Thames and room service menus offering glasses of Chardonnay (unoaked). The overall impression was one of an efficient business hotel, on the edge of a motorway between cities.

There was a television suspended on the wall in Charles’s room that had all sorts of satellite channels that Anne did not have at home. Since he had been ill, she had become a connoisseur of trash. There was an American programme she particularly liked that was a reality search for a new fashion model. It seemed to be endlessly repeated and Anne always liked to watch the ‘makeover’ episode where seemingly plain-faced girls with dull eyes were transformed, by dint of hair dye and teeth whitening, into glamorous visions of fabricated beauty.

She got an illicit thrill from the certain knowledge that Charles would have hated the programme, would have sat scowling in the room, making his disapprobation painfully obvious with every heavily exhaled breath. The only television he watched was the
News at Ten
or
Panorama
, although he’d gone off the latter when the BBC cut it down to half an hour. Anything else would prompt him to launch into a critical analysis of why Anne felt she had to rot her brain by watching ‘rubbish’. She had become used to recording her favourite programmes and looking at them late at night, after he had gone to bed, with the volume turned so low she had to strain to hear what the characters were saying.

Anne liked the hospital for its sense of quiet order and the wordless comfort offered by the nurses’ sympathetic glances. Part of her felt she did not deserve their arm pats and smiles. Over the years, she had successfully convinced herself that Charles had become a fact rather than a person, something to be borne, to be lived with and endured rather than loved and looked after. It wasn’t that she was callous. It was rather that she had had all her tenderness battered out of her. She found a sense of peace by Charles’s bedside that she had not known for years. And, of course, it brought her physically closer to Charlotte.

Most of the time, they did not speak much. Charlotte would head straight for the bedside in a flurry of movement and embark on a cautious monologue of the day’s events. Anne would sit in the chair by the window, pretending to look out at the river but secretly stealing glances at her daughter, noting the precise inclination of her head and listening to the easy inflections of her voice. She would try to see, without drawing attention to it, if Charlotte’s eczema had flared up. Recently she had noticed a tell-tale series of vivid red dots sprayed across the crease of her daughter’s elbow.

Today, Charlotte was wearing long sleeves and Anne could not see whether it had cleared up or not. She looked upset when she walked in, her eyes puffy at the corners, her face pale. Head down, she avoided eye contact.

‘Hi, Mum. Sorry I’m late.’

‘Don’t worry. I’m sure he won’t notice.’ It was an attempt at levity but almost as soon as the words had left her mouth, Anne had regretted them. She heard herself sounding so bitter, so shrivelled inside and it wasn’t how she wanted to be at all. Charlotte hadn’t replied, instead setting her mouth in a stubborn line.

‘How are things?’ said Anne, desperate to make amends.

Charlotte rolled her eyes, quickly but perceptibly. ‘They’re fine.’

‘Busy at work?’

‘Yes.’

There was a strained pause. ‘And . . . what about . . . Gabriel?’ Anne said, barely managing to utter his name. Charlotte looked straight at her.

‘He’s great, thanks.’ She stopped and then seemed to reconsider. ‘You know, it’s really obvious you don’t approve of him, Mum, so you don’t need to bother pretending.’

Charlotte’s chin started to wobble and she turned away.

Anne was momentarily speechless. It was true that she didn’t approve of Gabriel, that she didn’t believe he had the character or, from what she had heard, the capacity for fidelity that she desired so desperately for her daughter. But she thought she had disguised her dislike effectively, admitting it only to Janet or, obliquely, to Charles.

‘I don’t disapprove of him, Charlotte,’ she said, frostily. ‘I don’t know what gave you that idea. I’ve barely met the man.’

‘You met him that time you came round for dinner.’

‘Yes, and he spent most of the evening holding forth.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Anne took a sharp intake of breath. She didn’t want to say something she regretted. At the same time, she found she was suddenly furious, backed into a corner against her own daughter by some interloper who wasn’t even divorced from his wife yet. ‘He seems to be a very self-confident individual.’

Charlotte shook her head vigorously. ‘He knows himself,’ she said, her voice oddly choked. ‘Is that such a bad thing? At least he’s not a professional victim.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Oh forget it, Mum, I’m just not in the mood.’

Anne felt the hot pricking of tears, a tightening at the bridge of her nose that signified she was about to cry. She breathed in for a few seconds, digging the nail of her thumb into the palm of her hand to stop herself. Once she had regained her equilibrium, she stood up and shuffled to the door, pausing as she stepped into the corridor. ‘Well, I’m sorry you feel that way,’ she said, quietly. Then, faux-brightly, ‘I’m going to get a coffee. Do you want one?’

Charlotte was sitting by her father’s bedside, gently tugging at the edge of the sheets. She didn’t even look up. ‘No thanks.’ The door closed. ‘I wouldn’t want to put you out,’ she added, a beat too late for her mother to hear.

Then, as soon as she’d left the room, Charlotte started to feel the familiar waves of guilt. She shouldn’t let her irritate her so. She should rise above it and remember that her mother was a lonely and embittered woman, a woman whose potential had never been realised, who had found herself trapped in marriage and motherhood without discovering fulfilment in either, a woman constantly looking for something else, something more, without the means of achieving it. Charlotte knew that her mother looked at her daughter’s life with a curious mixture of wonderment and envy, regretful that she had never had the same opportunities. And it was true that Charles had made her life miserable – the affairs, the bullying, the snide comments delivered like a pinch to the flesh.

But there had always been a part of Charlotte that felt her mother deserved it. She was so constantly on the lookout for the negative in any given situation, so anxious and worried about the consequences of any decision, so determined to assume the mantel of perpetual martyr. Whereas Charles was possessed of a bluff charm, an insouciance that was attractive to those who found themselves within its orbit. He flirted with life. She shrank from it.

Above all else, thought Charlotte grimly, she did not want to end up like her mother. She wondered, not for the first time, whether part of Gabriel’s attraction was Anne’s disapprobation. She remembered the shock on her mother’s face when she had told her he was Jewish – shock and then a hasty cover-up, a rapid rearrangement of the censorious mouth in order not to be thought ‘intolerant’.

‘Jewish?’ Anne had said. ‘How interesting.’

‘Don’t worry, Mum, he’s not practising.’

‘Why should I be worried?’

‘In case you lose your nice middle-class daughter to a hirsute Hassidic gentleman who spends his summers sticking bits of paper into the Wailing Wall.’

‘The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind,’ Anne said stiffly.

Gabriel. Even the smells and sounds of the hospital – the disinfectant, the squeak of a nurse’s shoes on linoleum – failed to distract her from thoughts of him. She replayed their argument of the preceding evening as if picking a scab. She had woken up this morning, hungover and tired, fervently hoping that he would have texted her or tried to call while she was asleep. But she knew, even before she looked at her phone, that he wouldn’t have done so. She felt sick in the pit of her stomach, a shivering sensation of uncertainty that plagued her for the rest of the day. She started questioning, as she always did in the wake of an argument, whether she really wanted to be with someone whose personal situation was so demanding. It would be easier to be with one of those uninspiring but simple men of her own age, with supportive families and straightforward aspirations, with uncomplicated jobs and a circle of friends she would find easy to charm.

On the drive to the hospital she had actually started mentally going through a list of her single male friends, checking each one off as unsuitable, until she realised she didn’t want anyone else or that no one else would want her and this had made her feel even more depressed. By seven that evening, Gabriel still hadn’t been in touch and she couldn’t stop her mind festering on the whole situation, alternately angry and upset but still determined in spite of herself not to call him first.

‘You’re obsessed with power,’ Gabriel had once said to her while they were lying in bed one lazy weekend morning.

‘No, I’m not.’

‘You are,’ he said, half-teasing. ‘You think that if you show a single tiny crack in your armour, I’ll exploit it to my advantage and then you won’t be in control any more.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ she had laughed, rolling over to kiss him on the tip of his nose.

‘I’m serious. But the thing is, Charlotte . . .’

‘What’s the thing?’ She started to tickle the flatness of his stomach.

‘The thing is,’ he said, clasping her hand in his to stop her, ‘that being in love isn’t about control. It’s about the lack of it.’

And he had been right, of course, although she hadn’t admitted it to him. Her exposed fragility terrified her – the thought that he could hurt Charlotte the way he had hurt Maya, his wife; the thought that he could manipulate her emotions, make her love him and then, one day, simply decide he’d had enough; the thought that although he professed to love her so profoundly, she knew that he had a whole set of secret compartments in his life where he kept his unspoken thoughts and desires; that he was quite capable of concealment if it kept the surface smooth.

Gabriel had admitted to her once that he felt no guilt over his flings with other women. If anything, he said, part of him blamed Maya for not being good enough, for not living up to the expectations he had of her. So Charlotte had instantly become frightened that she would not live up to him either and every time they had a disagreement or a shouting match, she was left overwhelmed by a ripped-up feeling of total insecurity. She would not call first, she told herself nonsensically, because she did not want him to have the power to make her feel like this. Besides, she wasn’t allowed to use her mobile in the hospital. Let him wait. Let him worry for once. Let him try and get hold of her and realise she wasn’t at his beck and call.

Charlotte looked at her father’s impassive face, set with waxy permanence against the starchy pillow. The ventilator made a scratchy whirring sound like an air conditioning unit sucking up flies and dust. She remembered the last time she had seen him before the accident. He had emailed her at work, out of the blue, asking if she was around for dinner. It was something he never normally did and she had found herself feeling a curious mixture of dread and flattery. What on earth would they talk about all evening? Conversations with her father tended to be discourses on important topics of the day and she always felt battered into submission by his superior intelligence, by the breadth of his knowledge.

Just recently, Charlotte had begun to wonder with increasing frequency whether she had any opinions. As soon as she found she had a thought about something, she could just as easily pick holes in it. When someone challenged her, she would find herself agreeing with them and switching sides, not simply because she wanted to keep the peace but also because she genuinely believed that what they said was more convincing than anything she could come up with.

In discussions with her father, this would manifest itself in a sort of half-hearted attempt at an intelligent comment (on abortion laws, on tuition fees, on the various benefits of communism versus capitalism) and then a lapse into silence as Charles expounded his views. She was, she realised, too scared to disagree with him. It was like those sneaked childhood television sessions all over again – an encompassing sense of his brooding anger; the anxious worry that there would be an unexplained explosion of temper and that it would have to be managed or ducked or borne without expression so that she would not irritate him further.