Singled Out (5 page)

‘I felt I had to see you,' Kent began slowly. ‘Tell you this face to face. Didn't want to do it on the phone.' He was silent again. Two fingers wiggled the steak knife infuriatingly from side to side, but still Laura controlled her annoyance. ‘Fact is …' Kent finally started again. ‘There was a message when I got back into the office this morning.' He stopped and looked up, his eyes locking with hers. ‘The old man's dead.'

Laura knew exactly what he meant, but, perhaps to buy time to construct a reaction, found herself asking, ‘The old man?'

‘Our father,' Kent confirmed. ‘He's dead.'

The moment of hearing this news was one that Laura had imagined all her life. But she was still unprepared for the rush of complex emotions which its reality triggered.

‘We can't escape it,' said Kent. A wooden hand-gesture failed to encompass the enormity of what they couldn't escape. ‘It's going to be with us all our lives, bound to be.'

Laura shook her head firmly. ‘No. We can escape it. I'm not going to let it be with me all my life. I'm making my own life. I've started from scratch, I've remade myself, and I'm not going to allow anything to change the new me.'

Kent sighed and pushed back his unfinished steak. ‘I wish I could share your optimism. When I think back … there's no way things like that aren't going to affect anyone for the rest of their lives.'

‘I don't think back.'

‘I try not to, but …'

‘Come on, Kent, you're strong. You know you are. If you hadn't been strong, I don't think I'd still be here. You protected me …'

‘And I always will protect you,' he said with sudden fervour.

‘I know. I appreciate that very much. But what I've been doing over the last few years is to put myself in a position where I don't need protecting. I want to look after myself.'

‘Sure. We all want that. But there are things that happen … things that did happen in our lives when we were too small to look after ourselves … and I just don't think we'll ever get away from them.'

‘I'll get away from them,' Laura asserted. ‘I have got away from them. I mean, think what I was like at fourteen … sixteen … even eighteen. Could you ever imagine then that I'd be holding down the kind of job I am now? Not just holding it down either – doing it bloody well. And I've got the job – and I'm doing it well – simply because I made a decision that that was what I was going to do.'

‘Maybe, but –'

‘Listen. I decided to join the BBC as a secretary. I decided to pull up my roots and work those six months in New Zealand – in the face of incredible opposition from Michael, I may say. I decided to make the move to ITV when I came back. I decided I wanted to be a director. And that's what I'm now doing. I haven't let anything that happened in the past hold me back.'

‘All right,' he conceded. ‘All right.' Another of his interminable pauses. ‘But you're still scarred by it.'

‘No, I'm not. I'm not scarred,' she countered passionately. ‘I have healed the scars. I've made myself whole again.'

‘Huh.' Kent toyed with his wine glass. ‘You must teach me the trick one day.'

‘I'd be happy to.'

Despair reasserted its control over him. ‘Not that I think it'd work for me.'

‘Why not? Listen, Kent, we're only here for one life. It's not very long. And I'm certainly not going to let my entire life be ruined by things that happened when I was just a kid.'

‘It went on way beyond when you were a kid. You were nearly fifteen, remember, when … when, you know …'

Laura was angry that Kent could not bring himself to say what he meant. Even angrier to discover that she too was unable to put into words the horror they had shared.

‘All right, yes, I was nearly fifteen. But that was fifteen years ago. I've got over it.'

‘Bully for you,' said Kent with tired disbelief.

‘And you've got over a lot of it, too. Come on, Kent, you're holding down a pretty stressful job. You're doing well, you said you're in line for promotion. You haven't let him destroy you.'

‘No? Laura, it's one thing to be able to cope at work, it's another to …' He shook his head. ‘I'm never going to be in a relationship. I've recognized that now.'

‘Why?'

He looked at her bleakly. ‘Because I'm too afraid of the possibility of history repeating itself.'

‘It needn't repeat itself.' Kent looked away. ‘Why are you so sure? Things happen. You can change.'

Another defeated shake of the head. ‘No. Whenever I've got close to a woman, I … Things get complicated … So many emotions come into my head that …'

It was rare for Kent to reveal so much of himself. Normally he kept his feelings tightly reined in, and Laura could only conjecture what went through his mind. The shock of their father's death had broken down some barrier within him. Kent seemed to realize the singularity of what was happening at the same moment Laura did. His eyes flickered away from hers. When he looked back, their shutters had been replaced.

‘So I'm always going to be on my own,' he pronounced without self-pity. Without any emotion, in fact. ‘Anyway,' he continued with something that was almost a sneer in his voice, ‘your track record on relationships isn't that great, is it? You may be able to be a star in the job, but your personal life –'

‘You know nothing about my personal life,' she snapped.

‘I know you don't seem to have that many friends.'

‘I have enough. A lot of colleagues.'

‘Like that mincing poof in the bar?'

‘A lot of other friends you don't know. Anyway, some of us don't need people around all the time.'

‘I also know,' Kent persisted, ‘that your marriage to Michael wasn't much of a success. And I don't think any amount of positive thinking in the world can make you deny that.'

‘No. All right. With Michael it was wrong … He was the wrong person, it was the wrong time. I was only eighteen, for God's sake. Think back, remember the kind of state I was in when I was eighteen – living with Mr and Mrs Hull – do you remember that? Is it any surprise that the marriage didn't work?'

‘No surprise at all. I just wonder why you imagine any other marriage will stand any more chance.'

‘Because, as I said, I have changed. I'm my own person now. I could cope with marriage … if that was what I wanted.'

‘You mean it isn't?'

‘I didn't say that,' she replied, suddenly cautious.

‘So … are you in a relationship at the moment?' This was an unusually direct question, according to the strict rules of circumspection which governed their conversations.

‘None of your business,' Laura replied lightly.

‘No. No, right.' He accepted the point without argument.

They moved to other topics. Both felt shocked by the intimacy with which they had talked. Though to an outside listener their conversation would have sounded unrevealing, by the conventions of their encounters they had come surprisingly close. Close to talking about the shared secret that was never fully articulated between them.

They did not have much of a range of ‘other topics' either. Kent could not talk about his work, and Laura was aware of foot-shuffling resistance from him when she talked of hers. He made her feel as if she was showing off. With so many subjects off-bounds, there was little left to talk about. Neither was particularly interested in the other's views on the Arab–Israeli conflict or the prospective fuel crisis. Relief was felt on both sides when they agreed not to have sweets or coffee and Laura asked for the bill.

She saw her brother wince as she put down two ten-pound notes to cover it, and wince again to see how little change the waiter brought back. Aware again of the perverse desire to annoy Kent, Laura overtipped grotesquely.

Outside the restaurant they stood awkwardly apart in the cold October air. ‘I'll let you know about the arrangements,' said Kent.

‘Arrangements?'

‘Funeral, what have you. I'm sure they'll be in touch when they've sorted it out.'

‘Oh, right,' said Laura. ‘Fine.'

‘Goodbye then.'

‘Goodbye.'

Gauchely, without touching, they set off in opposite directions, into their separate lives. They were totally different. Outsiders would have been surprised to know they were even related. Only Laura and Kent knew how much they had in common. She deeply resented the connection, he had perhaps become reconciled to it, but they were inextricably joined by the appalling violence of their upbringing.

The Trimphone warbled in Laura's flat the following Saturday just as she had started nibbling a solitary lunchtime salad. She leant across to the hi-fi and turned down ‘Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road'.

‘Hello?'

‘Laura?'

‘Yes?'

‘It's Philip.'

The name released a cataract of dammed-up thoughts. Thoughts she'd worked hard to suppress, thoughts which she had disciplined out of her mind and which only broke in as an ache of wistfulness at wakeful three-in-the-mornings when her will-power was at a low ebb.

‘Ah. Where are you calling from?' she asked, bleaching her voice of all intonation.

‘Heathrow.' This prompted a little surge of hope. Surely it wasn't possible that he had come all this way just to see her? But his next words dashed the hope. ‘I'm on my way back to Auckland. Flight'll start boarding in ten minutes.'

‘But why …? Have you been over here long?'

‘Just a week. Giving a paper at a series of seminars on documentary television.'

The idea of his having been there all week, even having been in London when Laura had her encounter with the man in the hotel, was almost unendurable.

‘Just didn't want to leave without saying hello, Laura.' He tried to make the remark sound breezy and unimportant, but she could hear the tension in his voice. ‘Why?' she couldn't help asking. ‘Why didn't you get in touch with me before?'

‘I thought it …' The tension was now almost strangling his words. ‘I thought it was not right. I thought, safer, if we didn't meet … if I just made contact …'

‘Then why make contact at all, Philip? Are you deliberately trying to hurt me?'

‘No. No, I … Look, this week's been agony. Every moment that I haven't actually been sitting in meetings and lectures, I've been thinking about phoning you. I've even dialled your number a couple of times, but …'

‘Oh, Philip …'

‘It's better this way – really.' The words still struggled out with difficulty. ‘This is the right thing to happen.'

‘And now you'll be able to sit on that plane for twenty-four hours or whatever it is,' said Laura, a harsh note creeping into her voice, ‘congratulating yourself on having resisted temptation once again – is that it?'

‘No, no, it's not … I'm not scoring points or anything. I'm not trying to hurt you. It's just … this is the right thing to happen,' he repeated lamely.

‘Right for you perhaps. Right for Julie. Have you ever considered what might be right for me?'

‘We went through all this, Laura. We've been through it many times. This is the only way it can be.'

‘But don't you still want me?'

‘Yes.' He swallowed. ‘Yes, I'll always want you. I still wake up in the night physically hurting from how much I want you, but … It can't be any other way.'

‘No,' Laura conceded reluctantly. ‘How is Julie?'

‘Not bad at the moment. Not getting worse, anyway. The doctor says it's probably only a temporary remission, but it could be years before things deteriorate again.'

‘That's good. And she's keeping cheerful?' Even as she spoke the words, Laura was aware of their incongruity. Why should she be showing such solicitude for the wife of the only man she had ever loved?

‘Yes, yes, not bad at all.'

‘And the children?' Again she asked herself why. She didn't care about Philip's children. They were just two more obstacles to her ever sharing her life with him. But as she had the thought, Laura recognized the pattern. It had happened often during their affair. Talking about Julie, talking about the children, had always sobered them up, lowered the temperature, put their relationship in perspective, made it possible for them to part.

‘They're great,' Philip replied with distancing bonhomie. ‘Paul should be at university next year, with a following wind. And Tammy's actually developed a boyfriend.'

‘Good for her.' A meaningless platitude, an automatic response, small talk recognizing the impracticality of any deeper communication.

‘So, anyway …' Philip's voice continued uneasily, ‘I just rang to say hello and see how you are.'

‘I'm fine. Directing – and a bit of producing – on
Newsviews
.'

‘Yes, I heard. Well done. So you benefited from the experience in New Zealand?'

‘Yes,' said Laura.

He was flustered by the deliberate ambiguity in her tone. ‘Good, good. And everything else OK?'

‘Everything else? You mean my personal life? My emotional life? My sex life?'

This too embarrassed him. His voice was throaty as he replied, ‘I've given up any rights to know about your sex life.'

‘Yes,' Laura said vindictively, ‘you have.' Philip was inarticulately silent. ‘Everything's fine, thank you.'

‘Good.' He was relieved to have moved back from the brink of further intimacy.

‘Oh, Philip … I've been through so many conversations with you in my mind.'

‘Yes. And I with you.'

‘But …'

‘But this is the only way it can be.' Again he repeated his mantra, the sole article of faith he could cling to. ‘This is the right thing to happen.'