Some Old Lover's Ghost (10 page)

I was halfway through cutting a sleeve into neat, half-inch ribbons when there was a knock at the door. Charles Lightman and his sister Lucy stood on the step.

‘You haven’t returned any of my phone calls,’ said Charles, coming in. He had a couple of bottles of wine.

‘I told Charles that you were probably working,’ said Lucy, ‘but he insisted.’

‘You shouldn’t neglect—’ began Charles, and then he stopped as he caught sight of the sweater and the scissors. ‘What on earth are you doing, Becca?’

‘Cutting it up,’ I said. ‘Toby gave it to me.’

Charles smiled, but Lucy stared at the label and said, ‘But Rebecca, it’s Nicole Farhi!’

I shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t ever wear it again.’

‘But you could give it to Oxfam – or to
me
—’ Lucy was horrified.

Charles said, ‘That’s not the point, is it? It’s not the absence of the thing – it’s the destruction of it. It’s the act of vengeance that’s so pleasurable, especially to an obsessive like Rebecca.’

I said, outraged, ‘I’m not an obsessive.’

‘Of course you are.’ Charles had gone into the kitchen to search for wineglasses. ‘You were obsessed with Toby Carne, and now you’re obsessed with Tilda Franklin. Just look.’ The wide sweep of his hand indicated the books and papers that cluttered my desk, the time-line of Tilda’s life that I had affixed to the wall, and the old black and white photographs on the pinboard. ‘An improvement, of course, but an obsession nevertheless.’

Lucy was cradling the Nicole Farhi jumper in her arms. I said defensively, ‘Tilda’s a fascinating woman. And it’s an interesting job … trying to fill in the gaps … There’s so many things one
can’t
know … You just have to work out what must have happened as best you can.’

‘Perhaps I can cut the other sleeve down. Make it short-sleeved.’

‘There’s so much you have to assume or infer.’

‘Put a little hem around it.’

‘It’s like a crossword puzzle. Filling in the gaps.’

‘Or unpick the shoulder seam.’

‘Oh, do shut up about that bloody jumper, Lucy,’ said Charles
amiably. ‘Donald will buy you dozens of Nicole Farhi jumpers, no doubt.’ He refilled my wineglass. ‘Lu has acquired a new and ghastly boyfriend. He is terribly rich.’ He sat down on the floor. ‘Anyway, I agree with Rebecca. One shouldn’t just let a love affair fizzle out. One should end it with a great, dramatic gesture. So cathartic.’

‘Paint his windows black,’ said Lucy, bundling up the jumper and putting it in her bag. ‘Do it overnight, so he won’t know what’s happened when he wakes up in the morning.’

‘Toby has a third-floor flat.’

‘Drain the brake fluid from his car.’

‘I don’t want to
kill
him, Charles – just humiliate him a bit. Anyway, you know I’m hopeless with cars.’

‘I saw a television programme,’ said Lucy, ‘where an abandoned wife sewed lumps of Stilton into the hem of her ex-husband’s curtains. Think of the
smell
. He couldn’t work out where it was coming from.’

‘Langoustines,’ said Charles. ‘Langoustines would be better.’

I finished my glass of wine. ‘I haven’t a key to Toby’s flat,’ I said regretfully.

But a few days later, Charles appeared again, with an invitation to a Law Society dinner dance. He wouldn’t tell me how he’d got it. I argued a bit, but he insisted, and I thought – why not? At worst, I’d find myself in court for petty vandalism. And as Charles pointed out, think of the publicity. So good for book sales.

I changed into something long and floaty, and together – Charles in his ancient dinner suit and me in my Monsoon dress – we stopped en route at Sainsbury’s. They hadn’t any langoustines, so I bought prawns instead. Then we drove into central London.

I’d been to Law Society functions before, with Toby. I’d always seemed to end up standing on his toe during my inept attempts at the quickstep, or arguing with some right-wing but influential old judge. The chill grandeur of the building, the distant sound
of well-bred chatter, were all unpleasantly familiar. With Charles ambling behind me, I scuttled quickly along the corridor to the cloakroom, terrified that Toby might suddenly appear from behind a pillar. The cloakroom was unattended, luckily, and it was easy to find the right Burberry raincoat. Toby still used name-tapes, for heaven’s sake.
T. F. Carne
, sewn neatly into the collar of his coat. A hangover from school, I suppose. I wondered whether his mother sewed them for him.

Charles went outside to keep watch. I knelt on the cloakroom floor. My hands trembled so much as I took scissors, needle and cotton from my evening bag that I could hardly thread the needle. Yet there was an awful exhilaration in my task. The pleasure of revenge, as Charles had pointed out. I couldn’t stab Toby through the heart, but I could make him ridiculous.

I had nearly finished when I heard a sound behind me. ‘Almost done, Charles,’ I muttered without looking round.

There was a cough. Not Charles’s cough. Suddenly cold, I looked up.

I recognized Patrick Franklin instantly. I remembered walking with him through Tilda Franklin’s garden. I remembered how much he had annoyed me. Now he was lounging against the cloakroom counter, his hands in his pockets, looking down at me. I couldn’t make out the expression in his eyes.

‘I’m just … I’m just … ‘I said, floundering. My heart pounded and my mouth was dry.

‘You’re just …’ and he peered over my shoulder, ‘you’re just sewing prawns into the hem of someone’s raincoat.’

‘There’s a very good reason for it,’ I said pompously, breaking the thread and bundling my things back into my bag. My face felt hot and pink and I wanted to run. ‘Must go,’ I said. My voice wasn’t working very well. I stood up. ‘Bye.’

‘Goodbye, Rebecca,’ he said. But as I turned to go, Patrick reached out and took my arm, halting me. ‘Don’t forget these.’

‘These’ were the leftover prawns, still in their white plastic bag. I shoved them in my pocket, and ran out of the room.

I didn’t sleep much that night. I got up early and was working on my book when Jane telephoned at nine o’clock. She had flu and Steve was away on business. Would I come and help with the boys for a few days? She was apologetic about disturbing my work, but when I suggested that I bring my laptop so that I could get on with things while the boys were asleep, she laughed hollowly, and pointed out that Lawrie hadn’t slept through the night since he was born.

My sister’s plea for help came as a relief. I was sorry that poor Jane had flu, but delighted to escape London. The events of the previous night – the recollection of the expression in Patrick Franklin’s eyes as he had looked down at me, kneeling on the cloakroom floor, prawns in hand – made me squirm with embarrassment. I knew that he must think me mad, and I minded that he should think a madwoman was writing his illustrious grandmother’s biography.

So I enjoyed the drive out of London and into the countryside. The sky was a clear, pale blue, and the brown earth in the fields was hazed with green where the new wheat had begun to show. I reached Jane’s house by eleven. She lives in a tiny thatched cottage, surrounded by a pretty garden where cabbages nestle beside hollyhocks, and runner beans climb the same trellis as a rambling rose. I can never help but compare her cottage with my drab little flat.

Jane was stuffing grubby cot sheets into the washing machine when I arrived. She looked dreadful, so I sent her to bed. Both Jack and Lawrie had been ill the previous week, and were still runny-nosed and coughing. I made them lunch, most of which ended up on the table or the floor, then I wrapped them up in jackets and woolly hats and gloves and took them out for a walk. On the way home, they both began to complain of hunger, so, with a few guilty pangs about balanced diets, I bought Milky Ways from the shop.

Then I attacked the vast heap of ironing, made up Lawrie’s cot, and began to mop up the mud left by the boys’ wellies in the hallway. While I was cleaning the floor, Jack decided
to help himself to a drink of orange juice from the fridge. I heard the crash and yell as the bottle slipped out of his hands onto the tiles. I dashed into the kitchen, grabbed Jack, who was barefoot, and sat him howling on the kitchen table while I set about picking up fragments of glass. From the doorway, Lawrie told me tearfully that he’d lost Boffy, his toy rabbit. Then the phone rang. I could feel myself breaking out into a hot sweat. I answered the phone (double glazing, of course) before it could wake Jane, carried both weeping boys into the living room, and switched on the TV.
Pingu
, thank God. I wanted to flake out with a stiff gin, but there was still the broken glass and the mud and Boffy to be found, and the boys’ tea-time in half an hour. And bath-time, of course. I discovered Boffy stuffed down the back of a radiator, and then I crawled all over the kitchen floor, squinting, terrified I’d overlook a splinter of glass. Then I shoved some fish fingers under the grill and suddenly remembered poor Jane, who hadn’t had as much as a cup of tea since eleven o’clock that morning. She was asleep, but by the time I came downstairs smoke was belching from the grill. That set the smoke alarm off, so I had to leap around, flapping open doors and windows.
Pingu
finished, and the boys stood in the doorway, thumbs in mouths, mesmerized by the sight of their aunt standing at the back door in the rain, scraping black gobbets from grill pan to dustbin.

Much, much later, I collapsed on the living-room sofa, a mug of tea in one hand, laptop in the other. I was due to see Tilda again in a couple of days, and I hadn’t yet finished writing up my notes from my last visit. I stared at the blank screen, and saw only charred fish fingers and shards of broken glass. Then I heard crying. I dumped my laptop on the floor and ran upstairs.

Lawrie had been sick in his cot; the Milky Way had not been a good idea. I picked him up and tried to comfort him; his howls set off Jack in the next bed, who began to yell in sympathy. I was trying one-handedly to strip the cot whilst cuddling Lawrie and calming Jack, when, to my immense relief, Jane appeared in the doorway. She patted Jack’s head and told him firmly to go back to sleep, and then she peeled off Lawrie’s sodden sleepsuit and pyjamas while I
stripped the cot. Lawrie’s clothes, the bedding and, disastrously, Boffy, had all to be washed. Lawrie howled inconsolably as Jane rinsed his rabbit in the sink. He howled throughout the entire cycle of both washing machine and tumble-drier, and he howled and fought as Jane and I changed his nappy and dressed him in clean clothes. All attempts at distraction were rejected – his suck-cup was pushed away, his dummy was batted to the floor. Only when Boffy, untypically clean and fluffy, emerged from the tumble-drier did Lawrie curl up on Jane’s lap, and the sobs begin to lessen.

Jane looked down at him, and wearily stroked his curls. ‘Poor old boy,’ she whispered. ‘Poor old boy.’ There was no colour to her skin; it seemed transparent. She looked up at me. ‘Do you know, Becca,’ she said quietly, ‘that I’d sell my soul for an uninterrupted night’s sleep?’

I didn’t doubt her. Lawrie, on Jane’s lap, still hiccuped, but his lids had closed.

‘Couldn’t Steve help more?’

She shook her head. ‘We need the overtime. We have negative equity.’

I glanced at her, shocked. ‘I hadn’t realized.’

‘We bought this house at the wrong time. And there’s only two bedrooms, and the boys fight terribly. I don’t know when we’ll be able to move to a bigger place. I envy you your freedom, sometimes.’

It had been a long time since I had considered myself an object of envy. Not since Toby.

Jane managed a watery smile and, very gently, I scooped Lawrie out of her lap. He didn’t stir. I told Jane to go back to bed, and promised to see to Lawrie if he woke in the night.

I carried him upstairs, but did not immediately put him into his cot. Instead, I stood there for a moment, with his warm, velvety head cradled against my shoulder, looking down at the small, perfect curves of his face, at the violet-tinged eyelids, and the fine skin still blotched pink from crying. My own eyes were heavy with tears, but I did not allow them to fall. At last
I touched my lips to his forehead and laid him carefully in his cot. He shuffled about a bit, ending up with his knees tucked under his bottom, his rabbit pressed against his face, snoring. I watched him as he slept, and I tried to imagine Toby scrubbing yucky baby clothes in the sink, Toby putting aside his work to run to attend to a sick child. And I couldn’t. The images just didn’t fit. He would have worried about spoiling his suit. He would have worried about losing a case.

I sat down on the chest of drawers beside the cot and felt, for the first time, a sober regret instead of grief and anger and a need for vengeance. I began to recognize that my relationship with Toby had been based on mutual fantasies. That Toby had been looking for a young, pliant partner to mould into the sort of wife who would be an asset to him in his career. That I had been searching for a family to replace my own flawed, fractured clan. The child had been a part of our fantasy. My initial disbelief that someone like Toby – handsome, cultured and well-off – might love me had never quite gone away. I had believed, I suppose, that a child might bind us together. As for Toby himself, perhaps he had been attracted to that caring, early-Nineties image of masculinity reinforced by fatherhood: the man in the adverts with the beautiful wife, the adorable child, the fast car. The adverts don’t tell the truth, of course: the shiny new car cluttered with carrycots and disposable nappies and baby toys; the brilliant career put on hold by too many sleepless nights.

I stayed another three days with Jane, until she was on her feet again and Steve was back from his conference. Then I drove to Tilda’s. As I shut the gate of The Red House behind me and started up the path, I felt a sense of release. The high walls of the box trees, pearled with raindrops, embraced me, and I could smell the heady, hypnotic scents of hyacinth and jonquil. And for a moment, standing there on the pathway, enclosed by the hedges, I closed my eyes, breathing in the perfumed air, elated by the prospect of returning to the sanctuary of the past.