Someone to Watch Over Me (2 page)

‘Will it come back, Mum?'

Charlie asked her the question because he knew the beginning of a story when he saw one, and indeed, Carrie was already thinking about a possible bedtime tale which could feature a confused flamingo called Fabian and perhaps Florette, a lost flamingo wife.

‘Why is it pink?'

Damian knew it was something to do with its diet, but was unable to say what it could find on a Norfolk beach that would be pink enough to maintain its plumage.

‘Will it go grey after a while?' asked Charlie anxiously.

‘I'm not sure, pal,' said Damian. ‘Perhaps he will find his way home where his brothers and sisters and a bucket of fresh shrimps will be waiting for him.'

After he had been persuaded into a fleece, they had lunch. Charlie ate his bread and an apple and said he wanted to save his cake for later. He sat for a while, watching the boy whose encampment was nearest theirs. He was squatting on his heels and digging energetically. Carrie could tell that Charlie wanted to play with him by the way that he kept sliding his small feet through the sand.

‘Why don't you go and make friends?'

‘I think he's older than me,' said Charlie. She knew how much he hated to be at a disadvantage.

‘He looks pretty much the same age to me.'

Charlie got to his feet and wandered in a self-consciously casual way over to where the boy was scooping up sand. For a while Charlie pretended to be looking for shells, but then he gave up dissembling and stood over the other boy, watching his endeavours with a critical eye.

After what he clearly considered to be the correct amount of time, Charlie finally spoke.

‘My name's Charlie. I'm five. How old are you?'

The boy looked up at him and answered. Carrie didn't catch what he said, but it must have been encouraging because Charlie got down on his hands and knees and started burrowing too. They each began to excavate from a different point and dug along towards each other. Whenever their hands made contact under the cool sand and another tunnel was formed, they exclaimed in surprise. Carrie watched them for a while, but then the effects of lunch and the sun began to catch up with her and she lay back on the picnic rug. She could hear Damian turning the pages of the newspaper, the occasional voice shouting, and once, what sounded like a helicopter, but the sounds were muffled. Black shapes swarmed behind her eyelids and she dozed. She woke when Damian tickled her bare feet.

‘Sorry to disturb you, sleepy head,' he said, ‘but I need to go to the toilet. I'll have to go back to the car park.'

Carrie shook herself awake and sat up to look at Charlie, who was still playing with his new friend. She got her magazine out of her bag, rolled over onto her stomach and tried to read but the words swam in front of her eyes and she laid her head down on the paper and slid back into sleep. Charlie's voice woke her the second time. She rolled over onto her side and squinted up at him, but the sun was too bright to see his face.

‘Can I go down to the sea again?'

‘Only if you go with your father.'

‘Dad's still not come back.'

‘Well you'll just have to wait until he does. Where's that other little boy gone?'

‘He had to go for a walk with his mum.'

‘Is he nice?'

‘Yes.' Charlie made his case by ticking off his new friend's attributes on his fingers.

‘One, he is five. Two, he has yellow hair. Three, he isn't mad on bats. Four, he likes
Scooby
Doo
.
Please
can I go down to the sea?'

‘Just wait a bit, I can't leave the bags. Wait till Dad gets back.'

Carrie sat up, and Charlie sat down next to her, looking up every now and again to see if Damian was coming. Finally he spotted him in the distance making his way back down the beach.

‘Can I go and meet him …
please
…
and then we can swim …?'

‘Only if you give me a kiss first,' said Carrie, lying back down. He knelt next to her and planted his lips on her cheek, stroked one sandy hand across her face.

‘I love you every single day,' said Charlie.

‘And I love you every single day too,' said Carrie, and shut her eyes.

Afterwards, she wasn't able to say how long she had been asleep. She thought it could only have been a matter of minutes.

‘Where's Charlie?' asked Damian, appearing suddenly above her.

Carrie, like every parent, was always only a moment away from panic. All it took was for her to lose sight of him when he lagged behind in a crowd, or when he was hidden by a slide in a park, and she felt a dip in her stomach. She felt that familiar lurch now.

‘I thought he was with you.'

‘No, I left him here when I went to the toilet. I've just been for a run.'

Carrie stood up and scanned the beach. There were a number of figures in the distance that could have been him. It wasn't easy to see that far away. She couldn't immediately spot anyone in the distinctive yellow shorts he was wearing.

‘You stay here in case he comes back. I'll go and look for him.'

Carrie started running towards the sea.

Molly watched Max as he lay on the floor, lining up his plastic animals in strict formation. He was using the geometric design on the border of the carpet to ensure that all hooves and paws toed the line. The ark stood waiting with its gangplank down and its tiny bearded Noah standing to attention on the deck. Max's tendency to place things in lines was sometimes disconcerting – miniature soldiers faced certain death as if about to start a race; crayons lay in an orderly rainbow all the way along the hall. Cards trimmed the mantelpiece in royal flushes. He even rearranged the food on his plate in sequence, with the least desirable items bringing up the rear. Since this was a recent habit, Molly wondered if this behaviour was a sign of inward disturbance. Possibly she should be worried by his seemingly compulsive need to order the world. Maybe she was simply reading too much into it and he was disclosing a propensity that had always been there, waiting for the right set of animals or the new box of crayons. He had probably been born with the straight-line gene, and would grow up into an adult who was fond of graphs and trousers ironed sideways and pint glasses placed neatly in the centre of beer mats. She thought that what she was really looking for in his behaviour, were confirmations of her own sadness.

Although the Christmas tree bent slightly to the left, Molly thought it looked pretty, with its multi-coloured lights flicking out some sort of puzzling rhythm. They had gone and got the tree together and brought it back in the car with its tip sticking out through the window. She had resisted the temptation to take charge of its decoration, despite the fact that Max had adorned all the lower branches with the heaviest baubles so that they bent at the ends and almost touched the floor.

She started to put away the canvas she had been working on earlier in the day, a small watercolour of the view out of the window. It was the first thing she had painted for a long time and it felt good to be getting back into doing even a little of what she loved. She looked out of the window, across a wide, black field over which birds gathered and then dispersed. It was beginning to get dark although it was still only three o'clock. She felt oppressed and anxious, as if this small house was cast adrift on floodwaters, without a compass or proper provisions. Molly was keen on the acquisition and preservation of provisions. As a child the stories she had loved the most always involved families in extremis eking out bitter winters with a small box of onions and turnips and fashioning pathetic, yet admirable playthings out of twigs and balls of wool. She liked fictional characters who bottled and salted their way through their lives and nobly stacked their larders with the labours of their presumably very rough, red hands or who, when left on desert islands, conjured up ingenious accommodation and cunning ways of collecting rain water. She had always celebrated each season by preserving it. Jam from the warm strawberries she had heaped into smeared punnets. Blackberries brought home in jugs and Tupperware boxes and then stashed away in freezer bags. Each sloe carefully pierced and pickled with gin and put in the dark to marinate.

‘When's tea?' asked Max, rolling onto his back, a rhino in each hand meeting horn to horn.

‘Not for ages yet,' she said. ‘Are you hungry?'

‘Can I have just one chocolate bell from the tree?' he said. ‘That should tide me over.' She recognised with pain that this was one of Rupert's expressions. She thought of him years ago, packing the boot of the car to go away somewhere with more food and drink than they could possibly need. ‘That should tide us over,' he had said and smiled, and she remembered feeling the safety in the words.

Max untied a chocolate from the tree, careful to avoid touching the wire from the flashing lights. He had a morbid fascination with electrocution, and the slightest darkening of the skies would provoke dire warnings on the danger of standing under trees and wearing leather-soled shoes. It had been Rupert who had planted the horror in Max's mind by telling him some outlandish tale of putting his finger into a socket and being thrown through a window and biting all the way through his tongue until he almost choked on his own blood.

He always was a convincing teller of tall tales. Molly thought about the evening they had first met. He had seemed more vivid and distinct than anyone else in the room. Her eyes had been drawn to him straight away and she had found it hard to stop looking. Rupert had reminded her of a fox, or some other shiny-furred creature. She had always thought of herself, with her pale blue eyes and hair of an indeterminate brown, to be the very reverse of striking. She had often despaired at the soft, almost child-like contours of her face, wanting instead to have high cheekbones and dark, dramatic lashes, the sort of looks that made men catch their breath, and so she'd been astonished when he came straight over to her, as if he had been waiting for her to arrive, although they had never met before.

‘You can sit by me,' he had said, steering her over to the table and the chair next to his. He had talked to her throughout the meal, his eyes never leaving hers, his hands solicitous with butter and wine. When her napkin slid off her lap and fell under the table, he insisted on ducking down and retrieving it. She felt, with shock and excitement, his hand brush her ankle and pause delicately, halfway up her leg.

They were married six months later. She had set her heart on a dress that she had seen in a shop window. The material was the palest pink and encrusted with crystal beads. It had a tight bosom-enhancing bodice and fitted sexily across the hips and made Molly feel like a decadent princess. Molly thought that being a bride was your one chance to be voluptuous and get away with it. Rupert's mother, whom she had only met once and whose eyes, on that occasion had shifted over her swiftly as though assessing a metre of fabric, had insisted both on paying for the dress and coming with Molly to choose it. She dismissed the frock Molly had selected with a small sound of distaste and chose instead a severely simple sheath. Although its pale lines were exquisitely cut and it was four times the price of the dress she had wanted, Molly never felt like herself in it – but rather as if she was playing the part of the person that should have been standing by Rupert in the little church that was filled with the scent of lilac.

They honeymooned in Umbria in a villa that looked out over terraced olive groves and a night sky full of fireflies. They spent their days exploring the nearby towns where Rupert took hundreds of pictures of her by fountains or leaning against yellow walls threaded with caper flowers and quick lizards. Sometimes when he stopped her halfway up some steps and made her turn towards his lens or when he laid down his fork to frame her head exactly beneath an arch she felt as if the sequence of pictures were what made the story for him.

‘Smile!' he said, and she had no trouble obeying, since everything was enchanting to her. She found it endearing that he wanted to record her happiness so minutely. In their muslin-draped four-poster bed Rupert gave her slender body the same earnest attention.

‘You are so beautiful,' he said as his fingers moved over her and into her as if his touch could read her secrets. He discovered the tiny, silvered scar on her breast caused by the removal of a cyst, the dent just above her ankle where she had been bitten by a dog as a child and the raised mole at the top of her inner thigh.

‘It's a kind of inventory,' he said when she protested that she felt scrutinised. ‘So I'll know you again if I was blind.'

He held her open with his fingers and stroked her with his tongue and she was glad and surprised that he wanted her so much. When they got back he carried her carefully over the doorstep of their new home. After advice from his mother, Molly had set about painting it cream, with the occasional wall in heritage grey or papered with large, muted flowers. The first year he took her to all the places he had been to as a child. There was a wood that smelt of wild garlic that was threaded through by a fast, brown river, and a garden with blue and pink hydrangeas the size of a child's head and a low wall against which they had nestled like lost lambs.

The phone rang and Molly came out of her reverie with a start.

‘Hello?' There was silence at the other end of the line. ‘Hello?' she said again, but no one answered and she replaced the receiver. She told herself it was a foreign call centre and that a young man with a made-up British name had been prevented from selling insurance by tangled lines or that a hand in a bag had unknowingly activated a cell phone, but she knew it was him. He often phoned in the early evening, as if the fading light was his prompt to check on where she was.

‘Are you alright, Mum?' asked Max. He sat down next to her on the sofa and put his arms around her neck. She could see her face reflected in the darkened window, as pale and as insubstantial as the ghosts that populated this area of the Fens. One such phantom Fenland farmer was said to regularly return to haunt his land. So precious was the rich black soil, that he ate great chunks of it. His invisible munching left clods disturbed where no tractor had been.