The Child Inside (21 page)

One day, after we have made love, Simon has to make a work call. He takes the phone into the living room, and closes the door. I hear his voice, business-like and abrupt. While he is gone I look inside his wardrobe again, at that cardigan. I look to see if it has moved; if it has gathered fluff or evidence of more wear, but it hasn’t. So I scan the shelves for anything else that is new, or that I may have missed before. There are his socks on one shelf, his pants on another. A couple of jerseys, folded up. Three pairs of shoes on the bottom, below his suits. Everything is so minimal, so neat. At the back of the wardrobe there is a safe the size of a microwave. This, I imagine, is where he keeps all his important things, his passport, his financial stuff, the photos of his sister, though I will never know, of course. I cannot ask. And on the shelf at the top of the wardrobe there is a small suitcase, which I imagine he uses for business trips, and visits to his house in Kingham. There is a leather luggage label attached to the handle, with his name on it, and the address of this flat. I wonder if there is anything inside the case, but I cannot get it down, of course. He would hear me.

But still, look and you will find.

Inside the bathroom cabinet there is now a pot of moisturizer that wasn’t there before. I open the lid and discover a long blonde hair wrapped around the rim. And so I know without a doubt that his wife has been here, and been here long enough to need her things. Simon hasn’t mentioned this, of course, but why would he? We don’t talk about our families. I don’t want us to talk about our families. But once I left my scarf here, left it for days, because each time I came here I kept forgetting to take it away with me again. And so there it sat, tidily folded up on his kitchen counter, between his mail and the fruit bowl for the best part of a fortnight. And now I wonder, did he quickly hide it when his wife turned up, and then get it back out again for me? Does she hunt around looking for evidence of me? Does she have her suspicions, or does she not even care?

And those things in the bathroom: did Simon hide them away, thinking I wouldn’t find them? Or were they simply put away out of tidiness? The whole flat is tidy – ridiculously so. I suppose he is hardly here. And a woman comes in on Saturdays to clean for him. She changes the bed too, and does his laundry, all of it. She hangs his shirts back up in his wardrobe, all clean, all pressed, all in order. She gets his groceries in, too, and puts them away. She even arranges his fruit in the fruit bowl. I laughed when he told me.

‘My God, what is she like?’ I asked, picturing some scarily officious housekeeper type.

But of course he said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never met her. I’m not here at weekends.’

I know his full address now, in Kingham. I have it written down on a little slip of paper, in my purse, though with no name attached to it, of course. I copied it down from a letter on the pile on the kitchen counter in his flat one day when he was in the bathroom. There were lots of letters there with his other address on, pieces of correspondence to do with insurance, schools, credit cards, all stacked up, waiting for him to deal with them.

His house doesn’t have a number, it has a name. Roseberry House
,
Mill Lane, Kingham. I picture it, some idyllic golden-stone cottage with roses around the door, children playing in the garden and a couple of horses gambolling out the back. But if it is so idyllic, why would he choose to live here in London instead of there?

I look up Kingham on the Internet again. I scroll through the photos of the church, the village fete, the old, golden-stone houses. I find a little map, hand-drawn and very basic, but there it is: Mill Lane, leading off the road behind the church.

I know his wife’s name, and the names of all his children now, though I wish that I didn’t. His wife is called Isobel; his children Theo, Alistair and Charlotte. I cannot help but know.

Simon shows me a photo of Charlotte one day. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘look,’ practically shoving it under my nose. ‘See how she looks like Vanessa. Doesn’t she? Doesn’t she look like Vanessa?’

And so I have to look. I’ve seen other photos of her, of course, on that hideous photo cube on the shelf in Simon’s living room. Seen photos of all of them, of Charlotte and Theo and Alistair, and Isobel too, with her perfect cheekbones and perfect, shiny blonde hair; seen photos of them all laughing and horsing around together, having such a jolly, wonderful time. Seen that photo of Simon too, with his arm around Isobel, smiling at Isobel. I don’t want to see any of these pictures, but see them I do. How can I stop myself? They are
there.

And now this photo of Charlotte.

‘See how she looks like my sister,’ Simon says, but I can only look for traces of his wife. Oh sure, the hair is long and fair and wavy, and yes, she is pretty; yes, she is delicate. But how can I fall upon this picture of another woman’s child?

Simon knows nothing about me, about Andrew or Jono. He knows nothing about my life, these last however many years. I tell him nothing, and he doesn’t ask. I come to him empty, the canvas onto which he can paint all his pictures of Vanessa. I lie in his arms and in his bed, and I convince myself I am some sort of redeeming angel, that I am here to set him free. I almost believe I have a duty to do this. After all, how could I possibly walk away?

He talks about his sister. He loops me into that world. For an hour here, half an hour there, the past twenty-five years of my life disappear. I step out of my life. I can be someone else.

And yet the thing that I know – and that I have always known, right from the very beginning – is that although we have this momentous thing in common, this love of Vanessa, this shared romanticized memory that fate has brought us back together to share . . . the thing that I know, the thing that eats away at me, that sits on my shoulder whispering and whispering its poison into my head, is that it is his mother with whom I really empathize. His mother, living her cold and loveless life in that house in Kew. His mother, who one day fetched a roll of bin bags and threw out every single thing belonging to or reminiscent of her daughter; every item of clothing left in the airing cupboard, every shoe left down in the hall, every half-used bottle of shampoo in the bathroom, along with the toothbrush, the box of tampons, the cotton wool for cleaning her face. And the school reports and the library card, the passport even; and that favourite mug in the kitchen cupboard, the one with the multicoloured spots like giant Smarties all over it, which sat there on the shelf untouched now, while all the other mugs around it came and went, and came and went. Out it went. Out everything went. The clothes, the old toys, the bedding that still smelled of her. Out. Out. Out.

But it still wasn’t enough. Vanessa was still there, haunting the air, haunting their lives. So the house had to go, and the marriage, too. And what must it have been like then for Mrs Reiber still to have Simon to look upon, Simon with his blond wavy hair and his blue eyes, his fine bones and his tall, slim body? What must it have been like to have one child left, so very much like the other, and so be reminded constantly of what was gone, and of what remained?

She is the one that I really feel for: Mrs Reiber, whose only way of coping with the ceaseless roll of day after torturous day is to pretend that she never had a daughter at all. Mrs Reiber, who loved her daughter so much that no comfort will ever be found.

In March it is Jono’s birthday. This year it falls on a Sunday, which means his party will be the day before. This year I have booked an hour and a half of bowling, followed by a pizza. He has invited eleven boys, those that he is friends with and those that he would like to be friends with. They arrive in ones and twos and threes, dropped off by parents who mostly can’t even be bothered to stop and speak to me. Some of the boys barely even speak to Jono; instead they cluster in their little groups, bored, so rude that I want to slap them. All morning Jono has been anxious and agitated, dreading the whole thing. It breaks my heart to see how hard he tries, to see how he swings from frowning bewilderment one minute to desperate, hysterical laughter the next. We are not natural performers in our family. We don’t put on a good show.

In the restaurant, Andrew and I sit at a small table away from the boys, from where we can sip our coffee and watch them. We watch how they compete to be the funniest, the smartest, the most important in the group. Food is flicked, drinks squirted through straws. One boy is jeered at for his haircut, another because his phone’s out of date.
They’re just boys
, Andrew says, but I sit there tense, wishing it was over. When Jono isn’t looking, one of them tips pepper all over his pizza, which of course everyone thinks is a huge joke. Jono doesn’t know why they are laughing at first, though he joins in and laughs along with them, making them all laugh even louder. And then he takes a bite.

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ I snap, seeing Jono’s face flush scarlet and his eyes flood with tears as he breaks into a cough, and I start to stand, to go over there, to tell them all to just grow up and behave like humans, not animals, but Andrew sticks out his hand and stops me.

‘Don’t,’ he says, ‘you’ll embarrass him. You’ll make him feel like a baby.’

And then we have to pay for the whole thing. Bowling and dinner for twelve. Andrew sticks it on his credit card, trying not to flinch. Bang goes that week in a caravan that he was so keen on.

Jono is quiet in the car on the way home. I glance in the mirror and see him staring out the window. He looks exhausted.

‘You okay, Jono?’ I ask.

He grunts a reply.

And Andrew says, ‘Did you enjoy yourself then, old boy?’

‘Yes,’ Jono lies automatically.

‘Good,’ Andrew says decisively. ‘That’s all that matters.’

Jono carries on looking out of the window. For the rest of the journey we are all silent.

And then the next day Jono has to perform all over again, for his family this time. My parents arrive in time for lunch, bearing presents and an excess of birthday bonhomie. Andrew’s mother is already here and has been since yesterday morning, when Andrew drove all the way to Leicester and back to fetch her. She sits on the sofa from which she has barely moved since she arrived, radiating displeasure.

At least she didn’t come to Jono’s party, though he was terrified that she would.

‘Come along,’ Andrew said, doing his best to persuade her, while Jono glared at him, absolutely horrified. ‘You’ll enjoy it.’

But, ‘No, thank you,’ she said pointedly. ‘I don’t want to get in the way.’

We had a row about her, of course. We always do. No, not a row, exactly; a
disagreement.
Andrew doesn’t do rows. He wanted her to come for the week.

‘It’ll be nice for her,’ he told me, as I stood in the kitchen last Sunday evening, chopping up beans. ‘It’ll give her a break.’

‘It won’t be nice for me,’ I said.

‘Come on now,’ he said, in the kind of tone that you’d use on a truculent child. ‘She doesn’t see much of Jono.’

And, like a truculent child, I responded, ‘What about her precious cat?’

‘It’ll go into the cattery.’

A whole week with her watching me, judging me, poking around in my business? No way. Absolutely, no way.

I wouldn’t be able to see Simon.

I stopped what I was doing and looked at him. And I said, ‘I assume you’ll be taking the week off work, then?’ And I saw it cross his eyes, that hesitation, that doubt. It hadn’t even occurred to him that he should do that.

He pushed his hand back through his hair and lowered his eyes. ‘Well, I’d
like
to, but I’m really busy at work at the moment. I just don’t know if it will be possible . . .’

‘Well, then.’ I picked up my knife and my beans and carried on chopping.

‘Rachel,’ he said, ‘it’s not that much to ask, is it? She could come up for Jono’s birthday and just stay on for a few days . . .’

It wasn’t going to happen. It just wasn’t going to happen.

‘Andrew,’ I said, without looking at him, ‘if you want your mother to come and stay, then make it when you can take the time off to entertain her. She is your mother, after all.’

‘She doesn’t need entertaining,’ he said. ‘It’ll be nice for her just to be here.’

I snorted. I couldn’t stop myself.

‘For God’s sake, Rachel, she’s my mother.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but she’s not staying all week unless you can get the time off work.’

I could feel him glaring at me. I ignored him, and carried on chop-chop-chopping at those beans.

‘I don’t understand you,’ he said at last. ‘What do you have to do all day that means you’re too busy to be hospitable to my mother?’ He walked out of the room without waiting for a reply.

But no way could I give in, and go a whole week without seeing Simon. And so Lois is here just for the weekend. On Monday Andrew will have to go into work late, after he has taken her back to Leicester.

‘She could always go on the train,’ I said.

And Andrew said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not sending my mother home by train.’

‘That’s up to you, then,’ I said.

But Andrew, who likes to have the last word, snapped back, ‘Well, actually it’s not, really, is it?’

I don’t know what he told his mother. No doubt they will have discussed me on the long, cosy drive down from Leicester. And now she sits on my sofa, puffed up with umbrage, while Andrew dances in attendance, doing his best to please her and make up for the failings of his wife. I hate the way he acts so falsely jolly. I hate the way he says, ‘Come on, Jono, show Grandma what you got for your birthday,’ and, ‘Tell Grandma what we did yesterday, Jono; tell her about the bowling,’ thus heaping yet more pressure on poor Jono to perform.