The Flavours of Love (34 page)

Teachers, as far as I know, aren’t allowed to touch pupils in this way. If at all. Certainly not twice in less than a minute.

Mr Bromsgrove is hugging my daughter.

It’s not Damien. It’s him. It was him all along. That’s why he has been trying to charm me, it is not me, it is my daughter he wants. He has kept me distracted with attempts to ‘hook up’, as Phoebe would say, so he could work his magic on her. I was stupid enough to believe it. I actually thought someone other than Joel liked me, found me attractive without knowing me first. When I was allowed to go to school discos, I was always the one stood on the side for the final slow dance, no one even glancing in my direction. By the time I went clubbing in my university days, I had mastered the art of dancing alone, enjoying it, revelling in it while all my friends were snogging or leaving with the men they met. I wasn’t fat in those days, not like in school, but I wasn’t the kind of thin that made me visible or appealing to anyone who hadn’t entered the last chance saloon, either. No one spent the night trying to woo me into bed, they only saw me at one-thirty in the morning, when it looked like they would be leaving alone – and realised I was better than nothing.

Lewis Bromsgrove must have seen that in me, he must have known that I was the type of adult who grew from that kind of child. He must have guessed that I would fall for flattery and I wouldn’t notice he was carrying on with my daughter. Filling her head with lies, allowing his son to take the blame for the things he had done.

They break apart, him obviously realising someone could see them. He steps back, puts a hand on each of her shoulders and lowers his head to talk to her. Phoebe’s head is still trained downwards, but I can see her nodding, agreeing with whatever it is he is telling her. Probably some variation on,
We’ll be together soon, Baby, I promise
.

Suddenly, surprisingly, he steps back even further, shoves his hands in his pockets and seems to be awkward. Even from this distance, I can tell that Phoebe isn’t looking at him with longing, the way I expected her to look at the man she said she felt so close to that she wanted to sleep with him. She looks at him like she would a teacher, a father, really. Is that how he managed to seduce her? Confuse her, appeal to the part of her life that she misses?

Zane became quiet, Phoebe became a guilt-riddled version of herself. She carried on as normal, but blamed and still blames herself. Maybe she’s been desperately searching for someone to be that father figure in her life, someone who can partially fill the gap left by Joel. I’ve been searching for him through cooking, Phoebe has maybe been searching for it through this man.

Phoebe continues to speak and Mr Bromsgrove shakes his head slowly, then suddenly opens his hands in hopelessness. Maybe she wants to come clean and he’s telling her the world wouldn’t understand – that once they’ve decided what to do about the pregnancy, once she’s sixteen, they can go public.

I need to know what they’re saying.

She won’t tell me anything, he certainly won’t. I can’t allow this, though. Whatever ‘it’ is. There is something ‘off’ in the way they relate to each other; I’m not sure if it’s because they have to pretend all the time in public, or if there is nothing there to see. I have watched them together, like I watch all people, I suppose, and there doesn’t seem to be that latent intimacy people who are connected unconsciously show to the world; no awkwardness, no secret looks or forced indifference. There is something, though. For him to twice have so openly hugged her, for her to have accepted the hug so easily, there is something. Maybe my skills aren’t as honed as I thought, maybe I have missed all of this and Lewis Bromsgrove has been grooming her and is now in the process of grooming me to miss what he is doing with his pupil, with a child – with my child.

She returns to school first, and Mr Bromsgrove stands in the street, hands in pockets, staring at the ground looking bewildered until enough time has elapsed before he goes back towards the main road and the main entrance to the school, too. I wait for them to leave before I can. I need to work out how to find out the truth about this.

*

‘How was school?’ I ask my daughter when she climbs into the front seat of my car.

Shrug.

‘Anything interesting happen today?’ I probe.
Did you hug one of your teachers who you may or may not be sleeping with?

‘No,’ she replies. She turns her head and most of her body away from me, like she did the day I found out she was pregnant, to gaze out of the window, watching the world surrounding her school disappear behind us as I take us home. Even though I am driving and have my eyes on the road, I can sense Phoebe’s thousand-yard stare. She has the pregnancy on her mind, no doubt, but is it because she was hugging the father today, or is it something else? What else it could be I have no idea, but I would bet Mr Bromsgrove would know.

‘Phoebe,’ I say after clearing my throat, after I try to dislodge the blockage of fear around my voice box. She doesn’t stop staring out of the window, bobbing around lost and forlorn, like an untethered boat on the sea. ‘Phoebe, you can talk to me about anything and I will listen. If you want me to listen to your thoughts on what to do about the pregnancy, I’m more than willing to do that. If you want to talk through your feelings for the father, we can do that, too. Anything, any time, talk to me and I’ll listen.’

‘You can’t.’

‘Yes, I can.’

‘You can’t, Mum, because you won’t get it. Mums don’t get it.’

She thinks that my life began with Joel, that nothing of me existed before him. My first time I was seventeen, so older than her, but I thought I was in love, too. Actually, I pretended I thought I was in love so that I could do it without too much guilt. I remember going back to his small, dingy flat in Central London after we’d finished our shift working at a department store. I’d fancied him for weeks and I convinced myself it was all right to let him undress me and to watch him roll on a condom and to kiss him back because it was love. What stuck with me most of all was the pretending. It wasn’t awful, being physically, completely entered for the first time, but I pretended to him and to me that I felt something. That it was amazing, that I had experienced something other than the nothingness I did feel when
he was moving on top of me and that I’d
die
if I didn’t do it again with him soon. Pretending is something I did very well.

I pretended quite a few times with him until he decided the new girl in haberdashery was a better fit than me. I cried because I thought I was expected to, but the fact was, I didn’t mind not having to do it again. What got to me was the humiliation of seeing him and the haberdashery girl together, public and loved-up, when he’d been adamant and determined that we keep our ‘thing’ a secret. Their constant canoodling sent me back where I had been: desperate to cope, to fit in, to look better, to be validated in a way I hadn’t been for ages.

‘Try me,’ I say to my daughter. ‘You may find that I do “get it”.’

‘No thanks,’ she replies dismissively.

Bleep-bleep-bleep
, intones her phone in her grey and turquoise, branded St Allison school rucksack.

‘Phone,’ I tell her, surprised it’s not already in her hand.

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘Sounds like a text message.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘Are you going to read it?’

‘I don’t have to read every message the second it comes in,’ she says, with her gaze fixed in that thousand-yard stare out of the window.

Since when?
I think at her. ‘How’s Alzira, these days? I haven’t heard you talk about her in a while.’

Phoebe snorts. ‘Alzira’s family moved back to Portugal.’

‘When? You didn’t mention it.’

‘You didn’t ask.’

‘Oh, I suppose I didn’t.’ I leave it thirty seconds. ‘So, Phoebe, any of your friends move to a foreign country today?’

‘Ha-ha, very funny.’

‘Which girls do you hang around with nowadays? Do you want to invite any of them round?’

She snorts again, an unpleasant sound loaded with the precise amount of scorn to show that I am irrelevant. ‘So you can make weird comments and cook some of your strange food? No thanks.’

‘Well, it’s nice to know what you objectively think of me at least.’ My ego smarts with the efficient way she has slapped me down.

‘See?’ she says.

‘I suppose I do make what others might think of as weird comments. But, much as it might pain you, this is who I am so you’re pretty much stuck with me.’

‘Doesn’t mean I have to expose anyone else to it, though.’

She is being uncharacteristically mean, unusually nasty. I know she hates me, won’t speak to me most of the time, but this is low, uncalled for, and more than a little vicious. ‘Is something bothering you?’ I ask.

She waits a beat, a long enough moment to be filled in my mind with:
Yeah, you
then she says, ‘No.’ Her shrug that follows is a full stop to any more conversation; it tells me that I can talk if I want, but she’s not going to dignify me with any kind of response – not even a shrug.

This has something to do with Lewis Bromsgrove and what I saw today, I know it does.

Friday, 10 May
(For Saturday, 11th)

Saffron
.

I’m really disappointed. I thought after my last letter you might attempt to meet me halfway, at least.

Prove that you believe me when I say I’m sorry by at least leaving your blinds open or something.

It was never meant to be like this.

Please trust me. Please show you trust me by opening your blinds again.

A

‘Thanks for the dropping by,’ Kevin calls as I rush to pack up my belongings.

I’m already pushing it – at five-thirty-five, I’ll be lucky to get there just after six, let alone for six when homework club ends.

I’m sure Phoebe was meeting whoever the father is in the hours between finishing school and coming home, and I need to be there to see if I can spot anyone hanging around. I’ve spent most of the weekend, with the blinds still closed, tossing and turning between whether Lewis could be guilty or not, and I kept thinking ‘not’ but then the fact they were sharing something secret would make me cycle right back to ‘guilty’ again. With so much on my mind, I don’t need this from Kevin.

I pause in stuffing my laptop into its black neoprene carrier. My boss stands in the doorway to his glass box, his weaselly face contorted into a nasty sneer. I think of Joel, how he’d deal with this: he’d quietly work to prove Kevin wrong, would go over and above on every single occasion so that Kevin had nothing to say. This strategy had worked for the last few months but when my life started to fall apart again, and I wasn’t there to immediately do his bidding, Kevin had started this up again. Joel’s way only worked as long as I was doing exactly what Kevin wanted whenever he demanded it. I am being stalked by the person who killed my husband, why does that not scare me more than Kevin? Why am I putting up with this when someone could be planning how to end my life?

‘My stated hours are nine to five-fifteen,’ I say. ‘It’s home time. In fact, it was home time twenty minutes ago.’

Kevin surveys the large open-plan office, split up into desk banks of
four, each person with a divider on either side of them so they can’t easily chat to the person next to them, even though the desks face inwards. There are ten people in here still working, about thirty-five others have gone already, departed as soon as the clock hit five. It’s only me who Kevin has made a comment to today.

‘Yes, for some it is, I suppose,’ he says, pleasantly with a smile. He knows full well that I often finish my work at home, that despite my demotion I mostly do the job I did before even though his good buddy Edgar has the title and salary for it. ‘Like I say, thanks for dropping by today. Hope we see you again tomorrow if your family doesn’t develop another drama overnight.’

I remember vividly, painfully, the unadulterated humiliation of walking away from my other desk, the one beside Kevin’s glass office. It would have been bad enough to pack my belongings into a box and move to the other side of the room, but to have Kevin and my replacement, Edgar, stood over me was something unusually punishing. I’ve never fully recovered from the calculated cruelty of that. They even followed me to my new desk, near the exit and as far away as possible from the wall of large floor-to-ceiling windows. They wanted to underline to me and everyone else in the room that sitting outside the office of the Director of Operations was for the second in command and I now belonged where the new people sat. I was nothing any more – I hadn’t been demoted, they wanted to show, I had been degraded, too.

I clatter my laptop back onto my desk and lean forwards to my computer, catching the satisfied smile that slimes across Kevin’s face – he thinks I’m about to start work again because I’ve been suitably shamed. I’ve never been able to work out quite what my crime was against him, given that my work was always done and on time. Even when my life imploded my work was done. I sometimes wonder if it’s because he’s scared of death. That he thinks he has to distance himself and prove I’m a lesser being which is why Death chose to visit itself upon my life. And if he proves he is better than me then Death will leave him alone. Most of the time I accept it’s probably because he’s a weaselly-faced bastard.

Once he sees I am still at my desk, he retreats into his office. I observe him from under my eyelashes until he throws his wiry frame into his chair, picks up the phone and spins towards the window behind him, resting his ankles up on the wide, low window sill as he stares out over Brighton.

My fingers move over the keyboard to finish backing up my files to the black data key I’d inserted earlier, then I shut down my computer. I pick up my mobile and dart out of the office, down the navy blue-carpeted corridor, up the stairs and onto the top floor, the executive floor.

As I open the door onto that floor, a flush of embarrassment creeps through me – I once thought my career would bring me here. I thought I’d one day be in one of the five offices up here after all the hard work I’d done.