What Women Want (22 page)

‘But what about the hair, the gym . . . ?’ The penny dropped. These hadn’t been tactics employed to impress a new woman. They were to impress his colleagues, the young bloods now running the show who judged a man finished if he’d seen the wrong side of forty, let alone fifty. Paul had clung on for as long as he could but now he was facing the fact that, whatever he did, he wasn’t one of them any more, and never would be again. Her heart went out to him. She knew how much it mattered.

‘I know it’s a bad time, but there must be other jobs.’

He shook his head. ‘Come on. It’s over. They salve their consciences with a big pay-off and I walk into the sunset. I’ve got to face it. I’m fifty-seven and too old to start again. It’s consultancy work and non-executive directorships from now on. Want another?’

She shook her head. While he went off to find another bottle, she remembered Bea talking about her need to control the timing of when and how she left Coldharbour, if it ever turned out that she had to. Paul must have felt the same way. For the last weeks he had sensed the control slipping from his hands without consciously realising it. The shock and humiliation must have been terrible. She could imagine how low he must feel right now. At least money wasn’t the issue, thank God. And at least she could help, now that she knew what was going on. How selfish she’d been.

When he came back, she got up and hugged him tight.

‘Whoa, hang on. I’m going to drop the bottle,’ he gasped, extricating himself to put it down, then returning to her arms. ‘What’s all this about?’

‘I am so, so sorry,’ she said, leaning her head into the hollow beneath his collarbone. ‘I’m such an idiot to have doubted you.’

‘I don’t blame you. I should have talked to you but then I would have had to admit to myself that something was wrong. And we’ve both been so busy.’

‘I know. I thought when the children left home life would be easier but that’s not how it’s turned out. I suppose I’ve thrown myself into work so I don’t have to think about them living their own lives – Sam thousands of miles away. Emails are great but they’re not the same. I was so pleased when Pete and the others asked me to be a partner in the practice that I didn’t think of the effect the extra workload might have on us. And I can’t backtrack now.’

‘I wouldn’t want you to. This isn’t your fault. I’ve seen plenty of men my age go the same way, some of them even sooner. Deep down, I’ve known that I couldn’t last for ever, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it. I should have prepared myself better.’

They sat down and talked, leaning against one another on the sofa. Kate knew it would take time to repair the damage to Paul’s self-esteem, and for him to decide where he wanted to go next in life. But the best thing to come out of this evening was that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with their relationship, nothing that a little time and attention couldn’t put right.

Despite having her left wrist in plaster, Adele had managed to make her trademark minestrone, learned during her and Bob’s lifelong love affair with Italy, and eaten by the family for Sunday supper ever since. Sitting with her at the scrubbed pine table in front of the Aga, grating Parmesan, Bea was, as always, transported back to her childhood. The blue and white patterned plates had never changed, replacements easily picked up at car-boot sales or in the covered market, the Duralex tumblers likewise. There was the familiar semi-circular burn on the table from a casserole that should have been put on a mat, the W scored by Will’s compasses when he was bored doing his maths homework, its patina darkened with age. She remembered the whack he’d got when their parents had finally noticed it. The large dresser was littered with correspondence, notices of what was going on locally, snapshots of the grandchildren, unopened mail-order catalogues, anything that hadn’t been found a home when the table was cleared for a meal. Above her head, a fraction nearer the Aga, the Kitchen Maid was hung with Adele’s tights, a bunch of dried lavender and a couple of tea-towels. The smell of newly baked bread drifted round them. She closed her eyes to the thin layer of dust that coated the less used surfaces. Whenever she came here, she was at home.

Bea had noticed with some sadness that, now Adele had accepted an offer on the house, she had made a start on sorting things out. The cupboards upstairs were virtually empty apart from Adele’s own wardrobe, and the furniture she was expecting the local auction house to shift was marked with large red stickers. Books had disappeared from the shelves, pictures from the walls and in every room boxes waited to be packed, marked ‘junk’ and ‘to go’. Bea felt so proud of her mother. She admired her determination to get what she wanted from life, even at her age. Just shows, she thought, it’s never too late. At the same time, she couldn’t help that feeling of nostalgia. Adele’s move would mark the final death knell to her childhood.

‘Well?’ asked Adele, who was looking particularly spry today.

‘Well what? You’re the one who said she had something to tell me.’ Adele had asked her over for an early supper because she had something she wanted to say. With Ben at football until nine that evening, Bea had agreed, but not without pressing her mother to tell her what was so special.

‘No. I need to think about it a little more. All things come to she who waits.’ With that Delphic remark she hung up.

That was so Adele. If Bea had heard her say that once, she’d heard it a thousand times. She sometimes felt as if she’d been kept waiting all her childhood: for sweets (two a week), for surprises (birthdays and Christmas), for pets (a cat, two dogs and a small assortment of rodents scattered over eighteen years), for decisions (after the subject had been thrashed to death with the rest of the family), for information (after begging to be told). Had she enjoyed any of them more for the delay? She thought not. Adele had been a mother bringing up her family not long after the war when things had been scarce and, as she never failed to remind them, treats were all the more special precisely because they were few and far between. She was determined not to spoil her children and had succeeded. It didn’t take a genius to work out how differently each of the three had reacted to their upbringing. Will had escaped to Oz; Jess was leading a life in which every whim could be satisfied immediately; and while Bea would in some ways have liked that, she affected to despise her sister’s lifestyle and tried to accept delayed gratification as part of her own. Or so she believed.

‘Come on. Spit it out,’ Bea encouraged her mother.

‘That can wait for a moment. How’s it going with Mark?’

‘Far too soon to say.’ Bea felt like screaming with frustration but knew better and decided to play along.

‘I thought he was a good man when you both came down. You could do worse, Bea.’ Adele’s eyes crinkled at the corners with a hopeful smile. As she pushed her hair back from her face, Bea could see the attractive younger woman she must have been.

‘It’s early days but he seems to understand me better than Colin ever did.’ Bea laughed.

‘You thought he understood at the beginning.’

‘Oh, yes. What was to understand? A woman with a wickedly sweet tooth whose biological clock was ticking and who liked a good book. Do you know, we stayed together for almost fifteen years? That’s nearly as long as a minimum life sentence for murder. And I can tell you that sometimes it felt as if it might become one.’

They laughed, and Bea cut a couple of slices of the still warm loaf, spreading hers with butter that melted immediately.

‘But you like him? Mark, I mean.’ There she went again. A little nudge that would become more insistent until the whole lot came spilling out. Bea looked across the table at her mother, diminutive and kindly in her neat duck-egg blue twinset and stripy red and white apron. She’d never lost interest in what went on in her daughter’s life.

‘Why are you suddenly so keen to partner me off with him?’ For a reason she couldn’t quite put her finger on, she was irritated by her mother’s insistence.

‘I thought that was what you were looking for. Otherwise, why all that dating malarkey?’

She had a point. After all, Bea had often travelled down to bore her for hours with her deliberations over the different men she’d met and their total unsuitability to become anyone’s life-partner, let alone hers.

‘I know, I know. That was why I started doing it, but the more I think about it, the more I realise I don’t want someone cluttering up my house again with their razors and shoes and opinions. I like having my wardrobe to myself and, to be honest, my bed too. Don’t get me wrong, Mum.’ Adele was looking a tad dubious. ‘I love the sex and all that but it’s the extras that come with it. Who wants the snoring and duvet-snatching every night of their life? Meeting all those guys, some more desirable than others admittedly, and seeing Ellen and Oliver together has taught me something: lover, yes; live-in lover, no.’

Adele began to laugh again. ‘You’re a dear girl after my own heart.’ She gathered up their plates and, having stacked them in the old sink, foraged in the freezer for her homemade elderflower ice-cream, one of Bea’s childhood favourites.

‘Mum!’

‘Not the sex bit. Not any more anyway, more’s the pity.’ She ignored Bea’s look. ‘It’s the independence thing. When your father was alive, I never thought of myself as anything other than his wife, but after he died I realised I had a choice. I could either do nothing and moulder away or I could decide what I wanted from the rest of my life and grasp what it offered before it was too late. You’re the same. If staying apart’s the kind of relationship that’s going to work for you and Mark, then I’m not going to argue. You’ll do what you want to do anyway. You always have.’

‘Not strictly true. Anyway Mark and I aren’t even close to living together. We haven’t even slept together. We’re going to Norfolk next weekend and we’ll see what happens. Early days. Besides, I’ve got far too much on my plate at work to think about that at the moment.’

‘I thought things were better on that front.’ Adele pulled open the table drawer for the teaspoons before reaching down the blue bowls from the top shelf of the dresser.

‘So did I. But I was wrong. The ghastly Amanda is getting her talons into Adam and her knives out for me. I don’t think I’ve got a chance. The all-too-brief honeymoon’s over.’

‘Then why don’t you think about leaving?’

‘Leave?’ What a question. ‘I couldn’t possibly. What about Stuart and my authors?’

‘If Stuart’s as good as you say he is, he’ll be fine. And the authors will find their own way, you know.’

‘No. It’s not an option at the moment.’ Yet oddly, as she spoke, she was aware that a little seed had taken root in her mind. ‘Besides, I couldn’t afford it.’

Adele scooped out a couple of good-sized dollops of ice-cream. Bang went those resolutions again. ‘Thanks to Colin, you haven’t got a mortgage.’

‘Thanks to that divine barrister who did the divorce settlement, you mean. I wouldn’t have minded getting to know him a little better.’ He had been like a character from Central Casting, she recalled with a flutter. A young Gregory Peck without the American accent.

‘Honestly, Bea! Have you no shame? Apart from the roof over your head, you’ve got enough clothes to last you a lifetime and alimony to help you with Ben. So you don’t need all that much. But that does bring me to why I asked you down tonight.’

At last.

‘I’ve decided to share some of the profit I’m making on the house with you, Will and Jess. Don’t worry,’ she stopped Bea’s protest, ‘I’m keeping most of it to cover the worst eventualities that might happen when I finally reach life’s departure lounge. Though I hope I get struck down long before that. But if the time comes when I can’t look after myself there’ll be enough to cover some sort of care home, God help me. The only catch is that I must keep going for another seven years, so there won’t be any tax to pay on whatever I give you. Bloody government.’

‘Mum, I don’t want it anyway. It’s yours.’

‘That’s not how I see it. This house was all of ours. So all of us deserve something from its sale. And perhaps this might buy you a bit of time to think about doing something different with your life. Anyway, it would give me enormous pleasure to see what you do with it. Better than waiting till I’m dead and gone. There’s no more to be said.’

‘Something different?’ It was an absurd suggestion. She wasn’t trained for anything else and had no idea what she could possibly do outside the world of books.

‘Why not? I am, so why can’t you? Think about it, Bea. That’s all I’m suggesting. If you decide you don’t need the money, you can always save it for Ben.’

Bea looked across the table at her mother, returning her sharp gaze. Her iron-grey hair framed a determined expression. Bea had learned long ago there was no point in arguing with Adele when she had made up her mind. The only thing to do was to make up her own, and in that split second, she did so. Pushing back her chair, she stood up and walked around the table to give Adele a big hug.

‘Thank you. It’s going to be really helpful when, and if, I make a change.’

‘That’s just what I hoped you’d say. Now, what else have you got to tell me?’

‘I want to talk to you about Ellen.’

*

Looking back over the day, Ellen could see that storm clouds had been gathering all afternoon. Oliver had arrived just as she was putting together a scratch sandwich lunch. Matt was in a state of high excitement at the prospect of a friend’s football party and sleep-over – on a Sunday! Emma had patched up her differences with Freya and they were now inseparable again. If they weren’t together, Emma spent hours closeted in her bedroom, giggling with Freya on the phone. Now she announced she would be staying overnight at Freya’s.

Normally Ellen drew the line at the children being away on the night before a school day but she had managed to convince herself to bend the rules. Their absence meant that she could have Oliver to herself. For once, they didn’t need to snatch a hurried hour or two at the flat but had the whole evening together.

That afternoon, though, the children were being particularly trying, so she made allowances for his tetchiness with them. Why should he be consistently pleasant when his attempts to forge any kind of relationship with Emma were met by a brick wall? She was either dismissive or plain rude. Ellen felt like shaking her, embarrassed that her daughter could be so ill-mannered, but at the same time she didn’t want to cause a scene by saying anything. Meanwhile Matt wouldn’t keep still or quiet. He dashed around the house, noisy and insistent. Aware of Oliver’s worsening mood, Ellen had taken her son to one side and asked him to calm down – with no effect whatsoever.

By the time they had left, she felt completely ragged, exhausted by the efforts she’d made to keep the peace. She’d been careful to make Oliver’s ham sandwich with just the amount of mustard that she knew he liked. She’d uncorked a bottle of his favourite Sauvignon. She insisted he didn’t help but sat him in a quietish corner with the
Observer
and a drink. She suggested Emma and Matt went upstairs to pack their stuff. But she couldn’t stop the frenzy of family life intruding and Oliver plainly wasn’t in the mood to tolerate it. He fortified himself with a couple of glasses of wine but, judging from his thunderous expression, they didn’t improve matters.

At last the children left and a blessed silence descended on the house. However, Ellen’s hopes that the atmosphere would change with their absence had been misplaced. The children might not be there, but they had clearly irritated Oliver beyond the point of no return. He remained monosyllabic, clearly not in the mood for conversation. They ate supper on their knees in silence, watching a dullish episode of
Midsomer Murders
.

On the way to bed, their exchanges had been kept to a minimum. But what did she expect, she asked herself, as she brushed her teeth. He didn’t have family of his own and wasn’t used to the pandemonium, the constant demands and changes of mood. It was unreasonable to imagine he would adapt immediately, especially when Emma was making things so difficult. She would be patient and do whatever it took to smooth over this difficult period of transition. Everyone was allowed an off-day or two, including Oliver.

When she returned to the bedroom she found him standing by her side of the bed in his boxers, her photograph of Simon in his hand. A slight frown creased his forehead and a pale blue vein she’d never noticed before had appeared at the left side of his temple. She imagined the blood pumping through it.

‘What’s the matter?’ She crossed the room to stand beside him, touching his arm.

He flinched, then moved away from her, almost bumping into the chair where she’d left her clothes.

‘What’s wrong?’ she persisted. ‘I know the kids have been a pain today but that’s what they’re like. They’ll come round in the end.’ But how many times am I going to have to reassure him before they do?