Whatever You Love (15 page)

David was smart enough to take his cue. ‘Aunt Lorraine has said they can help her make chocolate pudding. And Uncle Richard has got a new DVD. It’s about dinosaurs.’

I looked down at Betty. ‘That sounds good, doesn’t it?’ I said brightly. She nodded.

Rees allowed himself to be prised from me, still whimpering but without hysteria.

David mouthed, ‘Thanks,’ as he turned away.

*

When the children got home from their Sundays with their father, I always quizzed them carefully about what they had done. He had promised me they would not meet Chloe without my permission, so he couldn’t take them back to his place, wherever that was. When it was too cold for the beach or the playground, that meant either trips further afield in the car or visits to Aunt Lorraine’s house, which had become a sort of no-man’s-land or neutral territory between us.

‘So, did you help Aunt Lorraine make chocolate pudding?’ I asked Betty casually, as I washed her hair in the bath that evening.

‘I did the stirring!’ piped up Rees, who was sitting on a soggy bathmat, wrapped in a towel, making spaceship noises while he wiggled his fingers.

‘No, you didn’t!’ spat Betty. ‘I did the stirring, you just helped!’

Before Rees could open his mouth to scream abuse at his sister, I jumped in with, ‘I’m sure you both helped Aunty Lorraine lots and lots.’

‘So did the lady!’ Rees said.

I was combing conditioner through Betty’s long hair. The comb snagged on a tangle. ‘Ow! Mum, you’re
hurting
!’

‘Sorry darling, sorry…’ I concentrated on the combing for a few minutes. Betty had fallen suspiciously silent. ‘Which lady?’ I asked eventually.

‘Daddy’s friend,’ Rees confirmed helpfully.

‘She came later,’ Betty said quickly. I was not sure whether her nervousness was because she had been urged to deceit by David or whether she was simply picking up on my mood.

‘Her name’s Eddy,’ said Rees, pulling his towel over his head and rolling around the floor.

‘Eddy’s a boy’s name,’ said Betty, in a tone of voice that made it clear she had only just restrained herself from adding the word, stupid. ‘Her name is Ee-dy!’

*

As soon as the children were asleep, I sent David a text.
Who
the fuck is Eedy
?

His reply must have been carefully composed, maybe shown to Chloe before he sent it, as it took half an hour to come through.
Edie is nickname for Chloe. Battery went flat and
Richard couldn’t find leads so she came. Lorraine invited her in.
Wasn’t planned. Sorry
.

I did not trust myself to compose a measured reply, so for once in my life, I had the good sense not to respond.

Edie
. E. I wondered if he called her by her surname as well, or her initials. I wondered if he played that trick on her, the one where you make someone look down by pointing at something on their top or jumper, just so you can flick their nose with your finger as they drop their gaze.

A week later, David rang. I listened in silence while he gave a full and detailed explanation for why he had had to call Chloe to help him jumpstart the car that Sunday, why Lorraine had invited Chloe in, and how he thought it was probably for the best that the children met Chloe unexpectedly and quickly like that without turning it into a big drama. He told me he was sorry that he hadn’t been able to consult me first and it honestly wasn’t planned and I would just have to take his word for that. Then he altered his tone and told me, with insulting gentleness, that he and Chloe were going to have a baby.

The next morning, as soon as I had dropped the kids off, I went up to the cliffs. I had an idea that it would be good to go to the spot where David had threatened to throw me over the edge to acknowledge that my marriage was over. I am not sure why I thought this was a good idea – maybe for the same reason that physicians performed blood-letting in the eighteenth century. Maybe I thought that if I caused myself some extra emotion I would feel drained afterwards – not better, perhaps, but too exhausted to care.

Everything is reversible except a child. A child will always be there, I thought, no matter what.

I did everything that I knew would cause me most pain. I walked slowly, taking long strides, up to the point where David had grabbed me with that strange mixture of passion and aggression, nearly ten years before. As I walked up the slope, I pictured me and him walking together, hand in hand, about to spend the rest of our lives together. I pictured the way he turned on me, perhaps not even knowing himself what he was about to do. I rubbed at my upper arms as I walked, feeling the grasp of his hands on them, the firmness of his grip, remembering my sudden knowledge that this was more than his usual messing around. I remembered the unexpected venom and passion in his gaze. Inevitably enough, I wandered up towards the edge of the overhang. Ten years on and still it had not dropped into the sea. Time it did, really, I thought.

As I walked slowly towards the edge, I was already picturing myself staring over it, at the huge chunks of jagged concrete below and the brown shingle and the grey and white of the English Channel. I began to shiver violently and it was more than just the cold. I was contemplating how easy it would be. I was thinking about looking over in the same way I had done that day but without David’s arms to hold me. I was imagining tipping forward, slowly at first, letting my centre of gravity pull me, arms outstretched in a simile of flight. I was wondering if falling like that stole the breath from your body, whether maybe you were already unconscious when you smacked against the ground, or whether your mind screamed all the way down at the irreversibility of your decision. One moment of bravery, that was all it would take. After that, you would have no choice.

I would like to say that as I approached the overhang, I was indeed contemplating throwing myself off, just standing on the edge and tipping, maybe without even looking down. I would like to say I felt the pull of gravity, the magnetic force of the concrete blocks below. The truth was, I didn’t even get close to the edge. Before I was near enough to look over, I pulled back, afraid and shivering, hating my cowardice, convinced that a life of post-David misery was what I was destined for, was nothing more than I deserved.

*

As I turned to go, I saw the encampment, a group of mobile homes, four or five of them in a neat row and the others grouped haphazardly around. The first few, the neatly arranged ones, had not attracted controversy – they had been placed there by the landowner who had registered them as holiday homes. The others had been added more hurriedly and local migrant workers moved into them at the landowner’s request – some deal he had struck with the leaders of the group concerned. It had made the local newspapers due to planning concerns.

From where I was, I could see down into the patch of land in the middle of the haphazard grouping. Two cars were parked next to each other, both with their bonnets up, and men stood around regarding the cars, raising their arms occasionally. Beyond the mobile homes, there were four other cars, three of them second-hand saloons but the fourth a new-looking fourby- four. It stood out enough for me to wonder if it was a collective decision amongst the group to pool resources into one smart car that was the public face of the group, while the rest of their vehicles were half-broken, run down. As I watched, a woman descended from one of the mobile homes with a bundle in her arms and crossed the land, ignored by the men, before disappearing behind another of the homes. It was a brief glimpse of other lives, different from my own, a reminder of how narrow my own concerns had become. I chided myself as I strode back down the hill.

*

All I’ve proved is that suicide isn’t an option, I thought, walking back to the car park, and I think I knew that already. I had left my car unlocked but no one had come near it. There was no one else around at that time on a Monday morning.

I went shopping. I bought myself underwear in the tacky new womenswear shop that had opened up when the betting shop closed down and while I was paying for it got into a long conversation with the assistant about how well maroon contrasted with pale skin. Afterwards, I ordered a coffee with amaretto syrup in a large white mug at the only decent Italian café on the esplanade and sat conspicuously in the window for the rest of the morning, reading the newspapers.

*

There was one moment, though. It came around three weeks later and was completely unexpected. Julie was babysitting for me. There was a meeting at the school about the new numeracy and literacy programmes. I didn’t normally go to that sort of thing – Betty was doing fine and Rees wasn’t anywhere near that stage yet – but I was going through a phase of making myself go out. I had been hoping that some of the other mothers that I liked would be there and that there would be a move to the pub afterwards. As it was, nobody I liked had shown up, not even Sally, and everyone else had sloped off home immediately.

It was around 8.30 p. m., already dark. A deep mist had descended upon the town, as it often did on damp winter evenings. I had left the car at home in case there was any chance of a drink and as Julie wasn’t expecting me back immediately, I turned left at the roundabout and walked into town. I couldn’t go to a pub on my own and there was nowhere else to go, bar the chippy, so I descended the stone steps at the end of the esplanade and went for a walk on the pebble beach in the dark, not feeling particularly glum or contemplative, just because I had the freedom to do it when most evenings I was trapped at home.

No one else was around. The mist was heavy and the sea lost behind the mist. I walked into it, down to the water’s edge, then stopped still to listen.

I felt it then. I felt its pull, in the deep quiet of the enveloping fog and the constancy of the waves. The gravity of the clifftop had not done it, but the chill mist, the invitation in the gentle shushing sound of the water, they spoke to me in a way that the drama of vertigo had not. Perhaps you are not a coward, after all, they seemed to whisper, perhaps you just needed to be asked nicely.
How easy it would be, I thought to myself. Remove
your shoes, remove your coat – you don’t need to strip completely.
Or you could keep everything on and weight your pockets with
pebbles if you want to make it quicker. You’ve never been a strong
swimmer and the water is very cold. If you just keep going as far
as you can, you’ll never make it back, even if fear gets the better
of you. Just a few determined strokes and you’ll be too far out
before you know it
. The waves shushed-and-fell, oh so gently, shushed-and-fell, against the shingle. Nothing was visible beyond the mist – out there was chill water and more mist. Its density was an illusion. If I walked into it, it would part to reveal itself and more of itself, its apparent solidity always just beyond my reach.
The water is freezing. You’ll be numb before
you know it
.

I would like to say it was thoughts of my two children that kept me from walking into that mist – it was, in a way, but not in a way that reflects well upon me. I thought of Chloe’s pregnancy and how pleased Betty and Rees would be when they found out they were going to have a baby brother or sister. Then I thought of how, if I died, they would be raised as part of a brand-new family, whole and logical, of how Rees, not much more than an infant himself, would regard Chloe unquestioningly as his mother. I thought of him saying to a friend, when he was grown, ‘My real mother died when I was just a toddler, so I don’t really remember her.’ It wouldn’t matter if he got on with his step-mother or not. She would still be the dominant figure in his life, for good or ill. If I did what I wanted to do, that misty night, Chloe would have it all, everything I had ever loved or cared for. It wasn’t love of my children that kept me safe that night, it was hatred of her.

*

Strange, the way the little things get to you, the way they slide in like acupuncture needles and like acupuncture needles have disproportionate effects. Some months after I found out Chloe was pregnant but before Harry was born, Aunt Lorraine rang me one evening to ask what Rees wanted for his birthday. We had an earnest discussion about just how many Hot Wheels cars a three-year-old needed. He was desperate for more plastic track so that he could make a loop-the-loop for the Hot Wheels cars to whizz around and had also put in a formal request for a hamster. I was a little concerned the two requests might be connected.

‘More cars,’ I said to Aunt Lorraine. ‘Utility vehicles, you know, fire engines and tow trucks and police cars.’

‘Has he got an ambulance?’

I thought about it. ‘I think he’s got three.’

‘Well at least they don’t get lost all the time, not like all those tiny doll things Betty liked.’ It wasn’t the dolls themselves that got lost, it was the tiny rubber clothes; the tiny pink bikinis and stretchy orange mini-skirts and tiny-tiny turquoise rubber boots. All the mass-produced dolls that Betty loved came with outfits only suitable for lapdancing but they seemed domesticated souls at heart. There were tiny dogs as well, and tiny dishwashers. ‘That yucca you brought round for me for my birthday’s still going strong, you know. I’ve still got the ribbon round it.’

I had not seen Aunt Lorraine on her last birthday – it had occurred during the period when David and I were not even on speaking terms. I had remembered the date and bought a card for her but was paralysed by indecision over what to write in it. I had no idea how much his family knew about what had happened between me and David. I could have written simply love, Laura, but my name, standing alone, was still such a strange concept.
Love, Laura, Betty and Rees
? Equally odd. I hadn’t yet accepted we were a trio, that a whole corner of our lives was irrevocably gone. In desperation, I signed the card,
Laura & co
, put it in its envelope and sealed it, then tore it in two and put it in the paper-recycling tub.

So I hadn’t sent Aunt Lorraine a birthday card and I had felt bad about it because it was always me that did the cards and presents for David’s family, of course, and I thought well she won’t get anything from us then, and she might wonder why.

But, clearly, David
had
remembered Aunt Lorraine’s birthday. And so had someone else, someone Aunt Lorraine was, in a momentary lapse of concentration, confusing with me. David hated plants. He would never dream of buying a plant for anybody, let alone putting a ribbon round it.

There were only two people in the world that I still trusted to love me: my children.

*

When Chloe and I eventually met, it was, of course, a huge anti-climax. David engineered it with his usual efficiency, making sure it was in a public place and that we were diluted by the children. He sprung it on me one Saturday morning, ringing me at home and saying that he wanted to take Betty and Rees to the new rollerblade park that had opened up at the leisure centre in Lower Banton. (It was a disappointment, I later learned. The rink was tiny, they played hard rock at unspeakable volume and there was nothing to eat except junk and fizzy drinks from vending machines.) I told him I had already promised Betty we would go to Wellingtons, the discount clothing store in the High Street, to try on new trainers. He agreed she needed the new trainers, then added, oh so casually, ‘Well, why don’t you do that first and then we’ll meet you at the beach café and take the kids off from there?’ We. Us. Him and Chloe and the tadpole of unknown gestation she was carrying inside her.

*

Unlike many beach cafés, ours was actually on the beach, in the lee of the esplanade wall. You could only meet at it rather than in it as it was no more than a sheltered kiosk with a couple of firmly anchored windbreaks either side of four or five cheap tables. The fare was unpleasant – sugared drinks in cartons and white-bread sandwiches with processed cheese – it wouldn’t have lasted two minutes on the High Street but the kiosk’s location gave it a spurious charm. It’s surprising what tastes good after a walk on a cold, windy beach, as long as you have no desire to linger over it. David had chosen the venue for the handover with great care. We would all be feeling cold and brisk and businesslike.

The kids and I were there first – I made sure of that. I bought them each a hot chocolate made from a machine, the froth on top induced by some sort of chemical reaction between hot water, sugar and the additives in the powder. I had a black coffee. The three of us sat huddled at a green metal table, cuddling our drinks. Rees and Betty were moany because it was getting near lunchtime. The sky overhead looked as chemical as our drinks, a swirl of greys and yellows, high and motionless.

After five minutes, I saw David and Chloe approach, walking carefully alongside each other with their hands shoved in their pockets, like a couple who usually hold hands but have decided not to on this occasion. David saw us and raised a hand. At his gesture, Chloe looked up from where she was stepping carefully across the shingle and as she spotted me, she stumbled. She was small, shorter than me and tiny next to David. She was wearing a purple duffel coat over jeans and a purple and brown hat in a tea-cosy shape. She dropped her gaze as soon as she saw us, allowing me to watch her approach in exactly the way I had anticipated. I was surprised. I had expected something a little more glamorous. I felt both relieved and insulted. I stared, hoping she would lift her gaze again and see me watching her but she did not.