A Place for Us (27 page)

Karen

“
E
ASY NOW
,”
SAID
Dawn, as Karen heaved her shopping bag over her shoulder. “Let me get the door for you. Where’s that Joe, then?”

“He’s up on the Levels, meeting some meat guys,” said Karen. “Thanks, Dawn. I’m fine now.”

Dawn stared at Karen’s vast, domed stomach, hidden by her coat. “Look at you. That’s a big baby in there, isn’t it? Sure it ain’t twins?” She roared with laughter.

Karen smiled and hitched her bag up again, unlocking the front door. “See you later.”

“You’re sure you’re all right up here?” Dawn persisted, peering inside at the nondescript carpeted hallway and the stairs that led up to Joe’s flat. Trying to collect information about the adulterous love nest, Karen knew, because no matter how many times she said, “We’re not together. I’m just staying with Joe for a bit,”
no one believed her. That wasn’t how the story went, was it?

“Oh, yes. Till I work out what I’m doing next. It’s very kind of Joe to have me.”

“Hmmph,” Dawn said. “You must be lonely, what with Joe and Sheila and everything that’s going on at the pub these days.”

“I don’t mind. He deserves it. They both do.”

“It’s mad, though, isn’t it?” Dawn folded her arms and leaned against the door.

“Yes, it’s great. Please, Dawn—I hope you don’t mind if I just take that other bag and . . .” Karen began, trying not to snap. Her feet ached more each moment she stood on them, and she felt if she didn’t sit down
soon she might just have to slump onto the stairs, wait for Joe to finish work so he could haul her up to his flat in a sack.

“All right, Karen?” Sheila appeared from the pub. “I’ll help you upstairs with them bags, shall I? Bye, then, Dawn, good to see you. Len’s all right?”

“Oh, he’s fine these days,” Dawn said. “Ever since the varicose veins got done, he’s a new man. All thanks to Dr. . . .” She trailed off. “Well, bye, then.”

“She’s a nice girl, but she needs more to do with her time, now Bill’s fixed Len’s legs.” Sheila huffed upstairs and into the tiny kitchen, dropping the bags on the counter, as Karen followed behind. “Only thing keeping her going before that, running around after him. Now, shall I put the kettle on? You look done in.”

Karen sat down slowly and eased her swollen feet up onto the coffee table. “That’d be great.”

“How long you got to go now?”

“I’m due end of May. I wish it was over, Sheila. Those celebrities they interview in
Hello!
or whatever who go on about how they’ve never felt better—what are they on about? And I’ve still got two months to go.”

“Those magazines conspire against women to keep them in their place. It’s the patriarchy’s finest work,” Sheila said grimly, and Karen looked at her in surprise. “Oh, the last bit’s the worst,” she added in a normal voice. “Everyone knows that. You got all your baby gear ready?”

The same questions, twenty times a day.
How long have you got to go? Have you got everything ready? Is it a boy or a girl? How are you feeling? You look well!
Karen knew from her fellow mothers-to-be in the parenting course they were doing that there were just as many questions she wasn’t being asked. Whether they were going to stay in their current home or move somewhere with more space, for example. No one in Winter Stoke asked Karen that.

“I’ve bought some things but I don’t want to go overboard till it’s here. I’m superstitious. Joe had some journalist down from London last week—she swears by IKEA. He’s obsessed with it now, keeps trying to buy stuff online, only there’s so much you have to go in the stores to buy. That’s how they make their money, isn’t it?”

“Those bloody wineglasses. Ten pounds for twelve, they do them, and those patterned cardboard storage boxes.” Sheila leaned on the counter,
laughing. “Every time I go in there I promise it’s just to get a desk for the office or whatever, and every time I come out with a pile of those patterned cardboard boxes and a lorry-load of glasses and they smash on the way home and I never use those cardboard boxes, never.”

“Well, maybe you should go mad and treat yourself, Sheila.” Karen tried to reach her foot, but her bump prevented her. “Take Joe. He’s desperate to go. I can’t face IKEA, walking round like a beached whale in flats. No way.”

“You look beautiful,” Sheila said. She poured from the teapot. “Honestly, you do. Suits you, being a bit more . . .” She stopped. “Well, never mind.”

“Now you’ve got me worried.” Karen smiled. She hadn’t ever really cared about her appearance. She knew she was attractive—it was part of her pragmatic nature that she accepted it as fact—and often it was boring, men coming on to you because you were short and had big boobs. It was one of the things she’d liked about Bill, that he hadn’t minded much about her clothes or nails or hair, or that she was seventeen years younger than he. He’d liked
her
.

It was Joe she’d tarted herself up for, almost as if she knew she had to play the part of the scarlet woman to make sense of what she was doing—and the irony was, he didn’t like it. They’d only slept together four or five times, but they’d met a few more than that. In summer, going into September . . . before he’d found out she wasn’t just Karen Bromidge, the lonely girl two years older than he, who was new to the area and from the north and sexy as hell and lots of fun, whom he could talk to about his son, and the weirdness of the village, and starting over again, and then have sex with—intense, heated, silent sweaty sex that matched the wet, humid summer. He didn’t know her married name was Karen Winter, and that she lived down the road with the doctor who’d sewn up his finger. She was married, and Joe—Joe was a damn prude, she was starting to think. He’d ditched her faster than a rubbish truck at full speed, and he’d been so angry with her, so bloody furious!

“You should have told me, Karen,” he’d said gently, but his voice was cold. It was early October and chilly in his small flat, where they’d had their secret summer. But summer was definitely over now. “It changes everything.”

“What’s the difference? You weren’t into me,” she’d yelled, not caring
who heard them, how mad she sounded. She’d have been pregnant then, two or three weeks, how weird to think of it now. “You didn’t want to go out with me. I know you didn’t. I’d have thought you’d have been glad, no strings attached, what’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with
you
?” he’d said angrily. “Karen, you can’t just go around lying to people like that. I really liked you. I’d—if I’d known, then . . .”

It had been hard enough to get him to sleep with her, she’d thought. Then she found that if she just kept playing the part of the bad girl, she’d start to believe it, and somehow she’d be okay. But it hadn’t worked out like that. She’d engineered this whole sorry mess, and there was nothing to do but make the best of it.

The memory of it made her shiver. She took a biscuit from the tin and dunked it in the tea Sheila handed her. “This is lovely. Thanks, Sheila.”

Since Karen had moved in with Joe, just after Christmas, Sheila had been nothing but kind to her. It couldn’t have been easy, her star chef suddenly lumbered with a hormonal, homeless, pregnant ex, four weeks after that review in the
Daily News
.

It was funny, when she thought about it. How Lucy had babbled on for weeks about this guy at work, how he was old and sad and keen on her, how he kept saying he’d review the Oak Tree, and Karen just hadn’t believed her. She was too worried about Lucy’s obvious crush on Joe to see any further than that.

Karen sometimes wondered if Lucy knew how profoundly she had changed everything, really. The review had run the week after David’s funeral, Saturday, December 1. A copy of it had been framed, and hung above the bar.

. . . In the cooking of Joe Thorne, the young, gentle chef who spent two years under Jean Michel Folland at Le Jardin in Leeds, we have the very best of British cuisine today. The apparent simplicity of the names of dishes belies the extreme complexity with which they are created. Pressed ham hock, salmon roulade with beetroot relish, goat-cheese ravioli—they all sound straightforward, and they are, for this is no snob’s menu, designed to dazzle and intimidate. Rather it is a menu for a neighborhood restaurant, which happens to be situated in a pub, one that is as old as the
Civil War, in an idyllic little slice of Somerset just outside Bath. The food is locally sourced—in an unpretentious and sympathetically realistic way, none of your foraging for borage nonsense here. The execution is perfect. The atmosphere—under the eagle eye of landlady Sheila Cowper—is welcoming, laid-back, and yet with just a touch of magic: witness the rose hips on the table and the complimentary damson vodka offered to me after my meal. I booked another table for the following week when I left. I cannot recommend this wonderful place highly enough.

It had happened fast. Bookings started coming in that day for dinners and Christmas parties. Tables of six, eight, ten. Then weekend lunches, then requests for birthday parties, private room rental, the works. By New Year’s Eve the restaurant had been booked out for two weeks, and though Sheila and Joe both fully expected the slump in January, it never came. There were mutterings from some of the villagers about cars blocking the high street and not being able to move for Londoners up at the bar now, and there’d been some defections to the Green Man, but as Joe told Karen, he was sure he’d win them back. If necessary, they’d buy the field behind Tom and Clover’s, turn it into a vegetable patch and a car park. Maybe institute a locals-only night, where you had to have a council tax bill with you to claim your table and all you could eat for £40 for two, including wine.

He was full of plans. So was Sheila. Karen went along with them, smiling at their enthusiasm, even as the endless winter passed and the days grew wetter and longer, and her body grew bigger and began to drag her down. She had no idea what the future might hold. She was too terrified to ask herself the question, so she avoided it from anyone else.

•   •   •

She had left Bill after Christmas. Since his father died he was a robot, a man who put on his overcoat every morning, went to his office, solved his patients’ problems, and in the evening came home and either went up to the house to be with his mother or sat in an armchair listening to old episodes of
Hancock’s Half Hour
and staring into space, square fingers drumming on the arms of the chair. She tried to help: she ran errands for Martha, she fielded calls, answered letters. But Lucy wasn’t talking
to her, Florence had vanished off the face of the earth, and Cat was back in Paris. Karen was worried about Martha, more than merely concerned she wasn’t coping. There was something strange about her, about the language she used. Karen didn’t believe some of the things she said, didn’t think she was quite well.

She tried to talk to Bill, to ask him what he thought, what he wanted for tea, what he wanted to watch on TV, but every time he’d just say, “I don’t know, Karen. You do what you want.”

On New Year’s Eve he sat in front of the television, gin and tonic in hand, a plump quarter of lime trapped under the ice cubes. He always had lime, not lemon, just like Martha and David. It was a Winter thing; there was always a pile of jewellike limes in a brown glazed bowl on the table at Winterfold, even in the depths of winter. Karen stood behind him, twisting her fingers together over and over.

“Bill. Bill?”

He’d turned round, and she saw the tears in his eyes, the glazed expression. He hadn’t really been watching anything.

“Yes.” He’d cleared his throat and stood up, with the sofa between them.

“I think I should move out,” she’d said. “I just wondered what you think about it.” There was a pause and, because she was terrified of his answer, she rushed ahead and said, “I think we need some time apart. So you can work out what you feel about all of this. You’ve got so much to deal with at the moment.”

He’d shaken his head. “No, it’s not that, Karen.” He’d moved the empty glass onto the shelf, carefully. She loved how precise he was with everything, how neat and modest his movements were, how he inhabited his space so comfortably, how being with him was to feel safe and secure and . . .

Karen had put her hands in front of her eyes so he couldn’t see her tears.

He’d said gently, “I think you should move out because you have to work out what you want. I can’t make you happy, that’s clear. I loved you. If you want to go, I think it’s best you go. We got it wrong, didn’t we?” He’d looked up, his eyes puckering together, his mouth creased into an awkward smile. “It was always going to be a risk, wasn’t it? Suppose it was worth it. . . .” And then he’d come round the sofa and squeezed her arm. “Do you have somewhere to go?”

She’d gritted her teeth so he wouldn’t see how ill-prepared she was. She hadn’t booked a hotel, rung a friend—she had no friends here now, anyway. “Oh, yeah. I thought I’d . . . I’ll . . . Yes, I’m staying with a friend,” she lied.

“Really?” Bill picked up his keys. “Well, then,” he said quietly. “I’ll leave you alone to get your stuff together. I’ll go and see Ma.”

He’d stood a couple of meters from her and they’d nodded, trying to keep the conversation alive. The distance between them . . . Then Bill had pulled on his coat.

“We’ll talk soon, then. Let me know . . . how you are.”

And he went out, leaving her alone in the little house. Karen packed her bags, tears falling on the duvet cover. She could see every stepping-stone on the path that had taken her to this point, every wrong turn, every mistake. She was completely alone, and there were no fireworks that signified the end of her relationship with Bill. He’d made her chicken Kiev sandwiches. Suddenly that was all she could think about.

•   •   •

Joe met her at the end of the street and helped her with her bags. He didn’t ask any questions, but that first night, he gave up his bed for her.

“I’ll sleep in Jamie’s room. It’s absolutely fine.”

They were very formal with each other. “Thank you,” she’d said, looking at his short, curly hair, the dark hairs on his arms, his strong hands gripping her bag. Trying to remember how it felt to be naked with him, to feel him inside her. She couldn’t; she couldn’t remember it at all. “I won’t be here long. I’ll start looking for somewhere.”