Flight (16 page)

‘Are they happy?’ Wren asks, her voice barely audible.

‘Very happy,’ Laura replies, and Wren hears the pleasure and pride in her voice. ‘And Phoebe – she’s beautiful, and clever, just like her mum.’

Wren’s breath draws in and out, sharply ice cold. ‘Just Phoebe?’ she whispers.

‘No, of course not
just
Phoebe. I know it’s hard for you to ask about him, Wren. But Rob – he’s a brilliant dad. If you could see him with her. She’s the apple of his eye.’

‘Just the two of them?’

Laura hesitates. ‘And me. I – when it was clear you really
weren’t coming back – I moved in. We stuck together, Wren. Not only for Phoebe – you understand? Without you there, we needed each other more than ever.’

‘Yes, yes – I had hoped – ’ Wren’s mind scrabbles for reason, unable to articulate through her swelling panic. ‘But no other children? You didn’t – ’

‘No,’ Laura replies. ‘We didn’t.’

A new grief rushes in at Wren, a missing piece, an absence as profound as death. In the cocoon of the cave, Wren can almost conjure up the clean scented heat of her newborn daughter’s downy head, feel the invisibly soft chub of the back of her little hand, the flutter of sleepy eyelashes against the crook of her neck. What can she say? What is there to say?

‘Does she still have dimples on her knuckles?’

Laura shifts on the ledge, turning to face Wren in the blackness, never releasing her hand. ‘No, Wren, her fingers are long and slender, just like yours. She’s not a baby any more. She’s twenty, and God knows I hope Phoebe will forgive me for telling you this – but Wren – I think she’s pregnant.’

Soon after they rise on Sunday morning, Laura starts to regret her decision to tell Wren about Phoebe’s pregnancy. Until then she had managed to bite her tongue, to hold back and resist the almost overwhelming urge to reach out and shake her friend, demand answers to all the questions she left floating in the empty space she created all those years ago, when she walked away from them. When she ran away. She has to tread more carefully, Laura reminds herself, if Wren is to trust her.

Wren has retreated within herself again, withdrawn to the aloof, unreachable place from which she greeted Laura when she first arrived at the cottage on Friday afternoon. It feels as though the returning warmth and friendship they shared yesterday – the comfort and honesty – as though none of that ever happened at all, and they’re right back to where they started. Even the dogs can sense it; they pace from room to room at Wren’s heels, Willow releasing a little whimper every time Wren closes a door on them.

Laura helps herself to toast, putting the kettle on and searching through the cupboards for jam or honey. ‘Want one?’ she calls out through the back door, where Wren is busy with a blunt screwdriver, cleaning the mud clods from the soles of her walking boots.

Wren maintains a fixed expression, continuing to dig into the tread of her boots.

‘Want a cup of tea?’

After a brief hesitation, she jerks her head in assent, still refusing to meet Laura’s eye. She looks furious.

Beyond her, the view out to the rocks is a clear one; it’s going to be another fine day, icy and bright. Laura wonders if this is the last she’ll see of Wren in this lifetime – if
this
will be their final time together. Anxiously she wonders if her message reached Phoebe – whether she’s been trying to make contact since Laura switched off her phone last night and put it back in her bag.

‘I bet it’s beautiful here in the summer,’ she calls out to Wren, the troubling ripples of her thoughts compelling her to speak. ‘It’s really quite idyllic.’

‘Gets busy,’ Wren replies. She drops her boots to the stone step with a clump and pushes her socked feet into them, rigidly tying the laces in double bows. ‘Londoners.’

Laura smiles, handing Wren her tea. ‘Like you, you mean?’

‘Not like me at all.’ She takes the cup and walks away, leaving a dark trail through the dewy grass of the sloping lawn, down to the old bench, where she brushes away dead leaves and sits facing out across the quiet bay. The dogs trot along in her wake, and Laura watches from the doorway as Wren stoops to lift them on to the bench beside her, one on either side. Badger eases his long snout beneath her arm, to rest on the warmth of her thigh, and Wren continues to gaze out over the horizon, one hand on her mug, the other absently stroking the neck of the little dog. Her white breath lifts and carries like mist and it strikes Laura that here, alone at Tegh Cottage, Wren really could be the last remaining person in the whole world.

The image is that of a still life, a moment captured in history – a study of solitude. Slowly, Wren turns to face
Laura, and the unflinching fix of her gaze tells her that she knows she’s been watched all this time. She lifts a hand to beckon, shifting Badger on to her lap to make space on the bench. Laura follows the dew tracks and sits, wrapping her coat tighter against the frosty morning, letting her eyes fall across the waking bay as she waits for Wren to speak.

Minutes pass and they sit in silence, both focused on the ocean and the clearing sky beyond. Laura cannot stand the waiting, cannot stand Wren’s lack of words. ‘Do you regret it?’ she asks. ‘Do you regret leaving Phoebe?’ She finds herself studying Wren’s profile, the lean curve of her long neck, the strong, aquiline nose and the roughly cropped hair.

‘You could never understand, Laura,’ Wren replies. ‘You’ve never had a child. I gave up more than just Phoebe, when I walked away. Do you think it was easy?’

Laura hates her for it. ‘I know about loss,’ she answers. ‘And I know about giving things up.’

When she was sixteen, Laura decided she wanted to be a guitarist, to be in a rock band, and therefore she wanted to learn to play the guitar.

Her father was dead set against the idea. ‘It’s a waste of bloody money, if you ask me. If you’d wanted to play an instrument you’d have done it years ago. I’m not coughing up for a bloody fad.’

But Laura already had a Saturday job clearing dishes at the Maystream Hotel, so as far as she was concerned she was a woman of means – she would pay for her own lessons.

The school put her in touch with an ex-pupil, a young peripatetic music tutor who was happy to teach her popular chords rather than classical guitar, and who could fit her in
on Saturday afternoons after she had finished her kitchen shift. His name was Declan – Dec – and from the outset he treated her like an adult, not just some dippy kid to be humoured. The hotel manager, Mr Adams, let them use a small corner of the function room, and there, in between short bursts of ‘Smoke on the Water’ and ‘Brown Sugar’ they talked about music, films and TV, discussed the historical significance of jazz versus punk, gossiped about the many failings of Mr Clitheroe, the headmaster at the primary school they found they’d both attended. They could talk without pause, sharing their ideas, debating their tastes, until the weightwatching ladies of Gatebridge arrived to bustle through the doors at 5.45, putting an end to the lesson. Through Dec, Laura learned the language of politics, and with it a rich new vocabulary was hers: of arms treaties and car bombs, milk increases and militants, missiles and miners, Thatcher and Reagan, Gandhi and the Ayatollah Khomeini. Her ideas and opinions took root and blossomed. Her passions were ignited.

The day she told Dec comes back to Laura with
knife-sharp
precision: the slump of his wide, angular shoulders and the way the light from his first-floor window lit up the unkempt fuzz of his golden tangle of hair, the shift in his face from cheery intrigue to ashen horror. The image of his tanned knee pressing against the tear in his age-worn jeans, the threads of material straining in soft webs of cotton. He put his face in his hands. Soon afterwards a decision was made, with the background help, she’s sure, of his parents.

On the evening they returned from London, Dec parked his dad’s BMW at the end of her street and turned off the engine.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

She nodded, still woozy from the procedure. For the entire journey she hadn’t been able to stop weeping, and her eyes felt swollen and sore.
This is happening to someone else
, she repeated wordlessly,
and soon this will seem like a film I watched on TV, another person’s memory, not mine
. Outside the car, the street lamps were already on; she hoped her parents weren’t watching the clock. With any luck her dad would be absorbed in
A Question of Sport
or
The Krypton Factor
, too busy berating the knucklehead contestants to notice his only daughter returning home from an abortion clinic. She winced at the words inside her head.

‘What will you tell your folks?’

Laura dabbed the corners of her eyes with a crumpled tissue. ‘They think I’ve been on a shopping trip with friends. I’ll tell them I’ve got a cold and go straight to bed.’

‘Remember what the nurse said: plenty of bed rest and painkillers until you’re feeling ready to get up and about.’ He touched her wrist gently, talking to her for the first time as if she
was
just a kid, not the young woman she’d thought she’d become with him. ‘Now, do you want me to drive up a bit nearer, so you don’t have to walk?’

Laura shook her head and felt around for the door handle. The last thing she needed was her dad spotting Declan and quizzing her about where she’d really been. As she eased her legs from the car her abdomen cramped like crushing bone, and she felt the deep regret of reality as a rush of blood left her body to soak into the surgical padding supplied by the hospital. She leant in to retrieve her bag, catching the expression of fear on Dec’s face as he bent low to see her off, one arm hooked over the steering wheel.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said quietly, the bitterness seeping through. ‘I won’t tell anyone, Dec. You’re off the hook.’

She’ll never forget the look of relief on his face; the gratitude.

When Laura has finished talking, Wren leaves the bench and fetches a wide rake that’s leaning against the side of the cottage. She hands it to Laura. ‘You can rake up the leaves,’ she says, ‘while I dig the compost into the vegetable patch. The garlic wants putting in before November’s out.’

Laura sets to work on the autumn debris that litters the garden, glad of the distraction. Every once in a while she glances over at Wren, noticing how differently she moves when she’s labouring, how easily her limbs work with the elements, in the open. She wishes she could look inside her head, see what it is she’s thinking, know what she’s feeling. She wishes Wren would say something,
anything
.

‘Do you think I should feel guilty about what I did?’ she calls over, the rake gripped in her hand like a staff. She hears the challenge in her own voice. ‘Getting rid of a baby like that?’

Wren continues to drive her fork into the earth, turning great clods of frost-hardened soil, breaking them up with a smash of the prongs. Why won’t she speak, say something about the things
she
left behind, the baby
she
gave away?

‘Because I do,’ Laura presses on. ‘There’s not a day that passes when I don’t.’ She raises her voice against the gulls that screech and soar above them. ‘But that’s OK – I think we should accept responsibility for our actions, don’t you? I miscarried four times in the years since that termination.
Four times
. So many times that in the end I couldn’t bear the thought of having a baby at all, for fear that it might end up dying on me anyway. But the abortion was my
decision; I should expect to feel something – for there to be repercussions. Why wouldn’t there be?’

From the shift in Wren’s posture Laura knows that she recognises this as a personal attack. It is. Laura wants a confrontation, for Wren to admit to her own failings, to explain why she left them all; why she left
her
, Laura, to fend for herself.

Instead, Wren strides casually towards her and takes the rake from her hand, exchanging it for the fork. Laura watches as Wren walks away and begins to gather the small leaf-piles into one large pyre over an already blackened patch of lawn. Her arrogance is staggering.

‘How come I have to do all the talking?’ Laura demands, driving the fork into the vegetable patch, ramming the prongs into the soil with the force of her boot. ‘When do I get to hear what you’ve got to say? Because believe me, Wren, you’ve got all sorts of good reasons to judge me – but you’re far from spotless yourself! At some point you’re going to have to face up to things – you can’t run away forever!’ She’s shouting now, so absorbed in her own anger and grief that she’s taken aback to see Wren walking away, out through the garden gate with Badger and Willow at her heel, down through the meadow towards the coastal path.

‘Wren!’ she shouts after her, but Wren just keeps on walking.

Thinking back to their earliest days together, it was obvious that Rob fell for Wren on that very first day in the college refectory. He was tongue-tied, dopey with it, like a
sparkly-eyed
pup. He would knock things over, struggle to remember the simplest of words – unless he’d had a few drinks, when
the words would spill out of him like a rushing tap. Initially, Laura put his mute adoration down to his inexperience with the opposite sex; after all, he had spent his entire childhood running around with her, Laura – chief tomboy of Gatebridge village – and she didn’t exactly count as ‘the opposite sex’. But who was Laura to disagree? Wren
was
captivating, different. She didn’t seem to need people in the same way as everyone else, and she certainly didn’t seek anyone’s approval but her own. Laura loved her fierce independence, her quiet resilience; she took power from it when she herself was failing all over the place, needing too much, on her own solitary quest for approval. For Wren there was no anxious mum and dad phoning on Sunday nights, no one checking if she was eating well, how her exams were going, whether she’d paid this month’s rent. No cosy trips home in the holidays for laundry services and home-cooked food. Wren had been by herself from the very beginning. And that was the strength of her – her ability to be entirely alone, entirely at peace. So unlike Laura, who needed everything, everyone. Looking back, Laura can see how wrong both states were for a young woman starting out in the world, and her gratitude for Rob rushes in at her like a wave of shock, reminding her of his existence. Rob was their balance, their well-adjusted prop-in-the-middle.

Now, Laura stands at the gate to the meadow, watching, watching, until finally Wren comes into view again, a small dot of a woman leaving prints in the wet sand as she heads towards her rocks, with two tiny dogs weaving a path behind her. What would Rob do now? In a rush of urgency, Laura returns to the house and locates her mobile phone in the deepest pocket of her overnight bag where she’d stashed it last night. She flips through the address book until she
reaches the icon with Rob’s face on it.
Call Rob
, she selects, and she brings the phone to her ear and listens as the line starts up, sending out a signal, reaching out to the man she’s loved her entire life, the one man who’s never let her down.

It rings, five times, six, seven, and then, just as Laura is starting to fear that he doesn’t want to hear from her – that she’s blown it, that she’s blown the whole thing – Phoebe answers.

Phoebe possessed a sweet serenity from the day she was born. From the first moment she held her in Wren’s hospital room, breathing in her warm, animal scent, Laura was smitten.

‘If we were churchgoers you’d be officially made her godmother at the christening, of course,’ Rob said, when she joined them for Sunday lunch a week after Wren and the baby had arrived home. ‘But we’re not, so instead we thought we should have a special toast for you today – and give you this.’ He handed her a tissue-wrapped gift and started to unpeel the foil of a chilled bottle of champagne, a long-distance delivery from Wren’s mother.