Life Begins (15 page)

It seemed only seconds later that the doorbell rang. Sam, alert instantly to the need to curry favour, sprinted down the stairs and scrabbled with the locks, dragging the hall chair across to reach the top bolt.

‘For your mum, I should imagine,’ said the delivery man, winking as he handed over a large bunch of yellow roses. ‘Birthday, is it? Let’s hope they’re from your dad, eh?’

Sam closed the door slowly. It wasn’t his mum’s birthday, was it? He ransacked his brain, producing a recollection not of Charlotte’s date of birth but that the celebrations tended to coincide with summer half-term. And they hadn’t even had Easter yet, so that was okay. He turned for the stairs, carrying the bouquet carefully in both arms, knowing it couldn’t be from his father but rather hoping the estate agent with the beard wasn’t responsible either.

‘Sam, who was it?’

‘Hang on.’ He took the last few stairs two at a time, spurred on by the realization that flowers, from whatever source, were likely to put her in a good mood.

At first things looked very promising. On seeing the roses, Charlotte propped herself up in bed with a sort of squeal, then tore at the little envelope as if it was indeed a birthday present – the most exciting one she’d ever had. While reading it, she sniffed dreamily at the flowers, then slumped back against the pillows with a goofy smile on her face. They were from Tim Croft, she confessed, goofier still, although Sam, with application that would have given fresh hope to his English teacher, had already worked that out for himself
by reading the note upside-down:
With love from Tim. Dinner next Friday? I never give up.

But the moment Sam laid out the no-school proposal her face went white and hard. She thrust the flowers to one side and said no way, that he was to have a bath and then breakfast, then write two letters, one to his headmistress and one to Rose Porter, and that if he had a problem with that she would think of several others for him to do as well.

‘Thank God we ordered,’ remarked Henry, the following night, as he, Graham and Paul elbowed their way through the crush to the ledge where the bartender had promised to leave the champagne. The bottle had been opened and parked in an ice-bucket, next to six flutes and two bags of peanuts. His companions, hot and dry-mouthed as they all were from the theatre’s over-zealous central-heating system, rubbed their hands in appreciation while Henry poured.

‘Should we wait for the ladies, do you think?’ ventured Paul, glancing in the direction of the sign for the toilets.

‘I take it that’s your idea of a joke,’ scoffed Graham, who, thanks to a colleague’s leaving do, which had almost made him late and earned a death-glare from his wife, was several glasses ahead of the others and a lot thirstier. ‘You know women’s lavatories, there’s
always
a queue. The three of them should have held on, in my view, kept their legs crossed until the end of Act Five. In fact, if they’re very much longer we’ll have to give serious consideration to downing their share.’

‘What do you think of it, then?’ asked Henry, making a mental note as he rummaged for peanuts to forgo the bread basket when they got to the restaurant.

‘He’s good. I’m not sure about her, though. A bit…’
Graham frowned, searching for the right word and getting a sudden vivid flash of Naomi the night before, staggering down from a fourth visit to settle the twins. ‘Hysterical, I’d say. Overacting, like she’s been to drama school and wants us to know about it.’

‘I think the whole play is being over-interpreted,’ agreed Paul, with an authority borne of the fact that, in spite of having found his way into accountancy, he had taken an upper second in English at Cambridge. ‘The story shines through, it always does with Shakespeare, and they’re banging it out like some cheap soap.’

‘Ah, here they are.’ Henry waved as Theresa, Josephine and Naomi’s heads bobbed into view through the doorway on the opposite side of the bar. He watched as his wife led the trio through the throng. She had, he noticed, dressed with particular care that night, a lacy black top designed to show teasing bits of flesh and bra, and a velvet skirt that flared prettily round her knees. And she was in her most serious heels too, the ones she claimed numbed her toes. No doubt she had assembled the entire costume in the space of five minutes, between reading bedtime stories, briefing the baby-sitter and not forgetting the theatre tickets.

In short, he was the luckiest of husbands, Henry reminded himself, handing out glasses as the women arrived, thinking how splendid they were in their finery, how such evenings, with their costumes and chat, were like mini plays in themselves. He remembered in the same instant how Theresa had put her hand on his knee during the second act, just as the ebony-faced actor playing Othello was booming about how ‘our loves and comforts should increase, Even as our days do grow’. Henry had responded by placing his hand over hers, dutifully, briefly, wondering at her damnable intuition, calling for reassurance precisely because she could
sense he was in no mood to deliver it. Was knowledge of another person love? Henry wondered suddenly. Was it that simple?

‘It’s so awful, isn’t it,’ said Josephine, eagerly, ‘knowing it’s all going to go wrong? Like watching a crash in slow motion.’

‘Ah, the fatal flaw.’ Graham cast a knowing look round the five faces. ‘We’ve all got them.’

‘So what’s yours, then, Graham?’ teased Josephine, with her customary feistiness. ‘Come on, you’re among friends, you know.’

Naomi’s husband scratched his closely shaven dark hair in a show of deep thought. ‘Let me see, working too hard for the good of others… an inclination towards self-sacrifice…’

‘Yeah, right,’ Naomi murmured into her glass.

Theresa was watching her husband’s face carefully. There was a fleck of something on his cheek, salt or maybe a peanut crumb. His eyes were crinkled in amusement; his big friendly mouth moved easily between smiles, eating and conversation. He pushed at the bridge of his glasses and twiddled with his ear. He was as he always was. And she was a ninny. A spoilt ninny with so many blessings in her life that she could luxuriate in a sense of wrongdoing at not being made love to for a couple of weeks, and feel jealous of Charlotte –
Charlotte
, of all people – simply because Henry had paid court to her during the course of a Sunday walk, while Theresa had had to play the dutiful mother, attending to runny noses, overturned tricycles and fallings-out between the boys. Henry should have helped and she had told him so, angrily, the moment Charlotte’s Volkswagen had made its throaty departure from outside their front door. He had said sorry and she had said fine.

Except that it wasn’t fine because there were the other things that Theresa couldn’t bring herself to mention: like the flirty teasing at the table about Charlotte’s age and the ridiculously generous suggestion that they should throw a party for her fortieth (a
party
!) and later in the week the carefully rehearsed broaching of the subject of whether Charlotte should have been included in the trip to the theatre. They would normally have asked Martin and Charlotte, he had reasoned, looking like George did when he was bargaining for more time on the PlayStation or a second helping of ice-cream, a tightness round the eyes, as if he was fighting shiftiness, so surely it wasn’t fair to exclude Charlotte from the treat just because she was on her own? Or Martin and Cindy, Theresa had shot back. Why not ask them instead or as well? That had shut him up. But then she had retreated to the kitchen and seen the pencil arrows in the big diary next to the phone – thin, innocent lines running along the tops of the dates of the Easter holiday. Work blitz’, he had written, which meant, as it always did, retreating on his own to Suffolk. Except, as they both knew, Charlotte was due to be in Suffolk round the same time – there was a line in the diary for her too. Theresa, flicking her eyes from one pencilled arrow to the other, had seen a sudden, horrible, inevitable collision in their paths – ‘work blitz’ and ‘Charlotte’ – destined to meet. Like watching the slow-motion disaster on stage that Josephine had so aptly described, she reflected unhappily, the champagne pulsing in her temples as they made their way back to their seats.

But as the false, fatal evidence of Desdemona’s hanky did its dirty work on stage, Theresa began to feel a lot better. What one
saw
and what was
true
were entirely different things. Indeed, the key lesson from the hapless Othello was that too much fear and imagining could make the very
disaster one sought to avoid come true. All that mattered was trust. The rest followed. She found Henry’s hand for the second time that night, interlacing her fingers with his: fine long fingers, surgeon’s fingers, she had always loved them. His palms were a little clammy, but the theatre was warm. ‘Farewell the tranquil mind!’ groaned Othello, ‘farewell content!’ But not for me, Theresa vowed, pulling her hand free, sensing that Henry found its presence troubling. ‘I’m bloody starving,’ she whispered instead, pressing the ninniness away. ‘Roll on Act Five.’

Later in the restaurant she volunteered the subject of the dilemma over Charlotte and the theatre tickets herself, easily, confidently. A lively debate ensued, encompassing the difficulty of allocating loyalties between divorcing friends and the burden of balanced couple-groups having to accommodate suddenly single relationship refugees. Then the behaviour of the wretched and disgraced Sam was picked up and punted round the table as well, amid murmurings of horrified pity and disbelief… The motherless Rose, of all people, being
bullied
by the diminutive
Sam.
The conversation pulsed with the sort of
Schadenfreude
that had no place in the context of close friends.

Theresa, recognizing this ugliness, could not muster the wherewithal to put a stop to it. She would do what she could to help Charlotte, via influencing George (she had already delivered another lecture about standing by friends in times of need) and her own capacity for kindness. She was desperately fond of the woman for all her tangles and foibles; but for that night at least, the security of her own position within this safe circle of friends, at her husband’s side, mattered far more. So she let the conversation roll, welcoming the hum of congratulation when the matter of lending the cottage came up and even saying that poor
Henry was going to have to carve one of his prized work sessions round the inconvenience. She glanced at her husband as she spoke, taking fresh heart at his groan of concurrence and the willingness with which he met her gaze.

Six weeks into my first term, and the city has become a moonscape of snow. The cathedral, thickly iced, rises from the whiteness like a giant wedding cake. It strikes the hour as I pass, the chimes sounding muffled and uncertain in the blizzard. I am in new fur-lined boots and a duffel coat, late and hurrying for an audition. The snow sticks to my soles in uneven lumps, holding me back and upsetting my balance. It is seven o’clock and I have another half-mile to go.

I am late but I push back my hood and look up at the clock-tower, seeking solace and meaning in its new mysterious wintry beauty. But all I see is a church, covered with snow and bigger than the one in which I stood ten days before, gagging on incense while my mother trembled under her veil, making noises that embarrassed me and would have embarrassed my father, I am sure, had he the power to see through the wooden sides of his coffin. He wouldn’t have liked the incense either, or any of the other Catholic touches on which she insisted, but he had left no instruction so she had a free rein. It was a service for her, not him. And yet she wept and wept and wept. Dry-eyed, mute at her side, I wondered if this was hypocrisy or love.

My own tears come in solitude, as now, under the balking shadow of the cathedral, with icy flakes melting on my lips and the muted chimes still echoing in my ears. My closed circle is broken, my point of reference lost. I have only her whom I do not love. I have no answers. I have no home, only a house I do not wish to visit. My course is made up of books that seem pointless, a quest for ideas that I have no desire to hunt down. There is no pattern, no meaning. It is Eve, motherly, clucking, concerned, who has chivvied me out of my room to attend the audition. She is going, too, but arriving from somewhere else. Like me
,
she has never acted before, but has a crush on the director and is prepared therefore to endure any ignominy in order to breathe the same air. She has said that we can only make fools of ourselves, that if rejected as would-be actors we can offer to find props and paint scenery. She has said that life is about picking yourself up after a fall, about not being afraid to reach for your dreams, from which I have gathered that she is besotted indeed.

Wet-haired, wet-eyed, wet-nosed, skidding on my lumpy soles, I cross the college quad and push open the double doors of the room to which a chalkboard in the porter’s lodge has directed me. The door creaks, but no one turns. There are several rows of chairs, half filled, facing away from me towards a makeshift stage lit by two Anglepoise lamps. A girl with blue streaks in her hair and violent red lipstick is on her knees, referring to the script as she shrieks, ‘Yes, we all know what you did for me!’ Her voice is strained, raucous, compellingly overdone, yet it is not to her that my eye is drawn but to the man standing over her. Loose, messy, sandy blond hair, slim-hipped in tight, faded jeans, wearing a scruffy black jumper with the sleeves pushed up to the elbows. With one of the lamps directly behind him, the light shines through his hair. When he moves I am blinded. I put my hands to my eyes and squint. I had thought he was trying out for Jimmy, but he tells the girl thank you and calls for me to take a seat.

I grope my way along a row to Eve, who hands me a script.

‘Isn’t he divine?’ she whispers. ‘Isn’t he perfectly divine? I’m on next. We can do any bit we like, he says. I’m going for the ironing scene at the beginning. What do you think
?’

Having no view, I nod and start to flick through the play.