Life Begins (18 page)

Uncomfortably stirred, Tim had briefly considered trying to find another source of practical assistance for the evening. But then the
boeuf Stroganoff
recipe had caught his eye, looking so classy and simple; and not using it because of some ancient sexual memory of his wife had seemed pathetic. He would have new, even better memories soon, he had reminded himself excitedly, if he played his cards right.

After the main course he planned to offer cheese rather than a pudding. He would decorate the board with fruit as Phoebe had always done on the rare occasions they had had guests – sliced kiwi, a small bunch of grapes, maybe a plum or two – something he and Charlotte could pick at and would look pretty. As far as Tim was concerned a more substantial dessert was out of the question, not because of any limitation to his culinary skills but because, while alcohol had never been known to dampen his energies, too much food, particularly when he was nervous, had been known to lead to all sorts of horrors – cramps, indigestion,
wind
, God forbid. Besides which, wine slipped down so easily with a nibble of cheese. And wine, Tim was sure, was going to be key to the delivery of the prospect he so cherished: Charlotte with her defences down, Charlotte unleashed.

All the phone calls went smoothly until Tim got to those that mattered most: Mrs Burgess, thanks to the report of a nit-picking surveyor, wanted to lower her offer on Charlotte’s house by a mighty ten thousand pounds, while Mrs Stowe confirmed that they were sticking with the private-sale route and wouldn’t require the services of his or any other agency in Wandsworth. They had had a private offer in the pipeline for weeks, she confessed, and her husband
was now cross that she had tempted them both to deviate it from it. Tim fought as best he could, marshalling the calm and charm that had seen him through countless tight spots in the past. Some forty minutes later, however, his efforts had secured only the measly compromise that both women would call back if they changed their minds. Short of a miracle, Charlotte’s beloved Chalkdown Road was as good as lost.

Tim’s spirits were so deflated that he forgot two sets of keys for his afternoon of viewings and managed to leave the supermarket without plums or cheese biscuits. He didn’t realize these omissions until he was running seriously late in his preparations for the evening, standing guard over a complicated combination of boiling ingredients, which were supposed to form the basis of the sauce but which refused to
reduce
as the recipe promised. Thanks to the anxiety this caused, with the cooking steam and a hasty, too-hot shower, he was also sweating, so profusely that he could already see a second, cooler shower was going to have to be crammed into his dinner preparations, along with a freshly ironed shirt.

With the sauce obstinately retaining its look of unappetizing soup – copious, thin, lumpy – Tim turned the ring up to maximum and spent a few minutes rummaging in the dusty backs of cupboards for some form of biscuit to serve with the cheese. Clutching an open pack of crumbling Ryvita, he returned his attentions to the hob only to find that his unpromising sauce had ‘reduced’ at last, to an unusable crust of speckled brown.

Inspired, perhaps, by Theresa’s gleeful enthusiasm on her behalf, when Friday evening came Charlotte found herself jettisoning the safe black trousers and ironed shirt for a crushed blue velvet skirt and a loose silk top. Streaking green across her eyelids to accentuate the sharp emerald of her eyes, slipping her feet into a pair of slingback high heels, she studied the effects in her full-length mirror warily, half expecting the ghost of Bootface to skip out from behind the glass.

So this was being happy again, she marvelled, swivelling first one way then the other, admiring the umbrella twirl of the velvet panels and the elegance the fine mesh of her black tights managed to lend her too-thin calves and bony knees. This was
living –
relishing life, instead of faltering like a rambler without a compass. She had direction at last: dear friends, a suitor who sent roses, a prospective house! Sam was still quiet, too quiet, but had made no further mention of being unpopular. Even more encouragingly, three purple
stars for excellence had recently appeared in his homework book and that evening he had asked –
asked! –
if he could go to after-school club an extra afternoon the following Thursday, when Charlotte only worked a morning shift and positively looked forward to breaking the tedium of domestic chores with an excursion to the school gates.

Tucking in a peeping bra strap as she hurried downstairs, Charlotte admitted a rare moment of self-congratulation at her own part in bringing about this small but seismic shift in her son’s state of well-being – holding firm about facing the ordeal of school, insisting on the skating outing when he didn’t want to go, not quizzing him about the counsellor. She had taken initiatives, taken control, got it right for once
on her own.

Jessica arrived on a bicycle this time, nosing it into the hall so that Charlotte had to step out of the way as she opened the door. She wore a grey beanie pulled down over her eyebrows, which caused her wispy hair to bunch out round her ears. Strapped to her back was a bulky rucksack that bumped against the wall as she wrestled with the bike.

‘Is it okay to park it in here? Only I don’t have a lock.’

‘It’s fine,’ Charlotte murmured, lunging for the handlebars to prevent them gouging fresh holes into the already battered paintwork. ‘Sam’s in the bath. After that he’s got some homework to do, if you wouldn’t mind making sure…?’

‘No problem.’ Jessica tugged off the hat. ‘I’ve got a load of stuff to do as well.’ She slung the rucksack on to the floor and scratched vigorously at her scalp. ‘Bloody coursework. Hey, Mrs Turner, you look really
nice.’

‘Thank you.’ Charlotte blushed. ‘I won’t be too late,’ she added, hurrying out of the door and thus being spared the merriment that flashed across the teenager’s face.

∗

Outside Tim’s house Charlotte paused and breathed deeply. She could smell something cooking, something nice. Martin had never been any good in the kitchen – greasy fry-ups, the occasional vast, messy, complicated stir-fry, which she rarely enjoyed and usually resented having to clear up. Suddenly it felt inordinately special that a man should have volunteered this simple compliment of preparing her a meal.

Tim opened the door so quickly that she feared he had been waiting on the other side, maybe even watching her profile through the mottled glass. He was wearing a pink shirt, open at the collar, and black trousers with sharp fresh creases that disappeared at the bulge of his thighs. As he fussed round her, easing off her jacket and warning about a state of total unreadiness, she noticed a pair of polished black leather tasselled loafers parked tidily at the bottom of the stairs. Her host, she observed in the same instant, was wearing neither socks nor shoes. Minor details – microscopic, irrelevant – but they snagged at Charlotte’s imagination. She didn’t like tassels on shoes. And something about the sight of his bare feet, the toes thickly haired, the second strikingly longer than the big one, was also unsettling, almost too intimate, as if he was divulging information beyond her willingness to process it.

On entering the kitchen, however, her reactions yo-yoed back again. The food smelt so good and everything was laid out beautifully: two saucepans puffing steam on a gleaming stainless-steel hob, a vase of freesias on the table, with napkins, wine glasses, cutlery and a single red candle, already lit. She was still taking it in when a pop sounded behind her and Tim pressed a fizzing flute of champagne into her hand.

‘To you,’ he murmured, holding her gaze as they chinked glasses, ‘and to whatever the future holds. I am entirely yours to command.’

‘
Well, I’ll certainly drink to the future.’ Charlotte laughed, pulling a face as the first sip sent bubbles bouncing up her nose.

‘It’s a rather cobbled-together sort of meal, I’m afraid,’ Tim confessed, putting down his glass and flicking switches on a miniature CD-player parked between the toaster and the kettle. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be. Why is it that recipes always end up being more complicated than they first appear? I had something of a sauce crisis, though I hope I’ve made up for it with cream.’

‘I’m sure it’ll be lovely.’ A lilting ballad was coming out of the CD-player, a man’s voice, a black man, soulful, engaging, familiar.
‘Classic Love Songs
,’ Charlotte read out, scanning the names of the artists listed on the cover and chuckling at the sudden, obvious absurdity of humankind – masters of microchips and space travel – expending so much creative energy expounding on and trying to understand a single emotion. As if love was a riddle that could be cracked if come at the right way when, as people like her knew only too well, it was a mercurial, whimsical, unsustainable, unreliable
feeling
, dependent on mood and circumstance and certain brain chemicals that one day scientists would probably (she hoped) bottle and sell over chemists’ counters.

‘What’s funny?’

‘Nothing.’ Charlotte slid the box back towards the CD-player.

‘You look fantastic.’

‘Thank you.’ Seeking escape from his disarming stare of appreciation, she found her gaze inadvertently returning to the bare toes.

Tim, realizing it, performed a little hop of embarrassment, as if he would tuck the offending items out of sight, were it acrobatically possible. ‘Sorry – got late showering, couldn’t
immediately locate socks, the rice was boiling over and then you rang the bell.’

‘Oh, but it really doesn’t matter,’ Charlotte cried, thinking what a cluck she had been to give the informality even a moment’s thought, how horribly stiff and prudishly out of practice she was at the business of getting to know someone. She was about to assure him that it was too warm for socks anyway when a thick white froth began to spill over the edge of a saucepan.

Tim leapt into action, emitting expletives, while Charlotte turned her back tactfully and made a big to-do of sniffing the freesias and working her way through her champagne. She wanted, badly, to ask about progress vis-à-vis houses, but feared it might sound callous. She would wait until the food had been safely served, she decided, obeying Tim’s command to top up her glass, when his confidence had settled and the mood between them was more mellow.

Instead, sitting knee to knee over full plates at the small table, with the groomed stubble round Tim’s mouth glistening in the flicker of the candlelight, Charlotte experienced a fresh, irksome onslaught of nerves. She drank hard to keep them at bay, warning that she had come in a taxi and would need one to get home. Tim, filling her glass, said he would have been disappointed if she hadn’t and how important it was to let one’s hair down. A pause followed, sufficiently resonant for Charlotte to shy away again from mentioning Mrs Burgess or Chalkdown Road and to embark on a quest for information about his upbringing with the electrician father and a mother who, as it transpired, cleaned people’s homes.

Tim relaxed visibly under the attention, recounting a tale of such an obviously deprived childhood compared to her own that it seemed to Charlotte more and more unacceptable
that she should not like him very much indeed for having endured it. By the time the last of the champagne had been despatched, along with a bottle of red and every last morsel of his delicious beef and mushroom stew, she had been stirred almost to tears on several occasions.

‘So what happened when your dad’s business went bust?’

‘We got kicked out for not paying the rent. I had to leave school to get a job. Don’t look like that –
sorry
for me – it wasn’t so bad. I mean, we were happy enough. I don’t see them much these days and my sister still gets on my wick, but that’s families for you, isn’t it?’

‘Absolutely… families…’ Charlotte rolled her eyes, wondering suddenly if he really was going to leave any advancement of the situation in her hands, whether she was up to it. The doubt continued until Tim had cleared the small table to make way for a splendid palette of cheese and fruit. Reaching for a grape, Charlotte found her fingers making contact with his instead.

‘Charlotte.’ He held just one finger, stroking and tugging it gently.

Here we go, Charlotte thought, staring down on the scene as if from a great height, at her and Tim at the little table, hands linked beneath the flickering candle. Here we go. Go with the flow… Go on, move on, go…

‘Charlotte, you know what you do to me, don’t you?’ His voice was husky, his eyes hooded. ‘I can’t stop thinking about you. Not for one moment of one minute. I’ve tried, but I can’t. Please…’

He had her whole hand now and was leading her through an archway connecting the kitchen-diner to the sitting room. The journey seemed to take a long time. Charlotte leant back a little, enjoying the feeling of being pulled, persuaded, of abdicating control. They passed a print of a leopard,
crouching amid tall grass, the sides of its mouth curled to reveal the white scythes of its teeth; then a photo of a young woman in shorts and a loose T-shirt, long bleached hair blowing across her eyes, dimpled knees, her feet buried in messy mounds of sand. Up ahead, beyond Tim’s arm – still stretched in the act of pulling her – was a sofa, dark red, velveteen. It felt soft to lie on, almost too soft, sinking under her spine like a hammock even before he was on top of her.