Life Begins (27 page)

Dominic looked out of the window instead, at the mayhem of warehouses and scrapyards, terraced houses and high streets. He liked being back in London far more than he could ever have imagined; he loved its sheer busyness, so many colours, creeds and personalities living on top of each other, trying to make a living, and, presumably, like him, endeavouring to be happy. There was something noble in the effort, he decided, as the train trundled above market stalls in full flow and strings of pegged washing flapped on tower-block balconies.

Redundant. Dominic tested the word in his head, trying for the umpteenth time to get a grip on his true reactions, but not managing to progress beyond another knee-jerking sensation of personal rejection. The word itself had never been used, of course, not by his sympathetic colleagues or the sharply dressed female MD who had been mandated to deliver the decision. He was being ‘released’, ‘let go’; the bank was rationalizing, economizing, streamlining. Several other heads had rolled as well, although only Dominic could boast the distinction of having been summoned in from a day off for the privilege.

Benedict, in pitching his kindly intended but absurd
business proposition the other evening (Dominic had rejected it out of hand), had been right in pointing out that his brother did not enjoy his job particularly, but that did not make the inconvenience of losing it any easier to bear. It was true that he would, in an ideal world, like to spend more time with Rose, and that he did have a lot of savings – although most of the latter had been swallowed up in the purchase of the new house. It was wonderful to have no mortgage but, Dominic reflected bitterly, the overheads of life still required a salary.

He felt somewhat bitter, too, about the timing of his ejection from the world of high finance: the ink on his house purchase was still virtually wet, his daughter had settled into school at last and was at that very moment enjoying the company of her first publicly acknowledged friend since losing her mother (the most unlikely unexpected friend, of course, forced into the open by sheer chance, but that was Rose for you). Such developments had taken so much effort and yet now, with his
redundancy
, Dominic couldn’t help thinking that the necessity of all that effort had been somewhat undermined. They needn’t have moved back to London. He could have taken their grieving state and his talent for advising clients on investments to Scotland or Bath or Timbuktu.

Dominic hugged his briefcase, brooding over whether the time off round Maggie’s death had done for him, all that compassionate leave; his employers had probably had the knives hovering ever since, paying lip service to accommodating the work compromises required by his personal tragedy while secretly condemning him for it.

He was gripping the briefcase a little too hard, he realized. The girl with the bags was looking at him strangely. Although
several minutes from his stop, he left his seat and went to stand by the doors. He would tell no one about his sacking, he decided, at least, not until the bank holiday was over; not Rose, not Benedict – especially not Benedict, who would start lining up beer bottles again and telling him what to do. An employment lawyer was what he needed, but not until Tuesday when Rose went back for the start of the summer term.

Dominic walked home via the supermarket, where he filled his trolley with a ridiculous quantity of oval-shaped confectionary of all sizes, several large foil-wrapped rabbits and, for good measure, a box of chicks that squawked, ‘Happy Easter,’ when you tapped their beaks. It was panic-buying of sorts – he was in shock, he knew – but there was also something pleasingly reckless about it. Maggie – zealot of things home-made, of keeping treats in moderation – would have been appalled.

‘Your kids will love you,’ chuckled the woman at the till.

‘I certainly hope so.’ Dominic blazed a smile at her, a little nervous at this inadvertent reminder of their house-guest. Rose had been so thrilled and pleading when he had taken Charlotte’s surprising call for help that morning that there had been no question of saying no, but now he found himself wondering about more practical matters, like whether Sam would eat the shepherd’s pie he planned for supper and whether he should expend any concern over sleeping arrangements. Rose clearly assumed that Sam would occupy the lower bunk in her bedroom, but they were a girl and a boy, teenagers now, and Sam was almost certainly the correspondent Benedict had been told about. Who knew what they had been saying in their letters, or what their hopes were? For a moment Dominic was even tempted to
consult the woman at the checkout, who looked the jolly, maternal sort, easily old enough to have been through a few similar quandaries herself.

Instead he was interrupted by the trill of his mobile. ‘Hello?’ Dominic slipped the phone between his shoulder and his ear so that he could continue packing his shopping.

‘Ah, I have you at last.’

‘Petra, indeed you do, so to speak… except that I’m in the supermarket, about to pay for a ton of Easter eggs. If you could give me two minutes,’ Dominic pleaded, struggling now with his wallet, the bags and the phone, and turning his back on the checkout woman, who was clearly enjoying the show. ‘Don’t go away. Keep the phone in your hand. Two minutes – and I’ll call you back.’

‘I want to meet with you, Dominic,’ she said. ‘If you do not want me, please, I prefer that you say it.’

‘Of course I want you,’ he whispered. ‘That is, I would like to meet you very much. And in two minutes I will call you back to arrange it.’

The checkout lady’s face had closed like a fist. From hands-on dad to sneaky husband – that was what she thought, Dominic realized helplessly, as she snatched his receipt out of the till and slapped it into his palm. He offered a firm thank-you but she was already beaming at the next customer, giving a fresh face the chance he had unwittingly thrown away.

He called Petra back the moment he had slung his bags into the car, only to be told, ‘This is Petra, please leave your message.’

Dominic slammed both hands on the roof of the car so hard that his wedding ring clanged against the metal. He remembered in the same instant, with some astonishment, that he had forgotten to buy a goose. Goose, potatoes,
carrots, peas for Easter Sunday lunch… Benedict was coming, he had it all planned. He must be in an even greater state of shock than he had thought. A little wearily, Dominic pulled his phone back out of his pocket but found himself studying his wedding ring instead: white gold, engraved with the date of their marriage. Maggie had had it made specially. Tucking the phone under his arm, taking a deep breath, he removed the ring and dropped it into his back pocket. It came easily, even over the knuckle, as if it was ready.

‘I would like to see you,’ he insisted, in response to the recording of Petra’s voice when he dialled again, ‘very much
indeed.
I will have a lot more free time from now on and will make lunch with you a number-one priority. I’m not one for giving up,’ he added, before stabbing his electronic key lock in the direction of his car and plunging back into the supermarket.

After the flat there is so much space in the Wandsworth house that I dance from room to room with outstretched arms, proving to myself, and Sam, skipping behind, that we can now live and move and have our being without bouncing off walls. Martin, more usefully employed with speaker wire and screwdrivers, pauses to watch, laughing with an abandon that makes my heart sing. A change of geography may not cure, but already it is helping
. She –
whoever she was (Fiona, probably, but he never admitted anything) – is far away now, a thing of the past, like the too-small flat and the ill-lit street corners and Martin’s ridiculous working hours. I stop dancing, catching my breath as some of the sourness, the suspicion, threatens to return. Fifteen-hour days… He might as well have invited her home.

We heave at furniture together and hang pictures, taking it in turns to balance on the arms of chairs and call out guidance as to where to bang the nail. For supper we order pizza because the oven doesn’t work; a fuse, Martin thinks, but he has no spares and the shops are closed. We keep Sam up late to tire him out, letting him chew the pizza crusts and play among the boxes while we slave at the unpacking. We are a team again, I feel, at last. And when Martin wins the battle with the speaker wire and puts on one of our old favourites, I slip into his arms with something like the reverence of our very first time. We dance, cheek to cheek, eyes closed; a new rare perfect moment. I vow to hold on to it. Nothing with Fiona could ever have felt so good, so close.

A vital screw has gone missing in the move so we can’t put up the bed. We sleep sprawling on the mattress, too exhausted to care. Across the landing, Sam, in his own room for the first time, wakes in the middle of the night and howls, rattling the bars of his new safety rail
like a despairing prisoner. Martin growls, ‘Leave him,’ but I can’t. Of course I can’t.

‘Hey, sweetheart.’ His little arms clamp round my neck. I try to lay him back down but he won’t let go. I try a drink of water from his beaker but he blows and spits and giggles. ‘You bad, bad boy,’ I scold softly.

‘Bad, bad,’ Sam echoes, rubbing his knuckles in his eyes,yawning.

‘Come on, then.’ I carry him back to our mattress, trying to keep him on my side so as not to disturb Martin, but within seconds Sam is clambering across me to the middle, fearless – heedless, as every four-year-old must be, of any desires but his own.

Martin, disturbed, groans. ‘He has his own room. Take him back.’

‘You do it.’

‘You know that won’t work.’

‘You never try.’

Moments later my husband and my son are fast asleep, lying on their backs, arms by their sides, as if sunbathing in the moonlight spilling in through the still curtainless windows. Tears prick my eyes, partly because I am tired but mostly because my faith is returning – in us, in the fruit of our love, lying between, the point that separates, but also the one that keeps us whole.

In the end it took a couple of hours to leave the hospital. Jean was having a final test somewhere and Nurse Telson couldn’t be found, which Charlotte took as an opportunity to move the car nearer and make enquiries about nurses visiting patients at home. Feeling a little more on top of things, she did a double-take when the arrival of the patient back on the ward was announced and she turned to find herself staring at a hunched figure in a wheelchair. ‘Mum.’ The word caught in her throat.

‘The chair is just to save energy for getting to the car,’ explained the nurse in charge brightly. We’re doing very
well, aren’t we, Mrs Boot? We’ve had a scare more than anything, haven’t we? Right as rain in no time, eh? What a lucky girl to have such a lovely daughter to come and look after you.’

Jean allowed a flicker of a smile to cross her face. Her right arm rested on her lap, like some disconnected, precious object, plastered from the fingers to the elbow. She was wearing her old blue Paisley dress, one sleeve hitched up to accommodate the plaster, and a faded grey cardigan, draped over her shoulders like a shawl. Her legs were swathed in their usual too-loose stockings, her feet in ancient sheepskin slippers instead of shoes. Through the stockings Charlotte could make out a couple of inky bruises on her shins and one that looked almost black, spreading from her right knee above her hemline. Her hair, meanwhile, without the attention usually paid to it, had lost its sprightliness and shrunk to flimsy, lifeless strands that made no secret of the chalky liver-spotted scalp from which they grew.

Charlotte waited in some suspense, certain that her real lack of loveliness must be showing through. But all Jean did was glance meekly from her to the nurse and murmur, ‘Yes, indeed,’ in a voice so whispered and flat that it was impossible to know if it was ironic or truly meant.

As they embarked on an obstacle course of stiff-hinged fire doors, over-populated corridors and tardy lifts, Charlotte found herself slipping into the same false heartiness as the nurse.
Soon have you home. A cup of tea and lots of rest work wonders.
It was a survival technique, a stopper for difficult thoughts. Inside, meanwhile, she could feel the dread she had experienced in the car park congealing into something far worse, something closer to revulsion.

She drove with exaggerated care, asking about the accident and the prognosis, trying not to be irritated by the
feeble monosyllables that continued to come in response. As they pulled up outside the house Prue appeared round the corner with Jasper tugging unhappily on his lead. The cleaner, unsurprisingly, given her new duties, seemed delighted to see them, as did her charge, who had to be physically deterred from abseiling up the baggy stockings to have its head patted. It was the antics of her pet, however, that brought the first real smile to Jean’s face, and she talked to it, too, Charlotte noted wryly, cooing nonsense throughout their laborious, hobbling progress to the front door.

Escaping in the car to the supermarket the following morning, Charlotte let out a small scream, then a much louder one that made her eardrums vibrate. Sam had pleaded to stay with the Porters and Martin had sounded relieved. A rota of carers would make home visits but not until after the bank-holiday weekend. Which meant she had four more days to endure,
FOUR MORE DAYS
. A hushed conversation with Prue had offered the back-up of thrice-weekly visits, ‘If I’m paid,’ the cleaner had added, which was perfectly allowable, understandable and what Charlotte would have expected anyway, but which had nonetheless made her flinch. Where were the bridge friends, she had wondered, and the names on the church flower rota? When had that hectic phase been replaced by daily communion with no one other than a dog?

The screaming helped. And the supermarket, in a vast clean complex, fringed with coffee shops and aisles as wide as small roads, was somehow soothing too. Charlotte took her time, doing her best to resist the urge to shop for her own tastes, selecting products either with long sell-by dates or which could be stored in her mother’s tiny fridge-freezer.