Life Begins (6 page)

‘And I want you,’ Tim replied, slipping his arms round her waist. ‘I’ve been dying for you to call. You said you would. Why didn’t you?’

Charlotte hesitated. She hadn’t called because she wasn’t sure she wanted to go on another date. And yet, receiving his formal handshake in the street, a small part of her had felt faintly rebuffed, and even wondered, dimly, whether her kissing the previous week – rusty, a little shy of the geography of a new face – might not have been up to scratch. ‘Because it’s wrong, Tim, that’s why.’

‘Wrong?’

‘Inappropriate.’

‘Nonsense. We’re grown-ups.’ He slid his hands over her hips and pulled her more firmly against him. ‘I was thinking… we could finish here and then go back to my place. I’m not a bad cook. I’ll rustle something up and then…’

‘I’m afraid I can’t tonight. I’m already busy.’ She wriggled free and turned round.

‘Oh.’ He looked crestfallen.

‘My girlfriends,’ she explained, more kindly. ‘Every few weeks we meet at each other’s houses and play mah-jong together.’

‘Mah-jong? Very fancy.’

‘It’s to talk, too, of course – a bit of a girls’ night, you know the sort of thing. It’s a small group but they’re good friends and, frankly, I don’t know how I’d have got through the last few years without them… I say, do you mind if we get on with looking round?’ she ventured, impatient suddenly, both to see the rest of the house and at having to pitch the question – to him of all people – as if it were some kind of favour.

‘No, of course not.’ Tim clicked his heels and saluted. ‘At your service, madam. All inappropriateness to cease forthwith.’

Charlotte laughed, flinging up her arms in despair at the awkwardness. ‘Look, Tim, I’m sorry. This whole business – you and me – I’m just not sure if it’s wise, or what I want from it or… but I do like you,’ she continued hurriedly, seeing his dismay deepen, remembering how good it had felt to be held, ‘and maybe – if we agree there’s no pressure and so on – we could perhaps meet again soon. Okay?’

‘Okay.’
He rolled his eyes and made a face, like a child being told something he knew already. ‘I just think you’re great, that’s all. I think you’re great and I’m not very good
at hiding it. But that’s fine,’ he added, jaunty once more, tossing the house keys from palm to palm. ‘It’s my problem, not yours. I will, as they say, take what I can get.’ He clenched the keys in one fist. ‘And now would madam like a tour of the bedrooms or is she too worried I’ll rugby-tackle her on to a mattress?’

Charlotte giggled, taking his hand for the walk up the stairs, which were steep, with spindly wooden banisters and a T-junction of a landing at the top. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom, all pleasantly decorated and of a good size. The back one had its own balcony, decked with window-boxes of miniature cyclamen and winter pansies, and a little wrought-iron chair. It was on seeing this – on seeing herself, in fact, sitting in the little chair with a book and a cup of tea and peace in her heart – that Charlotte spun round and declared that she had to have the place at all costs, that she would accept anything Mrs Burgess offered and beg a loan from the bank, from Martin if necessary, to make up the difference. She
had
to have it, she gabbled, the colour rising in her cheeks. Did he understand?

Tim, busy grappling with an unfolding ladder from a hatch in the bedroom ceiling, said he would do his best and did she want to go up first or should he?

‘Tim,’ Charlotte pleaded, ‘can you get me this house?’ She tugged at his jacket. She didn’t care about the attic. They were pointless places, used for storing things probably better off in a skip. She didn’t like their dusty cool either, the sense of the unknown crouched inside. Sam would love it, though, she reflected, glancing upwards with a trace more interest. Sam, who didn’t want to move, who was too young to see the sense – the importance – of a clean slate for the pair of them, would
love it.
As a little boy one of his favourite places had been the tank cupboard behind the eaves on the top
landing of her mother’s house. Discovered during a game of hide-and-seek, he had taken to retreating there when no need for concealment was required, staying sometimes for alarmingly long periods, but emerging always with dirty knees and the dazed, triumphant expression of an explorer returning from a distant land.

‘Hey, I’ll do my best, okay?’ Tim promised, clearly somewhat surprised by the urgency in her tone. He patted the ladder. ‘Now, are you going to take a look or not?’

Charlotte shook her head. ‘Not now, thanks. I’ll save it for Sam. Talking of whom,’ she glanced at her watch, ‘I ought to be going. I’ve got to pick him up from after-school club, drive him to his father’s and get back in time to go out. I’m a bit worried about him, actually,’ she confessed, stepping out of the way of the ladder.

‘Who?’ puffed Tim, still trying to seal the hatch.

‘Sam,’ Charlotte murmured, momentarily transported back to her unsatisfactory consultation with the very young, very smiling, faintly condescending form teacher earlier that afternoon. Charlotte had left the meeting feeling humoured rather than reassured, angrily contemplating the empathetic deficiencies of a creature whose talents extended only to the dates of Henry VIII’s wives and how to inscribe those dates across a whiteboard in straight lines, a creature whose sole knowledge of childhood was her very recent own.

‘You’re worried about Sam?’ Tim prompted, brushing patches of dust off his suit.

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ Charlotte protested, heartened nonetheless at this display of interest. ‘I saw his teacher today… Something unpleasant is going on at school, I’m sure of it. But Sam, like all children, I suppose, would endure anything rather than the hassle – the
embarrassment –
of complaint.’

‘Bullying, you mean?’

Charlotte shrugged. ‘Maybe. A bit…’

Any temptation to elaborate was cut short by the slam of the front door. Starting a little guiltily, they hurried downstairs to exchange hasty pleasantries with the owner of the house, a Mrs Stowe, in her late fifties with pale blue eyes and long grey hair kept in girlish fashion off her face with a wide blue hairband.

‘We were just going, but it’s
lovely
, thank you
so
much. In fact, I might…’ Charlotte glanced at Tim, who had shrunk back into composed, estate-agent mode, clutching his sheaf of papers and staring hard at the briars of tight green rosebuds springing round the front door ‘… that is to say – and I know this is probably premature and unprofessional – but I might be interested in putting in an offer.’

Mrs Stowe smiled uncertainly. ‘Well, that’s very nice, dear, but as I hope Mr Croft explained, this was very much an unofficial visit. My husband, in particular, is still keen to sell privately. In fact –’

Before she could reach the end of the sentence Tim had abandoned his flower-study and was bringing the encounter to a smooth close with farewells and thanks and promises to call.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Charlotte wailed, once they were out of earshot. ‘Either it’s on the market or it isn’t.’

‘Well, no, actually, since people are entitled to change their minds. And as Mrs Stowe said, that was something of a
premature
viewing, agreed to by her thanks to my powers of persuasion. Getting a foot in the door, Charlotte, that’s so often the key. I shall talk to her first thing tomorrow, see what I can do to move things forward, maybe drop in the idea of sealed bids…’

‘Sealed bids
?’

‘If Mrs Burgess comes back with an offer on your place
and you can, as you say, raise a bit more money, you could be in a very strong position.’ Tim couldn’t keep the heartiness from his voice. One of Charlotte’s reservations about him, he suspected, was that he was
only
an estate agent. Well, here he was, showing her how important that could be, how he could guide her and help her; that he could be depended upon. She looked lovely, too, standing all flustered by her car, with the wind knotting her extraordinary hair and her green eyes a bit wild. He even liked it that she was complicated, blowing hot and cold, keeping him guessing, keeping him on his toes. ‘You enjoy your mah-jong and don’t worry about it, okay? I’ll phone as soon as I have any news.’ He touched her cheek with the back of his fingers. ‘Okay? This is my job,’ he added, aware that he was pushing his luck, but riding high now, unable to resist. ‘It’s what I
do.
I’m good at it. You go off and have a nice evening. We’ll talk soon. And, Charlotte?’

She paused, one foot in her car.
‘Yes
?’

‘The other business… us… No pressure, I promise. Scout’s honour.’ Her face collapsed into a warm, relieved smile that made his heart surge. He’d quite forgotten the thrill of a chase, the sweetness of a prize that required patience.

I am three people: the daughter who writes home each Sunday with talk of the occasional tasty meal, the results of maths tests and hopes of selection for the swimming team; the quiet, carrot-headed girl called Bootface, who keeps her eyes down and feigns sleep when the teasing starts, holding the sheets tight against her clammy skin; and I am Charlotte, friend of a day-girl called Bella, who sits next to me in class and invites me to her house for leave-weekends and half-terms, where we play with her mother’s makeup and try to handle cigarettes like film stars, letting the smoke stream between our teeth, pressing the pink prints of our lips round the cork tips.

Bella has an elder brother called Adrian, who is short and thick-set, with whiskery hairs on his chin, and ears that stick out like brackets. I like him because he rides horses and because he doesn’t care that he is ugly. His eyes are a sharp blue and full of teasing. He smells of saddle soap and the mulch of the stableyard. He calls me Charlie and orders me around. I fetch and carry tack, buckets, brooms, brushes with a singing heart. Between the clammy sheets I seek consolation in dreams of his piercing gaze and big hands. Calloused, the nails stubby and full of dirt, I want them on me, stroking the nape of my neck and pushing up through the long orange burden of my hair. And in such dreaming I start to believe that maybe there is another me – a fourth – sitting like the miniature Russian doll inside the others, waiting to be found.

The Rotherhithe house was everything Charlotte had always assumed Martin would despise: part of a modern development within a gated compound, one in a row of identical
homes overlooking a mini roundabout filled – at this time of year – with regimental lines of daffodils and tulips. Entering the place always made Charlotte feel as if she was in some sort of adult Toytown, where grown-ups could play safely at the normally hazardous business of living.

Sam, however, claimed to like it a lot. It was ‘cool’, he said, to be able to see the river Thames from his bedroom and not to need a helmet for riding his bike round the compound’s network of plump, humped Tarmac pathways. And when Charlotte pressed (gently, oh-so-gently, resisting the urge to howl that the only mothering worth anything was her own), he claimed to like Cindy, too. She cooked home-made pizza and let him choose the topping. She allowed him to get out three DVDs at a time in Blockbuster and on Sundays he could stay in his pyjamas till lunchtime if he wanted. Charlotte received such pieces of information (randomly and infrequently delivered) with as much stoicism as she could muster, fighting urges to scour cookbooks for pizza recipes and sweep shelves of DVDs into her shopping basket.

Of course, Sam’s happiness was all that mattered; Charlotte knew that, had always known that. Far better an indulgent, saccharine Cindy than a cruel one, though she did marvel that Martin clearly colluded in such cosseting – Martin, who had spent so much of their son’s brief life reprimanding her for being too soft, who, on one particularly horrible night, had locked Sam’s bedroom door to discourage his nocturnal wandering into their bedroom. When the whimpering started, he had locked theirs too, pinning her to the bed, ranting about some childcare tactics he’d seen on the telly, telling her that this was it, that she had to choose – to act with him or against him. As if he was the one being hurt rather than their six-year-old, sobbing in voluble confusion across the landing.

Charlotte had chosen. It had been easy. She had crawled into Sam’s bed and stayed there all night, telling herself he needed her, even though he had fallen asleep in seconds and she had lain awake, listening to the pumping of her own heart till the birds sang.

‘Okay, here we are,’ Charlotte trilled, doing her best to sound cheerful as they pulled up on to the slab of spare Tarmac next to Cindy’s Saab. ‘Did you remember your toothbrush?’

‘Mum.’

‘Well, don’t forget to use it, then.’

‘Mum.’

‘You haven’t had George round for a while, have you?’ she offered next, in a fresh bid to lift the gloom that seemed to linger after each school day now, even the ones that hadn’t involved the ordeal of after-school club. ‘I’m seeing Theresa tonight – shall I fix something up?’

Sam made a noise suggesting rather than actually articulating the word ‘No.’

‘No – thank – you – Mum,’ Charlotte corrected sternly, hoicking his bag out of the boot, then kissing his head to sweeten the reprimand. In the same instant a light came on in the kitchen, which overlooked the drive, bringing the room to life like a flickering TV screen. Cindy, in pink velour jogging bottoms and a white T-shirt, her blonde hair gathered in a fashionable spiky knot, strolled across the centre, her back to them as she reached for a cupboard. Charlotte couldn’t help staring, at the slim honey-coloured arm, at the ample curve of the bustline, the trim indent of the waist. Freya, she recalled suddenly, had had a doll called Cindy, with wavy yellow-blonde hair, pearl studs in her ears, red-painted fingernails and a chest so pointy and hard that when they gave up on playing and fought each other instead she was often the top choice of weapon.

When they were greeted on the doorstep, however, Charlotte couldn’t help noticing that her husband’s new partner looked rather below her usual dolly-perfect self. Though she smiled as she always did and said
‘darling’
to Sam, who surprisingly – annoyingly – didn’t cringe and make his gagging face, but merely offered a shy smile back, there were blue-black smudges under her eyes and evidence of thick concealer to hide several large blemishes on her face. Charlotte, poised as always to scuttle back to the refuge of the car, couldn’t resist asking if she was all right.