Love and Fallout (16 page)

I nodded as if I could bear it well, unwilling to tell her I'd been living at the camp for precisely three days.

‘We couldn't do it without your support,' I told her.

‘Tessa!' I sat up straight to see Barbel waving from the other side of the road. The affinity group! I'd completely forgotten about the rest of them.

13

A Blast from the Past

It's half-past seven and the office blinds are drawn. Unable to sleep, I decided to come to work where at least I could be doing something. Or that was the plan. The Grants Directory lies abandoned while I tease at the knots in my head.

It's been a week since the night of the colander, a long and miserable week during which Pete and I have fallen back on the old routines of cohabitation. We cook, we watch news of distant crises unfolding in war zones, we nag Dom about his homework, we stack the dishwasher, but we are living without reference to one another. Or at least I am living without reference to him. We undress in the same room and arrange ourselves side by side, conscious of each other's breathing. He shifts and sinks into sleep, and I lie on my back, waiting for another day, waiting for the sun to come up and etch a lion's mane in the old furled roses of the wallpaper.

It's at night that I see them most clearly – him bearing down on her, pressing against her, tracing a line with his finger along the length of her thigh – and it's compelling, this intrusion into my husband's secret life. I see them curled in the half-light. I give them whispered dialogue. And then the wallpaper roses begin to bloom again and it's time to shower and eat and pretend for Dom's sake that everything is all right.

Her contact details are scribbled on an ear of notepaper and tucked into my diary. They weren't difficult to come by, I simply found the name of her agency, phoned and said I was from Pete's school and wanted to send one of their teachers an invitation to the summer barbecue. Twice I've picked up the phone and dialed her number, twice I've put the receiver down after her hello, blood thudding in my ears. It wasn't just the fear of not knowing how to articulate everything I'd rehearsed, it was the fear of her very real and immediate existence, the knowledge that I wasn't addressing a mute space but a person who had the ability to speak and feel and answer back. I didn't want to make her real because if I did she could say anything, that she was six months pregnant, that she was going to start a family with my soon to be ex-husband. Pippa's gone, Dom will be off to college in no time, so what's to stop him finding a nice younger woman and setting up home with her, filling the new breakfast room with cherubic two-year-olds? It happens all the time. And it might be too late for me to have more children, but it's not too late for him.

These are new sensations, new thoughts and they're strangely compelling. Pete only had one serious girlfriend before we met, Helena, an American student who eventually moved back to Illinois and in so doing broke his heart. One or two girls came and went after her, no one he spoke much about. But now, years later, after we've nearly forgotten our appeal to each other, let alone anyone else, this new woman, this shadow woman has lifted the bed clothes and settled between us, a live ghost. In the pauses between daily events – locking up my bike and unlocking the office, box-filing a report – there'll be a glimpse of her, a thought of her, and images from my own back catalogue sweep in. Pete racing Dom and Pippa across Holcolmbe Sands… Pete, flaked out after rugby, his head on my lap… Pete climbing an apple tree when we were first married… Pete tracing a pattern on her thigh… Pete presenting me with an apple… Pete pressing his mouth to her neck… Pete pretending to descend invisible stairs to make me laugh… Pete fitting his body around mine, kissing my neck… Pete fitting his body around hers, kissing her neck. And so it goes on.

We're due another counselling session but neither of us has arranged it because neither of us wants to sit on Valeria's pink sofa discussing this new parcel of sorrow, neither of us wants to unwrap it and examine it and work out what to do. And my head is already too full.

Since sliding that shoebox into the light, scenes from the past have been creeping up on me. I might be standing at the kitchen sink and suddenly I'm transported back to the common with its bowls of greasy water for the tin plates, and the red wire rack where they drained in the freezing air. My Greenham dreams have got mixed up with recent events: the night before last Pippa appeared in a bikini at one of the campfire meetings and I tried to cover her up with Angela's parka. By the illogical logic of dreams we were both nineteen but I knew she was my daughter. Then everything morphed into the set of a television show where the supply teacher played Jude introducing me to a studio audience, and I glimpsed Rori among the crowd of faces, saw her holding a placard and shouting something I couldn't make out. I woke with a lurch, prickling in a horrible after-shiver, the taste of the dream still in my mouth.

I make a crack in the blinds. Already the pavement is brightening. I fill the kettle and flip through a copy of
Third Sector
, glancing at the job pages: Head of Media, Account Manager, Direct Marketing Executive, they're roles that might be advertised in any large corporation and they're a long way from Easy Green. I could move back to working for another charity, but it's taken so long to build this one and I can't give it up now. The kettle reaches boiling point and leaks a small puddle of water. As I drop one of Frieda's camomile teabags into a mug, something returns to me – one of
Valeria's strategies for confronting fears is to write them down. I jingle my laptop to life and think for a few seconds before typing:

What should I do about work?

The answer comes quickly because I've already half-formulated a decision:

Appeal to the council.

Another pause and then words I wasn't planning on:

Is this the end of my marriage?

The cursor blinks and I press delete, fighting a return to that image of Pete and the supply teacher, their breath fast and shallow. Instead I try to work on the problem of keeping the charity in business. But my thoughts won't be contained and they spill in other directions until I find myself typing something else:

If I was a good mother, Pippa would be able to talk to me.

The cursor pulses before a response appears:

She's still young. You didn't tell your mum everything when you were nineteen.

I consider that for a minute and type:

But I didn't resent her.

This exercise doesn't seem like such a good idea after all, but I've started now so in the shadowy office I think back over the past few weeks, my dissolving marriage, failing charity, misunderstood daughter, and type the one true thought, the thought that keeps drumming backwards and forwards like a wave.

I think I'm being punished.

And there it is for the first time, trapped like an insect under a glass. The cursor blinks at the end of the d, leading me on, but there's nothing else to say and nowhere else to go. I close the document, take another sip of tea with its faint taste of fields then click the cobalt blue e of the web. That little blue icon opens the door to swathes of human experience, it offers a chance to analyse what the great philosophers and psychologists have said about fidelity, or to summon tabloid articles in which footballers' wives battle to save their relationships after public blizzards of humiliation. Could I look her up again? Could I track her down on a social network? Is she mentioned on an education website? I have started this quest before but each tap into the search engine became an act of hollowing out, until by the end of twenty minutes, on the edge of my chair and nauseous at what I might find, I turned the computer off and went to bed in darkness, fully clothed.

The screen stares back, white as an eye. I don't know what I'm looking for. Not her. I resist that temptation and instead type Miss Student Body, then wait while a million search parties are dispatched invisibly to bring back news. And when it comes my spirits are not lifted. Photographs from last year's final are posted on the competition homepage: an array of pretty young women in evening dresses whose long shining hair gives them a similar appearance. The one in the centre is smiling hardest because she's been crowned with a silver tiara. I try to place Pippa among them. Is it really a bit of fun? They're so young.

I close the page and open my email, typing the password Frank, which is Pete's middle name. A dozen new messages are stacked in yellow envelopes: a circular from Amnesty and several other mailing lists, minutes from the last Heston Fields meeting, an online phone bill which I daren't open because I don't know how much Easy Green spent on calls last quarter. There's also something from Maggie. We've not spoken since the filming, but she's left two apologetic messages, and I meant to ring her but couldn't face it after Pete's bombshell. We've been friends for too many years to let this stupid programme come between us but even so I decide to defer my reply. One message jumps out. It's from Lulu, the Production Assistant. I click:

Hi Tessa

This came to the office. Isn't it great being famous?!! I hope you loved the ep. as much as we did, you looked fantastic!!!

She signs off with a kiss and a smiley face made out of a colon and half a bracket. I scroll down and read. And then re-read.

I'm sending this in the hope you can put me in touch with Tessa Perry, who featured on
Make Me Over
. We were at Greenham Common together. Many thanks, Angela Mullen.

Angela? Angela Mullen? I lean back in the chair and mentally add three exclamation marks of my own. Even as I try to picture her typing this – age her, offer her a setting (was this sent from an office? A kitchen table?), I cannot re-imagine the person I knew: pale-faced Angela, zipped into a parka, bending over her keyboard with a frown.

Part T
wo

Down at Greenham

14

Never Trust a Journalist

It was a wet Sunday afternoon in mid-November and the wind rampaged around the common like a mad woman. Our tarpaulin, set up in a gazebo-style arrangement to protect the main fire, had repeatedly collapsed, and finally ripped, leaving us nowhere to shelter, so in the end we'd retreated. I was in Rori's bender, listening to the weather as it warred with Barbel's experimental recorder-playing from next door. Barbel could play the guitar like a professional, but she'd never been forced to learn the recorder at primary school like the rest of us and now she'd decided to teach herself from a book.

‘At least she's happy,' I said, as she started another round of ‘London's Burning'.

‘Yes, she has a gift for happiness,' said Rori, shifting to get more comfortable. We were propped on our elbows, a candle glowing inside a jam jar, bronze light pooling between us. ‘She's one of life's free spirits.'

It was true, I'd never seen Barbel downhearted – even when the rain had seeped into our dry food supplies, ruining the flour and biscuits and turning the bread to wet sponge, she'd refused to complain.

‘Do you think she'll stay long?' I asked.

‘Difficult to tell. They're planning a peace camp in New York State, she wants to go and help.'

‘The weather's got to be better at least.'
The sheeting cracked hard in the wind and Rori sat up to re-tie a loose piece of plastic flapping near her head.

‘Such a sloppy housewife,' she said, ‘haven't dusted for weeks.'

‘Well, I didn't like to mention it, but I noticed your antimacassars need a wash.'

She arched an eyebrow. ‘What's an antimacassar?'

‘You put them on the back of your three-piece suite.'

‘Three-piece suite! You're hilarious,' she said, and flopped down again.

I didn't know what was so funny about a three-piece suite, but it was good to see her laughing. I'd noticed the melancholy she occasionally slipped into. Two days before, we'd been sitting by the fire, eyes fixed on the flames, and she'd told me about a time she'd walked into the sea. ‘But it's harder to drown yourself than you'd think,' she said. Appalled by this, I'd put my arm around her and she'd smiled, not stoical but sad, and laid her head on my shoulder.

Rori's bender was more comfortable than my tent and more spacious too. She slept on foam spread over duckboard. The knobbles on the branches, which had been bent over to create the shelter's structure, acted as handy clothes hooks, while straw insulation kept in the heat. When the weather improved she'd promised to help me build a bender of my own.

The rain picked up speed and she sighed.

‘Some days I'm convinced I've had enough, and other days this seems the only place to be.'

I knew what she meant. After a run of clear, cold nights I'd begun to enjoy being outside in a way I'd never have imagined when centrally heated in Stevenage. I liked the practical business of making do, the way women wrapped hot stones from the fire in cloth and put them in their sleeping bags. I liked listening to their stories as we cooked. I liked the sky, an ever-changing wallpaper. But in the rain it was a different matter.

‘You know, being here is a little like playing tennis,' Rori said. I pictured hordes of women jumping over a net in their filthy whites. ‘So much is about the inner game, the struggle with one's self.' She was inserting long fingers into her curls. Even if she hadn't washed or brushed them, the curls stayed springy.