Miss You (42 page)

‘Will you take me to school, Mummy?’ Bella asked.

‘Yes, I will. Won’t that be fun?’

Marcus put me in touch with a female divorce lawyer who was fierce but offered little hope. She intimated that it would be less damaging for the girls if I behaved as if I
thought the whole thing was a good idea. To my surprise, Nash concurred, saying that the worst thing about having separated parents was the strain of pretending to each one that you were happier
with them than the other. I think I’d secretly been hoping that she would insist on me putting up more of a fight.

‘But going to court won’t restore the status quo, will it?’ said Nash, making me understand that what I wanted was impossible.

My decision not to contest at least ensured that I would have the girls every other weekend and every holiday.

I met Robert, choosing Kew Gardens as the venue. I’m not sure why, because I’d never been there in my life, but I thought it would be somewhere we could walk undisturbed and he
wouldn’t be able to dodge any difficult questions. It’s actually a wonderful place with amazing Victorian glasshouses, but I doubt I’ll ever go there again.

As I parked on Kew Green outside the big wrought-iron gates, I noticed a man a few cars along pointing his key fob at a little green G-Wiz electric car, and thought how silly and toy-like it was
for someone so tall and distinguished. Never imagining that Charlotte’s lover would drive anything less flashy than a convertible white Audi, I walked behind him all the way to the Orangery
cafeteria, our agreed meeting place.

After a couple of minutes standing awkwardly by the cutlery island, Robert was the one who dared to approach me with eyebrows raised, smiling and offering a firm handshake, as if we were about
to start a business meeting,

‘Angus?’

‘Robert?’

My first reaction was a strange sense of relief, because he was so much older than me that people were bound to mistake him for my children’s grandfather. Perhaps because of the age
difference, I couldn’t seem to feel much anger towards him. Ultimately, it was Charlotte who had decided to leave me; Robert couldn’t have enticed or persuaded her against her will. If
wealthy and well-preserved was what she wanted, I was never going to be able to compete. Clearly a rich and powerful man, Robert sat on the board of an arts foundation and an opera company, and
although he was wearing jeans and a coral Ralph Lauren polo shirt on the day we met, I could easily picture him in formal dress at the Salzburg Festival, with Charlotte beside him in a fabulously
expensive ballgown.

He was open about his history as we strolled down the Broad Walk towards the lake. Amicably divorced from his first wife, with whom he had a son who held some post in Brussels, he clearly had no
desire to take my place in Flora and Bella’s lives, but he said perceptive things about them to demonstrate that he was sensitive to their needs.

‘If your daughters would be living with us, it would be an honour for you to visit my house,’ he promised.

I couldn’t quite work out how it was that I was the one who would appear uncivilized if I turned the offer down.

‘We don’t say that,’ I heard myself saying.

‘Excuse me?’

‘In English, we say, “if your daughters were living with us . . .”’ I told him, feeling a tiny, idiotic fillip of triumph as momentary embarrassment furrowed his assured
Eurocrat brow.

‘Also, I will ask Flora and Bella to correct my English!’ he laughed, smoothly re-establishing his composure.

When we parted at the gates a couple of hours later and he raised his hand in a friendly wave, I felt almost sorry for him taking on the icy presence of Charlotte, although I was sure he would
know exactly how to deal with her. And when things with Charlotte were going well, I remembered dismally, she wasn’t cold at all.

Charlotte took the girls to say goodbye to my mother, because I was still smarting from her response, when I phoned to tell her the news.

‘I’m astonished it’s lasted as long as it has.’

At the ages of seven and three, the girls couldn’t really imagine how different their lives were going to be, and it didn’t occur to them to be sad. I tried not to show them how
miserable I was, but I didn’t want them to think of me as uncaring when they came to realize that the arrangement wouldn’t be as equal as they’d been led to believe. During our
last few days together, we did our favourite things, and they were astonished to be allowed all the sweets and ice creams they asked for. I hugged them a lot, and said things like, ‘I will
miss you very much!’ and ‘Remember that you can always call me, or Skype me. Mummy and Robert both know how to do that, so just ask them to help you!’ and even, a little
melodramatically, ‘I love you so much and my life won’t be the same without you!’

To which Flora responded, ‘But you’ll still be in our house, won’t you, Daddy? And our room will be the same? And we’ll come for weekends and holidays just like Harry and
Hermione and Ron do from Hogwarts?’

On the last evening, I cooked a family meal of their favourite
tricolore
salad and pasta
alla carbonara
with strawberries and ice cream for dessert, and, after they had eaten, and
smashed me at tennis on the Wii, they went up to bed and were asleep within seconds of me closing the last page of
A Bear called Paddington
.

I sat in the dark for a few moments, inhaling the indescribably comforting smell of just-bathed children, listening to the peaceful stillness of them sleeping, with fat wet tears rolling down my
cheeks.

Charlotte was still sitting at the table when I went downstairs.

‘That was more carbs than I’ve eaten in a year,’ she said, stretching back on the sofa.

Automatically, I began to collect up the plates.

‘Don’t,’ she said, pointing at the ceiling. ‘You’ll wake them.’

I sat down opposite her, wiping my nose with the back of my hand, like a child who’s forgotten to bring a handkerchief to school.

‘I’m sorry it’s so hard for you, Angus,’ she said.

‘Are you?’

The last thing I wanted to be was petulant after being so decent about everything, but all the defences I’d erected were collapsing around me.

‘I tried, Angus. I tried so hard. I really did . . .’

Suddenly I realized she was crying too. I couldn’t remember seeing her cry before. Not since Ross’s funeral.

‘The thing is, you’d never give an inch, never compromise,’ she choked.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Me? Me? She was turning it all the wrong way round. We’d always done what
she
wanted, not what
I
wanted.

‘. . . the pressure of being the only one who’s earning . . . of looking after everyone . . . it just didn’t seem to occur to you . . . you just didn’t get it! Did you
ever for one minute think whether I’d like to spend time with my children? I didn’t want to be a full-time mumsy mum, no, but most people get a little balance!’

‘But I thought—’ I’d assumed that her career was the most important thing to her. She always seemed pleased to be freed from the day-to-day grind of keeping house.

‘Did you, though? Did you ever actually think?’

Clearly not as much as I should have done.

Charlotte took a deep breath. ‘I know you were trying to exorcize Ross, when we first . . .’

His name jolted because it had always been a taboo word for us.

‘. . . but didn’t it ever occur to you that I was too? I was going to marry him, Angus, and my whole life was turned upside down. I had to learn to look after myself. I didn’t
know how to talk to people without being this tragic figure. When I went out with men, I dreaded the moment they’d ask, “Why is someone as pretty as you still single?” With you, I
didn’t have to say anything.’

I stared at my soon-to-be ex-wife. I was about to face a future without her, and now it was as if the past had happened without her too. I’d always seen her as coldly, sexily controlling,
like the vampire in the photo on the mantelpiece. Now I wondered if she’d dressed as an angel that day, in a white dress with wings, would I have thought of her differently?

‘Sex with you was the nearest I got to oblivion,’ she said.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘No, I mean in a good way. It was like a drug. And when I fell pregnant, it seemed like, I don’t know . . . I couldn’t not keep the child . . . could I?’

‘No!’

A world without Flora was unimaginable.

‘We muddled through, for a while,’ Charlotte said. ‘Didn’t we?’

I hadn’t looked after her. She’d needed looking after. She’d used the expression twice. And I’d thought I was good at looking after people.

An image of Charlotte kneeling on her bed in shell-pink Agent Provocateur lingerie on the night she told me she was pregnant flashed across my mind.

‘Can’t you look a bit happier than that?’ she’d said, and, then, in a small, wistful voice I’d never heard before or since, ‘It might be fun, don’t you
think?’

‘Couldn’t we still?’ I now stammered. ‘Isn’t there a chance? For the girls? I’d do anything—’

‘Oh, grow up, Angus, for God’s sake!’

She’d found someone to look after her now, and we both knew he’d do it so much better than I ever could.

The silence extended until I finally said, ‘I could do with a drink. Would you like one?’

She granted me a wry smile. ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

There was a bottle of champagne in the fridge left over from some more convivial occasion. We clinked glasses.

‘Truce?’ Charlotte suggested the toast.

‘Truce,’ I echoed, though, typically, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was agreeing to.

‘I knew it was never meant to be,’ I said.

‘Are things meant to be?’ Charlotte asked. ‘If we lived our lives on that basis we’d never accept any responsibility.’

‘I love my children,’ I said.

‘They’re still yours,’ she said.

‘We’ll have to find a way of making it work. For them.’ I tried to sound grown up and responsible.

‘I’ll drink to that.’ Charlotte clinked my glass again, in comradely fashion, before retiring to her room.

The following afternoon, when I returned to the silent, empty house and noticed her half-full glass still standing on the dining table, I did wonder if it had all been a way of prepping me for
not making a scene at the airport.

Candyfloss-blossom trees, yellow daffodils, lime-green grass; a paintbox row of houses, blue, pink, aquamarine; pyramids of orange, red and purple fruit. My key in the door, a
steep wooden staircase in front of me . . .

Each morning I woke up with a thump of disappointment; then, getting out of bed, bare wooden boards under my feet, walked to the window, pulled back the blind a fraction and looked out. In the
street below, market stallholders were calling to each other as they set up their pitches, poles clanking, a dustbin lorry reversing, joggers bouncing past, a well-dressed woman dragging a small,
yawning child in school uniform along the pavement, the sweet waft of croissants filtering up from the cafe next door, all confirming it wasn’t a dream.

I took up running because in London everyone does some kind of exercise, not like at home where you sign up to a Zumba class and start making excuses after a couple of weeks,
like it’s raining, or you’re tired, or
Scott & Bailey
is on the telly. In London, you have to have an answer when people ask you how you stay in shape, especially during the
Olympics when everyone was pumped up with healthy resolution. Most of our clients went to the gym, but being indoors most of the day, I preferred to exercise outside. It had started off as a walk
each morning, but since it took a good fifteen minutes to get to the park, I bought a pair of running shoes and a sports bra, and built up my speed gradually until I could do about six miles in an
hour. I’d never run before, but once my legs had got the idea of what was expected of them, it became a bit of an addiction.

People always say that they like New York because it’s exactly how it is in the movies. I love London for the opposite reason. No movie I’ve seen captures London’s variety: the
serene elegance of the white stucco terraces; the improbable red-brick Christmas cake of the Royal Albert Hall, golden Albert glinting in the sunshine; horses galloping on Rotten Row; crazy
swimmers diving into the Serpentine; and, near Hyde Park Corner, where I turned back for home, gardens with luscious herbaceous borders and pergolas of roses, planted and tended for no other reason
than to give people colour to look at.

Sometimes I’d find myself listing the flowers, like Hope and I used to do on our walks to school: red-hot poker, lavender, Sweet William, acanthus lily, the names repeating in my head
until I reached a rhythm where I’d travel hundreds of yards with no memory of doing so, before returning to the busy immediacy of the Bayswater Road.

I always slowed to a walk at the top of the Portobello Road, wondering whether the people who lived in the terrace of brightly painted houses woke up each morning with the exhilaration I did, in
my flat at the other end of the street.

I say my flat. Really it’s Doll’s. She says it was a business decision, but it was a pretty big coincidence that she decided to open her first London store in the exact place
I’d always dreamed of living.

For a while, after Leo, it was like I lost interest in things. I don’t know what I would have done without Doll coming round every week with a takeaway and a DVD just like she used to.

When she said I should think of my new freedom as an opportunity, I thought she meant university, but since they’d raised the tuition fees, that was never going to happen. The theory was
that you earned more as a graduate, so you could pay back your student loan, but graduates were finding it just as difficult to get work as anyone else. And I was disillusioned with professors.
I’d hung on Leo’s every word, but I wasn’t sure it’d be worth paying nine thousand pounds a year to listen to him, and that’s before accommodation, bills and food.