The Marriage Mender (24 page)

I stared at the wall opposite and tried to stop my bottom lip from quivering.

‘But you did, though, didn’t you?’ said Tania.

‘Yes. Because I found someone who was so much better than her that she blew Lydia out of the water.’

‘He’s talking about you, Alison,’ said Tania.

I looked at her and nodded.

‘And now you have to believe it,’ she said.

‘I know.’

‘And the reason you don’t is because you’ve spent the last eleven years comparing yourself with her. It’s not easy for a woman to compete with an ex, is it?’

‘I wasn’t competing with her.’

‘Only because you didn’t think you were even in the same league. And it turns out you were right. Though not in the way you thought.’

I managed a watery smile. Chris reached over and squeezed my hand.

‘Chocolates and flowers on the way home,’ Tania told him. ‘The biggest and best you can find. She deserves nothing less.’

We go to Bognor Regis every year on holiday, have done since we were married. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like Bognor Regis, but sometimes you can’t help thinking it would be nice to go somewhere else for a change.

So one year I suggested Eastbourne. He gave me a look like I’d lost my mind and asked if they did day trips to Bognor Regis from there.

It was something Josh had once said which made me think of it. He’d told me that Lydia didn’t do breakfast. She was one of those people who couldn’t stomach anything before ten thirty in the morning. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if she even got up before ten thirty most mornings, people working in the music industry probably didn’t. She did brunch instead. Coffee and a croissant or something chocolatey. I could only conclude that she had one of those metabolisms which sucked up calories and blew them out into the atmosphere, where they were inhaled by people like me walking past unsuspectingly.

And despite the proliferation of cafes in Hebden Bridge, there was one blindingly obvious place to start. The cafe in the record shop on Market Street. A proper independent record shop. One that, admittedly, had racks of CDs
now, but which still managed to smell of the vinyl that had once lined the walls.

Lydia had taken Josh there loads of times. I think it was the only cafe they ever went to. Josh had come back the first time telling me he’d had a hot chocolate which, according to the menu, was ‘richer than Pink Floyd, smoother than George Benson and more luxurious than Sade’. I’d even impressed him a little by digging out a Sade album to prove that I had not only heard of her but had the LP to prove it.

I hesitated outside the door, aware that I was effectively stalking her and also that I had no idea what I was going to say if I did find her. I knew I had to do it, though. I couldn’t put it off any longer.

I walked in and smiled an acknowledgement at the waistcoated man with long, grey-streaked hair at the counter at the far end, aware that I probably didn’t look like one of his usual clients. No doubt he had already written me off as a cafe-only customer. I ordered a hot chocolate, as Josh must have done on numerous occasions, and opted for a small table for two near the counter, rather than one of the stools facing out of the window towards the street.

A song was playing which I didn’t recognise. Something suitably edgy and alternative. I imagined Josh poking fun at me for not knowing who it was. Lydia would know it, of course. Lydia knew all those sorts of things.

I sat for a long time. Sipping the hot chocolate, wondering whether Josh used to sit at this table when he came
here with her, unsure quite how long it was acceptable to make one hot chocolate last.

A steady trickle of people came in, some for a coffee, others to browse the CDs, several simply to have a chat with the guy at the counter. That was when I realised he probably knew Josh, by sight if not by name. And that he would definitely know Lydia. They had probably shared many stories together. Tales of who she’d met and what she’d got up to. She would have shown him the signed guitar, I was sure of it, before she gave it to Josh.

I looked at my watch. It had been almost an hour. Maybe she’d left Hebden. Done a runner at the same time as Josh. Too distraught over what she’d done to be able to face him again. Or maybe she was with him. Maybe he had forgiven her and they were together somewhere now. London, perhaps, hanging out with her friends in the music business. She might have pulled in a favour or two to get him a job.

It was no good. I was going to have to ask. It was crazy to waste time sitting here if she wasn’t even still around. I stood up, pushed my chair back and wandered up to the counter. I decided not to even make a pretence of browsing the CDs.

The guy behind the counter looked up.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘My stepson was right, you do a great hot chocolate.’

He nodded his thanks, seemingly still a bit wary.

‘He used to come here with his mum,’ I continued. ‘She was one of your regulars. Long dark hair, works in the music business. Lydia, her name is.’

The man’s face flickered into life as if he’d just tuned into a radio station that was worth listening to. ‘Still is one of my regulars,’ he said. ‘She’s usually here by now as well. She’s got her name on that stool,’ he said, pointing to the counter nearest him. ‘Reckons our espressos are the best cure for a hangover, and she has a fair few of those.’

I nodded and smiled, as if I found that as endearing as he clearly did.

‘And she’s usually in most days?’ I asked.

‘Yep. Think Wednesdays might be her laundry day, mind. She’s usually a bit later. Comes in while her wash is doing.’

I nodded. I didn’t want to sit back down now. It would make it too obvious. ‘Right. Well, thanks again,’ I said, turning to leave.

‘Who shall I say was asking after her?’

I hesitated before turning back. ‘Don’t worry, thanks. I’ll catch up with her myself.’

He nodded.

I left the shop. He’d made it easy for me. There was only one launderette in town. I walked over the bridge and turned left, my pumps soundless on the cobbles, like a cat silently stalking its prey. I stopped at the door of the launderette. She was in there. I could see her through the window, cramming the last of some clothes into a machine. It was a dark wash, of course. I couldn’t imagine Lydia doing whites. Part of me felt uneasy. That it was somehow wrong to be doing this here, when my prey was most vulnerable, innocently brandishing her smalls. There
was nothing innocent about Lydia, though. I knew that already.

I opened the door. I don’t know why Lydia looked round. It’s not as if you would expect someone to come looking for you in a launderette. I wondered if the guy from the record shop had phoned her. Warned her someone had been asking questions. She stared at me. I half expected her to put her hands up in the air. To wave a pillowcase in surrender. There was no white flag, though. Just a steely glare.

I walked a few paces closer to her. The woman who had caused so much grief. So much pain. I wanted to hate her. I also wanted to hurt her. I couldn’t do either, though. Because I was Alison. The woman who fixed things. Tried to make them better.

‘Hi,’ I said.

She eyed me warily, a box of washing powder in one hand. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

‘I wanted to see you,’ I said. ‘I wondered if you knew where Josh was?’

A slight frown creased her brow. I knew instantly that she didn’t. If you were going to try to fake surprise, you would do it much better than that.

‘Why should I know where he is?’ she asked.

‘He ran away,’ I said. ‘The morning after you came round.’

She stared at me, the frown increasing. ‘You’ve not heard from him?’

I shook my head. The washing powder was shaking in
her hand. I walked up and took it from her. Placed it on top of the machine. Her hand shook even more now that it was empty.

‘I thought he might have been in touch,’ I said.

She went on staring. I noticed for the first time how rough she looked. Her hair was lank and needed washing. Her face gaunt. Her eyes heavily made up, as ever, but heavier still with shadows.

‘Is that everything?’ I asked, pointing towards the machine.

She nodded.

I picked up the powder and poured some into the dispenser tray. Shut it, turned the knob to forty degrees and pulled it out. The machine whirred into action. The water started hissing in, spitting venom at the dirt. Laughing as it smothered it.

‘Is there somewhere we can go to talk?’ I asked, hoping she wouldn’t say the cafe.

She nodded. ‘My place,’ she said. ‘You’d better come back to my place.’

We didn’t speak on the walk there. It was as if we were both saving it up, keeping the words in our heads until we found some walls for them to bounce back off. She only lived a few streets away. There were kids playing in the road outside. Kicking a ball about in what appeared to be a concerted effort to disprove the theory that children didn’t do that any more.

She stopped outside a battered blue wooden door and fumbled in her pocket for the key. Her hand was still
shaking as she turned it in the lock. I followed her inside, into a gloomy hallway. The whole place was going to be gloomy. She was on the wrong side of the valley to catch the light.

‘It’s through there,’ she said, pointing to another door at the end of the hall.

The room beyond was pretty unremarkable in the way that rented flats are. Cream-painted walls, a rug on the wooden floor which may have been her own and a worn green sofa with a throw over it beneath the window. A hallway ran off it to three further wooden doors, one of which would have been the room where she’d slept with Tom.

‘Do you mind?’ asked Lydia, holding up a packet of cigarettes which had been lying on the table.

I shook my head. I did mind, but I was in her flat. These were her rules.

She lit it, took a long, slow drag and looked at me. ‘Did he take his stuff with him?’ she asked.

‘About half of his clothes, and various bits and pieces in his rucksack.’

‘Passport?’

‘Yeah. We’ve got no way of knowing if he’s used it, of course.’

‘Are the cops not looking for him?’

‘We registered him as missing with them. But at the end of the day he’s sixteen, and he left of his own accord. His details are on their database, but they haven’t got the resources to do anything more than that.’

Lydia blew out. ‘Fucking hell,’ she said.

‘I take it he hasn’t been in touch, then.’

‘Nothing since I came round. I texted him and called all that night and the next day. It just went to voicemail.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Me too.’

It was weird to think about it. Both of us pulling from different directions. Both of us reaching the same message. Hearing the same Josh.

‘I just thought he hated me. Wanted nothing more to do with me. I can’t say I blamed him.’

‘He was hurt, that was all. The people we love hurt us the most.’

‘I didn’t know he was Josh’s friend,’ she said. ‘I would never have done it otherwise.’

‘Why did you do it, anyway?’

‘It’s like you said. I’m a sad lonely woman who knows she’s past her prime. I screwed up on the only man I ever truly loved and I walked out on my own son. And you wonder why I hate myself? Why I’m left picking up any scraps of love or lust that are thrown my way?’

She walked across to the window and took another drag on the cigarette.

‘Why did you leave?’ I asked. ‘When he was a baby.’

‘Because I knew I wasn’t good enough. I loved him, I loved him to bits. That’s why it scared me so much, when I started drinking again.’

‘Chris said you might have had post-natal depression.’

Lydia shrugged. ‘It’s no excuse, is it? Not for what I did.’

‘It’s not an excuse, but it explains it.’

‘Being drunk in charge of a baby? I don’t think so.’

‘You needed help. Professional help.’

Lydia rolled her eyes. ‘You don’t let up, do you? Thinking you lot are the answer to everything.’

‘I’m not saying that. I’m saying that a lot of new mums find it hard, incredibly hard, to adjust to being responsible for this tiny person.’

‘I bet you didn’t.’

I looked down. ‘I did, actually. I didn’t change a nappy for the first two weeks after Matilda was born. I wasn’t capable. I was a wreck. Matilda wasn’t latching on properly, so I couldn’t feed her at first. I felt such a failure. How was I going to be able to look after her if I couldn’t manage that most basic of things?’

Lydia stared at me. ‘You didn’t walk out on her, though, did you?’

‘No, because I had Chris to support me. To show me how to do everything, because he’d been there before with you and Josh and he knew what he was doing. He even helped me with the feeding, got me to hold her in a different position. He probably remembered how you did it. Though he didn’t tell me that, of course.’

Lydia sat down on the wooden chair next to the table. She traced her fingernail along the grain in the wood. ‘I envy you, you know.’

‘Me?’

‘That day, when I turned up at your house. You looked like such a perfect family. You, all warm and radiant, your beautiful little girl, Chris doing his protective “They’re
mine, so fuck off and don’t come anywhere near them” routine. You had what I could never have. You had a happy family. Because you were a good mum. You were what I could never be. Why I had to go.’

I sighed and went to sit down on the chair opposite her. ‘It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?’ I said.

‘What is?’

‘I’ve spent eleven years trying and failing to compete with you.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘Because he loved you so much. It was there, in the house, etched into the bloody stonework. How much he loved you. And when I first moved in, every time I entered a room I imagined him being there with you. Unable to take his eyes off your face, stroking your hair, making love with you.’

‘He never wanted me. I used to kid myself he did, but he didn’t. Not really.’

‘He did,’ I said. ‘He loved you more than he’d ever loved anyone in his life. He told me so.’

‘When?’

‘Last week. During our counselling session.’

‘You’re going for counselling?’

‘Yeah. Things haven’t been good between us since, well, you know. He’s taken it all pretty badly. It’s brought up a lot of stuff that he’s never dealt with.’

She turned to look at me. ‘He’s told you, hasn’t he?’

I nodded. ‘Barbara told me, actually. Last month. She was worried about him.’

Lydia stubbed her cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray on the table and shut her eyes. ‘I didn’t do it on purpose. Leaving Josh wrapped up like that when I went. I didn’t want him to be cold, that was all. It was only after I left that I realised what it might look like. That he would think I did it to get at him.’

‘Why didn’t you tell him you were leaving? You could have saved him coming back and finding Josh like that.’

‘I didn’t know I was leaving until after he’d gone to work. And once I’d made my mind up, I was determined to do it. If I’d called Chris to tell him, or taken Josh to him at work, he would have tried to stop me going and he would probably have succeeded.

‘It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, walking out on Josh. And I couldn’t let him stop me doing it, because it was the right thing for Josh.’

‘Why do you think that?’

‘Jesus, he’s bloody amazing. He’s the best teenager I’ve ever met. He’s funny, he’s sharp and he’s incredibly caring, and that’s down to you and Chris, isn’t it? That’s the only reason I can live with myself. Because I know I did the right thing.’