These Days of Ours (30 page)

Standing, Charlie took off the hairpiece. The sudden masculinity of his short hair rendered his perfect maquillage eerie. ‘Anna. Let’s go.’

‘Stay.’ Kate changed her mind; he mustn’t leave. ‘You can’t just . . .’ She groped for words. The surroundings and the personnel were all wrong for this
conversation. ‘Becca, what is
wrong
with you?’

Already on the road to regret, Becca was ashen. ‘What’s wrong with
him
? Why can’t he just let Flo have an adventure instead of putting himself first? This job is
important to Leon and—’

‘There is no job,’ said Leon. ‘I didn’t get the job.’ Leon sounded bereaved. ‘Sorry, princess, but we’re not going to the States.’ Awkwardly
inserting himself into the booth, he put an arm around Becca.

Pushing him away, Becca knocked over the coffee cups in her haste to put some distance between herself, her husband and the scene she’d caused. Leon said to Charlie, ‘This is all
highly regrettable, mate. Believe me, if I’d known she was planning this I’d have done something.’

‘Don’t worry, Leon. I think it was spur of the moment.’ Charlie was ready to fight or flee by the look of him, standing tense in his LBD.

‘I’d better find the missus.’ Leon slipped away.

Snatching up Jaffa who’d been left on the table, Kate rushed after him. ‘Here. For God’s sake don’t go without this.’

‘I prefer Jaffa dead,’ said Leon sadly. ‘He doesn’t crap in my slippers any more.’

‘Did the job really fall through?’ asked Kate. This close, Leon’s ever-cheery face was rugged, marked by a long life that surely wasn’t all fun and games.

‘Put it this way,’ said Leon, after a pause. ‘There’s no way we’re going after that little sideshow.’

‘You’re a hero,’ said Kate.

‘I’ll get Jaffa thrown at my head if she ever finds out.’

‘Your secret’s safe with me.’

Back at the table Anna, her head on Charlie’s shoulder, was working her way through her stock of insults. ‘What a cow. What a bitch.’

Unable to disagree, Kate said, ‘It’s complicated,’ hoping it translated as
You’ve only just arrived in our lives so please back off
. It was unfair to expect a girl
– that’s all Anna was – to comprehend the complexity of galling, glorious Becca. How could she empathise with the lengths Becca had gone to in her quest to feel valued? At times
Kate herself had trouble scraping together sufficient empathy. Tonight was one of those times.

‘So she, what? She had an affair?’ Anna poked through the entrails, appalled but excited as if discussing the plot of a movie.

Beneath his false lashes, Charlie winced as if somebody had stuck a blade in his side. ‘Can we get out of here?’

Kate knew that two’s company, three’s a crowd, but she had the excuse of Charlie’s insistence that she go back to his flat with them.

Showered, changed into jeans, Charlie was himself again, apart from stray glitter in his eyebrows. He was thin,
too thin
, in Kate’s opinion. The thinness was for Anna, who preferred
the trendy, wasted silhouette of the archetypal hipster. The spare frame was easier to achieve for young guys; Charlie had ripped up his gym membership and now carried a well-thumbed carb counter
in the back pocket of his – skinny – jeans. Kate found it ridiculous that anybody would alter their actual body shape for the sake of fashion; she was sitting it out until big bums were
à la mode.

‘At times like this, people drink whisky for the shock.’ Charlie scratched his head. ‘But I’ve only got tea. Will that do?’

‘Bring me some, pweez!’ called Anna in a baby voice from the other room. She’d gone to bed and called out occasionally, by turns grumpy and imploring, like some giant kid they
were babysitting.

Kate wandered about the room, touching things as Charlie fussed with the kettle and dropped the sweeteners. Charlie’s writing had commandeered the poky flat. Towers of lined pads tottered
on the rug. Post-It notes snaked across the walls. A plot diagram was drawn in the dust on a window pane. None of the books leaning chummily against each other on the shelves were by Charles
Garland: all that effort and nothing published.

‘Charleeeee! Me want a cuddle!’

‘In a min, darling.’ Charlie fobbed off Anna as he joined Kate on the sofa, an aged behemoth only made bearable by a myriad of cushions.

Sex doesn’t cure everything, Anna
. Kate heard the tone of her own thoughts and wondered if she was finally turning into her mother. The old, pre-Mary model.

A welcome contrast to the wine bar, the quiet room, a catch-all cooking/eating/relaxing space, was pure Charlie: no order, all charm.

Having rehearsed and discarded a number of phrases, Kate chose to open with, ‘I’m sorry you had to find out this way.’

‘You silly sausage,’ said Charlie. ‘I already knew.’ He leaned back, closed his eyes. ‘Remember how bad things got between me and Lucy at the end?’ He opened
his eyes and glanced at the door: mention of the most recent Queen was outlawed by the present monarch. ‘We tried for a baby. It wasn’t like me and Anna, just silly talk. Lucy, God
bless her, was desperate to be a mum.’ Charlie looked into the middle distance. ‘It was a sticking plaster, sure, a bad idea, but we both wanted it.’

The sigh made Kate suspect that not only Lucy was ‘desperate’ for a child.

‘Weeks passed. Months. Nothing. Lucy was jittery because, of course,
I
was obviously fertile. Flo was proof of that. She wanted to get herself checked out and I said I would too
because, well . . .’

‘You’re a nice guy,’ said Kate, feeling intently how near he was. And how far away.

‘Not really.’ Charlie ducked the compliment. ‘I just wanted to support her. You can imagine what happened next. Lucy got the all clear. I was told I was infertile.’

They were quiet for a moment, giving that memory the space it needed.

‘She’s got a little son now, did I tell you?’ Charlie tried to smile. ‘Lucy’ll be a great mum.’ He slapped his knees. ‘Ah, well . . .’

‘What was the problem? With you, I mean?’ Kate thought of those miscarriages and didn’t like the light it shed on Becca.

‘You sure you want to know?’ Charlie gave her a sideways look. ‘None of the story is pretty, as you can imagine. I have ejaculatory duct obstruction.’

‘Right,’ said Kate, uncertainly.

‘Don’t worry. You’re allowed to pull a face. I pulled a face for about a month when I first heard the term. Basically . . .’ Charlie sighed, hating putting it into words.
‘Me tubes are bunged up. I can make, you know . . .’

‘Semen?’ said Kate, helpfully. She hadn’t expected the evening to end this way.

‘Yeah, that stuff,’ smiled Charlie. ‘But there’s very little sperm.’ He rubbed the end of his nose, suddenly and viciously. ‘Not something blokes like to
admit.’

‘Oh Charlie, it’s only me.’ Kate moved nearer. ‘Can’t the doctors do anything?’

‘There are procedures. I won’t explain. It’d put you off your dinner for life. It’s very invasive, lots of possible side effects, and even then only a twenty per cent
possibility of a natural pregnancy for the partner.’ Charlie shrugged, understating. ‘It wasn’t the nicest afternoon of my life.’

‘How did Lucy react?’

‘She was shocked, like me. We couldn’t speak about it, or anything else, until the next morning. And then we talked about nothing else. Lucy had had a ton of tests herself by this
point, and she was sick of waiting rooms and statistics and bad news. She didn’t want to make me go through the treatment if it might not make a difference. I told her I’d do it for her
and that was . . .’ He exhaled sadly. ‘That did it, really. Lucy wanted me to do it for
us
.’

‘I suppose,’ said Kate, ‘there’s a world of difference between those two words.’

‘I said I’d do it, said I’d do
anything
. I loved Lucy. You know that. But not enough, it turned out. The pressure pushed at the stress points in our relationship. We
tried and we hung on but in the end we parted and we were right. It still feels right,’ said Charlie, a lump in his throat strangling the words.

‘Oh Charlie.’ Kate felt for him, wanting to make it all better.

‘As well as the implications for me and Lucy, there was, of course . . .’

‘Flo,’ said Kate.

‘My Flo,’ said Charlie.

‘Is there any chance she
is
yours?’

‘I’ll tell you what the experts told me. Ejaculatory duct obstruction can be something you’re born with, but in my case it was late onset. They pinpointed 2000 as the
approximate year the problem began. They were sure it was no later than 2001.’

‘Flo was conceived in . . .’ Kate counted on her fingers. ‘Summer 2002.’ Her shoulders wilted.

‘It’s not like
CSI
. They can’t be completely accurate.’ Charlie had trawled back through his life, remembering a period when Becca had seemed elusive, when he
hadn’t always known where she was, when she’d been twitchy, touchy. ‘Hiding something.’

Kate remembered how she’d done the same thing with Becca, retracing her steps, unpicking the betrayal.

‘Obviously Becca was impatient to fall pregnant again. Whether she had a proper affair or just a drunken one night stand . . . It doesn’t really matter. But the diagnosis plus
Becca’s behaviour plus my own sixth sense added up to the fact that, although the early babies, the children we lost, were mine, Flo very probably wasn’t.’ Charlie’s
demeanour changed. No longer reflective, he was almost angry. ‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘It wasn’t my job.’ Kate was firm. Her decision to keep quiet hadn’t been taken lightly. ‘It would have blown your marriage apart. More importantly, it would have
had repercussions between you and Flo.’

‘Yeah. Me and Flo,’ said Charlie slowly. ‘Look, you and Becca, you like to thrash things out, go over things again and again. But me, I’ve done my thinking and it’s
this.’ Charlie sat up, deaf to the yowled ‘
Chaz babes! Pleeease!
’ from the bedroom. He stabbed a cushion with his finger as he made his points. ‘I was the first to
hold Flo. All that love can’t go to waste. I rank her happiness and safety far above mine. That child needs me and I don’t just
need
Flo. They haven’t minted the word that
covers how I feel about her. So I’ve done my thinking. Flo’s my little girl. And I’m her daddy.’

Every second word was a crackle.

‘I
crackle
hate
crackle crackle
Skype,’ said Charlie, as he flew apart into technicolour fragments and then came together again.

‘Hang on, hang on. That’s better.’ Kate smiled as his face, grumpy and discombobulated, sharpened up.

‘I only half believe you’re getting on that plane tomorrow.’

‘This time I mean it.’

‘One month my arse. Seven months you’ve been there. What’s it got that London hasn’t got?’

‘Stop teasing.’ Charlie knew what Beijing had. It had challenge, it had promise, it needed her.

‘Even with this crappy technology I can see in your face that you’re already planning your next trip.’

‘You could always come with me . . .’

‘I can’t see Anna swapping swinging London for Fangshang district.’

I didn’t invite Anna
, thought Kate. The girl had grit. Even Becca had to admit that. Anna had chewed up and digested the horrible scene in the wine bar, telling Charlie it
didn’t matter. Kate reminded herself that the girl was only twenty, that her earlier talk of wanting a baby and subsequent change of heart were probably just attitudes she was trying on for
size. Anna had plenty of time to work out what she really wanted.
When I was that age I wasn’t thinking about babies.
At thirty-eight, almost twice Anna’s age – Kate gulped
and shooed away that thought – Kate realised she’d spent almost two decades believing the cosmos had a little being with her name on it, waiting for the perfect moment to waft the child
her way.

‘So,’ the fuzzy Charlie said, ‘did you read it?’

‘Every word.’

‘And?’

‘Charlie, I love your book.’

‘Really?’ The elation lasted all of a second. ‘You have to say that, though.’

‘True. But luckily I really do love your book.’

The four hundred pages and one hundred thousand words of
BLOKE
had engrossed Kate in her tidy single bed at the orphanage. Charlie’s aim to write a story that enthralled on a human
scale, without explosions or plagues or a plot to blow up the Eiffel Tower, had resulted in a beautifully detailed novel of the impact that ordinary love has on an ordinary man. ‘I loved it.
Every word.’ She’d searched for herself in the pages, at first trepidatious, then disappointed. If not the love interest, couldn’t he have included her as a villain? Or even a
thumbnail sketch?

Desperate for detail, Charlie asked, ‘And the scene where the hero gets together with the love of his life after all they went through? Did it ring true?’

‘I wept. Actual tears.’ In Kate’s head Charlie had voiced the hero’s lines and the heroine had sounded suspiciously like herself. ‘It was my favourite
chapter.’

‘Mine too. Not my editor’s, though. I have rewrites to plough through.’ Charlie exhaled showily. ‘Man, I feel as if I’ve been writing this book since I was born and
it’s still not finished.’