Under My Skin (27 page)

I imagined her, a young desperate woman, the adrenaline long gone, arriving home reeking of her lover, only this time the smell of blood rather than sex. I saw her push her way into the bathroom, strip off and fling herself into the shower, leaving that vicious little pile of clothes behind her. But there are some things that hot water can’t wash off. Just as there are some words that don’t burn, despite the ashes. I saw the towel on the floor and the indentation on the bedcover, the empty glass of whisky and the pills. Maybe she had thought that she’d find some peace in sleep, only to realize that sleep would mean dreams, and that in the end it would be easier to choose that other tunnel of forgetfulness. Just a question of not being able to live with what you have done.

The day after the official reports came through, I got a letter from Olivia Marchant. It read:

Nicely turned, I thought. And generous. In more ways than one. Tucked inside the envelope was a check for a thousand pounds. The amount didn’t surprise me. I was getting used to being overpaid. The real problem was how it didn’t make me feel any better. God, I hate this bit. I hate it when it’s all over, but you still feel as if it isn’t. What I needed was something to earth it, to let it go.

So I drove down to the Nag’s Head. Well, a promise is a promise and the money was already burning too many holes in my psyche. My windscreen washer was there at the traffic lights, sitting having a fag, a stack of the
Big Issue
next to his bucket and sponge. I rolled down the window and called him over. He gave me a grin and ran up with a copy.

“Hi, Hannah.”

“Hi.” I took it from him and in return handed him a fifty-pound note. He stared at it with stunned disbelief. “I used you in a bet,” I said. “They could afford to lose it. Have fun.”

I drove off before he could ask further.

In a dozen other circumstances it would have made a perfect end. But my malaise was too deep for a corny philanthropic gesture to cure, and anyway we all know this isn’t really the end. For some time now this has been a story of two marriages, two sets of infidelities in need of resolution, and only one of them had come to rest.

Two evenings ago Colin had taken his wife out to dinner in the country to try and patch up their relationship and prevent her from finding out the truth. I went home and waited for my sister to tell me about it.

S
he took her time. Three days, to be exact. I sat through a long weekend, then finally I lost my patience and called home. It was early evening on the Kent-Sussex border and my mother had been out pruning the rosebushes. I think that was where I first encountered violence, in my mother’s gardening. Her and her shears. The plants used to tremble as they heard her opening the shed doors. I could see her now, hair caught up in an old-fashioned roll, wisps escaping as she pulled off the gardening gloves to pick up the phone.

We talked weather and saucepans and my father’s angina. Then she told me all about the lovely visit they’d had from Kate and the family, and how they had gone home the day before and what a marvelous man Colin was, the way he worked so hard and cared so much for his family. I suppose every girl sets out to make herself in the image of what her mother isn’t, but in my case you can probably appreciate now that it was a matter of survival. I put the phone down, got out my stash, and rolled myself a joint.

And so it was that I was not entirely in control of all my faculties when half an hour later the doorbell rang. I looked out of my open window to see Kate standing below on the doorstep, a bottle of champagne in one hand, a potted plant in the other, and no kids hanging round her skirts. No doubt they were at home with Daddy playing happy families. I took a few deep breaths of fresh air and went downstairs to greet her.

She looked a little guilty, no doubt about that. But she
also looked happier. Younger even. Reconciliation: cheaper than a face-lift. But was it less painful? She smiled at me. How mean was I going to be to her?

“Kate, what a surprise. Mum must be baby-sitting.” Very mean was the answer to that question.

“No. We’re home.”

“We?”

“Yes. We all came back together last night.”

“I see,” I said and held out my hand. “And those are for me.”

When I was little, I could be so cruel to her; even though she was the elder, I was always the one who could make her cry. Once I told her a ghost story that had her sobbing with fright. I felt guilty about it later, but it didn’t stop me then.

I took the bottle and the plant. “Thank you. You don’t mind if I don’t invite you in. Only I’m quite tired.”

“Hannah …”

“Don’t worry, Kate. You don’t have to say anything,” I said firmly. “It’s got nothing to do with me, remember.”

She looked at me for a moment. I smiled. I thought I did quite a good job, but then we’re talking Kate here. She sighed, then put out her hand and took the champagne back. I was so surprised that I let it go. “It’s not a present, Hannah,” she said quietly. “It was a way of getting you to speak to me. If you don’t want to talk, you can’t have it.”

“What?”

“You heard. You can keep the plant. Mum says it doesn’t need a lot of water, but you have to dead-head the old blossoms. Give me a ring when you’re not so tired.”

And she turned on her heel and walked down the path. Well, when I say I used to be the cruel one, I did, of course, have to learn it from someone. Some responses just take you right back to childhood. “All right,” I said. “But I still don’t think it’s fair.”

We sat around the table. It was good champagne. At least it was better than most of the stuff I’ve drunk, but then that wouldn’t be difficult. She had sniffed at the air a bit as she got out the glasses but didn’t say anything. In fact, she didn’t speak until the bubbly was poured and we were sitting down.

“You stoned?” she asked.

I laughed. “Not really. Your arrival seems to have sobered me up. How did you know?”

“How do you think?” She paused. “We were sitting in opposite seats last time.”

“What?”

“When I was here last. I was sitting there, with a cup of coffee. You were here.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so unhappy, you know. Or not that I can remember. You were so good to me. I can’t tell you how grateful I was that you were here.”

“I … er … it was nothing,” I said.

“I really thought it was all broken up. I kept wondering how I would cope, bringing them up on my own. What I’d do for money, how they’d be without a father. So many people do it, don’t they? It must be possible.”

“Yes,” I said. “But you’re lucky. You don’t have to do it after all.”

“No. No, I don’t.” She fell silent. I didn’t push it. That’s the thing about dope. Even the silences are OK. Although long.

“We’re all right, Hannah,” she said after what seemed like an hour and a half. “Colin and me. We’ve talked about it. I wasn’t imagining it. There was something really wrong. A reason why we’ve grown apart, why he’d become so distant. The business has been in trouble. Serious trouble, much worse than he’d ever admitted to me. Eight months ago the bank threatened to foreclose on the loan because they’d
fallen behind on payments. He even thought about selling the company, but he was advised that he wouldn’t get enough to cover the outstanding debts. He’s been worried sick for the best part of a year, but didn’t tell me because he didn’t want to burden me with it. He’s always felt that work was his responsibility, his half of the relationship, and he couldn’t bear for me to know he’d failed. Isn’t it crazy? That in the 1990s a man like him should still feel so ashamed of something like that?”

I grunted. “Well, he’s always been a traditional kind of chap,” I said. Nice one, Colin. Make her feel sorry for you and then anything that comes after is forgiven in advance. I wondered who would mention the skirt first, her or me.

“I was so angry with him. But then I kept thinking about his father and how nobody had ever said anything to anybody in that family. It was a big step for him. Telling me. You should have seen him,” she said quietly. “He cried. He said he felt that somehow he was betraying himself as a man, not being able to support the family. That if he’d told me he knew I would have helped, agreed to sell the house or go back to work to bring in extra money. But that would have broken his side of the bargain.”

I thought of Kate sitting in her nice Islington kitchen awash with children and toys and chaos, against the odds so enjoying it all, happy to have a career behind her. Colin was right. Of course she would have coped, but it would also have been the death of a kind of innocence between them, a breaking of a promise. Not the only one, though.

“And what about the other money?” I said at last. “The two or three hundred pounds he was taking out of the joint account every month. Did he tell you about that?” What had he said? That he was siphoning off private funds to pay the public debt. Very clever, Colin. Who says you’re not fit to run a business?

“Oh, that …” She hesitated. “Hannah, I’m sorry, but I mean … if I tell you, will you promise me not to tell anyone else. I mean I know how you feel about Colin, but if Mum or anyone—it’s not for my sake, but Colin—”

“Kate, it’s me, Hannah, remember. I’m the one who stopped talking about my life to Mum twenty years ago. You really think I’m going to tell tales on yours? I wouldn’t say a word to a living soul. Was it a woman?”

She nodded and her face broke out into a sudden grin. “Yes. It was.”

“Who was she?” I said, the dope pushing me into an amazed smile in reply to her laughter.

“She was a therapist.”

“What?”

“A therapist.”

I would have laughed, too, had my bottom jaw not fallen so far away from my top one. Colin and a therapist?

“Isn’t it incredible? When things started to go so wrong and he couldn’t tell me because he was so scared it would break up the marriage, he began to feel ill. He couldn’t sleep, then he started having panic attacks. So he went to his doctor and she suggested he should see someone and referred him to this woman in Kentish Town who deals with short-term crisis patients. She was wonderful apparently. Really helped him to think it through. When she heard that I had taken the kids to Mum, she told him that he had to tell me the truth. He came the very next day. He just walked into the room and burst into tears. Luckily Mum had the kids in the garden. Oh, Hannah. I felt so awful. That I hadn’t known, or hadn’t even tried to understand. He’s been through such pain, stupid bloody man.”

I was grateful that she kept on talking. That way I didn’t have to say anything. My mind was spinning like some astronaut who’d snapped free from the space cable. A therapist. Jesus Christ. I ran it all back again: the monthly bills,
the early mornings, the nice residential street, the basement flat, the fifty minutes on the clock, the next client in a suit and the unexpected ordinariness of the woman who had opened the door to me. And finally, the sight of Colin sobbing into his steering wheel. Look at it one way and you had infidelity, look at it another and it was crisis management.

Much though I would have liked to disbelieve it, I knew immediately it was true. God, no wonder he’d been so freaked when he saw me. And so beside himself with worry and with rage. Poor old Colin. A man weighed down under the burdens of masculinity. It might have been better if she had been a hooker. Well, I know what to buy him for Christmas. The latest Pete Pantin album.

I was lucky I was stoned, really. That way I could just roll with one thought into another, enjoy the journey, not have to take responsibility for the meaning, or my part in it. But dope can be a dangerous ally in such circumstances. Pleasure to paranoia is an easy step. When I got there, it hurt more than I care to admit. My God, among the many ways in which I have fucked up in my life this was a real beauty.

Except for one thing. When she’d sat here a week ago weeping into her coffee cup, he hadn’t been the only problem in the marriage. She had been doing a little retreating herself, sexually as well as emotionally. Not anymore, it seemed.

“And what about you, Kate? What about your doubts? Or are you ready to patch it all up?”

She gave a little frown as if the reference embarrassed her. As well it might. Maybe they’d already sorted out that bit, making the bedsprings sing in Mother’s spare room. In which case they’d got more nerve than I ever had.

“We’ll work it out,” she said quietly. And then, as if she knew it wasn’t enough: “It’s who I am now, Hannah. I don’t know how to be anybody else. Even if I wanted to.”

And I knew that was all I was going to get. I looked at her, this sister of mine who had occupied such a powerful place in my childhood and my life. And I realized again the one single fact that always caused me trouble: that she actually loved this man, that against all the odds of his pomposity and conservatism, there was something in him that had touched her. Something in his steadiness and reserve and his old-fashioned notions of life and marriage that made her feel safe and free. And although what had happened would no doubt shake those easy choices, make them have to redefine each other anew, it wouldn’t entirely obliterate their relationship. Kate needed Colin. She might be lovely and bright and sassy enough to have a hundred others, but Colin and Ben and Amy were what she wanted. And I couldn’t keep pretending that she didn’t—like some women want bigger breasts and younger faces because they think it will make them feel good, because they want to fight the world in their way, not mine. And just because it wasn’t my choice, it didn’t give me any right to refuse them theirs, to assume that it automatically made them stupid or damaged. Face it, Hannah, you can’t make the world in the way you think it should be. You just have to accept it for what it is.