Life Begins Read online

  What he needed was a clean sheet, Dominic mused, tracking the squirrel as it scampered through a patch of weeds and up a tree; someone fresh and uncluttered as Maggie had been when they’d first met, full of ideals, hope and generosity, holding still to the view that the world would deliver rather than disappoint. Someone, maybe, like the Polish girl whom his sly brother had recently placed at Dominic’s end of a dinner table; late twenties, self-assured, saucer-eyed, full of a youthful eagerness to please, to succeed, proud of her unusual career path – au pair, to PA, to fledgling producer in a film company – she had exuded an energy that was impossible to ignore. So some of his clients invested in films, she had exclaimed, in her clipped, school-book English, with the delight of somebody stumbling upon a monumental coincidence, maybe they could talk about it over lunch some time.

  ‘Dad, we’re going to be late.’

  ‘No, we’re not.’

  ‘But you haven’t had your breakfast and it’s eight o’clock and you feel sick if you don’t eat before you fly.’

  Dominic reached out to stroke his daughter’s cheek, missing the harum-scarum creature who had spent the first ten years of her life exercising his patience. She was filling in for Maggie, of course. Even the most amateur shrink could have worked that out. All perfectly understandable, but heartbreaking nonetheless. Something she loved had been taken away so she was damn well going to protect what was left. In his own way Dominic felt it too, had fought it minute by minute during the bad times, letting her be when he wanted to crush her gangly, fragile twelve-year-old body against his chest and howl. It was the new game they played, no sissies allowed, and Rose was still excelling at it. How she had handled the business with the loathsome Sam Turner had been typical: keeping it to herself, not worrying him, calmly reporting it to teachers the moment it got out of hand, then putting it behind her as soon the headmistress’s door was closed. Sam Turner was a saddo and a geek, she had pronounced, during the car ride home, and she would have kicked him back if there hadn’t been the danger of getting into as much trouble herself.

  Before they left the house Dominic shuffled through the morning post. ‘There’s a letter, look, for you.’

  ‘For me?’ Rose snatched it from him, beaming.

  ‘Anyone I know?’

  She ignored him, tucking the envelope into her blazer pocket, but adding, because she had her mother’s kindness, ‘I might show you later, okay?’

  As Dominic crossed the M25 the glorious spring day promised by the forecasters – clear skies, light winds, temperatures rising to sixteen – began to push through the mist like some ravishing oil painting emerging through an insipid overlay of watercolour. He felt, as always, a deep reluctance at the thought of the hour or so it would take to shoulder-barge the hangar doors, tug the Cessna out on to the Tarmac and carry out the necessary checks prior to radioing for permission to take off. Enthralled as some members of his flying group were with such technical ritual, Dominic’s part-ownership of the little plane had always been about the pure joy of being in the air. In the immediate aftermath of Maggie’s death he had, on a couple of occasions, skipped every safety check in the book – ailerons, elevators, lights, oil, avgas, the lot – bumping along the grassy runway with no precaution other than the clearance to do so. No one would know, he had reasoned. No one would care. But the second time he did it, on a loop round the Isle of Wight, a storm had blown up from across the Channel. For half an hour he had had to fly by his instruments alone, which he had managed, sweating with concentration, drawing on the advanced lessons he had taken for just such an emergency. Buffeted in the cramped cockpit, the rain splatting against the screen, he had willed the plane on, his heart swelling with a desire to survive, not just for Rose – of course for Rose – but for himself.

  That day Dominic’s outing did not disappoint. The sky was the densest blue, the sun glaring even through his sunglasses. A thousand feet below, the ordered map of southern England was predominantly rural rather than urban – a green feast of a world, embroidered with the silvery sinews of rivers and motorways and the darker, more geometric lines of its hedges and ploughed fields. Houses clustered round churches like pebbles round a rock, their pedestrian colours studded with the occasional emerald and turquoise jewels of games pitches and swimming-pools.

  Dominic turned east, tracking the lower ridge of the North Downs, letting the sides of the control stick float between his palms. In the distance to his right he could make out the thick, ominous shimmer of yellow-grey hovering over London; smog trapped by high air pressure, voluntary human suffocation. Dominic shuddered, nosing the plane south instead, rejoicing in the simple power of being able to turn his back on it. He began to rise higher, until the sheep in the fields were white flecks and the lakes of the chalk pits fingerprint smudges of blue. His heart, his hopes, soared with the plane; such a jewel of a day, so full of beauty and promise; a day, he mused, releasing a sudden involuntary chuckle, when even Maggie might have been prepared to swallow one of her travel-sickness tablets and come along for the ride.

  Chapter Eight

  Theresa kept within arm’s reach of the barrier as she circled the rink, trying her best to glide rather than stagger, as Charlotte was managing a few yards in front of her. Behind them, somewhere among the moving crowd, Sam and George were ricocheting off each other and the edge of the rink as if ineptitude merely added to the thrill of trying to stay upright. Charlotte had only skated on ahead at Theresa’s insistence. She was wearing a blue scarf, which flapped among the brilliant auburn tumble of her hair, and had the too-straight back and legs of an amateur but was still graceful, clearly having mastered the knack, which Henry liked to go on about on skiing holidays, of transferring weight to achieve momentum rather than actually moving one’s legs. It boiled down to letting go, Henry said, allowing instinct to overrule intellect. Which was a fine theory, Theresa mused, steering her aching ankles towards the side for yet another breather, but took no account of the importance of self-preservation; driving, shopping, tackling laundry and marauding children – some silly accident, and the world as she knew it would cease to turn.

  She was still catching her breath when Charlotte threaded her way across the ice to join her at the barrier. ‘Are you okay? Have you had enough? Shall we sit down? This is brilliant of you, by the way, Theresa, asking us out like this – a mid-week treat, getting the boys together – absolutely brilliant.’

  ‘I’d love a cup of tea,’ Theresa admitted, wishing her motives for the impromptu entertainment were as pure as they seemed. Bits were pure, like enjoying Charlotte’s company and wanting to do something supportive in the face of the gossip still rippling between the buggies, dogs and bicycles at the school gates, gossip that had made her own tittle-tattle at the theatre the previous week seem positively innocent. One woman who barely knew Charlotte had used the word ‘abuse’ to a spellbound throng awaiting the end of orchestra practice, adding knowingly that such things always began ‘in the home’. When Theresa had said rot and Sam was basically a good boy going through a bad patch – painfully shy, cut up about his parents’ separation – they had looked not so much ashamed as disappointed, as if something truly enjoyable had been snatched away.

  George’s summary of the hiatus – that Rose was stuck-up and Sam an idiot – had struck Theresa as infinitely more likely and honest. Having delivered this verdict, her eldest’s attentions had switched, with refreshing speed, to outrage at a spell on the substitutes’ bench and a dogged resumption of negotiations to be allowed to give up the trumpet. When Theresa broached the skating plan he had even tried to use that as leverage, saying if she wanted him to befriend an idiot there had to be a pay-back. ‘McDonald’s,’ Theresa had retorted, using a sharp tone to mask her admiration. ‘Chips and nuggets afterwards can be the pay-back. And on the subject of music lessons, since we need to give a term’s notice, you’re committed to the end of the summer anyway.’

  The impure aspect of her invitation to Charlotte a
nd Sam was something Theresa had been doing her best not to think about and related to survival instincts of a baser and far more calculated kind than those impeding her prowess on the ice rink. Staying close to the enemy, her mother would have called it. There was no fresh evidence for worry, only the two pencil lines in the diary and a tension that came and went, sometimes feeling real and sometimes not. But if something did happen – some development in the crush or whatever the hell it was, if it even existed – Theresa wanted to be near enough to know it, to smell it, as surely as an animal scents its own doom.

  ‘Oh, look, Theresa, look – they’re having such fun. Quite like the old days,’ exclaimed Charlotte, setting down two Styrofoam cups of tea.

  ‘The great thing about boys,’ remarked Theresa drily, ‘is that generally they don’t talk they just do, and if the doing works…’ she waved in the direction of Sam and George, who had borrowed Charlotte’s scarf and were using it to tow each other round the rink ‘… everything else falls into place.’

  Charlotte carefully tore off the corner of a paper sachet of sugar and tipped it into her tea. ‘This is so what Sam needs after the ghastliness of last week.’ She paused, shaking the sachet, steeling herself to describe what had hitherto been too awful for release, even to Martin, though he had phoned to apologize after her dawn message, admitting coldly but decently that if there was blame for Sam’s appalling lapse in behaviour they did indeed share it. ‘In Miss Brigstock’s office, all of them there – Rose, her father, the counsellor– with Sam having done such despicable things and everybody thinking it’s my fault…’

  ‘Of course it’s not your fault.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Charlotte smiled sadly. ‘It’s because he’s been unhappy, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ cut in Theresa, briskly. ‘Everybody knows that’s why.’

  ‘And if a child isn’t happy, whose fault is it?’

  Theresa, catching George’s eye as he sailed past their table in pursuit of Sam and the scarf, waved both arms, secretly glad of the distraction. There might not have been abuse as such, not as the hateful orchestra woman had suggested, but there had been trouble in the Turner household, all right, and Sam had borne the brunt of it. What was more he had always been the centre of his mother’s world, which was a dangerous place for any child.

  ‘And yours wouldn’t have done it, would they?’ persisted Charlotte, with endearing frankness. ‘Your kids wouldn’t have twisted Rose’s arm, would they? And it had to be her of all people, didn’t it? The girl without a mother.’ Charlotte groaned. ‘You should have seen the way that man looked at me – the father. It was… deathly, like… like I suppose I would have looked at him had it been the other way round,’ she conceded glumly, dropping her face into her hands. You know he viewed my house, don’t you? Or rather didn’t because he hated it so much on sight.’

  ‘Dominic Porter? No, I didn’t… Sorry to laugh, oh dear, what a small world… Oh dear.’ Theresa sat back in her chair, shaking her head. ‘But I hope, deathly looks aside, he was reasonable… I mean, everybody knows children are capable of all sorts of things.’

  ‘I suppose he was, if silence is reasonable.’

  ‘Apparently he never talks. Naomi says she’s tried several times and got nowhere. Poor man, after what he’s been through… He works for one of those big American banks, yet he’s always dropping Rose off, isn’t he? And he was at the swimming gala the other day.’

  ‘Well, bravo – I’m sorry,’ Charlotte added, in response to Theresa’s look of surprise, ‘but just because he’s widowed and a single dad everybody thinks he’s marvellous or heroic or something. Whereas a single mother, even one whose husband had died instead of running off with a younger model, would get nothing like the same sort of admiration for doing ten times what he manages. Though I feel sorry for him, of course,’ she added quickly, ‘what he must have been through and so on.’

  ‘His brother is that actor,’ said Theresa, deciding it prudent to change the subject, ‘Benedict Porter, the one who was in that thing with the dog and the two doctors. Oh, and George says Rose is very stuck-up,’ she offered next, judging from the scornful expression on Charlotte’s face that this might be a surer route to consolation.

  Charlotte beamed at once. ‘I’ve always liked your son. And I like him even more now,’ she murmured, tracking the boys who had given up the scarf game in favour of imitating speed skaters, bending double, left hands pinned behind their backs. ‘This will cheer Sam up so much. Although, funnily enough, he does seem quite a lot better already – or at least calmer. I made him write a letter to the wretched Rose, which he hated, but he did it, and after a bit of early resistance he’s been going to school like a lamb. This Mr Dawson, he seems a good thing. Sam has seen him a couple of times, though I’ve no idea what they talk about.’ An uncertain laugh escaped her, triggered by the thought of her son opening up to a stranger, pouring out his heart in a way he never would to her.

  ‘The letter thing sounds like a great move,’ Theresa assured Charlotte, seeing the darkening expression and puzzling over how she could ever have regarded a creature in such an obvious state of torment as a threat of any kind. ‘I’ve tried to get more out of George about the general situation at school, but as I said, the problem with these males is that they don’t talk.’ She pulled a face. ‘Speaking of which, how is it going with that lovely new man of yours?’

  ‘Lovely?’ Charlotte, unaware of having said anything so enthusiastic or unguarded about Tim Croft, glanced up from her tea in surprise.

  ‘The estate agent.’

  ‘I know who you mean, dumbo. I just had the impression that you – everybody – had written Tim off as unsuitable.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Theresa retorted, justifying the lie because she had genuinely changed her mind. ‘I can’t speak for Naomi or Josephine, but personally I don’t think it matters what somebody is. It’s how a man behaves that counts.’ She paused, as her thoughts looped back wearily, reluctantly, to the new invisible shadow over her marriage. Of course Henry would behave well. He always had, he always would. Hadn’t he been the one to pull her back on course all those years before? Hadn’t his faith in their union always been stronger than hers? Hadn’t he wept tears of joy holding each of their slithery newborns in his arms, gasping that her love and her labour completed him? That couldn’t change, surely, not with one silly crush, if indeed there even was a silly crush… and weren’t crushes normal anyway? Hadn’t she got a bit starry-eyed for a time over the young music teacher who had insisted George join the jazz band, revelling, just a little, in the man’s praise of her son’s powerful lungs and quick fingers? Yes, she had been a shade smitten there, all right. But then he had got engaged to a flautist and left the school, oblivious, quite rightly, to any flutterings his dark-eyed sincerity had provoked in the heart of a woman guilty only of being overtired and looking twice where once should have done. Such things were normal, blips in a rhythm, nothing to stop a heart.

  Charlotte had scrambled off her seat and was crouching at Theresa’s feet. ‘I think your laces are too loose.’ She pushed up the sleeves of her jumper. ‘Maybe if I tightened them–’

  Theresa let out a small shriek, trying to lift the skates out of reach without causing physical injury to Charlotte’s arms. ‘Any tighter and I’ll get gangrene. There’s no circulation, I tell you, just heat and pain.’

  ‘Let me see,’ Charlotte insisted, settling on to her knees and pulling Theresa’s left foot on to them. Yes, you see, it’s loose at this bit,’ she patted the ankle, ‘and too tight here. Whereas if…’ She was soon expertly unhooking, tugging and retying the laces. ‘There. Now the other one, please.’

  Theresa submitted in silence. The first boot felt considerably better. She leant back in her chair, studying her friend through half-closed eyes, her affection in full flow again. ‘You know you’re very good-looking, don’t you?’ she blurted. ‘You’re very good-looking and that’s power. You should use it wisely.’<
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  Charlotte snorted, keeping her head down. ‘And you should shut up – shut up and keep still.’

  For a few moments neither spoke. Charlotte carried on with the task she had assigned herself, inwardly marvelling that a compliment could sound like a warning and at the recent predilection people had developed to remark on her looks. She had never felt less attractive, less sure of herself, in her adult life. Glimpsing her body between the folds of her towel in the bathroom mirror, these days, seeing the sharp points of her elbows and knees, the loud, exuberant topping of her hair, she sometimes felt as if the ugly little girl of her school days was re-emerging, that she had never really left her behind.

  ‘I just meant,’ Theresa pressed on, ‘now that you’re single, you’ll probably find yourself fighting men off… bees round the proverbial honeypot, et cetera.’

  ‘I haven’t moved to another planet,’ Charlotte protested, laughing as she tied the last double knot and returned to her seat. ‘I’m just getting divorced.’

  Theresa sipped her tasteless, now tepid tea, fighting the urge to say that from what she could see divorce was another planet – a different game plan, different rules, different priorities; that by separating from Martin, Charlotte had upset the balance not only of her life but of those closest to her, and they should ignore that fact at their peril.

  ‘I wasn’t a honeypot before, and I’m certainly not one now,’ continued Charlotte, merrily. ‘My history as regards men is…’ She hesitated. ‘Well, never mind what it is.’