Life Begins Read online

  ‘A drink?’ Charlotte whispered, casting a wary glance over her own shoulder as she eased her hand free. ‘A drink?’

  Tim laughed, tugging nervously at the point of his chin where the hairs were longest. ‘Yes, you know, traditionally presented in a glass… sometimes with the accompaniment of food.’

  ‘Oh, my goodness…’

  ‘Not tonight, obviously,’ he repeated, patting the springy top of his wiry brown hair and gazing out of his office window, as if considering the logistical possibilities of diving over the filing cabinet and hurling himself through the pane.

  The answer had to be no, of course. The man was her estate agent. While having vowed to girlfriends that, when ready, she would play the field with gusto – have some fun after all the years of discontent – it had never occurred to Charlotte to imagine the solidly built, square-faced Tim Croft as a target. He had a beard. She didn’t like beards.

  But it had been a Valentine’s Day with no cards, she reminded herself, and she had her decree nisi safely stowed in the bulging beige file labelled Divorce, and maybe the still elusive urge to launch herself into the alien business of having a good time required a bit of a kick-start. And then there was the inescapable fact of feeling sorry for Tim – desperately sorry, with all the twitchy looks out of the window, the terror of rejection flashing like a red light. So, while still thinking, No, Charlotte muttered instead that she was out of practice with baby-sitters and that this might prove a problem since Sam, at twelve, still needed considerable supervision through the travails of homework, supper and being persuaded into bed.

  ‘My neighbour’s sixteen-year-old is always up for baby-sitting jobs,’ Tim gushed, forgetting to keep his voice down and eliciting a raised eyebrow from the Asian girl. ‘She’s called Jessica,’ he continued, with a little less exuberance, ‘mad about children. I could give her a call. How about eight o’clock next Wednesday? Just to talk houses, if you like, over a drink instead of this filthy coffee.’ He grinned, tugging his chin again, his eyes pleading.

  Charlotte agreed, then spent the rest of the afternoon regretting it. By the time the tall black gates of St Leonard’s came into view, pointing like a line of gleaming black weaponry towards the washed-out February sky, she had hatched and abandoned several elaborate pretexts to cancel. It was almost a relief to have the usual hunt for a parking space – scouring for gaps between driveways and double yellow lines – to distract her. By the time she found one the sun was already a sinking silver disc – more of a moon than a star. Watching it from the warm cocoon of the Volkswagen, aware of a subtle slide in her spirits, Charlotte hurriedly switched off the engine and stepped out into the raw chill of the afternoon.

  ‘You can’t park there. Your bumper’s right over the end of my drive.’

  ‘Is it?’ Charlotte looked over the shoulder of her accuser, a jowly-faced man in a beret, seeing nothing but the unwashed hump of the Volkswagen. ‘But I thought I –’

  ‘There’s a white line,’ snarled the man, flecks of spittle gathering in the corners of his mouth. ‘There’s a white line and you’ve crossed it.’

  Down the street a crowd of parents had now gathered in front of the gates. Charlotte could see Theresa in her funny hat with the ear-flaps talking animatedly to Naomi, whose twin three-year-old boys were tugging at her arms. ‘I’m only collecting my son, I won’t be a moment.’ She cast the man an imploring look, hoping that his obviously advanced age might make him more likely to succumb to the dubious faded charms of a pallid thirty-nine-year-old with violet smudges under her eyes and messy auburn hair, which had begun the day as a bun but was now bursting out as a makeshift ponytail.

  ‘If you don’t move, I’m phoning the police. We’re fed up with it, I tell you, fed up. Every bloody day it’s the same. Useless bloody women parking your huge bloody vehicles across our driveways…’ He paused, perhaps at the realization that the Volkswagen did not match this insult, or perhaps because tears were pouring down Charlotte’s face.

  Appalled by herself, swiping furiously at her cheeks, Charlotte ducked away and stabbed blindly at the door with the car key.

  ‘Five minutes, then,’ the man snapped, backing off and shaking his head. ‘And I’d better not find you here tomorrow.’

  Sam was easy to spot – face masked behind his flopping shock of white-blond hair, shoelaces and shirt tail trailing, his rucksack bumping along the Tarmac like a recalcitrant pet on a lead. Several classmates were horsing round alongside, towering above him as they all seemed to now, their pubescent bodies ripe and thick for manhood. Sam, with his waif-like smallness and stick-thin arms and legs, cruelly in evidence thanks to a wayward decision that morning to wear shorts, seemed more closely related to the skinniest of the girls.

  ‘Sam!’ Charlotte hurried towards the gates, blinking away the ridiculous tears. He hung back, inspecting something on the sole of his shoe while George, unmistakably Theresa’s son with his thick dark curls and round ruddy-cheeked face, bowled out of the group for brief but enthusiastic entrapment in his mother’s arms.

  ‘Mah-jong, my place, a week next Friday,’ yelled Theresa, dodging the lollipop lady as they set off towards the mud-spattered Volvo on the opposite side of the road, where the bobbing, pig-tailed head of her youngest was visible through the passenger window.

  ‘I don’t know how she does it,’ said Naomi, strolling over with the twins, who were now hanging from their sister Pattie – she had been in the same class as Sam since nursery school but these days turned up her nose at play dates with boys in favour of closed-door consultations with girlfriends. ‘Four children, four schools. The woman’s mad.’ Charlotte nodded and smiled at this well-worn line of commentary. They all admired Theresa – organized, cheerful, self-deprecating, with a high-powered medical consultant of a husband who was often away presenting papers at important conferences. She would claim she wasn’t coping but managed to cope superbly all the same. With the friendships between their children wavering, it had been Theresa’s idea that the mums should keep seeing each other anyway over games of mah-jong (she had no time to read a book a month, she said, and abhorred bridge). Sporadic, enjoyable, the sessions had started at about the same time as Charlotte’s marriage had entered its death throes, and proved nothing short of a lifeline. The warmth of her friends’ support had been like oxygen, giving her the strength to plunge back into the awful disintegration going on at home.

  ‘I thought Theresa had decorators in,’ remarked Naomi, making a desultory attempt to pull the twins off their sister.

  ‘She does, but they’ll be gone by then.’

  ‘Leave Pattie alone,’ Naomi shouted, in a gunfire explosion of impatience that had the desired effect, before turning back to Charlotte and saying, in the mildest voice, ‘Jo’s asked me to pick up Ellie because the au pair’s sick. Have you seen her?’

  Charlotte scanned the thinning group of children. Josephine Burrows, a marketing executive with three offspring and a history of problematic home-help, made up the fourth of their close-knit group. Ellie was her youngest; two elder brothers got themselves to and from a school in Wimbledon by bus. ‘Hey, that’s her there, isn’t it? On that wall, reading.’

  ‘Reading. Do you hear that, Pattie, she’s reading, without being asked.’ Naomi glared at her daughter, before switching her attention back to Charlotte. ‘Hey, are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, fine, absolutely fine.’

  Naomi cast her a quizzical look. ‘Martin hasn’t been renegotiating Sam’s weekends again, has he?’

  ‘No… in fact, this morning the decree nisi came through. At last.’ She punched the air.

  ‘So why the long face?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know – hormones possibly, and not selling the house… and, just maybe, accepting a date with my estate agent. I tried to refuse,’ Charlotte wailed, ‘but it came out wrong.’

  Naomi was guffawing in a manner endearingly at odds with her petite frame and delicate features. ‘Well, I think that�
�s great. So long as it’s not the fat old one, but the nice youngish one with short hair and he’s not married.’

  ‘Of course he’s not married,’ Charlotte put in a little sharply. ‘I’m hardly likely to play that game, am I?’

  ‘Nope, I guess you’re not,’ agreed Naomi, still laughing. ‘And don’t worry about the house – they always sell in the end. Remember it took Graham and me eighteen months to get shot of our first place in Milton Keynes? The market had nose-dived and refused to come up again, but here we are, safe and sound, in sunny Wandsworth. Now, I’d better retrieve Ellie and get this lot home.’ She gestured with sudden weariness at her twins, who were playing a vicious game of tug-of-war with a pencil case. ‘You said you were going to have a good time, remember?’ she added, perhaps still not convinced by the expression on Charlotte’s face. ‘That you were just going to go with the flow, enjoy yourself. It’s been months now and you were so unhappy… Do you remember that, Charlotte? How unhappily married you were?’

  There was a trace of impatience in her voice; enough for Charlotte to roll her eyes, say, ‘Of course,’ and signal to Sam that it was time to head for the car. She felt impatient with herself too. The turning point she had longed for had arrived that morning and here she was already finding reasons to be blue.

  She walked fast but Sam skipped on ahead. There were red patches on the backs of his knees – a flare-up of his babyhood eczema – and a bruise on his calf. Charlotte hurried to catch him up, the self-pity displaced by the much more understandable and familiar sensation of guilt – for what she and Martin had put him through, for knowing only too well what it felt like to be the child of a cheating dad. ‘You okay, love?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I thought maybe a Coke and a slice of chocolate cake at that nice café.’

  It was a cheap ploy, Charlotte knew, but like many of the simplest stratagems it worked. The past could not be controlled – what was done was done – but the future, she reminded herself, was now more within her power than ever.

  Sam’s face lit up as she had guessed it would – a treat in recent weeks and beautiful to behold, like curtains parting on daylight. ‘Let’s dump your bag in the car and walk. Or maybe run,’ Charlotte cried, taking off down the street the moment the car door was closed, knowing he would overtake her in seconds, loving it that she could still astonish him.

  Chapter Two

  There is a workshop – always – wherever we live; a dusky, woody-smelling room lined with shelves of small, sagging boxes, each containing different-sized nails, bolts and screws. Hanging along the wall above the workbench are hammers, screwdrivers and spanners, arranged in graduated order of size, the smallest so appealing that I long – as with the smallest of my beloved babushka dolls – to fold it tightly in my palm. Sometimes – the scenes merge – my father lets me sit on his lap to help tighten a piece of wood in the vice. I use both hands to work the heavy handle, then watch the tightening clench of the metal jaws as he finishes the job. Like teeth, he says, a monster’s teeth; and he presses his mouth to my neck and I squirm and squeal with that afraid-pleasure that comes so easily to a child.

  The following Wednesday afternoon Sam ate tea with more than his usual methodical reluctance, cradling the side of his head on one hand and using his fork to spear too-large pieces of chicken and solitary slices of carrot and potato into a barely open mouth. Charlotte sat next to him with a mug of tea, resisting the urge to reprimand. They had already had a scuffle about not being able to eat in front of the television, which she had managed – within a hair’s breadth of caving in – to win.

  ‘I won’t be out for long. A nice girl called Jessica is coming to baby-sit. Are you okay with that?’

  Sam placed a shred of carrot in his mouth and chewed slowly. ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Dad phoned. I’m dropping you there straight after school on Friday as Cindy has the afternoon off. He said they might take you to the cinema. That will be nice, won’t it?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘School all right?’

  He raised his head to look at her, his pale blue eyes flashing with scorn behind the straggle of his hair. ‘School sucks.’

  ‘Miss Hornby said you’re doing much better this term, that you –’

  ‘Miss Hornby is a spastic.’

  ‘That’s a horrible word, Sam. You’re not to use it about anyone.’

  He dropped his fork on to his empty plate and pushed back his chair. ‘Can I watch telly now?’

  ‘Don’t you want a pudding – yoghurt or maybe a biscuit?’

  He shook his head, sticking out his chin, reminding her momentarily – vividly – of Martin.

  ‘How about a yoghurt and a biscuit while watching telly?’

  Sam knitted his eyebrows together, fighting her kindness, the softness of her voice, holding out. ‘Can I play on the computer?’

  Charlotte drummed her fingers on the table, pretending to think. ‘Yes, but only after eating and… let me see… I think that will require a hug too. A massive, gigantic one that no one else need ever know about.

  Sam shuffled towards her and allowed himself to be held, while Charlotte felt a swell of emotion as strong as the one she had experienced when the doctor first tugged him free of her womb and placed him, tiny and slimy, in her arms. She put her nose into his hair, treating herself to an inhalation of the little-boy mustiness of his skin, feeding the animal need that had begun that day in the hospital, so instantaneous, so all-consuming that she had looked at Martin hovering by the bed with a sort of wonderment that she could ever, until that moment, have had the remotest knowledge of what it meant to love.

  An instant later Sam had wriggled free and was delving into the biscuit jar.

  ‘Did you have games today?’

  ‘Nah. Can I take two?’

  ‘Yes – hey, let’s see that bruise a minute.’

  ‘What bruise?’

  ‘There, on your leg, and there’s another by your elbow. Two bruises.’ Charlotte tried to grab his arm, but he snatched it away and skipped out of the kitchen.

  An hour later she was welcoming a pimply-faced teenager and Tim Croft into the hall, noting with mixed feelings the effort the estate agent had made on her behalf – his wiry light brown hair, lustrous from washing, his beard freshly trimmed, his large teeth gleaming. In place of the usual work suit there was a tan leather jacket, a black polo-neck jumper and faded blue jeans, tight enough to reveal either a natural athleticism or hard work at the gym.

  In fact, he was quite attractive, Charlotte realized, tensing rather than relaxing at the observation as she ushered them into the dining room to meet Sam. Her own ablutions had been limited to a hasty bath, followed by a torturous scanning of her overcrowded wardrobe for an outfit that would appear presentable without communicating any suggestion of a conscious desire to please. Pulling faces at her reflection, feeling, with some disgust, like a teenager who had gone nowhere, learnt nothing, she had settled at last on a staid (too staid) pair of chocolate corduroy trousers and a cream top with mother-of-pearl buttons.

  ‘We – I – keep the computer in the dining room so I can see if Sam’s eyes are going square, don’t I, darling?’ Charlotte chattered, trying to strike a tone that would make up for her son’s rude growl of a hello. ‘I bet you’re good with computers, aren’t you, Jessica?’ she prompted, peering over Sam’s shoulder, pleased to see it was dancing dots that were transfixing him, which meant a harmless football game as opposed to something sinister, like a chat room, whatever they looked like. Martin had been in charge of all that – child locks, spam blocks, firewalls and other ungraspable concepts that constituted technological health and safety. The extent of her own abilities, as Sam knew only too well, reached no further than websites and emails.

  ‘I’m not bad,’ Jessica replied slowly, exposing heavy rail-track braces that Charlotte suspected might account for the poor girl’s evident reluctance to speak.

  ‘Shall I show you round, then?�
�� she offered, fighting fresh doubts about the evening and her selection of the cream top, which she had forgotten had an infuriating habit of riding up to her ribcage.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Turner.’

  ‘Excellent.’ Tim, clearly the happiest by far of their unlikely gathering, slapped his hands together and strode across the room to ask Sam who was playing who and where they stood in the league. Charlotte warmed to him, especially when – getting glimpses during the course of her guided tour with Jessica – she saw the hard time Sam gave him in return, his eyes not leaving the screen, his answers monochrome and monosyllabic. ‘The estate agent,’ he had snorted, when she confessed the identity of her escort. ‘What for?’ Charlotte had hesitated, stumped by the multitude of possible answers, all inappropriate (because I felt flattered and sorry for him, because since your father left the only male I have spent time with is you, because with the closure I so craved within reach I seem to have been pitched into a baffling, maddening state of immobility, of back-sliding, of retrospection…). ‘Hab!’ Sam had spat the word into her silence, making his special gagging face as he bounded up the stairs.

  ‘Are you ready to go?’ Tim met her and Jessica as they returned to the hall.

  ‘I think so, unless there’s anything you want to ask me, Jessica?’ Charlotte murmured, smiling encouragingly at the girl, who had chatted very sweetly between having the fridge pointed out to her and receiving instructions about bath-time and bed. ‘He’ll argue about going upstairs, of course. So don’t give in, will you? He can leave his light on if he wants… He likes to sleep with it on. Not that I’ll be late –’ Charlotte broke off, flustered, with Tim cracking his knuckles and Jessica staring at her feet, both clearly dying to get on with things.

  ‘I thought we’d get out of town a bit.’