Life Begins Read online

  With both hands full – cardamom, a fresh chilli, the dripping wooden spoon – Theresa tugged up the sleeve of her sweatshirt with her teeth to get a glimpse of her wristwatch, performing in the same instant a rapid complex mental calculation encompassing all the things that had to be achieved in the half-hour remaining before her school run. And after that – Theresa hummed louder as her mind whirred – George would require cajoling through some trumpet practice for his exam the following Friday, Matilda, her youngest, needed a nit-check, while the middle two, Alfie and Jack, would, as usual these days, need supervising through absolutely everything, from homework to the insertion of toothbrushes between their jaws. Fifteen months apart, her two younger sons had reached a stage of such competitiveness – for her attention, for the number of spaghetti hoops that made it on to their plates, for who could get to the top stair first – that it required the tactical skills of a wily diplomat, not to mention exhaustive vigilance, to keep the peace.

  Theresa placed the lid on the casserole dish with a contented sigh. She could, she knew, have done many things with her life. She had always got high grades at school and been bright and popular. Her parents, both teachers, had been stunned into silent disappointment when she shunned university and opted for nursing. She had excelled at that, too, just as she now excelled at the management of her large family. It was like running a ward, or a small company – supervision of projects, seeing to practical details, rewarding good behaviour, trying to bring out the best in everyone, thinking and planning ahead. How anyone ever thought motherhood unchallenging or dull was beyond her. Though people did it badly, of course, everywhere, all the time, just as lots of people made a hash of running businesses. It was wrong to judge, Theresa knew, but really, when one looked at the mess some people made of their lives – dear Charlotte, for example – it was impossible not to count a few blessings at least.

  The curry, mild enough to suit the children, was also sufficiently large to serve as dinner for the mah-jong group, and for Henry, who would make himself scarce as he always did on what he called her ‘hen nights’. He would put his head round the sitting-room door, his thinning hair askew after his walk from the station, his deep-set blue eyes crinkling with mild amusement at the assembly of females gathered round the card table, plates and wine glasses slotted between the little walls of tiles, then retreat via the kitchen to the den. Later, after clearing up, Theresa would find him asleep, glasses on the end of his nose, his chin on his chest, the TV murmuring, a half-read journal still open on his lap. He would wake instantly, as all doctors learnt to do, marvel at the lateness of the hour, then shoo her upstairs so he could lock up and set the alarm.

  Theresa, hurriedly writing a cheque for the decorator, scraping the worst of the meat blobs off the invoice with her thumbnail, paused in her humming to smile as the scene formed in her mind’s eye. They had their fall-outs, of course, but even those, during the course of fourteen years, had acquired an element of predictability that was almost comforting. The hardest time for them by far had been early on, when Henry worked long hospital shifts as a houseman and she was still climbing the career ladder as a nurse. Tired, lonely, disillusioned, she had had an affair with one of his colleagues – or, rather, a one-night stand – to which she had confessed almost immediately, flinging clothes into a suitcase between sobs. Instead of being angry, or offering to help her pack, Henry had taken her to Paris that very evening, frogmarching her to Gatwick and then to a hotel so expensive they had spent the next few months paying off the overdraft. Looking back, Theresa often thought that the incident, though in many ways terrible and unforgivable, had been the making of them; like a horse knocking a first fence that wobbled but did not fall, and keeping its hoofs higher in consequence, they had bounded on all the stronger for the crisis.

  Decorator paid, sitting room dusted, curry simmered, rice washed, ironing folded, washing-machine loaded, dishwasher unloaded, alarm set, door double-locked, Volvo launched into the afternoon traffic, Theresa found her thoughts returning to the demise of Charlotte-and-Martin. There was no going back for either of them now, which was sad, of course, but also – if she was totally honest – a tad inconvenient. Martin was extremely nice. Henry, in particular, got on very well with him – computer talk, rugby-watching, dad-only sessions in the park. With the marriage beyond repair, he was in danger of losing quite a friend.

  Now it was Rotherhithe and a woman called Cindy. A couple of days before, they had received an invitation to a house-warming, a large, ostentatious card, studded with pictures of champagne corks and glitter. Flicking the duster round it on the mantelpiece that afternoon, Theresa had wondered suddenly whether it wouldn’t be better off hidden in a drawer, at least until the mah-jong was done with. Her first loyalty lay with Charlotte after all. They had become friends eight years before – via George and Sam’s Montessori and an incident with a flat tyre on the South Circular when they’d left the hazards flashing and bolted into a wine bar.

  Martin and Henry hadn’t stepped into the frame until many months later and then only because she and Charlotte had orchestrated it, promoting the relationship to an official adult level with invitations to dinner and the theatre. Now such occasions would have to involve either a fund manager called Cindy, who was ten years younger and childless (not the most likely-sounding soul-mate for either her or Henry) or, apparently, an employee from one of Wandsworth’s leading estate agencies.

  Theresa, accelerating and slowing with practised ease between the road humps lining the final approach to her daughter’s primary school, shook her head in disbelief. To go out with one’s estate agent smacked of desperation. And where would it get Charlotte in the end, she mused, other than into another relationship that would eventually require effort, a willingness to launder male socks and the need, sometimes, to feign an interest in sex when all one really wanted was a cup of tea? Love, Theresa had learnt, lay on the other side of such trials, the extraordinary waiting in the shadows of the ordinary. It could take time to find, not to mention trust, commitment… She gripped the steering-wheel harder. Staying power. That was what all marriages needed, and her friend had simply never had enough of it.

  As we wait on the station platform I observe how fresh-faced the other parents look, how energized, wielding bags and younger siblings, how young. Mine hang back, different, uncertain, old. Compared to the other women’s smart hairstyles, my mother’s looks limp and long, the red salted with white, while my father’s once full head has shrunk to a ring of brown that circles his baldness like a too-small nest holding a large egg. Their clothes are wrong too – her loud yellow shawl, his red-spotted neckerchief. I blush to belong to them.

  The garters of my new school socks cut into the ridge under my kneecaps. The material of my skirt feels rough against my thighs. My plaited hair tugs at my skull. I long for the train to arrive, for the farewells to be something to look back on instead of dreaded. I wish my parents weren’t different, but I ache already from missing them, especially him, with his big, bear-hugging love, his games and jokes, and that special smile, which even after two years still says, ‘I know that you know but we shall not speak of it.’

  We have a woodshed in Constantia but I never enter it. The dolls’ house, mended, pristine, lives on a table at the foot of my bed. Through its white-framed windows I can still see the figures I used to cherish, the man sitting in an armchair, his spindly legs – wool woven round wire – bent awkwardly, the woman in the kitchen propped up against the miniature mangle I bought with saved pocket money from a magazine. Her hair is coming unglued and she leans unrealistically, like the doll she is. Nearby, in a pink wooden cot, the tiny china face of a baby – their baby – peeps over its gauze blanket, its pencil-dot eyes blank. I see them but I no longer want to touch. They must manage alone, as I do.

  On the train I hold my hat on my lap. It is made of straw and has a blue ribbon round it. In the middle at the front is a badge with a crest on it and the words ‘In Omnibus Ver
itas’. At the station café my mother, scowling at the watery grey tea (the dust off the factory floor, my father complains loudly, proud of his knowledge), has explained that this means ‘Truth in all things’. She said it twice, glancing from me to him, as if she knew… but, of course, she couldn’t because she had been lunching with her friend that day, and if she knew she wouldn’t have agreed to go to Africa, to swap tea-leaves for grapes and a damp, sapping heat for one so dry it burns through to your bones.

  ‘Are you new?’

  ‘Yes.’ I pluck at the blue ribbon and try to smile, as if being new is normal and bearable. The girl who has put the question has dark blue eyes and hair the colour of honey, curling in silky tips across her shoulders. She is sitting opposite, with a magazine on her lap. She chews gum, pushing it out between her teeth and sucking it back again. On her fingernails are jagged traces of red varnish. She wears her school boater pushed back on her head, like a halo. She tells me that she is thirteen and that a blue ribbon means we are in the same house. I am overjoyed to have a friend already, an older, beautiful friend, in the same house. She says she is called Letitia and then asks me my name.

  ‘Charlotte Boot.’

  She pauses, the blue eyes widening. ‘Boot?’

  I sense danger and turn to look out of the window. The English countryside is like a washed-out picture compared to the landscapes I know: greys spilling into greens and browns, like something created by a painter with too much water on his brushes.

  ‘Boot, as in Bootface?’

  I stare hard at the smeary palette of Surrey, seeking something lovely or certain, something to hang on to. I do not look at her but I hear the change in her voice, the edge, as sharp as the blade our old cook had used in the hill country, slicing new cuts into the criss-crossed map of her chopping board. For a moment – a blissful moment – the tunnel of the memory closes over me and I am standing at the cook’s elbow, watching the dark hairs on her arm glisten as she slides the knife across a pineapple, decapitating its prickly head and then the stubbly armour of its body. One, two, three, four strokes and the juicy yellow innards are there – mine for eating. ‘No, just Boot.’

  ‘Yeah, Bootface, like I said. And Carrot-top. Carrot-top, Bootface.’ She swings her foot as she talks, banging my shin with the hard toe of her shoe.

  A woman in a brown suit and thick tights slides open the door of our carriage and checks off our names on a clipboard. She teaches a subject called Divinity, she says, and is a deputy housemistress. She smiles at me and says it is nice to have me on board and that I will soon get the hang of things. I stretch my lips back at her, willing her never to leave. But a minute later the door whooshes shut and she is gone. Letitia tucks her feet under her seat and returns her attention to her magazine. I breathe quietly, slowly, absorbing the knowledge that an English boarding-school will offer no haven from the complications of living, that pretending not to care remains the only sure way to survive.

  Fresh from the most unsatisfactory of meetings with Miss Hornby (no, Sam wasn’t himself, yes, they were keeping an eye on him), it was in a somewhat distracted frame of mind that Charlotte map-read her way via the A–Z towards Chalkdown Road. Yet at first glimpse the virtues of the location were so obvious, even in the dim light of a March afternoon, that she delivered a thump of delight to the steering-wheel, accidentally sounding the horn and prompting a dark look from a sprightly jogger for whom she had slowed to allow safe passage across the road.

  The park was a minute’s walk away, quite a nice walk, too, by the look of it, along a winding avenue of large grey and white Victorian houses sporting pruned shrubs on their doorsteps and gravelled off-street parking slots for small, expensive cars. In Chalkdown Road itself, there was a more motley assemblage of buildings, including a disused and dirty red-brick church and a section of ugly square flats studded with graffiti, satellite dishes and concrete balconies full of rusting white goods and chipped flowerpots. But it was a long street and number forty-two was one of a cluster of semi-detached cottages set away from such unsightliness. It had a neat front garden of well-tended grass, bordered by flowering thickets of winter jasmine – a dazzling and welcome splash of colour on a day that had begun with such heavy downpours that Charlotte had been reminded of the grey monsoon lashings of her early childhood when the rain streamed so thickly it hosed gullies in the soil as it fell.

  A charming cottage in Wandsworth, near the park and only just out of her price range… Charlotte peered through the windscreen of her car in happy disbelief, her imagination leaping forwards to visions of Sam skipping merrily to school and her waving him off from the doorstep. She might even give in to the years of pleading for a dog, she decided dreamily, not a squat silly dachshund like her mother’s, but a real dog that bounded and licked and fetched and gave affection on demand. Sam’s delight alone would make it worthwhile. And with Sam back on an even keel she was sure she, too, would be able to embark at last on the new beginning she had promised herself, to start relishing her freedom instead of being frozen by it.

  The interior did not disappoint. While Tim (having arrived very much the estate agent rather than as a would-be suitor) consulted some notes and punched in a set of numbers to decode the alarm, Charlotte skipped round the hall, exclaiming at every detail – the stained glass in the front door, the low beams, the polished pine floorboards. Thus inspired, it was easy to forgive the somewhat worn kitchen units and note instead the original tiles on the floor, the handy hooks and shelves housing scrubbed pans, strings of garlic, family photos, teacups and jars of dried herbs.

  There were darker beams in the sitting room, and a limestone fireplace, offset by a handsome décor of lemon and faded blue. In the darkening light a crescent-shaped patio was visible through the double doors overlooking the garden. Fringed with beds of lavender and an ebullient japonica, bursting with scarlet berries, it lit up the back of the house just as the jasmine had the front. Beyond stretched a long wide lawn which, like everything else, exuded a sense of something nurtured, something loved. And it was this she was falling for, Charlotte realized, scanning it greedily, just as much as the house’s cosy rooms and proximity to the park.

  Absorbed, enchanted, the arrival of Tim’s hands on her shoulders, his smart polished shoes silenced by the carpet, caught her by surprise.

  ‘I think I might want this place,’ she murmured, letting her weight shift against him, thinking in the same instant that, even with the lowest of expectations, there was a simple, profound pleasure in having someone to lean on, to share food with, and thoughts on houses.

  ‘And I want you,’ Tim replied, slipping his arms round her waist. ‘I’ve been dying for you to call. You said you would. Why didn’t you?’

  Charlotte hesitated. She hadn’t called because she wasn’t sure she wanted to go on another date. And yet, receiving his formal handshake in the street, a small part of her had felt faintly rebuffed, and even wondered, dimly, whether her kissing the previous week – rusty, a little shy of the geography of a new face – might not have been up to scratch. ‘Because it’s wrong, Tim, that’s why.’

  ‘Wrong?’

  ‘Inappropriate.’

  ‘Nonsense. We’re grown-ups.’ He slid his hands over her hips and pulled her more firmly against him. ‘I was thinking… we could finish here and then go back to my place. I’m not a bad cook. I’ll rustle something up and then…’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tonight. I’m already busy.’ She wriggled free and turned round.

  ‘Oh.’ He looked crestfallen.

  ‘My girlfriends,’ she explained, more kindly. ‘Every few weeks we meet at each other’s houses and play mah-jong together.’

  ‘Mah-jong? Very fancy.’

  ‘It’s to talk, too, of course – a bit of a girls’ night, you know the sort of thing. It’s a small group but they’re good friends and, frankly, I don’t know how I’d have got through the last few years without them… I say, do you mind if we get on with looking round?
’ she ventured, impatient suddenly, both to see the rest of the house and at having to pitch the question – to him of all people – as if it were some kind of favour.

  ‘No, of course not.’ Tim clicked his heels and saluted. ‘At your service, madam. All inappropriateness to cease forthwith.’

  Charlotte laughed, flinging up her arms in despair at the awkwardness. ‘Look, Tim, I’m sorry. This whole business – you and me – I’m just not sure if it’s wise, or what I want from it or… but I do like you,’ she continued hurriedly, seeing his dismay deepen, remembering how good it had felt to be held, ‘and maybe – if we agree there’s no pressure and so on – we could perhaps meet again soon. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’ He rolled his eyes and made a face, like a child being told something he knew already. ‘I just think you’re great, that’s all. I think you’re great and I’m not very good at hiding it. But that’s fine,’ he added, jaunty once more, tossing the house keys from palm to palm. ‘It’s my problem, not yours. I will, as they say, take what I can get.’ He clenched the keys in one fist. ‘And now would madam like a tour of the bedrooms or is she too worried I’ll rugby-tackle her on to a mattress?’

  Charlotte giggled, taking his hand for the walk up the stairs, which were steep, with spindly wooden banisters and a T-junction of a landing at the top. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom, all pleasantly decorated and of a good size. The back one had its own balcony, decked with window-boxes of miniature cyclamen and winter pansies, and a little wrought-iron chair. It was on seeing this – on seeing herself, in fact, sitting in the little chair with a book and a cup of tea and peace in her heart – that Charlotte spun round and declared that she had to have the place at all costs, that she would accept anything Mrs Burgess offered and beg a loan from the bank, from Martin if necessary, to make up the difference. She had to have it, she gabbled, the colour rising in her cheeks. Did he understand?