Life Begins Page 6

  It was nice now, though, George had to admit, lying among the suds, safe from the annoyance of his younger siblings and the awful hubbub of his mother’s dinner-party preparations. Pattie’s mum, Naomi, had already arrived and was sitting on the sofa with a glass of wine, which George had been instructed to pour for her while his mother frisked his little brothers for mah-jong tiles. They were in bed now upstairs, on pain of death not to wake Matty, who had bawled so loudly during her nit-check that she had actually puked up some of her tea. Alfie had squatted down in fascination to point out the undigested baked beans to his brothers (Matty hadn’t liked the curry), which had been gross but also sort of interesting until their mother had said if they liked peering at it so much they could jolly well clear it up.

  George had sought refuge in trumpet practice, working at it far longer than he really wanted to out of fear that his mother might carry out the threat. When she had slipped into the room he pretended not to notice and restarted his piece even though it had gone really well the first time. But instead of talking about the puke, or his wrong notes, she had said, in her softest, nicest voice, that she was sorry if she had been on his case about the music exam and would he like her to organize a sleepover for the following Friday to celebrate it being over and what about Sam?

  It had gone a bit wrong after that because George had said no – not to the idea of having a friend over but to Sam. At which point the motherly niceness had turned into a lecture on what Sam was going through and supporting friends in times of need, to the point at which George had wanted to say that if she was so keen on Sam Turner why didn’t she invite him over herself? He hadn’t, of course – answering back was never a good idea with his mother – and then he had been let off the hook by the doorbell and the business of helping with the wine.

  It wasn’t fair, though, George mused now, sucking the sodden flannel noisily through his braced teeth, that his mum should try to make him feel bad about whom he chose as a friend. Sam had been okay once – way back – during the days when anybody played with anybody. But nobody liked him much any more. He had become a sad show-off, all the more annoying because he had nothing to show off about: how much his dad earned, what phone he was going to get, scores in computer games – who cared? And it was probably lies anyway. So what if his parents were getting divorced? It wasn’t like he was the first kid it had happened to. Rose, the new girl in their class, had had a mother who died. Now that, in George’s opinion, was far more dramatic and impressive. If Theresa had said to be nice to Rose Porter he would probably have done his best, because the thought of losing his own mother, for all her bossiness and cunning, was so impossible to contemplate that he actually felt a little sick just trying.

  As it happened, the motherless Rose didn’t seem to need much looking after. She was one of those scary girls, who sat in the front row and shot her hand up to answer everything and buried her nose in a book at breaktime. She was as tall as several of the boys in their class, with carrot-coloured bird’s-nest hair, skin as white as sunblock and blue eyes that stared so hard you felt she was seeing through you to something on the other side. Instructed to partner Sam for an exercise in Drama that morning (a stupid exercise where one person had to be a tree and the other the wind), she had looked so fierce and towering, so scornful of Sam’s puffing efforts round her stick-like outstretched arms, that George had felt almost sorry for his erstwhile friend.

  But not sorry enough, George vowed, slopping more water on to the floor as he scrambled out of the bath, to invite the irritating loser over for the precious treat of a Friday-night tea.

  Downstairs in the sitting room Naomi had been joined by Josephine, whose stylishly cropped blonde hair was dark and damp from having been caught in the rain, but who looked immaculate nonetheless in a navy trouser suit and high heels. ‘Theresa bustled between them, setting out bowls of vegetable crisps, offering top-ups of wine and checking the card table, which had been unfolded from its usual storage behind the piano and set up in preparation for the evening game. Safely retrieved from her sons’ pockets, all the mah-jong tiles were now neatly arranged in the two-tiered square required to start the proceedings. Sitting in the middle, like two loose teeth, were the faded misshapen dice that had come with the mah-jong set (acquired on a whim at a car-boot sale a few years before), with a small booklet of instructions, held together by Sellotape so old it had dulled to a dirty brown and lost most of its stick. Naomi, left alone with her glass of wine for long enough to be driven to picking up the little booklet and studying it, warned her friends now that she fully intended going for one of the more high-scoring difficult hands.

  Josephine groaned. ‘I can never remember them. I get my winds and my dragons muddled and some of those bamboos are just like flowers.’

  ‘It’s like cards, Jo – different suits, extra points for winds and dragons – and we must do the North Wind thing this time, Theresa.’

  ‘What thing is that?’ asked Theresa, absently, more concerned for the curry, which was showing severe signs of dehydration, while the rice, being kept warm in the top oven, was starting to look clumped and sticky.

  ‘I don’t get the North Wind thing,’ complained Josephine, stretching out her long legs and settling back with obvious relish into the deep folds of the sofa, hands and wine glass resting on her stomach. With a reputation among her management-consultant employers for being keenly intelligent, ruthless, inexhaustible, she found such evenings particularly relaxing. As her friends well knew, she didn’t really care a jot about the North Wind or whether she muddled bamboos and flowers. Before mah-jong she had been a member of a book club but had found it too much like hard work: fierce, often intellectually frustrated women holding forth, fighting to have nonsense opinions heard and respected – as if it mattered. She read Dick Francis, these days, or fluffy stories about women who shopped and had a lot of sex. I’ve always thought the South Wind should be more important than the North, anyway. Because it’s nicer, more clement… Oh, I could so do with some now.’ She sighed, pulling a face. ‘March is so long and hateful, with Christmas a distant memory and still months and months until the summer hols. I’m pushing hard for an Easter trip somewhere but Paul says he can’t get the time off.’

  ‘Paul always says that and then you persuade him,’ said Theresa, smoothly, glancing at the clock and wondering what could have happened to Charlotte.

  ‘Graham’s got a conference in Dubai this summer,’ said Naomi, crossing to the mantelpiece to study Martin and Cindy’s invitation, which, thanks to the distraction of her various domestic dramas, Theresa had forgotten to hide. ‘He’s going to try and fix it so I can go too.’

  ‘With Pattie and the twins?’

  ‘I haven’t got that far.’

  ‘You never get to spend time with husbands at conferences, though,’ Theresa pointed out. ‘I know Graham’s banking, not medicine, but it’s all the same. You end up seeing more of the room-service boy than you do of your partner.’

  ‘Not always a bad thing,’ quipped Josephine, her brown eyes glinting.

  They laughed, united in a gentle, effortless companionship that offered no real threats to husbands or room-service boys, but was instead a simple acknowledgement of the fact of being female and young enough still to lament some of the constraints of the marital state.

  No longer an issue for Charlotte, however, Theresa mused, crossing to the window to peer out into the street, wondering if this was a fact over which, after a few more swigs of wine, she might even be able to muster a frisson or two of jealousy. Bell-boys, estate agents – Charlotte, in her newly single state, could have her pick. Glancing down at her chest – a little too slack and ample since the children, but attractively displayed in a favourite blue lace-trimmed top – Theresa spent a moment trying to imagine the face of a nubile young man, as opposed to Henry, owl-eyed without his glasses, nuzzling at her cleavage. Then she thought of her stretchmarks, the large mole on her thigh that needed checking, the sag of fle
sh masking her hips, and the dear face of her husband came more clearly into focus. A stone overweight, aged thirty-eight, she was well past her physical best and any new lover would see that. Henry, on the other hand, she reflected happily, had known her at her best, just as she had known him before the glasses, the clicky knee and the tummy that swelled or shrank according to his level of self-discipline. For her there would always be that first enriching memory to fall back on – of the handsome, twinkly-eyed, newly qualified surgeon who had asked her to a rugby match and kissed her dry, freezing lips afterwards, saying now that he had found her he would never let her go.

  ‘We’ll have to start without Charlotte,’ she declared, dropping the curtain and turning back to the room.

  ‘Maybe she’s with her new man,’ suggested Josephine, casting a sideways glance at Naomi, normally her closest ally in the group.

  ‘Oh, but I think we should offer Charlotte nothing but encouragement,’ Naomi cried, releasing a snow-shower of glitter on to the carpet as she flapped the invitation. ‘It must be so hard, don’t you think, to feel any sort of confidence about dating when you’re nearly forty and you’ve been on the receiving end of such deception?’

  Josephine rolled her eyes. ‘You mean Martin and Cindy?’

  ‘Of course.’ Naomi carefully put the invitation back in its place. ‘And the others. Remember, Charlotte thought there were others.’

  For a few moments the three women fell silent, recalling the woeful tales of the Turner marriage, recounted with increasing bitterness and frequency as the years of their acquaintance with Charlotte had ticked by. Difficult, unloving, unfaithful – Josephine had quickly dubbed him Martin the Monster, and pioneered early efforts to get Charlotte to leave. But then Martin had finally pitched up for a school parents’ evening and she had found herself talking to a mild-mannered, good-looking man with anxious eyes and a ready smile. She had dropped the nickname overnight and, while remaining supportive, stopped trying to tell Charlotte what to do.

  ‘But Charlotte’s got her estate agent to look after her now, so she’s fine, isn’t she?’ pressed Josephine, as she took her place at the table, determined to get a rise on the subject from at least one of her companions. ‘And she’s beautiful,’ she exclaimed, with some exasperation when neither responded. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to look like that and be happy, would it, now?’

  ‘Jo, you’re horrible,’ said Naomi, amicably, sitting down next to her.

  ‘Let’s throw to settle who’s the North Wind,’ commanded Theresa, shooting both of them dark looks. ‘I’ll be me as well as Charlotte.’

  With a precision that would have been impossible to orchestrate, Charlotte arrived on the step just as Henry was slotting his key into the front door. Thus unheralded, she had time, while easing off her coat, to hear her name being mentioned through the half-open door of the sitting room. Henry, hearing it too, looked momentarily panic-stricken and barked an unnecessarily loud reprimand as George’s dark curly head bobbed through the banisters. ‘You should be in bed.’

  George rolled his eyes, announcing, with some pride, ‘Look, Dad,’ and proceeding to push his tongue up over his upper lip until the tip made contact with his nose.

  ‘Does young Sam have such social graces, I wonder?’ asked Henry, grinning once his son had been ordered back to bed.

  ‘Not that particular one. But he used to be able to put both legs behind his head and do somersaults round the room.’

  ‘Blimey – how alarming.’ Henry chuckled, pushing open the sitting-room door. ‘Here we are, ladies, your missing member.’

  There was a half-beat before the three women responded, like the pause before applause at an inconclusive conclusion of a performance. It was enough to confirm for Charlotte that she had indeed been the subject of conversation and to leave her with a dim, irrational sense of exclusion, which persisted in spite of the warm greetings that followed.

  They had been talking about Tim, probably – understandably – and she was being over-sensitive, she reasoned, trying her best to enjoy the usual chaos of the game with collapsing walls and Josephine shrieking ‘pung’ every time she meant ‘cong’ and one of Theresa’s delicious curries to oil the wheels. And, of course, not having a husband did make her different, Charlotte reminded herself, wondering that it had taken so long for this feeling to dawn. Holding back on her own news, she tried to lose herself and the niggling sense of separation in the merry stream of anecdotes that bounced around the table. Only to find the feeling getting worse: family life, family holidays, family tiffs, husbands this, husbands that. It was as if all three friends were speaking a different language.

  She was rescued eventually by Theresa, who caught her gaze and held it, generously insisting that their Suffolk cottage (inherited a few years before from Henry’s parents) was at her and Sam’s disposal for an Easter as well as a summer break if they wanted it. Whereupon Naomi, having suggested they abandon the game and retreat to comfortable chairs, asked with touching concern how things were going with Tim.

  ‘We’ve only had the one date and it was a bit of a blur, to be honest,’ Charlotte admitted, basking in the warmth of the kindness, ashamed that she could ever have doubted it. ‘We went to this weird Spanish place and ate salted almonds and lots of little dishes of oily snacks. It was okay, I suppose, but then I let him kiss me in the car when we got home, which has made him think we’ve got a proper thing going and I tried today to tell him that we haven’t but now he’s gone and found me this totally perfect house in Chalkdown Road so I really don’t feel I can ditch him altogether.’

  ‘A house!’ exclaimed Theresa, over the laughter of the other two. ‘But that’s fantastic news. So long, I suppose, as you have a buyer for yours…’ She tailed off, glancing round the freshly painted walls and carefully selected furnishings of her sitting room, thinking how loath she would feel to part with it.

  ‘That’s the point. It looks as if I might have. She’s called Mrs Burgess and Tim’s sure she’s keen.’ Charlotte chattered on, loving the feeling of relaxing properly, of being part of the old circle at last. ‘It’s more a cottage than a house – there’s all this lovely jasmine in the front garden and a bedroom balcony and two dear little stained-glass windows in the hall. The owner said they might not go with Tim’s agency, which would be bad for him but not the end of the world for me, now I know where it is and how much I like it. And it would be so good for Sam to have a fresh start. He’d be able to walk to school, of course, and we’d be so near the park I’ve been thinking we might even get a dog…’

  ‘Whoa there – a dog?’ cried Theresa, raising both arms to stop the flow. ‘But what about your job in the bookshop and keeping it entertained? Anyway, you hate dogs.’

  ‘Correction: I hate my mother’s dog for being dull and overfed and spoilt. And my job at Ravens is only part-time. And Sam has always wanted a dog. And at the moment Sam is –’ Charlotte stopped abruptly. She had drunk far too much, she realized, with some surprise, carefully setting down her wine glass. She had been on the verge, stupid goat that she was, of mentioning the very subject she had privately vowed to avoid. Miss Hornby had said they were on top of the situation. Martin would almost certainly agree with that view. The last thing she wanted was for these dear friends to think that, with clear water ahead of her, she was still finding cause to be unhappy; that with one major worry solved she was immediately on the track of another. And how would it sound, anyway, to tell the mothers of Pattie and George, Sam’s two oldest friends, that she suspected some sort of foul play? ‘Sam is still so… unsettled,’ she finished lamely, looking round for her handbag.

  ‘Sam will be all right,’ coaxed Theresa, gently. ‘He’s still… adjusting, that’s all.’

  ‘And children are so adaptable,’ put in Josephine, brightly, slipping her feet back into her shoes and nodding at Naomi, who had promised to give her a ride home.

  ‘Of course they are,’ echoed Naomi, unhooking her handbag from the back of her
chair and standing up.

  After their farewells, and having double-checked the state of the downstairs loo before she allowed Charlotte to enter it, Theresa sought out her husband in the den.

  ‘I’m not asleep,’ he croaked, waggling the two feet she could see sticking up over the end of the sofa. ‘Is it safe to come out?’ He peered over the back in the manner of a soldier checking the edge of a trench.

  ‘Ssh,’ Theresa scolded fondly, pressing her fingers to her lips. ‘The others have gone but Charlotte is in the loo. I want to invite her to a Sunday lunch – her and Sam.’

  ‘Of course.’ Henry pushed his fingers up under his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  ‘Because George and Sam appear to have fallen out and getting them over here might help sort it. And though Charlotte did her best tonight I think she’s pretty blue.’

  ‘You are the wise one, my love.’

  ‘Yes, I am, and if you’re coming out of here before Charlotte leaves you might want to consider doing up your flies first. I relish any opportunity to ogle your Y-fronts, of course, but I’m not sure Charlotte would share my enthusiasm.’

  A few yards away, sitting in the ill-lit cramped confines of the downstairs loo, her knees almost touching the door, Charlotte had to steady herself against the basin. The walls on both sides were crowded with framed collages of family snaps, cleverly spread like scattered playing cards to reveal toothless baby faces, tottering toddlers, Henry with a fatter face and thick sweeps of hair, Theresa laughing and pregnant in a Laura Ashley smock, pushing a buggy. The images shifted and blurred, pressing in on her. Struggling upright, she studied her reflection in the small mirror above the washbasin, pinching her cheeks and tugging at her lips in quiet despair at her pallor. ‘Like a ghoul,’ she hissed, grabbing the basin again as she swayed. ‘An ugly ghoul’.