Missing You (23 page)

Mari gave the children their names. Tomas after some Portuguese footballer she used to hero-worship, Fen after the part of Cambridgeshire where she first met Gordon, and Sky, which is Lucy’s real name but from the age of about five Lucy flatly refused to answer to it, and told everyone that her name was Lucy.

Fen first makes an appearance in a school photograph. It was taken at primary school the summer after Mari left. Fen and Tomas are together in front of a pale-blue canvas screen that is supposed to represent the sky. They are wearing matching, slightly grubby, white polo shirts and red jumpers, and are sitting head to head, grinning at the camera as if they don’t have a care in the world. Fen remembers the teacher tidying her hair for that photograph and making Tomas take off his jumper and put it on again, because he was wearing it inside out. Fen is missing her top two front teeth and Tomas’s teeth look too big for his face and have not been brushed in a while. There is a crust of sleep in the corner of his eye. Fen looks at the picture and smiles back at the two unkempt children with affection.

The next picture is a large photograph of Gordon and his revised family standing primly outside the grand arch at the formal entrance to Merron College. It was taken when Gordon was appointed to the role of Headmaster. Now the children are clean and immaculately dressed. Fen is wearing a blue coat and tights. She is skinny, slope-shouldered, nine or ten years old. Lucy’s hair is cut in an unflattering bob. She looks shy and uncomfortable in her new glasses. Between his sisters Tomas is smiling proudly for the camera. Gordon’s new, improved wife, Deborah, stands beside him holding his hand. Gordon looks imposing and confident. Deborah looks exactly as the wife of the headmaster of one of Britain’s leading independent schools should look. She looks like an attractive, well-dressed, middle-class woman who is devoted to, and very proud of, her clever, much-respected husband and who is doing her best for his wayward children.

Fen puts the picture back on top of the piano. She wipes her hands on the side of her dress and looks out of the window for a few moments, watching the finches at the feeder. Then she crosses to the bottom of the stairs and calls up quietly, so as not to disturb the baby: ‘Luce? Is it OK if I call Vincent?’

And Lucy calls down: ‘Of course. You don’t have to ask.’

So Fen phones the Gildas Bookshop and Vincent says everything is fine and that Connor was no trouble whatsoever last night; the only problem is that Sheila is already besotted and might not want to give him back.

‘Thank you both so much,’ says Fen. ‘I don’t know how I’ll ever make it up to you.’

‘It’s our pleasure,’ says Vincent. ‘Oh, and that young man of yours was in earlier, worrying about you. He wants you to call him. He said it was important.’

‘Did he?’ asks Fen, and she looks at herself in the mirror over the telephone table, and combs her hair with her fingers.

‘I know it’s none of my business but he looked, frankly, dreadful. He looked like he hadn’t slept. You two haven’t fallen out, have you?’

‘No,’ Fen says quietly. ‘No, of course not.’

When she has finished speaking to Vincent, she takes a couple of deep breaths and then she dials Sean’s number.

She is connected to his answerphone. She doesn’t even have the pleasure of hearing his voice, just the virtual lady telling her to leave a message.

She apologizes. She says she’s sorry for not speaking to him last night, then she summarizes William’s dramatically improved health in a couple of sentences, and says she’ll text him to let him know when she’s coming back. She does not tell him that she misses him and wishes he were here with her.

In the late afternoon, after Lucy has rested, the two sisters go for a walk. Lucy pushes the baby in his buggy, and Fen walks beside her, one hand on the handle. Lucy has an old-fashioned notion that fresh air is what William needs. She believes it will do him good. They walk along pavements, past buildings that Fen has known all her life, along roads that are so intrinsic to her history she imagines they must be embedded in her DNA. They don’t go anywhere near the suburbs where Joe used to live; Lucy and Alan’s house is in a different neighbourhood altogether.

It is such a long time since Fen has been on her own with her sister that she finds the intimacy awkward. Although they speak of superficial, trivial things, Fen has an urge to unburden herself and to confide in her sister. She feels like a little child again and she has to hold herself back. She isn’t sure if it would be appropriate to start being honest with Lucy now, after so many years of lies. She does not know where the boundaries are, whether complacency should trump propriety, or vice versa.

‘How long is it since we were alone together, like this? Without it being somebody’s wedding or funeral?’ asks Lucy, reading Fen’s mind.

‘Ages. Not since before you went to university.’

‘Twelve? Fifteen years, then?’

‘I suppose.’

Lucy sighs. ‘That’s awful.’

They walk a little further.

‘I feel like I’ve let you down,’ says Lucy.

‘Me? No! Of course you haven’t.’

‘I haven’t been much there for you, have I?’

‘You’ve always been so busy, Luce. You had Alan and your job and the school to look after.’

‘And who’s been looking after you?’

Fen shrugs. ‘I don’t need anyone to look after me. I’ve been fine. Mostly . . .’ Then she tries to take the bull by the horns. She says: ‘Only, we never really talked about the things that matter most, did we? You and me, I mean . . . We’ve never talked about the accident . . . about Tom and Joe . . . the accident . . . that night . . .’

Lucy turns to her sister and smiles. ‘Alan and I, well, we always think it’s best not to look backwards, not when the past is different to how you wish it was. Sleeping dogs and all that. There’s no point opening old wounds, is there?’

‘No,’ says Fen quietly. ‘Of course not.’

Lucy says: ‘You should always turn your face away from darkness and towards the sun. That’s more or less what the Bible teaches. It’s not a bad philosophy, is it?’

‘No,’ says Fen. ‘Only . . .’

‘Deborah came over last month,’ Lucy says briskly. ‘Did I tell you?’

They both know she didn’t.

‘She’s looking really good, for a woman her age, and after all she’s been through. The Aussie lifestyle obviously suits her.’

‘Mmm.’

‘She asked after you. She said to give you her love.’

Fen watches her shoes.

‘And,’ says Lucy, ‘you’ll be pleased to know that Emma Rees went out there earlier this year and stayed for a month. She had a lovely time. Deborah took her out into the Blue Mountains and they went to the opera and walked over Sydney Harbour Bridge. Deborah didn’t say as much but I’m pretty sure she paid for Emma’s ticket.’

‘That was kind.’

‘It was,’ says Lucy.

They walk along in silence for a while.

‘Deborah’s a good person,’ Lucy says. ‘She was the best stepmother we could ever have had. She did so much for Dad . . .’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘I don’t think Dad was an easy person to love.’

‘
I know.
I was there too.’

Lucy gives her younger sister a hurt look.

‘Sorry, ’ says Fen.

‘All right,’ says Lucy, ‘all right. Change the subject. What about you, then? Are we allowed to talk about you? What’s new in your life?’

Fen picks a leaf off a shrub at the side of the road, crushes it and sniffs her fingers.

‘A ctually,’ she says, ‘I’ve met someone.’

‘Goodness,’ says Lucy, and then she adds quickly: ‘Someone nice?’

‘Yes, very nice. He’s my lodger. He has a daughter a little older than Connor.’

‘Single parent? Divorced?’

‘Separated.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s all right, Lucy, he was separated before I met him. He’s still getting over it, but he’s much better now than he used to be.’

Lucy measures her words.

‘Fen, are you sure it’s not just a rebound thing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Darling, you don’t have much experience of this kind of situation. How do you know?’

‘I just do.’

‘Fen . . .’

‘If I try to explain you’ll think I’m mad.’

‘I won’t.’

‘You will. Because if somebody tried to explain it to me I’d think they were exaggerating . . . Or imagining the whole thing, or something.’

‘Try me.’

‘It’s just that, when I’m with him, it’s as if I’m where I was always supposed to be.’

Lucy leans over, squeezes Fen’s elbow and kisses her on the cheek. ‘There you are,’ she says, ‘you explained that very well.’ She seems genuinely, deeply pleased. ‘Still,’ Lucy adds, ‘you be careful. Marriages are complicated, messy things. Sometimes they look like they’re over when in fact they’re not; they’re just having a lie-down.’

They walk a little further. Fen isn’t concentrating on the route and when she raises her eyes and sees that they are on the street where they used to live, she is surprised at how ordinary it looks.

In her mind, whenever she remembers the last weeks in her father’s house in Merron, she remembers a dark, gloomy, oppressive building on a long, cold street. She remembers wet pavements, black hedges, dark evenings and gloomy facades, pale-faced people in sombre winter clothes, their quiet, sad voices, one funeral after another, the volume on the radio turned down low. She remembers Deborah’s damp handkerchief bunched on the dresser, the gentle footsteps of the palliative nurse, the hair in the priest’s nostrils and his habit of jingling the change in his trouser pocket. She remembers the smell of bleach and bedpans and flowers rotting in their vases, the air chilling around the damp fabric of coats hooked on the stand in the hall and the spatters of water droplets on the parquet beneath the folded umbrellas, the endless cups of tea and the steam on the windows. She remembers, one day after another, having to be brave for her father’s sake and not mentioning Tomas, how she felt as if she were wearing a corset pulled too tight all the time, how she could not breathe, she could not properly feel because she was so constricted and . . . Deborah.

Deborah was always at her side, squeezing her elbow. Deborah was saying things like: good girl, well done, now make another pot of tea, it’s important to be positive. Deborah was brisk, she was always busy, she never seemed to sleep and, sharp-eyed like an eagle, she watched Fen; she watched her and she chivvied her along and made sure she held herself together.

It didn’t change the facts, though.

Fen’s poor father was dying and she was unable to look into his face because all she could see was Tomas’s face reflected back at her and, beyond that, her terrible, terrible guilt.

Now she’s here again and nobody she knows has died in ages, years, and she sees that it’s just another street lined with large, attractive, bay-windowed houses built in the 1930s. It’s quite pretty with all the trees in leaf and flowers in pots in the small front gardens.

The sisters stop in front of the house where they used to live. It’s been looked after and tastefully modernized; everything is neat and tidy and in order.

The hedge that Tomas used to hide behind has gone. The front garden has been paved to provide off-road parking. There’s a child’s tricycle parked inside the open, arched porch; a paper note is tucked under a glass milk bottle on the step; the same coloured glass is in the fanlight above the door.

Fen looks up to the window of what used to be her old bedroom. Football stickers frame the window. She remembers what it was like before the stickers were there, how it felt to be Fen, inside the house, looking out to Tomas, who was standing here, where she stands now.

It doesn’t feel like the place where something terrible happened. It feels normal. She is amazed to find that there are no ghosts here.

It’s this, this normality, which gives her courage. She turns to her sister and touches her arm. She says quietly: ‘Lucy, what I said earlier . . . We never talked about the accident and I need to tell you what happened with Joe and Tomas. I need your help . . .’

‘Our doctor lives there now,’ says Lucy, moving her arm slightly to dislodge Fen’s fingers, walking on so seamlessly that Fen honestly is not sure whether her sister heard what she said or not. Something about Lucy’s posture, her demeanour, reminds Fen of Deborah. ‘She’s a specialist in mental health, she’s very nice. Her husband has written a book about model railways. They have twins.’

thirty-three

Sean walks up and down outside the railway station and watches the diggers and the men working on the redevelopment of the shopping centre; the old post-war, concrete shopping mall and the coach station were demolished months ago and now the foundations are being laid for replacements which will be more in keeping with the rest of the city. All the planners will need to do then, thinks Sean, is sort out the gasworks which dominate the western side of central Bath.

Wearing yellow hats, industrial gloves and boots spattered with concrete, the builders are working under artificial lights, to move things on. They seem to be acting independently, each focusing on his own job, but they’ve already moved so much, changed so much. Sean likes watching. He has enjoyed watching the mechanics of construction since he was a child. It’s not his line of work, the deep-piling and the steel-framing and the concrete-pouring, but still it gives him pleasure to watch. A concrete-mixing lorry is churning away in the corner, but the long arm of the crane is motionless overhead now. In its monstrous shadow the men, with their rolled-up sleeves exposing their sinewy forearms, gesture to one another and spit the dust out of their mouths. It’s like watching a film, but better, thinks Sean, because there’s so much going on at the same time and it’s real. It’s construction; it’s dynamic, creative. And all this activity takes his mind off Fen. It takes his mind off how he will feel when he sees her again.

After a while, an eastbound train rumbles in on the tracks behind him and stops at the platform with a screech of metal on metal. He tucks the newspaper he hadn’t been reading into the bin and steps forward to meet Fen.