Missing You (27 page)

As they walk through the gardens Belle wants to stop and look at the flowers and read the labels, but Amy is impatient and neither parent can refuse her any whim today. Their joy in their daughter is the only thing they have left that is mutual and pure. Amy bobs between the two of them, insisting on walking in the middle and holding their hands; she is the link between her disconnected mother and father.

They walk among similar families, men, women, children. They are part of the pattern. Sean finds the conformity intensely relaxing. He fits. He belongs. He knows how to act this role.

Amy looks sweet today, in yellow shorts and a yellow T-shirt appliquéd with daisies. Her hair has been cut into a shorter bob. Her eyes and her eyelashes are so pretty, so dark, her little features so neat. Sean squeezes Amy’s hand and feels a swell of pride in his heart. She won’t be a child forever. He determines not to waste a moment of his time with his daughter, no matter what the circumstances.

‘It’s nice to be together again, as a family, isn’t it?’ says Belle.

‘Yes.’

‘We should do this more often,’ says Belle, smiling down at Amy. Amy is skipping, swinging on their arms.

‘I would like pesto for my lunch,’ she says. ‘Pesto and pasta and tiramisu.’

‘It’s her Italian phase,’ says Belle.

‘
Per favore
,’ says Amy. ‘
Ciao. Mi chiamo
Amy Scott.
Ho sette anni
. Yesterday I only
ho sei anni
.’

‘Very good!’ says Sean. ‘Where did you learn all that?’

‘Lewis taught her.’

‘Oh.’

‘And,’ says Amy, ‘I’ve got my first wobbly tooth. Look, Daddy!’ She stands in front of him and opens her mouth wide, using her forefinger to press one of her front teeth. Sean detects no movement but pretends that he does, and praises her to the ends of the earth.

They eat a pleasant lunch in the zoo’s delightfully old-fashioned restaurant and then Amy badgers to go on the play equipment until the adults give in.

‘Amy, the whole point of a zoo is the animals, not the slide,’ Sean says. ‘We might just as well have gone to the park if all you want to do is play.’

‘I don’t want to be in Bath today,’ says Amy.

Sean nods. He strokes his chin. He watches as she climbs the ladder, agile in her yellow sandals. She is growing. Her legs are long and slim, tanned. She’s going to be a beauty, like her mother.

As the day wears on, Sean relaxes into it. The sun warms the air; even the animals seem sleepy, content. The flamingos, with their exaggerated, salmon-pink, question-mark necks, pose as if enchanted by their own reflections, and the inscrutable but friendly-faced okapi stands dreaming of open spaces it will never know.

Amy puts on an apron and a pair of comically large, heavy-duty rubber gloves and helps a thin young man with a bucket and a microphone feed the sea lions. She holds a decapitated fish by the tail and one of the sea lions, perhaps Ariel, claps its flippers to beg for the fish. Amy drops it, the sea lion catches and swallows it and the assembled audience applauds. Afterwards, Amy tells her parents that it was the best moment of her whole entire life.

Sean and Belle slip back into how they used to be, together, sharing the same space comfortably, predicting each other’s movements because they know one another so well, and have done for so many years. More than once, Sean has to stop himself from reaching out and taking Belle’s hand. It’s the way his brain and body have been wired. It’s a difficult habit to break, but habit is all it is.

They stop beside the meerkat park. Amy gazes over the wall. Belle takes a compact from her handbag and touches up her lipstick. She raises her chin and purses her lips and peers into the little mirror. There are only a few years between them, yet she seems infinitely more adult than Fen. She’s confident and graceful and elegant in her movements. She feels Sean’s gaze on her face and turns to smile at him. She gives him one of her best smiles, one of her all-encompassing, beautiful smiles.

‘I’ve missed you,’ she says very quietly.

‘Don’t,’ says Sean.

‘I’m so sorry for everything. I wondered if we—’

Sean shakes his head. ‘No, don’t,’ he says. ‘Don’t say any more.’

‘You don’t know what I was going to say.’

‘Whatever it was, there’s no point. It’s too late.’

She nods, and then turns away again. Her eyes are glassy. Sean feels helpless. He does not want Belle to be unhappy, but how can he help her? Frustration digs its claws into his back. After all she’s put the family through, after so much heartache and grief, why can’t Belle be satisfied with what she has? If he had let her continue, would she have asked him to come back to her? Is that where this whole day has been leading? Was Belle’s intention to entice him with a snapshot of his old, perfect family life and then seduce him with her remorse and vulnerability?

She’s walking away again, on her own, with an air of abject resignation.

Amy looks up at Sean over her shoulder.

‘What’s wrong with Mummy?’

Sean does his best to give his daughter a reassuring smile. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

But Amy’s buoyant mood disappears. She deflates in front of him.

‘Then why is she crying?’

Sean sighs. He doesn’t know what to say. He holds his daughter’s gaze; he can’t lie to her but he can’t tell her the truth either because the truth is far too complicated.

The zoo is starting to empty, there are strange animal calls in the air and Sean’s sense of being in a dream mutates slightly. Now he feels uneasy. He feels as if he’s in some kind of nightmare. He feels responsible for his daughter. He has to do something to make things all right again.

He squeezes her shoulder.

‘Come on,’ he says, ‘it’s time we were off.’

‘We can’t go yet. We have to go to the reptile house.’

‘We’ve been to the reptile house.’

Amy shrugs off his hand. Now her voice is high and whiney. ‘Yes, but we didn’t see the . . . thing . . . you know the thing we didn’t see because they were cleaning its cage.’

‘The iguana.’

‘Yes.’

‘I think the reptile house is probably closed by now.’

‘And we didn’t see the gorillas.’

‘We did.’

‘No, we only saw one, and there’s a whole family, you said. You said there’s a baby gorilla, Daddy. You
promised
!’

Sean looks across the gardens. Belle is some way away now, standing on her own again. He crouches down so that his eyes are level with Amy’s. From this perspective it hurts him to see the anxiety in her face.

‘Come on,’ he says again.

He stands, picks her up and puts her on his shoulders as he used to when she was a toddler. Her legs come down almost to his waist. She squeals and holds on tightly to his hair.

‘The plan,’ he says, ‘is to find Mummy and then we’ll go to the shop and see if we can buy you a toy sea lion, and after that we’ll go somewhere nice for dinner.’

thirty-nine

The lights are off and Fen is curled up in the armchair watching an old Hitchcock film on television when he comes in. Her sewing box is on the carpet beside her, its lid open, different fabrics and threads spilling out. She enjoyed a thrill of anticipation when she heard his car pull up on the road outside – she recognizes the sound of the engine – and her heart skipped when she heard the clanging of the gate, his feet on the steps and his key in the door. Now she smiles at him sleepily, her chin in her hand.

‘Hi,’ he says, leaning down to kiss her. He smells of baby powder, of Amy.

‘Did you get my message?’ he asks.

She nods. Her eyes flick back to the television screen.

‘Amy asked me to go back and read her a story and . . .’

Fen looks back at him. ‘I know. I’m glad you were there to tuck her in on her birthday.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Is there any beer?’

‘I think so.’

‘Are you having one?’

Fen glances at the television. Cary Grant has just found out that Eva Marie Saint is in mortal danger. He’s hiding upstairs in the house she shares with evil-but-charming James Mason, who is moments away from killing her.

Fen looks back at Sean. He stands in the doorway. He looks . . . defeated.

‘OK.’

Fen switches off the television and follows him barefoot into the kitchen. She chews at the side of her thumbnail. He does not turn on the light. He opens the fridge door and the front of him is illuminated. He takes two beers out of the fridge, shuts the door, flips the lids and passes one to Fen.

Fen does not touch him. She holds the cold beer bottle in her hand and says nothing, although her heart is thumping. Something is wrong.

Sean drinks his drink. He doesn’t say anything either. Somehow, though, it’s important that Fen stands with him. She picks at the label on her bottle. She peels it from the glass and rolls it into a narrow pipe.

After a long time, Sean puts his empty bottle down and leans on the counter. He looks dog-tired.

‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’ she asks, softly.

‘Nothing happened,’ he says. ‘We went to the zoo. Amy fed the sea lions. We had dinner in a Harvester. She went to bed and I read her five chapters from
Heidi.
’

Fen bites her lip. She does not touch Sean or move closer towards him. She doesn’t speak. He takes the vodka bottle from the freezer and pours himself a large glass. He doesn’t ask if Fen would like another drink, he doesn’t apologize or explain.

‘Lewis and Belle have broken up,’ he says quietly.

‘Oh.’

‘It’s hard for Belle,’ he says. ‘Usually she knows what she wants, and she gets it. This time it turned out that Lewis wasn’t what she wanted after all.’

Fen fiddles with the rolled paper in her fingers.

‘Does she want you back?’ she asks.

He does not answer this directly. He says: ‘She’ll be OK. Things will sort themselves out. They always do.’

Fen doesn’t ask again. She doesn’t need to. She knows.

Sean drinks his vodka. She stands beside him. She watches his Adam’s apple move up and down his throat; she watches the light on the rim of the glass.

Then he says: ‘I’m going to bed now.’

Fen nods.

She waits downstairs until she hears the toilet flush, the rattling of the never-mended pipes, then she goes up. Sean is standing on the landing in his boxers. Connor has made a traffic jam of toy cars along the middle of the carpet and Sean has a leg on either side of the cars, making a bridge. His knees are bony. She wonders if he wants to sleep alone tonight.

Sean reaches out to her. She takes his hand. It’s warm. It’s strong. ‘Fen . . .’

‘Yes.’

‘What was it you said, about having a duty to look after the people we love?’

‘Not a duty,’ she says. ‘A responsibility.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Is it Belle? Are you worried about how she’ll cope on her own? Is she really unhappy?’

He shakes his head.

‘Not Belle,’ he says. ‘She’s made her choices. It’s Amy. I can’t bear what all this is doing to Amy.’

forty

They see the rain coming from a long way off. The Lady Chapel is situated high up the hill and the workmen have a perfect view of the threatening clouds that move slowly and inevitably over the city towards them. They are preparing to replace the cupola. The stones have been restored and repaired and the original bell has been brought out of storage. The scaffolders have already set up a frame, but the first spots of rain spat onto the tarmac path before they had the chance to protect the chapel roof with plastic. Thunder rumbles in the throat of the cloud.

‘What do you think?’ asks the foreman.

Sean checks his watch. He looks up at the sky.

‘Let’s call it a day,’ he says.

The foreman nods.

Sean helps tidy the site and checks that all the relevant safety signs and barriers are in place. He swaps his work boots for his trainers, gets into the car and drives back to Lilyvale
.

The house is empty. Fen is still at work. He goes into the living room and switches the TV on for company, then he washes his hands in the kitchen sink and opens the fridge door.

There’s not much in it, but there’s enough to make a bacon and egg sandwich.

So he turns on the grill and lays some strips of bacon on the tray; he takes a small pan off the drainer beside the sink, rinses it, fills it with water and sets it to boil on the hob. There are no mushrooms, but there are a couple of tomatoes in the salad drawer. He slices them in half and puts them under the grill too. He opens the back door to let out the fat smoke. The thunder is still grumbling on the other side of the valley and the air is steamy with the smell of rain.

The water is boiling so he puts in some salt and breaks an egg against the handle of the pan, then carefully slides the unformed substances into the steam. The egg white congeals as soon as it touches the water; it whitens protectively around the yolk and a lacy frill forms around it. Sean watches. He butters some bread then turns the bacon.

He eats from a plate on his knees in front of the television.

When he has eaten, he checks the time. He could let Fen know he is here to meet Connor off the bus. She may want to stay in the city and do some shopping. He tries her phone, but it’s switched off. He does not leave a message. He wanders into the kitchen. There’s a Bath Rugby calendar hooked under the cabinets. Amy gave it to him for Christmas. He checks the date and beside it Fen has scrawled: 4 p.m. Speech Therapist.

She must have gone directly to the school.

Sean yawns. He wanders into the living room. He turns down the volume on the television and picks up his guitar. He plays some chords, a blues riff.

He left his phone on the kitchen counter and he doesn’t hear it ring the first time. The second time he goes into the kitchen and sees who it is, and he almost does not pick it up.

It’s Belle’s number.

She keeps calling. She keeps talking to Sean, not telling him directly what’s wrong, but complaining about trivial things that it’s in Sean’s power to resolve: squirrels in the roof, a knocking noise from her car’s exhaust, whether or not Amy should start piano lessons. Sean knows she’s lonely, he knows she needs someone to lean on but these calls drag him down. They exhaust him. So he almost doesn’t answer and when he does he says, ‘Hi’ with a sharp edge to his voice as if he is in the middle of something important and has been inconveniently interrupted.