Missing You (6 page)

‘I’m not sure,’ Fen says.

‘Well, I’ll save the article,’ says Lucy. ‘Maybe you’ll come and see us and we can look at it together.’

Fen gazes out of the window. She will never go back to Merron.

‘Maybe,’ she says.

The line goes silent. Then both sisters start to speak at the same time and they laugh, awkwardly.

‘Lucy, I’m sorry but I’ve got to go,’ says Fen. ‘Connor’s calling me.’

‘All right. But let’s speak again soon. Let’s arrange for you both to come and stay for a weekend or something. How about bonfire night? It’s always great at the school.’

‘I’ll see,’ says Fen. ‘I’ll give you a call a bit nearer the time.’

‘OK,’ says Lucy, but both sisters know that she won’t.

Fen switches off her phone. Then she opens the back door and sits on the top step in the cool air, staring out across the darkening valley. She wishes she had a cigarette or a drink or something. All this talk of the past, it’s made her uncomfortable. She feels itchy, irritable, upset. She wants to cry, she wants to hide, she wants to run away and disappear into the background of life like she did before, in the years between her father’s death and Connor being conceived. She wraps her arms around herself and shivers, and looks out across the valley. She wishes things were different, she wishes there were something she could do to change things, to put things right, but in her heart she believes there’s nothing she can do, nothing at all.

eight

It’s Friday evening. Sean lies down on his bed, just for a moment, with his hands behind his head and his ankles crossed. The last of the sunlight dies on the ceiling. A dead moth is caught inside the paper globe of the light shade. Water glugs in the radiator, warming the room, and the November chill, the smell of fallen leaves, hangs damply in the air beyond the cold window glass.

Sean wishes he could close his eyes and sleep. The bed is comfortable; he’s used to it now and it’s pleasant to sleep in the same bed every night. He likes the calmness of this room, this house. He likes to be on his own up here, but it’s comforting to hear Fen downstairs, playing with Connor, doing his physiotherapy exercises before she puts him to bed.

Fen does not have to leave the house again. He does. And the effort he needs to make now, to do what he has to do, appals him, and his head is aching and his heart is sore. But he must leave soon if he is to pick up his daughter on time, so, after a few minutes, he gets up, goes to the bathroom and splashes cold water on his face. The darkness that’s mustering beyond the window dismays him. Sean pats his face dry with his towel, goes into his room and picks up his jacket, his wallet, his car keys.

He meets Fen on the stairs. Connor is on her hip, in his pyjamas, his head on her shoulder and his fingers wrapped in his mother’s hair. One of his delicate feet, one slender ankle, hangs by her knee. His pyjamas are a little too small. They have been washed too many times and the pattern has faded.

‘Hi,’ says Sean, stepping back up to the landing to give her space.

‘Hi.’

He jingles the keys. ‘I’m just off to fetch Amy.’

‘Did you want me to leave some supper out for her? There’s some pasta . . .’

‘No, thanks, it’s OK. If she hasn’t eaten, I’ll buy something at the services.’

Connor holds his hand out to Sean.

‘High five,’ says Sean, and the little boy laughs and throws his hand up, almost unbalancing Fen. Sean catches her elbow to steady her.

‘Thanks,’ says Fen, coming up onto the landing and setting Connor down. She looks up at him. There’s a slight colour to her cheeks.

‘I’ll see you later, then,’ says Sean.

‘OK.’

‘Fen?’

‘Mmm?’

‘That chain around your neck, it’s pretty.’

‘Oh, this,’ she says, touching the gold chain. ‘It belonged to my mother.’

‘Belonged?’

‘It was a sort of souvenir. She left us when I was very young.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Sean.

‘Don’t be. We had a stepmother. She was very . . . competent.’

‘What does the “M” stand for?’

Fen covers the letter with the palm of her hand. ‘Mari.’

‘It’s a pretty name. Is it Gaelic?’

‘Irish. My mother is Irish. My father’s Scottish and my sister and brother and I were all born in England but we grew up in Wales.’

‘Must have made things tricky in the Six Nations.’

Fen laughs politely and he laughs with her.

They both stop laughing at the same time, and there’s an awkwardness.

Fen gives an apologetic shrug. ‘I need to get Connor to bed,’ she says.

‘Yeah, sorry, of course,’ says Sean. ‘I’ll see you later.’

It’s not far from Bath to Swindon, but an accident has closed the eastbound carriageway of the motorway. Sean is listening to Nirvana, singing along, tapping out the rhythm on the steering wheel to put himself in a good mood, and when he turns on the radio to find out why the traffic up ahead has stopped, it is too late. He is trapped. Lorries dwarf his car on either side, their giant tyres and vertical walls of metal shimmering in the heat from their engines. Sean idles the motor and calls Belle’s mobile to explain why he will be late. She is already at Membury services. She is unsympathetic.

‘Why didn’t you leave earlier?’ she asks. ‘Why didn’t you come straight from work?’

Sean feels a tingle between his shoulder blades. He wonders whether it is feasible that the source of his pain is Belle. Could he actually feel the loss of her as a physical pain? The car in front of him moves forward a few feet, and then stops again. No, he thinks, shifting in his seat. It’s just that I spend too long sitting in this bastard car.

‘I had to sort out the room, to make it nice for Amy,’ he explains. ‘That’s why I couldn’t leave earlier.’

Belle sighs a long-suffering sigh. ‘Sean, you’ve had all week to do that. You didn’t have to leave it to the last minute.’

Sean sighs back. He can do patronizing too; she doesn’t have a monopoly on that.

‘I can’t help the traffic jam,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing I can do about it.’

‘It’s just,’ she says, and he can hear the frustration in her voice, ‘it’s just you
always
do this. You’re always messing me around.’

Sean holds his breath. He can’t deny this. There
is
always some kind of problem when it comes to him honouring the rendezvous arranged by Belle. He doesn’t do it deliberately, but some devil in him connives with the world to ensure something goes wrong every time he is on his way to collect Amy, or on his way to take her back to her mother. Belle, for whom life seems to run more smoothly, finds this intensely frustrating. These late changes in the arrangements set her weekends off to a bad start, but he invariably has a valid excuse so she can’t accuse him of direct sabotage. For Sean, it’s a Pyrrhic victory, for Belle’s anxiety infects Amy and this minor discord seeps into his weekend. It’s a victory, nonetheless.

He plans a little speech in his head which goes along the lines of saying he may be late, but if he were still living in the family home, that wouldn’t be an issue, would it? And Belle, presumably, did not take into consideration the potential inconvenience to him, Sean, when she took up with the Other. He, actually, believe it or not, would rather be driving home,
home
, right now . . . home to his house, the house he and Belle chose together, the one they were going to stay in until Amy and their future children had flown the nest, the
family
home.

But if he says any of this, the conversation will deteriorate into accusations and the reliving of past hurts and slights. And it would be petty and mean and pathetic. It would confirm that Belle had made the right decision in choosing the rational, reasonable Other over Neanderthal Sean. It would demean Sean in her eyes, and his.

‘Belle, I
am
sorry, ’ he says, making an effort to sound sincere. ‘I can see the traffic moving up ahead. Why don’t you get something to eat? I’ll pay.’

‘It’s not that, it’s . . .’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Are you doing something special this weekend?’ Sean asks. ‘Is that why you’re upset?’ Now he’s trying to sound empathetic. It works. He hears her gentle, relieved exhalation. The texture of their dialogue is smoothed. If only he’d worked out how to do this before . . . If only he’d known that was what he had to do . . . He makes a fist and salutes his new-found, new-man self. He will win Belle back. He is learning.

‘We’re going to St Ives,’ says Belle in a more subdued voice.

‘Cornwall? That’s a long way to go for a weekend.’

‘It’s our anniversary.’

‘Your anniversary?’

‘Yes,’ she says quietly.

‘Oh.’

And Sean thinks back; he thinks back to this time last year and how he took a week off work so Belle could join her tutor group for a study week in Cornwall, and how, when she came back, she seemed to have grown in confidence and energy, and how she changed her hairstyle and laughed a lot and kept going off for walks, on her own, with her mobile phone in her pocket, and how her eyes were bright and her cheeks pink, and how she said she was as happy as she’d ever been . . . and how he’d thought she meant that, now she was being intellectually stimulated by her degree course in creative writing, she was happy with him.

‘Oh Christ,’ he says.

‘I promised you no more lies,’ she says.

‘I know, but . . . I wasn’t expecting . . . a year, Belle? It’s been going on for a whole year?’

‘Sorry, ’ she whispers.

A year. That’s twelve months’ worth of lies, fifty-two weeks of unfaithfulness, three hundred and sixty-five days of deception, who knows how many hours and minutes and seconds of pretending.

‘Christ,’ says Sean. ‘Shit!’

His brain is trying to assimilate this seismic new information. It is fighting back a tidal wave of memories, small inconsistencies in Belle’s accounts of how she spent her days, sudden changes in her plans, how she would shower when she came back from her tutorials, the new clothes, the new perfume, the brittle laughter, the energetic, let’s-get-it-over-with-quickly sex.

‘Sean?’

‘Sorry . . . The signal’s going,’ says Sean, and he puts the phone down so that she will not hear the effort he is making to stop himself fragmenting into a million little pieces of humiliation and hurt.

nine

‘
Gëzuar Krishtlindjet e Vitin e Ri
,’ says Vincent.

‘Oh yes?’

‘Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. In . . . Albanian, I think.’

Fen smiles and shakes her head.

It’s been a mad busy morning. The Christmas rush always starts early in Bath, and this year is no exception. Literary aficionados come into the shop in search of special gifts for like-minded friends, others are looking for something a little out of the ordinary, and some, Fen thinks, are just looking to escape the crowds. The Gildas Bookshop is an oasis of quiet and calm. The city is already filled with piped carols; shop windows are overflowing with energy-saving fairy lights, their political correctness tempered by the red and gold of tasteful, Victoriana point-of-sale displays; tens of thousands of shoppers are trip-trapping through the streets, bumping each other’s legs with their smart carrier bags filled with delightful, shiny, well-packaged items; they are queuing to buy wraps of genuine roasted chestnuts and cardboard cups of mulled wine from entrepreneurial street vendors. At this time of year, Bath is a cathedral to Mammon, but the bookshop is devoid of glitter, twinkle and marked-up prices. The only concessions to the season are the foreign-language Christmas cards and a tiny, old, three-bar electric fire. The top bar doesn’t work, but still the fire warms the air in the shop until it is heavy and thick and anyone standing within about a metre of the appliance will scorch their legs. The heater makes the shop smell of burned dust. It’s not a pleasant smell and after a while Fen can taste the dust in her mouth and feel it in the moisture that coats the surface of her eyes.

Fen has been making a display of the greeting cards. They are beautiful things, photographs of winter landscapes of the countries they represent, each captioned in the appropriate language.

‘Hah,’ says Vincent. ‘You’d have to go a long way to find another shop that stocks Christmas cards in, er –’ he turns over the card he is holding – ‘Lithuanian!’ Normally a man given to self-deprecation, today he is exceptionally pleased with himself.

‘What if the words are inappropriate?’ asks Fen. ‘What if they’re wrongly spelled? What if that doesn’t say, “Happy Christmas”, what if it actually says . . .’

‘That’s what the internet’s for,’ says Vincent happily. ‘When the shop’s quiet, Fen Weller, you can make yourself useful by Googling the phrases and seeing what comes up.’

He wags an affectionate finger at Fen. ‘You never stop learning, dear girl, that’s the beauty of life.’

The migraine that has been hovering just outside Fen’s field of vision all morning finally swoops in for the kill just before lunch. She sees a shimmering mirage before her, a pool of mercury that darts whichever way her eyes turn, and the familiar, spiteful vice has begun to tighten around her skull. She battles on, but Vincent, who is always attentive, notices that she is not right.

‘Sit down a while; you’ve gone very pale,’ he says, offering his chair, but Fen knows that if she gives in, the headache will win. ‘Your skin looks bleached. Would paracetamol help? Ibuprofen?’

‘No,’ she says, ‘thank you, but they won’t touch it. If I ignore it, it may go away.’

Lina comes into the shop. ‘Hello, gorgeous,’ she says to Vincent, going over to him for a hug and a kiss. ‘Hello, Fen. What have you done to your eyes?’

‘Nothing, I . . .’

‘She’s not feeling well,’ says Vincent. ‘Migraine, I suspect, although she hasn’t said as much.’

‘Oh, Fen, nobody likes a trooper,’ says Lina. ‘It shows the rest of us up.’

‘I’m fine,’ says Fen.

‘You blatantly aren’t.’

‘Is your car nearby, Lina?’ Vincent asks.