Plan B

Copyright © 2005, Emily Barr

The right of Emily Barr to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

For James, Gabriel and Sebastien

Thanks to Griselda Muir for bidding at Free Tibet’s auction and deciding to have the name Glad Muir included in this book. Thanks also to Kate Ireland, Tim and Heidi Marvin, Jonny Geller, Jane Morpeth and everyone at Headline. And thanks, as ever, to James, Gabe and Seb.

It was a terrible day to emigrate. The sun was shining. The sky was a deep spring blue. My breath came in clouds all around me.

Clifton Street was beautiful. The tall white houses opposite were bleached by the light. I could smell the sea in the air, hear the distant seagulls. Anne, who lived across the road, was looking at me from inside her bay window. She waved when I looked at her, and motioned to me to come in and see her before we left. I had lived opposite Anne for seven years. I prided myself on knowing all my neighbours. I didn’t know any of them very well, but I was on friendly terms with just about everybody at our end of the street. For the past seven years, this house had been my home, my place of safety. I had lived here with lodgers, then with Matt, then with Matt and Alice. I brought my daughter to this house two days after she was born. It was the only home she had ever known, yet she was going to grow up with no memories of it at all.

When I finally accepted that the move was going to happen, I hoped that we would go in the rain. I wanted all the bad things about the life I was leaving to be spread before me, as reassurance. I wanted spiky rain blown at me by a driving wind, a blanket of black cloud, the street full of uncollected rubbish bags pecked open by seagulls. I wanted to hear drunk stag parties arriving at the station. Ideally, there would have been a Labour Party conference blocking off the seafront with barriers and covered walkways, which always irritated me as I believed that people had a right to see their leaders walking along the street. I hoped that it was going to take us three hours to drive to the ferry port at Newhaven.

Instead, the day was perfect. The rubbish had been collected two days earlier. The seagulls circled far overhead, up in the blueness, screeching in the distance. I knew that we would leave soon. It was all out of my hands, now. We were only going because I had been weak, and because I hated confrontation, and because I always did what Matt suggested, and he knew that.

I was heartbroken. This was an enormous mistake, a massive misjudgement. I imagined myself trying to rectify the situation. I wondered what would happen if I touched the arm of one of the removals men. ‘I’m sorry,’ I might say. ‘I’ve changed my mind. Would you put all the furniture back, please?’

I was not sure that these removals men would look at me even if I spoke to them. By a strange quirk of science, my physical form appeared to be invisible to their eyes. Soon after they had arrived, at nine in the morning, I had put a tray bearing a cafetière of coffee, four cups, a jug of milk, a bowl of sugar and a plate of biscuits, neatly arranged, on the front wall. Even then, they had ignored me, but for a collective grunt that might have been ‘cheers’. They were more than happy to chat to Matt, to accept his questionable help and his diffident instructions. They looked straight through me when I tried to catch their eyes with my polished, cheerful smile.

I sat on the next-door neighbours’ low wall and watched the exodus of the boxes, each one marked by me with thick black pen and labelled by the removals men with a yellow sticker. I saw a box marked ‘Alice’s toys’ pass by, followed by ‘Matt’s books’ and ‘Emma’s shoes’. My life was in those boxes. My life, Matt’s life, Alice’s life. Nothing I said or did was going to stop the move from happening. I had sold my house. It had never been Matt’s house, always mine. I was proud of it. It was a city centre cottage, with small rooms and low ceilings. It felt homely. I had painted all the walls, picked up cheap furniture wherever I could, and I had made it my own. Mine, and Matt’s, and Alice’s.

I was trying to be proud of myself now, for the obscene amount of money I had made from it. I had bought it for almost nothing and had sold it for a third of a million pounds. Now it belonged to a pleasant professional couple who were moving down from London. If I had asked them, if they had heard me, the removals men would not have been able to replace everything. It was too late to cancel. I had a new house, and it was in Gascony.

Matt and Alice and I were moving to France. We had known it for months. Until last week, the idea had meant little more to me than it had to Alice, who had parroted ‘Moob-a-Pance’, meaninglessly, at anyone within earshot. For months, I had efficiently blocked out reality, and made the whole insane adventure into an interesting talking point. I had assured myself that it could not really be going to happen, that everything would inevitably fall through at some point in the long and complicated process. It had seemed phenomenally unlikely that such an outlandish scheme could work out; it was, I knew, just another of Matt’s wild ideas.

Before Alice had come along, he had proposed a move to South Africa, where we would buy a vineyard near Cape Town, and sell our wines directly to Oddbins. ‘I have a good contact at Oddbins,’ he had assured me, as if this made the plan foolproof.

After that, he had posited that I might care to take my newborn daughter to Thailand, where the three of us would buy a beach hut and make some kind of idealised living from catching fish and picking fruit.

It was currently extremely fashionable to pine loudly for a house in rural France and, although Matt had seemed serious when he started on about it, I had assumed that he was simply repeating conversations he had had with his colleagues. I had played along to humour him. ‘Yes,’ I had agreed blithely. ‘A big house in the French countryside would be just the thing. Good schools, cheap property, bilingual children. Mmmm. It would be perfect.’

It had been stupid of me to encourage him, but I’d had no idea that he was serious. Everybody watched documentaries about people making that move. Everybody said they wanted to do it. Nobody actually went through with it. Nobody that I knew had ever seriously considered it. As far as I was aware, a few of Matt’s colleagues had darling little farmhouses in Provence or the Dordogne, but they stood empty for most of the year, then hosted crowds of squabbling families through the summer. Nobody actually spent the winter in the south of France. Nobody but us.

I had put my house on the market in the sincere hope that no one would want to buy it. At that price, I didn’t expect the offers to flood in. I had agreed with Matt that we would make an offer for a big stone house in the Gascon countryside, on the assumption that the offer wouldn’t be accepted, that we wouldn’t get a mortgage, and that something in French law would prevent us from buying it. It had all been a game. Then a couple of barristers had loved my house and exclaimed over how reasonably priced it was, compared with London. They offered the asking price after the estate agent told them that a fictitious ‘cash buyer’ was on the verge of snapping it up. A week ago, we had exchanged contracts. My house, my home, was no longer mine. The silly plan had suddenly become real. I realised how stupid I had been.

I never behaved rashly. I did not make brave moves or step into the unknown. It was not in my character to do anything that had not been thoroughly thought through and declared to be safe. Left to myself, I would not have left Clifton Street. I would not have seen any reason to go to a different part of Brighton, let alone abroad. Alice would have gone to the primary school on the next street and when she got older I would have found her the best comprehensive in town. I had never lived in the country, and I had never wanted to. I liked cities. I liked knowing that there were people all around me. I felt safety in numbers, and I liked being an anonymous member of a crowd.

In fact, I had lived in the country once. My mother and I had lived in a village in Hampshire until I was three. Then she had died. That was when I had been taken to London and reshaped as a city girl. The country was another world to me now. I had grown up in a big house in Holloway, with my cousins and my aunt and uncle. Geoff and Christa still lived there, so I had my childhood home. Christa and Geoff were the only parents I had ever known, since I had almost no memories of my mother. Their three children were, to all intents and purposes, my siblings. Bella, my eldest sister, was married, and I was as good as married, but Bella and I both retained our old bedrooms, replete with single beds and pink and purple decor, in Holloway. We all went back there at Christmas, with husbands, partners and offspring in tow, and we always had a magical time. I made sure of it. Magical times were important.

I forced a smile as a neighbour, a young mother from halfway down the street, walked by and beamed at me.

‘Off today, then?’ she asked. Paula was always full of energy. She was pushing a double pushchair, which contained her twins Tallulah and Nemo, and she was heavily pregnant.

‘Hey, wow!’ she exclaimed, without waiting for my reply. ‘Nobody told me you were having another! When’s it due?’

I looked down at my stomach. I was wearing a jumper that was tight around my stomach, and as I looked, I saw that she was right. I did look pregnant.

‘That’ll be a French baby!’ she continued, and I searched for the right words to let her know about her mortifying mistake. ‘Congratulations.’

I gave up. ‘Thanks,’ I said, and stood up to pretend I was needed back in the house. As soon as she had gone indoors, I sat back down on the wall. I had been meaning to lose weight but I could never quite be bothered.

The sound of the phone ringing made me leap back to my feet. I rushed inside to answer it, aware that I was almost certainly answering my telephone for the last time. I was surprised it hadn’t already been cut off.

‘Hello?’ I asked breathlessly. My voice seemed to echo in the unfurnished house.

‘So you’re still there! That’s good.’ It was my aunt. ‘How’s it going?’

‘You know.’ I looked around the bare hallway, and flattened myself against a wall to make way for two men carrying a large cupboard. I pulled the phone into the sitting room and stood in the bay window watching the last pieces of furniture and boxes going into the van. ‘Looking pretty bare.’ A lump rose to my throat. I wanted to stay so much that it hurt. Christa knew that. She thought the move was a mistake. She was angry, in her buttoned-up, tight-lipped way, that Matt had forced me into it. She was angry with me for capitulating.

‘We’re just ringing to say good luck. You take care of yourself. Let Matt do everything that needs doing. Just look after yourself and ring any time you want.
Any
time, OK?’

I nodded. ‘Mmmm,’ I said, not trusting myself to speak.

‘Have a good journey. Ring us when you’re there.’

‘OK.’

‘And give Alice a big kiss. Here’s Geoff.’

I smiled as Christa handed over to my uncle. Christa couldn’t get off the phone quickly enough, and I knew it was because she was uncomfortable saying things like ‘ring
any
time’. Everyone thought she was prickly and difficult. Matt found her impossible. I thought I understood her, and I knew that this call was her way of saying she loved me.