Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon (6 page)

Oh Martin, Martin …

She knew he was claiming her back.

Chapter Four

What’s the point of this? She dabs powder, applies lipstick, grimaces at herself to check for smears on her teeth. The face in the mirror looks tired; blue-grey eyes, with a little red veining, gaze back at her. But when she looks more closely, the eyes are quite empty. She can look right into them and there’s nothing.

Sometimes, catching unexpected sight of herself, she sees her mother’s face; even, more alarmingly, her grandmother’s. Where has the smooth-faced young girl disappeared to, in this fast-forward rush through the generations? Can it really be hers, this face? How odd that people think it’s her they’re seeing. It can nod and smile and do all the things faces are meant to do, and that’s enough to fool people. It’s become an irrelevance. Other people seem closely associated with their faces, but hers is an encumbrance, something she has no choice but to wear, patching it up and trying to make the best of it whenever she’s going to meet people. Like plumping up cushions or dead-heading the roses.

She’d rather stay in. She isn’t hungry and she doesn’t want to spend the evening in pointless chit-chat, but Don has said they’ll go and it’s too late to back out. There’s no escape from what she can only see as an ordeal. He’s like that. If he says he’ll do something, he does it.

‘Ready, then?’ Don is jingling his keys, just short of impatient. She puts on her coat and a silk scarf, picks up her gloves and follows him downstairs.

Malcolm. That’s who they’re going to visit. A golfing acquaintance of Don’s, and his wife, Kathy; she’s met them both briefly, but can hardly picture their faces. Why not keep it like that? Why make the effort to
get to know each other better
, as Kathy put it when she invited them? Other people’s lives. Other people’s children and grandchildren and holiday plans. She wants to float away, look down on it all from an aloof height.

‘But we won’t be living here much longer,’ she objected, when Don told her about the arrangement. ‘What’s the point of making new friends?’

‘For Pete’s sake! Cranbrook isn’t a million miles away. We won’t be cutting ourselves off from everyone we know. That’s the point.’

Perhaps they
should
move a million miles away. Perhaps that’s what she wants. Cranbrook is no more than a feeble gesture of change, barely forty minutes in the car.

Don has remembered to pick up the wine and chocolates she bought yesterday. All she has to do is belt herself in and be transported.

‘You’ll like Kathy,’ he tells her, wiping the inside of the windscreen.

‘Will I?’ She always bridles when people tell her that. Are her affections so logical, so easily predicted?

There’s a pause, then Don says, as he pulls out of the drive, ‘I wish you’d tell me what’s wrong. You don’t seem very happy. I thought you’d be pleased everything’s going so smoothly.’

She takes a deep breath and sighs it out, wondering if she can pick something from the confusion that will make sense. ‘It’s – oh, something at work. Not important enough to bother you with.’

‘No, go on.’

‘Well – I wish they wouldn’t try to change things. Afternoons. I can’t do afternoons. I told them.’

‘Have they asked you to?’

‘Yes, two a week, but I said I couldn’t.’

Don looks at her. ‘Is that all? It’s sorted, then. Why worry about that? You’ll be leaving, anyway, when we move.’

She wonders why she started this; she has no intention of elaborating. And yes, he’s right. Just a few weeks more. It’s part of her routine now to get well away from the health centre by one-thirty; she can’t risk being even five minutes late. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays have become dangerous now, evenly spaced, waiting to trap her. The others in reception have no idea, seeing no difference between those days and the others. But she doesn’t have to keep putting herself through this – it’s the one thought that keeps her going. She could resign now if she liked: say she’s got too much to do, getting ready for the move. Don wouldn’t mind. It’s only a kind of obstinacy that makes her reluctant to give in. With so much about to change, she wants at least to hang onto the shape of her days.

She keeps noticing, lately, how carefully he treats her, with a mixture of concern and exasperation, as if she’s a frail-tempered convalescent who must be humoured. It’s making her
feel
frail, her nerves about to snap, as if she’s entitled to outbursts of temper or irritability. She has to remind herself that there’s nothing physically wrong with her, nothing at all. It’s only a house move they’re facing, not life-threatening illness.

Soon the tyres are crunching on gravel and they’re outside an ivy-clad house with a pillared entrance porch. The woman, Kathy, comes to the door, wearing some sort of Eastern-inspired, bead-encrusted garment, her hair held back by jewelled clips. In the gush of
How lovely to see you
and
You found us, then
, she registers her own dullness and drabness, her safe clothes. Fortunately Malcolm is far scruffier than his wife, dressed as if for gardening in saggy trousers and a zipped top.

Everyone seems to kiss nowadays, the double air-kiss that once looked flamboyantly Gallic, even people who are barely acquainted. Reluctantly she submits. Kathy, one hand still on her shoulder, says, ‘Come through and sit down, Sandra. Such a cold night! Malcolm’s lit the wood-burner.’

‘Cassandra. My name’s Cassandra.’

Why’s she saying that? Sometimes it’s as if a different person speaks for her; the words are out so quickly that she hears them before they’ve formed in her mind.

‘Oh! I’m so sorry. I thought Don said Sandra.’ Kathy recovers quickly. ‘Well, Cassandra is lovely – I don’t blame you for preferring it. Do you predict the future?’

‘No.’ The answer yips out of her. ‘I can’t even predict the past.’

Kathy laughs, as if this is immensely witty, but there’s an awkwardness now, affecting all of them. Malcolm rubs his hands together. ‘Drinks! Let me get drinks organized. White wine, er, Cassandra – Soave? Or there’s soft drinks if you prefer.’

While Kathy takes the coats and Malcolm officiates in the kitchen, Don gives her a puzzled, warning look, and mouths, ‘What’s that about?’ She doesn’t answer. Drinks are brought in; there’s bluesy piano music in the background, and warmth from a log-burning stove. Sinking into a too-soft sofa, she stretches out her feet and assumes a vaguely genial expression, saying nothing. Kathy is answering a question from Don: something about her grandson, how naughty he is; how she looks after him every Tuesday and Thursday morning, how he plays her up.

‘Have you got grandchildren?’ Kathy asks, looking at her.

‘No. Not yet.’ Her voice sounds much louder than she meant. ‘Not until Rosanna …’ The pause stretches into silence; they’re all looking at her.

‘Rosanna?’ Kathy prompts. ‘Don mentioned your daughter – an estate agent, isn’t she? That must have been useful.’

She is thinking of Rosanna in the garden, the coming and the going – like people weaving patterns in a folk dance, looking as if they’ll collide but always swerving away, looping back. Finding a gap to disappear into. Always someone has to disappear. It seems to be a rule.

The pear tree. She can close her eyes and take herself there, beneath its branches, in the everlasting summer.

‘Yes,’ Don says quickly, with a sharp, sidelong glance. ‘Anna was very helpful in all our house-searching.’

‘Anna,’ she says, bringing herself back. ‘Yes, yes, she was.’

‘So you’re moving to Cranbrook? Lovely, and not too far.’ Kathy passes a plate of olive canapés. ‘And you’ve been in your house for – how long?’

‘Oh,’ Don says, ‘more than thirty years now. We moved there when …’

The pause stretches out while everyone waits. It’s the sort of harmless-sounding question that can easily trip them up. This is his own fault, she thinks almost with relish, for getting them into this situation. Their oldest friends, their real friends, know about Rose; it’s understood, no one needing to mention her name. With new acquaintances they have to skirt around this unstable ground that won’t bear their weight.

‘… when Anna was three,’ Don finishes.

‘Aaah, so all your memories of her childhood are there. It’ll be a wrench to leave, Cassandra, I’m sure?’

Kathy’s sympathetic tone sends her into a foment of rage. She feels her limbs tensing against the sofa’s embrace.
I understand
, says the crooning voice;
you don’t need to tell me. I know what you’ll be leaving behind
.

No, you don’t. No one knows. No one can begin to know.

She has to grant Kathy this, though – during that stilted conversation, a decision has made itself. On the way home, in the car, she announces to Don: ‘I can’t go through with it. We’ll have to pull out. I can’t live anywhere else. I’m staying here.’

Anna and Martin spent Sunday morning, as usual, at their health club: Pilates and a swim for Anna, weights and the sauna for Martin. Over a snack lunch in the bar, they considered seeing a film later. Anna was looking up times in the listings magazine when a man in his fifties, a gym acquaintance of Martin’s, came over to their table.

‘Hi, Jeff. How’s it going?’ Martin greeted him.

‘Good, thanks. Thought we might meet up next week, if you’re free one evening?’

He was about to engage Martin as his financial adviser. They arranged a time; then Jeff turned to Anna. ‘He’s in great demand, your husband. I’m lucky to get a look in. Are you in the same game?’

‘Partner. Martin’s my partner,’ said Anna. ‘No, I’m not. I work at an estate agent’s.’

Jeff raised his eyebrows. ‘So the two of you should have your fingers on the pulse, between you. Which one?’

‘Burton Brown, in Holborn, at the moment.’

Jeff nodded, and Martin said, ‘But it’s not just
at the moment
, is it? Anna’s doing a maternity cover, but we hope they’ll make it permanent.’

‘We? I haven’t decided yet. I might turn it down,’ Anna said.

‘Really? Nice to have the choice.’ Jeff settled as if for a long chat, stretching his legs. ‘You’ve got something better in view?’

‘Not really.’ Anna gave a tight smile, not meeting Martin’s eye; they were prickly with each other today, and she knew the reason. Martin had turned huffy on their way here, when she told him of her arrangement to help Ruth next Saturday.

‘Again? I don’t see why you want to get involved,’ he said, and she had retorted, ‘I know.’ Privately, she hadn’t forgiven him for his casual misinformation about Rose, for telling Ruth that Rose had died. He couldn’t begin to understand the gap in her life, a dark place of incomprehension and reproach, a sore ready to weep again whenever she picked at it. Knowing how unreasonable it was to blame him, since she never spoke of it, only made her harden towards him.

At last Jeff said he ought to be going. ‘Till Thursday, then, eight o’clock. Nice to see you, Anna.’

As soon as he’d gone, Martin turned back to the film listings. ‘What was that about,’ he said, not looking at Anna, ‘saying no to Burton Brown?’

‘Well, I might. I’m not sure.’

He put the magazine down; his face registered puzzlement, then exasperation. ‘You can’t be serious!’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s a good position, you know it is. You like the work, and they’ll give you the training you need to make a career of it. You’re lucky to have a chance like that drop into your lap. What more do you want?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh, come on, Anna. You’d wait a long time for a better offer – I thought you’d bite their hand off. It’s a good salary, convenient for home, it could lead to other things. Are you saying you’d rather drift from job to job, carry on as you were? You’re not being rational.’

‘Not agreeing with you, you mean.’

‘You haven’t given one good reason for not accepting.’

Anna tried to find one. ‘I don’t want to tie myself down, that’s all.’

‘For God’s sake! You’re thirty-three, not a student on a gap year. Tie yourself down? Why look at it like that? Aren’t we all tied down in one way or another? How d’you think we pay for the flat, our membership here, our holidays, weekends away, the car? You’d miss all those things soon enough if you didn’t have them.’

‘It’s just – things happen without me choosing them. I didn’t choose Burton Brown. It happened that way, that’s all. If I say yes, it turns into something I can’t get out of.’

‘All I know is that you’re throwing away a chance most people would jump at. I don’t understand you, Anna.’

The words hung in the air for a moment. She looked at him.

‘That’s right. You don’t.’

Martin threw out his hands in a gesture of
I do my best
. ‘So this is about more than the job. It’s about everything.’

‘Maybe.’ Anna had the feeling that this conversation had already been written; that it was running ahead of her, pre-scripted. And being a script, it would end in a row, an ultimatum, a point of no going back.

‘You were quick to put Jeff right when he thought we were married,’ Martin said quietly.

‘I don’t like people making assumptions. But we can’t argue here.’

‘I don’t want to argue anywhere. A relaxing Sunday was what I had in mind. Looks like that’s off, then.’

He was on his feet, shouldering his kit bag, turning his back on her. Suddenly self-conscious, Anna became aware of all the people around, the jangly music in the background that couldn’t have been quite loud enough to drown their conversation. She threw a jaunty smile at the barman in a pretence that nothing was wrong. Following Martin through the swing doors, she knew from the set of his shoulders and the speed of his walk that she’d done it now, spoiled their day – more than their day – and no wonder.

What now? Perhaps he expected her to scuttle after him, but instead she lingered in the foyer, reading notices about exercise classes and New Year offers on beauty treatments. When he realized she wasn’t coming, Martin would probably march back to the flat, unless he’d chosen a film and would go ahead and see it by himself.