Separate Beds (28 page)

Annie tried again: ‘I mean it, Tom. I do understand.’

‘Thanks.’ He splayed a second length of tape and, with the fork in one hand, groped for the scissors.

Annie forestalled him and hacked off a length of tape. It clung stickily to her fingers and she had a bit of a tussle before she managed to disengage herself. Watching him patch over the split wood, she thought, If Jake could see his father … ‘It was a wonderful, never-to-be repeated job but, Tom, it couldn’t, wouldn’t, have gone on for ever. Even if you had managed to cling on until they had to push you off the gravy train –’

‘Gravy train?’ he cut in. ‘Is that what you think?’

She cursed silently. ‘No, of course not. But, in the end,
you would have had to face being without it. Think, Tom, you’re still young enough to be able to do something else.’ Had she caught his attention? ‘Tom … you’re not powerless. I know you feel it, but why not use this time to think again? Re-evaluate. Think about what you find important. Do something different.’ She paused. ‘I’ll back you.’

She spoke softly, passionately – and the words with which she was urging him had long been unused between them. He lifted his eyes briefly to hers. ‘The tape may not do the trick. I suppose I should consult Jake.’

‘Are you listening to me?’

‘Sure.’

He turned his back on her to put away the scissors and tape. The message was clear. Tom didn’t want Annie in his domain. He was closed off – and Annie discovered that she minded very much. She wanted to be welcome, she wanted to help him. And she wanted him to listen so that he could get on with the rest of his life.

‘It’s all right, Tom. I’m going in.’

He kept up the deaf act. ‘Yup, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll ask Jake,’ he said. The indignant moths and spiders fluttered between their two figures. ‘We should go in. Your presence is requested for a game of Monopoly.’

Emily looked up as Annie and Tom re-entered the kitchen. ‘Listen up, everyone, we’re going to have some fun.’ She indicated the Monopoly board on the table. ‘Mike tells me lots of people play it.’

‘Oh, Mike-at-work,’ said Jake. ‘If
he
says so …’

‘Leave the door open, dear,’ said Hermione. ‘It’s nice to have a bit of fresh air.’

Annie sat down reluctantly and Emily’s hands descended to her shoulders. She bent over and whispered into Annie’s ear, ‘I know you hate games, Mum, but I insist.’

Annie abandoned an after-supper plan of rereading the lawyer’s report on Samuel Smith, which was not strictly necessary for she was aware that she had taken the case too much to heart. ‘Why this particular torture?’

‘Because …’ Emily set out the cards and doled out the money.

Jake finished the sentence: ‘Because she’s never grown up.’

‘And you have?’ Emily turned to Tom. ‘You remember the fun we had, Dad?’

‘I have a vague memory.’ Tom took the seat beside Hermione.

‘You could never concentrate.’ Jake pointed at his sister.

Emily ignored him and continued with her task. Annie discovered she approved of the new Emily: more settled, less wispy and very pretty in her office clothing.

Emily decided she would be banker. ‘Choose what you want to play with.’

‘I’ll have the boot,’ said Hermione.

‘You always have the boot, Gran,’ said Emily. ‘Why not the top hat?’

Hermione tapped a fingernail on the table. ‘Because, as you well know, you think of me as an old boot.’

Emily snorted, ‘
Gran!
’ and plumped for the Scottie dog, Jake took the top hat and Tom went for the car. This left Annie with a choice between the iron and the battleship.

Mia had always chosen the iron. As a little girl, she had
liked what it represented. ‘Lovely clean clothes, Mummy.’ As the politicized undergraduate, however, she had laughed, tossing it from one hand to the other. ‘I’m not afraid to play with an instrument of feminine repression.’

How she missed her daughter. Raising her eyes, she encountered Tom’s steady gaze.
Don’t go there, Annie
, he was telling her.

She chose the battleship.

Emily had got up a head of steam. ‘We’ll throw for playing order.’

‘No,’ said Hermione. ‘I go first. I’m an old woman and I refuse to wait in a queue.’

‘But that gives you an advantage,’ Tom pointed out.

‘Precisely.’

‘You’re not stupid, Gran, are you?’ said Jake.

Hermione threw the dice and made seven. ‘There are not many advantages left at my stage of life.’

Jake murmured, ‘The probability of rolling a tally of seven is one in six. Whereas two and twelve are the least probable.’

‘Shut up, Jake,’ said Emily.

Hermione landed on ‘Chance’ and the card she turned up said she was drunk in charge and fined twenty pounds.

Again, Annie met Tom’s amused gaze.
So, there is some justice
. Next up was Tom. He landed on the Angel, Islington, and bought it. ‘Good one. Building costs low, hotel rents high.’

‘This is the man,’ Jake teased, ‘who argues that property is theft. Give it to me instead, Dad.’

‘That was Mia, stupid,’ said Emily.

Oh, Mia
, thought Annie.
Where are you?

Tom kept his eyes on the board. ‘But I agree we should guard against being too acquisitive.’

‘Dad … pompous or what?’ Emily poked his arm.

Tom grinned. ‘Games are useful in this way. The government should demand everyone plays Monopoly once week in order to allow our rotten impulses full rein and to purge the system. Wouldn’t you say, Annie?’

Was this his way of making up for being so unresponsive earlier? Once, he had used this easy good humour to woo Annie and she had loved it. She hadn’t thought back to that time very much in recent years but when she did so her heart took on a life of its own.

She got up, ran water into a glass and drank it thirstily.

Jake threw a six for the second time running and edged into the lead. Emily stared at him suspiciously. ‘Are you cheating, Jake?’

‘How could you ask such a thing?’

‘
Very
easily.’

This is good, this is pleasant, Annie thought. Jake looked better, Emily was enjoying herself, Shed man was happier, Hermione was (relatively) silent.

In this companionable way they played for half an hour or so. Then Tom took a look at Jake’s hotels and properties – and competitiveness kicked in. ‘You
are
cheating.’

The edge to his voice was unmistakable.
Testosterone. Rivalry
. Annie knew them well. ‘Tom …’ she warned.

Jake flushed, and took his time to move his top hat forward. ‘Actually, Dad, that’s a bit insulting.’

Tom leaned over the board and counted up Jake’s properties, then did the same for his own, lower, tally. ‘That can’t be right.’

Jake held his father’s gaze. ‘Dad, I have not cheated. Do you understand?’ The hazel eyes were steady – and just a trifle contemptuous.

A second ticked by. Two seconds. Three. It was touch and go. Tom backed off. ‘Sorry, Jake. Of course you haven’t.’

Jake dickered over whether he should buy King’s Cross. Emily rolled a couple of duffs and remained in jail. Hermione’s nails clicked on the table. The game stumbled on, punctuated by the occasional exclamation and counter-accusation.

Later, Hermione bought Pentonville Road. Tom said, ‘You sell me Pentonville, and I’ll cut you a deal on Fleet Street.’

At that, Emily protested, ‘No, you don’t, Gran. Give up the blue and you’ll give away the game.’ She picked up the unused iron token from its slot in the box and tossed it from hand to hand.

Don’t
, thought Annie. Mia’s absence was draining the strength out of her – a discordant, unresolved loss of the large-eyed, naughty, teasing and, yet, utterly contained child, who had been replaced by the crop-haired, dungaree-clad vegan, with a cold, critical gaze.

‘Dear Mother,’ ran the letter hidden in the ex-chocolate-now-memory box. ‘I won’t be forgiving you and Dad any time soon.’ Annie pictured Mia writing it, sitting gracefully upright, using one of the graphology pens she favoured. ‘Nor, if I know you, will you be forgiving me.’ Was Annie an unforgiving person? She puzzled over and over the point and it hurt her immeasurably that Mia should see her in that way. ‘I’ve turned out different from the rest of the family, and you refuse to understand what those differences are, or what I believe and what I feel … You are worse than
Dad for you say that you love me and, yet, you can’t accept what I am …’ Was this true? Annie asked herself. Could I not accept that, despite having made her from my body, Mia was not in my mould? ‘PS I’m told that you have been up looking for me. Don’t. I am no longer part of your life, or you of mine. We are finished.’

Funnily enough, it was the last line that managed to penetrate Annie’s grief. It showed how little Mia knew – how profoundly she misunderstood the interleaved connections between parent and child. These were impossible to kill and Mia had no idea that Annie would no more give up on her daughter than breathing. Mia might have, and had, covered her tracks thoroughly and finally, yet Annie would spend the rest of her life waiting to glimpse the face in the crowd, to hear a voice in the hubbub, to watch without resting.

That was all she could do. It was nothing. It was everything.

It had begun to rain again and the kitchen was turning chilly. Annie got up to close the door. ‘Sorry, Hermione.’

‘Don’t mind me, dear.’

Emily’s mobile buzzed and played ‘Scotland the Brave’ and practically danced over the table. She threw herself at it. ‘That would be
great
.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘In an hour? Yup. The café …’

Jake finessed a hotel on Coventry Street. He did not look up. ‘Mike-from-work, at a guess.’

Emily shook the dice and trotted her Scottie five places forward. ‘Let’s get a move on.’

‘Poor Tod.’ Jake took revenge on his sister for the cheating jibe. ‘Poor cast-away Tod.’

‘Shut up.’

‘Got you.’ Tom snaffled a wodge of cash from Jake, who had landed on his hotel-infested site. ‘One more push, and I’m there.’

‘Tom, dear, I want you to have this.’ Hermione held out the Pentonville Road card.

‘No,’ protested Annie. ‘You’ll give the game to him. Sell it to me.’

‘I want Tom to have it.’

‘Of
course
you do.’ She heard her voice rise. ‘How stupid of me.’

‘Mum …’ Jake laid a hand on hers.

‘Right, that’s it.’ Emily slithered to her feet. ‘Well done, Gran. You’ve decided the day. I’m just going to put my face on.’

‘A word of advice,’ said Jake. ‘Don’t be too eager.’

‘Shut up.’

‘Never does. Take it from me.’

‘Back off, Jake.’

Jake turned to his mother and managed a flicker of a smile. ‘Joking. Well, a little. I’ll check on Maisie.’

After everything had been stowed away and Hermione had gone upstairs, Tom and Annie sat opposite each other at the table and drank tea.

‘Almost like old times,’ he said.

Dear Mother
,
I won’t be forgiving you and Dad any time soon
…

‘Tom,’ she said urgently. ‘Go and talk to Jake. Tell him you really didn’t mean it about the cheating.’

Tom frowned. ‘He knows I didn’t.’

‘No, he doesn’t. That’s the point. He doesn’t believe you, however often you say sorry after a row.’

‘He’ll have to learn to take a bit of teasing.’

‘Sometimes,’ she said bitterly, ‘I think you’re utterly without wits. And cruel.’

That got to him as she’d meant it too. ‘You’ve been just as critical at times.’

‘I know,’ she admitted. ‘We’ve made mistakes with our children and we shouldn’t make them in the future.’

‘He’s a grown man with a child.’

‘Believe it or not, grown men cry.’ She moved around the table towards him and pulled him to his feet. ‘You do. I’ve seen you, many times. Remember? You hurt and bleed just like Jake.
Especially
now.’

‘Do I?’ he ventured at last, and smiled down at her. Then he hooked a finger under her chin and made her look up.

‘Tell him you’re sorry,’ she murmured, scrutinizing the face that, these days, smiled so rarely at her. ‘That’s all it takes.’

Rain trickled down Emily’s neck as she dashed along the street, and lodged in the collar of her blouse. Her heart was beating a little too fast for comfort, and she told herself that it was because she was hurrying and not because of Mike’s phone call. He knew it was a bit late and spur-of-the-moment, but he just wanted to check over a few things with her about work, he’d said. And, anyway, wasn’t it a good idea for them to get to know each other better?

Emily could hardly disagree, could she? In fact, she considered it a sensible plan. If she was to work in an office, it would only be prudent to get a handle on her immediate superior. This was not, she realized, a view that laid-back counter-culture Tod would share.

‘Emily.’

She whipped around. ‘Jake?’

He tucked his hand under her elbow. ‘Had to get out. Now and long term. But I just can’t see my way at the moment.’

Emily was sympathetic, of course she was, but also preoccupied about the meeting with Mike. ‘Get Jocasta to pay off the mortgage and give you the house. She must be earning millions by now.’

More often than she admitted, Emily found herself uttering not so much stupid as ill-considered remarks to Jake, which she usually regretted. It was partly that, these days, she was always in a hurry or distracted by things outside the family.

But it was also partly – and it was distressing to have to come to this conclusion – that some of the sillier things she said were the result of her ignorance.

Jake peered at her in the street light. ‘I wish it hadn’t happened,’ he admitted haltingly. ‘Almost, I wouldn’t have minded if Jocasta had stayed and we lived like Mum and Dad do.’

‘They’re estranged,’ offered Emily, tartly.

‘They tolerate each other. Maybe that’s all that can be hoped for. Maybe there’s more going on between them than we know.’

‘What planet are you on, Jake? The last few years have been awful. And they don’t exactly tolerate each other, as you put it. Mum and Dad are cold, icy, at times unforgiving.’ She recollected Tom’s secret on-line playing with the stock market and how uneasy it made her feel. Should she tell Jake about it? Should she tell her
mother
? ‘Dad never talks to Mum, and Mum is taken up with the hospital. God
knows why they haven’t divorced. It’s far better that you and Jocasta make a clean break.’