‘That won’t even come into it,’ I snap. ‘But is that what you’re saying? That your mum doesn’t like me?’
‘I’m saying it’s hard for her, that’s all. I’m her only child.’
‘Oh yes,’ I say. ‘And Jono is mine.’
The unsaid words hang between us.
Andrew carries on putting away the crockery, and then he moves on to the glasses, his contribution to the day’s meal. I stand there, mute now, and I watch him. He moves so precisely, so controlled. Inside I am bubbling with a rage I cannot define.
When there is nothing more to be done in the kitchen Andrew very carefully folds up the tea towel and places it on its rail. His composure infuriates me. I want to see him undone.
‘It isn’t my fault that Jono is an only child,’ I say and my voice is loaded.
‘No,’ Andrew says. ‘I suppose, like everything else, it’s mine.’
My heart is thumping. ‘Babies don’t conceive themselves, you know.’
He looks at me coldly. ‘And is that supposed to be a turn-on?’
The anger inside me floods over into despair and I feel tears rush into my eyes.
But we cannot argue, we cannot even talk, with Jono still up and Lois in the house, no doubt with her ear against her door. Andrew sighs, and he leaves the room. Moments later I hear him in the living room, talking to Jono, and to his mother, and laughing. And I am stuck in the kitchen, trapped within myself, unable to join them. Always, unable to join them.
That night, I take off my earrings and I put them away in their box. I get into bed, alone. Inside my heart is a vast, hollow space.
Andrew is downstairs, watching something on TV, and I know he will stay there for a while, until I have gone to sleep. Perhaps, if I had behaved differently, we would have had sex tonight. Perhaps those earrings were more than just a present, perhaps they were a bigger gesture, a held-out hand. But I have blown it now. I have slapped that hand away.
And so on we go.
I close my eyes tight and the tears slide into my hair. Is this it? Is this all there is for me? To be useful till I am no longer useful? To be grateful for my small domestic slice and cling to it, no matter what? To hang on and on, till one day I will end up like Andrew’s mother or, worse still, like Mrs Reiber, old and alone.
I see my life run away from me. I see it, skittling down the years like leaves in a breeze. How bitter will I be then, when everything is gone and I am stuck here still in this terrible glue?
Janice comes to visit us the weekend after Christmas. She brings books for Jono and champagne for Andrew and me, but she doesn’t bring her boyfriend.
After lunch we go for a walk in the park, and she and I walk and talk while Andrew and Jono kick a ball. Janice doesn’t have children, and now, of course, she swears she’s never wanted them. She observes Jono with a carefully studied disinterest. I ought to find this refreshing, a break from the intensity with which Jono is normally viewed. I ought to find it liberating; it should free me up to be just myself with her. But the fact is that Janice regards all family life with the same indifference, verging almost on disdain. We are part of the domestic otherworld, Andrew, Jono and me, and as far as Janice is concerned, I am cemented squarely in the middle of it.
‘How was your Christmas?’ I ask.
‘Fantastic,’ she says decisively. ‘No cooking, no relatives – best Christmas ever.’
The feeling that I am a lesser being somehow pervades me, the dull footsteps of predictability creeping over my skin.
‘How about yours?’ she says now, with forced enthusiasm.
‘Oh, fine. You know, the usual,’ I say. ‘Have you seen the parents?’
‘Yes, I went down yesterday. Getting all the family done in one weekend.’
‘Oh.’ That is what I am then; something to be
done.
‘Paul’s still stuck with his in-laws in Bristol,’ she adds, by way of explanation.
‘You’re still seeing him, then?’
‘Of course.’
Janice is just over one year older than me. I remember when she used to roam around the house at night-time, dragging her stuffed donkey behind her, terrified of the witches hiding in the dark. Now, she holds her hardness in front of her like a huge, giant bat, with which to smack us all away.
‘Did you see him over Christmas?’ I ask kindly. She is my sister, after all.
‘He came to Devon the day after Boxing Day and stayed over.’ She laughs, triumphantly. ‘Told his wife he had to go into work.’
She is my sister, but her harshness frightens me. I don’t know what to say.
As if she senses my disapproval she says, ‘All men have affairs, you know.’
‘No, they don’t.’
‘Well, most do,’ she says. ‘Ian did.’ Ian was her husband. ‘And Paul is. I’m doing no worse than was done to me.’
‘That’s hardly a justification,’ I say, and then, because I don’t want to argue with her, ‘I worry about you, that’s all. I don’t want you to get hurt.’
She loops her arm through mine suddenly and I am overwhelmed with a thickening sadness.
‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ she says. She gestures to where Andrew and Jonathan are now wrestling over that ball, the picture of familial bliss. The shriek of Jono’s laughter cuts clean through the cold winter’s air. ‘Andrew is one of the few men I know who wouldn’t have an affair.’
I watch him, grappling with his son. And I see his love for Jono, fierce and absolute, stretched wide across his face.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t suppose he would.’
‘He’s a great dad,’ Janice says, with detached finality.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘He is.’
I almost tell Janice about Mrs Reiber. As we walk, I am hunting for the words with which to mention her. Casually, of course; it would have to be casually, as a bit of an aside.
You’ll never guess what
, I’d have to start, or perhaps,
A weird thing happened to me the other day.
But the story gets stuck before I can say it. There are too many connotations, too many layers.
What are you doing snooping around old ladies
? she might ask. And,
If she says she’s not your friend’s mother, then she’s not your friend’s mother. Why are you so obsessed? Let it go.
She might well ask these things; after all, I ask them of myself.
She may not even remember Vanessa. In fact she may not have known about her at all. As children, our social lives were entirely separate, as they are now. And I can’t bring myself to have to explain. I can’t think how I would explain, not just about who Vanessa was, but about how important she is to me – now, as well as back then. I’d have to reveal the feelings that seeing her mother like that has stirred up in me, about the frightening parallels I see in our lives. I’d have to talk about the loss of my own baby daughter.
And I can’t do that.
When Andrew is back at work and Jono is back at school and the tree has been taken down, there is just me again, pacing the house. My thoughts dance in and out of my head like nimble demons, and I find myself back at that computer, typing in Simon’s name again. And up he comes, just as before: partner at Sutton and Wright. I click on the link and there are the details about his office: where it is, the phone number. Before I even have time to think what I am doing, I pick up the phone from the table beside me and I dial that number.
It is answered almost immediately.
‘Sutton and Wright Associates,’ chirps the female voice on the line. ‘How may I help you?’
My heart starts to thump. ‘Can I speak to Simon Reiber, please?’
‘Just putting you through.’ The line rings again, six times. With each vital ring I think to hang up; I think to chicken out. I ask myself,
What am I doing? What am I going to say?
Then the phone is picked up again and my heart kicks into overdrive.
It’s another woman. His secretary, I presume. ‘Simon Reiber’s office,’ she says.
‘Oh, hi,’ I say, trying to sound like a client or something, like I do this all the time. ‘Can I speak to Simon, please?’
‘Who’s calling?’ she asks and my heart sinks.
‘Rachel,’ I say. ‘Rachel Thompson.’ I give her my maiden name, but Simon won’t remember me. I don’t actually know if he ever even knew my surname, and look how many years have gone by since then anyway. He won’t have a clue who I am.
‘Just a moment,’ she says, and I expect that to be the end of it. I expect her to come back and say he’s not available, or would I like to leave a message? And of course I won’t leave a message, I’ll just hang up and crawl away from all this, as I should have done in the first place.
But then I hear a faint click and a male voice says, ‘Simon Reiber speaking.’
I so didn’t expect to hear him speak. I so didn’t expect to be put through, and now that I have been, I don’t know what to say. I hesitate, and in those seconds I sense the fast impatience of a busy man.
‘Can I help you?’ he asks, and I am thrown just by his voice. It’s a confident voice, a professional voice; last time I heard Simon speak he was a boy still, his voice on the cusp, too deep for his body, too deep for his thin, awkward bones, till it lilted on a pitch and caught him out, cranking up on a high note and sending the blood rushing scarlet into his cheeks.
‘Hi,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry to call you like this. I hope you don’t mind.’ I pause and he waits. My heart is banging against my ribs. I take a deep breath and look out the window, at the cold dank grey of a January day. ‘You probably won’t remember me. I’m Rachel Thompson. I was a friend of your sister.’
There is a short, awkward silence in which I close my eyes. I think of Mrs Reiber chasing me away, saying,
Go. Just go . . . Just leave me alone.
I think of the suspicion in her cold blue eyes.
What do you want from me?
she asked.
And I said,
I don’t want anything.
I think of Vanessa, dancing, singing, with one arm around me and the other around Tristram. I think of her body, swaying, bumping up against mine, her body both hard and light, brittle as sticks. I think of her hair tickling my face, her cheek hot against mine. I think of Tristram’s arm and mine, linked together around her back, holding her, holding her.
‘I do,’ Simon says at last. ‘I do remember you.’
It’s raining, hard. I come out of Bank station pushing up my umbrella, trying to time its opening with my ascendance into daylight, and failing; rain pummels its way down the back of my collar. By the time I reach the top of the steps my hair is all but soaked, and my shoes too, the suede mopping up the rain like a sponge. I move with the crowd; I have no choice. It’s just gone midday, but the Tube was still packed; no one is walking today.
I cross the road and pull into the shelter of a building, and look around, to get my bearings. The rain is hammering down and magnifying the roar of the traffic as it swooshes along the wet road. Just across from the station exit there are roadworks going on, and the splintering crack of a jack-hammer machine-guns through the saturated air. I screw up my eyes, squinting out from my umbrella to read road names, and peer at the map that I printed off Google, soggy now, breaking up in my hand. I see a sign for Lombard Street and head down there, tilting my umbrella against the rain, till I come to the crossroads, and then I wait among the huddle of rain-beaten office workers for the lights to change. Fenchurch Street is straight across.
Simon’s office is in a grand, white, stucco-fronted building with columns flanking the entrance, and stands wedged between two much newer buildings, phallic towers of metal and glass, thrusting up at the skyline. ‘Sutton and Wright Associates’ is etched on a gold plaque to the side of the revolving doors, along with several other company names. In and out of these revolving doors passes a constant stream of people clad in the business colours of black and grey; I am in a different world here, a world so far from my daily round of supermarkets and schools and endless, sundry errands that I had almost forgotten it existed. I feel like an alien. Like a mouse, come up out of the wrong hole. And yet nobody looks at me. Nobody sees me. I could be anyone; I realize this, and it thrills me.
Andrew worked in the City for a while, when we were first together. He worked for an accountancy firm in Cheapside. And when I had my job at the auction house we used to come in together on the Tube; I’d get off at St James’s Park and walk, and he’d stay on till Cannon Street. And when we moved out to Surbiton we took the overground in, and went our separate ways at Waterloo. Andrew used to take the Drain and come up at Bank then, just as I did today. I think of him, melding in with the crowd. I think of him and I miss those days; I miss how we were back then. But Andrew hated working in the City; he hated the push of it, the constant, driving shove. It was because of him that we moved out to Surbiton in the first place; it was a halfway point, halfway out. Then he got his job in Guildford, and I kept mine, in Piccadilly. From then on, in the mornings, he went one way and I went the other.
I watch all these people. I watch how they move, fast, clipped, defying the rain. I try to do the same. I march up to those revolving doors, shake down my umbrella, and I am propelled into that building as somebody else comes out. Inside, it is quiet suddenly; plush, like in a luxury hotel. My heels sink into a carpet designed to absorb sound. There are leather sofas scattered about the foyer, and low glass tables, and straight ahead a curved reception desk behind which two girls answer calls in fast, constant rotation. On the desk to one side of them is a tall glass vase filled with lilies; the smell permeates the air like a funeral parlour.