The Past and Other Lies (9 page)

I think Jen’s seeing someone behind my back
.

This wasn’t a question, not technically, so she could simply have not answered, but there was Darren McKenzie, always Darren McKenzie.

So she had answered him at once, reassuringly, unequivocally.

Anyone who had genuinely known nothing of the affair might have paused to ask Nick why he thought such a thing and who the affair was supposed to be with anyway. But she hadn’t asked these things. Instead, she had jumped in with her denial so rapidly there was no room left for discussion and no time to ponder the morality of it all.

She’d already done the pondering. Had been pondering for the month prior to this conversation. In fact, ever since she’d overheard a message she wasn’t meant to overhear on Jennifer’s answering machine. A message from someone called Adam who had been very keen for Jennifer to come over that night.

‘Oh, Adam!’ Jennifer had said, rolling her eyes at Charlotte’s questions. ‘Adam works with me, that’s all. We go out. We have fun. It’s not serious.’

But the wedding was serious, and by the time Charlotte and Nick were sitting in the cafe just off the Embankment, the wedding was in seven days and Jennifer was still having fun with Adam. Charlotte had almost not come to the cafe. A part of her had believed Nick couldn’t possibly suspect and that, if he did, there was no way he would ask her about it. A part of her, a large part, had believed it was none of her business and it was best not to get involved. A tiny, minuscule, insignificant part of her had remembered Darren McKenzie and felt guilty.

It was the tiny, minuscule, insignificant part of her that had said, ‘Honestly, Nick, do you really believe Jen would be out getting measurements for her wedding dress if she was having an affair with someone else?’

The rest of her had been appalled.

‘Why don’t you ask her?’ she added, swallowing the wretched coffee and trying desperately to rescue the situation.

‘What’s the point?’ Nick looked down at the red and white plastic tablecloth then looked up into her face. ‘She’d only deny it.’

‘Well, there you are!’ There had been a moment’s silence. ‘I mean, if you can’t trust each other, what good is that?’ which meant that now it was Nick’s fault as much as Jennifer’s if the marriage didn’t work because he hadn’t trusted her. It certainly wasn’t Charlotte’s fault.

What would he do, she wondered, if I said,
Yes, you’re right, Jen’s having an affair?
Would he believe me and not her? How is it that their marriage depends on me?

Instead, she had stood up, knocking the table and causing the coffee to spill over the edge of Nick’s cup and form a pool in the centre of the table. She was going to be Jennifer’s bridesmaid and Nick would soon be her brother-in-law. She liked Nick, he was a nice guy.

‘I have to go. Look, it’ll be fine,’ and that was another lie, though perhaps not as shameful as the first.

‘I believe Environmental Studies went with empire blue in the end,’ Dr McGill of Linguistics was saying. ‘Something to do with a charter from the sixteenth century,’ he added mysteriously.

Charlotte jerked back to the present and caught Dave Glengorran’s eye across the table. Dave had arrived late and was now tearing strips from the agenda and screwing them up into balls, which he was flicking off the end of his pen in the general direction of the wastepaper bin. Dave had said nothing either.

‘Well, there’s always damask,’ he said suddenly and a little impatiently, as though this was a suggestion that ought to have been made some time ago. ‘After all, that’s what the University of London wears.’

‘
Damask!
’ spluttered Professor Kendall. ‘The
Chancellor
wears damask, a damask robe. You cannot graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in a damask robe.’ He took a deep breath and noisily reshuffled his papers. ‘We need to decide today! I must make the Sub-Committee’s recommendation to the Vice Chancellor this week.’

‘All we want is gold cord,’ insisted the younger of the three Media Studies lecturers, a girl with large spectacles and blue hair.

‘Or sulphur, at a pinch,’ said her colleague, the thin wiry boy with the goatee and skinny jeans.

There was a tense silence.

‘Could we maybe look at a compromise here?’

Everyone turned to look at Ashley. She had tossed aside her pencil and was sitting up with a sudden air of determination and Charlotte’s heart sank. That was it then. Dave had spoken, Ashley had spoken, and she was now the only one left who had remained silent.

‘You guys want cord and you people say they gotta have tassels. Okay then, have both. Have the gold cord. Have the goddamn gold tassels. And why don’t we all wear damask robes?’

The room erupted.

‘Everyone,
please
, I must insist on one person speaking at a time!’ Professor Kendall paused to mop his brow with a handkerchief despite the near-zero room temperature. ‘It’s ten o’clock and many of us have a Finance Committee meeting to attend, so may I suggest that we adjourn and meet again next week and may I
beg
you all to come to some sort of agreement on this issue?’ He looked around the room.

Charlotte sat on the edge of her seat, the words
Isn’t this the most absurd waste of all our time...?
perched right on the tip of her tongue, flexing and about to dive into the verbal arena. Her mouth felt dry and her palms started to sweat.

‘I believe this room is free for a meeting next Wednesday, Professor Kendall,’ she announced instead, the words bursting from her chest like a cough she had tried to suppress. ‘There was a memo—the Misconduct and Discipline Review Board meeting has been postponed...’

She sat back again, her heart pounding. Well, at least she had said something. And then her mobile beeped and she was surprised to see she’d missed two calls from Aunt Caroline.

AUGUST 1981

J
ENNIFER RETCHED VIOLENTLY, bringing up barely digested shepherd’s pie and peas. Perhaps, she realised afterwards, vomiting in such dramatic fashion actually helped things along a bit. At any rate, Mum came running up the stairs, buckets were proffered, glasses of water, soothing words, searching questions.

And all the while she knew that Charlotte was sitting silent and unnoticed in the doorway to their bedroom as though she had no part in any of this. As if she were merely a bystander.

When eventually Mum thought to look in on her, Charlotte had climbed into bed and was lying under the covers in a way that wordlessly and innocently proclaimed her own sickness. And she looked sick too, so still and pale and silent that Mum was on the verge of telephoning Dr Caddington. She was dissuaded, fortunately, from this course of action, but what could be more believable? Two sisters struck down with the same affliction. Some bug picked up at school, no doubt. Children are always picking up bugs at school.

When the first bustle of post-vomit activity had died down and the house had resumed its more usual afterdinner air, Jennifer sat on her bed, her knees drawn up 70 tight to her chest, her arms wrapped around her shins, her throat raw. She stared straight ahead at a pile of geography and history textbooks on the floor, at the open jar of nail polish on the dressing table, at a poster Charlotte had blu-tacked to the wall. There were no posters on her own side of the room because at seventeen you no longer stuck pictures of pop stars on your bedroom wall. She reached behind her pillow for Peter Rabbit who was old and soft and battered and whose presence she hadn’t noticed in five years. She held him close. Something was wound up very tight in her chest, so tight that were she to loosen her hold on him she felt that she might unwind suddenly, horribly and irreversibly.

Out of the corner of her eye she could see Charlotte’s still and silent form beneath the sheets. The lid of the nail polish lay on its side on the dressing-table and the cloying smell of varnish hung in the air and coated the back of her throat.

She found that if she stared hard enough at the opposite wall, at the pencil case and the school bag on the floor, at the flaking putty on the window sill, at Steve Strange’s eyes watching from a poster above the bed, she didn’t need to think about anything else. If she just kept her arms wrapped very tightly around herself and refused to let go, everything else could be pushed to the edges, so far to the edges that it almost vanished. If she could just concentrate hard enough.

The dining-room chair lay on its side in the middle of the bedroom floor and, oddly, Mum appeared not to have noticed it.

Jennifer let go of Peter Rabbit, jumped up off the bed and fled the room. She bolted down the stairs to the lounge and the television and the remains of dinner—shepherd’s pie and peas—which was beyond cold by that stage.

Mum was still in the kitchen while Dad, who had finished the washing-up, was reading the business pages, which meant the newspaper was open on his lap as he sat in front of the telly. On the screen
Capital Tonight
was ending and the new presenter, Derek Longstaff, smiled affably. ‘
...looking like the end of the road for jellied eels
’ he declared, one eyebrow raised in conspiratorial irony. Dad got up and flicked the channel back to BBC One, where the opening credits of
Angels
had just ended.

Grandma Lake had positioned herself in Dad’s armchair to watch and was already asleep. At the other end of the sofa, Graham was curled up sucking a pencil stub, precociously studying
The Times
crossword puzzle. This necessitated much thoughtful frowning, pencil tapping and triumphant scribbling. As Jennifer appeared in the doorway, he paused long enough to glance up and cast a speculative glance in her direction, surprised, no doubt, that the sudden bout of illness that had so dramatically felled both his sisters had struck in the evening and not in the morning when it was time to leave for school.

‘
One who pretends ill-health to be part male but more than dally
. Ten letters, something
a
something
i n
something something
r e r
,’ pondered Graham out loud.

On the television a young male nurse in a lemon-coloured uniform ran silently in white plimsolls along a busy hospital corridor.

Jennifer stood in the doorway and reached up to touch her throat which was smarting from being sick.

‘
He’s stopped breathing!
’ gasped the nurse in the lemon-coloured uniform.

Standing in the lounge doorway, Jennifer found she was unable to go any further. Little tremors ran through her body as though she had just climbed out of an outdoor swimming pool on a particularly wintry day. This was the final day of August, it was still mild, the weatherman had said so. Graham was in a T-shirt, Dad had his shirt sleeves rolled up. Grandma Lake was in a heavy-duty tweed skirt circa 1935. The skirt looked as though it had seen duty on many a cross-country ramble which was odd as Grandma Lake herself considered a walk to the pillar box at the end of the street to be an unnecessary journey fraught with peril.

There was a place on the sofa between Grandma Lake and Graham, and Jennifer made for this spot with wooden but dogged steps, finally reaching it, turning around and sinking down onto the sofa. It seemed an immense effort.

No one noticed. No one said a word. She stared straight ahead at the TV screen.

Somebody on
Angels
was on a life-support machine. Somebody was always on a life-support machine—last week it had been a young bride on her wedding day after a car crash (died), the week before a little boy after being bullied at school (survived), now it was one of the nurses following a drink-driving crash that had dramatically closed the last episode. This nurse—a young woman whose fiancé, another nurse, had been discovered having an affair—lay on the bed with a white sheet across her and a bandage around her head, various tubes taped here and there, her eyes shut, breathing noisily as though she had a blocked nose.

That would be a cushy acting job, Jennifer thought. I could do that.

‘
Malingerer!
’ cried Graham triumphantly and Jennifer spun around.

Graham innocently scribbled the letters into the crossword.

‘Reminds me of when I wanted to be a nurse,’ said Grandma Lake unexpectedly, and they all looked at her because they’d assumed she was asleep. Dad raised a silent eyebrow. She wasn’t his mother, after all. It wasn’t his suggestion she come and live with them.

No one said,
Does it, Gran?
or
When was that?
or
Why didn’t you become a nurse, then?

‘The Great War,’ Grandma Lake continued, conversationally, as though they had asked all these questions and more. ‘All sorts of young girls became nurses. Volunteers they were, and stretcher bearers and ambulance drivers and all sorts.’

Graham, who was good at maths and equally good at history, chewed his pencil for a moment then said, ‘But you’d have been about sixteen when the First World War ended.’

‘That’s what I’m saying—I wanted to be a nurse but I was too young, the war ended.’

‘That’s a pity,’ said Dad wryly. ‘You must have been choked when they signed the Armistice.’