The Child Inside (2 page)

It’s gone five now. The shops are starting to close. There’s a coffee shop with a delicatessen at the back; I go in there and order a cappuccino just as they are starting to wipe down. The only other customers are a young woman and a child, spread messily around a circular table right in the middle. The woman is saying, ‘No, Polly, don’t do that. There’s a good girl. No, Polly, no,’ while the child picks up lumps of cake and throws them on the floor. The child reaches out a chocolatey hand to me as I walk past, and grins a chocolatey grin; I dodge around them, pick up an old copy of the
Daily Mail
and sit myself by the window.

The paper is just for cover; I don’t read it. I’m listening to that mother and the way she talks to her child; listening and remembering what it was like to be so blanketed. I can almost hear my own voice superimposed over hers, saying,
There, now, Jono. Good boy, Jono. That’s right, that’s a clever boy.
And I feel the sweet-sad prickle of loss.

But soon they leave, packing themselves up, with a zipping up of coats and the scraping back of chairs, and leaving behind them a cold blast of air and a sudden quiet. I watch as one of the girls comes out resignedly from behind the counter with a J-cloth in one hand and cleaning spray in the other to tackle the mess left on that table. I listen to the hiss-hiss-hiss of the spray and the clatter of the plates and cups as she piles them up, and I’m thinking that I will have to be leaving soon, too.

But just then the automatic doors slide open again and somebody else walks in, and this, I feel, gives me licence to stay a moment longer. It’s an old woman, wrapped against the cold in a marbled brown fur coat and hat – real fur, by the look of it, which surprises me, even for around here. Though I have to say it looks like she’s had the coat forever; the fur has that mangy, slightly matted look that comes from having been alive once, and then dead for so long. Anyone dressed like that would get your attention, and I watch her march up to the counter and start ordering various items from the display cabinets, taking her time to point and deliberate and eventually make her choices in a voice that is clipped and precise, but with an underlying scratch, catching on the vowels. She wants some ham to be sliced, and so the machine that had been cleaned and covered in a red checked cloth and put away for the night has to be unwrapped again and brought back out. The girl behind the counter sets about doing this with an audible sigh, and I see her look at the other girl and roll her eyes. And this makes me feel sorry for the old woman, fur coat or not.

I watch, as she is so begrudgingly served, and I find myself intrigued by her. She is quite tall, and her legs – where I can see them sticking out from under that coat – are painfully thin, and clad in tights so laddered as to be almost shredded. Her shoes, which are suede with a buttoned strap across the top, would have been gorgeous once upon a time, but are badly worn down now at the heel, so that the material is ruched and torn. And yet I notice that the finger with which she points, as she makes her requests, sports a diamond ring so enormous that it almost covers her knuckle.

And when she leaves, carrying her purchases inside a woven canvas bag that she loops over her wrist, she glances at me briefly and I catch the glacial blue of her eyes. Startlingly blue, in the naked paleness of her face. Then she passes me by with her worn heels clacking on the tiled floor, and the doors swoosh open for her and she’s gone, out into the dark street. I sit and watch through the window as she looks twice and then steps out into the road.

And suddenly the girl at the till exclaims, ‘Oh no!’

‘What?’ says the other girl, and I turn away from the window and back to them.

‘She’s left her card, again. Mrs Reiber. She’s gone without her card.’ She holds the credit card up in annoyance, and the other girl sighs and throws down her cleaning cloth.

‘I’ll go,’ she says, like she’s said it a hundred times before, and she grabs the card and straight away she’s round from behind the counter and out of the shop with it, running after the woman.

And I’m thinking,
Reiber, Reiber
, and my heart is fluttering as if there’s a butterfly trapped inside my chest. I shove back my chair and stick my arms into my coat, and scramble my purse out of my bag with trembling, clumsy hands.

‘Keep the change,’ I say to the girl at the till because I don’t want to wait. And I rush out the door, just as the other girl comes back in, her face flushed from the cold and from running.

I cross the road where the woman crossed; from there the road curves round onto the main street and then you can go either left or right. I think I might have lost her, but just then I see her: she’s crossed over again and she’s just turning into one of the side roads, going the same way that I will have to go when I head back to collect Jonathan. I walk fast, to catch her up. And still I’m thinking,
Reiber, Reiber.
How many people have that name? The only Reibers I ever knew lived in Oakley, in Surrey, and that, of course, was a long time ago.

I want to see her face again. I want to see her eyes.

I cross over the road and follow where she turned. She’s just ahead of me now and I slow down a little. I walk just a few paces behind her, and I study the shape of her, and the way she walks. I look for clues. I walk softly in my quiet, flat boots, but even so I feel that she must sense me being there behind her, scrutinizing her like this, and I think that she will turn.
Then
I will see her eyes.

But how could I possibly recognize her? How could I know if it really is
her
? And what could I say?
Are you Mrs Reiber? Are you Vanessa’s mother?

How could I ever ask her that?

I only ever met Vanessa’s mother two or three times, and then in passing, just as she walked through the kitchen or the living room of their house in Oakley, leaving one of Vanessa’s parties to go off to another party of her own, throwing out intonations:
Be good, darlings
, and
Don’t stay up too late!
I remember her laugh, rich and throaty, and the way she moved like an actress; I remember her voice, the easy, boarding-school drawl.

I think of this woman in the delicatessen, asking her questions and ordering her ham. I recall her voice, the precision of it, so English. But don’t all people of a certain class sound the same?

Vanessa’s mother had auburn hair, I remember, but she may well have dyed it. This woman’s hair is hidden under her hat. But this woman is old – older than Vanessa’s mother would be now, surely? Though maybe not. I need to see her face again; I need a second look. I mean, it isn’t inconceivable that Mrs Reiber –
my
Mrs Reiber – should live in Kew now. More likely that than that she’d have stayed on in Oakley, surely?

But is it her?

On she walks, with her heels clacking hollowly on the concrete pavement. But look at the state of her shoes, and those poor ripped tights. Why would Vanessa’s mother be dressed like that? Why would any woman with a diamond the size of a conker on her finger be dressed like that? But
Vanessa’s mother?

I think perhaps I’ll cross the road and walk on ahead, then cross back again and return so that I’ll get to walk past the woman, face to face. I need to see her eyes again. Vanessa had the most amazing eyes: clear pale blue. Like that stone you can get, aquamarine. Vanessa was the most beautiful person I have ever seen.

But then the woman abruptly stops, and so I stop, too. And my heart, which has been beating fast and steadily, cranks up a notch; I can almost hear it in the sudden silence of the street. She turns – not to me, but to the gate on her left, which creaks as she pushes it open. It’s a waist-high black iron gate, attached to the railings enclosing a small front garden, dense with exotic plants: palm grasses and some kind of cactus reaching up its cowboy-film arms, and a monkey tree, crowding down over the path. Without looking in my direction, she closes the gate behind her and makes her way through this miniature jungle to the front door. She can’t have seen me, and now I do cross the road, for fear of being caught spying, and I saunter on past, as nonchalantly as possible. And in a little while I saunter back again. She’s gone inside the house now; there’s a light on, in the hall. I can see the glow of it through the small window on the black front door, and faintly, through the bigger window to the side. Like Oliver’s, it’s a Victorian house, though narrower, with one big bay window at the front. As I loiter outside, another light comes on and the bay is lit up; I see her walk into the room then and approach the window. Startled, I react like a thief and catch myself slinking into the shadows, head bowed. I glance up one more time as I pass by, and see her reaching up an arm to draw the curtains, and as she does so she peers out with her face close up to the glass, squinting into the darkness, as if at last she can sense that I’m there. And I fancy that I can see her eyes. I can’t, of course, not from here, not in the dark. But I fancy that I can.

Her eyes were the first thing I noticed about Vanessa. You couldn’t not notice them. You couldn’t not be stunned. Not just by the colour, but by the shape of them too, oval as almonds. She had sharp features, witch-like almost, and the palest skin. And when you’d got over this, there was the hair – masses of it, long and thick, and as yellow as gold. She was so beautiful that the first time I met her I could barely speak. First I felt astonished by her, and then unnerved, in a whispering, glance-over-your-shoulder kind of way. And that unnerved feeling never left me. She wasn’t of this world; I’ll say it now, but I knew it then, too.

Now, I walk on by, but I imagine that woman is at the window, watching me. I feel the pull of her imagined stare at my shoulders. My head is racing with the things I might say – that she might say – and I turn around, and I am convinced that it
is
Vanessa’s mother, and that she will be there, beckoning me, recognition warm upon her face.
Rachel
, she will say.
Rachel.
And that will be enough.

But what I see is a dark and empty street, and that house, like most of the houses, is curtained up against the night now. And the fact of it is that even if that woman is Vanessa’s mother, she wouldn’t know me. Vanessa had so many friends; they came and went through her house in Oakley as easily as if it was their own. They slept there; they came for party after party. Friends called Fay and Annabel and Dominic and Tristram – see, I remember their names. And they called Vanessa’s mother by her first name – Yolande. See, I remember that, too.

Oh, Yolande
, they said
, I’m going to get completely drunk tonight.
And
Yolande, you’ve got to lend me that dress, it’s gorgeous!

Vanessa’s mother might have recognized and remembered any one of those other friends, but not me. She probably never noticed me at all. Why would she?

I was just the one on the edge of things; the hanger-on.

I am late getting back for Jono. I manage to get myself lost, taking a wrong turning here, heading down a wrong street there. I walk myself into a circle, till I come across my car and work out where I am.

It’s twenty to seven when I ring the bell. Amy opens the door promptly, as if she has been waiting. People like Amy don’t expect people like me to be late, to have other things to do.

‘Was there a lot of traffic?’ she asks, and her smile is a little thin.

‘No, I . . .’ I start to tell her –
what
? That I wandered around just killing time till I took it upon myself to follow some complete stranger, onto whom I projected the most ridiculous of dreams? ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I got delayed.’

Jono is ready. Out he comes from the room to the left of the hall with his shoes already on, scowling at me, and we say our goodbyes.

Out in the street he says, ‘What did you have to go and call me Jono for?’

‘I’m sorry, Jonathan,’ I say.

‘Oliver laughed at me.’

‘I’m sure he didn’t.’

‘Yes, he did. And he’ll go telling everyone at school, and they’ll all laugh at me, too.’

I sigh. ‘For God’s sake, Jonathan, do you have to be so sensitive?’

And he shuts up. Normally I’d launch into a long-winded explanation about friends not being your friends if they laugh at you, and how you mustn’t show that you mind when people tease you, and so on and so on, but not today. Today I can’t be doing with the arguing and the apologizing and the general wrenching that is my relationship with my son. I am too busy thinking about that woman, and about Vanessa. I am too busy sounding together in my head the connections: the blue eyes, the name, the fact that that woman would be the same age or thereabouts. These things cannot surely be mere coincidence?

I cannot let it go. Jono throws himself sulkily into the back of the car and I start it up, and drive back the way I walked, back towards that house. I drive slowly; I want to remember the way, I want to be sure of it, so I can find it again. And as I come to the house I slow right down and Jonathan wails, ‘What are you
doing
?’ and slams himself against the back seat in impatience.

I stare at that house. I lock it in my memory. The dust-faded black of the paintwork around the windows; the secretive, muted glow of the light from within. But when I try to imagine what it might be like inside, it is the house in Oakley that I see. I see the den downstairs in the basement where no adults ever ventured – and no wonder, Vanessa said, because the whole place was haunted as hell.
We
went down there, but we’d be sure to be drunk or stoned and always in a crowd. I see the living room upstairs with the balcony overlooking the green, and Vanessa’s bedroom with the bunk beds that she used for sleepovers pressed up against the wall, and her own bed, queen-sized with its pale-yellow duvet and her old blue rabbit seated upon the pillow. I picture us, six of us at least, crammed onto the top bunk with our legs hanging over the side, jostling for space, saying,
Move up, I can’t move
, but loving the closeness, all of us, just loving it. I picture Vanessa, lying on her bed, propped up on one elbow and watching us, cat-like.
Plenty of room down here
, she’d purr, but if any of us ventured down she’d pounce on us, tickling us to death and doing that thing she did with her nails, sticking them in you – one, two, three, four in a row and then all over again, one, two, three, four – till your muscles turned to mush, and you were helpless, begging her to stop. She said her dad had taught her to do that; it was a trick he’d picked up in Thailand.