Another Love (23 page)

‘I don’t think I have ever loved you more,’ he’d said. And he’d meant it. Romilly let her eyes fall to the china now lying smashed on the tiles and her tears finally came. It was done and it was her that had done it.

With an aching heart and words of regret spilling from her mouth, she crept from the kitchen, carefully avoiding the mess on the floor, wary of cutting her feet. She sobbed as she stepped into the hallway, opened the cupboard door and reached for her wellington boot. She turned it upside down, letting the bottle of vodka fall into her palm with a satisfying thud.

I wouldn’t say that I was fully aware of what was going on, but I knew that something was odd in my house. I started staying overnight with my friend Amelia and her family, and it’s like with anyone, you don’t realise how weird your own family is until you go and stay with another, and then you realise that everyone does things differently.

Amelia’s mum didn’t make her clean her teeth before bed, which I thought was the best thing in the world! At home I used to hate having to leave the warm duvet, where I’d been having a story or just playing with my toys, to go and stand on the cold bathroom floor and clean my teeth. But my dad was a stickler for it. Being at Amelia’s was like a holiday, an adventure. Her mum used to kiss me goodnight and tuck me in when she did Amelia and she smelt of talcum powder and cooking, unlike my own mum, who smelt of chewing gum and something sour.

I can remember telling Nanny Pat years later that I never cleaned my teeth before bedtime when I stayed with my friend and she said something to the effect that they were bad parents. This makes me laugh now. They might not have made Amelia clean her teeth, but her mum never got so pissed she lay unconscious on the floor and her dad wasn’t going to give himself a bloody hernia through trying to fake happiness and paint on a smile every day, even when his whole world was tumbling down around him.

In fact one of the things I love most about Alistair is his family. His parents are lovely, very warm and welcoming, and they don’t ask me too many questions about Mum; they clearly aren’t obsessed or fascinated with my situation. They make it easy for me to be with them and they love me and I love them. Dad sometimes calls Alistair’s dad and they go for a pub lunch together. I like the idea of them being friends, it just makes everything straightforward. I’m very lucky really.

She stared at the mini whiteboard with her name on it, or an attempt at her name. It read
Ronald Wells
, which was close enough. ‘I think that might be me.’ She pointed at the sign and bobbed her head at the man with the green padded gilet and the inscrutable expression.

He gave a stiff nod and lifted her suitcase. ‘Willkommen.’ He was polite but cool as he grabbed the handle and led her out into the early morning air and to a waiting minibus, for which she was the only passenger. She chose a seat midway back, against the window, and wrapped her coat around her form as the vehicle pulled out onto the road.

The drive to the lakeside clinic took them along mountain ridges and down country roads. The bright blue Austrian sky was pierced by rows and rows of closely planted, snow-topped evergreens that reminded her of arrows pointing upwards. Romilly wound down the window and breathed deeply. The air was so pure, it was how she imagined the air in heaven might taste: sweet, clear and beautiful. It was like imbibing goodness. She blew into her cupped hand and sniffed at her breath; it smelt predominantly of mint, with only the faintest trace of vodka discernible to a knowing nose.

She hadn’t tried to form a picture of where she was heading and anyway her imagination could not have prepared her for the magnificent sight that greeted her. The vast lake was so broad that on this cold morning, with a haze of fog hovering on its surface, she couldn’t clearly see the other side. What she could see, however, were the large wooden houses along its shoreline, with their high apex roofs and prettily carved balconies and window boxes. The houses were set in generous plots containing outbuildings, wood stores, boat sheds and vegetable beds. Romilly noticed that the plots didn’t seem to be fenced off; it wasn’t obvious where one property ended and the next began, which made the place feel friendly, communal, as if there were literally no barriers to being neighbours. An image of Sara flashed into her brain.

Long wooden jetties protruded from each piece of land into the lake. Some had fibreglass tenders tied to them, sitting high in the water; others had canoes upturned and drying out in the morning air. One or two had a pair of chairs at the end, facing outwards, which immediately conjured thoughts of long, lazy summer days. Romilly pictured herself watching the sun rise and set over the hypnotic water and in that fanciful imagining; David was by her side, where he had always been. It was breathtakingly beautiful; like a scene from a calendar, she thought.

Barely a ripple disturbed the surface of the lake. Its reflection was immaculate, as if someone was holding up a pane of glass to the reeds and spiky grasses that grew in clumps along the banks and around the jetty piles. Even at this early hour, couples were out briskly walking the path that encircled the water, kitted out in close-fitting Lycra and thermal gloves and hats, with long ski poles looped around their wrists. To Romilly, they looked impossibly happy and healthy, lifting their poles high by way of greeting and smiling widely as they called ‘
Morgen
!’ or ‘
Gruß Gött
!’ at each other. She glanced briefly at the lakeside
Bäckerei
but could summon no enthusiasm for the breads and pastries advertised on their handwritten signs; she was in no mood for organic rye bread with plum compote, poppy seed and hazelnut strudel or even a Viennese coffee. She wasn’t in the mood for much.

Would a few weeks at the Rechtsmittel Klinik restore her appetite, her health, her marriage? It was a potential lifeline at least, Romilly reminded herself. And she had Sylvia to thank for it, which had come as a big surprise. When David had thrown in the towel, it was Sylvia who’d talked him round. Instead of the ‘I told you so’ reaction Romilly had expected, her mother-in-law had insisted that David give their relationship another go. She’d berated her son for giving up after just one attempt at treatment. Would he have walked away so fast if Romilly had been suffering from a different illness, she’d asked; if she’d developed a physical condition that rendered her useless and needy? Of course he wouldn’t! Romilly had only been able to stare at the woman who was shouting her corner when she had no voice of her own. She knew that she would always, always be grateful.

The clinic that Sylvia had found and paid for was an ugly concrete splat on the otherwise picture-perfect Carinthian landscape of southern Austria. It reminded Romilly of a 1950s low-rise office block, the sort that in Britain usually housed a local government department. She stared at the abundance of concrete and the large sliding metal-framed windows that she instinctively knew would be screwed shut. Its anomalousness brought to mind what one of her uni professors had said of a similarly ugly building in Bristol. ‘Ah, but just think, Miss Shepherd,’ he’d intoned as he gestured out of the window at the fine Bath stone architecture of Clifton, ‘you are inside looking out and surely it would be far worse to be outside looking in? Fortunately for you, this building is not part of your landscape, it is theirs!’ It gave her comfort to think of that now.
Miss Shepherd. Whatever happened to her?

She placed her hands against her thighs to try and stem their shake, thanked her silent driver and went inside. The interior was a little better than the outside; it was still bland, gloomy and dated, but at least it was spotless. The straight lines and fuss-free minimalism of its original seventies decor made it look strangely up-to-date, which made her suddenly think of her dad; she gulped down a tear as she pictured him in his shed, hoarding once-fashionable walnut-veneer wardrobes and doors, adamant in his certainty that, like everything else, their distinctive grain would come back into fashion one day.

A young girl with piercing blue eyes and a blonde plait roped on top of her head showed Romilly to her quarters. ‘Your room.’ She stretched out her arm as she stated the obvious. ‘You unpack and then you have induction.’ Her tone was cold, officious. And with that she was gone.

Romilly looked at the dark green linoleum floor, which she was sure would stick to her bare feet on cold mornings. A low, single bed was pushed into a corner, its garish orange bedspread the only splash of colour against the depressing magnolia walls. A narrow Formica-topped table with two slatted shelves beneath it sat against the wall opposite and in a nook between the wall and the window stood an open-fronted wardrobe with four plastic hangers.

Sitting on the bed, still wearing her coat and with her back against the wall, Romilly thought of David. She heard his angry tone during their row, recalled the cold, forced hug he’d given her when he’d left her at the gate earlier that day. Again she saw the expression of disgust on his face as he’d made her look in the mirror. She thought of Celeste, her darling girl, and her face crumpled in tears. She pictured the two of them lying on their tummies, dipping sticks into the pondweed at Canford Park, smiling at the mayflies that hovered over the water as the sun glinted off their wings. ‘I miss you. I miss you, baby, and I’m sorry. I want to come home. I want to come home,’ she whispered, hoping that her words might drift across land and sea and fall into the ears of her little girl, who right about that time would be having her morning break at school and making up a dance routine with her friends or simply running around. Her heart lurched at the prospect of not seeing her for weeks. It felt like a sentence.

‘Hello!’ a woman boomed from the hallway. She knocked briefly on the door as she entered. She was solid. Her arms, revealed where her sleeves were rolled to the elbows, were like hams. Her complexion shone with a rosy glow and her eyes were bright. She was tall too, six foot at least, and she wore white clogs, white trousers, a pale denim shirt and a white cloth apron. Her dark hair was twisted into a bun. A man stood behind her, partially obscured, a doctor or nurse, judging by his upside-down watch and similar medical attire.

‘I’m Ulli and this is Ralph. We are your coordinators, and so, welcome!’ The woman smiled. ‘How was your journey?’ Her accent turned the ‘j’ into a ‘ch’.

‘Fine, thanks.’ Romilly sniffed up her tears.

‘It’s a big step for you, being here, being away from home.’ Ulli closed her eyes briefly in a gesture of understanding.

Romilly nodded. Yes it was.

‘But it’s good that you are here, and when you go home you will feel like a million dollars!’ She gave another smile.

I don’t want to feel like a million dollars, I just want to feel like Ponytail Mum. I want to feel normal. I want to not feel so crap. I want David to love me again. I want to be there for my daughter.

‘So!’ Ulli shouted. ‘First we need to get you settled and we need to check your things, is that okay?’

‘I can unpack.’ Romilly glanced up at Ralph, who had stepped forward.

‘We are happy to do it,’ he offered, unsmiling.

‘It’s just a precaution,’ Ulli said.

The Pineapple had been swankier, but the check-in procedure at both clinics was the same. Romilly watched as Ralph methodically felt his way through her clothing and opened the bottles in her toiletries bag, sniffing at the synthetic apple and peachy scents of her shampoo and conditioner.

‘Okay.’ Ulli smiled, satisfied. ‘We’ll give you half an hour to settle and then we’ll come back to take you to the Med Centre, where we will start your medication and talk you through what to expect during your stay.’ She nodded briefly and left the room, with Ralph following in her wake.

Romilly hopped from the bed, closed the door and turned the key in the lock. She reached down into her pocket where the lining had been cut away and pulled the hem up, enabling her to feel around inside it. Her eyes blinked in blissful relief as her searching fingers closed around the three miniature bottles of vodka she had snaffled from the plane. The thin silver metal lid gave a satisfying snap as she twisted it off. Placing the little round neck against her bottom lip, she felt the familiar euphoric lift in her stomach, welcoming the medicine that made everything feel better, gave her clarity. She popped the other two bottles into her snap-lock plastic bag and, with a silent vote of thanks to Gemma at The Pineapple, stashed them in the cistern behind the loo.

At the Med Centre, Ulli indicated for Romilly to sit on a plastic chair, one of seven lined up in the corridor along a glass wall. ‘Dr Nagel will be with you soon.’ Ulli nodded and left her to ponder the neat alpine rockery in the centre of the adjacent courtyard.

A door opened and a man in his early fifties took a seat along from her. ‘It’s like waiting outside the headmaster’s office, isn’t it?’ he joked. He had a British accent, but some of his vowels had a distinctly American twang.

‘I don’t know, I never had to wait outside the headmaster’s office.’
I was good at school, I was clever. My problems started after I’d left.

‘I bet you were a prefect. I can tell.’

Romilly turned to look at the emaciated man, who had rather laughably spiked up his thinning hair with wet-look gel and carefully crafted his pencil-thin beard to run along his jawline, up his tanned cheeks and above his top lip. He wore a large silver skull ring on his index finger, battered cowboy boots, leather jeans and a tight black blazer with a white T-shirt underneath. His posture – one leg stretched out in front of him, not caring less who it might trip up, and the other tucked under the chair – made him look cocky. With a stab to her gut, she wondered what David would say about his appearance.

‘I was,’ she confirmed, hoping that this might put an end to their conversation.

‘I’ve just done the old whizz test.’ He angled his head towards a room off the courtyard.