Face the Wind and Fly (24 page)

‘What do you mean? Of course I am.’

‘But while I’m suspended I can’t work on the wind farm, and that must make you very happy.’

‘Oh, Kate. You know it’s not as simple as that. I’m boxed in here. Dad’s becoming more and more militant –
Dad!
’ she gave a rather forced little laugh, ‘in combat gear. Can you imagine?’ She swilled half her wine at a gulp, then studied the glass.

‘You can make your own mind up about things, surely. You’re a big girl now.’

‘And you know Mike’s not in favour of wind farms either.’

‘Doesn’t stop you talking to your best friend, surely?’

She wouldn’t meet Kate’s eyes. She crossed her legs, then wriggled and switched them back again, then almost finished the wine in another couple of quick gulps. It takes six cranial nerves to carry out the act of swallowing, and Charlotte’s seemed to be working in perfect unison rather than chronological progression, so swiftly did the alcohol slide down her throat.

‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’

‘Is there?’

Kate tried another tack. ‘Do you remember I talked to you a month or two back about Andrew?’

Charlotte looked even more uncomfortable. ‘Still playing away, is he?’

‘Is he? You said you wouldn’t know if he was. “I’d hardly be likely to know about it if he was screwing the entire Scottish membership of the WRI,” if I remember your words correctly.’

‘That’s true.’

‘So what do you mean, is he still playing away?’

Charlotte topped up her wine, splashing a little onto the coffee table, where it spread into a small pool and glistened unnaturally under the light of the lamp behind her head. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s Andy, isn’t it?’

Kate stared at her, speechless and the silence dragged on into a long, uneasy pause. Eventually she said, ‘You make it sound as though he’s serially unfaithful.’

‘Oh come on, Kate,’ Charlotte was suddenly impatient. She sat up with a swift, jerky movement. ‘You can’t have lived with him all these years and not know that Andy likes his “fans”.’ She used her fingers to describe sarcastic quotation marks in the air.

Her words barrelled into Kate and knocked all the wind out of her. She fought for breath, shocked beyond comprehension. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You’re not that naive, Kate, are you? Andy’s vanity feeds on young flesh.’

‘That’s
horrible
.’

‘But true. Did he resist you?’

‘He fell in
love
with me.’

‘Never stopped him from testing his pulling power.’

‘What?’

‘Kate, he has always wanted to feel irresistible. I was jealous, I admit it. You were always so bloody perfect, you got top marks in everything, you were sexy as hell and had bags of personality. I was fed up being second best to you. Even Mike was a hand-me-down, for heaven’s sake.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I slept with him, you dolt. Your precious Andy, your oh-so-handsome, oh-so-adoring teacher-lover. I went to bed with him while you and Mike were out at some bloody engineering do.’

The breathlessness was back. ‘You slept with Andrew? Soon after I met him? I don’t believe you.’

‘That’s why I never told you. I knew you wouldn’t. And anyway, what would have been the point?’

Andy. It was a diminutive she’d thought nothing of – but now the familiarity was explained. ‘
Andy!
You’ve always been chummy with him, haven’t you? Why did I never see it?’ She rubbed her temples. They were starting to throb. ‘So why tell me now?’

‘I never meant to. It was years ago. It just came out. I suppose I was surprised that you didn’t realise what Andy was like.’

Best friends are anchors. They listen to problems without making judgements, they want the best for each other, they know the worst things about each other and love their friends anyway. Deep friendships take years to build because they are the sum of ten thousand shared experiences. Years to build, and a moment to shatter.

Charlotte’s triumphant little secret. The thought of her friend in bed with the man she loved made her feel sick. She stood up. ‘Thank you, Charlotte.’

‘What do you mean? What for?’ Charlotte stood, wobbled, caught hold of the back of the sofa to steady herself.

‘You’ve opened my eyes. I can’t say I like what I see, but I suppose I asked for the truth, and now I’ve got it.’ She turned and marched to the door, Charlotte stumbling and stuttering behind her.

‘Kate, wait! Let’s talk about this, it was years ago, I didn’t mean it. Christ, Mike’ll kill me. Oh,
fuck
.’

The expletive was the last thing Kate heard, because she slammed the front door behind her and strode off down the drive, leaving the stone face of The Herons staring emotionlessly after her as she was engulfed by the night. 

Chapter Twenty-five

Kate had assumed that her idyll with Andrew would go on for ever. When you are twenty two and in love, you believe that this state will never change. But nothing stays the same for ever – nothing and nobody. She hadn’t understood that, but Andrew should have. Andrew, who had already brought up one child. Andrew, who had watched countless not-quite teenagers come into school as children and emerge, six or seven years later, as young and sometimes frighteningly mature adults. Andrew, who had fallen in love with a teenage Val himself, then out of love again just as easily, when it suited him.

‘But it wasn’t like that,’ he’d told Kate during one of those endless, lazy conversations you have in bed with a new lover, sated with sex and blissfully drowsy with the headiness of proximity. ‘It happened slowly, over a long time. It happened, I dare say, because we did both change, Val into a mother and me into—’ He paused at that point and spent some blissful moments tracing the contours of Kate’s body from her navel to her nipple and up her throat to her lips. He didn’t finish the sentence, so she never did hear how he thought
he
had changed. Instead, he returned again to Val. ‘I don’t know where the exuberant, madcap girl I married went to.’

Maybe he kissed her then and they probably made love once more. She would have been exhilarated with the feeling of power, because she set him alight and she knew it. She hadn’t given much thought to Val, though.

She let herself into Willow Corner.

‘Ninian called,’ Andrew said, emerging from his study. ‘He’s staying the night at Elliott’s.’

She said, ‘Good. It will give you time to pack some things and go.’

‘I’m sorry?’ He stared at her incredulously over his half-moon spectacles.

‘It’s not too late.’ She glanced at the clock in the kitchen. ‘It’s only nine thirty. Plenty of time to find somewhere to sleep tonight.’

He followed her into the kitchen. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘Oh, but I am. Deadly serious.’

‘I thought we were going to work at our marriage. That’s what you said.’

Kate swung round, so abruptly that he almost cannoned into her. ‘You slept with Charlotte,’ she hissed. ‘And that’s unforgivable.’

‘No I didn’t.’ The puzzlement on his face seemed absolutely genuine.

‘Cast your mind back, Andrew. Sixteen years. One night, a few months before we were married. I’d gone to an Engineering lecture with Mike and—’

‘Oh that,’ he said dismissively. ‘She practically begged me. I’d completely forgotten.’

‘It wasn’t important.’

‘Right.’ He tried to take her face between his hands but she shoved him away, so violently that he hit the table and a chair went flying. ‘
Jesus
, Kate!’

‘You slept with my best friend and you didn’t think that mattered?’ Her voice had risen to a shrewish shriek.

‘Not ... no—’

‘Have you got any morality at all, Andrew? I’ve lived with you for all this time and I thought I knew you. How many women, Andrew? How many times have you been unfaithful to me?’

‘It’s not like that. I don’t—’

‘Oh, spare me the stories. Time’s ticking. Take the big suitcase, then you won’t need to come back for a few days. And that, believe me, is about the only way I can guarantee your safety.’

‘Ninian—’

Her anger yielded to anxiety. ‘We’ll talk to Ninian together and you’ll find the words – because you’re very good at words, isn’t that so? – to help him through this. Until we agree on what and where and how we will do it, however, you won’t make any attempt to contact him. Is that understood?’

She glared at Andrew’s shocked face and added, more gently, ‘I’m not trying to undermine you. I promise I’ll never do anything to compromise his view of you, so long as you agree to do the same. Where Ninian is concerned, we are – and always will be – his parents, equally loving, equally fair, equally concerned about what is best for him.’

Andrew said, very quietly, ‘Now I’m scared.’

‘This is what you wanted. Isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know. I thought I did. I’m not sure.’

‘Because I’m the one calling time, not you?’

His eyes flickered away from her and she knew she had hit on the truth. Where women were concerned, Andrew obviously liked to call the shots.

‘This is what
she
wants, isn’t it?’ she said, callously seizing advantage of her insight.

‘Yes. It’s what Sophie wants.’ He sighed heavily.

Her fury returned. ‘Go. Just go. I can’t bear to talk to you any more tonight.’

She went into the dark living room and tumbled untidily onto a sofa, not bothering to put on any lamps. The room looked ghostly in the shaft of light that beamed through from the kitchen, a cocky intruder from another world. She didn’t want light. She wanted to sink silently into the dark oblivion the room seemed to offer. She didn’t want to think and above all, she didn’t want to feel. Her hand found the netsuke mouse: a treasured gift from Andrew. Charlotte’s words scorched her mind as she remembered: he’d given it to her the day after she’d been at that lecture with Mike. The day after, according to Charlotte, he had slept with her best friend.

She dropped the mouse with a clatter. Another sweet memory had been destroyed.

This was what it was like, then, to come to the end of something beautiful and untouchable. This was what it was like to uncover a lie – a whole nest of lies – and realise that your entire life has been a twisted, poisoned scrap right at the heart of it. She had thought that their marriage had been constructed by some divine hand, that meeting Andrew had somehow been
meant
. She’d thought that getting pregnant had been predetermined, that their stars had been charted and their paths had been destined to intertwine – but that was the kind of twaddle only a student fresh out of university could believe. If only she’d talked to Val, instead of pitying her!

‘I’m off then.’ Andrew clipped on the switch at the door and a cold light flooded the room. Kate blinked, disorientated and confused, and threw her hand up to shield her eyes from the glare. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow. I don’t want this to end like this, Kate.’

‘If you must,’ she said, hardening her heart at his pathetic look.

‘Unless you—’

‘Call me tomorrow, if you have to.’

‘Yes.’ He dropped his head. ‘I’ll do that. Tell Ninian’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Good bye, Andrew.’

She heard him throw something into the car, then his engine started up. She shivered. The sense of power she had experienced, briefly, was gone. The room was cold and shock was setting in.

Kate stirred in the vastness of her double bed, unable to sleep. How do you accommodate your body to a large double bed when there is no-one to share it with? How do you face the day ahead when it is empty of meaning? How do you reconcile recollections of happy times with the knowledge that even then, even when you were at your happiest, the corrosion had started?

She shivered, unable to get warm. Her bedroom – her favourite room, she had to remind herself – seemed chilled and abandoned. The wardrobe stood open where Andrew had seized clothes, probably at random. She got out of bed and stood, shivering, peering into its dark recesses, trying to work out what he had taken. His dark suit. A couple of pairs of cord trousers. His favourite old threadbare tweed jacket. She pulled out one of the drawers and saw that he had not taken the fabulously soft, richly patterned alpaca sweater she had given him for Christmas a year ago. Its presence seemed like a metaphor: given with love, now rejected. She lifted it up and held it to her cheek. The smell of him was still on the wool and the immediacy of his presence unlocked the tears she had been holding back. She sank to the floor and, cuddling the sweater in her arms, howled for her lost love.

When she could cry no longer, she slipped the sweater over her head and felt its soft warmth envelop her. She crept downstairs quietly, as though she might disturb someone, and filled the kettle. Sleep still seemed beyond her, so she made herself tea and cradled the mug in her hands, then padded around restlessly – but the kitchen floor was cold on her bare feet and the living room still held the dark despair she had nursed there earlier. She could see light spilling out from underneath the door to Andrew’s study and a flicker of hope caught in her heart. Could he have returned? Was he in there, writing? Had he come back to fight for her? She pushed open the door – but the room was empty. He had merely left the lamp on his desk burning.

She woke the next morning to the sounds of Mrs Gillies clattering dishes in the kitchen. The memory of what had happened the night before flooded back to her. She started to shiver again, though the central heating had kicked in and the bedroom was warm. What had she done? Was it too late to beg Andrew to come back?

The kitchen radio blasted out Chris Evans’ breakfast show. Irritated, she leapt out of bed. For years she had tolerated Mrs Gillies changing the station on her kitchen radio from Radio Four to Radio Two, but she wouldn’t put up with it any longer. She didn’t need Mrs G and she didn’t want her around, with her proprietorial manner and annoying assumptions of quasi-ownership. She didn’t like the way Jean Gillies implied that she cared about Ninian more than she did. Ninian was her son, and Willow Corner was
her
house – and with Andrew gone she could claim her territory absolutely.

She flung on her jeans and Andrew’s alpaca sweater and ran down the stairs. Mrs Gillies’s bottom was angled up at her newly repainted kitchen ceiling because she was emptying the dishwasher – Andrew’s dirty dishes from the day before – and she couldn’t hear anything above the radio. Kate reached across the cream granite worktop and switched it off. The silence was immediate.

‘Oh!’ Mrs Gillies straightened and whirled round, glowering at Kate as though it was her kitchen and Kate was the intruder. ‘I didn’t know you were in, Kate.’

‘I’ve been
in
,’ Kate said icily, ‘every morning for weeks now, as you surely know.’

Mrs Gillies looked away. Her head dropped and she made a play of studying her gold rings, twisting them so that the tiny diamonds showed. Her loyalties, Kate realised now, all lay with Andrew, who she admired, and with Ninian, who she adored.

Too bad.

‘Mrs Gillies,’ she said, ‘how many years have you been with us?’

‘Since just after you came here, Kate.’

‘Mrs Courtenay,’ she corrected, irked by the familiarity.

‘What?’

‘My name is Mrs Courtenay. To you.’

‘Is everything all right, Kate?’

‘No. Everything is not all right.’

She wanted to yell, Alan Sugar-style, ‘You’re fired!’, but she’d been too well drilled about employee rights and employment tribunals and instead she said crisply, ‘Mrs Gillies. I’m afraid there’s bad news. Mr Courtenay and I are getting divorced and we will be selling Willow Corner, so I’m going to have to dispense with your services. As of now. Of course, I will pay you a month’s wages, which I think is the understanding we have, is it not?’

She found her handbag and fumbled in it for her purse. ‘Actually, I only have five pounds,’ she said, a little deflated, ‘so I’ll call round to your house later with the cash, if that’s all right.’

Kate looked up as Mrs Gillies’s mouth rounded into an ‘O’, a perfect ring in her circle of a face. She realised, too late, that Mrs Gillies’s cleaning pals formed a well-entrenched network of gossip and control in the neighbourhood. News of her difficulties would be round Summerfield within hours and probably round Forgie not long thereafter.

Well, so be it.

‘If that’s all right, Mrs Gillies?’

‘Well, I—’ The housekeeper sank down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs. ‘Is that it then? All these years of service and sacked just like that?’

Kate felt sorry for her before she remembered the dining room she had prepared for Andreas Bertolini and his wife: that hadn’t been mere housekeeping, she’d taken over.  She recalled her insistence on moving the vase on the mantelpiece in the living room from one end to the middle and the fact that she never put the sofa back quite in the place Kate liked it to be. She remembered the peremptory notes of reprimand and instruction:
We are out of bleach.
The lingering smell of cigarette smoke, which counteracted the freshness of pine cleaner – if she had to smoke, why couldn’t she go outside?

‘I’m sorry,’ she said firmly. ‘I won’t be able to afford your services any longer. I’ll pay you extra for today, but I think it would be best if you just go. Now.’

‘But I haven’t had my coffee yet.’

Kate thrust the five-pound note into her hands. ‘Here. That should be enough for a couple of coffees.’

She watched the housekeeper march down the path with her hat jammed on her head, every step an expression of righteous indignation. She felt victorious, just as she had over Andrew the night before – and, just as quickly, the feeling evaporated and reality set in. Now she’d have to cope with all the cleaning on her own. She’d have to discover all the nasty, dirty places she didn’t even know existed and suck out their dark secrets through the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner. Her tale would be all over the neighbourhood before lunch, no doubt with a twist or two that put her in the role of pantomime villainess.

Still, much more worrying than Mrs Gillies’s wounded sensibilities was how Ninian would feel about it all.

She need not have worried too much on that count. Mrs Gillies’s departure was considerably overshadowed for Ninian by news that his father had left home and that his parents were considering their future together.

‘Has he gone to the Maneater?’ he asked, his face contorted.

‘I’m not sure,’ Kate lied. Andrew was the one at fault here and it should be Andrew who explained what had happened and why he had gone. ‘We’ll talk in a few days, all of us.’

‘What is there to talk about?’

‘Oh Ninian.’ She sank her head into her hands. She wanted to seem strong, but she couldn’t manage to hide her hopelessness. The bleakness of her situation became painfully real. She had no husband and potentially no job either. She lifted her head, though, determined that Ninian should have faith in one parent, at least. ‘There’s so much to think about. Where we will live, where
you
will live, for a start.’