Falling For You (47 page)

I haven’t opened the letter yet.

It’s here. In the bathroom, propped up on the shelf where I keep my nice soaps and my dried starfish and all the shells I collected during walks along the beach as a child. It seems appropriate, as it’s the culmination of everything I’ve been aiming for all this time.

For me, it is potentially the greatest treasure of all. And yet - even if I have an offer I’m still back to the original problem. Without my dad being willing to shift, I can’t go anywhere. 

I lie back in the hot water and listen to the tiny bubbles of the soap suds as they pop all around me. I would love to be able to enjoy the heat of the water soaking into my skin and wish that I could just block out everything else; that I could stop being so hyper-alert for the sounds of the door going, for any sign that Lawrence has at last arrived. I’ve got my towel on the side, ready for me to jump out the minute I hear anything. But nobody arrives.

The minutes tick by. The heat from the bath-water, normally so comforting, is doing little to help me feel better right now. It’s only making me feel too hot. I try and untighten my shoulders.  I try and relax. I must change what I let myself think about. Not Lawrence. Not Dad. Not the letter. But as I sink down I see the hot steam rising up from the bath has smeared the mirror over.
It’ll cause the paper to become all damp
, I think. By the time I open the letter all the writing will be smudged and almost illegible like the hand-written scrawl in the top corner.

Urgent – please reply by the 30
^th
December.

The thirtieth of December. Today is the twenty-seventh, I think, and time is rushing by... Damn it!
Why
won’t Dad give the States a chance? More importantly, why hasn’t Lawrence turned up yet? It can’t have taken them all this time to move just one tree - can it? I know he said it would take a while... The sound of someone knocking sharply at the bathroom door goes right through me now.

‘Hey,’ Sam says, and I can tell her face is close up against the door. ‘Who’s in there?’

‘It’s me.’ I sit up, abruptly.

‘
Rose
?’

‘Of course,’ I tell my cousin. ‘
Who else?’

‘It’s just that ...’
S
he sounds a teeny bit put out.  ‘I was about the use the bath,’ she says after a bit. ‘We’re planning on leaving soon, haven’t you heard?’

‘I heard,’ I say. The rapidly
cooling bathwater is dripping down my arms now. They’re going; the sense of regret, of lost opportunity, that I felt earlier, returns softly.  They’re going and very soon all that’ll be left is me and Dad.

‘If you’re in the bath,’ my cousin adds as an afterthought, ‘then who has Uncle Jack been talking to all this time?’

‘Talking to himself, most likely.’ I think: if his meds haven’t kicked in yet, it’s entirely possible. 

‘I heard more than one voice in there,’ she insists.

‘Maybe he’s got the radio on?’ I’m not really paying attention to Sam anymore, all I’m thinking is that I can’t let them go and let Lawrence go and for
nothing to have changed.
Things have got to change! Lawrence should have turned up by now.  I could always get dressed and go back out there and find out what’s going on.

Or maybe I could just accept that he’s changed his mind,
he’s chickened out
, and he’s left me here to pick up the bits and pieces of my life as best I can.  The thought makes me very angry. It makes me feel that perhaps what happens to me in my life really isn’t all that important to him. Maybe he doesn’t care about putting it right with my dad as much as he cares about running away?  And now I think about it, Dad’s not very much better, is he? He’s too scared to move from here. He’s too scared to let
me
move.  

And I am letting him do that.

Oh, sod it. What am I playing at? I stand up abruptly, the water going all over the place as I rise. I wrap the large bath towel around me and step out onto the linoleum floor, the water pooling into messy puddles at my feet. I go over and pick up the letter.

Maybe if what I’ve got in here is an offer... I should just take Dad up on his suggestion and go do it anyway. Let him sort himself out. Whether that means via help from Uncle Ty or a trip to the States... maybe I need to step out of it all, take a step back, just like Lawrence seems to have done out of my life.  I need to make the decision for myself, that this is what I am going to do. I am going to leave.
I am
. Everything else is going to have to fall in place. I trust that it will. 

I rip the envelope open now. My fingers, all tangling and useless, feel thick as balloons, and the letter inside, thinner than I’d expected, slips to the floor.

As I bend to retrieve it, my last-chance ticket to the life I’ve dreamed of, I feel a sudden panic that it cannot be what I want. It is too thin! I got pawed by my gross neighbour, for this, the memory comes flooding back. I went out in a snowstorm, prepared to risk getting mauled by next-door’s dogs.
You were wrong, Lawrence
, I feel the swell of bitter tears gathering in my throat.
You told me that I’d make it. That I wanted it bad enough and I’d get there and I believed you.

I believed in you so much I thought you’d make it too. I believed that you’d save Sunny and that you’d come out of it all intact somehow, someway, and that there’d be a place for us in this world. But none of those things are true, are they? I ignore the sharp rapping at the bathroom door, now.
Go away
, Sam!

Dad is the only one who shou
l
d be here with me, to witness this, I think regretfully. I left him alone in his room, came away with the letter but I shouldn’t have done that. He wanted to be here with me for this moment. Dad knows... he’s one of the few people who really understands what getting this offer would mean to me. What it’ll mean if I don’t. 

I won’t study Law.

I will never walk over the bridge in the spring and watch the lazy boats punt gently up the Cam when the petals are falling like snowflakes from the cherry trees. I will never take my books on a sunny day and lie out with my friends on the grass at Howard Court like I saw all those other students do. I won’t sit in one of the fashionable coffee-shops, watching the tourists go by, or spend a Sunday evening sitting on the stone wall outside King’s chapel, listening to the choir sing. I won’t leave Merry Ditton. Because this paper... this paper is too thin.     

And yet, despite everything, I can’t entirely let go of this crazy hope that things could somehow turn out all right. I bend to pick up the paper, turning it over to read the words on the other side as I do. Now that I dare to properly look I can see that it
is
from Downing C
ollege, I can see that by the letterhead. A rejection?

I don’t actually read it, though. I catch just one, solitary word, on my way up.

That word is ‘pleased …’

‘Hello? Hello
Rose?
’ It’s Sam, she’s back. ‘I’ve just gone and checked,’ she says in a low voice, ‘and I can definitely hear Uncle Jack talking to someone in there.’ She sounds spooked. Why doesn’t she just knock on his door and check?  I wipe my eyes again and my face feels hot, steamed up from the bath and I can’t properly concentrate. I just got my Downing College offer.
OMG! I just got my offer!

‘Rose?’

‘I’m ... just looking at the letter that arrived for me,’ I say. There’s a moment’s silence as she takes this in.

‘It’s from the University, isn’t it?’

I place the letter over my heart, hardly daring to believe it but I know that it is true. And now I have to reply to them! And soon. Did they mean by email or by post? What do I need to do next? Oh God, oh God...! I skim over the letter, looking for clues but I can barely see the words in front of me, I can barely read, I can barely
think
any more. I put my clothes on then, in a hurry, dragging them up impatiently over my still-wet skin and then, in amongst my frantic rush to
do
something, take some action and do it quickly, I suddenly realise;

When I reply to them - what am I going to say?

I mean, I don’t know yet if I can honestly go. Not really. I feel like someone who’s bowled a bowling ball right bang down the middle of the lane, a sure-fire to knock over those ten-pins all in one go and what happens? The ball slows down and stops dead right in front of the gate. I go and unlock the bathroom door, my letter getting damp in my hand.

‘Let’s have a look at it then,’ Sam demands. I hold it out to her now and she reads it slowly and thoroughly. When she’s finished, a small smile crosses my cousin’s face and she hands it back to me. ‘Well done,’ she says quietly. ‘I’m glad that you got the offer you wanted.’

‘Thank you.’ I smile at her and I’m aware that the relief I’m feeling is coming off me in waves. She steps forward and gives me a little awkward hug. She’s happy for me, I know she’s happy, but I can
feel
what she’s thinking as clear as if she’d actually said the words out loud. I wipe my cheeks with the back of my hand and she steps away a little, her eyes crinkling curiously.

‘I mean to find a way to go...’ I tell her.

‘Will you persuade Uncle Jack?’ She shrugs, and in that one little movement I get a whole back-story from her, a sure sense that her parents haven’t just mooted the whole States issue with my dad - they’ve done their darnedest to persuade him; they’ve already
bent over backwards
to convince him. She doubts I’ll get any further than they did. ‘Maybe now that you’ve got your offer?’ she says, a little doubtfully.

‘I’m thinking maybe... once he knows what
my
plans are, he’ll shift his own,’ I tell her. As I tell her this, it seems to become clearer to me, in my own mind.  I can’t wait around for Dad to come around anymore. No matter what the temptation is to stay here and rescue him from the uncomfortable consequences of his own decisions. I mustn’t. He has options, after all.

‘That’s brave of you,’ she says. I’m not sure if that’s what she’s actually thinking, or whether she feels that would be the wrong thing to do, an unthinkable thing to do.  Then she lightens up suddenly, a dimple forming right there, in the corner of her cheek and she looks at my letter again. ‘You’re very lucky,’ this time a little wistfully. ‘I wish that I might get such a chance. I don’t think I’d get a look in. Maybe I can come and stay over in your room some weekend though?’

‘Sure, you can.’   

‘All right, girls?’

Her mother appears beside her now, coming up the stairs folding one of her blouses as she goes. She looks at my letter which Sam holds up for her to see before handing it back to me and her eyes widen a little in surprise.

‘
Congratulations
,’ she says and I can see that she really does mean it. ‘It’s all the more remarkable when you consider the circumstances under which you have achieved it.’ I feel a flush of pleasure at that. ‘Have you told Jack yet?’

I clear my throat.

‘I was just going in to him now...’  This doesn’t feel right. Two people know already and Dad isn’t one of them. He should have been the first to know. He wanted to be the first, but I was so
mad
at him...

‘I could have sworn you were already in there with him,’ she shakes her head. ‘I thought I heard him...’ she looks towards his door, slightly puzzled. ‘It’s not Ty. He’s still downstairs. We were both waiting for you to come down, in fact...’ 

There’s something else, isn’t there? Something in her expression looks cut up, hurt. For the tiniest of moments, standing there in the corridor with Carlotta, I catch a glimpse of the desperation beneath the tautness around her eyes. As if she has to hold the whole world together with her being; orderly, tidy, perfect. As if any sign of weakness or imperfection in her could mean that the sun might never rise again of a morning, that the moon could fade in the night sky and the tides stall.

‘I came up to tell you I’ve just had a call on my mobile from Matt Dougal. The Bentley’s repaired,’ she informs me now. ‘And now that the roads are passable enough we won’t be sticking around for too much longer...’

‘No. Of course not.’

‘I came up here to let you know but - Rose...’ She glances at Sam as if not sure if she should proceed with my cousin in front but then she says it, anyway.  ‘There’s a bone I need to pick with you. I’m sure there’s some perfectly reasonable explanation for it, but until I know what it is I’m left feeling, well, frankly, uncomfortable.’

‘Yes?’ There’s a cold draught running through the upstairs hallway now, I can feel it, chilling the damp skin on my arms and legs. A draught like a window’s been left open somewhere but I know that with Carlotta in charge here, no window would ever be left open. The draught makes me shudder but right now it’s the discomfort in her eyes that is troubling me the most.

I get the feeling that I am about to be called to account. All the things that I haven’t told the family yet since re-entering the house. All the things that I knew, when I came back here, I was going to have to tell them... 

 ‘The thing is, when I spoke to him just now, Matt Dougal didn’t seem to be aware that you’d spent Christmas at his house.’ She stops, and I can hear from her voice how upset she is.
Didn’t she hear me tell her that over my mobile? Didn’t she hear me, then?
My stomach tightens.  ‘I haven’t said anything to your uncle yet,’ she continues breathlessly. ‘If you weren’t at Shona’s... I thought I’d come up and find out from you first. What’s been going on, Rose?’

A feeling of shock, of imminent discovery, trickles like a rivulet of cold water from the top of my head right down to my toes. Suddenly, ridiculously, I feel like I want to laugh out loud but I know if I do I’ll only alarm her further.

‘You’re right of course,’ I can feel my eyes watering, keep my head down. ‘But there is a... a perfectly good explanation.’ She looks relieved at that, I can see her shoulders visibly relax. An explanation is forthcoming. Her discomfort is about to be assuaged and everything is still all right with the world…

‘It’s just that...’ I look her straight in the eyes. ‘I really, really want to go and give my dad the good news…’ I glance at the letter in my hand. ‘Do you mind if I come back to you in a bit?’

‘Oh. Well - of course,’ she understands. ‘Naturally. First things first, eh?’ She pats the letter in my hand. ‘Jack’s going to be thrilled. And
proud,
’ she brings herself to add. I stare at her for a moment. That last is as near as I’m ever going to get to an acknowledgement from Carlotta. I feel a warmth spread for a moment in my stomach, a feeling of pleasure at the thought that my aunt might ever actually
approve
of me.  

It’s mixed with a sadness at the thought that she won’t feel so approving once she discovers what the
perfectly good explanation
for me not being at Shona’s is… 

None of them will.