Her Living Image (35 page)

“But Clare –”

“What?”

“I don’t know . . . will anyone believe me? I mean, why should the police take any notice of me? All sorts of people must know about it already. . . .”

Under the assault of Clare’s mounting indignation, Caro found herself mouthing all Alan’s excuses.

“But what about that boy?” shouted Clare. “What about that boy they’re taking to court? For Christ’s sake, Caro – what are you saying? Is that what your
fucking park boils down to? – free garden materials for the bloody rich councillors, and barbed-wire fences and court cases for the local kids? What are you talking about?”

As always, another person’s certainty filled Caro with stubborn awkwardness. Why did Clare think she knew – any more than Alan did? Why did they all know, and think that she would do
what they said?

“What do you expect me to do? Be a private detective? Follow lorries? Snoop around gardens taking photos? The stuff he’s taken doesn’t amount to more than fifty pounds’
worth. Is it worth me losing my job for that?”

A record ended and there was suddenly a shocking minute of complete silence, before the racket started up again.

“I don’t believe it,” Clare screamed. “I don’t believe you can say that. For Jesus Christ’s sake, Caro – how can you? For years – ever since I
met you – you’ve sat back and been too pernickety to soil your dainty white hands with anything real – but I always thought – I always thought you were – you would
–” She shook her head incoherently. “I just don’t believe it. How can you carry on working there?”

“Shut up!” yelled Caro. “Shut up! and tell me what the fuck you think I can do, if you’re so bloody righteous.”

Clare studied her hands on the table top for a short time. When she spoke her voice was calm. “If it was me – I would – I’d find someone who knows about this sort of
thing. You don’t want the police. You want the media. That’s what’ll destroy Bellamy. Someone who knows how to chase it up and ask the right questions. I’ll ask
Jenny.” Jenny was a friend of Clare’s who worked as a researcher on the local TV news programme. “I’ll ring her now.”

Clare got up immediately and went into the hall. Caro heard her shouting at Sylvie. The record was turned down. Caro glanced at her watch – eight-thirty. She ran up to her room and
changed, and combed her hair. She was in the bathroom cleaning her teeth when Clare came to find her.

“She’s out. They’ll get her to ring back in half an hour. What are you doing?”

“I’m going to meet Alan in the George.”

“Don’t you want to talk to Jenny?”

“I don’t know – I don’t know!” Caro pushed past Clare and ran down into the hall, before she burst out screaming or sobbing, or started throwing things around the
room.

She was in the pub by five to nine. Alan wasn’t there yet. He wasn’t there by nine-fifteen. He wasn’t there by nine-thirty. She left at quarter to ten.

There was a long message from Clare on the telephone table – she picked it up quickly, but it wasn’t Alan. It was all about what Jenny had said. Caro scrumpled it in her palm. She
went heavily up to her room, threw herself on to the bed, and cried.

She was busy again next day. She avoided anywhere where Alan might be. It was the closing date for applications for the post of warden at the park field study centre. She and David spent four
hours wading through the two hundred and thirty-nine applications, and attempting to select six to be interviewed. Council yesterday had huffed and puffed, and permitted work on the park to
continue, as everyone had known they must do. She went down to the site to work out how long it would take them to clear up the fire mess, and how much of the old huts could be salvaged. It was a
hot dry day, with a fitful wind gusting about under the metallic clouds. Although it had been hot, the sun didn’t seem to have shown itself for days. In the park, dust and ashes from the fire
blew around in flurries and got into her nose, mouth, and eyes.

She didn’t get back to the office till six. Alan was sitting at her desk.

“What do you want?” she said.

“You.”

“Don’t be melodramatic. Go away. I’m tired and dirty.”

He did not move.

“Alan – look, it’s no good.”

“Just come for a quick drink. I need to talk to you. Please. Go and have a wash, and I’ll meet you at the main door. Just one drink, honestly – OK?”

She was too tired to argue.

In the pub he was curiously intent and considerate. She wondered whether he had simply forgotten the previous evening.

“What did you do last night?” she asked casually.

“Oh – I don’t know. Had too much to drink. That’s right – I tried to ring you. I couldn’t get through.”

“Why did you try to ring me?”

“I don’t know. Because I wanted to see you, I suppose – Caro – we can’t . . . it can’t go on like this.”

She nodded ironically.

“No. I mean it. I’m sorry I’ve – I don’t know what I’ve been doing, half the week. I feel as if I’m falling apart. I want us to go somewhere for the
weekend, away from everything else, and get ourselves sorted out – really, work out what we’re going to do, and then do it.”

She sighed. “Who are you trying to kid? Me, or yourself?”

“Well what then? D’you want to go on telling me it’s all over every second day, then behaving as if nothing’s happened the next time we meet?”

She recognized that that was what she’d been doing, but it didn’t seem very fair of him.

“Well what’ll be different at the weekend?”

“I’ve been thinking – I want to talk to you properly, without all these interruptions – and away from work. I want us both to know. . . .”

There was a silence. At last Caro shrugged.

“I’ll come. On condition that we both do whatever we agree to over the weekend.”

“Yes. That’s what I want.”

“Right.”

“Right.”

They went to an empty Indian restaurant, the type that only fills when the pubs close, and had a meal in the cavernous red gloom before setting off. Caro found her mood of despair lifting like a
cloud. There was a high-pitched wailing female voice coming through the stereo speakers. Alan began to speculate on what form of torture she was being subjected to. They agreed that she sounded as
if she had been physicaly stretched from India to Millside, specifically in order to make that noise here. Caro was almost light-headed with happiness. Why? What had changed since last night? It
was still a mess – everything was still a mess. The only difference was that Alan’s presence made her drunk enough to ignore it.

“I can’t imagine never sleeping with you again,” she said suddenly. “I don’t think I could bear it.”

He laughed. “Will you write me a reference?”

They called back at the Red House to get Caro’s things, and to make love, although they had assured each other that they would not get sidetracked.

The weekend continued as it had begun. Very late that night they booked themselves into an empty little pub-cum-hotel, in Chapelmoor, a village twenty miles east of town. It was absurd to think
about talking, discussing the future, organizing their lives, when each other’s skin and flesh and bones were within grasp.

They surfaced on Sunday morning – “For our statutory walk,” as Alan put it. It was a brilliantly sunny windy day, and they walked beside a reservoir that had flooded the valley
between two high moors. Fishermen were dotted along the shore, intent on the sparkling surface of the water. They walked in silence for quite a way, arms around each other’s waists, bodies
moving comfortably in step. At last Alan said, “All right.”

Goose-pimples suddenly came up on Caro’s skin, although it had not got any colder. She disentangled her arm from him.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting ready to listen to you.”

“Well you can still hold me, can’t you?”

“I – I – I can listen better if I don’t.” She put her hands in her pockets, hugging her arms to her sides, and stared at the water. The wind kept its surface
ruffled, and the sun was reflected off the moving crest of every little wave. It was so bright it made her eyes ache.

“I don’t want this to go on any more,” he said.

“No.”

“It’s a mess.”

“Yes.”

“I want us to live together. You’re right –” he went on more loudly, overriding her interruption “– we can’t do it here, I can’t just move in
with you. We can’t suddenly swap round all the bits of our existing lives, like a jigsaw. It’s got to change completely. We must go somewhere else.”

“Somewhere else?”

“Yes. Move away. Nothing will be any different while we stay here. I can – I can leave Carolyn – but not while she’s within reach. I want us to move away.”

The water kept moving and shimmering until she could no longer tell which was the surface and which the waves, and the whole reservoir seemed to be seething and moving horribly like a living
thing, crawling with insects – ants, or maggots. Something fell into place in Caro’s head.

“You were with her on Thursday night.”

“Yes.” He paused. “It isn’t fair – fair to her, Caro, I – she’s right. It’s not fair.”

“No.”

She did not let herself follow up the thread of what he had said, about not leaving Carolyn while she was in reach, because to be upset would be irrelevant. Mechanically, as if she had been set
a puzzle to do, she began to make a list of the items that would make the scales (as she already knew) weigh down against what he said –“moveaway”. It was simple. Clare. Her
friends. The Red House. Work – the park.

“We can get other jobs,” he said. “Neither of us will find it difficult.”

But in the autumn she would go round nurseries to choose shrubs and perennials for the blind garden, to fill it with scents and leaves that were lovely to the touch. Children would climb on the
climbing frame and tower, and throw bread to ducks on the lake. The place would take shape and grow.

“No.”

“You care more about – all that – than –”

“Than you? I suppose so.” She could feel him staring at her.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Well it’s true. You’re not the only thing in my life, Alan.” There was a silence. “And you wouldn’t want to know me if you were.”

After a short while he laughed bitterly. “I – I’ve left my wife – and kids – completely screwed up my life – and you . . . don’t want to give an
inch.”

“That’s right,” she said, making her voice light and cold. If that was what he thought; if that was what it all came down to. . . . She stopped, turning to face him, but he
carried on walking, ignoring her.

“Alan!”

He stood still, a few yards ahead of her, not looking at her.

“You don’t know what you want!” she shouted. “You need a – a mother, not me.”

He met her eyes briefly, expressionlessly, then turned and walked on.

Caro sat on the grass by the side of the path and watched him till he went out of sight, following the curving edge of the reservoir. Then she got up and headed back for the hotel. She felt
hollow and dull, in her belly and her head, as if she had a hangover. She wanted to explain to him – she could have explained – but there was no point. She gathered her things from the
room quickly, and ran downstairs to the bar. There were no buses back towards the city on a Sunday, the publican told her, looking at her curiously. She couldn’t think of anything to say, and
asked instead for a drink. How would she get home? At last she checked through her purse for change, and telephoned the Red House. Clare answered.

“Clare? Will – will you pick me up? I’m out at Chapelmoor, on the main road. I’ll – I’ll start walking to meet you.”

It was not until they were nearly home that she began to panic badly about what he might do.

Over that summer Carolyn’s ordered existence collapsed into a chaos, of which very little was memorable afterwards. The period of chaos was ended, with the neatness of
a full stop, by Alan hitting her. The night that he hit her provided a punctuation point not only to that summer, but to the first eleven years of their relationship. After it, things were
different.

When she found out about the woman, there was a long time which happened in bursts of conflicting emotions, rather than days, nights, or weeks. She convinced herself that Alan was unfaithful
(the most obvious fact, for some reason, was the hardest to swallow), that he deserved to be hated, that she would be calm and collected for the children’s sakes. She imagined ways of putting
everything right, scoured her memory for things that had gone wrong, blamed herself, wept uncontrollably and wished she was dead. She wished he was dead. She wished the woman was dead. She wished
he would go for good. She wished above all that he would come back. And every time she saw him he said something different. Twice he convinced her that he wouldn’t see the woman again, and
life would go back to normal. They both cried, and made love, and she knew he meant it. Then he stayed out the following night. At other times he came in late, drunk, either sentimental or
foul-tempered, and banged about the house until he managed to wake one of the children. On several occasions he told her he was moving out. She didn’t believe him, not only because of the
times when he told her he wasn’t, but also because he never took any of his clothes or belongings. When she heard him running upstairs to their room – his room – early in the
morning, to change his clothes, she was sickened by it. But she found herself clinging to the fact that he came back, that he was leaving this pretext for coming back, as a kind of hope.

Inevitably, it was the children that determined her behaviour. She must get up, make meals, keep the household running, smile and reply to their questions. She could do it, just about, if he
kept away. Each time he returned, it fell apart again.

To destroy the tenacious hope in herself, and to make him go – to make it end, so that something, even if it was worse, could begin – she finally packed his suitcase. When it was
full she dragged it into the hall and put his drawing-board on top of it. Then she went around the house gathering those of his belongings that she could carry: camera, binoculars, walking boots,
the framed prints and drawings from his study, his big architecture books, his alarm clock, his daft hat with a feather in it. Most of them were Christmas and birthday presents from herself. She
began to sort through his records. She worked mechanically, as if she were simply tidying up. It’s no good, she kept telling herself, it’s no good.