Homecoming (15 page)

Primrose sees Lauren’s watery form behind the mottled glass front door. The door opens and the warm air of Lauren’s immaculate home hits her face – furniture polish and the scent of the new, unmuddied. Lauren’s pearl-stud earrings are bright beneath her short, textured hairdo.

‘Primrose!’ says Lauren, full of that generous pleasure that Primrose has always liked so much. ‘What a nice surprise.’

‘I wanted to say thank you for the baby gym.’

‘Come in, love. Got time for a brew?’

Primrose steps into the thickly carpeted hallway with its polished dark-wood table with a mirror above. Lauren leads the way into the kitchen, which looks to Primrose as if it has slid off the page of a glossy magazine. Primrose is taking off her coat and Lauren stops making the tea and looks at her belly.

‘Oh look at you. Can I touch the bump?’

Primrose nods, feeling the pleasure of Lauren’s excitement, almost as keen as her own.

‘What a miracle it is,’ Lauren is saying, placing a hand on the little swollen roundness of Primrose’s lower belly. Primrose thinks she sees then a flicker of something – a shadow of pain across Lauren’s face. But then she goes back to her tea-making, saying briskly, ‘How are you feeling?’

‘I’m well,’ says Primrose and she sits on a high stool at the central island.

‘Max excited?’

‘Ye . . . es,’ says Primrose. ‘I think he were happy that Joe was so happy.’

‘Joe always loved bairns, I remember,’ says Lauren. ‘And of course, a farm goes with this one.’

‘Yes, Max were right pleased all that’s happening. More pleased about that than about anything. Says he’s arrived.’

‘Does he now?’ says Lauren, placing a cup of tea in front of Primrose. ‘Biscuit?’

‘Please.’ Primrose is happy to see Lauren bring out a posh packet – the kind of biscuits that are individually wrapped in foil. Thick chocolate, flavoured orange or mint. She feels a seeping pleasure to be here, in this warm, snazzy house with the posh biscuits, talking to Lauren who’s so motherly, and without that faint whiff of disapproval she always gets off Ann.

‘Always comes first, the farm,’ Lauren is saying. ‘I remember with Eric, I were last in the pecking order behind a thousand Herdwicks.’

Primrose laughs.

‘How are you in yourself, love?’ Lauren asks.

Primrose takes another biscuit. Lauren isn’t eating them, she notices.

‘OK I s’pose. A bit . . .’ Primrose coughs, puts the biscuit down by her cup. She can feel Lauren’s eyes on her. ‘Maureen Pettiford came into the Co-op the other day. She was being kind, congratulating me on the baby, you know.’ She can hear her voice – the drag on it. She plays with the foil-wrapped biscuit, turning it over. ‘She was being really nice, I know she was. Said being pregnant was the best time in her life, the happiest time.’

‘Oh bully for her,’ says Lauren, snorting. ‘Give the woman a medal.’

‘Only I don’t feel . . .’

‘Bursting with joy at every second of it?’

‘No,’ says Primrose.

‘Course you don’t. And I’ll bet Maureen Pettiford didn’t either. It’s like anything else in life – it’s got all shades to it. I remember I found it an agony of waiting. Everything’s all up in the air.’

‘Yes, p’raps it’s that. I think . . . I think I won’t be much good at it.’

‘Yes, ye will,’ Lauren says. ‘You’ll have to learn it, just like you’d learn anything – darts or knitting. And you get good at it, gradual like. By the time you have another one, you’re a pro.’

Primrose unwraps her waiting biscuit and takes a bite, putting a hand up to catch the crumbs that fall from the side of her mouth.

‘Max’ll help,’ says Lauren.

Primrose looks at her, her mouth full, and raises her eyebrows.

‘P’raps not,’ says Lauren. ‘Ann then. Ann’ll help. And you’ll not prise the thing off Joe. He’ll be driving the tractor with the baby in a sling at his chest.’

‘Wonder if I’ll get a look in,’ Primrose says.

Ruby is in the back kitchen. She looks out through the hatch and makes slow circular motions on the counter with a cloth.

She is hypnotised by the rain, which slides down the window like dishwater. The light is dusk-like even though it’s just noon, and the café is miserably empty. The early lot have shuffled away after their breakfast toasts or mid-morning pastries.

She walks out into the aquarium room where the rain is throwing patterns onto the smoky glass. She switches on a standard lamp and it casts a circle of orange in one corner of a blue sea.

Sunk, she thinks. Her body feels slow, as if her sadness is a physical leaden thing and she can barely carry it. And hollow too. She feels hollow from not eating. ‘Make the most of it!’ her mother had said on the phone. ‘The heartbreak diet. Always works a treat.’

As she turns back towards the kitchen, a low beam of sunlight breaks through the rain and illuminates Dave Garside’s broad back where he sits on his usual stool at the hatch counter. Most days he sits there, so he can talk to her while she’s working in the back kitchen.

‘Seven letters,’ says Dave. ‘Tragic lover married, for example, all for nothing.’

‘No idea, Dave,’ she says quietly, coming back into the kitchen.

She looks at him, head down over his crossword. She notices the mousse in his hair, which has made it stiff, like whipped egg whites. Brave Dave. Well, Gay Dave, as it turns out. Who’d have thought it, after all that macho stuff at school – all the skateboarding and the go-kart racing. (His T-shirts were quite tight, mind.)

Dave the gay estate agent. He sits in her café to escape the over-gelled, shiny-suited ‘banter’ at his office (Dave always does enlarged quotation marks in the air when he mentions it), which generally centres on his sexuality.

‘Gary and Wayne,’ he’d said a week ago, sitting at the counter as usual, eating one of Ruby’s speciality omelettes for his lunch. ‘God, where did they mislay their communal brain cell? You’d think Winstanton would be more evolved, wouldn’t you? I mean, we’re only a couple of hours out of London. But it’s like they’ve never come across a gay man before. They just can’t leave it alone.’

‘Maybe Gary and Wayne have a bit of a thing for each other,’ she’d said, getting the teapots down.

‘Now there’s an idea,’ said Dave, looking into the middle distance. ‘Friends of Dorothy but so deeply in the closet that even their brain cell doesn’t know.’

She’d laughed. And then she’d started to cry.

‘Oh god Ruby, what’s happened?’

‘I think it’s over. With Bartholomew.’ She could feel her face dissolving into tears.

‘Oh dear, sweetie. Come on, group hug.’

Bartholomew hadn’t been in touch at all over Christmas – no replies to her avalanche of texts; to her snapshots of food; no affectionate late-night calls to say goodnight. That scarf should have told her something. Horrible thing, over-fluffy and custard-yellow, like something Big Bird would wear.

She thought of him in Marpleton – a place she’d visited only once. She pictured him in that warm house where the bedding smelled of starch, where his mother baked bread, where the banisters gave off breaths of polish. She thought of the armchairs – their lovely faded pink and the neat antimacassars. He’d kept her apart from it. He’d guarded it to his chest like a mistress. She thought of him laughing in the pub with his brother.

After a week of his silence and just before she was due to catch the train back to Winstanton, with her bag packed next to the front door, she’d talked to her mother about it.

‘Oh lovey,’ her mother said. ‘I am sorry. I thought you seemed quiet.’

And Ruby knew then why she hadn’t wanted to talk about it earlier. She didn’t want the patient pronounced dead at the scene. If she didn’t talk about it, she could tell herself he was just being a typical rubbish bloke. Uncommunicative. Or that somehow it would all come right.

‘I think every person has a temperature,’ her mother had said, after Ruby had told her everything. ‘And you need to find someone who’s the same temperature as you. I know a couple – Alan and Hilary – and they spend most of their time apart. She works away, they take separate holidays. And it works. Don’t ask me how. They’re just both built that way. Kind of chilly, if you ask me. Now me and your father, we could never do that. Would be torture. We’d argue all the time. It’s bad enough when he goes on his golf weekend once a year. We’re just not built for it.’

Ruby had started to sob, the snot trailing down her upper lip and her mother had walked over and scooped her up, cupping her head into her shoulder and saying, ‘I’m so sorry, love, you were so happy. And he seemed such a nice chap.’

‘What if,’ Ruby had juddered between sobs, ‘what if he seemed like my temperature, at the beginning, but now all of a sudden he’s not?’ And she’d juddered again and her mother had kissed the top of her head where it lay.

‘Lovey, you can’t make him into something he’s not. You can’t do anything about the way he is. You just have to accept it, and maybe look for someone who is more at your setting.’

‘I’ll never find anyone,’ she’d wailed into her mother’s perfumed chest. ‘No one wants me. I’m too full-on.’

‘I want you,’ her mother had soothed, and she had taken her face in both her hands, pushing her wet cheeks together, so that she thought she probably resembled a goldfish. Her
mother
looked at her eyeball to eyeball. ‘And you’re not too full-on. You’re just full of life, my darling. And if he doesn’t want that then he needs his head examined.’

Back in Winstanton, she’d walked up Theobald Road carrying her bag and as she did so she noticed how much of this world was one they’d built up together. Fetching the paper from Mr Shah on Saturday mornings; walking home along the river together after work; Bartholomew sitting at the kitchen table reading out from the television guide while she cooked. What would she have left, without him? Her job at the café, her little flat, her book club and Sheila, who’s into cooking. They called each other about new recipes, but there was no one she could talk to about this.

She’d looked up and seen a light on in his flat and it came to her that it had all been a silly mistake. He’d been busy, or his phone had got lost or there were things on his mind but nothing so catastrophic as the things she’d been imagining, nothing to provoke such a flood of tears as she’d given way to. She’d rung his bell. And suddenly there he was, standing in front of her. Real. Alive.

‘Ruby . . . hi,’ he said. He’d used her name as if she were an acquaintance. As if she disturbed him. He was wiping his palms on the back of his jeans and he stepped backwards in the hallway saying, ‘Come in’. She didn’t know what on earth she was stepping into.

‘How have you been?’ he said.

‘Why haven’t you called me?’ she asked.

‘Oh god Rube, I’m really sorry. It was just really hectic at home. I didn’t get a chance.’

And for a minute she’d thought it was all going to be alright.

‘How was your Christmas?’ he asked, and it struck her that this was the kind of thing you asked a colleague, or someone in a shop. ‘D’you want something to eat? I’m just making something.’

She’d set her bag down in the hallway and came to sit in his kitchen but she kept on her coat and the ugly scarf, only removing her woollen hat for the purposes of dignity. He busied himself at the stove – something he never usually did – and she realised that the very texture of the air was different.

‘Is everything alright, Bartholomew?’ she said. She felt small and she stayed still, as if trying not to dislodge anything. No sudden moves.

‘Yes, fine. I’m just tired. It’s been a long week. And it’s going to be very busy at the garden centre. I’m bracing myself.’

She had nodded slowly. ‘Perhaps I should brace myself too,’ she’d said quietly. He hadn’t responded. She said, ‘I think I’ll just drop my bag back home and then I’ll pop back.’

‘Right you are,’ he said.

She had walked slowly to her flat, unable to work out what was different but knowing that nothing was the same. Her mind was a complete fog. At the flat, she plumped up her hair and put on some lipstick and a spray of perfume, then walked back down the stairs with the feeling of being condemned.

She doesn’t remember what they talked about that evening. How the conversation went – the babble on the surface. All she remembers is his coldness beneath. It had surprised her with its force. It was as if he was smiling at her from the very surface of himself and yet she could detect some malevolent force or an undercurrent of cruelty at his core.

She had debased herself by staying the night. Perhaps some part of her thought she could thaw him out in the intimacy of the bed, but they didn’t touch as if they both understood that touching was prohibited in this new frozen landscape. The duvet covered his shoulder like snow on a mountainside. She’d turned over in the bed, her back to his back. And tears had run down her cheeks. She must stop crying, she thinks now, as the tears prick up again in the back kitchen. She’s crying all the time.

Two solid weeks of it, as if her whole being were liquid and only held in by a weak membrane which gives way too easily: on the walk to work, in the toilets, but most of all in the evening in her flat, where she sobs on her bed. Moments of reprieve come, like when Dave tells her about a couple he knows (Brian and Steve) who split up lots of times before ending up together (‘God, it was the most boring saga in the world – no offence, Rube – they’re happy as anything now.’). She grasps it as concrete evidence that all is not lost, though she knows it is. She reads old text messages, lying there among the tissues at night. Sends new ones.