Life Begins (30 page)

As instructed, Charlotte waited until the forest path before unclipping the lead. Jasper scuttled happily up the slope for a few yards, then slowed as the gradient took its toll. Charlotte, who had been worried the treasured creature might disappear among the trees, felt almost sorry for it, so old and silly, so ultimately helpless. The trees were tall and mostly branchless till their upper reaches. Spread beneath them, rippling over roots and round the base of brambles, shimmering in the dappled evening light, were oceans of bluebells. The air was cool and still, traced with scents of wild garlic and pine. Here and there clusters of midges hung in sunbeams, as clearly savouring the day’s premature burst of summer heat as the mums she had passed in shorts and T-shirts wheeling charges in sunhats out of the playground.

When a bench appeared on the side of the path Jasper
flopped in front of it, looking at Charlotte and panting hard.

‘So you stop here, do you? Fine,’ she muttered, stepping over him to sit down. The path was still an empty corridor in both directions, steep-sided, speckled with light and so undeniably beautiful that Charlotte felt a surge of guilt for never having set foot in the place before. The playground had once been a petrol station, she remembered. On the rare occasions she had driven past or made use of it, the possibility of appreciating – let alone exploring – the surrounding land had never occurred to her. How many other things in the world had passed her by? Charlotte wondered idly. She pulled out her mobile phone to have another go at getting hold of Jason, but then decided it wouldn’t feel right to break the hush of the forest. She had left a message already and it was Easter Sunday, she reminded herself, hardly an appropriate time to pester anybody, even about something important.

Instead Charlotte let her thoughts wend their way back, with an effort at ghoulish humour now, to her dire confrontation with the sisters in the supermarket: Cindy’s blotchy-faced sincerity, her charging after them through the automatic doors – it had been like something out of a farce: one had to laugh or go mad. For Cindy’s claims were insane, surely. Pregnant with Martin’s child, hormones rampaging, the sad woman was probably just seeing what she needed to see, caught in the blinding glare of love as Charlotte herself had been, twenty years before; a rabbit in headlights, poised for crushing.

Since then a frenzy of housework had done marvels for her state of mind – the exercise, the display of daughterly virtue. If she could have awarded herself a medal, she would have. Keeping busy meant she didn’t have to talk to her mother too much either, which was another plus.

Charlotte rested one foot gently on the dog and closed her eyes. The forest wasn’t quiet: dense with rustles and creaks and whispers, it breathed noise. It was a question of listening hard enough, she mused, and in the right way, letting one’s senses get in tune with a dimension beneath the obvious. These happy meditations were interrupted by the bleep of her phone, which proved to be a text, not from Jason – to her regret – but Martin: ‘Concert date May 28th venue not quite sorted but really want Sam to be there hope J recovering ok’.

Charlotte chuckled darkly. Clearly Cindy hadn’t mentioned their little run-in yet, which was good, possibly even generous, but here was the true Martin, the one
she
knew: self-centred,
dis
honourable, making demands, paying only the merest lip-service to any needs other than his own. He had added severely to her stress levels on Thursday by being too busy to help out with Sam and now all he really cared about was the date for his and Cindy’s insufferable
concert.
And why should she be responsible for getting Sam there anyway? It was
his
gig so
he
could organize transport for Sam. Charlotte dangled the lead in front of the dog’s nose to get him moving and set off up the path. Cindy, as she had reminded herself many times, was
welcome.

She found such a long route through the forest that by the time they got back to the playground the sun was sinking and the dog dawdling so badly that Charlotte picked him up and tucked him, protesting, under her arm. She kept him there, ignoring looks of doggy bemusement and attempts to lick her neck, until they were almost back at the house, rejoicing all the while that, thanks to the collapse of her house plans, the bluff about getting a canine companion for Sam had never been called.

‘Only me,’ she exclaimed, having let herself in with thes
keys Jean insisted she take with her, even for a two-minute stroll to the postbox. Only me,’ she repeated, more softly, checking the kitchen and then the sitting room where the TV had been left on and the mug of tea she had made sat, grey and untouched, on the footstool. Gingerly, she pushed open the door to the downstairs loo, but that, too, was empty, and still looking dingy in spite of the hours she had spent scrubbing at the ridges of lime-scale round the taps and the dreary avocado wall tiles. A bag containing fresh bread and milk was where she had left it in the hall, thanks to a flurry of other requirements upon her return from the corner shop – tea, finding the TV console and a particular cushion, and taking the dog for his usual lengthy weekend walk.

It wasn’t until Charlotte was halfway up the stairs that it occurred to her to feel worried. The house was deathly quiet. Her mother couldn’t have gone out, surely. Unless the sun had drawn her… Charlotte pressed her face to the porthole window on the landing, surveying what she could of the back garden – the potting shed, the rustic chair, lichen-covered, these days, and too fragile to sit on, three large molehills, an empty plastic bag, blown in from somewhere. What was left of the sun had collapsed to a fiery smudge of red, illuminating silhouettes rather than shedding light. Charlotte hurried on up the stairs, checking the bathroom before finally reaching the bedroom. The door was ajar and squeaked as she pushed it open. Jean was lying on her bedcovers with her eyes closed and her head tipped back awkwardly over the crest of her pillow. The Paisley dress, worn solidly since the hospital, was hitched halfway up her thighs, showing the lavish extent of the purple-black bruise on her left leg and an expanse of petticoat.

Charlotte was transfixed, momentarily, by the petticoat: an obsolete, pointless garment to most people, these days,
and yet she could remember, with sudden shocking lucidity, a tiny version of herself watching a stocking being pulled up under a similar hem of pretty lace, watching in awe and happy acceptance of the impossible, longed-for ambition of ever becoming such a creature herself, so elegant, so perfectly beautiful, so grown-up.

‘Mum?’ Charlotte took another step towards the bed. She was lying so still, so awkwardly. Absorbing the implications of this, Charlotte was aware not so much of horror as a deepening shame that she could ever, no matter how briefly, have imagined taking the death of this woman – loved, hated, never understood – in her stride.

‘Did Jasper enjoy his walk?’

‘Charlotte gave a gasp of relief.
Yes
… at least…’ She hesitated, recovering still. ‘Good, you’re okay, then… That’s good. Jasper, yes, I think so. He was tired, actually,’ she confessed, guiltily recalling the dog’s ride home in the crook of her arm.

Jean tilted her chin to a more natural position and eyed her daughter steadily. ‘Another pillow would be nice.’

‘Another pillow… of course.’

‘In the top cupboard. You’ll need to stand on the chair.’

‘Got it. Fine. Here we are. Can you sit up? That’s it… Better? I was going to make supper. Pasta and some lovely sauce – I’ll add extra mushrooms and things, make it really tasty.’

‘Thank you, dear, but I’m not very hungry. Just a piece of toast will do and maybe some Bovril.’

‘Bovril? On the toast?’

‘Butter on the toast, Bovril in a mug, with hot water. But first, I wonder, would you mind…’

‘Yes
?’ Charlotte was fumbling with the window catch. The room was so stuffy she could barely breathe.

‘Please don’t, there’ll be a draught.’

‘A draught… right.’ Charlotte replaced the latch and folded her arms tightly across her chest, tucking her fingers into her armpits as if to prevent them doing any more harm. Two more days. Just two more days and she would be free again – to be impatient and undaughterly and get on with her life. A team of four would cover the visits for a week, the health-care people had said – work in a rota and without any of the irritation, probably, that Charlotte felt, with her dark thoughts about the self-pity behind the helplessness, the fact that (as the nurse had said) it was her mother’s confidence rather than her body that had taken the real bruising. ‘You were saying?’

‘My hair… I wondered if you could help me wash it?’

Charlotte’s first instinct was to find a pretext to refuse. She had done so much, shopping, fetching, cleaning, carrying, walking, shutting herself off from the outside world, with the hateful Cindy débâcle gnawing at her and no comfort except the occasional call to Sam, who seemed to have nothing to communicate but a hurtful eagerness to get off the phone and race back to his baffling new friendship with the Porters. Their conversation the previous evening had lasted for precisely fifty seconds.

‘A hairwash – of course. You should have said before.’ She spoke brusquely in a bid to mask her reluctance. Would you like to do it now or after your –’

‘Now.’

It wasn’t easy. The bathroom was small, the basin at precisely the wrong height. They tried it with Jean sitting in a chair – sideways, front ways, backwards. She got very wet, then distressed. ‘It’s not my arm, it’s my neck. I can’t bend it the right way – it’s hopeless.’

‘Perhaps I could tape up the plaster with clingfilm and
help you stand under the shower,’ Charlotte suggested, eyeing her mother and the old fixed showerhead uncertainly. She, too, was rather wet now, splashed down her front and with sodden shirt cuffs, in spite of efforts to keep them out of the way.

‘No. Let’s leave it. Never mind. It’s all too
hopeless.
’

She was crying, Charlotte realized, astonished, glad of the steamy mirror that had allowed her to make the observation without any obvious scrutiny.

‘I want my Bovril,’ Jean barked next, standing up. ‘And my toast. Could you do
that
at least?’

‘I’ve a better idea,’ Charlotte replied, pressing her gently back into the chair. ‘Don’t move.’ She returned a few minutes later with an old plastic shower attachment, a cherished accoutrement during her teenage years, dug out of a bottom drawer in her bedroom, and several more towels. ‘Kneel on these,’ she ordered, placing two of the towels on the floor and one across Jean’s shoulders, then pushed and cajoled the crusty old suctioned ends of the hose over the snouts of the taps. ‘There. Now, lean forward as far as you can on your good elbow. That’s it. Close your eyes. The towel will help, but you’re so wet anyway a bit more dousing won’t do any harm. We’ll find dry things afterwards.’

Jean did as she was told without another word, and after a moment or two Charlotte fell silent too. She worked quickly, moving her fingertips deftly through the froth of the shampoo, feeling the soft contours of the scalp, not with revulsion, or self-righteousness, or reluctance, or any other of the unedifying emotions that had dominated the last few days – the last thirty years – but with a simple, respectful tenderness. At the reapplication of water for rinsing (nicely warm, not too hot, Charlotte found herself taking as much care as she had during the early, joyful, gurgling years of
bathing Sam), and Jean released several audible sighs of pleasure. There was no soap left to rinse but Charlotte kept the water running, stroking the thin wet streaks of hair till they squeaked under her fingertips.

It was such a simple task, not just the cleansing, the soothing warmth of the water, but the act of human physical contact, performed with caring hands. Turning the taps off at last, it dawned on Charlotte that she had experienced a few moments of the same nurturing attention herself, a couple of months before, kneeling on almost the same patch of lino, drooling and wretched, when Jean had held her hair for her and pressed the soft hot flannel to her aching head.

Invisible, infinitesimal as they were, the sense of these two connecting moments flooded Charlotte’s heart; almost, she decided later, trying to describe it to herself as she lay in bed, how she might have imagined a state of grace, were she sufficiently religious to believe in such things. Whatever it was, she knew that Jean had felt it too: it had been like a conversation between them, unspoken and yet the most powerful they had ever had. Afterwards, giddy with the surprise of it –
the joy
of it – Charlotte had helped Jean into dry clothes, then happily accepted expulsion to the kitchen to do battle with gluey spoonfuls of Bovril and the toaster that only popped when its contents were blackened beyond salvaging.

By the evening of bank-holiday Monday the two-day spell of tropical blue skies had thickened and darkened to a ceiling of lowering grey. The muggy breeze that had been teasing under the rugs and skirt hems of afternoon picnickers began to whip its targets in greater earnest, driving them home to seek the comfort of thicker clothes and hot meals.

‘They’ll be fine.’

‘I know they will. I’m not worried about them in the least.’

‘Then stop looking out of the window.’

‘They missed an egg – in the hinge of the gatepost. I can see it from here.’

‘You could do some more unpacking.’

‘And you could return to your own home.’

‘I’m cooking, remember? Goose fricassée.’

Dominic turned from the window, frowning. ‘Yes, what
is
that exactly?’

Benedict was lying the length of the sofa, sucking a pencil and studying a script for an audition the following day. ‘Same as my chicken fricassée except with goose, to the accompaniment of French beans, new potatoes – a veritable feast. Christ, you’re lucky to have me as a brother.’

Dominic returned his attention to the front window. In fact he had been on the lookout for a black Volkswagen more than the children, both of whom had phones, not to mention the protection of the father who had been hardy enough to suggest a pre-school get-together for their class in the park – rounders and bring-your-own picnic. Five o’clock, Charlotte had said, and it was almost six. He had tried to call to tell her about the rounders, to warn her not to hurry on account of it, but her phone had been off, for the journey, he had assumed, but that had been two hours ago. ‘How long do you reckon the drive is from Tunbridge Wells?’