Life Begins (36 page)

Martin’s grin broadened, crumpling his handsome face to a more accurate representation of his forty-three years. ‘They are, mate, they really are.’ He lowered his voice, ‘Cindy’s expecting – we’ve only just started telling people.’

‘Hey, congratulations! That’s tremendous.’ Henry patted Martin’s arm, genuine delight pushing through his preoccupations. ‘We must get the pair of you over. I’ll talk to Tess about it – see if we can get the women to come up with a date.’

‘Yeah, absolutely.’ There was a pause while both confronted, privately, the unlikelihood of such an event coming to pass. ‘Or you two could come and support a good cause,’ Martin suggested. ‘Our choir’s doing a charity concert in a couple of weeks. It’s taken a while but we’ve got a lovely venue lined up – St Gregory’s, not far from the Albert Hall.’

‘The Albert Hall – goodness.’

‘No, the church is
near the
Albert Hall. It’s a breast-cancer charity. Cindy’s mother died from it – she and her sister Lu both have to have regular checks. But, hey, I’ll get Cindy to send you some bumph and you can decide for yourself.’ He glanced again at his watch, this time with a frown. ‘Look, mate, I’ve got to dash – I’m in need of a taxi and there’s bound to be a queue. See you at the concert hopefully,’ he added, delivering a farewell punch to Henry’s arm.

Henry, who had only to walk the remaining few hundred yards to the hospital where he saw patients privately two mornings a week, stayed where he was, watching Martin and
his exquisitely cut suit weave deftly through the crowds towards the station’s main entrance. The noise of announcements and hurrying people shrank to a blur as he remembered the envy he had felt for Martin at the party, still youthful, embarking on a second chance, with the curvy, radiant, goddess-like Cindy at his side. He could muster no trace of an equivalent emotion now, not for his friend’s new life, new wife, designer home and designer aftershave, probably, lingering still in the space he had occupied during their faltering conversation, and certainly not for the prospect of a new baby. Who would want to be at the beginning again, facing the hard slog of negotiating roles and trying to find out who each of you really was? Not to mention the invariably doomed efforts to reshuffle old acquaintances that the acquisition of a new partner demanded, as if friendships were as flat and flexible as an old pack of cards.

As the noisy reality of his surroundings came back into focus, Henry propelled himself away from the flower stall towards the nearest exit. He wanted a second chance, all right, but with Theresa. He wanted what they’d once had back again – the easy intimacy, tempting to dismiss it precisely because it was so familiar but which had taken so many hours and days and weeks and years to construct that he had utterly overlooked its value and fragility.

By the time he reached the street Henry’s heart was beating so hard he had to stop and make himself breathe. Such treasure and he had thrown it away. Unless… unless he talked to Charlotte and somehow secured her silence. Yes, that was it. A simple thing – why hadn’t he thought of it before? He would grasp the proverbial nettle, put his case, eke out some kind of peace of mind. Henry stepped into the road, then leapt back as a white van trundled past, so close that he could smell the driver’s cigarette. Across the
street he caught sight of Martin, his upper body framed in the rear window of a taxi, grinning still, waving madly. Henry raised a hand in return, then shuffled up the street to attempt a second crossing under the safer guidance of the traffic-lights, where he waited patiently for the green man to flash, even though the road was clear.

For the rest of the week April resumed the more rapidly changing weather patterns for which it is famous, but in such an extreme manner – patches of eye-achingly brilliant sunshine interleaved with torrential downpours – that by Friday Charlotte was quite used to seeing vast, vibrant rainbows arching across gun-metal skies beyond the fence in the back garden. Caught out several times, she had taken to carrying a brolly for even the shortest walk with Jasper and tried in vain to persuade Sam to pack a waterproof when setting off each morning on his bicycle – a new craze that Charlotte was sure she would have been able to celebrate more freely but for the sneaking suspicion that her son had adopted it out of spite to curtail the amount of time he had to endure with her.

‘A teenager, with pimples on his chin, a new sense of his own seriousness, a girlfriend, and you expected to be
liked
?’ Eve teased, when she phoned to confirm her arrival at the end of the following week, in good time, she promised, to help with preparations for the mah-jong party.

‘I’m not sure Rose is a girlfriend and, actually, he hasn’t got pimples – at least not yet.’ Charlotte let her gaze drift to the kitchen window where there were no rainbows, only Jasper sniffing at something in the grass. Her mother’s dog was proving a surprisingly complicated house-guest, only venturing into the garden if accompanied and then only staying there on his own if the back door was left open. The moment she prepared to go out he somehow knew it, no
matter how tightly curled up in his little basket he was, or how softly she tiptoed towards the front door. If she persisted with the abandonment, he would start to howl, so blood-curdlingly, so relentlessly, that on Wednesday Mr Beasley had been round to complain, muttering about noise-pollution assessments and cruelty to animals. Fearful on both counts, Charlotte had taken the dog with her for her next work shift, first keeping him in the car and then, when she discovered Jason tapping and cooing at the passenger window, into the shop, where Jasper had bedded down among the folds of her old green cardigan on a shelf in the stock room, as if his God-given doggy rights had at last been satisfied.

Eve laughed at Charlotte’s defence of Sam’s complexion. ‘Well, that won’t last, you doting mother, you. But I can’t wait to see him, I truly can’t. Not having any of my own…’ She let the sentence hang, adding quickly, ‘I called round on the off-chance on Monday night, by the way, but no one was home. You were stuck dealing with your mother’s accident, I assume. How
is
the old dear?’

Charlotte hesitated, partly at the uncharitable edge in Eve’s tone, for which she knew she was responsible (the distance between her and Jean had been the subject of many energetic conversations during their student years), and partly because, thanks to either the sloth or inefficiency of the Kent-area telephone-repair workforce, it was now almost three days since she and Jean had had any contact. ‘She seems to be managing, thanks. Carers, help from her cleaning lady, that sort of thing.’

‘Oh, good. I can’t wait to have a proper lovely catch-up about absolutely everything. And it will be hilarious to play mah-jong again – an aunt of mine had a set but it’s been years.’

Charlotte put the phone down with a fresh surge of doubt about reigniting an acquaintance that had lain dormant and not been much missed for a decade. She had been pleased at the bolt-from-the-blue email before Christmas and enjoyed the exchanges that had followed. But hearing Eve’s voice again was peculiar. She had sounded odd, different. Very much a part of her early happy memories of Martin. It would also be unsettling, Charlotte realized, to see her old friend now that she was separated and single – closer, in many ways, to the shy student whom Eve had befriended with shortbread and hot drinks twenty years before. Except no, Charlotte corrected herself, retrieving the phone and starting, with some defiance, to dial her mother’s number, she couldn’t be further from the girl she had been then: sad, lost, confused, angry, waiting for a parent to die and life to start making sense. It had been a truly desperate time, bearable only because there had been nothing else to know.

Halfway through dialling she stopped, pondering with the sudden clarity only ever granted by hindsight the obvious fact that when she had met Martin she had been on the rebound – not in a conventional sense but from the death of the man she had known and loved deeply as her father. And there had been that nagging sense of business unfinished to deal with too, of things unsaid and unexplained. No wonder she had constructed a tall pedestal and plonked Martin on top of it. No wonder he had fallen off.

It took Charlotte several seconds to register the engaged tone, beeping into her left ear as it had on every one of her attempts to contact Jean since Tuesday. Impatient, experiencing a spurt of real concern, she slammed the phone down and flipped through her address book on the slim off-chance that she had the cleaner’s number stored under ‘P’. She hadn’t, and had to console herself instead with the
acknowledgement that Prue had
her
number and was the sort who, in the event of any problem, would be only too keen to get in touch and disgorge the details.

Glancing at the page in the address book again, Charlotte’s eye stopped at the last entry, made a couple of days before in her own careful handwriting:
‘PORTER’
and then, in smaller letters, ‘Dominic and Rose’. She chuckled. As if she – or Sam for that matter – was likely to forget those two names in a hurry. And the man’s nose wasn’t really large at all, she decided, just a tad
aquiline
, an imperfection that was more than made up for by the deep, dark, dreamy brown eyes – like chocolate, but flecked with black, like – Whoa there, whoa there.

Charlotte closed the book and forced the room back into focus. Jasper had trotted in through the open door and was slumped against her left ankle, using it as he might a sturdy leg of furniture to lean against while performing the gymnastic feat of using a back paw to scratch behind an ear.

She had work to get ready for, not to mention the grand lunch with Theresa. Some proper makeup was in order for once and more than a passing effort at pinning up her hair. And Dominic might come into the shop, she told herself, hurrying up the stairs. He had apparently dropped in on Wednesday, when she was out on errands, and stayed for ages. Jason had given her a blow-by-blow on the questions he had asked, so intricate, some of them, that Dean, the true expert when it came to detail, had had to be consulted several times on the phone. Even Shona had mentioned the visit, saying, What a nice man,’ in such a gushing way that Charlotte had begun to wonder (while recognizing her own insanity) whether the girl was playing some dark, competitive game over their prospective new employer’s affections. She
had had to remind herself that, thanks to various lines of conversation during the Monday dinner, Dominic already knew enough of the shortcomings of her co-worker to have sworn Shona would be one of the various things he would choose not to inherit should his purchase of the lease go ahead. The order for the expensive new carpet would be jettisoned too, he had promised, along with Jason’s pet long-term project to surrender the little cast-iron Victorian fireplace for a measly few extra feet of shelves.

Charlotte hummed as she dusted her eyelids and cheeks with the assortment of worn makeup brushes that lived in an old toothmug next to the bathroom mirror, falling silent for the closer concentration required to apply lipstick. She was staring disconsolately at the dry sticky mess of her mascara, doubtful of any residual power it might have to enhance her looks, when her mobile rang. Thinking at once of her mother, she dropped the stick into the bin and hastily scooped the phone out of her pocket.

But instead of Prue or Jean, a man’s voice was on the line, so croaky and uncertain that it took an instant or two for Charlotte to recognize it as Henry’s. ‘I assume this is about your car mechanic.’

No, I – I’m sorry, Charlotte, I’d forgotten about that… Christ – sorry. It’s Mr Jarvis, at the bottom of Moreton Road under the railway arches. Unfortunately I don’t have his number to hand right now.’

Henry clenched his mobile. Standing in his own kitchen, he could easily have found Jarvis’s number, but he was in too much of a lather to think about such things. Theresa had set off so early on the school run that he had found himself with this unexpected breathing space – a bubble of quiet in which to address, at last, his plan of calling Charlotte. It had been hovering over him all week, surging and fading,
depending on how busy he was and the level of his own inner calm. ‘You’re meeting Theresa today.’

Yes.
We’re having lunch at Santini’s. If the food’s good and not too expensive I might decide to have my fortieth birthday dinner there. Why? Were you thinking of joining us?’

‘Charlotte… please.’

It occurred to Charlotte to hang up. Just in case he was on the verge of saying something truly awful – about liking her or wanting to see her again. But then it also occurred to her that he might simply be trying to apologize.

‘All I want,’ Henry blurted, ‘is for you not to tell her anything about what happened – please, Charlotte. Things haven’t been great, you see, so she might just… Look, don’t tell Tess
anything
, okay?’

No apology, then. No renewal of affections either, which was good. Charlotte hesitated, needing to think rather than because there was any pleasure to be had in prolonging Henry’s evident discomfort. What if she asks me something outright?’ she offered at last.

‘Oh, my God, she wouldn’t, would she?’

‘Henry, she’s your wife. You’ve just told me you’ve not been getting on too well. Maybe she suspects something. Maybe she thinks something happened in Suffolk. How do I know? All I can tell you is that, for reasons I’m not prepared to go into right now, I’m not a huge fan of the bare-faced lie.’

There was a long pause. ‘But if she doesn’t ask, you won’t say anything?’

‘No. I’d already decided that.’

‘Right.’

She could hear him breathing out.

‘Thanks.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

Charlotte stuck out her tongue at her reflection as she tackled her hair. She stabbed roughly with the clips and grips, not minding as she nicked her scalp, wishing she could turn the clock back to the time when Henry had been safely boxed as Theresa’s clever, slightly bumbling husband and she the disaster-prone friend.

By the time she was ready to leave, however, her good spirits had resurfaced. Guilt was robbing Henry of common sense. Theresa was as she always was. Since the shouting through the car windows they had enjoyed several thoroughly ‘normal’ phone conversations, covering a range of matters that included the maddening inefficiency of telephone companies and whether to make a fuss about Martin’s request
vis-à-vis
his and Cindy’s concert. On Theresa’s advice she hadn’t, with the happy result that Martin had offered to collect Sam straight from school the following Friday to give her a clear run to prepare for Eve and mah-jong. Charlotte was looking forward to the lunch enormously, not just because it seemed wise to fix on some plan for her hateful milestone birthday but because she was keen to move off such mundane matters and confide some of the other, much more seismic, things that had been going on in her life. Like the business of her father, and the miraculous new peace with Jean – subjects that required the intimacy of face-to-face contact as opposed to the impersonality of the telephone. And there was the Dominic Porter thing, too, of course, if she could muster enough courage.