Living with Shadows (45 page)

I
think
I
understand
you
well
enough
to
know
that
you
will
not
cause
me
any
more
pain
and
that
eventually
you
will
find
it
in
your
heart
to
forgive
me.
I
would
hate
to
think
that
our
time
together
will
always
be
tarnished
with
regret.

I
have
decided
to
sell
up
and
move
abroad
in
the
hope
of
making
a
fresh
start
and
perhaps
finding
even
a
modicum
of
happiness
in
this
precarious
existence
of
mine.

I
have
no
regrets
about
telling
you
even
if
it
has
made
you
despise
me.
I
want
you
to
know
I
could
never
have
kept
such
a
thing
from
you.

With
much
love,

Helen
x

Jim read through the letter twice and then stared at the slip of paper that had been carefully wrapped inside it. It was a cheque for ten thousand pounds, much more than was necessary since he had nowhere near finished the work. If he was meant to be grateful by this gesture it had no such effect. He was overcome by a sense of nausea. This passionate affair that had most likely cost him his marriage had been no more than a sham. No matter what she said in her letter about truth and honesty, he believed that Helen was as much the aggrieved lover as Scarlett O’Hara. A survivor, that’s what Helen Duncan was and this cheque proved it. Just like Carl, he had been paid off.

Kate scanned the host of expectant faces craning over the barrier at airport arrivals. Someone was waving and she saw Jim making his way towards her. She gripped the handles of the trolley more tightly. It was impossible not to feel anything for him; he was still as handsome to her now as the first time they had met. But that was superficial, meaningless, because the thing that had attracted her most of all had been the thing that he had destroyed—his integrity. Having realised this on seeing him, she was now glad she had not said in her brief reply to his text how much she had missed him.

Jim took her luggage from her. ‘You look good,’ he said as they cut across the car park.

‘Thanks.’ She allowed him to take her case without so much as a glance in his direction. They travelled home in silence. She didn’t feel like talking about her holiday, and anyway, Jim didn’t ask.

When they arrived home he carried her suitcase into the house. It had always felt good to step inside her home after a holiday, to be greeted by the familiar smells and have her own furniture and ornaments around her instead of the scant furnishings of an apartment. But not this time. It was as if everything had been tainted by Jim’s infidelity. She assumed he’d never brought that woman here, but it made no difference. She felt her presence everywhere and could not rid herself of the thought of her and Jim together.

‘Where shall I put it?’ he asked following her into the hall.

‘Just leave it there. I’ll see to it later.’ Normally, she would have made a cup of tea and put her feet up but she couldn’t bring herself to sit and chat with Jim as though everything was fine. She felt a desperate need to get away. ‘I’d better go and see Mother.’ She rooted through her hand luggage for the present she’d bought her and then went to find her car keys. As she passed through the living room, Jim glanced up from his chair as if he was about to speak, but said nothing. There was no need; the look on his face said it all. She hurried on out of the house. All week she had thought about how things would be when she got home. Now she knew, and the reality of the situation was much different from what she had imagined.

‘Oh, it’s you!’ Her mother looked surprised. ‘I didn’t expect you back yet.’

‘I told you I’d be back today.’ Kate checked the exasperation in her voice, and then she noticed the bruises on her mother’s face. ‘What on earth have you been doing?’ she asked, turning her to the light.

‘Oh, it’s nothing. Had a bit of a fall. I rang you. I’d forgotten you were away. Fancy you going off on your own, and to a foreign country.’

Trust something to happen the week I go away, Kate thought. She hadn’t told her mother she was holidaying alone knowing how she worried. ‘Jim was busy and I needed a break. Lots of people go away separately these days. Anyway, what happened? Did you see a doctor?’

‘No, Jim wanted to take me to casualty but once I’d sat and had a chat and a cup of tea, I felt fine. Oh, and he fixed the tap while he was here.’

That blasted tap. She’d kept forgetting to tell Jim about it. Another black mark!

‘In fact, he’s been here every day since. He tidied up the garden for me the other day. We saw the squirrel, too. Oh, and Sam brought me some soup that Alex had made. He’s handy, isn’t he?’

‘I’m glad they’ve been looking after you.
For
once
,’ Kate whispered under her breath.

‘Jim’s handy too. You’ve got a good husband there,’ her mother said, getting to her feet. ‘I’ll make us some tea.’

She remembered her father saying much the same not long before he died. She was visiting him in hospital. ‘Don’t go and mess this one up. Jim’s a good man.’ Her parents shared the same view that it was she who must be worthy of the man rather than the other way round.

Kate knew she wouldn’t tell her mother about Jim’s affair. It wouldn’t be right to burden her with it even for the chance of letting her see he wasn’t as perfect as she thought. To see a third marriage end in divorce would just about finish her mother off.

It seemed a life time ago since she had married her first husband, Martin. Having endured a strict upbringing, Kate couldn’t wait until she was old enough to get married and leave home. How different her feelings when told they wanted nothing more to do with her. She could remember quite clearly her parents’ reaction when she announced that she was leaving Martin—especially when they knew it was for someone else. That was the real reason for their hostility; that and the shame. What would the rest of the family and the neighbours think, as if it mattered? Banishing her from the family still seemed a harsh punishment to her. They had given her a choice, her family or the other man. She chose Dave because she believed she loved him.

They were a close knit family and she missed her brothers and sisters desperately. Then one day, when she was about seven months pregnant with Ben, she bumped into her mother and younger sisters in town. She hadn’t set eyes on them since she had left home and was elated to see her little sisters and they her. Kate had hugged them to her but her mother hurried them away. It was obvious she didn’t want her innocent daughters contaminated by a fallen woman. It all happened in a moment but that moment was as devastating as the full force of a thunderbolt. Kate went home and wept for days.

Several months passed before she decided to try and get back into the fold. Ben was a few months old. She told Dave she was taking their son to see them, that surely they couldn’t resist their only grandchild. When they got there she made Dave wait in the car, no use antagonising them. She went to the back door and knocked, her heart pounding in her chest. Dad came to the door. He didn’t know what to do, what to say, seeing her standing in front of him holding her baby, his grandson. There was a moment’s indecision as he looked from her to Ben, and then her mother’s voice from the kitchen almost screaming. ‘Tell her to go. I don’t want her here.’ The door slammed in her face and she ran back to the car in tears.

More time passed and then, out of the blue, Ken, her younger brother turned up at their flat. It was wonderful to see him again and to hear how everyone was getting on. He’d been told not to have anything to do with her but he said it was up to him whether he saw her or not. He was to become the link that was to mend the rift between them. Kate soon realised they were as curious to know about her as she was about them.

When she invited them to Ben’s christening, everyone came except her father, who took a little longer to accept things but within twelve months they were reunited with the family and all was forgiven. Any pictures of Martin were surreptitiously removed from albums and photo frames and he was never mentioned again.

In later years, and in view of how things turned out, she could see their reasons for trying to protect her, but she had to be allowed to make her own mistakes. Trying to coerce her into living the life they expected of her was never going to work; it only made her more determined. No one can live someone else’s life for them. Sometimes, even now, she wondered if it hadn’t been for Ken, whether they would have excluded her from their lives for ever.

Nowadays, Kate would look at her mother and see how frail she had become. She would notice the effort it took to pull herself out of a chair, the shuffle of her slippers as she moved slowly from place to place, and her increasing forgetfulness. Yet she still clung to her independence and never let on that she might be finding it difficult to cope. Gradually, the jobs she had done all her married life were beginning to get too much for her and Kate would offer to mow the lawn because it was a sunny day or nip up to the shops because the weather was too awful for her to go out, until eventually she didn’t need to make excuses; her mother yielded to these offers of help with an air of resigned acceptance.

Seeing her now, Kate didn’t recognise the person she used to be. Back then, there had been a pattern to her life that was unshakable. Each day she would perform the same round of chores in the same order, dusting, vacuuming, mopping, washing, shopping, making meals; she allowed nothing to hinder the clockwork precision of her routine. Vacuuming was the most dreaded chore of all. If anything lay in her path, shoes, toys, whatever, she would scream like a banshee. Kate used to envy friends whose mothers went out to work as their lives seemed calmer. They didn’t have a ferocious whirlwind howling through their houses every day.

Kate heard the sound of the kettle boiling and cups rattling in the kitchen, and then the clinking of the spoon in the cup as her mother stirred the tea. She knew which teaspoon she would be using. It would be the one she’d inherited from her own mother. It was different from all the other teaspoons in the cutlery box. It was the teaspoon for stirring tea. That thought was both a comfort and a source of anxiety to Kate. The comfort was in that part of her life which remained ordered and secure; the anxiety had to do with what the future held and the inevitability of change.

‘Here you are,’ her mother said, placing a cup of steaming tea down on the table and smoothing out the tablecloth with her bent hands, her fingers twisted with arthritis. ‘Would you like a biscuit?’