Love Is a Secret (39 page)

Occasionally, thought Lizzie, as she pulled into Sharon’s road with its line of identical small, terraced houses and white upvc front doors, she could quite see the advantages of being single. Oh yes! Not having to worry about cooking a meal but just snacking, when you felt like it. Not having to wonder if twice a month was ‘Enough’. Or arguing with someone about whether the children should be allowed to eat in front of the television. Still, it would probably get rather dull after a bit. That reminded her. She must give Sharon that press release about a new online dating group. Now where had she put it? Somewhere on the back seat along with the congealed Starbursts (the kids’) and the odd Bounty bar (hers).

‘I want to get home to do my violin practice!’ (Sophie.)

‘Me too!’ (Jack.)

Why couldn’t her kids be like everyone else’s and just give it up after the first term? It would save a fortune in music fees and earplugs.

‘Stop moaning you lot.’ Lizzie rang Sharon’s doorbell again. She had one of those awful chimes that her mother always said was common; a bit like the ‘Welcome’ mat outside.

Bracing herself, Lizzie tried to remember the excuses she’d lined up for being late. The camera had broken down. The traffic had been impossible . . .

‘Thank heavens! I thought something awful had happened!’ Sharon opened the door breathlessly, wearing her usual wrinkly jeans, revealing a scooped-neck lilac t-shirt and pale-blue, puppy-faced slippers; her face was flushed in the way that large people’s faces seemed to do, and with the sort of expression that suggested she’d just gone into the loo and discovered there wasn’t any paper (must go to the supermarket!).

A nasty cold feeling crawled up Lizzie’s ribs and down again. Her friend never got cross about anything. Laid back, Tom always said, in a tone that suggested she could take a leaf out of Sharon’s book. Plump people often were, she’d noticed. Laid back and smiley as though pretending that hey, they didn’t care they were a comfortable size 18 nudging 20. Ellie and Freddie, on the other hand, were skinny and blonde just like Keith had been.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine,’ Lizzie began to say before realising Sharon was addressing her own kids whom she was now hugging tightly as though Lizzie had just tried to kidnap them.

‘
Really
sorry but we got delayed,’ she said quickly as she followed Sharon through into the little hall with its beige plastic rack of small trainers, lined up neatly in pairs instead of scattered on the floor like they were back home. ‘The shampoo needed time to wash out.  And the traffic was awful . . .’

Jack nodded vigorously. ‘Ellie and Freddie locked themselves into the loo and it took ages to clean off the blue stuff and then . . .’

Why did the kids always have this irritating habit of telling the truth? ‘Actually that’s not quite . . .’

‘Why didn’t you ring?’

‘I’m sorry. The time just went by but the pictures . . . ,’ Lizzie found herself floundering, ‘ . . . the pictures are great. You’ll love them.’

There was something really odd about Sharon’s face. Something that made her pelvic floor plummet straight to the ground floor. Whoops.

‘Mind if I use your bathroom?’

She was in the tiny bathroom with its mirror tiles and the ‘
Please Wash
Your Mitts
!’ picture above the loo, before Sharon had said yes but then again, ever since they’d met at antenatal class (soon after the move from London), they’d been like that. In and out of each other’s houses. No ‘Do you minds
’
needed. ‘Your house is mine’ they’d always said to each other even though Lizzie and Tom’s three-storey Victorian semi round the corner was quite different. Motherhood, she thought, was a great leveller. Sharon was no kindred spirit but she was kind. And she didn’t mind helping out with the kids.

But now, as Lizzie flushed the chain (which chimed just like the front door bell!) and went to wash her hands (where was the soap?), she wondered what was up with Sharon. Don’t say her job was on the line too? She’d been worried about that last month.

Soap. Soap. Sharon always kept spare bars in the bathroom cupboard. Maybe that’s what she’d get Mum for her birthday: some nice expensive stuff from the late-night chemist which would, with any luck, still be open. And then tomorrow she’d get something else. Something nicer and . . .

Goodness! Lizzie picked up the small, pink, plastic square case in astonishment. It was an identical one to hers! And yet Sharon hadn’t said anything about seeing someone else. Hadn’t said she was now, after all these years, in need of a rather old-fashioned contraceptive device (according to Mum) which had now come back into fashion (according to
Charisma
whose headline had been ‘If the Cap fits . . .’).

‘Finished?’ Sharon was knocking on the door with that sharp edge to her voice again. ‘Freddie needs the loo.’

Quickly, Lizzie put the pink case back behind the toothpaste . . . How funny! That was the same toothpaste that they used. Or rather Tom used. A very strong kind of make in a pink and green tube that he always bought from the chemist in Docklands by his office. The one with the same name on the sticker in front of her . . .

A strange sick ball of something unidentifiable began to form in her throat as she noticed the green toothbrush next to it with a funny kink, just like the one she’d bought the other week, (before that overnight work trip to Edinburgh when Mum and Dad had had the kids) and then couldn’t find. In fact, she remembered it quite clearly because somehow, Jack’s hamster’s teeth marks were visibly indented on the stick . . .

Lizzie saw herself walk in slow motion across the bathroom. Watched herself in the mirror as though someone else was gliding past. Remembered with a sickening, deadening pang, the funny little endearments that her husband had muttered half-asleep last Sunday morning. Something about ‘boobies’ which wasn’t, she’d vaguely registered at the time, something she’d ever heard him say before.

She opened the door.

‘And another thing!’ Sharon was glaring at her, clutching Freddie who had an ‘I’ve-just-told-my-mummy face’ on. ‘Not only were you late but the kids tell me they had to pretend to have nits in their hair! I’ve told you before Lizzie. You can’t keep doing this. That feature on worms the other month was bad enough but . . .’

‘Please . . . tell . . . me,’ Lizzie heard herself speak in slow motion. ‘Please  . . . tell . . . me . . . Sharon, that there is a  reason – any reason – for my husband’s toothbrush to be in your bathroom cupboard?’

There was a silence punctuated only by the booming of the television next door.

‘I know. I know!’

Little Freddie was bouncing up and down, hand up in a bid to give the correct answer. ‘It was when Jack’s daddy came over for a sleepover. Wasn’t it, Mummy?’

2

ALISON

Yes!

No!

September 26th!

Alison had been looking forward to this day for so long – and yet dreading it at the same time. The day when their youngest – finally – was off to uni, leaving her and David home alone for the first time in, what, nearly twenty five years.

‘I can’t wait to go!’ Jules (christened Julia) had been saying this ever since her uni application had gone in. And although Alison had been wounded by this outburst, there was a small part of her that wanted to yell back over the John Lewis kitchen table: ‘And I can’t wait for you to go either!’

Of course it would be odd. Alison had had enough friends over the years who had been through the ‘last-child-to-leave-home’ syndrome, to know what it was all about. Some of these friends had moaned about having only their husbands around but she and David had been looking forward to it. ‘Life in a quiet carriage at last,’ he had remarked wryly.

So she’d bought some theatre tickets – including some special ones for that new Lloyd-Webber musical in preparation for David’s birthday just before Christmas. She’d helped her daughter to pack (‘It’s getting colder – you’ll need at least three sweatshirts!’). And somehow, they had crammed it all in the Volvo for the three hour journey up north, during which Jules had sat in stony silence, iPod plugged in so that for all the world, she might have been travelling in a completely separate vehicle. They’d arrived at a hall of residence built in dirty brick and glass and a plaque saying it had won a design award, hung back with other awkward parents while their children queued up for room keys, and then made the mistake of trying to help her unpack and make this horrible little room into ‘home’ . . .

‘I told you, Mum!’ Her daughter was glowering at her across the sea of clothes littered over those those scruffy, dark brown carpet tiles. ‘I told you not to pack all those sweatshirts. There’s nowhere to put them!’

She waved a hand (encrusted with nicotine stains which she no longer bothered to hide) around the box room which wasn’t much bigger than the travelling cage they’d had for Mungo, when he’d been a tiny, soft, golden puppy without the three-chinned rolls of Labrador weight that he’d accumulated over the years.

Take a deep breath, Alison told herself. ‘Iron’ your face by making your muscles relax: a tip she’d read about in some magazine. She was frowning, she could see in the mirror on the door of that awful wardrobe which also showed that not only had she forgotten to put on her usual pale blue eyeshadow in the rush to get out but that her mousy hair with its just-on-the-shoulder style (the same one she’d had for years) looked distinctly flat.

Stress maybe? There had been times when neither she nor David had thought Jules would get to uni. But after her A-level re-takes – so different from her older brother who’d sailed through with three grade As – she was finally here! So it wasn’t Oxford, where Ross had gone. Or even one of the more established red bricks. It hadn’t even, as she had to stop herself saying out loud, been called a ‘university’ in her day or David’s. But what did you expect – and this was something she had said out loud and probably too often – when your youngest had spent the last five years submerged in Facebook?

‘For Chrissake, Mum, stop it! You’re breaking that drawer! Tell her, Dad!’

David shot her a look which, after twenty nine – nearly thirty – years of marriage she could clearly read. ‘Don’t go on,’ his calm grey eyes said. ‘You promised. She’s nervous about starting her first day at uni. It’s understandable.’

Alison stood up, brushing herself down (when was this room last vacuumed?). ‘Don’t be so rude, Julia.’

‘Jules,’ said both David and daughter together.

At times like this, it felt as though they were in unison against her! They’d always been close, those two. Something, her sister Caroline had observed drily, to do with being the youngest child. Why was it that certain people who didn’t have kids, considered themselves to be experts?

‘You need to do something for yourselves, when she’s gone,’ her sister had advised bossily the other week. (Caroline was the kind of person, David often said, who insisted on making her own tea because no one else could do it the way she wanted.) ‘It’s all very well booking theatre tickets but you need to do something more physical. Not golf – too obvious. How about abseiling? One of my clients runs an extreme sports company. I could probably get you a free introductory lesson.’

The thought made Alison smile as she reluctantly yanked the sweatshirts out of the drawer and began packing them back into one of the three suitcases they had brought up. As if David would ever go abseiling!

At times, Alison wondered where the happy-go-lucky man, whom she’d married, had gone. True – she hadn’t been much older than Julia when they’d got married! David had been barely twenty three and still articled. How, she often wondered, had they managed in those early years? Yet they had, even though Ross’s ‘carrycot’ had been a pulled-out drawer lined with blankets.

Quickly, very quickly, they had fallen into the conventional role play which you hardly saw nowadays. One where she was at home, bringing up the kids and, when they were finally at school, doing . . . well, not very much to be honest. Occasionally she wished she’d gone to uni like her clever older sister so she could ‘do something’ now. But on the whole, she liked it. Enjoyed looking after their home (she actually liked polishing the parquet floors!); doing a leisurely school run without having to rush off to the office like some of the other mums; playing tennis a couple of times a week; doing her pilates (Wednesday afternoons) or the watercolour class (Thursday mornings).

As for David, he had fairly shinnied up the career ladder of the firm where he’d been articled. So much so that he’d been the natural replacement as Senior Partner. Not too bad, thought Alison, with a warm glow of satisfaction. Not too bad at all. And although it would be a terrible wrench with their daughter gone, it would at least give them time to be together as a couple again. Rather exciting, really!

‘Aren’t you going now?’

Jules stood there, arms folded, her reddish dark hair framing her face with its jagged do-it-yourself hair cut. (What other natural blonde would purposefully dye her hair?) But there was something odd in her face too. And not just that extra silver stud which had appeared on her right ear in the last week, to match the four that were already there. No. It was a certain look. A look that said,
‘I’m scared’
.

Alison’s chest lurched. ‘Wouldn’t you like us to stay and help you make friends?’

‘Make friends?’ Jules rolled her eyes. ‘For God’s sake, Mum. I’m not six any more.’

David already had his hand on her arm. It felt reassuring. ‘Come on, Alison. Let’s leave Jules to it. She’s got Freshers Week ahead. Remember?’ He grinned at his daughter. ‘You’ll soon make friends there. I still remember mine!’

Alison felt a funny pang; one that she’d had before every time her husband mentioned university or when Jules reminded her that despite all her nagging about the importance of getting grades, Alison herself had never been to uni. Like many women her age, she'd got married young instead.

‘Have you got everything?’ Alison still couldn’t bring herself to go. Suddenly, she was overwhelmed with the desire to keep her daughter safe. To make sure she handed in those essays on time. How on earth would she manage without her mother nagging and telling her to log off?

‘Yes, Mum.’ Jules was almost pushing her out of the door now.

‘Money.’ Alison shot a panicky glance at David. ‘You did transfer enough into her bank account, didn’t you?’

He nodded almost wearily. Of course he had. David was reliable. Stolid in his tweed jacket and ‘weekend’ brown cords. Logical. Organised.

‘Well don’t spend too much. Or drink too much. And if you put your glass down, even for a minute, unattended, you mustn’t drink out of it in case it’s spiked. And . . .’

David was whispering into her ear. ‘She knows all this, Alison. Give her a break or she won’t want us to come and visit.’

‘So you don’t want to come to the car park to see us off?’

Jules shook her head. ‘It might upset me,’ she said quietly. ‘Please go, Mum.’

So she did care! Instantly, Alison drew her daughter to her hugging her tightly.

‘Love you, Mum,’ Jules whispered.

Alison’s eyes pricked with tears. ‘I love you too darling.’

‘Call us when you’re ready,’ said David gruffly.

She knew that tone. He was as upset as she was but was grown up enough not to show it. And she needed to be the same; act the adult. To remind herself that she was fifty (only just!) and not nineteen.

The drive back was silent apart from the radio. Some author she’d vaguely heard of was being interviewed about her latest novel. ‘Now my mother is dead, I can write about her,’ she was saying coolly.

Was that how Jules felt? Alison glanced across at David’s handsome profile with the slight kink in his nose from a long-ago rugby accident, wanting to ask, but his face was set. That was something else she’d learned over the years. When he didn’t want to talk, it wasn’t wise to interrupt his thoughts. Clearly this was as difficult for him as for her.

‘Do you think she’ll be all right?’ she ventured just outside Birmingham when they were an hour from home.

He’d nodded curtly. ‘Course she will.’

But it was so weird to drive back with just the two of them when not so long ago, they had hardly gone anywhere without four in the car! So odd to unlock the heavy oak front door into the hall with its Edwardian table (inherited from David’s mother) and wander into the kitchen overlooking the neat, square, laurel-framed garden, without Jules pushing sullenly past.

Still, change was always odd. There had been something about it on
Woman’s
Hour
only this week. About how you would naturally miss the children when they went to uni but that it was a time to find yourself. Look at the advantages, the presenter had raved. No more arguments! No more nagging about homework. No more ‘What time do you call this?’

Thank goodness for Mungo! ‘Hello, darling,’ she said, burying her face in his neck as the dog lumbered towards her, as though to say ‘Glad you’re back but what time do you call this?’ He stood for a while, nuzzling her back and then wobbled back to his basket by the Aga. No need for a wee outside, she observed. He’d made full use of the terracotta-tiled kitchen floor. Poor thing! It was his age, the vet had warned – something else she didn’t like to think about.

After clearing up (David had headed to the study as usual to check his emails) she went upstairs. The house was so quiet! ‘Don’t go into her room,’ Caroline had advised. ‘Not for a couple of days. It will seem too upsetting. A client of mine has just written a book on this empty nest lark. Remind me to show you the proofs.’

Too late she realised her childless sister had been right for once. Everywhere, were reminders of Jules. Discarded jeans and t-shirts on the Habitat bed. Posters on the walls. Tubes of foundation, strewn over the dressing table which her daughter had painted black during her Goth stage. CDs  without covers. Jules was there and yet she wasn’t.

‘David,’ she began, running down the stairs towards his study for comfort. More than anything now, she just wanted to feel his arms around her. ‘I’ve just been in Julia’s room and . . . ’

Her eyes fell on the dark green suitcase in the hall. ‘Did we forget that one?’ A wonderful feeling of usefulness rushed through her. ‘I could take it up when you’re at work tomorrow!’

David shook his head, his eyes fixed steadily on hers. ‘It’s mine.’

‘Yours? You didn’t tell me you had another trip.’

‘I don’t.’

He was looking at her strangely now. Rather like Jules had looked at her in the hall earlier today. Only now did she realise he had his coat on. His grey tweed that she’d always liked; the one that smelt warm and David-y when she took it from him every evening and hung it on the rack in the hall.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’m leaving, Alison.’ His eyes were still fixed on hers, unwavering. ‘There’s no easy way to say this. I’m sorry. I’ve been wanting to go for years. But I needed to wait until Jules left. Until I’d fulfilled my responsibilities.’

The words chopped stiffly out of his mouth as though he was at a meeting. ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘There’s enough money in the bank to see you through for a few months until we can work out the practicalities. And please don’t ring. I’ll call when I’m ready to sign the papers.’

The papers?

He was looking at her now as though she was an idiot. ‘The divorce papers, Alison. I want a divorce.’