Missing You (11 page)

Later, after the service, Fen’s stepmother, Deborah, spoke to the woman, and the two of them were like mirror images of each other, Mrs Rees holding Deborah’s chill hand between her trembling palms, trying to offer some comfort.

They were friends, Emma Rees and Deborah Weller, of a kind. Mrs Rees was devoted to Deborah and would do anything for her. Even after the accident she would go out of her way to please the wife of the headteacher of Merron College. But although Deborah always smiled when she saw Mrs Rees, although she had the clothes she no longer wanted dry-cleaned before she passed them on to the college’s kitchen supervisor, there was a reserve to her friendship. Behind Emma Rees’s back, and never in front of any of the kitchen staff, Deborah Weller would roll her eyes when she spoke of the woman and her ‘funny little ways’. Although she insisted Mrs Rees was always welcome in her home, she complained about her every time Emma turned up looking for some company, or some sympathy. On the odd occasions when she did not have a convenient excuse at hand to avoid inviting Mrs Rees in for a cup of tea, Deborah said ‘the Rees woman’ always outstayed her welcome. She would mimic the other woman’s voice, imitating her turn of speech, her accent, her nervous, continuous apologies. Deborah felt duty-bound to appear to be kind to Mrs Rees, especially because of the circumstances of Joe’s death, but her graciousness was not heartfelt. Everyone knew how Deborah felt, except Mrs Rees, whose adoration of her employer’s wife was unconditional.

Fen is certain that Mrs Rees will have been to church today. She won’t have missed the Christmas service. Probably it is the only thing she will have looked forward to over the holiday, the only crack in the infinite ice of her loneliness. She will have tucked herself into a corner at the back of the church, dabbed a tissue at the corner of her eyes when the children in the choir sang ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, and gracefully received the kind words of the congregation, the vicar’s friendly handshake. Then she will have visited Joe’s frost-hardened grave. She’ll have brought some holly in a jar, perhaps a small gift. She’ll have lit a tea-light in a glass jar with tinsel at its neck. She’ll have had a quiet little chat with her only child.

‘I’m sorry,’ Fen whispers, her pain making her curl into herself, like plastic in a flame.

She drifts downstairs to switch off the lights and lock up. She does not want to put the television on; she does not want sentimental, nostalgic programmes to remind her of her isolation. She does not want to think about her sister with her swollen ankles, or her poor father, or Deborah, who now lives in Australia; and she definitely doesn’t want her thoughts to return to Mrs Rees or Joe or Tomas.

So she chases her ghosts away. She fills her mind with thoughts of a different man, a new man, and thinking of Sean brings her only pleasure. She wonders what he is doing, whether he has thought of her at all today; she thinks that, probably, he won’t have. She bought him a small gift, a little soapstone statuette of Ganesh to watch over him and keep him safe. He thanked her for the gift when she gave it to him and slipped it, unopened, into the pocket of his bag, and she suspects that he will have forgotten it is there.

Lilyvale feels empty without Sean. There is too much space, too little noise. And the neighbours on either side are away so there is nobody around and the quiet is deafening. In the silence Fen can hear the mechanics of the fridge and the ticking of the timer on the central heating system. She double-checks that the windows and doors are locked. She draws all the curtains. She feels jumpy, nervy. It’s too quiet. She wishes there were somebody she could ask over, but nobody else she knows is entirely on their own.

It’s her fault. She has kept herself to herself. She has not made many friends.

Sean will be back in a few days’ time, but those days, right now, feel like forever.

Fen goes back upstairs and pushes open the door to Connor’s room. Carefully, she lies down beside him on his bed, and listens to his breathing until Christmas Day becomes Boxing Day and there’s a touch of light in the sky beyond the window, then, turning her face into the pillow, she sleeps, at last.

fourteen

Sean is standing on top of the Lady Chapel roof, in the rain, wearing a safety harness and gloves. He is taking photographs of the Victorian cupola, which is much larger from where he stands than it looked from the ground.

Two days previously, during a storm, a chunk of masonry fell from the roof and shattered so violently that the concrete of the path below caved and cracked. It is obvious, from Sean’s vantage point, that the cupola is unsafe. Water has found its way to the steel rods which pin the structure together so the rods are corroding and, as they swell, they are putting pressure on the fine limestone blocks from the inside; now the stone has begun to concede and crack. Sean walks around the cupola and counts the visible fissures. He checks the condition of the roof. Frost-blackened weeds choke the guttering; there is a filthy mess of feathers and bird-shit; that’s probably a seagull’s nest crouching by the rear wall; some of the leading is loose or missing. It’s clear that nobody has been up here to carry out any maintenance for some years.

Sean records a verbal summary of what he can see into his phone, and then he gets back into the basket of the cherry picker, where the chapel’s caretaker is waiting. He’s a small, slight, chipper man, pale-eyed and grey-haired. He reminds Sean of a little terrier dog. He shakes his head as the basket goes down and says: ‘I told them the cupola needed looking at. I told them a thousand times. What’s the damage?’

‘It’s dangerous. It has to come down,’ says Sean.

‘Permanently?’

‘No. It’s fixable. Some of the stone will need replacing. It’s hard to say until we’ve bought it down and had a proper look at it.’

‘That’ll cost a bob or two.’

‘It will,’ says Sean. ‘But it’s your best option in the long run. In the meantime –’ he unhooks the safety bar as the basket reaches ground level – ‘we need to fence off the area in front of the chapel. You’ve got temporary barriers?’

‘I’ll have a look,’ says the caretaker, taking off his hat and scratching his head.

‘You want to cordon off this whole section, all the way round, and put up some warning signs, in case it all comes down. Are you all right with that?’

The caretaker nods.

‘What I’ll do,’ says Sean, ‘is go back to the office now. I’ll call . . . what’s his name?’

‘Mr Lamprey.’

‘Yep, I’ll give him a call and tell him my immediate thoughts and concerns, and I’ll get a report and recommendations over to you and him by the end of the week.’

‘Right,’ says the caretaker. He does not look happy.

‘It’s not worth the risk of leaving it like it is,’ says Sean briskly. ‘Some punter gets hurt and you’d never forgive yourself.’

‘I told them it’d come to this,’ says the caretaker. ‘They can’t say I didn’t tell them.’

Sean takes off his glove and extends his arm to shake the man’s hand.

‘I’ll call you later,’ he says.

In the car, he turns on the engine to warm up the heater and jots down notes in his pad. He finds it best to do this straight away because, lately, his brain hasn’t been working as well as normal. He has forgotten important pieces of information; he has forgotten to do things that needed to be done. He can be thinking about a problem, where to source a certain kind of marble, for example, when his thoughts will suddenly drain away, like water disappearing down a plughole, and he knows he won’t be able to retrieve them. They’ll have vanished into the complex, underground pipe-ways of his mind to be replaced by thoughts of Belle.

The state of separation does not hurt quite as much now as it did at first, the sharpness of the pain has muted into a dull ache, but it’s still there, all the time, the loneliness and the shock. He still finds it hard to believe that this thing has happened to him. That Belle, his Belle, who always said that trust was the only essential in any close relationship, has deceived him so badly.

He remembers a day last year. It was winter; they were with Belle’s parents in a country pub in the Cotswolds. It was a low-ceilinged, oak-and-wood-smoke place with a menu that featured all manner of game but had no vegetarian option. Countryside Alliance notices were taped to the walls, and a stuffed fox posed, one paw in the air, in a glass case suspended over one of the fireplaces. The fox held a car-crash-type fascination for Amy. She looked like Alice in Wonderland in her white tights and blue dress, standing on tiptoe to get a better look at the dead animal.

Belle’s mother squeezed Sean’s hand affectionately. She hadn’t thought much of Sean when he and Belle first met. She thought he wasn’t good enough for her daughter. But as time went by, and his devotion to Belle was consistent, his salary increased, they married and bought their beautiful home, then gave her a beautiful granddaughter, she had grown fonder of him. She tried to compensate for her former sniffiness by praising and complimenting Sean at any given opportunity.

‘Well, Sean, I don’t know what it is you’re doing for Belle,’ she said with a suggestive edge to her voice, ‘but I’ve never seen her look so happy. She’s positively glowing.’

Sean smiled and looked over to Belle. He caught her eye for a second, but she looked away quickly.

‘We’ve been wondering how you do it,’ Amanda continued. Her face was close to Sean’s. She was wearing dark pink lipstick which seeped into the feathery cracks around her lips. ‘Because honestly, Sean, our friends’ children’s marriages seem to be falling apart all over the place, but you two, you’re steady as a rock.’

‘Mum, please,’ said Belle. ‘Stop it.’ She scraped back her chair, scrunched her napkin onto the table, picked up her handbag and called to Amy, who left the fox and returned to her mother’s side, questions on her lips. Sean watched them head off conspiratorially towards the cloakrooms. He smiled.

‘There’s no secret,’ Sean said to Amanda. ‘If Belle’s happy, I’m happy. That’s all.’

It wasn’t me, he thinks now. I wasn’t making her happy. It was the Other.

‘There you go again,’ he says out loud. ‘You’re always thinking about her. What is the point? You have to stop.’

He closes the notebook and starts the car’s engine. He’ll put some music on loud. That usually does the trick.

Sean goes into work through what is known as the tradesmen’s entrance, the rear fire-escape door where the smokers congregate in ever-decreasing numbers for their cigarette breaks and gossip, no matter what the weather. He uses this door because he does not like clocking in through the security-heavy front door, partly because of its cameras and codes but mainly because he has lost his swipe card and therefore gaining entry is a time-consuming performance. The back door takes him, via a short service corridor, into the reception foyer, where Lina sits.

When Sean joined the company, the reception area was businesslike, befitting a small, specialist construction outfit. It looked like the sort of place you’d sit while waiting for your car to be MOT’d: masculine, scruffy, slightly untidy. Now it’s all black faux-leather sofas self-consciously arranged to look informal, a water cooler, a coffee machine, and glossy magazines on a glass-topped table. Flowers, always fashionable varieties that Sean doesn’t recognize, sprout out of big square vases half full of glass beads and gel; huge, framed prints of recent projects – the photographs taken at artful angles and tastefully lit – dominate the white walls. Lina, glamorous, neat, pinkly lipsticked, smiles at Sean from her glass-topped desk. He salutes her.

‘How are you, Mr Scott?’ she asks.

‘Mustn’t grumble.’

‘Pleased to hear it,’ says Lina, tapping a pen against her teeth. ‘Nobody likes a grumbler.’

Sean grins and slots coins into the drinks machine.

‘Cappuccino? Two sugars?’

‘Please.’

He takes the coffee to Lina and sinks into one of the sofas beside her desk. She bites the end off the sugar wrap and sprinkles the granules onto her coffee froth.

‘Anything exciting happen while I was out?’

‘Errrmm . . .’ Lina stirs her coffee and stares up at the ceiling. ‘No.’

‘Are there any messages?’

‘No, but your wife called,’ says Lina.

‘Was anything wrong? Did she say?’

‘She sounded all right. She didn’t say it was urgent or anything.’

But Belle never calls him at work.

‘I’d better call her back,’ he says.

‘You don’t need to. She said she’d try again later.’

‘Still . . .’

‘Sean, leave it. Make her wait.’

‘It might be something important.’

Lina shakes her head and rolls her eyes. Sean stands up, speed-dials Belle’s number – his number, their home number – on his mobile, holds the phone close to his ear and walks away from the reception foyer, back out into the fresh air. It takes a while for Belle to answer.

‘Hi,’ he says. ‘It’s me. Is everything OK?’

‘Yes, everything’s fine.’

‘Amy’s all right?’

‘Amy’s fine. Everything’s fine.’

‘So what’s so urgent?’

‘Nothing’s urgent. I didn’t ask Lina to get you to call me back.’

‘No,’ says Sean. ‘You didn’t. I just thought . . .’

‘Well, don’t. There’s nothing to worry about.’

There’s a pause. ‘Anyway,’ says Sean, ‘I’ve called you, so you may as well tell me whatever it is you were going to tell me.’

‘OK . . .’

He hears Belle take the sort of deep breath that usually precedes a mental girding of her loins, and he prepares himself for something he won’t like.

‘I was just wondering,
we
were just wondering, if you could look after Amy the week after next.’

‘Of course,’ says Sean, his hackles rising.
Look after Amy
. . . like he’s the childminder or something. ‘She’s my daughter; I don’t need to be asked to “look after” her. I do that anyway.’

‘You’ll be able to get the time off?’

‘If not I’ll drug her while I’m out and hide her unconscious body in the wardrobe.’

‘Sean,’ Belle exhales wearily, ‘you never used to be this childish.’