Missing You (31 page)

‘That’ll be nice.’

‘I think it reminds her of a happier time.’

Sean looks down. Fen knows what he’s thinking and doesn’t know what she can say to make him feel better. She sips her coffee. It’s too hot. It burns the top of her mouth.

‘Is she going to be here for a while?’

‘Until the end of the holidays. Belle’s gone to stay with her parents until she feels a bit better.’

‘Oh. Good.’

‘We haven’t talked about after that,’ says Sean.

‘No. But . . .’

‘What?’

‘Oh, Sean, you know.’ Fen bites her lower lip and stares out over the valley. ‘It’s not like you really have a choice.’

‘There is always a choice.’

Sean is worn out with emotion. Fen can see it in his face. He’s done too much thinking, too much hurting.

And so has she.

She tries to muster a smile. She says calmly, ‘This is what you wanted, a few months ago: Lewis out of the picture and the chance for you to go back, to have the family reunited, a stable home for Amy, your life back how you wanted it.’

‘I should be more careful what I wish for.’

Fen picks at a daisy in the lawn.

She says: ‘You know, I never thought we’d be together forever. I didn’t think I deserved you, I—’

Sean snorts. ‘Don’t talk crap,’ he says. Fen looks up at him. He stands, throws the remnants of his coffee onto the lawn and strides the short distance to the gate at the end of the garden, and then he turns and comes back.

‘You’ve spent too long feeling sorry for yourself, Fen Weller,’ he says. ‘You’ve spent too long beating yourself up over some stupid mistake you made when you were a kid. And yes, I
know
the repercussions were awful, terrible, but it happened, it’s over, you’ve done the right thing now, you’ve told the truth to the only person who still cares, so leave it behind you, move on.’

Down the alleyway children’s voices hush, dogs stop barking.

‘Christ,’ he says, ‘you’re entitled to some happiness. We all are.’

And he leans down and takes hold of Fen, one hand on either side of her face, his fingers pressing hard into her cheeks, and he kisses her and she knows the kiss is meant to be a commitment, but something about it tastes of desperation. He says: ‘We ’ll think of something. We’ll sort something out. We’ll be all right.’

Fen nods.

‘Daddy?’

They turn together.

Amy, flushed and sweaty in her shorts and vest, is standing at the top of the steps, in the kitchen doorway. She has Sean’s phone in her hand. She’s holding it out to him.

‘Who is it, Ames?’

‘It’s Mummy. She’s crying.’

forty-four

Fen showers, and while her hair dries she sits in front of the mirror in her bedroom, wrapped in a towel, and makes up her face. She is careful to do it properly: she highlights her cheeks, glosses her lips and curls her lashes. Warm air and summer noises come through the open window beyond the dressing table. The edges of the curtains billow in the breeze. She puts on her new dress and her flip-flops, perfumes her wrists and her throat, fastens the chain around her ankle and tilts her chin as she struggles to put silver hoops in her ears. Amy lies on the bed, watching and scratching at the eczema that’s bloomed on the backs of her hands and around her eyes.

‘You look nice,’ she says.

‘Thank you, Amy. What are you going to wear?’

‘I don’t know. Daddy didn’t pack any of my best things.’

Fen turns and pulls a sympathetic face.

‘Shall we have a look together?’

Amy fetches her rucksack and they go through its contents, and she’s right. Sean has just packed T-shirts and shorts and underwear, a mishmash of wrinkled clothes all tangled together, still damp and smelling musty because they’ve been bundled straight from the washing machine and not taken out to air.

‘OK,’ says Fen, ‘laundry really isn’t one of your dad’s strong points. Come with me.’

She opens her wardrobe door, flicks through the clothes on their hangers and pulls out a long, cherry-red, silk T-shirt. She holds it up against Amy. It’s about the right length for a dress for the child.

‘Do you like it?’ she asks. Amy nods.

‘You can wear it over your trousers and we’ll accessorize,’ says Fen. ‘I’ll find you a belt and you can go through my stuff and choose whatever else you want.’

‘Anything?’

‘Yes, tonight absolutely anything.’

Amy’s sore eyes widen with pleasure. Fen leaves her to rummage through her jewellery box and calls Connor upstairs to get changed.

Later, they sit in the restaurant, at the same table as before, eating the same food. They look smarter than they did last time; they have all dressed up as if, by unspoken agreement, they acknowledge this is a formal occasion. Amy is wearing so many beads and bangles and brooches, she twinkles in the candlelight. Her hair is done up with a butterfly clip. The T-shirt is already smeared with tomato paste and Fen notices the stain fondly and thinks it will be a permanent reminder of this evening. Sean leans across the table and fills Fen’s wine glass. The neck of the bottle clinks against the rim of the glass.

‘Thanks.’ She smiles, raising the glass then taking a sip. Her lips are still sore where he kissed her earlier.

When they have finished their pizzas the waitress comes round and asks if anyone wants dessert. The children ask for ice cream, Sean asks for coffee.

‘And what about your mummy?’ the waitress asks Amy. ‘What would she like?’

‘Oh, I’m not—’ Fen begins.

‘She’d like ice cream too,’ says Amy.

They walk back through the city. The air is already cooling. Connor rides on Sean’s shoulders. Fen wraps her cardigan around Amy’s shoulders and holds her close. They look at the lights, at the buildings, and swerve to avoid the bundling, lairy young people, but they’re all very quiet.

When the children are in bed, Fen asks: ‘Why was Belle crying?’

Sean sighs. ‘Same old same old.’

‘Do you think she’s well enough to look after Amy?’

‘I don’t know. Not on her own. Not as she is now.’

‘What are you going to do?’

Sean runs his fingers through his hair and scratches his head.

‘I don’t know,’ he says again.

He thinks for a while then says: ‘Well, Amy’s staying here until the end of the school holidays. I guess I’ll have to go back for a couple of weeks when term starts, just to keep an eye on things and make sure they’re all right. I don’t see any way round that. But I’ll come back as soon as everything has settled down. And we can still see one another. I’ll still be working in Bath. We can go out for lunch and—’

‘No.’

Fen moves away, she walks into the dark dining room and looks out through the window with her back to him, so that Sean won’t see her face.

‘I can’t do that, Sean. I won’t be your Other.’

He says: ‘But I won’t be
with
Belle, not like that, I—’

‘No,’ says Fen. ‘No. Amy needs you. She needs to know how things are and where she stands. She can’t be sitting at home wondering who you’re with and where you live and whether or not you’re coming back, and whether she’s responsible for her mother – not in the state she’s in now. I won’t let you do that to her.’

Sean steps forward to touch her; she sidesteps away.

He says: ‘Fen . . .’

‘No,’ she says again.

In the silence she hears Sean breathing. She hears him scratch the back of his head in frustration.

‘Fen . . .’

‘Please don’t say anything else.’

‘But I—’

‘I’ve got a terrible headache,’ she says. ‘I’m going to bed.’

And she pushes past him and runs up the stairs before he can say anything else. She goes into her room and closes the door and also her eyes, and she presses her back against the wall as she feels her world fall away.

forty-five

The next four weeks, the last month of the school holidays, are the most precious. It is because Fen knows her happiness is finite. She treasures every second of the month and tries not to think of the days going by, the dates following one another on the calendar, the time slipping through her fingers like sand.

August goes by – slowly at first, and then more quickly – in a succession of beautiful, hot days, days when waking up to the brightness of the morning is a pleasure that repeats itself, days that are spent together in the park, by the river, and, for one wonderful week, in a tent on a hillside overlooking the sea in Pembrokeshire.

Sean and Fen don’t mention the future for the whole month. They don’t talk about Belle. And when it comes to the last week, the week when they decide, on an impulse, to buy a tent and run away to the coast, they leave their phones at home so that they are unreachable.

For seven days, they exist only in the moment, with their children, in the sunshine. They are a unit of four. They spend their days on the beach and in the evenings Sean and Connor gather driftwood and build fires and together they cook whatever food is to hand. Sean plays his guitar. It’s magical: the music and the heat of the flames and their fingers sticky with smoky marshmallow. Most nights the children fall asleep beside the fire, their heads on the lap of one or other adult. Inside the tent, the four sleep in the same tiny space, bundled together like puppies. Their clothes are soon salty and sandy and smell of smoke but they all smell the same, like a pack of dogs, and nobody cares. They unzip the sleeping bags to make one big, communal bed. They eat in cheap, family restaurants by the little fishing harbour, the fresh air making them all wonderfully hungry, they are hungry all the time and food has never tasted so good. The children clamour for hot pasties and ice cream. Amy’s eczema clears up like magic and the shadows disappear from her eyes. Connor becomes stronger and more confident every day. People no longer stare at him so much; Fen is less patronized. She feels as if this week is where she has been heading all her life.

And Fen and Sean, they are so easy together. There is no discord and everything fits. Fen sits between Sean’s legs, on the beach, watching the children play ball with the children of a neighbouring family. Sean kisses Fen’s sea-tangled hair as she warms herself in the towel wrapped around her shoulders, and she resists the temptation to wonder if she will ever be so happy again.

The last day, the day before they must pack up the car and travel back along the M4, crossing the bridge that spans the estuary, Fen and Sean hardly say a word to one another but they are full of little kindnesses and considerations.

As the sun sinks into the sky and the temperature falls, Sean rinses out their swimming things under the tap at the edge of the field, his bare feet cold in the muddy puddle he’s making beneath the tap, and he watches the other campers packing up, because all the children have to be back home for the start of school in two days’ time. Fen shakes out the sleeping bags outside the tent. The children are lying on their stomachs on the grass in the last of the sunlight, between the shadows of the trees. Amy is reading a story to Connor.

Sean takes the wet swimming clothes back to the tent and ties them to the guy line to dry.

‘Shall I open the bar?’ he asks Fen.

‘Good idea,’ she says.

He upturns two plastic beakers and fills them from the wine box. He passes one to Fen.

‘Come and sit with me and watch the sun go down,’ he says.

Fen smiles up at him.

‘It’s the working title for a new song,’ he says and he means the words to be slightly self-deprecating and funny, but instead they sound forlorn, and rather sad.

She sits beside him on the hillside.

‘Do you know how far it is to the horizon?’ he asks.

She shakes her head. ‘Fifty miles? A hundred?’

‘Three miles,’ he says. ‘If we got in a rowing boat and kept going in a straight line, we’d only have to go three miles before we disappeared. That’s all it would take. Three miles and nobody would know where we were.’

The sun turns the sky a violent apricot and the sea is alive where the light catches the rolling waves, and where it doesn’t the sea is dark and deep and cold.

Fen leans against Sean and he puts his arm around her.

They both know what the other is thinking. They are both wondering how they will cope with the next day, and the inevitable separation, and all the days after that.

‘We could always just not go back,’ Sean says quietly. ‘We could put the tent and the kids in the back of the car and fuck off to France. We could be refugees. I could busk and you could pick grapes. We’d get by.’

‘Connor and I haven’t got passports,’ she reminds him.

‘You could both hide in the car boot, just until we were safely on the ferry. Amy and I would talk our way through passport control. It’d be fine.’

She smiles. She rests her head on his shoulder.

‘Ah, Fen.’ He sighs.

He rests his head on her head. Then he shakes the wine box, and fills up their beakers again.

‘Maybe the world will end tonight,’ he says.

‘If we’re lucky, ’ says Fen.

But it doesn’t.

forty-six

The day–night relationship has turned on its axis, the evenings begin earlier than they did last week, and Sean noticed condensation on the inside of the windows this morning. October is waiting in the wings of the year. Already the light is fading.

Sean has been back in the family home, with Belle and Amy, for two and a half weeks. He has not spoken to Fen in all that time. She doesn’t answer the phone when he calls and each time he’s called into the bookshop she hasn’t been there. He has driven past Lilyvale several times hoping to catch sight of her. Once he saw her walking through the city centre, holding Connor’s hand, her head inclined towards the child as if she were listening to what he was saying. She was wearing a purple hat, her hair billowing over the shoulders of her old green jacket, and her flat brown boots padded along the pavement. She looked smaller, younger, untidier and more tired than Sean remembered. He wanted to call after her, to take her for coffee, but he did not, because he could not imagine being with her and at the same time not being with her. He could not think what they would talk about, what he could say to her. The last thing she would want to hear would be the details of his revised life with Belle.