One Moment, One Morning (37 page)

He doubles over, in agony.

She does not stop. She scrabbles to her feet. And, while he is still bent over, cursing, she opens the front door. Then she grabs him, before he has a chance to realize what she is doing, and shoves him, with every ounce of energy she has, outside.

He falls backwards onto the path, lands on his arse, but she doesn’t pause to see if he is badly hurt: her own safety is paramount. She steps back inside the hallway and: BANG! slams the door. Then she puts the chain across and bolts it.

*     *     *     

‘Do you think Anna’s OK?’ asks Karen.

‘Hope so,’ says Alan. They are both still reeling from the encounter.

Karen bites her lip. ‘Perhaps I’d better ring her.’

‘I think you’ve enough to deal with. Françoise and I can drop round there, if you like, on our way home. We’ll be going soon, I expect.’

‘Would you mind?’

‘No, sure, that’s fine.’ Alan and his family live a couple of miles away; Anna’s house is en route.

‘Steve’s a pillock,’ observes Alan.

‘Sure is,’ Karen nods. ‘I feel terrible for introducing them.’

‘She’ll dump him.’ Alan is confident. ‘You’ll see.’

‘I hope you’re right.’

‘Here.’ Alan opens his arms; they embrace. He leans back, pushes her hair away from her face, looks into her eyes. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself. Not about Steve, or Simon either, come to that.’

‘I’m not!’ protests Karen.

‘You
are
.’ His voice is firm, but soft, kind; her heart lurches, it reminds her so of Simon.

‘OK.’ She nods. ‘But will you text me when you get home, let me know Anna is all right?’

*     *     *     

Shortly, Anna hears Steve getting to his feet, dusting himself down. Then he opens the letter box, peers in.

She moves away from him, sits on the stairs, stares at him.

‘You going to let me in?’ he asks.

‘You fucking kidding?’ Then she realizes what she has wanted to say since the argument started; maybe for days before that, perhaps even from the time she found out Simon had died. ‘You are never coming back in here again.’

‘What?’

‘What do you mean, “what?” You heard me. I said, you are never coming back into my home, ever again.’

‘You can’t do that.’

‘Try me.’

The letter box flaps shut. She braces herself: she knows what he is going to do next. Sure enough: BAM! She can feel the door, indeed the whole hall, house, vibrate, as he thows his full body weight against the wood. And again: BAM! And again: BAM!

She is worried; will the bolts hold? But she is still too full of adrenaline to give in to anxiety: she runs upstairs, opens the bay window in the bedroom, leans out.

He is down below her, in the dark, his whole body twisted sideways. He takes a few steps back, then lunges towards the door again. He doesn’t seem to care that he might hurt himself.

‘Oi!’

He looks up.

‘You carry on doing that, and I’ll call the police.’

‘You wouldn’t.’ His jaw is clenched, unbelieving.

‘Of course I would.’ She goes inside, gets the cordless landline phone from the dressing table, and returns to the window. She holds it up for him to see: ‘I think this probably warrants 999, don’t you?’

He whines, then. ‘Let me in, Anna. Please.’ She is reminded of the Three Little Pigs.

She laughs, incredulous. ‘No way.’

His face has that same expression she has seen so often before when he is drunk; his mouth is slack, his brow furrowed with confusion. Despite his aggression, his posture is lazy, his limbs ill-co-ordinated. And, at last, it is as if the last vestiges of mist have finally cleared from Anna’s vision. She can see him for what he is.

A sad, pitiful drunkard.

And she understands the message Karen’s speech at Simon’s funeral had for her. That while Karen loved Simon for his faults, Anna doesn’t love Steve for his. She can’t and never will. How can she, when Steve’s worst fault – his addiction – leads to this? She is being terrorized in her own home. It is untenable.
They
are untenable.

‘You’ve got to let me in,’ wails Steve.

‘No.’

‘Where am I going to sleep?’

‘That’s your problem.’

‘Aw, Anna . . .’

He sounds about five years old, but it fails to touch her. She is resolute. ‘No, don’t “aw Anna” me. I’ve had it. We’re through. Over. You don’t think of anyone as much as yourself. You even made the whole funeral about you. And over the last few days, you’ve acted as if I have to choose between you and my closest friend. So, I’m choosing my friend. And there’s no point you standing out here and arguing. If you yell or bang on my door once more, I’m calling the police. Now go, sleep where the hell you like, I don’t care. I’ll leave your stuff outside for you tomorrow.’

She moves away from the window, goes into the spare room, grabs a couple of old, worn blankets. Then she returns to the bedroom window, leans out.

Steve is sitting on the path, looking sorrowful.

‘Here,’ she says.

He looks up.

‘You can have these,’ she says, holding out the blankets. ‘Catch.’

And she throws first one, then the other down to him. The first lands still folded, heavy, but the second opens, catching in the air like a parachute.

For several minutes, Steve lingers by the front door, swearing. Then he quietens, but Anna can still hear him pacing outside. She doesn’t respond in any way, but then he starts ringing her. First, on the landline. Repeatedly. Until she unplugs it. Then on her mobile. She turns that off, too. Eventually she hears him pick up the blankets and shuffle away.

That’s it, then, thinks Karen, closing the front door. All the guests have departed. Now, she must check her mobile.

Alan has been true to his word.

All quiet on the western front, says his text. Been round, couldn’t hear anything untoward, so didn’t bother disturbing them – reckon they were both asleep and didn’t want to wake them. Rest easy.

Still, something is niggling her. She has had the sense all week that things between Anna and Steve have been increasingly tense, in spite of the Friday they spent happily cooking together. She has been so consumed by events that she has not given it much thought, but this evening’s frightful row has brought her fear to the fore, and she shudders to think what Steve is capable of when he is pushed to the limit.

She decides to ring Anna herself, to be sure.

But Anna’s mobile appears to be off; it goes straight through to voice message. Karen tries the landline. It just rings and rings, with no answer.

‘Leave it, darling,’ says her mother. ‘Anna is old enough to look after herself.’

Karen shakes her head. ‘I’m worried, Mum.’ How can she explain that she and Anna have a connection that goes beyond the bounds of many friendships; that sometimes they seem virtually linked by a sixth sense, psychically, especially when emotions are running high, as they have been lately? Her mother will think she is being melodramatic.

‘I know you’re anxious, and you’re a good friend. But given everything else you’ve got happening, I think you should let yourself off the hook. Let someone else help if need be.’

‘I’m her closest friend,’ Karen protests. ‘And I live round the corner. What if something has happened to her?’

‘Nothing will have happened to her. Alan’s text told you: they’ve gone to sleep. She’s probably just unplugged the phones so they aren’t disturbed. I think you’ve got so used to worrying and being upset about everything this week that you can’t switch off, which is quite understandable, but I am sure they are fine. I’ll look after the children and you can pop round and see her in the morning, if you like.’

‘OK . . .’ But Karen is still unsure.

*     *     *     

Lou is sitting in the lounge with her mother, Aunt Audrey and Uncle Pat. Uncle Pat has a wing-backed armchair pulled close to the television; along with his other ailments, he is deaf, and otherwise – as he has explained loudly – he can’t hear the chat-show host. Audrey and Lou’s mother are sharing the settee, their poker-like spines testimony to their rigorous (‘Sit up straight!’) upbringing. Lou is lounging, feet slung over one of the arms, on the one chair she finds remotely comfortable – a saggy recliner that has only escaped being deemed too scruffy and jettisoned by her mother because it was her father’s favourite.

Uncle Pat is actually blocking Lou’s view of the chat show, but Lou isn’t really watching anyway. Instead she is picking at her nails, a displacement activity for the aggravation she is feeling following the earlier discussion regarding Simon.

Can’t my mother see I wouldn’t be interested in a man? she thinks, as she pulls at a particularly resistant bit of cuticle. Yet she can observe fast enough that I wasn’t dressed appropriately for a funeral. I haven’t had a boyfriend in years, yes,
years
. Not since I was fifteen. What does she think I have done for all this time? Abstain?

Lou thinks of Sofia and their kiss the night before. Then she glances over at her mother; her helmet of grey hair with its Thatcher-like precision waves, her lips lined from decades of being held in an almost permanently pursed position. But in spite of her uptight appearance, her mother has produced two daughters close in age. She must have conceived them somehow. Lou even recalls her father implying her mother was surprisingly passionate sexually, and after all, there must have been something that kept two such different people together for over three decades.

She must, therefore, be in denial.

It’s a situation that has eaten away at Lou all her adult life. And how perverse it is. Here she is, virtually spread-eagled on the armchair, her body responding to the mere recollection of kissing a woman.

‘I’m gay,’ she murmurs quietly.

But her mother is so engrossed in the television that she does not hear.

*     *     *     

‘You go to bed, Mum,’ says Karen. ‘I’ll be upstairs in a minute.’

‘Why don’t you leave that till tomorrow?’

Karen is emptying the dishwasher. ‘I’m fine, honestly. I’d rather do it now. Then I can put on another load. Why don’t you have a bath, help you unwind?’

‘That’s a nice idea. Would you like me to leave you the water?’

‘Yeah, why not?’ They haven’t done this for years; it reminds Karen of her childhood. Her mum is of the generation where such frugality was commonplace. Karen has often thought people could do with acting more like that again.

It is peculiar, isn’t it, she thinks, as she removes dishes and stacks them on the sideboard; the way the past makes its presence felt at unexpected moments. Here she is, handling crockery laden with her own history.

There is the chipped cast-iron casserole Phyllis passed to her a few years ago, saying Karen would have more use for it than she did, now she had children. There are eclectic mugs from a range of sources: promotional ones Simon has brought back from work, a couple of finely shaped porcelain ones that were a gift from Anna, a jokey one from Alan about hirsute men being better lovers. There are the flan cases that were her grandmother’s, offered up when Karen went to college. It was the same autumn her grandmother went into a home; Karen recalls her saying she’d not be cooking any more but maybe Karen could use them to equip her own place? Karen had been blasé back then; now she finds the memory deeply affecting whenever she uses them.

Next, she removes one, two, three, four, five, six matching dinner plates from the service she and Simon asked for as a wedding present. How many meals has she served on these? She runs her finger round the edge, tracing the single line of blue glaze round the rim. They are nothing showy, just plain white china. Their friends weren’t awash with money at the time; she and Simon were married when she was relatively young, and she and her peers had only recently graduated. An extravagant wedding list would have seemed greedy. Anyway, they’ve lasted well enough; only two have been broken. And what would have been the point of something so precious and fragile they could never eat from them? Whereas these have had years of good use, taking them right through from their first dinner parties as a couple, when pretty much the only dish she knew how to cook was shepherd’s pie, to the children’s birthday parties. Their flat base makes them ideal for cakes, just as they have been ideal today for the quiches, pizzas and tarts . . .

And so it comes, like the plates themselves, full circle. At the heart of almost all these memories is Simon. For so long he has been intrinsic to her existence: almost every piece of crockery relates in some way to the two of them. Even the items that pre-date their relationship he has used, shared with her, time and time again.

It is too much to assimilate. Karen has shed every tear she can today. She is wrung out, numb.

Instead she empties the cutlery basket and refills the machine with one last load. Then she clips a tablet in the soap container, shuts the door, and rotates the dial to start.

*     *     *     

Once more, Anna wakes after only a few hours’ sleep. She is surprised, relieved, that Steve has not caused any further disturbance. Perhaps he has gone away.