Scissors, Paper, Stone (5 page)

‘It’s terrible the traffic in London these days,’ Anne said, because nothing else came to mind. She gave a dry little cough. ‘What time did you leave work?’

Although Charlotte’s face remained perfectly immobile, Anne could see that the tendons in her neck were taut with some indeterminate strain. When she replied, her voice was prickly.

‘Normal time. Six-ish.’ She put her handbag down on the floor, shrugging herself out of her jacket. She sighed, audibly enough that Anne could not help but hear it. ‘You know, I didn’t mean to be late. It’s not deliberate.’

Anne said nothing. She hated it when Charlotte became irritable. She had wanted her to notice her obvious discontent but only because she had craved an affectionate, apologetic response. And now it was too late to backtrack.

‘Well,’ Anne heard herself say. ‘You’re here now.’

The air between them crackled.

Charlotte shook her head, so slightly that no one else but Anne would have seen it. But she noticed every tiny movement Charlotte made. It was her substitute for spoken intimacy. If nothing else, she could watch her. She could know her like a collector knows his butterflies: beautiful samples, pinned up in glass cases, wings outstretched so that every marking was clear. And by knowing her this way, by checking every nuance of her light and shade, by detailing each twitch and tremble, every gentle susurration of an unintended sigh, Anne could move as close to her as she dared. She gazed at Charlotte from a safe distance.

She was worried that she loved her daughter too greatly, that to reveal the extent of it would be to overwhelm the precarious balance of their relationship. She felt her emotions were calcified by guilt at not having been a good enough mother, a deep, unspoken, dug-away sort of shame that burrowed away inside like a creature with vicious teeth and claws. To let Charlotte see how much she cared, to be honest about her imperfect love, would be somehow to reveal this failing. Anne was scared at the thought of it.

They both knew where this guilt came from and Charles, when he had been awake, he had known too, but they never spoke of it. Instead, there was a triangulation of silence, a delicate construction of half-accepted ignorance that was as brittle as spun sugar.

Charlotte drew up a hospital chair to sit beside her father’s bed. She was close enough that, if she had wanted to, she could have touched him, but Anne saw that she stayed a little apart, in her own separate space. She did not take his hand.

Charlotte’s hair hung loose around her face, strands of wavy dark brown that were neither entirely straight nor tightly sprung enough to be curly. It annoyed her, Anne knew, that her hair could never be relied upon. She would use these dreadful hair straighteners each morning that seemed almost to frazzle her hair to a cinder. Sometimes Anne would notice she had burned herself on the top of her forehead, a small reddish imprint that no one else would see. In spite of the straighteners, Charlotte’s hair would always be crinkled by the end of the day. Anne preferred it like this, untampered, but she knew that her daughter hated its uncontrollable nature.

Her daughter was a pretty girl, not that she had ever told her this. But Anne knew it, objectively, because other people remarked on it when they saw her photo or when they first met her. She had an oval face and smooth skin with a faint splattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were large and light blue and quizzical-looking. She had dainty earlobes, carefully defined and covered with soft downy hair that Anne stopped herself from reaching out to touch. Today, she was wearing earrings that looked like pieces of birch bark: silvery brown crescents that shivered when she spoke.

She was speaking to her father in a low, careful voice. The doctors had insisted that talking to Charles could have a positive effect on his recovery but Anne could not shake the unnaturalness of it; the slight embarrassment of a one-way conversation consisting almost entirely of the sort of mundane trivialities that Charles had always hated being subjected to. Listening to her daughter’s hesitations and forced jollities, Anne realised that Charlotte felt it too. It had never been particularly easy to talk to Charles. Now, it seemed almost impossible.

She tuned into what Charlotte was saying and realised she was talking about the holiday she had just been on with her boyfriend, a man Anne neither liked nor trusted.

‘. . . so then we went to this beautiful hilltop village and it took ages to walk up to the top because it was unbelievably steep.’ Charlotte broke off and poured a glass of water from the plastic jug on the bedside cabinet. She furrowed her brow, thinking of the best way to continue and then, before she started to speak again, Anne saw her quite deliberately force a smile on to her face. She wondered why she did this and then she realised that Charlotte’s words now sounded warmer as she spoke them, the curve of her lips shaping each sentence with a brightness that had not been there before.

‘When we finally got there, we were both so exhausted and sweaty that the first thing we did was find a nice outside table at this café on the square to drink a
citron pressé
and just look for a bit at the view. It really is the most lovely part of France – un-touristy, for some reason, I suppose because it’s not that close to the coast, but . . .’

‘Where was this?’ Anne asked a little too loudly.

Charlotte looked up, surprised and slightly flustered by the interruption. ‘Oh, it’s a region called the Tarn.’ She stopped and Anne waited for her to continue, just long enough that the silence started to feel scratchy. ‘I’d never heard of it, although it turns out that Claudia – you remember Claudia don’t you? – well, her parents have a house fifteen minutes from where we were staying, but I only found out when we got back, otherwise we would have dropped in.’

‘What’s Claudia doing with herself these days?’

‘She’s, um, she’s in banking. Something to do with hedge funds. I don’t really understand it.’

‘She was always such a nice girl. Very polite. I remember she wrote the most charming thank-you letters when she came to stay.’

‘Yes,’ Charlotte said, and Anne could see instantly from the vague wrinkle between her eyebrows that she thought she was being unfavourably compared.

‘Well, anyway, I’m sure your job is much more interesting.’

‘Mm-mm.’

And so the conversation juddered on, halting and uncomfortable and never entirely real, as if they were both reading from a bad script and neither of them knew what to do about it. And there was Charles, lying gloriously in the middle of it all like a stone figurine sculpted for the top of a medieval king’s tomb; static yet simultaneously alive, able to hear yet not listening, her husband, Charlotte’s father and yet, at the same time, neither of these things. Not really. Not now.

Later, as they stood outside the hospital doors saying their awkward goodbyes, Anne leaned forward and gave her daughter a half-peck on the cheek. She inhaled the fig-scented perfume that Charlotte always wore, taking a deep breath in and then holding it for a moment, like something precious and breakable, in the pit of her stomach.

‘Anyway,’ said Charlotte, pulling away, pushing up the shoulder strap of her leather bag that kept slipping down her arm. Her smile was pained, almost embarrassed. ‘See you.’

Charlotte turned and strode towards the car park, her silver birch earrings swinging as she walked. Anne watched her climb into the driving seat and for a brief moment their eyes met through the windscreen and both of them seemed surprised by this unexpected moment of recognition. Charlotte smiled and raised a hand. Anne nodded, more curtly than she’d intended.

Anne drove along the main roads to get back to Kew, past the fried chicken shops and the sari emporiums and the queues of tourists outside the London Dungeon and Southwark Cathedral, through the endless traffic lights that turned to red just as she approached them. It would have been quicker to go the back way but she felt the need for bright streetlamps and noise and urban chaos. It felt reassuring to see it all going on as usual, everyday life continuing undaunted beyond the hospital’s distillation of loss and hurt and illness.

Her mobile phone rang, the screen flashing up with a ghoulish light. It was Janet. ‘Oh no,’ Anne said out loud, fumbling to connect the hands-free set with one hand on the steering wheel. ‘Janet?’

‘Hello, Anne. Just calling to see how things went at the hospital today?’

It was typical of Janet to call at just the wrong moment, proffering just the wrong sort of concern – the kind that required exhaustive explanation and a decent show of emotion. Speaking to her always left one with a residual feeling of baseless unease, a sense of not having quite met up to the exacting standards of her goodness. She was so unremittingly nice it was impossible not to be irritated by her and yet simultaneously ashamed of this irritation. It made for draining conversations.

They had met years ago at the local Salvation Army Christmas carol concert, an event that Anne had found herself attending with dreary regularity in an attempt to paint herself as an upstanding and contented member of the community, a family-oriented mother and wife, a fund-raiser for assorted charities and a dedicated watcher of
Antiques Roadshow
. For a while, she had believed that pretending her life had some sort of meaning would actually give it some, as if the acting was half the effort.

Charles had never come along with her – he called himself an atheist and made a great show of shirking any sort of religious pomp – and this had been a relief, in a way. It allowed Anne to create an alternative persona: one of wholesome cake-baking goodness and jumble sales. She found a safety in this pretence, singing along heartily to rousing carols and contributing generously to the collection plate. She liked Christmas and discovered that seasonal festivity was the perfect opportunity for anonymity without isolation. Strangers smiled at her and caught her eye, but it was easy to elude conversation, to slip out just as the mulled wine was being poured.

That was until she met Janet. Janet had suddenly appeared one year, wreathed in jollity and home-knitted scarves, bearing Tupperware boxes filled with mince pies. She made a bee-line for Anne as soon as she spotted her trying to leave.

‘Sure I can’t tempt you?’ Janet asked, a beaming smile on her face. Anne looked at her and noticed the filmy eyes, perpetually on the brink of some extreme enthusiasm and the garish, orange-red lipstick beginning to bleed into tiny lines around her trembling mouth. She felt sorry for her, a small, unfamiliar twinge of empathy, a sense that Janet too was struggling to fit in, was desperate to find her own place in all of this communal bonhomie.

‘I was just on my way home, actually.’

‘Oh go on!’ Janet tinkled cheerily. ‘One mince pie won’t do any harm. I made them this morning. Grab one while you can.’

So Anne had taken a mince pie and the pastry had crumbled all over her coat and Janet had been so pathetically grateful that Anne stayed far longer than she wanted, trapped by the force field of Janet’s self-conscious jollity.

The friendship had stopped and started over the years, like a wheezy old car that struggled to accelerate up hills. But each time it threatened to extinguish itself completely, Janet had come up with some novel ruse to keep it going – free tickets to Chelsea Flower Show, a cake recipe she’d been dying to try out on someone, the chance to go to a lecture on Darwin’s evolutionary theory at the Natural History Museum, a new cheese shop that had just opened round the corner and was meant to stock the most fabulous Pecorino. And each time, Anne had capitulated – partly because it was easier that way and partly because, in spite of herself, she found Janet’s company strangely soothing. She never had to make any conversational effort in her presence and found it easy to let Janet’s cheerful monologues wash over her, smiling and nodding her head when it was required. She was, Anne supposed, her only real friend.

Once, but only once, Janet had stared at her across a café table and said, out of nowhere, ‘You never really listen to me, do you?’ Anne had protested unconvincingly and was mortified to see tears well up in Janet’s eyes. She couldn’t think of anything else to say, so she had lapsed into silence. After a while, the tears receded and Janet flapped her hands in front of her face. ‘Sorry. Ridiculous. Don’t know what’s wrong with me today.’ And that had been that.

This Friday, they had been due to go to Paris for the weekend – ‘A girls’ trip,’ Janet had said when they booked their Eurostar tickets – but now it all had to be cancelled. Janet was being purposely cheery about it, as if living up to her own notions of what a ‘trooper’ she was. She had insisted on dealing with all the paperwork, in enquiring about refunds and phoning up the hotel to let them know they would no longer be requiring two single rooms with en-suite showers. And then she had told Anne all about what she’d done, seeking approval with a single-mindedness that recalled a dog gripping a stick between its teeth. Anne knew that what Janet most wanted was someone to reassure her how selfless she was, how wonderful she’d been in a crisis, to say, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ and yet it was precisely because she was so needy, so oppressively grateful for any morsel of attention, that Anne found herself feeling perversely disinclined to play the game.

She knew this was mean and she was half-horrified by her own capability for small cruelties, but she couldn’t help herself. To an extent, her friendship with Janet enabled her to vent the frustrations accumulated in the rest of her life: it was the only situation she remained entirely in control of. For some reason, that was important.