Stop the Clock (33 page)

She knew objectively that it was irresponsible to be plotting a weekend away with someone she’d met online, but never in the flesh. Not that it was a whole weekend – just one night, a Saturday, while the girls were with Adam and Emily. Nice old Mrs Meadows from across the green had a key and was going to feed the cat; all Lucy’s charges would be taken care of. And surely she deserved a little romantic adventure? Perhaps that was a euphemistic way of putting it, but so what? Anyway, it wasn’t just about sex – it was about going away, being in the company of someone new, someone young; it was about being wanted. And she’d just got through a particularly awful, icy, exhausting January. She was owed a treat.

It wasn’t as if he was a total stranger, anyway. He was twenty-eight – about the same age as her sister, and her husband’s girlfriend. Not all that young, really; it wasn’t as if she was cradle-snatching.

He lived in Gloucester, made his living as a carpenter and was in a band she’d never heard of, and his
Facebook page was mostly photos of dirty-looking people in wellies at festivals. Meanwhile, he knew that she was separated with two children and worked in publishing. It was all above board. Of course, there was plenty that could go wrong – when it came down to it, he might not like the look of her, or she him – but she didn’t think she was going to end up buried underneath his floorboards.

She hadn’t told Adam exactly where she was going – she’d have her mobile on her, he could contact her if need be – and she had also decided not to tell Hannah, because sneaking off to a hotel with a stranger was such a reckless, Hannah-ish thing to do, yet Hannah was behaving in such a sorted, sensible way these days. It would be humiliating. Lucy was meant to be the one with common sense, Hannah the one who went in for chaos and sexual folly. Lucy couldn’t bring herself to admit that she’d ceded her usual territory and was exploring the hinterland that Hannah had abandoned.

However, Lucy had taken the precaution of emailing Tina and Natalie, and giving them the contact details for the hotel that Young Adonis was taking her to. It wouldn’t have seemed right to tell just one and not the other – she was still smarting slightly about Tina’s decision to withhold the story of her affair with that man, the top-secret so-called Grandee, although she did understand why. In a way, Tina might have been right; it was possible that disclosure at the time might have led to an even greater rift than secrecy.

Lucy had phrased her account of what she was planning to do in the Old Rose Hotel in such a way as
to obscure the fact that this would be the first time she and Young Adonis had met face to face. Natalie had sent a rather cryptic reply:
Well, be careful . . . but not TOO careful
. Cautiously giving her blessing, Lucy thought.

Tina was more inquisitive:
Who? How old? Where did you find him? How can you be sure he’s not an axe-murderer, or a conman or some other kind of wrong ’un?
And Lucy had replied,
Because of the way he writes. He’s literate, he’s funny
,
and he doesn’t do sob stories
, and Tina had responded,
Well, that’s good enough for me. Happy hunting, Cougar
.

Thankfully, neither of her friends had tried to stop her, and they hadn’t reminded Lucy of her responsibilities as a mother.

Lucy knew that when she dropped the girls off at Adam’s new flat on Saturday morning Adam would gaze at her forlornly and give her his best wounded smile, which meant: I know. I fucked up. I’m a cad. Forgive me? They were getting on rather better these days. Clearly he was in no rush to get divorced – well, that suited her; but also it meant that he was in no rush to marry Emily. Emily had recently turned twenty-seven; Lucy thought Adam might be able to string her along for another four years, maximum, before he got set an ultimatum.

But that was Adam’s problem. Lucy’s next move was to recruit a lodger; after the uncertainty of the last year, she was determined to build up her financial reserves. A young, working woman, who wouldn’t be there at weekends. She wasn’t looking for a replacement for the au pair function Hannah had once carried out, though
having someone else living in the house might stir up some ghosts. Not that Lucy had lost Hannah or anything, but that time, in which Hannah had lived under her roof and been her companion, was clearly dead and gone.

A lodger would be different; she would want a bit of polite contact, but on the whole, she would keep herself to herself.

People came and went, and you couldn’t bring them back, but you might be lucky enough to find new people who would give you some of what you’d taken from the ones who had disappeared, and who would accept some of what you had to offer in return.

She had mentioned the lodger plan to Adam, who had oh-so-jokingly offered to take up the position himself. But he didn’t really mean it. He was only kidding. Problem was, he never had had much of a sense of humour.

When they got to Adam’s flat, which was in a prosperous but unpretty tract of south-west London suburbia, she said a passably cordial hello to Emily, who was hovering nervously, and said goodbye to the girls as quickly as possible. It was the perfect maternal double bind; she didn’t want them to be upset that she was leaving, and she didn’t want them
not
to be upset. Still, it was only for one night; and she hoped Young Adonis would be an effective distraction. But first she would have to steel herself to drive to Sunnyview.

The M25 was a long slow hell, but arriving at journey’s end was not much of a relief; she still always dreaded
these visits, principally because Ellen invariably made her feel guilty. Ellen was in her room, as usual, sitting with her back to the window, listening to a book on CD; she’d developed a taste for grisly murder mysteries, and Hannah and Lucy had bought her a good stock for Christmas.

Ellen took the headphones off and said, ‘You look shattered.’

‘I’m fine. It’s just a beastly drive, that’s all,’ Lucy said, taking her coat off and perching on the end of the bed.

Ellen grunted. ‘I know it isn’t easy, trying to hold down a job and keep the household going. And it can’t be very nice knowing your girls are enjoying themselves with Adam and his new woman. I expect he can afford to buy them lots of treats now he’s back in work.’

‘Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’ Lucy said. ‘Anyway, I don’t think they feel too hard done by. They did pretty well at Christmas. We’re not quite so pushed for cash these days, especially now I’ve got a job too.’

Clemmie, predictably, had been enthralled by her Talking Walking Pet Wolf for all of half an hour, while Lottie had been quietly pleased with her newly pierced ears, and the clothes she’d chosen for socializing with her friends outside of school.

‘Yes, but it’s only a temporary contract, isn’t it?’ Ellen said. ‘You need to be keeping your eyes open for something else. Something in an office with a few more men in it. You’re not going to meet a new husband working on a freebie for old ladies, are you?’

‘I’m not looking for a new husband.’

‘Why not? Don’t tell me you’re going over to the other
side as well.’ Lucy stared at her in bemusement. ‘You know,’ Ellen said, ‘alternative lifestyles.’

Lucy realized that her mother was referring to Natalie. She had fallen into the habit of relaying stories from her friends’ lives when she visited Ellen, as it gave them something to talk about other than the toxic subject of their own family. Sometimes she felt uneasy about this – it was gossiping, really, though the likelihood of Ellen passing anything on to anybody else was negligible. In the case of Natalie’s doubts about her sexuality, Lucy had been careful to not give the name of the friend in question. Given the distaste with which Ellen had brought the subject up, it seemed that she’d been right to be cautious – although it would, of course, have been better to say nothing at all.

‘No, I haven’t got together with another woman,’ Lucy said, ‘though I have met a man on the internet, and I’m going to meet him tonight and shag him stupid.’

Ellen’s expression shifted subtly into a new configuration that Lucy couldn’t interpret. She shook her head. ‘I’ll thank you not to use that kind of language in my room.’

It was only then that Lucy identified Ellen’s change of mood. The lines on the good side of her face had deepened, and that side of her mouth was curving upwards. She was smiling.

‘You’ve had your hair done, haven’t you?’ Ellen said. ‘Bit shorter than usual. It’s much better – takes years off you. So what about this new man? I do hope, Lucy, that you’re not about to make a fool of yourself.’

Back in the car and on the road, Lucy realized that her clothes had picked up the smell of the nursing home: decay combined with disinfectant. She had planned to get changed anyway, once she’d put a bit of distance between herself and Sunnyview. It would be as well to stop off somewhere – catch her breath, get herself into the right frame of mind.

She found a pub with parking, went inside and headed straight for the ladies’: candy-stripe wallpaper, seashell-shaped hand soap, too cold for comfort. There she swapped her chinos, hooded fleece and plimsolls for stockings, heels and the party frock she’d worn to the cheese-and-wine fundraiser, the night she’d sat on Ian Morris’s knee.

Her reflection in the spotty mirror above the hand basin wasn’t so bad – certainly no worse than the photo she’d emailed to Young Adonis. She brushed her hair:
Much better. Takes years off you
.

She might as well go for it. While she still could.

She felt slightly foolish coming out of the loos in the outfit she had come to think of as her Dress of Disgrace, but told herself it was preferable to turning up at the hotel dressed as Casual Mum, and anyway, what did it matter if anyone had noticed her change of outfit? The pub was virtually empty anyway.

At the bar she ordered a coffee, then retreated to a corner table to drink it. She was startled when somebody came up to her to ask the time, and then went on, ‘You look kind of familiar – you’re not on the telly, are you?’

She had been approached by a spivvy-looking man in
early middle age, who was giving her his best blagger’s smile, big on teeth, but sad in the eyes, defying her not to be charmed.

Suddenly it dawned on her: for the first time in fifteen years, she was being chatted up.

Her last first date had been with Adam. She’d just moved into the house on Brixton Hill with Tina and Natalie, and was temping while she looked for her first job in journalism. She spent a week in the marketing department of a big drinks company; he was one of the graduate trainees. One Friday night she was just about to go home when he said, ‘Aren’t you going to come for a drink? Just a quick one? We always go down the pub at the end of the week.’ And he smiled at her and, just like that, she said yes.

She didn’t make it home till Sunday afternoon. A couple of days later they went out for a meal after work, but she was shy and he was distant, and the mood was tenuous and uncertain. Right up until the moment when they were walking away from the restaurant under her umbrella and he stopped and kissed her, it had been impossible to tell whether the intimacy they’d already established was a one-off, or the beginning of something.

This time round, her only communication with the man she was about to meet had been via her computer. Would he be attracted to her? Would she be attracted to him? Would he turn out to be an axe-murderer after all? How on earth was she going to get through this without having a glass of wine, and if she did have a glass of
wine, would she decide that she needed another, and another, and would it then turn into a disaster anyway? And, after so long, what would it be like, to be with someone who wasn’t Adam?

The light was beginning to fade as she skirted the centre of Cheltenham, pulled on to a B-road and then turned on to a long, secluded drive. Finally she parked in a grassed area edged by trees and occupied by a scattering of cars, one of which almost certainly belonged to the man she was about to meet.

But which? The red Ford Ka, the battered Peugeot, the white Nissan? Not the Beemer, surely; wrong income bracket. Young Adonis had been disarmingly open about how this hotel deal was a promotional giveaway.

She checked her make-up in the rear-view mirror and squirted on some more perfume (she’d thrown out the stuff Adam had bought her, and had reverted to an ancient bottle of Clinique Happy, which had probably gone off). Then she got her bag out of the boot and went off to check in, stepping carefully so her heels wouldn’t sink into the soggy grass.

‘Mr Hallam has already arrived,’ the bored yet unctuous man at reception told her. ‘Somebody will show you up in a minute.’

A teenage bellboy with fiery acne, dressed in a too-tight uniform, took her bag and she followed him up several flights of stairs with fleur-de-lis carpeting to a creaking upper corridor done up in dusty pink and old cream.

‘Here you are, madam,’ he said and rapped on the door.

The man inside the room called out, ‘Come in!’ and the bellboy pushed the door open.

Jack Hallam was reclining on the bed, barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt, watching TV. He turned it off and looked up at her with a grin.

‘Hello, you,’ she said.

‘Well, hello,’ he said.

She remembered the bellboy – she should slip him a quid – but he had dumped her bag by the bed and had already disappeared.

An hour later Jack said, ‘Oh dear. It wasn’t that bad, was it?’

They were lying naked, face to face, on the rumpled bed, in the dim light cast by Jack’s bedside lamp. The skylight overhead was dark and full of stars. She was crying, or rather, a sadness that seemed deeper than her, more universal, was welling up and spilling out as tears on her face, the hotel pillow and his and her interlocked hands.

‘It was lovely,’ she said and smiled at him. There was a scattering of faded freckles across the bridge of his nose, and his eyes, which she had at first thought were green, were tinged with gold. ‘I’m not unhappy. I mean . . . I forgot about everything. I lost track of time. And now it’s done.’

She withdrew her hand from his, sat up, took a tissue from the box on the bedside table and blew her nose.