‘John’s coming over,’ Robert said, as I was laying the table for two.
I added a third place.
How I wish I had not laid that table at all.
I sat between Robert and John, facing the tiny window. We were squashed around the three sides of the galley-kitchen table, under the tin-shade low lighting, which threw shadows down Robert’s face. Gravestone shapes, the horror to come.
‘I’m not ready to show you episode three,’ John said.
‘Just send it.’
‘But it’s crap.’
‘You always say that, John,’ I said.
‘And mostly Robert agrees.’ John laughed, always insecure, always handsome, with those golden flecks in his grey eyes.
Robert’s foot was twitching, up and down, up and down. He was watching his handsome younger brother more than listening to him, unable to feign patience.
I should have worried more about that.
Robert suddenly pushed back his chair and slapped his hands on his knees. ‘I’ll find a shit-hot young writer to take your place if you’re struggling.’
As the owner of Aspect Films, he could do this. I had felt uncomfortable about the power-play between them. They were brothers and they expected loyalty from one another, but sometimes I wondered if they liked each other.
Then Robert said, ‘Don’t look at me like that! I’m kidding! Write from the heart, John. You can’t go wrong.’ But the delivery had been irritable.
‘What happened to inciting incidents and story arcs and Billy’s character flaws?’ John shot back.
‘You get annoyed with me when I script-edit you.’
‘True.’ John sat in his thinking pose: elbow on the table, chin propped up by his thumb, fingers wrapped in a crescent moon over his mouth; smothering his words, apologetic about his worries.
‘Forget Billy. That series is low-rent. Maybe there’s only so much of that crap you can write. Write the love story.’
‘You hated that script.’
Robert tapped his fingers in an edgy rhythm. ‘You’re a brilliant screenwriter. I love everything you write.’
John’s lips were parted, his eyes fixed on his brother. The air between them was charged. My heartbeat had begun to speed up. I wished the window was bigger to let in some more air.
‘I can’t believe you’re telling me this now. I was desperate to write that script but you said it would bankrupt Aspect.’
My thighs had clenched. I had never seen John hit Robert, but I feared that he might.
‘I think we’re all tired,’ I said, feeling the strangeness of the evening come down on me. I brought Robert another cup of coffee, as he had let the first go cold.
‘If you don’t do what you want to do in life because you think it’ll fail or because of the bloody mortgage, you’re wasting your life. You’re wasting the precious time we have alive,’ Robert insisted, impassioned, adding, ‘There are always options. Always. Stop thinking about the comforts. That’s why we’re all trapped. Don’t be trapped, like me,’ he said, stabbing his temple. ‘Promise me?’
‘Do you feel trapped?’ John asked. I imagine John plays that question back in his nightmares.
Ignoring his question, Robert continued, ‘Forget me and everyone else! You deserve better.’
He grabbed John’s forearm and then at the same time kissed me roughly on my cheek, joining us together as an unwitting trio, swiping a tear from his nose. ‘I love you guys. And Alice. You’re the only three I do really love.’
I thought about Alice sleeping in her bed upstairs under pink fairy lights. I thought about Robert’s parents, and how devastated they would be to hear this.
‘We love you, too,’ John said, cautiously, catching my eye.
‘Where does Dilys think you are tonight?’ Robert asked John.
John mumbled his reply. ‘Research meeting with a nuclear physicist.’
Robert and I both raised our eyebrows at him.
John grinned sheepishly. ‘It’s plausible, isn’t it? Billy needs to use an X-ray gun in episode four.’
‘I’ve never understood why you can’t just tell her you’re here,’ Robert said.
‘She’d want to come,’ John said simply, as though this explained everything.
‘You know you have to leave her, don’t you?’
‘What?’ John reeled.
‘Robert?’ I quizzed him with a frown, a wifely shot of disapproval. ‘John, don’t listen to him.’
‘I want a fag.’ Robert stood, patting his pockets. ‘Where’s my wallet?’
‘Patel’s will be closed now,’ I reminded him.
‘San will let me in.’
He kissed me goodbye.
‘Your wallet’s in your jacket. Don’t be long, will you?’ I said.
‘No, no!’ The front door slammed.
‘He might not come back,’ I had said to John.
It had been a joke.
Our eye contact had lingered for a couple of seconds too long. We had both known that Robert would stay for a smoke with Sanjeev, that he might get stoned, drink more whisky and wine, stumble back across the road sometime in the early hours. He had done this many times before.
But Robert had not made it back home that night.
He had left Sanjeev’s, walked up Whitehall Park and turned left at the top of the hill towards Hornsey Lane bridge, where he had climbed up and over the metal spikes and jumped onto the A1 to his death.
I prepared to move from the sofa, to turn off the television, to unpeel Alice from her spot under my arm, to seek out matching socks and untangle the four-day-old bird’s nest in her hair. Robert’s mother, Camilla, would expect her grandchild to be well turned out for Easter lunch. Appearances were everything to my mother-in-law. She confessed, once, to wearing red lipstick on the days she felt sad, to cheer herself up.
Today was a red lipstick kind of day. I wondered if it might help me to get through lunch. Last week, I had said I could make it, knowing it was good for Alice to see her grandparents and cousins, knowing she would enjoy the Easter egg hunt on the sprawling lawns of their West Sussex pile.
The whole Tennant clan would be there. Camilla and Patrick, and John and his wife, Dilys, and their three children. Even Uncle Ralph, who was Patrick’s eccentric younger brother, would be there. All of them lived within five miles of the same village. They would be full of love; they were claustrophobic.
The remote control was in my hand, poised to turn off the cartoons. It seemed an impossible task. I kissed the top of Alice’s head, swamped with love for her, and looked out at the views from the skylight: the empty, pale, shifting hues of sky and the colourless metal geometrics of rooftops. This place on this sofa in this flat was the antidote to that landscape.
The flat had once been a rich colour bomb, high above the city, small but sumptuous and sensual. Every little detail – a bone-china dish for teabags or a patchwork tea-cosy – was like a twig to a nest, carefully chosen, part of building a life with Robert, my husband, who had promised me the world, who had been so full of life. This flat was meant to be the beginning for our little family, not the end. But it seemed I had missed signs, missed secrets, missed something; and he had taken his own life. An unfathomable act, flooring me, leaving me no real understanding of why. His motive preyed on my mind, continually, allowing little else to flourish. I seemed to be searching for a murderer in his head. Some days I guessed at his rationale, blaming myself, flooded with guilt. On other days, I debunked those theories, unsatisfied, back to where I had started.
Trapped in this wretched cycle, I ducked and shuffled through this small space: a dusty relic of my previous life. Tragedy layered the palette of colours that had once represented my joy for life. The flat was stuffy and busy with sadness, as though it knew its own history, as though it hated itself as much as I hated myself. For that very reason, I needed it. This flat and I were co-dependent. The memories and the secrets that it held were a tinder box. If I moved an ornament out of place, I worried the whole building would come crashing down on my head.
I began to type a text:
Hi Camilla – So sorry, I’m not feeling so well
I deleted it. Retyping:
Hi Camilla – So sorry, Alice has come down with a sick bug
Letter by letter, I deleted it, going backwards, retreating.
I brushed Alice’s hair while Scooby-Doo continued to entertain her. A knot was stubborn. I knew it was hopeless. It would have to be cut. Without Alice noticing, I found the kitchen scissors and snipped it out. The remaining tuft was obvious, and a little comical. Camilla would sniff at it. She would know I had cut a knot out; she would know I had not been brushing Alice’s hair; she would think I was a bad mother, but she would not say a word.
This is why I hoped I would be safe today. The Tennants were good at keeping distasteful truths to themselves. If the worst wasn’t said out loud, it didn’t need to exist at all. This was how I had learnt to operate with them. Especially when it came to Robert’s death. Nobody talked about it. Nobody was to blame. Nobody was accusing anybody. This was one of the few Tennant family traditions that suited me perfectly.
John could hear Dilys shouting his name. He closed the bathroom door, and turned his razor on.
A few minutes into his shave, the door burst open.
‘Why the hell didn’t you answer me?’
John turned off the razor. ‘I didn’t hear you,’ he said, innocently, waggling his razor at her.
‘I know you did, John.’
Everything about Dilys’ face was neat and symmetrical: her straight nose and even nostrils, the balance of her almond-shaped blue eyes, her top lip that mirrored her bottom lip, her centrally parted blonde hair. But when she was angry, the pool under her eyes turned purple and uneven, her lips puckered and her under-jaw pushed out at him.
‘Honestly, I didn’t hear,’ he insisted. He wiped his face on the towel to hide his lie. Dilys’ scrutiny was penetrating.
‘Don’t give me that crap. I was only next door.’
‘What did you need me for?’
‘I can’t find the bracelet your mum gave me!’ she cried.
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘If I lost it she’d never talk to me again!’
‘Mum won’t notice.’
‘She always notices everything.’
‘Have you looked in your jewellery box?’
‘Oh, yeah, I never thought of that,’ Dilys retorted sarcastically, throwing her arms in the air and charging out.
As he dressed, into a smart shirt – his mother always noticed everything – and jeans, he could hear Dilys storming around, yelling at the children, throwing accusations, throwing actual things, slamming doors and shouting hysterically about the bracelet.
John had a feeling that he was lying in wait in a bunker, hoping the hurricane outside would pass, but also knowing that the door to the bedroom wasn’t strong enough to keep it out.
He chose his socks and sat on the bed to put them on.
The door flew open. ‘Thanks for all your help, John,’ Dilys shrieked, although there were now tears in her increasingly high-pitched rage, and he felt bad, but he didn’t know how to help her when she was like this. His brain went into shutdown mode.
‘I don’t know where it is.’
‘I left it on my dressing table last night. Can you please think about whether or not you’ve moved it?’
‘Why would I touch it, Dilys?’ John bent down to put on his sock. ‘It doesn’t work with any of my outfits.’
His joke went down badly.
‘CHRIST! I’m going to go mad! Can’t you see this is important to me?’ Her voice strained, desperate.
He knew it was important, but he didn’t know what to suggest. He didn’t have any space in his head left. A lost bracelet was the least of his problems. If he spoke, he might blow up. He bent down to put the other sock on. Then he felt a slap to the back of his head.
‘Thanks for nothing, you idiot!’ she screamed, and stormed out.
He rubbed his head, where her hand had hit, where other scars lay, where his shame burned.
From deep within him, he called on his strength, battling away his fear, knowing only too well how her mood could escalate. He decided to engage with her plight for the bracelet, as he probably should have done originally. She couldn’t help her anger. It wasn’t her fault. Not really.
Clocking through the various scenarios when he had seen her take it off, he thought of places it might be.
He pulled out her gym bag from the bottom of the wardrobe, where he had tided it away, and looked in the side pocket, immediately locating it. He took a second to admire the tiny sapphire in the delicate silver. His mother had given it to Dilys on her fortieth birthday.
He found Dilys in the kitchen. The contents of the recycling bin were strewn around her feet as she picked each discarded item out.
‘Here you go.’ John handed her the bracelet.
She dropped the cereal box back into the bin and took the bracelet. It hung limply in her fingers, as though the reality of it disappointed her.
‘Where was it?’
‘In your gym bag.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well, I don’t mean to be funny, but if you’d tidied the cupboards better, I would’ve been able to find it myself.’
She looked up at him with her blue eyes, as blue as the stone in the bracelet. They had a depthless quality to them; their colour was a pretty watercolour wash rather than windows to her soul.
‘I’m always tidying it,’ he insisted, reminding himself of the many times he had been on his knees pairing her expensive shoes to make room for his battered old trainers.
She smiled at him. ‘Really?’
He clamped his jaws together, galled. Was it worth arguing with her about who tidied the most? Would it be petty to keep a logbook, charting the number of times he tidied bedrooms and cleared out the cupboards in their house? Was it worth it? He was sure he had better things to do; certain he had more important issues to worry about today. Could he rise above it, be the bigger person, drop it?
For an easier life, yes. To stay safe, yes. To shelter the children, absolutely.
‘I’ll have a clear out, maybe,’ he said, begrudgingly accepting that they had accumulated a lot of junk they could probably do without.
‘Your mum’s going to go mental when you tell them the news today,’ she said, re-positioning the sapphire centrally on her wrist, moving on, satisfied with his reply.
‘We’d better get going or we’re going to be late. And then she really will go mental.’
John was aware that Dilys had silenced him, but he could not waste energy winning a trivial argument about messy wardrobes today. His bigger worries wiped out their domestic gripes: his parents’ reaction to the news about Aspect Films, for one. Francesca’s desolation about the same news, another. It was going to rock the very foundations of her fragile survival mechanisms.
Thoughts of Francesca consumed him all the way to his parents’ house.
‘I think I’m going to tell Fran about Aspect first. On her own.’
‘What’s the point in that?’ Dilys reached into her bag for her phone.
‘It’ll give her time to process it before Mum gets hysterical.’
‘Fair enough,’ Dilys replied, swiping up on Instagram.
‘She deserves that,’ John murmured, more to himself than to Dilys.
‘Oh my god. You should see Polly’s post. Oh my god!’ Dilys cried, trying to show John a photograph he couldn’t make out while he was driving, and couldn’t have cared less about. ‘She’s such a bloody narcissist,’ Dilys snorted, but she ‘liked’ the photograph.
‘Did you just “Like” it?’
‘Of course.’
‘Why?’
‘Polly’s a friend.’
John sighed. He didn’t understand his wife sometimes. He didn’t understand social media. He didn’t understand the world. He felt completely alone. When he felt like this, he thought of Robert, and how much he missed him, and he thought of the suppers they would have at No. 2 Cheverton Road. Robert and Francesca had been his escape from Dilys and Instagram and anxiety. Where he could air his thoughts, and be heard. Where he had come out of his own head. Where they ate good food, and argued – as they had on that final night – endlessly, about scripts and films and books. Where he had enjoyed Francesca’s smile, unadulterated by sadness. How he yearned for those naive days back. How he wished he could be free of the constant gnawing guilt that was eating away at him now.
John pulled up outside Byworth End, where he had grown up. A mix of nostalgia and apprehension washed over him.
‘Here goes,’ he said, looking to Dilys for strength.
‘Don’t be wet about it, will you?’ she said, placing a hand on his sleeve.
‘It’s not wet to worry about people’s feelings.’
‘Francesca will be totally fine,’ Dilys said. ‘Your parents have a great plan for her, anyway.’
‘What plan?’ John asked, immediately panicked.
Dilys slid out of the car, saying, ‘They’ll tell you later. I’m sworn to secrecy.’ Before he had a chance to ask her more, she was gone; the dogs jumped and the children squealed and John was taken over by his mother’s embrace.
From this angle, he could have been Robert. He was crouching down, holding back the dogs from racing and jumping at the car as we drove in.
His head was covered by a cap, which hid his face and his hair, and his nape revealed the Tennant family olive skin. His broad shoulders, like Robert’s, strained as he held the collars of both Labradors.
‘Uncle John!’ Alice yelped, opening the car door before I had pulled up the handbrake. She raced out of the car and yanked John’s cap off, exposing twisted chunks of blond hair. He swept it back. I had forgotten how his beauty could make me feel. There was something about the weight of his blond eyebrows over his light grey eyes, and the worry-crease in between, that gave my heart a jump-start. This reaction to him was instinctive, and shameful. That night beat at my mind, the guilt tormenting me.
He let go of the dogs and swung Alice around as though she were as light as a feather.
My throat constricted. I imagined Robert twirling her in his arms like that. Kissing her, owning her love. Grief formed a lump in my throat. I had to get through the day without crying. The Tennant family worried about me enough. If I cried, they’d probably call an ambulance. I pressed my fingers into my eye sockets, hard, until they hurt, which felt satisfying, and then I was ready to get out of the car.
The oversized oak door swung open and Camilla opened her matriarchal arms to us.
‘Francesca, Alice! Happy Easter, darlings! How was your journey?’
Her effusive shrieks of welcome echoed through the cavernous hallway. The dogs scuffled around on the large black and white tiles, circling them, kicking about the petals that had fallen from a magnificent display of peonies. Alice collapsed onto her knees to let them lick her face.
Enveloped in Camilla’s hug, for a moment I luxuriated in the floral tang that hung off her permanently suntanned skin. Squeezing me tighter, she whispered in my ear, ‘It’s so good to see you.’
I hung our coats underneath the deer-head, dumped my keys and handbag onto the side table, and tried to feel at home. At least I no longer had sole responsibility for my life and Alice’s. There were others to take care of us today. There were others whose grief was as bad as mine – or worse, if we were being competitive about it.
‘How did you grow so tall since I saw you last?’ Camilla gushed, kissing Alice over and over.
‘The weekends get so busy,’ I explained, trying to justify my absence.
We came down as often as we could. Every three or four weeks, in fact. Fewer weekends than John and Dilys and the children, of course, who lived fifteen minutes away on the other side of Letworth. My journey was a two-and-half-hour trek from North London to West Sussex. If we lived closer, I would visit more often. That was my excuse, anyway.
‘Of course, darling. If you’re both happy, I’m happy,’ Camilla replied, standing up straighter, but still clinging to Alice, who was squashed into her middle.
John’s lips twitched with a smile, but then he dropped his hands low into the pockets of his hip jogging bottoms, and hunched slightly, perhaps also braced for one of his mother’s veiled admonishments. And perhaps also cross with me for not coming down often enough. I could never tell what John was thinking. He was a closed book. The worry seemed permanently etched.
John offered his hand to Alice. ‘Come with me. Bea and Olive are in the pool already. Harry’s playing tennis with Dilys.’
‘Here, take her costume,’ I said.
As we exchanged it, my hand touched his for a second, and our eyes met. I wanted to say ‘sorry’, for touching him, as though it had been a wrong thing to do.
It was the ‘sorry’ that would have been wrong.
Family gatherings, like today, when we were forced together, had become a robust buffer, where we could exist as distant relatives. I avoided being alone with him, never knowing what to say, self-conscious about what came out of my mouth, terrified of what one of us, in a bold moment, might bring up. It had been months since I had seen him last, and before that, months before that. When he had dropped by a few weeks after Robert’s funeral, without Dilys, it had been uncomfortable. The bond that tied us – that ghastly, life-altering night – was loaded with thoughts and feelings that could never be aired.
John took the swimming costume from me and off they trotted through the house, hand in hand; Alice’s face turned up to John, his turned down to her, ducking the occasional beam and low doorframe, smiling, chatting. Camilla and I walked silently behind them across the spongy cream carpets and Persian rugs, past the mix of bold modern art and old masters; passing small doorways and false panels, concealing sixteenth-century hidden passageways and stairways and tunnels. Many secrets were built into the fabric of this old Tudor house. Walking through it, I felt the eyes of the dead gossiping and beckoning, feeding on the drama of our unknown futures, on our fate.
Shuddering once, violently, as though a ghost had blown through me, I hurried after them, out through the boot room and into the sunshine and birdsong.
On the terrace, Camilla pulled my arm back.
‘Let them go. Patrick’s down there to help. I wanted to run a plan past you.’
I stopped, instantly nervous. Steeling myself, I watched John and Alice weave through the dangling poppies and daisies on the worn brick pathways of Camilla’s garden. Alice’s little legs were carrying her faster than they ever did in London, brushing past the balls of hydrangeas that reminded me of plastic flowery swimming caps worn by old ladies in the sea. As we watched, as I waited for Camilla to continue, John scooped Alice up under her armpits and stuck her on his shoulders. I clenched my jaw, preventing that untwisting behind my eyes; squeezing them shut, listening to the noises, promising myself I would get through this with my mascara intact.
‘There’s a house for sale in the village,’ Camilla said. ‘Number seventeen, on the green.’
I snapped my eyes open at her, to see if she was serious. ‘And?’
Her strong tanned arms were crossed around her widened middle. She shook out her blonde bob. The elegant, heavy-handed black kohl that she scored under each eye every day, permanent like tattoo art, acted like an underline, grounding the inattentive mood in those deep-set blue eyes.
‘It needs a bit of work, but I thought it might be a good time to make a change. The project might be good for you.’
The honeysuckle air had turned sour. Did she know I could barely leave my flat for the day, let alone live in another house all together? My heart tugged, almost out of my chest, towards London, to our flat, Robert’s flat, her son’s flat. I could hardly breathe.
‘We could contribute a little something towards the renovations,’ she continued, as though talking about sharing the cost of a birthday present.
‘I’d better check on Alice, she’s not such a strong swimmer…’ I pointed towards the pool, and jogged off along the ancient brick paths.
‘I’ll see what Valentina’s doing to the lamb!’ Camilla called after me.
Wiping a layer of sweat from under my fringe, I followed the trail of Alice’s discarded leggings and T-shirt to the poolhouse, where I found John helping her climb into her polka-dot swimming costume.
Normally, I would have taken over, but my head was spinning with Camilla’s proposition. I understood why Camilla wanted us to move near her. Through me and Alice, a part of Robert lived on. Through us, she could continue to care for him. I sympathised, I really did, but I couldn’t be that for her.
She didn’t know me in the way she thought she did. If I lived here, I would be closer to her grief, and to Patrick’s, and to John’s, to their love for her dead son and brother. Village life involved community spirit: dropping in for cups of tea and gossiping in the village shop and reluctant chats in the supermarket aisles. The Tennants would be everywhere. In North London, I could spend my days amongst strangers, who would not remind me of that godforsaken night.
Checking my watch, I worked out how long I would have to stay, if at all. I could feign a headache and escape before lunch. After Alice’s swim, I would leave. Could I survive until then?
‘Is Dad actually watching them?’ John frowned as he snapped the straps onto Alice’s shoulders.
I followed his scowl to the other end of the pool, where Patrick lay on one of the sun-loungers with his eyes closed. He would be watching his young granddaughters like a hawk, while pretending not to.
‘Daddy!’ Beatrice shrieked. Beatrice, John’s youngest, was four years old, like Alice. They were four months apart and as thick as thieves.
‘Do a dive!’ Olivia ordered, always more commanding than her ten years.
John pulled off his T-shirt and bent to yank off his tracksuit bottoms. His bony broad shoulders tapered to two muscular dimples in his back. I looked away. And then back again. He sliced into the water with a perfect racing dive.
Following his tracks, Alice’s feet slapped along the diving board and she belly-flopped in. Her tufted black head of hair and pale, city-life complexion bobbed about with her two blonde, olive-skinned cousins, as they said hello shyly to one another. Alice swam like a drowning puppy, her face barely above the surface, while Olivia and Beatrice showed off their flips and dives and underwater feats.
Patrick opened an eye, levered himself up from the low chair and walked over to me. In spite of being seventy-two, he was groomed like a young man: gelled-back silver hair, clipped designer stubble, black-rimmed spectacles and a white towel flicked around his tanned shoulders.
‘I haven’t really managed to take her swimming much lately,’ I explained, a little embarrassed for her.
‘London pools are rather grotty, I imagine.’
‘There’s a nice one near her school but I’ve never been much of a swimmer.’
‘Robert was like a fish. We’d have to bribe him out of here with Jaffa Cakes and hot Ribena. Less so, John. He didn’t have the same energy. Robert swam for the county.’
I cut Patrick a worried, sideways glance and noticed his Adam’s apple push his grief down and the goosebumps ripple across his damp skin, and I squeezed his hand briefly. ‘He was so lucky to have had all this,’ I said, as an echo of what I had told him at Robert’s wake.
Clearing his throat, Patrick said, ‘There’s a house for sale in the village, you know.’
I dropped his hand. My sympathies shrivel. . .
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