Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Part One: Denial
1. Selina
2. Lottie
3. Selina
4. Lottie
5. Selina
Part Two: Anger
6. Selina
7. Selina
8. Lottie
9. Selina
10. Selina
11. Lottie
Part Three: Bargaining
12. Selina
13. Selina
14. Lottie
15. Selina
16. Lottie
17. Selina
Part Four: Depression
18. Lottie
19. Selina
20. Selina
21. Selina
22. Selina
23. Lottie
24. Selina
Part Five: Acceptance
25. Selina
26. Lottie
27. Lottie
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Read on for a preview of They All Fall Down
About the Author
Also by Tammy Cohen
Copyright
Don’t miss Tammy Cohen’s new thriller
They All Fall Down
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Read on for a preview …
1
Hannah
Charlie cut her wrists last week with a shard of caramelized sugar.
We’d made the sugar sheets together in the clinic’s kitchen earlier in the day, under Joni’s beady-eyed supervision.
‘Yours are thick enough to do yourself an injury,’ I’d said to Charlie, as a joke.
‘I wonder if that’s what gave her the idea,’ Odelle commented afterwards, pointedly.
After Charlie died, Bake Off went on the banned-programmes list.
I don’t feel guilty, though, because I don’t think Charlie killed herself. Just as I don’t think poor Sofia killed herself. In a high-suicide-risk psych clinic like this, people die all the time. It’s one of the clinic’s USPs. That’s what makes it so easy for a killer to hide here, in plain sight. That and the fact that the only witnesses are us, and no one believes a word we say.
You don’t have to be mad to live here but … oh, hang on, yes, you do.
I’m frightened. I’m frightened that I’m right and I’ll be next. I’m even more frightened that I’m wrong, in which case I’m as crazy as they all think I am. Shut away in here, the only escape is in my own head. But what if my own head’s the most dangerous place to be?
Stella comes into my room and lies across the end of my bed without speaking. Her skin is stretched tight over the sharp points of her cheeks and I can’t look at it for fear it might tear.
‘It’s not true,’ I tell her. My room is at the side of
My room is at the side of the building. I am sitting by the window in the beige armchair, looking out across the rose garden to where a half-hearted rain is drip, drip, dripping from the flat roof of the dance studio and running down the wall of folding glass doors. All the furniture in my room is a variation on beige. Ecru. Biscuit. Stone. The whole of the upstairs is the colour of a surgical bandage. To avoid us getting over-stimulated, I imagine. Not much chance of that in here.
Stella turns her head so her wide blue eyes are fixed on mine. The necklace she always wears has fallen to the side so that the tiny silver cat seems to be nestling into the duvet.
‘How do you know?’ she says at last, in her soft, smoker’s voice.
I frown at her.
‘Come on,’ I say. ‘It’s Charlie.’
‘Was,’ she says. And starts to cry.
The Meadows is an old Georgian-style country house, complete with ivy growing across the front and elegant floor-to-ceiling sash windows. From the semicircular gravel drive at the front you might imagine yourself on the set of a Jane Austen adaptation where at any moment the grand front door will burst open to disgorge a gaggle of giggling young women in bonnets. But drive around to the car park behind the house and the impression is ruined by a large modern extension stuck on to the back, giving the effect of a stylish man with a bad toupee.
All the consulting rooms and the day room and admin and therapy rooms are in the old part, while the cafeteria and the bedrooms are in the new bit. Sofia told me once the old part was haunted, but I’ve never sensed anything weird. Mind you, I was so numb when I first arrived a ghost could have climbed right into bed beside me and I wouldn’t have registered it. The thing about staying in a place like this, where we have group therapy twice a day and keep journals detailing our every thought, is that we’re so busy gazing inwards we’re blind to what’s going on all around us.
Which might explain how two women have been killed and nobody seems to have noticed but me.
The art therapy room is at the back of the old house with two huge windows giving out on to the car park and beyond to the flower garden and then the vegetable plot. The jewel in the Meadows’ crown – the manicured lawn leading down to a lake that is disproportionately large and deep, a legacy of an earlier, grander incarnation of the house – is hidden from view by the ugly jut of the new extension on the left.
It is ten o’clock on Wednesday morning and we are at art therapy. Laura gets out the poster paints and asks us to do a self-portrait. The last time we did this exercise she gave us mirrors made of plastic instead of glass, so our reflections were smudgy, like we were looking at ourselves through smoke. ‘Sorry,’ she said when we complained. ‘Regulations. You know how it is.’ But today is different.
‘I want you to paint yourselves the way you see yourselves when you close your eyes,’ she says. ‘Where are you? What are you doing? What are you wearing? Don’t overthink it. And don’t pay any heed to the camera. Just forget it’s there.’
The film crew – which consists most of the time only of director/presenter Justin Carter and his cameraman Drew Abbott – have been installed at the clinic for the last seven weeks, just one week less than me. I arrived on the third Monday in January, auspiciously known as Black Monday, which is officially the most depressing day of the year, although, as you can imagine, competition for that title is fierce in here. Justin and Drew turned up the following week in an SUV loaded with equipment which they carted through from the rain-soaked car park, propping the door to reception open so an icy draught swept through the building and Bridget Ashworth, the clinic’s frowning admin manager, bustled about adjusting thermostats and ordering cleaning staff to mop up muddy footprints.
They’re calling it a fly-on-the-wall documentary. But Dr Roberts spun it differently: ‘An important film in breaking down the taboos surrounding mental illness,’ he said. ‘Of course, you are all perfectly entitled to opt out of the filming and at any stage you can be retrospectively edited out. But just think what your example could mean to a young woman going through what you’ve been through, feeling there’s nobody out there who could possibly understand.’
On the first day, Justin said, ‘Just imagine we’re not really here.’
‘That’s how most of us ended up in this place,’ Charlie told him. ‘For seeing things that aren’t there, or not seeing things that are there. You could seriously set back our recovery.’
Justin had smiled without committing himself to laughing, just in case it wasn’t appropriate, not understanding that appropriateness is something you leave at the door in here.
Today, in my painting, I am sitting in the low blue velvet chair in Emily’s room. Through the sash window behind me the sky is navy and I put in a perfectly round yellowy-white moon so it’s obvious it’s night-time. I am looking at something over to the right, out of sight. I’m wearing my pale blue dressing gown. My face is a pink blur, streaked with black because I didn’t wait long enough for the paint to dry before trying to do the eyes.
‘Nice dress,’ Laura says when she comes round to look. ‘Is that in your house? Your bedroom, maybe?’
I nod. I don’t want to tell her the truth because when I talk about Emily it gets noted down in a book and then I have to talk about it at Group. And then Dr Roberts will cock his head to one side and write something in his notebook and I might have to stay here longer. So I don’t tell her that the me in the picture is looking in the right-hand corner of Emily’s room, where her cot used to be.
Stella’s painting is all black, except for a tiny figure at the bottom, naked apart from her long, yellow hair, which reaches almost to the floor. Laura looks at it for a long time and then puts her hand on Stella’s narrow shoulder and squeezes before moving on to someone else.
Since Charlie died, all Stella’s paintings have been black.
As usual, Odelle has painted herself hugely fat. She’s wearing the same black top and skinny jeans the real Odelle has on today and is looking into a mirror in which a slimline version of herself is reflected back. Or maybe it’s the other way around and the slim Odelle is the real one and the fat one the reflection. Either way, it’s just another variation of Odelle’s sole enduring theme. Herself and her body.
‘It’s very . . . narrative, Odelle,’ says Laura. Odelle glances towards the camera at the back of the room, wanting to be sure they are capturing this. ‘But just once, I’d love to see you really let rip. This exercise is about here’ – Laura taps her chest lightly; ‘not about here’, tapping her head.
The mild rebuke sets Odelle’s bottom lip trembling. Odelle tends to fixate on people. That’s one of the reasons she’s in here. That and the fact she weighs around eighty-five pounds. When Charlie first arrived, Odelle apparently fixated on her too for a short while, following her around, sitting too close to her at dinner and on the sofa in the lounge. But mostly it’s authority figures she goes for. Roberts is basically God as far as Odelle is concerned, and Laura comes a close second. Odelle’s always loitering in the art room after class, offering to help clear away or asking for extra, one-to-one help.
The Meadows believes in niche therapy. We have people who come in to cure us through horticulture, music, baking and movement. Last week, Grace, the aptly named movement therapist, had us fling ourselves around the dance studio pretending to be leaves blown about by the wind and Odelle actually cried. ‘I feel so insignificant,’ she said. Judith said the reason Odelle got upset was probably because she really did get blown about by the wind, on account of weighing so little.
Basically, nothing happens in here that can’t be turned into some kind of therapy. There’s even recreational therapy, which basically means watching TV. Charlie and I had a running joke about that. Instead of asking if I was going to dinner, she’d say, ‘Are you coming to eating therapy?’ One time when I was late down to breakfast, I said I’d been doing some ‘pooing therapy’ and we laughed for about ten minutes, until Odelle told us we were being childish and also ‘insensitive’ to all the people in here who ‘can’t find much to laugh about’.
But Laura is the therapist people get closest to. She used to be a nurse in her younger days, and she still emits that I-can-make-you-better aura. She has her own little office, here, at the back of the art room, with a fan heater and a kettle and several different types of tea, and you can pop in there and curl up on the armchair and wrap yourself up in the soft woollen tartan throw for a chat without feeling like what you say will be noted down in your file somewhere. Laura can be a little bit new-agey. For those who are into that sort of thing, she offers informal meditation or relaxation therapy, which is basically hypnosis. Charlie used to love it in there. ‘It’s the only part of the clinic where I can be myself,’ she told me once. Odelle nips in there at any opportunity. She installs herself in the armchair, with the tartan blanket wrapped around all those other layers she habitually wears, and discusses her favourite subject. Namely, herself.
Laura spends a few moments murmuring something to Nina, who is slumped in front of a piece of paper which is blank apart from a faintly drawn oval. Last week in art she produced seven paintings in one class, her brush flying over the paper, colours bleeding into one another, but today she can hardly summon the energy to lift her stick of charcoal.
Frannie is crying again, tears tracking slowly down her cheeks, and she brushes them away as if she hardly notices them. Her painting has two figures in it, which, strictly speaking, is cheating, but no one is judging. Firstly, there’s a huge face with a long, fine nose and a small, full mouth and massive green eyes. The face is Frannie’s, and in one of the eyes is another face. It’s too small for the features to be identifiable but the black curls mark it out as Charlie.
‘Because she’s in your thoughts?’ asks Laura.
My chest feels tight when I look at the straight brown bob Frannie has given herself in her portrait, hanging just below her chin. The real Frannie is wearing a blue-and-white striped beanie hat, but underneath it her hair is sparse and thin with bald patches that break your heart, vulnerable as the soft part on a newborn baby’s head.
My baby was called Emily.
And now I don’t want to paint any more.
Later on, in Evening Group, we start, as always, by going round each one of us in the circle, reporting back on whether we’ve achieved the two goals we each set ourselves this morning. Mine were to start reading a proper book, as opposed to the celebrity magazines which are all I’ve read for the last two months, and to wash my hair. I failed at the first, the letters moving across the page like lines of tiny ants. But in the second goal I can claim some success, having dragged myself, finally, into the shower, so that my hair, while still a tangled mess, is at least clean for the first time in weeks. I hate myself for the glow of pleasure I feel when Dr Roberts says ‘Well done, Hannah,’ and everyone gives me a round of applause, as if I’ve climbed Mount Kilimanjaro or something.
After about half an hour we go back to talking about Charlie. Odelle shares a story about when she first arrived here and was missing her family and had just gone through her first meal with someone sitting next to her monitoring everything that went into her mouth and was curled up on her bed, crying into her pillow – Odelle holds a hand to her face to demonstrate, visibly moved by her own story – and Charlie knocked on her door and sat on the end of the bed and chatted to her, and even made her laugh. That was the thing about Charlie. She could say things to make you laugh so hard your tea came out of your nose. Then she’d go back to her room and make bite marks in her own arm. Of all the people I’ve met in my life, she was the one who was most forgiving of others – and the least forgiving of herself.
‘But she didn’t kill herself,’ I say, when it’s my turn to speak.
Dr Roberts sits back in his seat with one leg crossed over the other at the knee and one elbow hooked over the back of the chair. He has a pen in his hand and he clicks the end in and out as he listens, and nods. His eyes are narrowed so I can’t see them, but I know they are blue in some lights and green in others. His hair, brown but liberally threaded with silver, is swept back from his face, although a lock often falls over his left eye when he gets animated. His close-cropped beard is equal measures of silver and brown, and when he smiles, two dimples appear in his cheeks and the lines around his eyes concertina into folds a person could get lost in.
The transference rate, that thing where patients end up in love with their shrinks, is pretty high in our clinic.
‘It’s a very interesting theory, Hannah.’ His voice is warm and honey-coated. ‘But you know – we all knew – that Charlie was deeply, chronically depressed. Just because we loved her doesn’t mean we could help her. It’s inevitable that we all feel some sense of failure that we couldn’t do more, and failure is a damned uncomfortable feeling. It’s far preferable to imagine she was done away with against her will, because that’s not anything we could have prevented or seen coming. But the fact is, we weren’t responsible. There’s nothing anyone could have done.’
‘Yes, we have to forgive ourselves,’ adds Odelle.
I look around the circle, where twelve women sit on chairs, one leg twisted around the other, heads bowed, hands fidgeting. I see Frannie plucking at her almost non-existent eyelashes. She studies a hair and then pops it into her mouth. I see Stella staring impassively ahead through her widely stretched eyes. She’s wearing a powder-blue dress today that has a tight bodice and a
flared skirt. I try not to look at the waist, made artificially tiny by the removal of a rib, nor at the painful swell of her surgically enhanced breasts. I see Odelle, who layers clothes on to her body like she is making papier mâché, leaning earnestly forward, sniffing for approval like a blind laboratory rat. I see Judith and Nina and the eight other inmates – service users, as we’re officially known – and Justin and Drew, shadowing our every move with the camera. And though my back is towards the door, in my head I see, through the safety-glass panel behind me, across the hallway and up the sweeping wooden staircase that leads up to the plush consulting rooms, to where Dr Chakraborty, the clinic’s deputy director, sits in his office, reading through notes with his sad, brown eyes, while downstairs in the therapy rooms I see Laura and Grace and the other part-time therapists. At the back of the staircase, through the door that leads to the new building, and the cafeteria and kitchen and the Mindfulness Area and the tiny staff room where the medicines are kept, I see Joni and Darren, the psychiatric nurses, clutching their notebooks, and Bridget Ashworth, the clinic’s brisk admin manager, and the well-meaning volunteers and the kitchen staff and the orderlies. All the people charged with keeping us safe. And then my gaze is pulled back here again and I see Dr Oliver Roberts, guru, Svengali, saint, sage, saviour.
Murderer?
It could be him. It could be any of them.
But it definitely happened.
I’d have to be crazy to make a thing like that up.
Towards the end of our session, at about seven thirty, I slip away while the others are still stacking up the chairs. After eight weeks here, the grandeur of the hallway, with its glass chandelier and vast oil painting of the earl whose home this once was, no longer comes as a surprise. No one uses the front entrance anyway, unless they’re an important dignitary or there’s a fundraising event going on. The main entrance is round the back in the new wing, where a receptionist checks in visitors and politely searches their bags under the gaze of a smiling Oliver Roberts clad in a formal academic gown in the act of being awarded some honour or other.
But when I go through the door that divides the old building from the new, I don’t go straight ahead, past the Mindfulness Area and the blonde wood of the cafeteria, to where the vibrant orange reception sofa calls a cheerful greeting, as if to reassure visitors this is not a place conducive to dark thoughts. Instead, I take the first door on the left, which leads to the stairwell, with its muted oatmeal walls, and hurry on up to the bedrooms.
My room is the first on the left, but I walk straight past it and continue down the corridor, with its framed photographs of nature – a close-up of dew on a blade of grass, a feather floating in a muddy puddle, sunlight glittering through a canopy of green leaves. The photographs are caulked to the walls so that we can’t take them off and use them against ourselves, or each other. The very last room is Charlie’s room.
How many times have I made this journey between my room and hers over the last eight weeks? I’m surprised my feet haven’t made indentations in the strip wood flooring. Yet now I feel strange and unease prickles at the back of my neck. I glance up into the eye of a CCTV camera. The camera has always been there, but it is the first time I’ve really noticed it. Its unblinking stare makes me anxious.
Our doors don’t have locks. For obvious reasons. Even so, I’m surprised when Charlie’s handle turns. I hesitate before stepping inside.
I’ve been steeling myself to find her room cleared and emptied of all the things that made it Charlie’s. But it’s all still there – the blown-up photograph of her and her little nieces in her parents’ garden, their three heads dark against an explosion of yellow hibiscus, the lifesize cardboard cutout of Ryan Gosling given to her by an ex-workmate, the old-fashioned patchwork quilt on the bed, a riot of colour amidst the oppressive beigeness.
Yet whereas Charlie was notoriously untidy, with paperbacks piled precariously on the floor next to her bed, and jeans and sweaters strewn over the chair or heaped on the floor, the room has been meticulously tidied. The desk has been cleared of old newspapers and magazines and empty crisp packets, its white surface bland and clean. The bed, which was always messy, as if someone had just that minute got out of it, is now perfectly made, the quilt pulled taut.
I put a hand on the pillow and it feels smooth and unnaturally cold to the touch, like a bar of soap, and I snatch it back. I slide open a desk drawer. Empty. The wardrobe has no door, its edges rounded in case anyone should decide to string themselves up from a sharp corner. I almost cry out when I see her fuschia cashmere cardigan hanging on one of the weirdly shaped cardboard hangers, suspended from a rail designed to break under ‘undue weight’. How she loved that cardigan. She’d told me about a decluttering handbook her mother had given her in a not-so-subtle hint. Charlie had refused to read it on principle but had grudgingly flicked through, taking away from it only one thing – that you should hang on only to things that spark joy. ‘This here is my joy-sparking cardigan,’ she said to me.
Now it hangs on the clothes hanger, its empty arms drooping.
The absence of joy is palpable. Rather, again, I have that sense of unease, of being watched.
Charlie has a corner room, and I cross to the window on the back wall that looks out over the sloping lawn and, at the very bottom, the dark smudge of the lake. There are days when the sun is reflected on the surface of the water, making the lake appear to be lit up from within. But not today.
A radiator runs underneath the window. On especially cold days Charlie would throw a cushion down on the floor and sit cross-legged on the carpet with her back to the radiator. ‘I can never get warm enough,’ she once told me. ‘I’m like a chicken breast that hasn’t quite thawed out, with a hard, frozen bit in the middle that refuses to defrost.’
I drop to the floor and assume her position, trying to inhabit her skin, to feel what she felt. Did she really sit here that last day with the heat against her back and think about how best to slice into her wrist, the right angle, the right point? Is it possible I could have got it – got her – so wrong?
There was a time I was sure of my own judgement, trusted in myself. But that was before.
I hug my knees into my chest and rock gently for a while. Sometimes this soothes me, but there is something about this room without Charlie in it that makes me anxious.
I hear the soft thud of footsteps outside, and voices drawing closer.
‘We’ve cleared as much as we could, and I don’t mind telling you the place was a pigsty. But there’s a limit to how much we can do before the relatives turn up.’
The woman says ‘relatives’ as though it’s something not quite nice. I stop rocking abruptly, putting my hand down to steady me. My fingers brush against a piece of paper tucked away behind the pipe of the radiator which the cleaners must have missed. The footsteps stop outside the door and my mouth goes dry as I recognize Dr Roberts’ familiar baritone, sounding unusually clipped and impatient.
‘With any luck, they won’t stay long. Quick in–out, then we can get all her stuff bagged up. We’ve a new one arriving a week on Monday.’
The door handle turns and I’ve just time to snatch up the scrap of paper and stuff it up the sleeve of my sweatshirt before the door bursts open.
I scramble to my feet, my heart hammering.
‘Right. Let’s have a quick check over … Hannah! What are you doing in here?’
Instantly, Dr Roberts reverts to his usual slow drawl and I wonder if the woman with him, who I now recognize as Bridget Ashworth, has also clocked the change in his voice.
Bridget Ashworth has a severe brown bob with a grey re-growth line along the parting and glasses with purple frames and a dark wool jacket with what appears to be a single thick white cat hair on the shoulder. She clutches her lanyard and blinks behind her lenses as if she has surprised a wild fox rifling through her kitchen bin, while I shift from foot to foot.
Who would believe I used to give presentations to roomfuls of people, scanning the crowd and making deliberate eye contact with random strangers?
Now I keep my eyes to the carpet, but still, as I mumble some story about needing to feel close to Charlie, I feel Bridget Ashworth’s disapproving gaze crawl over me.
Even when I get back to the safety of my own room, I’m still scratching, trying to get it off.
About the Book
Imagine being happily married for twenty-eight years. You have three children, a lovely house and a husband who travels a lot – but even after all this time, you still love each other.
Or, imagine being happily married for seventeen years. You have one daughter, a lovely home and though your husband travels a lot, you still love each other passionately.
Then one day you get a call that turns your world upside down: your husband has died. You are devastated. You go to the funeral ... And come face to face with his other widow.
Another wife, another family. It can’t be true. It must be a mistake. It has to be her fault – doesn’t it?
With the sharp and witty scalpel she used in The Mistress’s Revenge, Tamar Cohen lays bare the raw emotions that underpin so-called normal family life and explores the hearts of two women forced to re-evaluate everything they thought they knew.
For Billie, with all my love
PROLOGUE
When those who were present look back on Simon Busfield’s funeral – which they still do, although less harshly as time goes on – they might disagree on the peripherals: who was standing where, whether the sun flung dark shadows like nets over the guests, or whether the clouds muffled the light before it fell. But on the basic facts, they are unanimous: the two women facing each other, dressed in black, the grown-up children who encircled them like a ring of barbed wire, all sombre clothes and sharp-edged grief, the outrageous claim that momentarily hung solid in the air before mushrooming over the proceedings like an atomic cloud.
By the time that cloud finally dispersed, a great many things had changed. It is a question of perspective whether those changes have proved to be entirely for the worse. Still, it is the moment itself that matters, not the ripples that came after it; the moment when Lottie Busfield, trailing her daughter behind her like a wheel-on suitcase, came face to face with Selina Busfield, the grieving survivor of a twenty-eight-year marriage, outside the crematorium.
Two wives. One husband. You can see how that might be awkward.
But then again, not technically wives any longer.
Widows. Two widows.
Part One
DENIAL
1
SELINA
FLORA IS PERCHED on the kitchen table, her big blue eyes following me around the room. She has just finished a very long-winded story about a party she and Ryan went to where Ryan was the only person who refused to wear fancy dress. Ryan thinks fancy dress is ‘gay’, apparently. Give me strength! I maintain a diplomatic silence. I’ve discovered that’s the best way of dealing with the matter of my daughter’s inappropriate boyfriend. If I were to voice an opinion – that he has all the charm of a dead haddock, for instance – she’d go back to giving me the sanitized PR version of Ryan – the Dear Leader version, as Simon calls it – like she did in the beginning when it became obvious what Simon and I thought of him. At least this way I get to hear the truth, even if the price is that I have to swallow my own tongue at times.
So I nod, and murmur appreciatively, and start wondering – oh, the guilt – how soon I’ll be able to switch her off.
That’s the problem with Skyping. You can never get away. There’s some old friend or family member on the screen on your table, or the arm of the sofa, and you’ve had a lovely chat, but you’re now running out of things to talk about, and because they can see everything that’s going on, you can’t invent a saucepan boiling over, or a ring at the door, or any of the normal things that end a conversation. So there’s an awkward pause while you come up with something else to say and try to stop yourself thinking about the million and one things you really ought to be getting on with.
The other problem with Skyping is – and I know this makes me sound as if I come from the Jurassic era – that you can see the other person. The other day, I was thinking about how Simon and I never Skype, even though he’s always away. Of course, that’s partly to do with us both being so ridiculously busy, but really, I realized, it’s more to do with the business of sitting there looking at each other. Even though we’ve been married all these years, it made us both uncomfortable the couple of times we tried it. It’s so intimate. When we first got together we used to spend hours sitting across from each other in cafés and pubs, playing with each other’s feet under the table while we put the world to rights, but what couple who’ve been married nearly thirty years still gaze into each other’s eyes when they talk? There’s something unnatural about it. Awkward. I found myself focusing on the collar of his shirt, or the wayward lock of hair he kept smoothing back with his hand.
I don’t actually want to be able to see the people I’m talking to. It’s distracting. While Flora launches into yet another long-winded story, I’m looking at her frizz of hair and thinking (yet again) how much better it would look if she had it cut. Nothing extreme. Just a little bit of shaping. And I’m looking at her desk in the architectural firm where she works as a PA and noticing, with a bit of a wince, that she has some kind of cuddly toy on there (no doubt bought by Ryan in a petrol station somewhere), and I’m looking at her clothes and wanting to cut through her story and shout ‘Colour block!’ or ‘Texture!’ or ‘Layering!’ or any of the other stupid things overbearing mothers want to say to their grown-up daughters but don’t dare. It’s a kind of maternal Tourette’s, I suppose.
Instead I tell her I have to be getting to the gym. This isn’t technically a lie. I do have a class. Flora doesn’t need to know it doesn’t actually start for another hour and a half. Then we have that awkward Skype goodbye moment where neither of us wants to be the first to click on Disconnect. Silly, isn’t it? It ought to be a straightforward technological act. Lean forward, press, gone. Yet it feels like an emotional rejection.
At the gym, I try to concentrate.
‘Into the Half Moon. And ho-old …’
Jawohl! While my body obediently contorts itself as instructed by the new rather Germanic instructor of Hatha Yoga (Advanced, Wednesdays), my mind keeps itself busy.
1. Book Pierre’s for Book Club Christmas Lunch (just let them try to tell me there aren’t any tables left, in September!).
2. Research printers for Simon’s study. Criminal, those ink-cartridge prices …
3. Ring round for history tutor recommendations. Surely one of the other mothers must know someone, preferably someone who doesn’t smell of wee like the last one.
Starting to ache now. I shoot a glance at the mirror that runs the length of the studio wall in front of me, surreptitiously comparing myself with the rest of the class. Body straight, arm stretched. Not bad, as long as you overlook the slight sheen on my forehead. So unforgiving, those overhead lights, even after two sessions of Botox and a discreet dermal filler (not that I’d ever admit those to anyone). But when you consider I probably have a good ten years on most of the women here, I think I’m doing OK. Not that I like to think in terms of age. So counterproductive. And so bloody depressing!
4. Call Lorenzo and make sure he has the revised flight times. Oh, and get him to stack the firewood in the main living room. Not much use to us outside the back door. Not with Simon’s back. Which reminds me …
5. Make appointment with chiropractor.
6. Email that friend of Hettie’s about the Cricket Club fundraising quiz questions. No soap opera questions this time, please God!
7. Send out Tweet about the Book Club Lunch. Mustn’t forget!
Ouch. I don’t actually gasp out loud, but my arms are starting to feel the strain. Sadist, this instructor. Some of the other women have already collapsed in a heap on their mats. Stamina. That’s the thing. You can have a twenty-five-year-old body, but if you have no stamina, you might as well give up.
‘And straight into the upward-facing dog.’
In my head I heard Josh’s voice mutter, ‘You’re an upward-facing dog,’ and I can’t help smiling. Internally, obviously. Such a worry, that boy, even at seventeen, but he can still make me laugh. The other day I asked him to unload the dishwasher, and he muttered under his breath, ‘You’re a dishwasher,’ and we both looked at each other crossly and then laughed like drains. Not funny in the slightest, now I think about it, but somehow it was at the time.
‘Come on, ladies, stretch those necks, lengthen those backs.’
The instructor has very muscly calves, I notice as I stretch and lengthen like crazy. (Even at fifty-one I retain a ridiculous compunction to please. I can criticize the instructor till the cows come home, but it doesn’t stop me craving her approval. Go figure, as my friend Hettie would say.) She makes her rounds of the class, tucking in chins and pulling back shoulders. She could be a pretty girl if it wasn’t for those calves, but I don’t think men really like that kind of thing, do they? All that gristle. It’s so important to know where to draw the line. I think so, anyway. I know I’m probably not best qualified to know what men want, having been married for so long, but you don’t have to be actively engaged in the business of men to appreciate what they do and don’t like. It’s like our villa in Tuscany – I’m not looking to sell it, but I still like to know what’s happening in the Italian property market. It’s just a question of being prepared for every eventuality. I know there are some people who believe being prepared spoils things, takes away from the spontaneity of life. The same people who love surprise parties, probably. Personally, I can’t think of anything worse. What if you had on a dress you’d always loathed, one of those ‘fat dresses’, as Flora calls them, that you throw on those mornings when you wake up feeling the size of a house? (I don’t actually have a fat dress myself, although I do have a couple of pairs of good quality leggings I reserve for that time of the month.) What if the person organizing the party forgot to invite the most important people or, worse, invited people you couldn’t stand?
After the exercise class, I get out my Emergency Repair Kit. Little travel-sized jars into which I’ve decanted some essential toiletries. There’s something very therapeutic about the ritual of applying nice-smelling stuff on fresh cotton-wool pads. It feels useful. Practical. When I look at my reflection in the mirror of the Chelsea health club (not a cliché, whatever Simon may say – just convenient, and really not so very expensive when you work out how much use I get out of it. Not like Hettie, who jokes that when she was a member she used to pay £2,000 a year for a sauna and a half-leg wax), I make sure to do it piecemeal fashion. Hair, eyebrows, upper arms. Anatomical fragments. After forty-five, you don’t really want to go looking at things as a whole. That’s one thing I’ve learned. Now I’m fifty-one, I’m finding out about the places inside yourself where you can tuck doubts away like unopened bank letters. The trick is to break everything down into its constituent parts and work though them systematically. I like to look in the health-club mirror and focus on the positives – overall shape, level of fitness, a general sense of purpose – rather than the areas where I can’t compete, like youthful complexion and cut-away shoulders.
In the changing room afterwards a woman compliments me on my cardigan. It’s a new powder-blue one I’m rather pleased with so I ought to feel gratified, but something about this woman bothers me. Her nails, when she puts out her hand to stroke the soft cashmere, are all broken with bits of ragged flesh around them, a bit like Josh’s. What kind of person chews their own skin? I used to ask Josh as a boy. Are you a cannibal? The thing he never seemed to get is that people judge a lot about a person by the state of his or her nails. Of course, he used to argue that those were the very people whose opinion he least cared about, but he’d be surprised how important those kind of things can be. My own mother taught me early on that there are few challenges in life that can’t be faced more easily secure in the knowledge of the possession of well-manicured hands and matching underwear. ‘It’s about self-esteem,’ I tried to tell Josh. ‘That boost that comes from knowing yourself to be … in order.’ In order! I made him sound like a lavatory! No wonder he looked at me as if I was bonkers.
‘You always look immaculate,’ says the woman in the changing room. ‘It puts me to shame. I feel like a complete mess in comparison.’
Oh Lord. Clearly what I should do at this point is to disagree warmly, or say something self-deprecating, but the truth is she does look a mess. She has on one of those flesh-coloured thermal tops that make people look as though their upper half is encased in a surgical bandage, and a pair of faded black multi-pack-style knickers. I don’t mean to be unkind, but obviously she has money or she wouldn’t be here in the first place, so presumably she has a selection of clothes, and it seems bizarre that she must have chosen to wear that top, weighing up its relative merits this morning against some other less offensive item before deciding in its favour. So I say, ‘Nonsense, you look perfectly nice.’
Which, as everyone knows, roughly translates as ‘Oh dear God.’ The woman backs off sharpish after that, and I feel like giving myself a good slap. All the way home in my zippy little Fiat 500 with the red leather trim that usually cheers me up, I feel cross and out of sorts. ‘Kindness costs nothing,’ I used to drum into my three children as they were growing up. Oh hypocrisy, thy name is Selina Busfield!
On reflection, I should have made the cardigan situation into some kind of joke, only I’m so useless at jokes. Simon once told a dinner-table of guests that I don’t have a ‘talent for humour’. I was in the kitchen preparing the dessert at the time and he was holding court, rather drunkenly. He didn’t know I could hear him. ‘Selina has many talents, but humour isn’t one of them,’ he said.
I never told him I’d overheard. But it hurt. Those kind of throwaway remarks always do. What was that wartime slogan? Careless talk costs lives. Someone should remind Simon of that from time to time. Of how much can ride on a careless comment.
The journey home takes an age. The roads are already being dug up and repaired in preparation for the Olympics, even though it’s still nearly two years away. Waste of money, if you ask me. All those new state-of-the-art stadiums. What will we do with them when it’s over? Pay our gas bills with them? Prop up the euro with them? Use them to sort out the bogging mess the universities have got themselves into?
A couple stroll past as I am idling at a junction. They have their arms draped across each other’s backs, hands plunged deep in each other’s back pockets. They are laughing at something on a mobile phone, their faces tilted together, and I feel this sudden whoosh of longing. To be so included in someone else’s world. As I watch the X of their arms against their backs recede into the distance I suddenly feel like bursting into tears, which is most unlike me.
As I cross the river and approach the wide leafy avenues of Barnes, my bad humour persists, prompting me to notice all the irritating details I usually blot right out – the CCTV cameras sprouting like alien fruit from telegraph poles and lampposts, the custom-built timber-clad huts that house the wheelie bins. (In Barnes, plastic is practically illegal. Christmas mornings are filled with the outraged wails of children who’ve been bought tasteful wooden toys instead of the garish coloured ones they covet from the television ads.) Funny how, even after twenty-seven years in our home, I still navigate my way around these streets according to the properties we saw when we were house-hunting all those years ago. This road had that one that was deceptively spacious inside, but no garden to speak of; down there is that one that smelt like someone had died in it. Of course, there are the inevitable pangs of regrets also. Who could guess that street would become so desirable? If only I hadn’t let Simon talk me out of taking on that structural work!
Turning into our road, I have the strongest urge to talk to Simon. Not for any gooey reason, but because he is the only person I ever want to talk to in moods like this. As my husband it’s his job to listen to the failings of my day, and then to poo-poo them – Clause 593 in the Married Couples’ Charter! I don’t have to pretend with Simon that everything is hunky dory. There’s always a degree of pretence with other people, isn’t there? How could there not be?
But Simon is AWOL somewhere in the Middle East. Not in his apartment in Dubai, I don’t think, but somewhere else to do with this new contract. He’s not due back until tomorrow night. Anyway he’d think it was odd if I rang him out of the blue in the middle of one of his trips. We don’t have that kind of marriage. Thank God! Not like Hettie and Ian, who call each other ten times a day to talk about absolutely nothing at all. This train is so crowded! I was boxed in at the supermarket car park! I drank three espressos and now I feel like the Duracell bunny! Blah blah blah. And always finishing with an ‘I love you.’ So unnecessary. Love is like any other commodity. The more you flaunt it, the less value it has. The real trick is to make the other person feel loved (Clause 594!). I always make Simon one of his favourite meals after he’s been away – roast lamb or beef, Yorkshire pudding, the works. There’s a joint waiting in the fridge downstairs ready for tomorrow night. What greater expression of affection is there than cooking for someone? Words are just words. It’s doing that counts.
Simon would be shocked if I tried to track him down. He’s constantly marvelling at how self-sufficient I am. ‘Selina doesn’t even notice if I’m there or not’ is his regular joke. Bloody good thing too, seeing as he spends half his life away from me. Dubai, for goodness’ sake! Even after all this time I still can’t quite get over it. Why couldn’t it have been Spain or South Africa – somewhere with a bit of culture or beauty? At least he’s used to it now, being there on his own, but I still feel a bit guilty. I did try to like it, but I knew as soon as I got there it wasn’t for me. Ghastly place, I’ve never felt heat like it. And the dust! When we drove out of the airport, there were all these cars around literally covered in the stuff. I assumed they’d been abandoned there for years, but Simon said they’d probably only been parked there a few weeks. I haven’t set foot back there in nearly twenty years. Can it really be so long? It’s horrible how time compresses itself these days like one of those zip files on my computer, all the hours stuffed inside like duck down into a pillow.
I haven’t really got a leg to stand on when it comes to him spending so much time away, but there are times, like now, when I long to be able to just pick up the phone without even thinking, without having anything in particular to say. He rings me, of course, between meetings or from a bar (so irritating that there’s still no signal in his apartment), but by then I’ve always forgotten why I wanted to speak to him so urgently in the first place. Quite often, in fact, he catches me at an inopportune moment – in the middle of a Cancer Research fundraiser meeting, or taking my mother shopping in the ghastly new retail park – and I end up being curt and snappish, quite forgetting how much I’ve been wanting to hear his voice. It’s the little things that are often lost between us, the minutiae from which intimacy is stitched. Sometimes I feel a bit sad about it – all those trivial moments that have slipped through the cracks between the floorboards of our marriage.
I decide to phone Felix instead. My older son has spent a lifetime filling in for his AWOL father, but increasingly he’s becoming first choice. I know that’s an awful admission and he’ll probably end up in therapy for life, but there’s something about the way Felix says ‘Hola, Madre’ that instantly calms me and reminds me how much I have to be proud of: my beautiful six-bedroom home, my three largely on-the-rails children, my fund raising work, my size-twelve figure, my legendary pavlova (well, what’s the point in being coy?), my patronage of struggling artists, my newly rationalized wardrobe, my never-missed twice-weekly visits to my mother at the marvellous residential home I almost killed myself researching, my competent skiing, my law degree (well, one year of it anyway), my olive oil made from our own olives from the trees around our Tuscan villa and given out at Christmas with our own distinctive, specially designed (by Josh) labels, my discovery of just the right white for our bedroom walls, my vegetable garden.
Felix doesn’t answer. He must be busy with work. I have to admit I don’t have much idea what he actually does for a living. Something creative, I know that much – something to do with film. He seems to spend a lot of time in meetings (at ridiculous hours of the night) in various Soho bars and restaurants, and it certainly seems to be lucrative enough – Shoreditch lofts don’t come cheap these days (not like thirty years ago when they couldn’t give them away). I remember us all trooping off to Wardour Street last year to see that film he’d made. We were ushered into a private viewing room with plush, purple-velvet seats set so far apart we practically had to yell to hear one another. The film was short, barely half an hour long (thank God, said Simon later), and consisted of a couple arguing in various locations around London. The arguments always started off with something completely random, like the man accusing the woman of sighing loudly, and her denying it. Then they’d escalate to full-on shouting matches during which the woman kept saying she’d ‘settled’ by entering into the relationship. I didn’t entirely understand it, but you could tell it showed promise, although Josh said, ‘If I’d wanted to listen to people arguing with each other I’d have hung around the girls’ changing rooms at school.’ Flora, bless her, tried to be tactful, but put her foot in it by asking, ‘Why was it all filmed at night?’ Felix was quite touchy about it. Apparently the dark quality is all to do with mood. Who knew? Which is another one of Hettie’s sayings.
Back home again, I feel at a bit of a loose end. Walter, our ancient arthritic Miniature Schnauzer, waddles painfully over to greet me, and I manage a distracted pat, then sit down heavily on the bottom step of the elegant curved staircase that first made me fall in love with this house. Can it really be nearly three decades ago? I run my fingers absently along the wall. So glad I stuck to my guns about the plum colour, when Simon was so set on grey.
‘Have you lost the use of your legs?’
Oh my!
It’s a funny thing about having nearly grown children – especially ones with older siblings who’ve already left home – you’re always forgetting they’re there. So Josh’s face looming upside down as he bends over me from the step above gives me a jolt.
‘Just taking off my shoes,’ I tell him, although it’s patently obvious I’m doing no such thing. It’s just as well Josh exists in a separate time/space dimension where nothing that isn’t directly related to his own physical or, on the odd occasion, emotional needs actually registers.
‘Did you warm up the cottage pie I left for you?’ I ask.
‘Nah. Couldn’t be bothered. Had some toast.’