Spring summer autumn us, p.28
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Us, page 28
Book club great success! Next week On Chesil Beach, no Nikita!!
She would normally have smiled at Teddy’s words. There was also a text from Jonny. It had come at 9.15 this morning, she noticed, when she’d been in bed with Gabe.
See you tonight! I fancy steak, if you can sort that. Thanks darling. Things have been WILD here, those crazy Belgians!! Xxx
She realised that because of this horribly slow train, Jonny would probably get home before her, hungover, no doubt, and in need of cuddles. He might even come to the door to greet her, with a huge, bemused smile and the boast he’d made dinner – once he’d sussed there was no steak. That was assuming he believed the lie she told by text yesterday, about going shopping in Oxford with Wren today. Of course he believed it! Rachel would never cheat! Rachel would never dare. And loving another man? Preposterous! Yet he had been happy to ride roughshod over their marriage, casually stabbing holes in it with his treachery and widening the punctures from which love and respect had been escaping, with a slow hiss, for years.
Jonny got what he wanted; everyone knew that. He was fearless. He took chances. If he were in her shoes, her miserable shoes, and he was offered a love like she had found, he’d just think he wanted it and he needed it, and he would grab it with both hands. That was ambition for you. Self-service, which her husband was so good at. Sorry, Gabe, she thought, I’m so sorry . . .
A teen in headphones in the seat in front noisily opened a packet of crisps and started chomping on them. Rachel was starving now, but she remembered she had a packet of Biscoff biscuits in her bag, stolen from the hotel room. She reached into the main compartment of her bag and rummaged, puzzled by a folded piece of paper she felt at the bottom, which she pulled free.
Unfolding it, she gave a small gasp. It was a piece of cream notepaper, torn from the hotel pad on the desk, and on it was a tiny sketch of a magpie, in black biro, and under the magpie were the words:
Fly where your heart takes you, Rachel. But wherever that is, you will always cast a bright shadow on my life.
Gabe x
He must have done this while I was in the shower, Rachel thought. She already had the little napkin sketch he’d done of her, slipped inside her coat pocket. And now this. These uncertain words. This wish and promise, and a little piece of his heart to keep. A tear landed on the creamy paper. It made the magpie’s beak shiny, like the sleek gloss of the Trafalgar Square lion Gabe had climbed on to yesterday. More followed, unchecked. She cried and cried as raindrops streamed diagonally down the window. She felt like she would never stop. Tissue after tissue came out of the packet.
There was a rustling from her right. The woman in the seat next to her laid a gentle hand on her arm. ‘It’ll all be all right, you’ll see,’ she said kindly. ‘You’ll know what to do.’
‘Thank you,’ Rachel said. ‘Thank you.’ But she didn’t know what to do, did she? She had the sudden panicky feeling she had made a mistake. The train lurched, then came to an abrupt stop, causing the passengers to exclaim and tut, and the driver’s announcements about temporary signal failure to be wearisome and light-hearted.
Rachel felt as paralysed as the train, as static, as stuck. Finally, it limped forward again and began to pick up a cumbersome speed. She leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes, letting all the images and words of the last two days swirl within her, to the turning of the wheels and the rumbling of the track. Round and round. Round and round. Further from him. Further from him. Six little words formed in her brain. How can I live without him? Six little words in her head as a refreshment trolley rumbled past. Six little words as the train undulated past electricity pylons and far-stretching fields and isolated cottages with autumn smoke billowing from their chimneys. I can’t live without him. Five words. The train swayed and tracked through fields of muted green and ploughed earth. A lone scarecrow flapped ragged arms. Four words. I could go back. And then three, as the wheels continued to turn and the track was eaten up, yard by yard: I need him. As the three words became two: Can I?, the fields gave way to houses and gardens. Empty autumn afternoon gardens. And then, as the train coasted into Fincham station, like it hadn’t just been the longest, most excruciating journey ever known on the British railway network, just one word: Yes. Yes, she would be with Gabe. Yes, she would leave Jonny. Yes, she could make it all work, somehow. She would go home, tell Jonny it was over, upend her life, turn it on its head and leave it in ruins, and then she would go back to London. To Gabe. To all-consuming, once-in-a-lifetime love. Jonny would be OK. Teddy was in a much better place these days. Their bond would survive. But Rachel would go back to love.
The passengers were gathering their belongings with relief. Rachel slipped her shoulders into her coat and zipped up her bag. The woman next to her stood up and was the first to make for the door, depositing her McDonald’s bag in one of those under-seat bins.
‘Thank you,’ Rachel whispered to her departing form, and the woman was gone.
Rachel trailed behind the passengers queuing to get off the train. She stepped down on to the platform and hurried from it, clattered over the footbridge and made her way to the tiny car park. Her Golf was where she had left it two days ago, but it seemed another lifetime ago she was in this car, in this space of hers where everything was so familiar: the leather gloves stuffed in the side door pocket, the fir tree air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror, and one of Jonny’s books on the dash.
She didn’t falter. She could do this. Rachel pulled out of the car park, determined not to shake, determined to be brave, and started driving home. The roads were quiet; it wasn’t yet rush hour, but as she got to Metcalf Road, just off the short bypass, she slowed the car as she saw the flashing lights of an ambulance in the rear-view mirror. A minute later, she pulled over, along with three other cars, on to the side of the road, allowing the ambulance – its sirens now blaring – to sail past. She saw it turn swiftly into Piper Way. Checking her mirror, she pulled out again. When she got to Piper Way herself, it started to rain, and the swoosh of the wipers was a welcome distraction. Jonny would be waiting. She was going to do this. She let the sound of the wipers sweep her with determination. With resolve. She was almost home. Three miles and she’d be in the village. Silent trees wept either side of the road. Her headlights, on full beam, picked up cat’s eyes like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs.
The village was quiet, largely free of traffic. She slowed carefully on corners. Piloted to avoid a lone cyclist, his bike lights winking. She turned on to Hedge Hill Lane, crunched into the enormous puddle that always lurked there when it rained and, further up the lane, flashing lights were casting watery blue and white shadows, like out of season Christmas lights. Even before she reached Crofters, Rachel realised the ambulance, that ambulance she’d seen flying past, was parked outside her house.
WINTER
2 DECEMBER 2019
Chapter Thirty-Four
Turkish delight had been one of Rachel’s dad’s favourites. A hexagonal box of them had sat on the windowsill in the sitting room, behind his chair, every year after Christmas, the plump cushions of dusted lilac treasures nestled in their papery compartments waiting to be selected. He savoured his Turkish delight. Gary liked to spread out his enjoyment of them. And when he bit into one, he always used to hold it up to the light, like a jewel, and examine the contrast between the floury exterior and the translucent lilac centre.
‘Beautiful!’ he used to say, popping the rest into his mouth, and Rachel’s mum would find the empty box, sometime in March, on the windowsill behind his chair, and put it in the bin.
Funny the things you remember, thought Rachel. The dear memories of her parents so distant now, but yet so clear, and the realisation she had outlived Frances and Gary by twenty-five years. She was not only thinking about Turkish delight because Christmas was coming and she was idly compiling a list, leaning over the coffee table, of Jonny’s stocking presents (chocolate Brazils, Mint Matchmakers and Lyle & Scott socks), but because this early December morning her view from the sitting-room window was a little Narnia. There was no snow for the White Witch, on her enormous sleigh, to come scudding into view on, but it was crisp and fearfully cold and there had been a haw frost overnight, which had tipped the front lawn and bushes in glittery platinum. A petrified child’s glove, stuck cuff-first into the hedge, was rigidly waiting for its owner to recognise the raspberry red under its frozen saccharine topping and Rachel wondered who it belonged to, as she stirred her morning coffee. Teddy had owned a set like that once, in her early thirties: a beret, scarf and gloves ensemble Rachel had bought her from Accessorize in Oxford. Jonny used to sing ‘Raspberry Beret’ to her every time she wore it.
‘Well, good morning, my dear!’
He surprised her, coming out of the conservatory like that. It was positively arctic out there at this time of the year. No one set foot in the conservatory between November and April, and it was so cold in the winter they stored wine in it, ready for Christmas.
‘Goodness, you startled me!’ Rachel said, from the sofa. ‘What on earth were you up to in there?’
Jonny navigated the brass threshold between conservatory and sitting room – a well-known trip hazard – in tartan slippers.
‘I went to get this,’ he said, waving a copy of Len Deighton’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Jonny was thinner than he used to be, the skin on his hands a little papery. ‘From the other bookcase. I couldn’t find my usual copy.’
‘Shut the door then,’ she said, ‘it’s freezing out there.’
‘All right,’ he said dismissively, flapping the book at her.
Rachel watched as he shut the conservatory door then headed quite jauntily to the kitchen, in his roll-neck sweater and plum-coloured cords. He didn’t need his stick any more, but it leaned against the wall just outside the kitchen door, its gnarled top a smooth-grooved walnut, just in case. If he had an author event, he always took it, for faux gravitas – an authorly prop to hook over the arm of his chair when he sat down. He laughed and said he’d always imagined himself with a cane one day, and perhaps a monocle. Why not go the whole hog now he had turned sixty and was properly old?
Jonny turned in the kitchen doorway, ballasting one shoulder against the frame.
‘I’ve had a WhatsApp from Teddy?’
Occasionally framing statements as questions was an affectation Jonny had picked up from watching Australian soaps in the afternoons. Neighbours, Home and Away . . . He had lengthy breaks from writing now; the luxury of a hugely successful author not expected to put out books quite so often, after having been ill for so long following the accident. He liked the new routine, working in bursts of six months to a year, then having long periods off.
‘Oh?’ Rachel enquired.
‘She can make the Winter Ball, after all? That thing she’s going to is finishing earlier?’
‘Oh, great.’ Rachel was glad she was coming, it would be lovely to see her.
‘She didn’t say anything about Lee.’
‘No?’
‘But I expect that means he’ll be coming, too?’
Rachel’s heart sank. ‘Yes, I expect so.’
Jonny nodded, then turned and walked into the kitchen. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he called out, the inflection gone, ‘for a while now, actually. I hope it’s the right thing to do.’ He reappeared in the doorway. ‘I’m stopping the investment, in Lee’s plays.’
‘Are you?’ Rachel had returned to her Christmas list, but now looked up again.
‘Yes. Dear old Michael, God rest his soul, had been banging on at me for years to stop doing it. My new agent, too. And my accountant called me last week and said I was mad to be continuing. That fiscally it didn’t add up. Really gave it to me straight, the fucker.’ He laughed. It turned into a cough and he fumbled for a balled-up tissue from the pocket of his cords and spluttered meekly into it. ‘Asked me exactly what Lee’s prospects were, you know . . . And, well, it might have been a bit rash—’ A look of disquiet briefly flickered across his face. ‘—but the decision’s been made now. No one could say I didn’t do enough for the man.’
I don’t know why you always have. ‘Well, no, they couldn’t.’
‘I mean, he’s not going to make it, is he? He’s been saying so himself, recently. A lot, actually. This is a kind thing to do, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, I’m sure it is, darling.’ She doubted Lee would see it that way, but this was Jonny all over. Act now, think later. At the same time, Jonny’s confidence was not so robust any more, not quite so undentable. His sentences these days often had the codas of ‘isn’t it?’ and ‘shouldn’t I?’ and ‘don’t you think so?’
Lee was – dishearteningly – back in Teddy’s life. Teddy had finished her degree, got a job in Oxford, for a telecommunications company, and a flat, and things had been going great, for a few years, until Teddy had walked into a book evening Jonny was hosting and Lee was standing by the fireplace, a roguishly charming look on his face. Teddy had succumbed to him again. She still had the job, but she was commuting to it from Lee’s bungalow and things seemed as up and down with them as they always had been.
‘Good, good. Well, as I say, that’s the decision. I think he’ll thank me, actually. Yes, I think he will.’
Jonny nodded emphatically to himself and stepped back into the kitchen. Rachel heard him switch the kettle on. ‘There’s a glove out there?’ he called almost absent-mindedly.
‘Yes, I know,’ she called back (wasn’t marriage mostly calling to the other person from different rooms?). ‘I’m sure someone will come along to pick it up.’
‘Teddy used to have a set that colour.’
‘Yes, darling, she did.’
Teddy had been wearing the raspberry red scarf that early evening in October 2008 when Rachel had driven home from the station, preparing to leave Jonny, and seen the ambulance parked in their drive. Having just arrived to visit her father, the red scarf had been trailing from Teddy’s neck when Rachel caught her streaking up the hallway in a dead panic as paramedics dealt with Jonny, who’d fallen from a step ladder in the kitchen reaching for the griddle pan on top of the cupboard, because he’d arrived home before Rachel and wanted to cook bacon – but had no idea where the regular frying pan was. He’d cracked his head on the quarry-tiled floor; he’d broken a rib on the way down as he’d glanced off the side of the oven. The damned fool idiot. That’s what he’d called himself afterwards – many weeks afterwards, when he’d had the energy to be angry with himself.
The cut head and the broken rib were only the start of his troubles. Jonny contracted MRSA while he was in hospital, from an epidural needle, he maintained, and had to stay there for six months, in a yellow room on the top floor, overlooking the Maternity Wing car park, while doctors tried to make him better. At one point it wasn’t certain if he would live – a halting, frozen week in November when time had stood still and each second of the day had to be dragged through like thick mud. And later, the following February, there was a week where they didn’t know whether he would walk again or not.
‘What’s for lunch?’ Jonny asked. He was now cheerily making his way from kitchen to study with a large mug of tea.
‘I was thinking tomato soup and some of that thick crusty bread I got from Morrisons,’ Rachel said, scribbling ‘Fry’s Chocolate Cream’ on his stocking list. ‘Are you making it?’
‘Oh.’ Jonny pulled a face. ‘Well, I was going to write until one.’
‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll make it, you can clear up.’
He pulled another one and disappeared into the study. Jonny was starting a new project this week – his first book for two years. Nikita was now a grandmother and her grandson, Alexi, was heading up a splinter spy ring in St Petersburg. Jonny shut the study door. Rachel crossed off ‘Fry’s Chocolate Cream’ and wrote ‘Lindt Dark Cherry’.
‘What’s for lunch?’ had been one of the rhythmic refrains of their days after Jonny had eventually come out of hospital. When Rachel no longer spent her days by his bedside, softly talking to him (when he was awake) or looking down on the car park as new dads carefully brought out new babies in car seats (while he was asleep) or waiting outside the yellow room staring at a poster about blood types while nurses did his personal care.
‘What’s for lunch?’, ‘What’s for dinner?’, ‘What’s for breakfast?’ When Jonny was confined to their bedroom when he first came home, the quiet, endless days were punctuated by meals served to him on the tray with the picture of the ginger cat on it. They were punctuated by the click of the numbers changing on the old-fashioned digital clock on the bedside table, as Rachel carefully changed their bed linen twice a week, to keep Jonny comfortable. Or spritzed a linen room spray he liked and arranged fresh lilies. Or adjusted his easy listening radio station to the optimum volume. She sometimes sat at the dressing table and dealt with cards and presents from well-wishing readers – replying to them, filing them, sifting them for any Kims she would silently dispose of.
That quiet period was from spring to summer of 2009. In August, Jonny got out of bed and took up residence between a recliner in the sitting room and a wheelchair he called Betty, as he said it made him feel like an inmate in a Betty Ford clinic.
‘That’s a compliment!’ he’d cry, wheeling himself round in it. ‘It’s all serene and calm here. Restorative. Film stars would think themselves lucky to get over the booze and the drugs chez Trent.’
He roamed around the house on Betty, in tennis shorts and a yellow jumper – the trundle of the wheels a daily percussion that soon became overlaid with non-stop talking; sometimes whispers. Jonny found sitting at the desk in the study uncomfortable, so he bought himself a Dictaphone and recorded ideas and snatches of dialogue for his books as he travelled the ground floor of the house. The trundling wheels and the whispers became a kind of daily lullaby – the rhythmic sound of a train going round and round an endless track. Rachel listened as eventually Jonny dictated whole books, and she washed the bed sheets, and she sprayed the linen room spray, and fiddled with the volume of the radio, and nursed her husband back to a full recovery – and it took six and a half years.
