Читать книгу Scissors, Paper, Stone - Elizabeth Day, Elizabeth Day - Страница 14
ОглавлениеCharlotte was at the office when her mother rang.
‘Charlotte?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, trying to keep her voice low so that none of her colleagues would hear it was a personal call. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing important, just thought I’d catch you if you weren’t too busy.’
Charlotte clenched her jaw. Unthinkingly, she started scratching the tender patch of flesh just behind her earlobes. Her mother’s insistence on calling her at work was a source of constant irritation. She had told her several times not to do it because it was an open-plan building and she was conscious that everyone could hear her murmured replies to Anne’s familiar litany of daily complaints – workmen who hadn’t turned up, weeding that had yet to be tackled, a brand of washing powder that the supermarket had discontinued for no reason, and so on. At least when Anne called on the mobile, Charlotte could recognise the number and choose to ignore it. At work, there was no escape.
‘I am in the middle of something, actually,’ said Charlotte, almost whispering. From across the room, Sasha, the perpetually nosy office secretary, strained to look over the felt-board partition like a meerkat scanning the landscape for food. Charlotte turned the swivel chair away from her.
‘Oh. Well, I don’t want to bother you.’ But the way that Anne said it managed to convey exactly the opposite – she employed a wheedling, semi-offended tone that always made Charlotte feel terribly guilty. It was at times like these that Charlotte wished she had a brother or a sister to share the exhausting obligations of being Anne’s child.
She blew her cheeks out silently so that her mother would not hear the resigned exhalation of her breath. She checked herself. Why was she being so unsupportive? Clearly, Anne needed someone to talk to, Charlotte told herself. Charles’s accident had taken them all unawares but Anne had seemed especially dazed by it. She found herself thinking of that strange morning, some months ago, when Anne had presented Charlotte with her engagement ring. She had never worn it. The mere thought of that unblinking ruby made her shudder. But clearly there had been something going on with Charles; something not altogether pleasant. She sat up briskly and resolved to be kinder, more patient, more willing to listen.
Charlotte clicked on her mouse and minimised the typed document she had been working on so that it shrank to a thin sliver of grey at the bottom of the screen. Sasha had dropped back behind the partition, her eavesdropping attempts clearly frustrated. Charlotte felt a small pang of triumph.
‘No, no, it’s fine, Mum,’ she said, deciding that the least she could do was to give Anne five minutes of her time. ‘It’s not too urgent.’
‘Are you all right?’
Charlotte tried to keep her exasperation in check. This was a familiar tactic of her mother’s, and the more she denied that anything was wrong, the more Anne became convinced she had uncovered some dark awfulness that Charlotte was not admitting to anyone else.
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
‘You’re sounding very flat.’
‘I’m at work, Mum.’
‘Are you sure that’s all it is?’
‘Yep.’
There was a pause.
‘You know, if you don’t want to talk to me you only need to say so . . .’ Anne let the sentence trail off.
Charlotte held her breath.
‘It’s absolutely not that,’ she said, with as much cheerfulness as she could manage. ‘How are you?’
‘Oh, I’m all right. Bearing up. The hospital visits are rather wearing, I must say. I think it’s the driving there and back that takes it out of me and, of course, Janet and I had to cancel our Paris trip so that’s something else to deal with on top of everything.’
Charlotte twisted the phone cord in one hand, mentally zoning out. Her stomach rumbled and she began thinking about what to have for lunch – there was a café she had recently noticed nearby and she wanted to try it out. It was a traditional London greasy spoon, of the sort that she thought had ceased to exist with the advent of coffee-shop chains and oversized bookstores with ‘break-out’ armchair areas. She started imagining a jacket potato with melted cheese and cheap mugs of strong tea and then she realised her mother was still talking.
‘. . . no idea about the prognosis. I always told him to wear that blasted cycling helmet. Always. But he was so stubborn. He’d never listen to me. Or to anyone, for that matter. Not an easy person, your father.’ She let the comment filter though and then added: ‘But then you know that already.’
They lapsed into a short silence. Anne’s conversations normally led this way – no matter what she began talking about, the subject matter would slide inexorably towards Charles. Charlotte was fed-up of hearing about her father’s shortcomings, partly because she was only too aware of them herself, but also because she thought that if her mother genuinely felt this strongly then she should have walked out years ago. It was as if the constant examination of Charles’s faults fed into Anne’s sense of self, enabling her to ignore her own. The familiar nit-picking seemed to have become integral to Anne’s own identity, as though she would cease to exist without being able to define herself in opposition to something. And while she clearly sought Charlotte’s sympathy for all that she had to put up with, the truth was that Anne was fuelled by her own unhappiness. She relied on it. Charlotte was pretty sure her mother wasn’t the easiest person to live with either.
She had never voiced these thoughts to Anne, but they skulked beneath everything Charlotte said; a shadowy, irresistible undertow that pulled her words out of shape and twisted her sentences so that nothing that came out of her mouth seemed able to convey how she genuinely felt. She tried to quell the frustration she felt tighten in her chest.
‘Mum,’ she said, as pleasantly as she could, ‘he’s lying comatose in a hospital bed.’
‘I know that,’ said Anne sharply. ‘I’m just saying, it’s been an exhausting few days.’
‘Yes, I know. But he didn’t have the accident just to annoy you.’
There was a lethal quiet on the end of the line.
‘Right, well,’ Anne said crisply, ‘there was a reason I was ringing you.’
‘OK.’
‘I’m clearing out the house and I notice there are still boxes of your stuff in your old room.’
Charlotte thought of her childhood bedroom, the single bed in the corner with the pink-and-blue duvet patterned with dancing figurines, the small cabinet piled high with books and the motley assortment of patched-up teddy-bears. She could smell it: the instantly recognisable aroma of lavender pillows and sharpened pencils and toast being made in the kitchen below. She felt her throat constrict with an inexplicable sadness.
‘Is there anything you want to hold on to?’ Anne asked. ‘If not, then I can take a load to the Red Cross, but there might be some things in there that you’d like.’
Charlotte dragged her mind back to the conversation. She knew she should be aghast that her mother was clearing out the house when her father was in a coma, teetering between life and death, but she wasn’t, not really. Anne had a curious capacity for detachment and Charlotte knew, from years of experience, that there was little point in trying to penetrate the carapace of her coolness. It was her way of coping. Charlotte held her breath. She sensed that Anne was issuing her with a challenge, was seeking to push her to the brink of something, to goad her into a reaction. She did not want to give into it.
‘No, don’t throw anything out. I’ll come round and sort it out.’
‘When?’
‘As soon as I can manage it.’
‘Well, it would be nice to know in advance.’
‘I’ll let you know,’ Charlotte replied brusquely. ‘Listen, I’ve got to go.’
‘Yes, yes, I’ve taken up enough of your time.’
Don’t rise to it, Charlotte thought. Just don’t do it.
‘Bye, Mum. Nice to chat.’
‘Bye, Charlotte. Do let me know when you’re coming round, won’t you?’
Anne hung up. Charlotte stayed motionless with the receiver pressed to her ear and listened to the reassuring crackle of the dialling tone for several minutes.
The rest of the day turned out to be an accumulation of petty irritations. She found that she could not shake the discomfort of her conversation with her mother or the thought that the family home was being disembowelled of memories, that Anne was somehow preparing herself for Charles’s permanent absence. She tried to talk herself out of such a fanciful notion, but once it had taken hold, she found that it coloured her mood so that every subsequent thought that passed through her mind disquieted her.
On the way back, she snapped at someone on the Tube for accidentally standing on her foot. She felt at once too hot and too cold, and when she walked down the stairs at East Putney station, she found that she could barely summon up enough energy to get to the bottom.
Charlotte was already dreading the evening: she was going to a private view with Gabriel and she could feel herself slipping helplessly into fractiousness.
She was determined not to have a row. As she got ready, she made a series of increasingly ludicrous bargains with herself: she would restrict herself to two drinks; she would let anything hurtful that was said skim over the surface of her consciousness; she would be mature and thoughtful and wise and she would tackle any issues that arose in the sobriety of the following morning. Above all, she thought to herself as she dabbed at her lips with a gloss that tasted like burnt caramel, she would rise above it – the whispered criticisms, the implied insults, the cold shoulders and the knowing half-stares from Gabriel’s disapproving friends – because she, Charlotte Redfern, knew that he loved her above all else.
‘Nothing else matters,’ he told her, sensing her unease as they climbed into the back of a black cab. ‘Stuff happens. People have to get used to it. Besides, it’s nothing to do with them.’ He took her hand in his and drew her over to his side of the seat. She noticed that he smelled faintly of toothpaste. ‘I love you above all else. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she said, and she meant it.
As the cab juddered its way across Hyde Park Corner to the art gallery where one of his friends was curating the exhibition, she wondered about the truth of this. She thought she knew – at least in the sense that he told her so and she believed it, although it had taken her a long time to trust him. She had known Gabriel for two years as a friend before anything had physically happened between them, and much of that time had been taken up with circular discussions about how she could ever trust him. He had been married before – unhappily, of course – and came with a chequered personal history that involved a string of ill-conceived flirtations. There had been a couple of brief affairs with trivial blonde girls, although he assured her that they hadn’t ‘meant anything’; that they had been symptoms of his discontent rather than being worth something in their own right. Yet his capacity for infidelity made her instantly wary of him. At the same time, she was forced to acknowledge that she was falling in love with him, and could not reconcile the two concepts. Objectively, he was entirely the sort of man she least wanted to be with. But everything he said and did overturned her supposedly infallible preconceptions. He was unlike anyone else, so disarmingly honest about his own failings and so consistent in his devotion to her, that it was difficult to resist him and impossible to protect herself from all that he promised to be.
It had been a spontaneous reaction: a feeling, as soon as they met and shook hands and sat down in the shimmering heat of a July evening, of knowing all that there was to know about each other. Part of Charlotte hadn’t wanted to believe it at first because she didn’t trust her own judgement that it was happening. For so long, so many years, she had wanted to feel exactly this shared recognition and to call it love. Throughout her twenties, she had projected all she most desired on to a series of not-quite-right men. The relationships had lasted two years at the most because, no matter how hard she tried, nothing ever quite seemed to live out its initial promise.
She had come to believe that love was a matter of compromise and that everyone made a similar bargain – they just didn’t talk about it. At the weddings of her friends, she found herself both jealous of the occasion and astonished that anyone could actually go through with it. With every new church reading she had listened to about tree roots growing together, with each choked speech delivered by the misty-eyed father of the bride, with every first dance she had smiled and nodded through, with every scrap of confetti she had scattered on dampened tarmac, Charlotte became more and more convinced of the pointlessness of it all.
Her cynicism became its own worn-down cliché. When, last summer, her friend Susie had asked her to be a bridesmaid, she found herself dreading the prospect but said yes in spite of herself. Charlotte had been out to lunch with her mother when Susie called and, curiously, Anne had proved something of an ally.
‘Another wedding?’ Anne said as Charlotte slipped her mobile back into her handbag.
‘Yep,’ she replied, spearing an asparagus stem with her fork. ‘And another bridesmaid’s dress. Lemon-coloured taffeta if I know Susie.’
Anne smiled dryly. ‘It’s a phase. Everyone seems to get married at the same time in their twenties, but it will pass.’ She took a sip from her glass of wine and looked at Charlotte sideways. ‘There’s no rush, you know.’
‘I don’t know if I ever want to get married,’ said Charlotte, not convinced that she meant it. ‘No one can live up to the overblown romance of a wedding.’
She expected her mother to disagree and half-wanted her to tell her not to be so pessimistic but instead Anne stayed silent, twisting the stem of the wine glass in her fingers, her eyes focused on an indistinct point just beyond the bread basket.
‘I don’t think soulmates really exist, do they?’ Charlotte continued. ‘Marriage is a transaction of mutual imperfection.’
‘Oh Charlotte, where on earth did you read that?’
‘Nowhere. I just made it up.’
Anne sighed and raised her eyebrows, the way she always did when she disagreed with something but could not be bothered to say why.
‘So there’s no such thing as true love, then?’
Charlotte pushed her knife and fork together on the plate before answering. She sensed a hidden danger beneath the surface of the conversation but was not quite sure why. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, cautiously. ‘I think it’s mostly a question of finding a man that you like, who will be good to you, who is trustworthy and with whom you can develop a quiet sort of mutual affection. Love fizzles out. You might as well resign yourself to that from the beginning.’
Anne looked at her and her face was distant and closed-off, like a stranger’s. ‘Well,’ she said, finally. ‘I suppose it’s good that you have more realistic expectations than I did.’ Anne drained her wine. ‘Shall we get the bill?’ she added, brightly.
But then Charlotte had met Gabriel. She remembered having a feeling of something like fatefulness even before she’d seen him. She just knew, somehow, that he would be important in her life. It was a work thing, at first – Gabriel was the head of a small but fashionable literary agency and Charlotte was doing the publicity for a books prize that they were part-sponsoring – but it had evolved from one post-work drink into a long evening of conversation and mutual teasing. Both of them were meant to be going on to parties. Both of them cancelled. Charlotte was immediately taken with his air of confidence and charm, the way he strode rather than walked, the way he wore an extremely well-cut navy suit over his thin cashmere green V-neck and knitted tie, as if he wasn’t quite sure whether to dress like an academic or an advertising executive. She found herself wanting to reach out and touch the velveteen tuft of hair that stuck out at the nape of his neck like a feathery chicken’s tail.
As he talked, he had a nervous habit of pushing his tortoiseshell glasses up the bridge of his nose more often than he needed to. His eyes were green-brown and his lips were slightly too full, like a girl’s, but the combined effect somehow worked. He was the kind of person you would look at as he passed you in the street – tall and broad and filled with a dynamic energy that made you feel invigorated just to be near him.
Charlotte had been with someone at the time, a boyfriend of several months’ standing – a thoroughly decent man whom she loved but didn’t feel remotely passionate about. Gabriel offered the possibility of otherness. Nothing physical occurred between them, but there was always an unspoken sense of shared infatuation that made her uncomfortable.
In spite of herself, Charlotte was drawn to him – to the idea that, finally, this might be it – and yet she was simultaneously horrified at herself for her perceived betrayal, reminded of the question posed by her secondary school English teacher about Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: what was the difference between physical and emotional infidelity? And which of them, ultimately, was the more potent?
After that first meeting, Gabriel and Charlotte would see each other every few weeks, a snatched couple of hours spent in a small pub with a dark wooden interior around the back of Sloane Square Tube station. The walls were covered with a murky green-and-yellow flock wallpaper, its garishness faded by years of nicotine. Framed prints of country hunting scenes hung from the picture rail. In one corner, an old wheelbarrow had improbably been hoisted up and attached to the ceiling as rustic decor.
The pub became a sort of joke between them. It was in the middle of a wealthy residential street of neat little cottages with well-trimmed box hedges and seemed an absurd location for an old man’s drinking den. It was the sort of place that, even though they both knew it was there, would take them by surprise every time they turned the corner. The pub seemed to have sprouted up from the ground just for them, illuminated like a surreal bauble for a few hours while they drank inside. There were never any other customers apart from a mustachioed Chelsea Pensioner in full uniform who sat on a high stool at the bar, drinking from his own pewter beer tankard.
‘What do you think his name is?’ Gabriel had asked her one night when they were carefully not sitting too close to each other, yet just close enough to feel the crackle of tension between them.
‘Mmm, I think maybe . . . Richard, no, Geoffrey.’
‘Geoffrey. Yes, that’s a good one. I imagine he used to have a wife who complained when he forgot to shave and that’s why he now takes such pride in his moustache.’
‘I’m not sure he was ever married.’
‘A confirmed bachelor, perhaps?’
‘Or the love of his life fell for his best friend instead of him and he comes here, each evening, to forget.’
They would make up endless nonsense stories like this, to fill the space in between talking about what they both secretly wanted to confess. Once, Gabriel had taken her hand in his beneath the table and it had felt so illicit, so thrilling and so entirely how it should be that she almost couldn’t breathe.
Gradually, Charlotte began to believe that he meant what he said; that he loved her in a way he had never loved before. He seemed to want her exactly as she was. She realised then that, for the first time, she was utterly, unthinkingly in love with someone and that she couldn’t rationalise it or shape it to fit round her. She simply had to take the leap. Yet this terrified her because she had no faith in herself, no real belief that she was worthy enough. She found that she did not feel Gabriel’s love with any inner conviction, but rather drew her conclusions logically from snippets of available evidence.
There was, deep within the folds of her own consciousness, a dark, jagged cave where Charlotte stored all her most awful thoughts. She kept it hidden away, scared of her own twisted imaginings, and, in a strange sort of way, this gave her a sense of power. If she kept it concealed, Charlotte realised that no one else could ever truly know her. And this meant that she was in control. She felt intensely vulnerable under Gabriel’s scrutiny but she still had secrets from him. There was a blackness nestling within her, a poisonous seepage of self-inflicted pain that she would never expose to the light.
The art gallery was a single white room, dotted with rectangular plinths that rose up from the white floor like sawn-off tree trunks. To access it, you had to walk down a rickety metal fire-escape staircase and it was difficult to negotiate in heels. Just as she reached the last step, Charlotte tripped up and had to grasp hold of Gabriel’s arm to steady herself, so that they ended up spilling drunkenly into the room, almost teetering off balance, and everyone appeared to stop talking at precisely the same moment. Charlotte instantly felt out of her depth. They were late – Charlotte’s fault, naturally – and now she could imagine all his glamorous female friends looking at her high heels with the disapprobation mature women reserved for trivial young things like her who wore unsuitable, cheap shoes.
‘Gabe!’ came a screeching voice from across the room. ‘Over here.’
They looked over. It was Florence, a pained-looking woman in her late thirties with a powdered face and a deep wrinkle between her plucked eyebrows. She was, as she never seemed to tire of reminding Charlotte, one of Gabriel’s oldest and closest female friends. They had met when both were starting out as trainees at one of London’s biggest PR firms in the early nineties and, for a brief while, had shared a flat together. It was a period of time that both of them repeatedly referred to with winks and wistful shakes of the head that signified some boring private joke.
Charlotte had once spent an entire evening with both of them during which the sight of an ashtray on a hotel mantelpiece had triggered a long-ago memory of Gabriel accidentally setting alight a curtain. The two of them were in hysterical fits of giggles even though nothing about the story was particularly funny. Charlotte had found herself laughing uneasily along with the joke, aware that Florence was deliberately pressing home her advantage: this is something I know about Gabriel that you don’t, she seemed to be saying, because you will never rival me in this man’s affections.
It was Charlotte’s contention that Florence was secretly in love with Gabriel – a belief that he dismissed as ‘absurd’ any time she raised it. ‘Besides,’ he would say. ‘Who would want to sleep with Florence? It would be like shagging a man.’
Charlotte looked at her now. She was a woman who had spent her whole life maintaining a fiction of her own appearance; a woman who cultivated extreme skinniness because it would make other women jealous rather than because it suited her. Her body was straight up and down, usually clothed in black dresses accessorised with a mad bohemian twist – belts made from Caribbean calabash gourds or necklaces woven together with bright Peruvian threads – and neat flat-soled ballet pumps tipped with velvet. Tonight, she had done something odd with her hair so that it was swept back off her high forehead and tucked behind her ears, kept in place with copious hairspray so that the blonde strands looked brittle to the touch. Two veins stood out thickly from the fleshy scrag of her neck.
‘Hi, darling,’ she said, kissing Gabriel on the lips. ‘So what do you think of the photographs? Pretty grim, no?’
‘We’ve only just arrived,’ he replied, scanning the walls quickly, ‘but they don’t look too bad. I like that one.’ Gabriel pointed at an overblown black-and-white study of a series of corrugated-iron shacks.
‘Hmmm. Very misery chic.’ Florence, who had intertwined her arm with Gabriel’s during this brief exchange, smiled brightly at Charlotte as if she’d only just spotted her. ‘Hi, Charlotte. How are you?’
‘Good, thanks, good. Although I did almost fall on my face on the way in,’ she said, giggling and simultaneously kicking herself for trying to break the ice by making herself look foolish.
‘I noticed.’ Florence turned away from her and towards Gabriel. ‘How’s tricks, Gabe? Any more news on the divorce?’
Gabriel looked taken aback. ‘Oh, you know, just hammering things out.’
‘Yeah, I spoke to Maya the other day and she said it was taking a while.’
‘I didn’t know you two were in touch,’ Gabriel said, and Charlotte could see the place where his jaw twitched when he was tense.
‘Listen, I’m not just going to drop her because you have. She needs support, Gabe. She hasn’t found anyone new,’ Florence looked at Charlotte pointedly. ‘Unlike you.’
The whole evening was played out in a similar vein of extreme discomfort. The photos were dull. The company was acerbic. Every single one of Gabriel’s friends, apart from the curator, who was uncomplicatedly friendly because he was drunk, had looked at Charlotte with a guardedness that was inescapable. She felt awkward and unlikeable and far too young. She had worn thick tights and the gallery was so hot that she felt herself sweating underneath the lights, her hair frizzing up and her cheeks acquiring a slippery surface sheen. She drank too many glasses of free champagne. She felt as if her forehead were tattooed with the label ‘Other Woman’ and sensed the unspoken accusation that she was a walking cliché: a younger model, a mid-life crisis mistress. She wanted to shake everyone by the shoulders and scream at them that it wasn’t like this; it was different; something else; something more; something they could never understand.
It was a familiar resurgence: the sensation of not being good enough. Suddenly, without knowing where the image came from, Charlotte saw her father lying comatose in his hospital bed, pale and impotent, like a skinned rabbit. She shivered and then pushed the thought of him away. She did not want to think about him now.
‘You’re being too sensitive,’ Gabriel murmured in her ear. ‘Besides, it’s hard for my friends to get used to it. Maybe they’re a bit uncomfortable but it’s nothing to do with not liking you.’
‘Why do they all blame me when I’ve got nothing to do with it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you left your wife. That’s one thing. Then you got together with me. That’s a whole other event. The two are not connected. You’re the one that did the leaving and yet I’m the one who’s seen as some brazen harpy who stole you away from your idyllic Boden catalogue family life. Jesus.’ She stopped a passing canapé tray and popped a smoked salmon blini in her mouth.
‘Charlotte, I’m not going to do this here.’
‘Do what?’ she said, through an unchewed mouthful.
‘I’m not going to have this argument here in the middle of my friends.’ He glanced behind her shoulder. Charlotte turned round to follow his sightline and saw Florence looking at them meaningfully, arms crossed.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ she found herself saying without really meaning to. ‘Go hang out with her and reminisce over the good old days if that’s what makes you happy. I’m leaving.’ She handed him her empty champagne glass, stalked to the cloakroom with as much dignity as she could muster and got her coat. She knew she wasn’t really angry but rather putting on a show of what anger should look like. She thought she had a right to be angry, that she should capitalise on this, and yet, beneath it all, she just felt sad.
Her mind wandered back to the phone conversation with her mother, to the thought of her childhood bedroom denuded of all that was once hers, to the realisation that nothing she could ever do would make any of it better and she hated herself for her powerlessness, for acting how she thought she should be acting rather than behaving in the way she actually felt.
And all the while, Charlotte was fervently hoping Gabriel would follow her, wrap his arms around her and tell her he was sorry. But he never came and she left without looking back.
