Come Away With Me

‘She sounded as if she was in the middle of a party,’ Flo says diplomatically.

‘That makes a change then.’ Tom lifts Rosie into her high chair.

Annoyed, I defend Danielle. ‘She has no family. There’s only Flo and me. Don’t you see? We are smug marrieds to her and when you get pompous you just reinforce her prejudices. You make her worse. Please don’t judge her.’

Tom immediately apologises. ‘Sorry, Jen. You’re right. I catch myself doing it. It’s just that she seems to get more promiscuous the older she gets. I do think the way she behaves is irresponsible. I know she has her own flat and what she does with her life is up to her, but I don’t have to like it.’

Flo turns from the oven. ‘Danielle does have sudden bouts of promiscuity, Tom, and I have talked to her about it because I worry about her safety too. You have to realise it is all about low self-esteem. I know nothing about her childhood, but something happened there. Try to be kind, darling.’

I fill Rosie’s little bowl with food and hand it to him. He places it in front of her and cuts it into tiny pieces.

‘Now I feel like a pig. Danielle’s such a head-tossing sultry beauty that it’s difficult to believe she’s promiscuous because she lacks self-worth and not because she just likes sex.’

Rosie lifts her spoon and bangs it in the gravy.

‘No!’ we all say together and Rosie, stunned to hear an almost unknown word, stops, plastic spoon in mid air.

That afternoon we leave Rosie with Flo and go to a gallery opening and then ice skating. After a Chinese meal that Tom insists on, we stumble home.

Tom has drunk too much. ‘I’m going to be dry for a long time, darling.’

‘Good thing too,’ I mutter, heaving him up the steps and getting the key in the door with difficulty. We stumble up the stairs and Tom wants to go in to see Rosie.

‘Don’t wake her, Tom. I’d like her to sleep in her own bed tonight.’

He watches her for a long time. He seems suddenly sober. ‘You don’t realise how much you’ll change when you have a child. The thought of anything happening to Rosie is…unthinkable. I feel so protective of you both. I don’t take either of you for granted, ever. When I’m somewhere grim, I think of you and know you’re both somewhere warm and safe. My mainstay. Without you, I couldn’t do the job I do without becoming bleak and hardened.’

We wrap our arms round each other and watch our child sleep. I want to weep because in forty-eight hours he will have flown away again, and the house will be quieter and emptier, and I will have this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach until he phones or a letter arrives without a postmark and I know he is safe somewhere and I can begin to count the days until he comes home again.

THREE (#ulink_343f25aa-1b64-5ba2-a728-2d0ff4e28c8d)

February 2006

When Bea got in from shopping the house was empty and she found a note from James on the kitchen table.

Darling, Flo rang from the London house. She is worried about Jenny who seems to have gone missing. Apparently, Jenny met Ruth Freidman again after all this time. Bizarre. Ruth is now on holiday in Cornwall and I have gone down to that creek house at St Minyon to see if they are both there. Try not to worry. I’m sure Jenny must be making her way home. J. x

Bea’s mouth went dry. She picked up the phone immediately and rang Flo. An Asian girl answered. Both Florence and Danielle were with a VIP client at the moment. Could she take a message?

‘Would you just say that Jenny’s mother rang? If Flo could get in touch as soon as she can, I’d be grateful.’

‘Of course. I will tell her.’

Bea went out into the garden still holding the phone. There was a cold east wind and the sea below her glinted fierce and navy-blue. She paced up and down the terrace among the wilted pot plants, a knot growing in her stomach with a chill premonition of disaster.

She turned and looked back at the house and the drive curling round to the gate. Ruth. Bea remembered clearly a thin child with fair plaits rounding the corner of the house, her small pale face anxiously searching for Jenny.

Ruth walking up the hill from Downalong each Sunday, desperate for an escape from home and a welcome here.

Bea looked up at the attic window on the right of the house, which had been Jenny’s bedroom. She could almost hear the giggles emanating out into the garden with the sound of the seagulls. Jenny and Ruth. Ruth and Jenny. The two of them had raced about together for all those years of childhood like odd little twins and then whoosh, Ruth was gone, and how Jenny had grieved.

Bea went inside again and into James’s study. She saw that his medical bag was missing.

FOUR (#ulink_e20f0374-62dd-59ad-9b36-89587cc119b0)

August 2005

Tom wakes with a start. His heart is thumping loudly in the silent house as if he’s had a nightmare. If he has, he can’t remember it. He turns on his back, sure there is something, some small niggling warning he should recapture from sleep, but he can’t conjure it up.

He gets out of bed and pulls on his bathrobe. He goes to the uncurtained window and looks out. It’s almost dawn and he watches the pink tinge grow behind the rooftops. He turns back to the bed and looks at Jenny sleeping. He feels such an overpowering sense of love and fear flood through him that he catches his breath.

He moves out of the room and across the landing, flinging the shadows away, swearing at these moods that always come on the last days of his leave. Rosie is curled like a dormouse in her cot, the same wiry hair as her mother, the same way of sleeping, a small clone. He smiles and tucks in her arms, carefully pulls up the covers over her plump little body. Rosie. Flesh of his flesh.

He shivers. The shadows in the room creep nearer, encroach from all sides. He can’t turn and face them because he doesn’t know from where the most danger comes.

He leaves the room, goes into the sitting room and sits in his battered leather armchair. He loves this house. This marvellous, lived-in Victorian house with its high ceilings and huge casement windows. He loves everything about his life except returning to this nasty little war he is unsure he still believes in. He has to cull these feelings; kill them with one blow before they take hold. He has younger, less experienced soldiers under him, nineteen-year-old boys who rely on him. It’s the life he’s chosen. He has no right to maverick thoughts, dread or self-pity.

Impatient with himself, he gets up to pour himself a brandy. He’ll sit and listen to the silent house move and breathe and creak around him. He’ll absorb into himself from the shadows of night the hub of Jenny’s busy days. The constant coming and going and chatter and giggles; the sound of the phone or doorbell; the noise of his daughter’s small footsteps on the polished floor; the touch of Jenny’s hand as she passes him clutching rolls of coloured material, turning back to smile at him, her face alive with love. All these things are the routine of her days when he’s away; her enclosed, safe, female world.

Marriage has made everything harder. There’s so much more to lose, risks become calculated, less instinctive. It’s hard not to grow softer, to lose your edge. He swallows the brandy quickly. Stop thinking.

He falls asleep in the armchair and dreams again. Dreams he’s getting off a plane in Northern Ireland, or Bosnia, or Iraq. It’s pouring with rain and his heart is heavy with the loss of something…

There’s something he should remember but it dances out of reach, just beyond memory. All he can feel is the icy night rain coming in on a wind that chills him to the bone.

He turns to look at the young soldiers following him off the plane. They shimmer in the heat blasts of the plane warming up behind them. They have a dreamlike quality as they float towards him and he realises with sudden clarity that time as he knows it does not exist. These soldiers, he himself, are shimmering in some timeless zone. They are the soldiers of yesterday and the soldiers of tomorrow. They are smiling, flirting with adventure, dancing with death. They do not understand it will never end, these brutal little wars against an unseen enemy. There they stride with their eager, innocent smiles and their new, squeaky boots and heavy packs, and he wants to shout them a warning. We’ll never win. It will just go on and on and on.

Yet, as he moves towards them he sees his own younger face among them, determined and alight with challenge. They move, laughing, through him as he stands facing them on the tarmac and he realises that they cannot see him for he is not there. He does not exist. His time has been and gone.

With relief he wakes. It is morning. He is in England. Sunlight shines across the polished floor. He laughs with relief. Where should he take Jenny and Rosie on this precious last full day of his leave?

FIVE (#ulink_b8dd544d-1522-5b61-aea7-7622b5cca4d1)

It was February and the neglected garden was full snowdrops and purple and yellow crocuses. Winter jasmine blossomed in a wave against the fence. Before I left to catch the train I went downstairs and gathered little bunches of snowdrops and dotted them about the rooms as if to leave a shadow of myself in the house. They looked like delicate ballet dancers bunched in white clumps against the stained-glass window on the landing, but they would all be faded and brown by the time I got back.

I was putting off the moment of leaving the house. I did not want to shut the front door behind me and find myself on the outside in the crisp cold air. I felt an irrational dread that something might happen to those left in the house or the high-ceilinged rooms would vaporise behind me.

I sat in Tom’s leather armchair and let the sound of the girls’ voices and laughter on the cutting-room floor above me filter down. I listened to Flo’s deep, soft voice on the telephone. I thought guiltily of how much Danielle had taken on these past few weeks and how it should be a small thing for me to make good the appointments she had set-up for me in Birmingham.

I heard the taxi outside and I got out of the chair and went downstairs. I gathered my bags from the hall and called up to Flo that I was leaving. She came down the attic stairs and stood on the first-floor landing looking down at me. I swallowed the urge to drop my bags and rush back up the stairs and admit that I had changed my mind and Birmingham was the last place on earth I wanted to go on my own.

Something must have shown in my face because Flo started to come down the last flight of stairs to me. ‘It’s not too late, lovey. Why don’t you give Birmingham a miss? Wait until Danielle gets back. A week is not going to make a great deal of difference. I can reschedule your appointments. Danielle will understand.’

I shook my head and lied, ‘I’m OK, honestly. I must go today, Flo. Danielle has set up these meetings and I don’t want to let her down, it wouldn’t be fair.’

Flo sighed and kissed my cheek. ‘All right, Jen. I’ll ring you tonight.’

I walked down the steps and into the waiting taxi. I waved and Flo watched me out of sight.