Come Away With Me

‘She was sad. She’d lost her lovely bounce. I was stupid. I was so excited about seeing her that I didn’t pick it up, just prattled on asking about her life and then she told me. Six months ago her husband was killed in a road accident.’

Adam turned to her. ‘Poor woman.’

‘Yes. She’s in Birmingham on her own so I’m going to ring her tomorrow. I would have asked her to stay but Peter’s back tonight and he’s going to be tired.’

‘Are we going to the airport to meet him?’

‘No, he’s on a later flight. He said he’d get a taxi home.’

‘We are still going to Cornwall for half-term?’

‘Of course we are.’ Ruth concentrated on the traffic. ‘How was your day?’

‘OK,’ Adam said. ‘Is Peter coming to the cottage with us? It’s more fun if I’ve got someone to birdwatch with.’

‘I hope so, Adam, but…’

‘I know, Mum! Like, why do I have to have workaholic parents?’

He grinned at her to take away the sting, but the familiar guilt was back. She and Peter did work long hours and Adam was on his own too much. Occasionally he brought a friend home, sometimes he went to a friend’s house, but it was not the same as having someone there when he got in from school.

The irony was not lost on Ruth. Her aunt had always been the one to be there for him after school when he was small. After that, he had almost always been picked up by someone else or come home to an empty house. The difference was that until his secondary school he had been happy and had loads of friends. Now, they appeared to have dwindled to two or three ostracised loners who had been pushed together.

She thought suddenly of Peter’s wistful voice. ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have another child in the house? I think Adam would like that too. Will you think about it, Ruth?’

Ruth didn’t need to think about it. She didn’t want any more children. It had taken her years to get where she was. She loved working and she had no intention of giving up. Bringing up Adam had been too hard, even with help. She never wanted to have to juggle work, a baby and guilt again. In a few years Adam would be at university. She couldn’t start all over again. She just couldn’t.

Adam had taken her silence as hurt. ‘I was only joking, Mum. You worry too much. Most of my friends’ mothers work long hours too. It’s cool.’

Yes, but most of Adam’s friends’ mothers worked because they had to, not because they wanted to.

Peter had not been impressed by the huge comprehensive that had been their only choice in the area. He had wanted to pay for Adam to go to a private school. Ruth had refused on the grounds she did not believe in private education. But she knew it was really about whether she and Peter stayed together long-term. If they ever split up she could not have afforded school fees on her own and it would have been cruel to have to pull Adam out of private education. Ruth was not quite so sure she would refuse again. Adam said little, but was obviously fairly miserable at school.

She drove up their leafy road of Victorian terraces and parked. For once there was an empty space outside the house. Adam leapt out and ran up the steps, unlocking the front door and leaving it open for her.

As she walked in and hung up her coat Ruth had an image of Jenny, childless, entering a house where her husband was never going to move through the rooms again. Sadness shot through her. She remembered running, screaming with laughter, with a small curly-haired girl across the sands at St Ives towards the Browns’ house with its windows facing Porthmeor beach and the harbour, and her abiding image was of Jenny’s happiness, her security in childhood, in life.

If this tragedy had happened to me I might have been expecting it. Even as a child, Ruth had never trusted happiness. It could be wiped off her face in an instant. She had learnt not to show it. All pleasures had to be hidden or hugged secretly to her. She would compose her face on her way down the hill from the Browns’ house so that when she walked through the door of her own home her puritan parents would see no traces of joy left on it.

She composed her features into that blank expression she recognised sometimes in children in the supermarket. The closed-in, shut-off features of a child shouted at or slapped too often. Children who knew they could never do anything right and tried to melt into the shadows.

Her own parents’ relief that Ruth was out of the house so often and not under their feet making dust did not prevent their jealousy of people who might bring her happiness.

Adam was making toast and humming over his bird magazines. ‘Are you thinking of the woman you met on the train, Mum?’ he asked Ruth suddenly.

‘Yes.’ Ruth sat down opposite him, and he cut his toast and Marmite and handed her a piece.

‘How did you lose touch?’

‘My fault. I never wrote to her when I left Cornwall for Arran. I hurt her a lot. I realised that today.’

‘Only today, Mum?’

Ruth met his eyes. She had given Adam the edited version of her early life. ‘I thought Jenny would forget me pretty quickly. She had three sisters and one brother. We were good friends, but she had a large family…’

‘But friends are different,’ Adam said firmly. ‘Friends are people you make on your own, that are separate from family. They see you in another way. So you become different with them and it’s the same for them. Friends are important.’

Ruth stared at him. You learnt new things about your children all the time. Adam was right. He was his own person, not just the person she knew, but another boy she didn’t know; a person who acted in a different way when he was not with his mother.

He said now, with butter on his chin, ‘Did you explain about your parents, about Auntie Vi looking after you? About me?’

‘A little. I didn’t have time to tell her everything,’ Ruth said carefully, as Adam watched her across the table. ‘But she knew your grandparents and what they were like.’

The phone went and Adam dashed for it. It was Peter. His flight had been delayed. As Ruth listened to them chatting happily she thought with a pang, I take Peter and the life I have here for granted.

At seventeen you believed that your dreams might come true. At thirty you tried not to have any illusions; yet the essence of some impossible hope lived insistently on. Somewhere out there was an exciting shadowy figure who could provide all emotional and sexual succour; a soulmate. Him.

She did love Peter, they were good friends, but her heart did not leap at his touch. She was not in love with him. He had always known that and Ruth knew she should never have let him persuade her he could change it.

Adam handed her the phone. Ruth listened to his voice, warm and loving and glad to be coming home, and she saw in a flash of familiar angst how little it took to please or make him happy. She understood herself. Childhood had taught her she must only ever rely on herself, never let anyone hurt her again, and the result of that was her inability to commit wholly to a relationship. It was a self-destruct button. Peter loved her and Adam unconditionally. What more could she ask? What more could she want?

Look at Jenny, for God’s sake. Look at Jenny.

EIGHT (#ulink_c5d7a18a-60e1-5084-8ecb-0b207637a820)

I took a taxi to my hotel to drop off my case. I ordered coffee and a sandwich I could not eat. I got under a power shower. I let the water pour over me and I blanked my mind of all thought in order to get through the afternoon.

I walked to my first meeting. Danielle had done most of the hard selling and the buyers for the department store seemed keen to have both our designs selling on separate fashion floors. Our clothes were quite different. Danielle’s work was fairly conventional and classic, the exact opposite of her character. She designed for the slightly older woman. The cut and shape of her work was stunning, with each piece having a small quirky difference that marked out her labels.

My work was mostly for the boutique and high street. I designed for the trendy fashion-conscious twenty-year-olds and my clothes were not meant to last more than a season. I did the bags and belts, the shrugs and the sandals. If I had a gift, it was for sensing what trend was coming next.

Coffee kept me going, but the afternoon seemed endless as the buyers poured through my sample books and decided on exactly what and how many different designs they wanted.

It was dark when I emerged into the street; that horrible lonely time when all the lights have sprung on and people are hurrying home. A light rain was falling. I got a taxi to my hotel with the familiar sick remembrance of loss churning in my stomach. It felt as if a huge wave continually hovered over my head, waiting to swamp me. I wondered if the loneliness would ever turn into anything I could endure.

I kicked off my shoes as soon as I got into my room and ran a hot bath. I went to the mini bar and pulled out a small bottle of wine, switched on the six o’clock news as background and took the wine into the bathroom. I closed my eyes and soaked, closed my mind.

The wine acted like a sleeping pill. It was still early, but I climbed gratefully into bed.

Snapshots of Tom filled the dark. They seemed to surround me, come from everywhere. Tom throwing his head back, flicking his hair out of his eyes to a backdrop of sea. Tom running across a rugby field, his legs pumping, clutching the ball. Turning to look at me in the garden in London, eyes half closed in a glance that made my heart turn over. Tom in uniform, leaning against a palm tree, blinking from some hot, unknown country.

Had it been a trick of the light, an illusion on that station as I looked at Ruth’s boy? For a second I had seen Tom so clearly. A younger, childlike Tom. Was it wishful thinking? The sort of boy Tom must have been before I knew him. Was it just a mirage conjured by my tired mind, like an oasis in a desert?

A frightening enervation crept over me like a shroud. Why was I here in Birmingham? What was the point when I didn’t care about anything? I searched for a purpose that would give value to what I was doing and could find none as I lay under the cold hotel duvet.

After a while the telephone started to ring persistently, at intervals. I left it. I let it ring on and after a while it stopped. People passed my bedroom door, laughing, talking and going down to dinner. I lay in an anonymous room, disconnected, floating.

Then I thought of Flo alone in the London house worrying about me. I switched on the bedside light and rang her. I tried to keep my voice light and cheerful. I talked business, talked up my day.