Chapter 45
45
Cam
The last thing Cam wants to do is dress Polly up and go to her sister’s house on a Sunday afternoon, with school the following day, but she has no choice. This is the way it is when you have no other siblings, no parents and, for Libby, no offspring. Cam’s absence would be too loaded, even though she went to Gordon’s on her sister’s actual birthday. Even though Libby seems to want multiple birthday celebrations. Cam is needed, and so she throws on a dress and heads over there with Polly.
She hasn’t told a soul about her meeting with Niall. About his revelation. His theory. She’s in a hinterland, afraid to hope, aware that it’s all deep past anyway. That is what Libby would say: What do the semantics matter, the exact turn of events? He’s still gone, still abandoned you .
Cam keeps the truth close to her. An embrace she doesn’t otherwise have.
It’s still early July, and yet there’s just the most indistinct autumn chill in the air, hardly yet noticeable, except to Cam, who looks forward to it. Blustery green leaves rustling up ahead, a glass fragility to the blue sky, an orange tint to the light.
She scurries down the street towards Libby’s, trying to hurry Polly but also trying not to spook her, thinking of the men who wanted Luke dead, of Madison, too. Of the stranger who stood at her garden fence several days ago, so still and quick and quiet she wonders now if he was even real.
‘Mum! What’s the rush?’ Polly says, of course not missing a trick.
‘No rush.’ Cam glances over her shoulder, just once, before Libby’s house looms into view.
‘You’re here!’ Libby says when they reach it, and Cam immediately spots it: lemonade in a wine glass in her hand. It’s colourless. Her eyes stray to it, then to Libby’s, who says nothing, and so neither does Cam.
‘We are here,’ Polly says to Libby. ‘The best guests of your life.’
‘Polly!’ Cam guffaws.
‘It’s true!’ she says, and Cam thinks how funny she is. Her daughter, grown into this happy sunbeam in the most shitty of circumstances; her asphalt flower, pushing up through the dust in a bright pink explosion.
It’s four thirty on the dot. A late-afternoon sort of thing , Libby had said. Tea and cake, etc., whatever . Libby wanted Cam to invite Charlie, and so Cam had texted earlier, hoping he might read it too late to come, hoping he might arrive, too. The mixed-up emotions in the upside-down world with a husband who might be dead, and who might be bad, and who might be good. Charlie’s coming, anyway, and Cam is glad of it.
‘Happy birthday,’ Cam says. ‘How’re the stress levels?’ she adds, peering beyond her sister and into the throng. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was a kids’ party: Libby’s friends all have children. Cam doesn’t know how she can stand it. Cam was blessed with fertility and still had to quit the NCT group when everyone’s babies slept except hers.
Cam follows Libby in and gulps at the crowds, feeling embarrassed, a very special toxic kind of celebrity feeling, same as at the school gate. A couple of people glance over at her, Libby’s friends, who Cam half knows but doesn’t see often, and Cam drops her gaze.
‘God, feeling very sorry for myself,’ Libby says. ‘We dropped the cake on the floor. Then we realized M I have had enough of houses by the end of each day – something Cam had laughed with her over but which she is actually quite jealous of. The walls and ceiling are a dark navy, the lights brass, the mirror a sunburst – Cam knows it’s hung too high for Libby to look at herself in it, but she doesn’t move it because it kind of looks right and I don’t care .
‘God, I’m bloody knackered,’ Libby says, flopping on to the sofa and topping up Cam’s wine. None for her. Cam wants to ask, is so desperate to ask, but doesn’t. ‘Stay if you want.’
‘No, it’s fine,’ Cam says listlessly, ‘we’re going, I need to get Polly now,’ she adds, glad it’s walking distance.
‘I’ll walk you home,’ Charlie says, ‘then go to mine.’
Cam throws him a grateful glance, trying to ignore the fact that what she’s grateful for is his lack of imposition.
Si crosses and uncrosses his legs. He’s about eight beers down. And, God, Cam misses those carefree times. She doesn’t drink often now because she’s always in sole charge of Polly, but she also doesn’t drink because she thinks she would cry and overshare her secrets. Again.
‘Not seen you in ages,’ Si says to Cam. Indeed, the last time they spoke was about the form.
‘Mmm,’ Cam says in response. Libby gets up and wanders off down the hallway, leaving them alone together. Suddenly, the sitting room feels sinister. The dark walls and ceiling like a night sky, the air black outside beyond the window. Cam shivers with it, with something, some feeling that she can’t name.
‘How’re you doing?’ Si adds, Cam thinks warmly. She looks up at him. His cheeks are pink, like a teething baby’s.
‘Not bad,’ Cam says, feeling exposed, sitting there in front of Si, who knows she tried to get her husband declared dead recently, but won’t broach that directly. In front of Charlie, who knows the full story, although Si doesn’t know that.
Si turns his mouth down and tips his head towards her slightly, perhaps a grim acknowledgement of what she is talking about, perhaps not.
Charlie lowers himself gently on to the sofa next to her, a calm and kind gesture of support. She reaches to touch his knee lightly, just once, thinking of their talk in her garden, his stoic understanding.
And why can’t they be? Why can’t they be a couple? Luke’s gone, whatever happened in the warehouse. He’s gone.
Charlie’s body is warm next to Cam. He smells of that very specific male-just-showered scent. She thinks of him agreeing to come and showering hurriedly, and something sympathetic awakens inside her.
Tentatively, he drapes his arm along the back of the sofa. And something slots into place for Cam. They can be a united front. Maybe her pain isn’t a block standing in the way of her relationship with Charlie. Maybe he can help her with it. Maybe she could talk to him about it, and be supported by him.
She leans her body against his.
‘Ah, a pair of lovebirds,’ Si says. Not the kind of thing he would say when he was sober, and his teasing unsettles Cam. That they’re all rooting for her, but to do something which feels somehow wrong, at times, to her. Incorrect.
Just across from him, on the oak of Libby’s rustic mantelpiece, is a photograph of Libby and Si on their wedding day. Behind that is a piece of blue cardboard which says ‘Window to the Womb’ on it. An ultrasound clinic. The lack of drinking was one thing – Libby is often not drinking – but this is another. She calculates it. Is it too soon after the last loss? Cam thinks, Oh, please, please, please let it happen for them. Please don’t let it be an old one.
Libby arrives and goes to top up Cam’s drink again – though she hasn’t had any more herself – and Cam covers the rim with her hand. ‘No, I’m leaving,’ she says.
‘Right,’ Charlie says, getting to his feet, and Cam’s grateful for the show of support.
‘I’ll get Polly,’ she says to him.
She walks up to where her daughter’s sleeping. It’s not a nursery, exactly, but neither is it a guest room. Cam supposes it’s a nursery-in-waiting. Pale pink walls, high ceilings, two small windows – dollhouse windows. Black beams across the ceiling – God, Polly used to be fascinated by those as a baby; Cam had forgotten until just now. And now she’s enormous, four feet long in a sleeping bag, her baby.
Cam shakes her shoulder gently, then picks her up.
Her body yields into her mother’s like a warm sack of flour, and as Polly’s legs briefly hit Cam’s knees, she longs, suddenly, for those dreamy newborn days when her feet wouldn’t even reach Cam’s hips. A little hand dangling casually between her breasts. The puff of milk breath by her ear. She didn’t appreciate them when she had them, was so ready for them to be over, to be on to the next stage. Weaning. Walking. Sleep. She didn’t realize she was rushing it, rushing her, didn’t realize that they would only ever get those discrete nine months as a family of three before everything shattered. The bittersweet sadness that always sits alongside motherhood, the notion of gradually losing time, of letting go, is even more pronounced for Cam. Newborn Polly, with her silken blancmange thighs, gone for ever. Two-year-old Polly, who would squat in a demi-plié to inspect bugs in the garden, gone, too. You can’t keep them. You can’t stop time.
Polly stirs, rubbing her eyes, blonde hair all over the place the colour of wheat right before its harvest, streaked naturally with highlights of July sunlight. Her daughter, born in the autumn, looking like the height of summer. ‘It’s OK,’ she says, carrying Polly out.
Confusion crosses Polly’s features, then she settles again in her mother’s arms. For a moment, she looks like Cam, but then she relaxes and is Luke once more. ‘Hi!’ she says.
‘Hi.’
‘Is it the morning?’
‘No,’ Cam says, stroking that flaxen hair, looking at her beautiful daughter. Pink cheeks. Peach fuzz. Still the pout of a toddler, ever so slightly, around the lips, the bottom lip disappearing underneath the top. Soon, she’ll lose it all, will grow up fully.
‘Are we going to sell our house?’ she asks, eyes still closed, and, God, children. Cam really does miss her non-sleeping baby who wasn’t capable of overhearing anything, who didn’t have a psyche like this: one that could be damaged with a few badly chosen words that Cam alone has to pick.
‘Who said that?’
‘Uncle Si.’
Cam rolls her eyes. Bloody Si, speaking without thinking.
‘Maybe, but we’ll live somewhere much better,’ she says. ‘If we do move.’
‘Will we sleep upstairs, like here?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Other people’s dads live with them, don’t they?’ Polly says, and the words hit Cam square in the chest like a swinging pendulum. As ever in parenting, the moments you fear happen suddenly, without warning, and you have to fudge it, or it feels like it.
‘Yes,’ she says carefully.
‘And mine had to go away. So he won’t know about the new house either?’ Polly says, and she’s confused. She’s so confused. Cam leans her head against her daughter’s, there on the landing, her heart hurting with it. Should she have given her the straight truth, then? Is that what other people would’ve done, rather than these vagaries? But would she have been able to handle it – and what it might have meant about her?
‘You know what?’ she says softly. ‘You know what I do know?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Well,’ Cam says, and she shifts Polly on her hip. She hasn’t held her like this for months, maybe even years. ‘Two men didn’t like your dad. They tried to hurt him, so he hurt them back. He had no choice. And he left and we don’t know where he is. But’, Cam says thickly, her throat closing up with emotion, ‘here’s what I know. He loved you so much. And he never wanted to do anything bad, at all. I know that.’
‘That’s nice,’ Polly says, a tired smile crossing her features. ‘I didn’t know all that. That he – that he had to go away to escape the men who didn’t like him?’
‘Yes, exactly,’ Cam says, though really, who knows?
‘So he didn’t want to leave.’
‘No.’
‘I like hearing that.’
‘I like saying it,’ Cam says.
‘Sometimes people do bad things for good reasons. We learnt in school,’ Polly says, sounding about twenty years old. ‘So is he one of those people?’
‘Yes,’ Cam says thickly. ‘He didn’t ever want to do anything bad.’
‘Sounds nice. My dad.’
‘I think so,’ Cam murmurs, and they rest their heads together for a few seconds, both silent. And she’s so glad. She’s so glad she held out for the truth, or a piece of it, anyway, so that she could tell it to her daughter. Tell the truth about Luke’s legacy, and who Polly is a part of.
‘We need to go home, but go back to sleep, I’ll carry you,’ she says to Polly, and Polly looks at her, blinks once, then slides a little bit down Cam’s body in her sleeping bag, comedically, cartoon-style, and closes her eyes. And that’s that.
As she walks down the stairs, she hears the conversation explode with laughter, hears her husband’s name. Surely not, not with Charlie there?
She stops, unconsciously, not wanting to go any further. Drunk people and their gossiping. Her sister and her opinions that Cam ought to move on. She is tired of it all.
‘No, he was so rich, we are quids in on the commission,’ Si says. ‘Despite his weird habits.’
Ah. Just gossip about their estate-agenting business. Cam’s shoulders relax. She will go home, later, to Adam’s wonderfully dark gem of a book – the protagonist has just told the reader that somebody does know the identity of his killer – and then sleep. Maybe this life isn’t so terrible.
‘I don’t know it – is it a wealthy area?’
‘Yeah – near Islington.’
‘Is it?’
‘Look – let me show you,’ Si says, his voice loud and exuberant. Cam is in the hallway, now, and can hear everything. ‘It’s a tiny borough, hang on …’ He speaks as he types it in. ‘St Luke’s.’ Ah. That is why she thought they were discussing her husband.
But … St Luke’s, near Islington. And Cam knows before she gets her phone out, before she googles it, what she’s going to find. She knows she’s just glimpsed a truth, like a prism that shines the light in the exact right place, just for a second, until it disappears again to darkness.
She types the coordinates in, then zooms out and out again. And sure enough, there it is: those coordinates she was sent were in the St Luke’s Borough of London.
Surely, they can only have been sent by one person.
Her husband: he chose them because they contain his name: it was a clue.