Four months before Catherine
Saying goodbye to the children almost broke me.
I didn’t want them to pick up on the tension between us so I’d cobbled together an excuse about Liv needing me to go and stay.
‘She’s feeling a bit low.
I’m going up to London to look after her,’ I said while the children looked at me in disbelief.
‘You’re missing our holiday?
’
How I hated to see Daisy’s quick tears.
‘Liv needs me, darling,’ I said, holding her hard little body against my own.
‘And you’ll be fine with Dad and Grandma and Grandpa, you know you will.
It’s only a few days.
’
It doesn’t feel good lying to your children, but the truth is so much worse.
Your father has been unfaithful to me; that woman who came to our house yesterday, the one who gave you Smarties, the one who wears halter necks and dark-coloured lipstick, was his lover.
When Sam dropped me off at the station – a wordless journey, no hand-holding on the gearstick – he pleaded with me to change my mind.
We stood waiting for the train to draw in to the platform, my overnight bag at my feet, staring at each other while I turned over the possibility of going to Cornwall, pretending to his parents that everything was fine.
But Julia was there, right there, my husband pressing her against the wall, the two of them locked together in their treacherous embrace.
He tells me it meant nothing; I think the opposite is true.
We can’t undo it and we can’t bury it either.
How can we not examine the fact that Sam was so unhappy he chose to sleep with someone else?
Or that it’s me who makes him miserable, me with my endless obsession over you?
If he and I are to make it work then somehow I must close the book on you.
No more cuttings. No more letters.
The end of my dreams.
Liv meets me off the train at Clapham Junction and carries my bag to a nearby café while I talk.
She expresses all the right emotions, incredulity and bewilderment at the unexpected turn of events, Sam’s shocking infidelity, Julia’s arrival on our doorstep, but it is her silences that say the most. Always with Liv there’s the spectre of you.
‘I think he still cares about you,’ she told me after you’d both been at a wedding together not so long ago.
‘I doubt it,’ I said, ending the conversation before it could begin.
But I can see the thoughts running through Liv’s mind as we sit in this blue-and-white-themed café with our Lapsang Souchong and carrot cake, which neither of us eat.
Sooner or later she won’t be able to stop herself mentioning your name.
So I don’t tell her that right now what I would like most is to be lying on the beach on a sunny August afternoon, watching Sam and Joe diving from the platform into the sea, or kneeling on the sand to make one of the seaweed and shell pictures that Daisy loves – a mermaid with green broken-bottle eyes and a flat grey nose and a perfect row of white pebble teeth.
I’d like to be sitting in my kitchen watching Sam flipping pancakes, his Sunday-morning party piece, while I work my way through our chipped brown teapot and Daisy sits next to me drawing or reading or playing with her gypsy caravan full of little grey rabbits.
I chose Sam because he made me feel safe, this tall, strong, football-mad boy with his unbreakable, shatterproof morality.
How can it have gone so wrong?
‘It was only a matter of time before this happened,’ Liv says eventually.
‘You’ve often said so yourself.
’
‘I know, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
’
We are circling each other, the way close friends do, biding our time, waiting for the right moment to spring.
Liv wants to dive back into my past, I see it, I feel it; I want to run as fast as I can in the opposite direction.
I met Liv on my first day at university, wafting around the freshers’ fair in a Victorian nightie and big clumpy boots, a paper flower stuck in her hair.
We got talking as we queued up for the Debating Society.
‘You don’t have to do any debating,’ the society secretary had innate selling skills, ‘and we always serve cocktails.’
We both paid our five-pound joining fee and neither of us attended a single debate in three years, but the conversation we struck up in that queue has lasted almost half my lifetime.
The atmosphere changes when Liv reaches down for her handbag and places it on the table between us.
She extracts a ripped piece of paper, a newspaper cutting by the looks of things, and slides it across the table towards me.
‘Have you seen this?’
I know just from the look on her face – expectant?
nervous? – that it’s got something to do with you.
‘What is it?’ I say, scanning the Births, Marriage and Deaths column from The Times .
For a moment I can’t see what I’m looking for; it’s just a blur of celebrations, engagements, marriages, and new births with names like Otto Atticus and Hebe Summer, never anything normal, never Sarah or Elizabeth or James.
And then suddenly a surname, in block capitals, springs out at me as if it’s lit up by flames.
WILKES: Serena Elizabeth, died peacefully at home on 1 August, aged 60.
Much loved mother of Emma, Joanna and Lucian.
‘Lucian’s mother,’ I say after a pause.
‘He didn’t get on with her, I remember.
’
‘They haven’t seen each other for years.
But he’ll be at the funeral, I would think.
It’s on Friday.’
‘No, Liv.’ I don’t need her to spell out what she’s thinking.
‘Why not? I’m going and you could come with me.
I think it’s time.’
Heart racing, mouth dry, I look again at the announcement.
An open service, to be held at St Luke’s Church, Chelsea, at 3 p.m. on Friday 7 August. I push the newspaper cutting away from me as if it’s infected.
There are so many reasons why I can’t go to this funeral, not least the fact that I have never met your mother.
I haven’t seen you for fifteen years, have no idea whether you ever forgave me for the way I left you, suddenly, harshly, without any explanation.
And then there are all your friends, who hated me for breaking your heart.
‘Jack and Harry will be there.’
‘Yes, but so will I. We can face them together. It won’t be as bad as you think.
’
‘Why are you going, anyway? You don’t know Lucian all that well; isn’t it a bit weird for you to turn up?
You never met his mother.
’
Dread has made me vicious.
Dread, fear, self-hate, call it what you will.
What I’d like most right now is for Liv to promise she’ll stop seeing you, stop reminding me constantly of this ache, this loss, this absence of you.
I know that my reaction to the past twenty-four hours of emotional chaos has been muted and strange.
If anything, dealing with the fallout from Sam’s unexpected betrayal, I felt half dead inside.
But not now. Now the sorrow is instant and overwhelming; it’s like being shaken violently awake.
‘For Christ’s sake, Liv.
Please don’t ask me to think about Lucian.
Or Jack. Or Harry. Not on top of everything else.
’
My voice is much too loud in this place full of toddlers and buggies and mothers with freshly highlighted hair.
My tears, which fall without warning, an embarrassment.
‘Catherine.’
Liv extends a hand across the table but it’s too late.
Now that I’ve started crying, I won’t be able to stop.
Crying for you, crying for me, for Sam and the kids.
Crying for the crossroads, bleak and damned, that must rear up over and over again, haunting me with my choice.