Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
Patch leaped to his feet, signalling to the waitress and pulling a few twenty-pound notes from his wallet. ‘Do you know if they include service? I don’t want to stiff our poor waitress.’
‘Let’s just leave extra and get back,’ I urged.
I was already standing up, my coat on and my bag over my shoulder. My phone was still pressed to my ear. ‘Don’t worry, Bridget. We’ll be there in five minutes, tops, okay? Are the kids all right?’
But I couldn’t hear her answer over the wailing of the alarm in the background and the buzz of voices around me in the restaurant.
‘Right, sorted.’ Patch headed for the door and I followed him, weaving my way between the crowded benches, feeling as if I was in one of those nightmares where, no matter how quickly you move, you can’t seem to reach your destination.
As soon as we turned the corner into our road, we heard the alarm, its shriek cutting through the still darkness. Patch increased his pace and I jogged to keep up, my mind filling with horrors. The top floor of the house on fire and the children trapped in their bedroom. The fire service turning up, flames silhouetting Toby and Meredith perched on the windowsill and me standing helplessly below exhorting them to Jump, jump! Fire engulfing the loft where all the kids’ baby clothes, our Christmas decorations and my wedding dress were stored.
Ahead of me, I could see our open front door, smoke hovering in the amber light of the street lamp above. Its colour reminded me of flames. As we drew nearer, I could see Bridget standing in the doorway, her arms wrapped around her. Above the din of the alarm, I could hear Toby crying and Meredith screaming, ‘Mummy! Mummy!’
The neighbours’ upstairs windows were open and pale, anxious faces peered out.
Patch reached the house ahead of me. He put a hand on his mother’s shoulder for the briefest second before nudging her out of the way and entering the house. I imagined him dashing up the stairs, taking them two at a time, reaching the first floor and finding – what?
‘What happened?’ I gasped, squatting down in the doorway and pulling the twins close against my body, hearing Meredith’s screams turn to sobs, feeling Toby’s tears hot and wet against my face. ‘It’s okay, darlings. Mummy and Daddy are here. It’s going to be all right.’
‘The lasagne.’ Bridget dropped to her knees next to me, clutching the door frame for support. ‘I left it in the oven like you said, but I was watching television and I didn’t hear the timer thing. Then when I remembered and opened the oven there was smoke everywhere and the alarm went off and I couldn’t make it stop.’
Thank God. There had been no fire – just a minor domestic crisis and the alarm doing its job.
‘It’s okay, Bridget. Deep breaths.’
I could see she was trembling and beginning to cry. ‘I’m so sorry, Naomi. What was I thinking?’
Abruptly, the alarm stopped. From the kitchen, I heard the roar of the extractor fan start up.
Patch emerged, a wooden spoon in his hand. ‘Those sensors are too high for Mum to have reached,’ he said, ‘even if we’d shown her the old kitchen utensil hack. I’ve opened the back door and the windows upstairs – the smoke should clear in a few minutes. Let’s all get inside, shall we?’
‘See?’ I told the children. ‘Everything’s okay. Look at that horrid burnt dinner, though. Poor Granny must be starving. Would you like some toast, Bridget? And a cup of sweet tea?’
‘There was smoke everywhere,’ Toby said, his eyes wide.
‘And then the alarm woke me up.’ Meredith pressed herself against me. I could feel her small body shivering through her Peppa Pig pyjamas. ‘I thought it was Daddy getting up for work but it wouldn’t stop. And then I started coughing and coughing.’
‘I don’t know why I didn’t notice earlier,’ Bridget said, clasping her hands together and squeezing them like she was doing a Covid-era hand-sanitising routine. ‘I must have been miles away. And I was responsible for Patrick and Niamh.’
My eyes met Patch’s over Bridget’s head and the flash of panic in his face made me realise how desperately he’d been trying not to confront the knowledge that things with his mother weren’t right.
‘Mummy.’ Toby pulled at my hand, and tugged again when I didn’t respond straight away. ‘Mummy?’
‘What is it, darling?’
‘If the house burnt down, would the firemen rescue Blue Bear?’
Stupidly, the thought of my son’s beloved teddy being lost to the flames brought me closer to tears than I’d been all evening. ‘Sweetheart, the house didn’t burn down. If there’d been an actual fire – which there wasn’t – the fire fighters would have come and put it out long before that could happen.’
‘But what about Blue Bear?’
‘He’d have been found soggy but unharmed upstairs in your bed,’ I said firmly.
I had no idea whether this was true – or whether telling my children reassuring half-truths was the right thing to do in the circumstances or the worst parenting cop-out ever. Rationally, of course, I knew that in the event of a fire Blue Bear and Meredith’s beloved orange camel would have been consigned to the flames without anyone thinking twice about it, along with my wedding dress and all our other treasured possessions.
‘Would you like to stay over, Mum?’ I heard Patch saying gently. ‘You’re more than welcome, if you’d prefer not to go home on your own. You’ve had a shock.’
‘I should wash up that lasagne dish,’ Bridget fretted. ‘It’ll need a good long soak with a scoop of biological washing powder and then a scrub. That’s the thing with Pyrex, burnt bits get caught in all the nooks and crannies.’
‘Come on, Meredith and Toby,’ I encouraged. ‘Let’s get the two of you to bed. It’s late now. Everything’s going to be all right, and I’ll stay with you until you both fall asleep, okay?’
Leaving Patch to comfort his mother, I took the children’s hands and led them upstairs. There was still a whiff of smoke in the air, but it wasn’t as bad as the kitchen. I opened the window in their room and tucked them up, planting kisses on their foreheads and reassuring them that everything would be all right now, Mummy and Daddy were here.
My mind kept returning to the possessions we might have lost, but hadn’t. Every time it did, I tried to force it away – to tell myself that those things, however important they felt, were just stuff that could either be replaced, or would remain in our lives in the form of memories.
Then I realised – they weren’t insignificant. They represented not just the past, but our future together as a family. One day, Meredith (or Toby, obviously – there was no way I wanted to be that kind of parent) would ask to try on my wedding dress, and I’d watch them parade around in it and tell them they looked beautiful. Toby’s teddy would be there for him as long as he needed it, and when eventually he didn’t, I’d know it meant that Blue Bear had played his part in my son becoming secure and independent. The Christmas decorations would be brought down from the loft year after year – the cheap, moulting tinsel Patch and I had bought the first year we lived together; the set of three glittering glass spheres the Girlfriends’ Club had given us for a wedding present; the cotton wool snowmen the children had made at a craft session, which were already dusty and greying – and as the children grew older they’d come to recognise their favourite ones, confident that they’d be there to hang on the tree every time.
It wasn’t just stuff – it was the physical fabric of what made us a family.
And it could all have been lost – not by a fire that had never actually happened, but by me. By me deciding that the foundations on which Patch’s and my marriage was built were too insubstantial to withstand further construction – that because the way things had started had been flawed, the future automatically would be, too.
‘Jesus, Naomi,’ I muttered. ‘What a bloody fool.’
Toby was sleeping now, his thumb resting near his mouth in case he needed it during the night. Meredith was dropping off, her eyelashes fluttering involuntarily over her cheeks, their smoothness marred by drifts of dried tears.
As silently as I could, I stood up and tiptoed across the floor, giving them one last look before turning the light off and pulling the door closed behind me. The lights were still on downstairs, but I couldn’t hear voices – Patch must have organised a taxi to take Bridget home.
I found him in the kitchen, slumped over the table, a glass of whisky in front of him.
When he heard my footsteps, he raised his head. ‘Kids down?’
I nodded. ‘Is there any left in that bottle?’
‘Plenty. You want ice?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Quite the night, hey?’
‘It was awful.’ I sat down opposite him and sipped my drink. I never normally drank whisky and this reminded me why – it was vile. The peaty taste that was meant to make it special just made it taste medicinal and burnt to me. But then, I supposed, lots of things were going to taste burnt for a while.
‘I mean, it wasn’t awful really,’ Patch said. ‘It was just a false alarm – literally.’
‘You did well, though. Quite the Boy Scout, with your wooden spoon.’
He laughed. ‘Be prepared, right? Except I wasn’t – I had to get it out of the drawer. Maybe I should carry it with me all the time.’
‘Like your pocket knife.’
‘A pocket spoon. Good shout.’
We smiled at each other – a tentative agreement that the almost-row we’d had earlier could be forgotten, set aside, deemed unimportant in the light of what had happened afterwards.
I couldn’t change the past, anyway. I could only apologise to Zara and explain to Rowan, Kate and Abbie that I genuinely hadn’t known about the overlap between our relationships with Patch. Explain that had I known, I’d have acted differently. Hope they understood that a matter of weeks when things were complicated wasn’t enough to undermine a marriage that had lasted years.
Then I thought of something else.
‘Patch?’
‘What?’ He swirled the whisky in his glass, the ice cube clinking against its sides.
‘That camera. The one Zara had. What’s on it?’
‘Photos,’ he said, his face expressionless. ‘What do you think?’
‘Yes, but photos of… what? Of the time when you and she were still… and I was already…?’
He looked up at me, his immobile features suddenly slackening with what I guessed must be relief. ‘That’s right.’
‘So that’s why Zara gave it to me.’ Anger and remorse flared inside me. ‘To prove that she was right and I was wrong.’
‘Except she didn’t have to prove anything. I’ve told you now.’
With a scrape, he pushed back his chair and left the room. I heard his feet on the stairs – For God’s sake, don’t wake the kids , I thought – and then the snap of our bedroom light switch and the rumble of a drawer opening and closing.
When he returned, I thought at first he was empty-handed, and then I saw the tiny sliver of grey plastic in his hand, a gold label shining on its side. He held it out to me.
‘The memory card?’ I asked, although it was obvious that was what it was.
He nodded. ‘We don’t need it now. It’s all out in the open.’
I turned it over in my fingers, looking at it. I remembered what I’d said to Zara all those years before, in Paris: All you have left is trust.
I handed it back to him and he took it delicately, then flexed his two thumbs and forefingers around it and snapped it in half. He snapped each piece in half again, then dropped them all in the bin.
Then he stepped over to me, placed those same strong fingers tenderly on the sides of my face, and kissed me.
‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s done. I think I’ll head up to bed.’
‘I’ll join you when I’ve finished my drink.’
I waited until I heard our bedroom door close, then walked softly over to the bin and opened it. The four fragments of plastic, each less than half an inch across, lay on top of a discarded teabag. Of course, they weren’t just plastic. In there somewhere would be a microchip, possibly made of silicon, tiny transistors and resistors and other things I didn’t know the names of, metals like copper or perhaps even gold. And also, maybe, the data itself, undamaged and recoverable.
Except I wasn’t going to try and recover it. Patch had told me the truth and I was choosing to trust that.
I closed the bin and fetched my phone from the hallway where I’d abandoned my bag earlier. The Girlfriends’ Club WhatsApp had been quiet that day, as it had been for the past couple of weeks. The question of the second, secret group that might or might not exist niggled at my mind, but I posted anyway.
Naomi:
Evening all. How’s everyone’s day been? Just wanted to let you know Patch and I had a good chat tonight.
Abbie:
Evening. Just got into bed, I’m knackered. What about?
Naomi:
The whole Zara thing. Turns out there was an overlap between her and me. He admitted it.
Kate:
Oh no. Shit, Nome, that’s a lot to take in.
Rowan:
Babe, I’m so sorry. What are you going to do?
Abbie:
Jesus. No wonder Zara was angry. You must be raging too. Why did he do that?
Naomi:
I don’t know. I feel really bad for Zara, obviously. But I can’t chuck it all away over something that happened years and years ago, can I?
I watched my screen. Two blue ticks appeared next to my message. Abbie started typing, then stopped. Then Rowan typed something, but didn’t post it. My screen stayed blank.
It stayed blank for a long time. I imagined all of them over on another group, talking about me. It felt horrible. All the emotions of the evening rushed in on me – anger; fear; the looming presence of grief that had never descended; the sure knowledge that, now, Bridget could surely never be left alone with my children again.
My friends didn’t know what had happened, but they knew I needed their support, and they were choosing to withhold it, and the pain of that was almost worse than all the other things. Now that they knew Zara had been right about what I’d done, they were choosing to take her side over mine, and I couldn’t say I blamed them.
Especially now Zara had been diagnosed with cancer.
As soon as the thought entered my mind, I hated myself for it. I tried to erase it, to unthink it, but of course I couldn’t.
Instead I tapped the top of the screen, scrolled down to the bottom and tapped the red words that said, ‘Exit Group’.