Chapter 17 Elise
Elise
The tube train was cramped, and there was a distinct smell of body odour coming from the armpit of the man who was strap-hanging nearby.
Lulu was rigid with fear in Elise’s lap, and Elise was well aware it would have made more sense to time her trains so she’d arrived in London after the tourists had all returned to their hotels.
But she hadn’t had the patience for that.
She’d needed to confront Robbie as soon as possible.
To look him in the face when she did it. To see the truth in his eyes.
As the train rattled through the overheated tunnels of the Northern Line, Elise’s mind turned up all the excuses Robbie had used not to be at the hospital in the weeks before Charlie had died. A flat tyre. Meetings that ran late. A sales conference. An ill colleague.
How could she have been so na?ve? Even if she had been so totally wrapped up in Charlie and his needs, on spending every last precious moment with her beloved son.
It simply hadn’t occurred to her that Robbie wouldn’t want to do the same.
He was the one who’d opted for that miserable course of chemotherapy in an effort to prolong Charlie’s life, after all.
The house was a ten-minute walk from the tube station. Turning into the front garden, Elise hesitated outside, unsure whether or not to use her key. It was still as much her home as Robbie’s. But it didn’t feel like it any longer. And she might be there. Kate.
Lulu started yapping, excited at the prospect of Robbie and home, and the decision was taken out of Elise’s hands. Robbie opened the door.
“Elle!” he said, his face lighting up. His tie had been yanked down but not taken off yet. He couldn’t have been home long.
“God, it’s good to see you! Have you packed that crazy project in? But what on earth are you doing out here? Come in.” Then Lulu jumped up at his legs with a little yelp, and Robbie’s expression changed. “Oh, no, don’t tell me you’ve come to bring the dog back?”
“No, I haven’t brought Lulu back.” Elise swept past him, into the house. “And I haven’t stopped working on that crazy project, as you call it.”
She turned to face him. “I came to tell you that I know about you and Kate. She called me up this morning. Took great delight in giving me all the gory details.”
“Shit.” Robbie closed his eyes. “Elle . . .”
“And I also came because I wanted to ask you—face to face—how . . . how you could possibly sleep with another woman while . . . our son was dying in his hospital bed.”
She’d started out speaking in a relatively normal tone. By the end of it she was shouting.
Robbie covered his face with his hands, sighing heavily. “Look, Elle,” he said, “it’s not what you think.” He took his hands away from his face to reach out to her.
“No! Don’t touch me. Don’t you dare touch me!”
Lulu was yapping again, stressed and excited, demanding to be picked up. Elise quickly did it before Robbie could.
“Look,” he tried again, “I don’t know what Kate said to you, but honestly, Elle, it was nothing. At least, not for me.”
Suddenly, she couldn’t bear to listen. Or to look at him.
“Please. Don’t insult me with that old cliché.
” She put Lulu down and walked away, through the kitchen and out into the garden, Lulu running beside her.
Past the playhouse Charlie had outgrown but refused to give up.
The patch of lawn where the three of them had made snow angels one winter, lying down next to each other in the snow.
The tangle of weeds which had once been Charlie’s flower border.
Robbie followed, his voice pleading. “It was just my way of trying to escape the complete awfulness of everything,” he said. “I’m not proud of myself.”
Elise turned on him bitterly, arms folded across her chest. “Oh, well, that makes it all right, then, doesn’t it?”
“I’m not saying that.”
“Who is she then, this Kate? How did you meet her?”
Lulu was digging at something in the flower border now, sending dirt flying through the air. She’d done the same thing many times before. They’d often laughed about it together in the past. Not now. Never again.
Robbie’s head was bowed. “She was one of the temps the company brought in when we were working on the Hobson deal. We all went out to celebrate after it was over. She . . . Kate happened to be sitting next to me. We . . . got talking.”
Elise remembered the occasion well. Robbie had come home in the middle of the night, stinking of whisky, stumbling about in the hall, breaking a vase she was fond of.
She hadn’t given him a hard time about it because they’d only just recently heard about the recurrence of Charlie’s cancer.
She hadn’t had the energy to be mad about anything else.
And besides, she’d thought he needed a night of forgetfulness.
She just hadn’t realised how far that need had taken him.
“I can’t believe this,” she said now. “She told me it was true, you’re standing here telling me it’s true, and yet somehow I just can’t believe you’d be so utterly bloody disloyal.”
He stared at her helplessly. “It meant nothing, Elise. Nothing. I promise you. You’re everything to me.”
Elise stared at him with scorn and open dislike.
“I’m not talking about your being disloyal to me, you bastard.
I’m talking about you being disloyal to Charlie.
About you putting yourself and your needs first. Doing that when Charlie wanted you.
When it was . . . your last chance to . . . be there for him.”
“I was there at the end,” he reminded her in a small voice.
“Only just,” she said. “You almost missed it. I thought . . .” A sob broke from her. “Robbie, I thought I was going to have to say goodbye to our boy all on my own . . .”
It was four o’clock in the afternoon, in the vacant space after visiting hours and before tea. Elise was sitting at Charlie’s bedside, holding Charlie’s hand. Claire, one of the regular nurses, was with her. She’d just finished checking Charlie’s vitals.
“I don’t think it will be very long now, Elise. I’m so sorry.”
Elise nodded, her eyes hollow, dried-out husks that had forgotten what sleep was, every bone and sinew of her body aching.
“Thank you.”
Once they had been Nurse Chalmers and Mrs. Jenkins, but a dying child had soon swept aside formality.
Claire squeezed Elise’s hand. “Would you like me to stay with you for a while?”
“No, it’s all right. His father should be here soon.”
“All right, lovely. Buzz me if you need me, okay?”
Elise nodded. Then, as Claire began to pull open the curtains screening the bed, Elise told her, “Charlie was born here, you know.”
She could tell from Claire’s expression that she’d already shared this on another occasion. Also that it didn’t matter that she had.
“You must have been so thrilled when you held him for the first time. He’s such a lovely boy.”
He was. Even gaunt and yellow skinned and bald.
“He’s always been beautiful,” Elise said, her voice not much more than a whisper. “Inside and out.”
Claire made to return to the bedside, but Elise shook her head. “No, it’s okay. I know how busy you are.”
“All right, then. But remember—”
“Buzz if I need you.”
That, she supposed, would be at the end. When it was all over. After Charlie had died.
Tears filled her eyes. She wanted to escape to memories.
Charlie digging on the beach like a thing possessed, the sand flying from his spade.
Calling out, “Aye, aye, me hearties,” in his best pirate’s voice on a Cornish boating lake.
Celebrating scoring a goal on the football field, his friends racing to embrace him.
But absorbing herself in memories would take her away from the present moment while Charlie’s chest was still rising and falling.
While she could still hold his hand and feel its warmth.
So she would leave the remembering until it was all she had left.
Robbie should be here. Where was he? It was almost two hours since she’d first phoned him.
Since then, she’d left umpteen voicemails and texts.
She’d even left a message with his receptionist at work.
It had been obvious the poor girl knew why she was calling.
Everyone at Robbie’s office must know his son was dying.
But none of them had been able to tell Elise where his father was.
And now she couldn’t let go of Charlie’s hand to fumble for her phone in case the moment when she looked away was the moment Charlie left her.
A pain she had no idea how to deal with sliced suddenly through her, making her want to jackknife.
The pain seemed more than her. Impossible to contain within her collection of bones and sinews and flesh.
Charlie had been her all, her everything, ever since the moment of his birth.
Even when work took her away from him and they’d had to resort to funny texts.
In jokes that gave them a dose of dopamine.
A quick reassurance of being loved, accepted, and understood.
Friends with older children had warned her about empty nest syndrome, but Charlie’s cancer was about to blast the nest out of the tree way before it was properly time for it to go, and Elise didn’t know how people even carried on living after they’d lost the person they loved the most. It ought to be impossible.
Her body ought to shut down along with his.
He had come from her, so she ought to go with him.
Suddenly Charlie made a sound, a sound Elise shaped into a world. Mum.
“Yes, sweetheart, I’m here. Mum’s here. D’you want some water?”
She reached for the drinking cup, her eyes never leaving his face, dripping some water gently onto his dry lips. The water ran untasted down his chin.