Chapter Nineteen
If he had to do one more ‘establishing shot’ Phinn thought, as he stood staring up at what purported to be the night sky but was, in fact, a giant green screen, he was going to drop down dead of boredom.
‘Just one more, Doctor Baxter.’ The director, who persisted in using Phinn’s full title at every opportunity, waved a hand. ‘Turn a bit more this way for this one, thank you.’
Phinn sighed and blinked hard behind his third new pair of frames this week. These glasses were going to be a continuity nightmare, but They, whoever They were, wanted him to wear different sets depending on whether he was talking to camera, interviewing or in long shot. Making a TV show was like making a patchwork quilt, they’d told him, all the bits would be stitched together and put into an order which would make sense of everything. He was really glad about that because the stuff he’d filmed so far made no sense at all, even to him, and he’d written it.
He leaned back against a strategic bit of scaffolding while a girl, who surely wasn’t old enough to have left school, rushed in and dabbed at his face with a brush. Was I right to leave? To make that decision so firmly, so finally? Maybe I should have thought more about it, taken advice, not let myself be panicked by the fear of what might have been and the longing for something to be again.
He shook his head, willing himself to keep focused, and his assistant, Annie, touched his shoulder. ‘Stay with us, Phinn,’ she whispered. ‘Soon be over. You up for a drink later?’
‘Sorry, can’t make it tonight,’ he whispered back. ‘It’s the last day of this block of filming, isn’t it?’
She checked her iPad, surely unnecessarily, she’d been organising him all day, she’d know the schedule if anyone did. ‘Well, yes, but we usually go on somewhere . . .’
He had that curious feeling in the pit of his stomach again. As if he stood at a crossroads and could choose his path, but one way was full of pitfalls and snares. He wished he knew which track was which. ‘Got a train to catch.’
‘Right.’ She leaned in and tweaked the collar of his jacket which had wilted under the lights, much as he was doing. ‘Do you need me to get the tickets for you?’
He smiled. ‘I think I can just about manage to do that myself, Annie, thanks.’
She gave him a slow nod. ‘Okay. Anything else you need me for, just call, all right? If we’re not going for a drink, I’ll get on home, relieve the childminder.’
Phinn shook his head, more at the image of this impossibly chic, impeccably tailored woman having a child than at her words. Annie was so cutting edge that she was practically a razor. ‘That’s fine . ’
She gave him a grin and walked out of shot and Phinn was cued up to gaze at yet another portion of featureless sheeting. But it wasn’t the screen he saw, it was Molly’s face, scrunched up in sleep, nestled into his chest and the feeling of loss made him tip forwards and screw his eyes shut, ruining the take.
* * *
I was snuggled up in bed with the folklore book, listening to the rain spattering against my window in the gusty breeze. Warm, cosy . . . and with a mind that wandered more than a tomcat. I’d battled my way through three-quarters of the book so far and started drafting up my article based around some of the more blood-curdling episodes, like the ghost that held its severed head in one hand while it wandered the lanes, screaming at passing locals and presumably frightening the local wildlife into scarcity, and the Moaning Entity at Howe End.
But it wasn’t enough. Not distracting enough. When I slept my dreams were all of black eyes and hot kisses, of strangely drifting lights sent from weird cloud-countries, and I watched the skies every night with increasing desperation. But the lights didn’t come. At least, while I was watching, anyway. Perhaps they came late at night when I’d given up hope and gone to bed. In the six days since Phinn had left, I hadn’t seen so much as an unidentified gleam in the direction of the sky.
There was a knock at the front door, and then a pause. This was odd, usually everyone just tapped once then walked straight in, in the case of Caro she’d have kept going until she got to my bedside. ‘Hello?’ I opened the window and looked out.
‘Oh, hi. Sorry, you still in bed?’ Link stood on the garden path, rain plastering his hair down and making him look even more like an overgrown schoolboy. ‘Only Caro said that you’d got a laptop I could maybe borrow? Only for five minutes, just to submit this stuff.’ He brandished a rather soggy notepad. ‘I’ve got a deadline,’ he finished sheepishly.
I pulled on some random jeans and a fleece and went to let him in. I won’t ask, I told myself. If Phinn Baxter has fallen down a mineshaft or got a place on I’m a Celebrity . . . I’m not interested.
‘Have you heard from Bax at all?’ Link stood in the living room and looked around. ‘How’s he enjoying the fame and fortune game?’
‘No idea.’ I showed him to my laptop, already plugged in and online. ‘Isn’t he in touch with you?’
Link shrugged. ‘No mobile signal. And if he’s emailing, well . . . it’d mostly be a waste of time, wouldn’t it?’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘Any chance of a coffee, Moll? It’s like living in the middle ages in that farmhouse.’ He sat at the table and stared at the laptop. ‘Although a mysterious consignment of furniture arrived the other week. Either Bax wants the place more comfortable for some reason or we’ve got a poltergeist with an Ikea account.’ His lips slid across each other with a series of unspoken thoughts. ‘Before he went, did Phinn say anything to you?’
I stopped in the kitchen doorway. ‘He said a lot of things.’
Link looked at me. His hair was beginning to dry and fluff up like a chick’s feathers. ‘Only I thought he might have taken you with him. What happened to you both that night you camped out? I mean, I know he’s a bit . . . quiet, but he’s not usually the love ’em and leave ’em type, not like this. Hell, he still gets postcards from a girlfriend he had when he was seventeen, and most of the others send Christmas cards.’
‘Nothing happened. Well, nothing physical.’ I tried to keep my back to him, fussing with the kettle to stop my blush from becoming noticeable. ‘Phinn is very messed up, Link. His wife . . .’ I stopped talking and began spooning coffee like a madwoman.
‘Suze. Yeah, she was a case.’ Link looked down at the keyboard, grinning. ‘Serious fruitcake.’
‘He knows,’ I said quietly and watched Link’s reaction. The grin faded and his cheeks looked as though they fell in a little.
‘Oh.’
‘Is that all you can say? “Oh”? That man, your friend , is so seriously screwed up by what she did that he started drinking himself to sleep, and all you can say is “oh”?’
A key tapped. Delete delete. ‘We never meant to hurt him. Shit, Moll, I’d never hurt Bax. We grew up together, he’s virtually my brother . But she . . . God, Suze could be so . . . Look, she saw something she wanted, she’d take it. That’s how she was with him, with Bax, saw him, wanted him, and jeez, he was something to look at back then, and she homed in there and she took him. He never saw it coming, never knew what hit.’
The kettle boiled and I ignored it. ‘Didn’t she ever stop to think what she was doing to him?’
Link stood up now but kept on tapping that key as though his finger was stammering. ‘That was Suze. She never thought things through, she was . . .’ He raised his hands and ran them through his hair, sighed. ‘She was like this kind of force of nature. She was beautiful, Molly, so, so beautiful, and if she wanted you, you had to be fast to get out of her way.’
‘And you weren’t fast enough either.’
He looked at me, serious now. ‘No. I wasn’t fast enough either.’
‘You bastard.’
He nodded. Kept on nodding, while a single tear ran down his face. ‘Yeah. You don’t need to tell me.’ A deep breath which seemed to help and then he wiped his face with both hands. ‘So. How much does he know?’
‘That she went to you when she left him. That she was probably running back to you the night she died.’ And probably a whole lot more, given how clever he was, how much he’d been able to work out about me, simply from how I lived. Like . . . ‘That the baby was yours.’
Link took two steps towards me and then crumbled. He rested his forehead against the wall and went silent, the tears now streaking in a continual line. I could see them rolling down to land on his collar where they stained his shirt a darker blue. ‘I tried . . .’ It sounded as though his teeth were gritted together. ‘I wanted . . . But she blew me out. Went back to him while she decided what to do, and then . . .’ A sadly simple little gesture with one hand which illustrated a life cut short.
‘Did you love her?’
A head tilt towards the ceiling. ‘I don’t know.’ Then infinitely sad eyes met mine. ‘I’d have tried, Molly. For her, for the baby, I would have tried. But I think . . .’ He scrubbed at the tears with the back of his hand. ‘I think it was the money, not me. With Bax it was the glamour, the whole “wife of a famous man” thing she wanted. It was all so stupid , like she was looking for vindication through a man, you know?’
I felt one short, horrible moment of affinity with her. Wasn’t that what I’d done, wasn’t that how it was with the men I’d dated, with Tim? The successful man syndrome? ‘She must have been quite insecure.’
‘She’d had a shit childhood, I know that much.’ Link walked past me into the kitchen and used one of the mugs from my mug tree to get himself a drink of water from the tap. ‘It wasn’t really her fault, Molly. It was the only way she knew how to be. And she had the looks . . . no one called her out on her behaviour, no one ever told her that she didn’t have to be that way.’
‘Did anyone ever try?’ Like Caro tried with me, telling me that I didn’t have to look for a father figure? That maybe Phinn was nearer to what I needed than Tim or any of the others had ever been?
Link shook his head again and straightened his shoulders. ‘I dunno, Molly. What Suze and I had, it wasn’t anything real, you know. It was like she was looking for something, something that nobody could ever give her, not me, not Bax, not any of the other guys she’d trail around after her.’
‘And then she took it out on him, on Phinn? Made him think he was too pathetic to be loved, what, to make sure that no one else would ever have him?’
He shrugged. ‘You didn’t know her, Molly. You can’t judge her.’
‘No. I suppose not.’ I poured the water onto the coffee, the bitter smell spiralling out of the cups on a conveyor of steam. ‘You never know what goes on inside other people’s relationships, do you?’ I fetched the milk from the fridge and nudged both mug and bottle towards his hand. ‘I just wish he’d . . . I dunno. Realise that he’s not a wimp.’
‘Weeelll . . .’ Link gave me a red-eyed smile. ‘He is a bit.’
‘Maybe. But it’s the nice bit. The bit that doesn’t come over all macho and try to be in the right all the time. The bit that’s kind and gentle and sweet.’
Link blew steam. ‘Wow. You really are gone over him, aren’t you? Are you sure it’s not the body? You know, we practically have to cover him in talcum powder to be able to see him when he takes his shirt off?’
‘Shut up you. Do you want the laptop or not?’
He gave a deep, broken sigh. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I’d better.’ And then, quickly, with his words coming in a tumbled rush, ‘I know you think I’m just a trust-fund kid who doesn’t care about anyone but himself, but I’d die for Bax, Molly, you should know that. What happened — it was wrong, I knew it when it was going on, and it wasn’t just Suze’s fault. I was just so bloody jealous .’
‘Of Phinn? Why?’
He sat back at my keyboard again, and his fingers found the delete key irresistible once more. I wondered if he knew he was doing it, or whether it was some subconscious urge to wipe out what had gone before. ‘Oh, not his background — his parents are like the two biggest weirdos on the planet. D’you know they don’t even have a house? They spend all their time on the lecture circuit. Dad’s some kind of hotshot in the world of nanoparticles and his mother built the first neuro-compatible computer. But he’s incredible, Bax, he’s so clever and quick and brilliant he makes me feel like I’m . . . I’m like the really dumb friend that he keeps around to reassure himself of how intelligent he is. Like keeping a dog, or a fish, so that you can know that, however stupid you might be, there’s some form of life lower than you are?’
I stared at him. ‘He doesn’t. No, Link, he doesn’t think of you like that.’
Two fingers now. Delete and backspace. ‘No. But that’s how I feel . When you see him work, when he’s making connections . . . He doesn’t just push the envelope, he shoves the whole fucking Post Office. And then he upped and married the most stunning woman that I’d ever seen — it’s like he had everything , Molly. And maybe . . . maybe I just wanted to see a little tiny rip in that wonderful life.’
I opened my mouth to scream at him. To ask him how he dared to sit here and tell me things like this. I’d bunched my hands up and I was a hair’s width away from punching him, yelling and shouting, until I saw his expression. He’d lost all the flirty winks and cheeky grin and was sitting with his eyes closed, one arm hugging himself and the other hand still flipping between those two, telltale keys. He wasn’t being brutal, he was being honest.
‘Thank you,’ I said quietly instead of screeching abuse.
‘Don’t tell him, will you?’ Eyes still closed.
‘No. No, of course I won’t.’
‘He’s all I’ve got. All I’ve ever had, really. My parents aren’t much better than his, to tell the truth, but at least I got to spend Christmases at home. He’d either come with me or have to stay at school.’
‘It’s like a bloody Dickens novel,’ I said, trying to make him smile.
It worked. ‘Hey, nothing is quite that bad. And, you know, a trust fund makes up for quite a lot.’
We shared a moment of complicit silence during which he stopped trying to wipe everything out and rested his hands on the main keyboard.
‘You’d better . . .’ I nodded at the notebook.
‘What? Oh, yeah, sure. You’re right. Wouldn’t want to keep the happy birthday grandma market waiting, would I?’ There was that tinge of bitterness again.
‘Link . . .’
‘No. It’s okay.’ A renewed cheeky grin. ‘Honestly. It’s really okay.’
While he was tapping away at the keyboard with a look of concentration so intense that it even made me poke my tongue out of the corner of my mouth, I went upstairs and sat on the edge of my bed. My stomach was rolling and my head hurt, not through any physical cause but because I’d started to see myself through someone else’s eyes, and what I saw wasn’t pretty.
Mine hadn’t been a shit childhood, whatever Link had meant by that. Not really. Plenty of my schoolmates either never knew, or had never met their fathers too. Plenty of us were raised by mothers who had to work all hours, lots of us wore second-hand uniforms and at least I’d had the riding lessons — I’d joined the school pony club and fallen in love with all things equine, and Mum had paid.
My mother had fallen pregnant during her first year of teacher training. To her credit she’d never considered giving me up, she’d worked extra hard to afford childcare while I was small, and then had simply worked around my school hours. But she didn’t seem to have considered my feelings in any of this, she’d simply carried on the life she’d always wanted without taking into consideration that a child might feel a little . . . well, left out of things.
She’d sit up late writing reports and lesson plans, and while I sat in our little front room working on essays about the causes of the Second World War, she’d been in the kitchen with a pile of exercise books, marking. I think she’d positively encouraged me to ride because it meant I spent my Saturday mornings at the local riding school and she could spend those hours drafting out schemes of work for her department.
And when I started dating, it wasn’t boys that attracted me. Not for me the hours spent sitting in a teenage boy’s bedroom while he stared at a games console and perfected the art of ripping the heads off things in ‘Silent Hill’. While my friends were standing cheering on chilly touchlines or sharing single student beds with earnest, acned lads, I was being driven in natty little sports cars by men who should have known better.
All of them older. Considerably, sometimes almost ridiculously , older.
All of them wealthy, or at least by my standards. Flattered, usually, by the attentions of a moderately attractive, fairly intelligent girl. Easily manipulated.
I felt myself blush, and lay down to hide my face in the pillow. Suze and I hadn’t been a million miles apart really. Although I hadn’t consciously damaged anyone, I was beginning to see how I’d tried to find something in each of these men that none of them had to offer, that I had, as Caro said, been looking for a father all that time.
A man who would love me uncritically, unconditionally, however badly I behaved, however much I rode roughshod over his feelings or desires. Suze, and her longing for a famous, eye-catching husband with an up-and-coming career, really wasn’t very different to me.
From downstairs I heard a tentative throat clearing. ‘Molly? I’ve done with the laptop, thanks.’
I stood up. My skin felt tight, as though it might split and shed at any moment. ‘Good. Yes, okay.’
Another bout of throat clearance. ‘And what I said earlier . . . all that stuff?’
I poked my head onto the landing to look directly down the stairs at him, standing uncertainly in the hallway. ‘Don’t worry, Link. I’m not in any hurry to hurt him any more than he already has been.’
Link’s face seemed to inflate, the chubby innocence coming back to his cheeks and the spark to his eye. ‘Right. Great. Thanks, yes.’
‘But I think you and he ought to talk about it.’
‘I’ve been thinking the same thing myself. Maybe I’ll head on down to London, try to meet up with him. Or I could go back to Bristol, he’ll probably head home when he’s done with the filming. Try to catch up with his research or something.’
He paused, as though about to say something else, then jerked his head sideways as though the thought was too petty to put into words, and let himself out of the front door.