Chapter Twenty-One
Phinn woke slowly from dreams of flying. There was a bed, which surprised him slightly, he didn’t really remember much after the bathroom, apart from the sex which seemed to have taken place in most of the rest of the house. ‘Wow. All night, eh?’ He tried to think past the headache. ‘Never done that before.’ Then remembering, a huge out breath. ‘Never done a lot of that before. Didn’t know I had that much imagination.’
They’d stopped for food, or at least slowed down for it. In fact, there was still a slightly squashed grape in his hair, he pulled it out and stared at it, then ate it, turning his head towards his distinct memory of Molly, flat out and tousled, with her face all pink and her eyes very round. ‘You were . . .’
Gone, leaving nothing but a warm sheet and that scent of strawberries.
The whole of yesterday thundered in and left him shaking, curling around himself in the bed and clutching the duvet as though it could stop that awful plummeting in his heart and that rise of his blood that trumpeted to itself about what a total stud he’d been. Oh God. Please. Please let me wake up . . . why did I do that? Why did I ever think that anything Link said would be a good idea and why . . . for the love of the entire Universe . . . why did I take those tablets?
‘Molly?’ he called, his voice experimental and cracking under the weight of his remorse. ‘Are you there?’
Silence. Without his glasses the room was a series of blurred colours and fuzzy shapes and the glowing face of the bedside clock a collection of lines and angles. He squinted. More angles and lines than he was expecting of a twenty-four hour clock, in fact. All four fields bore a shape . . . what the hell time was it?
With no one else there and no glasses to hand, Phinn had to pull the clock up almost to the end of his nose in order to resolve the shapes, and when he did he wasn’t sure how he should react. Fifteen twenty seven? Nearly half past three? In the bloody afternoon? He ran his hands through his hair. How much sex did we have? All day yesterday, and then we slept . . . Wow. I mean, yes, terrible, obviously but she didn’t run off in horror. No, in fact she . . . More memories, the image of Molly’s face while he made love to her, blurred with need and then relaxing into open-mouthed bliss. Shit. He ran increasingly desperate hands through his hair, the mental images stretching and flexing with the passion they’d shared; the whispered declarations, the brief touches to guide and enhance and . . .
Oh God. She enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. It was . . . unbelievable. It was soft, it was reciprocal; it was all the obsession and excitement and mutual satisfaction that I always wanted it to be. And her. Molly.
But it was all fake.
So where was she? Careful listening revealed no flushing toilet or running water sounds. No soft footsteps downstairs, or music, or humming. Slowly he peeled back the duvet, wincing slightly at some areas that were more sore than they should be, and padded his way across the floor to the last place he remembered seeing his glasses.
* * *
‘All right, that’s enough walking.’ I stopped, my feet sinking into the riverside mud. Beside us the dark waters bowled along with the sucking, slurping noises of someone eating a difficult boiled sweet, occasionally lapping up over the bank in a cappuccino-curl of froth. ‘If you want to say something, Tim, then say it.’
Tim inclined his head. He’d managed to regain most of his composure today, mostly by putting on a hat so that his bald spot didn’t look so much like a long shot of the rising moon. ‘It’s . . . difficult,’ he said. ‘Jacqueline asked me to come.’
‘My mother knows you’re here?’ I actually felt a little bit better knowing that. I had been beginning to wonder if Tim was going to work the reverse-affair trick and try to seduce me again, and his overly familiar behaviour hadn’t managed to disabuse me of that idea. ‘All right, so why did you come?’
He stared ahead at the river racing under the narrow arch of the bridge. There wasn’t much clearance now and the darkness of the peaty water running off the moors gave the river the look of bad coffee. ‘You wouldn’t speak to her on the phone, and she . . . we needed you to know. The cancer is back, Molly.’
My stomach turned. ‘But . . .’ That terrible time. Diagnosis, me not knowing what to say while my mother kept the stiff expression that she’d had all of my childhood, and then, after she started treatment, after everything seemed to be going well . . . the betrayal. ‘She was better!’
Tim shook his head. ‘She was in remission, the doctors hoped. We couldn’t talk to you about it, not with, well, everything.’ You wouldn’t listen, ran the subtext. Too busy being selfish, being angry and running off. ‘And now it’s back.’
I felt my feet sink as the world rocked. My mother. She stole my boyfriend. Had an affair with him while I planned our wedding. I looked sideways at Tim. He was frowning slightly and searching with his hands through his coat pockets, a nervous tic of his. My mother. And Tim. And I’d run away, cut my ties, never wanted to see either of them again. But.
‘How is she?’ It must be hard for him too, I thought.
‘Well, chemo and all that, but she’s strong.’ He tipped back on his heels, still staring at that bridge. ‘Yes. She’s strong.’ His voice broke, just a little and for a second the polished shell that was the Tim I’d been engaged to split a fraction and I saw a glimpse of a man I’d never known.
He cleared his throat. ‘Yes,’ he said again, firmly now as though his conviction was enough to make it so. ‘She’s fighting, but it takes time. Thought you should know,’ he repeated, as though it was important that I appreciated this fact. ‘Thought it was only fair.’
‘What, so that I can worry about her? She didn’t worry about me did she, when she took you away.’
Tim raised his eyebrows. ‘Molly. That whole thing . . . you and I, getting engaged, it was all a bit of a cock up, wasn’t it? Honestly? We were never really suited, you and I. I wanted . . . well, I suppose I was flattered really. You were so young, so vibrant, so seductive. And clever . When we won the Anderson . . . I got carried away by it all. And then, when you introduced me to Jacqueline, she and I just had so much in common . . .’
‘Well, me for starters.’
‘And then, with the cancer, I realised just how much I truly cared for her. Wanted to be there, to help her through. And I simply never felt that with you, you were always so . . .’ He seemed to flounder, struggling for the right word. ‘So self-contained. As though you didn’t need anyone, not truly. You liked all the trappings and the accoutrements associated with a relationship, but you were never really bothered about the person that came with it.’
My mother made me like this, I wanted to say. How could I ever care for someone, when she never cared for me? When she treated me like an unwanted impediment to her career?
‘And you must care a little, to have left a phone number,’ Tim went on, still flipping through his pockets, so that the front of his jacket rippled and undulated like a rising tide.
‘That was for emergencies. I never thought you’d track me!’ I heard my voice wobbling and fought to keep it level.
‘I’m a journalist, Molly. It’s what we do.’ Tim sighed. ‘But you seem to have found someone else without too much difficulty, although I can’t say that I liked him very much.’
‘Good. Wouldn’t want you having an affair with him; you don’t get stamps for a full set you know.’
Something inside me was aching, and it wasn’t because of the seventeen hours of nearly non-stop sex. My heart, which had sneakily allowed Phinn inside, was trying to stretch. Trying to make room for another person.
‘She never really loved me,’ I said, almost experimentally. ‘She was always so busy.’
Tim sighed again. ‘Well, of course she was. She was trying to build a career, trying to raise you without help, running a house and studying . . . she did her best, Molly, that’s all. If you feel she didn’t love you enough or give you enough . . . she did her best. And you were so totally unexpected, did you know? Jacqueline had . . . problems, some kind of ovulatory thing, so she didn’t even know she was pregnant until a matter of weeks before you arrived. She never had time to prepare, and there you were.’
And she, aged twenty, had trained, sat exams, worked hard. All with this unexpected baby lurking in the background. ‘Oh,’ I said.
‘Anyway. Better get back. She worries, you know, when I’m away.’ He turned and began to walk away, his chunky body almost comical in the big wool jacket, like a bad imitation of Paddington Bear.
I gritted my teeth, holding back the memory of his lack of concern for me whenever he’d been on an assignment; his sheer contempt for my anxieties. He’d forgotten it all. Wiped away our relationship as though it had been a fleeting thing, a few quick dates and a few quick romps, not . . . actually, what had it been? A real thing, or just something I held on to for security in a world where my career was rising faster than I could keep pace with, propelling me from a background where hard work had triumphed over emotional connection?
And then I thought about her. About my mother. Working those long hours into the night, with no company but a sourness-filled child with no empathy, who resented everything. Didn’t she deserve something too? If she and Tim felt just a fraction of how I felt about Phinn, could I really grudge them that, now I’d seen how it could be?
Almost against my will I called after him. ‘Tell her . . .’ Then I stopped. Words couldn’t do it, they couldn’t fill the gap that ran beneath my relationship with him and with her. Nothing could do anything about the way I felt about my childhood, not now.
Tim turned and squelched back over the grey grass. ‘It was never meant to hurt you, you know,’ he said, and his voice, under the pretention and the officiousness, was gentle. ‘Neither of us wanted to hurt you.’
I looked at him standing there, chubby and bald and so, so not right for me and wondered what I’d been looking at when I’d decided I was in love with him. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you. And I hope . . .’
I couldn’t do it, couldn’t say anything else.
Tim leaned forward and folded me in a damp embrace. ‘I know you’ll do the right thing, Molly.’
Then he released me and walked off without looking back and I watched him until he got behind the wheel of that over-priced car and closed the door with what seemed like a thankful thud. To think I’d once considered being driven around in a car like that as being the epitome of style. And now . . . now there was a man who cut through me, sliced through the detachment and the self-imposed loneliness. I was in love with a man who gave me the entire galaxy. Wrapped me round with stars and moons and showed me the heavens as though I deserved them.
Phinn.
* * *
With the donning of his glasses Phinn felt all the old doubts sweep back through him, as though having the world in focus once more brought it home to him that his place in it was never going to be among the winners. He sat on the end of the bed and put his face in his hands. Last night. Did I really . . . ?
The tattered remnants of a silk scarf, one end still tied to the bedhead, told him that yes, he really had. A riding crop stood in the corner of the room, angled arrogantly towards his hand and he tried to avoid looking at it, shame cascading through him in a hot wash which made the sweat prick under his arms and along his forehead. Oh dear God. I should never have listened to Link.
He’d been someone else last night. The man who’d crashed into Molly’s house yesterday, that hadn’t been him. Doctor Phinn Baxter would have buried himself alive rather than tie a woman to her own bed, wouldn’t even know how to go about using a hairbrush along the contours of bare buttocks to raise cries of pleasure from an unsuspecting throat. I don’t do that. I’m not Link, all leather and machismo like a man who got lost on the way to the rodeo. I’m the quiet one. The gentle one. He sunk his head lower. The wimp. Last night was false pretences on an unimaginable scale.
Unable to sit still with these doubts rushing through him he jumped up and began pacing around the bedroom. Every so often another memory would assault him and he started a kind of ritual of once-around-the-bed-and-groan as each new vision of the past came to him. He resisted the urge to knock his head against the wall to drive them out and instead rested his forehead against the chilly moistness of the window. Condensation ran down, softened the lines of outside almost as if he hadn’t bothered with the glasses; across the road towards where the village green lay in a smudge of greyish green, he could see a figure.
Molly, it had to be. No one else he’d ever seen had hair that seemed to have an independent existence apart from its wearer. Today that hair looked as though it had been to an all-night party and a renewed flush stung at his cheeks as he remembered just a few of the reasons why it might look like that.
She stepped into an embrace with that bald tosser she’d been talking to. There was a moment of physical closeness — were they talking? Or kissing? Were things being decided? Phinn felt that pain again, the pain that had almost become a friend when he was precariously hanging on to his marriage. A pain that said ‘you aren’t good enough. She’s got someone else, someone who’s more of a man that you could be, no matter how many drugs you take’. Now she was walking along at the edge of the green where it had been filed down by many years of rising rivers and she seemed to be staring into the water.
She doesn’t exactly look like she’s covered in rosy glow, he thought. More like she’s thinking really hard. Oh, hell, why did I do it? She liked me before, I know she did, why in God’s name did I have to take those tablets and come over all Captain Caveman last night? The self-doubt was joined by self-loathing as he remembered Suze’s reaction the one time he’d tried to take control in bed. How she’d first been startled, then amused by his attempts at being commanding, how she’d started laughing and been unable to stop when he’d tried to throw her down onto the bed. How it had ended, with him pleasing her as she told him to, where to touch, when to stop, at which angle to enter. But I gave Molly no chance to say any of that.
So, which course of action now would make him look less pathetic? If he simply told the truth about the drugs, said that he’d been out of control? Or if he apologised, prostrated himself before her and swore it would never happen again? Which was worse, to be thought of as a junkie madman or a sexual control freak?
When he looked up again she was standing beside the fast-flowing river, dropping what looked like pebbles from a clenched fist. He saw them fall, the tight circles of their impact immediately swept away by the water, all trace of their passage gone, erased. Maybe I should do that. Just go. Vanish. But she knew he was working for the BBC, she’d probably write to the Radio Times about him. Tell them all how I forced her.
I need to talk to her. To tell her. To say, what? That I’m really the wimpy guy too scared to make a move? That who I was last night was an imposter?
Before he could chicken out completely, Phinn pulled his jeans on, found a jumper lying over the back of a bedside chair and, in the absence of his own shirt, dragged it over his head. Grabbing his soaked jacket, he shoved his feet into his still-wet boots and headed down the stairs in search of Molly.
* * *
For the first time in my life I wondered what things must have been like for my mother. Twenty-eight years ago, having struggled to make herself a life — she’d not got on with her father and I’d never met my grandparents — being accepted to teacher training college, she must have thought things were starting to go right for her at last. And then, one night with a stranger and her whole life had become something else.
I’d never asked about my father. All I knew was that he’d been a student, a passing ‘thing’, not even a relationship, just a drunken party, a walk home and a mistake. And then, there I was and she’d been forced to deal with another life.
I threw a handful of mud into the receiving river and it swallowed it down. Swirled a deeper brown for a moment and then nothing. I shivered. She could have had me adopted, but she hadn’t. Could have just left me in the hospital, walked out with the visitors, pretended she never had a baby, but she hadn’t. Why?
She did her best Tim had said. So maybe she had loved me? Just hadn’t known how to show it, what to do with this awkward, careless daughter that nature had handed her? And now she was dealing with something else she’d never asked for, a disease that no one deserved. One she thought she’d beaten once.
‘Molly.’ Phinn’s voice made me jump. He was wearing his jacket, still sodden, over one of my jumpers, so much too small that it left his midriff bare. ‘I’m so sorry about last night. It was . . . I was . . . complete aberration. Not me at all.’
I sighed. My head felt full to overflowing. Last night, the way he’d been . . . ‘No, it’s okay. It was fun.’
I’d said the wrong thing, I could see it in his face. ‘I don’t know why . . . look, I’m not like that, Molly. I’m really not. Look at me.’ And he stretched his arms wide. The sleeves of the tiny jumper bunched under his jacket, leaving a long expanse of wrist poking from the leather like an overgrown seedling jutting from the earth. His jeans were buttoned up wrong and his boots had that murky grey patina of seriously wet leather. ‘This is the real me. Not whoever I became last night. This .’
If half my brain hadn’t been full of memories, of new, disturbing thoughts about the way I’d been as a child, I would have smiled. He looked fantastic, even with his glasses at an Eric Morecambe angle on his nose and the ill-advised clothing choices. And last night, with those galactic eyes and that stellar body he’d ripped up every book I’d ever read about sex and rewritten them all. I’d yelled his name more times than I could remember, in more places than I could remember, and the recollection of the sheer abandonment made me blush a little.
‘There’s nothing wrong with this. But last night was . . . extraordinary, Phinn.’
A smile made the corner of his mouth twitch. ‘I’m so, so sorry. I took . . . never mind, all you need to know is . . . it was like possession, like some kind of altered state of being. I don’t do that, Molly. I can’t.’ A shrug. ‘Like I said. Wimp.’
‘You’re too hard on yourself.’
‘Maybe. But some of the things I did . . . it was wrong. You had no say, I took you . . .’ A head shake now. ‘I shouldn’t have.’
‘But what if I enjoyed it?’
‘Then that’s worse in a way. Because it’s not who I am.’
‘I think it could be, Phinn. You could be so much more if you stop thinking of yourself as worthless and pathetic. You’re gorgeous, I mean, look at you, all hair and leather and . . . and . . .’
‘And wet. Wearing, if I’m not mistaken, a pink mohair sweater that doesn’t even reach my navel.’
‘But why does that matter?’
‘Because it does!’ he shouted. ‘It matters to me ! I’ve never done anything normal. I’ve never been normal! Just this freaky guy with a brain too big for him to handle, all thoughts and ideas and theories and nothing of any fucking use !’ Now his voice was an almost desperate shout. ‘I’m in here, somewhere, the me that I used to be. It’s like I’m looking out through my own eyes. I’m shut in here, Molly, sealed in with the way I once was, and last night showed me that I can’t . . .’ He dropped his voice and stood very still for a second. ‘I can’t,’ he said again, and the quiet tone of his voice held a horrible finality.
I felt my stomach drop. There was a horribly resigned look on his face, as though he’d always known this day was coming and had been preparing for it all his life.
‘I don’t want you to go,’ I said, very quietly. ‘I know you don’t believe it, but you are an amazing man, Doctor Baxter.’
He gave me a sad smile. ‘I just . . .’ and then his words were coming in a rush. ‘You deserve so much better than me, Molly. And this really isn’t about you, it’s about me. I saw you with whatsisname, Tim, and you looked so . . . and it was the same when I thought you and Link . . . doesn’t matter, still not about you, and I thought — there was guilt and jealousy and you don’t need a man who thinks like that. You don’t need someone like me. What I’m trying to say . . . it wasn’t me that you had sex with last night.’
I opened and closed my mouth feebly. ‘Identical twin?’ was all I could ask. His expression was a sort of tortured dismissal that made my heart ache as much as my lungs did.
‘Those tablets . . . Maybe we should look at the multiverse theory, yes, it’s the only answer; they let some alternative version of “me” breakthrough for a while there and . . . and . . .’ He turned his back as though not looking at me made the words flow more easily. ‘Not . . . not me, Molly. I’m sorry, I can’t . . . I just don’t do that.’
‘Phinn,’ I tried to start but he whirled around again, hands wringing around one another and finally cupping his face.
In the odd half-light that twitched and danced over the river’s surface he almost seemed to flicker, as though several of those overlapping universes were trying to claim him at once and he was only partially existing in this one. ‘You really are great at over-dramatising everything, aren’t you?’ I said, finally.
‘Over-dramatising. Good way of putting it, yes. I guess . . . yeah, that’s me. But that’s . . .’ He waved a hand. ‘The universe. It’s drama on an unimaginable scale. Makes EastEnders look like . . . actually I’ve never watched EastEnders , but I’d imagine the universe makes it look like an anthill. A really tiny anthill. Microscopic, possibly.’
‘Well, that puts things in perspective.’
‘I have to go, Molly. If I can’t even bring myself to trust you, then I certainly can’t trust myself.’
I dropped my gaze and stared at my feet. Mud was squishing up around my boots, claiming me an inch at a time for the river. I wanted him so, so much. But not like this. Not scared and disbelieving, and whatever I said here, I knew it could never be enough. He doubted himself too much.
‘I know.’ I couldn’t look up, even though I could see from his reflection in the fast moving water, that he’d started to reach out a hand to touch me. ‘Just go, Phinn. Before I crack completely.’
No more words. Just a soft exhalation that sounded as if it wanted to be words but didn’t dare, and then his footsteps sucking through the sloppy mud away to the road.