Chapter two #2
‘I was just about to call you!’ I hurried on, conscious of her bewilderment and also my recent normality-fail at the charity shop.
The next few sentences were critical, if a decent report of me was to get back to Fraser.
It would be self-centred to start explaining why I was there, wouldn’t it?
Instead of focusing on her mother’s accident?
Presumably there was some kind of fall alarm on Martine’s phone, one that had summoned Jackie to the rescue.
‘No need to panic, the paramedics gave Martine a thorough check-over, and there doesn’t seem to be anything broken, but—’
Jackie’s confusion abruptly shifted to horror. ‘Paramedics? Jesus.’ She took a step back, glancing past me down the hallway. ‘Mum? Mum!’
Then she glanced back at me, more sharply. ‘What’s happened?’
Oh God, I clearly hadn’t got this right at all. Did she think I was responsible? ‘I wasn’t involved in the actual accident, she slipped outside the bank,’ I gabbled. ‘In town! Not here! I was passing, so I brought her home and . . .’
Jackie squeezed her eyes shut. ‘Mum was at the bank?’
‘Yes, I think she slipped on the steps. I didn’t get the whole story, but the paramedics—’
‘Beth! Who is that?’ shouted Martine from the sitting room. ‘If it’s one of those parcel people, don’t let them leave anything here!’
‘And you say you found her?’ She frowned.
I suddenly felt hot, then cold. None of this was going the way it did in my imagination; Jackie wasn’t hugging me, delighted to see me again, and confiding she thought Fraser had lost his mind, as she did in the version I’d scripted.
My whole body felt fidgety and wrong: this bra – my last good one that still fitted, because I wasn’t spending bra money on something I intended to diet out of any time now – was pinching the skin into my ribs, and my knees ached.
For some reason, Martine hadn’t asked what on earth I was doing in Longhampton, but Jackie was about to, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by the prospect of having to invent swathes of details about my life to disguise the fact that the last five years had been spent vegetating in a duvet-laptop-box set loop.
Shame swarmed up inside me. Jackie had used lockdown to train for a ‘virtual marathon’, according to her family Instagram. I’d downloaded Duolingo and done one Welsh lesson.
Run, said the anxious voice inside my head. Run, while you still look like a hero for rescuing Fraser’s mother. While you’re still a mysterious coincidence.
‘I’ll let you take over from here, shall I?’ I gestured towards the door. ‘I’m so glad I was there at the right time, but I’ve got a meeting at three, so I should—’
‘Why are you here again? Sorry, I’m still not . . .’ Jackie’s brow creased in further confusion, and I kicked myself.
Did this look like I was trying to scuttle away from the scene of the crime?
She rubbed her forehead. ‘Sorry, sorry, that sounded rude. I was supposed to be taking Mum to a hearing-aid appointment, which she’s clearly forgotten about. So why don’t you stay for a cup of tea and fill me in? I doubt I’ll get the whole story from her.’
I wavered. The voices in my head were having an argument.
If I left now, I might never have another chance to chat with Jackie in real life, and finally get some closure about Fraser.
Why he’d blocked me. Whether he’d met someone else.
Whether there was any hope of trying again.
As Ash said, it was hardly surprising I struggled to move on: one minute we’d been on the brink of serious commitment, the next .
. . silence. Didn’t I deserve to understand how that had happened?
But if you stay, another voice countered, they’ll know you’ve done nothing with your life since the break-up.
No matter how clever you try to be about it.
Jackie and Martine were forensic about winkling details out of people.
They were like those bra fitters in posh lingerie shops who knew your bra size without taking out a tape measure, regardless of whether you were wearing a padded push-up bra and three layers of clothing.
My uncomfortable bra was dominating my thoughts to an unhealthy degree.
Then Jackie smiled. ‘And you haven’t even told me why you’re in Longhampton! Come on, stay for a quick cup of tea.’
Even if this was just Jackie’s tactic of disguising a ‘did you push my mother down the steps of the bank?’ interrogation, when she added, ‘It’s been too long, what have you been up to?’ – as if she really wanted to know – I couldn’t resist.
It was pretty clear that Martine had forgotten about the hearing-aid appointment but she styled it out.
‘Of course I hadn’t forgotten, darling,’ she insisted, with just a soupcon of affront. ‘I’m ready to go now!’
Jackie was already texting to cancel. ‘Mum, no, you need to stay here for the rest of the day. Beth says you’ve had a fall.’
‘What?’ Martine glared at me, then turned back to Jackie with a tinkly laugh. ‘Nothing of the sort! I slipped! I slipped, Jacqueline. Old people have falls.’
‘You’re eighty, Mum. That is old.’
‘How rude.’
How brave, more like.
I caught Martine’s eye and we exchanged faux outrage while Jackie’s attention was still fixed on her phone.
It gave me a nice nostalgic feeling: there was always an in-joke flashing around the Henderson gatherings, between Fraser and his dad (‘We’re outnumbered, son!
’), or everyone rolling their eyes at ‘I tell it like it is’ Cara, who took everything so seriously, or at Jackie for bossing them around.
Jackie looked up. ‘Right, that’s the hearing-aid appointment cancelled. We’ll have a cup of tea then I’ll drive you over to the surgery so Dr Robson can give you a quick check, OK?’
‘No!’
‘Mum, please. It doesn’t help to minimise things.’
Martine made a dismissive gesture. ‘Don’t start this again, Jacqueline. I know what’s happened to Perry’s parents is very sad, but that is no reason to treat me as if I have dementia too.’
Yes! Perry. That was Jackie’s husband’s name. Perry Dent.
I smiled blandly while they continued to argue politely about whether Martine should see a doctor, but my attention had slid back to the piano; where were the Dents?
There they were, close to their grandfather in the high-achievement zone.
Jackie’s children were unmistakable clones of her, beaming gap-toothed smiles in their cherry-red school uniforms and cricket whites, clutching trophies.
Sitting down provided me with a new angle and – at last – I found what I couldn’t see before: Fraser.
Excitement swept across my skin like a cool breeze, raising the hairs on the back of my arms. It gave me a pang, seeing this new photograph, evidence of a life going on without me; Fraser had a glass of wine in his hand, leaning on a barrel as he smiled that confident smile.
Blue shirt open at the neck, light tan, a few silver threads in his blond hair.
My brain rattled through possibilities: fortieth birthday wine-tasting? Holiday?
Honeymoon?
I searched for the things that were unchanged in his face; the watch, that was the one I’d given him! He was still wearing it. I couldn’t see his ring finger, which was out of shot.
‘Beth?’
I swung my attention back to Jackie.
‘Sorry?’
‘I was just saying, how bizarre that you were the one to find Mum.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘What are the chances of that?’
‘Yes, I know! I was in town to drop off some donations at a charity shop – I’m moving house at the weekend and . . .’ I shrugged, in a ‘you know how it is!’ way. ‘So much junk!’
‘Oh, I love a good sort-out! So cathartic!’
‘I cannot ever move,’ Martine announced. ‘It would be easier to burn this house down than attempt to pack up fifty years of my life. Jackie’s keen for me to downsize to some awful workhouse for geriatrics but I’d rather be carried out of Coleridge Drive than sell it, thank you.’
‘Mum . . .’ Jackie shot her a long-suffering look, then returned to me. ‘Where are you moving to? Are you renting, buying?’
‘Renting, with a friend. It took us ages to find somewhere,’ I went on, glossing over the house-hunting nightmare of the past months. ‘But it’s a lovely place, with a garden – which we needed, for my dog.’
My and Ashley’s new flat had been worth the painful rigmarole of bidding, missing out, bidding again, expanding search parameters, etc.
, etc.: it was bigger but slightly cheaper than our current place, amazingly enough, and near a wood where Tomsk could snuffle around to his heart’s content.
As soon as I’d walked in, I’d got happy vibes from it, and I honestly wasn’t the sort of person who ‘got vibes’ about anything.
I was more of a ‘do these figures add up?’ kind of person, as was Ash.
‘Sounds like everything’s going well,’ said Martine. ‘Good for you.’
I beamed. ‘Thank you.’
Without meaning to, my eyes were drawn again to the photograph of Fraser and I was about to bite the bullet and ask how he was when my phone beeped with the reminder that my meeting with my boss was in exactly one hour.
‘Is Fraser . . . well?’ I blurted out.
Martine and Jackie exchanged glances. Again, I couldn’t quite read their expressions.
‘Yes, I think so,’ said Jackie smoothly. And smiled, as if that was the end of that line of questioning. ‘Did you say you had a meeting at three? Just so you know, the traffic going out of town is really awful. It took me nearly a half an hour to get through the lights . . .’
So I had no choice but to leave, Cinderella-like, in a rush, and without any of the answers I’d hoped to find.
Although I had my own clients, my boss Allen and I had a Wednesday catch-up online, officially to discuss my caseload, but usually for him to warn me about a new scam he’d read about.
Occasionally he tested me on pension reforms. Most weeks it was the only time I saw anyone from work in person, as it were.
‘We missed you at lunch,’ he said, as an opener.
Lunch? What had happened at lunch? ‘Oh . . . yeah, I was sorry not to be there.’
‘It was Carryn’s leaving do – she said to thank you for those lovely cakes.’
I had a momentary twinge of guilt; Carryn was the receptionist and in the days when I was in the office more often, I used to bake birthday cakes for her kids’ parties. She was a nice lady, organised a lot of events for the hospice.
Allen read my mind. ‘I put a tenner in her leaving envelope on your behalf – you can ping it over to me later.’
‘Thanks.’ I scribbled a note to send Carryn a card. ‘I don’t think I knew it was her leaving do today.’
‘There’s been a notice up in the kitchen for ten days.’
Allen raised an eyebrow. He was bald, but still had incongruously full, dark eyebrows, so any silent eyebrow language felt like shouting.
He didn’t need to eyebrow-shout. I knew what he was intimating.
He’d been dropping gentle hints for some time but he was too kind to come straight out and ask if there was a reason I’d barely set foot in the office for such a long time.
I suspected he knew there were murky ‘personal reasons’ behind it, and didn’t want to wade into troubled waters.
Our HR director, Lisa, was very hot on respecting boundaries.
(For the record, I had been in. But not on days when anyone else was around.)
On the sofa, Tomsk pricked up his ears. This normally meant Ashley’s car was turning down our road, but it was only just gone three, and she was never home before five.
‘Anyway,’ he went on. ‘I was hoping you’d make it this week because there’s something I need to have a chat with you about.’
I smiled blandly. I could make a good guess as to what it would be: Christian, our new managing director, who’d recently joined us from a London firm, had sent round a high-priority email making a case for entering every award we were eligible for, ‘to raise our profile’.
Allen hated things like that – his maxim was that accountants should be as invisible as possible – and I suspected he wanted me to do any submissions on his behalf.
‘Can’t you tell me now?’ I asked.
‘I’d rather discuss it face to face.’
‘OK.’ I pretended to flip through my diary, which was empty. ‘When would be good for you?’
‘Any time next week. We could meet somewhere for a working lunch if that’s more tempting?’
My attention snapped back to Allen on my laptop screen, and my cheeks burned. Why lunch? Was he trying to lure me out with food? Did I come across as someone who needed to be tempted out of her den with a burrito?
‘We don’t have to have lunch,’ I said defensively.
He looked baffled. ‘OK. Coffee then. How about Wednesday?
‘Yes, Wednesday’s fine.’ There was time to get out of it, if necessary.
Tomsk’s tail thumped against the sofa cushions, alerting me to the click of our metal gate being opened.
‘Good. Eleven o’clock at the golf club. You know where that is, don’t you?’
I heard a key in the front door, then the door opening. This was unusual. Tomsk slipped off the sofa, his feathery tail now raised in ‘welcoming Ashley’ mode, so I assumed we weren’t being burgled.
‘So! All set for your big move this Friday?’ said Allen, business over.
‘Yup,’ I confirmed. ‘Mail redirection’s on, utilities ready to go, everything packed. And I’ve specifically started our broadband from Saturday morning, so I’ll be up and running for Monday’s meetings.’
‘Good for you, Beth. Sometimes a change of scene is what you need. New starts, fresh fields. New beginnings.’ He raised his eyebrows again.
What was that meant to mean?
The conspiratorial look on Allen’s face abruptly faded. ‘Oh! Sorry, that’s Christian just popped into my office for a . . . What? Now?’ He frowned off-camera. ‘Beth, I have to go, I’m sorry. ’
‘OK!’
When I turned back, Ashley was standing in the doorway, one hand absent-mindedly patting Tomsk’s head, the other clutching her phone.
‘Beth,’ she said. ‘I need to talk to you about something.’
‘If it’s about the deposit, I’ve already calculated how much is owing, if it’s in the right account . . .’
‘No.’ She bit her lip. ‘It’s bit more serious than that.’
And that’s when my day, which had already been like a strange cheese dream, turned into an actual nightmare.