Chapter 9 Freya
FREYA
What will he make of the news that the man we thought would never recover is out of his coma and, by all accounts, able to communicate?
It is what we’d both feared and hoped for in equal measure, neither of us able to decipher between the two.
“What will we do if he dies?” Charlie had said to me that morning as he paced the floor after the police officers left.
“What will we do if he survives?” I cried, already knowing we were in an impossible position.
“We need to get our stories straight,” he said, his panic rising. “We have to make sure we’re absolutely watertight.”
“But what about Frank and Coco? If the police talk to them, they’re going to know that we had a row, that we left separately, that we had the car.…” I’d looked at him, wide-eyed. “Did we tell them we drove…?”
Charlie had fallen onto the chair at the table with his head in his hands. “Fuck!”
I found my strength in his weakness, instructing him to go upstairs, wash the blood from his face, put a clean shirt on, and adjust the narrative that was railroading his brain.
We were going to have to take a chance on the police speaking to any of the other guests, and we were going to have to put our faith in the fact that we hadn’t mentioned whether we’d driven or got public transport.
“But didn’t I tell you to stop drinking at one point?” questioned Charlie, as he ran a manic hand through his hair.
Had he? Ironically, I was too far gone to remember.
“We’re going to assume that if you did, nobody heard. The official line is that we had a row, I walked out, and you followed shortly afterward. You caught up with me and we got a taxi home together.…”
“An Uber?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No, black cab,” I said, knowing that an Uber could be traced. “We hailed a black cab up on Euston Road, it brought us back home, and we paid cash.…”
“And all the while, my car is a mile away, lying on its roof, with someone underneath,” he cried.
I’d wanted to shake him, desperate to knock the frenzied panic out of him.
He was near hysterical, and dangerous. “We didn’t notice your car was gone until this morning, when the police came around,” I’d said authoritatively, in an effort to placate myself just as much as him.
“It must have been stolen sometime after we’d gone out and it was late when we got home, so we didn’t think to check. ”
He’d nodded numbly.
“Okay, so go and sort yourself out, because if anyone sees you like that, they’ll put two and two together.…”
“It’s going to be all right, isn’t it?” he’d said imploringly.
Was it? All I knew was that somebody needed to take control and I couldn’t help but feel disappointed that it wasn’t going to be him.
“Freya!” Mum gushes in surprise when she opens the door to see me standing there. “What are you doing here?”
I still don’t know, the two-hour drive having done nothing to clear my panicked thoughts. “I thought I’d stay over tonight” is all I offer.
She looks behind me. “No Charlie?”
“Erm, no, he’s at a work thing and staying at a friend’s.”
“Is everything all right?” she asks, the bloodhound in her always on high alert, albeit disguised as concern.
It would give her no greater pleasure to know that our relationship is teetering on a precipice, no more so than in this moment right now, when it feels like the deck of cards we’d so painstakingly stacked is shifting away from us.
The glue that has held us together for the past six months has become dangerously tacky, Marcus Harding’s condition and what he remembers being the difference between whether we come unstuck or not.
“Oh, darling, what’s wrong?” my mother asks as I battle to fight back unexpected tears.
It’s as if she knew that her news—welcome or not—would have me running to her. But how could she? She knows little of that night, only that it was Charlie’s car that had been involved, with us sticking to the story that we had no idea it had even been stolen.
But she’d always sought to dig a little deeper, poking and prodding with her questions.
Where had it been parked? Had it been left open?
What time did we get home? Where did Charlie get that cut above his eye?
It was as if she actively wanted to catch us out.
And our sudden move from London, where Charlie had been so publicly celebrated, to the Cotswolds, had only stoked her fire all the more.
“But I don’t understand,” she said, when I gave her little to go on.
“Frank was like a brother to him.… What could possibly have gone so wrong?”
I’d long since learned not to give her an inch, especially where the men in my life were concerned. Though it still didn’t stop her from stirring the pot with her wooden spoon, much to Charlie’s bemusement.
“How can you possibly know each other well enough?” she’d asked him outright when we announced our engagement after just eight weeks of dating.
He’d smiled. “You just know, don’t you?”
“That’s what Pete, her ex, thought,” she’d sneered.
At that, Charlie had visibly blanched, more on my behalf than his.
“They were love’s young dream, and then all of a sudden they weren’t. I think Freya gets caught up in the excitement of the early stages—like now, when it’s all new and hopeful, forgetting that real life comes along and interferes.”
“Mum…,” I started, not sure if I was looking to defend myself or bat away any doubts that Charlie might be having.
“I’m only saying,” she said, looking put out. “You thought Pete was perfect for that first year—and I treated him like my own son. But all of a sudden he was gone—never to be heard of again—and that was difficult for me to deal with.”
I’d closed my eyes, refusing to allow her innate ability to make my breakup about herself to get under my skin.
“I just couldn’t believe he would up and leave like that,” she said.
“Without as much as a goodbye. I always said to him, ‘If you and Freya ever break up, you’d better promise me that you’ll still come around for shortbread.
’” She’d thrown me a disparaging look, silently blaming me for something she knew nothing about.
“He loved my shortbread, did Pete. We’d sit on my patio and have a pot of tea. ”
I’d let her spurious ramblings wash over me, knowing that whenever she saw Pete, she’d invariably get straight on the phone afterward to tell me that she wasn’t a huge fan, and that she didn’t think he was right for me. Reveling in any opportunity to sow the seed of doubt whenever she could.
“So I don’t know what Freya did to make him run so fast,” she’d gone on, her face souring as if she were sucking on a lemon. “But whatever it was, it must have been bad.”
I’d swallowed my contempt, not wanting Charlie to see how the sting of her caustic words left their mark. But he’s not stupid. He could read between the lines.
“I don’t think your mum likes me,” he said afterward.
“It’s me she doesn’t like,” I said, half laughing.
“What mother doesn’t like her own daughter?” he’d asked in genuine surprise.
I’d shrugged my shoulders. “She’s complicated. You’ll learn how best to navigate her.”
“Is there anything I can do to improve my chances?”
I’d smiled to reassure him. “She’s always like that in the beginning. She’ll be fine now that she’s met you and knows that we’re serious about getting married.”
But despite my best efforts to believe what I was saying, her sharp tongue was still in force on our wedding day five months later.
“It’ll take more than that to keep him from straying,” she said as she watched me slide a garter up under my vintage lace dress.
I’d attempted to push the comment aside, my mood already dampened by the fact that her “big surprise” was to wear a white two-piece dress and jacket. It couldn’t have been any less of a surprise if she tried—though I’d hoped that just for once, she’d allow somebody else their time in the limelight.
“Charlie wouldn’t even so much as look at another woman,” I said, laughing in a bid to overemphasize my confidence in my husband-to-be.
“I thought as much about your father on our wedding day,” said my mother bitterly. “And look what happened to us. If it weren’t for you, I’d still be there, none the wiser.”
I’d drained the contents of the nearby champagne bottle into my glass. Looking to seek out that sweet spot: that one sip that would block out her attempt to derail the best day of my life while trying to remain in the moment and appreciate the enormity of what was about to happen.
My mother wiped away a tear that was yet to materialize. “Just be careful, darling,” she said, taking hold of a curl that had fallen from my daisy-chain headpiece and twirling it in her fingers. “Because I would hate for history to repeat itself.”
I pull myself up now, refusing to acknowledge that it might already have.
“Everything’s fine,” I bluster, batting away the rogue tear as I follow her into the kitchen of the flat she’s been living in alone since divorcing my dad. “Charlie’s in town at a do, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to come and see you.”
She turns to look at me as she fills the kettle, knowing as well as I do that there’s more to it than that.
“Well, I’ve got to get to my Zumba class,” she says, looking at her Apple Watch. “So I’m going to have to leave you to it. Unless you want me to cancel?”
I shake my head, suddenly grateful that I’m not going to be subjected to the third degree and asked questions I don’t want to answer. I don’t even know why I came here in the first place. How can my mother be my first choice? Though the realization that I have no other follows quickly behind.
The acquaintances I thought were friends had long stopped calling, my popularity and status sadly determined by my job title and “talk of the town” husband.
For as soon as I wasn’t organizing glamorous charity gala dinners, with celebrities I had to pay to show up, and Charlie was deemed little more than a small-town chef, it seemed I wasn’t worthy of a place in their contact book.
“I might go and check out the new Channing Tatum movie then,” I say.
She eyes me with suspicion, knowing I’m not the type to take myself off to the cinema alone. “Are you sure everything’s okay?” she asks as she puts her coat on. “Between you and Charlie, I mean.”
Oh, how she’d love me to tell her the truth.
That I don’t trust him to be in London. That he probably doesn’t even trust himself.
That I’ve barely seen him since he opened the restaurant.
That we’re under huge financial stress. That we haven’t made love in months.
And all that’s without the added fear that there’s a man in a hospital on the other side of London whose testimony could blow our alibi out of the water.
Perhaps that’s why, then, I find myself at the end of his bed, instead of the movies.