Chapter XX Cosima
XX.
Cosima
SHE STAYED WITH MARTIN FOR THREE WEEKS. She had already missed the final fortnight of term and no teacher had been in touch, so Cosima assumed her parents had proffered some excuse, presumably invoking her ‘poor mental health’, which was always a fail-safe way of ensuring no further questions were asked.
Now that it was the school holidays and she wasn’t going on protests, she had nowhere else to be.
She had neglected her other relationships during the time she’d been with Oblivion Oil.
There was no school friend she could call on to crash for a few days.
She didn’t want to see her parents. Nor did she want to stay with her grandmother at Denby Hall. So Martin’s house was the best option.
Cosima stayed up until the early hours of the morning, watching YouTube videos, checking her phone for Oblivion Oil updates and occasionally going for pints with Alfie at a pub called The Bun Shop that did oversized Yorkshire puddings on Sundays.
Alfie was easy company and never asked her too many questions, which she appreciated.
She ignored all the missed calls, voicemails, texts and emails from her parents.
After a while, her father had slipped through the net by ringing from an unknown number.
He’d been conciliatory. He’d asked her to stop her activism and she had pretended to be upset and made a show of initially refusing, even though she’d already made up her mind.
Meadow, Broccoli and Peatbog wouldn’t have her back in any case.
She told him she would consider quitting Oblivion Oil on the condition that she could leave her boarding school and go to the local sixth-form college for her final year.
She could hear the relief in his voice when he agreed. This, at least, bought her some time.
But she’d been shocked when her mother turned up.
Serena, who had always been so quick to criticise, so eager to point out all the things Cosima did wrong, had seemed chastened, even defeated.
Her mother had actually apologised, which Cosima was not expecting.
She’d been touched by the gift of a new pair of Doc Martens, even though she was fond of her old ones and it would take ages to wear the new leather in.
Her mother pleaded with her to come home but Cosima wasn’t ready, not yet.
The trust between them had been shattered and she was still wary of her parents’ motives.
As much as she wanted to believe they loved her, she also suspected the understanding chats and thoughtful gifts might just be a way of protecting their own reputations.
What if it was these, rather than their children, they wanted to save?
Martin understood. So she stayed with him.
They often had dinner together and she discovered he was a good cook, given to experimentation.
His tagines and stews would come to the table laden with herbs and the heady smell of cardamon.
She learned a lot about her father through talking to Martin – about Ben’s childhood, the grief he’d disguised over losing his brother and about the kindness he had once been capable of.
‘But then Jarvis got to him,’ Martin said one night, pouring them both a glass of some wine he’d picked up in Waitrose on the way home. ‘And I’m afraid whatever glimpse I had of Ben’s higher nature disappeared. Just … poof!’
He flicked his fingers outward.
‘Which is, ironically, what Jarvis called me.’
He raised his eyebrows over the wine glass. Cosima laughed.
‘Jarvis dragged your father down into the muck,’ Martin said. ‘I couldn’t save him, although I tried, believe me. I really did try.’
Her burgeoning friendship with Martin meant that Cosima didn’t miss her family, which surprised her.
No matter how much she had felt like the odd one out around the Tipworth dinner table, she’d thought that there would be some reserves of fondness there, some swell of sentimentality that would have her rushing back to them.
But the longer she left it, the more she realised she felt …
blankness. Perhaps the emotional cauterisation of boarding school, relied upon by the English upper classes for so many centuries, had played its usual trick.
Or perhaps she was more similar to Martin than she had imagined.
‘Do you think he’s really going to do it?’ she asked, as Martin made himself a mug of tea in the kitchen. They were getting ready to watch Richard Take’s interview on morning television.
‘Want one?’ Martin said, raising the Fortnum’s canister of Earl Grey.
‘No thanks.’
She got herself a Diet Coke from the fridge. Martin shuddered. He was repulsed by her caffeinated soft drink addiction. She opened the can with her thumbnail. Metallic crack and carbonated hiss. Would anyone ever invent a more perfect noise?
‘I do,’ Martin said, stirring milk into the tea. ‘Whatever else Richard Take might be, he’s also a politician. And the one thing all politicians have in common is the measure of their ambition.’
They went through to the living room, where Martin sat on the sofa and she opted for the floor, sitting cross-legged by his feet.
‘Also,’ he continued, reaching for the remote control, ‘I don’t think he’s a bad man. Underneath all the silly bluster, he’s decent. Ish.’
He switched on the TV. A freeze-framed scene from House of the Dragon filled the screen.
‘Jesus,’ Cosima said. ‘Haven’t you finished that yet?’
‘I’m taking my time with it,’ he said, a touch defensively. He changed the channel. ‘Ah. Now. Here we go.’
The theme tune for Harriet Seeker on Politics was just starting up: a jangly little chorus of strings and brass.
Maurice stalked into the room, fresh from a night’s hunting, the dawn air still cool on his fur.
He jumped onto the cushion next to Martin before changing his mind and peering over Cosima’s shoulder, tentatively extending one paw onto her jeans, then the other.
He leapt forwards, settling himself comfortably in the space between her legs and began to purr.
‘That cat,’ Martin said, shaking his head.
‘I’ll miss him,’ Cosima replied, running her hand all the way along Maurice’s spine.
She was leaving in four days. She had signed up for an environmental volunteer programme for students in Bali and would spend the rest of the summer there, clearing plastic from beaches and replanting mangrove forests.
She’d used the credit card her parents had given her to book her flights and accommodation and she had enough money from her allowance to use for living expenses when she was there.
She’d chosen Bali because she wanted to feel closer to Fliss.
She’d met her aunt’s friend Derek at the funeral and they’d stayed in touch.
Cosima would send him sporadic emails and receive emoji-strewn paragraphs in return.
Derek said he’d look after her when she was over there. She had it all worked out.
‘And Maurice will miss you,’ Martin said, which she knew was as close as he could get to admitting he would miss her himself. ‘But you’re doing the right thing, going to Bali. Shh, shh, we’re on.’
Richard Take’s face is beamed into the sitting room in unforgiving close-up, a sheen over his top lip.
‘Coming up, we speak to MP Richard Take about why he’s backing Energy Secretary Ben Fitzmaurice to be our next prime minister.’
The camera zoomed in on Richard’s eyes, which darted this way and that, then swung back to Harriet Seeker, glossy and sleek as a racehorse. She thanked him for being there and then asked an easy question to kick things off and in the chatter that ensued, Cosima wondered if he was going to wimp out.
‘Stop waffling,’ she muttered.
Behind her, Martin’s breathing became more rapid. They were both on edge.
‘He’ll get there,’ Martin said. ‘Just wait.’
She chewed her lip and pulled the cuffs of her jumper up over her hands. She could barely watch. Maurice, sensing her tension, stopped purring and looked at her, blinking his yellow eyes.
‘… owing to some information that has recently come into my possession …’ Richard Take was saying. Martin put his mug on the floor.
‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘Here we bloody well go.’
Cosima thought of her father, sitting behind the desk in his study at Tipworth, a lazy smile on his face as she walked through the door.
She thought of him at last year’s school prize day, when she had been awarded the English cup and he had seemed to clap more loudly than everyone else.
She thought back to being four years old, standing in a field and feeling scared of the cows with their menacing black eyes, and how he had reached down and taken her hand and she hadn’t felt frightened anymore.
She thought of the framed black and white photo on the kitchen shelves of their old home in Notting Hill; the one of her parents on their wedding day.
Her dad in a morning suit dotted with confetti petals and her mother, regal in bias-cut silk.
Both of them grinning, arm in arm, surrounded by a crowd of people – one of whom, Cosima realised now, would have been Martin Gilmour.
A happy picture, then. At what moment had it all started to go wrong?
On the TV screen, Richard Take was now saying that events had been weighing heavily on him.
Unease splintered through her. Her father’s career was about to blow up and with sickening clarity, she knew she had handed his enemies the dynamite.
But I didn’t mean to, she wanted to say, I didn’t think, I just wanted him to notice me …
‘I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that Ben Fitzmaurice cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead,’ Richard said.
Too late.
There was a split second in the studio when no one spoke. Dead air, her media studies teacher called it. Then, the sound of laughter. But it wasn’t coming from the television. It was coming from behind her. From Martin.