Bitter Sweet, page 31
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Ophelia was delighted for me. She came down to see me one Friday afternoon a few weeks later, with Oscar. They had packed up my things into a van, which she drove. I had rented a garage near Dad’s for storage. Even when we had unpacked all of my belongings, they only took up a corner. I told them to leave my chest of drawers on the street for someone to take and it had been gone within an hour. Ophelia had asked me if I’d wanted her to bring the chair Richard had given me, but the garage wasn’t secure enough for something so valuable and there was no room in the house for it. She’d suggested that we get her parents’ friend from Sotheby’s to value it, and I’d agreed. It seemed that it could sell for up to six thousand pounds at auction. I would use the money to pay my dad back, and keep the rest for New York.
As we unloaded the van, I saw all the evidence of my life in London laid before me. I was relieved to see my things again, but it was very painful. I wasn’t sure if it was right to up and leave, but New York seemed so distant, so far away. It was like a dream, really, getting the chance to move to a new city and start again. I wondered if people out there would know about what had happened. I decided not. If they had heard about it, which maybe they would have, they wouldn’t necessarily recognize me and put two and two together.
Ophelia and Oscar stayed for the afternoon. It was warm so we went to the beach. We drank Diet Cokes on a picnic bench outside the Anchor and talked about the summer, what they had planned. They were going to Italy together for a few weeks and I wondered if Oscar might propose to Ophelia. I hoped so. They talked to me about New York, which they both knew very well. They told me the good areas and the bad, the best restaurants and bars to visit. Ophelia had a friend from school living in the city who worked in fashion, and she was going to introduce me on email. I had never been before, but I felt like I had from books and films and pop songs. They said I’d love it. When Oscar went inside to use the bathroom, Ophelia got up and sat next to me and put her arms around me.
“We’ll come and visit. And email every day. I’m so jealous, really. Moving to New York at twenty-five. What an adventure you’re going to have. You do feel ready, don’t you? It’s a big step.”
“I know. And it will be hard, I’m sure, but I honestly think it’s for the best. I don’t know what I would do if I stayed. Everyone in publishing in London knows about me, knows what happened. And don’t deny it, it will have been gossiped about everywhere. I’m un-hireable. I know it. You know it. Ophelia, I am so sorry for how awful I have been, how I behaved after it all happened. You and Eddy—you have been nothing but good to me. I don’t really know how I can ever thank you.”
Ophelia was crying. “I’m so sorry I called your dad to get you. I didn’t know what else to do. I know how angry you were about that.”
I tilted her face to mine. “You did exactly the right thing. You have always done exactly the right thing, and you have always wanted only the best for me. I know that.” She nodded, unable to speak. “And now I’m doing better, thanks to you, and I can start moving on. And you are moving on, too, and I’m so excited for you. Hey, do you think he’ll propose in Italy?”
Ophelia choked on her drink and snorted, something I’d never seen her do before. It was loud enough that the people at the next table turned around to look. I started to laugh, and then she did. By the time Oscar came back we were both recovering, but there were tears in our eyes that were not, for once, tears of sadness.
They said they’d come and visit soon, and get a hotel or something so they could stay the night. I hugged Ophelia for a long time before they left. They offered me a lift back to the house but I wasn’t ready to go back. I walked on the beach instead. The tide was out and the familiar smell of seaweed drying in the sun filled every part of me with memories from my childhood. I thought about the version of me that had, aged eleven, searched the rockpools for crabs or fish or pearls as my parents sat on these stones, watching me from a distance. I thought of Noah doing the same in a few years, Dad and Laura maybe on that very spot, those very stones. I checked my phone. No emails, no missed calls. I knew it was really over.
When I got back to the house, Laura was in the garden with Noah. They were sitting by the pond. He was crouched in his shorts, glasses on the end of his nose, looking in the water for fish or frogs or newts. Dad was in the kitchen making a salad to go with dinner.
“Hello, love. Did you have a nice time with your friends?”
“Yes, thanks. How was your day?”
“Ah, it was OK. Tiring. I’m always tired these days. I’m ready to retire. Only a bit more to go now. Did you tell them about New York?”
“Yes, we talked about it. Ophelia has a friend out there she’s going to introduce me to. They told me about all the best places to go.”
“And you’re sure you are ready?”
“I am. Don’t worry about me, Dad.”
“I will always worry about you, Charlie. You can come home if it gets too much.”
I stole a piece of cucumber from the chopping board.
“That used to drive your mum mad. Do you remember?”
He didn’t usually mention her, so it was jarring to hear him do so. “No. I don’t remember. There’s lots I don’t remember. I think there’s far more that I don’t remember than I do remember.”
He carried on chopping. “She’d say, ‘You’ll ruin your supper if you keep picking.’ She always said supper, not dinner.”
“I remember that.”
“You know, I’ve always…worried about you. When it comes to relationships.” I could tell that he felt awkward. I looked out of the kitchen window. Laura was still by the pond with Noah. “Your mum was vulnerable when she was young. She lost her parents in her early twenties as you know, and it was hard for her. I think that’s why she fell in with your dad.”
“What do you mean?”
He put the knife down and looked at the ceiling as if hoping to find inspiration there.
“He was abusive. Coercive, they’d call it now. He didn’t like her having friends. And he had a really nasty temper, to put it mildly. He drank too much.” He clearly regretted saying this, knowing it was a sensitive subject for me. “And when I say too much, I mean he was an angry drunk. She was scared of him toward the end, very scared. You are so like her, you know. Inside and out.”
“Am I like him?”
“You are absolutely nothing like him. You really don’t remember him? Or that time?”
“No. I mean, I have some memories that don’t fit into the timeline of my life with you so I think they must be from then. But I don’t think I have any memory of him specifically, or any of the stuff you are talking about that happened.”
He nodded, then started chopping little red tomatoes in half. I said nothing, hoping he would go on.
“Did he ever hurt her? Or me?”
“I think he came close. It was a bad time. When she came to live with me, he would get drunk and come to the flat. We had to call the police more than once. You don’t remember that?”
I thought really hard. I tried to dig through any memories that would fit that event. “No. Nothing.”
“Good. We were so concerned about how it might impact you. I thought maybe that that is why you’d ended up involved with—with that man.”
“Richard didn’t hurt me.”
“Didn’t he?”
“He was never violent.” This was the most intimate and personal conversation I’d ever had with Dad, and I didn’t want to frighten him away. “I think I’m understanding more now about that stuff. That he isolated me, and made me completely dependent on him. And that he wasn’t always kind.” I was starting to see what I’d been blind to before.
“You should be with someone who is kind to you, Charlie. You should have good people in your life. Those friends of yours from London are absolute crackers.”
“They are, aren’t they?”
I smiled, and he smiled back. Then he pointed at the chopping board and winked. “Go mad. Your mum’s not here to tell either of us off.”
* * *
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Home. It was, for the first time in a long time, starting to feel like I had a real home. It wasn’t London. It wasn’t Stoke Newington or the Covent Garden flat. It wasn’t Stone Heap House. It was here, the house I had grown up in. The people had changed, but those who had left were in the walls, the bricks, the mortar. Noah and Laura, they were there, too, now, with Mum and Dad and me. Something had shifted inside me in the last few months. Being forced to sit still had had the effect of making me see what was right in front of me, not behind me, and not ahead somewhere in the future; she was unknown. So much was unknown.
As we stood in the kitchen that summer afternoon, I was hit by something that I recognized as being hopeful in how it felt. There was a long way for me to go to get better, I knew that, but I saw that there was a path ahead of me, maybe for the first time since Mum had died. I wasn’t exactly sure where it would take me and who would be by my side, but it was there, ready for me. Waiting. In a few months’ time, I would pack up my things and I would go to New York alone, not knowing anyone, and I would build a life for myself. I would work hard. And one day, maybe, just maybe, I would finally find a place for myself in this strange and surprisingly beautiful world.
Now
When I saw Cecile’s name appear on my phone, which was buzzing on the kitchen table, I knew that she was calling to tell me that Richard had died.
It was a warm Friday morning in May. I was alone in our little house in Oxfordshire, working on an edit. She told me that Richard had passed away the night before from complications relating to pancreatic cancer. He was seventy-one. He had been diagnosed just weeks before, and although he’d known that it was terminal, they’d thought he would have more time. A few months, at least.
I listened and then asked all the usual questions—was he alone? No, Elaine and John Cormorant had been with him. Was he in any pain? No, but they always say that. And then, when would it be announced? Later this afternoon—they were preparing a press release and giving the obituarists time to get copy together. It would say: following a short illness. I thanked Cecile for letting me know and hung up.
Although I knew myself better than I had ever done in my twenties, I was still surprised by how I reacted to things sometimes, and this was one of those times. I couldn’t feel the familiar, feathered hands of the depression that I knew still lived inside me. I waited to feel it stir, to rise up from where it had been sleeping, to put its cold fingers around my neck. I expected it to come, but it didn’t. For now, it stayed quiet, curled up and motionless.
I called my husband. He was in London at an academic conference for the day. He knew what had happened with Richard, but we had met nearly seven years after I’d moved to New York and it had been less raw by then. I had made a conscious decision not to talk about it too much with him. I didn’t want the sharp, broken pieces of that relationship anywhere inside my new, happy one.
He asked me if I wanted him to come home, but I said not to. Then I called my dad, and told him, because he would see the news later that day and worry.
I’d seen Richard once more, after everything happened. It was about three years after I’d moved to New York. I’d been at a publisher’s office for a meeting. As I was leaving, he had just arrived. He was standing at the security desk with someone I didn’t recognize. He had slowly lifted a hand to wave at me. I didn’t wave back. Our eyes had met for a moment, a barrage of memories flashing through my mind. He’d looked so much older. His hair was more white than gray, so different from how I’d remembered him.
I couldn’t settle in the house. The news of Richard’s death hung quietly around me. I decided it was best to go for a walk. We lived in a lovely red-brick terraced house with a yellow front door in a small village in the countryside just outside of Oxford, far enough from the rush and noise of London, but still close enough for me to commute in a few days a week. My husband worked at the university; he was an age-appropriate, true New Yorker and a prominent academic. I had met him in a dive bar in Brooklyn on a night out with my friends; he had been to college with one of them. We had quickly fallen in love, and then quickly fallen pregnant. After the birth of our daughter, we had packed up and moved back to England to build a life for our little family.
I still missed New York—we both did. It was the first place that I had ever really felt like I fitted in. It had been a haven for me after everything that had happened, and had offered me the anonymity and fresh start that I had hoped for. I’d loved the work and had flourished at Ridgebrook & Co., moving up through the ranks quickly to become an associate agent in less than a year. I’d stayed single for a long time, but I’d made friends, really brilliant friends, through work and apartment shares and running clubs. I’d run almost every morning through Central Park or along the Hudson or the East River, depending on where I was living. Running had kept me healthy, given me a reason to get up each day, a reason to eat well and to go to bed at a decent hour. Watching the city wake around me had connected me to it and to the people that lived there, and I’d soon found that I felt less alone, and less like I was living on the edge of everyone else. By the time we left New York, there was a group of us who were so bonded it had felt like it might be impossible to ever leave them, to unpick the beautiful tangle of our lives. But we had, and I knew it was right for us and our daughter to finally come home, to be nearer to Dad, and Laura and Noah.
The trees that Friday in May were suddenly full and green again after a slow, cold spring, and the world around me felt lush and clean in the sunshine, like a postcard from a long-ago time. The earth, the sky, the flowers, even the tarmac, none of them seemed to know the news about Richard, or if they did, they didn’t care. While I walked, I called Ophelia. She was worried about me. Any mention of his name always concerned her. Over the years we had talked about this day. Given his lifestyle, we’d have been surprised if he’d made it to a ripe old age, but this was still sooner than we had expected. She couldn’t talk for long and promised to call me back that evening. Her children were all off school with colds, the nanny was also ill and Oscar was away on Finn’s second stag do; his first marriage to an Australian supermodel some ten years earlier had not lasted three months. It sounded chaotic. Ophelia had three children, whereas I had just the one.
I texted Eddy telling him the news, but the text went green, so I presumed he was somewhere abroad or off-grid, writing, as he often was these days. I’d not heard from him in months, which meant that wherever he was, he was likely happy.
There was so much unsaid between Richard and me that would now remain that way forever. I hadn’t hoped for any absolution or reconciliation. It had been a very long time since I had wanted to have any contact with him at all. A lot of intensive therapy over the years had helped me come to terms with much of what had gone on with Richard, and to understand why things had gotten as bad as they had. I’d faced what I had been through in my teenage years, with losing my mum, even with Lee. I wasn’t cured of my sadness, that wasn’t going to be possible for me, but I knew it well enough to know what it needed. I knew it intimately, and what I had to give it in order to keep it contained, and how fragile that balance was and always would be for me.
But you can’t ever really get over loss like the loss I’d experienced.
You just learned to live with it, to grow around it.
If you were lucky, you could even maybe find something good in it.
I stopped at a very old church about a mile from our house and sat down on a bench in the shade of a yew tree among the ancient, moss-covered graves. Some were tended beautifully, and others long forgotten, their family lines either stopping or moving on to a different place. It was hard to imagine Richard’s cold, lifeless body on a metal tray in a dark cupboard somewhere in the depths of a London hospital. It was hard to imagine that such a man could simply cease to be, but there you had it. He was only human, after all.
When I got home, I went to my laptop and logged into my old email account, feeling compelled to read our emails, to see what they would make me feel. I’d not logged in for months, maybe even a year, and it took a few goes to get the right password. Scrolling through the newsletters and spam and notification emails, there it was. An unread email from Richard Aveling, dated the previous week.
Dear Charlie,
I don’t know if this is an email address you even use anymore, but I have no other way to reach you. I daren’t ask Cecile.
I have, rather unfortunately, much less time left to live than I had hoped. I have pancreatic cancer, and they have only just found it. The news is dire. This is not a good cancer to get, and they always get it too late, I’m told by the doctors. I have months, maybe a little more.
I am in Guy’s and St. Thomas’s at present, but I am focused on getting home in the next week or so. I want to die at Stone Heap House, in my own bed. Do you even live in the UK? Last I heard, you were moving back. If you are here, and you feel able to, I would very much like to see you. There are many things I need to say to you and there is rather a rush now for me to say them. The biggest of all is that I am sorry, and I’m sorry that it has taken this to happen for me to tell you that.
You can visit whenever you like.
I hope to see you, Charlie, just one last time. I really did love you, despite what you might think.
Yours,
Richard Aveling
I read the email several times. I felt something but it took me a while to realize what it was. It was pity. It had been close to fifteen years since it had all fallen apart and yet there, in a hospital bed in his last days, he was trying, finally, to say he was sorry.
