Lark Song, page 2
She spluttered over her mug.
‘Mr Simpkins?’
‘Yes. British Shorthair.’
‘Well, I think you’re right to have high standards.’
‘Just standards.’
She grinned, and looked at her watch again. He started to panic.
‘So . . . your children span quite an age range . . .’
‘Yes. Bringing up Will was quite all-encompassing, somehow, and I wanted to enjoy him. And then when he went to school, I toyed with the idea of going back to uni, but then Mum died and Jack came along. And Sophie wasn’t planned at all, so she just came along almost six years ago – but a lovely surprise, of course.’
She made it all sound so random. Her children just ‘came along’, as if joining an impromptu street party. He imagined her daily life: cluttered, chaotic, and alluring. It tantalised him. His own life was so tidy, so uneventful, so clean. The nearest thing to chaos was a cat bowl encrusted with flakes of hardened food, or bits of tuna-in-jelly flicked on to the floor around it.
‘Your husband’s a very lucky man.’
She looked down at her mug, and for a few seconds he longed and hoped for her to say she was divorced. But she didn’t. She circled the rim of the mug with her finger and pulled a strange face.
‘I think he was. I think he was a lucky man.’
‘I’m sorry, has—?’
‘He died in an accident.’
‘I’m so sorry. That was so thoughtless of me.’ He was sorry. Sorry and a little thrilled.
She looked up, almost indignant on his behalf. ‘Don’t be daft. How could you possibly know?’
‘Was it recent?’
‘Two years, now.’
‘Still quite recent, then.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘That must be hard, having three children and dealing with their bereavement as well as your own.’
She gave him a grateful glance. ‘Actually, yes. That’s the worst bit, what it’s done to them. I mean, Will is all over the place, like most seventeen-year-olds, but he was fifteen when it happened, just the age when you need a bit of male guidance, and he . . . well he . . . well, he has issues, which I won’t go into, and Jack, he’s developed a sort of eating disorder. I don’t know if it has a name: he kind of comfort eats – but he’s not fat – and I know that started when Reuben died . . .’
Reuben.
‘. . . And Sophie . . . oh, poor little Sophie, she pulls her eyelashes out. I mean, to be fair, she was quite an anxious little girl before he died, but the eyelash-pulling . . . that all started after he died. Oh, it breaks my heart. Some days I just feel . . .’
There was a silence that wasn’t silence at all. It was the low, deep murmur of a busy coffee shop on a wet day. It was him remembering her face in her hands. It was her remembering so many years he knew nothing about.
‘I really must get back.’
‘Let me give you a lift. My car’s right here – in the next road.’
‘No need. There’s a bus due in two minutes.’
They made their way to the door together, and as soon as they walked out on to the street she started running.
‘It’s here! Goodbye – thank you! Thank you for the drink and everything!’
And then she was gone, and Duncan stood for a good few moments in the cold breeze before he realised she was still wearing his winter coat, and he was holding hers.
3
THE COAT
It was the act of sitting down in the bus, something about the action itself feeling so subtly different, that made her realise she was still wearing his coat. She pulled open the lapel and looked inside the lining pocket. Nothing. No wallet, no piece of paper with any clue at all about the owner. She sunk her hands into the deep pockets and her fingers found some small dog-eared cards bundled together with an elastic band. She pulled one out and studied it. Duncan Swan, SwanRobins Architectural Design Services, R.I.B.A. Chartered Practice. There was a personal email address and an address and telephone number for the practice. She looked out of the window at the passing fields. Blackberries were swollen to their full ripeness along the hedgerows and dark purple sloes dotted the yellowing blackthorn leaves. There were tatty sheep with their heads down, their backsides in need of a tidy-up before the November tupping. It was still raining heavily, and the edges of everything shifted and bent through the glassy rivulets on the windows. Two birds: swan and robin. SwanRobins. Was Robins a woman or a man? How did this Robins like working with Swan every day? Duncan Swan. Now she would have to see him again. She would have to return his coat.
For the first two days, she did nothing about it. She hung the coat in the hall, and the next time she saw it was on Will, as he twirled around the kitchen.
‘Hey, Mum, what do you think? Cool, eh? Whose coat is this? Was it Dad’s? Can I have it?’
She put down her chopping knife and stared at him, open-mouthed.
‘You’ll have to take that off now. It’s not mine. Someone lent it to me.’
Will moaned, as if it weren’t fair, and she promised him one for Christmas, although she guessed it was beyond her price range.
‘Cool guy, anyway. Who is he? Someone we should know about?’
She told him then about the incident in the rain, how kind the stranger had been, and how he now had her manky old coat instead of his.
‘The stuff of romance!’ said Will in a husky, dramatic voice, and she turned back to the chopped carrots in case she betrayed any feelings she wasn’t yet sure of herself.
After that she hung the coat on a hanger and put it on the back of her bedroom door. She pressed her face into it and breathed in deeply. It smelt slightly of wood smoke and something else – a cologne, perhaps – that she remembered from his nearness when he had placed the coat around her shoulders. Then she put her arms around the coat’s waist and squeezed hard. It was soft and collapsed under her pressure, and she was shocked at her disappointment. At night, when the children had all gone to bed (or in Will’s case, gone to his room), she tried the coat on again. She lay on the bed with her hands deep in the pockets and drifted off to sleep. At three in the morning she got up and removed it, arranging it tenderly on its hanger before going to the bathroom.
She had fantasies about turning up at his flat with the coat and of him inviting her in. (She assumed it was a flat because in that elegant Georgian area of town where they’d met, there were no houses.) Once inside, he gives her coffee, and there is a log fire again, and one thing leads to another. And in this fantasy the children are all taken care of – off doing something with someone. There’s nothing to think about but the gentle smell of his cologne and the touch of his skin. But, of course, she couldn’t turn up at his flat because she had no idea of his address. Turning up at his practice presented more difficulty. He would have to be alone. Robins would have to be out on a project, and there would have to be a visitors’ couch somewhere – perhaps in a foyer that wasn’t open to the public. Or perhaps she bumped into him again on a Friday, his day off.
It was no good. She would have to phone him or email him or take it back, with or without Robins present.
It had been a while since she had heard the familiar I’m so sorry about her husband’s death, and even longer since she had delivered the teary, pink-eyed thank-yous. There was something shabby about the way she missed those frowns of concern, even though they could be exhausting. But there had been something solid and steady about the consolation of grief, and now that its reliability was slowly being eroded, she felt giddy by what she saw in its place. There was a gleam in the shifting sands, and she feared that if she dug too deeply she would see something far more shiny and troublesome. More shameful than relief: joy, perhaps, at new possibilities. Excitement, even. Freedom.
Of course, there could be no freedom with three dependent children, and she would not acknowledge such shocking thoughts. But still they sparkled.
Two nights had passed, and on Sunday evening she sat down at her laptop and emailed him:
Thirty-seven-year-old woman (my friends tell me I look eighty-seven) seeks companionship with kind, intelligent man. Three dysfunctional children (5–17) and one dysfunctional cat. Widow of two years. Utterly exhausted. Not much to offer, but likes gardening, and currently owner of very nice coat. On the plus side, lots of love to give and very tactile.
She pressed ‘Send’ before she stopped to think about it, then bit her lip in horror. She waited, staring at the screen. Nothing happened. Life would go on, and whatever humiliation she had made for herself would pass in time. Whatever had she been thinking? She knew nothing about New Wave cinema, and didn’t even know how to mingle at parties. She had spent her youth wondering how other people did it. Her sister, Rachel, had had to ration her parties so that she could fit in homework. Freya always imagined that one day her sister (who was nearly two years younger) would show her how to develop a facility for make-up and flirting. Meanwhile she sat in her room drawing the crest of a lark, painting hedgehog quills or trying to find the exact colour for a robin’s breast or a fox. She grew tomato plants from seed and made patchwork quilts and kept caterpillars. She was going to study the environment and protect the world from global warming.
She cringed. Duncan wouldn’t look at his work emails until Monday morning. She snapped the laptop shut and went to watch television with the children, wishing Sophie were older so that it could be Pride and Prejudice and men with brooding brows, instead of weapons and explosions and loud, gory death scenes. Sprawled on the sofa next to Jack, Sophie didn’t seem to care. She took her otter with her wherever she went, and no doubt the stories in her head too.
At bedtime Freya gave the coat a coy glance. It didn’t seem to mind. It wasn’t laughing at her or hiding from her, and when she went in close to sniff the collar, it didn’t back away. At eleven thirty she flipped open her laptop. Nothing. She couldn’t sleep, and tried it again at midnight and at one o’clock. Then at one thirty she saw that a message had been left at one sixteen:
What’s your cat called?
She smiled. Then frowned. Maybe this was an embarrassed reply, an attempt to deflect her blatant flirting. (Had she been blatantly flirting?) Well, he certainly couldn’t think her desperate. She had appeared to wait over fifteen minutes to reply:
Chunkables. He started off as Constable Chunkables, but there were some unfortunate diminutives, which I don’t think my youngest understood at the time. Is your cat of good character?
He came back straight away:
I think we should meet and discuss my cat and other matters.
The coat on the back of the door tried to look nonchalant, but it had never looked sexier.
4
ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN
Will had a growing feeling that everything he did upset someone in some way. He was a source of hurt. And it wasn’t always accidental. He was not a nice person. He could see swallows and house martins lining up on the wires along the lane, ready for their hazardous migration flight, and he envied them. He wished he could just disappear. Sometimes he felt like a dam about to burst, and other times he was just lugging badness around with him that spread like a virus. He just had to interact with someone for a few seconds and they were doomed. He had pissed off his father just days before he died by calling him a bigot, for example, although arguably he had deserved it at the time (a possibility which Will tried not to think about now, since his dad had assumed the squeaky-clean perfection of a dead person). He regularly hurt his little brother by calling him ‘fat boy’, even though he knew weight was Jack’s nemesis, and he even upset his little sister by calling her ‘baldy’, quite unnecessarily, when he knew she was obsessed with trying to grow her eyelashes back. And now he had upset Mum. And this was really stupid because she hadn’t done anything – yet.
He’d just passed her bedroom quite innocently, and happened to see her lying on the bed in that coat. The coat the man had left. And he knew – without any more details – that she was starting to fall in love with this mystery guy, and that would lead to a whole series of things that weren’t okay. For a start, she would be going out in the evenings, and who would be babysitting? He would, of course, and that would put limits on his freedom. But, of course, that didn’t matter. The fact that he might be in love with someone and he might want to go out in the evenings was not even considered. His father’s inconvenient death had left him as adult number two in the house. Not that it was his dad’s fault. He didn’t want to think that. But sometimes he hated his father for being so selfish as to pass on a baton that Will had not been ready to take. But his father hadn’t been selfish, he knew that. In fact, he had been the most unselfish person in the world, what with all his charity work and blah-di-blah. It was just Will who was being selfish. But . . . but, but, but . . . he was also thinking of his siblings here. If she started getting all lovey-dovey with some new guy, there’d be all the upheaval that went with it, and that would affect everyone in the family. Granny Sylvia had warned him not to let any men come sniffing around his mother too soon (she meant ‘ever’). ‘They’ll all be after your father’s life insurance money. You wait and see. They’ll be queueing up – and I’m not going to sit here and watch some other man slip into my son’s shoes. No siree! I’ll die first.’ Whilst Will hoped that she would die, her words had nonetheless troubled him ever since.
How would Sophie feel about a new man watching television with them? How would Jack feel about strange shoes in the hallway and embarrassing mealtimes with questions about school from a total stranger? And then he’d be moving in, and then there’d be all his stuff in the bathroom and mortifying grunts from the bedroom. Didn’t Mum realise? But when he had laid this all out for her, told her what he was worried about, she had asked him where on earth he’d got all these ideas from and he’d told her about the phone call, how he’d heard her all murmury and blushy on the phone after she thought he’d gone to bed, and then she’d gone ballistic, and her voice had gone right up, and she said she felt like she was living in a bloody goldfish bowl. When did she ever get any privacy? He had his privacy. He could go out with his mates and say and do what he liked and she had no idea or any wish to pry, but she had to get permission to make a date, and even a private call wasn’t possible any more – even waiting up till gone eleven to make it, since he now went to bed at some goddamn unearthly time and lived like a creature from another planet, while everything she said and did was open to scrutiny by everyone. A bloody goldfish bowl!
Will had felt momentarily bad about that, but mostly because he was slightly afraid when Mum got angry. Not of her, of course, but the fact that she was all that stood between life as he knew it and orphandom. The thought of losing Mum, or Mum’s goodwill, struck him as too unbearable to think about, so although he pretended to be laid-back about her outburst, it made him experience an anxiety that he couldn’t quite control.
‘Just promise me you won’t go marrying him,’ he said at last, affecting a benign and avuncular stance across the kitchen table whilst the others were watching CBeebies.
‘Well, I hadn’t planned on marrying anyone, least of all someone I’ve only just met.’
‘Well, that’s all right, then.’
‘No! No, actually, it’s not all right. I can’t promise anything, and I shouldn’t be asked to.’
‘Why not? Have you no sense of loyalty to Dad? Have you any idea what it would do to Jack and Sophie if you brought a dummy dad into the house? Hmm?’
‘I’m sorry, but you can marry who you like, you can go and fall in love with whoever you want—’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yes, really. And no doubt Sophie and Jack will find someone to love and go off and marry them, or do whatever people will be doing by then, but I’m not allowed to find happiness again. Is that what you want for me? Am I supposed to grow old with a bunch of cats long after any of you give a damn about this house, or who’s living in it, because I’ve got to wait until you’ve all left and my jowls are swinging around my shoulders before I so much as think about my own happiness? Is that it?’
‘Well, at least you’ve had your romance.’
‘Well, I won’t be having any more, will I? Not living in this greenhouse!’
‘Goldfish bowl.’
‘Goldfish bowl!’
He had upset her a lot, and he was feeling it now. If she knew half of the things he got up to, she would be far worse than this. She might even withdraw her love altogether. Strange that she should feel that she couldn’t hide. He often had the sense that he was invisible. He felt like someone looking in on other people’s lives, as if there were a sheet of glass between himself and reality. He behaved as if he were Cool Will, the arty, well-dressed older brother, but he was just a peeping Tom on the world, and he longed to be on the other side of the window.
5
TAINTED LOVE
They started seeing each other that autumn. Each time Duncan saw her, he was taken aback by something new and lovely that he hadn’t noticed the time before. Once, he just had to stand and stare at her unobserved in their agreed meeting place, the coffee shop where he had first taken her to get out of the rain. She was sitting in a corner with her glossy mud-coloured hair loosely tied up. He loved that looseness, and hadn’t really noticed it before, or wondered how long her folded hair must be beneath the casually placed grip. Tendrils of it hung about in an untrained fashion. There was nothing harsh or tight about the hair or about her. Her movements were fluid and gentle, her voice had no edges to it, and she smiled easily. He found something endearing about the way her smile showed her gums. He wanted to take out that loose grip and shake down her shiny hair. He wanted to watch her put it up in the mornings. He wanted to stand behind her and kiss that neck where the little mousse of baby hair strayed out of control.
