It was blissfully cool in the Covered Market. Eleanor stood in line at the flower stall, picking out the colours that would mix well, wanting to be ready when her turn came. She had decided to get enough for two vases, one as a centrepiece for the food and one for the sitting room, something flamboyant and dramatic, so as to give Trevor’s guests a lovely shock when they walked in.
At the thought of the evening party, just hours away, her stomach clenched with nerves. Trevor had a signing in an Oxford bookshop and she had offered to play host for a gathering afterwards. It was hardly a big deal. But she did so want it to go well. Megan had promised to come but cried off because of a sick child.
The flower queue was moving slowly. The girl in dungarees attending to customers looked flustered and out of her depth. Over her shoulder, Eleanor could just glimpse the sunlight bouncing off the cobbled stone wall against which she had parked her bicycle, locking it with the new heavy chain that weighed almost as much as the bike itself. Her first bike had been stolen after a few days, from the alleyway that housed the entrance to the small prestigious tutorial college that now employed her. She had emerged from her first teaching session, still reeling at the eagerness of the students, to find her little black padlocked tube in two neat pieces on the pavement, a broken circle.
The girl in dungarees was looking close to tears. She had got some change wrong and her Sellotape machine had jammed, making it impossible to stick the packs of flower food to each bunch. Eleanor was tempted to elbow her way through the crowd to help out, or to cut loose for the deli and come back. The Covered Market was as packed as she had ever known it, thanks to the glorious wave of Indian summer heat and the usual swarms of tourists, combining with long-suffering locals trying to go about their daily lives. It seemed increasingly to Eleanor to be a peculiar miracle of Oxford that the city was able to hang onto itself amid such heaving occupation. The richness of its past hung off every stone, hovered in every particle of air but in a way that buoyed it up instead of dragging it down.
It was in the Covered Market that Eleanor still found her own past echoing back at her most strongly. Snatches were arriving now, as they always did, of Nick cramming forkfuls of beans and toast into his mouth at the café that had once occupied the site between the butchers and the flower stall, talking eagerly about books or dissections, his wide agile lips working to keep up with his brain; and Igor, taking her one quiet birthday many years later to the leather shop that was still on the corner, to buy a handbag.
Some memories never lost their power. It was something she had tried to explain to her Virginia Woolf group that week as they struggled with the author’s dense, multi-layered prose, pointing out that it was precisely the shimmering strata of personal history that lay at the heart of being alive. Experiences built up like sediment over the years, no less formative and essential for being invisible and often ignored. The present only derived its shape from what had gone before and what might yet come to pass; every living moment resonated with the oceans of moments that had preceded it and those that were still to arrive. There was memory and there was hope. Life, as something lived, took place between the two. The students had nodded and tapped and scribbled as they tended to when she took flight. But had they understood? What could anyone really understand at eighteen?
A man in a peaked cap came to help the girl and the flower queue began to shift. Eleanor bought carnations, lilies and roses, together with several things she didn’t know the name of and a bunch of feathery ferns for filling out. The deli was in a post-lunch lull and had everything she wanted. Soon she was pedalling back down the Woodstock Road, the wind thickening the long bramble of her hair, her loose white shirt billowing over her jeans. She cycled hard, getting overheated in the process but needing to hurry because there was still so much to do.
A text arrived from Trevor while she was waiting at a traffic light. He had checked into The Randolph and would be around soon with the wine. He hoped her fridge had space for the white. He had a speech of thanks prepared but wasn’t sure if it was funny enough. She was a star.
Eleanor smiled to herself, grateful as always for Trevor’s expressions of appreciation. With For My Sins launched earlier in the month and selling very well, she had on occasion found herself musing somewhat darkly on the aptness of the term ‘ghostwriter’. She had done her job and received her fee. No one was interested in her. The same had been true of the book she wrote with Igor. Now at least she was directing her spare energies to her own writing project for once. The story was starting to take shape: Two little girls shut out by the strangely intense relationship between their parents. Two little girls who never spoke of the things that mattered because they didn’t have the words; who were close beyond measure until events they couldn’t share pushed them apart. It had even acquired a working title: The Habit of Silence.
The traffic light changed to green. Ten minutes of vigorous cycling later the first glimpse of the pitched roof of what had once been Igor’s home still caused Eleanor’s heart to skip a beat. One of several properties strung out along the winding approach to Wolvercote, the house was not eye-catching in any conventional sense: a rambling, hybrid of a place, it comprised a stone cottage, added to in an amalgam of questionable styles, with a tumbledown garage at the front and a half-acre of garden at the back. Inside, the general air of dilapidation left by years of letting had initially been a shock, almost erasing at one stroke all Eleanor’s memories of the clean, austere warmth under Igor’s occupation of the property. The rooms were as numerous and spacious as she remembered them, but in one section an ugly prefab corridor had been constructed to house an extra kitchen and two pokey bathrooms. Few pipes were clear of crusty limescale clinging to their joints, swathes of hairy black mildew forested several walls, doors didn’t close, the paint peeled and the carpets were worn to the floorboards; yet Eleanor, taking it all in on her first April visit, her very own set of front door keys dangling in her hand, had still been dazzled.
Five months on, that Igor, of all people, should have presented her with a gift of such magnitude, without warning or strings, was still something of a dream. Pleasingly, it had also lifted the veil on some of the mortification of the tail-end of their affair, allowing her to recall that the Russian had indeed once loved her passionately, as she had him. Eleanor had longed to be able to tell Igor how thankful she was, but by the time the lawyers had made contact, Igor was dead and buried, back in his homeland, beside the wife to whom he had ultimately been true. Eleanor had had to settle instead for paying her own quiet homage, by placing the book containing the newspaper obituary in the middle of the sitting room’s main wall of shelves, cocooned among some of her own favourites and where Igor himself had once kept rows of his own treasured scholarly tomes.
Dismounting on the scruffy patch of tarmac in front of the garage, Eleanor noted to her dismay that it was already past three o’clock. She wrestled with the gate latch as usual, propping it open with a flower pot to save a similar inconvenience for guests, before wheeling her bike between the twiggy beds of lavender that bordered the path to the front door.
Inside the hall, grappling with her purchases, Eleanor managed to collide with the stepladder left from the morning painting session that had made her late for the shopping. The ladder toppled with a clatter, only just missing knocking her freshly painted wall. Eleanor stepped over it and hurried into the kitchen, flicking on the radio before settling to the task of unpacking and sorting the fridge for the arrival of Trevor’s wine. Twenty guests, tops, he had said. If half of them drank red, that would only mean five bottles to squeeze inside for chilling. Except that Trevor and his friends drank a lot. Ten bottles then. Maybe twelve. Her phone buzzed.
Thinking balloons for the gate? Prevent lost guests. Be there soon. Tx
Eleanor took out one of the cold chicken dishes she had prepared the night before to make some extra room and emptied out her shopping. The wine would get squeezed in somehow. She needed to find vases for the flowers.
A tune she liked came on the radio. She jigged her way into the dining room. A party would be fun. She would travel to the bookshop by bike so as not to have to worry about parking, and wear the charity dress that had seen her through the summer.
She got two vases out of the dining room sideboard, one of the few furniture items to have survived from the Igor days, and then paused to look out onto the garden. The late September sun was hot on her face through the glass. It felt fantastic, like being stroked with big warm hands. Through half-closed eyes she stared out at the square lawn, bushy with moss and daisies, the borders of aged shrubs and various unsightly brambled patches that were clearly hangovers from attempts to grow vegetables. But there were bits that Eleanor remembered fondly and had grown to love again: like the magnolia by the bottom fence, fairly drab in its early autumn guise, but which on her first visit back in April had greeted her like a prima ballerina in full pirouette, its layered skirts of dusky pink flowers in full spin; and the old giant of a weeping ash that arched towards the house, exploding all summer like a great green fountain.
Eleanor was trying to open one of the dining room’s lattice windows when the rat-tat-tat of her front door knocker sounded. She kept thumping at the window frame, sticky from more of her own recent efforts with a paintbrush, yelling over her shoulder to Trevor that the door was open. The window gave way suddenly, releasing an angry wasp, which bounced off into the garden like a bullet.
‘Trevor, it’s open,’ she called again, flicking off the radio as she returned to the hall, pausing to pick up the ladder and lean it against the banisters. Having arrived at the door, however, she stopped. The shadow of the figure visible through the mottled glass did not belong to Trevor. It was too tall.
Eleanor stayed motionless, staring. Something wasn’t right. She could feel it in her bones, her hackles. She was a great believer in hackles. Animal instincts. Humans ignored them at their peril.
She called out in a firm voice, ‘Who is it please?’
There was a muffled answer, which might or might not have been her name.
Eleanor slid the chain into place before turning the handle. A slice of a face greeted her. A face with a broad forehead topped by dusty brown hair, the sides receding; wide, boyish blue eyes, darkly lashed, but heavily crinkled at the corners in the manner of someone over-accustomed to squinting into bright sun. The skin on the face looked rough and pale, the cheeks sunken, leaving the cheekbones like two prominent points of an upturned triangle. It was the third point that saved the face from sadness: the strong jaw, topped by a mouth that was curling up slightly at the corners. It was a face she had thought of perhaps a thousand times, perhaps a million. Such a familiar face and yet so utterly changed.
Eleanor gently closed the door and leant it against it, breathing hard.
‘Eleanor,’ he called, audibly this time. When she didn’t answer, the letterbox flap fluttered open. ‘Please.’ His voice boomed through the gap, making her jump to one side. ‘I got your letter.’
Eleanor looked down at the fingers prised round the metal letter-flap, keeping it open. Unlike Nick’s face, they were extraordinarily unchanged, long and strong, the little finger on the left adorned with the signet ring she had forgotten, a lion and sword.
What Eleanor felt most strongly was that there was nothing left to say. She had done all her explaining, written it down in the letter. She had laid herself bare, and then signed off with a final farewell that had come from the innermost point of her heart. The prospect of being forced to go over it all again, and worse, in person felt beyond her capabilities. It had taken a lot to get her life on an even keel. Every atom of her being was poised for the fight to keep it that way.
Besides, there was the shock of seeing him to contend with. He looked old and terrible. She preferred the image she had been carrying round in her head for twenty years; the careless tousled beauty of Nick Wharton at twenty-two, his glory undiminished by baggy home-knitted jumpers, his shoulders broad and proud, his face still full of hope.
Oh god, and now he knew she had loved him, Eleanor remembered, groaning softly. She had told him in the letter. She had told him everything. Loving him. Losing him. Kat. The cancer. The deceit. Vincent’s abuse. Everything. She wondered suddenly how much of it he had relayed to the beautiful South African wife; the incredulity and horror they must have shared in the build-up to this latest UK visit. Her guts churned.
‘Please go,’ she said, the strain making her voice stern. ‘I’ve said everything I have to say. It is done with. All of it is done with. I am so sorry for what I put you through.’ She sank to her knees as she spoke because her legs had started feeling curiously unequal to the task of keeping her upright. ‘I am sorry, Nick, okay? I’ve said sorry. Please leave me alone.’
The fingers slowly withdrew and the flap closed with a thwack. Eleanor stared at it. Outside, all had gone quiet. She lifted the letter flap and peered out, seeing a section of the loose path tiles and some straggles of lavender. She got up and picked up the ladder from the banisters. It needed putting away in the cellar. Instead, she set it down again and returned to the front door, opening it quickly.
He was sitting on the wall with his back to her, his long legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles.
‘I thought you had gone.’
‘No, I haven’t gone.’
Eleanor stayed in the doorway, folding her arms, but only so she could hug herself. He had spoken without turning round. He had a nice voice. She had forgotten that. A light breeze was blowing at his hair, showing thinness over the crown. That his body had grown so stick-like was the fresh shock. It accentuated the length of him, even sitting down, but also made him look oddly angular. He was wearing off-white chinos that seemed far too wide for his legs and a dusty blue jacket through which she could clearly make out the sharp mounds of his shoulder blades.
‘Nick, look, I’m sorry—’
‘You took some tracking down—’
Having both spoken together, they stopped at the same instant. He was the first to carry on, though still with his back to her.
‘Thank you for this.’ He plucked an envelope from inside the blue jacket and waved it over his head. Her letter, Eleanor realised with a start. Unbidden, the words that had spilled from her pen began flooding her mind…
I fell in love with you the moment you walked into the college library. Of course I couldn’t say. Not at almost-nineteen with a raw heart and no confidence and you with your childhood sweetheart. Tilly. I had just about got my head around that when you fell for Kat. Which you had every right to do, by the way. EVERY RIGHT. Because all really is fair in love and war. You loved my sister and it was up to me to deal with it, which I did, mainly, as you might recall, by avoiding both of you! I am not proud of that now – it was daft, but there you go. Like I say, I was young and had a broken heart. Unfortunately it put the seal on the distance between Kat and me, but as it turned out, there were other reasons for that too, which I fear I will get to in due course…
‘Look. Nick…’ Eleanor faltered. She wanted, more than anything, to put a stop to the sentences reforming in her head. They were clogging her brain, slowing her down. In retrospect it seemed incredible the detail that had poured out of her that March afternoon. Only the certainty that they would never meet had made it possible.
It was a relief to see him slide the letter back inside his jacket pocket.
‘I understand if there is stuff you need to get off your chest,’ Eleanor said, feeling calmer, but remaining on the doorstep, an easy decision given that he appeared not even to want to look at her. ‘But I really have said everything I have to say. And right now I have to get ready for something. I’m badly behind as it is…’ She broke off as he reached for a stick she hadn’t noticed, propped on the wall next to him, and used it to lever himself upright and turn round. ‘Have you hurt yourself?’ It was impossible not to ask.
He prodded at something on the ground with the tip, which had a thick cap of scuffed grey rubber.
‘Are you ill?’ she demanded next, much more shrilly than she had meant.
‘No, not ill. At least…’ He seemed about to smile and then sighed. ‘It is, as they say, a long story. An accident last December. Some lingering neural damage. But I am much better now.’
‘Jesus, I’m so sorry. What sort of accident?’
He looked at her levelly. ‘Swimming off the cape. I got swept out too far. Nearly drowned.’ He let out a sudden laugh, shaking his head, ‘I did drown actually, for five minutes or so, but then I got fished out…’
Eleanor had approached down the path without thinking about it, gawping. ‘Christ. How terrifying.’
‘It wasn’t actually. It was more…’ Nick frowned, searching for the right word, trying not to be distracted by the chance to have her near enough to scrutinise properly. She had put a tiny passport photo in with the letter, but it did not begin to do justice to the reality of her, so tremendously tall – he had forgotten how tall she was – and so carelessly attired in cut-off jeans and flip-flops, a white, rather grubby shirt half tucked in, her thick tumbling hair the colour of tea, her brown eyes huge and alarmed. ‘…More simple than terrifying, actually,’ he went on. ‘What mattered became very clear. Like a voice shouting inside my head.’
Eleanor flinched with surprise but did not say anything.
‘There was no fighting it, just acceptance. Just knowing what mattered.’
‘And what did matter?’
‘Love.’ He shrugged.
Eleanor had arrived at the gate and was holding on to it. Through the gaps in the roadside hedge she could see glints of silver which had to be his car. He could drive then, in spite of the stick.
‘I am so very sorry about Kat, Eleanor,’ he said quietly, ‘all of it… just so… cruel. I still can’t believe it.’
Eleanor kept her eye on the hedge. ‘Thank you. Neither can I. And I am sorry for having to tell you like that. I can’t imagine what you must have felt.’ She swallowed, a wave of the old self-mortification coming at her. Justification for what she had done was impossible. She had done her best with that in the letter. ‘The worst of it was that we – I – thought she was all right and then she wasn’t. It was caught late that was the trouble. There had been things she’d noticed… oddities… for months, but she chose to ignore them. Then she decided she didn’t want treatment. Typical bloody obstinate girl. Determined to shoulder everything on her own. Like the other stuff… with Dad.’
Nick groaned softly.
‘I am sorry for burdening you with that too. Another shock. It just seemed best to tell you everything, give you the full picture. It all seemed connected.’ Eleanor held the silver glints of his car in her gaze, realising that maybe the conversation could be got through after all, if she tackled it head-on and quickly, saying all that he could possibly expect of her, without any fuss. ‘It explained so much, you see. How she was back then. With me. With you.’ Eleanor took a deep breath. ‘And as for what I did, writing to you when she was sick, letting you think I was her – as I have tried to explain, it was never a game. It just somehow started… one decision to do something that led to another… and another. Snowballing. I suppose it took my mind off other things. Did I write that?’
‘Yes, you wrote that.’
‘I cannot tell you how sorry I am,’ Eleanor said softly. ‘How ashamed.’
‘Yes, you wrote that too.’
A bubble of concentration seemed to have formed round them. Close-to, he looked not only unwell but so deeply sad that Eleanor experienced a rush of guilt worse than any she had hitherto experienced. ‘Your feelings for Kat… if I opened those up… I am so…’
The squawk of a car horn made them both start. Trevor’s Nissan swung through the gap in the roadside hedge, revving to a stop on the square of tarmac. ‘Early guest?’ he boomed, leaping out, red-faced, a panama hat sitting at a jaunty angle on the back of his head. ‘If that’s your car, my friend,’ he went on to Nick, jerking a thumb in the direction of the road, ‘I have to say that is not the most ideal parking spot – a near-miss, if I am honest. Sweetest, I hope you’re feeling strong. We’ve got a bit to unload in here.’ He opened the boot and started tugging at one of several cardboard boxes wedged inside.
‘Trevor this is Nick Wharton, Nick this is Trevor Downs,’ said Eleanor as evenly as she could, hurrying to Trevor’s side so that she could give him a look designed to ward off any unhelpful questions.
Trevor duly limited himself to a brief polite nod in Nick’s direction, saying he was delighted to make his acquaintance before hurriedly returning his attentions to the contents of the boot. Trevor was, in fact, beyond curiosity. With just a couple of hours to go, he had entered the blinkered phase of one-track concern that had once characterised his preparation to go on stage and act well. His mind was entirely on himself: his book event, his speech, his reading, and the smooth running of the after-party.
‘After all that, I forgot the blooming balloons,’ he muttered, trundling off towards the house with a case of wine.
‘I better go,’ Nick said.
‘Yes,’ Eleanor muttered, fighting a mad impulse to ask him to stay. She accompanied him to the roadside, trying not to stare as he walked. Both legs worked all right, but the right one stuck out slightly, so that the foot led at an odd angle. She could see at once Trevor’s point about how he had parked the car. An attempt to line up with a curve in the road had left it sticking out badly at one end. ‘Look, thank you for coming. I hope you don’t feel it was a wasted journey. It’s just that I’ve said all I can. There’s nothing more I could add to make you understand or forgive me—’
‘Of course I forgive you,’ he snapped. ‘Your letter was… extraordinary. Life – all our lives – are complicated. Forgiveness is not an issue.’
‘Oh,’ Eleanor murmured, somewhat stunned. ‘Good. Thanks.’ She stood by the car, keeping an eye out for traffic as he levered himself into the driver’s seat, noting the controls on the steering wheel and the disabled sticker on the windscreen. It impressed her that car-rental firms could be so accommodating. ‘Enjoy the rest of your trip,’ she said, as he wound the window down.
‘Back there…’ He nodded in the direction of the house. ‘Was that Trevor Downs, the actor?’
‘Yes, yes it was.’
‘I saw him do Hamlet once, decades ago, at the Old Vic. Fantastic.’
‘Really? Wow, that’s…’ Eleanor hopped out of the way as a tractor rumbled into view, bearing a surly-faced farmer and a wide, trembling load of hay bales. Nick needed to reverse to give it room to pass. Eleanor walked backwards behind the bumper offering hand signals to assist during the manoeuvre.
‘Thanks. And good luck with everything,’ he said, once the tractor had roared off. ‘I just felt that, after everything, it was right in the end to try to see you.’
‘Yes. Absolutely. So it was. Where are you headed now?’
‘My mother. She’s in Cheltenham these days.’
‘Oh good. Well, best of luck to you too.’ Eleanor waved him off. He went slowly, tooting the horn twice.
She raced back to find the Nissan boot closed and Trevor standing in some dismay before the crammed shelves of her small fridge.
‘All sorted out there?’ He shot her a beady look.
‘Yes thanks, all sorted.’ Eleanor reached past him and began pulling out more dishes to make room for the wine, gripping them hard to stop the tremor in her hands.
‘Tell me later maybe?’
‘Maybe.’ She rummaged, not looking at him. ‘I got some bags of ice last week, they’re in the freezer in the utility room. We could stick them in a bucket now, and put a few bottles in there. What do you think?’
‘I think you are a genius.’
‘And now I ought to change,’ she muttered, pushing straggles of hair out of her eyes and making a mental note to pin it with something for the evening. ‘Then I’ll be all yours,’ she added with a grin, darting off before he could reply.
Only in the privacy of her bedroom, not the one she had shared with Igor, but another, plainer one she had picked out for herself, standing before her wall-mirror in the charity-shop dress, a butterfly-clip in her wild hair, did Eleanor allow herself to pause and breathe and think. It had been good of Nick to come. Good and thoughtful. And very brave. He looked old before his time, and wounded. Nick Wharton had become real again. He nurtured no rancour towards her. It ought to mean she could let him go.
Nick unclicked his seat belt and pulled out Eleanor’s letter. He had got onto the M40 and then off it again, taking the exit to the Oxford Services, where the car park was even vaster than he remembered and a fancy water feature had been added to the front of a building that now resembled an airport terminal. He had deliberately selected a space with nothing on either side, but the moment he turned the engine off, a small dusty black car had pulled up beside him, rap music pulsing from its open roof.
The letter was grubby from handling. The contents, first glimpsed six months before, had ripped at his heart. Shock wave after shock wave, each worse than the last. But they had also offered truth, plainly, beautifully and regretfully expressed. In the heat even of the very first reading, the final showdown with Donna still ringing in his ears, Nick had recognised the value of this.
He turned his back on the noisy car and scanned the opening lines, in spite of having come to know them by heart.
Dear Nick,
This is the hardest letter I have ever had to write. If you are not sitting down, then please do so now…
Nick jumped as a palm slapped his window. The driver of the black car, waved a cigarette, gesturing a request for a light. Nick shook his head and the man loped off in the direction of the building.
Nick dug inside the envelope for the little photo. He had taken more care of that over the months, held it round the edges, not put smeary fingerprints across her face. She said it was to make up for not having been able to send him one when he asked. Studying it now, dimly aware that the mild tremble in his hands that came and went since the accident was worse than usual, Nick contemplated the candid wide-eyed gaze which he had thought told him so much but which had actually disclosed nothing beyond the very obvious point that Eleanor Keating’s always formidable looks had improved with age. It had not, for instance, prepared him for the impact of seeing her; the mesmerising, disarming effect of those looks in the flesh. Nor had it provided any defence against the affecting blend of adult assuredness, so marked in what he now knew to be all her written correspondence, with the apologetic uncertainty that she had displayed that afternoon. He hadn’t been prepared for that.
In fact nothing about the encounter had gone as he had envisaged or planned, Nick reflected bitterly. Not one second. For a start, he had felt clumsy and cumbersome with his stick. Maybe that was why he had made such a botch of saying what he had intended to say, failing to ask all the questions he had meant to ask, not offering any of the reassurances he genuinely felt.
With weeks and weeks to come to the decision to track her down, he had believed himself prepared. Steadying himself for the opening of the front door, he had still believed it. But then she had poked her face through the gap, shrieked, slammed the door shut and shouted back at him through the letterbox to leave her alone. All of which had thrown him off course.
He had been outmanoeuvred by his own unforeseen reactions, Nick ruminated bleakly, not to mention the sudden and incongruous appearance of Trevor Downs. Trevor Downs. Of all people. The man who, at the height of his powers as a stage actor, had, virtually single-handedly, shifted Nick’s schoolboy perception of Shakespeare as a dull, necessary component of the English GCSE syllabus into a genius capable of evoking a state of awed stupefaction. It had been a school trip. Nick had signed up because his English teacher told him to. He had set off in the coach thinking Hamlet was a verbose, fusty make-believe Danish prince only to find Trevor vividly, convincingly, playing the part as a disoriented student, overwhelmed by life-changing events, as someone, in other words, whom Nick felt he might know. Aged fourteen, he had spent the return journey in an altogether different frame of mind, one that had never left him and which had played a serious part in all the early wavering over medicine. If only he’d had the wherewithal to thank Trevor for this epiphany.
Nick folded the pages of the letter back along its worn creases, wincing at the memory of Eleanor Keating after twenty years, helping him reverse in an Oxford country lane. Eleanor who had written to him for all those months, letting him think she was Kat. While poor dear Kat herself had been dying, holding fast to the unimaginably dark truth about her childhood. Nick had found all the new knowledge converging inside him. It had been deeply disorientating. It had made it hard to concentrate on which way to turn the wheel.
Nick began to slip the letter back into its envelope but then hesitated, glimpsing one of his favourite bits.
Feelings happen. In fact I am astonished that people separate them from facts. They are just as strong, just as solid. They make us do things, not always wise things…
She was such a clever woman, so unflinchingly self-aware, so interesting. He had known that once, a long time ago, and forgotten it. The same warm intelligence had shone out of her emails, so vibrantly that once the initial body blow of shock at the confession about authorship and its tragic circumstances had worn off, Nick had felt almost stupid for not rumbling the duplicity himself. Of course Kat couldn’t have written in such a way. She had never had the same intellect, or perspicacity, or patience. As he remembered only too well, Kat’s capacity to attend to anything for more than a few minutes had been woeful. It had been one of the most maddening, tantalising aspects of her, the way she flitted from one thing to the next – men, as much as anything – seeking distraction. It all made more sense now, of course, terrible sense. It had been thrilling to be caught in the spotlight of Kat’s attention. It was, after all, why he had fallen in love with her. But then it moved on.
And all Eleanor’s blessed rules should have rung alarm bells too; the insistence on leaving the past alone, the growing hints of deep distress, the refusal to send a picture, the sudden, panicked closing of the door when he tried to tease her into describing herself. There had been so many hints, but just not enough for him to be able to piece them all together. Little wonder she hadn’t been drawn on his suggestion of meeting up either, Nick reflected wryly. The Keating sisters – together – it would have been impossible.
Nick shifted in his car seat, sliding the key back into the ignition and taking it out again. Was there really any point in delaying the journey on up the motorway? Eleanor’s letter, now back in its envelope, stared at him from the passenger seat, pale and defiant. Nick shuddered, as Eleanor’s brief references to Kat’s teenage ordeals floated back into his mind. They had stirred uncomfortable memories of Reverend Keating: a bear of a man who interrogated rather than talked, his voice booming, one hand always busy with his beard or the big wooden cross slung low over his ample torso. What he had done to his daughter, Nick found almost too sickening to contemplate. It filled him with pity, for Kat most obviously, but also for Eleanor, having to come to terms with such information so long after the event, dealing with the inevitable confusion and self-blame it must have caused, and with her father still alive too. The letter had left such matters alone, but Nick could guess them.
Someone else was waving at him through the car window now. A man with a small trolley of cleaning equipment. Did he want a car wash? Nick shook his head. England was still such a shock to the system – his native land, but full of things that kept feeling alien. On bad days he felt like he would never catch up with it. During better times, like that morning, sitting with toast, marmalade and a pot of tea in his mother’s tiny back garden, the Lancet open at his elbow, the Gloucestershire sky arched overhead, he was overwhelmed by all the joy of a traveller who had returned home.
Nick wound the window down and the car-cleaning man ambled over, abandoning his trolley.
‘How much?’
‘How long you be?
‘Er… twenty minutes or so.’
‘Okay. Five pound.’
Nick manoeuvred himself out of the car and set off towards the water feature. A cup of tea would be a good idea; help him gather his wits before heading back up the motorway. He walked slowly, trying to reduce his dependence on the stick. The self-consciousness in front of Eleanor was still fresh, but more importantly he had a new target in the form of a visit from his daughters at the end of October. He would dearly love the walking support to be gone by then. There were no guarantees of such progress, but already he had come such a long way. That he was still an optimist had been one of the few pleasing discoveries Nick had made about himself that year; a useful piece of flotsam floating out from the wreckage.
Being a Saturday, the A40 Services was busy. Nick queued for a cup of scalding tea and found a seat near the tall glass windows overlooking the water feature and the car park. He tried to FaceTime Sasha, then Natalie, but neither answered. He sent them both messages instead, reflecting with satisfaction on the focus with which he had fought for his rights as a father. In the months building up to his departure from South Africa he had seen them whenever he wanted, as well as securing an agreement to whatever access could be managed in the longer term, once he was back in England. Donna’s affair with Mike Scammell had proved a trump card in that respect, any threat by Nick to expose it producing all sorts of handy climbdowns.
As to the financial aspect of the settlement, Nick had asked for so little that it left Donna’s exorbitantly priced lawyers nothing left to argue with. At times, he had sensed even his bullish father-in-law looking on in disbelief, wrong-footed by the extent of the surrender.
Dimly, Nick knew his newly decrepit physical state had aided his cause too. Donna put on the occasional demonstration of tearful dismay about the split when it suited her, but when they were talking through matters alone, he often detected flashes of eagerness in her formidable eyes. She had no desire to be hitched to a man with a lopsided shuffle; a man who could offer no guarantee of resuming a full-time career, let alone in the demanding high-profile world which she had been so horrified he might abandon anyway. The prospect of a generous divorce appealed to her far more.
When his phone hummed into life beside his cup of tea, displaying his mother’s phone number, Nick had to fight the urge not to pick up. She was so thrilled to have him around, it got too much sometimes.
‘That Oxford hospital of yours called. They want to change the time by half an hour. I think they thought I was your secretary.’
‘Oh dear—’
‘Which I don’t mind. I’ve made a note in the diary.’
‘Thanks Mum.’ Nick did his best to sound genuinely grateful, while fighting the usual surge of shame at having his mother so involved with the minutiae of his life
‘So it’s still a week next Friday but at two not two-thirty.’
‘Okay, thanks.’
‘How was your friend?’
‘Oh fine, thanks. Just fine. I should be home by seven. Seven-thirty at the latest.’
‘Good. I’ve got Bridge, but I’ve made a shepherd’s pie.
‘Super. See you soon,’ Nick cut in quickly, seeing that Sasha was trying to get through.
He thanked the miracle of FaceTime as the smiling face of his youngest daughter appeared on his phone screen, her beautiful mouth still bulging with evident discomfort over the recently installed rail-track braces.
‘Hey Daddeee, I got your message but I can’t talk.’
‘Hello Sashkins.’
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘Okay Sash-poops, I won’t call you that. Sit still or I can’t see you.’
‘Well, I can see you. Where are you anyway? Is it a party?’
Nick laughed, holding up the phone to render a glimpse of his decidedly un-festive surroundings, the queue of weary travellers by the till, the vacant grey plastic seat opposite. ‘I’ve been visiting an old mate from my student days and have stopped in a motorway café. Where are you?’
‘Adrienne’s. But I’ve got to go. They’re dropping me for riding with Gramps.’
‘Fantastic. Say hi to your sister, won’t you?’
‘Sure. Love you, Dad.’
‘And wear your helmets.’
‘Of course.’ She rolled her eyes at the tedium of being worried about.
‘And, Sash, I can’t wait to show both you and Nat round this place properly when you visit in October. It’s the coolest university, I promise. And remember what I said about those things called Rhodes Scholarships?’
‘Yeah, yeah, Dad. Gottago. Bye.’ She put out her hand, puckering her lips to blow him a noisy kiss.
Nick blew one back, rejoicing at the miraculous resilience of his two astonishing children. Mum and Dad loved them, but not each other, that was the line he and Donna had taken. There had been tears, but not many. They had their friends, their horses, their routines, for solace. Soon their lives were rolling along again, just as Nick had prayed they would. Perhaps his accident had even helped there too, he mused now, since it meant they had got used to not having him around as much. What remained in no doubt was their certainty that he loved them, he had made sure of that, seizing every possible opportunity during the course of the last five months to reinforce the fact. Only his actual departure had been close to unbearable – but Nick did his best never to think about that. Just as he tried not to speculate on what they might really know behind their courage and sweetness. Donna had always reserved her worst behaviour for him, but still, one could never be sure how much they really knew.
Nick could see through the big sloping windows that his car wash had only just started. He checked his emails, seeing confirmation of the changed hospital interview his mother had mentioned and then decided to pass some time by googling Trevor Downs.
As Trevor stepped up to the front to start his speech, Eleanor found a good perch on the end of a book unit. She flexed her feet and arched her back, easing the stiffness from all her early-morning work up the ladder with a paint roller. The charity-shop dress appeared to be shrinking, she noted absently, observing how it now fell round her shins rather than her ankles. Too much washing, perhaps.
Trevor made a big to-do of asking for a chair to stand on and was soon in full flow. He began with a thank-you to the bookshop, did the joke about a classic being the book everyone owned and no one read and then moved onto the things he always said about Larry.
Eleanor let the bookshop recede, tuning Trevor’s voice into white noise. Lots of people had come, including a couple of her work colleagues, which was touching. She wondered how many would pick up on the idea of the after-party and felt glad about all her dishes of chicken. Her gaze drifted from the attentive faces of the guests to the walls of shelves surrounding them, all the rows of spines lined up like regiments on parade, smart, multicoloured, marshalled under their respective headings: Biography. Fiction. Children. Travel. Crime. Historical. They were all stories of lives, she mused, regardless of the headings. The only thing that mattered was that the stories themselves would never stop arriving, never stop being written, never stop being lived. She thought of Kat, and her own trickle of progress on the story about two sisters, and a warmth coursed through her, the sense of being part of something, the sense of belonging.
Lost in the reverie, Eleanor could not have said what she noticed first, Nick Wharton’s silver-grey stick, leaning against the central book table beside Nick himself, a copy of For My Sins clutched in one hand, a glass of orange juice in the other, or the fact that Trevor was signalling to her to take a turn on the chair.
‘It seems only right,’ he was declaring grandly, ‘that the person too often overlooked, the person who did all the hard work, should have a chance to say a few words…’
Eleanor shook her head, scything a finger across her neck. But someone in the audience called out the word ‘Speech,’ which others then took up, turning it into a chant, to the accompaniment of what quickly grew into rhythmic clapping.
‘Just a few words, sweetie,’ Trevor whispered, having left his perch to take her elbow and escort her to the chair, looking infuriatingly pleased with himself. ‘Tell them how awful I was to work with. And your lovely party – you could mention that. Tell them how to get there.’
‘What, all these people are coming?’ Eleanor said weakly, letting herself be led while her brain performed cartwheels about what on earth to say.
That she did not need to stand on any chair in order to be noticed was Nick’s first thought, closing Trevor’s book so he could concentrate. His second thought focused on her change of clothes since the afternoon, from jeans and the big white shirt into a charcoal dress which hugged her chest and ribcage and then flared dramatically down to the calves of her long legs. Her shoes had something of the look of old friends about them, flat black pumps, clearly picked for comfort rather than style. And there were bracelets of deep indents in the skin round her ankles, Nick noticed suddenly – sock marks. He struggled to take his eyes off them, distracted by the refreshing notion of a woman too busy to care that they were there. For almost two decades he had lived with a creature who knew every blemish on her body, a creature who used magnifying mirrors to study such outrages as part of a daily, sometimes hourly, crusade for their eradication. It was a battle over which Nick had been expected to express sympathy, while never being allowed to release so much as a hint of even the most complimentary opinion to the effect that the need for such relentless eradications was groundless. It had been one of the minefields. His whole marriage had been made up of minefields.
‘It’s horrible being a ghost,’ Eleanor began, looking both startled and relieved when people laughed. ‘I nearly didn’t manage it. In fact, Trevor is the only reason I did manage it. In fact…’ she wrung her hands, accidentally gathering a section of the dress and momentarily revealing the point where one calf muscle narrowed to meet her knee. She had to have become a runner, Nick decided, to have developed legs like that. Or maybe it was just the cycling. He had seen an old bike with a basket propped beside her front door. She probably cycled everywhere. Most people in Oxford did.
‘In fact, the last year has been something of a difficult one for me personally, and writing Trevor’s wonderful life story – everyone should buy at least two copies,’ she blurted, interrupting her own flow and holding up two fingers before hastily slapping them back to her side, looking embarrassed. ‘The point is, being a ghost, working behind the scenes, is hard, but Trevor made it easy and, while he was at it, saved me from falling apart. He knows how and why,’ she gabbled, as Trevor shook his head, ‘and that is all that matters. And if For My sins contains some good juicy bits…’ There were more titters from the audience, ‘then I can assure you they are all Trevor’s doing not mine…’
Someone in the audience yelled, ‘Hear hear’. Eleanor looked about her, seeming to lose her train of thought and making Nick angry at whoever had provided so ill-timed a distraction, even if it was well-intentioned. He kept his attention on her face, willing her on as she nervously picked up the thread, delivering a few thank-yous, followed by some fairly incomprehensible instructions for navigating Oxford’s one-way system towards Wolvercote.
Eleanor was surrounded as soon as she finished. Nick joined the queue for Trevor to sign his book, trying to focus on what he wanted to say to the actor. A second chance to meet a childhood hero. One didn’t get many of those in a life, let alone within the timespan of a single day. Out of the corner of his eye, he kept track of Eleanor, locked now in intense conversation with a group at the drinks table. At one point she caught his eye and he managed to offer a quick thumbs-up of congratulation. Eleanor seemed to smile, but looked away so quickly it was hard to be sure.
Nick drove at a steady seventy, trying to concentrate on the motorway rather than speculations about the party in Wolvercote, to which Trevor had kindly issued an invitation and which he had refused. Necklaces of headlights streamed in both directions, adding to the deep, visceral sensation of the distance between him and Eleanor growing.
Accepting Trevor’s invitation had been out of the question. Eleanor, Nick was certain, would have been horrified. She clearly hadn’t wanted him to know of the event that evening. It was only googling Trevor in the services that had put him onto it.
Whether attending the event had in fact been the right thing to do, Nick was now in grave doubt. Getting the chance to speak to Trevor, acquiring his signature in the book, had been a great pleasure. But seeing Eleanor again, first busy talking to other attendees, and then, with that touchingly clumsy reluctance, taking up her stance on the chair, had been deeply unsettling. All the things he had intended and failed to say during the abortive visit to her house that afternoon had started popping back inside his head, together with the growing, dispiriting conviction that she wouldn’t have been interested in hearing any of them anyway. The fleeting reference in her speech to what a difficult year it had been for her personally had only made things worse. His heart had wrenched, with a sense of privilege at being party to what those difficulties had entailed and frustration that he could not offer solace and reassurance.
The motorway snaked on towards Cheltenham, a winding river of light through a black sea. Nick shivered, turning up the heating. He felt the cold easily these days. And though southern England was still caught in its pocket of delicious autumnal warmth, the moment darkness fell there was the bite of real chill to the air. A proper winter loomed. His first in almost a decade. Inwardly a part of Nick quailed. It was another indication of the difference between missing his homeland and being immersed back in the reality of it. He had no regrets, yet, but many of his rose-tinted memories – from idyllic images of rural pubs and winding country lanes, to friendly attitudes and good television – were still receiving serious readjustment. England was a busy, overcrowded island with dodgy weather and a population as self-centred as any other. Even without the business of having to rebuild his life, Nick had quickly accepted that it was going to take some time to feel properly integrated again.
When his mobile rang, his first, absurd thought was that it was Eleanor. Instead, Donna’s voice came on the line, strident with its new permanent note of righteous indignation.
‘Where are you?’
‘Hello Donna. Are the girls okay?’
‘The girls are fine.’
‘Good. Well, I’m driving, so I shouldn’t really talk.’
‘I tried earlier. Where have you been?’
‘Look, if this isn’t urgent—’
‘I just can’t believe that you are going back to it, after everything you said. The whole fucking teaching business was just to wind me up, wasn’t it?’
‘No… I…’
‘Nat told me, and thank God she did, so don’t go giving her a hard time—’
‘I wouldn’t dream of—’
‘There is nothing I can do. Obviously. Nothing I want to do. Except to tell you that I think it was a pretty cheap way to behave – putting me through all that bull last year about wanting to give up doctoring – when it turns out you had no intention of quitting—’
‘But I did—’
‘Which makes me see that it was a deliberate ploy all along.’
‘Ploy?’
‘You have been plotting for years to leave me…’
‘No, I—’
‘But all I want to say is, don’t think that hiding yourself away in the UK means you can wriggle out of increasing maintenance to more decent levels. My lawyers know of the situation and I can assure you…’
Nick held the phone a little away from his ear and let her finish. It made him glad he was on the M40 in England, even if he had made a botch of that particular day. At least he could turn the phone off when he wanted. At least he no longer had to suffer the vibrating air of his wife’s anger, tiptoe round it, manage it.
When she had run out of steam, he said, ‘All those ideas about switching to teaching were genuine, Donna. But plans change. If they didn’t we’d be robots not humans. I have an interview for a consultant post and mentioned it to Nat. But I can assure you, that, whatever job I end up getting, whether it does in fact turn out to be back in a hospital or sweeping the streets of Cheltenham, I have no intention of reneging on our agreement as to what portion of my salary should go on maintenance to you and the girls. As I promised, I shall pay their part until they are through university, and yours up until such a time as you remarry, or until your share of my pension kicks in.’
She was silent for a few moments. ‘Right. Good. Just so long as we are clear.’
‘Oh, we are clear,’ echoed Nick bitterly. ‘Please kiss the girls for me.’
He tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. That he had started to miss his career had come as much of a surprise to him as anybody. It had been one of the many things he had planned to mention to Eleanor, she knowing better than most all about the early reluctance to follow in his father and sister’s footsteps. She knew too, of course, about the previous year’s mid-life career thoughts – the wild idea of returning to England to teach– because she was the one to whom he had, inadvertently, first confessed it. She hadn’t pulled any punches in her reply either, Nick remembered, smiling to himself at the recollection of her blunt response which, unlike Donna’s bitter and spiteful opposition, clearly stemmed from the desire to protect his interests rather than trash them. You are hankering after an idyll, nostalgic for something that never actually existed… hold fast to what you have. You never know when it might be taken away. She may have been writing from her sister’s email address, Nick reflected, but it had never prevented Eleanor from speaking her own mind.
His thoughts drifted to the shepherd’s pie awaiting him, crusty-topped with cheese, the meat moist and packed with mushrooms and carrots and peppers. Instead of hunger, he experienced a stab of shame. A forty-one-year-old man lodging with his mother, his personal and professional life – not to mention his health – in tatters, was hardly edifying. The ketchup bottle would be ready on the table, he mused grimly, the cutlery neatly aligned with a table mat, the pepper and salt sellers, a glass of water, alongside. The perfectly clean clothes he had left on his bedroom chair would have been laundered, ironed and returned to their drawers. She was pitifully glad to have him – desperate, in spite of his efforts at reassurance, to make up for not having guessed his marital troubles or flown to his bedside after his accident. His plans for moving out were advancing fast, but she didn’t like to discuss them. Part of it was sheer mother-love, Nick knew. But mostly it was because she was lonely. His sister, still unmarried and now an eminent neurologist in Sydney, had returned for their father’s funeral, but then quickly flown back to her other life.
The truth was, they had never been that close as a family. How he was as a father to Natalie and Sasha could not have been more different. Nick clenched the steering wheel as the memory of the recent airport farewell with his daughters pounced. Nothing in his life had been as hard, not fighting for breath as the cold sea bubbled in his lungs, not forcing his legs to take the first agonising steps in the physio unit. At the security gate even Donna had looked momentarily stricken, her beautiful face convulsing in a fight for composure while Sasha and Natalie clung to him, weeping. Glimpsing her pain, Nick had, for one mad moment, entertained the notion of the pair of them trying again. But then Donna had switched her attention to her phone, and the despair and certainty that had brought them all to such a point washed back over him. Everything would work out, he promised his daughters, placing kiss after kiss on the tops of their heads, his own tears falling in their hair. He loved them. He needed to spend some time in England, but they would speak often and see each other soon. This was an interruption not a separation. They were not to be sad.
Nick took a hand from the steering wheel to swipe the tears off his cheeks. He missed his children. All the time. It was far worse than he had anticipated. There would always be lingering guilt, but the reasons for what he had done remained clear and strong: the need to distance himself from Donna and her controlling father had been important, but paramount was the desire to re-establish roots with his own country, to do what he could to lay the ground for his daughters to follow suit if they chose.
A van shot past, flashing its lights at his occupation of the middle lane. He had slowed to sixty without noticing it. Nick put his good foot down and sped on well above the speed limit, almost missing the slip road for Cheltenham and then having to swerve as something sleek and dark shot across the road in front of him. The car rocked briefly, terrifyingly, onto two wheels before thumping back into balance. Nick checked his mirrors, his heart pounding. By some miracle, the road in both directions had remained clear.
Life hung by such a thread, that was the thing. Bad luck, good luck, breathing, not breathing, it was always a hair’s breadth that separated the two. He crawled the rest of the way home like a learner, the blood still beating in his head, scolding himself that he, of all people, could have allowed himself to forget that, even for an instant.