Driven into her bedroom by Pam, who not only showed little sign of going home, but had also taken it upon herself to advise in matters of interior design, Carrie decided to have a sorting session. The long indulgence of Christmas had left her feeling that it was time to take stock and streamline both her waist and her cupboards. Besides which, she knew she might well murder her mother if she stayed downstairs to witness the remodelling that was taking place in the living room. Through the floorboards she could hear the sound of wooden legs being dragged across a wooden floor and she gritted her teeth. She wondered, not for the first time, where her mother got her energy. Although the woman regularly became completely supine when it was time to prepare food or to wash up, Pam was a positive whirling dervish when it came to demonstrating her superior taste. The two of them had attempted to get Carrie a black coat in the sales the day before and the experience had left Carrie feeling exactly as she used to do when she was twelve and her pleas for a fashionable school skirt or for shoes without buckles met with scorn. ‘It looks so very cheap, darling,’ Pam used to say about her daughter’s choice. Her mother never quite grasped that it didn’t matter that a skirt was not lined as long as it was the right length and had correctly placed pockets.
At the back of the cupboard, behind such disparate objects as hair curlers, expired diaries and half-completed cross-stitch tapestries (Carrie had a tendency to be seduced by the thought of nimble fingers flashing over bright strands of wool, but almost invariably became disillusioned by the length of time it took to complete even the smallest corner), she found her old camera. She had bought herself a digital one a year ago and hadn’t needed this one any more. She picked it up and examined it, wondering if it might be worth keeping or whether she should take it to a charity shop. When she took off the lens cap, some sand fell into her hand and she felt the small sliding away inside her that always came when she thought of Charlie. It amazed her that this shock always felt new, always had the power to unsettle her. This was the camera she had with her on the day he had gone. The police, along with everything else she had abandoned on the beach, had returned it to her and she had put it away and forgotten about it. She saw that the film inside was finished and she opened the back of the camera to retrieve it. She had hundreds of pictures of Charlie; from the very first squashed-faced one taken minutes after his birth, to the pictures of his fifth birthday party where he was captured capering joyfully in a Dennis The Menace outfit. In the early days after his disappearance she had not been able to look at any photographs at all. She had been scared that seeing him would simply scratch at her pain, making it raw all over again. But as the weeks became months she realised, with quite another, much worse sort of fear, that his face had lost its clarity. She found she was struggling to remember exactly how his hair lay across his forehead or the creases in the corners of his mouth, and she had turned to her photograph albums with relief. Indeed, photographs of Charlie became a great comfort to her. She saw that there was no shadow in his face. She was the one who had been left to face the darkness. The years would pass and here he would remain, distinct and loved. Carrie knew that the film must contain pictures of Charlie and she wanted to see them straight away. This was a little bit of him that she hadn’t realised she possessed.
A shop assistant delivered the blue packet into her hand and Carrie walked quickly across the road, down past the bus station and part of the way across Christ’s Pieces, until she found a bench by an empty flowerbed. The council gardeners had taken out the frost-burnt chrysanthemums in wheelbarrows and turned the earth over. It wasn’t the weather for lingering, the cold was making her face and neck sting, but Carrie found she couldn’t wait. Her hands were trembling as she unsealed the packet. The first few photographs were of an evening out she had taken with colleagues to a restaurant. She could vaguely recall that it had been a celebratory gathering, but she could no longer remember what was making them all smile. There was a picture of her with the cross-eyed face she often made when someone she didn’t know very well pointed a camera at her. She thought she looked dumb, unmarked, like the ‘after’ picture in an advertorial for plastic surgery. Except this, of course, was before. Next there was a shot of the beach, with a line drawn across the sky by an absent plane and then … Charlie. Oh Charlie. His head back, his hands outstretched and full of sand. Charlie. Walking along looking downwards. A shot of him making a face with a piece of orange fishing net wrapped around his head. Her heart caught at his huge smile and two missing teeth. She thought of the teeth, which were still tipped with his blood and in a drawstring bag in her jewellery box. Plunder of the tooth fairy and now not the extra of him, just the all. There was a picture of him on his hands and knees, digging a hole in the sand with the boy he had met on the beach with his mother in the background sitting on a towel. One of him showing the camera a strange-shaped stick. And then nothing more.
That evening Carrie phoned Damian to tell him about the pictures, and only hesitated a moment when he asked her if he could come over and see them that evening. She peeled potatoes, seasoned some lamb chops and sliced orange and red peppers ready for roasting. She opened a bottle of red wine and took a glass of it upstairs. She changed into a tunic-length black jumper and a pair of new dark denim jeans and put on a jet and pearl necklace that Damian had bought her years ago during a weekend they had spent together in Whitby. She remembered that it had been foggy and that they had spooked each other in a shrouded Abbey and eaten ice cream drizzled with strawberry vampire blood.
Jen had never been that keen on Damian, although she had attempted to hide her doubts about him, but then she had never been that keen on any of Carrie’s boyfriends. Carrie had met Damian when she was twenty-seven, living in London and working as a researcher in the fundraising department of a cancer charity. He was three years older and worked in the communications department. He spent his days trying to persuade indifferent editors that they might like to write something about the importance of respite care for the families of terminally ill people. What reason is there for us to cover this story now? they would ask, eager to get him off the phone. Give us a hook. He had a slight stutter that became more pronounced when he was under stress. Carrie liked the way he ran his hands despairingly through his hair and the fact that he made coffee for the whole office.
They got together after the work Christmas party. A chilly affair in a church hall at which the staff, terrified of being seen to be spending money that could be better spent elsewhere, ate sausage rolls and supped on sweet red wine out of plastic cups. Carrie left early, driven home by hunger and the beginnings of a cheap-wine-induced headache. Damian spotted her leaving and followed her out. They went for a Chinese meal and although Carrie was seduced by the way he looked at her mouth all the time she was talking, they didn’t kiss when he dropped her off at the door of her flat. The second date, they sat together in the cinema. She touched his thigh and he traced a line around her ear and down her neck with one finger. They missed the second half of the film to kiss against a wall in the alley alongside the movie house and she was surprised at the bold way he pulled up her skirt and pushed aside her knickers to feel her. The following weekend they stayed in a hotel in Hunstanton and got wet walking from groyne to groyne on a rain-lashed beach. She loved the feel of his stomach still chilled from wet wool and the fact that he didn’t stutter when he said her name as he came.
‘When we touched each other it just felt right,’ she said the next day over the phone to Jen who was working in Paris at the time and tormenting her journalist boyfriend with her particular brand of indifference.
‘What’s he look like?’
‘He’s tall, about four inches taller than me. Dark red hair, not carroty like Ron Weasley …’
‘Eyelashes?’
‘Well … they are pale …’
‘Boris Becker,’ said Jen with disdain. BB was a loathsome figure in her eyes, not only because he had invisible eyelashes, but because he had been caught having sex in the broom cupboard of a restaurant. For obvious reasons she harboured a hatred towards men who liked to have sex in confined public places.
‘No, much more like Damian Lewis, I promise you’ll love him.’
When the two of them did eventually meet, it wasn’t an auspicious beginning. Damian was anxious about meeting someone so important to Carrie and who had a lot of influence over her. Too much influence, in Damian’s view, although he managed to keep the thought to himself. They had arranged to meet at an Italian restaurant off Tottenham Court Road where Jen and Carrie used to eat when they were students and had something to celebrate (and the funds to celebrate with). The two of them had toasted the end of exams, the finding of new flats and the acquiring of jobs at their corner table right by the bar, so as far as Damian was concerned, the place was heavy with history that he had had no part of. Damian had a tendency to sulk when Carrie mentioned any experiences that he hadn’t shared with her. He thought that her life should be wiped clean until the moment when he first clapped eyes on her sitting at her desk with that soft mouth and the way she had of tucking her hair behind her ear. Prim, but also so sexy it gave him a hard on.
Jen was late for their meal, which enraged Damian. Unless the person had a bloody good excuse, like being tied up by bank robbers or swept up in a tsunami, he considered tardiness the height of rudeness. When she finally arrived in a plum-coloured coat large enough to house several small children, the first thing she did was to send him out with a peremptory wave of her braceleted arm to pay for the cab that was waiting outside. As the evening progressed, Damian decided that Jen was too fond of the sound of her own voice and Jen decided that Damian was manipulative and controlling and she didn’t like the way he sucked up his spaghetti. Molly had never forgotten what Jen had said on the phone the next day. The memory of it still made her smile:
‘He seems nice, really nice,’ said her friend with her ‘I’m being sincere’ voice, ‘although I’d say, if I’m being truthful, he’s less Lewis and more Weasley.’
Carrie went out onto the landing and listened for signs of life outside her mother’s bedroom door. Pam had exhausted herself that morning during a relentless two-hour make-over session. She had taken down the white living room curtains, washed, dried, ironed and re-hung them. She had hemmed the edges of a piece of fabric that she found in a cupboard to make a throw for the admittedly rather stained cream sofa. She had stuck squares of opaque sticky plastic over the bottom sections of the sash windows to thwart the curious stares of passers-by. She had cleared the dark wood desk and placed pens and pencils in a couple of brightly coloured jugs. The cushions were plump, the floor had a polished gleam and the room smelt of the rose oil that Pam dabbed on her pulse points and which she had clearly sprinkled about the room with abandon. Privately and uncharitably, Carrie felt that her mother was now of an age when drawing attention to her pulse points was not entirely seemly. She felt a little embarrassed that Pam, who was entering her mid-sixties, was still convinced of her power to fascinate, and still refused to succumb to the elasticated waist and the comfortable shoe.
‘The legs are always the last to go, darling,’ she said, crossing her Wolford velvet touch stockinged legs complacently. ‘The legs and the eyes. A woman can go a hell of a long way with legs and eyes.’ At present it was clear that the aforementioned legs were horizontal and the eyes closed, because there was no sound from within. Carrie heaved a sigh of relief that her mother would not be around to cast quizzical looks over Damian’s shoulder at her. On learning that Damian was coming round that evening, Pam had adopted her annoying ‘I am a wise owl’ face.
‘Do you think that is a good idea?’ she asked in meaningful tones.
‘He’s just coming round for dinner, Mum, that’s all.’
‘I know, darling, but I’m just saying, in case you were contemplating it, going back won’t bring it back,’ she said and she touched Carrie’s face gently. If she didn’t know her mother better, Carrie would have taken her expression for genuine concern.
Damian had come with flowers, as she had known he would. When they had been together he had bought flowers every Friday on his way back home from work. Having been told by her once, long ago, that she liked white flowers best, he never deviated from this rule. In summer there would be roses, iris and freesias, in winter carnations and orchids. She was, of course, grateful for this dogged application but sometimes she wished that his flower giving could be of the I-saw-these-and-thought-of-you spontaneous sort, rather than a habit. This evening he had brought a pot of cyclamen encased in a cellophane bubble, a flower, if ever there was one, designed to be hot pink, which looked somehow diminished in this snowy version. As she took the flowers and his coat she thought that he looked strained. He had the sort of thin, tight skin that showed his health and mood like a mirror. A couple of late nights revealed around his eyes as the purple of a fading bruise, a cold quickly rendering the space between nose and mouth a rough red.
‘I’ve told her we’re over,’ he said almost as soon as he had sat down and she had handed him a glass of wine.
‘Who?’ said Carrie, knowing full well, but playing for time.
‘Sarah. The person … the woman I’ve been seeing …’ he said. Carrie knew that he was looking at her as if he expected some response, but she didn’t for the moment know what to say.
‘It wasn’t fair to her. Not when I’m hoping for you.’ He paused. ‘You do know I’m hoping for you. For us. Don’t you, Carrie?’ He got up then, and put his arms around her and she shrank against him, because there didn’t seem to be any other place to go. He took their wine glasses and put them on the mantelpiece and he pulled up her jumper and put his hand under her bra and she felt so sad it took away the other feelings that she might once have felt. But then they were on the sofa and he pulled at the zip on her jeans and she felt his hardness against her and she felt the shape of herself blooming under him and for a while she forgot everything else, even the fact that Pam might walk in at any moment and object to what they were doing on the new throw.
After they had made love, Carrie made tea and Damian looked at the photographs of his son. ‘There are still days I don’t believe it,’ he said and when Carrie looked at him she saw no blame in his face. Damian may have managed to forgive her but she would never forgive herself. She knew that there was nothing she could ever do that would atone for the way she had lost him.
‘I love this one of him with the fishing net around his head,’ said Damian, tracing the contours of his son with a finger. ‘He was so full of life.’
‘Yes,’ said Carrie absently. Something in one of the photographs had caught her eye. The one of Charlie in the foreground and the people they had set up camp next to in the background. The woman kneeling on the towel in profile was the woman that Carrie had seen twice in as many days. The same woman and the same boy who had been brass rubbing in Ely cathedral. She felt a prickling sensation across the back of her neck and on the tips of her fingers. What were the chances of that happening? Was this more than a coincidence? Carrie thought again of the way she had turned to look at them, almost despite herself, as though she had been meant to see them.
A knock at the door brought her back to herself and, straightening her clothes and smoothing down her hair, Carrie went to see who it was. Oliver Gladhill was standing on her doorstep clutching a bottle of wine. Perhaps it was the faint flush that still lingered halfway up her neck or the fact her lips surely looked just a tad more swollen than they usually did, but something caused Oliver Gladhill not to press his suit when she said that she would love to invite him in but was too busy.
‘Another time, perhaps,’ he said, wondering who the lucky bastard was that had made her look so distracted.