скачать книгу бесплатно
Amongst the raw, bleeding stumps of rejection and hurt, humiliation twinkled and crackled like lightning; and there she was thinking Robert was about to go down on one knee, that he was her happy ever after. Susie felt her face redden. How the hell could she have got it so wrong? How come she hadn’t seen it coming?
Why hadn’t Robert mentioned the baby thing before? She had listened to his opinions on everything else; on foreigners, the government, education, immigration, the economy, Botox, cheap wine and middle-aged women wearing leather trousers. When she had mentioned going on holiday together in the autumn, he’d picked up a whole pile of brochures from town. If he’d gone broody why hadn’t he said, ‘Actually I was thinking more Mothercare than Montenegro.’ Bastard.
Susie reran memories of the last three years, trying to come up with anything, any conversation or comment that had brought them anywhere close to fatherhood, but came up dry. Although there was the time he’d said that if he had his time over again there were things he would have done differently. Susie remembered topping up their glasses and saying she was certain everyone felt the same; there was always stuff that you would like to change if you had the chance.
And he’d nodded and gone on to moan about the state of bread in this country, before moving on to include food generally, gastropubs and vegetarians, and especially the man who ran the corner shop in the village who had had an out-of-date vegetarian lasagne in the freezer. Susie sighed; in three years she’d never caught Robert peering longingly into prams, or cooing over commercials for Pampers. Three bloody years wasted.
She really needed a cup of tea. The cure for everything. Susie glanced at her reflection in the toaster – surely this was the time she should be having a life, having missed out on one first time around because she was bringing up Jack and Alice. She wanted to travel now and do things, stay up late, see the world, buy a sports car, wear wonderful, sophisticated clothes and swan around looking impossibly elegant with nicely cut hair, not be negotiating buggies up kerbs and in and out of shops, with a bottle, baby wipes and spare nappies in her handbag.
She’d already been there, done that. Susie squared her shoulders. She’d had Jack when she was barely twenty and Alice when she was twenty-one, stayed home, tended a garden and a dog, a cat, goldfish, various hamsters and a rabbit and regretted none of it. But that didn’t mean she wanted to do it all over again, especially not now.
How would she have felt if, when they first met, Robert had said, ‘Susie, I think you’re lovely. I want to have a family with you.’ Truth be told, if Robert had said that she would have said ‘thanks but no thanks’, and run away as fast as she could, safe in the knowledge that he had picked the wrong woman. She certainly wouldn’t have wasted the last three years of her life listening to him whine on about the state of Britain today, global warming, young people, refugees, dole scroungers and education. The more Susie thought about it the angrier she got. Robert had totally misled her. She’d spent all this time thinking they had some kind of future together, while all along he’d been busy thinking about raising a family with someone else.
When they had first met, Robert had told her that he liked gardening, foreign travel, long nights in and good nights out … There was nothing at all about wanting to burp small incontinent people and scrape puddles of puréed carrot off the front of his nicely pressed Boden rugby shirt – not a hint, not a bloody clue.
At which point the phone rang. Susie hesitated, wondering if she could really face talking to the big wide world without having had a mug of tea, if it was Robert, and why she hadn’t signed up for caller display to take the guesswork out of whether to answer the damned thing or not. While still debating, she found herself picking up the handset.
‘Mum?’
‘Alice –’
‘Oh, you are there. I spoke to Jack earlier, what’s he doing home?’ Alice snapped. ‘And why weren’t you up when I rang? Are you ill? I told him to tell you to call me back.’
‘Alice, I –’
‘Did he tell you that I’d rung?’
‘Yes, but –’
‘Did he tell you to ring back as soon as you got the message?’
‘Yes – but –’
‘Did he tell you that it was important?’
‘Yes, but –’
‘The thing is, Mum –’ and all at once the voice of the modern-day Spanish Inquisition softened and Alice giggled. ‘The thing is, Mum … I’m pregnant.’ Her voice rose to a full-throated chuckle at the end of the sentence. ‘You’re going to be a granny.’
Chapter 3 (#ulink_69552f38-1982-55a1-8391-acc2b4e817ea)
Susie stared at the phone, not quite able to catch her breath. Granny? Granny? Caller display really was the only option; from now on she’d just pick up crank calls, heavy breathers and people who wanted to sell her double-glazing. She’d ring and organise it as soon as she’d had a cup of tea.
‘Well, what do you think? Aren’t you going to say anything?’ said Alice, who still had an odd, whoopy, slightly hysterical tone to her voice.
What was there to say? ‘Well yes, of course – I’m – I’m –’ said Susie. What the hell was she? ‘I’m shocked.’
There was a little snarl at the far end of the line. Shocked was apparently not the right response.
‘I mean, I’m shocked and delighted, and very pleased too – obviously. Thrilled but surprised, I mean. I didn’t know that you and Adam were – well, I mean …’ What exactly did she mean? Granny, what sort of word was that to spring on anyone? ‘I knew you were, you know, but not …’ The pit Susie was digging for herself was steadily getting deeper and deeper. ‘You know,’ she said weakly.
‘I thought you would be pleased for me, Mum,’ said Alice, now sounding weepy and grumpy and hurt; it seemed as if the hormones had already kicked in.
‘I am, darling, I am, really. It’s just a bit of a surprise, that’s all,’ Susie said, not quite sure whether she was lying. ‘I’m delighted, absolutely thrilled,’ she continued, wondering if she was laying it on too thick. What was it she was supposed to ask?
‘When is it due? I mean, are you still going to work? How is work going and how is Adam? Is he pleased? Have you thought of any names yet?’
Did that cover everything?
‘January, and of course he’s pleased, Mum, why wouldn’t he be pleased? To be honest, we’re both a bit surprised but we both wanted a family at some point so … Obviously it wasn’t exactly planned, but these things happen, and we were thinking maybe next year anyway, so this just brings things forward a little bit. And once we’ve had the scan and we know what it is we’ll choose the baby’s name. Hardly seems an efficient use of my time to pick two sets of names.’
Well, obviously. ‘Right. I mean, congratulations, well done – it’s wonderful, wonderful news. I’m delighted for you. Really.’
‘Things are going to be a bit tight, obviously, for a while, but then again you and Dad managed. I was saying to Adam this morning that you didn’t work at all while we were little. I know things were different back then and you weren’t qualified for anything in those days so it wasn’t like you were losing a proper salary or anything –’
Back in the dark ages, thought Susie grimly. Maybe she would just give up answering the phone altogether.
‘I said to Adam that if you and Dad could manage it then I know we can.’ Alice made it sound like a done deal, her unborn child sorted out and organised from being an embryo up to and including university. After all, if back in the dark ages people like her feckless parents could manage it, without degrees and with an inability to understand the mysteries of predictive text, just how hard could it be?
None of which helped Susie work out what to say to Alice. For a start she hadn’t just bought a flat the size of a garden shed for more money than Susie could imagine without tranquillisers, nor had she ever assumed foreign holidays were a right not a privilege, and never in all her born days had she thought £199.99 was a reasonable price to pay for a pair of raffia wedges.
‘I’m sure it will be fine,’ was all Susie could come up with.
‘You know, I knew you’d say that,’ snapped Alice.
‘Mum, can I move now please? I’m getting cramp. My leg is absolutely killing me.’
Susie looked past the easel to where Jack was sitting. He was at her workbench surrounded by the weekend papers, a mug of coffee and half a packet of biscuits. Late-morning sunshine caught his fringe and the beginnings of a beard, so that he appeared to be surrounded by a great corona of golden light, although her gaze was slightly abstracted so it wasn’t exactly Jack she saw but the painting he might become – if only he would just sit still.
‘No.’
He groaned.
Susie had had nothing planned for the weekend – if you discounted the bottle of champagne chilling in the fridge, the fresh strawberries and the Belgian chocolates that she had bought in anticipation of a long, lingering celebration breakfast in bed with Robert – which was why she needed to keep her mind firmly occupied with work.
She closed her eyes, trying very hard to clear her head. Her throat was locked solid and a heavy pain hovered above her heart. Bloody man.
Susie let her eyes move slowly across the canvas. It was blank and creamy white, the surface very slightly raised and rough to the touch so that as she drew a stick of charcoal across it, it bit, giving a satisfying, almost mouth-watering, sensation.
‘Please, Mum? I’ll wash up the breakfast things,’ whined Jack.
‘I’ve got a dishwasher.’
The studio – once the washhouse adjoining Susie’s cottage – smelt of linseed oil, turps and oil paints, mixed today with the smell of hot wood, baked tin and stone where the sun burned in through the open French windows and drank up the spilt water from the profusion of herbs and geraniums in pots and window boxes. The cottage and the little studio formed an L shape, with a flagstone terrace set with tubs and planters, and cane furniture framed in the crook of the right angle.
Outside, Milo, the hairy hound, had found his spot in the sunshine and was snoring softly.
Susie taught art three days a week at the local college in Fenborough, and worked on her own projects in the time left over. Not that there had been that much time since she’d been going out with Robert; he found the whole art thing completely unfathomable.
The charcoal rasped softly under her fingertips. Susie had drawn and painted for as long as she could remember, long before she knew what art was, discovering very early in life that, somehow, laying her feelings and thoughts down on canvas or board or paper made more sense of them. When it was going well she felt as if she painted right from the core of herself, totally connected to the painting and yet at the same time almost an observer, as if the hands working across the canvas weren’t her own.
Not that she told many people that, having come from a family who were about as creative as tin tacks. Susie was altogether more pragmatic when she talked about her work, realising that people had enough preconceived notions about artists without being told that when it was going well she felt she was possessed by the spirit of Elvis. Worse still, Susie really did paint at the top of her game when she was unhappy. This morning the lines were flowing onto the blank canvas effortlessly, like melted chocolate.
‘I don’t mind unloading it. Or I could walk the dog – oh, how about I water the garden?’
‘For god’s sake, Jack, I’ve only just started. And you chose the pose: young man reads newspaper.’
Jack shifted his weight without breaking position. ‘I hate doing this. My leg’s gone numb now. I should have done young man sleeps peacefully in hammock.’
‘Bear in mind that you could have very easily been doing young man emulsions spare room. And besides, you didn’t used to hate it.’
‘Only because you bribed me and Alice with sweets and money and trips to the zoo.’
‘You could always go and stay with your father.’
Jack sniffed and flicked the page over. ‘Did I tell you you’re a cruel and heartless woman?’
‘I thought we’d already established that. Now, do you want me to put the radio on?’ Susie said, glancing back at the canvas and then back at Jack, her eyes darting quickly between the two, trying to catch him in the cross-hairs of her imagination.
‘Radio Four?’
‘Yup.’
‘Not really.’ There was a second’s pause and then he said, ‘So, are you going to ring what’s-his-face, try to kiss and make up?’
‘You know the rules, Jack,’ said Susie, without taking her mind’s eye off Jack’s silhouette. ‘At least ten minutes at a time without talking, now stay still. And no, I don’t think I’ll be ringing Robert, we’ve got nothing to say to each other as far as I can see. He wants a baby and, let’s be frank, I’m all babied out.’
She smudged the charcoal with her thumb and then paused to gauge the effect.
Jack sniffed. ‘Radio Four then?’
‘If you want, the afternoon play will be on soon. It’s always good on a Saturday.’
‘Says you. Are you feeling okay?’
Susie nodded. ‘Bit battered but I’ll be fine, now sit still.’ She had made a habit of never discussing her emotional life in depth with her children and she wasn’t going to start now. All the way through the death throes of her marriage, the hand-to-hand combat of divorce, and the new men, broken hearts and false starts since, she’d always kept the gory details to herself, never expecting her children to take sides or, worse still, dispense advice. Besides, she wasn’t the only one nursing a broken heart. It couldn’t have been easy for Jack to come home and find that Ellie had upped sticks and gone. Ironic really that they were in the same boat, and that while she kept encouraging Jack to talk about it, saying it could really help, she kept her own pain neatly tidied away.
Susie let the charcoal sweep down the page, catching the line of Jack’s back, working down over his shoulders, her eye and fingertips guiding the charcoal, trying to capture the subtle thing that was him, wondering as she always did if there was any way to truly capture the shadows and the texture and the vitality, so that someone would look at the finished work and see Jack as she did.
Jack had broad shoulders but was still rangy like a colt; he had his father’s jaw line and her long neck, blue-green eyes deep set under heavy brows, a good tan, and taut skin that reflected the light so he seemed to glow. She smiled; her baby had grown up to be a rugged outdoorsy man, with strong, gentle features.
She had painted and drawn Jack and Alice and their father hundreds of times, but never Robert. Robert had objected, saying it felt invasive, and that he didn’t like the way she looked at him. It felt, he said, one day when she got him to sit for half an hour, almost as if she could see right through him. Shame she hadn’t really, thought Susie miserably as she added another line, it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.
‘He seemed like a bit of a no-hoper to me,’ said Jack, without moving.
‘Really? And how could you tell?’ said Susie, eyes working back and forth, back and forth. When Susie was certain she’d got the right line, she’d look less often, for reference, but at the moment Jack’s pose was the only thing she had to hold the image. At the moment there was no dense safety net of lines or shapes or shading, just an idea caught by the most fragile gossamer of charcoal marks.
‘I was being polite,’ he said. ‘If I’m honest, I don’t really know what you ever saw in Robert, Mum, he didn’t seem like he was your sort at all – came across like a real stuffed shirt. Selfish, a bit spoilt. How long did you say you’d been going out with him?’
‘Jack, instead of picking over my love life, why don’t you go and ring Ellie when we’ve done here and try to sort things out with her,’ she said. ‘You can use the house phone as you haven’t got any credit.’
There was silence. He looked away. And then Susie noticed that there was the merest vibration, a tiny shudder in Jack’s shoulder and then another, and as she watched a single tear rolled down his cheek and plopped silently onto the newspaper on the table in front of him.
‘Oh Jack,’ she said gently. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you, honey.’
He sniffed, shoulders lifting. ‘You didn’t,’ he said. ‘And you’re right, I ought to ring her. The trouble is I don’t know what to say to make it come right – to make her come back.’
Susie laid the charcoal down and put her arms round him, and as she did the dam burst and he started to cry. It was all she could do not to cry with him.
‘Oh sweetheart, I’m so sorry,’ she murmured as sobs racked him. ‘C’mon, talk to me. Tell me –’
He sniffed the tears away. ‘Christ, this is crazy. I love her, Mum, it seemed so simple. What the hell am I going to do? I don’t know what happened. I thought – shit – I thought everything was fine, just fine. I thought Ellie would be coming out to join us at the dig at the end of the month; that we’d spend the whole of the summer together in Italy. She loved it last year. I really thought she was happy – okay, so things hadn’t been that great recently, she said I was always away, and money’s been a bit tight, but those things happen to everyone – and we’d got the summer to look forward to. We could have worked it out, worked through it.’ He stopped, sniffing miserably. ‘I thought we were it, Mum, I thought we were forever. What am I going to do?’
‘Oh baby,’ she whispered, stroking the hair back off his face, her own voice ragged. Still holding him close, Susie pulled a crush of tissue out of her pocket. ‘Here, honey.’
They never mentioned anything about tending broken hearts at antenatal clinic, not a whisper in any of the childcare books about how to deal with shattered dreams, or girls who ran off with your baby’s future in their hands. Or, come to that, men who ran off with dreams of future babies in theirs.
‘Don’t tell me,’ he snuffled. ‘A big blow for Mummy?’
Susie smiled sadly. ‘You could say that.’
On Monday morning during one of her classes Robert rang and left a message on her mobile.
‘Damn, of course,’ he muttered on the voicemail. ‘It’s Monday, isn’t it? I’d forgotten, you’re at work.’ Three years and he still couldn’t remember her schedule. ‘I just rang to see how you were. I was going to ring over the weekend, but I didn’t want to upset you again. Best to leave well alone, eh? I realise that it must have come as a little bit of a shock.’ The man was all heart.
‘The thing is –’ he hesitated. Susie could imagine his rather pained expression even on voicemail. ‘The thing is … sorry – maybe I’ll ring later, you know how much I hate these damned machines. I’ll be at home if you’d like to ring me when you get in, maybe that’s a better idea.’ He immediately sounded much brighter. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you give me a ring when you’ve got a minute? When it’s convenient, obviously.’
So, not much in the way of comfort there.
‘So?’ said Nina, carrying her coffee over as Susie deleted the message and dropped her phone back into her handbag. The art rooms were rarely empty but there was always a lunchtime lull, despite the end of term looming.
‘Come on then, tell me all about it. How did it go?’
Susie had deliberately arrived late to avoid any pre-class interrogation; leaving Jack at home in bed, or rather in his sleeping bag on the floor of the spare room. He had been snoring when she’d shut the back door. He hadn’t rung Ellie either. It had been a long, dark and painful weekend for both of them.
Come lunchtime Susie had scurried into town with the excuse that she needed to pay her council tax – but apparently nothing was going to put Nina off the scent, despite there only being ten minutes before afternoon classes started. And she couldn’t avoid Nina forever.
‘I’ve been thinking about you since Friday. I want to know all the details. What happened? What did he say? What did he do?’ Nina pressed, breaking out the custard creams.
Nina was Fenborough College Art Department’s senior technician, in her late forties, with hennaed hair, dreads, big glasses, a slightly wacky wardrobe, and probably – Susie often thought – more talent than the rest of the art department put together, herself included.
Nina had worked at the college since before dirt. She exhibited regularly, her work – huge abstracts painted in primal reds, ochres and blues with rich metallic threads twisted through them – sold like hotcakes. Over the years she’d been hailed as the next big thing, reviewed, featured and raved about in the broadsheets and had pieces in half a dozen famous galleries, and still she turned up every Monday morning bright and early to set up the studio for the next influx of students.
She and Susie were also good friends; they’d shared success and failure, suppers, sandwiches, bottles of wine, exhibition space, gossip, moans, groans and broken hearts for the best part of ten years.
‘I can’t believe you didn’t ring me. I was going to call you, but I didn’t want to interrupt anything, you know …’ Nina said with a sly grin, tapping the side of her nose as she settled herself down in a big purple armchair that one of last year’s upholstery class had left behind. Susie had taken the moss-green one, the one with the deep-buttoned back and the slightly wonky leg.
‘So, come on, how did it go then? Did he do the whole down-on-one-knee, a-dozen-red-roses thing? God, I hope so; I’ve found this fantastic suit in that second-hand shop in the High Street. They’ve got some really nice stuff in there. Anyway –’ Nina got up to demonstrate. ‘It’s cream, gold and plum silk, fitted, v-neck, bias cut, and I found this fabulous hat in Bows and Belles – you know, the one with the woman who looks as if she just smelt something rancid in her handbag? It’s like a cartoon top hat, with a feather –’ the mime continued. ‘Although actually I’m not sure now if it’s a feather or some kind of silk quill, it’s something curved, but it needs good weather so I was hoping you’d plump for maybe spring or summer next year.’ She paused, eyes wide. ‘So?’
