Losing You Read online

  ‘Rory, Rory, hold on…’ I walked a few steps down the driveway.

  ‘Just because I went off the rails a bit, does that mean I’ve forfeited the right to see them and they’re growing up so quickly my little children only of course they’re not so little any more and now there’s this Christian and soon they’ll stop thinking of me as their father that’s what you want isn’t it only you always used to say –’

  ‘What’s up?’ I hated the way my voice took on a calming, gentle tone, as if I was murmuring nonsense to a scared horse, all the while wanting to slide a bridle over its head. I knew what his face was like when he was ranting, screwed up in wretched anger, an unnerving replica of Charlie when she was upset. I knew there were tears in his eyes and that he’d been drinking. ‘You’ve known for weeks we were going away. You said it was fine. We discussed it.’

  ‘At least you could have let me see them before they go,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just for a bit, to say happy Christmas.’

  ‘That’s not possible,’ I said. I heard a crunching on the gravel behind me and turned to find Karen making exaggerated semaphores with her arms and mouthing incomprehensible words at me. Behind her, my car’s engine coughed and hacked and rasped, then stuttered into life. I held up a finger, signifying I’d only be a few seconds. I felt like a terrible hypocrite. I was having a suppressed row with Rory while making a pathetic attempt to suggest to the eagerly eavesdropping Karen that I was in a perfectly civilized discussion. ‘We’re leaving in an hour or so for the airport.’

  ‘I’m speaking theoretically. I’m speaking about principle. You know that word? Principle? The principle of a father seeing his daughter.’

  ‘You’ve got a son as well,’ I said. I had always hated the way he was besotted with Charlie and often seemed barely to notice Jackson, who adored him.

  ‘Of a father seeing his children. That’s what I’m speaking about.’ His voice broke up.

  ‘You’re on your mobile. You’re not driving, are you?’ Drunk-driving was what I meant but didn’t say.

  ‘I got your solicitor’s letter.’

  I was wary now. I’d asked my solicitor, Sally, who was also a close friend, to write a letter to his solicitor. It had been the first step on an unpleasant road. The letter warned him that if his behaviour with Jackson and Charlie didn’t become more rational I would be forced to seek a restraining order. I’d done it after their last visit, when he’d got drunk and knocked Jackson over. The children hadn’t told me about it until I’d insisted on knowing how the bruise on Jackson’s shoulder had come about.

  ‘You just want to take them away.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said hopelessly.

  ‘It’s Christmas and I won’t see them.’

  ‘I’ve got to go. I’ll ring you from home.’

  ‘Don’t cut me off.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m saying I’ll call you in a few minutes. Have a strong coffee or something and I’ll call you.’

  ‘What does that mean, “have a strong coffee”?’

  ‘’Bye, Rory.’

  I clicked the phone off. I blinked and hoped it might look as if it was just the wind in my face.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Karen. ‘Upset?’

  ‘He’s fine.’ I felt my pity flare into protectiveness before Karen’s blatant curiosity. ‘I mean, no.’

  ‘Christmas can be difficult for the absent father, can’t it?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘And, after all, Rory was always rather…’ She was searching for the exact word. ‘Volatile,’ she said at last, with heavy-handed tact. ‘Like Charlie,’ she added. ‘Not like you and Jackson. You’re always so polite and methodical.’

  I turned with relief to my now nicely chugging car. ‘That’s fantastic, Rick. Thanks so much.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  ‘Now go and work on your boat,’ I said. I stood on tiptoe and gave him a kiss on both cold, stubbly, grease-stained cheeks.

  ‘Not just yet,’ said Karen. ‘I need him for something else.’

  I sensed that I should escape before a really serious row broke out.

  ‘I’m going to collect Jackson and finish the packing. ’Bye, Karen.’ I kissed her too, missing her cheek and landing on her nose. ‘Thanks for the coffee. Take care, Eamonn.’

  I got into the car, pulled the door shut and wound down the window.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ I called, as I reversed down the drive.

  I waved, then swung into the narrow lane. ‘And new year.’

  I put it into first gear and drew away, free. The car rattled happily as I went.

  As soon as I had turned inland and was out of sight, I pulled over, tugged my mobile out of my back pocket and phoned Christian. The engine was still running, and the heating system blew warm air on to my hands while my feet remained cold. Outside, gusts of wind rattled in the bare branches of the trees and blew twigs and tin cans along the road. He didn’t answer his landline, so I tried his mobile but only got his voicemail.

  ‘It’s just me,’ I said into it. ‘And I don’t really know why I’m calling.’

  I had first met Christian when I was in the third year of my degree in maths. He was a graduate in marine biology. I was going out with Rory by then and I used to spend every weekend in London with him. We were planning our future together, and university already felt like part of my past. I liked Christian and his circle of friends. But because he was of the world I was preparing to leave, I didn’t remember him very well. I’ve tried, but he’s a blur, a half-remembered face. We had a drink together a few times. I think I once went to his house and had a meal with lots of other people there. He says we danced together more than once; he swears he once put his arm round me when we were in a pub by the river. A few weeks ago, he showed me a photograph of himself as a student, his thin face, the tumble of dark hair, the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. I studied it and felt desire stir in me for the youth he was then, but at the time I had felt nothing like that. He was a figure I passed on the road and, though we promised to keep in touch, we hadn’t really. He sent me a postcard from a conference he was at in Mexico several years ago, and it took me a few seconds to work out who ‘Christian’, signed with an inky flourish under a couple of lines I could hardly decipher, actually was. Two years ago I heard from a mutual acquaintance that the relationship he’d been in had broken up and I thought then of getting in touch, but I never did. I sent him a change-of-address card when we moved to Sandling Island, but assumed it would never reach him. I wasn’t even sure where he lived any more.

  Six months ago, he called me up out of the blue to say he was going to be in East Anglia for a conference, and maybe we could meet. I almost made an excuse. Rory had left in a maelstrom of tears, unpaid bills, smashed dreams, and I felt lonely, bewildered, reclusive and sad. By that time, I had already had a forlorn, short-lived fling, and I knew it wasn’t the answer to anything. Certainly not to loneliness, certainly not to sadness. All I really wanted was to spend time with the children, and when I wasn’t doing that, to work on the house and the small, nettle-filled garden. I was trying to create a tiny haven for us, filled with the smell of fresh paint and baking, and I didn’t really want to make an effort for a man I used to know but who was now a half-remembered stranger.

  In the end, I arranged to meet him because I couldn’t think of a reason not to quickly enough. I told him as much at the end of that first meeting, because even by then – two and a half hours in – I wanted to be honest with him. I felt I could trust him. He didn’t seem to be trying to impress me or pretend in any way to be someone he wasn’t. Had he always been like that, I wondered – and why hadn’t I noticed?

  He was still slim, still boyish-looking, but his unruly hair was shorter and streaked with grey, and there were crow’s feet round his eyes and brackets round his mouth. I tried to fit this fortyish face with the smooth, eager one from the past, and I could feel him doing the s
ame with me. Our ghosts were with us. We walked along the sea wall, with the tide going out and the lovely light of a May early evening gradually thickening into dusk, and we talked or sometimes were silent. He told me the names of the birds that glided on the currents, although as an islander I was the one who should have known. But that became part of the flirtatious joke. He came back and had a glass of wine at my house; he played a computer game with Jackson (and lost), and when he met Charlie, who burst into the room with mud on her shoes and a dangerous glint in her eyes, he was gravely friendly without being sycophantic or matey. He rang me almost as soon as he had left the house. He told me he was crossing the causeway and the water was nearly over the road, and would I invite him for dinner the next day? He would bring the pudding and the wine, and what did the children like to eat?

  I set off once more, turning inland, to drive through the centre of the town, past the shops and the church, the garage, the old people’s home, the garden centre; past the building that had been going to be Rory’s seafood restaurant and now had a ‘To Let’ sign swinging in the wind above its blank windows. I already felt slightly detached from it all, as if I were five miles high and safely away. Mixed with the detachment was a twinge of guilt. I’d dropped Jackson off with his best friend, Ryan, just after breakfast and promised to collect him very soon. ‘Soon’ is an elastic concept but I’d heard Ryan’s mother, Bonnie, talk about Christmas shopping and the day was advancing. I got to Ryan’s house in just a few minutes – practically everywhere on Sandling Island was a few minutes’ drive from everywhere else – and knocked on the door. I was carried inside on a wave of apologies.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said to Bonnie. ‘You were going out. I’ve sabotaged your day.’

  ‘It’s no problem,’ Bonnie said, with a smile.

  That made it even worse. Even though we’d been on the island for less than two years I still felt I was finding my feet, but Bonnie had been one of the people I had decided would be my friend. She was in the same position as me – bringing up a young son alone – and she was doing it with uncomplaining cheerfulness. She had short hair and a pale face with red cheeks and she was quite large and I felt that it wouldn’t take very much makeup to turn her into a circus clown.

  ‘But you said something about Christmas shopping?’

  ‘That’s right. I have a rule, or maybe it’s more of a challenge: all Christmas shopping has to be done in one day. And this is the day.’

  ‘Or, in fact, half a day, in this case,’ I said anxiously.

  ‘Three-quarters of a day. It’s not eleven yet. Which is plenty. Ryan and I are heading into town and we’ll be back in about six hours, laden like packhorses.’

  ‘So I’d better say happy Christmas,’ I said, ‘and a happy new year and everything.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Bonnie. ‘You’re flying off. That’s the way to turn forty. I’m so sorry I can’t get to –’ She stopped.

  ‘Get to what?’ I said.

  ‘I mean, that we won’t get to see you over the holiday. But let’s meet up properly in the new year.’

  I said I’d like that. Then I went to retrieve Jackson from where I’d left him, in front of a computer game with Ryan, who grunted but barely looked up as we gave Bonnie a Christmas-and-new-year hug and went out. When we were back in the car, Jackson retrieved another miniature computer game from his pocket and started to play. I glanced across at his serious face, the tip of a pink tongue sticking out in ferocious concentration and his lick of black hair tickling his screwed-up brow, and didn’t attempt conversation. I was going over my mental list again: passports, tickets and credit cards. If I got to the airport with those, two children and one nearly new boyfriend, nothing else mattered.

  I took the scenic route home. Instead of snaking through the back-streets, I drove down the main street, imaginatively named The Street, wound to the left to reach the beach and turned right past the deserted caravan site, the closed-up beach huts, and the boat-maker’s yard, which was now full of boats pulled up for the winter.

  Our house was in a motley line of dwellings just across the road from the boathouses and -yards and mooring jetties. They were all old enough to date from a time when people evidently didn’t see much point in a sea view as against the disadvantages of an icy wind and occasional floods. The grand Georgian houses, the manor houses and rectories were safely tucked away inland. The cottages that lined The Saltings were odd, ill-sorted and squeezed in at strange angles as if each had had to be fitted into a space slightly too small for it. Ours was probably the oddest of all. It was made of clapboard and looked more than anything like a square wooden boat that had been dragged on to land, turned upside-down and been unconvincingly disguised with a grey-slate roof. It had been hard to sell because it had a tiny garden at the back and almost none at the front, it was damp and the rooms were poky, but Rory and I had fallen in love with it immediately. From our bedroom window we could see mud and sea and beyond that nothing except sky.

  As Jackson and I approached the door, we heard a desperate scratching, whimpering and groaning from inside.

  ‘Stop that, Sludge,’ I shouted, as I fiddled with the key in the lock. The door opened and a black apparition flew at us.

  The time between our arrival on the island and Rory leaving was mainly a disaster of bills and half-finished building work, then more bills. Almost Rory’s sole contribution to the household in that terrible period was to give in to the drip-drip-drip entreaties of Charlie and Jackson over many years for a dog. In a blur of events that happened almost simultaneously, he obtained a Labrador that looked like an oversized mole, christened her Sludge, left her with me and left me. When Rory walked out, I couldn’t believe it. I literally couldn’t compute in my brain that he could be somewhere else from me; well, after the last few weeks together, I could imagine that. But even so, I didn’t see how he could be away from the children.

  However, it quickly became all too clear that Sludge would never leave us. In fact, she seemed to suffer acute separation trauma if we left the house to go to the shops. As we came in and she went through her emotional welcome home, Jackson asked for the hundredth time why we couldn’t take her with us on holiday and I said because she’s a dog, and he said that we should get her a pet passport and I said that pet passports took a lot of time and money, and I didn’t even know if they had them for the States, to which he said, unanswerably: so?

  Charlie and I had had an animated discussion on the phone the previous evening. I had said that I wasn’t sure it was such a good idea for her to be out the night before we went away. She had hardened her voice in a way I knew well, and asked why. I said there was a lot to do and she said she could do it when she got back. It never became an argument because really I felt relieved, and she knew it, that her enemies were, perhaps, becoming her friends. So when she said that she would come back early and feed Sludge, put the washing out, tidy her room and do her packing, I didn’t say anything sarcastic, I didn’t pull a face down the phone at her, I didn’t laugh. I did mention that she had a paper round to do as well, but she had said she would do that on her way home and then she would get everything else done. There was plenty of time. And she was right. There was plenty of time.

  I hadn’t fed Sludge this morning because Jackson or Charlie liked to do that: she’s so pathetically grateful. And Sludge had done what Sludge always did when she hadn’t been fed: she found something else to eat or, failing that, something to chew. In this case it was a box of porridge oats. Oats and fragments of box were scattered through the living room. I took a deep breath. This was the first day of the holidays: nothing could make me angry on the first day of the holidays. At least she hadn’t eaten the mail, which had been pushed through the door in my absence – a larger pile than usual, and mostly birthday cards as far as I could see.

  I put them to one side to open later. I picked up the fragments of box, then took out the vacuum cleaner and in a few minutes the room was as it had been. Jack
son fed Sludge, not that she needed much feeding, full as she was of oats and cardboard.

  Nor was I angry when I went into the kitchen and found the clothes still in the washing-machine. If Charlie hadn’t fed Sludge, it was hardly likely that she would have hung out the washing. Of course, it meant that the clothes we needed for our holiday would now have to be put into the dryer but that wasn’t a significant problem. I bundled them in and turned the dial to forty minutes. That should do it.

  And, of course, it was almost a logical necessity, just about as certain as that two and two make four, that if Charlie hadn’t fed Sludge and hadn’t hung out the washing, she wouldn’t have tidied her bedroom or packed. I went upstairs and gave her room the most cursory glance. I knew that the bed hadn’t been slept in but it looked as if it had been, then jumped on. Clothes lay on the carpet where they had been dropped. There were a belt, an empty violin case, a fake tigerskin rug, pencils, a broken ruler, scissors, a pair of flip-flops, CDs with no cases, CD cases with no CDs, a string bag, a couple of teen magazines, a book splayed open, the top half of a pair of pyjamas, a large stuffed green lizard, a couple of small piles of dirty clothes, a broken hairdryer, scattered items of makeup, disparate shoes and three bath towels. Charlie seemed to prefer using a clean towel after each bath or shower, though not to the extent of putting the dirty ones in the washing-basket.

  Her laptop computer sat on her desk with a tartan pencil case, several notebooks, a pink-capped deodorant, a bottle of Clearasil, a shoebox, a furry cow, various assorted piles of schoolwork and much, much more.

  I felt a sense of violation even peering into her room through the gap of the open door. Since she had had this new bedroom she had been firmly private about it. I didn’t clean it. Well, neither did she, but we had an agreement about that. I would leave her to do as she pleased in her room, order it as she wished, so long as she tidied up in the rest of the house. She hadn’t exactly kept her end of the bargain, but I had kept mine. I felt a pang about it, of course. In the past, she had always been open, almost terrifyingly so, with me about all her fears, troubles and problems, until sometimes I felt heavy with the weight of her confessions. That had changed, as it had to, as she changed and grew. It wasn’t that I believed she had important secrets to keep from me. I knew that she needed a door she could lock and a space she could call her own. Sometimes I felt excluded but I couldn’t separate that feeling from all of my emotions at watching my only daughter become a woman; someone separate from me with her own life.