Gina didn’t respond to the lame jokiness because Naomi clearly wasn’t joking. It was hard to explain properly how she felt about the letters. She couldn’t just throw them away – it would be like throwing out the part of herself that had written them. If he did . . . well, that was different. In the last house, there had been drawers to stuff them into. Here, every item that stayed was a choice.
‘I just feel they’re not mine to throw away,’ she said. ‘I want him to see them.’
‘Why?’
‘So he knows I wrote them.’
‘He knows, Gina.’ Naomi threw her hands in the air. ‘But it was thirteen years ago. Why would he want to read them now? What’s the point?’ She sank back, and regarded Gina with surprise. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise you were still so hung up on Kit.’
‘I’m not hung up on him,’ said Gina. ‘It’s more me. I just feel I have to tidy this up while I’m tidying everything else up. I feel . . . OK, I still feel guilty about it. I feel like all the bad luck in my life basically stems from not dealing with that situation properly.’
‘What? You were a kid.’ Naomi rolled her eyes. ‘Who can honestly say they dealt with anything properly when they were twenty-one?’
‘I wasn’t the last time I saw him.’
‘Well, he didn’t exactly cover himself in glory then either, if you ask me.’
They sat and looked at each other, the highlights and lowlights of all the years they’d been each other’s best friend flickering between them, too many for them to be anything other than completely honest with each other.
‘Shred the letters,’ said Naomi. ‘Give them to me and I’ll do it.’
‘I can’t,’ said Gina, simply. ‘That doesn’t solve anything.’
‘So what do you want me to say? Yes, go and see him? Because I don’t think it’s a great idea. Not right now.’ Naomi gave her a sharp look. ‘I’m not being funny, but it’s going to look like you’re using it as an excuse to get back in touch because you’re getting a divorce. And even if it’s not –’
‘It’s not.’
‘– I guarantee that’s how he’ll see it. So give it a couple of months, then see if you’re still desperate to hand the letters over in person. Wait until your decree absolute’s through, at least.’ She cocked an eyebrow. ‘Any news on that?’
Gina sighed. ‘It won’t happen until the financial arrangements are sorted out. And that won’t happen until Stuart gets that box of junk by the door and all the money he thinks he’s due. Which could be a while.’
Naomi grimaced. She glanced around the flat, and spotted the list on the wall opposite. Gina watched as she levered herself off the sofa, and went over to read it.
‘“One hundred favourite things”,’ she read aloud. ‘Interesting.’
‘It is.’
There was a pause as Naomi read on, occasionally laughing.
Gina grabbed the black marker pen from the pot on her desk, and went to join her.
‘Shift over,’ she said, and when Naomi moved, Gina wrote ‘20. Naomi McIntyre Hewson’ at the end.
‘A new entry at number twenty,’ said Naomi, wryly. ‘Below music but above, what? Tunnock’s Tea Cakes?’ But she bumped her hip against Gina’s with affection.
Chapter Thirteen
ITEM: brown velvet Vivienne Westwood suit, ‘guitar’ jacket with nipped waist, and narrow pencil skirt, size 12
Hartley, 2nd June 2008
Gina lies on her bed in her old room at home in Matterdale Drive, after the world’s gloomiest hen night (Janet, Naomi and her, and a bottle of rosé wine at Ferrari’s in Longhampton) and stares at her wedding suit hanging on the back of her door, like someone standing sentry over her, making sure she doesn’t do a runner.
The suit’s cut so well that it doesn’t really need a body inside it. It’s curvy and confident all on its own. Gina half wishes she could put some kind of Sorcerer’s Apprentice spell on it and send the suit along to the register office tomorrow morning in her place to marry Stuart.
Janet’s mother-of-the-bride ensemble is hanging on the back of her bedroom door: a hastily purchased dress-and-coat combo from Longhampton’s premier mother-of-the-bride shop. It’s muted, in shades of peach, and not what Janet had planned to wear to her only child’s wedding, but as Gina overheard her telling the assistant, ‘It’s not what you’d call a completely happy occasion.’
Gina had leaned over at that point to explain that she wasn’t pregnant, and the groom wasn’t about to go to prison. Janet nearly fainted.
She manages a twisted smile at the memory. Her new recklessness is giving her a glimpse into what it must be like to be Naomi all the time. Fun.
They’re doing some things the traditional way, though. Stuart has banished her from Dryden Road, and he’s arranged everything from cars to food to the blue garter that was waiting for her when she got back from the salon this morning. He’s even arranged for the hairdresser to come round to put her hair up into the last elaborate do she’ll probably ever have. Stuart loves her hair: he’s asked for curls and backcombing, the lot. Gina’s a bit worried that, combined with the suit, she’ll look like Sybil Fawlty, but it’s a little thing to do for him when he’s been such a rock.
It does cast a shadow over her heart, though, about how he’s going to feel when all her long black curls fall out. As they will. In about six weeks’ time.
Gina pushes the thought away. She’s decided that, before she starts her course of chemotherapy, she’s going to get her hair cropped. Properly Mia Farrow short, so that when it starts falling out it won’t be such a shock. And it’s something positive she can do. Anything more than that is just too hard to get her head around, and she finds her concentration sliding away, unable to take it in, as if the cancer’s an iceberg she’s too close to see.
This time tomorrow she’ll be Mrs Gina Horsfield. She’s practised signing her name but it looks odd, the ‘Gina’ scrawled, the ‘Horsfield’ almost printed. It’s like one of those dreams that feels like a very mundane waking reality, just before it lurches off at surreal tangents. Gina always scoffed at people who said, ‘Ooh, it felt just like a dream!’ but that’s exactly how the last couple of weeks have been: no connection between one moment and the next, no clue as to which assumptions will turn out to be wrong, what strange new routine will suddenly become her normality.
She stares at the ceiling, trying to pin down how she feels. People keep asking her that. How do you feel? Are you OK? Cancer isn’t something she imagined would be part of her life, especially not now, not aged twenty-eight. It’s not what she’s prepared for. She isn’t brave; she isn’t going to run charity marathons for Breast Cancer Care; she isn’t going to look ‘amazing’ with a pixie hair-do. Other people do that. And who the hell is Gina Horsfield, anyway?
Her new life starts tomorrow. Gina doesn’t feel ready. She hasn’t finished with the old one.
And with that, she gives in to the temptation that’s been eating away at her since yesterday. One last read of Kit’s letters before that life vanishes. They’re in a box with all her university memorabilia – postcards from Naomi, ball programmes, gig tickets, birthday cards from people she no longer sees. Earlier that day Janet had found her sitting in her old room, surrounded by her old life, and though Gina pushed Kit’s letters under a yellowed student newspaper she’d worked on, she could tell Janet had seen them from the shadow of disapproval that crossed her face.
But so what? It’s better than pretending the past never happened at all, like Mum does. She can’t make me ignore Kit the way she ignores Dad.
She reaches under the bed for the box and pulls it towards her, moving piles of old postcards until she reaches the bottom layers of stuff, where she’d tucked Kit’s letters out of sight. But they’re not there.
Panicking, Gina scrabbles everything out, spreading it across the floor – magazines, Christmas cards, lecture notes, lipsticks, pens – but they’re gone. Her letters to Kit, returned by his mother, ar
e still there. His to her are gone.
Something falls away inside her. There’s only her mother and herself in the house.
Gina’s ears fill with white noise as she marches downstairs to find Janet sitting in her armchair, next to Terry’s empty one. She’s painting her nails, the varnish a what’s-the-bloody-point pale pink, as Naomi would call it.
‘Mum,’ Gina starts, but Janet interrupts her.
‘If you’re looking for those letters,’ she says, without looking up, ‘they’ve gone.’
Gina’s mouth drops open. ‘Sorry?’
‘Those letters from Kit you were reading last night. They’ve gone. They’ve got no place in your new life.’
Blood pulses in Gina’s face, hot and cold. ‘What do you mean, they’ve gone?’
‘I put them through Terry’s shredder,’ says Janet, primly. ‘Don’t worry, I didn’t read any of them.’
A noise escapes Gina’s throat that she doesn’t recognise.
‘It’s for your own good,’ Janet goes on. ‘You’re getting married tomorrow. It’s the beginning of your new life. You don’t want any bad luck lingering around from the past.’
‘You had no right to do that,’ breathes Gina, reeling at the loss. The first ever love letters Kit had written to her from Oxford, the ones that are still magical, the only love letters she has. ‘You went through my stuff to find them . . .’
‘As a mother you sometimes have to do hard things but, Georgina, there’s no good looking behind you. You can’t go back. If you want any kind of happiness in this life, you’ve got to live in this moment, not in the past. Believe me, I should know.’
Gina closes her eyes. Of course. The martyred widowed wife. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that her mother has no idea what a proper, magical, life-changing love feels like.
‘It’s very sad, what happened.’ Janet’s words are tight with self-righteousness, as if she’s been preparing this. ‘But Stuart’s a lovely man. You’ve made that irresponsible, spoiled boy,’ she still can’t bring herself to say Kit’s name, ‘into some sort of fantasy. He wouldn’t be half the support Stuart’s being now.’
There are so many things Gina wants to yell at her mother that they’re crashing against her brain like big moths against a lit window. There’s too much: Stuart, the cancer, the wedding, the guilt that never properly leaves her . . .
‘Why do you blame him for what happened?’ It bursts out of her, for the first time in all these years. ‘It was my fault!’
‘It was never your fault.’ Janet’s voice cracks as she stands up, furious. ‘Never! That irresponsible boy nearly destroyed my only child! And I will not stand by and watch you sabotage your chance at happiness now because of something that happened when you were too young to know what you were doing.’
Gina realises Janet is actually shaking. ‘Mum,’ she says, as the exhaustion of the last few weeks overwhelms her, but Janet refuses to speak. Her shoulders hunch, and she shrinks into herself.
They stand, facing each other, and Gina wonders if Janet is seeing an adult there, or her daughter. She’s about to say something conciliatory – it’s her wedding eve, for God’s sake, she can hardly turn up tomorrow with red eyes – when Janet speaks.
Her voice has lost all its normal girlishness. She sounds like someone else, someone serious and angry. ‘If you don’t look me in the eye and tell me you understand why I destroyed those letters, then you shouldn’t bother going to the wedding tomorrow, Georgina.’
Gina knows what her mother is saying.
Stuart is real, she tells herself. Stuart is caring, and dependable, and attractive, and he is there. He loves me. He loves who I am now, even with this disgusting disease that might kill me before I’m forty. This is it. This is who I am. Maybe it is better if the door to the past is shut.
She draws a long, shuddering breath.
‘And I’ll tell him,’ Janet adds. ‘It’ll give me no pleasure, but I’ll tell him. He’s a good man. He deserves a . . .’
‘All right!’ Gina disengages herself. Her whole body feels too light.
What can she do?
Nothing. There’s nothing she can do but go forward.
‘I just want you to be happy,’ says Janet, and her voice is so heartbroken that Gina stares at her in surprise.
She rubs tears away from her eyes, hard enough to smear her mascara. ‘It’s the worst part of being a mother, watching your child make mistakes.’
Gina nearly says, ‘I’m sorry I seem to put you through so many, then,’ but she hasn’t the energy for a row. She just wants this to be over. She wants to go to bed, and sleep, and not wake up in the middle of a dream.
As she left the house on Friday morning, Gina was surprised to feel a bit sad that this was the last time she’d drop Buzz off at the dog-rescue shop. It meant it was the last time she’d potter around the park with Rachel after work, chatting about dogs, between ball-throwing, and people, houses and the shopping shortcomings of Longhampton. Rachel was very easy to be with, even without the dogs to chat about: she was open and friendly, without ever probing too much. And, unlike Naomi, she had absolutely no views on Stuart, which was, at the moment, quite restful.
Buzz had been an easy companion too. He’d just about stopped flinching when the door buzzer went, even if he remained pathetically greedy about food. In fact, Gina was offering him the other half of her Friday-morning croissant when her mobile rang, and for a weird second, she thought it might be Rachel telling her off for spoiling the dog in the street.
It wasn’t Rachel. Or, as she’d half expected, Amanda Rowntree.
It was Rory, her solicitor.
‘Good morning, Gina.’ He had a benign headmasterly air, with his faint Scottish accent and precise diction. ‘I thought I’d give you a ring to let you know straight away that I’ve some good news for you.’
‘Is it that Stuart’s decided to stop trying to get the last coppers from down the side of our marital sofa and signed the papers?’ She tucked her phone under her chin while she juggled the lead and her bag.
‘Actually, yes.’ Rory sounded surprised. ‘I got a call from his solicitor to say that the signed Acknowledgement of Service has been filed with the court, and we should be receiving a copy soon. If you come into the office this afternoon we can get on with preparing your affidavit, so it’s ready to go as soon as the paperwork arrives.’
‘But what about all that financial-arrangement stuff, about wanting a percentage of the deposit and compensation for the furniture I’ve got?’ Gina stopped in front of the deli, confused. ‘He’s decided that doesn’t matter after all?’ She frowned. ‘He’s not going to turn round and make all these demands to hold up the decree absolute, is he?’
Rules. Stuart was always better at using rules to his advantage.
‘Well, I can’t say that definitely won’t happen, but the impression I got from Mr Horsfield’s solicitor was that he was keen to make it a clean break. With no unnecessary delay, was the phrase she used.’
‘And what about that list of things he wanted? I’ve got a boxful of junk in my sitting room for him.’
‘My advice would be to give it to him as soon as you can. It shows you’re willing to co-operate. You can leave it here, if you want, and I’ll have it sent to his solicitor.’
‘Great,’ said Gina. ‘Well, that’s . . . brilliant news.’
It was, wasn’t it? She tried to catch the fleeting emotion that passed over her like a cloud: this was really it. Stuart hadn’t made a last-minute bid for forgiveness. He’d been decent about it, in the end, but he wanted a life that didn’t include her.
‘Yes. Yes, it is.’
Gina detected a note of reserve in Rory’s voice. ‘You don’t sound so happy about it. Is there a catch?’
‘I don’t think so, no. It’s great news. I just . . .’ He paused, and Gina could imagine him pushing the glasses up his nose, pressing his lips together in concentration. ‘In my experience, Gina, and don’t take t
his the wrong way, when one party does a huge volte-face like this, there’s usually a reason.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Well, sometimes they just wake up one morning and think, Jings, life’s too short to argue about who paid for the extension. I don’t care that much now. And sometimes they get an interim invoice from their solicitor and think, Good God, it’s cost me half as much as I’m going to get. I need to stop this madness.’
‘That sounds like Stuart.’
Rory laughed briefly, then coughed in a way that Gina recognised. Less a cough, more a warning that something awkward was hoving into view.
‘And sometimes,’ he went on, ‘particularly if there are other parties involved, they, ah . . . suddenly encounter a more pressing reason to sort things out. And that gets things moving faster than any stern letter from me could.’
Another strange emotion spread over Gina’s skin, as she was reminded of the ‘other party’ in all this. ‘You think Stuart wants to get married again?’
‘It’s not my place to get involved in the personal side of things, but it does happen . . .’ again, the awkward cough. ‘I just thought I’d introduce the possibility, in case he decides to get in touch directly to speed things up.’
Gina tried to imagine Stuart being swept away by a sudden urge to get married, and couldn’t. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a romantic – he never forgot their anniversary and always booked the same table at Ferrari’s – but he didn’t rush into things. And their wedding had been such a strained experience, she couldn’t imagine he’d want to repeat it. She certainly didn’t.
Unless Stuart wanted to do it better with Bryony. To replace that memory with a better one. Or he might have decided to emigrate? Gina could picture them biking round New Zealand. Kayaking and surfing and doing all the outdoorsy things she’d have hated.
‘That’s really thoughtful of you, Rory,’ she said, ‘but I expect he’s just had some financial advice. Or maybe he’s just trying to be nice.’