Cecily struggled to her feet. Gil met her eyes. “Are you okay?”
She stared at him, wordless. A group of onlookers formed a distant semi-circle, as though they were spectators at a particularly intense variety of street theatre. And suddenly there was Henry, thundering in, seeing them, seeing his car stranded at a precarious angle halfway across the grass. He gazed from one to the other, uncomprehending. “I’m sorry,” Cecily was saying. “I’m so sorry.”
Jem bridled. “About my mum? Or my dad?”
“About your mum. About you having to find out like this.”
“I didn’t find out.” Gil could feel her shaking. She had slackened under his restraint and he loosened his grip a little. “I remembered. You were always there, on the edges of everything, lurking in the shadows. I remembered that and I understood.”
Cecily nodded. “I thought maybe you knew. And then I thought you didn’t want to.”
“I was a child! I didn’t – I would never have believed that my dad … ” She wept. “You stole him.”
“I didn’t steal him. He belonged to me too.”
Jem shrieked.
Henry said, “For fuck’s sake do something with her Gil, before she gets even more hysterical.”
“She does have her reasons.” But he reasserted his hold on her anyway.
Cecily said, “Come and talk with me.”
Jem shook her head. “You’re not talking to me about them.”
“But maybe I can give you some answers – ”
“I don’t want answers from you!”
Henry said quietly to Cecily, “It’s not the time.”
She ignored him. “You had a brother,” she told Jem. “He died a few months after Marianne did. Can you imagine what that did to your dad? If you want to think badly of him, of us, that’s fine. But just imagine what that did to him.”
“Come on,” Henry persisted.
“He was the best of men.”
Henry nudged her gently. “All right,” she said under her breath, letting him edge her away. “All right.”
“Now,” Gil said levelly, when they were far enough away. “We are going to the pub over there and we’re going to sit in a corner and we’re going to talk. All right?”
“Can’t we go to your room?” She looked as shaken as he felt.
“No.” His instinct was to stay in public with her, where the level of self-restraint she needed as much as he did might kick in. He maintained his grip on her arm. “I want a drink.”
There were, thank God, an empty table and a couple of chairs in an alcove away from the bar. He bought their drinks, sat her down. She was trembling, her eyes wet and swollen. She looked wrecked, he thought, not without sympathy.
“She killed my mum.”
“It doesn’t help, you know, to say stuff like that.”
“If it hadn’t been for her – ”
“If it hadn’t been for her, Alex would have been completely miserable.”
She stared at him. “You’re on her side.”
“Jem listen. Alex and Cecily fell in love. They were filled with guilt about Marianne the whole time. But Cecily made him happy. After everything he went through with your mum, would you deny him that?”
“But he was married to her! And it wasn’t her fault she was … the way she was.”
“None of it was anyone’s fault.”
“He didn’t have to have an affair. He didn’t have to have a baby with someone else.”
“Sometimes things just happen. We’re only human you know, all of us.”
She frowned. “Would you, if you’d been in his situation?”
“Probably.”
She stared at him.
“Is that too honest?” he said.
She shook her head.
“He didn’t leave your mum. He didn’t abandon her to carers and hospitals. To being alone. He looked after her, the best he could, for years.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“And that was kind of heroic, you know?”
She said nothing.
He added, “Cecily has never got over the loss of her baby. I don’t suppose Alex did either. They thought they were paying the price.”
“He would’ve been my brother.”
“He was your brother.”
“I remember seeing Cecily with him,” she said slowly, as if reliving it, “I told my mum – ‘the lady from the café has had a baby’. She cried, and she hit him, over and over again. And then … then she … ”
So Marianne had known, Gil realised. She had known the baby was Alex’s. She had known Alex was having an affair and maybe she’d been able to live with that, but finding out about the baby had been more than she could take. He tried to imagine the emotional turmoil which had existed in Jem’s parents’ house for all those years and knew he would find it unbearable. No wonder there were ghosts.
Jem said desperately, “Why can’t you see this from Mum’s side?”
“I can. But you need to see it from your dad’s.”
“Why?”
“Because … you need him back. The father you worshipped. Because you have to forgive him. Because there’s no moving on if you don’t.”
“There is no moving on.”
He sighed. “Jem – ”
She looked at him suspiciously. “Did you know? Have you always known?”
“No, not at all. Not until today.”
“So you’re shocked as well.”
He gestured, helpless.
“She betrayed you too.”
He paused. He couldn’t talk to her about Cecily. He’d wanted to be two people out there in the square, restraining one woman, embracing the other. He had barely trusted himself to look at Cecily, to speak to her, for he had known his feelings would be clear in his voice, in his eyes. He ventured now, against his better judgement, “What she said, about giving you some answers? Maybe that’s a good idea.”
“What?”
“Well who else are you going to get them from?”
She shook her head. “I don’t want answers any more. I don’t want to hear her talk about him. It hurts too much.”
He said nothing.
She swallowed. “You said I could come to Bristol with you.”
“Yeah.” And his heart felt so much heavier this time.
“Can we go soon?”
“How soon?”
“Now.”
London had been a winter whirlwind of trips with old friends to theatres and galleries, of gusting into the bright warmth of wine bars and restaurants with dripping umbrellas, tube signs and neon lights shining in the dark. As she stepped off the train she was aware immediately of the empty platform, of the smell of the sea and the bitter cold. For years Cecily would tell people so often she almost came to believe it herself that dancing and London had given her up, that her life there had become too draining, too full of hopeless competition. She would never refer to it as a sacrifice she had chosen to make.
The tide was in, slapping against the wall of the wharfe as she wheeled her suitcase along it, sending jets of seawater in her path, splashing over her boots. From here the gallery looked as dark and deserted as everywhere else, but she knew better. A small light shone in the window of the workshop. She pressed the handle and stepped inside.
Alex turned in surprise. “But you’re back tomorrow.”
“I came home a day early.”
He was smiling, wrapping her in her arms. “Ah, I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you too. That’s why I came home a day early.”
He held her at arms’ length, surveying her as if she had been away for years instead of a fortnight. “I can’t do this anymore without you,” he said.
“Do what?”
“This … living thing.”
She hugged him again, aware of the breadth and muscle of his chest beneath the wool of his jersey, the threads of grey at his temples. He was thirty-nine and she often saw women look at him twice and
lingeringly, but still he seemed older even than he had a year ago, as if victim to the war of attrition waged by strain. “How is everything?”
“Fine, in fact.” He was reassuring but he had said before that though he clung to her when things were bad, in peacetime he didn’t know whether he felt better or worse. “How was London?”
“Mad, as ever.” She grinned. Upstairs in their room he opened a bottle of wine and she took off her coat and boots. He kissed her and handed her a glass.
“So what did you do? Tell me about it.”
She detailed to him the musical she had been to see, the visit backstage to her friend in the chorus. He knelt before her and removed her socks, rolling them into a ball and massaging her feet as she talked. She described an exhibition at the National which she hadn’t much liked and another at the V&A which she had. He unhooked her pendant and kissed the nape of her neck. She regaled him with the story of a meal at an Italian restaurant in Soho where everyone had been filled with such a combination of wine and high spirits there had been dancing and singing at the tables. He released her hair from its clip and combed it with his fingers, his hand sliding down to cup her breast. She had stopped talking.
Afterwards he said, “Why did you really come back early?”
He knew her too well. She said lightly, “I told you. I missed you too much.”
“But you love going up there. I don’t want to curtail your freedom.”
“You don’t.”
He held her gaze, disbelieving.
Oh God, she thought. She hadn’t wanted to tell him this yet. She’d wanted to continue to be the source of calm and peace she’d always been to him for at least a little while longer. She’d wanted time to get her own head around it first, to be sure.
She said, “My freedom might be curtailed anyway.”
He continued to gaze at her.
“I’m pregnant.”
His mouth slackened. He blinked. Say something! she wanted to cry. React the way I need you to.
He said, “Oh my love.”
Her heart lifted. “Is it all right? If I am?”
“Of course it’s all right.”
“Really?”
He smiled. “Our child? It’s a kind of blessing.”
Soon they were going to have to consider this, as they always had to consider everything, through the prism of the family he already had. But not yet. Not just yet.
It had taken some time to persuade Henry that she was and would be fine, that what she needed most was a bath and sleep and to be alone. He had left with huge reluctance, had been kind and concerned and taken aback to learn the story of Alex. She still felt tremulous in the wake of having to explain it all, to him, to Gil. Tremulous too in the wake of Jem’s attack. But what else should she have expected? What else had she deserved? The girl was young and vulnerable and still in mourning for her father, the one constant in her life. I did steal him from you, she thought. But you never lost him. He was always yours.
The café felt odd, having been closed all day. She hadn’t closed it all day for Alex’s funeral. Just the ceremony, after which she had returned, stripped weeping out of her black dress and into her jeans and t-shirt, tied on her apron and turned the sign on the door. The performance had helped her through the day, through the weeks. Gradually she had become able to put from her mind the thought of Alex smashed against the rocks. And then Gil had come, alive and beautiful and wanting to save people from drowning.
She stood in the bow of her window, watching the square which had been her home for all these years. She longed to stay but only in the company of people she couldn’t have. And then there he was, the man she couldn’t have, standing beside his car with the young woman who was Alex’s daughter, saying something, his face solicitous, sombre. Jem touched his hand, said something, turned and walked away to the furthest corner of the square, to the road she would take if she were going home.
Cecily gave it ten minutes, long enough for Jem to change her mind and come back again. She didn’t.
By the time she reached the foot of the iron staircase, Gil was descending it, carrying a large wooden sculpture. A tree, she saw, maybe three feet tall, its tangled limbs stretching past him and above him, the finer branches detailed with tiny leaves.
“Hi,” she said, followed swiftly by, “Oh my goodness.”
“It’s the Tree of Life,” Gil said, self-mocking.
“It really is.” He loaded it into the boot of his car and they stood, regarding it silently for a moment. Even in such a prosaic setting the tree spoke of power and hope. She said so.
He half-smiled. “I don’t know. I might display it from a car boot. ‘Fortitude in unexpected places’. Is that too corny? It’s not going to survive the journey unless I wrap it in something, is it? Maybe an old blanket. I was thinking I might try the charity shops – ”
“I have an old blanket you can use.”
“Right.” He shut up. Her heart was thudding. What journey? He said, more gently, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
He cleared his throat. “I’m going to take her away for a little while, up to Bristol. Give her some breathing space, a chance to get some perspective on all this.”
“Okay.” Her head felt packed tight with everything she wasn’t saying. Tears burned behind her eyes.
He said, “I’m so sorry. About earlier. It was horrific.”
She nodded.
He lifted her chin, to make her look at him. “Oh, don’t.” He drew her closer. She rested her forehead against his shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “We can’t do this here.”
In his room she stood apart from him, desperate to retain her dignity, desperate not to cry. But he was having none of it and enfolded her in his arms. “When she was hitting you … I just wanted to make her stop.”
“You did make her stop.”
“For then, for that moment. But what about the next time?”
She drew back to look at him. “Next time?”
He said, with difficulty, “I can’t … trust her, around you.”
“Is that why you’re taking her away?”
“I can’t think what else to do.” He sat down on the bed, his head in his hands for a moment. “I don’t want to leave you.” He looked back at her, tears in his eyes too.
“I don’t want you to leave me.” She sat beside him.
“I love you.”
“Gil – ”
“I love you and I can’t stop thinking, if we’d got back together the minute I arrived, none of this would have happened.”
“Alex would still be dead.”
He gazed at her. “All this time, you were grieving for him. That was what was wrong.”
“Yes. But right now I’m grieving for us.”
He shook his head. “I’ll come back.”
“Gil, what do you think will happen? Taking Jem to Bristol with you is making a commitment to her. If you start taking responsibility for her now it might never stop. Believe me, I know about these things. Anyway, you’re supposed to be going travelling with her, aren’t you?”
“I don’t want to go. I don’t want … ” He swallowed. “I look at her now and … Jesus, I can’t say it. It makes me sound like a monster.”
She stroked his hair. “You’re not a monster. You’re just trying to do your best.”
“I owe her my best.”
“All right, now I’m going to sound like a monster. Why do you owe her anything?”
“I don’t know.” He paused. “She has no one else, and she’s Alex’s daughter. If it were anyone but me, wouldn’t you be glad, in the circumstances, that someone was taking care of her?”
“Of course I would. But it is you. And she’s Marianne’s daughter too.”
“Meaning?”
“I’m scared.”
He shook his head. “She’s not like that. She’s just traumatised. We all are.”
She said nothing. He lifted her hand into his and kissed her
knuckles. Turned it over to kiss her palm. She watched him, desire spiralling warm and involuntary inside her. She remembered exactly how it felt to make love with Gil. The thought of it sustained her through lonely winter nights. The possibility of it now, in spite of everything, almost took her breath away. He leaned in to kiss her mouth. She opened her lips to his. He slid his hands beneath her vest and she unbuttoned his shirt. Then she was beneath him and he was kissing her throat as she was reaching to unzip him, her pants around her ankles, her skirt around her waist. He groaned and she drew in her breath.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Gil takes the phone from me. I try to read his frown as he presses the key pad. He shakes his head, shrugs.
“Was it her?” I still can’t tell what’s going through his mind. “Was it Cecily?”
He says levelly, “Think about that.”
I think about it.
He says, “It isn’t even Henry’s.” He tilts the phone towards me and scrolls through the contacts list, which is comprised entirely of Italian-sounding names. My mouth crumples. I look away, choking down my tears. The flat stone walls rising from the canal wobble and shimmer.
“I don’t know what’s real anymore.”
“I know.” He rubs my back between my shoulder blades. “I know, sweetheart.”
He walks me along the pavement as if I have lost the ability to move by myself. Maybe I have. When my father died, I became afraid to leave the house and spent days – weeks - shaking with grief in empty rooms. It’s like that now. It’s worse than that now.