After Ever After Page 5

  Mr Crawley appears from behind a worktop and looks at me down his aquiline nose, lifting an aristocratic chin.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, Mrs Kelly. Timothy, clear that mess up at once and get upstairs and prep the bathroom.’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, Mrs Kelly,’ Tim repeats in quiet tones, and picks up one of my dishcloths to address the mess. I smile and console myself with the thought of having a working bath and shower again and not having to wash myself inch by square inch in the tiny bathroom sink. Having made a half-decent job of clearing away his mess, Tim scuttles upstairs and I pour Mr Crawley a cup of coffee as Ella sits in her high chair and gazes at him with an adoration that would have Fergus spitting feathers if he knew.

  Mr Crawley is unlike any builder I have ever met or seen or thought of as possibly existing. He’s posh. He’s very posh and terribly well spoken, as is young Timothy, who’s bordering on about eighteen and who I imagine won his role on the team by being expelled from the same local boys’ school that Fergus attended with Simon Shaw. For example, Mr Crawley has brie and grape sandwiches for lunch, and it is because of him that I had to unpack Fergus’s London flat coffee maker as he always refuses instant and had preferred instead to bring his own flask of Columbian coffee until I bought some in especially for him. He and Tim have fifteen-minute breaks twice a day, and at lunchtime (which is never longer than an hour and often shorter) they discuss the news in The Times or play chess. When I’m trying to make sense of it all I imagine that Mr Crawley once headed up an immense corporation and one day decided that the pressures of high finance just weren’t for him and packed it all in to become a builder. Or he was a Nobel award-winning novelist with insurmountable writer’s block or that maybe being a builder just pays better than either of those options. But one thing I do know: you’d only ever find a posh builder in Berkhamsted.

  Whatever the reason, he is a nice man. Fergus, who hardly ever sees him, can’t believe this and routinely inspects his work looking for signs of shoddiness, and fully expects to be ripped off. I have no such worries; in fact the only thing I worry about is the day Mr Crawley packs up his belongings and moves out for good. How will I get Ella to take solids then? Besides, I’ll miss him.

  I take Ella, sticky-mouthed and triumphant at her latest conquest over the dreaded spoon, into the living room to breastfeed her. I enjoy the weight of her in my arms and settle back into the sofa and listen to the noises of the house. The morning seems springlike and it reminds me of something. Oddly it takes me a while to search the memory out.

  The year that Brian Harvey, the stereotypical builder, came to fix our roof.

  I was six then and we lived on this estate on Stamford Hill, a big block of post-war flats. Not a high-rise but a maze of long buildings connected by communal balconies and no more than four or five storeys high. Yes, it was five I think, but anyway, we lived on the top storey and the roof leaked.

  Dad had been on to the council to get it fixed for weeks and weeks but that was the seventies and nothing much happened very fast then, so one day he came in and told my mum he’d met this bloke down the pub who said he’d do it for a good price.

  ‘I don’t know, Don,’ my mum had said. ‘We should just wait for the council, shouldn’t we?’

  It was a wet spring and it seemed to me that it rained constantly; pots and pans were positioned all around the flat but the worst of it was in my room. I used to like the tympanic symphony that played for me as I went to sleep, but Mum worried about my chest.

  ‘If we wait for them, we’ll be waiting until the cows come home and anyway this little one deserves a quiet night’s sleep in her own bed without fear of drowning!’ He picked me up as he said it and swung me under his arm. ‘Hey, little pickle? What do you think?’ And I laughed the same tinny machine-gun laugh that Ella does now.

  We settled into his telly chair in time for Doctor Who.

  ‘I think we should get it fixed, Dad,’ I’d said, rubbing the palm of my hand along his stubble.

  ‘There you go then. Kitty thinks we should get this bloke to look at it. Don’t worry, love, it’ll be fine.’

  My mum had regarded us both from the doorway and smiled, shaking her head.

  ‘Well, I can’t argue with both of you, can I?’ she’d said, and then she’d gone into the kitchen to make chips. I remember her peeling and cutting potatoes. Who actually makes chips any more?

  The morning Brian was due to arrive I’d heard Dad getting ready to leave; it was still dark outside. He always left early, before six, to get to the bus depot where he worked as a mechanic. I used to imagine he was like Cliff Richard at the beginning of Summer Holiday. All singing and quiffs. I’d heard the murmur of Dad’s voice talking to Mum before he left and I’d closed my eyes and feigned sleep as he crept into my room and brushed a kiss against my forehead.

  ‘Love you, pickle,’ he’d whispered and finally I’d heard the latch on the door click to. I’d waited for a few seconds and then run into my mother’s room, leaping on to the bed.

  ‘Kitty! Good God, child, you’re like a herd of elephants!’ she’d said like she always did. I’d giggled as she’d pulled me under the covers to tickle me.

  ‘It’s early, darling,’ she’d said, winding her arms around me and curling me into the curve of her body. ‘Come on, let’s go back to sleep.’ I’d tucked my chin over the edge of the quilt and looked for faces in the turquoise peacock-patterned wallpaper, waiting until her breathing became even again. Then, once I’d known she was asleep, I’d turned around ever so quietly and watched her sleep like I did every morning. I’m glad I had that time to watch her in those days, because now I remember every little detail of her face: the soft brown wave of her hair, her wide and inviting eyebrows and the long gentle curve of her mouth.

  Later that morning the builder had arrived, and if I had to put a finger on it, pinpoint a specific moment, I’d say that that was the day that she had begun to die.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Right, off you go then,’ Georgina says, eyeing up my ensemble of loose shirt and jeans as if I am wearing a red latex number and thigh boots. It’s not my fault that she’s the only grandmother in the world who pitches up for babysitting with her suspiciously still-red hair neatly coiffed and a figure-hugging top over a slim-fitting pair of suede trousers. It’s not fair, it’s anti the laws of the universe – I should be the glamorous one, not sodding Boadicea here. Someone should do something. I drag my attention away from her Cuban-heeled boots and zone back to whatever it is she’s talking about.

  ‘Break’ll do you good,’ she finishes, whatever it was, and cleaves Ella from my arms, beginning to rock her in exactly the way she doesn’t like to be rocked. ‘We’ll sort you out, won’t we poppet, we’ll teach you how to have a nap when Grandma says so.’

  Ella looks exactly how I feel, and I search for any half-decent reason why I can’t go out.

  ‘Um, I’ve decided, we have, Fergus and I, that we aren’t doing that leaving them to cry thing. We don’t think its very kind?’ I say, anxiously picturing my little Titan howling her lungs out for hours whilst her grandma has a fag in the back garden. She’ll go all red and her face will be wet with tears and she won’t understand why I haven’t come home. ‘So I’d prefer it if you didn’t, you know, just leave her.’

  Georgina sighs about as theatrically as a person can sigh. ‘In my day …’ she begins, but just at that moment Mr Crawley enters the room and Ella launches herself at him with the assurance and desperation of a trapeze artist escaping from a dragon.

  ‘I just wanted to say the kitchen is spic and span now, Mrs Kelly. I got Timothy to give the fridge a bit of a wipe out while he was there.’ He nods at the elder Mrs Kelly, who presses her lips together.

  ‘Thanks, Mr Crawley, that’s really good of you,’ I say. ‘Tim doesn’t want a job as a cleaner, does he?’ I laugh half-heartedly.

  Georgina has already offered me the services of her cleaner, and my refusal to take her on ha
s caused some kind of offence. Now she edges past Mr Crawley and makes her way to inspect the kitchen, calling out behind her, ‘Have you made up the bottles, then? I can’t be bothered with all that nonsense.’

  ‘Yes!’ I lie. In fact I have defrosted breastmilk, but as she is disapproving of breastfeeding at all it seems simpler to lie and pretend it’s formula.

  I look anxiously at Mr Crawley and he leans a little closer to me and whispers, ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Kelly, I won’t let your little pickle cry on her own.’ I am so grateful that he is going to be here that I almost cry myself. He takes my hand and pats it. ‘And I’ve got a funny feeling that we’ve got just enough work on to mean that we shan’t be leaving until just after you get back. Now remember, you are going out to have some fun, there’s nothing to worry about here.’

  I nod and repeat his words over and over in my head until I’ve collected my keys, kissed and hugged Ella until she squirms angrily for release and finally shut the door on Georgina singing, ‘And WHEN the bow BREAKS the BABY will FALL.’ I can picture Ella wincing.

  When I get to the train station ticket office I have five minutes to spare, my carefully applied first-time-out make-up is halfway down my face, the heat is pulsating from my cheeks and sweat prickles my forehead.

  ‘London!’ I pant at the ticket office man, sounding maybe more desperate than I need to.

  ‘Travel card, madam? Single or return?’ I stare at him wondering who he’s talking to and then remember that I am a madam, and not the glamorous sort that goes to work in lingerie but the sort that is middle-aged and frumpy. I look at the clock; another minute ticks by. ‘Come on, come on, Kitty,’ I think to myself. ‘You know this stuff, you’ve lived in London nearly thirty years.’

  ‘Um?’ I look at him hopelessly.

  ‘Travel card,’ he tells me with kind authority, and I thrust one of Fergus’s notes at him hoping it will be enough, scooping up the change and the ticket and racing on to the platform just in time to make the foot-high leap on to the train before the doors close and it pulls out of the station.

  I find a window seat and breathe, grateful that this off-peak train is almost empty except for some tracksuit-bottomed lads who are making their daily pilgrimage to Hemel Hempstead, Mecca of the terminally highlighted, in order to walk up and down the high street all day.

  As the last remnants of Berkhamsted slide out of view I feel a moment’s panic about leaving Ella and force myself not to phone and see how she is, because I know that if I hear crying then I’ll be pulling the emergency cord and jogging across country to get back to her, and then Dora and Camille really will think I’ve gone insane. I sit back and let the rocking of the train calm my nerves. I’m shocked and a little guilty to find that once the train gathers speed I am excited; excited to be going home once again, to a place big enough that no one knows me, where I could feasibly head off down some turning and never come back again if I felt like it. Of course I’d never do that, but just to know I could is somehow freeing. I like the idea of belonging to no one, even if the reality of it scares me half to death. No, lunch with Dora and Camille is all the excitement I need right now, maybe more than, in fact.

  The thought of lunching with the ladies reminds me of my recently forgotten and now radically dishevelled personal appearance. In fact, since Ella I’ve been so involved in her that I’ve even forgotten I’ve got one.

  A quick inspection in my make-up mirror reveals facial mayhem, but I manage to fix it up pretty good with one of Ella’s baby wipes and I reapply as much mascara as I am able to between the rhythmic judders of the carriage. I brush my sweat-damp hair out and briefly toy with the idea of tucking my loose shirt in. I might have risked it, but when your two best friends are both a size ten there’s really not much point in kidding yourself. I sigh and anxiously wish that at some point in the last few months I had broken my rule about not shopping for new clothes until I’m thin again, and gone and bought something to wear that isn’t so last millennium, especially as all the signs suggest that I may never be as thin as I once was again and I wasn’t even thin when I was thin. Oh God, I don’t know what I’m talking about either.

  But I do know that I’ll have to show up to lunch with two of the capital’s most stylish (if in Dora’s case a little avant garde) occupants looking like the Michelin man in a voluminous red (red!) silk shirt that Fergus’s mother bought me after the birth. (‘Nice and roomy, dear.’) I run my fingers through my hair and tell myself that my friends won’t care what I look like, even though I know that even the best of girlfriends are always ever so slightly chuffed at outdoing their mates on the clothes front.

  Gradually the green-grey rush of the countryside loses out against the crowded graveyards and trackside factories that precede the grimy and ragged lace edge of the city as it unfurls its skirts in greeting. I press my face against the glass, waiting for the sign that says ‘Euston 1 Mile’, and resist the urge to kiss the glass as I finally come home again with a rush of relief. This is it, this is where I will feel like myself again. Where I can be me.

  Camille has offered to meet me at the station, and although I know everywhere north of the river like the back of my hand I’ve accepted her offer, grateful for her tactful acknowledgement of my general lack of practice with the world and, more importantly, other adults that aren’t my husband. I tap my foot impatiently as the train crawls the last few metres of the journey into the platform and wait at the door pressing the ‘Open’ button beside it long before the train finally comes to a halt. When I step off the train the last lingering fragments of any apprehension I had are sucked out of me by the vacuum of London air, thick with the carbon monoxide I have missed so badly.

  I practically run to the ticket gate. I would run, but as my body is now in a permanent state of exhaustion, a speedy and ungainly hobble is all that I can manage, pressing my forearm over my chest in an ill-fated attempt to stop my breasts wobbling and the catch on my nursing bra from coming undone. I feel it click open and I am forced to stick my hand inside my shirt and do it up as I walk along, looking as if I am giving myself a good fondle.

  Good as her word, Camille stands just beyond the ticket barrier dressed in a long jade-green shift dress, wearing a pair of low-heeled mules with silk flowers at the toes. As I take in her outfit, followed by her new weave, which is short, flicky and foxy, I begin to slow down. Even on my best shirt Ella has left a shadow of regurgitated milk and my sandals are thick black flat ones with a Velcro fastening that has curled up at the end. My jeans bite into my waist and my hair hasn’t been styled since the day I got married. I feel like Cinderella covered in ashes, only after the ever after bit.

  Camille spots me and furiously waves both arms. I marshal my smile and go to her, trying to remember that in real life I’m a happy and confident person, the hub of our little family trio.

  ‘Babe! Babe!’ she shouts eagerly and I find my practice smile melting into an expression of genuine pleasure.

  ‘Oh my God!’ she yells, flinging her arms around me. ‘You look fantastic! Are you sure you had a baby?’

  I laugh and hold her tight.

  ‘You are very sweet,’ I say. ‘But you are lying, I look like a dog. You on the other hand look amazing. Look at your hair!’ I turn her this way and that as she flutters her lashes for me and flicks her flicky bits. ‘My God, Alex must think he’s died and gone to heaven!’

  Camille bites her lip and looks a bit sheepish.

  ‘Well, there’s a bit of a story there. Come on, I’ll tell you all about it when we get to the restaurant.’

  Twenty minutes later we’re sitting at the open-fronted door of Cava, a little Spanish place in the City, near to where Dora works and not far from Fergus’s offices. I wonder about going to see him later and surprising him and I have to force myself not to picture him taking his secretary over the desk in between memos.

  Dora is late. Camille checks her watch and anxiously searches the passing crowd of super-thin straight-haired g
irls in tiny-waisted skirts, looking for our friend.

  ‘Don’t worry, Cam, I’ll spot her no trouble in this lot. She’ll be the one in the latex rubber catsuit,’ I grin, looking forward to seeing Dora’s latest incarnation.

  Camille raises an eyebrow.

  ‘I think you’ll be more shocked by her latest transformation than any of the previous ones,’ she says half to herself as she scans the crowd. ‘I offered to call for her, but she said no, she had to finish some stuff up before she left for lunch. I do trust her, you know that I do, but it’s just that, well, Dora pretty much defines flaky, doesn’t she? Who ever knows what Dora will do?’

  I nod. Neither of us wants to talk about her when she isn’t there, but both of us are thinking the same thing.

  I was just going into labour when Dora was going into intensive care. Although I knew nothing about it until a couple of days later, it seems that Dora was on the brink of exiting this world for ever just as Ella entered it, but Dora was lucky.

  It seems wrong to think of her as lucky, but in reality it was Dora’s ready access to the cash that got her into this trouble that saved her. If she had been your average addict mugging people for mobile phones or prostituting herself, the chances are she would have been dead or dying before she got into a rehabilitation programme. At least she had enough credit on her gold card to allow Camille to book her into a private unit called the Abbey, and the sheer trauma of the experience was mildly alleviated by a fleeting friendship with a model and soap actor. She was there for twelve weeks. In the last few months since she’d come back into the world I’d seen her only once, when she came to see Ella for the first time. Her blonde roots had shown an inch thick through her black hair dye and her natural slimness was painfully accentuated. Despite that, though, she’d seemed happy, and we had talked for the first time in months the way we used to. Dora and me against the world. It was Dora who taught me how to fight the inevitability of fate, and I was grateful and glad to see that once again she was engaged in that fight too.