After Ever After Read online

  Ella is now peacefully asleep and as I watch her head lolls back a little and the tiniest smile transforms her face. The Book would say it was wind, but fuck The Book, from now on I’m going to ignore it.

  I had never guessed that Mr Crawley was a widower. I have taken to confiding in him without a thought, but I have never once asked him about his own life. Since Ella, my own life, as small as it was, has expanded in my eyes until it has obliterated the whole of the world and everything in it. I’ve lost sight of everything but the way I’ve been feeling, or rather haven’t been feeling.

  ‘She is trying, you know,’ Fergus says after closing the front door on Mr Crawley. He sits on the arm of the chair and strokes Ella’s sweaty hair with the back of his finger. ‘She finds it hard, she’s a seventies mum. All this … you know, actually showing affection to your kids, it’s a bit alien to her. But she does care.’

  I avoid his eye, concentrating instead on Ella’s sweetly rounded face, now relaxed into sleep, and I gently rise from the chair.

  ‘Well, she might care, but there is no way I’m leaving my baby with her again. No way.’ I take Ella up to her nursery leaving a silent and crestfallen Fergus behind.

  Chapter Five

  Mum and I are washing up. I’m standing on the little wooden stool Dad made for me with my hands in the warm soapy water, smoothing the bubbles up my arms, pretending it’s bubble bath, or Imperial Leather like in the adverts. The sun bounces off the gleaming taps. Mum stands behind me, reaching round me for the plates and cups, rinsing them through and placing them on the draining board. Every now and then she plants a kiss on the top of my head and then she flicks a little puff of bubbles on to my nose. I giggle and splash water over my shoulder at her. We both laugh and I feel her hands lift me off the chair and begin to spin me around and around and around. At first the bubbles on my fingertips shimmer in the sunlight like snow, flying off as we gather momentum, like clouds now, like clouds and we’re flying. Then all at once the sky becomes black and all the joy has turned to terror. The bubbles have gone and so has Mum and I’m just spinning, faster and faster, and I can’t stop and there’s something there waiting for me to stop. And it’s blood now, blood flowing from my fingertips, and I can’t find my mum and I shout, ‘Mum!’

  ‘Jesus, darling, Kitty?’

  I blink in the darkness, feeling my own senses rushing back into reality. I’m breathless, my heart hammering in my chest, my face wet with tears.

  ‘Oh Fergus!’ I say with a whimper and I plunge into his embrace, burying my head in his chest, sobbing. After a while the darkness of the room recedes a little, lightened by the faintly orange glow of the streetlights and the night light in Ella’s room.

  I sit up, pushing my hair roughly back from my face.

  ‘Sorry, I’m sorry. I’m all right now. Let’s go back to sleep.’

  Fergus pulls me down to lie beside him.

  ‘Dream about your mum again?’ he asks softly, taking my face in his hands as he wipes away real tears with the balls of his thumbs. I nod mutely and look into the soft shadows.

  ‘Darling,’ Fergus says quietly. ‘What was it this time, do you think? Overtiredness?’ He strokes my face with the back of his hand and kisses my neck. I know he is trying to be kind, but this isn’t how I want kind to be.

  ‘So, what was it, do you think?’ he repeats, with an encouraging smile. ‘Cheese?’

  ‘No, Fergus, I don’t think it was cheese.’ I say quietly. I want to say, ‘I think it’s the traumatic circumstances of losing your mother when you’re a very small girl, of finding your mother dying, not cheese, you insensitive idiot.’ But I don’t because it would hurt Fergus to think he is being any less than thoughtful, and because I know he’s trying to make light of it all – he thinks he can chase away the shadows that way. So instead I tell him another reason, but it’s still true.

  ‘I think … I think it’s because now I have Ella, now I have her and I love her so much, I know just how really awful it must have been for Mum to know … that she was going to leave me and that there wasn’t a thing that could be done about it. Knowing – the knowing must have been the worst.’ I turn my back on Fergus and he hugs me into the curve of his body, his arm resting lightly on my breasts.

  ‘Maybe she didn’t know so much,’ he says gently, his fingers finding their way under my pyjamas. ‘Maybe it was over too quickly for her to know.’

  ‘No, she knew. She knew,’ I say, for a moment picturing the end and then chasing the image out of my head as quickly as it has appeared. I feel Fergus’s stubble graze the back of my neck, making me shudder.

  ‘Well, don’t think about it now,’ he whispers. ‘Let me help you feel better.’

  I turn in his arms and smile against his cheek.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling, I’m just so tired. I really need to go back to sleep, is that okay?’ I can’t hear him sigh but I know that he does. I turn away from him once again and close my eyes, concentrating on regulating my breathing, but it’s a long time before I sleep.

  Fergus has left without waking me, the spring sunlight is streaming through the curtains and Ella is not crying. Ella is not crying.

  ‘Oh my God,’ I say out loud. Dragging back the bedclothes I rush into her nursery. In the split second it takes for me to get there I picture her white and still. Picture her dead. She’s not, of course, she’s lying in her cot playing with her toes, and when she sees me she laughs. I pick her out of her cot and hug her close to me until she struggles to be free.

  ‘I can’t believe that you slept all night!’ I tell her. ‘It’s over. The long months of sleepless torment are over. I can tell people my baby sleeps through the night!’ I dance around the nursery making Ella shriek with laughter, hoping that the last uneasy remnants of last night will evaporate in the sun.

  Determined to feel energised and optimistic, I decide that today I’m going to make a start on my garden. The sky is blue, the caprice of April is giving way to the sporadic warmth of May and I’m going to weed. After we’d moved in, and during the seemingly endless last months of my pregnancy, I had nothing to do but avoid tradesmen, eat too much and stare at the garden. I’d looked at the long, yellowed and weedy grass and the overgrown trees and I’d dreamt of a place for my baby and me. In the absence of any other purpose I’d imagined a long summer where I floated about in a white dress and planted a herb garden as my baby gurgled and giggled under the shade of a tree. Of course, since Ella has been born I’ve been too tired to even open the door to the back garden – the moment I put her down she screams like a banshee, and a white dress? With my hips, I don’t think so; but I’ve clung on to the dream, and today is the first day I have the time and the energy to do anything about it. I get The Other Book, Alan’s book, the one that I’ve been reading religiously, one laborious paragraph/fifteen-minute baby power nap at a time, and bound down the stairs. Then I bound back up again to get Ella’s monitor and bound back down.

  ‘Morning.’ Mr Crawley walks in through the back door. ‘How’s that baby? Any more teething trouble?’

  I smile at him, resisting the urge to hug him with joy.

  ‘Not so far, and guess what?’

  He lowers his chin and smiles at me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She slept through the night!’ I omit the fact that I didn’t, and smile brightly. ‘Maybe this is it, maybe she’ll start to sleep though from now on and I’ll never be tired again!’ I whirl around, laughing. ‘God, I sound like a sleep-deprived Scarlett O’Hara.’

  Mr Crawley takes his smoked salmon baguette out of his bag and puts it in the fridge.

  ‘Well, I’m pleased for you, but in my experience it’s not usually so easy …’

  I shrug off his experience and ignore it.

  ‘Yeah, well, according to Scary Poppins, if I haven’t got her sleep-trained by three months she’ll be holding up banks and walking the streets selling her body for drugs by the time she’s eighteen, so frankly, who cares?’
I open the miscellaneous stuff cupboard and take out my first ever piece of gardening equipment, my only piece of gardening equipment actually, but I’m sure they’ll come in handy.

  ‘Well, watch your fingers with those.’ Mr Crawley raises one eyebrow as Tim joins us fifteen minutes later.

  ‘Come along, young man, we’ve got a bathroom to grout today,’ he says, his only admonishment a slightly hurt and letdown tone. Tim’s cheeks pinken and he gives me an apologetic shrug as they disappear upstairs.

  I have my pristine and unused long-armed shears in my hand when the front doorbell sounds. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with them, but I wholly resent the intrusion on what was to be my cathartic attack on the overgrown garden. I pause for a second and look longingly at the back door before I turn to answer it, sighing huffily as I go. When I open it a scruffy young man in green overalls greets me. It occurs to me that I am still a young woman too, technically at least, and I make a mental note never to refer to anyone the same age as me as ‘young’ ever again.

  ‘Mrs Kelly?’ he asks. He’s Welsh.

  ‘Yes?’ He’s obviously some kind of workman but I can’t work out which kind. All of the relevant ones are in the house right now and we won’t need a decorator for ages yet.

  ‘Ah good, I’m Gareth Jerome, Jerome’s Gorgeous Gardens?’ He rolls the ‘r’ in gorgeous and looks as if he expects me to let him in.

  ‘I’m sorry, am I expecting you?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh yes. Mr Kelly booked me a couple of months ago to start on your garden, we agreed I’d get going as soon as the weather picked up. There’s a lot of clearing to do, is that right? Of course, I should have started planting months ago but it’s not too late yet, you’ll still have a really beautiful garden come the summer.’ He smiles with obvious pleasure at the thought and I look him up and down and seethe. Damn bloody Fergus, he promised me that the garden would be all mine! I shake my head. The last thing I need is a cuckoo unbalancing my already precariously placed nest.

  ‘Look Mr … Jerome? There’s been a misunderstanding. We don’t need a gardener. I’m doing the garden and …’ The phone begins to ring and I know exactly who it is. And I would have anyway, even if there were more than one person in the whole world who ever phones me these days.

  ‘Will you excuse me for one moment,’ I tell him and go to pick it up.

  ‘Well?’ I ask in lieu of saying hello.

  ‘Ah, he’s arrived, I see. Thought he might do, what with it being sunny and all. You see, the thing is …’ Fergus does his usual trick of riding roughshod over my evident anger and displeasure in the hope that his amiable charm will evaporate my mood. It infuriates me, and worse still it diminishes all of my concerns to nothing but girlish foolishness, as if nothing I think or feel is to be taken seriously.

  ‘Fergus, you promised! Don’t you remember the conversation? You said moving out of London would be the best thing for all of us and I said okay as long as I get the garden to myself? Remember? The garden is mine! I’ve got plans and everything!’ I pick up my piece of grid paper that I have lovingly filled with my designs under the detailed instruction of Alan and wave it at the receiver as proof. Gareth Jerome shuffles his feet awkwardly on the doorstep and turns his back on me to gather his long reddish brown hair into a ponytail. I glare at him. I mean, who has long hair these days? Does he think it’s the eighties?

  ‘Darling.’ Fergus’s tone is conciliatory but not remotely cowed. ‘I know what we agreed, but I just thought there is so much crap out there – it’s so overgrown and all that – I just thought that maybe he could help with the clearing of it all and leave you to do the fun bit. I mean, if you just start to clear in the few moments that Ella is asleep you’ll never get anywhere will you? Will you? Look how long it’s taken you to get to chapter three in your gardening book – nearly six months!’

  I sulk silently for a few moments, belligerently resisting the logic of his argument.

  ‘You could have discussed it with me,’ I mumble.

  ‘I meant to, but you know how busy I’ve been. Dad recommended him, sorted it out for me and then I meant to tell you, but something happened and it just went out of my head until the sun came out today and I suddenly thought, “Oh shit, I’m for the high jump.”’

  I smile but try to keep it out of my voice.

  ‘Can we afford a gardener?’ I feel it’s my duty to mention cash, although it never seems to bother Fergus and since I quit my job I have had nothing to do with it.

  ‘Yes, we can afford a gardener,’ Fergus says deliberately.

  I sigh and look at the lanky figure of Gareth Jerome. He doesn’t look like he could prune a hedge let alone get through the jungle of overgrown thicket out the back. Maybe he’s wiry.

  ‘Okay, but when it’s cleared he goes and I’m in charge, agreed?’ I raise my voice for Gareth Jerome’s benefit.

  ‘Agreed. You know that I love you, don’t you?’

  The inevitable smile rushes into my voice, along with a brief reprise of that feeling that sometimes seems as distant in miles as Fergus is these days.

  ‘Yes, I love you too. I’ll see you later.’

  He always manages to convince me out loud that he is right, even if my heart is convinced that he is wrong.

  Goodbyes said, I return to Gareth Jerome. Of course I know I shouldn’t be suspicious of all Welsh people just because the last boyfriend I had before Fergus was Welsh and possibly the most low-life, double-dealing, two-timing, evil-minded, manipulating man I have ever met, but logic doesn’t often come into it when you’re dealing with an ex-hangover, and I remember once going out of my way home for weeks to avoid a shop called ‘Anne’s Antiques’ just because Anne was the name of the man I loved’s new girlfriend, so really, being slightly resentful and mistrustful of this stranger is me being fairly well adjusted in my book. It’s the very same lilt in his voice that used to send me bananas with Trevor that puts me right on edge now.

  ‘Did you get that?’

  He sighs and nods, looking disappointed, and, tipping his head to one side, watches me with a relaxed scrutiny. With his long straight hair and earthiness, he’s somehow faintly medieval, slightly wolfish.

  ‘Not really what I do, manual labour, being a fully qualified landscape gardener, but I suppose as I’ve not got too much on at the moment, what with the business being new and all …’

  I shrug and let him in. He makes his way to the kitchen and looks down the length of the garden and then gives me the same assessment, making me wish for once that I’d washed my hair and put on a top that was not resplendent with baby sick; he has amber-coloured eyes.

  ‘You really need a tree surgeon for that,’ he says, nodding at a sprawling cherry tree. ‘But I guess I can do it. Yeah, it’s got potential, that’s for sure …’ He sighs again, wistfully, and I clutch my grid paper to my chest protectively.

  ‘I’ll get my stuff and get stuck in.’

  Mr Crawley, who has come down for one of the mini-bottles of Evian that he keeps in the fridge, sees Gareth Jerome, opens his mouth and then closes it again.

  ‘Do you know each other?’ I ask, and Gareth Jerome holds out his hand to Mr Crawley, nodding.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Heard of you, obviously,’ he tells Mr Crawley, who returns the greeting with an oddly grim smile.

  ‘All right?’ Gareth Jerome asks him.

  ‘I’m very well, thank you,’ Mr Crawley says, and then he turns on his heel and exits the kitchen without another word.

  Gareth Jerome begins to bring through his tools, and, suddenly robbed of my purpose, I carefully fold my garden plan back into page seventy-three of The Garden Book and turn to the European laundry mountain which erupted suddenly shortly after Ella’s birth and which has never seemed to diminish since.

  My spirits plummet to the tips of my toes and I reach for the iron.

  I iron one of Fergus’s shirts, which I think is reasonable considering that in my adult life, which began at the age
of sixteen when I’d finally felt I could leave Dad to it, I had sworn to never, never iron again. I had promised myself daily during all the years betweens Mum’s death and the day I got a residential place to gain a B. Tech in business studies at college that as soon as my life was my own I’d never touch a domestic appliance again.

  Dad liked everything done around the flat the way Mum had done it. No, that’s too mild. He wanted – demanded – that everything around the flat should be exactly the same as when she was alive, everything. And I loved him and I wanted everything to be exactly the same too, as if keeping laundry day on a Monday and fish day on a Friday would somehow recreate my mum out of the empty spaces left by her absence. So I tried at first to help him voluntarily, and everyone said how good I was, a proper little lady looking after my dad, and I was proud of that. But then seven turned into ten, and by the time I was eleven I dreaded going home from school, dreaded letting myself into the long list of chores that Dad would have left out for me. The long list of tasks that I had to have finished before he got home from work. Iron Monday’s washing on a Tuesday; dust and vacuum on a Wednesday; clean the bath and loo on a Thursday; and every weekend to do the shopping and change the bedclothes, ready for the laundry on Monday. I tried telling him once that Mum never changed the bedclothes every week but every other week. He was furious, accused me of calling my mother a slut and sent me to bed crying my eyes out. After that, every night, straight after our tea, I’d wash up the pots and pans and go straight to bed to read one of my books to escape to any place but that place. It was around about that time he stopped kissing me goodnight.

  Then, as I grew older, the battle of wills began, the arguments and accusations. I was ungrateful and selfish, he was domineering and lazy. We co-existed, furious with each other twenty-four hours a day for each one of my early teenage years. Even that, though, was better than the last few months I’d lived with him.