The Reading Group Part 25

'And I love you.'

Polly and Cressida It was a real Indian summer, hotter than it had been in July, the kind of hot where heat shimmers on the roads, like it does in American films, and the air is still and thick. Like it was in Eden Close. Spencer was lying on a blanket under a tree, nappy off, his little vest pulled up. His legs were moving continuously, like he was pedalling a bicycle, and his arms were spread wide, as if he was trying to embrace the sky. The branches kept the glare out of his eyes and the searing heat off his skin, but he was still doing a static dance of sun worship, warm, contented and panting a little.

Polly had forgotten how much she loved it here. The cottage had belonged to Dan's parents she hadn't been to it since she and Dan had split up. She remembered arriving late on countless Friday nights after battling the traffic out of London, with fractious children and a car full of gear and food, as though there weren't any shops in Norfolk, Dan said. She'd always felt better almost the second she'd got out and stretched her travel-weary limbs, breathing in the salt sea air. Daniel had been conceived on one of those Friday nights, she was sure of it. Cressida had fallen asleep on the last hour of the journey and they had laid her straight in her bed, watched her uncurl from her car-seat foetal slumber and stretch out under the pink-and-white duvet, then taken a bottle of wine into the garden, where the gra.s.s still held the warmth of the day. They had made love under the tree where Spencer was lying now, listening to the sea, keeping time with the waves. She'd almost forgotten.

Dan had reminded her about the cottage, said she ought to take Cressida up there for a few days, if she wanted to; he would have Daniel. She hadn't been all wrong to love him like she had it was easy to forget that.

The cottage hadn't changed. Even the furniture was the same as it had always been, sofas stained now by years of salty, lotioned legs curled up on them, and beds saggy and inviting, like lying in a cloud. When they had arrived yesterday Cressida had been like a child again. She hadn't been there since she was very young, but she greeted the village and the house like long-lost jewels, making Polly stop the car on the little lane leading up to the house so she could collect samphire for them to steam, begging Polly to pick up some crab meat for lunch. She'd let Polly take Spencer in the sling when they'd walked down to the sea, and she'd run up the shingle bank, feet slapping outwards as the pebbles gave way beneath her, just like she had as a child.

This was the right place to talk to her.

Polly was nervous, and she didn't like that you shouldn't feel anxious about talking to your child. She was taking a while to adjust to Cressida's new status: her child still, but also Spencer's mother. She was no longer a person for whom Polly was responsible, she was a mother just as Polly had been. Young. Scared. But not just the same not if she would listen to Polly, let Polly do this for her.

She went into the dark cool of the kitchen and poured two tall gla.s.ses of water; then went back outside to where Cressida was sitting in an old deck-chair, half an eye on a book, the other, more attentively, on Spencer.

'I want to talk to you, Cress.' She sat down on the gra.s.s between her daughter and her grandson, then shuffled around so that she wasn't between them.

'What is it?' Cressida had been in the garden a great deal since July, and she was a beautiful golden colour. She looked very pretty, and ridiculously young again, without the b.u.mp of Spencer and the circles of late-pregnancy tiredness.

'It's about Spencer. And you. And me. Mostly about you.'

Cressida looked a little alarmed, so Polly took a deep breath, and just said it. 'I want you to have chances I didn't have, Cress. That's why I wasn't sure, at first, that you should have Spencer.' That idea felt almost evil, now, as she watched him doing his newborn ballet beside them. 'And I was wrong about that, very wrong. I love him too, and I'm so glad he's here. But the mother in me still wants you to have all those chances. I want the world to be your oyster, just like every parent does, and, as I know better than most, they won't come along in the same way unless you get your degree, get the right start in your career.'

'I know that, Mum.' Cressida's tone was patient. 'I'm going to go back to college. I've said that all along, haven't I?'

'You've said you'll go back to something, but it won't be what your first choice was it won't be what you really wanted.'

'Past tense. He's what I really wanted really want. He's arrived, and he's become my first choice, hasn't he? The rest of my life will have to fit in around him, just like it does for everyone else.'

Polly shook her head. It gave her a sharp ache between the shoulder-blades to hear Cressida talk that way part pride, part despair, that her daughter should have resigned herself so calmly and seemingly happily. 'Not if you let me look after him while you go to university.'

Cressida was quiet for a long time. Spencer gave baby sighs.

'I've thought about it a huge amount since the spring, I promise you it's not just some whim. I'm not trying to control things. I can have him, he can live with me, while you go to university. He'll be your son, he'll just live with me. You'll come home in the holidays, look after him then, weekends if you want. But mostly you'll be free to get on with your degree, have some fun, think clearly about what you want to do with your life.'

She didn't know if Cressida would be angry with her. She made herself keep looking at her daughter.

When Cressida finally spoke she said, 'Don't be daft, Mum. You've got Daniel. You've got a job. You've got Jack, if you two sort out whatever this nonsense between you is.'

Polly watched realisation dawn on her daughter's face.

'I'm the thing between you, aren't I? You've told him, and he can't handle it.' Panicky tears sprang into Cressida's eyes. She slid out of the deck-chair to sit beside her mother, took Polly's hands. 'Oh, Mum, you can't break up with Jack because of me. You can't. He's going to make you happy.'

'Not if he can't understand what I need to do.'

'But you don't need to do it.'

'I do, Cressida. This isn't about Jack. I can stand losing Jack.' Could she? 'But I can't stand watching your life go wrong. That, I know I can't stand. Think about him.' She gestured at Spencer. 'I know he's a baby, but think further down the line. Think about him when he's your age. Think about him like I think about you. I look at you and can't believe I was a part of making something that has turned out to be so unbelievably wonderful as you are, so beautiful, and so smart, and so energetic, and so pa.s.sionate and so warm. Look at him. Already you know you'd die for him, don't you? You know.' Cressida was looking at him. The tears were running unchecked down her cheeks. She was nodding. Polly put her hands on each of Cressida's shoulders. 'So now you understand how I feel about you.' She was crying too.

Polly remembered the day Cressida had started her first period, when she was thirteen. She'd been imperious, fiercely embarra.s.sed, private and irritable, and Polly had backed off. That night she'd found her in the bathroom, crying because she'd got blood on the towel and the bathmat and she had climbed, naked, on to her mum's lap and sobbed. All the 'grown-up' had gone out of her then, and it had now. Polly rocked her gently.

'I can't leave him behind, can I?' It was a question.

Polly felt some of the tension seep out of her muscles. She was getting somewhere. 'Yes, you can. You're not leaving him. You're lending him to me for a while. That's all.'

Later, Polly stood at the back door finishing a gla.s.s of wine. She felt almost excited. It was one of those days when you go to bed in a different life from the one you woke up in. They had talked for hours, and Cressida had brightened gradually, thinking of the possibilities for something she had believed was lost to her for ever. She was almost girlish again by supper-time, and Polly had felt a great weight lifting, one she had been carrying since March. They could make it work. They would make it work.

She locked the back door, and went up the narrow stairs, switching off the lights as she went.

Cressida was in bed, with the lamp still on, lying facing her baby, with one hand stretched out as if to touch him. Spencer was asleep beside her in his carrycot, both arms above his head in surrender to sunshine and formula-milk drunkenness. Polly bent over them to turn off the light, and Cressida opened her eyes. They looked at each other, mother and daughter, for a long moment, smiling in silent complicity and love, before Polly switched them into darkness.

Elliot Cressida had caught the sun in Norfolk. Her face was golden, and there were freckles across her cheeks and nose. Her eyes sparkled bluer in the bright sunshine, and her curls were touched with gold. She was beautiful. He wanted to push her white shirt down over her shoulders to see where the brown met the white skin, and to smell the sun and her together.

They were in the park near her house. Spencer had been asleep in his pram, but he had woken now. They stopped at a bench and Elliot sat down. Cressida picked up the baby and gave him to his father. He was wearing a white sun-hat, too big for his tiny, downy head, and Elliot pushed it up so that he could see his face. Spencer's eyes locked on to him straight away, in the shade.

Cressida came to him, and he put his arm round her shoulders. They sat that way for a few minutes without speaking. Elliot leant back and tried to imagine that this was it, that the three of them would be here, like this, for always. That people were walking past them, looking at them, touched by the family tableau, that middle-aged couples might take each other's hands in memory. But he already knew that they wouldn't be here, like this, for always. And the sun, as though it were intent on lighting that truth, burned at his eyelids. He pulled away first, so that she could speak, tell him what she needed to. Spencer stretched, and closed his eyes. But Elliot couldn't put him down. He needed to hold him.

'I'm going away.'

He was concentrating on his baby's face. He didn't move, but his heart was pounding.

She hated this. Hated saying this to him.

'I'm going to college. I'm not taking Spencer.'

Elliot couldn't digest the last part. What did she mean? Something like hope flooded his lungs.

'Mum's going to look after him for me while I study. When I've got myself sorted out, afterwards, he'll come and live with me, wherever that is. But I'm not going to take him with me to college. I'll come back and see him at weekends, and of course I'll be with him holidays and stuff, but I'll be away, studying, the rest of the time, term-time.'

Still he didn't speak.

'It was Mum's idea. I said no at first, but the more we talked about it, the more sense it made. She's taking a sabbatical from the law firm, and then he'll go to a creche. There's a really good one near her office. Mum's sorted it all out, all the benefit and stuff, and it's going to be fine, Elliot. I love him more than I ever thought or understood, and I'll miss him, horribly, but I'm going to be able to be a better mum for him, give him a better, happier life, this way. I'm not talking about money and stuff, I'm talking about being happy myself, and fulfilled. I know that sounds selfish, maybe, to you, but I think it's the right decision. I just think I'm so unbelievably lucky that Mum wants to do this for me.

'Say something, Elliot? Please?'

'I don't figure at all, do I?' His voice was hollow.

'Of course you do,' Cressida put her hand on his arm. 'You're Spencer's dad. Mum knows that as well as me. She wants you to see him, and spend time with him, and you'll be able to do that, won't you, much more easily here than if I'd gone away and taken him with me?' Her tone was imploring.

'I don't mean with Spencer. I mean I don't figure with you in your plans.' How could Cressida ignore what he meant? She knew what he wanted, what he hoped for. She couldn't just pretend it had gone away.

She took back her hand, and sighed. 'Elliot, it's not right, you and me. I know you think that's what you want but it's not right.'

'How do you know that? You haven't tried.'

'I know it isn't something that you can try or not try. It's something you have to feel.'

'You loved me.'

'I loved you, yes. Of course I loved you. No past tense. I love you. I know you love me. But there are shades of love, Elliot. I shouldn't be telling you about them. You're the older one. You know what I mean. You love the idea of me, that's what.'

He turned to her, almost angry. 'Don't say that. I don't love the idea of you. I love the look of you and the smell of you and the sound of you and the feel of you. I love how you fit on my chest when we hold each other, and I love how you pull those curls on your forehead when you're thinking. I love the way you can't make a decent cup of tea. That isn't ideas. That's real.'

She shook her head. 'You needed me. Need isn't love either. You needed to see that there was a life beyond your life with Clare. You needed to be cared for. I came along and showed you all that. You know it now.'

'Why don't you stop trying to tell me that I don't love you, and tell me that you don't love me? That's what this is about. If it was up to me we'd be together. We'd be married and we'd be a family, the three of us. So this is about you, what you want, and who you don't want. Not me.'

'Okay, I don't want this.'

She couldn't have hurt him more if she had stabbed him in the neck with the broken bottle that lay by the bench. He wanted to run away. But he was still holding Spencer. And then her hand was back, across his, small and warm. 'I don't want us to do this because of him. I don't want the only adult relationship I have to be one that started on the back of the wrong reasons, with deceit, lying, sneaking around, and someone else destroyed by it. I do love you. You're the father of my baby. That can't change, can it? And I don't think he could have a better one. We'll always have him between us. But now is not the time for us. Elliot. I know I'm right.'

'Don't do that. Don't give me hope. Don't ask me to wait for you.'

'I'm not asking that. I'm saying that we're always going to be connected, and I'm saying that life is odd. That's all.'

Elliot stood up, put Spencer back into his pram and covered his legs with the sheet. He watched him for a moment, and laid one hand on his cheek, gently. Then he stepped back.

He couldn't argue: he knew she was right however much he wished it was different, and he couldn't remember ever wanting anything to be different so much as he did this. But that wasn't true: he'd wanted things to be different with Clare, for him and Clare. Every time it had happened he had wanted it to be different. Suddenly he felt overwhelmed with sadness. Nothing had ever gone right, not with Clare and not with Cressida. Except for Spencer. But he couldn't think about him right now. He couldn't think at all. He wanted to be gone. He stepped a few paces further back, away from Cressida.

'Elliot?' She sat forward on the bench.

'I can't be here. I'm sorry.' He turned, and broke into a run. He ran awkwardly, too fast, until he was a long way from them. Then he collapsed against a tree, and sank down to rest on the gra.s.s beneath it, his breath coming in great rasps, and tears falling unchecked. A young mother who was walking her Labrador and her child picked up the little girl's Tweenies scooter and carried it fast past him, the child's hand held tightly in her own.

September.

Reading Group.

An Instance of the Fingerpost.

IAIN PEARS 1997.

Set in Oxford in the 1660s a time and place of great intellectual, scientific, religious and political ferment this remarkable novel centres around a young woman, Sarah Blundy, who stands accused of the murder of Robert Grove, a fellow of New College. Four witnesses describe the events surrounding his death: Marco da Cola, a Venetian Catholic intent on claiming credit for the invention of blood transfusion; Jack Prescott, the son of a supposed traitor to the Royalist cause, determined to vindicate his father; John Wallis, chief cryptographer to both Cromwell and Charles II, a mathematician, theologian and inveterate plotter; and Anthony Wood, the famous Oxford antiquary. Each one tells their version of what happened but only one reveals the extraordinary truth. Brilliantly written, utterly convincing, gripping from the first page to the last, An Instance of the Fingerpost is a magnificent tour de force.

They didn't meet for the reading group that month. Who could concentrate? Instead they had coffee together in Starbucks early one Sat.u.r.day morning. They were tired and washed-out and a bit like Omaha Beach survivors regrouping after the landings.

'Hey, Granny!' Harriet hugged Polly. 'Missed you last month. Hope you've brought photographs.'

Polly nodded. 'Which you may only see on condition that you never, never call me Granny in public again.'

'Okay, Nana get them out.'

'You okay?' Polly knew there weren't any words for what Harriet had been through.

'We are now. Thanks.' They hugged again.

The others were already sitting down, steaming mugs in front of them.

Nicole didn't think any of them had read the book. Her choice. An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears.

Harriet had only bought it the week before Josh's accident. Oh, deep joy, she had thought ironically. All my favourite ingredients history, religion, politics, science it's written by a man, and all in a compact and manageable 698 pages. She had wondered whether Nicole had chosen it on purpose to annoy her, although it was exactly the kind of book she would have expected Nicole to love. The morning Josh had fallen off the roof she had read the first chapter for the second time, and thrown it impatiently on to the sofa, convinced she understood less on second reading than she had on first. Nicole had joked with her that she had timed Josh's accident to coincide with the reading-club meeting so that she could get out of reading something she didn't fancy. It was okay to joke about it now that Josh was all right. The sheer relief made everything funny the stories about her mattress on the floor in the high-dependency unit, the canteen's dreadful food, and the endless one-sided conversations about a.r.s.enal. She would rather have been reading Iain Pears, with its complicated plot and layered retelling, than to have been reading Harry Potter, with all the imagination and enthusiasm she could muster, to a non-reactive boy. It had all turned into a chapter in Harriet's family legend, her maternal stand-up repertoire, to be told over the years in exactly the same way, like all the stories that had gone before, which she told to Josh and Chloe, the ones that started, 'It was a sunny morning in May when I knew you were ready to be born', and 'We didn't even know that the first tooth had come through until you bit me when I was feeding you a fromage frais', and 'On your first day at school you told the teacher you wanted to be a dinosaur doctor when you grew up.' This one started, 'The day Josh fell off the roof...' and she hoped, every time she told it, that it was the scariest one there would ever be.

She told her friends all about it. Nicole interjected more than once 'When I got there, they were just there, on the floor, and the other kids were crying in the doorway.' Now she was saying 'Tim was brilliant.'

'He was.' Harriet knew she couldn't have got through it without him. From the moment he arrived, he had taken charge: calm, slow and sure, although his eyes had filled with tears when he had first seen Josh, tiny in the vast white bed. Each morning he had brought her coffee, strong and frothy from the coffee-house outside the hospital, not the watery stuff from the canteen, and an apple Danish (she hated raisins, he never forgot). He brought her favourite magazines, the gossipy photographic ones he hated, and he remembered that she needed her eyelash curlers just to feel human. And he sat with Josh every moment he could, talking to him, about things they'd done that summer, things they were going to do when he was better. He couldn't have been more perfect. Just like always.

'He was fantastic. I couldn't have done it without him.'

She drew a line under the conversation about Josh with her tone. She didn't want to keep talking about how fabulous Tim had been. Nicole was looking at her curiously. Since the Gavin thing in Spain had happened, and then the accident, she had been even more incredulous about Harriet's ambivalence towards her husband. The worse Gavin was, the better Tim looked. Harriet thought that was what it was. It made her a bit uncomfortable. The marriages were distinct, even if the friendships were sometimes blurred, like they had been these last few weeks.

She turned to Susan. 'How did the funeral go?'

'It was okay. Quite a few people turned up in the end, which helped. It's a relief to have it behind me. I've still got the house to sort out, but Margaret, my sister, is going to help me with that.'

Polly snorted. The others looked at her. 'Margaret has... let's say issues.'

'What do you mean?' Nicole asked.

'She must be more traumatised about Mum's dying than I thought she would be. She's been incredibly upset ever since.'

'And she's taking it out on you!' Polly loved Susan for her reasonableness, and her gentleness, but she couldn't sit there and let Susan defend Margaret's behaviour on the grounds of trauma. b.o.l.l.o.c.ks to that! Margaret was a monster, as far as she was concerned, and didn't deserve anything approaching pity from Susan, who had shouldered the entire burden of Alice's care.

Susan didn't try to defend her any further. She grimaced. 'Yes, she pretty much is. Still, the cottage is full of paperwork, about G.o.d knows what Mum was a real h.o.a.rder so two more hands, albeit attached to a moody, sarcastic sibling, are better than none.'

'Can we help?' Harriet asked.

'G.o.d, no! You're all busy enough as it is. No, we'll be fine. Roger's around to lend a bit of muscle. Polly said she'd put in a weekend, didn't you, to sort her clothes out?' Polly nodded. 'And there really isn't any point in being sentimental. It's just "stuff", most of it. What's worth selling we'll sell, what's worth giving away we'll give away. The furniture will go to a house-clearer. It's Mum's paperwork that'll take the time. She's the sort who will have kept her cheque stubs going back thirty years, that kind of thing. That generation were all a bit like that, I think. Something to do with the deprivation in the war. But you've got to go through the whole lot, haven't you, to make sure you don't miss anything?'

'Like details of her Swiss bank account?' Harriet smiled.

'No such luck. I was thinking about insurance policies, letters of wishes, that kind of thing.'

'It's horrid, isn't it?' Nicole said, remembering her father's death a few years before. He'd left everything in perfect order. There had been a file in the deep drawer on the left-hand side of his desk marked 'on my death' in his green ink. It had told her mother everything she had to do, financial, practical. He'd even chosen his funeral hymns. Nicole wouldn't have been surprised if there'd been diagrams included: 'changing a fuse'; 'attaching the brush extension to the hose'. She remembered her mother sitting in an armchair with the folder open on her lap, crying, 'He loved me,' as if she hadn't realised until she saw it.

'It is.' Susan shrugged off the idea. She didn't want to think about it. 'Come on, let's talk about something more cheerful, if we're not going to talk about the book. Nicole?'

'Well... I'm not sure it's exactly cheerful.' She took a deep breath. Harriet knew of course, but she hadn't told anyone else before today. She felt almost shy. 'But I've thrown Gavin out.'

'G.o.d, I'm sorry.' Susan wished she hadn't asked.