A Most Desirable Marriage Read online

  ‘It’s confusing. Can’t you just have two bins? Biodegradable and non-biodegradable?’ Jo asked.

  Matt’s look was careful, clearly controlled. ‘It’s not that simple. Have you seen the inside of a recycling plant?’

  She confessed she hadn’t. ‘But honestly, does any of all this have an impact on Global Warming? Are you really saving the planet by putting the teabag in the compost and not in the bin?’

  ‘I think we’ve had this conversation before, Joanna. I’ve told you why I do it,’ Matt said, a trifle pompously. He was a small man, shorter by a couple of inches than Cassie, and wiry, lean, his dark hair floppy and long, his complexion permanently weathered. But his potential good looks – she reminded him of Neil Oliver, the Scottish historian – were marred, in Jo’s opinion, by the almost fanatical light in his grey eyes, which seemed to bore into her, monitor her actions, find fault. He had been a banker in his previous life, a successful one by all accounts, and the single-minded, relentless pursuit of profits had now transferred itself to his current alarming eco-fervour.

  ‘Look, I’m the first one to hate waste, I get why you want to recycle as much as possible; your dedication is commendable. But I don’t see why you have to be so obsessed about it. Never buying anything, not having a TV, no car . . . not even a fridge.’

  Fridges consumed more energy than any other household appliance according to Matt. So they kept milk and butter in a lidded bucket in the stream when the weather was hot, the rest in a larder built on the back of the house with cool, slate shelves. ‘It just seems spartan . . . punishing. And it takes up so much time.’ Jo could tell her daughter had become tense, but she pushed on. ‘Or do you really enjoy it?’

  Jo realized she’d been wanting to say all these things for the whole of the three years Cassie and Matt had been together. Until now she’d been careful, respectful of his lifestyle choices for Cassie’s sake. And there were aspects of Matt she liked, not least his clear love for her daughter. But her son-in-law seemed to have got worse of late: more fanatical, more obsessive, as if he were trying to reduce their lives to something almost nineteenth century. And in the light of Lawrence’s departure, she seemed to have lost the will to control herself.

  Matt’s face had gone solid. ‘Of course we enjoy it, don’t we, Cass? It’s the perfect life. I mean, how lucky are we not to have to do a dreary, crowded commute and sit in front of a toxic computer screen for nine hours every day? Most people are jealous, Joanna. They say they wish they were brave enough to do the same.’

  ‘It certainly takes bravery,’ Jo commented. She turned to her daughter. ‘But don’t you sometimes wish you could buy a new pair of trainers, not wear shoes someone else’s smelly foot’s been sweating into? Or just open the fridge to take the milk out? Grind some fresh coffee? I mean how much energy does a grinder really use?’

  Neither of them spoke, Cassie gave her husband a tight-lipped smile which seemed to say ‘Please humour her, she’s in pain.’

  ‘I am looking into the coffee thing,’ Matt conceded. ‘There might be a rationale for using a cafetière. It seems that because instant is brewed, then freeze-dried, then brewed again by us, it probably uses more energy than fresh.’

  Jo threw her hands up in the air. ‘Some sense at last.’

  ‘But to grind it ourselves might not work,’ Matt went on, ignoring her outburst. ‘Coffee already ground is processed on an industrial scale. Not great, but probably better than hundreds of individual machines. It’s hard to get accurate stats.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Matt. Is a ten-second burst once a day really going to bring the planet to its knees?’

  Her son-in-law shook his head in patient exasperation.

  ‘Maybe not. But if you apply that to everything . . . You have to understand, it’s cumulative.’

  ‘OK for you to say, you don’t even drink coffee. But Cassie does.’ Jo stubbornly persisted, although she knew she was being ungracious.

  ‘Mum, please. Can you stop? This isn’t your home. We don’t tell you how to live.’

  ‘I know, I know. But I look at you both, two highly intelligent people, and all you ever do these days is bang on about the energy consumption of a light bulb or a coffee grinder. Don’t you get bored?’

  Matt didn’t reply. Although it was late and dark by now, he walked slowly over to the pegs, put on his anorak, dug his hat out of the pocket and opened the door. His back was rigid with umbrage.

  ‘Thanks, Mum. Thanks for ruining a lovely evening.’ Cassie got up and took her glass to the sink then turned to face her mother, her beautiful face bewildered. ‘I know you’re upset about Dad. But it’s not fair to take it out on us.’

  ‘This has nothing to do with Dad. I just think you’re wasting your life.’

  Cassie, normally so feisty and argumentative, had merely raised her eyebrows and started to wash her glass.

  Now it had begun to drizzle. Jo shivered, drew her cardigan closer round her body. She realized she didn’t feel very well, sort of headachy, her throat scratchy when she swallowed. She had another two nights with her daughter and she didn’t know how she would get through them. She should never have come. Obviously she would apologize to them both this morning, but she despaired of finding a neutral subject they could all talk about. Topics fell between the devil and the deep blue sea: the destruction of the planet or Lawrence. She walked back towards the house, anxious to get warm and fend off what she thought might be an impending cold.

  She and Cassie took the bikes to the local Pick-Your-Own farm after breakfast, to get some sweet corn, green beans and strawberries for supper. The rain had stopped, but it was muggy and Jo was sweating by the time they got there.

  ‘Need to do more exercise, Mum,’ Cassie teased, her own face bright and glowing with youthful vigour. ‘It’s only two miles.’

  ‘I do lots I’ll have you know. I do a Pilates class, walk, garden . . .’ She got off the bike and felt her legs threaten to buckle beneath her. Clinging to the handlebars, she waited for it to pass.

  ‘Mum? What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s OK . . . just felt a bit wobbly. Not used to the biking I suppose.’

  ‘Do you want to sit down or something?’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  They walked the rows of strawberries, each with a cardboard trug that Cassie had carried suspended from the handlebars of her bike, bending to catch the best of the crop. Her daughter was eating as many as she put in the box.

  ‘You always did that as a child, when we went to stay with Etty.’ Jo’s mother had refused to be called Granny or anything similar, so Cassie, and subsequently Nicky, just picked up and adapted her real name, Betty.

  ‘I remember. But they were her strawberries, weren’t they? We didn’t go to a Pick-Your-Own.’

  For a moment they stopped picking. ‘That overgrown fruit cage was a nightmare. You always came out scratched from head to toe.’

  Cassie laughed. ‘And Etty took no notice.’

  ‘Nothing new there, then.’ Staying with her mother was always an ordeal for Jo. But oddly, since Betty had been such a useless mother, she’d taken great pains to be attentive to Cassie and Nicky. Unreliably, of course – she couldn’t be left alone with them – but full of wild ideas which the children adored, such as playing what Betty called cache cache dix – a game that involved hauling furniture from the house into a circle on the lawn, draping it with towels, then getting the children to run around, hiding behind a table or a chair, without being seen by the person standing in the middle. Or teaching them, aged five and three, how to pluck a pheasant. Or taking armfuls of clothes out of the wardrobe and dressing up along with the children.

  ‘She was fun,’ Cassie said. Betty had died from a stroke following a fall when Cassie was fifteen. ‘Do you still miss her?’

  ‘Not really.’ But in truth Jo did miss the fact of her mother. And without the constant reminder of her inconsistencies, the edges of Jo’s historical anger at the
appalling way she’d behaved when she was growing up had faded somewhat.

  ‘She probably wouldn’t have turned a hair if you’d told her about Dad.’

  Jo gave a short laugh. ‘No . . . I expect not. I wonder if he’s let Granny know.’

  ‘Hope not. She’d die of embarrassment.’

  Lawrence’s mother was the exact opposite of her own. Conservative and particular, she and his father – two teachers – had led a constrained life in a suffocating close in a small Suffolk town, fretting constantly about their hedge, the neighbours putting rubbish out on the wrong day or playing loud music or building extensions or parking in someone else’s space or letting their children shout or their dogs bark . . . or just breathing. Lawrence and his elder brother, Rick, had catapulted themselves out of there on the day they each turned eighteen and had barely gone back since. His father was now dead, his mother in a home in Ipswich, about which she never stopped complaining, mostly racist comments about the long-suffering nurses.

  ‘I don’t suppose I have to visit her now,’ Jo said, experiencing an odd moment of relief.

  *

  By lunchtime, Jo knew she would have to lie down. She felt exhausted, light-headed.

  ‘I think I’m fighting something off. A good snooze will sort me out.’

  But she didn’t wake till after five, and she was shivering, feverish, her body heavy and lethargic so that she wasn’t sure she could stand upright.

  ‘I’m going to call the doctor,’ Cassie said, hovering anxiously over her mother.

  ‘No! Please . . . it’s just a bug. I’ll be fine. I don’t want a fuss. Anyway, there’s nothing they can do.’

  That was the last thing she remembered clearly. It was as if she’d retreated behind a barrier to the outside world. She could still hear what people were saying, see the worried faces that loomed close then receded, but she felt no ability, or indeed any obligation, to respond. There was something inordinately restful in this absence.

  When she finally woke, all she could remember was a dream about Lawrence. The dream was based in a real event – Cassie’s tenth birthday party when they’d taken three of her friends to a go-kart track in Kent for the day. Lawrence had been on fire to have a turn himself. In the end he’d sneaked off to the adult track where the girls and Jo eventually found him. They’d cheered him on: he was impressive – fearless and exuberant, and had been on a high all the way home in the car. But in the dream version Jo was alone – no Cassie or friends – and was terrified as she watched Lawrence ride the kart. He was going faster and faster, seemingly out of control, no regulation helmet on, and didn’t hear her when she screamed her heart out for him to stop. She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was about to die and that she was powerless to prevent it. The dream-fear haunted her as she woke, her heart fluttering anxiously in her chest, although she pushed the images away, not caring to examine the significance.

  ‘God, Mum . . . you really scared us,’ was the first sentence Jo properly understood, her daughter’s words pulling her back to the normal world. ‘It’s nearly two days. Are you feeling better?’

  Cassie perched beside her on the bed, holding her hand. Her face was pale and pinched with worry. Jo struggled to speak, clutching her daughter.

  ‘I’m so sorry, darling.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry. You were ill. The doctor said you probably had a virus and just to keep an eye on you. But you seemed so far gone, Matt was on the verge of calling an ambulance last night.’

  Jo attempted sitting up, but her body seemed to have lost substance, her limbs floppy and recalcitrant when she tried to instruct them. Eventually, with Cassie’s help, she heaved herself into a sitting position, her head against the wall. Cassie grabbed another pillow from the chair and propped it behind her.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’

  Jo nodded. While Cassie was making it, Jo tried to make sense of what had happened, but her thoughts blurred. All she was aware of was a powerful desire to slide back into that other world where nothing touched her, nothing was expected of her.

  The mug of chamomile tea was warm and present between her palms. She took a sip and the liquid seemed to blaze a path through her lethargy, bringing her cells to life.

  ‘I’ve never experienced anything like that before,’ she murmured.

  ‘Mum . . . the doctor thought . . . she said it might be a virus, but it also might be the result of . . . well, a sort of delayed shock—’

  ‘Shock?’

  ‘I told her about Dad.’

  Jo just stared at her daughter. The first she was aware of the tears was Cassie moving to embrace her, holding her close. Jo usually found crying hard, the tears squeezed reluctantly from her with effort, her face contorted. But now they flowed copiously and without help, reaching inwards in their stream to touch the hard, dry stone of grief she had shut away and barely acknowledged since the night Lawrence left.

  ‘Oh, Mum,’ Cassie muttered into her hair. ‘You mustn’t keep things bottled up. You always say Dad is bad at expressing himself, but you’re just as crap.’

  Jo pulled away, wiping away the tears as best she could. ‘I didn’t know what else to do. I mean what are the rules for dealing with these things?’

  Cassie shook her head. ‘None, I suppose. I’m not criticizing you. It’s just, I think it’s better to talk about it than not.’

  ‘But then you only burden everyone else, and they don’t know what to say.’

  ‘It’s not what they say, it’s what you say . . . just getting it out in the open is the trick.’

  Jo wasn’t so sure, but she didn’t have the will to debate the point.

  *

  It was another five days before Joanna sensed some vitality beginning to return. In the interim she felt like an old lady for the first time: weak and fractious, alarmed by her inability to take charge of her life.

  ‘I don’t know how to thank you both,’ she told Cassie and her son-in-law the night before she was due to go home. They had all found a sort of peace together since she’d been ill, tacitly avoiding contentious issues, instead talking about books, politics, health, anything that wasn’t too close to someone’s heart. ‘What a nightmare. Your mother comes for a three-day visit and stays ten, raving and incapacitated. You’ll never ask me again.’

  Matt chuckled. ‘Just glad it wasn’t permanent . . .’ then obviously realizing his remark could be taken the wrong way, he quickly added, ‘You being ill, I mean . . . not the staying here bit.’

  ‘Well, either would have been grim,’ Jo conceded with a smile.

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK to go home?’ Cassie asked. ‘You can stay as long as you like, you know that.’

  ‘Thanks, but I’m quite sure. I don’t feel a hundred per cent, but that’ll take a while I think. I need to get home, get on with my life.’

  Chapter 4

  14 August 2013

  ‘OK, I’ve got this gorgeous man who’s dying to meet you.’ Donna’s grin was deliberately bright and fixed, no doubt fully aware of the reception she’d receive.

  ‘Very funny.’

  They were walking along Shepherd’s Bush Road towards the green, heading for Waitrose in Westfield. It was an indulgence, Tesco was much closer and cheaper, but Donna was bored with it and wanted something different. Max trotted along on his lead between them.

  ‘No, seriously, darling. He’s Swedish and in publishing . . . totally unattached. You’ll love him.’

  ‘And when exactly did you meet a Swedish publisher?’

  Donna chuckled. ‘Oh, you know. Out and about.’

  Jo had lost track of her friend’s social life since Walter had been given his marching orders. But Donna was eclectic; she seemed to know everybody from ambassadors to sculptors to property developers to film directors and journalists, having a particular penchant for older, successful males. She was discreet about her dalliances with these (frequently married) men, even with Jo, who had voted early on not to be too involved in
the detail, knowing the liaisons were always fleeting and that at the first whiff of commitment, Donna would be running hard in the opposite direction.

  ‘Just a drink, perhaps dinner. He’s such a sweetie. It’d do you good to hang out with a man again. He’s not after sex.’

  ‘You asked him, did you?’

  ‘Well . . . not exactly. And of course, never say never. But I meant he’s a gentleman. He wouldn’t leap on you if you didn’t want it.’

  Joanna sighed. ‘I can’t.’ She hadn’t been out since getting back from Cassie’s. She cried a lot – seemed like the more she practised the more proficient she became – but it felt soothing, not despairing and she didn’t hold back. And the outside world seemed to be a threatening place. She had no idea how she fitted in now she was on her own.

  Lawrence had been to the house while she was away, and taken more of his things. His wardrobe was almost bare now, only a very old pair of trainers on the floor, a jacket he never liked and a couple of summer shirts swinging on the empty rail. One, a baggy, viciously bright aquamarine cotton, they had bought when Lawrence’s case failed to materialize on what was supposed to be a romantic weekend in Barcelona. Jo remembered how excited she’d been to get away alone with Lawrence, the children left with his parents in Suffolk. But losing the case had cast a bit of a pall over their time together, Lawrence – cheapskate that he was – loath to spend money on a decent shirt he didn’t need, but also hating people thinking he wore cheap ones from Carrefour. In the end, though, the shirt had made her laugh so much that his good mood had been restored.

  Not knowing that he’d been back, the sight of the empty wardrobe had made Jo gasp. It felt like burglary, as if she’d been robbed. Which I have, she’d thought, gazing at the space where her husband’s clothes had hung for more than thirty years – the scent of him, so comforting and familiar, gone too. She had wanted to ring him right then, the phone poised in her hand. Wanted to scream at him until her throat closed up. But she hadn’t.