Come Away With Me

I felt as if a pane of glass were shattering into a thousand pieces inside me. Then all feeling drained away. Numbness returned. I unlocked the door and moved back into the corridor.

The crumpled envelope still lay discarded on the floor. I bent and picked it up, smoothed it out. Ruth Hallam. I opened my bag and unzipped the small pocket that held the photos of Tom and Rosie. I placed the envelope carefully beside them, zipped the pocket shut and closed my bag. It was all I had left.

I looked out of the window. The train was coming into the station. People were pushing past me to get to the door. Everyone had reached their destination. Ruth has a husband and that boy. She has a home life waiting where life goes on. Where life goes on.

SIX

I walk away from the noise of the party and lean against the huge trunk of a horse-chestnut tree. Its red blooms stand upright among the green foliage. It is like standing under an exotic, rustling chandelier.

The party is lavish, a PR exercise thrown by Justin, a designer friend Danielle and I had been at St Martin’s with. His clothes are a bit over the top, but celebrities and models flock to him for their competitive, reckless little red carpet numbers. He certainly has beautiful women here in abundance.

I watch Danielle networking. She looks like a celebrity herself, a perfect advertisement for our clothes. She is wearing poppy-red chiffon. I designed the dress especially for her. It was deceptively simple, low-cut with a straight silk bodice with floating chiffon panels sewn into the skirt. It looks as if she is wearing a scarlet hanky. Her dark colouring and long legs make her resemble an exotic butterfly.

I smile as I watch her. We need to come to parties like this, to be seen, and she is brilliant at networking. I am better at watching a party from a distance. I can spot emerging trends, get an instinct for the next fashion statement, and it helps to observe how women walk and sit in relation to the clothes they are wearing.

I can see a tall fair man standing with a bevy of women in front of the marquee. He stands like a fish out of water in this showy, arty-farty fashion crowd. He keeps throwing his hair back from his eyes and glancing sideways, as if seeking escape or at least another male. As the place is heaving with girly boys, gay or camp, I can perfectly understand why the women are dive-bombing him like noisy seagulls swooping at their prey, but it’s funny to watch.

I see Danielle looking for me, and ease myself away from the tree and walk back across the grass towards the noise and laughter. Danielle made me a classic white dress, cut exquisitely, as only she can, with narrow gold edging. I am brown from a week in Cornwall and I feel cool, simple and restrained.

Danielle had made me swear that I would not embellish it in any way and spoil the effect. It was hard, as I love colour and eccentric clothes, but this feeling of being almost invisible suits my mood perfectly tonight. I am secretly worrying about our premises, which have become too small, and the fact that although we are getting plenty of commissions we do not seem able to balance our books.

As I pass the group with the tall man I see he is looking at me. I smile and walk on. I am not about to become a member of his fan club.

I join Danielle and a group of friends, and we balance plates and drinks, perching on tiny wrought-iron chairs. Maisie Hill, a model Justin and Danielle and I design for, walks over to join us with the tall man in tow.

‘Hi, you guys. This is Tom Holland, an army friend of my brother’s. I invited them both to the party but Damien’s suddenly got posted off somewhere so he had to come on his own, poor thing. Tom, that’s Danielle, there. Jenny, Claire, Joseph, Milly, and Prue. I’ll be back in a sec. I’ve just got to check on the caterers for Justin.’

The man sits down gingerly on a tiny chair, with his plate of food and grins warily at everyone. Danielle and the other women focus on him relentlessly. He has a stillness about him; an economy of movement and a faint air of amused detachment as if he knows he is the interest of the moment, but it will quickly pass because he comes from a different world.

I notice the tightness of his thighs as he balances on the silly chair and the muscles in his arms where he has rolled up his sleeves a little way.

I like Damien, Maisie’s brother. He often comes to these parties. She had been worried sick when the Bosnian war blew up and he had been sent with the first wave to monitor the atrocities with the UN.

Knowing even one soldier had changed how we all read the papers and watched the news. I wonder if this man, Tom, had been with Damien out there. How frivolous we must all seem. Danielle is eyeing him under a curtain of glossy black hair. Oh, leave him alone, Elle. Don’t bed and dump this one. He won’t know what’s hit him.

When I look up he is watching me. His eyes are extraordinary, purple-flecked and iridescent. They hold mine intently, intimately, as if he is touching me. The blood rushes hotly to the surface of my skin. It is like being hit by a bus.

Maisie calls out to me and I leap up gratefully and walk over the grass. ‘For fuck’s sake, Jenny, don’t just sit there dumb as a daisy. That poor guy has been dying to talk to you all evening.’

I stare at her and fly to the loo, and when I come out Tom Holland is leaning gracefully against a silver birch. I stop in front of him.

‘Hi,’ he says.

‘Hi,’ I say imaginatively.

‘I’m sorry if it seems as if I’m following you. It’s because you are illusive.’

‘Am I?’

‘Like a ghost. Flitting mysteriously in the distance but never stopping for a proper glimpse.’ His laugh is infectious.

‘It’s what I do at parties. Flit. In case I get caught up or trapped.’

‘Very wise,’ he says gravely, then adds quickly, ‘Am I trapping you?’

I shake my head. We walk across the park together, away from the noise and the music towards the chestnut tree I stood under earlier.

‘This is where I first saw you. A small white phantom under a canopy of green. I blinked twice but you were still there, perfectly still. So I knew you must be real.’ His voice is addictive, with a lilt of a smile in it.

‘I was watching the proceedings from a distance. It’s how I sometimes get inspiration.’

‘Well, if Maisie’s clothes are anything to go by, it definitely works.’

‘Maisie would look amazing in a coal sack and bottle top earrings, and I’m afraid we don’t exclusively dress her.’

We walk on across the park in the growing dusk as the music and laughter drift behind us and ahead of us lights in buildings come on.

The evening is beautiful, utterly still. The heat has been caught by the day and trapped by the buildings of the city, keeping the air warm, filling the night with the smell of blossom.

I sense Tom Holland does not want to make small talk but draw in the peace of the night and we walk in a strange companionable silence, drinking in the night as if we have known each other a long time.

He looks at his watch suddenly and we turn without speaking and walk back towards the party going on uproariously ahead of us.

‘I have to go, Jenny. I’m catching a plane first thing in the morning.’

‘To Bosnia?’ I suddenly feel bereft. I haven’t asked him anything about himself. I thought there would be time.

He shakes his head. ‘No, just a training trip somewhere bleak.’

We stare at each other.

‘Thank you,’ he says.

‘What for?’

‘For walking with me on a warm London evening in summer and not making small talk, and for giving me a lovely peaceful memory to take away with me.’

‘You take care,’ I say.

He looks down at me. ‘May I ring you when I get back?’

I take my card out of my bag and give it to him. He holds on to my fingers, lifts them to his lips, then he turns and walks away, striding across the grass. My heart hammers like a trapped bird as the distance between us grows.

I call out ‘Tom’ before I even know I’m going to.

He turns and I run towards him. He scoops me up and turns in a circle with me. Then we just stand holding each other for a moment.

‘Please take care,’ I say again. I let him go and he walks quickly through the gate. This time I notice his step has a little bounce to it.

SEVEN

February 2006

‘You look happy today!’ Adam said, grinning at his mother as she jumped out of the train.

‘How do I normally look?’

‘Stressed, Mum! You’re usually in your own little world of work, for at least an hour or so.’

Ruth felt a pang. So this was how she was. She bleeped the car doors open and when they were inside she said, ‘It was extraordinary. I met someone on the train I haven’t seen for nearly fourteen years. It was weird, Adam, we were best friends at school.’

‘Cool,’ Adam said. ‘You recognised each other then?’

Ruth shot him a look. ‘I’m not that old! Actually, Jenny looked more or less as she always did, except…’

She concentrated on backing out of the car space.

‘Except, what?’

‘She was sad. She’d lost her lovely bounce. I was stupid. I was so excited about seeing her that I didn’t pick it up, just prattled on asking about her life and then she told me. Six months ago her husband was killed in a road accident.’

Adam turned to her. ‘Poor woman.’

‘Yes. She’s in Birmingham on her own so I’m going to ring her tomorrow. I would have asked her to stay but Peter’s back tonight and he’s going to be tired.’

‘Are we going to the airport to meet him?’

‘No, he’s on a later flight. He said he’d get a taxi home.’

‘We are still going to Cornwall for half-term?’

‘Of course we are.’ Ruth concentrated on the traffic. ‘How was your day?’

‘OK,’ Adam said. ‘Is Peter coming to the cottage with us? It’s more fun if I’ve got someone to birdwatch with.’

‘I hope so, Adam, but…’

‘I know, Mum! Like, why do I have to have workaholic parents?’

He grinned at her to take away the sting, but the familiar guilt was back. She and Peter did work long hours and Adam was on his own too much. Occasionally he brought a friend home, sometimes he went to a friend’s house, but it was not the same as having someone there when he got in from school.

The irony was not lost on Ruth. Her aunt had always been the one to be there for him after school when he was small. After that, he had almost always been picked up by someone else or come home to an empty house. The difference was that until his secondary school he had been happy and had loads of friends. Now, they appeared to have dwindled to two or three ostracised loners who had been pushed together.

She thought suddenly of Peter’s wistful voice. ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have another child in the house? I think Adam would like that too. Will you think about it, Ruth?’

Ruth didn’t need to think about it. She didn’t want any more children. It had taken her years to get where she was. She loved working and she had no intention of giving up. Bringing up Adam had been too hard, even with help. She never wanted to have to juggle work, a baby and guilt again. In a few years Adam would be at university. She couldn’t start all over again. She just couldn’t.

Adam had taken her silence as hurt. ‘I was only joking, Mum. You worry too much. Most of my friends’ mothers work long hours too. It’s cool.’

Yes, but most of Adam’s friends’ mothers worked because they had to, not because they wanted to.

Peter had not been impressed by the huge comprehensive that had been their only choice in the area. He had wanted to pay for Adam to go to a private school. Ruth had refused on the grounds she did not believe in private education. But she knew it was really about whether she and Peter stayed together long-term. If they ever split up she could not have afforded school fees on her own and it would have been cruel to have to pull Adam out of private education. Ruth was not quite so sure she would refuse again. Adam said little, but was obviously fairly miserable at school.

She drove up their leafy road of Victorian terraces and parked. For once there was an empty space outside the house. Adam leapt out and ran up the steps, unlocking the front door and leaving it open for her.

As she walked in and hung up her coat Ruth had an image of Jenny, childless, entering a house where her husband was never going to move through the rooms again. Sadness shot through her. She remembered running, screaming with laughter, with a small curly-haired girl across the sands at St Ives towards the Browns’ house with its windows facing Porthmeor beach and the harbour, and her abiding image was of Jenny’s happiness, her security in childhood, in life.

If this tragedy had happened to me I might have been expecting it. Even as a child, Ruth had never trusted happiness. It could be wiped off her face in an instant. She had learnt not to show it. All pleasures had to be hidden or hugged secretly to her. She would compose her face on her way down the hill from the Browns’ house so that when she walked through the door of her own home her puritan parents would see no traces of joy left on it.

She composed her features into that blank expression she recognised sometimes in children in the supermarket. The closed-in, shut-off features of a child shouted at or slapped too often. Children who knew they could never do anything right and tried to melt into the shadows.

Her own parents’ relief that Ruth was out of the house so often and not under their feet making dust did not prevent their jealousy of people who might bring her happiness.

Adam was making toast and humming over his bird magazines. ‘Are you thinking of the woman you met on the train, Mum?’ he asked Ruth suddenly.

‘Yes.’ Ruth sat down opposite him, and he cut his toast and Marmite and handed her a piece.

‘How did you lose touch?’

‘My fault. I never wrote to her when I left Cornwall for Arran. I hurt her a lot. I realised that today.’

‘Only today, Mum?’

Ruth met his eyes. She had given Adam the edited version of her early life. ‘I thought Jenny would forget me pretty quickly. She had three sisters and one brother. We were good friends, but she had a large family…’

‘But friends are different,’ Adam said firmly. ‘Friends are people you make on your own, that are separate from family. They see you in another way. So you become different with them and it’s the same for them. Friends are important.’

Ruth stared at him. You learnt new things about your children all the time. Adam was right. He was his own person, not just the person she knew, but another boy she didn’t know; a person who acted in a different way when he was not with his mother.

He said now, with butter on his chin, ‘Did you explain about your parents, about Auntie Vi looking after you? About me?’

‘A little. I didn’t have time to tell her everything,’ Ruth said carefully, as Adam watched her across the table. ‘But she knew your grandparents and what they were like.’

The phone went and Adam dashed for it. It was Peter. His flight had been delayed. As Ruth listened to them chatting happily she thought with a pang, I take Peter and the life I have here for granted.

At seventeen you believed that your dreams might come true. At thirty you tried not to have any illusions; yet the essence of some impossible hope lived insistently on. Somewhere out there was an exciting shadowy figure who could provide all emotional and sexual succour; a soulmate. Him.

She did love Peter, they were good friends, but her heart did not leap at his touch. She was not in love with him. He had always known that and Ruth knew she should never have let him persuade her he could change it.

Adam handed her the phone. Ruth listened to his voice, warm and loving and glad to be coming home, and she saw in a flash of familiar angst how little it took to please or make him happy. She understood herself. Childhood had taught her she must only ever rely on herself, never let anyone hurt her again, and the result of that was her inability to commit wholly to a relationship. It was a self-destruct button. Peter loved her and Adam unconditionally. What more could she ask? What more could she want?

Look at Jenny, for God’s sake. Look at Jenny.

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