The Reading Group Part 19

'I'm glad you're being good to yourself. I know it's a cliche, but that's what Alice would want, isn't it?'

'Oh, certainly. She'd be furious if she knew what was going on.'

The two women smiled at each other. They felt better for spending some time together.

When she got out at her house, Susan kissed Polly on both cheeks. 'Let me know what's going on, you hear?'

'I promise. Have you finished Eden Close yet?'

'Haven't started, of course. You know me! But I'll have it finished for reading group, I promise!'

'Okay. See you then.'

Susan was profoundly grateful, not for the first time, to be coming home, to Roger. He heard her slamming the taxi door, and had opened the front door before she had had time to fumble around for her keys. That was just like him.

Harriet It must be the Venice factor: that was why she was having a good time in Portugal. Nothing seemed so awful in this unbelievable suns.h.i.+ne. Even her elephantine thighs looked better brown. She had caught sight of herself in the big bedroom mirror after her shower the other night, and thought she looked all right. Was Junoesque a good way to describe it? Or Rubenesque. Whichever esque, it wasn't bad. She'd had to work at it, mind you. Judicious application of factor-15 every couple of hours, plenty of after-sun. Not like Tim and the kids, who went the colour of good furniture the second they stepped outside the villa and just got darker. The other day, Tim had leant against the bathroom door to watch her shower. For once, she hadn't minded. 'You shower very prettily,' he told her, when she got out. 'I like the way you arch your back when you rinse your hair.' It made her feel nice, to think he was seeing her that way. It must be the weather.

There was a new maid this year, a replacement for the desiccated widow they had known for years. This one was young and pretty, and clearly enamoured of the pool man. Each morning, after she had made the beds and changed the towels, she offered, for a few extra euros, to mind the children around the pool for a couple of hours so that Tim and Harriet could escape into the village for some peace.

The first morning, Harriet had said she wasn't about to pay the girl to sit around in a thong, and that she didn't trust her not to let the children drown while she and the pool man flirted in Portuguese. Tim said she was the daughter of friends of his parents and that no harm could possibly come to the kids, and that it would do all of them good. The kids implored Harriet to go with him: the pool man had said he would teach Josh how to back flip into the pool and Chloe had developed a four-year-old's desperate crush on both of them.

Harriet had had to give in. But she liked it, really, and they fell easily enough into a routine. They would walk down the steep hill into the village, stopping at the big undercover market to buy oranges, tomatoes, or bread, and then, at the same restaurant each day, Tim had his beer and sardines and she had chicken and white wine, and they watched the locals smoke on the broad beach, gesticulating wildly at each other. It was... comfortable. One day Tim tried to take her hand on the walk back up the hill, when she was complaining about the heat and the incline, and she had let him.

This morning they had made love. She had only half woken, wanting him suddenly in spite of herself, and shuffled herself into the middle of the bed, from the edge she normally hugged. There she had pressed her bottom rhythmic ally into his lap, until, barely awake himself, he responded. She'd gone back to sleep straight afterwards, feeling surprised and satisfied, but not before she had heard him murmur into her hair that he loved her.

Susan Roger had just finished an uneventful morning surgery, and was enjoying a quiet coffee in the staffroom. Summer surgery was always quiet, with so many people away; those at home were seemingly healthier for a bit of fresh air and a few salads considerably less snotty, too. He no longer ran the antenatal clinic that had once been his responsibility one of the new female partners had taken it on last year and the practice nurses were doing many of the routine health jobs. He might think about cutting back his hours in a couple of years, once the boys were out of university, maybe.

Although along with the pride he felt at Alexander following his footsteps into medicine came the realisation that he would be, if not financially dependent, then not entirely independent, for a few more years. Another year at Edinburgh before three years clinical, and yet another year as a houseman before he would be fully qualified and properly solvent. And properly awake.

Roger remembered his own training in the sixties as both the best and worst of times. Academically, he was middle bottom of the cla.s.s, always. But he had been good with people. He could put them at their ease, make it possible for them to confide their deepest, darkest worries, from the first time he went on the ward in his short white coat. Pretty good people skills with the nurses, too, until he met Susan, of course. He hadn't looked at another one after that, and they'd been married before he got his long white coat. General practice was perfect for him. He made a difference. Alexander, of course, was full of ambition and drive and all the arrogance of a twenty-one-year old. They'd clashed about it at Christmas. Well, clashed as far as Susan was prepared to allow at a family Christmas. Alex had made general practice sound dull, second best, and it stung, just a bit, that he held his father's work in such low regard. Still, he had time to learn that heroes weren't always in green scrubs, brandis.h.i.+ng scalpels. He'd be b.l.o.o.d.y proud either way GP or surgeon. Roger just wanted his boys to be happy.

Susan had loved having them both home this summer her only regret was that they hadn't made it back together. Still, they wouldn't dare not come home for Christmas, as usual. They'd settle for two or three days. Roger was afraid Susan would need it more than ever this year.

Sandy Kershaw, one of the other partners, came in and slumped on the old sofa, with an exaggerated sigh.

'Are you okay?' Roger asked.

Sandy grinned. 'Fine. I've just come back from the weekly delight of my visit to The Cedars. It's too hot for all this running about.' He weighed around twenty stones, which he joked was all haggis and whisky left over from a childhood and youth spent in the Scottish Highlands. His broad face was bright red, and his top lip was beaded with sweat. He got to his feet again, and lumbered awkwardly towards the water-cooler. 'Water, that's what I need, and a nice sit-down before afternoon surgery.'

Sacha, the new receptionist, opened the door. 'Guess what?' she asked Sandy.

'What?'

'That was The Cedars on the phone. They need you back there.'

'Sweet Jesus!'

'I know. One's died.' She said it like they were puppies from a litter.

'Could they not have died ten minutes sooner?' Sandy smiled ruefully. 'Who was it?'

Sacha looked down at the Post-it note in her hand. 'A Mrs Barnes. Alice Barnes.'

Sandy's demeanour changed instantly. He looked sternly at Sacha, warning her with his eyes, then turned to Roger. 'That's Susan's mother, is it not?' Roger nodded. 'Och. I'm sorry, Rog. Sooner than you expected, isn't it?'

'Who can say?' Roger answered. 'She went downhill fast after the TIAs this spring. I wasn't expecting her to last into the New Year, to be honest.' He sighed.

'Have they called the next-of-kin?' Sandy asked Sacha.

'I don't know.'

'Susan's out this morning.' Roger was thinking. His wife was notoriously bad at carrying her mobile phone around, and when she did have it, it was rarely switched on. It was for her emergencies, she'd told him, not other people's. He'd rather tell her himself. 'Give them a ring back, Sacha, will you? Tell them I'll inform Mrs Barnes's daughter.'

Sacha looked uncomfortable.

Sandy interjected: 'She's his wife.'

'Oh, my G.o.d, I'm so sorry. I didn't know.' She backed out of the room.

Roger smiled at her. He didn't want her to feel bad. They all talked about death flippantly. You had to.

'Hey, don't worry how could you? It's fine.' Roger just wanted her to make the call. 'Make that call, will you?'

'Right away.'

'How will Susan take it?' Sandy asked.

'She's expecting it. She'll be fine. It's always sad, but not tragic at Alice's age and with her in that state.'

'Aye, you've got that right. I'll get up there, certify her. I only saw her last week, so there's no problem there. Do you think Susan will want to see her?'

'I expect so.'

'Okay then, I'll arrange everything. Dinnae worry.' He patted Roger's shoulder as he pa.s.sed him.

On the drive up to the workshop Roger wondered how to tell her. Almost a quarter-century of marriage, and you'd think you'd know how to say everything. She'd been with him when he took phone calls, late in the night, about both his own parents. His mum had died not long after Alex was born: she'd had cancer in both b.r.e.a.s.t.s, then in her lungs. She was only fifty-eight. She'd been in a hospice, hovering between life and death for weeks, her eyeb.a.l.l.s rolling back, eyelids flickering with the morphine dreams at the end. He had stood by her bedside and willed her heart to stop beating.

Susan had picked a sleeping Alex, only a couple of months old, up out of his cot, after the phone rang, and put him in Roger's arms to hold and smell and feel. Pulsing breathing life, there in his lap, fighting off the feeling of death.

His dad had died five years ago one big stroke, and he'd been dead before Roger had even made it to the hospital.

He felt like an orphan, even at 45.

Susan had loved her dad, of course, but this was going to be so much worse for her. What she felt for Alice was different. He was glad it would be him who told her.

Like a two a.m. phone call, though, Susan knew something was wrong as soon as she saw him. She spotted the Volvo from the bottom of the hill as she drove back, then Roger sitting on the teak bench she and Mary ate their lunch on in the summer.

She didn't say h.e.l.lo. 'Are the boys all right?' Always that fear.

'They're fine, love.'

So it must be mum. It must be Alice. Her face crumpled. He told her quickly. 'It's your mum, Suze. She died this morning. She was sleeping, they said, so they didn't disturb her. When they went to check, she'd stopped breathing. Sandy's up there now with her.'

'Was it another stroke?'

'We don't know. Possibly. She might have had a heart-attack. Or she might just have stopped breathing.' He put his arms round her, and she leant on him so heavily that he nearly fell backwards. He moved her to the bench, and they both sat down. For minutes she didn't speak, and her shoulders heaved with big, hollow sobs. He just held her.

This bit was strange he'd seen it happen with patients. This competent, sensible adult had been rendered back into a child. She wasn't mourning for the hunched old lady who had succ.u.mbed to illness in the nursing home three miles down the road, but for the vibrant young mother who had thrown her across her lap and tickled her, and tucked her in at night with promises to keep the goblins away. The daughter was, at this moment, bigger than the wife and the mother, and the daughter was hurting.

Eventually, Susan sat up, with an impressive sniff, and dried her eyes on the sleeves of her linen s.h.i.+rt. She tucked her hair behind her ears and sat back on the bench with her arms folded, looking across the valley. 'I'm glad it was you who told me.'

'Me too.'

'Poor Mum.' A solitary tear rolled down her cheek. 'She'd have been happy to go, you know. She'd have hated seeing herself in that place. So... undignified.'

'I know she would.'

'I'm glad she never had to know.'

'I am, too.' Roger stroked her head. 'Do you want me to tell the boys?'

'Would you? I'd just cry down the phone, and that'd be no help. Thank G.o.d Alex is back from Ibiza. They'll both be able to come for the funeral, won't they?'

Roger knew his boys would be there, whatever it took. They loved their mum. 'Of course. Don't worry about any of that just now. We'll fix it.'

'She wanted to be cremated. She always said she'd hate to know she was in the cold ground, and the idea of us feeling we had to go there and put flowers down all the time.'

Roger felt her mind racing, and wanted to slow it down. 'There's plenty of time for that, Suze.' This next bit was the hardest. 'What about Margaret? I could call her?'

Susan shook her head. 'I have to do it. Mum would want me to.' Then she laughed, a tearful half-laugh. 'That'll get right up her nose, having to come over twice in a year. Ten years nothing, then twice in one year.'

Roger wondered if she was right to a.s.sume that Margaret would come, but he knew now wasn't the time to ask. He would make sure he was with her when she called her sister. There'd be more mopping up to do then, he was sure.

Susan was quiet again. The valley was very still, with just the lightest breeze making the leaves stir, alleviating the heat.

'Can I see her?' she asked.

'Of course you can. I knew you'd want to. Sandy's sorting that out now. We can go right away, if you'd like.'

Susan leant over and kissed him softly. 'Can we just sit here together, the two of us, for a while longer?'

'Of course we can. I'm going nowhere.'

Nicole Nicole was hot and she was cross. This was not at all how it was supposed to be. She'd been getting quietly crosser and hotter for the last two hours as she lay beside Tony b.l.o.o.d.y Brooks in the full sun he required to braise his back to the same just-slapped ruddiness (complete with fingerprints his sun cream was applied by his odious wife Phil with all the care a mud wrestler might show an opponent) his front had acquired yesterday. He was lying with his face in his towel and she was forced to ask him to repeat each remark he made, which was pretty tiresome since none of them was really worth hearing. She could hardly complain about the effect the heat was having on her without telling him about the baby, and she was b.u.g.g.e.red if she was going to tell him before she told Gavin. Who probably wasn't faring any better. In this gruesome family-sharing experience, it had fallen, apparently, to Gavin and Phil to take the older kids to tennis, and to her and Tony to mind the little one, as Phil consistently referred to Martha, by the vast communal pool.

This was not Nicole's natural habitat at the best of times she was not keen on being seen in the vicinity of fifteen-year-old girls, with their tiny hips and ridiculously pert b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She knew she looked good for her age, even clandestinely pregnant, but she was no fool. It was a noisy language smorgasbord, fragranced not by bougainvillaea and lemon but by the burger bar at the far end. And it was too b.l.o.o.d.y hot today she was worried about Martha's shoulders burning, and her own gradual but inexorable headache.

She'd read the same page of Michael Ondaatje at least five times now, and she still couldn't tell you anything that happened. There wasn't a lot of Michael Ondaatje around this particular pool, it had to be said. It was a gold-foil-s.e.x-and-serial-murder type of crowd. You sn.o.bby cow, Nicole thought. That is what Harriet would call her, and she was probably right. She wished Harriet were here to save her.

My trouble, she thought ruefully, is that I'm too b.l.o.o.d.y polite. I'd rather put up with this interminable man, his grotty kid and his heinous wife even if it's ruining the holiday and a host of perfect-moment opportunities than tell them to get lost. The cheekbone family in the brochure didn't have another family popping out from behind pot plants in distasteful swimwear waving jugs of sangria at them all day long. They didn't invite approach they were coc.o.o.ned in their own photogenic selves, safe.

Harriet wouldn't stand for it. She could see her friend, the iron fist in the velvet glove, finding infinitely polite yet completely candid ways in which to say p.i.s.s OFF YOU SAD NO MATES IT'S NOT OUR FAULT YOU HAVE NOTHING TO SAY TO EACH OTHER DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT LOOKING TO US TO PUT THE COLOUR IN YOUR GREY LITTLE LIVES. They'd never even know she'd done it. Well, they might. But so be it they'd be gone. She just didn't have that gene. Be polite or die. What a curse.

Had Phil Brooks been a mother in their school car park, Harriet and she would have giggled about her. She was the kind of mother they avoided sitting next to at coffee mornings and mums' nights outs: too slim and fit for Harriet, and too compet.i.tive for Nicole. She was constantly comparing the children's swimming distances and tennis talent, and asking how good the twins' cursive hand was, and what Nicole's thoughts were about boarding for seniors Harriet would have oozed sarcasm answering that one. As a consequence of this relentless hothousing Crispin, their waif-like, vaguely grey little boy, had a permanent bunny-in-the-headlights look about him, and probably didn't get invited out for tea very often, which was no doubt a good thing, since play dates would almost certainly clash with Conversational Latin or Art History and, anyway, he was allergic to almost everything. The poor sod didn't even have any siblings to share the weight of the yoke with.

They had met in the departure lounge. For met, read been ambushed. Once boarded, Phil and Tony had waved manically from their seats four rows away, and Phil had come over as soon as the drinks trolley had pa.s.sed down the aisle to chat relentlessly and block the path of mothers with babies to the loo.

When they picked up their hire cars from different operators and set off for the resort Nicole thought they had shaken them off, but to her horror, when they arrived Phil and Tony were picking up the keys to a villa on the same quarter-mile of La Manga. Since then, they had been 'just pa.s.sing', and 'wondering whether you needed anything from the shop', and generally worrying at them like wasps on every corner.

'You must all come over for a barbecue!' Phil had been exclaiming, ever since the departure lounge. 'So nice for Crispin to have some little playmates. So difficult, you see, with an only one. Tony makes a mean steak!'

Tony didn't have the look of a man who made a mean anything, and the boys had soon grown impatient with their puny shadow. So far they had avoided the barbecue but there had not been one day of this first week when they hadn't spent a part of it with the Brooks family. Nicole was waiting for Gavin to lose patience and insult them into going away.

She was searching for Martha's distinctive, beloved head among the human flotsam of the toddler pool, and listening she hoped it seemed intently to another of Tony's hilarious accounting anecdotes when she saw the three boys heading towards them disconsolately.

'Mum got the time wrong,' Crispin bleated as they approached.

The twins rolled their eyes in disdain. 'Greg was double-booked,' they confirmed.

Tony sat up. 'Oh, that's a shame, fellas. b.u.mmer.'

The twins and Nicole cringed at his hip-speak.

Nicole had had occasion to speak sharply to Will last night after she had heard him whispering to Crispin 'your dad is SUCH a geek'. 'He is, though, mum' Will had said later, when they were finally on their own. 'He is, mum' Gavin had added, and they had all giggled, even Martha, who at four, agreed with the diagnosis, conspiratorially. Christ, he was.

'Where's Dad, boys? He was going to watch.'

The twins had spied a burgeoning game of water volleyball in the pool and didn't answer. They pulled their T-s.h.i.+rts over their heads, and kicked off their trainers. 'Can we have a swim, Mum?' It was a rhetorical question, shouted back over their shoulders about two seconds before they plunged in. Crispin was folding his sports socks in two and back on themselves.

Oh, b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l. No towels, dry shorts, or euros for the drinks and ice-creams they would require when they got out. No Gavin to send back to the villa to get them. Where was he? At least she had the car, and it was an excuse to escape the sun and Tony. She'd better get Martha out of the water.

Ten minutes later she was being blissfully air-conditioned: both of the dashboard vents were firing straight at her face. Martha had refused to get out of the pool 'I playin', Mum, I playin' ' and Tony had a.s.sured Nicole that he could keep an eye 'well, both eyes, naturally' on Martha and the twins while she popped back to get what she needed. He had even sat up for the job, sacrificing vital minutes of pucing-up time. His front had been unpleasantly sweaty. But there was no way Nicole was going to leave her baby with him. Hopefully she could drag the boys away after they had swum maybe they could all drive over to the strip, where the only people they would be sharing the wide white beach with were the Spaniards who took apartments there every July and August for their annual holidays. Martha had screamed angrily, wriggling and kicking, but within minutes, she had plugged in her precious thumb and fallen asleep. Nicole decided to leave her in the car in the driveway she looked so peaceful, and it was nice and cool. She would only be a minute. Gavin might be there already, although in her experience, he was more likely to be taking advantage of the quiet to have a San Miguel on the balcony than sorting out dry towels for the boys.

And he was. In the villa. In the bedroom. And in Phil Brooks.

They always say, don't they, that if a door is closed and you suspect there may be fire behind it you must not open it? Because the rush of oxygen feeding the fire will make it burst towards you with new intensity, a wall of flames and heat.

That was what it felt like. Exactly what it felt like. A big wall of something so intense that she thought she would melt away, or be vaporised by the shock and the suddenness and the strength of it.

It happened, as these things do, in slow motion, so that the first searing pain lasted so much longer.

They heard her. Or saw her. She wasn't sure which came first. Gavin's a.r.s.e, white within his tan lines, flexing, Phil's thin legs framing it. She had cracked dry skin on her heels. It must have scratched him. The door was parallel to the bed, so that she could see where their skin made contact along their bodies. See Phil's thin, long b.r.e.a.s.t.s, nipples jutting out sideways, s.h.i.+vering with motion, her pointed hip bones. Her arms were above her head, pinned back by Gavin's hands, just above her elbows. His head was above hers, too far from it for kissing, though she was sucking at his neck, his chest in between saying, 'f.u.c.k me. f.u.c.k-' She stopped. Her head had thrashed right towards the door and she had seen Nicole. Gavin turned in the same direction. As he jumped off her, hopping awkwardly on the first leg to hit the floor, his p.e.n.i.s was bright red, and it bounced, ridiculously, against his stomach. Nicole registered that she had stopped them at the crucial moment, but it gave her no satisfaction.

They moved a lot then. She was very still. They flailed, pulling at sheets, and clothes. Nicole only tightened her grip on the door-handle, and stared at their nakedness, the absurdity of it. She had never seen people have s.e.x before, except in films, where it wasn't real, and she had never heard it, except through walls in cheap hotels long ago. Films and strangers were exciting. She remembered once, a million years ago, coming in time with another couple, through a wall, spooned from behind, so that she lost track, in the moment, of who she was keeping pace with, her lover, who wasn't Gavin, or them, the anonymous couple behind the wall. She'd only seen Gavin make love to her, from underneath, on top of or beside him. Then he had always looked s.e.xy to her. Now he looked vaguely comical. Except this wasn't funny.

She couldn't move forward or back, and she couldn't speak. Phil was saying, over and over, 'Christ, oh, Christ,' looking at Gavin, but not at Nicole. Gavin was silent, looking at neither of them.

The moment felt significant. If Gavin's peccadilloes, and one-night stands and office s.h.a.gs had landed bruising blows and deep cuts on her psyche, they had never reached the core of her. Now it had been sliced through. And it was this sudden change in her, so physically powerful, that stopped her moving.