That Was Then Read online

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, and I knew at once that had been the wrong thing to say. ‘Ben will be pleased to see you.’

  Drifting into sleep on the great, smooth wastes of the hotel’s king-size bed I allowed myself the luxury of unashamedly looking forward to home.

  And yes, Ben.

  Child of my heart. Apple of my eye.

  Chapter Two

  The following night at the airport we were both a little emotional. In my case it was the usual embarrassing routine – tears, snuffles, the odd audible sob. In Mel’s it was the merest blurring of the edges, something only a mother would recognise. And I almost wished I didn’t, for my own tears sprang partly from remorse – that I didn’t care more, that no matter how grateful I was, I was glad to be going and she knew it. The glint of sadness in my daughter’s eye – its restraint the more poignant for being surrounded by the jabbering and ululation of departing locals – was a devastating reproach to my shortcomings.

  ‘Give my regards to our kid,’ she said. And to Dad when you see him.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘If you see him,’ she added pointedly.

  ‘You know us,’ I said, ‘we keep in touch.’

  I noticed the slight tightening of the mouth which meant she was buttoning her lip. If we hadn’t been about to say goodbye she’d have had a comment to offer on this particular aspect of my domestic arrangements. Instead, she said:

  ‘Hope the flight’s OK. It usually settles down after Bahrein.’

  ‘I’m sure it will be fine.’

  ‘Off you go then.’ She gave me a peck on the cheek, turned, and walked briskly away from me without looking back.

  For two hours afterwards in the hot departure lounge, I felt that kiss like a cool full stop on my face.

  We were delayed in Bahrein for reasons that were not vouchsafed to us. After we had all sat obediently – the Brits more obediently than some others – in serried rows in the take-off area for an hour, we were told we’d be at least another hour and that we were therefore allowed to go and amuse ourselves in the transit lounge.

  I had my phone credit card number with me and decided to ring Ben and tell him about the delay, since he certainly wouldn’t think to make enquiries before leaving home. I wasn’t the only person with this idea, and had to wait for about twenty minutes before taking my place in the small plastic head-stall that reminded me of a commercial hairdrier.

  After a couple of botched jobs I got through, only to hear Ben’s recorded voice announcing that we couldn’t come to the phone right now. As the beeps went I glanced at my watch – it was one thirty in the morning here, about ten p.m. in England.

  ‘Ben,’ I said, ‘it’s Mum. I expect you’re still out somewhere. This is just to tell you that we’re held up in Bahrein. They say we should get going in an hour but I’ll believe it when it happens. So it looks as if we’ll be at least a couple of hours late, and you’d be advised to give Heathrow a ring and check, either first thing or tonight before going to bed. OK? Ring and check. Thanks for your postcard love. See you soon. Bye.’

  An hour and three quarters later we took off. It was the small hours, but time had ceased to mean anything. We were given a late-night snack of cold, dense cake, layered in pink and white, with tea or coffee. The film was the latest Mob movie, starring De Niro, Pacino, or Garcia – possibly all three. I didn’t put the headphones on – I couldn’t face that much casual brutality. But I wasn’t sleepy either, and although I opened my book my eye kept being drawn up to the ghastly goings-on on the screen. Men in suits garrotted other men in suits, or drilled them full of holes in restaurants, so that soup and spaghetti sauce mixed colourfully with the blood and guts. One fat man had a fork poked into his eye. A glamorous woman dabbed at the gore on her dress with a paper napkin. The lack of sound contributed to the gruesome humour of it all. It was the sort of film that Ben and his friends loved: total gross-out.

  I had a window seat. On my right, between me and the aisle, were two young Arab women in long black coats, like soutanes, and white headscarves. They watched the film with avid attention, headsets over the scarves. They didn’t speak, they didn’t flinch, they certainly didn’t laugh. It was impossible to tell what they made of it. Were they horrified? Disapproving? Turned on? I began to get a stiff neck glancing from my unturned pages, to the screen, to these two grave, sallow profiles.

  The cabin staff came round with thin grey blankets and eye masks, and I decided to make a determined effort to sleep. It was as wretchedly uncomfortable as ever, but I must have dozed a bit, because time passed. At some point the flashing screens went quiet and the lights were dimmed. Every time I turned over I saw the two Arab women still impassive, still wide awake, still listening to something on their headsets. Their calmness was comforting.

  Booming along, several miles up over southern Europe I felt curiously close to both my children, as though I were the apex of a huge triangle: Mel, just beginning to wake behind the white curtains and tinted glass of the Hotel Miramar … Ben, profoundly asleep, wherever he was … and me, up above the clouds, the fragile and inadequate link between the two.

  But as the window-blinds began to be rimmed in light and the clatterings of a northern dawn sounded from the galley, Mel’s image was already fading.

  Looking forward as I was to meeting Ben, I’d prepared the right kind of face to wear when emerging from customs – relaxed and unassuming, not the face of a parent who was going to be either embarrassingly emotional or wracked with neurotic suspicion. I came round the partition with my stride steady and head high. I tried not to scan the rows of faces, I was going to let him spot me first.

  But he didn’t, because he wasn’t there. I stood just past the exit, being jostled, an annoying obstacle to other people’s greetings and reunions. Outside it was grey – we’d seen the wet tarmac and shreds of dingy cloud as we landed – and I felt suddenly exhausted, and let down. Please God, I thought, don’t let anything awful have happened.

  As I made my way to the information desk I saw the two Arab women who’d been next to me on the flight. They were with a hawk-faced elderly man in a dark suit, wearing a white cotton pillbox hat. The women pushed their trolleys, he walked alongside, a fiercely proprietary presence. They looked as calm as ever. And why wouldn’t they? They were well met.

  Harrassed and neglected, I queued for assistance. The girl behind the desk was maddeningly bright.

  ‘We’ve received no message.’

  ‘Well look, I’ll go and have a cup of coffee, can you let me know if …?’

  ‘I’ve made a note of your name, we’ll page you if anything comes through.’

  I trundled to the coffee-and-baguette bar, parked alongside a free seat, and fetched a large espresso with two sugars.

  Even a much needed caffeine hit couldn’t replace the adrenalin that was ebbing away. I was horribly disappointed. And there was that foolish, wriggling worm of worry. Had Ben taken off somewhere? Was that why he’d sent me a postcard on day one – not because of a fond impulse but because he planned to disappear? I could picture his cronies going to work on him, telling him it was time he cut the cord and flew the nest. ‘ Do it while the old dot’s away, and she’ll hardly notice the difference, bottle of wine when she gets back and bob’s your uncle …’ My familiarity with the way they thought was frightening. And hadn’t I often done the same thing myself, taking advantage of Ben’s absence to clear out his drawers and his wardrobe, consigning old clothes and grotty paperbacks to outer darkness without his even knowing?

  He’d moved out twice already. Once, in order to put a somewhat ragged girdle round the earth with his best pal Nozz; the second time to university, but his positively epic failure to do any work at Newcastle (club heaven, as other parents had warned me) coincided with the break-up of our marriage, so what was expedient was nicely linked to what seemed at least to be filial. He came back and took a job behind the counter at HMV. Since his return, his sure instinct for self-preservat
ion and natural sympathy towards me had ensured a happy and serene household. But now that I was quite clearly over the trauma of separation I knew he was under pressure from Nozz and co. to quit the nest. Perhaps, with me out of the way, that pressure had finally born fruit—

  ‘Mum?’

  I don’t know when the seat opposite had been vacated, but it had been, because Ben was now sitting in it, red-eyed, unshaven and grinning, like a fairground gypsy.

  ‘I was, like, you’d be shitting yourself, having my name given out on the public address system, but here you are sat down with a nice cup of coffee, you don’t care do you?’

  I didn’t any more. ‘I knew you’d show up. How are you, love?’

  He leaned across and kissed me, stubbing out a cigarette in the ashtray at the same time. He exuded the unkempt, feral smell of youth. His dark, curling hair was slightly greasy. There was a single zit among the stubble.

  ‘Look at the state of you,’ he commented admiringly. ‘ Tan or what?’

  ‘Not bad is it?’ I agreed.

  ‘How’s the Melon?’

  ‘You really mustn’t call her that—’

  ‘Why, you didn’t bring her back, did you?’

  ‘No, but you put it on your postcard.’

  He beamed with obvious self-satisfaction. ‘ You got that, then?’

  From this I inferred that he hadn’t received my message and therefore had probably not spent last night at home.

  ‘Yesterday,’ I said, ‘what timing.’

  ‘I aim to please.’

  He lit another Marlboro like a man with all the time in the world. At twenty-one, one does.

  ‘Shall we make a move?’ I suggested.

  ‘Two minutes—’ he held up two fingers, then added a third – ‘three. Pearl’s gone to the bog.’

  ‘Pearl?’

  ‘A friend.’ He flicked ash, grinned. ‘Trust me.’

  I didn’t, of course, and I was right not to. When Pearl showed up she was no friend, but a white-faced, yellow-haired, damson-lipped houri, with a figure to stop traffic, kitted out in denim cutoffs that revealed the lower curve of her buttocks and an angora crop-top which threatened to do the same for her breasts. She had a small silver ring through her eyebrow – or through where her eyebrow would have been if she hadn’t plucked it out and repositioned it with kohl pencil. The whole voluptuous, undulating structure was balanced on black chunky high heels with fetishistic ankle straps.

  Sex, in other words, on a stick.

  ‘Here she is,’ said Ben. ‘What are we waiting for? This way girls.’

  He set off with the trolley, Pearl and I followed. She seemed preoccupied, but I was used to that.

  ‘Did you have a ghastly journey?’ I enquired.

  ‘It wasn’t too good.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘The M25 can be absolute hell in the early mornings.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Is it all still coned off near the junction with the M40?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘There are so many contraflows,’ I explained.

  ‘Yeah – Ben!’

  We were approaching the automatic doors when Pearl darted past both of us and out into the set-down area with astonishing speed and agility considering the shoes. Fortunately she just made the edge of the pavement before creating her very own contraflow right there and then, and pebble-dashing the area with the contents of her stomach.

  ‘Go Pearl,’ urged Ben unnecessarily. He sent me an amused ‘what-can-you-do?’ glance. ‘ Sorry about this. Should’ve brought a bag of sawdust, she’s been at it since four.’

  It was clear now why they’d been late. Ben explained that he and Pearl had spent the night at the house of a mutual acquaintance in Ealing, host of the event which had given rise to Pearl’s indisposition. Since she’d scarcely slept anyway, Pearl had plumped for a lift home via Heathrow, in Ben’s company, rather than face the challenges of the journey back on her own.

  We had to stop twice on the M25. We pulled over at speed, hazard lights flashing, with Pearl already opening the rear passenger door as we shuddered on to the hard shoulder.

  ‘Poor girl,’ I said, as we waited for her somewhere near Junction 12. ‘What have you been doing to her?’

  Ben raised his hands from the steering wheel. ‘ Not guilty. She did it all on her own.’

  We dropped Pearl off on the outskirts of town. She managed a ‘Bye’ to me, and a slighty more forceful ‘Ring me’ to Ben.

  ‘Where did you meet her?’ I asked.

  ‘Can’t remember … Pub I think.’

  ‘What does she do?’

  He sent me a sly look. ‘ Parties. Puts out.’

  ‘I mean in the hours of daylight.’

  ‘She’s doing retakes at college.’

  We turned off the motorway. ‘And are you going to ring her?’

  ‘Could do.’ He let this sink in, and then reached out and patted my arm. ‘Cheer up, Ma, you weren’t seeing her at her best.’

  Littelsea was a stolid seaside town, big enough to support an out-of-town superstore, several smaller supermarkets, a two-screen cinema, three persuasions of church and half a dozen ethnic restaurants, but too refined to harbour anything as louche as a nightclub. That kind of thing, reasoned the Littelsea elders, was best left to Brighton, a safe distance along the coast. The result was that at least half the town’s pubs, knowing where their most profitable customer-base lay, had reinvented themselves as happening venues for the young. So instead of the feared goings-on being driven, literally, underground, they now occupied many thousands of square feet at street-level and spilled out on to the pavements, where they frightened the horses and provoked letters of dignified discontent to the local paper.

  Today the offshore breeze was keeping the clouds away from Littelsea, and the sun sparkled on the white plaster work of Cliff Mansions as we approached along the seafront. I’d bought Number Fourteen with my half of the proceeds from our marital home. I loved it to bits. After the thumping great country rectory with its rampant acre and a half, its five cavernous bedrooms and its bank-busting fuel habit, this flat in a Victorian mansion block was very heaven. One front door, one large living room, two good-sized bedrooms and a small one; main hall, staircase and windows the province of the residents’ association; and a balcony from which you could see the channel – testy, sullen, or indolent according to the prevailing wind. From the Mansions you could walk to the long sweep of shingly beach with its stubby black breakwaters in less than five minutes. Far from having come down in the world, I felt I’d gone up, up and away – loosed from my moorings like a helium balloon.

  The front door of the Mansions was at the back. From habit, I glanced down into the black hole which housed the wheelie-bins but could make out nothing untoward. Ben went ahead with the key, and my big case.

  In the big central hall with its still grand staircase I went to look in our pigeonhole, but he jerked his head. ‘ They’re all up there.’

  There was no lift in the Mansions which for the moment we considered to be a good thing – it discouraged the elderly and retired who might have been oversensitive to noise, and it also precluded young families at the pram and pushchair stage. Our less fit visitors tended to arrive on the fourth floor completely out of breath, but we were used to it.

  Ben flung the door wide and stood aside for me to enter. ‘Welcome!’

  Apart from being a little stuffy and filmed with dust, the flat was fine. I realised as soon as I went in that he’d kept it respectable by spending almost no time there. If there had been a party just after I left (a circumstance which might have prompted the postcard) there had been plenty of time to erase the evidence in the days immediately afterwards.

  Ben put down my case, and indicated a pile of letters on the table by the phone. ‘ I wrote down your messages,’ he said, adding: ‘I’ll open up,’ and strolling into the living room with an air of complete assurance.

  When I joined him he had opened th
e balcony door. A gush of seaweed-salty air bustled through the room, bringing it to life. Ben’s hands were in the back pockets of his jeans but he made a gesture with his thumbs which offered up the whole area for my inspection.

  ‘So what do you reckon?’

  ‘Not bad at all,’ I said, glancing round. There was one of those mixed bunches of flowers you can buy at filling stations, still in its cellophane, stuck in a lager glass on the mantelpiece. ‘In fact very good.’

  ‘Thought you’d be impressed.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘To be honest I haven’t been around that much, but I’ve been looking in, you know, keeping an eye on things.’

  ‘Well thanks for doing such a good job.’

  ‘You’re welcome. Want to see the rest?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Dutifully I went to the kitchen and took in the empty draining board, the wiped surfaces and the two pints of semi-skimmed in the fridge. The top half of the sash window was down about six inches.

  ‘Brilliant.’

  ‘Bathroom?’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it, love.’

  ‘Fancy a cup of tea?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind another coffee.’

  ‘Coming up.’ I went to take my flight bag along the corridor, and he called after me: ‘Leave the big one, I’ll do that.’

  I liked my bedroom. It was tranquil, comfortable – a haven. After years of feeling that if I wasn’t actually asleep I should be up and about, making a difference, I had rediscovered the indulgent pleasures of eating, reading, watching TV, listening to the radio and making phone calls, in bed. I had even, since coming to Cliff Mansions, moved my pillows into the centre of the bedhead, a step from which I had shrunk before, because it seemed to consitute a painful admission of my solitary state. Now I took a clean nightshirt out of the drawer and dropped it on the pile of pillows that was all for me: I’d sleep well tonight.

  Ben bumped in with my case in one hand and my coffee in the other. I took the mug off him before he slopped any more.

  ‘Lovely, thanks.’