Annie Robinson is sweet, well-meaning, good-natured and slightly damaged - or maybe I should say bruised. The sound of her voice makes me wince. It tells me everything I need to know.
At three o’clock I pick Emma up from school. She has a sticker on her jumper that says ‘Best Counter’.
‘I can count to sixty-one,’ she announces proudly.
‘That’s very good, but what comes next?’
‘Sixty-two.’
‘So you can count higher.’
‘I can, but the teacher wanted me to stop. I think she was getting bored.’
When I laugh, Emma gets cross. She doesn’t like people laughing unless she understands why.
As soon as she gets to the terrace she goes looking for her Snow White dress.
‘It’s in the wash,’ I tell her.
‘When will it be out of the wash?’
‘Not for a long time.’
‘You can put it in the dryer.’
‘It will shrink.’
She looks at me doubtfully and then opens the washing machine. ‘You haven’t even started.’
‘I’ve been busy.’
Eventually she searches through the dirty washing until she finds the dress and puts it on, ignoring the chocolate and bolognaise stains.
Charlie arrives at about four, dropping her bag in the hallway.
‘How are things?’ I ask.
‘Guess.’
She blows a strand of hair from her eyes, but doesn’t look at me.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Let me think. That’s right, my father is an idiot, that’s about it.’
‘That’s not very polite, Charlie.’
‘I was going to call you an arsehole, so “idiot” is far more polite.’
Slumping angrily on to the sofa, she picks up the remote and flicks aggressively through the channels without taking any notice of what she’s ignoring.
‘I can explain.’
‘It’s all over the school. You beat up Mr Ellis and put him in hospital. He’s everyone’s favourite teacher - which makes me as popular as swine flu. I’m going to have to leave school, leave the country, change my name.’
‘I think you’re overdramatising this.’
‘Am I?’ I can hear the hated tone in her voice.
‘Gordon Ellis said things about you.’
‘What things?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Yes, it does. Tell me!’
‘He said that he’d slept with you.’
‘And what - you believed him and beat him up! I babysat his little boy, Dad. I didn’t sleep with anyone - that’s just stupid. Gordon wasn’t even there . . .’
‘Don’t call him Gordon.’
She shoots me a look.
‘I know things about him, Charlie.’
‘And you don’t trust me - is that it?’
‘That’s not it.’
‘So what were you doing - defending my honour?’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
Charlie looks at me dismissively.
‘What’s going to happen when I bring a boyfriend home? Are you going to beat him up too? Maybe you want to beat up my football coach - he’s a bit of a lech. And what about the creep on the bus who’s always perving at me? You could beat him up.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I’m not the one who’s being ridiculous. I’m starting to understand why Mum left you.’
The statement cuts through the hard spots, right to the soft centre where it hurts the most. Charlie senses that she’s gone too far, but she doesn’t take it back, which hurts even more.
Brushing past me, she pulls on her coat.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Out.’
‘Where?’
‘Away from you.’
The door closes and I tell myself that she’ll forgive me eventually and grasp what happened. And then I realise that I don’t want her to understand. I don’t want her to know what Gordon Ellis said and how much I wanted to kill him. I want to stop her knowing things like that.
‘Can I watch TV?’ whispers Emma.
She’s standing in the doorway. How much did she hear?
‘Come on in, Squeak, I’ll find you something to watch.’
A few hours later I take Emma for a walk, looking for Charlie. Letting myself into the cottage, I find her riding boots missing from the laundry. She’s across the lane in Haydon Field where she stables her mare in the barn.
Slipping inside, I watch as Charlie throws a quilted pad on Peggy’s back, smoothing it down. I help her lift the saddle from the railing and set it in place. Charlie ducks under Peggy and buckles the strap, pulling it tight.
Inserting her boot into the left stirrup, she swings herself upwards and looks down at me.
‘I’m sorry for what I said.’
‘I deserved it.’
A braided ponytail hangs beneath her riding hat. ‘You don’t have to worry about me and boys.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I have a horse.’
She laughs, kicks her heels and bolts away, thundering across the field, her hair flying and jodhpurs clinging to her young body. In every sense she’s getting further and further away from me.
34
Norman Mailer said there were four stages in a marriage. First the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
That night Julianne visits me and hands me the papers. I’ve just taken two sedatives and drunk a large Scotch, desperate to sleep. The alcohol and the Valium are starting to work when she appears, pushing past me at the front door and striding into the kitchen. She spies the bottle of Scotch and it seems to confirm her suspicions.
Calmly and dispassionately, she tells me about her decision. She wants me to understand that she has thought this through very carefully. She might use the term ‘long and hard’ but my mind is fuzzy. I feel as though I’m floating on the ceiling, looking down at myself, hearing myself trying to explain.
‘Gordon Ellis broke in here and said things about Charlie - terrible things - I just sort of snapped.’
‘Snapped?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You don’t snap, Joe. You never snap.’
‘I know, but this was different.’
‘Did you want to kill him?’
I hesitate. ‘Yes.’
She is quiet a long time, staring into space, her lips pressed into thin straight lines. I keep waiting for her to speak. ‘Is that how little you think of us?’
‘What?’
‘Is that how little we mean to you?’ I can see anger climbing into her face. ‘You tried to kill someone. What if you’re sent to prison? What sort of father will you be then? We’re not living in the Middle Ages, Joe, men don’t challenge each other to duels. They don’t bash each other’s heads in.’
She flicks hair from her eyes. I can see the twin furrows above her nose. Charlie has them, too. I want to defend myself, but the drugs have turned my brain to treacle.
Julianne sighs and hands me the divorce papers. ‘It’s time to move on, Joe.’
‘What does that mean exactly?’
‘What does what mean?’
‘Moving on. You see, I don’t think we move at all. We run up and down on the spot and the world moves under us. Days, weeks, months, pass beneath our feet.’
‘So you’re saying we’re like hamsters on a wheel?’
‘Going nowhere.’
Julianne scoffs at this and tells me to grow up. Looking at her hands more than my face, she asks me to sign the papers, saying something about it being both our faults. We got engaged too young and too quickly - six months and three days after our first date.
‘This isn’t about love any more, Joe. You joke about your Parkinson’s. You pretend nothing has changed. But you’re sadder. You’re self-absorbed. You obsess. You monitor every twitch and tremor. You’re like an archaeologist piecing together his own remains, finding bits and pieces but nothing whole. It breaks my heart.’