Girl Unknown(6)

‘Oh, Christ.’

‘She’s fine –’

‘What happened?’

I told him about the phone call I’d received – Ellen’s neighbour Marion, sounding breathy and rushed: You told me to call if ever something happened. I listened as she told me how she had found Ellen in Tesco, crying in the frozen-food section, not knowing where she was or how she would get home. It was not the first such occurrence. ‘I’ve settled her now,’ I said. ‘I gave her some beans on toast.’

‘Should I come over?’

Ellen was just beginning to get over her shakiness. The last thing she needed was to relive it for her son. ‘Leave it until the weekend, David. Give her a chance to recover.’

‘Okay,’ he agreed. Then he said: ‘Caroline?’

‘Yes?’

He hesitated. ‘Nothing. It can wait.’

But it was there in his voice – a note I couldn’t identify.

I knew it at once: something had happened.

She came into our lives, into our home, at an awkward time for me, a time I think of now as being filled with nerves and self-doubt. I had, after a fifteen-year hiatus, returned to work at the advertising agency I had left when Robbie was born. Everything felt changed, like foreign territory I had visited once but of which I retained no memory. Nothing was familiar.

The decision to give up my career to raise my children was not something I regretted, even though it had been a strain at times: the boredom, the loneliness. There was a deep need within me to create for my children a warm and loving environment where there would always be someone making sure they did their homework, putting dinner on the table, checking on them when they were in bed at night. I did it gladly. My only continuing contact with the agency was a calendar arriving every year at Christmas, each month headed with a sleek image of a car or an alcoholic drink or whatever product they were being paid to push. When the calendar arrived and I read all the names signed on the inside flap, I confess I felt a pang, a twinge of something close to envy. Fleeting, but I was aware of it nonetheless – a seam of uncertainty or regret that could be tapped into whenever I was reminded of what I had given up. When I met Peter by chance and he mentioned that one of the girls in the office was taking ten months’ maternity leave, the idea took hold. My children were old enough. I had time on my hands. Although I had been out of the game for so long, I felt the pull of it, the undertow of a distant longing. I hadn’t counted on Zo?. I hadn’t even known she existed.

That evening, after I’d left Ellen, I drove home through heavy traffic, the image of my elderly mother-in-law crying next to cabinets full of fish fingers and frozen peas still alive in my mind. Opening my front door, I heard noise from the sitting room, movement upstairs. I kicked off my shoes in the hall, pausing briefly to enjoy the relief. Having hung my coat over the newel post, I went into the sitting room.

Robbie was sitting on the couch with his legs tucked up under him. On the telly a woman was sobbing in front of a studio audience, the man beside her mortified.

‘Hello, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘Sorry I’m so late.’

‘Hey, Mum,’ he answered.

‘I was at Nan’s,’ I told him, although he hadn’t sought an explanation for my absence. ‘Where’s your dad?’

‘Upstairs.’

He was still wearing his school uniform and, after shooting a quick smile in my direction, went back to staring avidly at the screen, the room dark apart from the light cast by the flickering images. The studio audience were hissing and booing, the presenter advancing through them. Robbie shifted under my gaze and I caught a glimpse of an empty crisps packet stuffed down the side of the couch beside him.

‘You didn’t eat a whole bag, did you?’

He smiled again and pulled a face. ‘Sorry, I was hungry.’

‘Robbie …’

‘Sorry!’ he said again, still smiling. At fifteen, he was at an awkward transitional stage, trapped in the hormonal no man’s land between child and adult. At moments like this, when his roguish grin surfaced, he was my little boy again. I let it go.

Climbing the stairs, I could hear music coming from Holly’s room – some tinny pop – and beneath it, the sweet, faltering accompaniment of my daughter’s voice. I stepped past her door, opened ours softly and saw David stretched out on the bed, eyes closed, a glass of wine in one hand resting on his chest. I stood over him watching, his handsome face serious, even in repose, lines from laughter and concentration hardening now into permanence. He stirred a little.

‘You’ll spill that.’

His eyes shot open and he sat up quickly. I reached forward and rescued the glass, put it to my lips and drank.

‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ he said, blinking and running a hand across his face.

The wine warmed the back of my throat. I set the glass on the nightstand, and sat down on the bed beside him. He lay back, locking his hands behind his neck and I felt a brief, surprising nudge of desire. I could lie down on the bed next to him and, with the dinner drying out in the oven, we could slip off our clothes and forget the troubles of the day for a while. It seemed so risqué, the thought of sex at this hour of the evening with the children in the house, the telly on downstairs. I put my hand on his shirt-front, traced a line down to his belt. This kind of spontaneity still felt unnatural in the wake of what had happened between us. His eyes closed and he shifted under my touch, tacitly agreeing to my unspoken suggestion.