A Place for Us Read online

  “You’re still tall,” he said. “Tall and slim and beautiful. I’d know you anywhere.”

  She fiddled with the belt of her coat, never taking her eyes off him. “I can’t say the same about you, Davy. You look—well. I wouldn’t have known you.”

  He gave a faint smile. “Let me get you a drink.”

  “No, Davy. I’ll get it. You sit down.”

  She returned with a rum and Coke. “Five pound eighty! Five pound eighty, Davy, what a racket!”

  Her rueful smile relaxed him. He pointed. “Four pounds, this was.”

  “The world’s gone mad.”

  “Too right, Cassie.”

  There was an awkward pause; she took a sip of her drink. David cleared his throat. “So—you keeping well?”

  “I’m all right, thanks.”

  “Where you living?”

  “Flat off the Essex Road. I came back, you see.”

  “I’m glad,” he said uncomfortably.

  “It’s not the same. Everyone’s gone. It’s bankers and lawyers round here mostly. Or younger people. I don’t know anyone.” Beneath her heavy fringe her eyes filled with tears. “Long way back to Muriel Street from where you are, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. He didn’t belong here. He’d hoped he might walk around afterward, but fear haunted these streets for him, the way it always had. Suddenly he wished he was at home, sitting in his sunny study, the sound of Martha singing in the kitchen, Daisy and Florence playing in the garden. . . . He blinked. Daisy was gone, wasn’t she? And Florence . . . Cat was still there, yes? No, Cat had gone too. They’d all gone.

  “You got any more kids? I’m sorry. I don’t know—anything about you.” He gave an embarrassed half-laugh.

  “You know I didn’t want us to stay in touch,” she said. “Look, we got our own lives. No. I haven’t got any kids, Davy. We never had any, me and Terry.” Her watery eyes were fixed on him again. “You understand what I mean.”

  His hand covered hers. “I do, Cassie.”

  “What I don’t understand is why you wanted to see me,” she said. “After all this time.”

  David shifted in his seat. “I’m dying,” he said. He smiled at her, trying to ignore the pain that was always there. Her gray eyes widened.

  “Davy. That true? Cancer?”

  He loved the vowels. Kainsa. That London voice. He’d lost it deliberately, couldn’t wait for it to melt away. “No. My heart.” He clenched his fist, in and out, like the doctor had showed him. “The muscle’s dying. It doesn’t want to work anymore. One day I’ll just—phut. Then that’s it.”

  Her tears fell then, little black circles staining the newly waxed wood tables. “Oh, Davy.”

  He hadn’t told Martha. Only his son, Bill, knew. As Cassie put her arms round him and drew his head onto her heaving shoulder, as she cried softly and silently, it occurred to David she was the only link he had to where he’d come from. He’d tried for years to put it away, to push forward toward the golden life he’d promised himself he and Martha deserved, only to be obsessively seeking it out again now. He thought of the meeting he’d had that morning with his gallery on Dover Street.

  “I mean, there’s a few I wonder if we need to show. Sensitivity and all that. Do we want to include this one?” Jeremy, the director of the gallery, had slid the watercolor, pen, and ink toward him.

  David had looked at it and, as he always did with everything he drew, squeezed his arms against his sides, a little aide-mémoire to help him recall what it was, why he’d done it, how, what it had been like. In fact, he remembered the scene well, a bombed block of flats out in Limehouse. He’d walked there, the morning after a bad night. V-2 rockets had come to London when the war was almost over, and they were worse than the bombs of the Blitz. You only heard them flying toward you if you were out of their path. If they were headed right for you, you never knew until it was too late.

  David hadn’t slept much, since the bomb had hit their street. He’d dream about pulling Mum out of the wreckage, his sister too, running away with them somewhere safe. Not to the shelters but far away, out of the city, out where there were trees and no dead people, and no Dad coming at him, huge and black, stinking of stout and that smell men got.

  He’d woken up early that morning. Walked and walked as he liked to do. He could walk for hours; no one was bothered where he was, after all. He’d gone along the canal to Limehouse, past the bombed-out warehouses, the abandoned boats, the muck. A girl asleep on a bench, lipstick smudged, greenish tweed skirt twisted around her legs. He wondered if she was one of those kinds of girls, and he’d have stopped to draw her but a policeman came past on a bicycle and shoved him along. He kept on walking, and walking, because John, a boy down the street, had told him there was a bad lot there.

  The sketches he produced that morning of the scene in Victoria Court had become the painting he’d seen that morning, nearly seventy years later, in the white, hushed gallery in Mayfair. But he could still remember how it felt, all these years later. Women sobbing, hair coming loose from their scarves. Men dazed, picking through the rubble. It was very quiet, otherwise. There was one wall standing, against the road, and he’d squatted and sketched, a parody of a still-life scene of the corner of a room.

  Flaps of yellow wallpaper printed with ribbons, fluttering in the morning breeze. The side of a cup, a packet of rice, a tin plate, blue paint scratched off. And a child’s arm, probably a toddler’s, the cotton sleeve of its shirt frayed where it had become detached from the body with the force of the explosion. The small pink fingers, curled up.

  “Of course it stays in,” he’d said.

  Jeremy had hesitated. “David, I think it’s wonderful. But it’s very dark.”

  “War is very dark,” David had said, the pain almost sending him under. “Either we do this or we don’t. If you want cheeky urchins playing in rubble, forget it.” He had bowed his head, remembering, remembering, and the other men were silent.

  • • •

  Now, as he hugged Cassie, he realized he didn’t know her anymore, and that he had to do what he’d come here for. He sat back and patted her hand.

  “Don’t cry, dearest. Let me tell you why I wanted to meet.”

  She wiped her nose. “Fine. Make it good. You bastard, making me cry, after all these years. You’re the one who ran out on me, Davy.”

  “Don’t start that. Didn’t I help you?”

  “You saved my life,” she said. “And my little girl’s, later. I know it, I’ll always know it. Davy . . .” She gave a big sigh. “I wish it was all different, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. Maybe not. I’d never have gone to Winterfold if it hadn’t been like this. I’d never have met Martha. And had the children.”

  “Give me their names, then? All of them?”

  “Bill, he’s the eldest.”

  “Where’s he?”

  “Oh, Bill never went far. Lives in the village, he’s a GP. Pillar of the community, you might say. Married to a nice girl, Karen, much younger than him. Second marriage; he’s got a grown-up daughter, Lucy. Then there’s Daisy . . . she’s—well, we don’t see her so much anymore. She’s in India. A charity worker. Very dedicated. Raises money for these schools in Kerala.”

  “Blimey. How often does she come home?”

  “It’s sad. She doesn’t, really.”

  “Never?”

  “Not for years now. She has a daughter, too. Cat. Lives in Paris. We raised her, after Daisy . . . left.”

  Cassie seemed fascinated by this. “She ran out on her own kid?”

  “Yes. But . . . it’s hard to explain Daisy. She was—she’s difficult to understand. We’re very proud of her.”

  It was such an easy lie, once you got used to it. He kept thinking of Daisy these days. Wondering what had gone wrong with her, whether
it was his fault, something in his genes.

  “And—the other one, Davy, so what’s she called?”

  “Florence. Florence is the baby. But she’s very tall too.”

  Her eyes met his. “Just like her father.”

  “Just like her father, and we’re very close. She’s . . .” He hesitated. “Very academic. She’s a professor, Cassie. Of art history. Lives in Florence.”

  “Lives in Florence and she’s called Florence?”

  He smiled. “It’s true. She—”

  A languorous waiter came over to ask them if they wanted food, and broke the spell. David looked at his watch and said no, and Cassie slid her wallet into her handbag. She clicked her tongue. “So tell me what you want.”

  David took a deep breath, ignoring the fluttering pain in his chest. “I want you to come to Winterfold. Meet them all. Before I die.”

  She laughed. It took him by surprise, a big belly laugh, a touch of hysteria, and it went on and on, until the fellow drinkers turned round to see what the two old people in the corner found to laugh about.

  When she stopped laughing, she swallowed, and drained the rest of her rum and Coke.

  “No,” she said. “Absolutely not. You got your nice life down there, I got mine. That’s the deal we made. I wish it were different but it’s not. Forget about the past, Davy.”

  “But we need to straighten everything out. I want it all done

  before . . . I don’t know how long I’ve got. It could be months, it could be years, but—”

  She gripped his wrist, her eyes bright. “Davy, you always said I was cleverer than you. Didn’t you? So listen to me. Leave the past alone. Forget you saw me. All right?”

  “But doesn’t family mean anything to you, anything at all?” David tried to hold on to her grip, but she pulled her hand away from him and stood up.

  “Yes, my dear, it does. It means pain, and misery, and suffering, and you’re mixed up with it enough. Take the time you’ve got and just enjoy it,” she said, fixing her big bright scarf, not looking at him. Her voice wavered, but she finished firmly, “Let it be, Davy. God bless you, my love.”

  Karen

  KAREN WINTER SAT at the counter while the girl in front of her held her fingers, scraping at her cuticles. Outside, rain fell steadily out of a metallic sky, turning the golden Bath stone a dirty sand. People hurried past the nail salon, the fogged-up windows blurring their figures into smears of dull color. Karen stared blankly up at the music channel on the screen above her head, eyes following the video, not registering any of it.

  The invitation had arrived that morning, as she was on her way out. What did it mean? What the hell was Martha on about? Had she guessed? Was it a threat? Karen wasn’t normally one for introspection: she acted first, thought later. When her stepdaughter, Lucy, stayed with them, she alternately drove Karen up the wall and made her laugh with her amateur dramatics, staying in bed till all hours, sighing over her phone, frantically texting, scribbling her every last thought into a book she called a journal, which Karen thought was pretty pretentious. Then she’d flop into the kitchen at midday and say she hadn’t slept well because things were “on her mind.” Karen, who was only ten years older than Lucy, always wanted to retort: Can’t you unload the dishwasher at the same time as having things on your mind? Karen was a devotee of motivational self-help books and knew that the main principle of effective living as outlined in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was the Character Ethic. Lucy needed the Character Ethic. She, Karen, had it and—well, anyway.

  She sighed. Coralie looked up. “Okay, miss?”

  “Sure.” Karen shrugged. The nail salon was warm, tiny, crowded; it hummed with the easy chatter of women in salons. She could hear snatches of conversation: Marks & Spencer was having a sale on clothes, some child wouldn’t eat pasta, someone was going to Minorca on a package deal. “Didn’t sleep much last night,” she added, for no particular reason.

  “Oh dear. That’s bad. Why?” Coralie slapped Karen’s hands, slicking them with cream, and rubbed each one in turn.

  Karen’s fingers itched to scratch her own face, a habit of hers since she was little whenever she felt awkward. She inhaled slowly, watching Coralie deftly plumping the glossy blob of undercoat onto her nail. “Oh, family business.”

  “Oh. Family.” Coralie coughed. “Huh.”

  Karen smiled. “My mother-in-law’s having a party. Could do without it. You know?”

  “Sure. I know.” Coralie rolled her eyes. “Where do they live?”

  “They’re just south of here. It’s called . . . Winterfold.” She looked at Coralie, expecting her to recognize it, and then smiled. Why the hell should she? The way people said “Winterfold” in hushed tones, same as “the Queen” or “the National Trust.” But the Winters were famous, they had a sort of sheen to them. Their parties were legendary, they knew everyone for miles around, and it was all because of Martha. She had a cupboard full of woolen blankets for picnics in summer, for God’s sake. She made sloe gin, she pickled green tomatoes, she sewed bunting for birthdays. She remembered anniversaries, and brought round lasagnas to new parents. Didn’t stop to coo, just handed it over and left. She didn’t want to be your best friend; she just made you feel welcome and gave you a drink, and she listened.

  Karen’s only attempt to create something similar, her and Bill’s New Year’s Eve drinks party the previous year, had been a disaster. Susan Talbot, who ran the village shop–cum–post office, and therefore apparently had to be kept sweet otherwise she’d close it down and then Winter Stoke would be plunged back into the Middle Ages, had leaned too close over Karen’s Swedish candle display, which she’d recreated from a magazine article, and Susan’s hair had caught alight. It had ruined the atmosphere. Thirty people was too many in a house the size of theirs, and the smell of burned hair wouldn’t leave, even after they opened all the doors and windows.

  It was somehow symptomatic of her and Bill, she thought. They didn’t “entertain” well. At least his daughter brought a bit of life into the house, even if she was messy and loud and bouncy, like Tigger. Lucy made Bill smile. People seemed to drop by when she was staying. She was the exact combination of her grandparents: warmth radiated off her like David; she could knock together a meal from baked potatoes and a packet of ham and turn it into a delicious little winter supper, and the wine would flow, noise and laughter flowering in the house like a desert after rain. . . . Karen had bought Susan vouchers for a proper salon experience at Toni & Guy by way of apology for the New Year’s incident, and Susan had been deeply offended. Karen knew that if Lucy had been responsible for the Swedish candle disaster, she’d have had everyone laughing in seconds and more drinks flowing, and sent Susan Talbot home warm with attention and grateful for her free haircut.

  Afterward, in bed, Karen had said angrily to Bill, “I’m sure your parents never have a sodding cock-up like that at one of their parties. It’s just us.”

  Bill had laughed. “You weren’t there for the Summer Party Disaster.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, it was years ago. Our dog, Hadley . . .” He’d begun to smile, then said, “Actually, it was awful. But everyone stayed till three, in the rain. There was a conga, I seem to remember. Funny, isn’t it?”

  No, it wasn’t funny. Karen, dying to know what had happened, had simply turned over and pretended to go to sleep. They’d had a party and it’d gone horribly wrong, but of course that was all part of the fun, wasn’t it? Those Winters!

  Maybe that was when the sinkhole started to form under their marriage, and no one saw it, of course. Karen hated herself for being mean about her in-laws, but she couldn’t help it. Winterfold was only a house, for God’s sake, not a cathedral. They were only a family.

  “It’s my mother-in-law’s eightieth. They have a beautiful house,” she told Coralie. “Near here. Yes . . . they’re having a fami
ly party.”

  Coralie looked blank. “Fine. Why don’t you want to go?”

  Karen’s cheeks twitched. “Because . . . we’re so different. I don’t fit in there.” She didn’t know Coralie’s surname or where she lived, but it was easier to say it to her than to him. She’d been married to Bill for four years now, she knew every mole and freckle on his slim body, she knew how he liked his eggs done and what he meant when he said “Hmm” any one of fifteen ways, and yet she didn’t know how to tell him that. I don’t fit in.

  “Fit in?”

  Coralie’s supple fingers pressed the tiny bones in Karen’s hand. She jumped. “Like . . . I don’t belong there. Oh, it doesn’t matter.”

  “You feel stupid with them. I know.” Coralie took the clear nail varnish off the rack, shook it. Karen stared at it.

  “Something like that.” She imagined the look on Martha’s face if she could hear her. Did she know that was how Karen felt? Did Bill? Or his crazy sister, Florence the crackpot? Florence barely acknowledged Karen; it was as if she didn’t exist. Karen laughed softly to herself. She remembered the first time she’d met Bill and he’d told her he had a sister who studied art history.

  “Just . . . looks at paintings all day? For real? That’s her job ?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so,” Bill had said, as if she’d said something funny, and she’d flushed. This quiet man who was—what?—ten years older than she, and yet so handsome in a strange way, so intriguing, polite. He’d been so easy to tease, back then. She’d wanted to talk to him just to hear his soft voice, see the light in his eyes when he looked at her. But she’d made a fool of herself, even that first time.

  Funny to think of it now, really, the first time she’d met him. She remembered thinking: This guy’s a bit older than me but he could be the father of my kids. She’d felt instantly, completely, as if she’d found someone safe, calm, funny, kind. But she’d got his age wrong: he was seventeen years older, almost old enough to be her dad. He had a twenty-year marriage behind him, and a teenage daughter. She’d got a lot of things wrong, hadn’t she? And now she was paying, she supposed. Paying to not fit in.