PART I
Friday andSaturday
1
Beyond theBrambles
Now
When I leave my life behind, I make sure everything is perfect.
I fold a load of laundry, put away the dishes, then start on the rest of the house. The living room is always the messiest, the nursery is too small for my daughter, Millie’s, larger toys so her kitchen, craft box and games are in here. I dislike tidying it at the end of the day – rescuing the wheel of a toy buggy stuck between the balcony railings, fishing under the sofa for a wooden carrot that rolls beyond reach. Today though, I take time over her things. Sorting her play food into miniature crates. Finding the long-lost piece of her Peter Rabbit puzzle. Tenderly gathering up the teddies she invited for a tea party.
She’s still asleep after her tantrum so I cook dinner, a huge pot of her favourite – cheesy pasta with sweetcorn. I make it the ‘no lumps’ way, forming a roux with butter and flour, then adding milk and cheddar. Before I had Millie, I didn’t know what a roux was, Kit and I didn’t cook, we were rarely home early enoughfrom our firms, dinner would be take-away at our desks. But that doesn’t work for a little girl who eats at six, who refuses anything unless it’s an acceptable shade of beige and cries at the lumps in her bechamel. I beat the mixture to separate the cheddar, lift the whisk to make sure the sauce is smooth.
Through the patio doors, everything is in bloom: geraniums, campanulas, daisies I pick for small vases. The basil Millie and I have been growing has burst into leaf and the strawberries are starting to crop. I squeeze the trigger on the hose, don’t stop watering until the soil darkens, Kit will forget while I’m gone. Then, I make my way to the scrubland separated from the rest of the garden by the blackberry hedge. ‘Sharp, Millie, do you see how sharp?’ I pricked my finger the first time I caught her staring at it, let her come close to the globe of blood. ‘You mustn’t come here, mustn’t touch.’ But I know the way through. I pull on my gloves, push back three branches and step beyond the brambles.
A sense of calm courses through me as it always does when I come here. The foxgloves are alive with bees, the clusters so heavy, the stems bow, and the belladonna is flowering, that beautiful rich purple. I run my gloved hands over them for a second, before wrenching them out and stuffing them into a bin bag. I can’t guard Millie from them when I’m gone.
The greenhouse doesn’t need much; I’ll leave most of the plants to die down. But here is where most of the things I need are. Some look innocent – a packet of disposable gloves, specimen jars, a make-up bag of gardening tools. Then, there’s the not-so-innocent. Miniature Ziploc bags filled with leaves, seeds, roots. Pots of vibrant-coloured blooms. The thick wad of cash behind the old watering can. There’s a reason the greenhouse has a lock,why only I have the key. I slide out the money, choose the most dangerous items and pack everything neatly into my rucksack.
It’s my bedroom that fractures my calm. I move quickly, gathering up my painkillers, two changes of clothes, my hot water bottle, trying not to glimpse Kit’s side of the bed. There’s too much of him here – the duvet he folded back this morning, his neat stack of behavioural economics books, his empty coffee cup. He kissed me after breakfast by the side of the bed, not the brisk kind he does when he’s running late but full on the lips after he kissed Millie. ‘One for my little girl, one for my big girl.’ I stifle a sob against his pillow. My tears mix with the cotton scent of his hair.
The note, I can’t spend much time on. It’s 17:45 – Kit has messaged to say he’s walking up from the station. How to explain I’m leaving? There are no right words, only wrong ones.
I’m sorry.
I love you and Millie.
I slide on my trainers but a sound arrests me, Millie murmuring, and then the need to see her is gravitational. I drop my bag, make my pained way up the stairs and push open the nursery door.
She’s still asleep, her thumb is in her mouth, she breathes heavily against it. I crouch beside her bed, smooth back her hair. The colour never ceases to astound me, it is the darkest blonde, from Kit, from me, from my father who I know almost nothing about. But the Chinese of my mother is in her also, in the perfect oval of her face, her wide cheekbones.
Millie stirs; she’s searching for something – Acorn. The squirrel was the first thing I ever bought for her. In the shop, I held its maple colour against my barely swelled stomach, ran its tailbetween my thumb and forefinger. I find it, lay it next to Millie. She clutches it instinctively to her chest. My eyes are wet as I kiss her cheek. ‘I love you, baby, I love you,’ I whisper.
I shut the front door, crouch under the front window, pull the bins against my feet. I’m inconsistent, illogical, insane to wait for Kit, I’m abandoning my daughter for God’s sake, what’s two minutes? But I won’t leave her alone.
The heath is studded with traffic running from Greenwich to Blackheath, it’s one of the things Kit worried about. That and how tiny the house is. It’s called The Wedge because it’s wedged between two grand terraced townhouses – a hundred years ago, the neighbour to the left walled it off from their house and sold it separately. But I always felt comfortable in it, I love its narrowness, the fact that there’s only one room on each floor – kitchen in the basement, living room on the ground floor, nursery and bathroom on first, our bedroom on the second. I didn’t care that at Christmas time, when the neighbours invited us over for parties and drinks, we always felt the poorer cousins among the law firm partners, the hedge fund owners, the auction house presidents. ‘What else do we need, our own cottage on the heath?’ I always say to Kit. Even now, it looks idyllic, the blooms of blue hydrangea, the blaze of dusk reflected in the windows.
Kit is coming. He’s handsome, my husband, in his suit trousers and polished shoes. He’s finishing off emails to clients, he doesn’t look up to open the gate, just pushes it against his hip. If he wasn’t typing, he’d see me, do I want him to, is that why I’m here? He’s so close I could touch the white shirt trailing over his waistband, jump out at him like Millie sometimes does, ‘Did I scare you?’
He’d loosen his tie, say, ‘Right, you’ve asked for it,’ tickle my ribs and then we’d go into our cottage together, back to our daughter, who will wake to the sound of her parents laughing.
But none of that happens. His eyes are glued to the screen. He turns the key in the lock and calls out, ‘Hi.’
The door shuts.
Then, I’m gone.
2
Train
Now
Lewisham Station at six p.m. Commuters stream out of the exits, running to catch buses or queuing for the line of black cabs that will disperse them to various South East London neighbourhoods. I’ve been at this platform many times, there coming out of the lifts, there at the taxi stand, sometimes with Millie in her buggy. Her face in my mind makes me swoon. I stumble onto the tube.
The carriage is almost empty. Lewisham is at the end of the line; everyone is heading home while I head to the opposite of home. I sit at the front of the carriage, my breath catching at the shock of the tracks laid out before me, the open sky because I have instinctively chosenourfavourite seat, Millie’s and mine, we like to sit at the front and wave at the other tubes or watch for the silted banks of the Thames. Once, we saw a boy pretending to drive the train with a toy driving wheel and I vowed that next time, I’d bring hers. Her delight, when I drew it from my bag a few weeks later, was a spark catching fire, lighting up the carriage,lighting up me, and then I know that for as long as I am apart from her, this will be my fate, the agony of being pulled apart. My body knows who it belongs to – her, always her. Not even my abandonment will change that.