Carrie smiled at the thought of what the two of them had been through. She was glad and grateful that Jen was still in her life. She looked at her watch. It was time to open the shop door for the very first time.
‘Come on, girl,’ she said. ‘Let’s open the doors to the hordes!’
Chapter Four
Molly often woke with a sense of urgency; this morning it took her several minutes to realise that it was Saturday and there couldn’t be anything that needed her immediate attention. Although she and Max had been living in the house for over a year she still wasn’t used to its noises. The house was full of scratchings and creakings, as if the very bricks and wood it was made of were shifting uneasily. It was a house with a restless soul she’d decided, although the more prosaic side of her knew quite well that many of the late-night rustlings were due to rats. A couple of days after blocking a large hole in the edge of the kitchen floorboards with wood filler, the house had smelt unmistakably of rotting rat, a sweetish odour like overripe apples mingled with something more meaty and rancid. She thought that she had probably trapped a rat family beneath her floorboards. The smell didn’t subside for almost two weeks, by which time she had almost become accustomed to it.
She stretched out underneath the pile of blankets she had heaped over herself. Some of the house noises were also due to a decrepit old boiler, which seemed to have a mind of its own. At the moment the temperamental creature was sulking and produced only enough heat to warm the very bottoms of the radiators. She hoped Max would sleep for a while longer. She knew that once he was up, she would have to marshal them both through another day. It was that exact time between night and morning when everything was holding its breath. When the new day seemed to hover in the distance, as if waiting for a sign.
Molly couldn’t remember now exactly when she had stopped feeling happy. She sometimes wished that there was a way of recognising the end of things, so that you could properly acknowledge their passing. She always left rented holiday houses with a sense of ceremony. Thank you, she would say as she took a last look round. Thank you house, for giving us a good two weeks. I hope that I might see you again one day. She knew it was foolish and she would never say the words out loud, but it helped her to leave if she was able to mark both the happiness and its ending. She knew that being a mother set in motion a series of endings. Every child who was lucky enough to have a lap to sit in must surely also have a last time they indulged in this intimacy, but it was only when you looked back that you noticed that the last time had been and gone.
It seemed to her now that the first years of her marriage were part of another lifetime. It wasn’t that Rupert changed suddenly, it was more as if the bits of his personality that she had previously only noticed out of the corner of her eye came into sharper focus. Living together had been wonderful at first. She loved her grown-up home with its matching china and scatter cushions. She loved her job as a teacher at a local primary school, but most of all she loved being Rupert’s wife. Molly had felt like the most blessed of people, hardly deserving of the good fortune that had been heaped upon her. Rupert seemed to make it his mission to anticipate her needs and make her happy. There would be gifts hidden around the house, loving notes pinned up on the fridge. He would administer back rubs and hot water bottles at the first sign of period pain. He would remember passing comments she had made about books and films, and bring them home for her. He put batteries in her bicycle lights, paper in her printer and credit on her phone, and made sure her bottle of Chanel No. 19 never ran dry. He even once hunted down an unusual oval blue button that had dropped off the cuff of a favourite dress, finding a replacement on an obscure website. She laughed at the thought of him searching the whole of the internet for a button, but he looked at her as if he was surprised by her levity.
‘You know I would do anything for you,’ Rupert said, stroking her hair in that way he had; tugging slightly at the ends as if he was testing its strength.
They celebrated the first anniversary of their marriage by going back to their honeymoon hotel. Molly would have liked to have tried somewhere new but didn’t want to raise churlish objections when Rupert had gone to the trouble of putting a copy of the menu from their very first meal, with flight details added, into the side pocket of her handbag. She found it at work when she was looking for her pen, and just for a moment, as she pulled it out and saw what it was, she felt breathless. She thought of him waiting for his opportunity. Waiting for her to go upstairs or out into the garden and then opening the bag, maybe looking through her things to see which would be the best place to leave it and then zipping the pocket up again quickly so that she would discover it later and think of him. If Molly was irked by the way it had all been decided without any consultation, she didn’t show it, nor did she reveal her embarrassment when he caused a scene in the marbled hotel lobby on discovering that they had been put into a different room from the one they had stayed in before. Although the honeyed skin of the young receptionist flushed under the onslaught of Rupert’s bad temper, she remained composed.
‘I’m sorry Sir, we cannot ask our other guests to move,’ she said, biting down with small white teeth on her bottom lip.
‘I expressly asked for room number 8. I definitely put it in the email. Go and check. Go and check now.’
She checked and double checked and then a perfectly groomed young man tilted his head gravely at them and expressed the deepest of regret in impeccable English, but no amount of bluster from Rupert made the slightest bit of difference.
‘I’m so sorry, Sir; we only have the one room free. Would you like me to arrange for your bags to be taken up?’
As Rupert snatched the key from the receptionist, Molly saw the little purse of her lips and the quick glance she gave Molly before lowering her head, and she knew that the other woman felt sorry for her. You don’t understand, she felt like saying, you don’t know what he is really like, how he loves me. She was angry, and then regretful, that this place that had been so full of wonderful memories had been soured by this second visit.
Rupert remained cold and irritated throughout their evening meal, barely speaking despite her attempts at gaiety. She ate slivers of duck that were pinker than she liked, and he moved his sea bream around his plate and drank quickly, ordering another bottle of wine before he had finished the first. Because he wouldn’t talk to her, Molly spent the time looking at the other diners and wondering about their stories. At the table opposite there was an older man with a breathtakingly beautiful young woman who twisted her great fall of hair around her hand as he showed her how to eat langoustine. Next to them there was a woman with her head wrapped in a silk scarf patterned with butterflies. She was with a young man who was unmistakably her son. They had the same awkward thinness and sharp, pink-tipped elbows resting on the table. It looked to Molly as if the woman had been crying. ‘What makes me sad,’ Molly heard her say, ‘is the fact that I will never see them.’ Her son looked as if he wished he were anywhere else but sitting in this dining room with its sconces and tablecloths and extra cutlery.
‘They’ll probably be ugly sods,’ he said, shielding his face with one hand.
‘Nonsense,’ said the older woman, ‘they’ll be beautiful,’ and she smiled at a point behind his head as if she could see them in her mind’s eye, lined up, lovely and gleaming for her inspection.
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