Accidents Happen A Novel

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN



Kate arrived at Paddington Station at six-thirty, having fought the urge twice to text Gill a complete lie, that Jack had a cold and ask if the boys could sleep inside tonight.

Don’t think about it.

As always, after Oxford, London appeared to be in mid-tornado. Heels, suitcases, hands, words, blasted in all directions. Laughter, yelling, requests for directions to the start of a new life, maps, interview suits, couriers, squealing brakes and frustrated horns.

The mass purpose of intent of this huge city lifting her up and shooting her along, like flotsam on surf.

Kate stood still among the rush of people, feeling her energy levels instantly rising, her posture straightening.

One word echoed around her head, as it always did when she arrived here.

Home.

The Tube from Paddington to King’s Cross was jam-packed: the Saturday shoppers and tourists working their way around central London like giant multi-legged creatures, carrying coffee, bags, maps, matinee programmes as they swayed from carriage handles and raced for seats.

The last time she’d been here, a few weeks ago for the hospital scan, she had ridden amid the throngs of the Tube, thinking London was where she and Jack needed to be again. Away from Helen and Richard’s disapproving looks and endless excuses for ‘popping in’. Back in a world where life raced on, not floated by.

But today, as Kate stood on the Northern Line platform at King’s Cross, she felt less sure.

The Northern Line had been their Tube, their carriage to Highgate.

The journey home.

It had been four years since she had been on the Northern Line. Four years since she had been to Highgate.

The sensation of loss was so sudden that Kate stumbled back against the wall when the first train came.

She let that train go, and waited three minutes for the next, and then the next.

As a fourth train appeared and left she shook herself. If she was going to move on in her life, repair her relationship with Jack, start a relationship with Jago, she had to go and say goodbye to Hugo properly now.

So, when the fifth train came, she pushed herself away from the wall. She propelled herself through the doors before a compulsion to run away from the platform took over, and found a seat in the half-empty carriage.

The train kept stopping.

Each time, inside the dark tunnel, the window reflected back to Kate the reason why it had been four years.

The empty seat beside her, where Hugo used to sit.

Flashing at her as the train picked up speed again. Empty, empty, empty.

The seat of a ghost.

The hundred steep stairs from the bowels of Highgate Tube station up to the pavement teetered above her.

She leaned against the wall, sensing her heart putting up its shutters.

If she closed her eyes, she could feel Hugo’s hand on her back, pushing her up the stairs after a night in town, his voice echoing along the tiled walls.

‘Come on, you lazy cow, hurry up. I’ve recorded Match of the Day.’

‘Can I just say that I am not lazy – I am drunk.’

‘Lazy and drunk.’

She touched the handrail where she had bent over laughing, as he waited, that easy smile on his face.

‘Come on, I mean it. Hurry up,’ he had said, with a slap on her bum. ‘Or I’ll leave you here for the muggers.’

‘No, you won’t, because if you do that, then you won’t be getting any later.’

Hugo had snorted. ‘Yeah, well, I’m not going to get any later, anyway, am I? Five quid, you’re asleep on the bed with your jeans on three minutes after we get in.’

And she had sniggered so hard, she’d bent up double, and he’d given this sort of roar, and wrapped her up under his arm and raced her up the stairs, squealing.

Today, she walked the stairs alone, each step a mile high.

And then up the steep lane alone, towards Highgate Village.

Some of the Edwardian house fronts looked familiar, owned by people she’d once known. Anouk, the Dutch mum, from NCT; Jean from the Highgate History Society, who had told them so much about the history of their house; Hugo’s old schoolfriend Frank, who had moved in with his wife Sarah just before Hugo was murdered, and joined their Tuesday night pub quiz team. Kate peered in and saw a child’s bike. Were Frank and Sarah still there? Leading the life she and Hugo would have had?

She made her way to the top of the lane and the busy main street of Highgate Village. Nothing had changed. Beyond it, at the bottom of the steep drop of Highgate Hill, lay central London, miles in the distance, the skyscrapers like icebergs emerging from the Arctic mist of today’s overcast sky. A couple in their thirties walked across the junction in front of her, both in well-cut black coats, the girl laughing with a flash of red lipstick.

They could have been her and Hugo, on their way back from pushing Jack’s buggy around nearby Hampstead Heath, cheeks flushed, eyes bright, on their way to buy cake from the deli before going home. Or returning from a shopping trip to the farmers’ market, Indian breads and Moroccan harissa in rucksacks on their backs, Hugo’s arm around her shoulder, as they strolled along the cobbled narrow streets of this old London village, with its walled gardens and studded wooden gates, pleased with themselves that, after all that had happened to Kate, they had created this good life for their family.

‘A fine, fun-loving, hard-working young couple, ready to walk through life shoulder to shoulder’, as her dad had said in his speech, the night of their wedding, none of them realizing he would not be there to see it.

Just trying to make a good life for Jack.

The shutters were half open on the house.

It took her a minute to check, but they were the ones Hugo had tracked down in the salvage yard in Enfield and painstakingly stripped back to their natural pine in his workshop in the garden, one by one, then lovingly waxed.

The new owners had painted them white.

Kate walked around the square twice, fighting a new wave of nausea at the sight of it, peeking over at the four-storey house from different angles. The half-open shutters on the ground floor revealed a glimpse of the jaw-dropping view across London at the back of the house. There was a dining table, just where theirs used to be. The table they had sat at talking about their plans, looking over the Soviet-scale 1970s estate in the distance, with its ever-changing life stories played out on stacks of balconies and in rows of windows, imagining how the magnolia tree would look in spring when its branches came into their own.

She sat on a bench opposite and scanned the house further in stolen glances, trying to remember what it had looked like when those windows were full of chattering guests drinking champagne at Hugo and David’s famous ‘open house’ parties, to celebrate their latest restoration project and act as show-house to prospective clients. It had been a different life. One she could no longer believe she’d been part of. Windows full of their friends and family, estate agents, their architect, work contractors, old clients, new clients, solicitors, bank people, Georgian Society friends; all of them drinking Hugo’s fine wine, celebrating Hugo, David and Kate’s latest project and toasting the next. She glanced up to the square black roof and small windows of the Georgian attic. Jack’s playroom. The place she would sit rocking him after she and Hugo had argued – the pair of them exhausted from the sleepless nights – about who was doing their fair share of the childcare and cooking now Jack was born, why they never had sex any more. Rocking Jack, looking down at his tiny face, wondering secretly if it would be possible to love her and Hugo’s next child as much as she loved this one.

Worrying about a child who would never now exist.

She wandered back through Highgate Village, listening to passing chatter about rugby scores and film reviews and property prices. The pinboard outside the public toilet was crammed with notices. Hundreds of leaflets, in eye-popping colours, fought for attention, fluttering off all sides of the board, offering sessions and lessons in tai chi, Japanese, meditation, singing, Brazilian dance, osteopathy, theatre, book groups, writing groups, mother and baby jogging, cranio-sacral therapy . . .

The endless promise of the city. A promise of an exciting race through life.

Kate suddenly felt exhausted.

A pang for gentle, calm Oxford came out of nowhere.

As Kate turned, she spied her old theatre actress neighbour Patricia, with her distinctive grey beehive, emerging from the delicatessen, chatting to a bespectacled man with a chihuahua. Desperate not to be seen, Kate dived into the nearest pub and ordered a bourbon from a barmaid she didn’t recognize.

‘No – I heard her. Jo definitely said peach juice!’ The cosy, wooden walls echoed Kate’s own words from long ago back at her as she sat down.

The infamous bellini quiz question moment. Crammed in here, with their Highgate gang every Tuesday for the pub quiz.

‘I’m telling you, mate, she said peach schnapps. She’s trying to get out of it because she cocked up!’ Seb had yelled at Hugo, who threw down the pencil in mock-anger to show he was having none of their excuses about one teammate hearing another teammate’s answer wrongly, and losing them the quiz.

‘Seb. You’re a wanker!’ Jo had shouted.

‘One bloody point – they’re going to beat us now,’ Hugo groaned. ‘Use your bloody ears, Seb. . .’

Did Jo and Seb or any of the others even live here any more?

She had stopped answering their Christmas cards years ago, tired of their awkward messages and clear struggles on the envelope about how to address it to her and Jack without making Hugo’s absence any more obvious than it already was.

Mrs H Parker and Family.

Kate and Jack Parker.

The Parker Family.

The Parker Family Minus Hugo, who Was Brutally Murdered.

The old familiar thick belt of grief tightened around her middle and squeezed hard.

Kate jumped up and chucked back her bourbon.

No.

She had to get out of here.

She slammed down her glass, grabbed her coat and ran out of the empty pub.

The sun had completely disappeared now behind the murky sky. Clouds gathered ominously above her, even though the June air was still thick and warm. She ran across the roundabout crossing, picking up speed as she hit the lane back down to the Tube again. Her newly heeled boots thumped on the pavement as she set off at a pace down the hill.

‘Kate?’ she heard Patricia shout, surprised, the well-enunciated, loud vowels of the actor reaching out down the street to catch her.

But she kept running.

Leaving Patricia behind.

Leaving Hugo behind.

Leaving it all behind.

She couldn’t let herself feel that physical grief. Not any more.

It was time to move on.

This was not home.

London was not home. Not any more.

This was a place of ghosts, and memories that had rotted like old fruit.

She had to find her way to the future

She needed to see Jago.

Jago was the key.