I kissed him again. ‘I’ll find it for you and you can catch up at the weekend, okay? And if you can’t, just say you’re sorry and tell Mrs Carver it’s my fault.’
I could tell he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t want to get me in trouble.
‘Can we go?’ Leo said, hearing his grandmother open the biscuit tin in the kitchen. And then she was there in the hallway with us, the open tin angled towards them, and they turned from me and I mouthed my last goodbye and closed the door and that was it.
The last time I saw my sons.
As I travelled back to Alder Rise, my brain wouldn’t allow itself to process what this actually was. To do so would be to render myself incapable of fulfilling the rest of the duties before me.
I had planned to sleep at the flat, but in the event I stayed in the empty house, a sleeping bag spread out on the carpet in Leo’s room. I felt an irrational compulsion to guard it from intruders, though of course none were coming – at least not until the next day, when the legally sanctioned ones would be here. (They would meet their own share of agony these next days and weeks, I suspected. I understood about ripple effects, even if I had no emotion to spare for the outer rings of my own.)
There was no satisfaction to be had from touring the denuded rooms, no avoidance of the reality of my asset stripping. If anything, staying overnight was a punishment; maybe I hoped I’d die of a broken heart in that sleeping bag on the floor.
Enough wallowing.
At ten, I phoned my mother to check that the boys were in bed.
‘You’ve just missed them,’ she said. ‘I let them stay up late because they don’t have to get up for school in the morning, but they’re asleep now.’
‘Thank you. Thank you for everything, Mum. I’m sorry if I haven’t said that as much as I should.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.
I hung up, thinking there was a comfort in those final words of hers.
How do you say goodbye to your own mother?
The answer is, you don’t. Because it’s kinder that way.
46
‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:45:48
The last time I saw Bram, with my own eyes? It would have been on the last Sunday, Sunday the 8th, the noon handover at Trinity Avenue. Was there anything different about him, anything about his manner that augured betrayal – betrayal on a whole new level?
There wasn’t. I’m sorry. He briefed me on the boys, asked how I was. I noted, and appreciated, the absence of any mention of Toby. Even now, when I try to make something significant of a small detail, I fail. It was raining and he had no umbrella? That could be a metaphor, I suppose.
He was just Bram, or at least the creature Bram had become. When he left, I had the same feeling I’d had every Sunday and would no doubt have continued to have had the sky not fallen in: disbelief that he could have done this to us, sadness that he wasn’t mine anymore.
A weekly interlude of irrational sentiment, I admit. But I wouldn’t be human if that didn’t make me a bit sad.
Bram, Word document
Fi, I’d said goodbye to in my own way – that is, without her knowing. (Very defining, you’re probably thinking.) It was Tuesday the 10th and I knew from the diary app that she was doing what she usually did on a Tuesday, which was arriving at Alder Rise Station on the 18.30 from Victoria and going straight home, where her mother would have fed the boys and umpired their latest battle. She emerged from the tunnel on the edge of the commuter swarm, scratching the skin by her right eyebrow, adjusting the shoulder strap of her laptop bag. She didn’t notice me there, didn’t sense me following her down the Parade (she didn’t even glance at the Two Brewers). On the corner of Trinity Avenue, she paused and turned her head. It wasn’t an image that was ‘special’: there was no breeze to flare her clothing, no serendipitously placed light to catch her in memorable silhouette. Nothing about her expression or posture betrayed the emotions she’d confessed to feeling on approaching the house after work: general excitement to see the boys, specific dread that they might be fighting, that her day’s labours were about to begin just as she needed to rest.
She was exactly as she might have been any day at about that time. A woman with half her life behind her and the other half ahead.
Which, I know, was an unfair place for me to leave her.
*
Before dawn, I returned to the flat for the last time. I placed the keys on the kitchen worktop, along with details of the storage facility and Harry’s spelling book, unearthed at the eleventh hour from one of the boxes.
No note, no letter.
All set, I texted Mike.
As usual, he responded instantaneously:
As soon as I get confirmation the funds have landed, Wendy will deliver new pp etc to the flat. Cheers.
Cheers? Twat. I deleted the message, pocketed the pay-as-you-go phone, then picked up my pre-packed bag and left. I took a mini cab from the station to Battersea, where I had the driver wait while I posted a package through Challoner’s letterbox containing two sets of Trinity Avenue house keys (mine and the spares Kirsty kept for us, but not Fi’s or her mother’s – I hadn’t been able to engineer that). I told the driver to take me on to Victoria Station and messaged my mother en route to ask her to kiss the boys good morning for me and wish them a lovely day. I’d already briefed her that she should phone Fi direct to liaise about their return on Saturday morning.
In the street outside the station, I removed the SIM from my official mobile phone, slipped it into a drain, then re-pocketed the phone. Careful to leave the pay-as-you-go turned on in order to receive the many further messages Mike would be sure to send me throughout the day, I turned off the ringer and dropped it into the nearest bin.
Inside, I found a cashpoint and emptied my bank account of its last funds, before buying a ticket for cash and boarding the next Gatwick Express train. It was 7.30 a.m., the incoming throngs already thickening. I guessed Fi wouldn’t be awake yet, even if the charlatan in bed with her was already checking his phone, eager for confirmation of his remarkable change in fortunes.
‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:46:45
‘You keep looking at your phone,’ I said to Toby, over the hotel breakfast table. ‘Expecting a call?’
‘Just an email confirming something for tonight.’
He had an important function that evening, an advance gathering of the Commission before an announcement the following week of the initial findings of their report. Transport executives from Singapore, Stockholm and Milan would be present, as well as government officials. Though he would need to leave Winchester after lunch, he’d arranged for me to keep the room and return to London as late as I pleased.
God, what a patsy I was. I remember very clearly sitting there at the breakfast table when he’d gone to the bathroom, staring at the phone lying face down next to his cappuccino and consciously disregarding memories of Polly’s urging me to ‘dig for the truth’.
That’s the problem with actively disassociating yourself from life’s cynics: you deprive yourself of their good advice.
Bram, Word document
At Gatwick, I bought a return ticket to Geneva with cash. (My thinking: a return is less suspicious than a single. On the other hand, is cash more suspicious than card? Then: neither is suspicious. Millions of people fly out of here every week and airport staff have seen every last quirk of traveller behaviour. Get a grip, Bram.)
I used the self checkin, got through passport control without any trouble, and bought a mix of Swiss currency and euros with the cash I’d amassed.
With no time left for self-doubt, I proceeded to the gate.
‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:47:37
As it turned out, it was I who got the pesky work call, when we were back in our room after breakfast gathering a few things for a guided tour of Winchester College.
‘Where’s the Spirals brief for the agency?’ Clara asked, her degree of panic suggesting it might have been building for some time.