Flightsend (2 page)

Charlie walked down the stony track from the village
hall where the bus had dropped her. A half-hearted
fog had lingered all day; the school bus had its headlights
on, even though it was only four o'clock, and
mid-February, when the days could be expected to
lengthen. Her bag, weighted with three lots of homework,
pulled at her shoulder. Behind the yew trees at
the end of the churchyard, Flightsend looked almost
as unwelcoming as when she'd first seen it; there were
no lights in the front windows, and the face it
presented to approachers said
Here I am – like it or not,
I'm not trying to impress
. And then, as she opened the
front gate, Charlie's eye caught a splash of golden-yellow
in the border by the hedge. Winter aconites, a
drift of them. The first flowers must have opened
today, above the frilled green rosettes of their leaves.
Her mother, busy with cleaning and restoring the
house and outbuildings, had found time to
clear the overgrown garden, and now here were the
aconites, floating like golden lilies on the dark soil.
They had waited underground all through the winter
frosts, and now they were opening their petals at the
first hint of winter yielding to spring.

Charlie wondered whether her mother had come
out this way and seen them. They never used the front
door. The kitchen was where they mainly lived, at first
because it had been the warmest room in the house,
and now because they were used to it. Charlie walked
round the side path. Something else was piercing the
soil in the dug border under the front window: something
green and speary. Mum would know what it was.

Flightsend had been home for nearly two months
now. To Charlie, it still didn't feel like a proper home.
Home was their old house in town; home was family.
And Sean. Now, it was just Charlie and Mum, and
Charlie was finding it hard to adapt. This was how it
had been before Sean came, and she'd liked it then.
But now was different.

They'd moved in just after Christmas, in the coldest
months of the year, shivering in the draughty rooms,
and coaxing the Calor gas boiler into life. They got
used to wearing bulky layers of clothing and two pairs
of socks, and to using what Kathy called a sausage – a
tube of fabric stuffed with old tights – to block the
cold air that whistled under the doors. In January,
while Charlie sat her mock exams, Kathy scrubbed
and cleaned and painted, and got a builder in to
repair the porch and the window frames. She got the
ancient central heating system serviced, bought
furniture cheaply at auctions, threw an Indian bed-
spread over the faded sofa and hung pictures. She
worked outside, clearing the sheds, making space for
her plants. She was tireless, always talking of her plans,
looking forward to the day when she would open
Flightsend Hardy Plants
.

Charlie kept most of her doubts to herself.
Flightsend was miles from anywhere and even visitors
to the village could easily overlook it. There would be
fierce competition from the big garden centres on
every main road, with cafés and children's playgrounds
and multicoloured displays of bedding
plants; how could a small, specialist nursery, tucked
out of sight in a remote village, hope to make any sort
of income? At first Charlie and Sean, joining forces,
had tried to talk Kathy out of what seemed a mad,
impulsive scheme, trying to persuade her to keep her
teaching job; but Kathy refused to listen to Sean. She
pushed him away, out of her life.

Out of
her
life; but as Sean was a PE teacher at
school, Charlie still saw him most days. She'd seen him
today, in the canteen at lunchtime. At a time of year
when everyone else was bundled up in sweaters and
scarves, Sean was a conspicuous, athletic figure in a
short-sleeved polo shirt and tracksuit bottoms. Even in
winter his skin was tanned from the hours he spent
outside on the sports fields. Catching sight of Charlie
as she left the servery with her sandwiches, he came
over to ask, as he often did, how Kathy was.
Charlie always wanted to ask him, though she hadn't,
so far: 'And how are
you
? Are you managing on
your own? You haven't met anyone else yet, have you?'

And beneath the casualness of his question was a
sort of pleading that made Charlie want to tell him
lies, give him the answer he wanted. 'She's falling
apart. Come back. She wants you. We
both
want you.'

But all she said was, 'She's OK, thanks. Getting
organized,' and Sean nodded and went back to the
other teachers at his table. Charlie still didn't understand
why Mum had rejected him, stubbornly
choosing isolation and uncertainty. Sean was, in
Charlie's view, the best thing to have happened to
both of them since her own father had left, longer ago
than she could remember. It would have seemed odd
to call someone as young as Sean her step-dad, and in
any case he and her mother weren't married; but
nevertheless he'd been family for five years of her life,
and now he wasn't. No one had asked Charlie how she
felt about that.

She lugged her school bag into the warmth of the
kitchen and found a gangling, skinny dog gazing
devotedly at Mum, who was chopping vegetables by
the sink.

'Whose is that?' asked Charlie, bending to stroke
it.

'I don't know,' Kathy said. 'He just turned up,
hanging round outside. Poor thing looks half-starved.
I've given him some cereal and a bowl of milk,
and I've phoned the police.'

The dog wriggled and tried to lick Charlie's face.
He was rough-coated, gingerish in colour and still half
a puppy, with limbs not quite under control and an
anxious, pleading face. He wore a collar, but no name
tag.

'I'll get a bit of string, and take him round the
village to see if anyone's lost him,' Charlie said.

'The kettle's on,' her mother said. 'We'll have some
tea and then I'll shove the dinner in the oven and
come with you.'

The fog had thickened as dusk fell, and there was
no one about in the village. The cottage windows were
lamplit and curtained. There were no street lights;
Charlie found that strange, after years of living on a
suburban housing estate. Radbourne House, opposite
the church, had carriage lamps along its driveway and
a sensor light that clicked on as Charlie and Kathy
walked crunchily over the gravel. The plummy woman
who opened the door said that the stray dog reminded
her of a wolfhound she'd had as a child, but she'd
never seen him before.

The dog walked obediently between Charlie and
her mother as they worked their way round the rest of
the houses. People looked at him sympathetically, but
no one claimed him, or knew where he came from.

'The pub, next,' said Kathy.

In the
Bull and Horseshoes
, an elderly man drinking
alone at the bar told them, 'I seen that dog a few
times, hanging round. He been abandoned if you ask
me. Lurcher, he is. Coursing dog. He prob'ly weren't
no good.'

'Coursing?' Charlie asked Kathy outside.

'Chasing hares,' Kathy said. 'Two dogs after one
hare. A so-called sport. Barbaric. They're gypsy dogs,
aren't they, lurchers? Hunting dogs. Or poaching,
more like.'

'I like hares,' said Charlie, who had seen a few out
in the fields. 'Good for him, then, if he's a courser that
won't course.'

'A lurcher that won't lurch,' Kathy said. 'We'll just
try that other big house, shall we, the one round the
bend in the road? Then we'd better go home before
that casserole turns to charcoal.'

The big house was called Nightingales, a stone
Victorian mansion that kept itself aloof behind high
walls.

'Not that people in such a posh house would have a
gypsy dog,' Charlie said doubtfully as they walked
along the lane to the entrance gate. 'I bet some
incredibly rich person lives here.'

'Oh, but look!' Kathy opened the gate ahead of
Charlie, who had to wait while the dog cocked a leg
against the wall. 'It's not a private house after all.'

Nightingales
, said a large signboard inside the walled
garden.
Residential and non-residential courses. Full
programme of courses throughout the year.

'What sort of courses?' Charlie asked, thinking of
school. 'And what's the use of putting a sign there,
where you can only read it when you're already inside?
It ought to be out on the road.'

'We can ask,' Kathy said, but then, side-tracked, 'Just
look at this garden, Charlie! It needs taking care of,
but
someone
knew what they were doing – look,
garrya
elliptica
, and that beautiful prunus, oh, and hellebores
with the snowdrops—'

'Come on,' Charlie said firmly, since her mother
showed signs of disappearing round the side of the
house for a full inspection. She marched up to the
studded wooden front door and banged the knocker.

The woman who opened the door had short dark
hair and was about Kathy's age, perhaps a bit younger.
She was drying her hands on the striped apron she
wore. Past her, Charlie could see a large entrance hall,
with a reception hatch and a noticeboard; a table was
set with wine-glasses.

'Hello!' the woman greeted them. 'Did you find
your way all right? You're in good time, anyway. You
can park in the stableyard, then I'll help take your
bags over to the Well House. We talked on the phone,
didn't we? I'm Fay.' She held out her hand.

'No, no!' Kathy said. 'We're not whoever you think
we are. We've come about this lost dog.'

The woman clapped a hand to her mouth. 'Oh,
sorry! I thought you were the Enamelling tutor. She's
bringing a daughter, you see.'

Kathy explained about the ownerless dog, and Fay
shook her head; then she looked hopefully at Charlie.
'You live in the village, do you? I suppose you're not
looking for casual work?'

'Charlie's doing her GCSEs this year,' Kathy
said.

'But I'd still like casual work,' Charlie said quickly.
'What is it?'

'Waitressing, helping out in the kitchen, odd jobs,'
Fay said. 'I'm a bit stuck for tonight, to be honest. The
usual girl's off sick and we were short-handed anyway.'

'Well, if—' Kathy began, looking doubtfully at
Charlie.

'Yes, please,' Charlie said, completely forgetting
about practical details like what sort of hours, and how
much she would earn.

'Great!' Fay glanced at her watch. 'Gosh, look at the
time. Can you start straight away? Oh – you'll need to
wear a skirt. Black, preferably.'

'It'll have to be her school uniform skirt—' Kathy
began. Then she stopped abruptly, looking into the
entrance hall behind Fay. Charlie looked, and saw a
little toddling girl, about two years old, in a red
pinafore dress over a striped sweater. The girl came up
to Fay and stood behind her, hugging Fay's legs and
peeping out at Charlie and Kathy. Charlie was aware of
Kathy's tenseness, her eyes fixed on the child.

'Oh, this is Rosie,' Fay said, smiling. She reached
both arms behind her. 'Come on out, Rosie, you don't
have to be shy.'

Rosie
. Of all names. Charlie felt her mother receive
it like a punch in the stomach. Rosie was a beautiful
child, with brown eyes like her mother's, and hair
brushed back under a velvet headband to fall in loose
curls.

Charlie stood helplessly, her mouth opening to say
something polite. She couldn't think of anything.
Kathy made a sort of gulping sound, pushed the dog's
string in Charlie's direction, then turned and walked
away fast down the path.

'
Mum
—' Charlie tried.

The gate clunked shut. The lurcher pulled on his
lead and gazed alertly after Kathy, giving a faint whine.

Fay looked from the shut gate to Charlie, baffled.
'Oh, what did I—?'

'It's all right,' Charlie said quickly. Then, feeling
like a traitor: 'OK, then – I'll just go home to change.
Back in ten minutes.'

Charlie hurried after her mother, towed by the
lurcher. He seemed to have accepted Flightsend as
home and was pulling at his lead, his mouth parted in
a grin. He knew his way round the side of the house,
and pawed at the back door, eager for praise or
food.

Charlie, fully expecting her mother to be upstairs
crying in her room, found her instead in the kitchen,
mashing potatoes.

'We'll keep the dog, shall we, unless someone claims
him?' Kathy said, not looking at Charlie.

Charlie knew the symptoms. The blocked-up nose,
the catch in the voice, the careful avoidance of the
real subject.

'
Could
we?'

'It'd be nice to have a dog. Company,' Kathy said
stiffly. 'And he's a good dog, you can tell. Kind-natured.
Obliging.'

Sean's
kind-natured and obliging, Charlie thought.
Why couldn't we have kept
him
?

'You'd better go up and change,' Kathy said. 'Will
you eat before you go?'

'No, there isn't time. I'll have it when I get back,'
Charlie said, though her stomach felt hollow. 'Perhaps
waitressing will make me eat less. Make me sick of the
sight of food.'

'Don't be daft,' her mother said. 'I've told you
before. You've got a large frame and you're a healthy
adolescent and you need to eat. You'll never be stick-thin
like those supermodels, thank God. There's
nothing wrong with being well-built.' She served out a
small helping of casserole for herself. Kathy's
insistence on proper eating applied only to Charlie.
During her breakdown, she'd got so thin that
Charlie had been seriously worried about her starving
herself. She was much thinner than Charlie, and at
least two stones lighter.

Sometimes, comparing herself unfavourably with
her best friend Rowan, Charlie made half-hearted
attempts at eating less, but it was no good thinking
that missing out on a few potatoes or abstaining from
chocolate would ever produce a slim, graceful body
like Rowan's. Still, if they were keeping the dog – she
thought of taking him out for walks, of long-shadowed
summer evenings out in the fields and down by the
river. She could become fitter even if not slimmer.

'What shall we call him?' she asked.

Her mother thought for a moment.

'How about Caspar?' she suggested.

'Caspar. What do you think, dog? Do you want to
be Caspar?' Charlie asked. The dog looked at her and
thumped his tail. 'OK, Caspar it is.'

'I'll borrow some dog food from Mrs Webster and
get some more from the shop tomorrow,' her mother
said. 'But we'd better not get too attached to him, yet.
He might still be claimed.'

'There are other dogs. Now that we've decided to
have one. We could go to a rescue place,' Charlie said.

But she wanted
this
dog, this lurcher, with his smiley
mouth and his expressive eyebrows and his air of
gratitude. He seemed to want to stay, and having him
here made the cottage seem more like home, themselves
more like a family. Three of them.

Upstairs in her room, Charlie forgot her hurry. She sat
on her bed examining her fingernails and thinking
about the life that could have been.

Usually she tried – hard – not to let herself do this.
She had a new life now. This was what she had to get
on with, and it was pointless to waste time thinking
about the other one. But it was still there, penned up
like water behind a lock gate, ready to flood out and
suffocate her when she let it. Mum was the one who'd
had the breakdown, but it was Charlie's loss, too. And
Sean's.

None of them would ever be the same again.

They'd been a proper family. Herself, Mum, Sean.
There would soon be a fourth person, when the baby
was born. They spent so long waiting, planning. The
latest ultrasound scan showed that she was a girl;
Kathy and Sean named her Rose. Sean and Charlie
decorated the spare bedroom for her, choosing
curtains and a wallpaper border with a pattern of
chickens and ducks. Sean made a mobile and
suspended it above the crib. A second daughter for
Mum, first child for Sean, baby sister for Charlie.
Their lives were all tied up with the future, with the
date marked on the calendar. The end of waiting,
the start of this new life.

Until.

Something went wrong. All the scans had shown a
healthy baby; Kathy had felt her kicking. But her
heartbeat faltered and stopped, and all the efforts of
the obstetricians had been unable to save her. She
died before she was born, and Kathy had to give birth
anyway, to a stillborn baby.

Dead baby Rose. A life that never had its beginning.
The nurses gave her to Kathy to hold; Kathy wept.
They all cried together, Kathy, Sean and Charlie.
Then, when it was time for the nurses to take the baby
away, Kathy held on tightly, refusing to believe that
Rose was dead.

Charlie would never forget seeing her mother leaving
the hospital empty-handed, a few days later,
leaning against Sean. The new baby clothes waited
uselessly at home: the crocheted shawl and the Babygros
and the tiny shoes. The empty nursery was a reproach.
Everywhere she looked, Kathy saw emblems of failure.
Charlie saw them too, saw her mother seeing them,
and had no idea what to say or do. She could only
think of the cruel disappointment. All those cells,
splitting and dividing, making themselves into fingernails
and toenails, lungs, eyes, a heart; all for nothing.
Fate, or whatever controlled human fortunes, had
played a callous trick.
You think you're going to have a
baby, don't you?
it had teased them.
You wait. I'll show
you.

'Do you think we should do the room again?'
Charlie asked Sean, when her mother was sleeping
upstairs. 'Get rid of all the baby stuff, make it into a
spare bedroom?'

Sean shook his head. 'That would be pretending
Rose never existed. It wouldn't help Kathy, or us. You
can't get over things by pretending they haven't
happened.'

Charlie's grandparents came to visit, and Sean's
parents from Staffordshire, and some friends. Others
stayed away – because they didn't know what to say,
Kathy said. Those who did come offered sympathy and
comfort. 'You can try again,' they told Kathy. 'There'll
be other babies.'

But Kathy only shook her head. No more babies.
She wasn't going through all that again: the hope and
the loss, the pain and the defeat.

'It's my fault,' she sobbed, when her friend Anne
came round. 'I let her die. I couldn't hold on to her. I
failed her.'

Charlie overheard snatches of conversation, round
and round, over and over: her mother blaming herself,
refusing to be comforted. Anne was the only
person Kathy would talk to about the baby. She
wouldn't talk to Charlie, nor to Sean. Baffled and
hurt, Sean cooked meals for her, tried to plan outings
to cheer her up. But wherever they went, they saw
babies: healthy babies, beautiful babies, screwed-up-faced
babies, in the street, in the supermarket. Babies
kicking, crying, sleeping; babies with tiny fingernails
and delicate tracings of eyebrows and whorls of soft
hair; babies held by parents or grandparents. After a
while Kathy refused to go out at all.

'It's understandable,' Sean kept saying to Charlie,
always generous, always patient. 'She needs time. We
all need time.'

But what Charlie didn't find understandable was
that her mother was gradually dismissing Sean, pushing
him away. At a time when she might have been
expected to need him more than ever, she seemed
determined only to hurt and reject him.

Charlie tried not to hear, but the bedroom walls
were thin.

'You don't have to stick around with me.' Her
mother's voice was tight, accusing. 'If you want kids,
you can find someone ten years younger. Start again.
There's no need to tie yourself down to a failure.'

And Sean's voice, quieter, insistent: 'But I don't
want . . . Don't talk such rubbish . . . Why should you
think . . .' And eventually, rising in angry despair, 'But
I love
you
, Kathy, for Christ's sake!'

Charlie, at fourteen, felt that her life was falling
apart. First, there was the loss of the baby sister she
had so looked forward to; she'd imagined herself
pushing Rose in a buggy, looking at picture books,
reading stories at bedtime. The abrupt snuffing out of
Rose, and of all the possibilities of her future, was bad
enough. Even worse was watching her mother punish
herself and Sean, dismantling their life together with
what seemed to Charlie a deliberate, callous obstinacy.

Charlie had to do
some
thing. Eventually, after Sean
walked out of the house one Saturday evening, with
the strained, twisted-mouthed look that meant he was
only just holding back tears, she confronted her
mother in the kitchen.

'What have you said to him? It's not Sean's fault,
what happened! Why are you being so horrible?'

Kathy was standing by the cooker gazing at a fast-boiling
saucepan of spaghetti. They'd all been about
to sit down and eat. She took no notice of Charlie, nor
of the saucepan, which was about to boil over. Charlie
snatched the pan handle and pulled it to one side,
then turned down the flame.

'Mum!' It was like talking to a sleepwalker. 'Where's
he gone? Don't you care that he's just walked out?'

Her mother turned away, studying the instructions on
the packet as if she'd never cooked spaghetti before.

'
Mum
. . .'

Then Kathy said, slowly, 'You don't understand,
Charlie. I know what I'm doing.'

Charlie stared at her through a cloud of steam.
'Upsetting Sean? Driving him away? Is that what you
want?'

'Oh, for goodness' sake don't talk like someone in
an American soap!' Kathy said, with a flash of spirit.

'But Sean loves you. He loves
us
. Why won't you let
him help you?'

'Are you going to drain that spaghetti or not?'

'Yes, OK,' Charlie shouted. 'I'll drain the spaghetti
and then you can sit down and eat the meal Sean's
cooked for you. And I hope you're grateful. You won't
even
marry
him—'

'No,' her mother said mildly. 'You're too young to
understand, Charlie. He'll be glad, later. When he's
found someone new. He's eight years younger than
me and that's a big difference. He's not even thirty yet.
There's plenty of time for him. I don't want to wreck
his life.'

'But that's rubbish! You know it is. You
are
wrecking
his life! Sean doesn't care about the age difference,
why should he? Neither did you, till . . .'

Kathy shrugged. 'Everything's different, now.'

'Only because you're determined to
make
it
different, to make it even worse than it is – oh, you're
so selfish! Yes, you've had an awful time, everyone
knows that. But what about Sean? What about
me
?
You've got me, haven't you? Don't
I
count? Don't I
mean anything to you?'

Charlie hadn't intended to shout, especially not
these terrible
me me
things that made her sound
jealous of Rose. But it was a relief to be yelling, words
piling out of her mouth, an avalanche of the stored-up
frustrations of the last weeks. Everyone had been
stepping carefully round her mother as if she was a
house of cards that would collapse in a heap if you
breathed too hard. Perhaps it was time someone
shouted loudly enough to rouse Kathy and make her
realize what she was doing.

But Charlie had heard Sean trying, and should have
known it was useless. Her mother seemed to
have passed through some boundary to a place
unreachable by logic, reason or any amount of
emotional pleading.

'I know,' she said vaguely, 'and I'm sorry, but—'

'But what? Never mind
but
! Go after Sean and fetch
him back! Do you really want him to go, for good?'

Kathy considered. 'Yes. I think I do. It's for the best.'

'Well,
I
don't! Mum, please . . .'

Her mother turned and stared at her coldly. 'Please
don't harangue me, Charlie. It's not as if Sean's your
father.'

Charlie was so infuriated by this that she couldn't
answer at all, the words choking themselves off in her
throat. She served the spaghetti, tipping it in careless
dollops, splashing the sauce. She did three platefuls,
putting one in the oven for Sean in case he came back.
No, he wasn't her
father
; he was better than her real
father, who'd cleared off when she was two. That
didn't mean she wasn't entitled to care whether he
stayed or not.

'I can't eat this,' her mother said.

'No, neither can I.' Charlie looked helplessly
at the two plates, then shoved them in the oven
with the third one, just to get them out of sight.

Sean came back, and late into the night Charlie
tried not to hear the discussion on the other side of
the bedroom wall. She was frightened by this new
version of her mother, this person who had shrunk
deep into herself and couldn't be reached. Her
mother had always been calm, organized, hardworking
– above all, approachable. She had been
good at listening to Charlie, talking about problems
and uncertainties. Now, Charlie hardly knew how to
speak to her.

Perhaps, Charlie thought, when she goes back to
work, things will be more normal.

But Kathy had other ideas. A few days later she
announced her intention of resigning from her
Head of History at Charlie's school, selling the
house and moving out to a village. It was her way of
giving Sean a final ultimatum. Move out. Find
somewhere else to live. The house was hers, not
Sean's.

Charlie had another attempt at reasoning with her.
'But Mum! You
like
your job! Suppose you can't find
another one? It's stupid to change
everything
. . .'

Kathy was in one of her iceberg moods. 'Changing
everything is exactly what I want to do. Call it mid-life
crisis if you like. I'm not going back to school. I've
done it long enough.'