Rose is away so you won’t eat at all. Come and have some dinner. I forgot to tell you that I finally got some help at home – we have an au pair and she can cook! Her name is Bea.’ He grinned.
‘Be?’ she asked.
‘Bea, spelt B E A, short for Beatrice. Swedish. Blonde. Gorgeous.’
Jess frowned.
‘I’m kidding. She’s a Spanish brunette who makes a mean chicken casserole,’ he said.
‘Sorry.’ She folded the prescription and put it in her coat pocket. ‘I’m supposed to be at Leah’s. I bailed last night and Gus is determined to cook me a birthday meal.’ Her expression showed she’d rather miss it a second time. ‘I’m just not up for being nice to anyone. Not Leah and Gus, not you and Finn. The phone rings, I jump. I’m a wreck.’
As if on cue, Theo’s desk phone trilled.
‘That’ll be because Mrs Talbot’s getting irate.’ Jess leapt up. ‘I’d better go. Thanks, Theo.’
And then she was gone.
The rest of the morning was so busy, he scarcely had time to breathe. Though he only covered one in four Saturday morning surgeries, lately he had come to almost resent them, feeling that he should be doing fatherly things with his son at the weekend. Finn was probably glued to his laptop, when he should be doing something with him. Something fun. Instead, a morning filled with children and their typical school holiday colds had made his own sinuses tighten.
His eyes rested on the calendar on his desk. A present from Finn years ago, it was a wooden block where each date was displayed on a card. Above it, to the right, was a smaller card for the month and beside that, to the left, another card displaying the whole of the current year. He placed the correct date in the front. Saturday, 14 February 2015. A quick calculation told him it was ten weeks since his wife had left. Ten weeks since Anna went missing. Seventy days during which both he and Jess were beginning to learn how to navigate new lives.
Harriet was now living in a flat close to her office in London, able to walk to the law firm where she’d worked for the last five years. Harriet was now making love to another man in another bed in another bedroom in that flat. Theo tried not to think about it, but when he did, that was the indelible image he saw. Her making love to someone else. Someone else hearing the way she would sigh quietly, then louder and louder until she finally let out a tiny whimper. He wondered if he hated Roland, her lover; if he hated Harriet, or if a tiny part of him was jealous of her freedom. Then he remembered Finn. Finn was now the most important thing, and with his mother only visiting his life these days, Finn was proving to be a challenge.
Theo pressed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, then lifted a gilt-framed photograph from his desk. One of the three of them skiing – but rather than think of his broken family unit, Anna came to mind. Where was she now? His stomach clenched as it always did when he thought of her. He couldn’t help but picture her entombed in frozen snow. He said a silent prayer he remembered from childhood; he prayed to faceless saints whose names he had long forgotten. During the early days, after the accident, he had prayed that Anna had seen that same documentary on television as him; the one that told you to spit at the snow’s surface to see which way was up or down. It would show the way out. She hadn’t come out, so his prayer, over time, had changed to one where he pleaded to the Gods to ensure that she hadn’t felt a thing.
Anna. It was a moment before he realized he had said her name aloud.
He opened the drawer to his left, reached in and searched with his fingertips until he felt them rest on the envelope at the back. Lifting it out, he sat back in his chair, his right forefinger circling his name in her handwriting. It was striking and bold, like her, and slightly slanted to the left. The ‘o’ on the end had a little tail, like a comma, sticking out the top. Theo. Panic rose in his throat and he pushed the letter back inside the drawer, for another day. Some other day.
His patient rota finished, he’d had enough. Wrapping up against the outside elements, he lifted the briefcase. Checking inside one more time, he made sure he had the papers he needed to sign. Harriet had been efficient, her training managing to summarize their legal separation in a mere four pages.
Outside, a thin layer of ice had already formed on the windscreen. He shivered in his thick overcoat, opened his car door and slid his bag across to the passenger seat. Slipping his hands into fur-lined gloves, he gripped the icy steering wheel, started the engine and whacked the heat up high.
A five-minute drive had him parked in his driveway. The house, the home, that Harriet and he had created was a modern, detached, four-bedroom ‘executive villa’, so called by the builder who had built it a decade earlier. It was one of ten sitting in a small, gated community. It was, according to Finn, or more specifically his classmates, ‘posh’.
The herringbone driveway that his car now sat on had been a later edition. The time he and Harriet had spent poring over catalogues, matching the shade of the block to the bricks of the house – ensuring it had been just perfect – all seemed such a ridiculous waste now. Looking through the living-room window, he saw the curtains weren’t drawn. Harriet had always insisted they were, hating to be on view to anyone in the street. Neither he nor Finn cared and the thought made him smile. The curtains, perfectly held back by their matching tiebacks, probably hadn’t been closed since she left. In contrast, a few minutes earlier when he had driven through the street Jess lived in, her drapes had been drawn tight. A hint of a light escaping through a tiny gap at the top was the only sign she was at home.
He wondered if behind those drawn curtains she had been crying, having been unable to since the accident. It was as though, if she cried again, she would have to face the worst. Without tears, there was hope … As he turned the lock in the door, heard the sound of Finn’s laughter from the den, he realized the plain truth was that he would have sacrificed his marriage any day, rather than lose his child.
Bea’s casserole was perfect. She was out at the cinema with her newly acquired boyfriend, so Theo and Finn ate alone at the kitchen table. His son was quiet, the laughter he had heard earlier spent during The Simpsons episode on television.
‘Did you go to The Wall today?’ Theo asked.
‘You know I did,’ Finn replied without looking up from his food.
The Wall, the local climbing club, was Finn’s only outlet for physical activity. It had taken a while to find a sport he was interested in. He hated football, found rugby too rough, thought tennis was ‘a lot of running around after a tiny ball’. Both Harriet and Theo had been relieved and thrilled when climbing was the one thing Finn had stuck at and seemed to love; the one thing that took him away from the solitude of playing Minecraft on his laptop and reading what Harriet had called his ‘nerdy computer books’. Theo worried. His son was quiet and liked his own company a bit too much for a boy his age.
‘How was it?’
‘Okay.’
‘You’re not very talkative.’
Finn shrugged.
‘Did your mum call you earlier?’
‘Yep.’
‘What do you think?’ Theo sat back in his chair and stared; willed his son to look at him.
‘I think I’d prefer not to.’
Theo sighed. ‘I know it’s
