You and Me Read online

  Worse, there was the inescapable fact of everyone knowing that she was my mother, with her broad Yorkshire accent and her broad behind. There was no getting away from that. If you’d asked me where this divide between us and the other pupils might lead, I wouldn’t have predicted how sour it would turn, but, even then, before things went so wrong, it didn’t feel good.

  Back in London, I check to see if there’s any news yet of when Dickie’s funeral might be. Funerals are often public, after all, and Dickie’s might present an opportunity for me to speak to Charles. There’s no news, but Dickie’s wife has posted a black and white photograph of the pair of them with their daughter. She’s written: My Dickie. I can’t believe it. Thank you all for your love and support at this terrible time.

  I stare at the photograph for ages. It’s one of those classic family portraits – the three of them sitting on a picnic rug in the garden. Dickie and his wife look tired and happy. His wife, Caroline, has a kind face – freckled and unthreateningly pretty.

  Juliet, meanwhile, has dug out an old photograph from Chesterfield of Dickie and her at a Halloween social. Dickie’s dressed as Juliet with a long brunette wig, sucking in his cheeks and pouting for the camera, Juliet’s wearing a First XV rugby shirt, her hair in a backwards cap. She’s written: I miss you, Dickie Graham, my dear old pal. One of the good ones.

  That was a stretch, even for her.

  There’s nothing new on Ellie’s pages, and I look again at the email I started to her. I have another go at it, but I can’t concentrate.

  What I really want is to speak to Charles. To get him on his own, without Fiona, to talk to him properly. Charles might have seen who Dickie spotted on the platform. Or he might be able to reassure me that it was nothing but a horrible accident, like Fiona said. Either way, I need to see him.

  I remember that tomorrow’s Friday: the museum will be open late. There’s a chance he might be there. He sometimes is, surveying the crowd from the atrium with his colleagues. Smiling benignly at the visitors, with a paper cup of warm wine in his hand. It’s worth a try, I think, as I get ready for bed. I’ll feel so much better once I’ve spoken to him. He might be able to put my mind at rest.

  7

  When I get there, the following evening after work, a guide pushes a Friday Lates leaflet into my hand and I’m surrounded by faces, thrumming music – the museum masquerading as a party host. I do a circuit of the atrium, trying to fit in with the other revellers, looking for Charles.

  There’s no sign of him, though, and after twenty minutes I’m about to give up when I spot a colleague of his I recognise. I’m not sure of her name, but I’ve seen them chatting before. She wears her hair in victory rolls and her mouth is painted scarlet.

  ‘Hello,’ I say, smiling broadly as I approach her. ‘I think we’ve met before. I was wondering if Charles was here tonight.’

  The music is so loud she can barely hear me. She points at her ear and I take a step closer.

  ‘Where is Charles?’ I bellow the second time round, quite close to her face. ‘I wanted to see him.’

  ‘He’s not in,’ she shouts. She’s close enough that I can smell cheese and onion crisps on her breath. ‘He’s on compassionate leave.’

  I nod vigorously. ‘I read about the accident in the paper,’ I yell back. ‘Dreadful. I was at school with Dickie.’

  She smiles vaguely, so that I’m not sure she’s heard me, and pats me on the arm. We’re rudely interrupted by a brassy blonde with chunky earrings that almost brush her shoulders. ‘Victoria,’ she shrieks. ‘It’s been ages.’

  I make a mental note of her name for future use – Victoria, how fitting – and leave them to it, wandering around the museum as I think about what to do next. I go and see my favourite sculpture – Canova’s Three Graces, which reminds me of a mother comforting her two daughters. I always try to remember the names of the pieces here, so I can impress Charles when I bump into him. One that sticks is the Rape of Proserpina – a terrifying statue with Pluto’s strong arms hooked around Proserpina’s waist, his fingernails digging into her thigh, their bodies joined in that act of violence.

  Physical passions have always been a mystery to me. I sometimes catch a glimpse of a couple kissing in the street – grasping and groping at each other – and I wonder what that might feel like. ‘I love with my heart,’ I used to say to Ellie.

  ‘Well, don’t knock loving with the other bits until you’ve tried it,’ she’d laugh.

  It’s been another wasted trip, I consider, as I visit the Ladies’ before heading home. I had hoped Dickie’s death might bring Charles and me closer, but it’s just been dead end after dead end.

  I feel guilty for the thought immediately after having it and sit on the lavatory seat berating myself for being so callous: Mother would be ashamed of what I’ve become.

  In the midst of my self-flagellation I hear a voice in the next cubicle, cool and crisp over the background hum of the music.

  ‘Who was that funny-looking woman, Vic?’

  ‘What?’ calls another voice from a further cubicle.

  ‘That woman you were talking to, dressed like my grandmother. Plump. Intense-looking.’

  ‘Oh,’ says the second voice. ‘We call her Freaky Fran.’

  The first woman guffaws at this. There’s the flush of the loo further down and the click of heels against the tiles.

  ‘She hangs around here a lot, asking for Charles Fry,’ Victoria continues over the cubicle as she waits. ‘She went to school with him – I asked him about her once. I don’t think they’re friends, but he told me to be kind to her.’

  ‘That’s a bit creepy,’ says the woman in the cubicle next to me. There’s another flush and I don’t catch what she says next as they return to the party.

  I sit very still, looking at the wad of loo roll in my hand, listening to the revelry in the next room. Freaky Fran. The name has clung to me throughout the years. Like a curse I can’t shake off.

  8

  The first person I heard use that uninspired alliteration was Dickie. I’d been watching the boys play rugby, waiting at the edge of the pitch and it so happened that Charles found the excuse to run right by me. We locked eyes and had one of our special moments, when so much was communicated without saying a word. Dickie ruined it, saying loudly: ‘What’s that freak doing here?’ To which Charles said: ‘Leave her alone,’ and Dickie replied: ‘Ooh, Charles wants to get off with Freaky Fran.’ Charles punched him and ran away. That night, I couldn’t sleep for hugging myself and thinking: ‘Charles Fry wants to get off with me.’

  I move from place to place and still the name finds me. I’ve heard Ingrid and Liam say it in the staffroom before Brenda or Gareth upbraids them. Once, years ago, when I first started at the shop, I slipped quietly back from the loo at a rare social gathering in the pub and interrupted a flamboyant impression of me. Only a bit of fun, said the actor in question.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with being different,’ Mother said. ‘It doesn’t make you any less special. “To thine own self be true” – that can be one of the hardest things in life – and you’re already there, Fran. Your friends haven’t learned that yet.’

  It was kind of her to say. But I didn’t really have friends.

  Juliet was thrilled with the nickname and shortened it to FF, like the bra size, when I was in earshot – as if I wouldn’t be able to work that out. I think it was around the time she started to find it funny to put things in my hair while I leaned close into my books. Once it was pencil shavings – she and Dickie managed to pile them in, piece by piece. I pretended to laugh it off. Next it was bits of cheese that got stuck, went off and made me smell. The worst was a piece of used chewing gum. I cried that night as Mother had to hack chunks of my hair away over the sink.

  ‘I hate them,’ Ellie said, sitting on the edge of the bath. ‘I hate them so much.’ She took my hand and looked at me fiercely. Ellie’s small but she’s not a person to cross. ‘I’ll find a way
to get them back,’ she promised.

  For a week or two, things go quiet. I check on social media every day before work, but there’s no news of Dickie’s funeral. I wonder if they’re planning to hold one privately but I can’t ask his wife. It might seem strange – Caroline will know who Dickie’s friends are – and I don’t want her asking questions about me. Imagining that the manner of his death might present complications, I download some information from the British Transport Police website and read up about the procedure when someone dies in front of a train. Apparently eyewitnesses can be called to give evidence at the inquest. Guilt prickles at me when I learn this. But I reassure myself it could be months before one is held – I’ll have the chance to speak to Charles beforehand: at the funeral or memorial. I’m sure there will be an opportunity. He’ll help me decide what to do – if I should share my suspicions with the police.

  There is only one occasion that stands out in my memory during this quiet period. One night, close to Halloween, I spend a couple of happy hours arranging our seasonal picks in the shop window. Ingrid and Liam have had their fun playing with the pumpkins and fake cobwebs, but I have the more important task of selecting and displaying the books. To prepare for the job, I’ve been revisiting a few of my favourites – The Turn of the Screw, The Woman in Black and so on, which, in view of recent events, was perhaps a mistake.

  Maybe the ghost stories put ideas in my head. Dickie appears in my dreams, running down the rugby pitch at Chesterfield, bloody and bruised like something from a zombie film. At one point, always when I don’t expect it, he stops suddenly in his tracks and whips his head around. ‘It’s you,’ he says, looking straight at me. ‘I thought it was.’ His words chill me to the bone and I never know if he means me or someone else. Someone out of sight. I wake up, cold and sweating, longing for my mother’s hand to smooth the hair from my sticky forehead, to tell me there’s nothing to fear.

  Perhaps it’s the dreams, or the books I’ve been reading, but working in the shop window I start to feel someone watching me. I stop what I’m doing for a moment and glance over my shoulder. It’s a particularly dreary afternoon, the rain bucketing down, but I can see, across the street, a woman with a pushchair outside Marks and Spencer. She has a rain hat pulled down low, so I can’t see her face, but she stands like a statue, staring at me as I work. When I return her gaze, she springs into life and begins to walk swiftly down the Kings Road towards Sloane Square, her head down, shoulders hunched against the rain.

  It leaves me unsettled, playing on my mind as I do my social media checks that evening. Dickie’s wife hasn’t posted again since just after his death – perhaps because of the mountain of tasks facing the bereaved. It seems unfair at a point in your life when you’re at your lowest that you’ll be faced with more mundane, but important, administrative tasks than you’ll ever again encounter – death certificates, undertakers, cancelling bank accounts, standing orders and driving licences. The deconstruction of a life.

  When Mother died, Ellie left the paperwork to me. She was good at the more practical things – talking to undertakers, getting in touch with Mother’s friends and relatives, shifting things around in the flat and so on. Mother was fastidious about the lists she made before she died. She was ill for many years before she went and, ever the schoolteacher, she had time to gather her instructions in a ring-binder.

  Despite Mother’s best efforts, her paperwork went awry. Her life insurance certificate – the most crucial piece of paper; the one, when she became anxious and confused, she demanded we get from the folder and show her again and again – was declared null and void when her medical records revealed she’d found the lump before starting to pay the premiums. It was a matter of days. But that’s all it took.

  I sat in her rocking chair and wept when I found out. My sobs were so loud that Ellie dashed from her bedroom to find out what was wrong.

  ‘It’s only money, Fran,’ she said, kneeling at the foot of the chair, her warm hands in mine.

  But it wasn’t just the money I was weeping for – it was the idea of having to sell the flat, of Ellie and I perhaps moving on separately, of nothing feeling safe.

  ‘We’ll work it out,’ Ellie promised me. ‘It’s you and me against the world.’ She stayed there with me until I stopped sobbing.

  The memory drives me to Ellie’s Facebook page but nothing’s changed since last time I looked. Out of habit, I check Dickie’s wife’s account one last time before going to bed. My heart jumps when I see she’s posted: Please come to celebrate Dickie’s life at a memorial service in the Empress Hall at Chesterfield on Thursday 9 November.

  She adds a website with more on how to get there and some information on Dickie’s time at school, his starring role as scrum half in the First XV and so on, and why they’ve picked the school as a meeting point between his family in Scotland and friends in London. I skim through all of that, smiling, despite myself, at a plan coming together. Chesterfield and Charles. Where it all began.

  Buoyed by this thought, I return to the email to Ellie in my drafts folder. I delete it and begin again, keeping things simple: Did you hear about Dickie Graham? You must have done. His memorial’s at Chesterfield on the 9th. I thought you would like to know. How is Rose? Are you still in Paris? Come back soon.

  I look at the last three words for a long time before deleting them and sending it.

  9

  On the morning of Dickie’s memorial, I wake early with a fizz of excitement in my belly. My dark suit hangs on my wardrobe, pristine beneath the dry-cleaning wrapping. ‘We love our customers,’ says the logo. I’m always touched by those words of affection; it’s one of the reasons I keep going back. My Mary Janes are sitting beneath the suit, polished and ready to go. I squint at my alarm clock – it’s just after six. There’s plenty of time – the service isn’t until three o’clock this afternoon. Still, it’s difficult to allay the Christmas-morning feeling in my limbs. It’s important to get this right. Not only seeing Charles but my return to Chesterfield – the setting for some of the darkest but also the happiest moments of my life.

  If I were to be honest with myself, I would say I never got over Chesterfield, how it made me feel, with its Gothic hall and oak-clad library. When I first arrived, I wanted to live a life worthy of these lofty new surroundings – not merely scuttling from classroom to classroom, books clutched to my chest, eyes cast to the ground. Not everyone was so daunted by Chesterfield’s grandeur. Charles and Dickie could dawdle along the marble corridor or dash across the pristine quad, as if they’d grown up in buildings like this, which they probably had.

  I could never quite work out Charles and Dickie’s relationship – why someone as kind and noble as Charles, with such manners, such breeding, would be friends with someone as rough and mean as Dickie. And, after everything, how quickly he forgave him.

  But I’ve never truly understood men, after growing up in an all-female household. Just the three of us almost from the beginning – my mother, Ellie and me. The presence of our father, who died when I was six, lingered at first on the edges of things – the texture of his corduroys when I sat on his lap, the bonfire smell of his jumpers when he kissed us goodnight, the way you could hurl yourself at him and he’d catch you, fling you in the air. Ellie used to love that. But, over the years, those memories wore out like newspaper print left in the sun. I’d take them out and look at them, but they’d feel less real, and my sense of him grew fainter.

  The smell of Chesterfield is just the same. The same floor polish and sweaty cloakrooms, rugby boots and gym kits, the same coffee-soaked air billowing from the staffroom. An eclectic mixture of people gathers at reception. A few of us from school, as well as family and plenty of friends I don’t recognise. Dickie was the youngest of four brothers – the slightest and sharpest of the lot. His siblings are here today, each one bigger than the next, like a set of Russian dolls. There are others I recognise from the rugby team; his parents, of course, much older and more frag
ile-looking than I remember from school. His father wears his hair in the same side-parting that Dickie did. His face has almost folded in on itself in sadness.

  Juliet is there, dressed more for a fashion shoot than a memorial service in her tightly cut trouser suit. When she moves, bracelets jangle against her thin wrist, where the scars are still visible. As I arrive, she pretends she hasn’t seen me and I return the favour, thrilled to spot my old friend Meilin, who, like me, is dressed smartly in matching jacket and skirt. She greets me warmly and we stand catching up quietly, while I keep an eye on the entrance for Charles.

  He and Fiona don’t appear until the last moment when we’re about to proceed to the Empress Hall, led by the school chaplain, David Raven – known to generations of students as Dave the Rave. Charles looks immaculate, as always, in his charcoal suit, but his face has a Valium glaze to it, a beautiful sad vagueness. Fiona, with sleek hair and kohled eyes, sticks close to him, guarding him like a whippet. The pair of them seem to know everyone. They get swallowed up by greetings, pats on the arm and gravely delivered air-kisses. I shall have to wait for my chance to speak to Charles.

  We proceed to the Empress Hall, walking behind the chaplain and Dickie’s widow, whom I recognise from Facebook. Caroline is slight and sparrow-like, similar in build to Ellie. Dickie clearly had a type. Her hair is sandy, her face pale and freckled as an egg. Her baby isn’t with her today. Occasionally, she glances behind her as if to weigh up the rest of us.

  Everyone seems to know their place, as they always did, lining up to go into prayers. Meilin and I sit as far towards the back as we decently can and do justice to a rousing version of ‘Cwm Rhondda’. Reverend Raven – his hair white now, his face craggy and tired – speaks in praise of Dickie’s sporting prowess, his artistic talent, his popularity, his creative flair in the world of advertising. But there is a hesitancy there, I notice, a coolness in the delivery of the words. Perhaps he can remember the real Dickie. But it could be just wishful thinking on my part.