The Misplaced Affections of Charlotte Fforbes Read online

  Still, the church was quiet, and Charlotte managed to compose herself. But no matter how hard she thought, she could not answer her most pressing question: why him? Why on earth had she fallen for this man, when all others (she chose not to be too specific about actual numbers) had left her unmoved, her heart beating no faster than if she’d been reading a job ad in The Times? He wasn’t handsome. He wasn’t ugly either, to be fair, but his features were less refined than, say, his cousin Anselo’s. Yes, he had personal magnetism; people turned their heads when he walked into a room. But any very tall and broad-shouldered man drew your attention, Charlotte decided, simply because they took up a lot of space.

  He made no attempt to disguise his Cockney roots, his language was blue, and he was often blunt to the point of tactlessness. Charlotte used to find men like that unappealing. She’d considered those who aspired to geezer-chic to be puerile and deluded. And if they spoke Mockney, she’d felt they deserved to be locked up with real geezers who, with luck, would show them exactly the extent of bodily harm that could be achieved using only a plastic fork. Patrick, however, Charlotte was charmed by. She found his honesty and lack of pretention refreshing, and she admired his truly versatile usage of the word ‘fuck’.

  He was kind, too. He asked her questions about herself, and appeared genuinely interested in her, albeit careful, answers. He was brave and optimistic; he disliked problems as much as the next person, but he refused to let them beat him.

  Those were fair enough reasons to fall for someone, Charlotte decided in St Etheldreda’s dessicated presence. Reasonable reasons. But it was all the little things, Charlotte was appalled to realise, that had been the true nails in what she could only think of right now as the love coffin. Little things such as the fact he’d occasionally, without being asked, buy her lunch, and that he always remembered what kind of coffee she liked: a latte with one sugar. And what about him telling her she’d done a great job? Charlotte had never before needed that kind of reinforcement; she knew she was an excellent PA. But when Patrick said it, in that genuinely pleased way of his, Charlotte’s insides would melt. It was a miracle, she thought with disgust, that she’d refrained from simpering in return. She’d certainly had the urge.

  Charlotte could see now that Patrick’s little gestures of kindness had meant more than she’d been aware. They had sped past all her defences and landed right in the quick of her, where they’d bloomed and spread and consumed her from the inside. For that, and for simply existing, Charlotte damned him to the fiery pits of hell.

  Back at the office, Charlotte considered resigning. The parlous state of the employment market, plus the fact she actually enjoyed her job, dissuaded her. She decided, instead, that she would accept her ‘condition’, as she chose to call it, and put her mind to how to deal with it. The strategy she decided on was not giving him a single clue.

  At first, Charlotte was convinced that this would work. The skills she’d learned to conceal disappointment in her childhood had been honed in adult life by her determination to ensure one-night stands did not extend even a half hour past that. Charlotte had become an expert in the limited display of emotion, as inscrutable as a pre-age-of-political-correctness Chinaman, a veritable Mr Spock minus the unusual hand gestures. But to her dismay it now became clear that, by distancing herself in this way, she’d reduced the amount of emotion she had to limit to bugger all. Now, by contrast, she was awash with the stuff. It sloshed around inside her as if she were a fish bowl which, no matter how carefully you carried it, always threatened to slop its contents over the sides. Now, her self-control was being tested to its utmost.

  It helped that Patrick was increasingly distracted. Well, it helped in that he was less likely to notice anything odd about her. It did not help in that it made her feel pity, and thus even more affection, for him. The water lapped ever closer to the edge of the fish bowl every time Charlotte came into his office and caught him staring off into space, or noticed that his shirt collar was grubby, or that he gave off the faint but unmistakable smell of a cheap pub. Charlotte did not know where he went when he did not want to go home, but she was in no doubt that it had a dart board, a snug and a barman named Reg.

  Still, Charlotte hadn’t got to where she was today by being namby-pamby. She was resolved on her strategy of remaining aloof and inscrutable, and did not intend to deviate from it one inch. And that would have been that — if she had not come back to work one evening after drinks with her friends to fetch her phone from where she’d mistakenly left it on its charger.

  As she unclipped her phone, Charlotte heard noises coming from behind the closed door of Patrick’s office. She’d made enough of these noises herself to have no trouble identifying them. The woman seemed to have an accent — her yeses had a definite foreign lilt to them, Charlotte decided. He was being quieter, which suggested to Charlotte that the moment of crisis was nigh. What would he yell, she found herself wondering? Most of her liaisons usually petitioned a variation on the Lord God Almighty or Our Saviour, Jesus Christ, although one had once yelled ‘Madonna!’ She wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t meant the ex-Mrs Ritchie.

  As it was, behind the door, he just shouted. A single yell that coincided with a foreign (or was it Welsh?) sounding ‘Yes!’ And then it all went quiet, which is when it occurred to Charlotte that they could probably get to the office door quicker than she could get to the main door and, if she didn’t want to lose her job, she’d better leg it.

  On her way down the stairs, Charlotte found that her attitude, like a black cab being hailed by someone famous, had done an abrupt U-turn. In place of her determination to be distant there was now a different idea. It was only an idea at this stage, because Charlotte did not yet have a plan for how to put it into action. But a plan she would form, because the idea was far too powerful to ignore. In Charlotte’s mind it started to repeat itself, like a mantra, its six words gaining in charm and seduction every time.

  The idea was: ‘If her, then why not me?’

  2

  Patrick King stood facing his front door and rethought the bunch of flowers in his hand. They’d seemed a good idea when he’d bought them thirty minutes ago. For Patrick (and, he suspected, most men), flowers had always been a safe choice because they could never be the wrong size, not her colour, not her taste, a ridiculous waste of money or the reason she was forced to rearrange absolutely everything on the living-room shelves. Flowers wouldn’t hit the wrong note for the occasion because they had no pretentions to be anything other than cheerful and temporary. Flowers were a gift without risk of reproach. Yet somehow Patrick still sensed that they would not do.

  He toyed with the idea of giving them to ninety-two-year-old Mrs Livingstone next door, but decided the shock of receiving flowers from a man for the first time since the year Churchill lit his last cigar might very well stop her heart. He gripped the bunch more firmly and turned the key in his front door.

  Inside, Patrick dropped his keys in the bowl on the hallway table. He liked the hallway; it was where his stuff (the items he’d managed to save) had ended up after Clare had redecorated. Here were his prints of Victorian sportsmen, his Georgian card table (the only antique he’d ever bought) and his faded Doulton bowl, an inheritance from his grandmother, of sentimental value only.

  Patrick had owned the house for several years before he’d married Clare. It had proved a good investment. Although he had a knack for spotting property trends, he couldn’t pretend that had been his motivation in this case. He’d bought the house because it was near the key members of his extended family, was in decent nick, and had been briefly owned by one of The Who. When they’d married, Clare had moved in with him but had kept hold of her own house, about ten minutes’ walk away, in a slightly less salubrious part of Islington. Her place was much, much smaller, and was now being rented by Anselo and his wife, Darrell. Patrick wasn’t sure they loved having Clare as a landlady, but because Anselo had been a builder before he came to work for Patrick, the
couple had no reason to bother Clare about repairs or maintenance — or anything, really. Patrick felt that the arrangement worked well for all concerned. Especially since Darrell had had the baby. Clare didn’t have much time for babies that weren’t her own.

  Patrick stood in the quiet of the hall and listened. The stairs at the end led up to the living rooms and bedrooms, and down to the big open-plan kitchen, where Clare spent most of her time with Tom. At one end of the room, under the windows that just dropped below the level of the street, was the kitchen itself. Patrick had originally had an electric stove, but Clare, making the admittedly fair point that he never used it, had replaced it with an Aga. The Aga appeared to Patrick like something out of a Grimms’ fairy tale. Things bubbled in it.

  In the middle of the room was a large scrubbed pine table, which sat twelve at a squeeze. The last time twelve people had crammed around it was the Christmas before Tom was born. Clare had insisted that, instead of them schlepping to Jenico’s house as they bloody well always did, those members of Patrick’s family whom she could tolerate could bloody well come here. And so they had, but only after a large amount of behind-the-scenes wrangling, pleading and appeasing from Patrick. Over two years’ later, he was still appeasing those who had not been invited.

  At the far end of the room, beside French doors that opened out onto a small Italianate courtyard, there were bookshelves, and a squashy couch facing a television. Not that Clare ever let Tom watch television. Tom was not even allowed to watch educational videos because screen time for under twos was not recommended by paediatric associations, who said mothers should concentrate instead on activities to promote proper brain development. Clare liked to be at the forefront of techniques to promote proper brain development. Last year, Patrick found a CD of Don Giovanni in the bin after Clare had read that Mozart seemed to have a more stimulating effect on microbes in sewage plants than on your baby’s IQ. Now Clare focused on the aforementioned brain-developing activities, which comprised playing, singing and reading together. She had scheduled in appointments every day to play, sing and read with Tom.

  At this time, six-thirty in the evening, Patrick knew that if the day had gone well Clare would be having a little sing-along with Tom after his dinner, which would be followed by bath, bed and the reading of a children’s classic. If the day had not gone well, there would be no singing. The presence or absence of his wife’s voice raised in song was what Patrick listened for now.

  What he heard was the bang of the French doors, a yell of ‘Oi’, and then the clatter of what sounded like the feet of a thousand-strong orc army hastily scrambling up the stairs. Launching itself around the corner into the hallway, with a banking turn that nearly sent it sideways into the wall, came a dog. It sped past Patrick and came to a skidding halt at the front door, where it stood, tail furiously wagging, and barked.

  Patrick just had time to register that the dog was a black Labrador and still a puppy before quieter but no less urgent footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Patrick turned to see his wife, her face pink and her expression enraged.

  ‘You sod!’ she said.

  Patrick, opting to decide she meant the dog, turned to the front door, where said dog was now sitting facing them, its mouth wide open in what looked like a smile, its tongue lolling out limp and damp like a just-used chamois.

  ‘He was inside for five sodding minutes,’ Clare went on, ‘and he managed to rip apart a cushion and eat the entire bag of carrots I’d left on the bench! So I put him outside, and he dug up my icebergs!’

  The name rang a bell. ‘Your … lettuces?’ said Patrick.

  ‘My sodding roses!’ said his wife. ‘The huge big standard ones! The courtyard looks like the Villa d’Este after the Allied bombing!’

  ‘Um …’ Patrick chose his next words carefully. He did not want Clare to think he was blaming her for anything. But the fact remained: there was a dog running riot in his house and, for once, it had nothing to do with him. ‘Whose dog is it?’

  ‘Your sodding cousin’s!’

  Mentally, Patrick scratched the bit about it being nothing to do with him.

  ‘My—?’

  ‘Aishe!’ said Clare, as if it should have been obvious which of Patrick’s horde of cousins she meant.

  The dog wandered over to Patrick and sniffed his shoes. Patrick stooped to fondle the velvety ears, and the dog began to lick his hand with an eagerness that suggested that Patrick’s hand was now his most favourite thing in all of the world.

  His wife compressed her lips. ‘Bacon sandwiches for lunch again?’

  Patrick straightened up. The dog bounced off the floor, aiming for his hand. Patrick ignored it. ‘Why did Aishe leave her dog with us?’ he said.

  ‘She didn’t,’ said Clare. ‘She got her charming stooge to do it for her.’

  This, Patrick knew, meant Benedict, Aishe’s boyfriend. Benedict had not been born to a posh family, but he’d been smart enough, and his father rich enough, to gain entrance to a public school. Benedict now had the accent, the courteous manner and the kind of tall and slim, pale blond good looks that would make him a shoo-in for a doomed lover role in any new adaptation of RF Delderfield. He could not have been more different from Aishe, who was small, dark and cranky. Patrick saw the merit in sending Benedict to do her dirty work.

  ‘They’re off to Edinburgh. Aishe’s son’s jazz band is playing in some inter-school competition up there for—’ Clare suddenly broke off. ‘Shit!’ she said. ‘Tom!’ And she dashed back down the stairs.

  Patrick forced himself not to run after her. Normally, Clare was hyper-vigilant when it came to her small son, and quick to criticise other mothers who were not. ‘She shouldn’t have taken her eyes off them,’ was her response to any news item in which a toddler had been drowned, lost or run over. If Patrick pointed out that even if you did watch them like a hawk, they were still capable of making a break for it, often with a speed to rival Usain Bolt, Clare would only snort. ‘All the more reason to stay alert,’ she’d say. ‘If you’re too busy reading porn on your Kindle, then you deserve all you get.’

  Patrick knew Clare would be cursing herself for her lapse, hating the fact she’d even momentarily failed. If he followed her too quickly, she’d feel he was censuring her. So despite his mind conjuring vivid images of Tom reaching for the knives or placing his head inside the glowing Aga, Patrick counted to ten before he started down the stairs. The dog, seeing his newly beloved hand disappearing, barked once and then raced on down behind.

  Clare was standing at the kitchen bench, slamming the lid onto the kettle, a gesture Patrick interpreted to mean that Tom was fine. Sure enough, his son was sitting in front of the squashy couch, playing with his favourite toy, a board with variously shaped holes into which you hammered matching shaped blocks. Tom was really too old for this toy but could not be parted from it. Patrick knew that Clare had tried only yesterday to take it from him for good. The fact it was now in front of Tom was probably another reason Clare was slamming kettle lids.

  ‘Are you going to hang onto those all night?’ she said to him.

  Patrick remembered he had a bunch of flowers in his hand. The tightness of his grip, he observed, hadn’t done them a lot of good.

  As he reached out to hand the flowers to Clare, the dog leapt up and seized them in its mouth. It bounced around the floor, worrying the bunch as if it were some kind of large, paper-wrapped, pastel-hued rat.

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’

  Patrick reached down and grabbed the dog by the scruff of its neck. Then he whacked it on its rear. The dog yelped, dropped the flowers and shot under the table, where it sat, trembling and whining.

  ‘Nice one,’ said Clare. ‘You and the Dog Whisperer should form a team.’

  Shaking her head, she dropped to one knee to start gathering up the shredded flowers and sodden paper.

  Patrick put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll do that.’

  ‘No,’ said his wife.
‘You can deal with the dog. And I don’t mean put it outside.’

  ‘Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do with it then?’ Patrick was starting to feel he had some right to be aggrieved. ‘Why’d you say yes if you couldn’t handle it?’

  Clare shot to her feet. ‘Because I thought,’ she said, her voice low and furious, ‘that it would be nice for Tom.’

  She yanked open the lid of the rubbish bin and shoved the remains of the flowers inside, punching down any recalcitrant stems that refused to fit.

  ‘I was thinking of our son.’ She slammed the bin shut again. ‘So sue me.’

  ‘How long are Benedict and Aishe going to be away?’ Patrick asked after a moment.

  ‘Five days.’

  ‘Has Tom noticed the dog at all?’

  Clare’s gaze travelled to the far end of the room to where Tom was pulling out blocks and hammering them in, over and over again. ‘It licked him and he laughed. He also laughed when it tore apart the cushion. Then, after the carrot incident, I put it outside, and they both forgot the other existed …’

  Patrick stared at his wife. He noted how far her cheekbones jutted, how tightly she set her jaw. He saw the dryness around her nose and mouth, and the almost bruised darkness under her eyes.

  ‘I’ll take the dog to Jenico’s,’ he said.

  ‘Will he look after it?’ Clare sounded sceptical.

  ‘Unlikely. But he’ll know someone who will.’

  ‘Uncle Jenico to the rescue again.’

  Patrick shrugged. ‘We are his family.’

  ‘No,’ said his wife. ‘You are.’

  Anselo Herne came home to find his son peacefully asleep in his cot and his wife in the next room, curled up, sobbing, under their bed.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Darrell.’ He dropped to his knees and peered under the bed. ‘What have I said about watching the bloody news?’