In Any Life
Prologue
Summer 2010
I stood by the balustrade on Clare Bridge beside one of the lichen-covered stone spheres. The bridge was draped in fairy lights for the May Ball, and they cast luminous patterns over the rippling darkness of the River Cam. From my nook, out of the way of the wind, I had a clear view across the cobbled courtyard where most of the revelry was going on. Part of me wanted to stand at the highest point of the bridge, but I had tried it, and I felt too exposed. Too keen. What I really wanted was for Xander to be the one who arrived at the meeting place first, so he would be the one waiting for me for once.
Staring over the heads of the other students, who were gyrating in Old Court to the opening chimes of Mr Brightside, I searched for Xander’s wild dark hair. But he was nowhere to be seen.
My heart plummeted.
At that moment, the crowd parted, and my friends surged towards me, all shouting at once. Aalia led the pack, followed by Charlie brandishing a champagne bottle, and then Brian and Suzie – hand in hand like usual. The couple had been inseparable since Freshers’ Week, and I was sure they would grow old together.
Charlie waved the bottle at me. Flamboyant and charming, he was wearing white tie with his own vintage twist – a paisley scarf wrapped round his neck, and red pointed snakeskin boots.
‘Matilda, there you are!’ He was grinning. ‘Are you coming for a drink on the roof, or not?’
I froze, not knowing what to do. If I went with my friends, they would sweep me away into the party, and the spell would be broken, missing my chance to meet Xander.
‘Shh, Charlie,’ Aalia interposed. ‘There’s no need to yell at her. She can decide for herself.’ Thank goodness for Aalia, who always had my back.
But Charlie was not listening, instead he was raising the bottle high above his head and waving it to attract attention. ‘Xander!’ he shouted, then even louder over the hubbub, ‘Xander!’
My face grew hot, remembering the message Xander had sent me earlier: Meet me on Clare Bridge @midnight. I need to see you. There is something I want to show you.
‘I don’t think he can hear me,’ Charlie grumbled to Brian and Suzie.
I looked and looked for Xander in the sea of students, swaying beneath the starry sky. Finally, I spotted him, framed by the arched doorway on the opposite side of the court. His tie was askew, and his messy hair fell over his eyes, as he bent down to speak to a familiar waif-like figure.
My mouth went dry, and I felt Aalia squeeze my hand.
He had told me they broke up after her last exam. But here – right in front of me – was Xander back in the orbit of the mesmerising Emma. Her hair was pulled into a messy side-braid, showing off her long swanlike neck, above a gauzy gown which was the same gold as her hair. There was no way anyone could ever be as perfect as this cross between Serena van der Woodsen and Keira Knightley. Least of all me in the sage-green dress that Aalia had found last year in a charity shop on Green Street and lent to me for the ball. It was pretty, and I liked the way the chiffon floated behind me when I walked, but I was not spectacular like Emma effortlessly was.
I had to get a hold of myself.
Xander had asked me to meet him so I could not let my insecurities about Emma stand in the way. It might not be what it looked like. She might have stopped him in the crowd, and he could still be on his way to the bridge.
Aalia squeezed my hand tightly to try and comfort me.
‘Let’s go,’ she whispered. ‘We don’t have to go for drinks with the others. Who cares about going on the roof? There’s a chocolate fountain upstairs.’
I hesitated. ‘I’m going to wait here,’ I muttered. Did I really have to explain?
Aalia smiled, and her brown eyes were full of understanding. ‘I think Xander looks a bit busy.’
My heart was breaking as I said, ‘I know.’ But I could not leave. Not now. I needed to know if he was coming or not.
At that moment, there was a rush and a crackle and fireworks exploded across the sky in a stream of white light. I jumped, and the other students around me whooped and shouted.
It must be midnight because the ball committee had been very firm about the itinerary; the fireworks were to be let off at exactly twelve o’clock.
Perhaps Xander had changed his mind.
The fireworks kept exploding, sending shivers over my skin. Bright flashes of scarlet and green lit up the throng of happy faces around me. I was not able to match their exuberant joy. I was numb to it all; every fibre of me yearned to know what Xander was thinking.
Charlie was shouting with excitement. He grabbed Aalia’s hand, and then mine. ‘Roof, quickly, or we’ll miss the whole thing.’
Part of me wanted to go, but tonight was too important.
I wrested my hand away, hearing the thumping beat of a song we all knew. Men in white tie erupted, shouting along to the opening of I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) with a total disregard for rhythm and tuning.
Charlie took off, dragging the others with him. Aalia glanced back with her hand outstretched for me. But I shook my head emphatically.
I turned away from the group, placing my fingertips on the limestone of the bridge to steady myself. As I did so, I felt the wind catch at the hem of my dress, the light chiffon billowing up around me. The warmth of the day had died away long ago, and I had not brought a cardigan or a coat.
I shivered, wrapping my arms around myself. Could I bear to wait here in the chill for Xander who might never come, or should I run to catch up with my friends?
Chapter One
November – Present Day
Tilda
I was at the kitchen counter, ready to push the button on the coffee grinder. The elegant machine was wildly loud but if I wanted coffee – and I needed coffee desperately after hardly any sleep – it had to be freshly ground. Dorian had got me into it although I was not sure I could tell the difference between this and instant, and when Zelda had been up for hours in the dark, like last night, I needed my mornings to be easier. But my husband was a purist when it came to his coffee. On weekends, he used to treat me to flat whites with smiley faces stencilled on in chocolate powder, but that was before we had the girls, of course, and our routine changed beyond recognition.
I started the machine.
‘Hands over your ears!’ I remembered to tell Zelda just in time, before the grinder kicked in.
My younger daughter has always been sensitive to noise – like me – which I think is a sign of a musical child. Zelda begged to learn the piano, like her older sister, although she is only three, and she can pick up any tune even if she only hears it once.
‘Thank you, Mummy,’ she sang out over the aggressive whirring, one hand over each ear.
The two girls were sitting at their little table, in diminutive chairs, their blonde heads framed by the French doors which led out to our untamed garden.
Maude, my five-year-old, was reading The Worst Witch with her customary intensity, breakfast forgotten. Her icy curls cascaded over the page. How my daughters were both blonde, I could not quite understand. My hair was very dark, but I suppose Dorian’s genes must have won out. His hair used to be fair and wavy, although it grew scant around his temples now that he had hit the wrong side of forty.
The opposite of our unruly garden, where ivy climbed over the back wall, the fence, and even twined up the trunks of the nearby trees, choaking the other plants with its glossy leaves. I looked out onto the patio, sighing at the weeds that had sprung up between the cracks.
Gardening: yet another household task I had let slip, as I ran from dropping the girls at school and nursery to work and back again, with the weekend a mayhem of playdates, piano lessons, and children’s parties. When was I supposed to garden? I had asked Aalia, who confessed she sometimes weeded at night with her headtorch on. But then again, she used the herbs she cultivated to cook nutritious and fragrant family meals like the perfect earth mother, whereas I seemed to mainly feed my girls cereal and toast.
Zelda took a noisy bite of Cheerios, then she stared at me as she chewed. ‘Mummy, how old are you today?’
‘I’m one hundred and eight,’ I said without missing a beat. ‘Older than any mother that has ever been.’ She did not need to know I was turning thirty-five. Such an advanced age that to a three-year-old that I might as well be one hundred and eight. My mother was still pretending to be twenty-nine each birthday, which was absurd when she was going to be seventy next month, and she now had two grandchildren.
Zelda laughed at me, milk spraying everywhere, then she ran headlong at me. I winced as she connected with my waist, and clung to me painfully hard.
I crouched down to her level, and she wrapped her arms around my neck.
‘I love you,’ she whispered into my cheek.
‘I love you too,’ I told her.
Then we both giggled, and the joy of being together was better than any birthday dinner at a Michelin star restaurant, or a spa day at The Dorchester – where I went for my twenty-eighth. I had given up on hoping for anything so glamorous since we had Maude.
I lifted Zelda up and held her on my hip as I made the coffee: water bubbling up through the fresh grains.
I opened the cupboard to take out a cup from my collection. Over the years running my father’s auction house, I had amassed a symphony of lonely antique teacups. Each time a tea service came in smashed, the packers would set aside any leftover pieces for me to look at. I loved them all. The most expensive was a Wedgewood cup patterned with hibiscus flowers, its saucer trimmed with gold: the perfect birthday treat.
Zelda wiggled in my arms.
I let her slide back to the floor to run back to Maude, and then I lifted the cup down carefully. It was heavier than I remembered. As I did so, it tipped, and a small box wrapped in dark green paper fell out. My heart leapt. A birthday present. So, Dorian had remembered this year.
I glanced over at the girls both now happily immersed in their own interests – Zelda practising her piano hands, and Maude still engrossed in her favoured world of schoolgirl witches.
Perhaps it was not right to open the gift without Dorian here, but I could not resist taking a peek. He might not be up for hours, as it was one of his writing days, I told myself, and I had to get the girls out of the door soon.
I picked up the box, slipping my fingers under the strip of Sellotape. If I was careful, I could look inside, and then maybe put it back. Pulling back the wrapping, I opened the lid.
Inside, glittering in the dawn sunlight, was a gold necklace set with emeralds and diamonds in the shape of an “I”.
I swallowed. Shut the box. Hastily, stuck it back in the cup.
My vision clouded, hot tears stinging to my eyes. It was impossible the present was mine. Running through Dorian’s exes in my mind, I tried to remember all of their names. But then I stopped. There was one person he had been mentioning more and more, whenever he came back from lecturing at UCL. The best poet of her generation. Iris. Her name began with an I. The thought filled my whole mind with screaming horror and desperation.
‘Morning, Daddy.’ Maude’s voice echoed through my fog of misery.
I glanced up, and there was my husband, stumbling into the kitchen. Dorian’s aquamarine eyes were reddened in the corners.
‘What time is it?’ he said. ‘I must’ve overslept.’ As if this was in no way obvious to all of us. ‘I ended up working really late last night. The whole poem’s flowing. It feels so good.’ Then, he smiled at me. ‘Happy birthday, darling!’
‘Thanks,’ I replied, averting my face. I could not bear to meet his eyes, as our entire relationship felt shattered at its foundations in that moment. ‘We’ve got to get going.’ I called the girls, then whirled round the kitchen finding Maude’s reading book which she had finished in minutes last night and denounced as ‘very boring’ because there were no witches in it, and two apples for them to eat on the walk. ‘Come on darlings, get your socks on for me.’
‘Can’t you go in a bit later?’ Dorian asked. There was a plaint in his voice, which sent rage coursing through me right to my fingertips.
‘Someone has to get the girls to school.’ I was brusque.
He nodded, but then his face brightened. ‘But I’ll make us all dinner. Tonight. A big surprise – I can –’
‘It’s not a surprise if you tell me about it,’ I said. Of course, he was going to cook me a spaghetti Bolognese, and the new love of his life was worth diamonds and emeralds. It made me sick. I had to get out of there. I hurried past him to fetch Maude’s water bottle, and his hand moved towards my waist. I dodged it, running out into the hallway after the girls. When I reached them, they had the wrong socks on, and Zelda was demanding to wear her wellies.
It was only after we had left the house that I realised: the necklace was still sitting on the kitchen counter. Right beside the cafetière.
I took Maude to school first, trying to put a brave face on things by kissing her extravagantly and waving her inside.
The mums by the school gate flocked around me. There were shouts of, ‘happy birthday! Can’t wait for your drinks!’ coming from all angles.
Alex, the designated “fun mum”, who had sent a WhatsApp poll for my birthday drinks, dug me in the ribs. ‘So, what did Dorian get you, then? I bet it was a Porsche!’ She was grinning at me – her filler-smile stretching.
I bent down and swept Zelda into my arms, trying to hide as much as possible behind her curls. If I looked at any of the other women, I might cry. They all thought my marriage was perfect, but it was a complete sham. I knew Alex loved that Dorian had escaped the City to follow his creative dreams, unlike her husband who was still toiling away in the IT department at a bank.
Zelda squirmed in my arms.
It was all too much. I shifted my daughter onto my right hip, and – windmill waving frantically to the other mums – I ran down the street to drop Zelda at nursery.
When I had said goodbye, and I was sitting on the bus to work, I could finally breathe for a moment. I leant my head against the cool of the window, as the trees whipped past, and I tried to focus on watching their trembling leaves instead of dwelling on Dorian and Iris.
The bus juddered to a stop on Essex Road, and I hopped out, walking round the corner to the auction house.
Above the shop front, the green awning with Gray’s Antiques printed in gold across it was newly painted, but Sam had not yet had a chance to touch up the benches outside the front in the same shade of green, and they were still peeling. I would have to remind him because appearances were everything. But it could wait until the engineer came to fix the fridge in the café later today. Nowadays, the café inside the showroom was a big draw, although I was not sure my father would have approved of having it inside his auction house. But I knew my instinct had been right. Clients came in for a pot of tea, then they stayed to browse and put in bids on curiosities that they had not known they wanted: a pair of sparkling spider-shaped brooches, a delicate tortoiseshell sherbet spoon, or a viridescent taxidermy parrot.
When I pushed open the shop door, there was no sign of Sam. He must be late today. Usually, Sam was sitting at the front desk, or pottering around the showroom or warehouse behind it, rearranging the chairs and tables, or shifting paintings to more attractive spots on the walls.
I went upstairs to the office which had once been my father’s.
In the centre of the leather-topped desk stood an elegant bunch of flowers: white roses, delphiniums, sprays of baby’s breath and fragrant eucalyptus.
I stared at the cluster of foliage, then picked up the card nestled beside the largest rose: To Tilda, Happy Birthday! With best wishes from your biggest fan: your loving husband, Dorian,
It was not my husband’s writing.
I crumpled the card, feeling it cut into my hand as I squashed it into a ball.
