Sara MacDonald - Come Away With Me

‘You take care,’ I say.

He looks down at me. ‘May I ring you when I get back?’

I take my card out of my bag and give it to him. He holds on to my fingers, lifts them to his lips, then he turns and walks away, striding across the grass. My heart hammers like a trapped bird as the distance between us grows.

I call out ‘Tom’ before I even know I’m going to.

He turns and I run towards him. He scoops me up and turns in a circle with me. Then we just stand holding each other for a moment.

‘Please take care,’ I say again. I let him go and he walks quickly through the gate. This time I notice his step has a little bounce to it.

February 2006

‘You look happy today!’ Adam said, grinning at his mother as she jumped out of the train.

‘How do I normally look?’

‘Stressed, Mum! You’re usually in your own little world of work, for at least an hour or so.’

Ruth felt a pang. So this was how she was. She bleeped the car doors open and when they were inside she said, ‘It was extraordinary. I met someone on the train I haven’t seen for nearly fourteen years. It was weird, Adam, we were best friends at school.’

‘Cool,’ Adam said. ‘You recognised each other then?’

Ruth shot him a look. ‘I’m not that old! Actually, Jenny looked more or less as she always did, except…’

She concentrated on backing out of the car space.

‘Except, what?’

‘She was sad. She’d lost her lovely bounce. I was stupid. I was so excited about seeing her that I didn’t pick it up, just prattled on asking about her life and then she told me. Six months ago her husband was killed in a road accident.’

Adam turned to her. ‘Poor woman.’

‘Yes. She’s in Birmingham on her own so I’m going to ring her tomorrow. I would have asked her to stay but Peter’s back tonight and he’s going to be tired.’

‘Are we going to the airport to meet him?’

‘No, he’s on a later flight. He said he’d get a taxi home.’

‘We are still going to Cornwall for half-term?’

‘Of course we are.’ Ruth concentrated on the traffic. ‘How was your day?’

‘OK,’ Adam said. ‘Is Peter coming to the cottage with us? It’s more fun if I’ve got someone to birdwatch with.’

‘I hope so, Adam, but…’

‘I know, Mum! Like, why do I have to have workaholic parents?’

He grinned at her to take away the sting, but the familiar guilt was back. She and Peter did work long hours and Adam was on his own too much. Occasionally he brought a friend home, sometimes he went to a friend’s house, but it was not the same as having someone there when he got in from school.

The irony was not lost on Ruth. Her aunt had always been the one to be there for him after school when he was small. After that, he had almost always been picked up by someone else or come home to an empty house. The difference was that until his secondary school he had been happy and had loads of friends. Now, they appeared to have dwindled to two or three ostracised loners who had been pushed together.

She thought suddenly of Peter’s wistful voice. ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have another child in the house? I think Adam would like that too. Will you think about it, Ruth?’

Ruth didn’t need to think about it. She didn’t want any more children. It had taken her years to get where she was. She loved working and she had no intention of giving up. Bringing up Adam had been too hard, even with help. She never wanted to have to juggle work, a baby and guilt again. In a few years Adam would be at university. She couldn’t start all over again. She just couldn’t.

Adam had taken her silence as hurt. ‘I was only joking, Mum. You worry too much. Most of my friends’ mothers work long hours too. It’s cool.’

Yes, but most of Adam’s friends’ mothers worked because they had to, not because they wanted to.

Peter had not been impressed by the huge comprehensive that had been their only choice in the area. He had wanted to pay for Adam to go to a private school. Ruth had refused on the grounds she did not believe in private education. But she knew it was really about whether she and Peter stayed together long-term. If they ever split up she could not have afforded school fees on her own and it would have been cruel to have to pull Adam out of private education. Ruth was not quite so sure she would refuse again. Adam said little, but was obviously fairly miserable at school.

She drove up their leafy road of Victorian terraces and parked. For once there was an empty space outside the house. Adam leapt out and ran up the steps, unlocking the front door and leaving it open for her.

As she walked in and hung up her coat Ruth had an image of Jenny, childless, entering a house where her husband was never going to move through the rooms again. Sadness shot through her. She remembered running, screaming with laughter, with a small curly-haired girl across the sands at St Ives towards the Browns’ house with its windows facing Porthmeor beach and the harbour, and her abiding image was of Jenny’s happiness, her security in childhood, in life.

If this tragedy had happened to me I might have been expecting it. Even as a child, Ruth had never trusted happiness. It could be wiped off her face in an instant. She had learnt not to show it. All pleasures had to be hidden or hugged secretly to her. She would compose her face on her way down the hill from the Browns’ house so that when she walked through the door of her own home her puritan parents would see no traces of joy left on it.

She composed her features into that blank expression she recognised sometimes in children in the supermarket. The closed-in, shut-off features of a child shouted at or slapped too often. Children who knew they could never do anything right and tried to melt into the shadows.

Her own parents’ relief that Ruth was out of the house so often and not under their feet making dust did not prevent their jealousy of people who might bring her happiness.

Adam was making toast and humming over his bird magazines. ‘Are you thinking of the woman you met on the train, Mum?’ he asked Ruth suddenly.

‘Yes.’ Ruth sat down opposite him, and he cut his toast and Marmite and handed her a piece.

‘How did you lose touch?’

‘My fault. I never wrote to her when I left Cornwall for Arran. I hurt her a lot. I realised that today.’

‘Only today, Mum?’

Ruth met his eyes. She had given Adam the edited version of her early life. ‘I thought Jenny would forget me pretty quickly. She had three sisters and one brother. We were good friends, but she had a large family…’

‘But friends are different,’ Adam said firmly. ‘Friends are people you make on your own, that are separate from family. They see you in another way. So you become different with them and it’s the same for them. Friends are important.’

Ruth stared at him. You learnt new things about your children all the time. Adam was right. He was his own person, not just the person she knew, but another boy she didn’t know; a person who acted in a different way when he was not with his mother.

He said now, with butter on his chin, ‘Did you explain about your parents, about Auntie Vi looking after you? About me?’

‘A little. I didn’t have time to tell her everything,’ Ruth said carefully, as Adam watched her across the table. ‘But she knew your grandparents and what they were like.’

The phone went and Adam dashed for it. It was Peter. His flight had been delayed. As Ruth listened to them chatting happily she thought with a pang, I take Peter and the life I have here for granted.

At seventeen you believed that your dreams might come true. At thirty you tried not to have any illusions; yet the essence of some impossible hope lived insistently on. Somewhere out there was an exciting shadowy figure who could provide all emotional and sexual succour; a soulmate. Him.