One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [67]
‘Exactly,’ Maggie was saying.
It took me a moment to remember what we’d been talking about. Oh, Seffy. My chest tightened in its familiar fashion, but not as much as it would have done a year ago. Things were definitely better between us, but I still had the feeling he was deliberately distancing himself. Perhaps I’d been too overprotective, when he was younger? Too smothering? But then he was my only child, and I his only family too. He’d seemed to need that extra strong bond; we both did. But I knew some of his friends treated their mothers much more casually; kept them at arm’s length. Perhaps Seffy was embarrassed by our closeness. Didn’t want to be a mummy’s boy. Perhaps he was just doing the same.
I’d wanted to ask his housemaster how he was getting on, but I suspected Seffy knew that and didn’t want me to. Didn’t want to be discussed; examined minutely from every angle – who would? And the awful thing was, whenever I talked about Seffy, I got horribly emotional. Often in the most inappropriate places. The last thing I wanted was to have a box of tissues passed silently to me by an embarrassed housemaster. There’d been enough of that at the last school. Perhaps it was as well he’d gone back with Dad.
I dropped Maggie off at her house just off Fulham Palace Road and drove the few blocks round to mine. The moment I was alone all vestige of pretence left me, and I felt the skies descend. My spirits dived in a way that couldn’t just be attributed to general Sunday night gloom. Shoulders up, I hunched over the wheel. Not a great day. Not great at all. The encounter with Hal and Letty had shaken me more than I could say, and now Seffy – withdrawn, defensive. As I purred round the backstreets, I experienced a sense of foreboding that rushed at me in a nightmarish, ghostly fashion. It was one I knew of old and associated with inescapable loss.
As I turned into my road, though, remarkably, my spirits lifted, just perceptibly. They always did as I crawled down this tree-lined street to home. Home. My house. Small and terraced in a row of identical cottages, but how I loved it. Loved the pretty Victorian façade I’d painted clotted cream, the tiny front garden where I grew roses and sweet william, a lupin if there was room, the Peter Pan statue I’d found in Lyons and set amongst the fauna. I loved the fact that I could impose my taste on a small area and make it look so different from the neighbours’. And I’d done just the same inside. It was a real two-up two-down, but I’d knocked the two-down into one long sitting room: tacked a conservatory onto the kitchen too, which gave onto the garden. Now that really was a backyard. I smiled when I thought of Laura’s. I’d personally cleared it of rubble with the help of Kit and my father when I’d bought the place, chucking out broken bricks, an old bath, masses of green and brown bottles, turning it from a rubbish heap into a tiny walled enclosure, with a patch of grass. It was here that Seffy had splashed in his paddling pool, then later tricycled around in circles – just – and now lay on his back in the sun, feet up the wall. It was small, but enough for us. Or so I’d always thought. As I switched off the engine I glanced at it anxiously, willing it to do its magic. Willing it to relax my fraught nerves. It did, a bit.
In these enlightened days of residents’ parking – no more dragging of smelly dustbins into the road to reserve a space – I was able to park right outside. I walked the few steps up the front path, deliberately taking time to savour the musky scent of the tobacco plants I’d placed strategically in pots by the front door. Always gloriously heady in warm evening air, they were really earning their keep tonight. I inhaled their fragrance deeply; smiled. Then I reached in my bag for the key, but as I put it in the latch, I realized the light was already on in the hallway, shining through the stained-glass door panel. I froze. Music was drifting out from within.