The Best of Friends by Alex Day (accelerated reader books .txt) 📕

so soon after starting the job, plus the summer is the busiest time and Naomi has said it’s all hands on deck,’ I continue. ‘And anyway, where would I go and who with? I’ve no money and no partner. Justin will have the boys for a few weeks – there’s talk of camping – so I won’t even have them to keep me company.’

I raise my eyebrows and, as I do so, catch your eye. We both laugh.

‘I know,’ I say, ‘rather them than me sleeping in a tent. But it’s all he can afford and he is their father. I don’t want them to grow apart from him or lose touch – and I don’t want to be someone who lives in bitterness and resentment, however much Justin hurt me with his secrets and lies.’

Secrets and lies.

Charlotte seems to have quite a few of those. Whilst she pretends to be so open and forthcoming, in reality she’s a clam that I haven’t even got near to breaking open yet. She opens her mouth to speak and I feel my whole body tense, wondering if this is the moment she’s going to reveal all. But before she’s got started, the door bursts open and Jamie and Toby come running in.

‘Can we go down to the river to swim?’ they shout in unison.

The moment of disclosure is gone.

I hesitate, looking to Charlotte to see how she will respond to the request. I’m not sure how I feel about unsupervised activity around water but there are four of them and Jamie and Toby are tall and fit and strong so I’m sure they’ll be fine and are more than capable of looking after the younger two. But Charlotte can be quite a fusspot of a mum, and I wonder which side of her will dominate this decision – her need to protect her children against the outside world balanced against her inability to ever deny them anything.

‘Please, Mum,’ yells Luke, who’s jumping up and down behind his brother. Then Sam turns up, trailing a beach towel behind him, already prepared for a ‘yes’ answer.

Charlotte looks at me and waves her hands in a gesture of despairing acceptance. ‘I don’t think we’re going to be able to stop them, are we?’ she says. A good old-fashioned ‘no’ would have done it, in my opinion, but when it comes to her children, I don’t think Charlotte knows how to use that word.

In any case, the boys have already taken her response as permission granted and they melt silently away.

‘You were saying something,’ I say, leaning towards Charlotte in a way I hope inspires the sharing of confidences.

She shakes her head.

‘Was I? I can’t even remember. Whatever it was, it was nothing important.’

A silence descends, in which we are both lost in our own thoughts. I visualise the letter that arrived this morning, the all too familiar franking stamp. Not a debt collector, nor an accounts department. Instead, something that I’ve been dreading all my life; the researcher from the production company is tenacious if nothing else. It’s the third one I’ve received, forwarded courtesy of the Royal Mail from my old address in Barnes. I press my fingers to my temples where a sudden tension headache is pounding, then look back up and give Charlotte a bright smile.

I’ve no idea what she’s hiding but whatever it is, can it really be worse than what I am?

PART 2

Stars, hide your fires; let not light see my black and deep desires.

— Macbeth, William Shakespeare

Chapter 21

Susannah

Charlotte’s gone to Corsica after all, despite all the vacillating and hand wringing about whether she should leave Dan alone. I know that she was about to say something, to reveal something, when the boys exploded into the room with the force of a hurricane, begging permission to go swimming in the river. Once they’d disappeared she denied it. But I’d spotted the signs of a confession coming on. The lowered eyes, the husky voice, the contrite expression. I’d seen them all in Justin, after all, when he finally came clean about the extent of his debts and the trouble he was in.

And not just in him.

Because the thing is that, long before Justin, I’d been there before. My husband isn’t the first man who has abandoned me, nor the first who deceived and dissembled. Oh no, not at all. Even after all these years, I still think about him all the time … My first love. Mourning him, cursing him, missing him.

His name was Charlie.

I met him at university. He was sitting at the bar in the Malet Street student union building, incongruously drinking a pint of milk. Everything he did was unconventional, unusual, unique. I fell completely and utterly head-over-heels in love with him. He was my protest boyfriend, my beautiful, clever, funny, intelligent bad-boy from the rough end of Bristol, brought up in a tower block on the wrong side of the tracks by a drug-addicted and depressed single mother.

The first date we went on, he took me to Pollo Bar in Old Compton Street, famous for being the cheapest eaterie in town. Even now, I clearly recall the crowded space, rammed with booths in oxblood leatherette, all occupied by people talking at the tops of their voices. My eyes swivelled from side to side as I tried to take in the assault on my senses, the mural-covered walls and the dusty 1960s light fittings, everything shrouded in a haze of cigarette smoke. There didn’t seem to be any possibility of sitting down anywhere and it was hot as an inferno. Charlie ploughed on nevertheless and eventually, after much sliding sideways and avoiding legs and arms, we arrived at a narrow, twisting staircase that led down to a basement almost as packed as the level above. Formica tables and chairs jostled for position in the cramped, low-ceilinged space, all so close together there was scarcely space to move between