‘I got a roast chicken,’ she said, as if that was the most important thing in their world. ‘We can get the kids to bed earlier, that way.’ When he didn’t reply, she glanced up at him. Bless his heart, he looked like a 12-year-old at his first disco.
‘Where are they?’ His voice sounded so hearty that it made her want to start crying again.
‘Upstairs.’ To give him a bit of privacy, she turned back to the tomatoes. ‘They’re watching a movie.’ He probably wouldn’t realise that that was a special treat.
‘Bec? Bec, you believe me, don’t you?’
She put down the knife and met his eyes.
‘I believe you think you’re telling the truth,’ she replied. ‘But you were pretty drunk, Stuart.’ He had been. Not falling-down drunk but a fair bit drunker than her. ‘And I do know you wouldn’t ever have gone through with . . . with it. But the way you were all carrying on, the way those horrible men were talking . . . well, I mean, things like that do get said, Stuart, and not everyone who says them has “rapist” tattooed on his forehead.’ She sounded angry by the end. She picked up the knife and went back to her tomatoes.
‘Right.’ He used the same tone as when interns were incompetent. Hard. Exasperated. Polite. As if she was the one who’d done something wrong.
‘I’m just getting dinner ready.’ She snapped the knife back down onto the chopping board. He had absolutely no idea what her evenings were like. ‘Then I’ll put the kids to bed. Then we can talk. All right?’
‘OK.’ His voice had softened. ‘Whatever you want, Bec.’
‘What I want is for this to have not happened.’ She picked up the knife again. ‘And I don’t know if you’re planning on saying anything to the children. I can’t do it.’ She knew she was being horribly unsupportive. But her kids. Her kids her kids her kids.
He didn’t say anything. She chopped tomatoes (so snippily, so tensely, as if she was in a neat-salad-ingredients competition) for a while. When she looked up again, he’d tilted his head back so that his face was towards the ceiling. His eyes were closed.
Much later, she would remember him like that. Still beautifully dressed, handsome, still such a believer in his own ability to solve problems. She always remembered that night as a sort of turning point, where her life contained both the normal – the unplanned free-range chicken, the self-satisfied ache that came after the gym, the beautiful kitchen with its view over the Derwent – and the beginning of all the things that came after.
In a way, it was the worst of all the nights.
Chapter Seven
Kate
‘Here we are then,’ Adam said.
It was a few days after our weekend in Hobart, and I was at Adam’s place for the first time. Bec and Stuart would be practically apoplectic; I was tempted to text them a selfie of me giving a thumbs-up next to his fridge.
Seeing where Adam lived was honestly not that big a deal as far as I was concerned. I mean, I was a bit curious, but I already knew what made him laugh (toilet humour; certain political cartoons) and what made him cross (dangerous driving; poor journalism) and that he liked manual cars and disliked board games. I knew what sort of sex he liked, for heaven’s sake (will spare details. Nothing outlandish though. But: not boring). So it wasn’t as if seeing what he had in his fridge was going to give me any huge insights into his personality, and it certainly wouldn’t allay the concerns I had about him shagging multiple other women, trying to steal my millions and generally being an entirely different man to the one I thought he was.
Juliet – who’d fielded a large number of my Adam-related questions over coffee that morning – reckoned that unless two people confirmed they were ‘exclusive’ then you had to assume sex with other people was going on. Meeting families made no difference at all, she said, shaking her head like a New York doorman. ‘It’s not the olden days, Kate, unfortunately,’ she informed me. I didn’t bother telling her that everyone slept around in the olden days too, and without any protection, which is probably why lots of them got syphilis and, in the absence of modern medicine, then went mad.
Instead, I just said it was no wonder there’s no prospect of peace in the Middle East, when even sorting out something as simple as ‘dating’ is so difficult. Also, with today’s ready availability of dating apps, all the UN people probably bonk their heads off while at Middle East summits and are therefore too knackered to even do proper diplomacy. (Juliet said she was sure they were all very responsible and capable people who were far too dedicated to important social justice issues to stay up late having sex, but I got the impression she was being sarcastic. She once dated a logistician who worked for the UN, and that was apparently the best thing about him.)
‘The trouble is,’ I told her, ‘you can use the word “dating” for just about anything. No one actually knows what it means.’
‘That’s the whole point of it, Kate,’ she said, as if I was a loveable kid who was a little bit slow. Juliet has done a lot of ‘dating’. She says she would like to be in a proper relationship, but she somehow isn’t. (The men lose interest, she says.)
I didn’t bring up gold-digger issue with Juliet. It was too unbearable.
Anyway. We went through his boring front door (yes, exactly the same as mine) into what seemed like a perfectly fine sort of apartment. The kitchen had an almost-bare Formica breakfast bench and a white plastic bin with a swing-top lid and two rather crappy metal swivelling stools. Everything was clean, down to the clear plastic salt-and-pepper grinders and an almost-full bottle of olive oil next to the cooker. There was nothing else on the counter except a white toaster, a white kettle and a pristine green cylinder of Milo. I wondered if it was possible that the Milo had been bought for me.
‘Let’s sit down,’ he said. He indicated a grey, fabric-covered couch.
‘OK.’ I kept the surprise out of my voice.
He looked very serious, even though over dinner, when we’d been laughing about the waiter’s overuse of the term ASAP, he’d muttered something about being keen to take me home as soon as possible. His implication had not been that he was feeling an urgent desire to converse with me. (It had been really quite sexy, and I’d started to think: maybe tonight I could even go up on top of him. I really wanted to have an orgasm with him – well, I was having orgasms with him right, left and centre; my nervous system was probably in a state of near-exhaustion – but I wanted one during actual intercourse. And I could tell he wanted that, too. He’d put a little bit of pressure on my hip and turn over onto his back and say, ‘Come up here,’ or ‘Want to watch you’ or some such. But I hadn’t quite managed it yet. It is less easy than I once assumed, to get that carried away.)
So I sat down on his couch. That was when I properly noticed that there were no pictures on the walls. No cushions or rugs or plants. Stacked on the edge of the television cabinet, in a neat way that suggested that it was their allocated spot, were a book about London bars, a book about road trips in Europe, and a book by Barack Obama.
‘I need to tell you something,’ he said.
Of course, it occurred to me that perhaps he was married. Could this be his double-life flat? Maybe somewhere in the suburbs he had a proper family home, with bookshelves and lampshades and a kitchen bench cluttered with school readers and bills and batteries and, obviously, somewhere in that house – possibly running a vacuum cleaner or wrestling a fitted sheet – a harried-but-loving wife whose boobies were not as perky as mine but only because she had borne two or three of Adam’s adorable primary-school-aged children. Was I about to become someone who appeared in podcasts about serial liars?
‘I’m not a photographer,’ he said.
I reflex-nodded because although I had obviously suspected as much, I still had absolutely no idea how to respond. I wasn’t, for some reason, at all concerned for my safety. I didn’t stand up or even think about where the nearest exit was or if his bare walls would be soundproof. I believed he wouldn’t hurt me, is all I can say. There was no l
ogic about that. Probably just a lucky guess.
‘OK,’ I said, for the second time.
‘I’m a data analyst,’ he said. ‘I work for the public service. I tend to avoid talking about it, because it’s kind of boring, to some people.’ He was looking at me with his eyes moving rapidly back and forth, as if he was alive with strategies to cope with my fury. ‘The time I said about photography, I’d been taking photos that day. For a project we were working on. I didn’t exactly lie. I just—’
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Oh right. Wow.’ I stood up.
Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I looked down at him, and I suppose I probably looked appalled, because he said, ‘I am so, so sorry.’ I just stood there in front of him, very possibly with my mouth unappealingly open. ‘Kate. Look. As I said. I didn’t mean to lie.’
I snapped my face into shape (wrathful, feisty, empowered) and stood up straight.
‘We’ve known each other more than a month, Adam.’ If I’d had both my arms they would definitely have been crossed. ‘And I knew you were lying, by the way. You’re really bad at it. Have you not heard of the internet?’
‘I know.’ He looked utterly miserable. ‘It was just – it’s not as if we even talk about work much. And things rolled on and it was hard to find a moment. A couple of times I was just, look, I’d see you and it’d be nice, and I didn’t want to start up the whole conversation.’
‘And yet, somehow, you managed to find plenty of moments to fuck me.’ That time I really did sound like Catherine of Aragon. Regal and righteous as all hell, although I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have used the eff word.
‘Yeah.’ He nodded at the floor. Very chastened.
Then he looked up, raised his eyebrows and shrugged in a way that meant, Well, I’m only human after all. Very, very annoyingly – where the eff were my effing principles? – a glimmer of a smile forced its way onto my face. I met his eyes for a second and we grinned.
‘Whatever,’ I said, coming to my senses. ‘Don’t try your charming . . . smirk stuff on me. I am not . . . nineteen.’ Now I sounded like Anne of Cleves (fourth wife). Sturdy defender of the truth but not particularly good at English.
His smile vanished. He turned his head to the side, and I could see from the way he raised his hand halfway to his face and then lowered it back into his lap that he was actually very, very upset.
‘Were you worried about seeming boring or, or geeky, or something? Were you trying to, I don’t know, impress me?’
‘Nah. Honestly. It wasn’t premeditated. I blurted that out, and then – as I said – I didn’t find a moment to correct myself.’
‘Why would you say it then? The photography thing?’
‘I was maybe a bit overwhelmed. You’re a gorgeous woman, Kate.’ He swallowed. ‘And you asked what I’d been doing that day, and, I swear, that’s what I’d been doing. Traffic movements in various parts of Melbourne. Very boring.’
‘Whatever,’ I said, again. ‘You made me look stupid in front of my sister. You lied to my family.’
‘I know I did, Kate. I’m sorry.’ We were both quiet for a moment. ‘But I hadn’t told you, and I couldn’t tell you in front of them. I thought that’d make it worse.’
‘And are you “seeing” other women?’ The air-quotes were very, very nasty ones.
‘No. Not since we met.’
‘Really?’ I was so surprised I didn’t even sound angry anymore.
He nodded once, in a take-it-or-leave-it-I’m-not-going-to-reassure-you-further sort of way. Interesting.
‘What about your grandma in the nursing home. Is that true?’
‘God, yeah.’ He rubbed his forehead. ‘You couldn’t make that stuff up.’
‘Your family, all the stuff about your parents and nephews and everyone?’
‘Absolutely. Yes. They want to meet you, in fact.’
‘Where do you even work?’
‘Office block off St Kilda Road.’
‘Which one?’
‘On the South Melbourne side.’
‘You did the science degree before, like you said?’
‘Yes.’
I nodded, but I must have looked sceptical, because he stood up, opened a smoothly moving, almost-empty drawer in the TV cabinet and extracted a photo album, the sort that comes bound and printed from an online service. FORTY WHOLE YEARS OF MEMORIES!!! was written in bright green on the cover.
‘My sister just made me that,’ Adam said. He didn’t show me the photos, but extracted, from inside the back cover of the album, one of those cardboard slip-covers with a university crest on the front. I sat back down, and he sat next to me and opened it. Inside, was a single picture: a younger looking Adam – toothier, somehow, and if anything, less attractive – wearing a black cap and gown, and holding a rolled degree.
‘They your parents?’
He nodded. A man with Adam’s grey eyes, who was valiantly restraining a small paunch, and a woman with bright lipstick, stood behind Adam. The two of them were beaming in a brimming, unpractised way; each had a hand on Adam’s shoulder. You could tell that his mum had been to the hairdresser’s especially. I leaned closer. She was resting her hand lightly, obediently, just the way the photographer would have asked her to. But his dad had his hand clenched, hard, around his son.
Their baby. The words came into my head all by themselves, and I suddenly had tears in my eyes. It was just that they looked so proud.
‘Parents in graduation photos,’ I sat up straighter, ‘look very much more youthful than they once did.’
‘Yeah.’ His tone was so tender I knew he’d noticed the tears. ‘They certainly do.’ We exchanged a very quick we’re-not-all-that-young-anymore-are-we? glance.
‘So, is that all?’ I said. I looked at him, right into his eyes. It was as if I was Thomas Cromwell, or at the very least an extremely canny high school teacher.
‘That’s all.’ We kept looking at each other. ‘It’s usually just a busy eight-to-whenever sort of job. Longer hours sometimes. Irregular. When it gets busy.’ He smiled his quick smile. ‘When your sister and her husband were asking me . . .’ He made a face like a scrunched-up ball of paper. ‘Very uncomfortable. I’m very, very sorry.’
‘’S OK,’ I said. ‘They were being a bit . . .’
At exactly the same moment I said, ‘Dickhead-ish’ and he said, ‘Supercilious.’
‘Yes, that.’ I shrugged. He has an excellent vocabulary, actually.
He kept his hands in his lap, and, once more, I considered my options.
I was smart enough that he wouldn’t get my money. I could just wait, and see, and enjoy the nice bits. Because maybe, maybe he was telling me the truth. It can be hard to undo lies we tell about ourselves, God knows, and was it really so very impossible to believe that a man could like me, and be nervous around me, and tangle himself up like that?
‘Well,’ I said. ‘No harm done. So can we please go to bed?’ I was already touching his shirt.
‘Sure you don’t want to hear some statistics or see a pie-chart or something first?’
‘I’m pretty right for data analysis, just this minute, thanks, Adam.’
He looked so relieved, and so loving, and his hands on me already felt so familiar and so knowing, that I found it impossible to believe that he could be deceiving me.
Except. He hadn’t told me his department or his title or even his field. He’d been evasive about his office address. And the beautiful photo told me pretty much nothing about his life as it was now.
I wanted to believe him. I very much did.
But people do bad things. And I am very wealthy. And I am also not an idiot.
*
It was a Monday evening, and we’d just finished watching a movie about a twenty-something woman who falls for a forty-something man. Of course, the age difference was not part of the plot, which was to do with espionage, corrupt politicians and Eastern European nightclubs. Is there anything more annoying than the way m
ovie producers seem to think that beautiful young women find ordinary-looking middle-aged men irresistible? There are very few things more annoying, but of course it is purely coincidental that most movie producers are middle-aged men.
‘Just so you know, Adam,’ I said, ‘in real life, women who go out with forty-ish men usually don’t look like that. They usually look like me.’ I raised my forefinger and drew a circle in the air around my face.
‘No, they don’t,’ said Adam, lazily, flicking off the TV with my remote control. He looked at me. ‘Because you are exceptionally beautiful.’
‘Yeah, but you know what I mean,’ I said, a bit impatiently. ‘Age-wise.’
He smiled. He says he likes how I’m not fake-modest about how I look. (I’ve never said things like, ‘Oh, we all want what we can’t have. Look at your beautiful teeth,’ or ‘I believe every woman is beautiful,’ or ‘God, you should see me without my make-up on!’ Any of that just would’ve made me sound either dumb or really, really fake. And now I know what it’s like to actually, desperately want what you can’t have, I’m extra glad I never said any of that stuff.) (Also, I am proud to say that I never once complained about my beauty ‘defining me’. I mean, for God’s sake. How could that sound anything other than enraging to someone who has to work all day as a cleaner or a hotel receptionist?)
‘Hey,’ Adam said. He wasn’t quite looking at me. ‘Want to come and meet my nonna some time?’
‘All right.’
‘Great.’ He sounded completely natural.
Then I said, ‘And want to go to Hobart again? One day?’
I needed to see Bec, who was having a totally crap time, or, to put it in the most annoying way possible, facing some very significant challenges on her journey. We’d been speaking every day. And I thought it might be reasonable to give Adam another try with the family.
‘OK,’ Adam said. He sat up and cracked his knuckles. ‘Yeah. I could do that.’
But he made a little face. A sort of I’ve-been-worried-you-were-going-to-suggest-that face.
The Mistake Page 9