by Celia Walden
Usually so good at defending her husband – ‘he’s tired’, ‘he’s tetchy’ and the one-size-fits-all ‘he doesn’t mean it’ – Alex’s mum had fallen silent at the other end of the line, before offering a resigned ‘You know what your father’s like.’
Alex knew. She just wasn’t expecting the other men in her life to be as bad.
Pulling her phone from the pocket of the bathrobe she’d slung on top of her jeans and T-shirt instead of a cardigan, Alex scrolled down to Hayden’s number and exhaled deeply. His face – disbelieving, then horrified – when she told him. His voice, cold, suspicious: ‘How can you be sure it’s mine?’ She couldn’t do it. Not when her last words to him had been: ‘If you want no part in Katie’s life, I’ll do this alone. I promise, I’ll never ask you for anything.’ Not when she’d made the same silent vow to her own father thirteen years earlier, the little parenting he had done having been terminated, with contractual abruptness, before she was even old enough to vote.
On she scrolled, down to J: yet another spineless male waste of space, to add to lover and father. ‘Jamie home’, ‘Jamie mobile’, ‘Jamie Devon house’. She had more numbers for the man who’d been her world for the past year than she did for her own parents – and a deep reluctance to call any of them. Looking from those numbers to the blinking clock beneath the telly – 5.24 p.m. – and back to Katie, Alex willed her daughter to give her some kind of a sign, but there were only those blank blue eyes: bottomless pools of need. She was the only one who could answer that need, and feeling the last of her dignity drain away, Alex tapped the phone and put it to her ear.
Jamie picked up immediately. ‘Al, I’m in the middle of something.’
Alex heard the distant drone of pub music and the clink of glasses, the rise of a joke being told and the fall of a punchline. Even by his standards this was an early start at the Firkin.
‘I’ll be quick.’ She spoke with eyes closed: ‘I’d had a bit to drink – at Joyce’s party. And I might have come across a bit … strong.’ But not nearly as strong as I’d have liked to, you useless, treacherous piece of shit. ‘Anyway, I realise it wasn’t the right time for us to have had that discussion. Sorry.’
She felt physically nauseous apologising to him, but it had been over a week now, and there was still no word from either Jill or Nicole. If there was still a chance – any chance – that Jamie could help her out, it would be worth it. ‘But that job – I was really counting on it …’ Reaching for her daughter’s tiny foot, she squeezed hard enough for Katie to scrunch up her eyes in a pre-wail grimace, before letting go. ‘I really need that job, Jamie. I’m nearly out of money. And so if you really don’t think your mate needs anyone …’ She took a breath. ‘I mean, is there … could there be anyone else who might? Or would it be possible –’ she cringed at what she was about to ask ‘– given we both know that what happened wasn’t my fault. Given you owe me, Jamie … I’m just a bit stuck, you see. All I need is enough to tide me over.’
‘Alex.’ Jamie sounded more bored than annoyed and she pictured him standing by the pub door, where it was quieter, motioning at all his boozing BWL colleagues that he’d be right back. ‘Like I said: there is no job. Got my wires crossed. And look, I really am sorry and I wish you well. I hope you know that. You’ve got little …’
‘Katie.’
‘You’ve got little Katie now. And in the end family’s what matters most, right? Now I’ve really got to go.’
At the click, Alex pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at it in disbelief.
‘You little shit!’
Alarmed by her mother’s tone, Katie hiccupped into a high-pitched complaint. It was too early for her feed and the NHS health visitor had warned darkly against ‘overfeeding’, but Alex pulled up her T-shirt. ‘Take it. Take it!’ Again, Katie refused to latch on, jerking her head away just as she had ever since the night of Joyce’s leaving do.
Alex wasn’t superstitious, but she had started to wonder whether taking her breast away for that single night and allowing herself to be consumed by the hate that now ran through her veins like poison had soured her milk.
The morning after the party she had woken up hungover and sleep-deprived but buoyant. She hadn’t been the only one conned by Jamie, and as shocking as Nicole’s revelations had been, they were the validation she needed. Alex had done nothing wrong, but Jamie? He was wrong to the core. And with BWL’s founder now aware of who her protégé really was, Alex could breathe easy, knowing his payday was coming. Only as that day had passed and then the next, without the expected text or call from either Jill or Nicole, Alex’s exhilaration had faded into doubt. Had she exaggerated the two women’s anger in her mind? Imagined their complicity in the plan? No. This wasn’t about her playing anything up. This was about their self-preservation.
Pointing her engorged breast at Katie with one hand, and wiping away tears with the back of the other, Alex hissed: ‘You want the bottle? Have it.’ And too tired to fight, she got one ready, laid her daughter in her lap and held her breath until she saw the muscles in Katie’s cheeks slow their mechanical suction down to nothing, and her eyes flutter shut.
How did stay-at-home mums cope with these endless days? Alex had worked long hours at BWL, and in the build-up to a conference or a big sale the work could be gruelling – but not like this. Nothing like this. There wasn’t an employer in the Western world who didn’t let you pee when you needed to. Although of course if you had a man there, a co-parent, things would be different. There would be some form of human interaction, for a start.
Who had Alex spoken to since she’d woken – been woken – just before 4 a.m.? Her GP’s harassed receptionist in a conversation that had lasted all of thirty seconds. An automated voice on her parents’ answer machine. ‘Why won’t Katie take the breast any more?’ she’d so desperately wanted to ask her mother. ‘Why? When it’s the one thing I know how to do.’ And yet she hadn’t left a message, knowing that her father might intercept it and hear the desperation in her voice. The guy in the 7-Eleven had somehow managed to carry out their whole transaction that morning without even nodding, sick to death of human interaction, probably, or vaguely repulsed by the dribbling baby attached to her chest. The way some people looked at you when you sat down next to them on the bus or Tube, like you were diseased. And Alex didn’t blame the ones who moved away, rolling their eyes at Katie’s screams. Babies were messy and smelly and loud – even your own.
Her laptop was tantalisingly close, poking out from beneath an old coffee-ringed Metro on the coffee table, and Alex did the quick risk assessment every mother of a sleeping infant is forced to make in order to secure herself a few precious minutes of freedom. Having successfully transferred Katie from her arms to the sofa, she clicked on the inbox she’d been checking a dozen times a day in the hope of finding a conciliatory message from Jamie – sucking in a breath when she saw the email.
Nestled in between her Tesco Clubcard newsletter and an eBay reminder to ‘pay for your baby sleep sack’ was a message from one Ashley Bucknall; subject header, termination of contract. And immediately something didn’t feel right. For a minute, Alex’s finger hovered over the message, and when she did double click on it, she was surprised to see that there was no cover email, only a Word document attached. Opening up what turned out to be just three pages, Alex scanned the first, a letter:
Dear Ms Fuller, as we discussed in person on 4 May of this year, please be advised that LWB are terminating your contract which began … As she scanned down, Alex’s nails dug into the sofa: Please find enclosed details of the full and final maternity leave payments. This should bring us up to date. As is usual with a serious misconduct dismissal … Here the words began to bleed into the screen. ‘Serious misconduct’? She looked over at Katie, as though her sleeping baby could help make sense of this. Only of course she couldn’t. Nothing could. And the full extent of Jamie’s duplicity opened up before her. Nothing he’d said in that meeting had
been true: not the ‘misconduct’ she was supposed to have committed, not the promise to keep her sacking quiet and have the paperwork ‘simply state that you resigned’. How was she supposed to get another job with that on her record? But the biggest lie of all had been the JLL job, dangled like a carrot in order to get her to leave quietly – then withdrawn as soon as Alex was safely out of the way.
Funny how close love is to hate; how strong the desire to see that person’s face is, when caught in the vortex of either. Like a teenage girl, Alex pulled up Google images, chewing at the insides of her mouth as she moved from image to image of warm-eyed, duplicitous Jamie. In all the time she’d worked for him, she’d never thought to look at Jamie’s social media – the intricacies of her boss’s life being her daily bread. And it would have been hard for most people to work up much curiosity about a man who overshared as much as Jamie did with a pint inside him. Even the most transient drinking partner at the Firkin would hear about everything from the marital bust-ups prompted by his secretive smoking bouts (‘I swear she can smell them on me from a mile away’) and tendency to leave his wedding ring lying about (‘If I ever do lose it, Maya’s going to freak’), to the exorbitant cost of the Antiguan beach-front suite he was ‘about to push the button on’ for New Year. But when she scrolled down to find Jamie’s Facebook and Instagram pages now, it felt like uncovering virtual gold.
There, at her fingertips, were ten years’ worth of Jamie’s life: a treasure trove of birthdays, anniversaries and marital mini-breaks, pub nights and date nights and everything braggable in between. And as she clicked through a series of ‘family man’ posts, Alex found herself increasingly intrigued by the woman who had been so taken in by this fraud that she’d married him.
Alex had seen enough pictures of Jamie’s model-esque wife on both her ex-boss’s office shelves and phone to be familiar with the pleasing contrast of dark brows and honeyblonde hair, sharp cheekbones and full lips, and because he’d always talked of his wife’s looks as though they were a credit to him, she’d dismissed them. But zooming in on Maya now, she was forced to concede that something about this west London trophy wife elevated her above the rest of the breed.
Hers was a clean, catalogue-style beauty that managed to be both cosy and alienating. But it was the freshness – the sort very few women possess much past twenty – that was most disconcerting. Maya was a good few years older than Alex, and yet everything from her hair and lips, bare but for a slick of coral pink gloss, to the lightly tanned skin of her arms had an untouched quality to it, a newness – as though life had either failed to rub off on her or Maya had been sheltered from anything unpleasant enough to leave a mark.
Alex found herself returning to one Instagram image in particular. Taken a few months earlier, exactly sixteen days after she’d given birth (Alex worked it out), it featured Maya standing in their Bedford Park back garden in jeans and a sweatshirt. As Maya had outstretched a gardening-gloved hand towards whoever was taking the photo – Jamie, presumably – her mouth open in rueful protestation, that sweatshirt had risen up to expose a few inches of lower stomach. ‘Come on!’ Alex could almost hear her telling her proud husband. Because although it looked eerily perfect to Alex, without a blue vein or stretch mark in sight, in Maya’s head she hadn’t got her body back yet. Jamie would have known how his wife felt. She would have told him that morning when he rolled, breathless, off her, pinching the tiniest inch of abdomen between her thumb and forefinger and pouting: ‘Look what you did to me.’ And Jamie would have laughed, telling Maya she was as gorgeous as ever, maybe even bending down to kiss her stomach.
Jamie had only posted once more since that day. A west London park scene from the first weekend in May. The plaid rug was there, but this wasn’t your usual picnic debris: no Scotch eggs and cocktail sausages for this family. Instead there was something quiche-like in a brown Daylesford paper bag, a peeled and quartered pomelo, and the glinting green neck of what must have been a Sancerre or a Chablis – both favourites of Jamie’s, she knew – poking from a cooler. Little Elsa asleep on Maya’s chest, Christel making a face behind her father: ‘My girls.’
Those two posts took Alex down a Maya-shaped rabbit hole. Jamie may have been a liar, harasser and very probably a cheat, but there was no doubt he was still entranced by the woman he’d married. And if Maya was one of the things Jamie valued most beside his job, then Alex was going to need to get a little closer – and work out how she could make use of this.
Her fingers moving at lightning speed across the keyboard, she googled ‘Maya Lawrence’ before starting on some full-blown social media stalking. How had she never thought to do this sooner? Maya’s Facebook and Instagram had started way back when she was Maya Juhl, ‘interior designer’, pictured leaning against a design board in her Copenhagen studio in ripped boyfriend jeans. Too pretty to be taken seriously, she’d taken to wearing heavy black-rimmed black glasses and a challenging expression over the following months: always perched on the arm of some absurdly minimalist sofa or crossing her arms in the foreground of a monochrome hotel lobby we were supposed to believe she’d designed herself. But something had happened when she moved to London – Jamie? And Maya had become a softer, more playful woman; a woman who wore sundresses and plimsolls, sucked beer foam off her top lip and took selfies of herself kissing a younger, slimmer Jamie.
The baby period – Christel and then Elsa – had come next, and Alex marvelled at the self-indulgence of the photogenic Lawrences, forcing image after image of their perfect progeny down people’s throats in what was billed as a display of selfless love but was in fact extreme narcissism. As were the endless pictures of their lush Bedford Park back garden and conservatory, the tomato plants Maya was at pains to make people believe she’d grown herself, and a Stepford Wife post, the previous week, of one of those rainbow ‘days of the week’ pillboxes rammed full of virtuous-looking capsules. ‘Putting the husband on a vitamin schedule!’
The most recent post was of some kind of Mummy and Me class. Pictured in a circle of pampered and laughing Chiswick mums, her spandex-clad legs angled out in a diamond before her, Maya was focused intently on Elsa’s little head, supported by her feet. And as Alex zoomed in on the caption – ‘Little Gym class at Bumps & Babies. Great place to make new friends!’ – her stomach dipped at the realisation of how different two women’s experiences of early motherhood could be.
The whine and groan of a scooter breaking outside snapped Alex out of it, and going to the window she gazed down at the familiar hooded figure on the corner, his shadowy customers emerging from cars and doorways to place their nightly orders, the cross-body Fila bag briskly and repeatedly delved into for coke, weed and whatever else people needed to stock up on with alarming regularity. It was past eight now, and because she’d let Katie go off far too early, her daughter would be up all night. But she’d be up all night anyway. She always was. And although Alex felt hollow with tiredness, she was still too worked up to sleep – almost as worked up as she’d been in the early hours of the morning after Joyce’s party, when she’d discovered how easy that pub plan would be to implement.
The ‘mis-filing’ of the D-List, along with Hugo Mears’s email, had been an experiment. If it came off, and unsettled Jill and Nicole at the same time, all the better. Alex hadn’t expected her old BWL intranet access code to work – the one she’d used to change Jamie’s meeting times and flights, book the Addison Lee cars she could follow on the office database from pick-up to drop-off, and edit documents when out of the office. And, sure enough, it hadn’t. The idea of busy Jamie bothering to get IT to change it had rankled in the moment, then a joke he’d made over an Evening Standard article on the least secure phone pins came back to her. ‘Who seriously still uses their birthday as a pin?’ Alex had tittered. ‘Guilty,’ her boss had grimaced. And she’d had to tell Jamie off for being unsafe. He wasn’t stupid, but he was lazy – and when Alex had tried ‘123456’ – the code IT always provided under the proviso
you immediately change it – BWL’s portal had opened up before her.
A list of staff members in charge of each project was available on the main portal, alongside documents detailing the week’s viewings, deals and passes, but another password had been needed to access Jamie’s email and calendar, and this hadn’t proved so easy. Jamie’s wedding day no longer worked and Maya, Christel and Elsa’s birthdays all bounced, with and without a ‘1’ at the end. The little red words ‘forgot password?’ taunted her. How many more tries before she would be locked out? One, two? Staring out of the window at the row of dishevelled Victorian townhouses opposite, Alex had forced her mind to go blank, something she did on the rare occasions she forgot her credit card pin number. Then she’d typed in six letters: ‘NICOLE.’ ‘Fucking predator,’ she’d muttered as Jamie’s inbox had opened up before her.
Alex had known what to do the second she spotted the Minerva pitch meeting with the O’Ceallaighs in Jamie’s calendar. If the D-list was such an in-joke at BWL, with both Jill and Nicole in on it, then there would surely be people with access to the file. And when a quick keyword search of his inbox had unearthed Mears’s email advising ‘transparency’ – something Alex was now well aware her former boss wasn’t a fan off – she’d decided to throw it in for fun: for that extra twist of embarrassment. Just a few clicks had transferred both documents into Jamie’s Minerva presentation file, one she was confident he wouldn’t be bothered to review on the day: Jamie never did. But however much she’d enjoyed reading the ‘Minerva fuck-up’-themed email exchanges that were still doing the rounds days later, Jamie already seemed to be wriggling out of it.
In the days after Joyce’s leaving do Alex had been desperate for any form of acknowledgement from Nicole or Jill. Now, it was clear that they had erased her from their minds – along with the plan. But Alex couldn’t. She wouldn’t. And a little professional embarrassment clearly wasn’t enough. Not for Jamie – and not for Alex. Opening up her laptop once more, she bashed in ‘Bumps & Babies’. What was it he was always saying, unaware of the pang it caused her? ‘Family’s what matters most’? And after just the smallest hesitation, she clicked on ‘Book a class.’