by Celia Walden
‘D’you know it’ll be two years –’ he leaned over and kissed her neck ‘– next Wednesday.’
‘Don’t do that!’ She turned, angry at him and herself. ‘Don’t act like this is more than an affair. You and I have both had them before; we don’t have to pretend.’
‘No, Nic. I want this to be something else. I want us to give it a chance. I can’t sleep; I can’t function. It’s like my mind is just whirring, whirring …’
She had to admit that there was something frenetic about his demeanour: his words running into each other and his …
‘Jamie you’re trembling. How much coffee have you drunk today?’
‘Because this time I’m ready. Things at home: it’s just not working with Maya and me. I honestly feel like I can’t do anything right, like she’s trying to pick holes in me or catch me out.’ He pulled another cigarette from his packet. ‘I lost my wedding ring the other day. It literally vanished. And she was all ‘I told you that would happen!’ and ‘Maybe that’s telling us something’. I’ve got no time for that kind of superstitious shit.’
‘So this is all about her?’ Nicole’s mouth felt hard, the resentment making her ugly outside and in. ‘Is your dear sweet wife not paying enough attention to you? Let me ask you something, Jamie: will there ever be enough attention for you?’
Taken aback by her tone, he stared at her. ‘When did you get so bitter?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. At some point over the past two years.’
For a moment neither of them said anything.
‘Ben wants me to leave. Find another job.’
‘What?’
‘He can see I’m unhappy. He doesn’t know why, he thinks it’s the job, but maybe he’s right.’
‘No.’ Jamie shook his head. ‘No. You’re unhappy because of him, not the job or me. And you can try and resign if you want, but I won’t let you. You’ll get no pay off. I won’t even write you a reference, and I’ll make sure you’re blacklisted by every property agency in London.’
‘Jamie …’
‘No.’
Firmly, he lifted her up onto the wall. And when he pushed himself between her legs she felt them wrap themselves around him in a way that was instinctive, a way she knew she was too old for but didn’t care. They kissed, and it felt as deep and intimate and satisfying as sex. She heard herself moan.
‘I love you, Nic. And I want to be with you. You’re never going to be happy with Ben, are you? You know that now. And the sooner you can get on with your life … with me, the sooner everyone can start to heal.’
‘Listen to you, all Zen.’
Jamie didn’t smile. ‘It’s true.’
A tear slid down in a perfect vertical from beneath her sunglasses, and he wiped it away. Nicole had never allowed herself to cry in front of Jamie before and it felt significant that she could now.
‘Nic.’ He pushed the glasses up to her hairline and held her jaw with one trembling hand.
‘You’re not OK, are you?’
‘No. Look at me. I don’t know what’s happening to me. These past few days I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything. I’m jittery, I can’t eat a thing and I … Nic: not being with you is killing me. But yes, this time I am ready.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Because of before? Maya was pregnant, for God’s sake. You must be able to see that it wasn’t the right time?’
She gave the smallest nod.
‘But I need to know that you really are serious about telling Ben?’
Out of nowhere an image flashed through her mind: Ben clasping a weeping Chloe to his shoulder in Hyde Park as her Paw Patrol helium balloon rose ever higher into the sky above. ‘Think of all the other balloons that have gone up to balloon heaven,’ he’d murmured. ‘So he won’t be alone.’ And at the words ‘balloon heaven’, Chloe’s tears had only redoubled.
‘I’m not the one who broke my promise last time.’
‘No.’ He nodded. ‘Then again, I don’t remember you making one.’
Nicole knew what he was doing: trying to get her to share the responsibility for what happened – or failed to happen – last time.
‘You’re not seriously saying you don’t trust me to do it?’
‘How do I know you will?’
‘Jamie …’
‘No, I mean how do either of us really know?’ He fingered his pint, pensive. ‘But what if there were a way we could both be sure? A way of us doing it at the same time, same place even …’
‘Get Maya and Ben to meet us for some form of group therapy, you mean?’
‘There’s an idea,’ he deadpanned, running his thumb up the inside of her thigh. ‘No, I mean we take them somewhere public: a big crowded restaurant. But separately. You book your table, I’ll book mine, and we’re not allowed to leave until we’ve both done it.’
Nicole disengaged herself. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes. Think about it: we’d be going through the same thing at the same time. And to help us get through it we could arrange to meet somewhere afterwards – at a hotel. Wherever.’
Nicole looked at him. It was a mad idea, demented. But it might also be genius. Because however much her whole being shrank from telling Ben and imploding her life with a single sentence, knowing Jamie was there in the room, seeing him go through the same hell – well, that might just give her the courage she needed.
‘It’s bonkers. And risky.’
‘How?’ He took a long glug of beer, and not for the first time she wondered whether he felt the reverberations of his words and actions in the same way as other people.
‘Well, what if Maya recognises me?’
‘You’ve never even met.’
‘We’ve been in the same room, twice.’ The precision was humiliating and she deliberately fudged the next part. ‘At a couple of events – some Christmas bash and another thing. And women …’
Jamie raised an eyebrow.
‘Unlike you lot we notice things, people, undercurrents.’
‘OK. But I’m not suggesting we go to some intimate little place. I’m thinking somewhere big and rowdy like Angelini’s,’ he said. Angelini’s was a vast banquetted Green Park brasserie favoured by B-list celebs and deal-making city boys. ‘And we specify where we want to sit, so we’re not on neighbouring tables but can at least see each other across the room.’
It ought to have been preposterous, but the thrill-seeker in Nicole liked the idea. It would give them both a date they couldn’t back away from, and it would end the misery she’d nurtured for far too long. Besides, nothing could be worse than the status quo.
‘And from that night, we’d both be free?’
‘Exactly. Wouldn’t that be something?’
Beneath her dress Jamie’s hand had worked its way up to the elastic of her knickers.
‘Just imagine,’ Jamie was saying, ‘when we’re both free, all the things we could do? We could go away this summer. We could go anywhere you want … that place in Antibes you keep talking about. Anywhere.’
‘Let’s go to Biarritz.’
He laughed. ‘OK. Why?’
‘Don’t know. Always wanted to go. The surfing?’
He jerked his head back. ‘You surf?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither.’
Forehead to forehead, they laughed.
‘We don’t know very much about each other, do we?’
And their kiss then was different: long, lazy and filled with a contained mutual exhilaration at the life-changing decision they’d just made.
‘But think how much fun we’ll have finding it all out?’
Closing her eyes for a second, Nicole allowed herself a moment of pure happiness. Jamie’s warm, solid bulk was there between her legs, the leather of his belt sticky against her inner thighs, and until she chose to release him, he was hers.
A woman’s laugh, shrill with alcohol, drifted over, and she guessed without looking that this faceless female was
with a man, husband or lover. Behind her another fleet of rowers passed through the water. ‘Next stroke!’ ‘Easy!’ A baby’s cries drowned out the last words of the cox’s command. It sounded like ‘full slide’, and she tried to formulate a joke – the kind of silly double entendre she and Jamie had always made to one another – but the baby’s cries were now wincingly loud, and when Nicole opened her eyes, irritated by the interruption and determined to seek out the source of it, she saw a woman standing a little way off in the sad patch of green by the pub. The woman had a baby strapped to her chest and was staring straight at her: Alex.
CHAPTER 23
ALEX
‘You lying bitch.’
She’d waited in the underpass, knowing Nicole would come after her, and when Alex heard her panicked footsteps clicking down the ramp into the cool greyness beneath the Great West Road, she felt a new surge of anger, stronger than the first. Stepping out of the recess in the wall where she’d been lying in wait, she spat the words out into Nicole’s face.
For a moment the two women just stared at one another, Nicole struggling to regain her breath, Alex aware without really caring that a string of saliva was hanging from her bottom lip, threatening to drop.
‘Jamie thought he’d leave you to it, did he?’ There was still no sign of him in the underpass. ‘Fucking coward.’
‘He didn’t see you – thank God. Alex, what are you doing here?’
‘That’s all you have to say?’
When she’d jumped into an Uber and headed over to the Old Ship, Alex hadn’t stopped to think about what she would do when she got there, let alone how she might explain herself. But after logging onto Jamie’s email for the third time that day to find his exchanges with Nicole happening in real time, she had to find out what their meeting was about. Why had she agreed? And what did Jamie want from her?
‘How did you know we were …’ Then Nicole understood. ‘You’ve been reading his emails again.’
‘Of course I have. I never stopped.’
Damp-cheeked and dishevelled, her mouth clownishly encircled with pink where the lipstick had been kissed off, Nicole seemed to be struggling with a variety of emotions. From the darting downward glances at her chest, Alex realised that one was a squeamishness at this scene being played out in front of Katie, who Alex had forgotten was still strapped to her, and still howling.
‘Your daughter …’
‘Katie. Her name’s Katie.’
‘Well, Katie’s losing it. Is she hungry?’ The concern on Nicole’s face only ratcheted up Alex’s anger further.
‘You’re really going to lecture me on how to parent? When you’re lying to your husband and child – along with everyone else!’
‘I’m not lecturing. I’m just …’
Silhouetted against the bright white mouth of the underpass, a couple appeared, their easy laughter dying out as they took in the scene and silently scuttled past.
‘You’re just a fucking liar, is what you are. You lied to me, and you lied to Jill. Then you came to me, you came to my flat, and you told me more lies.’
Nicole closed her eyes.
‘What? You two …’ Just saying that made Alex’s stomach heave. ‘It hasn’t just happened, has it?’
‘No.’
‘How long?’
Nicole looked away.
‘How long?’
‘Look, I shouldn’t have said what I did that night at the pub. And then when I came to your flat, I was so angry I couldn’t see straight. But it wasn’t …’ Nicole broke off, tried again. ‘It wasn’t a lie. Jamie and I, what we do, how we are with each other – it’s complicated.’
‘“Complicated?”’ It had looked pretty simple from where Alex was standing. ‘You told me he raped you.’
‘I never called it that.’
But Nicole was no longer meeting her eye. ‘Alex!’
Alex followed Nicole’s eyeline down to her daughter, who was retching now, mouth in an agonised O, and it struck Alex as strange that she hadn’t heard Katie until Nicole had pointed it out, not since she’d found herself frozen on that threadbare patch of green by the river, transfixed by the sight of Jamie and Nicole tangled up like teenagers on the wall.
Alex wasn’t sure how long she’d stood there, but it was long enough to take in the wild sensuality of Nicole’s laughter and the ease of Jamie’s hips between her legs. Those two bodies knew one another well. And that Nicole could have lied about the harassment and made her believe far worse, that she could have sat there on Alex’s sofa – ‘I said no; I asked him to stop’ – when all the time their relationship had been consensual? That wasn’t just a betrayal; it was something Alex couldn’t, wouldn’t accept. They were too far gone.
‘Have you got any milk?’
‘What?’ Rummaging in her bag, Alex found a bottle and plugged it in her daughter’s mouth. ‘What would you call it, then? What you and Jamie “do”?’
‘We’re …’ Nicole’s voice dipped so low it was barely audible. ‘We play games. We always have done. Sometimes things get rough. One time – one time – I’d asked him to stop, and he didn’t get it or hear me or think that I was—’
‘You like to play games or he does?’ Now this was starting to make sense. ‘Because sometimes things can start off as games, only when you want to stop playing the other person won’t let you.’
‘No.’
‘And if that person has all the power, if that person is your boss, then it’s still abuse. If that person doesn’t stop when you say “no”, whether he’s your boss, your boyfriend or even your husband, it’s still rape.’
‘No, you’ve got this wrong.’
All contrition was gone from Nicole’s face now, leaving behind a barely masked impatience. But Alex pushed on regardless: ‘I think you told me what you did that night because you knew that what had happened between you wasn’t right. Only maybe he’d made you feel it was. Or maybe you’re just plain terrified of Jamie.’
Nicole was shaking her head, muttering words Alex could no longer make out.
‘Why can’t you see what he’s doing to you?’
Smoothing her hair back, Nicole sighed. ‘Because I’m in love with him.’
Alex stared at her, and that stupid smudged mouth. Then she laughed. ‘Whatever you are – and, by the way, therapists will have a term for it – you’re not in love with Jamie.’
‘I don’t know what bad experiences you’ve had, Alex, and maybe that’s what this is about, but me and Jamie … it’s not what you think. You’ve got to understand how I was feeling when I told you what I did. If I’d had any idea that we would get back together—’
‘“Get back together”?’ Alex repeated in a sickly teenage voice.
‘I’m trying to explain. I thought I’d have the chance to before you—’
‘Found out you were a lying bitch who was sleeping with the guy we were supposed to be taking down?’
Nicole was frowning, but not at the insult. ‘What happened to your hand?’
Alex looked down at her right hand, scrubbed raw and yet still, somehow, stinking of baby powder.
‘Eczema. Flares up sometimes. Go on.’
‘I was so hurt. He’d made these promises in Frankfurt. We’d decided to try and make it work.’
‘You two were together in … ?’ Alex groaned. ‘Of course. What else are conferences for if not shagging your boss? You do realise what a fucking cliché this is – you are?’
‘Of course it’s going to look that way to you.’ Nicole shrugged. ‘But people don’t always get it right first time around. And you can’t blame one side or the other for that. You’re not married, you can’t know.’
‘I think I do.’ Alex thought of her mother, whose every move was dictated by her husband. And she thought of Hayden. Nicole was wrong about the blame: it was always clear where it lay.
‘Right.’ Nicole had pulled herself up straighter now, defiant after the initial shock of being caught out. ‘Well,
no offence, but at this point I don’t care about how it looks to anyone.’
‘OK. So let me ask you one last thing: what changed? From before, I mean. From wanting to take Jamie down, from telling me he’d raped you—’
‘You’re going to have to stop saying that.’
‘From telling me he raped you, Nicole,’ Alex repeated, louder.
‘You’re not listening! He was going to leave Maya, before Christmas, and I thought he really meant it.’ Alex snorted. ‘But she was pregnant with Elsa and then after the birth … well, he just couldn’t cope with the idea of leaving his daughter when she was that little.’
‘Ah – dad of the year is Jamie.’
‘I’m not asking you to believe me, I’m just trying to explain why I did what I did – that I wasn’t playing a game. I really did hate him as much as you do. And I genuinely thought it was over. Why on earth would I have agreed to what we planned if I hadn’t? But then, last week, Jamie and I—’
‘Oh, spare me the details.’
Alex started jiggling Katie, who was exuding heat from her nappy.
‘Fine.’ Nicole attempted a smile. ‘Anyway, we’ve worked things out. Just now. And he’s been a mess, Alex. That’s how I know this time is going to be different. I’ve never seen him like this. He says he hasn’t been able to eat—’
‘Oh really? Having trouble sleeping too is he?’