About Last Night

by Adele Parks

  Stephanie took the bottle and mumbled her thanks and something about losing her head if it wasn’t screwed on. This wasn’t true, Stephanie was generally the most organised of women but it didn’t matter – people rarely expected to hear the truth, they just expected to hear something or other. Steph then automatically reiterated the carefully negotiated bedtimes to Mrs Evans (although she knew Mrs Evans would ignore her instructions, as she was far more interested in having the children’s company and favour than she was in worrying about how tired they might be in the morning) and then Steph had pulled out of her driveway and driven across town to Pip’s home.

  The large detached houses in lush grounds, adorned with pretty flowers and the occasional swimming pool, began to shrink and huddle and all signs of green had disappeared by the time Steph pulled up outside Pip’s 1970s flat. There was no driveway. Usually Stephanie was concerned about parking in the street, nervous that kids, rich on resentment but poor on resources, would be unable to resist scraping a key along the door panel. Frankly, today she didn’t give a toss.

  Pip was far too high on her own success to notice Steph’s bleak mood. She squealed in delight at the Bolly.

  ‘Is it chilled?’

  Steph didn’t answer. She didn’t know. She couldn’t remember if she’d put the bottle in the fridge or not. Pip patted the bottle and was surprised to find that it wasn’t chilled, it was unlike Stephanie not to pay attention to that sort of detail. A little disappointed, Pip internally debated whether they should drink the champers now, at room temperature, or whether she should bang it in the freezer for ten minutes. That might do it. But could she wait? She wanted to celebrate now. It had been an age since she’d felt this happy. No, she couldn’t wait, she decided to dig out some ice cubes and sling them into the glasses. OK, some might say that it was a waste of Bolly to serve it warm with ice but Pip didn’t care. She opened the bottle to a discreet pop and started to chatter.

  ‘Are you happy to stay in the kitchen? Then we can chat freely. Chloe is watching Wizards of Waverly Place in the sitting room and you know the rule, no talking when Selena Gomez is in the house. Although do nip in and give her a kiss, she’s been so excited that you were coming round, even though she saw you yesterday and the day before that!’

  Stephanie was Chloe’s godmother and generally she was a conscientious and loving one. She adored Chloe like a fourth child, the daughter she didn’t have. She knew that Chloe’s favourite colour was lilac, that she had a small birth mark on the base of her back, she knew that Hama beads were out and braiding was in (this week, although a new hobby would dominate next), she knew the name of Chloe’s schoolteacher (Miss Fletcher) and that the word sponge made her giggle. But this evening Steph dreaded the thought of making small talk to Chloe about hair accessories, and who was this Selena Gomez? A new kid at school? Had Chloe made a new friend? Steph did not care.

  Not noticing Steph’s pallid colour or unusual reticence, Pip carried on chatting excitedly. ‘Thank you so much for taking Chloe to school yesterday. Imagine if you couldn’t have managed it and I’d missed the train! I really am going to have to get more organised. If this takes off, the way the people at Selfridges think it might, I won’t be able to be so slapdash. I can’t always depend on you being my failsafe back up.’

  ‘No, you can’t,’ muttered Steph gloomily.

  Pip was taken aback. She’d made the comment thoughtlessly. If asked to consider her situation Pip would have admitted that she didn’t mean what she’d just said and in fact she did believe that she could always depend on Stephanie being her failsafe back-up. She had been for thirty years, after all. Steph’s response was unexpected and unwelcome. Pip continued to pour crisps into a bowl, the ones from Selfridges food hall, the ones Steph always served; her favourite. Perhaps Steph was having one of her migraines. She was always a bit of a grumpy bugger when she had a migraine, but she was too much of a martyr to simply go to bed in a darkened room, she liked to soldier on (and to make everyone suffer). Pip decided to ignore her friend’s grouchy mood. She was too happy to be brought down and, besides, she didn’t for a moment believe Steph. Of course she could depend on Steph, she’d said as much just yesterday and on countless other occasions before then. Steph practically encouraged her dependency, she enjoyed being needed.

  Pip placed the crisps on the table but didn’t take a seat because Steph was still standing and wearing her coat. Usually, she flung her coat to one side the moment she was in the house and she pulled up a chair without asking or waiting to be asked. Why the formality?

  ‘I am so excited! I don’t know where to begin! I think my luck is changing, finally. OK, are you ready for this? Besides the order from Selfridges, and I’m going to tell you all about that in detail soon . . . but that’s not all. Guess what?’ Steph didn’t guess. Not really needing to be encouraged, Pip continued, ‘I’ve met a man! A lovely man. A nurse. A fertility nurse actually.’ Pip rolled the words and her eyes around the room. ‘That’s taking a bit of getting used to, if I’m honest, but he’s so nice! He’s asked me on a date. This Friday. A Friday date.’

  Pip paused. The importance of a Friday date could not be underestimated; it showed a commitment and intent that a Tuesday or Wednesday date lacked. Of course, it might just be that Robbie’s shifts at the hospital only accommodated a Friday date, but still! There must be a dozen things a man like Robbie could do on a Friday. He could meet his friends for a drink or he could visit his sister and her family, he’d talked about them quite a lot today, on the phone. It was obvious that he was really close to them which was a good thing because, while Pip knew the danger of projecting, she did think it was a good sign if a man had a decent relationship with his family, it showed an ability to commit. Or, and this was the scary one, he could choose to see another woman on a Friday night. But no, he’d chosen to invite her on a date.

  ‘We’ve been on the phone to one another most of today. I haven’t done a stitch of work. Literally!’

  ‘You haven’t finished the sample?’ Steph could not disguise her distress. She hadn’t called Pip because she’d thought Pip needed to be busy but Pip hadn’t been getting down to it, at least not to work! Steph glared at her friend.

  Pip smiled. ‘Don’t worry. I called them. I said I’d finish it by tomorrow.’

  ‘Do you ever learn?’ snapped Steph.

  Pip didn’t register her friend’s anger or anxiety. ‘So can you have Chloe? Is it too much? If you’re busy I can arrange for her to have a sleepover at a friend’s. Not that I’m suggesting I’ll sleep with him that first night,’ Pip shrugged and then admitted, ‘although I probably will, I always used to. I’m pretty certain sex is still fashionable.’

  Still Steph didn’t say a word about the fertility nurse. She stood like a statue, polluting Pip’s cheerful kitchen with her horror and misery.

  ‘Didn’t you hear me? I have a date! My love life has been like the Gobi desert for years and I’m telling you I’ve been asked on a date, why aren’t you whooping?’ asked Pip, giggling.

  ‘Because Julian is having an affair,’ Steph replied.

  14

  ‘What?’ The silence between them was sudden and sturdy. Pip could hear her own heart, Steph’s laboured breathing and the jolly chatter from the Disney channel that was drifting through from the living room, but had she correctly heard what Steph had just said? No, she had misheard. She must have.

  ‘An affair. Julian is having an affair,’ Steph repeated for clarity.

  ‘There must be some mistake.’

  ‘No mistake.’

  ‘But, but he can’t be. Not Julian. He’s . . . he’s nice. He’s . . . he’s Julian,’ Pip stuttered.

  If Stephanie could get her heart to behave in the way that it always had – with feeling – she might have felt sorry for Pip. Pip looked stunned, shattered, almost as confused as Steph herself felt. But Steph couldn’t feel a thing. She was numb.

  ‘What makes you think so?’ asked Pip, whose fi
rst instinct was not to believe the charge, not for a moment. There had to be some sort of mix-up or misguided gossip, there had to be an explanation. Pip’s experience of unfaithful men was extensive and that’s what made her so sure that Julian wasn’t having an affair. He wasn’t the type to do anything so destructive, so thoughtless and selfish.

  So pathetic.

  Secretly, over the years, Pip had occasionally thought that Julian was the sort of man she ought to have married. He used to be dashing (although nowadays he was more likely to be described as dignified). He earned a fortune. It was impossible not to be just the tiniest bit envious of Steph’s walk-in wardrobe and her en-suite bathroom. Of course, he was not the sort of man Pip could have ever married because he was not the sort of man she ever dated. Julian was sensible (in her less generous moments, if she’d had a glass too many, she might admit she thought he was bordering on the dull side). More positively she’d openly declare that he was ambitious, considerate and that he had an impressive game plan (something none of the men she’d ever dated could be accused of). A game plan he followed to the letter, in order to better his life and the lives of his loved ones. A mistress couldn’t be part of a game plan, could she? In the final summation, Julian was respectable.

  Pip had never dated respectable men, men who could play golf or had attended schools where the teams were called ‘houses’ and the terms were called Michaelmas, Lent and Trinity. She’d tended to date working-class boys who had made good. She always said she admired their tenacity, which was true, but the pertinent fact was that she was also wildly attracted to their dangerous, unpredictable, unconventional side. But she’d blundered with Dylan, she’d swum in waters too deep. He wasn’t a working-class guy made good, proud of his roots and empathetic to the struggles of others because of it. He was a shallow, pretentious wanker.

  Wow, it felt good saying that. It had taken a while. Years. The truth was, Dylan wasn’t even called Dylan, even his name was a fake. He was born and baptised common or garden, good old-fashioned Ian. He’d changed his name by deed poll. He said it was to add a certain distinction, a certain class, which he clearly felt he lacked. Well, it would take more than erasing the details on the birth certificate to lend that man class. He was a horrid snob around other state school-educated people. He was cringingly lick-ass towards people he thought could help him in any way. Sometimes, in her bleaker moments, Pip wondered whether Dylan was ever attracted to her or whether he just wanted access to Julian and all of Julian’s colleagues. She’d thought that his willingness to mix with her best friend and her best friend’s family was a tribute to how much Dylan cared about her, but was it? Julian was a very powerful man and a generous one. He had opened up his contact book to Dylan. He’d arranged for him to be interviewed at the bank. He’d helped Dylan find a rung on the ladder. Dylan had first got a position in the bank’s marketing department but soon left and went to work for the competition. He hopped around from job to job, as he did from bed to bed. Last she knew he was a fully-fledged consultant.

  God, what was she doing thinking about Dylan at a time like this? This was Steph’s crisis, not hers. She should be thinking about Julian, not Dylan. She had to pull herself together, she had to focus.

  Pip grabbed the pile of magazines that were on the kitchen chair and tossed them carelessly on the table, where no doubt they would lie for several more weeks in amongst the rest of her clutter, library books, spools of thread, scraps of material, forgotten homework and the ketchup bottle. Carefully, she lowered her friend into the seat and then quickly pulled up another wooden chair which she slumped into. Pip handed Steph the glass of champagne. Neither of them thought to toast. Pip swallowed two large gulps and then guided Steph’s glass to her lips, just the way she guided Calpol into Chloe’s mouth when she had a fever.

  ‘I found a phone in my car. There are texts to and from him.’ Steph fished the nasty phone out of her bag and passed it to Pip. Pip took the offending item and started to read the messages. After a few moments of reading she turned so pale she was transparent, Steph thought she could see the picture hung on the wall behind her.

  ‘Why do you think this phone is his? It might be someone else’s.’

  ‘Someone who has been in my car?’ asked Steph sceptically.

  ‘Julian might have given a colleague a lift. His colleague might be having an affair. This phone belongs to a friend of Julian’s. It has to.’

  Pip was desperate to reason away the evidence. She wanted to believe in Julian’s fidelity. She’d met countless faithless men in her time and it would be reasonable to expect that she’d be the first to condemn but throughout all her disappointments Pip had looked at Julian and seen some sort of beacon. He stood firm and tall like a lighthouse, guiding her to safer waters. Julian was proof that faithful, decent men were out there, somewhere. She just had to keep looking for one and stop crashing against the rocks. Julian had been so good to her during her splits from Philippe, Jacob, Tim and Andrew etc., and most importantly, throughout the aftermath of her split from Dylan. He might not have said much on these occasions but he’d listened and that had been a comfort at the time, the countless times. But what if Julian was a nasty bastard just like all the others? What then? What could she believe in?

  ‘There’s no chance of a mistake. There was a message from a hotel. I rang back. Mr Julian Blake has been staying there, every Tuesday night, for nearly three months,’ said Steph flatly and firmly.

  ‘Oh.’ The bulb in the lighthouse flickered and then went out. There was no hope. Pip knew enough about Steph’s family life to know that Julian was usually away from home on Tuesdays.

  Somehow Steph had held the microscopic hope that Pip would be able to explain away this atrocity and defy the mountain of evidence against her husband. But Steph saw by the sad slouch that Pip thought the case was open and closed. Pip, the eternal romantic, the woman who once believed a boyfriend when he said the frilly, size eight panties in his laptop case were his – that he’d worn them at a fancy dress party – rather than think he might be cheating, did not believe Julian was innocent.

  Steph thought she might die. Just stop. Cease to be right now. It would be easier than carrying on, facing this. Instead, she chose a more conventional root, she began to sob again. Stephanie was not a crier by nature, except during her three pregnancies when her hormones turned her to mush and she was known to cry at adverts for cat litter if the kitten was cute enough. She lived her life on an even keel, rarely allowing indignation to bubble into rage, the way so many people did. It surprised everyone when she turned out to be a screamer during labour and now, she seemed to have tapped into somewhere in-between, something instinctual and primeval and terrible exploded from her. She howled. Between her howls she gulped out the impotent words that countless betrayed women had spilled before her. She called him an idiot, a cruel and two-timing, double-dealing, faithless bastard. She howled that she hated him. And that she loved him.

  She had no idea which it was.

  Chloe, who sadly was quite used to hysteria, stood up and moved to close the door between the kitchen and the living room so that her TV viewing would not be interrupted. She stopped in her tracks when she realised it was her Aunty Stephanie crying and not her mum. She stood in the doorway looking and feeling frail.

  ‘It’s OK, sweetheart,’ said Pip. ‘Aunty Stephanie has just banged her funny bone. You know how that hurts.’

  ‘Yes, there’s nothing funny about it at all,’ said Chloe, immediately relieved and only too happy to accept her mother’s spurious explanation.

  ‘Give me a kiss and then hop off to bed, I’ll be through in a moment to tuck you in and turn out the light.’

  Chloe was a noticeably obedient child, especially in this instance – a kitchen with a weeping adult held no allure.

  As soon as her daughter was out of earshot, Pip asked, ‘Have you spoken to him?’

  ‘I confirmed that he’s planning on being away tonight. He said he was going to
be late, probably stay in the company flat, in town. Of course, he said he’d try to make the last train home but it’s all crap.’

  ‘Are you going to confront him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ gasped Steph through her tears. She didn’t know anything. Not anymore. Everything she’d known, everything she’d clung to and stood by – a happy home, a strong marriage, a devoted husband – was a fraud.

  Pip understood that a confrontation would inevitably have consequences. Was Stephanie ready to face those consequences? What if a confrontation led to a request for a divorce, rather than him pleading for forgiveness? It often did. What a lot Steph would have to give up if they divorced. Not just the money and the security but the simplicity. No one knew better than Pip how complex everything became after a divorce. Because Dylan had gone AWOL, she at least did not have to worry about who saw who at Christmas but that was a tightrope that had to be limped along for many. Birthdays were no longer a simple celebration, more a minefield of sore memories and potential flare-ups. Then there was the responsibility to the estranged grandparents and the restrictions on where it was viable and practical to live. So many complications.

  On top of that there were other people’s reactions to contend with. People didn’t mean to be cruel but following a marriage breakdown, tactless and tasteless questions fell like confetti. Was he seeing someone else? Was he in debt? Had you been arguing for long? Did you see it coming? Yes, yes, yes and no had been Pip’s honest replies but her sincerity hadn’t quietened or quelled anyone. Pip realised that the reason for these questions was that people were trying to pinpoint exactly why her relationship had broken down, often in an effort to comfort themselves that their marriages were quite different and therefore not in danger. But the clumsy questioning led to the careless destruction of the gossamer-thin recollections and convictions as to what she thought the relationship had been. It was a little like watching a brutal, trainee cop stomp all over a crime scene, his huge boots bringing more havoc and reducing the chances of ever getting to the bottom of things.