by Marian Keyes
I wasn’t going to steal the bloody jacket. It wasn’t nice enough.
“I’ll put this away,” I said, and for the first time our eyes met properly.
He did a quick scan of my face and said levelly, “You’re looking well, Claire.”
He said it with the enthusiasm an undertaker usually reserves for someone who, against all the odds, survives a terrible car crash. “Yes.” He nodded, a tiny bit surprised. “You are looking well.”
“Well, why wouldn’t I?” I gave him a knowing little smile, conveying—at least I hoped I conveyed—dignity and irony in equal amounts. Letting him know that although he no longer loved me, that although he had hurt and humiliated me, I was a reasonable human being and would get over it.
Almost making a joke of the whole sorry mess and practically inviting him, the perpetrator, to join in and laugh along with me.
I couldn’t believe that I had managed that.
I felt pretty pleased with myself.
Because, although I did not feel calm and civilized, as God is my witness, I was going to do a damn good job at acting it.
However, he didn’t seem to find it as gently amusing as I managed to pretend I did.
He gave me a wintry look.
More undertakerish vibes.
The miserable fucker.
Since I was prepared to try to be nice and civil about all this, surely, surely, he could too. After all, what had he got to lose?
Maybe he had prepared a beautiful speech about how I would get over him, how he wasn’t good enough for me, how we were never really suited, how I was better off without him. Maybe he was disappointed that he wasn’t going to get to say it.
He’d probably stood in front of the mirror in his bedroom at the hotel and practiced flinging his arms around me in a beseeching manner while he told me in a voice choked with emotion that, although he still loved me, he was no longer in love with me.
We stood in the hall for a few seconds, James looking as if his entire family had just been wiped out in a machete attack. I’m sure I didn’t look much better. The tension was terrible.
“Come on into the dining room,” I told him, taking charge. Otherwise we could have stood there all day, white-faced, miserable and paralyzed by nerves. “We won’t be disturbed there and we can have the table in case we need to spread out documents or whatever.”
He nodded grimly and walked down the hall in front of me.
How dare he! What was he looking so bloody uptight about? Surely I was the one who should be afforded that right?
Kate was waiting in the dining room.
She lay in her crib and looked beautiful.
I picked her up and stood holding her, her face against mine.
“This is Kate,” I said simply.
He stared at the two of us, opening and closing his mouth.
He looked a bit like a goldfish. A pale, serious goldfish.
“She…she’s gotten so big, she’s grown so much,” he finally managed.
“Babies do.” I nodded at him sagely.
The subtext being, of course, “If you had stuck around, you bastard, you’d have been there for when she was doing that growing.” But I didn’t say it.
I didn’t need to.
He knew it.
It was written all over his sheepish, shamed face.
“And she’s called Kate?” he asked.
The surge of anger was so intense that I thought I would surely kill him.
He hadn’t even found out her name, and there were plenty of people he could have asked.
“After Kate Bush?” he asked. Referring to a singer whom, while I certainly liked her, I wouldn’t have ever considered calling my firstborn child after.
“Yes,” I managed bitterly. “After Kate Bush.”
I wasn’t going to bother giving him the real reason. What the hell did he care?
“Hey!” he said, the idea obviously just having occured to him. “Can I hold her?” In different circumstances he could have been described as speaking with enthusiasm.
My anger and bitterness had obviously gone right over his neatly combed head.
I wanted to shout at him, “Of course you can hold her, she’s waited two months for you to hold her. You’re her bloody father!” But I managed not to.
I felt like a traitor, like a third-world mother who is forced by economic circumstances to sell her child to the rich gringo. But I passed her from my arms to his.
And the look on his face.
It was as if he had suddenly become mentally retarded.
All smiles and shining eyes and reverential expression.
Of course he held her all wrong.
Crossways, instead of lengthways.
Horizontal, instead of vertical.
People who know nothing about babies hold them like that.
I know because I did it for the first day or so of Kate’s life until one of the other mothers, who was sick of hearing Kate roaring, wearily set me right. (“Up, not across!”) But you wouldn’t catch me being sympathetic to James for making the same mistake.
Kate started to cry.
Well, of course the poor child did! Being held like a rolled-up carpet by a strange man. Wouldn’t you cry? James looked frightened.
“What’s wrong with her?” he asked. “How do I make her stop?” The reverential expression disappeared and was replaced by naked fear.
I had known all that mister-nice-guy stuff was too good to be true.
“Here,” he said, thrusting her at me. He looked at both of us with an expression of distaste. There was obviously no room for crying women in James’s world.
He hadn’t always been like that, you know.
Well, he’d married me. And I wasn’t famous for blinking back the tears.
Better out than in was always my motto. But looking at him now, at his fastidious expression, I marveled—and it wasn’t for the first time—at what a bastard he had become.
“Oh golly.” I smiled acidly. “She doesn’t seem to like you.”
I laughed as if it was a joke and took her back from James’s yielding arms.
He couldn’t get rid of her fast enough. I cooed and shushed her. She stopped crying. For a moment I felt bitter satisfaction that Kate had sided with me against him.
And then I felt sad and ashamed. James was Kate’s father. I should do everything in my power to make them like each other.
I’d find another man to love. But Kate had only the one father. “Sorry.”
I smiled apologetically at him. “It’s just that you’re new to her. Give her a chance. She’s scared.”
“You’re right. It’ll probably just take a bit of time,” he said, cheering up a bit.
“That’s all,” I reassured him. But at the same time thinking, horror-struck, when exactly does he propose spending this alleged “bit of time” with her?
If he had come to Dublin to try to take Kate back to London, then he had to die. It was really quite simple.
He hadn’t done the doting father bit up until now, so what did he want?
“Coffee.”
“What?” I asked him sharply.
“Is there any chance of a cup of coffee?” he asked.
He was looking at me as if I was a bit peculiar.
How many times had he asked me before I heard?
“Sure,” I told him.
I put Kate back in her crib and went into the kitchen to make him his coffee. I should have offered before. But in all the excitement it never crossed my mind. It was a bit of a relief to get into the kitchen. I sighed long and deep and hard when I closed the door behind me.
My hands shook so much I could hardly fill the kettle. Being with him was so hard. Having to pretend that I was fine was exhausting. And constantly keeping a lid on murderous anger was a demanding business—but I had to do it. I was going to salvage as much as I could for Kate out of this.
&nbs
p; I brought the coffee back into the dining room.
And, no, I didn’t offer cookies.
I’m sorry, but I just wasn’t a big enough person.
He was leaning over the crib, attempting to talk to Kate.
He was having some kind of muttered, uptight discussion with her.
As if she were a business colleague and not a two-month-old baby.
He was not behaving the way nice, normal, warm people do in the presence of young babies. You know, as if they’ve left their brains out, overnight, in the rain. All singsong noises and doting rhetorical questions.
Asking stupid things like “Who’s the most beautiful girl in the whole world?” And the correct answer not, as you might expect, Cindy Crawford, but in fact Kate Webster.
Instead he sounded as if he was discussing tax reforms with her.
But he didn’t seem to notice anything amiss.
I put the coffee down on the dining room table and the moment the china touched the mahogany I realized that I had automatically made James’s coffee the way that James liked it.
I was furious!
Couldn’t I even pretend to have forgotten?
Couldn’t I have given him a milk and two sugars instead of a black, no sugar and half cold water?
And then, when he gagged on it, nursing his burned and oversugared mouth, couldn’t I have airily said something like “Oh sorry, I forgot, you’re the one who doesn’t like sugar?”
But no.
I’d missed a precious chance to let him know that he didn’t matter at all to me anymore.
“Oh thanks, Claire,” he said, sipping from the mug. “You remembered the way I like it.” And he smiled with satisfaction.
I could have happily gone to the kitchen and doused myself in kerosene and set myself alight, so angry was I.
“You’re welcome,” I said from between gritted teeth.
There was a little silence.
Then James started to speak.
He seemed to have suddenly clicked into Relaxed Mode. The apparent nerves at the front door had evaporated.
I only wish mine had.
“You know, I can’t believe that I’m actually here,” he mused easily, leaning back in his chair, nursing the traitorous coffee between his cupped hands.
He sounded as if he had no trouble at all in believing it.
“I can’t believe you let me in.”
Well, actually you’re not the only bloody one, I felt like telling him, but didn’t.
“Why’s that?” I asked with icy politeness.
“Oh,” he said, shaking his head with a wry little smile, as though he couldn’t quite credit his runaway imagination. “I thought that perhaps your mother and sisters might have done something really nasty when I arrived. You know, poured boiling oil down on top of me. Something like that.”
And he sat there and, looking straight into my eyes, he smiled smugly, accepting the ease with which he had been readmitted to the Lion’s Den as nothing less than his due, confident that, although I was from a mad family and a nation of savages, he was really quite safe.
I resisted the urge to lunge across the table at him and rip out his larynx with my teeth, hissing, “Boiling oil would be too good for you.”
Instead I gave a cold little smile and said “Oh don’t be ridiculous, James.
We’re perfectly civilized around here, no matter what you might like to think. Why would we hurt you? And after all”—tinkly little laugh like shards of ice banging off the side of a glass—“we need you to be in good health so that you can afford Kate’s child support payments.”
There was a resonant silence.
“What are you talking about, ‘child support payments’?” he asked slowly, as though he had never before in his life heard of such a thing.
“James, you must know what child support payments are,” I told him, faint with shock.
I just stared at him.
What the hell was going on?
He was a boring, accountant-type person.
He and child support agreements should be best buddies.
In fact, I was amazed that he hadn’t arrived with a huge itemized agreement for me to sign. You know, detailing all kinds of things, such as the cost of keeping Kate in shoes for the rest of her life, projected economies of scale, sinking funds, amortization and suchlike.
After all, this was the man who could, and probably frequently did, cal-culate a waitress’s tip to within fourteen decimal places.
Not that he was cheap, you understand.
But he was very, very organized.
Forever scribbling on the backs of envelopes or on napkins and coming up with immensely detailed calculations which, oddly enough, nearly always turned out to be correct. In five minutes he could tell you to the nearest penny how much it would cost you to decorate your bathroom, taking everything into account, including paint, fittings, labor, coffee for the workmen, workdays (your own, that is) lost from sleepless nights when the workmen disappeared for three weeks, leav- ing the bathtub in the hall etc…. Honestly, he thinks of everything!
“Child support payments,” he said again thoughtfully. He didn’t sound happy.
“Yes James,” I said with steely resolve, although my stomach was lurching around like a ferry in rough seas. If James was going to be difficult about money, I’d die.
No, let me take that back. I wouldn’t.
I’d kill him.
“Right, right, I see,” he said, sounding a bit stunned. “Yes, we obviously do have a lot to talk about.”
“Yes, we certainly do,” I confirmed, trying to sound jovial. “And you’re here now so we’re in the happy position of being able to do so.” I gave him a bright smile.
It was so reluctant that I think I damaged muscles in my face.
But I had to keep this as amiable and friendly as possible.
“So,” I continued briskly, determined to sound as if I knew what I was talking about, “I know we’re both unfamiliar with this sort of thing, but don’t you think we should try to sort out the basic issues ourselves and let the lawyers dot the t’s and cross the i’s?” (I permitted myself a little smile at this. Which he completely ignored.) “Or would you prefer to do the whole lot, lock stock and barrel through our lawyers?”
“Aha!” He suddenly seemed to brighten up. He raised his index finger like Monsieur Poirot demonstrating the fatal flaw in the argument. “That would be fine if we had lawyers. But we haven’t, have we?” He looked at me in a kindly but pitying sort of fashion as if I was a bit of a half-wit.
“But…well, actually I have,” I told him.
“Have you?” he asked. “Have you indeed? Well, well, well.” He sounded quite astonished. And not that pleased.
“Um…yes, of course I have,” I said.
“My, my, weren’t you the busy one?” he said a bit nastily. “You certainly didn’t waste much time.”
“James, what are you talking about? It’s been two months,” I protested.
And to think that I had felt guilty about all the procrastination and time wasting.
I was confused.
Had I done something wrong? Was there some sort of pro- tocol? Some sort of time limit that I had to observe before dealing with the wreckage of my broken marriage?
Like not being allowed to go dancing in a red dress until my husband had been dead for six years, or whatever it was that Scarlett O’Hara so scandalized the Atlanta community with?
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose it has been two months.”
He sighed.
For a moment the wild thought crossed my mind that he might be sad.
And then I realized that, yes, he probably was sad. Wouldn’t any man be sad when he suddenly realized that he now had two families to support?
He was probably envisioning lawyers’ fees and estate agents’ costs stretching as far as the eye can see into the future as we sorted out the
severing of our marriage. And of course keeping those three little brats of Denise’s in pink nylon shell suits wouldn’t come cheap either. Although, by rights, it should.
So I put any sympathy that I might have entertained to one side and said, “James, did you bring the deeds to the apartment with you?”
“Er, no,” he said, looking a tiny bit bewildered.
“Why not?” I asked, slightly exasperated.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking at his shoes.
There was a perplexed pause.
“I suppose I just didn’t think of it. I left London in such a hurry.”
“Do you have any of our documents with you?” I asked, fighting the urge to smack him. “You know, bank statements, our pension details, that kind of thing?”
“No,” he said shortly. His face had gone very pale. He must have been furious at being caught unprepared.
This kind of inefficiency was really very unlike him. He was acting totally out of character. Although he hadn’t exactly been acting in character for quite a while. Maybe he was having a nervous breakdown? Or maybe he was so in love with fatso Denise that he’d turned into a bimbo. His eyesight had obviously failed him when he ran off with her. What’s to say that his brain hadn’t gone the same way?
“Do we need all those documents?” he asked.
“Well, not right away, I suppose,” I said. “But if we want to work things out while you’re here, it would be a lot handier to have them.”
“I suppose I could get some of them faxed over,” he said slowly. “If that’s what you really want.”
“Well, it’s not exactly a question of what I want,” I said, feeling a bit confused. “It’s so that we can try to figure out who owns what.”
“God, how sordid!” he said with great distaste. “You mean, things like
‘I own that towel, you own that saucepan’ kind of thing.”
“Well, yes, I suppose I do,” I said.
What was wrong with him? Hadn’t he given this any thought whatsoever?
“James,” I asked him as he sat on the chair looking totally shell-shocked.
“What did you think was going to happen? That the divorce fairies would come along and magically sort it all out for us while we slept?”
He managed a pale little smile at that.