Strictly Between Us

by Jane Fallon

  ‘Did you go up to Nottingham for a set visit a few weeks ago?’ I blurt out before he can even ask me how I am.

  Is it just me or does his voice sound cautious? ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘On July the sixteenth?’

  ‘I don’t have my diary with me but that sounds about right. What are you on about, Tamsin?’

  ‘It was definitely Nottingham, not somewhere in London?’

  There’s a moment’s pause. ‘Why are you asking me all these questions?’

  There’s no point in me not coming clean now. The combination of the words Nottingham and July 16th must be setting off sirens in his head.

  ‘Just something Michelle said.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘I … I don’t know. Something about a credit card slip from a hotel …’

  There’s silence at the other end. It feels as if it goes on forever.

  ‘I’m coming over.’

  ‘No … wait. I shouldn’t have said anything. I don’t want to know.’

  ‘Then why the phone call?’

  Actually, scrub that, I do want to know. ‘Did you take someone there?’

  ‘What business is this of yours exactly?’ Patrick says in a cold tone of voice I have never heard him use before. I feel a rush of nausea.

  ‘Please say you haven’t been cheating on her.’ In retrospect this is a stupid thing to say. Given, well, you know what.

  ‘What, like I did with you, you mean?’

  ‘That was different …’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not about to tell her. I know that’s why you called me, right? Self-preservation.’

  ‘Why are you being so horrible?’ I say. I should never have phoned. I should have stayed well out of it.

  ‘You’re the one who rang and started hurling accusations.’

  ‘I didn’t. I just asked you a question. You told me to tell you if I thought Michelle suspected you of seeing someone and now she does, OK?’

  ‘Ah, so you’re just telling me out of the goodness of your heart?’

  ‘I’m not having this conversation,’ I say, forgetting that I’m the one who started it. ‘I’ve warned you, OK.’

  ‘Gosh, thanks, Tamsin. Your concern for your friend is touching.’

  ‘I’m putting the phone down.’ I can’t quite bring myself to do it, though.

  There’s a moment’s silence and then he says, ‘Go on then.’ I almost laugh. It reminds me of when I was a teenager and I would carry on like this for hours with whatever boy I was seeing at the time. ‘Put the phone down’, ‘No, you’, ‘I’m definitely putting it down now’, ‘Go on then’, ‘No, you first’. I wasted many of my precious adolescent years having that conversation.

  This time, though, there’s no flirting. It’s just a stand-off. I’m too old for this.

  ‘Bye.’ I press the button to end the call. Run into the bathroom and throw up.

  Not knowing what is happening is killing me. I pace around the flat, trying and failing to find any distractions. Eventually I get Ron’s lead, much to his delight, stuff my phone in my pocket and head out for a walk. I can’t stop running scenarios in my head. Michelle showing Patrick the receipt, tearfully asking him what it means. Him denying, excuses prepared because of my phone call. All I have done is give him the weapons to get away with whatever he’s getting away with. I may have saved myself, but at what cost?

  Does this mean everything he said to me was a lie? Or has it just happened since me and him? Maybe he enjoyed it so much with you he had to have another go, some irritating voice in my brain offers up helpfully. I choose to ignore it. Deep down, though, a bit of me is wondering whether I am somehow partly to blame. Did he think, Sod it, if he was ever going to be hung at all it might as well be for a great big premeditated all-the-way sheep as for an opportunistic drunken fumbly mistake of a lamb?

  I reach Primrose Hill and unclip Ron from his lead. As always, he runs round in circles while I sit on a bench staring off into space. I check my phone to see if Michelle has called. Nothing. Has she even confronted him yet? Has he told her? And, if so, what?

  After a while Ron exhausts himself and flops at my feet. I lean down and stroke his wiry head and he sighs contentedly.

  ‘Come on then,’ I say, standing up. ‘Home time.’

  We trudge back up the hill and turn into my road, where I see a familiar figure sitting on the high steps to my front door. I feel a sharp pain in my chest and my fight-or-flight reflexes kick in, telling me to make a run for it in the opposite direction. Ron has other ideas. He’s seen his beloved Uncle Patrick up ahead and he’s already barking enthusiastically and straining at the leash like he’s trying to pull a chariot. I have no choice but to follow. Patrick stands up when he sees us. I know that I’m scowling at him but I can’t seem to help it.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  He smiles, which unnerves me completely. It feels like Jaws asking how you are before he chomps into your leg.

  ‘I thought we needed to talk.’

  ‘I think you were right before. I think it’s none of my business.’ I don’t want to have to listen to whatever he’s going to say. I want to go inside and shut the door and not go out again till Monday.

  ‘Tamsin, for God’s sake. I need your help.’

  I relent. What else can I do?

  Inside I don’t even ask him if he wants a cup of tea. I just want to hear what he has to say and then get him out of there.

  ‘So?’ I say when he doesn’t offer anything up. Ron is doing loud comedy slurping from his water bowl, something that I usually find endlessly entertaining and endearing. I wish he’d stop.

  Patrick exhales loudly. ‘I was there with someone. At the Park View.’

  I almost think I’ve heard incorrectly. ‘What? Who?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter who.’

  ‘I imagine it will to Michelle.’

  ‘Just someone.’

  ‘What the fuck were you thinking? How could you?’

  ‘I haven’t come here so you can tell me how disappointed in me you are. I’ve come because I need your help.’

  ‘With what?’ I say, although I have a horrible feeling I already know the answer.

  ‘Michelle can’t find out.’

  ‘I think she already has.’

  He picks up a lonely ageing apple out of the wire basket I laughingly call my fruit bowl. Puts it down again. ‘No. She suspects. She knows that something isn’t right, but she doesn’t know what. I need you to help me convince her it’s nothing.’

  ‘Are you joking? You cheated on Michelle and now you want me to help hide the evidence. What the fuck?’

  ‘It was a mistake. These things happen.’

  ‘No way. I’m not going to get mixed up in this.’

  ‘Actually, Tamsin, you already are. If she finds out about this I might as well tell her about us. I’ll have lost everything anyway.’

  ‘There is no us. There never was. We had too much to drink and we crossed a line we never should have crossed. That was it.’

  He raises an eyebrow at me. ‘I’m sure she’ll see it like that.’

  I feel as if the floor has disappeared out from under me. I sit down on the arm of the nearest chair before my legs give way.

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  He shrugs. ‘Not threatening, just stating a fact.’

  ‘Patrick … what the fuck?’

  ‘What? You want to get all high and mighty with me about having a fling with someone but then you still wan
t me to lie to my wife about what happened between me and you?’

  ‘I thought we’d agreed that what happened between us was a shitty mistake when neither of us was in a fit state to know any better. That’s hardly the same as booking a hotel and making up a whole story about being in an entirely different city.’

  ‘Her best friend or someone she’s never even met. Which do you think will hurt her more, whatever the circumstances?’

  I know he’s right. I know I don’t have a leg to stand on. ‘I don’t understand. If you’re fucking someone else then why do you care about saving your marriage anyway?’

  Patrick picks up a book I’ve left lying on the kitchen counter. Gourmet Meals For One or something equally tragic. He turns it over casually, looks at the back as if it’s just a normal day.

  ‘I love Michelle. This other thing is nothing.’

  ‘Why do it then?’

  ‘Because I’m weak or a douchebag or something. I don’t know. It’ll all blow over soon …’

  I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. I stand up, grab the book from his hands and slam it back down on the worktop. ‘It’s still going on?’

  ‘I really don’t think you need to know the details.’

  ‘Oh no, hold on. If you’re going to force me to be involved then I have to know what I’m involved in. Who is she?’

  ‘You don’t know her.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘I told you, you don’t know her.’

  ‘Did you meet her through work?’

  ‘Yes. Sort of.’

  ‘And it’s been going on for how long?’

  ‘Six weeks or so. I’m going to end it soon. It’s nothing serious.’

  ‘Six weeks? Jesus, Pad.’

  ‘It just happened. I didn’t mean it to. You know how that goes, right?’

  I choose to ignore the last part. He sweeps his hair back from his face with his right hand, one of his patented ‘aren’t I cool?’ gestures. He has stupidly thick glossy hair. No sad pink scalp peeking through for him.

  ‘And was she the first?’

  There’s a pause while – I imagine – he weighs up whether or not to lie to me.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me the truth.’

  ‘Why ask if you’re not going to believe my answer?’ He smirks. I edge back to put some more distance between us. I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to be in hitting range. I might not be able to control myself.

  ‘Ball park. Three? Ten? Twenty? Five hundred?’

  ‘There may have been a few over the years. None of them meant anything.’

  ‘So all that shit about being worried she suspected you—’

  ‘I was worried. I still don’t know who that Cheryl woman was.’

  ‘But the innocent act. The stuff about how you couldn’t stand it if she thought that of you because you would never do anything like that.’

  ‘Well, five minutes later you must have known that wasn’t true.’

  ‘Jesus. You were so convincing …’

  ‘I don’t need a lecture, OK. I’m not proud of myself. I just need to work out what to do.’

  ‘Well, you can’t do anything until Michelle brings it up. Apart from get rid of this woman, that is.’

  ‘I don’t know which would be worse. Michelle accusing me and me having to think of a cover story or her never saying anything, but I know she’s thinking about it.’

  ‘And if she does ask you?’

  ‘I have no idea. That’s why I need your help.’

  I close my eyes. ‘She found the itemized bill, too.’

  ‘Shit.’ He puts his head in his hands and I almost feel sorry for him. I talk myself out of that one pretty quickly, though.

  ‘She went through my stuff?’

  ‘Well, we’re all full of surprises. I mean, why would you even keep that receipt? Were you going to try and claim it back? I don’t want my wife to find out but I really want to fiddle my expenses, is that it?’

  ‘Of course not. I just never imagined her searching through my things, I suppose. And then I just forgot it was there.’

  ‘Brilliant. You’re a master criminal.’

  ‘There’s no point being fucking sarcastic. I might be a shit husband but you’re not exactly a textbook best friend either. So let’s just sort this out together, OK?’

  I know I don’t have any choice. Not that I’m sure I have any interest in preserving Michelle and Patrick’s marriage any more – in all honesty, I’m starting to think she’d be better off without him. Now I know what he’s really like it’s impossible to hope that they’ll stay together.

  ‘Let me think.’

  I sit back down. Patrick flops into the other armchair and neither of us says anything for a few moments. I’m racking my brain but I can’t make it come up with anything. The quacking of a duck that is Patrick’s ring tone nearly gives me a coronary.

  ‘Michelle,’ he says, looking at the display. ‘I can’t answer it.’

  We both wait for what seems like an eternity for it to stop. It’s times like these that really bring it home why comedy ring tones are not a good idea.

  Reluctantly I offer up the only solution I can think of. ‘Tell her you booked it for a colleague because they’d forgotten their cards or, no, say it was someone coming for a meeting with you the next day and usually you would book those things on your business card but you couldn’t find it and Verity had gone home, so you had to use your personal one. Say you think they were bringing their wife.’

  ‘What if she asks me who?’

  ‘I don’t know. Make someone up. The blandest, most common name you can think of that isn’t John Smith. Make sure you tell her the bit about the wife.’

  I can’t believe I’m about to say this next bit but here goes. ‘I’ll offer to phone your office and check it out or something.’

  ‘What if she thinks of doing that herself?’

  ‘I don’t think she’d phone your office. She knows Verity far too well to pretend she’s someone else, and I don’t think she’d want to be seen to be checking up on you.’ Verity is Patrick’s assistant. I’ve never spoken to her but I know that Michelle is fond of her. I worry for a moment about whether she might be one of his conquests, but then I remember that she’s in her late fifties. It seems unlikely. ‘And anyway, I’ll make sure she doesn’t.’

  ‘And what if Michelle doesn’t report the whole thing back to you?’

  ‘She will,’ I say, sadly. ‘She tells me everything. And anyway, it’s all we’ve got.’

  19

  The awful thing is that it works.

  Michelle tearfully tells me that Patrick vehemently denied any wrongdoing. By the sounds of it she was waiting when he got home from mine and she asked – as calmly as she could; she didn’t want to sound like she was accusing him of anything – where he had stayed on the night of the 16th. He said Nottingham, obviously, so she produced the credit card slip. She didn’t mention the itemized receipt because she didn’t want it to look as if she had been snooping on him.

  Patrick had laughed, she said, and immediately told her that he’d booked the hotel in London for the producer of one of their shows who was coming down from Scotland for a meeting at the channel the next day. He thought he’d brought his wife with him so they could go off somewhere and spend a few days together down here afterwards. Michelle had asked why Verity hadn’t booked it on the company card and Patrick had told her it was a last-minute thing and she had already left for the day. He’d decided
to use his own card and claim it back. He had sounded so confident, she said, that she’d felt stupid. There was no way he could have come up with that whole convoluted scenario off the top of his head. Only one thing was still nagging her – the name of the guest on the itemized receipt.

  So she had come clean and told him about looking through his bag. He’d looked a bit hurt – here I almost laughed, out of nervousness, not because I thought any of it was remotely funny – but then he’d said that he hadn’t even noticed that, probably the hotel just got their wires crossed and assumed the room was in his name.

  Michelle had paused here apparently. ‘But when you booked wouldn’t you have said the room was actually for Mr and Mrs so and so?’

  ‘Probably but they wouldn’t necessarily have taken it in. What I’m saying is it’s not out of the question.’

  ‘I want to believe him,’ she said sadly. ‘And I suppose it does make sense.’

  And I – to my eternal shame – said yes, yes it did.

  ‘Did he say who it was he booked it for?’ I wanted to make sure Patrick and I had our story straight.

  ‘Someone Robinson,’ she said. ‘He said he’s one of the execs on some show they’re making about Scottish castles.’

  Thank God he’d taken my advice and picked a common name.

  ‘I know,’ I said, as if I’d just had a thunderbolt of inspiration. ‘You can’t do this because Verity knows you too well, but why don’t I phone his office and say – I don’t know – that I’m from the hotel and I’ve found something of his and see what they say. What’s the worst that can happen?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to become one of those wives who keeps checking up on her husband.’

  ‘You won’t be. I will. If not you’re just going to keep on wondering whether there’s something he hasn’t told you.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t there, but it sounds plausible to me.’

  ‘You’re right. Maybe I should just forget all about it, move on.’

  I want this all to go away, so I push home my point. ‘You could but you might still have a nagging doubt. Apart from anything else it’s not fair on Pad. If I can find out for certain then why don’t I?’