Petite Anglaise

by Catherine Sanderson

  I complied, and the screen shuddered into life. I could make out a balding man dressed in a T-shirt and jeans – presumably Pete – and a slice of boardroom. I’d never visited the London office, and I’d only ever spoken to Pete on the phone, so I studied both with genuine interest.

  ‘I can see you all right,’ I said, ‘but can you see me?’

  ‘No, I’m just getting a marble fireplace and a mirror, you’ll have to adjust the webcam angle and focus it. If you press the split screen button on the remote, you’ll be able to see what I can see too. That’ll make it easier.’

  I pointed the webcam vaguely in the direction of the chair where I imagined George would sit, tilted it downwards, then reached for the remote.

  ‘That’s more like it!’ Pete exclaimed.

  I looked at the screen, and gasped. I’d leaned forwards across the desk to make the adjustments, and the picture currently being broadcast to the London office was a shot of my cleavage. With a nervous giggle, I pulled myself upright and darted out of range of the camera. George arrived seconds later, and I was relieved he hadn’t witnessed me making such a spectacle of myself.

  I wrote about the episode on my blog later that day, elated at being handed such a juicy, blogworthy anecdote on a platter, and what was more, a safe subject, perfect for distracting me from agonizing over the rights and wrongs of my decision to see James again. The anecdote had such comic potential, such slapstick value, that I milked it for all it was worth, even if that did mean distorting the truth. Unrepentantly, I padded out what had really happened, adding some mild flirtation with the IT guy, George’s presence in the room by my side throughout, and an audience of partners on the receiving end of my cleavage. My shoulders shook with silent laughter as I typed. I suspected my readers were going to like this one.

  Once I’d finished, I fired off an email to James, letting him in on what had really happened, and exposing the liberties I’d seen fit to take in pursuit of the perfect blog post. He was no longer a faceless reader like all the others, and I wanted him to understand the difference between what petite anglaise wrote and the reality of my life, to grasp that a diary written for an audience cannot be entirely trustworthy. Petite anglaise might have brought James into my life, but reading my blog could be no substitute for actually knowing Catherine, the master puppeteer pulling the strings in the background, occasionally blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction.

  A few days earlier that email would have been destined for Mr Frog, regardless of the fact that there was little chance he would have read the blog post in question. In a sense, with every text message, with every email James and I exchanged, I was silently transferring my loyalties elsewhere.

  I was already being unfaithful to Mr Frog. Inside my head, where it counted the most.

  10. Subterfuge

  In all the years we’d lived together, I had never cheated on Mr Frog. The idea of sneaking around behind his back to plot a secret meeting with another man would have been inconceivable to me a few days earlier. And yet, suddenly, I seemed to be able to rationalize and justify the very behaviour I would have despised in another; telling myself that it would be wrong not to take things one step further, that I owed it to myself to explore ‘what if…’

  Not only had I never cheated, but I’d never been wooed – covertly or otherwise – in the electronic age. The rules of courtship had changed, and over the next two or three days I took a crash course in deception. My inbox was awash with James’s messages, and I had to keep my wits about me, changing my password and signing out of email every time I left the computer unattended. My phone was set to silent mode, allowing a steady stream of incoming text messages to slip under the radar. I hadn’t really had much use for my mobile before: it had hibernated at the bottom of my bag gathering dust, its battery flat, useless in an emergency. Now its memory was filled with staccato text messages: short, sharp and dripping with innuendo.

  Just over a year earlier, when text exchanges between a famous footballer and his alleged mistress were splashed across the English tabloids, I had been torn between disgust and total incomprehension. Only now did I grasp the power of a few choice syllables, intimate words which could reach me any time, anywhere, and deliver an electrifying jolt. Wherever I went, James’s words followed. I felt a prickling at the nape of my neck and fought the urge to look over my shoulder. It was as though he were tracking my every move from an unseen vantage point. He was thinking about me, I was sure of it. I could feel the weight of his attention.

  ‘You look a bit flustered, is everything all right?’ said Amy, as I emerged from the ladies’ toilets at work, my mobile phone clutched in my fist.

  I’d been sitting on the floor, enjoying the smooth caress of the marble tiles against my bare legs, while I flirted with James. ‘I woke up thinking about your eyes, your lips, your skin,’ he’d written. ‘I wish we could speak on the phone so I could hear your voice.’ I’d closed my eyes, shivering as I imagined his hands inside my clothes, moving over my skin.

  ‘I can’t wait,’ I replied. ‘But phoning is too risky…’ In the past forty-eight hours my texting speed had increased tenfold, although I still looked at my right thumb as I wrote. But when I re-read what I’d typed – or rather what the predictive text function had decided I must have intended to type – I cried out and dropped the phone as though scalded. ‘But sinning is too risky,’ it read. Hauling myself to my feet, my message unsent, I’d run straight into Amy, my cheeks ablaze.

  ‘Oh! Yes… Bit stressed, you know, work stuff…’ I gestured at the mug in her hand. ‘I was about to fetch myself a cup of tea.’

  ‘Kettle’s just boiled,’ she said. ‘I think there’s enough left in there for another cup. I’ve got to get back to work, otherwise I’ll never get out of here tonight.’

  There was a part of me that longed to tell Amy what was going on: it would be a profound relief to be able to unburden myself to someone other than James. But I was afraid she would burst my bubble or, worse still, succeed in talking me out of seeing him again. Only a week earlier she’d confided in me that she had reason to believe her ex-boyfriend had been unfaithful to her before they parted. She had railed about his dishonesty, condemned his use of subterfuge, and I had agreed with her wholeheartedly. If she knew what I was now plotting, I would be no better than he was, in her eyes. I decided I’d much rather deal with my guilt alone for now than risk disappointing my friend.

  After work I tried to lose myself in the comfort of my routine with Tadpole – home, dinner, bath, stories, bed – functioning on autopilot if my mind wandered irresponsibly away from the task in hand. I refused to check my phone or email in my daughter’s presence, but this just made me feel doubly guilty for willing the hours to go by quickly so that I could read James’s words in peace, once she’d gone to bed. I was distracted, constantly on tenterhooks, and my patience was in dangerously short supply if, God forbid, Tadpole chose to do battle with me.

  ‘Non, pas fait caca dans la couche!’ Tadpole protested, wriggling free of my grasp and distancing herself from the plastic changing mat which lay on her bedroom floor. Her claim was patently untrue: my nostrils did not lie. I should have smiled, grabbed her by the midriff and tickled her into giggling submission, but instead I shouted harsh words and manoeuvred her roughly into position. Tadpole yelped with indignant surprise.

  ‘You have done a poo and Mummy needs to change your nappy right now!’ I bellowed.

  My daughter looked at me oddly, as if she was trying to figure out who had taken possession of her mummy’s body. I closed my eyes for a second and tried to get a grip on myself. I was an elastic band pulled taut. What would happen if I snapped? Would I raise a hand to her, leaving an angry red palm print on her milky thigh, or would I dissolve into hysterical tears? Even if I did manage to hold myself in check, Tadpole was so attuned to my moods, I felt sure she had already sensed that something was very wrong. The betrayal I was plotting hadn’t even happened yet, but alr
eady she was suffering from the fall-out.

  With Tadpole finally settled for the night, a swarm of guilty kisses scattered across her cheeks, I took evasive action, cowering behind my computer screen or soaking in long, scalding baths until the water cooled and the skin on my fingertips puckered. Mr Frog, once he got home, snoozed in front of the television, blithely oblivious to my turmoil. When proximity was unavoidable, eating dinner together or engaging in normal conversation taxed me to my very limits. It was all a sham, a mockery: I was a counterfeit girlfriend, going through the motions, my mind elsewhere, and I couldn’t believe Mr Frog noticed nothing amiss. Was I really so invisible to him? Could he not feel the tension in every sinew of my body, my every movement a spasm? When guilt choked back the words in my throat, leaving me uncharacteristically quiet, did he think we were sharing a companionable silence?

  As the weekend loomed, I was filled with dread. How would I manage to play happy families for two whole days – under the constant surveillance of Mr Frog and Tadpole –when my only desire was to curl up in a tight ball under the bedclothes, shut out the real world and lose myself in the scenes playing out across the inside of my eyelids?

  ‘I really don’t feel well,’ I moaned in my most convincing sick person’s voice as I administered Tadpole’s breakfast on Saturday morning. It was the same voice I’d used as a teenager to fool my mother when I couldn’t face school, for whatever reason. ‘I think I’m going to have to go and lie down for a while. Sorry.’ Mr Frog looked up from his magazine in alarm. He had been about to run one of his famously long baths; I was riding roughshod over his routine.

  ‘What about me?’ he said, indignantly. ‘I’m really tired too, you know. It’s been a tough week for me at work…’

  ‘Put the TV on,’ I retorted. In spite of my own hypocrisy I could feel self-righteous anger welling up. Wasn’t I only asking him to pull his weight, after all? Wiping the corners of Tadpole’s mouth on her bib, I heaved her out of the high chair and deposited her on his lap. ‘How do you think I manage when you have to work at the weekend?’ I shot over my shoulder. ‘Or when you come home at 4 a.m. after a night out and feel too hanged over to get up the next day?’ I pulled the bedroom door closed behind me with a bang before he could remind me that I had rolled in well after midnight on Tuesday, the night of the concert, and done just that.

  From our bed – its headboard separated by a thin internal wall from the sofa where Tadpole sat and Mr Frog lay – I listened to my daughter babbling in French, delighted to have Daddy’s undivided attention. I heard the sofa creak, Mr Frog cursing as he grappled with the baby-proof device which prevented Tadpole from posting crayons inside the video player, then the semi-coherent baby talk of the Teletubbies. At regular intervals my shaking hand reached for the phone in the bag I’d taken to keeping by my bedside, checking for messages which came few and far between. James was working on a cottage he had been renovating with Eve – as business partners – deep in the Breton countryside, where phone masts were scarce. I foundered: without his words to cling to, there was nothing to stop me sinking.

  Feigning illness wasn’t especially difficult. Charcoal smudges under my eyes testified to the fact that I had barely slept a wink over the past few nights. And yet a single cup of coffee was enough to make me shake like an alcoholic with the DTs. I was secretly pleased about the weight loss which seemed to be a by-product of my anxiety – my clothes were beginning to hang off me, and I’d managed to squeeze into a pair of pre-Tadpole trousers for the first time in almost three years the day before – but there were less attractive side effects too. Perspiration drew acrid circles under my arms; my stomach cramped and clenched. When the Teletubbies video ended and Mr Frog appeared, looking sheepish, an hour later, he was forced to admit I didn’t look well.

  ‘I’ve brought you a cup of tea,’ he said, placing the mug on the corner of the desk nearest to my side of the bed. ‘You feeling any better?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, I just feel really run down, like I’m coming down with something,’ I said weakly, propping myself on one elbow, bringing the anaemic, milky tea to my lips. In the eight years we’d spent together Mr Frog had never quite got the hang of making a decent cup of tea for his petite anglaise.

  ‘Okay, well, I suppose we could go to the park for a while, and leave you to rest, in peace,’ Mr Frog said grudgingly. ‘Hopefully you’ll be feeling a bit better by the time we get back.’

  ‘Oh, that would be lovely, if you don’t mind,’ I said, summoning up a wan smile. I almost wished he wouldn’t be sympathetic: my conscience, dulled by my annoyance earlier, was now prickling uncomfortably. But at the same time my mind raced ahead, plotting and scheming. If I was going to have the house to myself, maybe I could try phoning James? I hadn’t heard his voice since I’d jumped into the taxi and left him behind. I’d told him phoning was too risky – preferring to read his words – but suddenly the desire to hear his voice had become almost a physical need.

  ‘I don’t much like going to the park on my own,’ Mr Frog confessed. ‘People look at me strangely. I’m sure they think I’m a papa du dimanche.’ I was probably guilty of giving that same pitying look to lone fathers myself, I realized, when really I had no proof whatsoever of their marital status. Why is it that a father and child can’t go somewhere alone without people assuming he must be a part-timer? When I wandered through the park with Tadpole, or took her to Franprix to shop for food without Mr Frog, people didn’t automatically brand me a single mother, did they?

  ‘Oh, you should milk that,’ I said, making a weak attempt at humour. ‘I bet it makes you very popular with the ladies…’ The irony of the situation, the fact that Mr Frog might well wind up being a weekend daddy, was not lost on me, and I was simultaneously amazed and horrified at my own ability to make light of it.

  ‘We go to the park now?’ said Tadpole bounding into the bedroom, still wearing her pyjamas.

  ‘You’re going to go to the park with Daddy. Mummy’s not feeling very well, I’m afraid.’

  Tucking her favourite rag doll under the duvet beside me, Tadpole touched a cool hand to my flushed cheek. I shrank away. Mr Frog’s sympathy was difficult enough to deal with, but my daughter’s was just plain unbearable. I didn’t deserve to be fussed over. I was a wolf in her mother’s bed, a monster plotting to betray her father as soon as his back was turned.

  Once I heard the lift doors close behind Mr Frog and Tadpole and I’d let a few more breathless minutes elapse to allow for a return journey to collect a forgotten bucket or spade, I was out of bed like a shot, pacing the creaky floorboards, fingers busily dialling. A few moments of nerve-racking dead air were followed by a click, then a ringing sound and, finally, James picked up.

  ‘Wow! You called.’ James sounded cautiously pleased. His voice was balm to my soul: normal, reassuring, real. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ I replied, my voice unsteady. ‘I’m all over the place. I had to pretend to be ill so that I could get some time alone. They’ve gone to the park without me. I just couldn’t be around them, it was too difficult, pretending…’

  James sighed. ‘I wish this didn’t have to be so underhanded. I feel awful for putting you through this, making you lie. I of all people should know how wretched these situations can be.’ He was silent for a moment, and I guessed he was revisiting scenes from his own divorce in his head. He knew all about deceit, about being played for a fool, and yet here he was, looking on from the sidelines while I put Mr Frog in the same position, betraying his trust, throwing dust in his eyes.

  ‘No,’ I said, feeling calmer now, soothed by the sound of his voice. ‘This is my mess. You’re not forcing me to do anything. I’m in a relationship which isn’t making me happy; which hasn’t for a long time. I hate sneaking around behind his back, but it seems like the only way, until I’m sure. Or as sure as I can be.’

  ‘You haven’t changed your mind then? About next week?’ James must have been half expecting me to call e
verything off, dreading those words from the moment he picked up the phone.

  ‘No. I haven’t changed my mind,’ I said. ‘I have to see you again. I can’t keep on sleepwalking indefinitely. I’m afraid I’d be missing out on something, and that I’d end up regretting it for the rest of my life…’

  ‘Thank God,’ he said forcefully. ‘Well, the guy at the garage reckons the car will be ready by Thursday at the latest. So I could come up on the train on Wednesday, book a hotel for the night, and go back on Thursday afternoon. I don’t want to put pressure on you, but any time you can snatch away from home, or the office…’

  I’d thought about this part a lot, turning over and over in my mind how it could be done. Infidelity was a complicated business, logistically, for a working mother whose day was mapped out in detail from dawn until dusk. A hotel would be perfect. We needed to meet in private, away from prying eyes and unexpected interruptions, but also on neutral ground. I tried not to dwell on the fact that there would be a bed, or to think about the seediness implicit in the arrangement.

  ‘I’ll pretend I’m ill,’ I explained. ‘My boss won’t like me leaving, but there’s not a great deal he can do about it. Then I’ll get a babysitter lined up in the evening, say I’m invited to a party with some blog friend. I’ll need to come and go – I’ll still have to do the run to the nanny’s and back as usual – but we should be able to spend a good few hours together…’

  James whistled. ‘You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you? Leave the hotel to me. If I aim for something near Bastille, would that be easy enough for you to get to, but far enough away not to be uncomfortably close to home?’