Caitlin had been having one of her quiet days, when all she wants is to stay in her room, playing with the Edwardian-style dolls’ house Hector originally made for Kitty, or simply sitting on her bed surrounded by books and those infernal notebooks. She doesn’t want to talk or be sociable with anyone at those times, and that’s fine; it’s what she needs.
Hector and I had been for a walk in the morning, then he’d gravitated to his drawing board where the tree house is taking magnificent shape, and I’d done the usual Sunday things like re-colouring my hair – which came out a shade too red, like a conker, but Hector said he liked it – finished the ironing, and read a book in the garden until the sky clouded over and it got chilly.
When Kitty and Hazel came home, I coaxed Caitlin from her room for dinner, and then, her quiet time having done its work, she asked to play the taxi game. For the millionth time I blessed my luck, luck I don’t deserve, at having family time to enjoy. After two rounds of the game, Hazel and Kitty went to watch TV and I re-opened the conversation with Caitlin about our day out.
‘We could go to London, on the train,’ I suggested. ‘Go to a museum, or a boat trip on the river?’
‘We would get the bus, in London, though?’ Caitlin frowned at me. ‘Not the Tube thingy. Because, Mummy, you’re scared in the Tube thingy, aren’t you?’
‘No, I’m not scared in the Tube, Caitlin,’ I said, with a little laugh. It’s true that I’d rather not use it, and if there’s a lift and not an escalator, I’m stuffed, but it’s fine as long as the train keeps moving and I don’t have to spend too long below ground.
I smiled at my youngest daughter, whose caring nature has the power to reduce me to a tearful wreck in moments, as nearly happened then, until Hector rescued me.
‘Mummy can go on the Tube,’ he said, ‘but if it was me, I’d rather go by bus because you get to see everything, especially if you sit on the top deck.’
But Caitlin decided in the end that she’d rather not go to London, and did I mind? Of course I didn’t mind, I assured her, and we settled on Worthing.
So, here we are, strolling along Worthing pier, having been round the shops and bought some shorts and a cute flowered dress for Caitlin and a white linen shirt I found in a charity shop for me, and we’ve had lunch at a coffee shop facing onto a square. It’s a fine day, still spring but with the promise of summer so close you can touch it. Being a Monday and term-time, there aren’t many people about, which suits both of us very well. The springy feel of the boards under my feet, the expansive views along the coast, the soft breeze on my face and the gently lapping sea work their magic on my nerves which have been more frayed than I’d realised. Caitlin was right; we didn’t need the hustle and roar of the capital today.
As we reach the gallery of painted glass panels depicting local life, Caitlin darts from one side of the pier to the other on a tour of inspection. The colours and designs appeal to her artistic nature. It’s the simple things, the small things, that make her happiest. Isn’t that the same for all of us? We pass the attractive art-deco buildings housing the amusements and café, and arrive at the end of the pier. Caitlin had skipped ahead of me, but now she holds back, staying close to my side, as one of the fishermen looks up from the lower deck and grins at her.
‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘Watch.’ She watches as the man casts his line in a great loop against the blue-green sea and settles into a chasm of patience to wait for a bite.
Other fishermen do the same, ranged along the deck, surrounded by the clutter of fishing gear, discarded outer garments, flasks, and lunch boxes. Caitlin, her shyness gone, sits down on the higher deck, legs dangling over the edge, and observes with fascination the scene below. When a young bearded man lands a fish, she tenses with delight as the squiggling silver creature is reeled in. It’s a tiny one and is thrown back into the sea to live another day. Caitlin nods in silent satisfaction and then says she really, really would like to have an ice cream now.
Back at the café, I buy Caitlin’s ice cream, and coffee and ginger cake for me, and we take it to an outside table. Apart from an elderly couple, their faces upturned contentedly towards the sun, the tables are deserted. But then I swivel round on my seat and there’s a man sitting alone at the end table, gazing out to sea, a drink in front of him.
Caitlin realises at precisely the same second as I do.
‘Mum, I can see Zoe’s dad, over there. It is him, isn’t it?’
I can only nod in response, as at that precise second, Ben turns away from the sea view and looks directly at me.
‘Hey, Fran.’ His voice is faint on the breeze, but I see his mouth form the shapes of the words.
Okay, I see Ben plenty of times around Oakheart, and only the other day he was troubling our front step. This is different. Anxiety swills around inside me.
‘Hi,’ I mouth back.
He stays right where he is, and I can’t not go over. He makes it impossible. I get up from my seat and walk across, Caitlin following, clutching her ice-cream cone. Having my daughter with me keeps me grounded in normality as I approach Ben’s table and give him what I hope is a neighbourly smile.
‘Day off?’ I say.
‘Yes, but don’t tell the missus.’ He laughs, flashes his eyes. I must look confused, because he adds, ‘I needed time out, didn’t realise until I was at the station, so I came here instead of getting the London train.’ He laughs again softly. ‘It was so early when I got here, too bloody early.’ He glances at Caitlin and mouths ‘Sorry’ at me.
I nod to say it’s fine. ‘You’ll tell her when you get home, though, that you played hooky today?’
I have no idea why I care. Well, I don’t, but I have to say something. This is feeling pretty weird as it is.
‘I might.’ The eyes again. ‘Okay, yes, of course I will. I’ll head home soon, anyway.’
‘Well, my coffee’s over there, so…’
‘Fetch it over.’ Ben indicates an empty seat at his table and drags another across. It sounds like a command, a command I obey. It would seem strange to Caitlin otherwise.
‘I wouldn’t have thought this was your sort of place,’ I say, sitting down in the seat furthest from Ben while Caitlin wriggles onto the other one and concentrates on licking her ice-cream.
‘Worthing, or the pier?’
‘Both.’
‘You know me so well,’ Ben says quietly, and immediately I regret my words. ‘I just fancied the peace and quiet for a change, and the sea. I like the sea. It doesn’t have that remote feel, like the rural setting we happen to inhabit. In any case, it was where the next train was going, so…’
He looks at me in a way I remember all too well, a look that at one time would have set my pulse racing. Now I simply feel annoyed to have my day encroached upon. As if my recent dealings with Tessa weren’t enough. I wonder wildly if some kind of spell has been cast that is designed to glue me and the Grammaticus family together forever.
Caitlin slides off the seat and crosses to the railing to look at the sea.
‘How are you, Fran?’ Ben asks. He tilts his shoulders back, links his hands behind his head, and gazes up at the sky, as if the answer is of no consequence.
Which it isn’t, of course. It’s just small-talk. He’s an Oakheart parent, an acquaintance, the status he was relegated to, long ago. I answer just as casually.
‘Oh, fine, thanks. You?’
He waits before he replies, brings his hands back and rests them on the table, his eyes scanning my face. ‘I miss you. I really do.’
‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘Just no, Ben.’
He should know we don’t have that kind of conversation. It’s as much against the unwritten rules as you can get.
He shrugs. ‘I speak only the truth. It’s okay if you don’t feel the same. I can live with that. If I must.’
I don’t favour this with a reply. I’m shaking inside with shock and anger.
I get up from my seat and call Caitlin. ‘Come on, love,
time we were going.’
She comes, and we leave. I can feel Ben’s eyes on my back all the way along the pier.
Eleven
FRAN
Since that day, I see Ben all the time – or it certainly seems that way. He leaves Rose Cottage before seven on weekdays, driving himself to the station – sometimes Tessa drives him, Grace has seen them – and doesn’t return until seven in the evening. I’m not often around the village in the evenings, but the other night we ran out of fillings for the girls’ sandwiches, so I walked to the other end of Oakheart where there’s a shop that stays open late. On the way back, I saw Ben in the high street ahead of me, walking towards Rose Cottage. He didn’t see me. He may have been for a drink in The Crown, although he’s not a regular; I know that from before. Unless his habits have changed.
Other reasons threaded through my mind as to why he might be out and about at nine pm, of which there could be several, none of them interesting or extraordinary. Which led me to wonder why I was even thinking about it.
He’s home at weekends, of course, but it’s not as if we live that close. And yet I’ve seen him on both the weekends since Worthing. A Saturday trip to the high street had me ducking into the book shop as Ben swung past on the other side of the road. A week later, on the Sunday, the five us were driving along the road out of Oakheart to have lunch at a favourite restaurant as a treat, when we passed him coming in the opposite direction, alone in his car. He glanced at us – at me – but gave no sign of recognition.
I even saw him striding along the perimeter path of the park when I was on my way to meet Grace for coffee at the park café. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, on a weekday. I couldn’t be a hundred percent certain it was him – he was some distance away and the tree shadows provided cover – but in my head it was definitely him.
Ben is suddenly everywhere, and it isn’t helping.
I am overthinking this, I know. He’s probably not around any more than he ever was, and somehow my brain has retuned itself to spot him whereas I may not have done before. This takes me back to how it was in the weeks after we broke up, if ‘breaking up’ is the right term. I virtually went into hiding, creeping along the streets to work or the shops, putting my foot down in the car whenever I passed his house. But Ben was conspicuous by his absence then and I need not have bothered. When Hazel and Zoe had social arrangements, it was Tessa who did the running about, if any was needed.
Had he kept a low profile during that time for my sake, to save any awkwardness should we accidentally meet? The strange thing is, I don’t know the answer to that. I was the one who ended the affair. Ben, the arrogance I’d previously found so attractive in full force, refused to believe me when I said we had to stop seeing each other. I couldn’t imagine him creeping anywhere, so it may have been pure coincidence – with a dash of luck – that our paths didn’t cross during those after-weeks.
Whatever, none of this helps now, and I resolve to put what happened in Worthing down to a moment’s impulsiveness on Ben’s part and forget it. And while I’m about it, I’ll try to forget about Tessa, too, with her crazy comment about the past catching up with you. Not so crazy, of course, because it does, and it has, all the time. But again, I tell myself I’m safe and she knows nothing. If she did, something else would have happened by now.
Sometimes, in the still, small hours, I wonder if we should move, indulge Hector’s dream and buy a rambling, timbered house in another village or down a lane in the middle of nowhere. But rambling, timbered houses are beyond our means, unless they’re riddled with woodworm and need a new roof. Besides, how would I get to work and the elder girls to school if we moved away from Oakheart? In any case, I’m not the type to run away, and have no intention of doing so now.
Looking back to that crazy time with Ben, I’m amazed at my daring. It wasn’t as if I had a friend to give me an alibi, because I told no-one. This was my mess, my doing, I told myself, and it would be unfair to involve anyone else. Unfair? Yes, okay, nothing about it was fair to anyone. But that is what I thought, at the time.
I lied. I’m so ashamed about that, not just of the whole thing with Ben, but the lies I told to Hector as to my whereabouts when I was with my lover. That first afternoon, up on High Heaven, we talked and we kissed, once. That was all. We didn’t make another date. Ben just said, ‘See you,’ when we parted in the car park, and I said the same back. But we knew. We knew we were already at the stage where we couldn’t keep away from one another.
I didn’t lie directly all the time; it was more by omission. I had time owing at the surgery, as I’d been filling in on Saturday mornings for Sally who had been on holiday, and Ben would skive off work – something he seemed to find easy to do and, apparently, still does – and pick me up in his car around twelve-thirty. He would park in a side street, near the back entrance to the vets’. We spent a lot of time in that car, trolling around the countryside, smiling at each other, touching hands, before we settled on a distant park or riverbank where we would lie in the grass and kiss until our lips were swollen. Just kissing, a little more, that was all. I refused to go any further in a potentially public place.
The result of all this holding back was that by the time we did have sex – in a small country hotel miles away, where we knew nobody and nobody knew us – we fell on each other like wild animals. I was shameless, I admit that. The feeling of being wanted, desired, to that extent, the sensations Ben awakened in me that had been missing for a long time, the frisson of a secret relationship… it was heady stuff and I was hooked. I was hurting nobody, I reasoned, because nobody knew.
That little hotel – I do remember its name, but I never say it now, not even inside my head – became our love-nest. Love? I use the word loosely. It was never love like the feeling I have for Hector. Yet it was still love. Ben and I talked about that. He said he had fallen in love with me, and I challenged him over it. Did he not love his wife? Yes, he loved her. But this was different, another brand of love. There are many forms of love, and all of them real in their way, he said. I couldn’t disagree. How very convenient.
Afternoons with Ben were easy to get away with. Hector assumed I was either at work or at home, and I never failed to respond to a call or text from him, whatever state I was in at the time. I was never once late collecting Caitlin, and I was always there when Kitty and Hazel arrived home from school. I say these things now as if I’m proud of them. I am not. Far from it, believe me.
One day while I was at work, I received a text from Ben asking if I could get away for an evening, ideally a whole night. Using our regular mobile phones was always a risk, but what other way was there? We both took to hiding our phones when we were at home, either on our persons or secreted in a drawer. On the rare occasion I forgot, I would suddenly spring up from my chair and dash off to retrieve my phone from the bathroom or hall table.
Ben never forgot, or so he said. At least one of us stayed relatively sane.
I lied outright and invented a girls’ night out in Worthing. Ben and I actually went to Brighton, to a smart hotel overlooking the sea. Not for the whole night – I wasn’t crazy enough to risk that, although Ben seemed remarkably cool about the whole thing – but I didn’t get home until half past one in the morning. He dropped me at the station, and I got a taxi home from there.
We’d had a memorable night, with dinner amongst other diners like a proper couple. We took the last of the champagne up to our room, time being of the essence. I ended up drinking most of it because Ben was driving.
During those frantic weeks, Ben was my drug of choice, my go-to in my head whenever I felt worried or anxious or sad, about Mum and Dad, about Caitlin, about anything. Not only did I find Ben achingly attractive in a physical sense, I saw something in him that was never made crystal clear, something in his eyes that spoke of inner secrets which, should they be released, would spoil the effect. Ben made me feel more alive than life itself.
It couldn’t go on, though. Not on
ly did I begin to panic that the longer it continued, the more likely it was that we’d be found out but, more pressingly, I didn’t want to betray my husband and children any more. I’d been living in a dream world, convinced I wasn’t harming them, or Ben’s wife, until one day I woke up in a maelstrom of self-hate.
I texted Ben and asked him to meet me at High Heaven. We would talk, and Ben would agree I was right. We would share a goodbye kiss and it would be over. Damage limitation.
It wasn’t an easy conversation. How did I ever imagine it would be?
Twelve
TESSA
Zoe is not seeing so much of Hazel these days, not outside school anyway. She prefers to hang out with a girl called Tayler – skinny little thing, I do hope she’s not anorexic. Zoe isn’t easily influenced by her peers, but you never know quite who you’re dealing with.
Zoe and Hazel haven’t fallen out as such, not according to Zoe, anyway. Friendships when you’re twelve are fluid things, allegiances easily switching around. But it does mean my access to the Oliver family’s movements, Fran’s in particular, are more limited.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. That’s how the saying goes, isn’t it? Well, it works for me.
I saw Fran briefly the other day, when I’d made a snap decision to walk to the school and meet Zoe. My daughter doesn’t particularly like me meeting her, but on the odd occasion that I do, she accepts it with indulgent resignation. I was waiting by the main gates when I saw Fran pass by in her car. She slowed as she passed the school, scanning the entrance, and then she must have found a parking space because five minutes later, she appeared on foot. Caitlin wasn’t with her, being picked up her father, perhaps. The entrance was thronging by then, but I waved across and she saw me. She hesitated for a moment, seemingly unsure as to what to do, and then she started towards me and ran into a testosterone barrier of large, loud boys in rugby kit.
The Wife's Revenge Page 8