Raising my gaze to Vince, I shrugged a little, smiled a little more. “I don’t know. Maybe never,” I said, my voice skimming on the serious side of glib.
“But you’d be such a great mum,” Carole gushed. “I can’t imagine you not ever having kids, you’re wonderful with our two.”
The corners of my mouth edged up into a bigger smile, I couldn’t help it. It was such a compliment. “Thank you,” I cooed. “That’s such a lovely thing to say. They are wonderful kids, though.”
“They adore you. They’re always wanting to see their Aunty Steph. That’s why … Well, you’d be a great mum.”
“Thank you,” I said again, still glowing from the compliment. A second or two later, I felt rather than saw Mal’s body stiffen across the table. Everyone not privy to my thoughts probably assumed I was grinning about the idea of me being a great mother; they did not realize that I collected compliments like other people collected oxygen molecules to breathe. I craved external validation of my self-worth. It soothed a deep part of me like very little else could. However, to anyone outside of my mind, it must have seemed that I was desperate to have a baby, I was desperate to become a mother. And Mal … Mal obviously thought I was basking in this, that I was so caught up in the idea of parenthood that I’d forgotten what happened eight years ago.
I had to stop this. I had to change the conversation, otherwise it would become explosive. Mal’s explosion would be quiet, subdued, but destructive. He wouldn’t shout, he wouldn’t rant and rave, he would do something far worse: he would get up and leave.
He would not say anything to anyone, he would simply get up, go outside and wait in the car for me. He’d done it several times before, and I couldn’t bear it if he did it tonight. It made people think he was some sort of uncouth brute who couldn’t express himself. It made our friends think they had to worry about me and that maybe, just maybe, he might one day hurt me. Physically. He never would. I knew that, but none of those at the table did.
“You haven’t answered the question, Stephie dear—when are we going to hear the patter of little Wacken feet?” Vince pressed. “How long are we going to have to wait?”
All eyes were on me by then; even the head-dippers were focused on me.
I’d known most of these people since we were eighteen or nineteen, but we were not close. The reason we had all got on for so many years was because our friendships were impressively shallow. We enjoyed our time together, but I wouldn’t call any of the people sitting around the table during a crisis. After the crisis had passed, to tell them what could be a then-funny anecdote, yes. During, when one of them had to take charge and offer comfort, never.
I opened my mouth to repeat that we’d maybe never have children, to put a firmness into the words that would shut Vince up and would tell the rest of them that they had to end this interrogation.
“You can hear the patter of tiny Wacken feet whenever you want,” Mal said for me. “I’ve already got a child.”
Everyone at the table drew back; a couple of people gasped quietly. Internally, I gasped, too. Out of everyone there, I was the most jolted: I never thought he’d say that.
“A son,” Mal continued, seemingly oblivious to the horror he had unleashed. Even Vince, cocky, mouthy Vince, was stunned to silence.
Carole found her voice first. “Was this from a previous relationship?” she asked, keeping her shock in check. She raised her hand, brushed a brown lock from her face as she looked to Mal for his answer. A tremulous silence settled as everyone looked to him for an answer. Lie, I pleaded telepathically with him across the table. Please lie. For me, lie.
“He’s coming up to eight,” Mal said. “He’s called Leo, in case you’re interested. He’s got black hair, brown eyes. He likes the green Teen League Fighter superhero the best and he plays Star Wars on the PlayStation all the time.” Was that pride in his voice? He was proud. Proud. He hadn’t told me these trivial details and we had agreed … Now, he was revealing unknown secrets to our friends. And he was proud.
All eyes shifted back to me. Truly horrified as they were. My husband had cheated on me, had impregnated another woman while cheating and was so unabashed about it. Even vacant Frankie was agog: her eyes wide and incredulous, her mouth hanging open as her gaze swung between Mal and me, trying to work out who to stare at.
I gathered my senses together, inhaled and exhaled a few times before I attempted to speak. “It’s not as simple as Mal is making out.” I began the damage limitation process. “Someone very close to us desperately wanted a baby. It was heartbreaking. Mal loved her so much he’d do anything for her. And he agreed to father her child.” The absolute truth.
Mal stared at me across the table. His eyes were a piercing glare, slicing me open, cutting me apart, trying to expose the way I was lying without lying.
“Do you still see the child and mother?” Frankie asked. Frankie, who would previously have been smiling benignly and playing with her hair, was fully engaged and asking questions.
Mal’s glare intensified, I could feel it on my skin so I didn’t look at him. He was daring me to misdirect my way out of that question. He was accusing me, too. Accusing me because we both knew I was guilty. Of course I was.
“No,” I said. “She moved away before the baby was born. Went to live on the coast, rarely comes to London. We never see them.”
His chair made no sound as he pushed it back. He made no sound as he dropped his cream napkin on his half-eaten meal. Poor Carole had probably spent hours hand-making the pastry for the salmon en croute, scrubbing the new potatoes, baking the goat’s-cheese-and-chili-topped vegetables. And Mal had hardly touched it. Mal made no sound as he left the dining room. The only sound from his exit was the click of the front door as it shut behind him.
I stared down at my plate, tears collecting at the corners of my eyes, a lump bulging in my throat. I had hardly touched my food, either, and it all looked so beautiful. So delicious. And I could not even think of eating another crumb. In the candlelight and the shocked hush, everyone was watching me. Everyone was watching me and I was so ashamed. About now. About then.
I pushed out my chair, told Carole I would call her in the morning, told everyone it was good to see them, and left. And for the second time in less than six hours, I had to leave a room knowing that the second the door shut behind me, people would be talking about me.
Mal marches into the house without so much as a backward glance. After slamming the door, I run up the stairs straight to the bathroom. I clatter open the bathroom window, get a cigarette and then empty my bag on the tiled floor to find my lighter. I suck the life out of a cigarette, leaning out of the window to let the evidence escape. I draw the innards out of a second cigarette in four or five inhalations, too. After I am done, after I am calmer, I wrap the ends in a wad of toilet roll and flush the telltale signs that I am a liar. It’s only a little lie, one of action, not words, and it’s necessary because now I can talk to him without shouting.
He isn’t in the living room, sprawled on the sofa, angrily flicking through TV stations, as I thought he might be. He isn’t in the dining room, rummaging through our CD collection, looking for something loud and thrashy he can play at full volume to rile the neighbors and hurt my ears. He is in the dark kitchen, standing in front of the open fridge door so he is illuminated by its light, chugging down a beer as though it is water.
“I can’t believe you did that,” I say to Mal.
The last of the pale gold liquid slides out of the clear glass bottle and down my husband’s throat. He slams the bottle back onto the shelf in the fridge, hard enough to crack the bottle or the shelf, and reaches for the next beer, twists off the top, flicks the top back into the fridge, puts the glass lip of the bottle to his mouth, starts to gulp. It’s him ignoring me. In the car, I thought I had been ignoring him right back, but now it is obvious that it’s definitely this way around.
“Don’t you dare ignore me, Mal Wacken. I’m not the one in the w
rong here.”
He halts as he tips the bottle to his lips, lowers it and turns to me for the first time. His hooded eyes settle on me but are focused somewhere inside my head, as though he is trying to ransack my mind for information on what makes me tick.
“I did nothing wrong,” he states. “I simply told the truth.”
“We agreed—”
“We agreed I wouldn’t have any contact,” Mal cuts in. “That’s all we agreed. We didn’t say I wasn’t to talk about them. Him.”
He is right, of course. Just because we don’t talk about it, about her, about him, about them, I have assumed that he wouldn’t talk about it at all. To anyone. Not to his mother (who he must have been getting all that information from), to his friends, to his work colleagues, to our friends. The world might know all about Mal’s son and I would be none the wiser. “But you didn’t have to do that,” I insist.
“Don’t you ever feel guilty, Steph?” he asks suddenly, the tone of his voice dropping to a low level that makes his words reverberate through me, like a low bass on a speaker moving sound through a body. “Don’t you walk around with a huge anvil of guilt sitting just there?” He presses his beer to the area over his heart. A million times he has silently and vocally asked me that, and every time the same thought flies through my mind: you have no idea how it feels to be me. To feel so guilty all the time that you aren’t sure where you begin and the guilt ends. “I never forced you to do anything,” I reply, deliberately avoiding the question. My guilt is not like an anvil, it is a small, determined, lethal parasite that has gnawed its way through my mind, my body, my heart, my spirit. My guilt has hollowed me out and left me dead inside.
“I know. It was my choice.” He clutches the bottle over his heart, a brand of his guilt as well as that anvil. “And I’d make the same choice again. I’d always make that choice.”
I move across the room to him, all anger gone. I wrap my arms around him, the bottle, his symbol of remorse, still between us, separating our hearts.
“There’s something I meant to say to you earlier,” I tell him, trying to bridge the gap.
“Yeah?” he asks, still clutching the bottle between us.
“It’s a little weird that we both forgot,” I said.
“Forgot what?”
“It’s our anniversary.”
He closes his eyes, exhales deeply. “I did forget. With work and everything … I’m sorry.”
“I forgot, too,” I remind him. “If I hadn’t, we wouldn’t have gone to dinner with a lot of other people tonight. I only remembered as we sat down to eat.” I lower one of my arms, and with my hand I find the space on his body reserved just for me, that only I am allowed to touch in this way. “We could always make it up to each other.” I flatten my hand more firmly against him, but there is no response, his body hasn’t replied that he wants what I am doing to him. I continue talking, keeping my voice low, a suggestive smile on my lips—if I can get him to respond it will be fine. We’ll be fine again. “You know how good we are at making things up to each other.” Nothing. Absolutely nothing from his body. Absolutely nothing from his face: his eyes stare blankly down at me, as though I am a person he does not recognize, as though I am speaking a language he does not understand nor wants to learn. My fingers find his zipper and slowly draw it open. He shifts away from me then. Only a fraction, but it tells me his answer very clearly: no.
“I forgot,” he repeats, fumbling with his free hand to redo his zipper.
“Happy anniversary, Mal,” I say, and with a strength I didn’t know I possessed, I keep the tremble of tears out of my voice and off my face.
“Steph, happy anniversary.” His lips are brief and distanced as he touches something approximating a kiss on my forehead. He carefully untangles himself from me and leaves me to stand rejected and humiliated in the darkened kitchen.
My fingers curl into my hands, my nails dig into my palms and I close my eyes to stop the panic. Breathe. All I have to do is stand here and breathe. It will be fine, it will be OK if I can breathe.
I know he means it. I know he means it when he says he’d make the same choice again. Between Nova, his oldest friend, and me, he would choose me. Between his son and me, Mal would choose me. Always, he’d choose me.
I know this. But I also know that at no point in the last eight years has Mal said he doesn’t regret the choice he made with every bit of his guilt-heavy heart.
“Why you crying?”
Mummy was sitting on the sofa with her head in her hands and she was crying. She was crying and crying and crying. She looked up at him and she had a wet face and funny eyes and she kept crying.
“Why you crying?” he asked.
“Because I’m tired, Leo. I’m really, really tired. The house is a mess, and I don’t know where to start. Amy’s on holiday for another week, so I have to run the café on my own because that girl who was covering for her kept stealing from the till. I’m scared to close my eyes and go to sleep at night because you keep climbing out of your cot and I’m terrified that if you’re not turning on the gas downstairs, you’re going to work out how to unhook the chain and then you’ll disappear out the front door. And I’m sick of doing this on my own. I’m sick of having no one to talk to, no one to rely on, of having to be everything all the time. That’s why I’m crying, Leo, I’m tired.”
He stared at her. Poor Mummy. From the box on the table, he pulled out a tissue. He put it on her arm and held it there, like she did to him when he had a bump and he cried. He held it and held it and then he took it away and kissed her arm.
“All better,” he said. “No cry anymore. All better.”
“I suppose it has to be, doesn’t it?” Mummy said.
He nodded at her. All better now.
Leo, age 3 years
CHAPTER 5
H e’s been good as gold,” Nurse Melissa says as we return to Leo’s hospital room.
She has switched on the lights and is thumbing through my book—Methods in Experimental Psychology. I wonder for a moment if she finds it interesting or if, as is most likely, she thinks it’s dull.
“Thanks, Melissa,” I reply, and then I realize she is looking at, and talking to—in fact, completely focused on—Keith. I roll my eyes as I take my seat and start to examine Leo for any signs—no matter how small—of change. I often wonder if Nurse Melissa is so eager to watch over Leo because she fancies my husband. A disproportionate number of women do; Nurse Melissa is simply a shade more unsubtle than most.
Over the years, I’ve watched otherwise sane, rational and professional women lose their minds and, frankly, their self-respect around Keith—it happens all the time, in shops, in banks, in restaurants, at airports, in this hospital. It’s his looks, his height, his job, his persona, and his presence. He is like a fantasy. Even if you didn’t know he had once been in the Army, you only have to look at him to know he’s the type of guy who would take a bullet for one of his men in battle, and would go on to lead a group of villagers to safety by putting himself between them and life-threatening danger. You spoke to him and his voice would turn your knees to mush; he smiled at you and you felt like the most beautiful woman in the world. He might not be someone you would normally fancy on paper, but in the flesh he would make you turn a little bit silly. I know, because that’s exactly how I felt about him when I first worked with him at the bar. I had a huge crush but I got over it. Then two years later he asked me out. And the fantasy became an altogether different reality.
The first time I’d seen him naked, the anniversary we’d just been “celebrating,” I had become frozen. His body had been carved from the most perfect block of dark mahogany, every line of him smooth and unblemished. I’d lost my nerve at that point, and my eyes started scanning the room for the clothes I’d already shed, as I decided not to take anything else off. I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. Not when he looked like that, like a Michelangelo statue, and I was ordinary and, up until that moment, more than happy with mysel
f. He’d taken my wrist and, gently but firmly, had placed the flat of my hand just left of the center of his bare chest, held it there. I’d immediately felt the rhythm of his heart: strong, steady, fast. Incredibly fast. “You’re the only person who’s ever been able to make my heart beat that fast without trying,” he’d said. “Do you understand now why I love you?” In his dark eyes, in his smooth voice, rang sincerity. Plain, simple, honest. I’d smiled, he’d grinned back and the roller-coaster feeling that swelled and plummeted inside me told me I was going to fall in love with him. I wasn’t then, not like he was with me, but it would happen. It would absolutely happen.
“You’ve arrived quite late,” Melissa says to Keith. I don’t have to look at her to know she’s probably twirling a lock of hair around her fingers, sticking out her chest, just-so to sit in his line of sight, while she simpers up at him from under her eyelashes.
“I suppose I have,” Keith replies. “I didn’t really notice the time.”
I have no real need to be bothered by the women who flirt with my husband, even if I was the jealous type. He’s aware of their attention—he’s a man, after all—but he isn’t interested. In his post-Army, bar manager days, he slept with any woman who looked in his direction, and had no shame about it. He was like a sugar addict let loose in a world full of every variety of cake, and he did not restrain himself. He sampled, devoured, indulged in—basically gorged himself on—every crumb that came his way, so by the time we went on our first first date, he had decided he wanted steady, filling home cooking. He had lost his taste for sugary, empty goodies and was ready to settle down, get married and have children. Even though I wasn’t, he was very open about being willing to wait for me to catch him up.
During the breaks in our relationship, I expected him to go back to his old ways but he never did. And that was why he never flirted with any of these women: he really had lost his appetite for cake.
Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel Page 4