The Affair

by Amanda Brooke

  Nina could feel the heat rising in her cheeks and it had nothing to do with the mulled wine. ‘Care to explain?’

  Scarlett spun around so fast that the tinsel she had been hanging almost pulled the tree down on top of her. ‘What is this? Do I have to give you a list of everyone I see and everywhere I go now?’

  ‘You said you were with Clara and you clearly weren’t. Who were you with all night, Scarlett?’

  ‘I didn’t see Linus last night,’ Liam said, sounding only half-interested in the conversation as he began pulling more strings of cheese from his toast.

  ‘Fine, I was with Linus! And before you start on me, we were revising,’ she said, making the last word stretch out to drive the point home. ‘I only stayed because Bryn wasn’t around to give me a lift; there’s no other reason, Mum, so don’t go trying to have that conversation with me again!’

  Rather than launching into a debate, Nina was left dumbstruck and it was Bryn, appearing unnoticed behind her, who broke the tension. ‘So what am I getting the blame for now?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Nina said, ‘Scarlett will be taking full responsibility for her actions. I took it on trust that she was with who she said she was. Well, now I’ve learned my lesson. Don’t even bother asking to stay over with a friend again, because the answer will be no.’

  While mother and daughter glared at each other, Bryn shook his head. ‘I’ve had a lovely time in Llangollen, thanks very much for asking. I can’t say I’m getting on nearly as well with Caryn as you are with Scarlett but, you know, early days.’

  Nina blinked as her mind switched between the thorny issue of her daughter’s behaviour to the more prickly one of her husband’s relationship with his only child. She went over and cupped his weary face in her hands. ‘I’m so, so, sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I wanted everything to be perfect for when you came home. How was it?’ When Bryn pulled a face that made him age a full decade, she added, ‘That bad?’

  ‘I got over the threshold,’ he said. ‘She even made me a cuppa, but it was still hot when I was asked to leave.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I overthought things as usual,’ he confessed. ‘She looked really well, Nina, much better than I was expecting. I wanted to tell her how she suited having more meat on her bones, but I didn’t,’ he added quickly. ‘I know I would have been accused of suggesting she was fat again, so all I said was that she looked good.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound too bad.’

  Bryn shook his head. ‘Caryn accused me of being obsessed with how she looked, and how I never thought about the person she was inside.’

  ‘It sounds like there wasn’t anything you could have done,’ Nina said. ‘She’s still angry with you.’

  Rubbing his eyes, which looked tired and sore, he said, ‘I was really hoping for a breakthrough.’

  ‘I’ll get you a beer,’ Scarlett said, putting her hand on Bryn’s shoulder ever so briefly as she went past.

  ‘Thanks, love.’

  Bryn dropped down on to the sofa next to Liam and released a sigh that was part exhaustion, part defeat. It wasn’t a sound Nina ever wanted to hear from him again. ‘Do you want something to eat?’ she asked.

  ‘No, thanks. I grabbed a sandwich on my way back.’ He leant forward to inspect the upturned centrepiece which Liam had all but trashed. ‘What’s wrong with this?’

  ‘The wiring’s knackered,’ Liam said.

  ‘Do you want me to have a go?’

  ‘Could you?’ Nina said, hoping that even a minor victory fixing lights might brighten her husband’s mood.

  Bryn unscrewed the back plate, disconnected a couple of wires and, using his teeth, exposed bright silver wire from beneath the green plastic coating. ‘Technically,’ he said to Liam, ‘that’s not the way to do it.’

  ‘Do you know your way around electrics then?’

  ‘Any idiot could rewire this,’ Bryn said, and in a matter of moments the lights were on.

  ‘I did a lot of the maintenance myself when I had the printing factory,’ he told an impressed Liam.

  ‘If you’re that good, why don’t you set yourself up as an engineer or something? Must be better than spending half the night driving drunks home.’

  ‘Because,’ Bryn said, ‘I don’t have the proper qualifications. In fact, I don’t really have any qualifications, except my driving licence. Me and my brother were too eager to set up our printing business to bother with school, you see.’

  ‘But it could have worked out,’ Liam said.

  ‘And I suppose it did for a while, but, who knows, with more of an education behind us, we might have stood a better chance of keeping the business going. When we lost it, I had nothing to fall back on except an in-depth knowledge of obsolete printing equipment.’

  Turning to his mum, who had been holding her breath, Liam said, ‘You know I was only messing when I said I didn’t want to go to uni?’

  Nina gave a strangled cry, but Bryn silenced her with a warning glare. ‘Quit while you’re ahead, Nina.’

  After taking a long, cleansing breath, she managed to say, ‘Do you have a shortlist of universities and courses you want to apply for?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Right, priority number one; we get your application and personal statement and whatever else you need to do sorted by New Year.’

  ‘I don’t have to do anything until the end of January,’ Liam was saying as Scarlett returned to the room.

  She handed Bryn a tray with a bottle of beer, a glass and a bowl of his favourite olives. ‘It looks like you and me have been shoved to the back of the queue again as far as Mum’s attention goes,’ she muttered to him.

  ‘You,’ Nina said, ‘should be glad I’ve got other distractions.’

  Scarlett

  I remember Mum making this big announcement about having a boyfriend. She’d been acting weird for weeks, so I wasn’t that surprised, not until she followed it up by saying they were getting married. I seriously thought she was having a mental breakdown and we would all be stuck with some psycho. No way could I understand how she got carried away like that and, if I’m honest, I was pissed off that she wanted to be with him all the time. Apparently I wasn’t good enough company for her any more, which is why I spent most of the summer over at Eva’s. I didn’t realize back then what it was like to fall madly and deeply in love. I do now. I know exactly how she felt.

  It was like an obsession, for both of us. From the moment he’d watched me putting on my lip gloss and said I would get him into trouble, we’d both known what was going to happen. There was nothing we could have done to stop it. OK, he was married, but he told me it had been a big mistake because me and him were soulmates. I could talk to him like no one else I’d ever known, and he told me things he couldn’t tell her, especially his fantasies.

  Whenever Eva droned on about my idiot brother being the love of her life, I’m sure she thought I’d be jealous. But what I had was so much more, and the problem was I wanted more. I was thinking about him every second of every day and I wanted us to take more chances, but he was way too careful – or maybe not, given how things turned out. Getting that phone app off Liam was so the right thing to do.

  ‘Are you sure this will work?’ he’d asked when I first told him about it.

  ‘I’ve set it up on my phone and, yeah, it really does work.’

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘Send me a message,’ I said with a mischievous smile and then watched him type it out.

  What colour are your knickers?

  When he pressed send, my phone beeped, but instead of the message he’d sent, it was one from some PPI firm telling me I could claim a gazillion pounds in compensation.

  ‘So how do you see the proper message?’

  I tapped in a pass code and there it was, but when I closed the message down again, it went back to showing the dodgy details. My brother really isn’t as stupid as he looks.

  ‘I’m impressed.’

  After
sending him the installation file Liam had used and setting it to encrypt all our messages, I sent him a reply. I watched while he read the message from Vodafone offering an upgrade and waited until my message got the reaction I’d wanted. He gasped and then laughed.

  ‘This photo won’t appear anywhere else on my phone, will it?’

  ‘It won’t let you copy it into your photo album and it won’t let you forward it on to anyone else. It’s perfect.’

  ‘Not quite. Anyone checking phone records will see how often we contact each other.’

  ‘Who’d bother checking?’

  ‘I’m married, remember,’ he said.

  ‘OK, not a problem,’ I said, because Liam wasn’t the only one who was good with technology. ‘It can piggyback off other apps too, you know, like Messenger, which only shows up as data usage.’

  ‘I have to say, that brother of yours has thought of everything. He could make a fortune out of something like this, but he probably knows that already.’

  To be honest, the comment annoyed me. This wasn’t about bloody Liam. It was about the photo I’d sent him.

  ‘What?’ he asked, and that’s when I knew he’d been teasing me. ‘Oh, the photograph.’

  I’m pretty good at taking selfies, but this wasn’t one I was going to stick on Instagram, if you know what I mean. I was lying on my bed wearing Mum’s dressing gown. The gown was open.

  He let out a soft groan, and I leant over the table to kiss him. It looked like something was making it difficult for him to move towards me, not that he was going to anyway. He was too scared of someone barging in and catching us.

  ‘You’re getting too hard to resist, Scarlett Carrington,’ he said. ‘Oh, to hell with it. Come here.’

  After we kissed, I was just as desperate as he was. ‘I want us to spend the night together,’ I whispered.

  ‘No, we can’t,’ he told me. ‘We have to be careful. If we were caught it would taint what we have and hurt the people we love. Think of your mum, Scarlett. She wants so much for you, and so do I. You’re capable of so much and I don’t want to hold you back.’

  ‘You’re not.’

  ‘And that’s how it has to stay, and not only until you’re sixteen, but at least another couple of years after that. We have to wait until you’re an adult in every sense of the word. Only then can we let the world know how we feel.’

  ‘But that’s like for ever, and I can’t wait that long. All I’m asking for is one night. I love you.’

  It was the first time I’d told him I loved him and I think I shocked myself as much as him. I’d known for a while, but I thought he’d think I was childish if I’d said it too soon.

  I can’t begin to explain what it felt like when he looked into my eyes and said, ‘And I love you too.’

  I’m not ashamed of what we did or how we feel, and I refuse to feel guilty. We couldn’t help ourselves, and Mum of all people should know what that’s like. She put herself first once and all I’m doing is following her example.

  In the end, we only got to spend one night together because my stupid brother snitched on me, but I haven’t given up, you know. I’ll wait forever if I have to.

  11

  The Accusations

  Vikki’s legs felt wobbly as she got dressed and made her way downstairs. She could hear familiar piggy snorts coming from the TV along with Freya’s giggles as she slipped past the living room and headed for the kitchen. She hadn’t been expecting to find Rob in there, and at first he didn’t hear her come in. He was leaning against the kitchen counter with his forehead resting against a cupboard door.

  ‘Rob?’

  He gave a start and ran his fingers through his hair as he turned towards her.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’ve got a banging headache,’ he said tightly, and there was certainly pain in his voice. There were dark circles beneath his puffy eyes that mirrored her own, although she had managed to conceal hers with makeup.

  ‘Do you think you should stay off? You look awful,’ she said.

  Rob pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘No, I need to be in school today. I’ll go and have a shower to clear my head.’

  ‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there?’ she said, and felt sickening dread twist her insides. ‘You’ve been off all weekend.’

  ‘It’s nothing more than the usual problems of too much work, too many kids playing up and too much pressure on us all to perform. I’m starting to dread Mondays, but I’ll be fine once I get myself moving.’

  ‘How about I make breakfast?’ she said, swallowing back the saliva filling her mouth as she fought a wave of nausea. ‘What do you fancy?’

  Rob’s lips cut a thin line across his face, but gradually his features relaxed into a smile. ‘Only you.’

  Vikki’s heart clenched, and it was a distinctly unpleasant feeling. She had always felt secure in the knowledge that theirs was a perfect partnership. She had never doubted her husband’s devotion and his comment should have made her feel warm inside, but she felt oddly cold.

  ‘I wonder if Scarlett will be in school today?’ she asked.

  Rob turned away. ‘You shouldn’t be worrying about her. She’s not our problem.’

  ‘But still, I can’t help wondering what Nina’s going through. She’ll want to know who the father of the baby is. Did I tell you Scarlett says he’s married?’ she asked, knowing she hadn’t. When Rob turned to look at her, she added, ‘She thinks he’s going to look after her, which means …’ Her words trailed off, because she didn’t know what it meant.

  Rob raised an eyebrow. ‘What?’ he demanded.

  Vikki could feel her cheeks warming, convinced that Rob was about to realize what wicked suspicions had been keeping her awake all night. In panic, she said, ‘There’s a suggestion it’s someone close to home, like maybe her stepdad.’

  ‘Seriously, Vikki, since when did you start paying attention to malicious gossip? This isn’t one of your soaps. Scarlett’s bound to be covering up for some boy, and if her mum has any sense, she’ll march her straight to the doctor’s and get things sorted. Scarlett’s a good student and as long as people don’t build this up into something it’s not, she could get through this relatively unscathed.’

  ‘So you don’t think it’s Bryn?’

  Rob was shaking his head as he stepped past her. ‘I’d rather not think about it at all. And no, I don’t want breakfast. I need to make an early start at school so I can help those students who haven’t decided to throw away their lives.’

  When Rob went upstairs, he left behind yet more questions that Vikki didn’t have, or want the answers to.

  12

  Before

  Monday, 14 December 2015

  While Nina was busy getting everyone in the festive mood, Christmas was the furthest thing from Vikki’s mind as she made up her mum’s bed with fresh linen. She took a deep breath of air laced with fabric conditioner, a pleasant change from the nastier odours that had invaded her mum’s room over the last few days. Elaine was fighting back after her third and most gruelling round of chemo so far, and Vikki was becoming adept at splitting her time between home and what was becoming a second home. She couldn’t have done it without Rob’s forbearance, and thankfully he had gradually accepted that once every three weeks she needed to stay with her mum.

  Gathering up the dirty linen, Vikki opened the window just a crack to let in fresh air and refused to lift her gaze to the landscape that would be ravaged by developers in the New Year. She kept telling herself that there were worse things that could happen, but it was a thought that brought little comfort.

  Returning downstairs, she found her mum sitting at the kitchen table. It was the first time in three days Elaine had felt well enough to get up, and Vikki’s next challenge was to stop her from overexerting herself. Usually, Elaine wasn’t happy unless she was doing something. Rest, she said, was the reward earned after a hard day’s toil, which only proved how desperately ill she must have fe
lt to spend days in bed.

  ‘How are you?’ Vikki asked, hoping against hope that her mum didn’t feel as awful as she looked.

  Elaine had complained of being overweight in recent years but the weight she had lost since her diagnosis had the effect of making her appear much older than her years. Her features were gaunt and although she hadn’t lost all her hair, the remaining wisps weren’t enough to cover her scalp. She had acquired a wig which she wore for trips out, but preferred colourful scarves indoors. Today, however, she had put all her strength into the small matter of getting out of bed and had grabbed the first thing to hand. The grey beanie hat matched her complexion.

  ‘I feel like I’ve been kicked by a horse,’ Elaine said, ‘but on the upside, I don’t feel like I’ve been run over by a bulldozer like I did yesterday.’

  The comment served as a reminder that it wasn’t only Vikki who had been wondering about the view from her mum’s bedroom window. The planning application for the new development had been approved, and Sarah Tavistock had wasted no time. Even though Elaine hadn’t been well enough to get up and see what was going on outside, she had heard the gate opening and closing as one vehicle after another came to inspect the site. There had been a small digger at one point and Vikki had been horrified to think they could be starting work so soon.

  ‘Do you think you’ll be able to eat something?’ she asked.

  ‘Maybe later, when Freya’s home from nursery.’

  ‘All right. I’ll go and put this washing on and then nip out to the cottages to open some windows. They could do with a good airing,’ Vikki said, with a confidence she didn’t feel. In assuming the role of carer, Vikki had taken to stealing her mum’s lines, but it was only playacting.

  ‘Do you want me to help?’ Elaine asked, her shoulders tensing as if she were about to stand, but that act alone was enough to sap her strength and her body quickly sagged.