Foursome

by Jane Fallon

  ‘How did you even get them to see her with nothing to show them?’ Joshua says, and I wait to see how she’ll respond to that one. I haven’t told her about filming Mary because she never really gave me a chance.

  ‘Um…’ she says, looking uncomfortable. ‘Well…’

  I don’t know what’s happening to me but I can’t just let her flounder there. Maybe I’m just hoping to shame her with my kindness.

  ‘Lorna had me and Kay put her on DVD, didn’t you, Lorna? We just got her to read something, that’s all.’

  She can’t keep the surprise off her face as she looks at me. But there’s also nervousness there. Is this a trap? Of course she would think like this because I can’t imagine her ever doing anything kind for anyone unless there was a catch. I raise my eyebrows to try to convey that it’s the truth.

  ‘Mmm,’ she says, and this time she genuinely does look embarrassed at taking the credit right in front of me.

  ‘Well, you should be very pleased with yourself,’ Joshua says, and Lorna says nothing.

  Later I ring Mary who is hysterical with excitement and gratitude. ‘I know you had a big hand in this,’ she says, which goes a long way to making me feel better. Even despite Lorna having to assume the glory I am so pleased for Mary, so genuinely happy for her, that I get a real buzz from her reaction. It carries me through the afternoon. I feel like I’ve eaten Ready Brek. It’s just as well because without that feeling the rest of the day, comprised of typing in the blanks in a contract, arranging a couple of meetings and doing some filing, would be insufferably tedious. I’m finding it hard to believe that until a few weeks ago this was how I spent my days. And I was happy. At least, I thought I was.

  We’re seeing Rose and Simon again on Saturday night, but first Isabel and I are meeting to go to Westfield for some Christmas shopping. After we’ve trailed around unproductively for an hour or so we decide that sitting at the champagne bar is much more fun, even though it’s not even midday and neither of us can afford to drink champagne.

  ‘I had a long talk with Alex this morning,’ she tells me. ‘He came to pick the girls up for ballet. I told him I was serious about Luke. And I meant it. I am. You were so right, he’s good for me in so many ways and I’m happy when I’m with him. Really happy. In a way that I can’t ever remember being with Alex.’

  Thank the lord. ‘How did he take it?’

  ‘Well, he said he was upset but, do you know, I’m not sure he was really. It almost felt like he’s going through the motions, like he doesn’t know what else to do with his life so he thought he might as well see if he could get back with me.’

  That’s exactly right. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me. I don’t think he’s stable enough at the moment to know what he really wants.’

  ‘And it’s funny. It’s Alex being around that’s really made me realize that I want Luke. That and your tireless campaigning.’

  ‘I like to provide a service.’

  ‘I’m going to introduce him to the girls. And then, if they get on – which I know they will – I think I might ask him to spend Christmas with us. Him and Charlie. Unless Charlie is with his mum, of course.’

  I couldn’t be happier. For Isabel and, if I’m being honest, for myself. I lean over the table and give her a hug, nearly knocking everything on to the floor.

  ‘You’re going to be happy this time. I know you are.’

  Rebecca and Daniel, Luke and Isabel. It works perfectly.

  I can’t believe what I’m hearing. She’s got it wrong, she must have. Or else there’s an innocent explanation. I can’t think what that could be, but I’m sure there is one.

  Rose has just put her drink down and said, ‘Oh, I know what I meant to tell you. I remembered where I’d seen Luke before.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I say, expecting her to say that she’d met him through work or Simon had played football with him once or something.

  ‘My sister lives in Highgate and he lives on her street. I’ve seen him with his wife…’

  ‘They’re separated,’ I say quickly.

  ‘Well, I thought I remembered him saying he was separated, and, of course, he was all over Isabel, but, the thing is, Rebecca, I’ve seen them together recently. Like last week.’

  ‘They have a kid. He was probably visiting him.’ So he told Isabel they couldn’t stand to be near each other. He was probably just exaggerating a bit. Big deal.

  Rose looks at me like she’s about to tell me someone’s died. ‘They were holding hands.’

  I look at Dan like he might be able to help me understand what she’s telling us. He looks as clueless as I feel.

  ‘Maybe it’s his… I don’t know, his sister or something.’

  ‘Why would he walk down the street holding hands with his sister?’ Simon says, and he’s got a point although I don’t acknowledge it.

  ‘It’s not his sister,’ Rose says gently, realizing she’s upset me more than she anticipated. ‘He lives there. With his wife and their child.’

  ‘And you’re sure about this?’ I can’t take it in. Luke walking down the road holding hands with his wife. The wife that he told Isabel he could barely stand to be in the same room as. And then it hits me. Of course, that’s the reason he can never stay the night. It’s not because of work or his fear of commitment. It’s because his wife would want to know where he was. Now I think about it, it suddenly seems so obvious. It makes sense of the fact that he can’t meet up on the weekends too. He’s been using his son as an excuse but, in actual fact, what he should have been saying is, ‘My wife wouldn’t like it, really, if I told her I was going off to see my mistress.’

  Oh God. That word. Isabel is a mistress.

  ‘I take it Isabel has no idea?’ Rose is saying, and I struggle to tune back in.

  ‘No. God, no, of course not.’

  ‘She’ll be devastated,’ Dan says, stating the obvious.

  ‘Well, don’t worry,’ Rose says. ‘I’m not going to say anything. I’ll let you decide how you want to handle it.’

  I look at Dan. We’ve – well, let’s face it, I’ve – spent so much time protecting Izz from the full horror of Alex’s behaviour and steering her towards Luke that I have never really even considered whether that was the right thing to do. I just wanted her to be over Alex. I just wanted her to be happy again.

  ‘I’m going to have to tell her,’ I say. ‘I don’t think she’d ever forgive me if I didn’t. You’re definitely sure it’s him?’ I say to Rose and she nods.

  ‘Definitely.’

  She would find out eventually anyway, of course. Luke would duck her invitation to spend Christmas, he’d continue to run home every night and claim childcare duties every weekend. Of course, he’d have to avoid introducing Isabel to Charlie too. Sooner or later she would have realized that something wasn’t right and confronted him. Maybe he was hoping that eventually she’d get bored of the relationship not moving forward and she’d just dump him, or perhaps he intended to finish with her before it all got too serious. Sadly, it may be too late for that in Isabel’s case. With my encouragement she’s latched on to Luke as the great white hope for her future. She’s finally got over Alex and fallen head first into something new that I’ve helped convince her is the answer to all her prayers. I have no idea how I’m going to break it to her that her new relationship is a sham, but I know that I have to do it straight away, before she lets herself get in any deeper.

  I can’t believe that Luke took us all in. He had us all falling for him, not just Izz. But how could he do this to her when she was so vulnerable? He probably does it all the time, sweeps lonely women off their feet and then disappears out of their lives mysteriously one night before they’re on to him. I could kill him. I’d enjoy it. But dealing with him has to come later. I need to think how to tell Isabel first.

  Needless to say the news rather takes the shine off the evening. We still have a nice enough time, we all get on, but my heart, at least, isn’t really in it.

&nb
sp; ‘I hope this doesn’t send her running to Alex,’ I say to Dan when we’re getting ready for bed.

  ‘If it does, it does,’ he says like some kind of wise Chinese philosopher. ‘Let her do whatever she thinks is best for her, OK?’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  On Sunday morning I take William round to Isabel’s with strict instructions to keep the girls amused while their mum and I have a chat. At least I can be sure that Luke won’t be there. He’ll be tucked up in bed with his wife, reading the papers or smiling at her as she brings him bacon and eggs. She’s surprised, but pleased to see me. I try not to look like the bearer of bad news, but she knows me too well and she picks up pretty quickly that something is wrong.

  ‘Rebecca?’ she says. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Of course,’ I say in return. ‘I’m fine.’

  I wait until William has gone up to the girls’ attic room and Isabel is putting the kettle on, and then I say, ‘Actually, everything isn’t fine.’

  She looks all concern for me. ‘Bex, what is it? It’s not Dan?’

  I launch straight in. For both our sakes I just have to get this over with as quickly as possible.

  ‘Luke’s married.’ Well, there’s one way to break it to her gently.

  Isabel looks at me, confused. ‘What?’

  ‘Luke. He’s still with his wife. Rose saw them together in Highgate.’ I hesitate and then deliver my sucker punch. ‘Holding hands.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last week. That’s where she recognized him from. Do you remember she said…? Anyway. He lives near her sister.’

  Isabel sits down. ‘No, she’s got it wrong. It must be his wife’s new boyfriend. Luke said she had a new boyfriend.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Izz.’

  ‘But…’ she says, ‘how can he still be with her? I see him three or four times a week…’

  ‘But never overnight or at weekends…’

  She looks up at me as she takes that in. There’s no denying it makes sense.

  ‘Oh God,’ she says. ‘How could I be so stupid?’

  ‘He’s very convincing,’ I say, sitting down next to her. ‘He had us all fooled. If you think about it, though, he had it all worked out. His job means that he works late sometimes so his wife isn’t going to question it when he’s not home till ten thirty. He travels a lot and who’s to know if he has a woman holed up in his hotel while he’s away? He couldn’t have kept it up for long, though.’

  ‘But he came over to yours. Why would he risk that if it was such a carefully worked-out operation?’

  I’ve been thinking about this overnight. I couldn’t sleep, of course. ‘Because I think he really likes you. And I don’t think that was ever part of the plan.’

  ‘I’ve been so stupid,’ Isabel says. ‘So fucking stupid.’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘It’s hardly your fault.’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘but I encouraged you. I told you to go for it. I told you he’d be good for you.’

  ‘Oh God,’ she says. ‘I’m meant to be seeing him tomorrow night. What shall I do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m all out of good ideas. But I’ll come with you, if you want, if you decide to go ahead and see him. I’ll stand in your corner and cheer you on. Although I can’t guarantee I won’t feel like I have to tell him what I think of him.’

  ‘Is it better on the phone or in person?’ she says. ‘Obviously I can’t phone him today – he always told me he’d call me at the weekends, so he could do it when Charlie wasn’t around. He said until I’d met Charlie properly he didn’t want him wondering who his dad was talking to. It sounds lame now, doesn’t it, but it made sense at the time. I thought he was such a nice bloke to be so worried about his son like that.’

  ‘Well, if you see him, there’s a danger he’ll win you round somehow, after all, we know now how manipulative he is. But if you phone him you risk him putting the phone down on you before you’ve said all you want to say.’

  ‘I need to see him. I want to see the look on his face when I tell him I know. And I want him to have to explain himself.’

  She decides to leave the arrangements as they are – that they will meet at half past six in the little bistro up the road. I offer to come again and she says no, she’ll be fine and, besides, she doesn’t want to alert him to the fact that anything’s wrong before the time is right.

  ‘I might just tell him I’m going to go back to Teddington with him to stay the night, see what he does,’ she says. We spend a few minutes coming up with more and more elaborate revenges we could take on Luke, which seems to cheer her up until she suddenly seems to take in exactly what this all means and her mood crashes.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ Nicola demands when she comes in looking for something.

  ‘Because I told her Justin Timberlake was gay,’ I say, and Isabel manages a smile.

  ‘He’s not, is he?’ Nicola asks nervously. Nicola loves Justin Timberlake. Natalie, on the other hand, is more a Rhianna girl.

  ‘No,’ Isabel says, and laughs. ‘He’s not is he, Rebecca?’ She gives me a look.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I was just teasing.’

  ‘Well, don’t,’ Nicola says sharply. ‘It’s mean.’

  I spend most of the day round at Isabel’s while she alternately feels fired up and then torn down. At one point she says, ‘Oh no, I told Alex I’d moved on forever,’ and I can’t decide if she’s upset because she doesn’t want him to think she’s still not over him or if she’s wishing she hadn’t turned him down so finally. I start to worry that she’s going to decide to go back to him after all, a knee-jerk reaction to her latest disappointment, but I decide to say nothing. I’ve said enough, really, on the subject of Isabel’s relationships.

  27

  Lorna is all dressed up and ready for the big lunch. I’m still keeping out of her way although I’m desperately curious to know how it goes. She’s being unbearably smug and self-important around the office and she makes sure she drops in something about ‘lunch with Heather and Niall’ at least every ten minutes in her conversations with Joshua or Melanie and the orders she barks to Kay. She still seems a little unstable to me, a bit manic. I hear her telling Melanie about the ‘brilliant’ weekend she had, which seems to have involved clubbing and eating out, shopping with friends and, rather randomly, bowling. I know she’s lying. I know she will have spent the whole two days holed up in her flat, hoping vainly that Alex would swing by on a white horse and sweep her off her feet. Actually, I don’t expect she would have cared what colour the horse was.

  I’m hoping that she remembers Heather’s agenda, which is to find a more highbrow project, something where she can show off her brains as well as her beauty. Not too highbrow, obviously. Just something where she can maybe say something without having to have it written for her once in a while. Lorna’s only role in the lunch, really, is to stop Heather committing to something she’ll later regret and to keep reminding Niall how great she is, how talented, how smart. And, let’s not forget, how popular. (Her current shows, Celebrity Karaoke and High Speed Dating, pull in more than seven million viewers each, taking twenty-eight and thirty-one per cent of the audience share respectively; Heat apparently sells five per cent more copies than usual when she’s on the cover, etc.) I have all the facts and figures memorized if she wants to hear them, but I don’t want to go in there to be insulted by her, so I write what I think is relevant on a piece of paper and give it to Kay to hand to her.

  ‘Tell her you compiled it,’ I say. ‘That way she might take some notice.’

  ‘I already know all this,’ she apparently says to Kay when she looks at it, but she folds it up and puts it in her pocket anyway.

  About forty minutes after Kathryn’s audition for Nurses, just as I am putting on my coat, I get a call telling me that she has got the job. It’s a year’s contract, a rare bit of stability in an insecure world. I pass the details on to Kay, gutted that I can’t tell Kathryn th
e good news myself.

  As (bad) luck would have it I am just going out to get some lunch as Lorna is getting in the lift. I think about saying, ‘It’s OK, I’ll walk,’ but that would be such a pointed and obvious insult that I decide I can’t. We stand there in silence, both counting down the floors from five to ground, willing it to go faster. As she steps out I decide to take the moral high ground and I say, ‘I hope it goes well.’

  She manages to say thank you, which, I suppose, is something. I follow her out on to the street, deciding that whichever way she walks I’ll go the opposite, so we’re not doing that awkward ‘walking down the street pretending we don’t know the other one is right there’ thing. She turns to the left and, just before I step out I hear her say, ‘Oh my God,’ so I look to see what she’s seen and there’s Alex, standing there, leaning against the window of the shop next door.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ he says, and then he sees me, and he looks straight past Lorna who has stopped dead still, and he says, ‘Rebecca.’

  ‘What do you want?’ I say. I can see Lorna’s bottom lip trembling and tears are welling up in the corner of her eyes. It’s like that moment when you know a toddler is going to kick off because he’s dropped his ice cream and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

  ‘To talk to you. About Isabel.’

  Lorna is rooted to the spot, waiting to hear whatever it is that he has to say to me. All I can think is that she needs to get going if she’s going to get to the Ivy on time.

  ‘I don’t have time. Neither do I have anything to say to you, to be honest. Come on, Lorna, I’ll walk with you.’

  She doesn’t move and Alex doesn’t seem to be going anywhere either. I can’t just walk off and leave them there; I need to know she’s going to get to where she needs to be, so I end up standing there too, waiting to see what will happen next.

  ‘Alex…?’ Lorna says.

  He looks at her briefly then turns back to me and says, ‘She told you that I asked her if I could come back?’