When I’ve got over enough of the feeling of being winded, I peer through the half-open living room door. I can see Jamie, slumped on the sofa, with a dejected look on his face, as if Manchester United have just lost a game. I think because, to Jamie, upsetting me is like Manchester United just losing a game. It’s not something he enjoys, or something he wants to happen. It’s just no more of a big deal than that.
“Then you should have told her that,” says Liam, whose face I can’t see.
“Look, it isn’t like I planned it. I didn’t sit down and think, hey, my girlfriend wants to adopt a kid, but I don’t, so maybe I’ll just keep quiet about it and hope it goes away …” Jamie trails off. “I just don’t know, now that it’s staring me in the face, if it’s something I’m really all that up for.”
“Christ, Jamie, listen to yourself!” There’s a little bit of affection mixed in with a lot of irritation in Liam’s voice. “Don’t you ever look at your life and realize how lucky you are? To have a woman like Bella, an amazing, funny, beautiful woman like Bella, and to throw that away because you’re not really all that up for making a proper life with her? When you know that’s a thing that a lot of people would kill for?”
I don’t move a muscle. I don’t even breathe.
What does Liam mean by this?
Oh, wait a moment. I get it. He means Kerry. What he’s really saying—even if he’s using my name—is that Kerry was an amazing, funny, beautiful woman. That his life with her was just taken away in a flash, and nobody should take anything like that for granted.
Jamie’s answer is to get to his feet, yawn, and stretch. “Yeah, well, I’m too knackered to think about any of this tonight. I’m going to crash.”
Which means that any moment, he’ll be walking right past me in the hallway.
I’m not ready for that encounter right now. I just can’t do it.
I don’t even care that it’s freezing cold outside, or that it’s gone two o’clock on Christmas morning. I’m going for a walk. A long, long walk, until Jamie is fast asleep and I can slip into my side of the bed without waking him.
I move swiftly and silently to the front door, open it, and pull it shut with an almost-inaudible click behind me.
Grace
Friday, December 25
When the electricity cuts off, at one thirty on Christmas Day, with a turkey in the oven and five pans of vegetables ready to put on the stove, there’s a small part of me that wonders if Charlie has put in a call to the power company and deliberately arranged the power cut, just to spite me.
The call I put in of my own, however, assures me, via a soulless automated voice message, that in fact it’s three whole streets that are out of power, that they are doing everything they can to fix the problem as fast as possible, and that I should call back for regular updates. So I stop thinking it’s anything to do with Charlie.
Unless, of course, he’s so focused on hating me, from the friend’s flat he’s staying in up in West Hampstead, that the power of his righteous anger has caused a small part of the National Grid to short-circuit.
When I hang up on the soulless automated voice, I try calling Polly, for at least the tenth time today. I desperately want to apologize for upsetting her last night, and I desperately need to hear a kind voice right now.
It cuts straight to voice mail, for at least the tenth time today.
So I leave a pathetically jokey message, asking her if she has any idea how to cook a turkey in a cold oven, and wondering if she’s up for coming around and getting horribly drunk later on tonight. I’m just ending the call when I hear the front door opening and Charlie letting himself in.
He greets me with a look of twisted disgust on his face that’s enough to make me wonder if I’m right about the power cut after all.
“Where are the boys?” is all he says to me as he carries a bag of presents in, not bothering to wipe his feet on the doormat.
“They’re in the garden. Percy is showing Robbie how to work the electric car your parents sent him.”
“Well, tell them to come in, for Christ’s sake! I came over to spend Christmas Day with them, not stand around in a freezing cold garden trying to work a stupid toy.”
I don’t say that actually, the only reason I suggested they go out into the garden was that Charlie was due to arrive almost two hours ago, and I thought a run-around out there might distract them from the fact he was running late.
“Sure. I’ll call them in. They should probably have a snack, anyway. Lunch is going to be delayed, because there’s a power cut, and—”
“This is all your department, Grace,” he interrupts me coldly. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have all that much interest in your homemaking trials and tribulations anymore.” He pushes past me, determined to go out into the chilly garden now that I’ve expressed a reason of my own to bring the boys indoors. “That can all be Saad Amar’s concern, now.”
“Charlie, I’ve told you, it’s all over with him!” Told him every day this past week—in pathetically begging text messages and emails that I would have been ashamed to send if I hadn’t been all maxed out on the shame front. And if I weren’t trying to save the only family my children have ever known. “I’m not going to see him again! It was a huge mistake. Huge. And I’m so, so sorry.”
“You’re right, it was a huge mistake. And you should be sorry.” Charlie’s using the icy, clipped tone that accompanies my hysterical one these days—when he actually decides to speak to me, that is. “You’ll be even more sorry when Valentine has finished wiping the floor with you.”
The incongruously named Valentine is his freshly (re-) appointed divorce lawyer and the bogeyman Charlie has been scaring me with this past week.
“Oh, and just in case you were thinking of going out and having a little spending spree in the sales tomorrow, you should know that I’ll be handing in my notice to MMA once the holidays are over—I mean, I don’t know how I can be expected to work for my ex-wife’s lover—so money is going to be pretty tight for you, I’m afraid. Even before Valentine has proposed a suitable settlement.”
I don’t know why he thinks I’ve been planning shopping sprees. Or why he thinks he can scare me with looming penury.
I mean, I’m scared enough of everything else for that to be pretty low down on my list right now.
“Oh, God, Charlie, please don’t leave MMA.”
“Why? So that you can feel less like you’ve destroyed my life?”
“No! Because you enjoy your job, and you’re good at it, and—”
“Well, maybe you should have thought of that,” he says, a sneer taking up residence on his lips, “before you opened your legs for my boss.”
Even if he weren’t already heading for the back garden, I’d have absolutely nothing I could say to that.
The point is, he’s right. I didn’t think of anything. I refused to think of anything. Charlie’s job. The effect on the boys. All I thought about—selfishly, stupidly—was Saad, and how incredible he made me feel.
To be honest, a whole lot of what I’m still thinking about—now just plain moronically—is Saad.
Though this is partly just because it’s taking so much effort to ignore his calls, and his texts, and—waiting for me when I got back home from Bella’s disastrous party last night—an actual letter, shoved through the letter box. I opened it up before I realized what it was, only to see that it was a version of the handmade card I made for Saad all those weeks ago. He’d photocopied my drawing of the Starbucks-drinking Van Gogh cow and added, in the background, his own rather wobbly and endearingly rubbish drawings of two figures that I think were meant to be me and him, holding hands and smiling at each other. It made my heart hurt, just looking at it. Which is why I burned it, without reading the long letter inside. Burned my hand, too, incidentally, which made me understand a little bit about what self-harm might be all about. The searing pain that shot through my finger, followed by the extreme soreness as I chopped the vegetables
and basted the turkey today, felt like penance for my terrible sin. I’d burn it again, five times over, if it would help ease the pain I’ve caused everybody else. I’d start wearing a hair shirt, and one of those horrible bonkers metal spike things the mad monk wears in the Da Vinci Code, and wake up in the middle of the night to scourge myself for three hours before sunrise if it would turn the clock back to …
Well, to when? To the time before I started having an affair with Saad, so that I could stop it before it had even begun?
Or just to the time before Charlie found out?
Because the truly terrible thing is that despite all my agonies of regret, and the suffocating weight of guilt about what I’ve done to my family, I’m not sure I could put my hand on my heart and say I wish I’d never done what I did with Saad. That’s how truly happy he made me.
“Mummy!” It’s Robbie and Hector, pressing their noses up against the glass at the side of the front door. They’ve come around through the side gate into the front garden, which is only going to enrage Charlie even more, both because they’re not supposed to know how to open the side gate (thanks for that, Percy) and because they’ve clearly run off the moment he’s gone out there. Mind you, if he’s doing the same with the electric car as he did with a remote-control plane last Christmas—taking it over, refusing to allow them to have a go in case they damaged it, and barking at them when they got in the way—I can’t exactly blame them. “Mummy, Mummy, Santa Claus came!” Hector sings at me as I open the door to let them in.
“I know, darling. Are you happy with the things he brought you?” By which, of course, I mean, are you happy, period? Do you mind that I’ve blighted your childhood by forcing your dad to divorce me? Has the fact that I’ve practically bankrupted myself (OK, practically bankrupted Charlie, but thanks to the fanatical Valentine, the end result will be the same) buying extra toys and games and chocolate made your Christmas as good as I always want it to be? “Is the electric car good fun?”
“Yes, but that was from Grandma and Grandpa,” Robbie explains, with the weary patience he’s picked up from Percy this past week. “Santa brought us different things. Santa brought me a water pistol, and a baseball mitt, and a Sponge-Bob SquarePants annual …”
“We should really say thank you,” Hector adds, more serious than ever.
“Yes, that’s a lovely idea. When Christmas is over, we’ll write and say thank you to Santa. Now, don’t the two of you want to go out and play with Daddy for a bit?”
They look reluctant.
“We’re cold and hungry now,” Robbie informs me.
“Well, maybe you can have something to eat, and warm up a bit, and then go outside and play with Daddy.” I force a smile onto my face, trying to sound as positive as the slew of Coping With Divorce and Not Totally Screwing Up Your Children books I got from Amazon have bossily instructed me to do. “He’s come all the way from North London to have lunch and play with you today!”
“Santa came all the way from the North Pole,” Hector says. “I think we should have lunch with him instead.”
When I marshal them into the kitchen for a snack—homemade gingerbread men (only slightly burnt) that I baked at four o’clock this morning! I’m not the world’s worst mother after all!—I can see Percy and Charlie through the window. They’re standing about ten feet apart, on opposite sides of the garden, while Charlie operates the electric car. They’re not talking.
They don’t talk much all day, in fact. Lunch, when it eventually hits the table hours behind schedule at four thirty, is a pretty dismal affair, and not only because as soon as the power came back on, I had to heat-blast the turkey to within an inch of its life (or should that be death) so that it’s gone appallingly dry and chewy. Nor is it because the roast potatoes haven’t really recovered from their slow start and have soaked up masses of oil to become soggy and leaden. Nor because I’m just a rubbish cook, who hasn’t even managed to serve up a vegetable, root or cruciferous, that isn’t either under- or overdone.
It’s because Charlie is pinch-lipped and silent at one end of the table, Percy morose and monosyllabic at the other, leaving Robbie bewildered, me desperate, and Hector still chattering on and on about inviting Santa for lunch, to anyone who will listen.
I think we’re all relieved when a decent amount of time has passed and Charlie can take his leave of us without having to feel that he’s done anything at all, unlike me, to Ruin Christmas.
Though actually, in the grand scheme of things, this is pretty ironic. Because from my point of view, Charlie has ruined plenty of Christmases. Hector’s first Christmas, for example, when I was still permanently chained to the washing machine and the breast pump, and Charlie suddenly announced (on the twenty-third of December) that his parents had decided to come over to meet the baby, and would I mind making the mince pies this year rather than buying them from the bakery section in Tesco, because they’d be so disappointed if they felt I wasn’t doing a proper English Christmas. Or the first Christmas we had together, with his sister in Chicago, before the boys came along, when Charlie got his American and English sizes back-to-front, bought me a slinky negligee that was two sizes too small, and then spent the rest of the day wondering out loud if I should really be eating so much of that pecan pie, or drinking so much of that eggnog, as though I was fat rather than him being dim enough not to check the sizes.
Still, I know those things pale into insignificance in the wake of my crime.
Anyway, while he buttons his coat in the hall, he mutters threats at me about lawyers’ letters, and how the courts take a dim view of a mother’s adultery … He’s so stoked up with righteous fury that my fresh round of apologies runs off him like water off a duck’s back.
“Words are pretty meaningless,” he tells me just before he stalks out toward the waiting cab that will take him back to West Hampstead, “coming from a liar and a cheat.”
Two words which, incidentally, aren’t meaningless at all.
I just about make it through the boys’ bathtime without bursting into tears, tuck them up into bed with promises of a walk to see the deer in Richmond Park tomorrow, and then I head downstairs again. I’m planning on pouring myself the largest gin and tonic the world has ever seen, desperately trying to call Polly again, and, if she doesn’t answer, going out into the back garden and howling into the night air until at least a tiny part of this utter misery lifts itself from my shoulders.
I’ve forgotten—because he’s been so quiet all day—about Percy.
He’s sitting at the kitchen table, plugged simultaneously into his iPod and his iPad, while also sending a text message on his iPhone.
Part of me wonders if I should start calling him iPercy.
He looks up, smiles, and—this is an honor indeed—takes both plugs of his iPod out of his ears. “Hi.”
“Hi, Perce.” I think I may have to forgo the world’s largest gin and tonic until he’s in bed. My life may be falling apart, but I’m not sure it’s OK to demonstrate, to a teenage boy with a documented liking for pot, that mind-altering substances are the best way to deal with a bad situation. Toast, maybe, is the soft solution. “I’m just going to make myself a bit of toast. Do you want any? Or anything else? A turkey sandwich? A baked potato?”
“Yeah, toast would be good.” He watches me while I get the bread out and put it in the toaster. “Thanks for the lunch and everything. I hope Dad wasn’t too mean to you.”
Something about his voice makes me turn around and look at him. He’s got the strangest expression on his face, and I suddenly realize that this must be hideous for him, too. I’ve been so focused on Robbie and Hector that I’ve forgotten that this is the second divorce in Percy’s young life. Another thing for me to feel sick with guilt about.
“Perce, you mustn’t worry about things like that!” My mind flits to a bit of the psychobabble I read in one of the bossy divorce books from my new Amazon stash. “I really want you to understand that even though things might be a lit
tle bit rocky between me and your dad for a while, everything will settle down in the end. And that I’ll still always be there for you, no matter what happens.”
“You mean, when you’re not my stepmother anymore?”
“Oh, Percy. I’ll always be your stepmother.”
“Good.” He grins, fleetingly. “Because lots of the guys at school saw you when you dropped me off at the start of term, and they all think I’ve got the fittest stepmother in the world.”
“Right. Er … that’s nice.”
His grin is replaced by a scowl. “I seriously don’t want Celia dropping me off at school, ever. There’s no way I’m ever going to think of her as my stepmother. Not like you.”
I accidentally press the pop-up button on the toaster, then reflexively grab the hot toast as it shoots upwards, burning my already burnt hand again. “Sorry?”
“Celia. Dad’s girlfriend. It’s OK, Grace. You don’t have to protect me from this stuff. I know all about her.”
Then how come I don’t?
“Are you talking,” I say faintly, “about your dad’s secretary at work?” The one Malcolm Morley’s wife thought was a silly little thing, the blonde in the short skirt? “That Celia?”
“Yeah. That Celia.” Percy kicks the chair leg in front of him moodily. “First his secretary, then his girlfriend. For months and months. Your friend Thomas told me, that afternoon he met me at Paddington. I wasn’t supposed to mention it to anyone, but I figured now Dad wants to get divorced from you, and everything, it would just be weird if I pretended I didn’t know. Wouldn’t it?”
“Yes … it would …”
“Anyway, I hope you’re not too upset about it, Grace. You know you’re miles better off without Dad, anyway, don’t you? The same way Mum’s been better off without him. The same way I’m better off without him—I mean, I’d be a basket case by now if I’d had to live with him the whole time I was growing up.” He lets out a little grunt of laughter. “Hey, maybe this Celia cow has done Robbie and Hector a favor the same way you did me a favor, taking Dad out of the picture a bit … Is that them thumping around up there now?” he adds as we’re suddenly interrupted by a thud from above, which is Robbie’s bedroom. “D’you want me to go up and check on them while you butter the toast?”
There Goes the Bride Page 31