‘How old was she when you were married?’
‘Not much more than a baby. And Michael – well, he had his work, you know.’
‘Yes.’
A curious bond was materializing between them. As with old friends, they knew the landmarks of each other’s lives. The pretences they put on for other people were unnecessary. ‘Michael just abandoned her for me to cope with.’ Jane sighed, a sigh of relief because at last she had made a confession which was normally silenced by loyalty. ‘I tried to love her, but she would never respond and then the trouble began. We did it all, the therapy, everything. I’m sorry, I’m out of order here – I shouldn’t be telling you this …’
‘You can tell me.’ Strange that she really wanted to know, she had real sympathy for her lover’s wife.
‘At first I thought it was my fault, that I didn’t know how to be a mother because I hadn’t got any kids of my own. You always blame yourself first.’
‘I know that one. I feel it’s my fault that I can’t have any – unworthy to care for children, not even a real woman.’
‘I didn’t know. Grace, do forgive me, that must …’
‘No, no. I’ve accepted it. What else can I do?’
In the quiet, cool room the connection had been made, the first gossamer threads of recognition. Each had the same impression. I know this woman, I know how soft she is, how tender, how self-denying, honourable. She is a woman like me. How good to be with.
The insulation between Jane and the world thinned a little. She became aware of the small birds squabbling in the cherry trees outside the window, the faint aroma of the hot grass.
An instinct was pressing her to speak. It was very strong. She resisted, then asked herself why she had invited this woman to her house if it was not for this? She had no perverse bent for revenge, no masochistic curiosity about one of Michael’s lovers. What she wanted was to get out of the cage of Michael’s reality. She wanted a good look at the truth, it would give her strength.
‘There’s something we have to get in the open, Grace. I don’t really know you and – I suppose I want to. You must be wondering …’
‘Did you ask us on purpose, then?’ For Nick’s sake, Grace was protective.
‘Yes. When I realized it was you who Nick was married to. It seemed – I don’t believe in fate or any rubbish like that but it seemed such a coincidence.’ What are you afraid of? Jane asked herself. Her eyes flew open wide with effort. ‘You know I know about you and Michael, don’t you?’
It sounded like something Grace had been expecting to hear for a long time. It felt like a blow in the stomach. She put down her tea in case she spilt it. ‘I didn’t know, no,’ was all she could say, but her face was showing panic.
‘I’m sorry.’ Jane leaned forward to touch her arm.
‘Aren’t I the one who should be sorry?’
‘Only if you insist.’ A hard, humorous shrewdness suddenly settled in the child-woman face; she leaned closer, as if proposing a sneaky deal. ‘I mean, we both know what we’re talking about here, don’t we? Michael isn’t a normal erring husband.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘I don’t think he’s a normal man, or a normal human being even. He’s a serial adulterer. If he’s picked you as his next victim, you have no hope, you will not escape. I do know about the guilt – he was having an affair with me when he was married to Pia, don’t forget.’
‘When …?’ Was it a cruel question? There were no Miss Manners conventions for this conversation.
‘I found out when you had your accident. Andy Moynihan told me; she wasn’t as immaculate about confidentiality then as she is now. Michael denied it, of course.’
A flash of outrage illuminated Grace’s eyes. ‘I had no idea,’ she said slowly. ‘He told me you didn’t know, that he was terrified you’d find out.’
‘He’s not a normal liar, either, is he? Even when I had one woman’s brother on the doorstep ready to beat him up, he just lied his way out of it.’
They stared at each other, realizing that here at last was a witness, that here was an end to their solitary confinement. ‘What …’ Jane hesitated. ‘This isn’t just curiosity, or masochism or anything – so simple. I need … I’ve lived in this swamp of his lies so long, I don’t know who I am any more. Will you tell me what he said about me? Then at least I’ll know who I’m supposed to be.’
Delicately at first, neither wanting to hurt the other, they retraced the steps of their dance. One by one, they pulled memories of those years out of the shadows of Michael’s interpretation and held them up to be compared. Again and again, they agreed. Soon, like very old friends, there was no need to fill in details or finish sentences. Taking courage, they pulled out the deepest and darkest of their lonely miseries. The single thread connecting them became a web.
The tea turned cold. Jane fetched a bottle of velvety red wine, and then they began to share their suspicions, and tried the names of other women on each other, and found again that they agreed. Finally, Grace dared to relate the scene with Louisa in the library, feeling she and Jane were bound together, two people suddenly in possession of a secret history. ‘My God,’ was all Jane could say. ‘My God.’
‘She’s an old friend of yours, isn’t she?’
‘Not much of a friend, you mean? No, I know Louisa. She knew somewhere she was doing me a favour.’
Outside, the sunlight was fading. ‘You left him,’ Jane said. ‘That’s more than I’ve achieved.’
‘But the children …’
‘That’s not it. Oh, I say it is. You’ve seen my children. They’re the real victims. I do everything I can, I do my best, I over-compensate, but they’ve grown up in a world that isn’t real, with a father who’s just pretending. I can’t make that better for them. And people say I like the status and the money, and I let them think that because it’s easy. But that’s not it. I believed him for years, tried to live in this world he conjures up. It’s so right, just how you feel a family should be. All his beautiful statements, great speeches. You know it’s a lie, I know it’s all a lie, but everybody else believes him.’
‘Of course they do – he’s in business to make people believe, him. Communications czar, chief executive of NewsConnect …’
‘I want to leave. I want to live in the real world, not this sick fantasy of his. Then I get scared and I lose faith. Maybe I can’t make it, maybe the real world won’t work for me, I’ve lost the skills, I don’t know how to make it work. I’m just a coward. He’s the one with guts, he’ll always win over me.’
‘That’s why you asked me.’
‘Yes. Yes it is. I met Nick, I liked him, I realized it was you he was married to. I thought, this is the proof, life after Michael. Maybe she’ll give me the courage.’
They were elated now, and the wine had played little part in it. Grace fell back into the depths of the chair, her big white teeth flashing in an ironic laugh. ‘I was nearly too scared to come. God, the shame and the guilt – I was imagining some neurotic-bitch conspiracy. Then I thought about you and realized you couldn’t.’
‘Michael doesn’t pick neurotic bitches. He turned Louisa down, didn’t he?’
‘No, he likes women like us. Kind and decent and moral and self-sacrificing, guaranteed never to give him any trouble. That’s the sickest, isn’t it? Your own goodness kills you.’
Jane poured out the last of the bottle. ‘I didn’t plan us talking like this – but I hoped. Who else could share it; what we’ve been through?’
‘You can’t talk about him, nobody understands, nobody believes it. I’ve tried to tell Nick, he’s as honest as a dog, he can’t begin to understand.’
‘Yes.’ Jane looked into her empty glass and for an instant it seemed as if her mood was crashing and she was going to cry.
‘He is an honest man, isn’t he? You’re lucky.’
Grace didn’t know what to say. Other women had made the same observation in the past, and she had found it easy
to confess that there was some vital spark missing in her marriage. Now the words would not come. She thought of Nick with an intensity she had never felt before. His shirt was still in its box on her lap; he was waiting for it.
‘But now …’ Jane was looking at her, bright-eyed, over the edge of her glass. ‘We’ve done it. We’ve broken through. We’re not on our own with this madness any more.’
‘It was like madness,’ Grace agreed.
There was a knock at the door. It was Debbie. She came in quickly, tense and anxious, and asked, ‘Is Xanthe with you in here? We can’t find her.’ Then she sensed the atmosphere in the room and hesitated.
‘Never a dull moment.’ Jane collected herself with reluctance. ‘Have we lost the little one?’
‘I’m so sorry, I thought she was with Emma. We watched the train and then we came back to the house, and I went to get her night clothes and when I came back Emma was out of the pool and it was a few minutes before I realized little Xanthe wasn’t with her. It’ll be getting dark soon …’ Her normally placid face was tense with anxiety.
‘All right. She can’t be far away. If we all look we’re sure to find her.’ Automatically Jane had turned to Grace, not wanting to leave her.
‘I’m coming. I must just go upstairs and give my husband his shirt. He’ll be wondering what has happened to me.’ And I can’t tell him, she finished to herself, pricked with disloyalty like a hundred needles.
The smothering air of a late summer afternoon filled the room. Sitting on the floor, watching the bed, his back against the wall, Stephen sighed for breath, and for grief. How had she got pregnant? Another of her defiant acts of self-destruction, falling under another body, too out of it to care? Or was there some middle-aged idiot around, stupid enough to see only her beauty and selfish enough to want to possess it?
Imogen was the kind of woman who took great moral pleasure in exploiting the lechery of men twenty years older than herself. ‘Watch that sleaze over there watch me,’ she would say, stalking across a room in a tiny skirt, pouting and preening. She enjoyed looking wild and condemning men who took her at face value. The whole sex thing was nothing to her, except a way of evening the score with old men; the most enjoyment she got from it was playing this malicious game.
How it had happened didn’t mean anything. What was unendurable was what she would become. He saw her determined to seize the experience and harm herself with it. It was a knife she was holding to her arm. She wanted another terrible scar across her life, another crippling of her heart. Something more of her would die, physically and spiritually. She would turn another loop in the spiral down, and there was nothing he could do to help her. At times when he analysed her actions everything she did was just a great dare with destruction.
It was his fault, in a way. If he had been with her she would never have got into whatever madness had hold of her now. He thought again of the silver under the bed in her room, her manic outburst when he had confronted her. Madness was always at the end of her lane, holding out its arms in welcome, and without him to turn her away she was running full tilt towards it. She said it sometimes. ‘Why don’t you just leave me alone and let me go crazy? It’s in my genes, Stephen, you can’t do anything about it.’
Alone for the first time in her life, away in Paris – how fearful he had been for her, when she announced her intention. Her father had been so full of phoney approval, making all those speeches about how marvellous that she had found a direction, wanted to strike out on her own, do her own thing. The truth of it was that she was desperate to get away from him and he was thrilled to get rid of her. So was Jane, but Jane was one of Michael’s prisoners, he never blamed her. There was no place for Imi under her father’s roof, there never had been.
She was muttering something in a soft child’s voice. He got to his feet and went to kneel at the bedside.
‘Keith? That you Keith?’ She meant to giggle, but it became a spluttering cough. Eyelids opened hesitantly, the eyes dark, not focused yet.
‘Yeah, it’s me.’
‘You all right then?’ She was struggling to get an arm free of the sheet.
‘Uh-huh.’ What state of mind was she in?
‘Has he gone? The doctor bloke, has he gone?’
‘Yeah. There’s nobody else here.’
She reached for his hand and pulled it to her cheek, appealing with eyes which could look at him now but were brimming with remorse. A hot pain seized his throat. ‘Are you mad at me, Keith? Don’t be, don’t be angry, say you aren’t …’
‘No, no. Of course I’m not …’
‘You should be, shouldn’t you?’ It was a mere echo of her old, scornful, teasing voice. ‘You should be saying, “Never darken my doors again,” or something, shouldn’t you?’
‘I’d never say that. I’m not angry. I’m just afraid for you – I love you.’
‘Yeah, but … fuck it.’ Abruptly, she released his hand and started struggling to sit up. ‘You shouldn’t do that either.’
‘Yeah, well – don’t you tell me what I ought to do, OK? I’m not going to get angry with you and fuck off just because that’s what I ought to do, right?’
That extracted another humorous splutter and again she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, pulling herself further upright. There was a spare pillow on the floor and he put it behind her head. ‘Are you still tripping?’
‘Don’t think so. I feel good, maybe I am. But you make me feel good. Feel safe. If I could actually have this baby, we’d be safe with you.’
‘Don’t talk about it now.’
‘Well, we’re going to have to talk anyway, aren’t we? Might as well get started now.’
‘But why …’
‘Don’t be daft. I’m not fit to look after a cockroach, am I?’
‘But …’
‘Don’t hassle me. Just be nice, OK?’ Abruptly, she pulled his tenderly placed pillow around to the front of her body and hugged it to her stomach as if to smother everything within. ‘Do you suppose the baby was tripping too? Inside there, out of its tiny, tiny box? How big do you think it has to be before it’s got a brain?’ Then she put her hands over her ears, twisting her neck around as if she could squeeze the thought out of her head. ‘Stop me thinking this stuff. Stop it. I can’t believe there’s anything still inside there, I chucked up so much. If that doctor had stuck around we could ask him, couldn’t we?’
‘He’s coming back. Can I get you anything?’
She moved her lips around, monkey-like, as if trying to decide what she would like to taste. ‘Water. My mouth feels disgusting.’
There was no glass in the bathroom, or in the next bathroom along the corridor. ‘I’ll go down to the kitchen,’ he told her.
‘No.’ She was getting up, looking much more together and moving energetically. ‘I’ll go. I feel all right now.’
‘No, let me …’
‘I want to walk around a bit, get my head clear.’ She went over to the armoire and pulled it open, looking for clothes.
‘I think you’ve got some jeans in there,’ he advised.
‘Jeans make my bum look huge.’ It was a reassuringly normal reply.
‘Nothing could make your bum look huge.’
‘What do you know about it?’ He was annoyed at her rudeness and sat down on the chair again, declining to help while she rummaged through the cupboard. Jeans and a white shirt were the only things in it that were not too hot for summer, so she dressed with bad grace and made for the door. She paused in the doorway, said nothing but looked at him, the look that told him he was boring.
While he waited, he reflected on his dullness and how it infuriated her. Once she had thrown a total witch-out on the crest of the South Downs, screaming into the wind and hurling chalk rocks at him because, she said, he could not go for a walk happily without knowing how he was going to get back. He had always felt pitifully ordinary, beside her.
Away from her for the past few months, it had been differe
nt. Since he went to university, they had been parted three times now for almost three months. The first half he had been utterly lost, passively looking on while the other freshers scrambled for whatever they wanted, the tutor, the partner, the extra-curricular enhancement to the CV. It had been a genuine shock when a lecturer made a formal point of telling him he was by far the most interesting student of his year, perhaps of his decade.
By the second term, he seemed suddenly to have friends. At school, Imi had taken up his company all the time. There had been a lot of people who disliked her. He was surprised to find the space she left filling with new friends who enjoyed him, praised him and had open ears for his confidences. He had defended himself, unaccustomed to such closeness, but they persisted; one in particular, a nice girl. She knew about Imi, of course, he’d made it clear in the beginning, and she respected the situation. There wasn’t any chemistry there, but it had been a new experience to eat in a restaurant with a woman who just ordered food, ate it and enjoyed it, instead of making a five-act opera out of getting a plate of vegetables cooked without animal fat.
So much had happened this year. Now there were two Stephens, the old one and the one who dared and won, who had dared to go up to Alan Stern.
It was even new to think about himself. He felt guilty when Imogen needed so much care, but he was looking at her now from a different angle, feeling resentment that she took so much from him. And Nick had made him feel guilty in another way. Had he been caught out in using her, with her talent for trauma, just to insulate himself from his own thoughts?
‘What’s going on?’ Michael came out of his office, wearing his dark blue jacket and his public air of consequence. He was up again, in control. His secretary had been at home, able to take some letters and restore him with an extended conference, preparing the week ahead. Considerable as it was, the sense of his own identity always began to leach away when he entered his home circle; he needed contact with the bigger world to keep himself strong.
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