by Lisa Jewell
“Hello, Suse,” he said, approaching her and kissing her lightly on each cheek. “You look great.”
“No, I look awful. I wanted to see what would happen to my hair if I stopped dying it. And now I know.”
The smaller children were on a large trampoline at the bottom of the garden and Cat and Luke sat side by side on a blanket, staring at Luke’s smartphone.
“Luke,” he said in greeting.
Luke looked up at him and started to get to his feet.
“Don’t get up. It’s OK.”
But Luke ignored him and approached him with open arms. Adrian felt vaguely alarmed by him. Where Cat was bursting out all over the place with lumps and bumps and only-just-controlled fat, Luke was like a wraith. Taller than Adrian by two inches, thin from every angle, he had Susie’s coloring and Adrian’s physique. And his eyes, the narrow, almost glacial eyes that had looked so extraordinary in his childish face, looked oddly unsettling now that his features had set.
“Dad,” he said, wrapping his Mr. Tickle arms around Adrian and squeezing him. “It’s really good to see you.”
Adrian smiled in surprise. Luke had been an affectionate child, but for the last year or so he had become distant from his father, almost hostile. “Absence making the heart grow fonder?”
Luke put his hands into his trouser pockets and smiled. “Well,” he said, “it has been six months.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Adrian, “has it really?”
Luke smiled at him from under his slightly fey fringe. “It sure has.”
“God, I’m so sorry. What was it then, Christmas?”
“No, not even Christmas. I was away over Christmas. It was my birthday.”
“November, then?”
Luke gave him a slow clap and then sat down again next to his sister. “Don’t tell me the Board of Harmony is letting you down?”
“I think I might need to update the Board of Harmony,” he said, sitting down in a chair that had been pulled across for him by Caroline and smiling his thanks to her. “It’s not good enough. Six months . . .” He shook his head.
The small children had cottoned on to his arrival and Beau and Pearl threw themselves off the trampoline and hurtled towards him crying, “Daddy!” Pearl climbed onto his lap and Beau held his small arms around Adrian’s neck. They both smelled of scalp and sun cream. Across from him Caroline sat down and pulled up the sleeves of her jersey dress. She looked radiant, her dark blond hair cut in a flattering style that showed off her cheekbones, long, toned legs in leggings, and wearing a dress decorated with flowers. Caroline rarely wore dresses. And certainly never ones decorated with flowers.
“You look beautiful,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said, accepting his compliment graciously. “You look worn-out.”
Adrian frowned. “Thanks a bundle.”
Luke had opened one of Adrian’s bottles of champagne and passed him some in a plastic flute. “Cheers,” he said, holding his own out towards the center of the group. “Here’s to birthdays. To Cat.” He turned and waved his flute towards his sister. “And to Caroline.” He turned to his stepmother. “And to family. It’s been too long.”
Otis finally approached and smiled shyly at his father. “Hello, Father,” he said. He’d never called Adrian “Father” before. Adrian took it as a thinly veiled expression of disenchantment.
“Hello, son,” he said, and grabbed him round the middle. Otis was his best-looking child. He absolutely should not have been able to discern such a thing; he should have been blind to the variances in his children’s physical attributes. But he wasn’t. He himself had been one of those unfortunate products of the early sixties who spent his seventies boyhood in mustard knitwear, sporting hair that looked like a wig. He’d had crooked teeth and freckles, and studio photographs of him at the time showed him to be a slightly heartbreaking work in progress. Like every other boy of his age. Otis on the other hand looked as if he should be plastered to young girls’ bedroom walls in poster form. His face was perfectly symmetrical, his eyes mocha brown, half his face full of lips and dimples, the other half full of eyelashes and cheekbones.
Adrian took a sip of his champagne and looked up briefly at the back of the town house. He could barely believe that this had once been his home, this beautiful white building with its tumble of windows, its garden of ancient fruit trees and frothing bushes of spring blossom. There was a white spiral staircase connecting the first-floor living room with the garden and Caroline had strung it with dozens of crystals and fairy lights that shone through a tangle of white climbing clematis. The house was enchanting—but he hadn’t appreciated it when he’d lived here. He’d spent far too much time worrying about how to pay for it all and looking for ways not to be here. And now, well, he felt as if he’d won a competition just to be invited here for the afternoon.
He knocked back the rest of his champagne in one gulp and let his gaze fall to the floor.
“So,” said Caroline. “Adrian. You have to tell us all about this mysterious girl with the phone.”
The mystery of Jane had grown, exponentially, from his own tiny sliver of a secret into a slightly wider secret shared with his two daughters, and now, as the weeks had passed, into a big juicy anecdote passed around to each member of his sprawling family like a cookie tin.
He held his empty glass out to Luke, who was doing refills.
“What’s this?” Luke asked, looking at his father with those unnerving, colorless eyes of his.
“Oh God,” said Adrian. “It’s nothing.”
“A lady came to see Maya’s cat,” Pearl began. “Just before my birthday. And then I saw her at skate training. And then—”
“I put an advert in the post office window,” Adrian broke in, wanting to take some kind of adult responsibility for the dissemination of the facts. “A couple of months ago. I thought I should rehouse the cat. Maya’s cat. Anyway, this woman called me and we arranged for her to come to the flat and she came but said she didn’t think I should get rid of the cat. She said she thought I needed the cat. Shortly after that Pearl thinks she saw this woman watching her at skate training—”
“I did! I did!”
“Maybe. Anyway. Then on Pearl’s birthday we bumped into her again on Upper Street. On the way to Strada.”
“Which she totally did on purpose because she’d seen it written down on Daddy’s whiteboard.”
“Maybe, Pearl. Maybe. And she was with a young man, on a date. We had a very quick chat and then I got home and found her phone down the back of the sofa. And when I switched it on I found that mine was the only number in it, that I was the only person she’d ever texted.” He stopped and caught his breath.
“How bizarre,” said Susie. “It’s almost as if . . .”
“She was looking for Daddy,” finished Pearl. “On purpose.”
“And then she found him,” continued Caroline.
“And then totally disappeared,” said Susie.
“She was really, really pretty,” said Pearl. “Daddy went all red and his voice went all funny.”
“Oh God,” said Luke, “don’t tell me you’re casting about for the fourth Mrs. Wolfe. God help us all . . .”
“Luke!” Susie admonished.
“What?”
“Totes inappropes,” said Cat.
“Oh my God,” said Luke, his hand held against his heart. “London is turning you into a cretin. Please tell me you didn’t just say totes inappropes.”
“I totes did,” she said with a grimace.
“I barely know my own sister,” Luke said theatrically.
“I was being ironic.”
“Yeah. Sure you were.”
“Anyway,” interjected Adrian. “It’s all irrelevant. Unless Jane reappears out of the blue to claim her phone we will never know what her intentions were.”
<
br /> “But we could make a stab at what yours were, eh, Dad?”
“Stop it, Luke!” said Cat.
Adrian sighed. “She was just a very nice woman,” he said.
The distant sound of the doorbell chiming broke the momentum of the conversation and Caroline got to her feet. “That’ll be Paul,” she said.
“Who’s Paul?” said Adrian.
“Mum’s new boyfriend,” said Otis with a groan.
Adrian felt his gut wriggle as he watched his ex-wife moving towards the back door and he reappraised the floral dress and the soft skin and the air of youthful buoyancy. Caroline had been steadfastly single since he’d left her, had constantly made pronouncements on the joys of single life: the empty bed, the lack of various male stenches, the spare drawers and folded towels.
“Paul’s not her boyfriend,” said Pearl crossly.
“Yeah he is,” Otis retaliated. “I saw him touch her face.”
Pearl tutted, put her hand out and stroked Otis’s face. “There,” she said, “I touched your face. Does that mean I’m your girlfriend now?”
He backed away from her in horror. “Oh my God, Pearl. You’re such a sick weirdo.” He rubbed her touch from his face and headed back to the trampoline, moodily kicking a football ahead of him.
Paul was in the garden now. Adrian looked up at him and blanched. He was at least ten years younger than Adrian. He looked away and unthinkingly pulled the small, hovering figure of Beau up onto his lap, almost like a talisman, or a kind of credential for being here. Beau burrowed his hot body against his father’s and Adrian felt it then, a little bubble of yearning for the compactness of babies, the baby he and Maya had never had.
“Everyone,” Caroline was saying brightly, “this is Paul Wilson. Paul, this is my ex-husband, Adrian, and this is Adrian’s other ex-wife Susie, who’s come up from Hove for the day. And this is my stepson, Luke, Cat’s brother.”
Adrian gave Paul Wilson what he hoped was the smile of a man confident and comfortable in his own skin, while also using body language to explain the fact that he would be unable to get to his feet because he had a child on his lap. “Good to meet you, Paul.”
“So these are all your kids?” said Paul, his nice face opening up in awe.
“Er. Yeah. At least, so I’ve been told.”
Paul laughed. “You’ve been busy.”
“Well,” said Adrian, giving Beau a little squeeze, “it’s been a long-term project. I got started on it quite a long time ago.”
“Christ,” said Paul. “I’d better crack on myself. I’m forty next year.”
Adrian swallowed down hard on his impulse to suggest that Paul also better “crack on” with a younger woman if babies were his aim.
Caroline erected another fold-up chair for Paul and Luke poured him out a plastic glassful of champagne.
“This is pretty amazing,” said Paul, looking keenly from person to person. “All of you, getting together en masse like this. Nobody killing anybody.”
Caroline and Susie exchanged a glance and laughed.
“No, I mean seriously. What’s your secret?”
“We all just like each other, I suppose,” said Susie.
“And we all like Adrian, which helps,” said Caroline.
“Wow,” said Paul, nodding in wonderment. “That’s quite a testimonial. Honestly, I’ve known a few broken families in my time; in fact I am the product of one. And I’ve never heard of a family getting away with it before. You know. The messy aftermath.” He shook his head from side to side and smiled. “Carrie tells me you all go on holiday together, too?”
“Well, we try,” said Adrian, starting to feel oddly defensive. “At least once a year. For the children. Helps them to bond when they don’t live together.”
“Wow,” said Paul again. “Amazing. Makes you wonder though, you know, what lurks beneath. Who’s got the secret voodoo dolly.” He mimed someone sticking pins into a doll and laughed extra loud to ensure that everyone knew he was joking. Caroline squeezed his knee in a cautionary gesture and Adrian eyed him uncertainly.
“Oh,” Adrian said lightly, “I think you’ll find there’re no dark secrets buried here. I think you’ll find we’re all very open with each other.”
Paul smiled at him and nodded. “Good for you,” he said, “good for all of you.”
Over the top of Beau’s shaggy mop of hair, Adrian observed Paul and Caroline closely. She had always been the most beautiful of his three wives and he had imagined her living out her life in elegant, just-so singularity in this enchanted house, pruning her fruit trees, walking her dogs, tending to the needs of her family. And as he thought of Caroline’s dogs, one of them appeared from where it had been sleeping under the table and made its way giddily towards Paul and Caroline. Paul put out his hand and the dog wagged its tail. He waited for Caroline to greet the dog—she’d bought the pair as puppies about two years ago and called them her “husband substitutes.” She fussed over them like babies and talked about them constantly as though they were human beings—but she did not seem to notice that the dog was there. Instead her gaze rested upon Paul, her body lean and erect, her stomach, he could see, held in tautly.
He lowered his gaze into Beau’s scalp and let the realization sink in that he wasn’t the only person moving on.
Once again, Adrian’s flat slapped him fully around the chops when he arrived home alone a few hours later. The sun had fallen behind the horizon and he hadn’t left any lights on, so the four rooms of his home were dark and shadowy. The cat appeared at his feet like a murky phantom. He leaned to stroke her, more out of a sense of altruism than anything else. She leaned into his touch needily and he sighed. He switched on some table lamps but his flat still felt dank and lonely. He poured himself a glass of wine from the end of a bottle he’d opened the night before and he took it and Jane’s mobile phone out into his backyard (he could not call the eight-foot square of concrete outside the kitchen door a garden, however many potted plants he put out there).
There was still some warmth in the air, but because his yard got only two hours of sunshine each day, it felt damp and mossy out here. He thought for a moment of the house in Islington, the soft sun-kissed garden with its flora and greenery, its children’s clutter and gamboling dogs. Then he thought of Susie’s house in Hove, the sweet Arts and Crafts cottage just off the main road full of the furniture they’d bought together in their student years from what used, in those days, to be called flea markets and junk shops: the bits of 1960s and ’70s tat that were now worth hundreds of pounds. He thought of his odd moody son and his fragile air of entitlement and of beautiful Otis and his bee-stung lips. He pictured Susie in her scruffy gardening clothes and Caroline in her sexy floral dress with her new young lover. And the others: little Beau with his warm, malleable body; cocky Cat and her insatiable appetite for everything; and cool, inscrutable Pearl with her focus and her commitment. They had all belonged to him once: the houses, the wives, the children. And yet now he had nothing. A crap flat, a weird cat, a stranger’s phone. For nearly five decades he had lived with an unshakeable belief in the decisions he made. Every morning for forty-eight years he had woken up and thought: I am where I want to be right now. And now he was not. He did not want to be in this flat, with this cat and this phone and this feeling of cold dread. He’d made a bad choice somewhere along the line but he didn’t know where.
He drank some wine and stared at the cat and drank some more wine. Then he switched on Jane’s phone, just as he’d done every few days for the past two months, and sat bolt upright when he saw a little envelope icon showing on the screen. And the words: You have 1 new message.
He clicked on the icon and a message came up.
“Hello it’s Mum. Just checkin in. I havent heard from you in a while. Give us a call if you can.”
The feeling of cold dread dissipated for just one momen
t as he read these words. He put down his glass of wine and formed a response.
9
The woman was called Jean and had a thick West Country accent and sounded as though she had no teeth. She lived around the corner from Adrian in Tufnell Park and said she’d be happy to meet him for a coffee. “There’s a place by the station. Does proper porridge. Can’t remember what it’s called now.”
Adrian walked a full circle around the station at Tufnell Park before he found the place she’d described, a putrid-looking place he’d seen a thousand times before without ever noticing it. It was called Mr. Sandwich.
The woman called Jean was sitting at the first table he passed. He knew she was the woman called Jean because she was eating porridge. And because she had no teeth.
“Adrian?” she said, rising to her feet. She was extraordinarily thin, wrapped up in an Aztec-knit cardigan that fell to her knees. Her hair was dyed henna red and tied back in a ponytail.
“Hi,” he said. “Jean?”
“That’s me. Take a seat. I didn’t order for you, but I would strongly recommend the porridge.”
Adrian pulled out a torn vinyl-topped chair and sat down. “I’ve had my breakfast. Thank you.” Instead he ordered a cappuccino and an egg salad sandwich.
“So,” said Jean, noisily scraping the last layer of porridge off the sides of the bowl. “You’ve ended up with my daughter’s phone?”
Adrian nodded. “It appears so.”
“And do I really want to know how?”
Adrian sighed. “Well, there’s no story really. Your daughter came to my flat to see a cat I was trying to get adopted.”
“What, Tiff? A cat? Are you sure? Doesn’t sound like her kind of thing.” She pushed the emptied bowl away from her and sat back in her chair, her chin tucked into her chest, hands deep in the pockets of her cardigan, scrutinizing him with tired brown eyes.