A Family Recipe

by Veronica Henry

  Nevertheless, more than one of her neighbours had given her a knowing look. Perhaps she was being paranoid, but Bath was a small place. Everyone knew everyone and everything about them. One day someone would say something to someone else, and they would repeat it someone else, and it would get back to Laura. They were on borrowed time, and Antonia believed that she should neither a borrower nor a lender be. Having someone else’s husband on loan was against everything she stood for.

  So today was the beginning of the end.

  After she had made her bed, she put the kettle on and texted him. It was breaking another of her rules, but she had to get the plan underway.

  Can you please give me a ring at your convenience? A.

  A perfectly acceptable message to receive from one’s solicitor. Not one that would arouse suspicion if it was intercepted.

  She would ask him to meet her at Wellington Buildings the next morning. By the time she got to work the relationship would be behind her. A fond memory to be tucked away. Taken out every now and then to be looked at, then neatly folded and put back again in a faraway corner of her mind. There was no point in being sad or regretful. She should be grateful for the time they’d shared. She’d learned a lot from him, about life and love.

  She sighed. It was going to be difficult telling Dom, she knew that. He would probably cry and she probably wouldn’t. He was surprisingly emotional and sentimental. And she had taught herself not to show her feelings long ago. Her parents hadn’t run to affection for humans, so she had trained herself not to expect it.

  Once she’d sent the text she sat down on the sofa with her coffee.

  Her flat was like a show home. The walls were painted in Egyptian Sand, a warm but neutral beige which had none of the heat or promise of its name, but was so understated it was barely there. The carpet was a pale wool twist; the sofas cream linen; the Roman blinds at the deep sash windows the same. The kitchen area had white high-gloss units with touch-close drawers and not a handle in sight. A bookcase held a row of novels, and she arranged them in the order she had read them (she had to fight the urge for alphabetical order), and they made quite a pleasing display: Barbara Kingsolver, Anne Tyler, William Boyd …

  Fiction, Antonia realised, was about as much as she let go. With a book, you had to let the author take control and follow them wherever they led.

  Antonia didn’t allow anyone else to take control in her life. She didn’t allow mess. Or disruption. Or chaos. Every day when she woke up, she was certain what the day would bring. Of course, she couldn’t allow for calamity or catastrophe or weather conditions, but as far as possible her days were timetabled and she rarely deviated. Dom had been the only exception.

  Sometimes after they’d been to bed together she had looked in the mirror at her wide eyes and dishevelled hair and flushed cheeks and thought she looked almost pretty. Not that she was ugly, but she always felt her features rather severe: a somewhat bony face, with a very straight nose, hollow cheeks and eyes that were just, well, eye-shaped, as a child might draw them, with sparse eyelashes and thick eyebrows (quite the wrong way round) that she’d never had the nerve to pluck. Or indeed have plucked, by an expert. Antonia was a stranger to that kind of indulgence.

  Dom had once told her Laura had a hot-pink Aga in the kitchen. Antonia had an induction hob, and thought their respective ovens said it all. Laura was vibrant, ever-warm and glowing. Antonia was just a blank hard surface, impossible to read or turn on unless you happened to know how.

  She told this to Dom one night, who laughed.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but Agas go out when you least expect them to, and with no explanation, and then need coaxing back into life, and in the meantime the whole kitchen is thrown into disarray, with soot and dust sheets and bloody men with rods sucking air in through their teeth and shaking their heads and no one can get anything done. And then you get a whopping great bill for servicing and parts.’

  Antonia nodded. Yep. She was an induction hob. Steady and reliable. No drama.

  By mid-afternoon she had signed up to do a charity bike ride along the Great Wall of China.

  It ticked lots of boxes. It would be an adventure. It would get her super-fit. And she’d be raising money for a good cause. She didn’t much care what the cause was – she had no personal experience of any disease; there wasn’t one particularly close to her heart – but anything that focused on scientific research appealed to her.

  The ride was advertised as tough, which was good, and she could reward herself with the promise of a trip to a panda sanctuary. She would buy a bike in the meantime, to console herself. Maybe she would go and buy one this very afternoon. She could start her training right away.

  Then she looked in the mirror and thought Seriously? A charity bike ride? How worthy and dull can you get?

  She sighed. She was reverting to type yet again.

  She jumped as her phone rang.

  ‘I’m nearly home,’ Dom told her. ‘I’m at the service station. Is it urgent? What’s the matter?’

  He sounded worried. She placated him.

  ‘I need to see you first thing, that’s all. About a couple of things.’ No need to tell him it was personal. She didn’t want to ruin the rest of his weekend.

  She asked how Willow had got on. She wasn’t one of those needy mistresses who pretended their lover didn’t have a wife and children. She took an interest in them. They were part of him. Maybe she shouldn’t. Maybe that was where she had gone wrong. She’d crossed a line by being too invested in his daily life.

  He’d rung off, quickly, after they agreed to meet at Wellington Buildings. She had keys. They always met on the top floor as they could hear if anyone came into the building and it took ages to climb up all the stairs and gave them time to get their clothes on.

  ‘I’m not this sort of person,’ he had said, the first time.

  ‘Neither am I,’ she agreed.

  That’s what made it so irresistible, that it was so unexpected. So unlike either of them. He told her he’d never looked at another woman during his marriage and she believed him. Although she found it hard to fathom that it was she who had tempted him. She had never felt like a temptress. She had never so much as kissed someone she shouldn’t.

  Her eyes filled with tears at the memory as she realised she wasn’t going to feel his hands on her ever again. Not even tomorrow. Tomorrow she would deliver her pre-prepared speech and leave, before he had time to protest or dissuade her.

  She thought about going to the swimming pool and doing her hundred lengths. She knew it would distract her, because her mind always focused on making sure her strokes and her kicks were as perfect as they could be. Before she could find her swimming things her phone rang. Dom again. Was he going to cancel on her?

  ‘Are you busy?’ He sounded strained.

  ‘No. What’s the matter?’

  ‘Can you come and pick me up?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m still at Gloucester Services.’

  ‘Have you broken down?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘It’s going to take me an hour to get to you.’

  ‘Just be as quick as you can. I’m on the southbound.’

  ‘Dom – what’s happened?’

  ‘I’ll explain when you get here.’

  Antonia grabbed her keys and headed out of the door, not even stopping to put on make-up. She was still wearing her Sunday-morning lounge pants. She had a feeling this was a crisis and what she had on wasn’t going to be of any import.

  Dom was pacing up and down outside the entrance, looking like a man who didn’t want to be seen yet who needed to make himself reasonably obvious. Antonia pipped her horn and he hurried towards her.

  When he opened the car door, there was a look on his face she hadn’t seen before. He looked shattered. Not as in tired, but as in broken into a million tiny pieces. Her first thought was that something had happened to Willow. But if it had, he wouldn’t be here with
her. He’d be with Laura.

  Her second thought was that what she’d been planning to say to him the next day was probably superfluous. Something had happened to supersede it.

  ‘Laura knows,’ he said, confirming her suspicion.

  Antonia rapidly processed all the possible outcomes of this announcement with her solicitor’s brain: practical, financial, emotional. Dom slid into the passenger seat next to her, running his hands through his hair in a filmic gesture of despair. She smelled the rank scent of panic underneath his Diptyque aftershave. The two didn’t go.

  ‘How does she know?’ she asked. Which part of their watertight regime had a chink in it? A nosy neighbour? An eagle-eyed builder?

  ‘Some girl overheard me talking to you while I was in the service station. She told Laura. Repeated our conversation. Well, my side of it.’ He looked despairing. ‘She had some sort of feminist idea that telling Laura was sisterly solidarity.’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ Antonia was horrified. Not least because she was mortified for Laura. What an undignified way of finding out: at a motorway service station, over cappuccino and cupcakes. ‘But what did you say that was so incriminating?’

  ‘It wasn’t that so much. It was the texting afterwards. It was Laura who texted, not me. You sent back four kisses.’

  Antonia groaned. Four kisses. Solicitors didn’t send kisses to their clients, even in this world of disingenuous x-ing. It had been automatic – she had suspected her single kisses were rather bloodless, so had saved four kisses as her predictive text rather than keep having to remind herself to show her affection.

  Instinctively she started to think about damage limitation. Not for her – she was brave enough to face the music – but for Dom. His marriage was far more important than she was. There was much more at stake.

  They didn’t speak much as they sped back down the motorway towards Bath, then turned off and drove along the A-road, meandering down through the green hills towards the city, the pale-gold buildings laid out like a toy town below them.

  ‘Am I dropping you home?’

  ‘I can’t go home!’

  ‘Where, then?’

  ‘I thought I could come to you?’

  ‘Is that a good idea? Shouldn’t you go somewhere else?’

  Dom shook his head. There was a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead. The late-afternoon sun was making the car warm, but the sweat was a result of panic.

  ‘Everyone loves Laura. I won’t be welcome anywhere. I’ll be a …’ He searched around for the word.

  ‘Pariah?’ suggested Antonia.

  ‘Outcast. I’ll be an outcast.’

  ‘Well, Travelodge then. Isn’t that what Travelodges are for? Men who’ve been kicked out of home?’

  He looked sideways at her. ‘That’s a bit harsh.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be.’

  She knew she was terse when she was stressed.

  They were coming into the outskirts of Bath. The Sunday-night traffic was building up. They queued along the London road, the square terraced buildings ranked either side of them. Antonia felt as if they were folding their arms, observing them with disapproval.

  She sighed. How had this happened? She was furious with herself for not coming to her senses sooner. She would have made it a clean break. She would have been ruthless, for both their benefits. Her ability to compartmentalise was very male. She supposed it came from years of not feeling as if she mattered. Of causing as little trouble as possible.

  Dom was looking at her beseechingly, like a little boy pleading not to be told off. She couldn’t just cast him out. She was, after all, complicit.

  ‘Laura won’t be happy if she thinks you’re staying with me, though? I mean, that really does make you look guilty.’

  ‘I won’t tell her.’

  Antonia raised her eyebrows. He wasn’t that naive, surely?

  ‘Women know these things, Dom.’

  ‘But I can’t afford a hotel. Not at the moment. Every penny I’ve got is in that wretched building. It’s bleeding me dry. Even the bloody doorknobs are nearly a hundred quid each. I need all the spare cash I’ve got.’ He looked desperate. ‘I couldn’t even really afford that hotel last night.’

  Antonia inched the car forward as the lights up ahead turned green. How was she going to rescue the situation? Obviously the most important thing was for Laura not to be hurt any more than she needed to be, and if she found out Dom was shacked up with Antonia she would be mortified. But he had to sleep somewhere.

  ‘You can stay with me tonight,’ she told him. ‘But you’ll have to find somewhere else.’

  ‘I suppose it’s not your problem.’ His voice was tight with agitation.

  ‘Dom, of course it’s my problem. I’m not turning my back on you. But we’re occasional lovers. No more than that. I don’t want Laura to think this is any bigger than it is.’ She didn’t want Dom to think it was any more than it was, either. She couldn’t tell him the depth of her feelings. ‘And staying with me makes you look culpable …’

  ‘Don’t talk to me like a solicitor.’

  ‘But that’s what I am. I’m being objective. Not emotional. You must have a friend with a spare room? Or you’ll have to sleep at Wellington Buildings.’

  ‘I can’t sleep in a building site. The showers and loos aren’t plumbed in yet. I’m not using the bloody Portaloo. And what will the builders say?’ Dom gave a groan. ‘I hope that girl’s happy. Does she realise what she’s done?’

  ‘You can’t blame her. What we were doing was wrong. You know that. I know that.’ She paused. ‘The terrible irony is I was about to tell you I couldn’t do it any more. That’s why I phoned. That’s why I wanted to see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Really?’

  She nodded. ‘I should have done it last week.’

  Dom’s face was craggy with misery. ‘Every time I left you I used to tell myself it was the last time.’

  ‘Same here.’ Antonia put her foot down, going through the lights just as they turned to red behind her, then cut down along her favourite road, with its bohemian bars and antique shops and boutiques that made you want to buy everything in them. She wished she could be more like Walcot Street, with its relaxed and confident style.

  She hit the centre of town then negotiated a few side streets before coming to a halt in a small cobbled square, outside an antiquarian bookshop. The old-fashioned lamp posts were just coming on as dusk approached. It was quiet and still in the cold of late afternoon and there was no one around.

  ‘Get out here. We can’t be seen together outside my flat. Head over to mine in ten minutes and I’ll let you in.’

  Dom looked at her in admiration. ‘You’d have made a great spy.’

  She gave a wry smile and pretended to lift up her collar.

  ‘There’s probably still time.’

  He leaned over to kiss her but she jerked her head away. ‘No kissing! For heaven’s sake. This is it, Dom. There’s no more between us.’

  ‘Of course. Sorry.’

  He got out and slammed the door. She watched him in the rear-view mirror as she drove off. He was standing on the pavement looking utterly lost. She knew deep down that what she should do is cut him off now, for his own sake.

  If he’d been a bastard, she’d have given him the chop and let him sort himself out. But he was a good man. Yes, what they’d been doing was wrong, but despite everything he belonged with Laura. Of that she was certain. And she knew Dom didn’t have the guile to save his own marriage. He was going to need her help.

  Twenty minutes later, she let him into her flat. He was pale and shaken.

  Antonia moved towards the kitchen. ‘Coffee? Tea? Wine?’

  ‘Strychnine.’

  He walked over to her sofa and slumped into it with a deep groan, tipping his head back with his eyes closed, his arms and legs out like a starfish.

  She looked at him. The warmth and solidity of him made her want to cry; to hug him. Th
e broad shoulders, the strong arms, the stomach kept flat because he was hands-on at work, lifting and carrying and shifting sand and rubble and bricks, up and down stairs all day long. The thighs like iron. His sleepy smile. His kind eyes. The lock of brown hair that fell over his eyes when he was on top of her – he would try to blow it away, then laugh. She put a Kirby grip in it once. They’d both laughed at that.

  Yes. She loved him. But she was going to lose him. She knew that. She had to make things right. She had to mend his marriage. The wonderful, warm, chaotic marriage that she was so deeply envious of, because she knew she would never have one like it.

  She knew enough about it. They’d been working together for three years now, ever since his conveyancing file had been handed to her when he was selling a small barn conversion out near Box. The purchasers had dropped their offer by fifty thousand on the day of exchange. He was anxious for the deal to go through because he was buying another property to renovate.

  ‘Hold your nerve,’ said Antonia. ‘They’ll pay the full price. It’s a beautiful conversion in a stunning location. They won’t find somewhere else like this in a hurry.’

  ‘But I can’t cope with the stress.’ Willow was in hospital again. Laura was sleeping next to her in an armchair. He didn’t want to compound the situation by being distracted by the deal. So what if he lost fifty grand? He’d make it back somewhere down the line. ‘I don’t care about the money.’

  ‘OK. I’ll tell them.’

  Antonia, however, did care about the money. She wanted the person who deserved it to have it, not the greedy buyers who were trying it on and taking advantage of the fact they were right up against the wire. So she had taken a huge professional risk. She’d gone back to the purchasers and said asking price or no deal. As the clock ticked by, she felt more and more calm. She was going to get the money for Dom if it killed her.

  At midday their solicitor phoned. ‘Split the difference.’

  ‘Which part of full agreed asking price don’t you understand?’ Antonia replied, not missing a beat.

  By three o’clock that afternoon the exchange took place for the original amount. When Antonia called Dom to tell him the money had gone through, he was amazed.