by B. A. Paris
Then it dawned on me – those two days a week last year, when he’d worked away from home, he went to the Darlington offices of his company. I knew Darlington was somewhere in the north of England but I didn’t know where exactly. I scrabbled in my bag for my phone and located Darlington on Google Maps. It wasn’t as far north as Durham – but was it near enough for him to have gone to see Marnie while he was there? When I discovered that it would have taken him half an hour to get there by car, I felt ill. I wanted to phone his boss and ask him if it really had been as Rob had said, that he hadn’t had any choice about the new job – that although the company knew his wife had MS, they’d forced him to work away from home. But I was too scared I’d be told what I suspected was the truth, that Rob had asked – or at least put himself forward – for the job.
There was something else too. Because of the relationship between us all, it would have been normal for Rob to have looked Marnie up when he was in Darlington. We wouldn’t have thought anything about him taking her out for a drink or a meal. It’s what an uncle would do for his student niece, because that was how we considered Nelson and Rob, as Marnie’s uncles – she had even called him Uncle Rob until a few years ago, for God’s sake! Yet he had never mentioned to us that it was something he was going to do, and no bells had rung for me because I hadn’t realised how close the two places were. But once I realised, his silence damned him. What surprised me was that Adam had never questioned it. If he had gone anywhere near Aberystwyth, where Cleo was studying, he would have automatically looked her up.
It took me a long time to pluck up the courage to go back and face Jess that day. I phoned Paula and asked her to tell the office that I was ill, then told Jess I’d come home early because I wasn’t feeling well. She made me a cup of tea and insisted I went to bed, and I lay there, staring at the ceiling, trying to work out how I was going to tell her that her husband was having an affair with my daughter. But my mind wouldn’t go there, just as it wouldn’t let me tell Adam what I suspected when he came to see how I was. I wanted to think everything through before I destroyed their worlds.
I walk restlessly around the kitchen, realising that although the food looks lovely, I’m not going to be able to eat any of it, feeling as I do. I know I’ll enjoy my party once it’s got going, as long as I can avoid Rob. To fill in the time, because I don’t have my phone, I go to the sitting room and look through my cards again. Most of them are from people I’ll be seeing tonight but there are some from those I didn’t invite, and even though there’s no reason why I should have invited Kirin’s two cousins, or Ian’s mum, or the girl from the hairdressers, I still feel bad that I didn’t.
I check the time; it’s almost six. I’m dying to see the garden but I need to wait until Josh tells me I can. He and Max have been hard at it since they came back from dropping off Murphy. Adam should be down soon, so we’ll be able to see it together. He had the longest shower he’s ever had in his life, judging by the length of time the water was running for, trying to wash away his migraine, maybe.
There’s the sound of footsteps on the stairs and I go out to the hall. When Adam sees me, he comes to a stop and just stands there, halfway down the stairs. It’s as if he’s looking at me, thinking – OK, this is it, the evening Liv has been waiting for forever, so I better get it right. And I want to tell him that he’s got it exactly right, that dressed in his beige chinos and white shirt, he’s perfect. He’s filled out since I married him, and is in amazing shape thanks to the fact that he never gets much of a chance to sit down. He’s forgotten to shave, but I don’t mind.
He comes the rest of the way down the stairs and takes my hands in his.
‘Livia.’ I can see from the way he’s looking at me and from the way he’s called me Livia that he’s feeling a bit emotional and I know he’s going to tell me that he loves me.
‘Mum! You can come out now!’ Josh calls from the garden.
Excitement surges through me. ‘I love you too,’ I say, kissing Adam softly. ‘Thank you for making me the happiest person in the world.’ I pull him towards the door. ‘Come on, Josh needs us.’
6 P.M. – 7 P.M.
Adam
I let Liv lead me into the garden. As we walk out onto the terrace the evening sun, still high in the sky, sears my eyes. What am I doing, letting her take me out here? I need to tell her, I need to tell her about Marnie. I’d been ready to, I’d prepared myself mentally. But Josh had interrupted us and before I could say anything else, she told me she loved me too. Why had she said that? Had she really believed I was going to tell her that I loved her? Or had some sixth sense told her I was going to say something that she wouldn’t want to hear?
She said I’d made her the happiest person in the world. Now, as we step onto the lawn, that’s exactly how she looks. She turns slowly, taking everything in, and I’m glad that Max is filming her because one day, if the worst has happened and – I can’t bear to think about it – Marnie was on the flight, I’ll want to look back and remember how happy she was at this moment in time. The words resonate through my brain – how happy she was – and my heart breaks. I have to tell her before she gets carried away. There’s no way this party can happen.
‘Livia,’ I say again.
‘I know,’ she says, turning to look at me, her eyes shining. ‘It’s beautiful!’
I catch her hand, pull her towards me, fold her into my arms. But she turns so that she’s facing the garden, her back warm against my chest.
‘It’s so much more than I imagined,’ she says. ‘Haven’t we got the best children in the world? Have you seen what Josh has done? Over there on the fence?’
I hadn’t really taken in anything when we’d come up the steps onto the lawn. I was aware of the lights and flowers and balloons but it massed together in a blur. All my senses are affected, I realise. Livia’s voice seems to come from a long way off and I can barely feel the touch of her hand as she pulls me towards the fence. The air must be heavy with the scent of her roses but I smell nothing, except my fear.
We reach the fence and my whole world shatters. I drop Livia’s hand and move clumsily away from her. There are photos of Marnie everywhere – photos of her as a baby, at school, in the garden, on holiday, in Hong Kong, photos I’ve never seen before – tacked all the way along the fence. And above, a sign saying ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MUM!’
Fortunately, Livia mistakes the breath I take.
‘I know, isn’t it amazing?’ she says.
I close my eyes and Marnie’s voice rings out, Happy birthday, Mum! She sounds so close that if I reached out, I could touch her.
Josh comes over and puts an arm around each of us, drawing me in. For one terrible second, I want to lay my head on his shoulder and weep.
‘So,’ he says. ‘What do you think?’
‘Wonderful.’ I can’t bear to look. I keep my eyes fixed above fence-level and try to focus on the chance that Marnie is still alive.
‘I think it’s the best thing ever!’ Livia says, hugging him. ‘Thank you so much, Josh. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble.’
‘It was Marnie’s idea; it’s her present to you.’
‘I couldn’t have asked for anything better. I remember taking that photo,’ she says, pointing. ‘And that one of her in her Star Wars outfit. Where did you get them?’
‘Marnie gave me most of them, others I got from your albums. I took photos of the photos and had them enlarged.’
‘I wish I could tell her how much I love it.’ She turns to me. ‘Shall I try and call her?’
‘No!’ Aware that I spoke too fast, I try to speak more reasonably. ‘It’s the middle of the night for her and anyway, didn’t she say that she was going to revise where there wasn’t any wi-fi, so that she wouldn’t be disturbed?’
‘She’ll still have a phone signal,’ Livia says. ‘It feels wrong not to call, to say thank you.’
‘Dad’s right,’ Josh says. ‘We’ll hear from her tomorrow, when she gets back from her
weekend away.’ He drops his arms from our shoulders and I feel suddenly cold. ‘Right, I’ll leave you to it. I’ve got things to do.’
He leaves and there’s only me and Livia. Is this the place to tell her, here on the lawn, in front of the photos of Marnie? Or should I take her into the house?
‘By the way, your mum phoned,’ Livia says.
‘Did she? When?’
‘While you were in the shower.’
‘What did she want?’
‘Just to wish me a happy birthday.’ She pauses. ‘I thought it might be Marnie phoning. Isn’t it lovely, what she’s done?’
‘Yes,’ I say, glad I hadn’t heard the phone ring, that I was spared the crushing disappointment of it not being Marnie.
‘I could stand here all evening looking at these photos but I’d better go and get ready.’ She starts to move away and I catch hold of her hand again.
‘Livia, wait—’
But she gives me a kiss and pulls away, her mind already elsewhere.
She gets as far as the steps before she realises.
‘Sorry!’ she says, turning around and laughing. ‘Did you want to tell me something?’
I look at her, her hair burnished by the sun, her face flushed with excitement, and all I can think is that this might be the last time she’ll ever be truly happy. In the future, the very distant future – if Marnie isn’t alright – there might be moments when she forgets. But for the rest of the time, for every second of every minute of every hour, for every hour of every day for the rest of her life, Livia will feel the desperate pain of grief. As she stands there waiting for my answer, all I can think is that these might be her last few moments of happiness.
So, I prolong them a bit. I take my time answering, stretching out the seconds.
‘Adam! Can it wait?’
Her words echo in my ears. Can it wait? I draw in my breath, overwhelmed by a sudden thought. What if – what if I only tell her once the party is over? I don’t have official confirmation that Marnie was on the flight, and there’s a fair chance that she wasn’t. What if I tell Livia that Marnie might never be coming home, that we might never see her again – and then, a few hours later, she walks through the door? I’ll have caused Livia unimaginable pain and anguish for nothing. And if she doesn’t walk through the door, if the very worst has happened —
‘Adam!’ Waiting for my reply, Livia becomes impatient.
I take a steadying breath. If the very worst has happened, then it won’t make any difference to Marnie whether I tell Livia now or not. If Livia can have another few hours of happiness, then surely that’s the greatest gift I can give her?
‘It can wait!’ I call. And she blows me a kiss and runs down the steps towards the house.
She deserves so much to be happy.
Livia
I take the towel from my head and shake out my wet hair. As I reach for a comb, I catch sight of myself in the full-length mirror and move to stand in front of it, running a critical eye over my body. I’m in my underwear, so I can see that watching what I ate has got rid of the extra pounds that crept up on me over the years. It wasn’t that hard. I lost my appetite the moment I found out about Marnie and Rob.
The level of deception that he, and Marnie, have stooped to is bewildering. A couple of days after I saw Rob naked in the hotel room, when I was still piecing everything together, a couple of days before he and Cleo were due home, I had a conversation with Jess.
‘Didn’t Cleo mind Rob going to Hong Kong with her?’ I asked, remembering that she hadn’t wanted Cleo to travel on her own. I hoped she hadn’t noticed that I’d almost choked on his name. What I’d discovered weighed so heavily on me that I could hardly bear to be around Jess, and I was glad I could escape to work during the day, that Adam was with us in the evenings, and that she’d soon be going back to her own house.
Jess threw back her head and laughed. ‘Yes, of course she did! No self-respecting nineteen-year-old wants their dad chaperoning them when they go to see their best friend. But Rob insisted that Cleo wasn’t going without him. I tried to persuade him to let her go on her own but he wouldn’t budge, saying it wasn’t safe. Cleo was furious and said there was no way that he was going with her and that she’d pay for the ticket herself. But Marnie told her that if it was the only way they were going to be able to see each other, it was best to accept Rob as part of the package.’
To know that Marnie was part of the deceit crushed me even more. It made me question everything she’d told me about her time in Hong Kong. I could think about nothing else and when I remembered how depressed she’d been when she first arrived there, I also remembered how she’d suddenly perked up in December. And then I remembered Rob’s big trip away, supposedly to the Singapore office of his company. We were all so impressed that he was going somewhere more exotic than Darlington that nobody thought to wonder why he’d suddenly been sent to the Singapore, not even Nelson, because it wouldn’t have occurred to any of us that he could possibly be lying. We were best friends, family. People don’t lie to their families.
I was so obsessed, so determined to have all the facts, that I trawled Rob’s Facebook, scrolling down his timeline until I came to the corresponding date. There weren’t many posts, certainly not as many as I’d have expected from someone like Rob in somewhere like Singapore, because he loved to brag. And what he had posted was tellingly vague – no views at all, just a couple of selfies, one sitting in a restaurant in front of a platter of seafood with the caption ‘loving Asia’ and another of him holding a cocktail and the caption ‘unsurprisingly hot in Asia’. But I didn’t know for sure.
I run the comb angrily through my hair, tugging the knots hard, the eternal question trapped in my brain – how could Rob do that to Jess? I’ll never get an answer I can understand. Jess is the kindest, loveliest person I know. She doesn’t deserve to have a cheating, lying husband, especially now, when she’s ill. What I can’t bear is the thought that it’s happened because she’s ill, that Rob no longer loves her because of her illness. Surely it should have brought them closer, made him want to protect her? I know one hundred per cent that if I was ill, Adam would be there for me, just as I would be there for him.
Out of nowhere, a sudden fear takes hold of me. I put down the comb slowly, turning it over in my mind. Is that what’s wrong with Adam, is that why he’s behaving so strangely, because he’s ill? Josh said he was stressed when he got back from town. What if he had a doctor’s appointment that he didn’t tell me about because he didn’t want to worry me? What if he received bad news? Don’t let it be that, please don’t let it be that Adam is ill, I pray. But I can’t think what else it can be.
Grabbing my dressing gown, I shrug it on and run down the stairs, tying the belt as I go. It must be bad if Adam wanted to tell me before the party. Maybe he wants me to cancel it. But he’d only want me to cancel it if it was something really bad.
I can’t see Adam in the garden, even Josh and Max have disappeared, so I head to the work shed. As I squeeze behind the tent, I see Adam through the window, standing at his workbench, his head bent over a piece of dark wood.
‘Hey,’ he says, when I burst through the door. ‘Aren’t you meant to be getting ready?’ He sees my face and freezes. ‘Livia, what is it? What’s the matter?’ The fear on his face mirrors my own. He knows that I know.
I go towards him because he seems unable to move.
‘Adam.’ I take his hands in mine and find them ice-cold. ‘Adam – please, tell me the truth. Are you ill? Is that what you wanted to tell me? That you’re ill?’
The long pause makes my heart race.
‘No.’ He shakes his head, puzzled. ‘No, I’m not ill. Apart from my migraine. I didn’t want to say anything but it’s come back.’
I swallow a shaky breath. ‘You didn’t go and see the doctor today?’
‘The doctor? No, I would have told you if I’d had an appointment.’
‘Really?’
‘Ye
s.’
I give a half-sob, half-laugh of relief. ‘You don’t have some terrible illness that you’re keeping from me until after the party’s over?’
‘No, Liv, no.’ He pulls me into his arms. ‘I’m sorry you thought that, I’m sorry you were worried.’
‘Promise?’
‘Yes. I’m not ill, I promise.’
‘Then what was it you wanted to tell me? You tried to tell me several times so it must be important. I should have listened.’
His arms tighten around me. ‘I just want you to know how much I love you, how I’ll always be here to look after you, no matter what.’
‘I know you will be.’
‘All I want is for you to be happy.’
There’s a darkness in his eyes that I don’t understand. ‘I am happy,’ I say, kissing him softly, wanting to chase it away. ‘I’m happier than I’ve ever been.’
‘Good. Now, if you don’t go and get ready, you’ll be welcoming your guests in your dressing gown.’ He looks at the old battered clock standing on his workbench. ‘It’s quarter to seven, so you have exactly forty-five minutes.’
‘I’m already gone!’ I call, running from the shed, my feet no longer heavy with dread but light with relief. I could bear anything, anything, except Adam being ill. I think of Jess and I know that’s why I made that jump, because before she told us about her diagnosis, I’d known there was something on her mind. But she waited until we came back from holiday, knowing we’d worry about her as soon as we knew.