Lover

by Anna Raverat

  “Charlie, of course! And guess what Daddy did?”

  “What did Daddy do?”

  “He brought Charlie’s toothpaste and toothbrush to show us and guess what?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Guess what flavor Charlie’s toothpaste is?” says Hester.

  “Chicken,” says Milla dryly.

  “Milla! I wanted to tell her!”

  “Urgh, chicken-flavored toothpaste, yuk!” I say.

  “Yes, but Charlie likes it,” says Hester.

  “Because he’s a dog,” says Milla.

  “Actually, it’s chicken-liver flavored,” says Adam.

  “Eww,” I say.

  “What’s chicken liver?” asks Hester.

  “It’s a part of a chicken that you can eat,” says Adam. “You can get chicken-liver pâté. In fact, I think you’ve both had some.”

  “Did I like it?” asks Hester.

  “I didn’t,” says Milla.

  “Do you remember eating it?” Adam asks her.

  “No.”

  “How do you know you didn’t like it, then? I think there’s some in the fridge, actually. Shall I go and get it and you can brush your teeth with that?”

  “Oh, nooo! Yuk! We’re not dogs!” squeals Hester, delighted.

  “Daddy, that’s disgusting,” says Milla.

  “How do you know it’s disgusting? Try it,” says Adam.

  “No way, I’m using my normal toothpaste,” says Milla.

  “Yeah, me too,” agrees Hester, and they rush off to brush their teeth.

  “You are brilliant,” I say to Adam.

  “Thank you,” he replies.

  * * *

  Later, when the girls are asleep and we are drinking wine in the kitchen I ask Adam if he has called Louise since I found the emails and he says not. He looks at me fair and square and says, “No. I didn’t and I won’t. I promise. Nothing happened with Louise.”

  “Adam,” I say, “I believe you didn’t have a proper affair or anything like that with her, but I’m not totally sure what—”

  “Listen,” he says calmly. “This has gone far enough. I know it must have been horrible for you finding those emails, and I was a complete idiot about the whole thing, but it was nothing.”

  “I just want it to go away,” I say, although what I really want is for it never to have happened at all.

  “So do I,” he says. “Come on, Kate—I’m sorry. I’ll say sorry as many times as you like.”

  He hugs me and I do feel better. I sink farther into his arms and he kisses me. We kiss the way we used to, and everything feels simple again. Maybe that was the problem; we just stopped kissing. I remember what I read in The Happy Couple: it’s not necessarily a calamity if your partner has an affair that makes them feel more youthful, exciting, and attractive. It can even be a wake-up call for the main relationship. The crucial thing is that you are able to discuss it.

  “You know that book, the long-term relationship one?”

  “Mmm?” says Adam, pouring the rest of the wine.

  “Remember I told you it said something like this can actually be a good thing and you said ‘How’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, the reason is—they say it can be a wake-up call.”

  “Exactly,” says Adam. “That’s exactly what this is—a wake-up call.”

  We clink glasses, agree to get a babysitter more often and go out just the two of us, and when we go to bed we have sex—for the second time in a week, which hasn’t happened in a long time. Not the lovemaking kind; more like rutting, more like something coming into season. But anyway, afterward both of us sleep really well. Many marriages survive affairs, and some may even thrive on them—or so say Rosenfeld and Abrahams, and maybe they are right. And maybe Adam is right, maybe this isn’t even an affair, or wasn’t, because whatever we eventually agree to call it, it’s over.

  7

  The day we leave for our Christmas trip to Adam’s parents’, I get up early to make a chicken-and-leek pie. I made one two years ago when they were staying with us and it was a hit. His dad had triple helpings and afterward dozed in front of the evening news; his mum asked me for the recipe and I remember Adam cozying up to me, pleased as a cat.

  A story comes on the radio about a Frenchman living in Manhattan who gave up his job as an advertising executive to start his own fashion line after seeing a picture of a pair of shoes.

  “What was it about the shoes that so inspired you?” asks the reporter.

  “They were embroidered—these shoes were made in 1690 and they were embroidered in the most wonderful way—they looked so contemporary, the embroidery was so free! The way the cobbler—or artist, really—let the stitching roam all over the shoe, I wouldn’t have expected that and I saw these shoes and straightaway I knew what to do. I went out and I bought myself a pair of shoes—just a pair of white tennis shoes—and some thread and I started to embroider them and I loved it. And when I finished the shoes, I started on my jeans, and after, my T-shirt, and my jacket, and that’s how it started.”

  “What color thread did use on your shoes?”

  “White. The white silk thread is very luxe, very generous with the plain white canvas and the two whites are not the same, you know? But they talk to each other.”

  “And what did you do while you were sewing—what music did you listen to?”

  “Nothing. No music. I just sit in my small room, a hundred feet above the ground, and I can see the river from my window, and the bridge going over it, and all day long I sew, and I look at the weather forecast and if they say it will be sunshine, I say, ‘Perfect! I can have the window open while I sew and I can feel the breeze come inside the room,’ and if they say it will be rain, I say, ‘Perfect! I can sew even more today.’”

  * * *

  I wish for things to be simple and good and true, like the Frenchman in his tower embroidering white silk thread on a pair of white canvas shoes. It feels good to be quietly moving around the kitchen rolling pastry from the packet, weighing and chopping and stirring with Charlie watching from his basket, nose raised to the smell of the chicken. Poor Charlie; he trembles when spoken to. Hester thinks he’s excited because it’s Christmas, Milla thinks he’s cold and keeps covering him with a blanket. Charlie totters between kitchen and front room, several minutes behind whomever he is following. If someone else comes in the other direction he’ll start following the more recent person, which about-turns make him look confused, but he isn’t, only forgetful.

  * * *

  Packing the car later that morning, frost melting from the windscreen, sun bright, I buckle the girls into their booster seats and they arrange selected teddies and toys around them, arguing over space. Charlie lowers himself to a cushion on the floor, Adam loads up suitcases and bags of presents. The car is too full. Adam is wedging things down the sides. I bring the pie out, hand it to him, and go back inside to check the windows and doors are locked. I hear a smash and run outside to see Adam with his arms raised in exasperation over the pie broken on the ground, steam rising.

  “Oh, no!” I exclaim.

  “I didn’t do it on purpose!”

  “I know, I’m just saying!”

  He swears as he lifts pieces of crockery out of the warm gloop. Charlie sniffs the chicken, heaves himself out of the car, and waddles round the back, eager to get a bite. Adam pushes him back. “He’ll cut himself! Can you get him away, Kate, please!” I bundle Charlie into the front and shut the door, but he jumps onto the backseat, disturbing the carefully placed toys and sending up a wail from both girls. I tell Adam to mind his head and slam the boot shut and move the car to the end of the street so that Charlie is away from the enticement. The girls unbuckle themselves and argue all over again about whose toy goes where.

  “Why do you have to fight about it again? Can’t you just put them back where they were before?” I snap. The girls resume their bickering in whispers. I look in the rearview mirror and w
atch Adam shovel pie remains into a plastic bag with the dustpan. He dances back as some spatters on his jeans and I see him swear and fume. He strides into the house; shoulders up, head down—a familiar sight. It’s just a pie, I tell myself. My disappointment isn’t all about the pie, but if I mention it there’s danger of sparking off a bigger row or causing a sulk to set in like fog.

  I take out my phone and look at the picture Adam sent a couple of days ago of a really horrible sofa. Soon after we got together, I walked past a store on Fulham Palace Road and took a photo of a bed with an enameled black headboard inlaid with mother-of-pearl hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades. We enjoyed being appalled and had a lot of fun speculating who would buy such a monstrosity and, even worse, who could design one and think it was all right. The game evolved and we played it happily for years. Looking back, I can’t remember when it faded. So it lifted me to receive this picture of a superbly ugly sofa made up of three different colors of leather, all rolled around each other at the ends like a gigantic Licorice Allsort.

  * * *

  Adam comes back out in a pair of fresh jeans and apologizes for breaking the pie.

  “It’s OK, it was an accident,” I say.

  “I’m cold,” says Milla, grumpy because we’ve been in the car for fifteen minutes.

  “So am I, and so is Charlie,” says Hester.

  “Right, hang on.” Adam opens the back door, tucks a blanket round each of the girls, and drapes a towel over Charlie, who lifts his head momentarily and goes back to his doze.

  “What about these guys? I bet they’re cold too, aren’t they?” says Adam, meaning their toys.

  “Yes!” shout the girls, delighted.

  “Right,” says Adam. “I think they need a blanket too, don’t you?” He pulls a tissue out of the box and lays it over Winnie-the-Pooh, another one for Piglet, one each for all their toys.

  “Is that better?” he says, and kisses the girls.

  “Yes, Daddy,” they chime, happy again. Adam puts on a CD of Christmas carols. As we set off, he starts singing along to “Jingle Bells,” and the girls and I join in.

  * * *

  On Christmas Eve we go out with Adam’s parents. The party is a small gathering of friends and relatives Adam has known all his life, including his Aunty Vera and Aunty June, who send Christmas cards every year, which I fail to reciprocate, always hoping Adam will do it.

  This time, to appease my guilt, I’ve brought cards that the girls have made and written. There’s a holly wreath on Vera and Stan’s front door, a bunch of mistletoe hanging in the hall, walls decked with dozens of Christmas cards in hanging loops. Perhaps they didn’t miss not getting one from us.

  Vera greets us. “How are your parents, Kate? How’s your mother, still teaching? Headmistress at a large school, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes, she’s still there,” I say, my daughters weighing down each leg so that I enter with giant, slow steps, walking on the moon. My mother is the head of the school I went to; at home she worked all the time and in school there were six hundred other girls competing for her attention. I only saw her from afar—across the assembly hall, at the end of a corridor, disappearing into the staff room. Just after I started that school, when I was eleven, my father had an affair—but they got through that and are still together.

  “It was a grammar school, Vera,” says Aunty June.

  “That’s right, for the clever ones—like our dear Kate,” Vera says warmly, “and like these little ones—” She goes to kiss the girls but they shrink back.

  “Shy,” says Aunty June. The girls slide their heads and shoulders under my coat.

  “That’s right,” says Aunty Vera. Vera and June don’t seem to mind, in fact they seem to think it’s just as it should be. They have the luxury of time and they’re generous with it. Perhaps the girls hear the warm welcome in Vera’s and June’s voices, perhaps their natural curiosity gets the better of them, or perhaps it’s too hot under all those layers of coat, because they begin to peep out, one after the other.

  “Come on, girls, say hello!” says Adam, reaching down and prizing them off.

  * * *

  A buffet is laid out. People are loading plates and going to eat in the lounge where the Christmas tree is. I find myself in the kitchen with Adam’s mother, perusing the food.

  “Do you think Adam would like a sausage roll?” she says.

  “I don’t know, why don’t you ask him?” I reply, and instantly feel mean—she’d only been thinking of her son; his appetite, what he might like.

  “No, wait—I’m sure he would. I’ll take him one,” I say, grabbing a sausage roll and heading for the lounge.

  Adam is on a sumptuous couch in the bay window, but before I reach him Aunty Vera touches my elbow. “Wouldn’t you like a plate for that, dear?” she says. She’s wearing a low-necked peach pullover, a white tissue bunched up and tucked into her bra strap like a rosette. “Here, take mine—it’s only got a few crumbs on it.”

  “Thanks,” I say, battling on so she won’t see the tears spring to my eyes. I am a terrible wife—I don’t send Christmas cards and I can’t even remember a plate for the sausage roll I hadn’t wanted to provide for my husband. No wonder he’d— Well, that was over now.

  I make my way to Adam, bearing the sausage roll like an offering. He eats it in one bite, licks his fingers, and looks around for more. I return to the kitchen. I may as well ferry sausage rolls between kitchen and lounge, mother-in-law and husband, since I don’t have it in me to make polite conversation.

  “You were right, he did want one, and now he wants another!” I say, and maybe she hears the forced brightness in my voice because she says, “Oh, darling, you sit down and have a rest. You must be exhausted with your busy life. I’ll take them and you have a little sit. And have something to eat yourself!”

  “I want to lose weight,” I say as she disappears out of the kitchen with the plate of sausage rolls. I look down—those bulges aren’t folds of fabric, they are midriff. “Spare tire,” I say to myself, pinching a roll of belly between fingers and thumb.

  The house is horribly overheated. Damp patches bloom under my armpits. I don’t want to sit next to the chicken wings and drumsticks, mince pies, Twiglets, crisps, and quiche. I go out through the back door with my phone. My parents have been leaving messages; they want to say goodbye before they go to America to stay with my brother. They’re flying on Christmas Day because my mother is unsentimental about such things. I can phone them back and get some fresh air at the same time.

  * * *

  Dad answers straightaway and I hear a click: the second handset being picked up. My mother often does that, and sometimes she rings off again without even saying hello. I don’t know if she realizes how obvious it is to the caller.

  “It’s Kate,” I say.

  “Hello,” says my mother; evidently she’s decided to join the conversation today.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” says my father. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at Vera and Stan’s house, you remember them from our wedding.”

  “No, I don’t think I do,” says my mother. “Should I?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say.

  “Anyway,” says my father. “How are you doing? How are the girls?”

  “They’re fine, thanks. How are you both? All ready for your trip? I bet you can’t wait to see Greg and Susannah.”

  “You sound exhausted,” says Dad.

  “Yes, you do,” says Mum.

  “I am.” I feel suddenly defeated and let out a little sob. I dab my lower eyelashes with my finger, a gesture that catapults me into the form of my mother, who does exactly the same move. Experiencing my mother from the inside is disconcerting since we’re not that close.

  “Oh, dear,” says Mum.

  “And Adam nearly had an affair,” I blurt.

  “Oh, Kate,” she says, sounding concerned now.

  “I haven’t told anybody.”

  My dad lets out
a deep sigh. “Oh, sweetheart.”

  “He didn’t—I mean, he hasn’t actually had an affair. He ended it before it turned into anything. It was more like an inappropriate friendship.”

  “A what?” says my mother.

  “A near miss,” says my dad.

  “Yeah, kind of,” I say.

  “Are you all right? Do you want us to come and help?”

  “No, thanks, Dad. Anyway, you’re going to Boston. I’m OK. I didn’t really mean to tell you—it just kind of blurted out.”

  “That’s perfectly natural,” says Dad.

  “Yes,” agrees Mum. “I didn’t tell anybody when your father had his affair.”

  “You told me,” I say.

  “Apart from you. Anyway. Once you get past it, you have to really get past it. I remember reading something very useful, it was Elizabeth Taylor. She said, don’t serve it up every day for breakfast.”

  * * *

  Adam is nowhere to be seen. I look for the children, needing to locate them like coordinates on a map before I can know my own position. Hester is lying on the sitting-room floor with her arms around Charlie; Milla is explaining something to Aunties Vera and June on the sumptuous couch.

  Adam comes up behind me, takes hold of my waist, slides his hands down to my hips. “Where have you been?” he says, nuzzling behind my ear.

  “Can we go home?” I say.

  “Sure.”

  “I mean home-home. Not today obviously, but maybe on Boxing Day? We need to spend time together,” I say.

  “Mum will be disappointed,” Adam says. “I told her we’d stay until Wednesday.”

  “I know, I’m sorry, but can we anyway?”

  “Yes, we can,” says Adam, steering me along and kissing me under the mistletoe.

  “That’s what we like to see!” calls Adam’s mum from the kitchen.

  * * *

  The night after Christmas we pack up our daughters and aged dog, bags and presents, and set off for London. There are not many other cars on the motorway.

  “It’s so empty,” I say.

  “Yes, but we’ll get home quicker, and the girls are asleep. We can have a peaceful journey,” says Adam.