Lover

by Anna Raverat

  15

  Arriving at work on Monday, I am astonished to be able to go through the motions. I greet coworkers, hang my coat, go to my desk. Gérard sees the bandage where I cut my hand on the broken windscreen and frowns. “Are you OK? You look a bit pale.”

  “Do I?” I say, and look down at my shoes so that I am not lying to his face. “Rough weekend—the girls have been unwell,” I say.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” says Gérard. “Who’s looking after them—Adam?”

  At the mention of Adam a sob escapes. I hide my face in a man-sized tissue and blow.

  “I imagine it must be very worrying when they fall ill,” says Gérard, who doesn’t have children. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  “Yes, please,” I sniff, already regretting the lie.

  Gérard shuffles off to get coffee. His walk is very low to the ground for such a tall man; nothing seems to actually lift, and he has that small hunch around the shoulders that very tall people sometimes have. It strikes me that I know next to nothing about Gérard, just that he eats three pieces of fruit each day, takes his coffee black with no sugar, comes from a town near Bordeaux, and wears jumpers over his shoulders in the European style. There’s a framed photograph on his desk of him with his cousin, who has the same overgrown shaggy hair but much darker than Gérard’s. In the photo, Gérard’s eyes are shut. The cousin is looking at him and they’re both grinning.

  He comes back with two mugs of coffee.

  “You’re very kind,” I say. “I don’t just mean the coffee, but thanks for that too. I haven’t been sleeping very well recently.”

  “Maybe you should try the swim team,” he says, and we both snicker. Lunchtime exercise is officially encouraged—there’s a swimming coach who takes forty-five-minute training sessions and lunchtime yoga twice a week, but woe betide anyone on Trish’s team who has the temerity to actually go. Yoga is too slow for Trish. She tried the swimming once but came out of the pool early because the lanes were congested, saying, “I can float faster than those people.”

  We used to go swimming as a family. The last time we went Adam told me that my swimming costume wasn’t flattering.

  * * *

  At lunchtime I wander in and out of shops. In the chemist’s I pick out some fruity-zesty shampoo and conditioner for the girls, but as I go up to pay I see the condom display and fear crashes through me like a bolt of lightning. How did he—? What if—? I text him: Did you use condoms? The answer comes back straightaway: Yes. You don’t need to worry about that. Adam calls but I don’t answer. I throw my sandwich in a bin after two bites.

  * * *

  In the afternoon everybody gathers in the lobby for a viewing of the new company film. It opens with uplifting music and aerial shots of PHC’s biggest and best-known hotels around the globe, a collection of palaces in a corporate kingdom. We’re all expecting Richard but it’s Don who appears, his title emblazoned across the bottom of the screen: Mr. Don Mitchell Esquire, Executive Vice President for HR and Legal, Palazzio Hotel Corporation. I’m glad I told Richard about Don and Trish’s secret meeting with the shareholders—only a week ago, though it feels more like a month—but it looks as though Don and Trish are advancing on several fronts. I’m not the only one to have noticed: in the darkened hall, there are mutterings.

  “‘Esquire’—what’s that about?”

  “Where’s Richard?”

  “Being pushed out by this muppet, looks like.” Don looms large from the screen. “Welcome to Our House,” he says, and the camera swoops inside a hotel and pans around the smiling faces of uniformed staff. The rest of the short film is all pictures so that it can be shown to all 360,000 employees around the world. Don is the gracious host to people of all nationalities having model Guest Experiences. Queenly and benign in a wide-skirted blue dress, Trish is seen presiding over a meeting of impeccably turned-out junior staff.

  “I bet they’re actors,” says someone nearby.

  “Yeah. Nobody that good-looking works here,” says the person next to him.

  “Speak for yourself!” says the first person.

  Toward the end of the film the music becomes solemn and stately as if a new country is being introduced to the world and there are shots of PHC’s logo, as heraldic as a coat of arms. The music is all it takes: hot tears bubble up and out and I bend my head slightly to hide them. My sobs are inaudible but my shoulders shake. Even as I hope nobody notices, Trish appears at my elbow, leans in close, and whispers, “I know—exciting, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  After the film I gather my things and get ready to go home. I’ve held it together through the day but I’m not sure I can keep it up. Ordinarily Adam would have done the school run, but today Jo did the morning and Yvette came up from Brighton to collect them. She’s going to stay a couple of days until my parents get back from Boston.

  “I hope they get better soon,” says Gérard as I’m leaving.

  “Who?” I say, then catch myself. “Oh—the girls. Thank you.”

  * * *

  I’m leaving a couple of hours earlier than usual, so even though the cars have their lights on it’s not yet fully dark. Deep pink mottles the sky behind the tall office buildings and the last rays of the sun are reflected in the windows. As I head for the Tube I feel an internal tug. I know this feeling and I know it won’t go away until I act on it, so I turn and go back inside, back up the silver escalator and back to my desk. Gérard looks up and says, “Forgot something?”

  “Yes. I forgot to tell you the truth. The girls aren’t ill. I lied, I’m sorry, but we did have a rough weekend—Adam left. Or ran away. And I don’t know if he’s coming back. I don’t know if I even want him to. I didn’t see it coming—oh, maybe in a way I did, but it was still a shock. I had a feeling something wasn’t right and when I finally looked it exploded in my face. So that’s kind of it, really.” I sprint through two-thirds of this and then wobble. Gérard rises, takes me by the elbow, and sits me down, pulls another chair close.

  “Kate, I am so sorry to hear this. How are you?”

  I shrug. I can’t answer.

  He nods, as if he understands. “How are the girls taking it?”

  “We haven’t really talked. It’s only just happened—Friday night, and today’s only Monday. They know something’s up, but they haven’t asked and I haven’t said anything. Yet.” I suddenly feel guilty that I haven’t explained the situation.

  “You might still be in shock, you know. It’s like a sudden bereavement. You think you can carry on but—”

  “It happened to you?”

  “A bereavement, yes. My partner.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s OK. It was years ago. It was difficult—really difficult—for a long time, but things are better now.”

  “How do you—I mean, if you don’t mind me asking—how do you get over something like that?”

  Gérard thinks for a moment. “You don’t, really. The hurt doesn’t go away completely, it becomes part of you.”

  This is the opposite of what I want to hear. I must look appalled because Gérard smiles and says, “I needed that time. It was like a passage and at the end I was really…” There’s a pause while he looks for the right words. “At my place.”

  “‘At my place’?” I repeat, not understanding.

  “Bien dans ta peau—when you feel happy in your skin, you are at home inside yourself. You are in your own place.”

  * * *

  Leaving the office for the second time that night, I’m glad I told Gérard the truth. In the alley, Peter is outside his shop in a big black overcoat, rearranging a display of ornaments on a slightly wonky shelf unit. The busy high street is up ahead, winking with lights, purring with traffic, but here the air is still. It’s very nearly dark. The pink clouds have faded into dark blue dusk.

  “Hello, darling—do you like these? They are from Buckingham Palace. Gifts from the Queen. An old servant, she sold them to me, s
he doesn’t want them anymore.” A flattened roll-up cigarette stuck to his bottom lip moves up and down when he talks. I stop for a moment to admire the miniatures of Westminster Palace, Kensington Palace, St. James’s Palace, Balmoral Castle, Windsor Castle.

  “Where’s Buckingham Palace?” I ask.

  “She kept it. Take one, I give it to you,” he says, cigarette wagging.

  “Well, all right,” I say. “It’s not every day a man offers me a castle.” I select Balmoral, set on a greenish mound with painted yellow and brown dots that I assume to be gorse and bracken on the heath.

  16

  “Oh, your big sad eyes,” says Yvette when I get home, but I think Gérard was right; my eyes are wide with shock. Walking in the front door feels strange; there’s a different hue, like someone’s swapped our normal lightbulbs and made the hallway brighter, harsher. The girls rush forward and almost take me down, Hester at the knees, Milla at the hips. I manage to stay on my feet and work my arms out of my coat with both of them hanging on tight, pushing me back down the hall until we crash against the door. I slide down to the floor and they pile on top.

  “Poor Mummy!” says Yvette. “She’s just got home from work!”

  “It’s OK,” I call from the bottom of the scrum, “this is normal!”

  “Oh, right,” says Yvette, and retreats into the kitchen. I tickle the girls before shoving them off, by which time Hester’s little red tights are round her knees and everything I’m wearing is ridden up or out of place and static is making my hair rise like a ghoul.

  “Thank you for coming.” I hug Yvette, daughters at my side. Milla is watchful and attentive.

  “I’ll always come, whenever you need me,” Yvette replies.

  I lift Hester onto the kitchen table to pull up her tights, but she wants them off. The sight of her dimpled knees and sturdy little legs almost makes me cry—she’s so young—but I don’t want to collapse in front of them and I still don’t know what to tell them, so I quash it.

  * * *

  At bedtime after I’ve read a story I tell them that Yvette will take them to school and collect them and that they will see Daddy again soon.

  “Where is Daddy?” asks Hester.

  “Why isn’t he here?” says Milla.

  “Daddy’s gone to stay at George’s house for a while. We had an argument.”

  “I heard it,” says Milla.

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. You were arguing about his phone. He wanted you to give it back but you wouldn’t.”

  “Well, that’s not quite all of it, but—”

  “That’s not very nice, Mummy. You should have given him his phone.”

  “It wasn’t really about his actual phone.”

  “Yes, it was! I heard the words!”

  “Don’t lie, Mummy!”

  “If you say sorry, he’ll come home.”

  “You should say sorry, Mummy.”

  * * *

  Say you’ve been married for a long time and there’s always been a certain tension between you, something you took for passion at the start and later explained away, and say this tension grew, but so slowly that you didn’t notice until it was bigger than the house and even then you had so many explanations—the children were young and you were both exhausted, money was a worry because there wasn’t enough, his job made him feel he was being buried alive so no wonder he was snappy and distant, and no wonder you didn’t have sex anymore or even really talk. Say all these things are true, and say you thought you loved each other and so you waited, and waited, and waited for things to improve. How big an idiot are you?

  “You’re not an idiot, Kate. Adam deceived you,” says Yvette.

  “He did, but—how did I not see?”

  “You were being lied to! You trusted him!”

  “I suppose so,” I say. But it’s easier to chastise yourself for being a fool than to admit, even to your closest friend, the terrifying plummet of your humiliating failure to see. The fear is not that you will hit the bottom; the fear is that there is no bottom to hit.

  * * *

  I go to bed at 10:00 and turn out the light, feeling sure that I will sleep because I haven’t for three nights, but I’m so wired I levitate above the mattress. After fifteen minutes I accept that sleep is not going to happen. I get up and check my emails. Jo has sent numbers: solicitors, barristers, mediators, family therapists, counselors, surveyors, and estate agents. A psychiatrist in Harley Street.

  It looks as though it’s going to be a full-time job sorting out the mess, so I may as well start. I email everyone on Jo’s list, asking for appointments, and after that I respond to the emails Trish has sent in the last half hour. She wants to know how I’m going to solve the mystery of the Guest Experience; she’s glad I thought the film was exciting and she wants to know what everyone else thought of her and Don in it; she wants me to go to Belgium on Wednesday to sign the contract on a 1930s palace for a new concept hotel we’re piloting, an immersive experience where a particular moment in history is re-created in full. It’s awkward timing, but maybe it will be good to get away for a couple of days, help me regain some perspective. My parents are coming to us straight from Boston and they can look after the girls so I tell her I will go. I look around. The bedroom looks exactly as it did last week—the book Adam had been reading, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the latest Q magazine, and half a glass of water that has stood by his side of the bed for three days. The sheets are the ones we last made love in. I wonder if we’ll ever do that again. The flurry of sex just before I found out seems desperate now. His pajamas are still under his pillow. I root them out and gather them to my face for a moment to breathe in his scent. The smell conjures him up so powerfully and yet his absence is so complete.

  It’s no wonder I can’t sleep, I tell myself briskly. As quietly as possible, so as not to wake Yvette and the girls, I strip the bed and bundle his pajamas and the old sheets into the laundry basket, make up the bed with fresh linen. It’s a joyless act that I regret instantly. I run a bath and steep in it for thirty minutes, but that feeling doesn’t go away. Three and a half years. A thousand and one nights when he knew and I didn’t. All those birthdays, Easters, Christmases, the summer holidays, the ordinary days. All that life. All those lies. And yet he was with us then, and now he’s gone. My skin pink and porous from the hot bath, I retrieve the bundle and spread the old sheets on top of the clean ones, sip his old water, turn out the light, and hide in the dark with Adam’s pajamas against my cheek, breathing in the smell of him.

  17

  At 3:00 a.m. I wake up and wonder why I am clutching Adam’s pajamas, remember everything in a rush like a cold shower, and throw them across the room, which is unsatisfying since they are not heavy enough to hurl. I get up to make tea, wishing there was something stronger in the house. While the kettle’s boiling I start a new shopping list and put whiskey at the top, then notice that the red wine Yvette and I shared last night isn’t completely finished. I drain the bottle. The dribble of wine has sediment in it. For a flash, it’s funny and I add to the shopping list: vodka, gin, red wine, white wine, beer, advocaat, Bailey’s, sherry, cognac, cherry brandy. There’s some relief in knowing that tea and biscuits are more my style. I rinse my mouth and find a digestive to go with the tea.

  I reread Rosenfeld and Abrahams on infidelity, a chapter I know well by now. It is entirely normal to have many questions. This reassures me somewhat and I write them in a pad of A4, each on a new line and numbered in the margin. I have forty-six questions.

  * * *

  In the morning, I come down from the shower to find Yvette and the girls in the kitchen in their pajamas. The children are drawing. Yvette’s made coffee, soft-boiled eggs, and toast. My shopping list is by the kettle with a few more items in Yvette’s handwriting: Paracetamol, ibuprofen, aspirin, coffee.

  “Thanks,” I say, grateful that she got the joke.

  “I love you,” Yvette says, giving me a hug.


  “Do you want to see our list?” says Milla, holding out the paper they’ve been huddled over. Their list says: Haribo Gummi Bears (big bag), Haribo Starmix (big bag), Coke, Fanta, Sprite, Crisps, Ice cream, Shoklet Butuns, Pupi.

  “Wow, that’s a good list! You’ll have no teeth left!” I say. It’s all in Milla’s writing with the exception of shoklet butuns and pupi, in Hester’s.

  “What’s ‘pupi’?” I say.

  “Puppy, Mummy!” say the girls.

  “Oh, puppy—but we’ve got Charlie!”

  We look at Charlie, wheezing in his basket.

  18

  Peter is laying out the stall outside his shop early. Alongside the miniature castles are two gold carriage clocks, a small yellow pillbox clock, two gilded oval photograph frames, an iron, a kettle. I notice a tea caddy and silver spoon decorated with the royal coat of arms and then other items with the lion and unicorn; three ashtrays in varying condition, a bone-china teapot, a used bath mat in thick white cotton with the emblem embroidered in faded gold thread, a white soap dish with gold edges and the royal emblem.

  “Twenty-two-carat gold on that,” says Peter as I pick up the soap dish and turn it over. On the underside is written Buckingham Palace in gold lettering.

  “She got a lot of presents from the Queen, this old servant,” I remark.

  “Maybe she work there a long time. I don’t know.” Peter shrugs.

  “I didn’t know the Queen smoked,” I say, picking up a slightly chipped ashtray.

  “Secret,” says Peter, and winks. I smile at the idea of the Queen being a secret smoker, and seeing this, Peter offers me anything I want from the royal selection. I’d quite like one of Her Majesty’s soap dishes because they look so quaint—little porcelain tugboats—but I can’t help feeling I’d be stealing if I said yes. PHC phased out soap dishes long ago because they lost so many. In fact today, Peter’s whole stall is like a display of things most often taken from hotels. Clocks, picture frames, phones, irons, kettles, towels, sheets, and bath linen fit easily in suitcases, but people also manage to steal flat-screen TVs, rugs, curtains, minibar fridges, ironing boards. It’s hard to imagine how, or even why, but if people are determined, they’ll find a way.