In bed, I occupied a ribbon of sheet as far from him as I could. He was hot and restless; once when his legs flailed to kick away the covers, he snagged my shin with a toe nail and I wanted to kick him back; kick him and then push him out of bed, push the duvet down on top of him, and shout and scream and pummel him until he cried for mercy, for forgiveness. But I didn’t. I just lay there, everything going on in my head and nothing outside.
I went over and over in my mind when their affair must have started. Before she went to America and she’d been there—what?—two years. So, before we had Fergus? No, it must have been after that because she’d said, that day in my kitchen, that “the love of her life”—of her life—couldn’t leave his child. Child singular. So after Fergus, but before Dan. It was a horrific thought. I’d believed we were happy then, him and me and our little boy, fussing over the cradle and the stroller and testing the temperature of his room with an over-anxious little thermometer. But all that time . . . As I thought about it, the past moments of contentment went off, like sour milk. Those nights when I’d been working and came back to find Jake at the kitchen table, and he’d made me tea and massaged my shoulders, had she been there with him until minutes before I got home? The weekend he’d spent at St. Andrew’s with Ed when I was pregnant, cheering poor Ed up he’d said, one last fling, one last swing, before Dan was born, had that been an alibi? Had Ed been an accomplice? Had he been off on some little holiday with her, tucked up with room service in a country house hotel off the M25? And then his behavior over the last year, withdrawn, self-contained, guilty almost, was that bitterness against me, unhappiness at what he’d given up? At Christmas, when we were all bundled together in our bed, sharing smiles of amusement as Fergus hurtled through his stocking, had he, all the time, been thinking of her? I often wondered what my mother had felt like when my father left her. Had she felt like this? As if someone had taken their life together, all the things they’d shared, and thrown a bucket of dirty water over it.
But some things still didn’t add up. Why did she refer so dismissively to him the day we bumped into each other? Remember Jock, Jake, whatever he was called, dull Jake. Dullsville, she’d said. Why would she say that? A smoke screen? To put me off him and prepare the way for herself?
And what was happening now? She wanted him back. That was obvious. Now Marcus had dumped her. But would he go? Whom would he choose? Claire Masterson, the glamorous girl about town, with her Disney contract and her faultless skin and her flat stomach and her keygels all in trim. Or me, plain, mousy Maggie who had none of those things? There was a murmur then from the room next door, a moan with a kick at the end of it, not a cry exactly, not quite a word. Fergus fighting dragons in his sleep. Maybe, I realized, I didn’t even come into it. Maybe Jake’s choice was between Claire Masterson and his children.
As I lay there, sleeplessness coiled in my stomach like hunger, I realized how impotent I was. Part of me wanted to hurl his clothes out of the window, bundle the children in blankets, and roar off down the street. That’s what they did on the television, in the two-part Sunday/Monday ITV dramas Jake and I watched, used to watch, together. But when you have children, life isn’t that simple any more. I knew that if I confronted him, I might drive him away. I might force him to make a decision, to do something he might otherwise turn away from.
I’d intended to take Fergus and Dan with me the following day to the Marsden for Mrs. Allardyce’s lung X ray. But at the last minute, I rang Maria to see if I could borrow Merika for the morning. Maria didn’t exactly sound thrilled—one of the rules concerning other people’s au pairs is that you don’t nab them in the day—but I said, darkly, that it was an emergency, and reluctantly she agreed.
It was 11:15 when I knocked at Mrs. Allardyce’s door. I felt dazed with exhaustion, but I smiled chirpily when I saw her. She had the traces of talc on her tortoise cheek, pink lipstick across her lips and a turquoise silk scarf, with proper rolled edges, around her neck. She was also, in honor of the radiologist, wearing navy blue heels that squeezed the American Tan flesh on her feet into swollen semicircles.
“Come in, dear,” she said. “I won’t be a minute. I’m just out back feeding the neighbors’ cats.”
She left me in her front room, where a gas fire, clagged on to the hearth, was radiating a high heat. There were thick net curtains at the window and a swirly red and black carpet on the floor. On a wheeled table next to the chintz-covered sofa was the TV Guide, a magnifying glass, and a tiny plastic beaker, with pills at the bottom of it, and on the mantelpiece and on the sixties sideboard in the alcove, there were jumbled rows of birthday cards—white fluffy cats with cupid mouths, textured red roses with scarlet relief bows, announcing the bestest of wishes for the best gran/mom in the world. There were photographs there, too. I was bending to look at one of the smallest, black and white, of a young man in uniform, when Mrs. Allardyce came in behind me.
She said, “That was Arthur, just after we got married.” She paused for a moment before gesturing to another, “And this is us on our silver wedding.”
The picture was old, in faded blues and greens. It showed a plump middle-aged couple under a rose swag in a suburban garden. I asked her when it was taken and she said thirty-five years ago, in 1965, and while I was inwardly wondering how anyone’s marriage could last that long, she told me that they’d lived in that house since 1950 and seen a lot of changes, but that life hadn’t been the same since Arthur had passed on, cancer it was, that not a day went by that she didn’t miss him, that he was a good man. I asked how long she’d been a widow and she said twenty-five years, which I said was a long time.
“Yes, dear.” She seemed impatient suddenly with my sympathy. She was gripping the side of the wheeled table with one arthritic hand, leaning into it as if it was bearing all her weight. “But I’ve got my boys.” She pointed to another photograph. “That’s Philip. He’s a teacher, but he’s retired now and they live in Newcastle, near her parents. Those are his kids, all grown themselves. I’ve got four grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. They’re always saying I should come and visit but, well, it’s too far for me now. And this is Nicholas. He went to work for Boeing.”
I asked her where he lived and she said Seattle and I said that struck me as quite a long way.
She looked at me beadily. “They grow up, dear. You think it’s going to go on forever, but it doesn’t. They fly off and you hear from them at Christmas, and my boys always remember my birthday. And Flora, my granddaughter, she lives in Streatham and she pops in whenever she’s passing . . . But I hope you’ll make the most of it while you can, dear. I’ve seen you around, with your heart in your heels some of the time, and I know it’s hard, but . . .”
“But it’s not nearly as hard as it was for you,” I finished for her.
“Well,” she looked oddly satisfied. “Everything’s different now.”
We had to hurry a bit after that to switch off the fire and lock up the house and get her into the car and to the hospital on time. I parked on a meter and took her arm to guide her in her heels through the long cream-walled corridors and up the cranky lift to the right department. The nurse at the desk said there was a bit of a wait and that Mrs. Allardyce would have to see the doctor after the X ray and then hang around for the results to take back to her GP. It would be a couple of hours, she said. Mrs. Allardyce heaved herself down into a chair with a copy of January’s Good Housekeeping on her knee and said she didn’t mind if I went off for a bit. “You go and do some shopping, dear. I’m fine.”
So at 12:30 p.m. I was on the steps outside the hospital. For a moment I wondered whether I should do some shopping. We were out of a few things. And there must be somewhere in South Kensington you could buy some soap powder and some ketchup . . . Although, on second thought, maybe there wasn’t. But I’d made up my mind earlier. Jake’s phone conversation with Claire played in my head. One-ish, he had said. Lunch. I didn’t know exactly what, or how much, I expected to see, b
ut if I witnessed them with my own eyes I’d be sure then. I would see where the land lay. I would have proof.
First I asked for change in an expensive jewelry shop to feed the meter, then I half walked, half ran to the Tube, where I waited “4 mins” for a train, though it felt like forty, wandered in a crush of people along endless Stygian corridors to change trains at Victoria, and then, face squashed into the back of someone else’s jacket, endured two crowded stops to Oxford Circus. Only one escalator was working, so there was a line to get out. I was hot and sweaty when I finally reached the open air. I came up the steps, turned the corner and then—there was central London.
The sky was deep blue, though the street was in shadow. There were people everywhere, getting off and on the buses that idled at the lights or crossing between cars or selling hot dogs, or weaving purposefully through the crowd, with cups of coffee balanced in each hand or pausing in their lightweight anoraks to consult their maps, or wandering in pairs, amid concertina’ed shopping bags, in and out of shops. There seemed to be a businessman, with his arm out for a taxi, on every corner. No strollers. No three-wheel all-terrain mountain buggies. No babies in slings. No young mums in Boden. No sense of time lingering like you get in the suburbs, but time divided into holiday schedules, dotted with colored stickers, and production schedules, a world of work. Oh, of course I knew central London was there, but it still came as a shock.
Jake’s office was in a side street between Oxford Street and Soho. It was a big glass-fronted building with rotating doors and leather retro armchairs, in bright colors and bulbous shapes, in reception. Appearances matter in advertising in a way they don’t in other businesses. It’s how you perceive the product, after all, not the product itself, that counts. Jake’s building said, “cutting edge, out there, classic with a twist.” There were other buildings adjacent saying other things, but I made for a small old-style café on the opposite side of the road, with sandwich fillings lined up like different types of vomit in the window and hot water gushing into stainless steel teapots from a network of metal pipes.
I sat at the Formica table closest to the door with a can of Coke as cover and waited. Over the next fifteen minutes, a lot of people drifted out of the TMT&T building in dribs and drabs, but there was no sign of Jake. I was beginning to think maybe he wasn’t coming, that maybe, perhaps, he’d decided not to meet Claire after all, my stomach tightening in hope, when at ten past one, the doors swung open and there was a stocky dark man in chinos and a white shirt. There he was. There was Jake. He stood for a split second in the street to shrug on his jacket, slipped on his sunglasses, and then he turned and began to walk briskly down the road toward Soho. I jumped up and was halfway out of the door when someone else came out of the building behind him and called him to stop. It was Ed. He was wearing a lilac shirt with a Nehru collar. I hid in the doorway, suddenly fascinated by the sandwich fillings, as Jake turned and waited for him to catch up. Then they both walked off together.
It isn’t difficult following somebody if they’re not expecting it. I stayed on that side of the road, twenty yards or so behind them, not even needing to dodge behind a parked car, until they reached a small restaurant on a nondescript street. I knew this restaurant. Jake and I had met there a few times before we had children, before I’d retired to the warm milk world of the suburbs, and I had loved it. It felt dark and Dickensian inside, with its faux cigarette-stained walls and the candles making fairy-tale palaces of wax out of the bottles on the tables. It was full of people you knew, but it still felt like a secret. Jake’s and my secret. And now he’d gone there to meet Claire.
The two men were, for the moment, still standing outside. Maybe Jake was trying to get rid of Ed. They seemed to be talking with some heat—Ed was waving his arms about and Jake at one point rubbed his eyes slowly. Finally, hunching his shoulders up to his ears, Ed walked on up the road. Jake stood watching him for a bit and then went inside.
I stood across the street, wondering what to do. There was no café to hide in here. But there was a hat shop that I spent some time in, one eye on the mirror, one on the glass, pretending to be in need of something for a wedding. “Not my own,” I jested with the bored young man with snaky hips who worked there. After a while, I ran out of hats and had to leave, promising to return with my Jill Sander suit. I don’t own a Jill Sander suit.
I walked up and down the road a couple of times, bought a paper from the newsstand on the corner and hovered as inconspicuously as I could manage. I obviously wasn’t that successful because after a bit I noticed the man from the hat shop eying me suspiciously. I gave a half-smile and made a big play of looking at my watch, clicking my fingers impatiently as if I was waiting for something or someone. I even walked directly in front of the restaurant, peering quickly past the menus in the window to see if I could spot them, but it was too dark and too busy. In the end I sat in a patch of sun on some office steps a few doors down and pretended to read the paper. After a while, the sky began to fill up with clouds like steam against a window and the sun went in.
I was about to go—there was only half an hour before I had to pick up Mrs. Allardyce—when the door of the restaurant opened and Jake came out. He was with Claire. She was wearing the same orange shift dress, carrying the same pink bag she’d carried on the day I first bumped into her on Morton High Street. She looked very blond, very fragile, next to Jake. I ducked into the doorway of the hat shop. I watched as he ran his hands through his hair, and then took both her hands in his. He talked earnestly looking into her eyes and then hugged her close.
I turned and ran to the end of the road where a taxi was just pulling away. I threw out my arm, yelled at it to stop, and then hurled myself into the back seat. My limbs felt numb. By the time we reached the Marsden it had begun to rain and the streets had emptied of people.
That night, Jake rang to say he would be staying late again at the office and to warn me that he’d have to work all weekend. “Kyushi?” I said. He said yes, in a tired, tense tone. “Or sushi,” I said, after I’d put down the phone.
I ranged around the house for a while, feeling lost and impotent. I sorted through the fridge and tossed three tins of half-eaten pickles and unopened jars of Gentleman’s Relish, past their sell-by date, into the garbage. In the bedroom, I went through the pockets of Jake’s clothes, smelling the collars and then chucking restaurant receipts and loose change onto the bed, sorting through them as if they’d bear up a secret. I threw the receipts in the wastepaper basket: there were enough of them to be deeply incriminating. But then Jake was in advertising, so they were nothing of the sort.
And then I did something I’d been putting off all day. I rang Mel.
“Maggie,” she said. “I was just about to ring you. I’m off to Shrewsbury tomorrow to meet Piers’s parents. I know, I know. Don’t say anything. I don’t know what I’m doing. You’re right . . . blah blah. But I’m doing it. And also I meant to ask you . . . And at some point, I must collect Milly’s Tinky-Winky. We had tears about that yesterday. Quite happy without it for days and then suddenly she noticed and it was as if the world had ended. Anyway I told her Fergus was looking after it, but I must get it sometime. And . . . Maggie, are you all right?”
I said, “Yes.”
“You’re not, are you?”
“No.”
“Are you crying?”
It took me a while to say anything. Finally, I managed to say, “Yes.”
“Maggie, what’s the matter? Do you want me to come round? Milly’s asleep but I can get a neighbor to sit.”
I blew my nose and wiped my eyes. “No, don’t,” I said. “I’m fine. It’s just . . .” I started crying again but while I was doing so I told her what had happened. She said, “I’m coming round. Give me ten minutes.”
When she got there, I’d pulled myself together and we sat in the sitting room and I went through everything again. Mel kept shaking her head and saying she didn’t believe it. She said Jake just wouldn’t. I w
as very calm. I said it explained everything, that I knew it was true. She said I should talk to him. I said I thought it was important that I didn’t, that all that mattered for now was keeping our marriage—huh, I corrected, with a self-pitying laugh, our relationship—going for the sake of the children. “And maybe for the sake of me, too.”
She said, “But if it’s true, how can you put up with it? And if it isn’t, you need to find out.”
I was silent for a long time and then I said, “I just don’t want to lose him.” She put her arms round me and said should she cancel her week away? “No, of course, not,” I said. “But you’re meeting the parents?” Even under the circumstances, I started laughing at this.
She laughed back. She said, “I know, I know. I’m up to my neck here. It’s just he’s so . . . nice.” She stroked my hair with her voice. “I’m so sorry,” she kept saying. “Maggie, I really am. I’m so so sorry.”
I was pretending to be asleep when Jake came home, and I was pretending to be asleep when he went off again on Saturday morning. He left me a note. It said, “Maggie. XXX.” Either he was kissing me or crossing me out.
Chapter 14
When you’re a grown-up, or at least when you’re a grown-up who has recently discovered the father of your children in the arms of another woman, there are few things as unimportant as a child’s birthday party. When you are two and a half, on the other hand, there are few things that matter more. A week later, after a hot, sticky picnic on the common, I was pushing the stroller past Monkey Business, my mind full of single parenthood, when I remembered. There, on display in the window of the toy shop, was a Barbie hair salon, complete with vanity unit and working hair dryer.
“FUCK,” I said.
“What?” said Fergus.
It was a week since I’d found out, a week in which our life had shrunk down to essentials. I had steered past the playground, seen and spoken to no one. I could just about get through pretending everything was unchanged, if I avoided social contact. I had hardly even seen Jake—which made things easier in one way, but also more difficult. He had been at the office (or with her), and when he had touched down at home, I had managed to behave as normally as I could. But I wasn’t normal. I was close to losing it.
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