Subconsciously, I took a step backward, then another, until I reached the bathroom door. I went in and locked the door. I sat on the closed toilet lid for what felt like hours, unsure of the man outside the door. I had pushed too far. He was right; I wasn’t the one who suffered. I just couldn’t understand the way he was willing to let this go. If our positions were reversed, I would have…But really, what would I have done? Something like this changed you. How could I, someone who had grown up in a completely different environment, say how I would react? Was my desire to make this “better” helping? My head dropped into my hands. I was not equipped to deal with this.
When I finally crept out of the bathroom, Jack had gone. He didn’t come back for several days.
The shooting weekend went off without a hitch the following weekend with none of Edwina’s interference. Jack was polite but even more distant. Despite his admission that he didn’t want me to leave, he kept pushing me away any time I tried to apologize or talk about it, and I was almost ready to admit defeat. Being around him was exhausting, and I eventually gave up trying to talk to Jack anywhere but at the therapist, where I roused myself from my haze of misery to work on our marriage.
I hadn’t forgotten about Crispin, though.
“Have you spoken to Crispin yet?” I gently asked Jack every weekend.
“No, it’s not just something you can do over the phone. I’m waiting for the right time.” He rolled his eyes, exasperated that I kept asking him. Finally, I’d had enough. If he wasn’t going to do it, then I would have to. As much as I thought it would accomplish little, my conscience wouldn’t give me peace. He was hurting young women, and, for their sake, I had to try.
Amazed that I was voluntarily ringing him, I half-hoped that the call would go through to voice mail. Instead, he answered.
“Well, if it isn’t my slutty sister-in-law,” he drawled.
“Crispin, I would like to talk to you. Would you be able to come to the Hall sometime this week?”
“You’ve reconsidered? I thought you said you told Jack?” He sounded unsure. I’d managed to floor him.
“No, he knows. This is about something else.”
“What?” he asked suspiciously.
“I’ll tell you when you get here.”
“Okaaay,” he said slowly. “I should be able to come for a few hours on Thursday. I’ll be there early afternoon.”
“I will see you then.” I hung up the phone. I thought the house would be the best place to meet him. There were always people around to hear my scream for help if need be.
I had afternoon tea waiting in the library. Crispin entered with his usual slimy smirk. He sat down on the couch next to me, sitting slightly too close.
“Tea?” I asked, surreptitiously moving a little further away as I poured for both of us. Handing him the cup, I held mine in front like a tiny china shield. “I wanted to talk to you about something that came up in our therapy sessions,” I began as gently as I could.
“Jack is going to therapy?” He scoffed.
“It was about you.”
“What about me?” He immediately jumped to the defensive.
“It was about seeing your mother doing something…inappropriate,” I hedged. Crispin slammed down the teacup onto the table, sending tea splashing.
“That’s a lie!” he shouted.
“You’re reaction says not. I am so sorry that happened to you. Have you thought about talking to someone about it? It might help.”
“What?” He leaped to his feet.
“Crispin, you are hurting young girls. There are too many rumors for it not to have some truth. You need to stop and deal with what happened to you before you go so far that even your family will not be able to cover it up. You will go to jail. If you care about yourself or your family, something needs to change. I have some names…” I stood up and handed him the piece of paper with the contact details of some therapists I had found who specialized in childhood trauma. The look of stunned incredulity on his face changed to something darker. Slowly and deliberately, he tore the paper into small pieces and threw them in my face.
“You bitch,” he said slowly. “You know nothing. How dare you, a lying, cheating slapper, tell me that I need help?”
“Because someone needs to, and your family are all too repressed to talk about this sort of thing.”
“My family are perfectly fine. Do you know how many people wish they were us? We have wealth and history and can trace our family tree back to the twelfth century!”
“How many of those people would want to be you if they knew the truth? Your mother is an incestuous pedophile, your father is completely absent and so inbred his mental faculties are in question, and you beat up and rape young girls. You and Jack still suck up to your abuser, refusing to force her to acknowledge the damage that she did. Why would anyone want to be you?” I spoke the truth thoughtlessly to punish him, completely losing sight of trying to help him. For a brief moment, his pain showed before he shut down completely.
“Fuck you!” He strode from the room and slammed the door behind him. I sat back down in the chair. That had not gone how I’d hoped it might. I didn’t think I had made anything better, and the thought that at least I had tried was a hollow one.
Chapter Twenty-One
THE TEMPTATIONS OF SAINT KATE WAS RELEASED with mixed feelings on my part. Everyone raved about it, saying it was beautiful, brilliant, etcetera. All I could think about was Anders, in bed, and his enjoyment of the things I had made. Even with how it ended, I found myself wishing I could be back there with him and make that time last forever, stuck on a loop. I had dreams where I would be with him, and on waking I would try to force myself back to sleep to get away from the current hell of my life.
Jack and I turned up at the required events and posed happily for photographers. Reporters asked their questions, and we laughed off the rumors of my affair with Anders as extraordinary and without foundation. Despite the pain in my heart at the mention of his name, nothing showed on my new poker face, honed through having to repeatedly face Edwina and keep my silence. Lindsay nodded approvingly in the background.
Just when I thought the situation couldn’t get any worse, a bolt of lightning came out of nowhere. The signs were all there: the tiredness, sore breasts, and the aversion to the smell of meat. I was so emotionally exhausted that I didn’t notice until I brushed too close to a door, whacking my breast on the edge, and it exploded in pain.
“What the …?” I gasped, trying to deal with the sudden and unexpected agony. Why did that hurt so much? I wondered. I ran through some likely and then not so likely possibilities, like breast cancer or unknown trauma while I slept, before my sluggish mind stumbled upon the most obvious scenario.
I looked at the stick I’d raced out and bought from the store three villages and a forty-five-minute drive away and swore. Then I swore some more. I was still swearing two days later as I drove to meet Lindsay at her office for our weekly meeting.
“How are things going with Jack? The media reports have been largely positive about the two of you. The book, as you already know from the sales reports, is doing very well,” she began without preamble as we sat down on her black sofas. Her entire office was super-stylish and entirely monochrome. It was visually stunning and showed a remarkable ability to adhere to a theme. Even the glasses of water she put down on the coffee table were white instead of the usual clear.
“Couldn’t actually be much worse. I just found out I’m pregnant,” I said with a bitter sigh.
“Interesting.” She nodded to herself. “Do you know whose it is?”
“Anders’.” There was no doubt; Jack and I had finally tried sleeping together a couple of weeks ago. It had been so tentative and awkward, I don’t think either of us had relaxed enough to enjoy it.
“Does Jack know?”
“No, but he’s bound to notice eventually. He’s pretty unobservant, so I could probably get through the whole pregnancy first, but I
’m sure he’d notice a new baby in the house. Mind you, the house is so huge, I could stash the baby somewhere he’d never find it.” Bleak humor was my only refuge from despair. Lindsay’s eyes had rolled sideways at the new bomb of information. For a second, I thought she was going to allow herself to have a genuine reaction of some sort, but she gathered herself quickly.
“Have you thought about terminating it?” she asked softly.
“Yes, but I couldn’t. Not after what we went through.”
“Well, you’ll have to tell him, then. There’s no way it could be his?” she asked, slightly hopeful.
“Not unless it’s the next messiah.” Somehow that joke didn’t seem funny.
“Oh.” There was nothing more to be said on that topic. Lindsay went into action, amazing as usual at her job. I felt about two inches high.
I went for an ultrasound and saw my baby for the first time as a smudgy blur on the screen. The only thing I could see clearly was a beautiful and tiny heart beating, and I started to cry. My obstetrician gave me the all clear the following day, though given my age I would still have to have an amniocentesis in a few weeks. It was time to tell Jack. He had just been showing signs of starting to…not exactly thaw, but to be calmer and less angry. This was going to blow it all to hell. I waited until Saturday night, so he hadn’t just come in from the long drive down and had had enough fresh air and manual labor to hopefully be in as good a mood as possible.
“Jack?” I called out as I heard him come in. He stopped in the sitting room, a small smile on his face as he looked at something on his phone.
“Yes?”
I looked at him and felt so guilty about the pain I was about to cause him. “I’m pregnant.”
His smile faded, and he looked at me with wide eyes.
“How?” He looked stunned. “We were told we had almost no chance of falling pregnant naturally, and now you’re nearly forty and your fertility is declining, it happens?”
“I’m more than three months along,” I said, trying to hide my exasperation that Jack had taken the time even now to point out to me my lack of fertility. We had no trouble with the boys, who were conceived on our honeymoon. With an heir required, I had to quickly come to grips with the concept that birth control would not be in my future until I had ensured succession. With not one but two male babies, I was then allowed to go back on the pill.
When we decided to go again, we both just assumed it would happen as easily as the first time. We were wrong, and after trying for more than two years, went down the expensive and heartbreaking IVF path. Jack reminding me of this put me instantly on edge, and that wasn’t the way I meant this to go. I needed to be calm and handle this gently as it would probably be harder than the affair on him.
He looked at me silently for a long moment.
“Right,” he said quietly. “So, the baby is his.”
“Yes.”
With a sharp outtake of breath, he started pacing the room. I watched him doing laps for about five minutes, the only sounds that of his heavy steps and harsh breathing as he fought for control.
“What do you want to do about it?” he asked unevenly, not looking at me.
“After all we went through, could you imagine willingly terminating?” I asked him. It was a while before he answered.
“No. I guess not. So, where does that leave us? Do you expect me to raise it as my own?” he asked angrily.
“If we want to stay together, then, yes, I guess that’s what I’m asking. I know this is an extra complication, but you said you could forgive the—” I swallowed hard before I could say it. “Affair.” God, it was still hard to say that word.
“You’re kidding, right?” he shouted. “This is hardly the same.”
“No, but I haven’t done anything more than you’ve already said you would forgive.”
“You’re still a lawyer. Your talent for twisting logic is exceptional.” He breathed out heavily. “So, how far along are you, exactly?”
“Fourteen weeks.”
“Have you had the scan?” he asked.
I nodded. “I wanted to be sure before I told you. Everything is fine. The baby looks strong and is a good size.”
“Have you told him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because…we aren’t in contact anymore, and things are complicated enough.”
“Do you intend on telling him?”
“No, I guess not. I don’t have to.”
“Fuck,” Jack said and walked out.
You think I would have learned my lesson about the Internet, but apparently not. Jack had been AWOL for a couple of hours, and to distract myself, I Googled Anders guiltily. I knew I had no right to have any feelings about his life, but I was using him as a fix, to remind myself what I had given up and why.
I found pictures of him looking hip and young at music festivals, inhabiting a galaxy far, far away from my world of a troubled marriage and now pregnancy. The dark jealousy felt bad and good at the same time, finding out which coffee shop he had been to and which super-skinny beautiful starlet was currently keeping his bed warm at night. It was painful but somehow masochistically satisfying, comparing myself to them. They were younger, thinner, more glossily beautiful than I had ever been, their limbs smooth and flawless despite the bad lighting of some of the paparazzi photographs. They looked self-satisfied at the interest being shown in them, being on his arm. He just looked amused and slightly distant, or perhaps that was just wishful thinking on my part.
God, I missed him. So many times I wanted to pick up the phone and call him, but how could I do that now? He was as faithless as I had accused him of being, and looking at the inhumanly beautiful women keeping him company, I understood how it happened. I had never felt less attractive, with my body starting to swell. He was who he was and it was too late and he had moved on fast, which was another blow to my almost non-existent ego.
I was carrying his child, but the thought of telling him now scared me witless. I wasn’t ready yet to deal with the fallout. I hugged my arms about myself and thought of myself with a new baby, like a talisman against the darkness. It gave me some hope for the future, a bright light to warm the frozen wasteland that was the rest of my emotional landscape. Once I was myself again, I would tell Anders, I promised myself, and I thought of the warm little incredibly precious being I would hold and love for the rest of my life.
After what I went through, I couldn’t think of a baby as anything other than a miracle. Somehow, though, I couldn’t force myself to picture raising my child in this house. Was it a sign? I didn’t even believe in signs, but the thought of running away from everything and starting afresh no longer had the power to scare me as it once had.
Even though our affair was over, rumors still circulated, particularly on the Internet. There were mentions of us together in the Google search for Anders, though some of it was horrible, mostly on the sites that allowed comments at the bottom of the articles. Even though I knew it was going to upset me, I still had to look.
“She’s so old and fat, I really hope they are not together!” sniped Sexxygirl9.
“I can’t see what anyone sees in her. She’s ugly and he could do soooo much better,” agreed tabby14.
“What has she ever done? Why is she even famous???”
“God, I hate her so much! She is so dumb…”
“Her recipes are complete crap. I’ve heard she doesn’t even write them herself…”
I pressed and held the computer’s power button, wanting to get rid of the poisonous comments as quickly as possible. Shutting down properly would take too long. I was angry at myself for letting it get to me, and I was a fool to have looked. All it did was reinforce my own insecurities and remind me of why it would never have worked out with Anders, even if he hadn’t been a lying son of a bitch. Actually, that was probably not fair to his mother, who could be perfectly nice. Sometimes you need to remind yourself of why you let that fish get away.
It was hard to get Anders out of my thoughts any time I was in London, though, seeing he was on every second bus dressed as Captain Milton. He had also just become the face of some men’s fragrance, so he appeared in most magazines. Those I could avoid, and I had been lucky so far with the ad on TV, but I couldn’t do anything about the buses. Or stop thinking about him in unrealistic scenarios where it was all a misunderstanding and he swept me off my feet into the sunset where we lived happily ever after. In reality, though, he was a million miles away with someone else, maybe several of them, probably laughing at my ridiculous reaction to him being with another woman, so hypocritical given I was married. If he thought about me at all.
I hadn’t made any announcement about the pregnancy, but it was becoming apparent if you were looking. The rumors were unconfirmed, and being a food writer, there was more speculation that I had been overindulging in my own wares. I continued to do promotions for The Temptations of Saint Kate, the latest of which was a writers’ festival.
I was part of a panel discussion on how to get published with other authors, which was particularly interesting as there were different genres present, not just food writers. It gave us all an opportunity to talk to new people that we didn’t see at every event and who were amused rather than jaded by our practiced spiels about our own books.
I was seated next to a young English science fiction writer who introduced himself as Daniel Waterstreet. He seemed very serious about his stories of intergalactic robot wars until he smiled with a surprisingly cheeky dimpled grin. Strangely enough, he said he had heard of me, though he had never bought one of my books. I took that as a sign that Lindsay was doing an excellent job. We chatted away about random things while we waited for the event to start, and it was fascinating to hear how he came up with his ideas and his method of writing.
Saint Kate of the Cupcake: The Dangers of Lust and Baking Page 18