by Tess Stimson
The commute from Brighton is a killer, too. It’s hot, the train is overcrowded and stuffy, and I can’t find a seat. I stand in the cramped corridor outside the packed carriage along with half a dozen other commuters, leaning against the back of the toilet compartment for balance. I can feel the sweat gathering beneath my breasts and trickling down my back.
When Chris first suggested the job at Whitefish a couple of days after our lunch the other week, I refused point blank even to consider it: I told her I’d rather beg on the streets than work with Caz.
‘You’ll hardly ever have to see her,’ Chris insisted. ‘You’ll only have to come up to London one day a week at most; the rest of the time you can work from home. And you’ll mostly be based at my Docklands office, not at Whitefish. You’ll need to liaise with the team there, of course, but you can use Caz’s assistant, AJ, as your go-to guy most of the time.’
Even though she was offering me more money than I’d earned in years, and the chance to undercut Caz in the one place she thought she was safe, I’d turned it down, because I hadn’t wanted to pour petrol on the flames and start an all-out war with the woman.
But then Caz got me fired. The letter from the head of the media department at Sussex was polite, but firm: I hadn’t disclosed my criminal record, and they had no choice but to cancel my contract for the upcoming academic year. The safety of our students … Extremely sorry, but we can’t risk it, not in this day and age. Our legal department, you know how it is.
Five minutes after I opened the envelope, I picked up the phone and called Chris. It’s time Caz learned there are consequences.
Walking into the Whitefish offices now, though, I’m suddenly beset by second thoughts about parking my tanks on her lawn like this. She certainly provoked me, but now I’m on territory where she feels most comfortable: she’s got the home advantage, and I’m certain she won’t hesitate to use it.
But I have the advantage of surprise. I almost feel sorry for her when I see her face as I step out of the lift; her jaw literally drops. I remember what it was like when the Post editor brought in an old college rival of mine to edit the Saturday pages that carried my column. I felt under attack in the one place I’d always considered my kingdom. This must be Caz’s worst nightmare come true. Not only am I on her turf, but she’s just discovered her new boss on this account is my best friend, and even worse, that I know Patrick, too. I can see all the pieces slotting into place in her head as she finally works out why ‘Tina’ tried to get her fired. Chris has always felt terrible about introducing Andrew to her at that charity event, but like I said at the time, it was hardly her fault my husband ran off with Caz.
My sympathy is short-lived. Chris will make Caz’s life a misery in the next few months; maybe it’ll make her think twice about sabotaging my life again. But I don’t fool myself for one minute this is going to be easy for me, either. Caz may be on the back foot for the moment, but this glamorous, hip world belongs to girls like her, not middle-aged women like me. You just have to look at her in her skinny jeans and Superga sneakers; next to her, I feel like a throwback from the Nineties, overdressed and out of touch.
‘Stop worrying,’ Chris says, as we get a taxi back to her office at the Shard. ‘You’re going to be fine. You can do this job with one hand tied behind your back.’
Now that I’ve found out a bit more about what I’ll be doing, I realise I’m going to like the work itself. Persuasive writing is a transferable skill, and using copy to promote a particular brand isn’t really very different from working to a newspaper proprietor’s political agenda. AJ is clearly Caz’s man, but I think I can handle him. And if he starts to make my life too difficult, Chris has enough clout to get Patrick to move him onto a different account.
‘It’s not the job I’m worried about,’ I tell Chris. ‘It’s whether I’m going to end up in a body bag. She’ll probably put antifreeze in my bloody coffee.’
She laughs. ‘Don’t worry. A Starbucks gift card comes with the job.’
It’s only on the train back down to Brighton, another insanely crowded commuter nightmare, that I allow myself to think about how Andrew might see all this. I don’t want him thinking I’ve turned into a bunny boiler, first moving into Caz’s house and now working at her office. It’ll be difficult to defend myself: I’ve got no proof Caz is the one who tipped off Sussex University and got me fired, and if I accuse her, it’ll just make things worse.
Min is right, I realise suddenly: I need to move out of Caz and Andrew’s house right now, whether the kitchen’s finished or not. If I do that, it’ll take the edge off the fact I’m working with Chris for one of Caz’s biggest clients. And Andrew owes me a little faith. I haven’t landed him in it by telling Caz anything about what happened the night of the storm, and I could have done. Obviously, I’d never try to blackmail him emotionally; that’s not the sort of person I am.
I hope he remembers loyalty is a two-way street.
Chapter 19
Caz
I watch Andy slide his arm around Louise’s shoulders as they sit on the sofa, pulling her against his chest. She laughs, twisting in his arms to tilt her head up to him, and he kisses her, tucking a long strand of hair behind her ear in a tender gesture that makes my heart twist. I recognise the look in his brown eyes, which have softened to a warm amber with love.
Eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves. The same principle applies to those who spy from the shadows. I should stop tormenting myself, but I can’t look away.
Even as I watch, Louise kicks off her sandals, casually draping her bare feet across Andy’s lap as she reaches for her mug. He makes a remark I can’t hear, and she laughs, looking ten years younger than I’ve ever seen her. Then he takes one of her feet in his hand and starts to rub it as she sips her tea, but after a moment, his hands slide up her calf. He stops, taking the tea from her, and she wreathes her arms around his neck, pulling him towards her. He kisses her again, and then suddenly turns towards the camera and waves Bella away, laughing, tells her to turn the camera phone off, and the screen goes black.
I’ve watched the same clip a dozen times since I found it on Andy’s Facebook page yesterday. I hardly ever check his page – he’s my husband, I don’t need to be his social media ‘friend’ – but then I received a notification Louise had tagged me in a post, and stupidly, I clicked on it. I should never have accepted her friend request a couple of years ago, when we were being ‘civilised’. I’ve blocked her now, but the damage is done: I can’t unsee the video.
The footage was taken about five years ago, by Bella: she starts with a selfie in which she talks to the camera about ‘meeting my family’, perhaps for some sort of school project. She’s about ten, but I didn’t do the maths and work out why Louise wanted me to see this particular video until the second time I watched it. And then it hit me, like a punch to the gut.
There’s just the briefest glimpse, when Louise reaches for her tea, but it’s unmistakable: the clear outline of a baby bump.
I’ve always known Andy cheated on me with Louise. He told me when we met they were legally separated, waiting for the slow wheels of divorce to turn, and even though I’d known it was a cliché, exactly the kind of thing all married men say, I believed him. He had his own flat in central London, devoid of any feminine touch, and we didn’t just spend weeknights together, but most weekends, too; once, we even flew to Barbados for a week. I didn’t know then that Louise was used to him travelling for work for days or weeks at a time, giving him the perfect excuse to be away.
Just a few weeks after that Barbados holiday, I saw them together, quite by chance, at Paddington station. I’d never met Louise Page, but I recognised her instantly from her byline in the Daily Post, a column I’d always enjoyed reading until I fell in love with her husband. She was smaller than I’d expected, and prettier than her headshot photo. And at least five months pregnant.
Of course I should have ended things with Andy then and there. But he was
so distraught, so repentant. One night of nostalgia, he said, too much wine, they’d slept together out of habit rather than desire. He hadn’t been sure of me, then, he said; he’d been convinced I’d find someone my own age, someone more appropriate, with less baggage. He swore it’d just happened once, and that he and Louise had both agreed it had been a mistake. But then a scan at twenty weeks had revealed some kind of shadow on the baby’s heart, which can indicate Down’s syndrome, and her obstetrician had booked her in for an amniocentesis test (thankfully negative) with a foetal expert in London. That’s where he’d been taking her when I’d spotted them at the station. There was no relationship between them anymore. He was just doing the decent thing by his child.
Once again, I’d believed him. I’d allowed myself to be convinced he was a good man who’d made a mistake, and was now trying to do the best he could to clean up his mess. In fact, I loved him all the more because he hadn’t walked away from Louise, knowing the way a man treats your predecessor is the best indicator of how he’ll treat you.
And most important of all: I’d just found out I was pregnant myself. I couldn’t face the thought of being a single mother, but at the same time, aborting the baby of a man I loved to distraction was out of the question. Every man was allowed to screw up once, surely? He swore I was the one he loved, and that was all that really mattered.
But this video changes everything. Louise didn’t get pregnant on a nostalgic, one-night-only trip down memory lane. They were clearly still in a relationship the whole time Andy and I were together. I replay the clip yet again, freezing it as Andy tucks the strand of hair behind Louise’s ear. He loved her. I can see it in his face, as clear as day. Perhaps he’s never stopped. Did he love me, too, when he was rubbing Louise’s feet on the sofa? Or was I just a diversion for him, providing sex and careless, child-free pleasure? Louise was his professional equal, but I looked up to him; worshipped him, almost. How that must have stoked his ego. God, what an idiot I was. I’m an intelligent, successful, ambitious woman, and I still fell for some of the oldest lines in the book. He would never have left Louise if she hadn’t screwed up. He didn’t choose me. Her mistake pushed him into my arms by default.
I snap the computer shut as I hear the front door open. There’s no point feeling sorry for myself. I knew Andy was a liar when I married him. The question is: now that I know our entire relationship has been built on a lie, what am I going to do about it? Do I give Louise what she’s wanted from the beginning, and leave him? Or do I reconcile myself to spending the rest of my life with a man I can never quite trust?
I compose my face into something resembling normal as Bella and her friend Taylor come into the sitting room. ‘Hey.’ I smile. ‘Was the movie good?’
Bella shrugs. ‘It was OK.’
‘Did you get anything to eat while you were out? Or do you want me to sort you something for lunch?’
‘We went to Pret,’ Taylor says. ‘But thank you, Mrs Page.’
‘Oh, God, please call me Caz. You make me feel ancient.’
The two of them hover awkwardly in the middle of the sitting room, throwing each other meaningful looks. They clearly want to ask me something, and I resign myself to handing over the rest of the contents of my wallet. Neither Andy nor Louise give Bella any kind of proper allowance, and refuse to let her get a Saturday job, which means she has to ask for handouts every time she wants to get herself a coffee or buy a T-shirt. She’s sixteen now: it’s humiliating for everyone. I’m tempted to set up an automatic transfer via a banking app myself, except I don’t want to totally overstep my bounds.
Taylor nudges her friend. ‘Go on. Ask her.’
I reach for my bag. ‘How much d’you need?’
‘It’s not that,’ Bella says quickly.
She twists the silver ring nervously on her hand. She and Taylor both sport identical ones; they could be twins, in their ripped black jeans and oversized black sweaters, except that while Bella looks young for her age, Taylor could easily pass for twenty-one.
‘Come on,’ I sigh. ‘Spit it out. What d’you want?’
Bella glances towards the doorway. ‘Is Dad here?’
‘He’s taken the boys to the Science Museum. They won’t be back for ages.’ I stand up, and grab my jacket from the back of my chair. ‘OK, I’m taking you two out. We’re going to Halva’s Patisserie for a sugar hit. Then you can tell me exactly what’s going on’ – I grin – ‘and why you don’t want to tell your father.’
I double-lock the front door, and shoo the girls down the street ahead of me. The flat is just off the North End Road, in one of the many tiny side streets honeycombing Fulham, and jammed with parked cars on both sides, one of the main reasons we never brought Andy’s SUV to London. Our next-door neighbour, a sweet woman in her seventies, opens her door to bring out her rubbish just as we pass her gate, and I call out to the girls to wait as I stop and take it to the street for her. ‘Sounds like you’ve been partying, Mrs Mahoney.’ I smile, as the bag clinks.
‘Oh, get away with you, Caz.’ Mrs Mahoney laughs. ‘It’s Ernie’s pickle jars. You know what he’s like.’
‘I do indeed,’ I say.
Ernie and Elise Mahoney were the first people I met when I bought my flat eight years ago. It was definitely the dodgy end of the borough at the time, and my flat was broken into three times in the first year before I finally wised up and got mortise deadlocks and an alarm installed. But since then, as people have been driven further and further out from Chelsea and Belgravia by the influx of Russian oligarchs and foreign money, it’s become gentrified. The girls and I have to step out into the road twice to avoid basement excavations before we even reach the end of our street; it’s a wonder some of these terraced rows of houses are still standing. Working-class people like the Mahoneys, who’ve been here forty years, are in the minority now.
We thread our way through the throng of people crowding the Fulham Road and join the queue in Halva’s, where Bella surprises me by ordering a huge slab of cheesecake. Normally she eats like a sparrow, but Taylor has bought a massive slice of lemon cake, so perhaps she’s just following suit.
‘OK. Out with it,’ I say, as we sit down. ‘What’s the deal?’
‘You’re only going to say no,’ Bella says.
I rip open a packet of sweetener and add it to my cappuccino. ‘You won’t know till you ask. First of all, is it illegal? Because I’m not getting hold of weed for you, so don’t even try it.’
‘It’s nothing to do with drugs,’ she exclaims, looking shocked.
‘So why don’t you want your father to know?’
‘He wouldn’t approve. And Mum would, like, totally flip.’
‘But I wouldn’t?’
‘You’re much cooler than most people’s parents,’ Bella says. ‘You’re pretty sick, actually.’
‘I assume that’s a good thing,’ I say dryly, hiding my pleasure at the compliment. ‘I’ve got to tell you, you’ve certainly made me curious. Do you need an adult’s permission for whatever it is? Do you want me to sign something?’
‘She doesn’t need anyone’s permission,’ Taylor says. ‘Not now she’s sixteen.’
‘I’m going to do it anyway,’ Bella adds defiantly. ‘You can’t stop me. It’s just …’ She looks at Taylor, then back at me. ‘I’d kind of like you there. Just in case. If that’s OK.’
I sip my cappuccino, considering, more curious than ever. I remember what it’s like to be a teenager: if Bella’s set on doing whatever-this-is, she’s going to find a way to do it, whether or not I agree to help. And having an adult present would give her some backup in case things go wrong. I have no idea what she’s planning, but on the grounds that it’s better to be inside the tent pissing out, I’d rather go with her than leave her to her own devices.
Especially since it sounds like it’s really going to upset Louise.
PATRICK SIMON THATCHER
PART 1 OF RECORDED INTERVIEW
Date:- 28/07/2020
Duration:- 27 Minutes
Location:- Whitefish Advertising Agency
Conducted by Officers from Devon & Cornwall Police
(cont.)
POLICE
So you’ve worked with both women?
PT
Yes. Caz was already at Whitefish when I met Louise about five years ago. She interviewed me for a profile piece. And then of course Tina took her on to handle PR for Univest.
POLICE
Were you aware of their personal history?
PT
Well, I knew Caz was married to Louise’s ex-husband, yes.
POLICE
Did you know Andrew Page had left his first wife for Caroline Page?
PT
Caroline – oh, you mean Caz. Yes.
POLICE
But you didn’t think it might cause trouble, having Louise Page working in the same office?
PT
Louise isn’t like that. She’s a sensible woman. Very smart, actually.
POLICE
What about Caroline Page?
PT
Look, the divorce was years ago. As far as I knew, everyone had got past it.
POLICE
Caroline Page has worked for you for eight years, is that right?
PT
Yes.