by Prue Leith
He should feel outraged. Outraged that she was having an affair. And with his tenant. Outraged that Ben should dare to touch his wife. Outraged that Ruth was conducting their affair on home ground. Maybe even in their bed.
But oddly, all he really felt was shock that Ruth could express herself so collectedly, so cold-bloodedly. Maybe that was a bluff. Maybe she loved the guy. Maybe he could make her happy when Oliver could not. He pushed away the thought.
Did he want his marriage to end? Was this the call that should have him on the next plane home, to beg for forgiveness and a new start?
He did not know. He felt panicky at the thought of separation from the girls and he didn’t like the thought of Ben and Ruth together. But he felt strangely indifferent to the word divorce.
He still held the envelope in his left hand, and now he extracted whatever it was that Ruth had enclosed. It was a fat newspaper clipping, folded tightly.
As soon as he saw the headline: Exclusive: ‘I was a fool. I loved him,’ says Kate, he sat down at the kitchen table. He was conscious of his heart beating fast. He spread the two pages out and read the article, top to bottom.
At first he couldn’t concentrate on its content. His mind kept demanding why Kate would do such a thing. How could she have agreed to talk to the press? It wasn’t like her. Of course the headline was nonsense – he’d been around the press for long enough not to believe much what they printed, especially headlines. But why was she doing this to him? He’d never said anything at all, beyond his official denial, written by Terry and issued by the Downing Street press office. He had obediently done as Terry had demanded: dutifully got on with his day job. He had refused, polite and smiling, to say anything beyond ‘No comment’. It wasn’t until he was exonerated by the court settlement that he had spoken in public at all, and then only for a few minutes on the Today programme. Why on earth had Kate reopened a can of worms?
He felt no resentment, only dismay and disbelief. Why? Surely it could not be for the money?
And then as he read the body of the piece, and began to understand for the first time Kate’s feelings of abandonment and betrayal, saw how he had shattered her opinion of him, grasped the fact that while he was smugly ‘doing his day job’ protected by all the resources of the state, she was on her own, fighting to keep her business going, to protect her boy, to go about her work, to survive.
How utterly feeble his efforts to protect her had been. How supine his obedience to Terry and his spin machine. How blind to just how bad it was for her. God, he had been an unthinking fool.
It was only on the second reading that the more important message got through to him, and he was mortified. Poor Kate had really cared for him, maybe even believed herself in love with him.
How could he have been so insensitive? To have enjoyed her company, abused her confidence, revelled in her enthusiasm and good sense, and yes, in her youth and attractiveness, without realising what he was doing. He had encouraged her by attention, by affection, by admiration. And then expected her to treat the relationship as though it were nothing unusual.
Oliver stood up and poured himself a large whisky. He thought back through all the occasions that they had sat talking, sometimes into the small hours, drinking wine in a kitchen somewhere. But he had never laid a finger on her, had he?
The negative answer to this did not fool him. He might not have touched her, but that did not mean he had not wanted to. He thought back to the ride in his car from Hampton Court, when he had given her a lift home. He remembered noticing how smooth and shapely her legs were under stockings that glinted in the sudden light of street lamps. He had forced his eyes away as she crossed her legs.
He felt guilt creep over him like fog. He’d been stupid and unthinking. At best. But the truth was worse than that: he had employed his grown-up charm to captivate her. He had used his sophistication, his position, his fame and power to seduce her. He had made Kate fall for him just because he liked the feeling of being adored, and because he could. He had wrecked her life to satisfy his ego. Terry’s words came back to him: If the cook in question had been male, ugly and old? Would you have been driving him home and sharing regular night caps with him?’
Oliver seldom swore, even inwardly, but now he said aloud, ‘Oliver Stapler, you are a first class shit.’
For the second time in less than a week, Oliver rang Kate’s number. This time, as soon as she answered, he said, his heart pounding, ‘Kate, don’t hang up. It’s Oliver.’
There was a fractional pause, an intake of breath and then she said, very fast, as if she had learnt the speech by heart, ‘Oliver, I cannot speak to you. I don’t want to. If you want to give me grief over that article, I probably deserve it and I’m sorry. I mean it, I really am so sorry. But I can’t talk to you. There is nothing to say.’ And she hung up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Chris appeared at her door at six-fifteen, a bunch of roses in his hand, like a shy suitor on his first date.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Hello, Chris.’ And then they stood there, silent.
He was looking very good. He had shaved off the stubbly beard and his tanned open face, candid eyes, one chipped front tooth and nervous smile had taken her right back to seven years ago, when he could make her gut melt with a look. They shook hands, a trifle awkwardly.
He seemed genuinely sad not to meet Toby. But Kate thanked her stars that neither Toby nor her mother was around. She needed, she thought, to send him packing before they even knew he’d been here.
They sat at the kitchen table, Chris with a beer, Kate drinking tap water. She wanted to know why he’d tracked her down.
‘I’ve wanted to, oh, for years. But I felt guilty, you know? For what I did? And I’d try every now and then. I couldn’t believe you wouldn’t turn up on Facebook or Friends Reunited. But nothing. So, although I would occasionally Google you, I more or less gave up.’
‘But why now, Chris? What is the point? We have different lives now. I don’t understand.’
Chris shook his head, ‘I dunno, Kate … Maybe my wife getting custody of my daughters, you know? I miss them so much? Maybe that made me think … realise what a dreadful thing I’d done, what a fool I’d been? I couldn’t stop thinking about you Kate, and what a bastard I was.’
Kate had forgotten how he ended his sentences on a rising note, making all observations a question requiring confirmation. It was very Australian and she’d found it attractive. It had made him sound a touch diffident and unsure, a nice counterpoint to his confident Aussie directness.
She said nothing, just watched him gather his forces to continue. He said, ‘You know, you were always a cloud, always sort of there, in our marriage? My not being able to forget you, and wanting to know if I had a son or daughter, you know? It was a real issue, for Jolene more than for me. She hated it, and after a while, kind of hated me for it too?’
Chris had rubbed his big hands roughly over his face and had shifted on the sofa to look directly at her. ‘Kate, you have no idea how grateful I felt when I knew that you had gone ahead and had the baby. I was crying, you know? Like a kid.’
Kate had seen that he was near to tears, but she’d said nothing. She didn’t trust herself to speak. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘the publicity over the Stapler affair answered some questions at last. I knew you were alive and had had the baby and he was now six-year-old Toby. But knowing that made me want to see you more, you know?’
‘How did you find me?’
‘One day I Googled you, expecting to draw the usual blank. But up came all this stuff about Oliver Stapler. I feel so sorry for you, Kate. What a shit! Anyway, I wrote to you at the Foreign Office, and when you didn’t answer, I went on standby and came here. Of course the bastards there would not tell me anything, so I just trawled our old haunts, looking for chefs we knew. Struck lucky today.’
‘How?
‘You know Gerard at Le Trou Normand?’ he said. ‘He told me you sometimes did casu
al shifts for a mate. And the mate gave me your address.’
They talked for nearly two hours in the house, then walked along the High Street and had supper in Odile’s. It wasn’t great, not a patch on the Taj Amal, but Kate was careful to choose a restaurant on the nearer side than Amal’s. She didn’t want to risk Talika or Amal spotting them through the window and popping out to say hello.
Chris talked a lot about his marriage break-up and how he missed his daughters, and Kate sympathised. ‘I know, I could not bear to lose Toby,’ she said. ‘I’m neurotic about it.’ She hesitated, wondering if she should say what she wanted to say. Why not, she thought? ‘The reason I’ve no website, am not on Facebook etc, is because I didn’t want you to find me, in case somehow you’d make a claim on Toby.’
‘But Kate, that’s crazy,’ he said. ‘I would never want to take him away from you, even if I could.’ He reached across the table and took her wrists. ‘You must know that? Anyway, I’m the bastard that abandoned him, remember?’ Kate looked into his eyes, searching for any false note. But he was, she knew, absolutely sincere.
She told him something of her financial troubles, the hurt she felt at being closed out by her old government colleagues, by the lack of contact from Oliver.
And then, somehow, after a bottle of Pinot Noir, they were walking back with their arms around each other. It felt comforting and familiar, and when he stopped her at the gate and kissed her, Kate knew that they would go to bed together. They did, and it was wonderful, both exciting and familiar. Most of all it was deeply, wonderfully, satisfying: it was so long since she’d made love she found the sheer physical release, the crashing pleasure of it overwhelming. She lay on his shoulder, tears running down her face, but laughing.
The next few days reminded Kate what it was to be happy. Chris was with her almost all the time, and they spent a lot of it in bed, marvelling at their easy resumption of the old magic, and how seven years seemed to have somehow vanished.
Chris helped her with two small catering jobs and it had been fun working with him again. She felt alive for the first time in months.
‘Chris,’ Kate said, as they were finally unpacking his backpack and stowing its contents into a cleared-out couple of drawers in her cupboard, ‘I’ve asked Amal and Talika to supper tonight. I want you to meet them. It’s going to be so difficult with my mum, and we need them as allies.’
‘Sure thing, babe.’ Chris knew Amal from their old agency cheffing days before he got his own place. ‘He’s an amazing cook, and not just Indian tucker. He was sous-chef in that French joint with the Michelin star.’
‘I know. If I get this school job, I want him to take over my clients. He’d have to cook mostly French and Italian, often very stylish and modern. But most still want Country House British – you know, salmon fish cakes, beef Wellington, upside down apple cake.’
‘Yeah, that posh woman we did the gallery opening for was bending my ear about how much she hates fancy food with foams and drizzles and micro-leaves etc. She called it television food.’
Kate laughed, ‘Yup, that’s Lady Suskind all over. But she’s used me for years. We did her daughter’s wedding in June. The gallery belongs to her son, though I suspect it’s her husband’s money. She’s a good client, pays on time, but she’s not exactly adventurous about food and she’ll need some persuasion to accept an Indian caterer.’
‘How many are there? Clients, I mean? I thought they’d mostly gone?’
‘No, only the government ones went really, which admittedly was most of my business. The private ones have all stayed loyal though they spend less than they did. There’s maybe thirty or so. I don’t want to leave them high and dry. We’ve got thirteen forward bookings and if the worst comes to the worst I could probably manage them: get up early, go to bed late, get someone to stand in for me if the job’s in school time. Wouldn’t be the first time, but I would rather make a clean break.’
Kate was folding crumpled T-shirts and putting them into a drawer. Chris came up behind her and wrapped his arms slowly round her body and covered her breasts with his hands. He said into her neck, ‘Kate, don’t take the school job. Come back to Melbourne with me. Bring Toby. Leave all this crap behind. Let’s start again, Kate.’
Kate turned round, shaking her head, but almost at once she felt desire creep into her like melting honey. She lifted her arms round his neck and in doing so her T-shirt came out of her jeans and his hands slipped under it, round her back on her bare skin. She could smell the sharp clean smell of his aftershave and she let her mouth and nose rest lightly on his neck, breathing him in. She felt her bra tighten round her breasts as his hand pushed under the back strap and held her steady. He slid the other hand round under her bra.
She put her fingers into his hair and pulled his head up to look into his face. She felt dreamy with desire as she said, ‘Can we discuss this later?’
* * *
‘Who was that?’ asked Chris, without looking up from his newspaper as Kate came in from the study.
‘Oh, nothing. Just someone I don’t want to talk to. Cold caller.’ Kate hoped her voice betrayed nothing of her agitation. She walked through the sitting room into the kitchen, touching her ex’s springy hair with her fingers as she passed. ‘Do you want some coffee?’
She had said nothing to him about the Evening Standard article. It had come out before he arrived from Oz and with luck he’d never hear about it now. She didn’t want him to know that she had been infatuated with Oliver, any more than that she had talked so candidly to the press. Chris believed, had chosen to believe, that she was as pure as the driven snow, an innocent twice wronged: first by him when she was pregnant; now by a bastard politician called Stapler.
Oh, why did Oliver have to start ringing her up now? She’d spent months longing for a word from him, but now she wanted to be free of him; free even of the thought of him.
Kate put the kettle on and felt a now familiar rising tide of panic. What on earth was she doing? She had let Chris back into her life, and had been both excited and horrified at the speed with which he had re-established himself.
And now Toby, her mother and Hank were due back. Of course she longed to see Toby, but she absolutely dreaded the arrival of her mother and stepfather. Her mother had not approved of Chris the first time round, and then when he had abandoned her and the embryonic Toby, she had seen him as the devil incarnate.
Pat would never understand. Indeed, Kate hardly understood herself. She could not believe that it was only a week ago that Chris had arrived, that, after all the years of fearing he might just reappear to claim his son, she had let him into her house, and into her bed, within a couple of hours of reunion.
The next morning, Judy telephoned to offer her the teaching assistant’s job. Or almost.
‘I’m ninety per cent certain you will get it,’ she said, ‘but we have to go through the formalities. You can start at the beginning of term anyway, as a temp. And apply for the job at the same time.’
Kate took a Coke out to Chris, who was trying to tidy the garden on Kate’s instructions. It was an attempt to forestall criticism from Pat. ‘Things are looking up,’ she said. ‘First you appeared. And Toby’s coming home. Then Amal agreed to take on my customers. And now I’ve got an interview with the Head of St Thomas’s. And she says the job is probably in the bag.’
She grinned at him, waiting for the praise. But he frowned.
‘Look, Kate, if you want to teach, you can do that in Australia. Have you given the idea any thought at all? Just think how much better it would be for Toby to grow up in that climate. Kids in Oz don’t spend all day in front of the telly, or sitting in the park in the sodding rain. And the schools are probably better? Less bullying, and more sport, and teachers getting some respect, you know?’
For a second Kate allowed herself to be carried along by this picture. Of Toby with a father, his real father, of her having a man to look after her. Of an open-air life, trips to the beach, she teach
ing well-behaved kids, helping them cook the vegetables she had helped them grow.
But it was a pipe dream. ‘Chris, I can’t work in Australia. And you haven’t got a job. And you already have one family to support. How would we live?’
‘You could marry me. Then you could work. I can get another job.’
I don’t want to marry you, she thought. I’ve no idea what the hell I want, but I don’t want to marry you.
But she didn’t say so. She just smiled and gave him a quick kiss. ‘Too far! Too fast! How about we decide nothing yet? You’ve not even met Toby.’
For the first fifteen minutes after Toby, Pat and Hank walked through the automatic sliding doors at Arrivals, Kate was so happy she didn’t give Chris a thought. Toby had ducked under the barrier and leapt into her arms, his tanned face alight with the purest happiness. He had clung on like a monkey, while Pat fussed and clucked like a mother should about Kate’s loss of weight and pale, drawn face. Hank had been his usual good, solid self. It was wonderful.
Kate had refused to let Chris come to the airport: she wanted to tell her mother about his reinstatement before they got home and found him there. She had had a vague idea that she could do this on the Gatwick Express to Victoria, or in the taxi from the station to home. But Toby was so excited, telling her about the desert, the caves, and going to Waterworld it was impossible. There was no opportunity to get her mother away from the others and anyway, she did not want to leave Toby. She also began to think she should talk alone to Toby too, explaining his father to the child, before they met.
She walked down the train, ostensibly to find a loo, and rang Chris from the next compartment.
‘Darling, I’m sorry, but I just cannot tell Mum about you now. Toby’s so happy to be with me, so excited. I don’t want to disappear into a corner with Pat and leave him. Do you think you could …’
‘Kate, you’ve got to tell them sometime.’
‘I know, but now is not the moment. You have to trust me, Chris. Please? Could you just disappear for tonight? Would you? I will tell them, I promise, after Toby has gone to bed, when it’s peaceful and we can have a proper conversation.’