Rachel wasn’t going to be put through an inquisition, especially not by Catherine. She still felt sick in the stomach, and now she was finding it hard to breathe. She had to get out of here. She went on automatic pilot, crossing the room to pick up her bag. There were other things, a salad bowl, a cooler bag, but she didn’t care about them right now. She knew all eyes were fixed on her, watching her, following her.
‘Rachel?’ Catherine persisted as she walked past her.
She ignored her, pausing in front of Lexie and Scott, but she couldn’t meet their eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’ She tried to think of something else to say, but nothing came. So she just said it again. ‘I’m sorry.’
She felt Martin at her side. ‘I’m leaving now, Rachel, can I give you a lift?’
‘No . . . thank you.’ She walked up the hall, numb. Her hand was shaking as she opened the door and stepped out, closing it quietly behind her. The air was cooler outside. She breathed it in and it hurt her lungs. She could hear voices, and she glanced over towards Tom’s place. The door was open. She felt compelled, her legs carried her down the path and over to his front door. She stood on the front step; she couldn’t see them, but she could hear them clearly now.
‘Of course I loved your mother,’ Tom was saying. ‘I did a bad thing, a terrible thing, but it was a mistake. I was really drunk. Come on, Sophie, look at you tonight, surely you can understand people do stupid things when they’re drunk? It never happened again.’
‘What about Rachel?’
‘That didn’t start until after . . . a while after.’
‘I don’t understand.’ She was crying. ‘How could you replace Mum like that, so soon?’
‘Oh, Soph, I could never replace your mother.’
Rachel could hear her sobbing. ‘I’ve been so scared. I didn’t know why you were being so secretive. I thought you were going to run away with her.’
‘What?’ Tom sounded shocked. ‘Why would you think that? You and Hannah are more important to me than anything in the world. You’re my family.’
‘But I’m not.’
‘Sophie, you are my daughter every bit as much as Hannah is. Don’t you know that? Don’t you think of me as your father?’
‘Yes.’ She was still sobbing. ‘But I started thinking, maybe with Mum gone, you might try and find my real father, so you wouldn’t have to be responsible for me any more.’
‘Oh, my God, Sophie.’ The shock and distress in his voice was palpable. ‘I wouldn’t give you up for anything, don’t you know that? You think because your mum’s gone that could change? That it could ever change?’ There was a long pause, and eventually Sophie was quiet. Tom was hugging her, Rachel imagined, soothing away her tears. After a while he spoke again and his voice was calmer.
‘I fell in love with you the same time as I fell in love with your mum. You were a package. I honestly couldn’t cope with losing you as well, Sophie.’
Rachel stepped away from the door and walked quietly down the path, as Martin’s car pulled away from Lexie’s house. She turned in the opposite direction. She didn’t want to go up to the main road, she’d take the coastal walk. It probably wasn’t the safest route this time of night, but she had to clear her head, away from cars and traffic, where she could look out at the ocean.
‘Rachel! Wait!’
She turned around to see Alice running towards her.
‘Can I come home with you, please?’ she said as she drew closer, breathless.
‘No, Alice, you can’t,’ said Rachel. ‘You have to go with your mother.’
‘I don’t want to go with her,’ she protested. ‘I don’t have to do anything she says, ever again.’
‘Yes, you do,’ said Rachel. She saw Catherine stepping out onto the footpath outside Lexie’s.
‘Please, I won’t be any trouble,’ Alice pleaded. ‘Let me go home with you.’
‘No, Alice. You can’t come with me.’
‘Why not?’
Rachel swallowed down the lump in her throat. ‘Because you have to sort this out with your mother.’
‘No,’ she cried.
‘Alice, listen to me,’ said Rachel, taking her by the shoulders. ‘Sophie would give anything to have her mother back. And I would have given anything to have a mother who cared about me.’
‘She doesn’t care about me.’
‘Of course she does, Alice. She loves you more than anything. I know it doesn’t always seem like that to you, but she does. And you’re old enough now to make it work. Talk to her, tell her how you feel. Make her listen to you.’
Alice just stared at her, her eyes glassy.
‘It’s going to be all right, chook. I’ll always be here for you, but she’s your mum, and you have to go with her now.’
And then she turned and walked quickly up the street.
‘Alice,’ Catherine called to her. ‘Come along now.’
Lexie was watching from the doorway. Alice stood where she was, and Catherine walked up to her. She couldn’t hear what was said, but eventually Catherine took Alice by the arm and led her down the street in the other direction. Lexie stepped back inside and closed the door. She walked slowly down the hall to the living room. Scott was clearing the table, he glanced up at her.
‘Go to bed, Lex,’ he said. ‘I’ll clean up.’
She didn’t say anything; she walked through the kitchen to the playroom and locked the sliding doors to the backyard, turning out the lights. Then she came back into the kitchen, where Scott was standing at the sink. ‘Leave it,’ she said.
‘No, I’ll do it.’
She took his hand. ‘Leave it.’
She led him through the kitchen and up the hall to the stairs, turning out the lights as she went.
‘Lexie . . .’
‘Shh.’ She started up the stairs. At the landing she pushed open the door to the children’s room and peered in; they were both sleeping peacefully. She closed the door and turned around. Scott was standing there, watching her.
She brought her arms up around his neck. ‘I love you, Scott,’ she said.
He sighed, drawing his arms around her and holding her tight. ‘I love you, too, Lexie, so much.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said tearfully.
‘I’m sorry too.’
‘Please make love to me.’
‘Absolutely.’
The next day
Tom had been calling all day. Rachel didn’t answer the phone, she wasn’t ready to talk to him yet. But he didn’t seem to get the hint.
‘Rachel, come on, pick up, I know you’re there. We have to talk. You can’t just ignore me.’
Oh, but she could, for now anyway. After five similar messages, each a little more desperate than the last, she pulled the cord out of the wall. Then she turned off her mobile when it kept ringing out. She checked her text messages after a while, and there was a steady stream, all from Tom.
When can I see you? We have to talk. Call me. I love you.
You can’t ignore me forever. You have to let me explain.
RACHEL!!! CALL ME!
I’m coming round. See you soon.
That was obviously him now, buzzing the security door downstairs. It was annoying, but he couldn’t keep it up for long, someone would get the shits eventually and come out to see what was going on.
It stopped. Rachel breathed out. She went into the kitchen to put the kettle on. But then she was startled by loud knocking on the door of her flat. Blasted security door, someone must have let him in.
‘Rachel!’ he called, followed by another couple of loud knocks.
She walked back into the living room, her heart pounding in her chest.
‘You’re not leaving me any choice,’ he called, and then she heard a key in the lock. She walked over to look up the hall as Tom came through the front door, closing it behind him.
‘You can’t just barge in here like that!’ she cried.
‘I can, I have a key, remember,’ he said bluntly, striding r
ight up to her.
‘Then give it back,’ said Rachel, holding her hand out.
‘Not until you listen to what I have to say.’
‘Excuse me?’ she frowned. ‘You’ve got no right to walk in here making demands, Tom.’
‘I just want to talk to you, Rachel, please,’ he said plaintively.
‘Then give me the key,’ she insisted, glaring at him.
He sighed, taking his keys out of his pocket. He twisted her house key off the ring and handed it to her.
‘Okay,’ she said calmly. ‘Now leave.’
‘Rach, come on, you have to hear me out.’
‘No, I don’t,’ she said, walking across the room away from him. ‘I don’t have to hear you out, I don’t owe you anything, Tom.’
‘So you never really loved me this whole time?’
Rachel spun around. ‘What the fuck? Where do you get off putting this whole thing onto me?’
‘I’m not, I just think if you loved me you’d want to hear what I had to say,’ he said plainly. ‘But you’d rather take Catherine’s drunken ramblings over my word.’
‘I remember, Tom, her going on about the guy she slept with at the conference, the guy she was going to leave Martin for.’
‘That was all in her head.’
‘Are you going to try and tell me you didn’t sleep with her?’
‘No, I’m not. But the only person I have to apologise to for that is Annie, and I already did.’
Rachel wasn’t expecting that. ‘You did?’
He nodded.
‘Annie knew?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t live with myself, I had to tell her.’
She stared at him. ‘How do I know you’re telling the truth?’
‘For Chrissakes, Rachel, why would I lie?’
‘You’ve been lying all along.’
‘I didn’t lie to you, it had nothing to do with us. It was none of your damn business, to be honest.’
She flinched at that. ‘Fine. Then we have nothing more to say to each other,’ she said. ‘So leave.’
‘Rachel,’ he held his hands up. ‘It is your business now. Of course it’s your business now, after what happened last night. You have to give me a chance to explain.’
She stood there, breathing hard.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘I promise I’ll go if you still want me to, once you hear me out.’
She stood for a while longer, considering her options. It’s not as though she could physically evict him.
‘All right, fine.’ She dropped down into the armchair furthest away from him. ‘Go ahead.’
He sighed heavily, walking over to the couch and sitting down. He mustn’t have slept much, he looked dreadful.
‘I don’t know where to start,’ he said.
‘Well, you could start with how you came to sleep with Catherine,’ she retorted.
‘But that’s not where it started,’ he said, looking at her. ‘You have to understand, I was going through a bad time last year, even before that. I hated my job, I’d hated it for years. I was working longer and longer hours, and I was getting no time with the girls, or Annie. I felt like I didn’t have a life.’
Rachel frowned. ‘You’ve talked about this a lot, you know, Tom. Why haven’t you ever done anything about it?’
He shrugged. ‘Every time I brought it up with Annie, she just didn’t seem to hear me,’ he said. ‘I mean, she’d sit there, she’d listen while I’d tell her how miserable I was, that I couldn’t bear going in to work every day. And she’d act like there was no way out.’ He paused. ‘It was strange, she was so . . . sympathetic in a way, but it was as though there was nothing that could be done about it.’
Rachel could picture Annie, being so understanding, listening to him. That’s how she always was. She never pushed solutions, she just listened. ‘Maybe she was waiting for you to work it out for yourself?’
‘I tried. I started to throw up options, other jobs I could do, maybe something in legal aid, or with a government agency, where the hours would be better and I might be able to do something I believed in. Annie would look right into it, do the sums, and then she’d say it wasn’t possible. We just couldn’t maintain things the way they were without my salary.’
‘Did you ever put it to her that maybe you didn’t need to maintain things exactly the way they were?’ said Rachel. ‘That she could have gone out and got a job, for example?’
He sighed heavily, holding his head in his hands for a moment. Then he looked up again. ‘I don’t know,’ he shook his head. ‘Maybe I should have pushed it more. It’s hard to explain . . . The way she was about it, I would have felt selfish if I suggested anything like that. She just asked me to hang in there for a few more years, get the girls through school, and then I could do whatever I wanted, she promised.’
He stared out across the room. ‘But Han had just started high school . . . it would be another six years. I felt trapped. I mean, I loved her, and I knew she loved me, but there was this gulf opening up between us.’ He shook his head. ‘Annie just thought it was all about work. So when this conference came up, she encouraged me to go, have a break, connect with other lawyers, I might get a new lease . . .’
He sat back, breathing out.
‘Catherine came on to me the first night, I could tell what she was doing but I held her off, ignored her pretty much,’ he said. ‘Then the second night . . .’ He sighed. ‘I got really drunk.’ He looked directly at Rachel. ‘I’m not making excuses, but she came on pretty strong. And I guess I was flattered by the attention. By someone who wanted me, not my pay packet. Which is shallow, I know.’
Rachel didn’t think it was that shallow.
‘She seemed to understand exactly how I was feeling, she said all the right things, things I’d been waiting to hear Annie say.’ He drifted off for a moment, thinking. ‘But when I woke up in her room the next morning, I freaked. I couldn’t believe what I’d done. I told her it was a mistake, it should never have happened. But she kept calling me.’
‘Is that why you confessed to Annie?’ Rachel asked.
He shook his head. ‘I’d already decided to tell her, I was too riddled with guilt. But after what happened, I wish I hadn’t told her.’
Rachel frowned. ‘How did she take it?’
‘She was shocked. No wonder, I was shocked myself. She couldn’t understand how I could do that, with Catherine of all people.’ He took a breath. ‘But mostly she was just . . . bewildered, I suppose you’d call it. You see, I think Annie believed the fantasy as much as everyone else, that we were the perfect couple, and that’s why she had literally been unable to see how unhappy I was. It rocked everything she believed in. She was completely disillusioned – with me, and our marriage, and herself. I didn’t want her to feel that way, but she wouldn’t talk about it, she said she couldn’t, she needed time to process it . . .’
There was a long pause till finally he spoke again, his voice ragged. ‘And then she got sick.’
Rachel drew her breath in sharply. She hadn’t realised exactly when all this had happened. Tom was visibly distressed. He had to wipe his eyes before he continued.
‘When she . . . when she died,’ he went on, his voice hoarse, ‘I lost it. I was so torn up with guilt, convinced it was my fault somehow, if only I hadn’t told her . . .’
‘Tom . . . no . . .’ was all Rachel could say.
He looked at her. ‘I haven’t told anyone this, but I snapped at the hospital, I went a little nuts, they had to give me something to calm me down. That’s why it took so long before I was able to call the girls, before anyone knew what had happened.’
Tears sprung involuntarily into Rachel’s eyes. And that’s why he had so much trouble talking about it, talking about Annie. He probably thought he’d lose it again if he dared to open up, scratch under the surface.
‘The guilt was eating me up, Rachel,’ he said. ‘I honestly didn’t know how I was going to be able to stand it.’ He
paused. ‘And then, you were there for me . . . and you let me be myself. And you loved me for myself. You helped me let go and heal, Rach. I couldn’t have done that without you.’
She stood abruptly. ‘But I didn’t know about any of this.’ She turned her back to him, looking out the window at the brick wall of the next block.
‘Rachel,’ he said, his voice sounded so tired, ‘I know that. Of course you didn’t know. You haven’t done anything wrong.’
She turned around. ‘Sophie’s never going to see it that way.’
‘She will, given time.’
‘Give her a break, Tom. She lost her mother, so suddenly and tragically, and you just haven’t been there for her, for either of them. I understand why, and what you’ve been going through. And I’m glad I could be there for you, and that we’ve had this time together, but it’s been borrowed time. We can’t do this any more, Tom.’
Something shifted in his expression. ‘What are you saying?’
‘Nothing you haven’t said yourself,’ Rachel said plainly. ‘It didn’t matter what anyone else thought, but this had to be okay with the girls.’
‘It’s okay with Hannah.’
‘Because Hannah’s never going to imagine you’ll send her packing off to her real father.’
He looked a little stunned at that.
‘I heard you and Sophie talking last night, at least some of it.’
‘She knows that’s not going to happen, Rachel,’ said Tom.
‘Maybe on one level, but that’s how insecure she’s feeling, poor kid. I know what that’s like, I was around the same age. My parents chose jobs and partners and pretty much anything over me, and it broke my heart, Tom.’
He shook his head. ‘So that’s what this is really all about,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘This is your stuff again, Rachel, running away from a relationship, from uni, from life, when it all gets too hard.’
She stood there, trembling, her eyes filling. ‘You think that’s what I’m doing? That this is about me? I’m not twenty years old any more, Tom, I’ve figured out a few things. I know that you love me, and I do love you, so much, and I want to be with you more than anything, but this is not about us. I promise I’m not taking the easy way out.’ Her voice broke. ‘This doesn’t feel easy to me. Walking away from you feels like the hardest thing I’ve ever done.’
Three’s a Crowd Page 38