‘It is bad news,’ he said with a heavy sigh.
‘Oh fuck,’ Fiona tutted. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’
Stupid? What counted as stupid by Fiona’s standards? Falling in love with a married woman? Losing your head as well as your heart? He had already leapt the bounds of his own stupidity. He could look back on this in time and say it was inevitable. He and Kate were meant for each other. Why couldn’t she see that? It was bound to happen. The attraction was too strong. But, at any time, they could have stopped it. Either of them. A well-timed no instead of a passion-filled yes. If only life were so simple. It was very easy to be logical when Kate wasn’t two feet away from him.
Fi’s voice broke into his thoughts. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
Don’t rush! Dawdle. ‘Drive safely,’ Ben warned.
‘I always do.’
‘You don’t,’ he corrected. ‘You’ve had five smash-ups in the last two years.’
‘Yeah, but the others always came off worse,’ Fiona protested.
And who was going to walk away the least hurt out of this tangled wreckage? Would it be him or Kate?
‘Stick to the speed limit,’ he said.
‘See you soon,’ she breezed and the line went dead.
Ben looked forlornly round the room; he pictured Kate curled naked on the bed next to him—one of the many cherished images he would carry away with him. The scent of her was still in the air, on the tips of his fingers, on his lips. He pressed his hands to his temples and tried to stop his brain working. Soon it would be gone.
Kate’s lips had gone dry and she licked them nervously, before knocking timidly at Ben’s door. It didn’t look like the same doorway in the daylight as it had in the dark; she must have been concentrating on things other than the décor the last time she approached it, she thought with a wry smile. She was about to knock again when Ben opened the door.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘This is terrible,’ she said, wandering into the room and sinking onto the bed. ‘I hadn’t wanted to face saying goodbye last night. Now it’s even harder.’
Ben sat down beside her and wound his arms round her. ‘There’s never an easy way to do this.’
‘We might never see each other again,’ Kate choked.
‘It’s the only way.’ Ben kissed the top of her head.
‘There must be something else we can do.’
‘Like what?’ he said. ‘You’ve made your choice, Kate. You have to stick to that.’ Ben smiled wickedly. ‘Unless you want to change your mind?’
How could she tell him that it was changing every five seconds? And when it wasn’t changing, it was having doubts.
Kate put her head in her hands. ‘I want you both.’
Ben laughed. ‘That’s generally known as being greedy.’
‘This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Even giving birth was like shelling peas in comparison.’ Sorrow was breaking her heart.
‘I’ll always love you, Kate. If you ever need me, I’ll always be there for you. Waiting.’
‘But how will I know where you are?’
‘You’ll find me. Trust your instincts.’
‘I’m going against all that my instincts are telling me now,’ she said wretchedly.
‘I don’t know what to say, Kate, to make it any easier. This has to be your decision.’
‘I bet you’re sorry that the wine-tasting was cancelled,’ she joked tearfully.
‘But then I would never have tasted the bouquets of your skin.’ He pressed his mouth to hers and they clung to each other, kissing silently, sadly, fiercely as only people who know they are about to part kiss.
‘How do we end this?’ Kate started to cry, single tears rolling over her lashes. ‘I can’t be the first one to walk away.’
‘I’ll come down and take your bags to the car for you.’
‘I couldn’t bear to watch you walk away from me either.’
‘Then this is going to be very tricky,’ he said too lightly.
There was a brusque knock on the door, before it was flung open. A burly woman bearing a pile of sheets barged through it. ‘I need the room vacated,’ she barked. ‘The next course is coming in.’ And she dumped the fresh linen next to them on the bed and stood there looking bad-tempered.
‘We need a few more minutes,’ Ben said politely.
‘I’ll give you five,’ she snapped and stomped out again. ‘Not the most romantic of endings,’ Ben commented. ‘I bet Robert Redford never had to put up with this.’
Kate laughed through her tears. ‘No.’
He took her hand and kissed the back of it. ‘We can’t delay it any longer, my Katie.’
‘You go first,’ she said, standing up and smoothing her skirt. ‘And I’ll stay here. No… I’ll leave. No…you leave. No…’
She burst into tears. Ben stood up and held her against him.
‘Turn round, walk out and don’t look back,’ he instructed. ‘Go to your room, collect your case and drive straight off. Short, sharp, swift.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You have to.’
‘As easy as that?’
‘What else can we do?’ Ben pleaded. ‘You’re a wife. A mother. You have people who depend on you.’
‘You forgot the cat.’ She sniffled wetly.
Ben smiled. ‘The cat would be bereft,’ he conceded.
‘I need you,’ Kate sobbed. ‘How will I fly to the stars without you?’
‘If it’s destiny, Kate, we’ll be together,’ he said seriously. ‘Somehow, some way. Things will work out. Maybe the timing just isn’t right. Like Sam said, if we put our trust in the universe it will give us what we need. Now go,’ Ben said, holding her tight. ‘Just keep walking. Don’t turn round.’
She kissed him for the last time. Then she turned and went. Out of the door, out of the corridor, out of his life—and she didn’t look back, not once. Not even when she heard him shout, ‘I love you!’
chapter 47
In the leafy driveway of number 20, Acacia Close, Joe was kicking a football against the garage doors. The sky had turned a pasty grey and a spiteful breeze was making the summer trees shiver with cold. No doubt the teeth of the over-bright sun were chattering somewhere as it hid behind the clouds.
Having parked the car in a more traditionally sedate arrangement than earlier, it had taken considerable effort for Jeffrey to relax his death-grip on the steering wheel and coordinate his body through the motions of getting out of the driver’s seat. Even now, his fists were bunched so tight, the muscles in his shoulders felt like steel girders. Jeffrey stumbled from the car, still feeling dazed and disorientated. Joe was wearing his I SURVIVED OBLIVION! T-shirt and probably would do until it walked to the washing machine itself.
He watched his son and wondered would he ever feel so carefree again? Would there be a time when his biggest worry would be keeping greenfly off his sweet peas, whitefly off his petunias and blackfly off his nasturtiums? When would he be able to think of Natalie and not get a sharp pain in his chest that threatened to stab the life out of him? Joe scored an imaginary goal and cheered himself. Why couldn’t he be that age again, but with the added benefit of wisdom that hindsight had supplied? Jeffrey closed his eyes and let the pain wash over him. Would I do things differently?
‘Where’s Natty?’ Joe asked as Jeffrey walked on jelly legs across the gravel.
‘Gone,’ Jeffrey said.
Joe stopped kicking the ball and stared at him. ‘Where?’
‘You know she wanted to go to Europe?’
Joe nodded.
‘Well,’ he said hesitantly, ‘she decided to go a bit earlier than she’d planned.’
‘Why?’
Jeffrey crouched down and picked up the ball, twirling it in his hands. Anything, rather than look at his son’s bleached face.
‘Sometimes grown-ups change their minds.’
‘Didn’t she like us?’ His lower lip started to tremble.
>
‘Of course she did.’ Jeffrey put his arm round Joe’s shoulder. ‘I think she liked us a lot.’
‘Then why didn’t she say goodbye?’ he burst out.
‘Saying goodbye to people you like is very hard.’ There was a constriction the size of Joe’s football lodged in Jeffrey’s throat.
‘We could have made her stay.’
Jeffrey hugged his son tightly. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Let’s go inside. I’ve got to tidy up before your mother comes home and sees the state of the place.’
‘I don’t want Mummy to come home,’ Joe said bleakly. ‘She’s boring.’ He looked up at his father. His eyes were round and trusting. Kate’s eyes. ‘Natalie was fun. I wanted her to stay for ever.’
Jeffrey swallowed uncertainly. ‘So did I, son. So did I.’
The radio in the kitchen was blaring out unheeded, the television was offering lively competition from the lounge and sounds of Kerry practising her keyboard jerked inconsistently from the dining room. Jeffrey went into the kitchen and snapped the radio off. He supported himself on the work surface and breathed deeply before turning to the task in hand. Tidy up, his brain said, and he searched for the plastic carrier that held all the necessary requisites for the job. Clutching a duster and Mr Sheen, he decided he would start with the bedroom. Do the worst first. Polish and spray Natalie out of his life.
He launched himself up the stairs, taking them two at a time, collecting clean sheets from the airing cupboard on the way. He stopped abruptly at the bedroom door, unable to move. The scent in the room caught at his nostrils, heavy, musky, sexy. Natalie. The evidence was all still there. Untouched. Like a murder scene. The tangle of sheets. The smears of make-up. The psychedelic pink note, complete with Natalie’s endearments on Kate’s bedside table next to frilly Jilly Cooper. All that was missing was the blood. That’s because the bleeding’s going on inside, where no one can see it.
He ripped the sheets from the bed, screwing them into tight little balls and forcing them into the bursting laundry basket. The washing machine would need to go on, too. Do I know how to work it?
Jeffrey was smoothing down the fresh, unsullied sheets when Kerry appeared in the doorway. ‘Joe says Nat’s gone.’
He grabbed the psychedelic pink note and pushed it under Kate’s pillow out of harm’s way, before turning to face his daughter.
‘It didn’t look like she’d slept in her bed,’ Kerry said. And his daughter was suddenly thirty-two, not twelve.
‘Perhaps she was just very tidy,’ he said weakly and Kerry eyed the duster and Mr Sheen doubtfully.
‘I heard some funny noises.’ Kerry kicked her toe against the carpet. ‘Was she sick?’ His daughter’s gaze burned into him. ‘Like Clarissa’s daddy’s girlfriend?’
‘No.’ Jeffrey cleared his throat guiltily. ‘That was me. I had too much champagne.’
‘Adults!’ Kerry tutted. ‘Why don’t they ever grow up?’
Jeffrey looked more sheepish than Shaun the sheep. ‘I’m sorry I disturbed you,’ he said wanly.
‘Mummy will wonder why she’s gone.’
Kerry, I’m still wondering too! ‘I know.’
‘Do you want me to help you?’ she asked. ‘You look a bit weird.’
‘No.’ Jeffrey shook his head. ‘I can manage. You carry on with your keyboard practice. We’ve still to face your mother with the pierced belly-button confession, so you’d better do something to get in her good books.’
‘I could put the sheets in the washing machine.’ She cast a look at the laundry basket. A look that was just too knowing for a twelve-year-old. Why, if adults never grow up, do children grow up so fast?
‘Do you know how it works?’
‘Daddy! Of course I do! I’m a girl!’
She strode into the room and purposefully picked up the wicker basket. ‘I’ll leave you to get on with this,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to squirt the polish on the duster first and not straight onto the wood.’
‘Why?’
‘Mummy said so.’ She headed towards the door.
‘Kerry.’ Jeffrey picked up the duster. ‘What did you have for breakfast?’
‘Jammie Dodgers.’
‘Kerry!’
‘You said not to have crisps. You didn’t say we couldn’t have biscuits.’
‘Don’t tell your mother,’ Jeffrey warned her.
‘I won’t even tell her that you weren’t here,’ she said tightly as she left the room.
Jeffrey squirted the Mr Sheen carelessly and the cloying smell of it made him nauseous. Where was Natalie now? Was she risking the delights of Eurotunnel, heading for the art galleries of Paris, the crumbling beauty of Venice, the romance of Prague? Or would she have got as far as Euston Station and be regretting shunning the cultural wasteland of Leighton Buzzard and the more obvious charms of its occupants? Would she, in fact, even now be rushing homewards through Hemel Hempstead and back to him? Jeffrey rubbed the duster half-heartedly over the dressing table. He doubted it.
Perhaps it was for the best. What sort of life would they have had together? Who would have sorted out the year-end accounts for his clients at Hills & Hopeland if he had just upped and left them in the lurch? And what about Kate and the children?
There was a picture of his wife in a silver frame. On the night of their engagement? Possibly. The occasion had been lost over time, due to the alarmingly steady depletion of his brain cells. She was as beautiful now as she had been then. Jeffrey ran the duster lovingly over her face, tracing the smooth skin that was now more wrinkled, tenderly polishing her nose. He had come so close to losing Kate. Marriage, these days, was like a sandcastle on the beach. No matter how well it was constructed or how big or fancy a moat you dug round it, the advancing tide would inevitably try to wash it away. What could he do to hold it together against the constant battering? Should he just rejoice in the fact that they had come this far, so much farther than most, give up the fight and let Nature do her worst? Or should he keep on trying to shore it up, piling on sand when the cracks started to show and the walls started to crumble? And what if you smashed one sandcastle to the ground and started all over again with a new one? Wouldn’t the same thing happen eventually? Looking round the bedroom, he saw that no trace of Natalie remained. She was gone. Out of his life. But what of his heart? Would a simple rub round with Mr Sheen do the same trick? He felt more tired than he had ever felt in his life. Kate would be home soon, expecting life to go on as normal. He would have to pull himself together. He would heave himself up by his boot straps, gird his loins—whatever that meant—and do all those singularly British things that added up to soldiering on. From now on, he would put everything into his marriage to make it work. He would never take Kate for granted again and he would never, ever, ever so much as look at another woman as long as he lived.
Jeffrey looked in the mirror and didn’t recognise the careworn man who looked back. His face was as haggard as Mick Jagger’s and suddenly his eyes welled with tears for the loss of simplicity in his life. Clutching the duster to his heart, Jeffrey Lewis—staid, sensible, Conservative-voting accountant—crumpled to the floor and wept like a child.
chapter 48
It was pissing down. The blistering hot summer week had turned as cold and cheerless as November. After the sun, now comes the rain. Balance. Just as Sam had forecast. Kate’s feet echoed emptily on the glistening wet cobbles of the courtyard as she made her way back to her room. The priory looked grey and gloomy, the trees had closed in and all the flowers in the manicured beds were weighed down, bent heads dripping with water.
The only good thing about the rain was that no one could tell she was crying. Her heart screamed at her to turn round and run after Ben, but her body plodded stoically on. In her mind she knew this was exactly the right thing to be doing for everyone.
She reached the accommodation wing and then stopped in her tracks. What if she was shutting the door on the one thing that could make her happy? What if sh
e was letting Ben walk out of her life when he was the one person who could lift her from the ordinary and the mundane?
This was insane. She had to find him and stop him. Great splats of rain splashed onto her head from the overhead guttering like Chinese water torture. No—wait—hang on. She was married, with children. Could she selfishly walk away from all that to pursue her own happiness? What would she do with the children? Where would they live? If she took them to live with Ben, it would disrupt their schooling—they’d have to leave all their friends. But they could stay with Jeffrey and she could see them at weekends…. Would they turn to drink, drugs and prostitution because they came from a broken home? Wasn’t that what World in Action was about every week? Good heavens, what was she thinking of ?
Turning on her heels, she dashed inside the building, setting off towards her room with a determined stride. After three paces, she ground to a Tom and Jerry-style halt again. There were ways of making this work. Perhaps Ben could buy a cottage in one of the villages and commute into London, so that she could see them during the week. What would he think about that? Did he want children? Did he want her children? Someone else’s children? Perhaps Natalie was so enchanted by their perfect behaviour that she would dump Jessica’s marauding tribe at the drop of a cork-brimmed hat and move in to Acacia Close permanently, thus solving all childcare arrangements in one fell swoop. She wondered how well the week with Natalie had gone. It had been so difficult to tell with their guarded phone conversations. Jeffrey had said so little.
Where was the balance in this? The scales swung heavily from one side to the other. It wasn’t possible. Was it? Kate chewed her nails. People did it all the time. What were the statistics now? One in two marriages consigned to the scrap heap. Was Ben worth all this? In a moment of stillness, the pond became calm and clear. Yes. Now all she had to do was tell him.
Kate ran back across the slippery cobbles of the courtyard. She raced up the stairs and along the corridor to Ben’s room, pushing past the trolleys stacked with mops, buckets, towels and tea bags. His door was open and she skidded inside. The cleaner was busy making the bed with clean sheets and Ben’s bag had gone.
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