CHAPTER NINE
Sophie woke to see the sun streaming through the not-quite-closed curtains. She remembered yanking them bad-temperedly together before getting into bed. Alone. Mark had still not got back when finally, crossly, she had fallen asleep. So much for promising he would come back early. She should have realised he had meant the early hours of the morning.
But it wasn’t just the curtains that felt wrong. The pillow next to her remained plump and unpressed; the expanse of sheet, as she slid her arm out beneath the duvet, was cold, smooth and empty. Mark had not come home at all.
She lay quite still, absorbing this enormity. Her heart pounded. There was a sick feeling at the back of her throat.
The telephone blasted into the silence. Sophie fought her way through the duvet to the bedside table and snatched it up.
‘Sophie?’ demanded a rasping, throaty voice. ‘It’s Persephone here.’
Sophie’s eyes narrowed. Her teeth began to chatter. She crouched, as if against an anticipated blow. ‘What do you want?’
‘Mark stayed in a hotel last night,’ Persephone trilled. ‘He says he’ll call you later.’
What? Pouring into Sophie’s mind came images of some five-star suite; Mark rubbing Persephone’s back with expensive soap in the walk-in shower. Breakfast in bed with a rose in a silver vase. ‘Where is Mark?’ she demanded, her voice shaking. ‘I want to talk to him.’
‘Er, I’m afraid that’s not possible. Look, I’ve got to go. He’ll call you, er, later.’ And with that, the line went dead.
Sophie clutched the phone so hard that it hurt. She struggled to believe what had just passed. Mark wouldn’t even talk to her. He had got - that woman - to do the dirty work. Was he lying in bed beside her as she made the call? Sophie pushed off the duvet with a mighty thrust. The cold air seized her unprotected body but she hardly noticed. One throbbing thought obliterated all others in her brain. The affair! Those women at the party were right. The suspicions she had tried so desperately to suppress were all founded on fact after all. It was true!
Bugger those pink cocktails, Mark groaned. They were obviously of that sneaky variety that tasted innocently of fruit juice but were more lethal than a quadruple brandy mixed with battery acid. One minute he’d been woozily holding forth about Compromised Masculinity to some bug-eyed woman with aubergine dreadlocks, the next minute his knees had buckled under him. Compromised Masculinity had been about the size of it.
He was hideously hung over. His back ached from the lumpy single bed in the godforsaken travel lodge in which he had hurriedly been found a place when he realised that he was not only paralytic, but lacking his house key. In some eternally optimistic part of his drink-addled brain he hoped that not getting his wife up at half-past two in the morning might go some way to restoring him in her favour. He dared not think of his promise to return in good time.
Persephone had proved, at this stage, unprecedentedly useful, not only sorting out the motel bed for him but volunteering to call Sophie and explain what had happened. Admittedly, this was the very least she could do. One of the many disasters that had befallen Mark was that his mobile had run dry again.
Mark lay in the bed now, squinting at the too-bright blade of sun slicing through the gap in the curtains. His main feeling, apart from nausea and a headache that felt as if an axe was embedded above his right eyeball, was relief. Thank God the two big launches were now over. At last he could - to use that hackneyed phrase, but in the unhackneyed sense that he really meant it - spend more time with his family.
Standing in the kitchen, the cold tiles of the floor burning her feet, Sophie drove a fist into her thigh with frustration. She knew what her rival looked like now. Still in her pyjama bottoms and T-shirt, she had blundered downstairs after the phone call and started scrabbling through Mark’s briefcase. What further evidence she expected to uncover she was not certain, but what she had discovered was a battered copy of his company’s report and accounts brochure. Inside were photographs of all the staff, including a crumpled but handsome Mark, which had momentarily reduced her to tears. Her eyes had dried, hardened and burned when, a couple of head shots on, they had fallen on Persephone O’Rourke, Head of Public Relations.
The face in the picture was pretty, heart-shaped, hazel-eyed and massed about with wavy black hair. Sophie could easily imagine the body that went with it. Small, slender, gym-hardened and with a perfect all-over tan. Her own baby-ravaged figure could hardly compete. While she steered a determined course away from biscuits and crisps during the day, she steered an equally determined one towards the wine bottle in the evening. And from there, back to the crisps. But the merest glance at Persephone revealed that she and crisps had a very distant relationship. Rather more distant, Sophie thought bitterly, than that she evidently had with Mark.
There was a knock at the door. Sophie started, blinking. Mark? Heart pounding, she raced down the hallway.
‘Ta da! Hello, darling! Do I look twenty years younger?’
‘Mum!’
‘Hasn’t Dr Carmichael surpassed himself, though?’ Shirley trilled. ‘I just had to spend last night in the clinic and then they took everything off and here I am!’
‘You look great,’ Sophie said dully.
Shirley certainly exuded vitality. She trotted into the clutter-strewn hallway, immaculate in her tiny jeans and black high-heeled boots. Her short auburn hair in its trademark bouffant layers, an effect which always reminded Sophie of a chysanthemum, stood proud above a neck remarkably smooth for its age. A crisp white blouse and a pale pink fur gilet completed the look that Mark called ‘yummy granny’.
Shirley looked about her in obvious disapproval of her daughter’s slipshod interior.
Then she looked at her slipshod daughter.
‘You’re still in your pyjamas. Is everything all right?’
‘Fine,’ Sophie said determinedly. She wasn’t telling her mother about it. She had hardly had time to think it through herself.
‘Where’s Arthur?’ his grandmother demanded.
‘Still asleep.’
The one positive thing about this cataclysmic dawn was the fact Arthur had managed to restrain his usual morning bawls.
Shirley clacked upstairs. A chorus of cooing ensued, then she appeared at the top of the landing clutching a dazed-looking Arthur. His cheeks were puce with sleep.
‘What’s the time?’ Sophie suddenly asked her mother. She had lost track of it.
‘Half past nine.’ A flash of Cartier as Shirley checked her narrow wrist.
‘God. Is it? Shit. I’m hideously late for work. And Arthur for nursery.’ She began to make rapid movements about the hall.
Her mother looked at her strangely. ‘It’s Saturday.’
‘Oh.’ Sophie dropped the shoe she was holding, extracted from under a heap of coats that had fallen from their hook. ‘Is it?’
Her mother came downstairs with Arthur and strode past her into the kitchen, where an empty bowl, pan and spoon in the sink told of Sophie’s lonely supper.
‘Mark out again last night, was he?’
Sophie hung her head. Her mother was sifting through the evidence at terrifying speed.
‘Where is he?’ Shirley asked now.
‘At work.’
‘On Saturday?’
Sophie paused, caught in the headlights of her mother’s stare. She could not think of anything that might explain this. Her usual defensive reflexes, like everything else, seemed slow to respond. It was like thinking and moving underwater.
‘Do you want to tell me what’s going on?’ Shirley asked gently.
Sophie lifted glistening eyes. ‘He didn’t come home last night.’
Her mother’s mouth tightened beyond anything Dr Carmichael could ever have done. Her hands may have tightened too, as Arthur began to wail.
‘I think,’ Sophie confessed, ‘that he’s having an affair.’
Shirley’s eyed hardened. ‘Come on.’
‘No, really,’ Sophie protested. ‘I really think he is.’
‘I don’t doubt it in the least,’ Shirley said grimly. ‘I mean come on and pack some things. You and Arthur are coming home with me.’