10

‘Charles.’

If you put her on the stand, made her swear on the Bible, Jen would have to say that he jumped. Certainly he took an almost imperceptible step away from the woman as he turned to see who was calling him. And there was also no denying that he looked panicked for a split second when he realized it was his daughter-in-law. Then he forced his features into a smile, but she knew him far too well. She could tell that it wasn’t genuine.

‘Jen, what a lovely surprise.’

For a moment, Jen didn’t know what to say because, having intended to suggest lunch, she now couldn’t imagine anything she wanted to do less. Or what she could talk about in its place.

‘I’m on my way to meet someone.’ She looked at her watch hammily, as if to emphasize the point. ‘I was just going to stick my head round the door to say hello, and then rush off again. And then … here you are … in the street.’ She could almost feel the wave of relief as it flooded his face. She would be gone in a moment.

‘Well, it’s always good to see you, even if it’s only in passing,’ he said, making as if to move away.

Jen took a step forward, extended her right hand to the young woman at Charles’s side. She wasn’t letting him get away that easily.

‘Hi, I’m Jen. I’m Charles’s daughter-in-law.’

As she waited for the woman’s response – ‘Hi, I’m X, I’m Charles’s mistress’ maybe? Or ‘I’m a prostitute he’s hired for a quick one, we were just arguing about the fee’ – Jen got the chance to give her a quick appraisal. She was even younger than Jen had thought at first. Late twenties, maybe. Thirty at the most. She was taller than Jen, something that, despite all her better instincts, always made Jen feel a little inadequate. She noticed the woman’s brown, thick, shiny hair, worn long and loose, her dark eyes and her slim figure. OK skin. Attractive but not a head-turner. Quite ordinary, really.

Jen always noticed when women had good hair. Her own was out-of-control curly. The hours of her life she had lost to hair straighteners would have added up to a lifetime for some animals. Not elephants, maybe, but guinea pigs, say, or hamsters. She lived in fear of drizzle or humidity. She fantasized about chemical blow-dries and months of smooth silky locks. Who cared if the formaldehyde took years off her life? At least she would be a sleekly coiffured corpse. Luckily for the two girls, they had inherited their father’s family’s poker straightness. Dark brown for Simone, and Jen’s all-out red for Emily.

The irony of regularly dying the roots of her hair a colour she had hated her whole childhood was not lost on Jen. For the record, she loved it now. Once she was out of an environment where people shouted ‘Ginger’ (to rhyme with ‘wringer’, not ‘whinger’ because that, somehow, turned a colour into an insult) at her at every available occasion, she had started to revel in her difference. Possibly at about the same time as some artsy boy she was seeing had told her she reminded him of a Titian painting. She had never claimed she wasn’t superficial.

She had inherited the colour from Rory’s side of the family, apparently. It had bypassed him but his grandmother, he had informed her when she was little, had had a fine head of flaming locks. It had made her feel special when he’d told her that. Connected to ancestors she had never known.

These days she tended to keep it in a ponytail, in an effort to minimize potential weather-induced horrors. Now she felt herself tuck a strand that had come loose behind her ear. A reflex action that, if you knew her well, would probably have been a dead giveaway that she was feeling awkward. It was her default gesture when she didn’t know what else to do with her hands. Ever since she had realized that, she would try to pre-empt it by doing something else, but she’d lose concentration for a second and there it was again.

Finally, the woman seemed to realize that she was expected to respond, and she shook Jen’s offered hand.

‘Cass Richards,’ she said. ‘Nice to meet you.’

‘Cass is looking for a place in town.’ Charles jumped in before Cass could say anything to the contrary. Anything incriminating. (‘I’m a sex surrogate. I get paid by the hour to try to coax it back to life.’)

‘I’ve just been showing her what we’ve got available at the moment but, you know, the market’s slow …’ He tailed off without completing the sentence.

Jen had to resist the urge to ask questions, to put this Cass on the spot by asking her what area she was considering and how many rooms. She knew she wouldn’t have the answers ready.

‘Well …’ She decided to let Charles off the hook for the moment. She needed to regroup, to assimilate what she thought she’d learned, to make sure she wasn’t rushing headlong towards a ridiculous conclusion.

‘Like I said, I have a friend to meet, so I should go. Bye, Charles.’

She accepted his proffered kiss on the cheek.

‘Nice to meet you,’ she said to Cass as she moved off. ‘Good luck with the house hunting.’

Cass smiled politely. ‘Thanks. Good to meet you too.’

Jen resisted the urge to look back as she rounded the bend into Rathbone Place. She knew there would be nothing she would want to see.

She had lost her appetite, and any ideas she might have had about luxuriating with a snack in the sun had withered and died. Charles, having an affair? She couldn’t believe it could be true. She simply couldn’t compute that he would do that to Amelia. Sweet, loving, devoted Amelia. Or to Jason and his daughters. To her, for that matter. To the entity known as the Masterson Family. He had principles, morals, standards. She knew he didn’t take his role as husband and father lightly. She knew he was the opposite of the man she had called Dad.

She tried to assess the evidence rationally. A young woman with shiny hair had put her hand on Charles’s arm and he had failed to shake it off immediately. Then he had held it in his own for a few seconds, no more. It was hardly a smoking gun. What had really given them away was much more indefinable. The argument, the atmosphere, something in the way they looked at each other, the way Charles started when Jen had called his name. It all added up to something. She just couldn’t be sure what exactly.

Usually, when anything interesting happened in Jen’s life she would reach for her phone and hit Poppy’s number. Poppy was always her first port of call in a crisis. Somehow, that didn’t feel like the thing to do in this case.

‘I think your dad might be having an affair …’ might not be the best opening line of a conversation she’d ever thought of.

‘So guess what? Charles has got a bit on the side …’

‘Did you know your father can still get it up?’

No.

Plus she knew that she had a habit of making something out of nothing. There was the time when she’d told everyone at work that Judy was pregnant, when she had just put on a couple of pounds, or when she’d insisted to Poppy that the bloke painting her living room had a crush on her, and then he’d told them about his upcoming wedding. To a man. It was just that sometimes she wanted things to be true so much she convinced herself that they were. This time, obviously, was not one of those occasions.

She walked on towards Oxford Street, thinking about how much Jason adored his dad. How he had always held him up as an example – and it had never been challenged by her – of the husband and father he aspired to be himself.

She pictured Amelia in her cosy, welcoming house that she had worked lovingly for years to turn into a home that her whole family would want to return to every chance they got. Poppy who was Charles’s uncrowned favourite – he would never have admitted to it, but his pride in her success and the way she was managing to juggle her career in advertising with being a single mum to four-year-old Maisie positively burst out of him whenever they were together. And Jessie who, at thirty-seven, was still the baby of the family, and who loved her dad so much she would probably still sit on his knee and insist he read her a story, if he would let her.

She thought of how much they meant to her as a family, how, since they’d all but fostered her twenty-two years ago, she had felt like they’d filled a hole in her life that her dad had created when he’d left and that she and her mum had steadily made deeper every year, chipping away relentlessly at the foundations of their relationship like would-be prison escapees.

It couldn’t be true.