‘I need to speak to you urgently,’ I said, without preamble, the minute Roger answered his mobile.
‘I’m at work,’ he said plaintively.
‘Well, leave early and see me on the way home. This is serious, Roger.’
‘Yes,’ he said flatly. ‘Hannah told me what you said to her.’
‘I wonder if she told you what she said to me ! You need to hear this Roger. No – not at my house. We can’t risk Charlotte popping by. In the town somewhere. Before Stanley gets home. Roger – I am seriously worried about you both. You have got to promise me not to listen to anything Hannah says or go anywhere with her until you’ve spoken to me. Just keep away from her today. And don’t sigh like that.’
‘She’s off work this week,’ he said, when I eventually drew breath. ‘Alan has left, of course, and we’ve got a new woman starting who Hannah’s going to work for but she doesn’t get here for another fortnight. So Hannah’s taken some leave. She’s going to see her mother in Northampton for a couple of days and then …’
‘I don’t need the details,’ I snapped. ‘Just meet me somewhere – I’ve got to tell you what happened.’
‘I know what happened. Hannah phoned me this morning.’
‘Well there’s a surprise,’ I said. ‘Just bloody get over here.’
We met in Peeps – the new café bar on the seafront. Roger was already sitting at a table in the window when I got there. He looked awkward; I felt like throttling him.
‘Let’s move back a bit,’ I said crossly. ‘Just in case Charlotte drives past.’
‘She wouldn’t see us anyway,’ he said. ‘I’ve had to run into the road and throw myself in front of the car to get her to notice me before now.’
‘Well, I shouldn’t do that if she finds out about Hannah,’ I said grimly. ‘She’s likely to put her foot down and flatten you.’
He looked at me, troubled. ‘What do you want?’ he said, getting to his feet.
I studied his back as he waited at the bar for my coffee. He looked big and solid and dependable. Six week ago, I’d have said those words summed him up perfectly. I want, I thought, feeling upset, for you to see sense before it’s too late.
As soon as he sat back down, I told him what Hannah had said. ‘It’s exactly as I feared,’ I finished. ‘She’s determined to have you for herself and she doesn’t care who she hurts along the way. And Roger – really – is she worth throwing your whole marriage away for?’
‘I’m not going to do anything like that,’ he said defensively. ‘It’s not like that at all.’
‘So what is it like?’
‘We – we talk and discuss things. She’s just a friend.’
‘Oh, come off it, Roger! You go for a drink with her every night, you text all the time – that’s not just a friend. If she was just a friend, you’d tell Charlotte all about her. If she’s just a friend then why don’t you invite her home for a drink so she can meet your wife?’
Roger looked irritated. ‘She’s not my wife’s type. Charlotte wouldn’t like her.’
‘Too bloody right she wouldn’t!’ I exploded. ‘Charlotte would take one look at her and know exactly what she was up to. Charlotte hates women like that and so do I.’
‘Like what?’
‘Women who home in on other women’s husbands because they can’t find one of their own.’
Roger shook his head. ‘She really isn’t like that. She’s been through a very hard time, she’s very …’
‘Calculating?’
‘I was going to say caring.’
‘The only person Hannah cares about is herself.’
I could see, satisfying as it might be (this was Day Ten, which was always dodgy on the self control front), I wasn’t going to get anywhere by shouting, so I started again.
‘Roger,’ I began, in my best counselling tones, ‘I think the problem here is that while you may regard you and Hannah as just work mates, Hannah herself is seeing it rather differently. You think you are being kind and supportive; she is seeing your natural colleague-type concern as sexual interest. You want a bit of a drink and a chat after work, she wants you to be her life partner.’
He shook his head.
‘Roger,’ I said, my voice rising despite my best efforts. ‘She is a woman on a mission. She’s saying you’re going to end up with her!’
Roger shook his head again. ‘That’s not going to happen,’ he said. ‘But –’ he twisted his cup in his hands, uncomfortably. ‘I do – get something from her.’
With great force of will, I kept my mouth shut and waited for him to tell me what.
‘I don’t want to leave Charlotte, of course I don’t,’ he went on. ‘I love her and you know I wouldn’t do anything to hurt my kids. But, you know, we’ve been married a long time. It’s comfortable but it’s not always –’ he frowned as he searched for the right word ‘ stimulating. Charlotte has a lot going on – she’s taken up with the kids and the dog and work and her friends. We don’t really talk about what we think about things any more – she says she loves me but she doesn’t think I’m particularly clever or exciting. You know how it is when you meet someone new – make a new friend,’ he corrected himself hastily. ‘You get the chance to talk about who you are. I haven’t done that for a long time.’
He turned the cup round and round in its saucer. ‘Hannah is so – so interested.’
I shook my head in despair. Hannah knew exactly what to do and it had worked a treat.
‘Do you understand?’ Roger gave me a beseeching look.
I glared back. ‘Yeah, I understand. I understand that your ego has had the best massage it can remember in years. And if it carries on, you will hurt Charlotte whether you want to or not, and then she’ll get you by the balls and twist them off.’
Roger winced.
But for all my words, I felt a sudden flush of discomfort. Because I did know what he meant. It was nice, after years of being in the same relationship, to have someone pay you real attention, to want to know what you thought, what kind of person you were.
It was all very well for me to take the moral high ground, but if all this TV stuff had happened while I was living with Daniel, wouldn’t I have still been flattered by Cal flirting with me? I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have gone any further, not that “further” was necessarily on offer. Here I paused to relive, for the thousandth time, the memory of his mouth on mine. The delicious, feathery brushing of his soft lips. The way it had sent a tingle right up my spine. And into a few other places …
I shook myself back to the present to consider the matter in hand. Could I honestly say that if I were still married I wouldn’t have wanted to go for a drink with Cal, wouldn’t have been taken and tempted by his interest?
Roger was looking at me miserably. I softened my voice again. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But look, Rog, if you want to talk about who you are, take Charlotte out more. Life doesn’t have to be humdrum – you don’t have to only discuss the dog and the kids. Do all that stuff they tell you to do on the problem pages. Make a date with her – take her away for a dirty weekend. Go for dinner, just the two of you, and start a better conversation. Who knows? She may want to tell you how she is too. I do think you two have something pretty good together – I mean you’re still friends, you still like each other.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Roger. ‘We are friends, of course. But Charlotte’s not always easy, you know.’
‘Easy?’ I squawked, freshly outraged. ‘Of course she’s not easy. She’s passionate and intelligent and sexy and has given you two beautiful children and a wonderful home life and loves you to bits. What do you fucking want?’
‘I know, I know,’ Roger said awkwardly. ‘I love Charlotte, you know I do.’
‘And would you like it if she was going out with one of her colleagues every single night and texting him when she got home?’
‘No, probably not.’
‘So what are you bloody doing?’ I asked, realising we’d come full circle and got precisely nowhere.
‘I don’t know. Obviously … Well the thing is, I mean … Well, I can’t just dump Hannah. She needs me at the moment – she’s fragile.’
I looked at him hopelessly. ‘Oh pur-lease. She’s playing you. Being all needy – I can’t stand women who do that.’
‘She’s not playing me,’ said Roger. ‘But she does need me, I think. She is depending on my friendship. I suppose she has got a bit –’ he hesitated ‘ attached to me. It’s probably my fault.’
I stared at him. ‘Have you slept with her?’
‘No! Not really.’
‘What do you mean “not really”? You either have or you haven’t.’
‘She wanted to, we got close to it, but I didn’t.’
‘Why not?’
Roger looked embarrassed. ‘We didn’t have any contraceptives,’ he said uncomfortably.
‘So you would have done, if you had?’ I demanded.
‘No – well, I don’t know. She was upset and I … I wasn’t going to but we got a bit carried away … And I think she just needed some affection. She was really quite distressed. But I didn’t, that’s the main thing.’ He’d started on the napkin now and was twisting it tightly round and round into a spiral in his fingers.
I shook my head in disbelief. ‘But she still wanted to, didn’t she? She was still going to sleep with you whether you had a condom or not. Jesus!’
‘I don’t know really – she wasn’t thinking straight – she’d had too much to drink. Her ex had called her and she –’
‘See?’ I cried agitated. ‘See what she’s doing? Roger, please promise me you won’t ever touch her again. Even if you had a condom she’d probably make a hole in it. Are you mad ?’
Roger shook his head silently, looking wretched. I gripped his arm in frustration.
‘Look at me. She’s trying to trap you – she wants to turn up on your doorstep pregnant. What would Charlotte say then?’
Roger shuddered. ‘She was crying. I felt a bastard.’
‘I bet she bloody was,’ I said grimly. ‘I bet emotional blackmail’s right up her street.’
Roger shook his head. ‘I don’t think she’s doing it deliberately,’ he said slowly, ‘but I do think she’s maybe a bit disturbed emotionally at the moment. To be honest, I did feel worried this morning when she phoned me. Even before you rang, I was thinking: what have I got into and how am I going to detach myself? I know it’s getting heavier than I ever intended and I don’t know what to do. It was only meant to be platonic …’
‘But these things never really are, are they?’ I said wearily. ‘Not really. Not unless the other person’s as ugly as sin and totally sexless to boot.’
‘Well, look at us – we are,’ Roger said, with a weak smile. ‘And I’m dead handsome and you look OK in the right light.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Very funny. We’re platonic because we’re like family. We known each other a long time – watched the kids grow up together, seen the worst of each other. Generally, seriously, it doesn’t happen often, does it? There’s usually a frisson – a little something if a heterosexual woman is spending time alone frequently with a heterosexual man – and even if they don’t remotely fancy each other, it’s still different from two women or two men, isn’t it? The sex thing is always there – even if it’s totally buried and nobody thinks about it.’
‘I guess so.’ He looked at me appealingly. ‘What am I going to go?’
‘You are going to accept that she’s bad news and stop the whole thing in its tracks right now. You don’t have to be a bastard. You simply tell her that you love your wife and kids and that while you’re sorry for her and about all her troubles, you can’t risk hurting them. Give her all that crap about what a special person she is, how she deserves a proper relationship of her own – with someone better than you.’
I gave him a hard look. ‘And then you stick to it. No drinks, no texts, no phone calls. Tell her it’s the best way for both of you – so you can both get over it. It doesn’t really matter what you say as long as you mean it and don’t give in.’
Roger nodded, suddenly resolute. ‘I will.’ He grabbed my hands. ‘Thank you, Laura. Thank you.’