Chapter Twenty-one

Meg could not sleep.

She wanted to sleep, she longed for the oblivion of sleep more than anything, but she had to stay awake because Iris was poorly. Her nose was blocked, her head was hot and she must have been feeling very uncomfortable, the poor little mite, because as soon as Meg tried to put her down in her cot she became distraught again. So Meg had no choice but to walk her up and down the hallway, taking one step over Gripper on the way to the kitchen and one step over her on the way back towards the foot of the stairs; it felt like she had been making the trip for hours, and as she checked her watch she realised it was almost four in the morning. Gripper had been lying with her nose on her paws pointing at the front door for several hours now, which Meg had found disturbing. Normally it would be a sign that Robert was about to arrive, but she was certain that was not going to happen. Perhaps the dog sensed what was going on. Perhaps she was pining for what had been lost.

‘I’ve made some camomile tea,’ Frances said, keeping her voice low. ‘And some toast. You need to eat.’ Meg looked at the kitchen table. Frances had turned the butter out into a butter dish, made the tea in a pot and even found a napkin which she had folded next to the plate and knife she had set out for Meg.

‘You should go home,’ Meg told her. ‘What about Henry?’

‘Henry will be all right with his dad for one night. Besides, you need me here now to look after you. That’s what friends are for.’

Meg could not say that actually she would do better without her sister-in-law. Just having Frances here, despite how sweet and supportive she was trying to be, was exhausting. At least with Natalie or Jess, or even Tiffany and Steve, Meg would feel free to crumble, to dissolve in her misery. But with Frances in charge there was simply no room for self-pity.

‘You’ll get through it,’ Frances told her stoutly. ‘You have no choice. Giving up isn’t an option, with four children to care for you can’t put yourself first.’

Meg felt it would be impossible to explain to Frances, whose whole life seemed to have been built on those stoic foundations, that what she wanted more than anything was to give up and give in. That just for now, just for a little while, she wanted to be able to surrender to the agony that was wracking her body. Somehow, feeling the full intensity of the pain she was in would give her a cruel kind of comfort.

Frances took Iris from Meg and nodded towards the table.

‘You eat, I’ll walk,’ she said. ‘She must need to sleep soon. She’s been crying for hours. It’s not like her – she’s probably sensing how unhappy you are.’

Meg sat down at the table, trying to shrug off Frances’s comment which was probably meant harmlessly enough but somehow felt like an accusation. She obediently poured the hot golden liquid into her mug, laced her fingers around the cup and felt the warmth seep through the ceramic and throb against her palms.

‘You realise that if I had known anything I would have told you, don’t you?’ Frances asked her as she paced. Meg nodded – if she was sure about one thing it was that Robert hadn’t told anyone else in his family. His parents, upright and ultraconservative, would probably disown him once they knew.

‘I can’t believe that this is happening,’ Frances added. ‘I honestly can’t believe that he would be so stupid. If Mother and Dad find out that will be it, you know. They’ll be finished with him.’

Meg laboured over buttering her toast. She wondered if it was that Frances, like her brother, simply wasn’t capable of facing the real issues that his affair had created, or if she really did believe that parental approval was the most precious thing at stake here.

‘It can’t be kept from them,’ Meg said. ‘They will have to be told.’

Slowly and very carefully Frances sat down at the table opposite her. Iris was sleeping at last.

‘He was in a terrible state when he arrived at my house,’ Frances whispered across the table. ‘Really shaken up, Meg. He felt awful.’

‘He felt awful? Probably only because he’d been caught,’ Meg replied, tasting the bitterness of her own words in her mouth. ‘Trust me, I saw him with that woman and whatever he was feeling it wasn’t awful.’

‘I know it’s a horrible thing to have happened,’ Frances went on. ‘And I know you must be feeling pretty low at the moment, but these things don’t have to mean the end of a relationship. I know you haven’t just instantly stopped loving Robert . . .’

‘Frances!’ Meg cried loudly, clapping her hand over her mouth as she heard the pitch of her voice. She went on in a ragged whisper, ‘Of course I still love him, of course I do – that’s why I feel as if my guts have been ripped out of my body and dragged through broken glass. That’s why I feel like I want to die. It’s not me stopping loving him that’s the problem. He doesn’t love me any more. He can’t. If he did he would never have . . .’ Meg trailed off.

‘He says it was just meant to be sex but that it all got out of hand and that the woman started to expect more from him. He knows he’s been foolish, an idiot, but he says that he’ll finish it for good if you say you’ll give him another chance.’

‘You mean he hasn’t done that yet?’ Meg asked Frances, feeling the spark of her anger rekindling into a fierce flame in the pit of her belly. ‘You mean he’s hedging his bets? Keeping his options open?’

Frances looked exasperated.

‘He still loves you, Meg. You and the children mean the world to him.’

‘He was fucking her for months, Frances.’ Meg pushed the plate of toast away so hard that the plate spun and tottered on the wooden surface. ‘I think he was even with her on the day I gave birth to Iris.’

Meg knew that Frances would be appalled at her language, but she said nothing about it. Instead she took a breath and tried again.

‘It hasn’t been easy for him either. He felt excluded from the family, excluded from you. He says you stopped paying him any attention.’

Meg furrowed her brow and glowered at Frances. ‘This is not my fault,’ she said quietly.

‘I’m not saying that it’s your fault,’ Frances replied hastily. ‘All I’m saying is that there were reasons for what he’s done. If he hadn’t been unhappy here he would never have had an affair.’

Meg found that her foot was tapping against the tiled floor. Her fury was burning brightly now. It was new to her, this constant fury; she didn’t think she had ever felt anything like it before in her life. But if it was at all possible she liked feeling it, preferred it at least, to the alternative – the excruciating sense of loss.

‘He could have told me how he felt. He could have said that our four children were taking up too much of my time. He could have said he wasn’t happy. We could have talked about it, perhaps worked it out. But he didn’t do that, did he?’

‘Perhaps he found it too difficult to talk to you,’ Frances offered. ‘Maybe if you just sat down and talked you’d be able to work it out now . . .’

‘For God’s sake, Frances, why can’t you understand what he’s done to me?’ Meg stood up, scraping her chair back across the tiles. ‘Why can’t you see what your precious brother has done? He was having an affair while I was pregnant with his child. He was sleeping with another woman while I was giving birth. He had sex with her and then with me on the same day! He’s not only betrayed our marriage, he’s betrayed our children – each one of them. You say he doesn’t love her. Well, I wish he did, because otherwise he’s ruined all this – and for what? For his cock!’

Iris was crying again and Meg reached across the table and took her out of Frances’s arms.

‘You’re his sister,’ Meg said. ‘I think you should go to him.’

Frances pressed her lips into a thin blue line, looking as if she were losing patience with Meg.

‘I understand that you are upset, Megan.’ She spoke slowly and deliberately as if she were addressing a lobotomy patient. ‘But you are being unreasonable and short-sighted here . . .’

‘Oh fuck off!’ Meg suddenly shouted at her. ‘Just fuck off, Frances, fuck off to Robert and listen to his excuses.’

Frances sat still for a moment, her expression frozen.

‘You shouldn’t have spoken to me that way,’ she said eventually. ‘I expect an apology.’

‘An apology! You should be the one apologising for your bastard scum of a brother – he is the one who has caused all this – not me!

‘Megan!’ Frances looked at Meg as if she didn’t recognise her. ‘I’ve been here almost all night for you . . .’

‘I don’t want you here for me,’ Meg told her. ‘I don’t want your pep talks and your excuses. Just go, go and leave us alone. We don’t need you. I don’t need you, you’re not my friend, Frances. I put up with you because Robert said I had to. But I don’t have to any more so just . . . leave.’

Meg watched as Frances’s skin blanched white. On one level she instantly regretted her words, but she was still far too angry and too hurt to be able even to attempt to retract them. Frances stood up.

‘Very well,’ she said, steadily. She collected her coat from the coat rack and Meg watched her as she opened the front door. The first grey streaks of dawn were rising in the sky. Frances paused and looked at Meg.

‘I know you put up with me,’ she said. ‘I know you don’t really like me very much, that you think I’m bossy and difficult. But you’ve been the nearest thing to a friend that I’ve ever had. I hate him for what he’s done to you. I honestly hate him for it.’ Suddenly Frances’s voice caught with unshed tears. ‘I just want things back the way they were.’

She drew up her collar around herears and hurried off into the dark morning.

Meg closed the door and held Iris close to her, soothing the baby until her cries subsided again.

She knew exactly how Frances felt.

She would have done anything to turn the clock back to that night she had spent with Robert. To have not seen that text or needed so much to know what it meant. Perhaps if she had just gone to sleep that night instead of picking up Robert’s trousers, that would have been the turning point. Perhaps that night he would have realised he didn’t need anyone else. He might have come back to her then without her having to know that he had left.

But it was too late. She couldn’t undo what had been done.

It would be morning soon and then she would have to get dressed and get on with it, just as Frances said. She’d have to face the new day, uncertain of what the future might hold but ready to deal with it, whatever it was.

But until then, in the few short hours until the emerging dawn turned into daylight, she could be as pathetic and as miserable and as scared and as devastated as she wanted to be, as indeed she was.

Until the day began, she could mourn the death of her marriage.