I open the fridge door and am confronted by precisely the same rotting fare as when I quit the flat this morning. “Jesus Christ, Sara! I thought you were going shopping!”
“I was in Court all day, I told you that. When was I supposed to have time?”
I remove two putrescent tomatoes and something that may once have been a block of cheese but which is now an homage to Alexander Fleming, and cast wildly about for the dustbin. Of course this is pointless, since Sara uses supermarket plastic bags hung on the knob of the cupboard nearest the door in lieu of the traditional rubbish receptacle; a practice rendered even more irksome when the bags leak, as they frequently do, all over the floor. Only this morning I found myself standing in a puddle of last night’s Chinese takeaway as I spooned fresh coffee into the percolator.
Rotten tomato is oozing through my fingers by the time I locate the bag and dispose of them. I swear under my breath as I rinse my hands in the sink. Dear God, I haven’t lived like this since I was an impoverished student at Oxford.
Sara skulks into the galley kitchen. “You didn’t have to throw out the cheese, Nick! I could’ve scraped the mold off.”
“And poisoned us both.”
“Cheese is milk gone moldy, everyone knows that. It doesn’t go off.”
“Fine.” I fling open cupboard doors. “I gave you two hundred pounds on Tuesday to go to Waitrose, and the only thing in the damn larder is a bottle of Tabasco and four tins of fucking anchovies. What the hell happened?”
“I spent it,” she mutters.
“On what? Bloody truffles?”
“I left my credit card at home, and I saw these shoes. I was going to pay you back,” she adds defensively as I storm into the sitting room, nearly tripping over the wretched cat. I wish I hadn’t bought her the animal; this entire apartment stinks of piss. She picks up the kitten and follows me. “I just haven’t been to the cash-point yet.”
“It’s not the damn money, Sara. It just would’ve been nice to come back and find something to eat—”
“I’m not your freakin’ servant,” Sara spits.
“Sara, I’ve just buried my father!”
Startled, the cat springs out of her arms. Sara deflates like a pricked balloon, and I’m reminded, yet again, how very young she is.
Moving in with her was a mistake. I knew it even as I unpacked the holdall of clothes Mal had left in the taxi for me—each of my shirts carefully folded so as not to crease—and crammed them into Sara’s overstuffed wardrobe on cheap wire coat hangers. I had nowhere else to go, other than a hotel; but in the end, practicalities were the least of it. It was the desperate need to salvage something from this whole sorry débâcle that made me agree to Sara’s feverish suggestion. For the misery and grief I have caused to have been for a reason.
If we work at it, it’s bound to get better. It’s just a question of adjusting.
“I thought there’d be something to eat,” she mumbles now, eyes on the ground, “at the wake. I assumed you’d just come home and we’d—you know.”
“We’d what?”
She grinds her toe into the carpet like a small, embarrassed child. “In the midst of life we are in death, and all that. Amy said when people die, you want to celebrate life. Oh, come on, Nick, do I have to spell it out?”
I suddenly notice that she’s wearing a very short pleated gray skirt and has her hair in short schoolgirl bunches. Even as I sigh inwardly at her naïveté, my cock springs to life.
“Man cannot live on sex alone. Although,” I add, “I appreciate the thought.”
She drops to her knees in front of me, unzips my trousers, and releases my semierect cock from my boxer shorts. Through the uncurtained window behind her, I can see straight into a block of flats opposite. I watch a fat woman struggle out of a green wool jacket. She glances up as she hangs it on the back of the door, and I realize that if I can see her, the reverse must also hold true. She’s too far away for me to see her expression, but the way she snaps her drapes shut speaks volumes.
I’m not really in the mood; but the thought of being watched as Sara kneels and sucks my hardening dick is an unexpected aphrodisiac.
In fact, I realize, I’m about to come: too soon. I grab her shoulders and pull her upright, then shunt her up onto the breakfast bar. She pulls her white blouse over her head without troubling to undo the buttons, and I scoop her breasts from the lacy bra and clamp my mouth around a cherry red nipple. She groans and buries her hands beneath my shirt. I bite and nip, not troubling to be careful. Her fingernails scrape and claw at my back. I bunch her skirt up around her waist, pulling off her panties and thrusting my fingers forcefully inside her. She’s slick and wet, and I lick my fingertips afterward. Her eyes half close as she leans back on her elbows, opening her pussy to me.
I taste her, relishing the musky sweetness. And then I lift her off the counter, push her forward over the uncomfortable white sofa, and plunge my dick into her backside.
She gasps in shock, but after a moment’s hesitation, starts to grind her hips in time with mine. As her movements get more frantic, I thrust faster, reaching around to knead her breasts, trapping her nipples—none too gently—between thumb and forefingers.
I come in an explosion. As I slump over her sweat-slicked back, I glance up through the window again. The fat woman is staring right back at me.
“Fuck,” Sara pants, twisting round. “Can we finish up in the bedroom? This sofa still stinks of puke.”
It took my father three weeks to die. He survived the initial massive stroke, only to succumb to an infection originating at the site of his IV line. The cause of death, according to the somber gray certificate with which I was presented upon registering his passing: septicemia leading to multiple organ failure.
I don’t know if I could be said to have got there in time. He was still, technically, alive when I arrived posthaste from London, so consumed with fear that I was able, briefly, to banish the excoriating circumstances of my summons in some uncharted corner of my mind to deal with later. But he was already unconscious by the time I reached his bedside, and so we never had a chance to exchange a last word, a final farewell. I was left to sit helplessly beside the husk of the man who had once been my father, stroking his hand—occasionally his cheek—and trying to talk to him as if I really believed he could still hear me.
Since we are being technical, Edward Lyon wasn’t actually my father at all, but my father’s elder brother. My biological parents achieved the unusual distinction of being killed in the same car crash in two separate cars.
Andrew Lyon had been having an affair with his dental nurse. My mother, upon discovering this—quite how never became clear—confronted him and a domestic fracas naturally ensued. She fled in her car; he pursued her in his. It was subsequently impossible to establish which of them lost control on a sharp bend first, and which smashed into the other’s wreckage. Very little survived the fireball, and of course forensic science in the sixties was not what it is now.
Edward and his wife, Daisy, took me in. I was six months old; they have always been my parents in every sense that matters.
I have often wondered what kind of man could embark upon an affair when his wife had just presented him with their first child. Now, perhaps, I know.
Bad blood. Is there a gene for infidelity, I wonder, like those for baldness or big feet? All my life, I have tried to atone for the sins of my biological father. Made a career out of picking up the pieces of adultery, in fact. Hubristically, I believed that of all the men I knew, I was without doubt the least likely to have an affair.
This afternoon I stood at my father’s graveside, my arm around my mother, and watched my wife, her face undone by tears. Of course I grieve for my father; his death has left a void in my life that nothing can fill; but there is a point every adult child reaches when they unconsciously begin to prepare for their parents’ deaths. You ache for your loss, but it is the natural order of things. Nature renders us heartlessly resilient when necessary.
Losing the woman you love through your own stupidity, weakness, and mendacity is another matter. Stultum est queri de adversis, ubi culpa est tua: Stupid to complain about misfortune that is your own fault. Nature erects no self-protecting carapace for such preventable misery. Nor should she; I deserve the obloquy now being heaped upon me from all quarters.
Except, astonishingly, from Malinche.
“This isn’t what I wanted,” she said quietly, stopping beside me as I handed my mother into the waiting funeral car. “I wanted to wait you out. I did try.”
A sea of mourners washed past on either side of the car, newly turned earth sticking like coffee grounds to their stiff black shoes. Muted snatches of consolation—“So sorry, Nicholas”—eddied around us. April seems such an inappropriate month in which to bury someone, with its pledge of life. I wanted bare branches scraping at leaden gray skies, not this green-bladed promise and birdsong.
“How long have you known?”
“Since the Law Society dinner.”
“How did you—?”
“Nicholas,” she whispered.
I looked away. On the gravel path behind us, a knot of black-clad mourners stopped to chat; a rising laugh was hastily smothered with a quick, abashed glance in our direction. We can only do grief and pain for so long, before life surges back out of us, bidden or not.
I took a deep breath. “Malinche, is there any chance I could come—”
“No, Nicholas. I’m sorry.”
Inside the car, my mother glanced fleetingly at us, and then looked away.
“I know how this must sound: but it didn’t mean anything. Please—”
“Of course it meant something,” she said sharply, “to me, if not to you! You aren’t the only one affected by this. It’s not up to you to decide if it meant something or not.”
“I realize you’re angry now, but—”
“Angry doesn’t begin to cover it.”
“You can’t mean to go through with this. Separation. A divorce. Surely?”
She stepped backward slightly, as if I had just dealt her a physical blow. “What else did you expect, Nicholas?”
“Can’t we at least talk?” I said desperately. “What about the children, did you think about what this will—”
“Did you?”
In the distance, two men in blue overalls walked toward my father’s grave, chatting, clods of dry earth falling from the shovels over their shoulders.
Mal watched me watch them and sighed. “Nicholas, now isn’t the time. I’ve told the children you’re looking after Grandma at the moment. When the time is right, we can tell them that you—that we—”
“Can I see them?”
“Of course you can see them!” She touched my arm; briefly. Her face softened. “I would have brought them to see you before, but you were always either working or at the hospital. It didn’t seem right to involve them in all of that.”
I should have established a pattern of access immediately. Set precedent, worked out ground rules for visitation. How many times have I rebuked a client for failing precisely in this regard, thus enabling the other side to allege noninvolvement, disinterest, neglect? Never considering for one moment that they simply couldn’t face the children they’d so badly let down.
Mal shifted on her feet, imperceptibly, but enough to tell me that she was finished here. My heart clenched. Suddenly my head was filled with a thousand things I wanted to say to her. I wanted to tell her that I loved her more than I could have thought possible, that I had never stopped loving her, that I had been a complete and utter fool. I would do anything, promise everything, if she’d just give me a second chance. That my life without her was ashes. And yet, like Lear’s daughter, unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I’d like to see them this weekend, if that’s all right.”
Her expression flickered, as if she’d been expecting me to say something else.
“They’d love to see you, too,” she said, after a moment. “Where?”
“I couldn’t come—”
She half turned, presenting me with her profile. “No.”
“Not McDonald’s. Or a park. I couldn’t face it.”
“And not—”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said quickly. “My parents’, then? Or,” I added, “rather, my mother’s. I wonder how long that will take to get used to?”
“He was a good man,” she said warmly, “your father.”
“Thank you for coming.”
“Nicholas. I loved him, too.”
Perhaps ten feet away from us, a man hovered. I hadn’t noticed him before, but now that he’d caught my attention, I couldn’t imagine why not. He was extremely good-looking, with that rumpled Steve McQueen edge women inevitably find attractive. And he was clearly waiting for my wife. She smiled sadly, briefly, at me, and then turned, walking toward him. He didn’t touch her, but there was something in the way he bent toward her, like a poplar to a riverbank, that told me there was a history between them of which I was not a part.
And for the first time it hit me that I’d lost her.
He’s there too when she drops off the girls at my mother’s house the following Saturday, sitting in the passenger seat of my wife’s car.
I take Metheny from her mother and nod toward the Volvo.
“Who’s that?”
Mal unshoulders a cumbersome quilted bag filled with Metheny’s detritus: nappies, cream, plastic beaker, Calpol, spare pacifier, spare clothes, spare blanket. “Make sure she sleeps for at least an hour in the afternoon, but don’t let her go beyond two; she’ll never settle for the night. She’s started taking the beaker of apple juice to bed, but don’t forget to water it down first. And for heaven’s sake, don’t lose the Wiggle-Wiggle book, she had the house in an uproar last week when we couldn’t find it—”
She stops rummaging. “Yes. Of course.”
Sophie and Evie bound up the garden path toward me, hair flying.
“Daddy! Daddy! Mummy said we can stay all night at Grandma’s house! I brought my new satin pajamas, Uncle Kit gave them to me for Easter, he said they were much better than chocolate, I look like Veronica Lake, who’s Veronica Lake, Daddy, do I look like her?”
“You don’t look like a lake, you look like a big fat puddle,” Evie says crossly, “you’re a big muddy fat puddle.”
Sophie smirks and folds her arms. In an irritating, singsong voice, she chants, “I know you are, but what am I?”
“Puddle head. Puddle head.”
“I know you are, but what am I?”
“Puddle head—”
“I know you are, but what—”
“I’ll see you all tomorrow afternoon, girls,” Mal says blithely, kissing each in turn. “Be good for Daddy. And give Grandma lots of extra cuddles, she’s missing Grandpa and she needs them.”
Metheny’s sweet brow furrows as she watches her mother walk down the garden path. For twenty seconds she is silent, and then as Mal gets into the car, she starts to squirm in my arms, plump fists flailing as she realizes her mother isn’t coming back. I march firmly into the house and shut the front door as she starts to turn red, then blue, with temper, waiting for the familiar bellow of sound.
“Oh, dear Lord,” my mother says nervously. “What’s wrong with the child?”
“She’ll be fine in a minute, Mother. Sophie, leave your sister alone. Evie, stop fiddling with that lamp—”
We all wince as the scream finally reaches us. I’m reminded of counting the seconds between flashes of lightning and the thunderclap to work out how far away the storm is.
I jounce my youngest daughter against my chest. Her screams intensify.
“Metheny, sweetheart, calm down, Daddy’s here. Mummy will be back soon. Breathe, darling, please breathe. Sophie, please. You’re the eldest, you should be setting an example—”
There’s a crash. Evie jumps guiltily away from the kitchen windowsill.
“Not the Beatrix Potter!” my mother wails. “Nicholas, I’ve had that lamp since you were a baby!”
Metheny, shocked into silence by the sudden noise, buries her wet face in my shoulder. I apologize to my mother and hand the hiccuping toddler over to Sophie with relief. “Take her into the back garden for a run around while I clear up this mess. You too, Evie. We’ll talk about this later. Oh, and Sophs?”
I have always despised clients who use their children to snoop on their spouses.
“That man who came with you today,” I say, with studied casualness. “I don’t think I recognized him—”
“He’s a friend of Mummy’s.” She shrugs, banging out into the garden. “The one she does all the cooking with.”
I digest this news as I sweep up the shards of broken china. So that was the famous Trace Pitt, Mal’s onetime boyfriend and current boss. I hadn’t realized he was quite so young. And attractive. And close to my wife.
I wonder if his sudden ubiquity is the staunch support of an old friend in times of need (in which case: why not Kit?); or altogether something more.
And if the latter, how long has it been going on?
I am thoughtfully emptying the dustpan into an old newspaper when Evie runs back in with muddy feet and a bunch of flowers almost as big as herself. “I got these for Grandma, to say sorry for the old lamp.” She beams from behind the blooms. “Aren’t they pretty?”
My mother moans softly. “My prize cheiranthus.”
She retreats upstairs for a lie-down, while I struggle dispiritedly to impose order on the childish chaos Mal normally keeps efficiently in check. I dose Metheny up with a preemptive teaspoon of Calpol and finally manage to get her down for her nap, but Sophie and Evie squabble continuously for the rest of the afternoon, refusing to settle to anything approaching sibling harmony even when I break every household rule and permit unrestricted access to the television on a sunny day.
“The stupid TV’s too small,” Sophie says sulkily, drumming her heels on the base of the overstuffed sofa. “And there’s no Cartoon Network.”
“Please don’t kick the furniture, Sophie. Evie, if you need to wipe your nose, use a handkerchief, not the back of your sleeve.”
Defiantly, Evie scrubs at her face with the starched antimacassar. “I want to watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I brought my new DVD—”
“Duh! Grandma doesn’t have a DVD player.”
“We’ve got one at home,” Evie whines. “Why can’t we go back home and watch it? Why do we have to come here anyway?”
I sigh. “It’s complicated—”
Abruptly, Sophie leaps to her feet. “Daddy doesn’t live with us anymore, stupid! He’s not coming home! Ever, ever, ever! They’re getting a divorce, don’t you know anything?”
“Sophie, nobody said anything about—”
She turns on me, her eyes large and frightened in her angry, pale face. “You are! You’re going to get divorced and marry someone else and she’ll have babies and you’ll love them more than us, you won’t want to see us anymore, you’ll forget all about us and love them instead!”
I stare after her as she slams out of the room. Guilt makes a fist of my intestines. And I know from bitter vicarious experience that this is just the start of it.
When Sara telephones at teatime, and suggests coming down and taking the girls out to Chessington with me on Sunday, I fall upon the idea. My mother is clearly in no fit state to cope with the children at the moment, particularly when they are acting up like this, and I certainly don’t have a better idea. I have never had to fill an entire weekend with artificial activity and entertainment for three small children before. I have no idea what to do with them. Weekends have always just happened. A spot of tidying up while Mal goes to Tesco’s, changing lightbulbs and fixing broken toys. Mowing the lawn. A game of rounders now and then; teaching the girls to ride their bikes. Slumping amid a sea of newspapers after Sunday lunch while the girls play dressing-up in their rooms.
I love my daughters; of course I do. But conversation with children of eighteen months, six, and nearly nine is limited, at best. In the normal course of events, we are either active in each other’s company—playing French cricket, for example—or each doing our own thing in separate parts of the house. Available to each other, but not foisted. Not trapped in a cluttered house of mourning in Esher without even the rabbit’s misdemeanors for petty distraction.
For the first time, I realize that access and family life are not even remotely related.
Clearly Mal isn’t scrupling to introduce our daughters to her “friend.” And they may actually like Sara. Relate to her, even. In time, perhaps, she could become more of a big sister than anything else—
“I hate her!” Sophie screams the moment she sees Sara getting out of her car the next morning.
“Sophie, you’ve never even met her.”
She throws herself at the lamppost at the end of my parents’ drive and sits on the filthy pavement, knotting her arms and legs about it as if anticipating being bodily wrestled into the car. “No! You can’t make me go with her!”
“Sophie, you’re being ridiculous! Sara’s a very nice—”
“She broke up our family!” Sophie cries. “She’s a homewrecker!”
I stare at her in shock. I can’t believe I’m hearing such tabloid verbiage from my eight-year-old daughter. “Who told you that?”
“I heard Mummy talking to Uncle Kit on the phone! She was crying! Real, proper tears, like when Grandpa died! Her face was all red like Metheny’s and she had stuff coming out of her nose and everything! And she told Uncle Kit,” she hiccups, “it’s all her fault!”
Involuntarily, I glance at Sara.
“Please, darling. Let go of the lamppost. The entire street is looking at you.”
Sophie pretzels herself even tighter. “I don’t care!”
My arms twitch helplessly.
“Why are you being so difficult? Sara is trying to be nice to you. Chessington was her idea.”
“So what! It’s a stupid idea!”
Evie climbs into the back of our car and sticks her head out of the window. “We could always push her off the rollercoaster,” she suggests cheerfully. “She’ll splat like strawberry jam on the ground and the ambulance men will have to use spades to scrape her off. We could put the bits in a jar and keep it next to Don Juan’s cage—”
“Evie, that’s enough!”
“Why don’t you sit in the front with Daddy?” Sara says nicely to Sophie. “I’m just along for the ride, anyway.”
“You’ll get carsick,” Evie says, pleased.
“If I was going to cling onto something,” Sara whispers loudly to Evie as she gets in beside her, “it wouldn’t be to a lamppost. Dogs love lampposts. Just think what you might be sitting on.”
Sophie quickly lets go and stands up. She pulls up her pink Bratz T-shirt and wipes her damp face on the hem. “I’m not sitting next to her, even if we go on a scary ride. I’m not even going to talk to her.”
“Fine. I don’t suppose she wants to talk to you much either, after that little display.”
“She’ll get cold,” Sophie warns, ruinously scraping the tops of her shoes on the pavement as she dawdles toward the car, “in that stupid little top. She’ll probably get pneumonia and die.”
“Seat belt, Sophie.”
She slams home the buckle. “She can’t tell us what to do. She’s not our mother, anyway. She’s not anybody’s mother.”
“Thank goodness for that,” Sara says briskly. “I don’t like children.”
Evie gasps.
“Not any children?” Sophie demands, shocked by this heresy into forgetting her vow of omertà.
“Nope.”
“Not even babies?”
“Metheny can be a pain,” Evie acknowledges, regarding her sister, who is sleeping peaceably in her car seat, with a baleful glare. “Especially when she pukes. She does that a lot.”
“Don’t you like us?” Sophie asks, twisting round.
“I haven’t decided yet,” Sara says thoughtfully. “I like some people, and I don’t like others. It doesn’t really matter to me how old they are. You wouldn’t say you loved everyone who had red hair or brown eyes, would you? So why should you like everyone who just happens to be four?”
“Or six,” says Evie.
“Or six. I just make up my mind as I go along.”
“You’re weird,” Sophie sniffs, but her voice has lost its edge.
I glance in the rearview mirror. Sara smiles, and the tension knotting my shoulders eases just a little. Clearly my intention to present her as a friend was arrantly naïve; certainly as far as the precocious Sophie is concerned. I must discuss how much she knows with Mal as soon as possible. But I could not have maintained the subterfuge of remaining at their grandmother’s in order to console her for very much longer in any event. Perhaps it’s better to have the truth out in the open now. Rip off the sticking plaster in one go, rather than pull it from the wound of our separation inch by painful inch.
Children are remarkably resilient. And forgiving. As Sara and Evie debate the relative merits of contestants on some reality talent show, I even dare to hope that today may turn out to be better than I had expected.
My nascent optimism, however, is swiftly quenched. Before we have even reached the motorway, Metheny wakes up and starts to scream for her mother, Evie and Sophie descend into another spate of vicious bickering over their comic books, and I am forced to stop the car in a lay-by so that Sara may be, as predicted, carsick.
I turn off the engine. We had a Croatian au pair one summer: sick every time she got in the car. Couldn’t even manage the bloody school run. Fine on the back of her damn boyfriend’s bike, though.
As Sara returns from the bushes, there comes the unmistakable sound of my baby daughter thoroughly filling her nappy.
Naturally, I have forgotten the changing bag. And naturally again, we are far from any kind of habitation where I might purchase anything with which to rectify the situation.
I unbuckle Metheny and lay her on the backseat with some distaste, wondering what in God’s name I do now. Clearly I cannot leave her like this: Mustard-colored shit is oozing through the seams of her all-in-one. I struggle not to retch. We’re at least half an hour from anywhere. Jesus Christ. How can a person this small and beautiful produce substances noxious enough to fell an army SWAT team at a thousand paces?
I look around helplessly. The car rocks alarmingly as vehicles shoot past at what seem like incredible speeds from our stationary standpoint. It isn’t that I’m not versed in changing foul nappies; I have handled several bastards, in fact, from each of my daughters. But not unequipped. Not without cream and wipes and basins of hot water and changes of fresh clothes.
Metheny’s screams redouble. There’s no help for it; I will have to clean her up as best I can and wrap her in my jacket. I offer a silent prayer that we reach civilization before her bowels release a second load into my Savile Row tailoring.
Sophie watches me struggle for ten minutes with a packet of tissues from Sara’s handbag and copious quantities of spit, before informing me that her mother always keeps a spare nappy, a packet of wet wipes, and a full change of baby clothes beneath the first-aid kit in the boot.
I grit my teeth, aware that I now smell like a POW latrine. I have liquid shit on my hands, on my trousers, and—Christ knows how—in my hair. I tell myself the children are not being much worse than normal. It’s just that normal childish awfulness is infinitely worse when endured alone. And despite Sara’s physical presence, I realize that without Mal beside me, I am very much on my own.
Each of the next four weekends is successively worse. This for a number of reasons—not least of which is the unexpected, but undeniable, new spring in Mal’s step.
“You’ve cut your hair,” I accuse one Saturday in mid-May.
She blushes. “Kit persuaded me to go to his stylist in London. Do you like it?”
“I love it,” I say grudgingly. “It’s very short, very gamine, but it really suits you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you with your hair short like this before.”
“I used to have it this way,” she says, “before we met. But you never let me cut it. You always insisted I keep it long.”
“Did I?”
“You used to insist on a lot of things, Nicholas.”
She smiles and shrugs. I watch her flit across the pavement to the car, where Trace is once again waiting. I can’t fool myself that there is nothing in it anymore. It’s manifestly evident that the sparkle in her eyes is entirely down to—and for—him.
Jealousy, thick and foul, seeps into my soul.
That Mal would so simply slough off our marriage like an unwanted, outgrown skin, emerge somehow brighter and sharper, an HDTV version of her blurry, married self, was an outcome of our separation that I had, narcissistically, never even considered. But every time she drops off the children, she seems to have grown younger, closer to the free-spirited nymph I rescued in Covent Garden. For the first time in perhaps years, I find myself noticing her. The ethereal fragility—so deceptive—the dancing, bottomless eyes. The way she has of drawing you in, making you feel like the king of the world with a look, a quirk of the eyebrows. All this extraordinary beauty and happiness was mine; I held it in the palm of my hands. And now I don’t even have the right to know how she will spend her days; or, more pertinently, nights.
Nor have things become any easier between Sara and the children. I had thought—hoped, rather—that their hostility toward her would diminish as they grew used to her. To my perturbation, the reverse appears to be the case. Sophie, in particular, is sullen and uncommunicative. Evie is simply rude. Metheny, who can have little comprehension of the grim changes stirring her life, picks up on the general air of familial misery and responds by being fractious, grizzly, and demanding.
Understandably, Sara’s initial well-meaning patience soon wears thin.
“I didn’t expect rave reviews,” she says one day, after Sophie deliberately leaves a wet umbrella lying on top of her new suede jacket with predictably disastrous results, “but do they have to make it so freakin’ clear how much they hate me?”
I put down my newspaper.
“I’m sure it was an accident—”
“Of course it damn well wasn’t, Nick, but I’m not just talking about the jacket. It’s everything. We never have a moment to ourselves anymore. We daren’t be in the same room together at work in case it looks like favoritism—for God’s sake, Emma’s quit because of me. Joan practically hisses when I walk past, and Fisher seems to think he’s now got carte blanche to grope my arse every time he comes into the office. My fucking reputation is shot to shit—”
“You’re not the only one,” I say grimly.
“Yeah, well, you’re partner already. No one’s going to accuse you of sleeping your way to the top. But whenever I pull off a coup, everyone will say it’s because I’m screwing the great Nick Lyon. And then,” she snaps, returning to the subject in hand, “then, at weekends, we have the children twenty-four/seven. We saw more of each other when you were still living at home!”
“It’s family life,” I say powerlessly. “It’s the way it is.”
“But it’s not my family, is it? Ruining everything.”
I stare at her. “They’re my children.”
She stalks to the window and peers between the blinds in a gesture of frustration I’m starting to recognize.
“I’m beginning to think your wife has planned it all this way,” she says spitefully. “Dumping the children on us every weekend while she gets it on with her new hottie. She’s got it made, hasn’t she? While we’re crammed in this tiny flat with three out-of-control kids—”
I reel from the sickening punch of jealousy to my stomach at the thought of my wife with another man.
“At least she’s let them stay here now,” I manage. “That can’t have been easy for her.”
Sara’s mouth twists into an unattractive smile.
“Poor cow. Stuck shagging Mr. Sex-on-Legs while we get to wipe snotty noses and change fucking nappies all weekend. My heart bleeds.”
“You make it sound,” I say tightly, “as if you’d rather be her.”
A silence falls. Sara drops her head, abashed.
“I didn’t mean that,” she says. “It’s just—”
“I know,” I say.
And I do. Most children are not, if we’re honest, love-able, except to their own parents, and then not all the time. Or even much of it. For every heart-warming, couldn’t-live-without-them moment, when plump childish arms are wreathed about your neck and sunny smiles bottled in some corner of your mind, there are many more bleak, never-admitted, what-was-I-thinking ones. Children demand and insist and control. They force you to be unselfish, and since this is not a natural human state, yielding to their needs breeds resentment, and refusing to do so evokes guilt.
I can’t blame Sara for not wanting my children around too much. In such intense, concentrated, artificial parcels of time, frankly, neither do I. Until now, I’d thought divorce for a man meant not seeing his children enough. It hadn’t occurred to me that too much was worse.
“There’s a party next Saturday,” Sara says, lighting a cigarette. The smoking, it seems, is no longer just postcoital. “A friend of Amy’s. I’d really like to go.”
“I don’t mind staying here and babysitting the girls—”
“To go,” she says firmly, “with you.”
I wave my hand in front of my face, to make a point.
“Give me a break,” Sara snaps. “It’s my flat.”
I don’t want to go to a party at Amy’s friend’s house. I already know what it will be like: dark, noisy, cramped, with appalling music and even worse wine. I will feel like an invigilating parent, and will be regarded as an object of curiosity and derision. Sara will want to let her hair down and smoke drugs on the staircase—yes, I was a student once—and feel she can’t because she has to look after me.
But she needs this. She needs to float me into her other life for our relationship to be real. And perhaps without the children we can have the wild, untrammeled sex we used to have, instead of the furtive suppose-they-walk-in married sex we’ve been having recently.
I call Mal, and tell her that I can’t have the children this weekend. She sounds neither surprised nor put out; in fact, she exclaims cheerfully, that’s perfect, they—she and Trace, I think sourly—were planning to take the Chunnel to France for the weekend anyway, another sourcing trip; the children can come too, it’s not a bother, be lovely to have them for a change, actually: next week, then?
I picture my daughters, laughing and bouncing up and down excitedly in the back of his flash car, singing “Frère Jacques” at the top of their young voices. Thrilled by the thought of a tunnel that goes all the way under the sea, by the adventure of traveling to foreign lands, by sleeping in beds with French bolsters instead of English pillows. I imagine Mal leaning across in the front to kiss his square-jawed matinée-idol cheek, smiling contentedly at some erotic memory from last night, “dormez vous, dormez vous”—
“Nick? Are you OK?”
I jump, spilling my wine—execrable; I’m surprised it doesn’t dissolve the carpet—from its plastic cup. “Sorry. Miles away.”
Sara leans in to be heard over the music. “How’s it going?”
The party is everything I had feared it would be. I am indeed the paterfamilias of this social gathering, doubling the average age of the participants at a stroke (literally, I fear, if the music continues to be played at this bone-jangling level). In the semidarkness around me, couples who probably don’t even know each other’s names exchange saliva, if not pleasantries. A number of pairings are not the traditional boy-girl. It is impossible to conduct a conversation anywhere but in the kitchen, whose harsh fluorescent light illuminates the pallid, vacant faces of our legal elite in variously mentally altered states. I was wrong in one particular: the sweet smell of marijuana I remember from the parties of my student days is absent, replaced by a dusting of chic, expensive white powder on the lavatory cistern and arranged in neat Marmite-soldier lines across the surface of a small square hand mirror, quixotically imprinted with a lithograph of the engagement photograph of Prince Charles and Lady Di, complete with hideous pussycat bow.
Mal and I found ourselves at a party not dissimilar to this, shortly before we got engaged; at Kit’s invitation, naturally. He vanished as soon as we arrived to pursue the travel writer to whose column—in every sense of the word—he had taken a fancy. Mal and I clung to each other’s fingers like lost children, excusing ourselves in that peculiarly British fashion every two minutes whenever someone trod on our feet or jostled us as they barged past.
“Oh God, I’m too old for this,” she exclaimed suddenly, as a louche youth brushed against her, burning her bare shoulder with his cigarette. “Please, Nicholas, please get me out of here.”
We spent the night in our own safe, dull double bed at my flat, a little ashamed of our prematurely middle-aged flight, but thrilled and relieved to have found simpatico company in our retreat, to not have to pretend. And of course, we were still at that stage in a relationship when one does not need the ameliorating presence of others. We were each enough for the other.
I woke up that morning, Mal’s tawny limbs tangled in my Egyptian cotton, her dark hair streaming across the cream pillow, small brown nipples proudly erect even in her sleep. She was exquisite; and I knew then, without a doubt, that I wanted to wake up next to this amazing woman every day for the rest of my life. The following weekend, having procured the ring—an opal; its pearlescent creaminess seemed, to me, to encapsulate the image of Mal that defining morning—I asked her to marry me.
Sara’s hand snakes possessively down my wool trousers—“Are you really wearing a suit?” she said to me as we dressed this evening. “Don’t you have any jeans?”—and grasps my tumescent erection. “Looks like the party’s happening elsewhere,” she purrs in my ear.
I smile faintly. She wraps her body sinuously around mine, pleased. She isn’t to know that my arousal stems not from her young, vibrant presence, but from a ten-year-old memory of another woman in my bed.
“I’m sorry—”
“Forget it. It happens. It’s not a big deal.”
We both know she’s lying. Sex is not just an important part of our relationship: It defines it. When things have started to go wrong in the bedroom—which has, until now, been the one place they can be guaranteed to go right—for us it is not just a little hiccup, one of those things to be put right with a change of scene or a good night’s sleep.
I fold my arm beneath my head and stare up at the ceiling. The bald truth is that the hot, frantic passion I had for her, the desperate need, has vanished as quickly and inexplicably as it came. Suddenly, after all these months of lust, I don’t want her anymore. She hasn’t done anything wrong. She is still just as sexy, as attractive, as she was the day I first saw her. Just not to me.
Sara gets out of bed and wraps her red kimono about her voluptuous curves, clutching it to her body as if cold.
“Just getting a drink of water,” she says.
I nod, and she goes out into the kitchen.
It’s my fault, of course. I knew this would happen. Love lasts; passion doesn’t. Without warning, there’s nothing left. If only it had burned itself out before Mal discovered us. Why now? When all this can cause is more pain?
Sara may have been a willing partner—the instigator, even, of our affair. But she’s so young. So—despite the worldly facade and bedroom skills—very inexperienced when it comes to men. I know her feelings for me are not as transient, or as lightly dismissed, as my more carnal sentiments toward her. I’m very fond of her; I like and respect her; the last thing I want to do is hurt her—but that’s it. She fancies herself in love. Calf love, perhaps, but no less powerful for that.
Above all, I should never have agreed to move in with her. Permitted her to entertain fantasies of a happy-ever-after together. It was stupid of me; cruel, actually. When I am still in love with my wife.
I hear the sound of the shower, and slide out of bed. It’s three in the morning; Mal will be in France now, cozying down with her lover at her charming Normandy pension. But, suddenly, this can’t wait.
I stand at the window, looking down into the street, my mobile pressed tightly against my ear. After four rings, the answerphone kicks in. I listen to Mal’s voice explaining that we can’t come to the phone right now, imagining it echoing around the darkened kitchen, startling the poor rabbit in his scullery.
“Mal,” I say desperately. “I know I’ve been a bloody fool. What I did was unforgivable. I don’t deserve a second chance. But please, Mal. Please don’t shut me out. I love you so much. I know you’ve—” I hesitate. “I know you’re not alone. It kills me, but I swear, I don’t even care about that. I just want you back. Nothing else matters besides being with you.” My voice cracks. “Jesus, Mal, I wish more than anything I could turn back the clock. I wish I’d told you before how happy you’ve made me, how much I love coming home to you every night, waking up next to you every morning. I know what I did was wrong. I have no excuse. But please, Mal. Give me a second chance. I swear I won’t let you down. Please.”
I don’t know what else to say. After a long beat of silence, I click off my phone. Behind me, Sara is silhouetted in the bedroom doorway. I have no idea how long she’s been standing there, or what she’s heard.
I know, in some deeply instinctual way, what she is going to tell me, even before she opens her mouth and changes things forever.
“I’m pregnant,” she says.