Anger can take you a frighteningly long way, I discover: far from those who love and hurt you, far from everything that’s familiar, and—it’s this last I find so terrifying—far from everything you thought you knew about yourself.
After I have vomited on Sara’s sofa, I wipe my mouth carefully on the back of my wrist. Without even glancing at my husband, now frantically throwing on shirt and shoes and jacket, or his mistress, still standing frozen in shock by the door, her cheap red kimono gaping, I walk out; and keep on walking.
I walk down New Fetter Lane toward Fleet Street, my feet starting to blister in the ridiculous gardening clogs I grabbed in haste from the scullery as I ran from the house, desperate to get to Nicholas before it was too late. Barely noticing the traffic or the fumes or the lewd remarks from hooded teenagers loitering in doorways, I concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, terrified to stop even for a moment in case I cannot start again. My feet are raw and bloodied by the time I reach the Strand, and the left turn that will take me across Waterloo Bridge, back to the railway station and home; such as it is, now.
But I turn right. I hadn’t known where I was headed, until now; but I keep walking, up Bow Street, with renewed purpose, and then, ducking through a maze of small narrow streets, I emerge abruptly in Covent Garden.
His beautiful gourmet shop is easy to find; but it is in darkness, of course, closed, and I realize with a shock that it’s after nine-thirty, late; that if he is anywhere, he will be at home now: or else out of my reach entirely. Jostled by tourists and theatergoers, I take a side turning out of the piazza, and within moments find myself in an elegant old street, lined with tall, narrow white houses; graceful, sophisticated houses that seem to close their eyes with pained expressions at the litter and the down-and-outs and the youths urinating into the street.
I mount the steps of his cottage, knowing that if he’s not in, or turns me away—we’ve barely spoken, after all, since Rome—I shall simply curl up in a corner and wait to be blown away, like the rest of the unwanted rubbish bowling along the street like urban tumbleweed.
But he is in. And when he opens the door, and I stumble across the threshold in my bare, bleeding feet, clutching the silly clogs in my hand, my hair whipped wild by the wind, my face streaked with tears I hadn’t known I was weeping, he simply picks me up without a word and carries me upstairs.
I awake to the sounds and smells of a summer a long time ago. Nancy Sinatra’s “Sugar Town” plays distantly in another room. Coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice scent the air—I sit up, realizing he has placed a breakfast tray at the foot of the bed, complete with croissants and muffins and a single white rose—and sunshine streams across the high, white brass bed from the bank of French windows, casting rhombuses of light on the hand-finished planked floor. One pair of doors are flung wide open; white muslin curtains billow in the light breeze, catching on the iron railing. Overhead, a woven plantation fan slowly turns. I feel like I have stepped into a Flake advert; all I need now is a lizard on the Bakelite telephone.
I sink back against the marshmallowy pillows, pulling the fluffy cloud of duvet up to my chin. Even my British winter pallor looks fetchingly honeyed against this much eye-watering white.
My thighs ache; there is a raw, sticky, unfamiliar throb between my legs.
Last night, after Trace ran me a bath in his clawfooted movie-bathroom tub, and soaped my back, and rinsed my hair free of vomit and street grime and tears, he took me to bed; and made love to me with such controlled passion, such gentleness, that the ice storm in my heart finally ceased blowing its frozen winds through my body.
At the thought of that erotic, blush-making sex—“Lights on,” Trace said firmly, “I want to see you, all of you, I want to see your face when you come”—I suddenly realize I’m ravenous.
I sit up in bed and pull the tray toward me. I am on my third croissant and raspberry jam when Trace comes in, toweling hair still damp from the shower. His white linen shirt and cornflower blue linen pants would look outrageously Men’s Vogue on anyone else. His feet are bare. Despite the satiating gymnastics of last night, a pulse beats somewhere in the region of where the knickers of a thirty-something married mother of three should be—which is not twisted inside out and hanging on the bedpost of her lover.
“Sleep well?” he asks, throwing aside the towel to sit on the edge of the bed.
I rescue my glass of orange juice as it tilts on the tray. “Oh, yes,” I purr, stretching lazily, “I can’t remember when I last—”
I bolt upright, nearly sending everything flying. “What time is it?” I grab his wrist to see his watch. “Eleven-thirty! Trace, you should never have let me sleep in that long!—the children!—I need to get home. And Edward, poor Edward, I must speak to Daisy, I—”
“All taken care of,” he says, “I rang Kit. He’s arranged for Liz to keep the girls until tomorrow evening, they’re all going to some gymkhana or another, having the time of their lives. And Kit checked with the hospital: no news yet, he’ll call me back as soon as he hears anything. But in the meantime, you,” he says briskly, taking the locusted tray from my lap and flipping back the duvet, “need to get up. I have plans for you today.”
His gaze lingers appreciatively. Blushing furiously, I grab back the bedclothes.
He laughs and stands up.
“I took the liberty of getting Alice—my right hand, Alice, couldn’t manage without her—to nip along to Whistles and get you something fresh to wear. Five minutes, downstairs. And don’t bother to shower,” he adds, with a wink. “You’re not going to need it where you’re going.”
I wait until he leaves the room before getting out of bed (thirteen years and three children is a little too much water under the bridge in the cold light of day) and open the bag he’s left propped against a beautiful cherrywood armoire. Alice, whoever she is, has taste, and common sense. In addition to the simple turquoise tunic and loose-fitting cropped cream trousers, she’s included some flat, non-blister-rubbing (oh, bliss!) sandals, a pretty pair of pink-and-white knickers, and a matching bra. All in the correct sizes. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she’d done this kind of errand for Trace before.
I catch myself. Of course she has. He’s hardly been living the life of a monk for the past decade while I’ve been marrying and giving birth to three infants. I catch up my hair with a clip, feeling a little disoriented by the speed things are moving.
“Come on. You have no idea how many strings I had to pull to get you in at this short notice,” Trace urges, as soon as I come downstairs. He tenderly wipes a splodge of jam from the corner of my mouth with his thumb. “Luckily the girl who takes the bookings is a friend of mine.”
That ugly twinge of jealousy again. I give myself a shake. It was this kind of absurd paranoia that ruined everything last time.
Five minutes later, I’m being propelled across the cobbles toward the glass door of the Sanctuary, a girls-only oasis of spoiling I have visited only in my dreams. Liz and I always said we’d treat ourselves and book a day there for our fortieth birthdays, get Giles and Nicholas to mind the children—
A fist of pain winds me. I take a deep breath, and open my eyes again.
Dear Lord, what am I doing here? Wandering around Covent Garden in strange clothes with aches in strange places from a night of sex with a man who is not my husband while my children are somewhere in the wilds of Wiltshire and Nicholas is—Nicholas is—
“Go on,” Trace prompts, “I can’t go in with you. You’ve got an entire day, booked and paid for—massage, aromatherapy, toe painting, belly-button cleaning, the works—”
“Belly-button cleaning?”
He grins, and my heart lurches as if I’ve just driven over a humpbacked bridge.
“Well, I don’t know what they do in there, do I? I’ll see you at five, a new woman.” His eyes gleam wickedly. “Not that there’s anything wrong with the old one, if last night is anything to go by—”
He kisses my flushed cheek, and I follow his long-limbed stride as it eats up the cobbled street.
There are so many confused thoughts whirling around my head, tangling into a Gordian knot of fear and panic, that the only way I can prevent myself from splintering into a thousand pieces is by refusing to acknowledge any of them. And so I meekly go inside and submit to the pampering that has been arranged for me, deliberately emptying my mind until it’s as blank and cloudless as the sky on a sunny day.
At five, pummeled and polished and smoothed and painted, I am collected as promised, and taken straight to Michaeljohn, where my hair is smoothed and tamed and coiled on my head. And then to Gucci, where he has picked out a dress—black, thank heavens—which fits me beautifully, and is perfect for the film première (a première!) in Leicester Square, where I try not to hang on his arm too adoringly, too obviously. And then to Boujis, to dance until 4 A.M., when he finally takes me, drooping, home, and to bed; and, eventually, to sleep.
On Sunday, we drive out to Oxford for an afternoon picnic—roast pheasant, grilled asparagus, truffles stuffed with Bermuda onion confit and the smallest, sweetest early strawberries, washed down with a bottle of cold Krug Tête du Cuvée—lolling on a riverbank across from a beautiful, mellow stone college; not the one Nicholas went to, that was further in town—
Don’t think don’t think don’t think.
Trace finally drives me home to Wiltshire a little before eight; and then calls me on his mobile before his car has even pulled out of the gravel driveway.
“I miss you,” he says.
“You’ve only been gone two minutes!”
“I miss you,” he says firmly.
“You too,” I say, sifting through the clutch of envelopes on the floor, hoping Liz will bring the children back soon, to fill this empty house—strangely cold despite the Aga—with laughter and noise. “Now go, you mustn’t talk to me while you’re driving, I don’t want you to crash.”
“I’ll call you in the morning,” he says.
And he does. He rings me in the morning, and at lunch, and in the afternoon; he peppers my day with calls to see how I am, to check that the hours aren’t dragging, and then at seven he scoops me up on his white charger (well, racing green Aston Martin) and whisks me out to dinner. When he drops me off later, much later, that night, I am so tired that I fall asleep the moment my head hits the pillow, my tears drying unnoticed on my cheeks.
Every day that week he calls me; every night, he takes me out while Kit babysits: to the theater, the movies (a romantic comedy with a handsome new actor I haven’t seen before, someone called Matthew McConaughey; it’s years since I saw a film at the cinema), to an art gallery, to dinner. And afterward, he takes me back to his cottage in the village, where we spend some energetic, pleasurable hours in bed—not quite as smooth, as practiced, as with Nicholas, perhaps, not quite as easy, but then it has been a long time; we are having to learn each other all over again.
I never stay the night. The children need me home, at the breakfast table as I always am, constant and steady. Now that their father has gone.
Trace keeps me so busy, that what with the girls, and my work (for some reason the recipes come thick and fast, now; feverishly I race to write them down) I don’t have a moment to dwell. To think or wonder what I’m doing, or where this is all going. I’m a dancer whose partner has spun away, out of her reach, only for another to take her hand, whirling her back into the reel with steps so fast she barely has time to register the change.
I feel as if I’m on a merry-go-round, colors and shapes spinning past me so quickly everything has become a blur.
Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t know how to get off.
It is Kit, of all people, who sounds the first warning note.
“It’s happening too fast, darling,” he says, kneading my shoulders as I sew in name tapes, “too soon; heaven knows I don’t want to rain on your parade, but you can’t just bounce from the marital bed to the arms of your admittedly toothsome lover. It’s just not you.”
I bite off a thread.
“How do you know,” I demand. “How do you know that about me?”
“Angel. It’s barely three weeks since you marched into his girlfriend’s flat and told your husband not to come home, before vomiting heroically all over her sofa. You then walked straight round to your childhood sweetheart—”
“Hardly childhood—”
“—and hopped into bed with him—”
“It’s not as if Nicholas—”
“Since then,” Kit interrupts firmly, “he’s had you gallivanting all over town, rushing off to one glam junket after another. He’s turned your head and blown your mind with premières and parties; he hasn’t given you a moment to yourself.”
“I haven’t wanted—”
Kit brooks no argument. I can’t remember ever seeing him this serious.
“For the past month, your beautifully shod feet—love the Ginas, by the way, darling—have barely touched the ground. And let’s not even get into the extraordinary pink paint job you’ve given your bedroom; what on earth possessed you, Malinche, did you give Barbie carte blanche?”
He releases my shoulders and drops into the chair opposite me. “Look, darling, I’m not saying you shouldn’t enjoy yourself a little.” He sighs. “But for the best of motives, Trace deliberately isn’t giving you a moment’s peace to think. And think, my darling, is what you really need to do before you let this go any further.”
“I can’t,” I say, terrified. “I can’t, Kit. If I start to think, I’ll break apart, I’ll collapse, I’ll be no good to anyone—”
“Malinche, apart from anything else, this isn’t fair to Trace. If you two are going to make a go of it, it has to be honest. And sooner or later, you’re going to have to face Nicholas—”
“Tomorrow, actually, Kit,” I say faintly. “It’s Edward’s funeral.”
Kit is silent for a long moment. He lights a cigarette; now that Nicholas isn’t here, I’ve given in and allowed him to smoke in the kitchen. Exhaling slowly, he blows a stream of smoke across the table.
He pounces with the speed and accuracy of a rattlesnake.
“Trace or Nicholas?”
“Nicholas,” I say instantly: and then gasp and cover my mouth.
“It doesn’t count,” I whisper. “It’s just force of habit—”
“This,” says Kit, “is why you need to think.”
My chair scrapes hideously across the stone floor.
“There’s nothing to think about, is there?” I cry anguishedly. “Because I don’t actually have a choice! Nicholas has gone and he isn’t coming back! He hasn’t even called once to see how I’m doing, much less thrown himself at my feet and begged for forgiveness—”
“Do you still love him?”
“What does it matter, if he doesn’t love me? And Trace does. Trace makes me feel special and wanted and cherished! I’ve loved him for as long as I can remember; I can’t imagine ever not.”
“But you love me,” Kit says. “Not quite the same thing, though, is it?”
I start to shake. Kit stubs out his cigarette and pulls me into a hug, resting his chin on the top of my head.
“Why are you doing this?” I sob into his shirt. “You don’t even like Nicholas. You’ve pushed and pushed me to be with Trace. Why are you doing this?”
“Because somebody has to make you face the truth,” Kit says simply. “Whatever it is. You can’t keep burying your head—and your heart—in the sand forever. You have to allow yourself time to grieve for your marriage. You can’t just move on to Trace as if the two men are interchangeable. This isn’t real.”
But it’s not that simple, I think the next day, watching as Edward Lyon’s casket is lowered into a gaping dark wound sliced into the bright green grass, tears streaming unchecked down my face. I used to believe that every one of us had a soulmate—“A bashert,” I explained to Nicholas, not long after we first met. “That’s Yiddish for destined other,”—but perhaps that’s fanciful, too suggestive of order and purpose in a life that is really nothing but chaos and confusion. Thirteen years ago, I was convinced Trace was my soulmate; then I met Nicholas, and was suddenly certain that he was the man I was destined to be with. And now? Now I don’t know what I believe. I’m not sure I believe in anything anymore.
All I know is that Trace wants me. And Nicholas doesn’t.
After the service, I stop by Nicholas as he helps his mother into the waiting car. For several moments, I struggle for words. What do you say to a man who has shared your bed for more than ten years, and now looks straight through you, as if you’re not even there?
“This isn’t what I wanted,” I manage, finally. “I wanted to wait you out. I did try.”
“How long have you known?” he says shortly.
“Since the Law Society dinner.”
How can he be so cold, so clinical? I choke back a sob on his name.
He shifts uncomfortably. “Malinche, is there any chance I could come—”
I cut him off, not yet ready to have him at the house, emptying his wardrobe, clearing his bookshelves; not yet ready to put away the framed wedding photographs—currently flat on their glass faces, but still there. Misery makes my tone harsher than I intend. “No, Nicholas. I’m sorry.”
“I know how this must sound: but it didn’t mean anything. Please—”
“Of course it meant something, 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,” I breathe fiercely, “doesn’t begin to cover it.”
“You can’t mean to go through with this. Separation. A divorce. Surely?”
Divorce. The word hits me like a hammer blow. Of course, I think bleakly. He’ll want to marry her now. I shrug dully. “What else did you expect, Nicholas?”
“Can’t we at least talk? What about the children, did you think about what this will—”
“Did you?”
Two grave-diggers pass us, cigarettes and shovels in hand. The grief on my husband’s face as his eyes follow them is so naked, so raw, that despite myself, my anger dissolves. “Nicholas,” I say quietly, “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?” he says, his voice cracking slightly.
“Of course you can see them! 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.”
From the corner of my eye, I see Trace get out of the car—which I asked him to wait in; I don’t want Nicholas to see him, not now, not here, at his father’s funeral—and walk toward me. He stops twenty feet away, hovering on the edge of a knot of mourners. Waiting.
I turn back to Nicholas. A strange expression crosses his face; almost a look of yearning. Suddenly, dizzily, the years fall away, and I’m standing before him, at the altar, my hand in his, the gold of my wedding band shiny and new and foreign on my finger. And as we stand outside another church, ten years later, for a funeral, not a wedding, I understand, with startling clarity, that I still love him, that my love for him is stamped through me like a stick of rock, that even if I’m shattered into a thousand pieces by grief it will always be there, running through the center of my being, an absolute certainty; and that all he has to do is tell me he loves me now and nothing else will matter: nothing at all—
But, “I’d like to see them this weekend,” he says coolly, “if that’s all right.”
We arrange his painful, time-share access to the children—at his mother’s house; I can’t quite bear to think of her with them yet. A part of me wants to fight him, to make it as difficult as I know how, to hurt him in the only way left to me. But that would hurt our daughters too, and I can’t do that. They are suffering enough as it is. And however angry I am with Nicholas, however much I hate him in the small hours of the morning, when Trace has gone and I am left to sob into my pillow, I can’t do it to him either.
I say good-bye and walk away from him, toward Trace, who loves me, honestly and unreservedly, who will be the one I’m with, now, if not quite the one I love; and realize for the first time that I’ve lost my husband forever.
“But you said I could have it!”
“No, I never! I said you could have it later.”
“It is later! You’ve been ages. Give it to me, Mummy said we had to share—”
“I haven’t finished with it yet! It’s not fair.”
“But I want it now!”
“Give it back! Give it back, you’ll break it! You can’t do it anyway—now look what you’ve done! I’m telling on you! Muu-uuu-mmmmy!”
Louise marches into the sitting room. I hear her scary, Mary Poppins tones through a foot of thick cob wall. “Stop it, the pair of you!” she says sharply. “You’ll wake the baby. One more word out of either of you and neither of you will see that PlayStation again.”
“I don’t know what Nicholas was thinking,” she adds, coming back into the kitchen, “buying them expensive electronic toys at their age. Buying their approval, if you ask me.”
“Well, it seems to be working,” I say despondently.
“Children aren’t stupid, Malinche. They’ll see through it—”
“Chessington was a roaring success last weekend,” I despair. “The girls came back full of how Sara took them on all the big rides, Sara took them to have their faces painted, Sara didn’t mind at all when she got absolutely soaking wet on the flumes.” I pick fretfully at my nails. “She’s practically half my age, she doesn’t nag them to brush their teeth or do their homework; of course she’s going to seem fun compared to their ancient dull mother, no wonder Nicholas upped and—”
Louise slams her palm on the kitchen table. I jump six feet; in the scullery, I hear the frantic scrabble of claws against wood as poor Don Juan nearly dies of fright.
“You can stop that nonsense right now,” she says fiercely. “Self-pity will get you nowhere. Your eldest daughter has a great deal more sense than you give her credit for. She’s pushing your buttons, that’s all. Testing you, to see how you feel about all of this.”
I bite the inside of my cheek.
Louise folds her arms. “Little Miss Drop-Her-Drawers is full of peace and love right now,” she says thoughtfully, “whisking your adorable little girls off to theme parks and playing dress-up and braiding their hair. Easy to play the fairy godmother when you can throw money at the problem for a couple of hours and then send them home. It’s all a little different when you have to live with them twenty-four/seven.”
I’ve never quite got used to my mother’s easy appropriation of teenage slang.
“Tell me about it,” I say crossly, going into the scullery to soothe Don Juan. “Metheny slept in my bed for two nights after they got back, and Sophie was an absolute swine for days. Wouldn’t do her homework, refused to clean out the rabbit’s cage, was beastly to her sisters—”
“Real life, in other words. Something Nicholas must be missing.”
I toss a carrot into the rabbit’s cage. “What are you getting at?”
Her mouth twitches. “I think perhaps it’s a little unfair to refuse to allow them to stay over at Madam’s flat after all. Nicholas said his mother found it all a bit much, so soon after losing Edward. Maybe you should let them spend the weekends with the lovebirds at their bijou little nest after all. Their charming, one-bedroom, no-garden, white, minimalist London flat.”
I gasp delightedly.
“Louise, I can’t, they’ll run amok—”
“Well, come on, Malinche,” she says robustly. “It’s one thing to put the children first, but no one said you had to be a saint. The little trollop pinched your husband from right under your nose. It’s about time you rubbed hers in a little reality. And it won’t do any harm at all if you drag that ridiculously handsome new man of yours with you either. Nicholas could do with a taste of his own medicine. And before you start in about turning the other cheek and the rest of that nonsense,” she adds tartly, “ I’m not the one who threw up all over her sofa.”
Trace and I sit in darkness, the three girls asleep, finally, on the backseat behind us. He cuts the engine, but neither of us can summon the energy to get out of the car.
“Well. That was a big hit, wasn’t it?”
I start to laugh, end up in a half-sob. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”
“I think unmitigated disaster just about covers it. Hey,” he says, as I dissolve into tears, “hey, relax. It’s OK. No one expects children to be angels all the time. The more it matters to you that they behave, the less likely it is to happen, you know that. Come on, Mal. I hate it when you cry.”
“But they were awful!” I wail. “The worst they’ve ever been! I don’t know what got into them, I bet they’re not like that for their father—”
He wraps his arms around me and I rest my head against his shoulder. I can feel his heart beating, strong and steady, beneath my cheek. “Look,” he murmurs into my hair, “it’s been a tough time for them. Perhaps it was too soon for us to all go away together to France. I know they’ll have to get used to it eventually, but maybe it was just too much, what with having to deal with Nicholas and Sara, too. Give them a little time, and it’ll sort itself out.”
I dash the back of my hand across my nose. Trace is right. The past few weekends have been dreadful; certainly for me. Watching my children—my children, mine!—walk into that woman’s arms. Well, not literally, Nicholas did at least have the decency to keep her out of sight: but it might just as well have been. I don’t know how I’d have borne it if it hadn’t been for Trace.
And I deserve an Oscar for my performances on the doorstep. Smiling, laughing like I haven’t a care in the world, refusing to let Nicholas see the pain splintering my heart. I do have my pride.
I dress more carefully to drop off my children than for anything since my wedding day. I am not a victim. I am not.
“You’ve cut your hair,” Nicholas said, shocked, one Saturday.
“Kit persuaded me to go to his stylist in London.” Without thinking, I added, “Do you like it?”
I could have kicked myself for sounding so needy. But, to my surprise, “I love it,” Nicholas said. “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.”
It’s funny how the pain catches you unaware, just when you think you are ready for it, have steeled yourself for the worst. In bed, Nicholas would often twine my hair around his fingers, telling me how much he loved it long, making me promise never to cut it. He said he loved the way it fell across my face when I was on top of him, claimed it made me seem wild and abandoned.
“I used to have it this way, before we met,” I said steadily. “But you never let me cut it. You always insisted I keep it long.”
“Did I?”
He didn’t even remember. Oh, dear God, when will the pain stop?
I smiled sadly. “You used to insist on a lot of things, Nicholas.”
I got back into the car and sobbed for the entire hour it took us to drive to the beautiful country manor house in Kent that Trace had booked for the weekend. To his great credit, he never once indicated that he was anything other than thrilled to be rubbing my back as I sniveled and hiccuped like a child. I don’t know if I’d have been so phlegmatic if the boot had been on the other foot and it had been Trace bawling his eyes out over an ex-girlfriend.
When Nicholas rang last week to ask if I could keep the children this weekend, I was thrilled. Monday to Fridays are such a slog, getting the girls ready for school, cleaning, laundering, helping with homework; it’s the weekends with them that are the real treats. Well, usually. I’ve really missed them the past few weeks when they’ve been with their father. Nicholas and I are clearly going to have to come to some sort of arrangement to divide our time with them more fairly; perhaps a midweek visit and alternate weekends. Oh, Lord, the horrid, soul-destroying business of divorce.
Trace and I extended our original romantic reservation at the farmhouse in Normandy to include the children, and I had thought it might be the perfect time to introduce them properly to Trace. Not just as Mummy’s friend, but as—well, Mummy’s friend.
It started to go wrong the moment we got into the car. First the nonstop battery of questions—“Why aren’t we going to Daddy’s this weekend? Doesn’t he want to see us? Are we going next weekend? Why don’t you know? Can we ring and ask him? Why can’t we ring? Can we ring later? When?”—and then the sulks, punctuated by demands to stop the car every five minutes for the lavatory, a drink, to be sick. When Trace finally insisted that everyone do up their seatbelts and hold their bladders and their bile until we got to the Eurotunnel train, Sophie muttered, audibly, “You’re not our father. You can’t tell us what to do.”
Once in France, it just got worse. The girls hated the farmhouse: the sheets were scratchy, the room too cold, the food too foreign; they were bored, they couldn’t watch television, they had nothing to do. Did they want to go to the beach? Duh, raining! Well, how about a nice long walk along the river? I’ve got your anoraks, in some places it’s shallow enough to paddle in—oh. All right. Maybe a pony ride, then; wouldn’t that be nice? It’ll be dry in the forest, under the trees. They’re very friendly, you can feed them if you—well, what do you want to do? No, I’ve told you. Your father is busy this weekend. I don’t know what he’s doing. No, I can’t ring and ask him. No!
When, on Sunday, the owner of the pension apologetically explained that her mother had been taken ill, she was extrêmement désolée, she couldn’t cook us our lunch after all, c’est bien dommage, she’d quite understand if we wanted to leave early—we all leaped at the chance.
The drive home has been the only peaceful part of the entire trip, I think ruefully, glancing at the sleeping children in the back.
Trace carries the bags into the house, while I rouse Sophie and Evie, who stumble, drowsy and grumbling, up the garden path, and carry Metheny, still sleeping, upstairs to her bedroom. She doesn’t wake even when I undress her and lay her gently in her cot.
For a long moment, I stand looking down at her, my hand resting possessively on the side of the rail, moonlight gilding the plump curve of her cheek, warm as a ripe peach.
Our last-chance baby: named for the jazz guitarist Nicholas loves so much. She still isn’t yet two. What happened to us? How did it all go so wrong, so fast?
I sink onto the window seat, watching Trace unloading her pushchair from the car below. He looks so competent and assured, it’s as if he’s being doing this for years. But he hasn’t, I remind myself. He isn’t the father of your children. However much you have, at times, wished he were.
Kit was right when he said I hadn’t got over Trace when I met Nicholas. That I loved Nicholas, I had no doubt. But I didn’t give myself time to heal. I simply papered over the cracks, and threw myself headlong into Nicholas; used him, perhaps, to get over Trace and so started everything out on the wrong foot from the beginning. When Sophie was placed into my arms, even as Nicholas and I gazed at each other in awe at what we had made and I drank in her pink-and-white perfection, greedily, a tiny part of me wondered what my lost baby would have looked like: how it would have felt to give birth to Trace’s child. Once a year, I slipped away to the tiny Catholic church in Salisbury to light a candle for him—it was a boy, I’m sure it was a boy—and thought of Trace. Every time Nicholas and I ever had a row—and we were married ten years, of course we rowed—a secret, black part of my heart turned, disloyally, toward Trace. Wondered if he would have canceled a skiing trip because of work, or failed to buy a single Christmas present again, or undermined me with the children: whatever silly, domestic niggle had triggered the fight. My internal calendar observed his birthday, the day we met, the date we parted. I followed his exploits in the gossip columns, telling myself the ugly swirl of jealousy was maternal frustration at his refusal to grow up. I never acknowledged it, even to myself; but he was as much a part of my marriage as I was, an undercurrent always tugging, tugging me away from Nicholas.
If I hadn’t been so focused on Trace, on his sudden physical presence in my life after a decade of imagining, I would have seen what was happening with Nicholas. Perhaps, even, in time to stop it.
I reach up to close the curtains. Trace glances up as he locks the car, smiles, lifts his hand. He really is startlingly handsome.
All these years, I’ve secretly believed Trace was my soul mate, wrenched from me by Fate. I’ve thought of Nicholas as the sensible choice, the husband of expediency, the safe, steady, reliable option; loving and loved, of course, but not passionately, not in the wild, untamed way I had loved and was loved by Trace.
But Trace and I weren’t destroyed by jealous gods. The rather prosaic truth is that we were never right for each other. I was always convinced I didn’t deserve him—which is why I was so ready to believe the worst. And he just wanted to fix me.
Nothing has changed. He is still racing around, bending life to suit him by sheer force of will. And if I no longer feel inadequate, I can see how wildly unmatched we are. Have always been. I don’t want a savior; I want a partner. A friend, an equal. I want Nicholas.
My hand shakes. All this time I’ve spent missing something I never had, letting what really mattered slip through my fingers.
Nicholas is the love of my life, not Trace. It is Nicholas I love with a real passion, born of years of loyalty and laughter and shared love; of tears and hardship, too. Frustration and joy, contentment and boredom: That’s what makes up a marriage, that’s what real love is all about.
I close Metheny’s door softly. It’s not that I don’t love Trace: I do. But not enough to make this work, however easy and safe it would be for me.
He glances up as I walk into the kitchen and pushes a mug of tea toward me. “Here, thought you could do with this—”
My eyes fill. This is going to be so hard.
“No,” I say softly.
He knows immediately that I am not talking about the tea. A shadow crosses his face, replaced in an instant by his usual, easy smile. “It was just a bad day, Mal,” he soothes. “A bad couple of days. It doesn’t mean anything. Next time, it’ll be easier—”
“No.”
Outwardly relaxed, smiling still, he leans back against the sink. Only by the whiteness of his knuckles can I see that this is just an act.
“Why don’t I go home and give you a call in the morning?” he says, his voice carefully neutral. “It’s late, we’re all tired, and it’s been a long journey. Perhaps next week we should—”
“Trace,” I say gently. “This isn’t going to work. Us. You know that as much as I do.”
His eyes darken. A muscle moves in his jaw, but he doesn’t speak.
“You know I’m right,” I press. “We’re just too different, Trace. We want different things. It’s been fun for you playing at being a husband and father these last few months, and you’ve been wonderful with the girls, but it isn’t you,” I say. “Not yet, anyway. We don’t really fit into your life. I’m not the person you should have on your arm. You should be escorting some glamorous, leggy model up the red carpet, not an old married woman like me.” I touch his arm; he doesn’t respond. “That life isn’t me, Trace. Never was. It was exciting for a while, but it’s not my world. And this world”—I spread my arm, taking in the paintings Blu-tacked to the kitchen wall, the anoraks slung over the backs of chairs, the Lego in the fruit bowl—“this isn’t yours. We’ve both been stuck in the past, seeing each other the way we were thirteen years ago. But life has moved on since then. We’ve moved on.”
“I’d learn all of this,” he says, painfully. “The nappies and the Pony Club and the rest of it, if that’s what you wanted.”
“It isn’t that—”
“Nicholas,” he says heavily.
“Nicholas,” I agree.
We both know there is really nothing more to be said.
Trace heaves himself away from the sink.
“I should go,” he says awkwardly. “There is—there’s someone I should call. Someone—nothing would have happened if—anyway. I said I might ring. And I should go.”
We both know there isn’t anyone. But there will be.
“Friends?” he asks, his voice catching slightly.
For a long time after he’s left, I sit at the kitchen table, wondering if I have made the worst mistake of my life, pushed away the man I love for a second time. And then I finger the wedding band on my finger, and I know that however terrifying it is to let him go, I’m right. I care too much for Trace to condemn him to life as second best. And for as long as I’m in love with my husband, that’s all it would be.
Four days later, Nicholas files for divorce.
I can’t believe he’s done this. Actually gone to a solicitor, sat in an office, and regurgitated the story of our marriage to a virtual stranger, sifted through the dirty laundry of our lives together for something to fling at me, to make this outrageous charge of unreasonable behavior stick.
How could he? How could he do this to me?
I bury my head on my arms, the ugly legal papers scattered over the table in front of me. I can’t bring myself even to read them through; the first paragraph was enough. I can’t bring myself to move. I know I should eat, get dressed, clear up the kitchen, but I’m unable even to summon the energy to lift my head from my arms. Thank God for Liz, answering my howl after I opened the morning post and called her, dashing over to take the girls to school.
It’s real. It’s really over. He isn’t going to come back, throw himself at my knees, and beg me to forgive him. He’s left me, and he’s going to marry this girl.
A bloom of hatred wells in my heart, and as suddenly dies, unable to find purchase. My despair and grief are so all-consuming, I have no room for anything else.
Suddenly I can’t stop the tears. I keen like a wounded animal, crying for hours until I have no tears left, and still I weep, dry, wracking heaves. Darkness oozes through my soul. I cannot even imagine how it might feel to smile.
Hours later, dimly, I register the sound of a car on the gravel outside. A minute or two passes, and I become aware of a presence behind me. I look round and see Sara standing outside my kitchen door.
It doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing matters anymore.
I open the door, then retreat to the safety of the Aga, wrapping my dressing gown tighter about my body.
She takes a huge breath. I realize she’s nervous. How strange. I can’t imagine feeling nervous, or anything else, ever again.
“Do you want him back?” she asks.
She makes it sound as if she’s returning my ball. This landed in my garden, and I was just wondering—
I stare at her for a few moments, at this girl—no, that lets her off the hook too easily, as if she is too young to know any better, as if she isn’t responsible for what she’s done—this woman, I think, this woman who has so casually picked up my life, shaken free what she wanted from it, and cast the rest aside. An angry red spot, like an insect bite, disfigures her chin.
I put the kettle on the hot plate of the Aga. “Tea?”
She hesitates, then nods.
“It’ll take a while. It’s not like an electric kettle.”
“That’s fine.”
“I’m sorry I’m not dressed. I wasn’t expecting—”
“I know. I should have called, but I thought you wouldn’t see me—”
“I wouldn’t,” I say, “if I had a choice.”
“No.”
The silence spreads.
I gesture to the table. “Why don’t you sit down. I’m sorry about the rabbit, one of the children let it out this morning, I haven’t been able to persuade him to go back in his cage.” I rub at a patch of eczema on the inside of my left wrist. “I can’t say I blame him, I wouldn’t want to be cooped up in there all day myself, I’d let him wander around in the garden but something might get him. Last time he was let outside he was nearly eaten by next door’s dog—”
“Evie?” Sara hazards.
“She wanted him to go organic,” I say, sighing.
She smiles. Ambushed, I smile back.
We’re like tourists, trapped in a foreign land, trying to find common ground—“From which part of Wiltshire? Oh, how extraordinary, my son’s godfather lives not far from you”—so that we feel less alone. Safety in numbers. The kettle boils; I busy myself making us tea, choosing two mugs that aren’t chipped, setting out milk and sugar on the table. Hurriedly, I heap the divorce papers into a pile, and hide them beneath one of Metheny’s paintings.
The link between us, such as it was, dissolves.
“What did you mean,” I ask abruptly, “when you asked if I wanted him back?”
The grandfather clock ticks loudly in the hall. Somewhere beneath my feet, Don Juan scrabbles, his claws clicking on the stone floor. I don’t like her perfume: strong and synthetic. It makes me feel slightly sick.
“I need to know,” she says finally, staring into her mug. “I can’t make a go of things until I do. I don’t want to come home every night wondering if he’s gone back home to you.” The strap of her bag slides off her shoulder and she pushes it back. “That’s all. I just want to know it’s over between you.”
She isn’t here to put things right. She hasn’t come to apologize: If you want him back, here you are, he’s yours. She isn’t going to tell me it’s all been a terrible mistake. She’s here for reassurance: that I won’t steal him back from her.
A bubble of hysterical laughter rises to my lips. I cover my mouth with my hand.
“You expect me to help you?” I demand incredulously.
Her cheeks stain. “I know it seems ridiculous, me coming to you. I know you must hate me. I’ve given you every reason. But you have Trace now,” she pleads. “You don’t need Nicholas anymore. Can’t you let him go? Can’t you let him be happy with me?”
I lean both arms heavily on the sink, my back toward her. “I’m not stopping him.”
“But he needs to know you’ve moved on. He can’t shut the door otherwise. You have to tell him—”
“I don’t,” I say coldly, “have to do anything.”
She swallows hard. I pull the edges of my dressing gown a little closer.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbles. “I didn’t mean it like that. Of course you don’t have to say anything. It’s just—I don’t understand. Your marriage was dead, you have a new life now, I know you must be upset that things worked out as they did, but it wasn’t my fault—”
I spin round.
“What makes you think my marriage was dead?”
“But—” she flounders. “But there’s Trace—”
“No,” I say tightly, “there isn’t. For a few weeks, perhaps, after Nicholas left, he filled the gap. Or rather, tried to. Nothing, actually, can mend the rip in my heart that losing my husband to you has made. Nothing.”
She bites her lip. I’m suddenly reminded how young she is; how little she knows.
Old enough.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” I demand fiercely. “Do you? The damage you’ve caused? Do you know what it’s like to listen to your child sob herself to sleep in the next room because her father’s left and she thinks that somehow it must be her fault?” My body trembles with anger. “Do you know what it’s like to face her in the morning and see the accusation in her eyes, because you couldn’t protect her from this pain? You’ve taken away from my children the one thing I wanted to give them more than anything else: a happy, stable home.” I close my eyes, misery rising in my throat like bile. “You’re not a mother; you can’t know. They’ll carry the scars with them for the rest of their lives. They’ll take this baggage with them into every relationship they ever have. A mother wouldn’t do this. A mother wouldn’t smash three little girls’ childhoods just for the sake of a quick roll in the hay.”
She seems to shrink back in her chair with each word, as if I’m pelting her with rocks. Good, I think bitterly. Let it hurt. Good.
“You think my marriage is dead because he slept with you?” I challenge. “Well, let me tell you something, Sara. Marriage is hard work. Very hard work. If you don’t both put everything you have into making it a success, it fails. Sometimes it’s wonderful and romantic and everything you ever dreamed it would be when you stood at the altar and made your vows to love and cherish until death parted you. And sometimes,” I say, my voice hard, “it’s dull and frustrating and difficult and you can scarcely bear the sight of each other. Sometimes you bore each other to tears. It only takes one trip, one stumble, and it can all come crashing down.”
I push my hair behind my ears, my hands shaking with anger. What can she know of seeing ten years of your life wiped out in a few short hours? Of watching the man you’ve loved, whose children you’ve borne, walk away from you to another woman?
“My marriage was very much alive until he met you,” I hiss. “But you didn’t care. You saw someone you wanted, and you took him. You took him.”
“I didn’t make him,” she protests. “He had a choice. He wanted me.”
“What man wouldn’t?” I laugh shortly. “You’re beautiful. You’re young. You’re not his wife. Of course he wanted you. But did he make the first move, or did you?”
She looks away.
“You won’t always be twenty-six,” I say bitterly, “with your smooth unlined face and firm body. You think you’ll be young forever at your age. Forty seems as far away as a hundred. But it sneaks up on you when you’re not looking. Nothing happens for years and years—and then suddenly, wham!, you wake up one day and your hips have got bigger and your lips have got smaller and your breasts are halfway down to your stretch marks and what the hell happened? But he,” I add, “he just gets distinguished wings of gray at his temples and character in his face and secretaries’ eyes following him as he walks past their desks.”
I wrap my arms around myself, barely seeing her anymore. “You marry a man and give him children and tell yourself it doesn’t matter that you’re not so young now, that your body isn’t as taut, your face as clear, because he loves you anyway. You let your guard down: You let him see you sniveling with a cold or with your hair in rat’s tails because you haven’t had time to wash it, and you think it doesn’t matter.” I pace the length of the kitchen, frightening the rabbit under the table. “At work you get out of the fast lane to make way for the bright young things without families, reminding yourself that giving him somewhere he wants to come home to is far more important than a corner office or a promotion, that he’ll still find you interesting. You know that there are younger women than you, prettier women, more exciting women; but you’re the one he chose to marry, you’re the one he promised to love forever.” I shiver. “You put him at the center of your life, at the center of your heart, where he should be; and then overnight, it’s all gone. Gone.”
“I’m—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen,” she whispers.
I jump; I’d forgotten she was there.
“You could have had anyone you wanted,” I say helplessly. “Someone free to love you, without a wife and family. Why did you have to take my husband?”
“Because I fell in love with him,” she says simply.
For the first time, I notice the shadows beneath her eyes, the fatigue and weariness in her face. I recognize in her expression the fear and uncertainty that walk hand in hand with love. I can’t bring myself to forgive what she’s done. But with a sudden rush, I begin—just begin—to understand it.
“It’s not just about love.” I sigh. “Marriage.”
“No.” She folds her hands in her lap. “No. I see that now.”
My nose starts to run. Using the sleeve of my dressing gown, like a child, I wipe my face.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she pleads. “I know that’s no consolation. But I didn’t mean this. I’m not a bad person. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I kept thinking I could stop it, that no one would ever need to know—”
“Enough. Please.” Exhausted, I collapse into a chair. “Why are you here, Sara? Does Nicholas know?”
“No.” She shoves herself back from the table and stands up. “I told myself you were happy without him. Convinced myself he wouldn’t have come to me if his marriage had been a good one. But that’s not true, is it?”
I shake my head.
And then, “He loves you, not me,” she says clearly.
I can’t breathe.
“He’s never loved me. Not enough, anyway.” She rubs the heels of her hands against her eyes, and I’m reminded of Evie. Somewhere, deep inside, I feel a dim tug of pity. “He wasn’t free to love me. I thought it didn’t matter, that I could love enough for the both of us, but it doesn’t work like that, does it? And it turns out,” she attempts a smile, “that I have a conscience after all.”
She hitches her bag on her shoulder. Her hand shakes, and I realize how much this confrontation has taken out of her, too.
“What are you doing here?” I ask again.
She shrugs, then gives me a sad half-smile. “I’ve been trying to work that one out myself.”
A fragile tendril of intimacy unfurls between us. We are linked, after all, by love: for the same man.
“May I use the loo,” she says, “before I go?”
I point her in the direction of the downstairs lavatory. She’s come all the way here to offer me a choice: Take him, or give him back to me. Free and clear.
But it’s not up to me. I can’t go to him. He has to come to me. He’s the one who made the choice to leave: He is the one who has to make the choice to come back. Otherwise I’ll never know; it will undermine everything we try to build. I have to hear that he loves me not from her, but from Nicholas himself.
She opens the lavatory door, and dips her head around it. Her expression is a strange mixture of pain, embarrassment—and an extraordinary, fierce relief.
“Do you have any Tampax you could give me?” she says. “I wasn’t expecting it, but my period just started.”