Billy wanted me to get proof that Christoph was earning significantly more than he was telling the courts but she didn’t want me to go any further until she was ready. I feared all my efforts would be in vain and Billy would never be ready. My friend the divorce lawyer spent his days screwing as much money out of people who at one point in their lives had stood in front of their friends and family and declared to love, honor and whatever the modern way of saying obey is. I asked him where that common ground had gone and he told me that what hadn’t been eroded away by infidelity, unhappiness and neglect was demolished by the lawyers. I had attended his wedding a few years back, so I enquired after his own marriage. I was relieved to hear that it was going well, and asked him what his secret was. “I know how horrid divorce is, so I make it work, we make it work,” he said, then added, “but just in case, my assets are well protected.” I didn’t think he was joking. He gave me a number of a private investigator who specialized in this field, but warned me he was expensive, although the expenses would be recouped if we won. There was no way Billy would go for that, so I had to be a bit more conniving. Christoph was clever, but he was also vain. I intended to get him on his vanity. I put a call through to Cora, who I knew would be at home with the nanny. It may be using an underhand source, but Cora knew things she didn’t even know she knew.
“Hi, sweet pea, how are you?”
“Tired,” said Cora.
“Long day at school?”
“Uh-huh.” She coughed to make her point.
“That doesn’t sound good,” I said.
“I’ve got bogeys on my chest.”
“Sounds like it. Have you been to the doctor’s?”
There was silence. I guessed that Cora was shaking her head.
“Mummy at work?”
More silence. Cora nodding. Billy should have got a job in a doctor’s surgery, instead of a dentist’s. It would have been much more useful. Since food wasn’t her thing, especially sugary things, Cora never had any trouble with her teeth.
“Just a quick question, then. Do you remember the postcard Christoph sent you with the picture of the boat on it?”
“Yes.”
“Do you still have it?”
“No.”
Damn it. My first lead was a dead-end.
“Mummy keeps it in her bedside table drawer inside a book.”
Oh, Billy. “Great,” I said, full of faux cheerfulness, “I need it. Clever Mummy for keeping it.”
Cora wasn’t convinced, so I didn’t bother trying to convince her. I was about to ask her to get it, but she had quite a bad coughing fit, and I had to wait a minute until it calmed down.
“Have you got any cough medicine?” I asked her when the coughing had subsided.
“Magda has gone to get some lemons.”
Gone to get…? “Who is with you?”
“She’ll only be a minute.”
“OK, well, let’s chat until she gets back.”
“I’m too tired to chat, Godmummy T.”
“OK. Take the phone, sit on the sofa and I’ll tell you a story. OK?”
“OK.”
I heard her walk across the room, climb on to the sofa and snuggle down.
“Ready?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Once upon a time…” One minute turned out to be sixteen. My story waffled on, making no sense, with no obvious plot and no obvious finishing line, but it didn’t matter, since Cora was asleep for most of it. I was grateful for the lungful of phlegm the poor girl had because it provided me with a reassuring backdrop to my pathetic tale. As long as I could hear her breathing, she wasn’t burning to death in a house fire, or being kidnapped, or choking, or swallowing bleach, or any of the millions of life-threatening things a household presents to a well-guarded child, let alone an unaccompanied one.
“Cora! I’m back!” came a distant voice. Footsteps. A crackle as the phone was lifted from Cora’s hand.
“Hello?” I said loudly.
“Fuck.”
“Madga, it’s me, Tessa.”
“Hello, Tessa.”
“You left Cora alone?”
“I had to get her something, she’s been coughing and coughing. I thought hot lemon and honey would help.”
“But she’s been on her own!”
“Billy sometimes does go to the shop on the corner. I was as quick as I could be.”
I liked Magda. She was honest and great with Cora, but it wasn’t that quick.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“A bug.”
Cora got lots of bugs. Billy said if she kept her off school every time Cora got a bug, she’d never be at school. It worried me. It worried me that she wasn’t stronger. All that personality, in such a little frame. It would probably help if she ate better food. Saw the same doctor. Got out of London occasionally. All the things that were possible with a bit of extra money.
I told Magda about the postcard in Billy’s drawer and waited while she went to get it for me. I remembered when Cora received that postcard. It fell through the letter box on Cora’s seventh birthday. We were all amazed—Christoph never remembered Cora’s birthday. Turned out he still hadn’t. It was a coincidence. It was just a quick note saying that he wasn’t going to make it back for half-term since he was still in Dubai on work and his family were going to come out and join him. It was a fairly cursory note, hurtful, but cursory. On the front was a picture of an enormous yacht. Christoph didn’t send pictures of other people’s yachts. It wasn’t his style. He was showing off to Billy, letting her know what she was missing, turning the knife while stoking the fantasy. It worked, too. She’d kept the postcard though it was addressed to Cora.
What I wanted was the name of that boat. Armed with that, I put a call through to Camper & Nicholsons, the best boat builders I knew of, and asked them how I would go about tracking down a yacht registered in the UAE. They were extremely helpful. I felt a real sense of excitement as my sleuthing started to reap results, so I rewarded myself with a glass of wine.
Halfway through pulling the cork, the phone rang. It was Francesca.
“Is this a good time to talk?”
“Hang on.”
I finished opening the bottle, poured myself a large glass, slipped off my shoes, and lay on the sofa.
“It is now.”
“I’m sorry about this morning.”
“No, I’m sorry, Fran, I should have told you.”
“You know I have always loved the relationship you and Caspar have. I wouldn’t have survived if you hadn’t taken him off my hands so often when he was younger. I realize that I can’t have it both ways. He trusts you.”
“Trusted me.”
“I didn’t tell him we’d spoken. He doesn’t know I know about the speed, the police or the money he stole. I have given him the opportunity to tell me everything. I’ve put him on the train to stay with his grandparents until he’s allowed back at school. I packed his bag and searched his pockets. If he had drugs on him, they were up his arse. We’ll see what happens next.”
“You needn’t protect me. I’ve been thinking too. Above all, you are my friend, not your son. You come first. He needs a good shake-up. Drop me in it if you have to, but get him to see sense.”
“Hopefully it won’t come to that.”
Personally, I thought it already had. “What has he stolen from you?”
I felt her wince. “Nothing for sure, but too many things have gone missing. Money I could have sworn I’d left for a school trip, the laundry, twenty quid here or there that I thought I had in my wallet. I think the CD collection has been dwindling. And his has disappeared completely. My pay-as-you-go mobile phone. I thought I’d been pickpocketed.”
“Oh Fran, I’m so sorry.”
“Why is he doing this to me?”
“I don’t think he’s doing it to you.”
“He is.” Francesca sighed heavily.
“What have I got to do to convince you, to reassure you, that you are and have always been an exceptional mother to that boy? What you gave up for him, without prejudice, is still beyond me.”
“You sound like a lawyer.”
“I am a lawyer.”
Francesca sighed again. Or was it a sob? A quiet sob.
“Where’s Nick?”
“Still in Saigon.”
“Everything all right?” I’d just been talking to a divorce lawyer who was never out of work. It got my imagination running on overdrive. I could hear Helen quoting that bloody poem at me: do not distress yourself with dark imaginings…Easy to say, not so easy to do.
“Yeah, we’re fine. We’re good. I would like a little more support from him on this one, but Nick just isn’t that kind of man. He has many other strengths, but he can’t do this one.”
“You are very generous to your husband.”
“As he is with me. When I get wound up because things haven’t been put back in their proper place, completely unimportant things that get me incensed, he just calmly brings me down off the ledge.”
“You have always been an enviable team.”
This comment made Francesca fall silent.
“You don’t sound so good. Do you want me to come over?” I asked. I checked my glass of wine. I wasn’t over the limit yet.
“No. I don’t think I could tell this to your face.”
“Tell me what?”
I waited. It was a legal trick.
I heard Francesca take a deep breath. “There was a time when Nick and I weren’t doing so well.”
I wasn’t expecting that.
“That’s normal, isn’t it? Even great marriages can’t be fantastic all the time.”
“I met someone.”
Bombshell. I instinctively sat up on the sofa and placed my feet squarely on the floor.
“When?”
“Caspar was twelve.”
I relaxed. Many moons had waxed and waned since then and Nick and Francesca were still firmly together.
“I nearly left.”
“Left Nick?”
“I can’t believe it now, but Tessa, what I felt for this man felt so real. I honestly thought I had made a mistake, that I had never felt for Nick what I felt for this man. It was utterly all-consuming. I was possessed.”
“But you’ve always been so, so happy with each other.”
“It takes a lot of work to be that happy. We got lazy, I guess. Someone once said marriage is like standing in a corridor lined with doors. You go off through your door, he goes through his, but at the end of the day you have to come back to the corridor, touch base, hold hands, because through every door are more doors, and beyond them, more again, and if you both go through too many without coming back to the corridor, you may never find your way back. That’s pretty much what happened; it didn’t take long, either.”
I hadn’t really listened. I was still reeling. Fran had an affair. “Who was it?” “Doesn’t matter who it was. None of it was real. Poppy wasn’t talking, Katie was being an utter madam, Caspar was hitting puberty and I was lost. I met him in the doctor’s surgery. I’d had a cough for months that I couldn’t shift.”
“I remember that.”
“I was utterly depleted. Nick was off saving the world and I was nothing. Nobody. We started meeting for coffee. I was just grateful to have a friend who wasn’t another moaning mother like me. He was a lecturer, you know I’ve always been attracted to intelligence. I fed off him. It would have been fine if I’d told Nick right from the beginning that I’d made a friend, albeit divorced, male and supremely clever, but I didn’t. The secrecy of it started to take on its own life. Finally there was something more exciting in my life than nappies, the Mr. Men books and having doors slammed in my face and washing out Caspar’s skid marks. Why can’t boys wipe their own arses? Why can’t men, for that matter?”
“Sorry,” I said, speaking at last. “Can’t help you on that one.”
Francesca fell silent again.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come over?” I asked.
“No. Just stay on the phone.”
“OK.”
“I’m so ashamed, Tessa. That’s why I could never tell you.”
“Fran, you don’t have to tell me anything. It was a long time ago now, it’s over.”
“I have to tell someone.”
Tell me what? Was there more?
Slowly, she went on. “I think I know why Caspar is doing this.”
Did teenagers need a reason to be hateful to their parents?
“Do you remember when I asked you to have Caspar to stay for the whole weekend? Nick was away and my mum had taken the girls.”
I’d had Caspar to stay quite a few weekends.
“I had gone back to college—”
“Oh yes, it was some weekend field trip or something, lecture course, I can’t even remember what you were…” My voice trailed off. Studying, was what I was going to say. Was she going to tell me there was no weekend course?
“There was no course.”
“You dropped it, halfway through. I remember thinking it wasn’t like you to be so flaky.”
“I mean, there was no course at all.”
“Oh.” That was a substantial lie to tell your friends and family.
“I wasn’t thinking at the time. I got myself in way over my head.”
“How long did it go on for?”
“Six weeks. It ended that weekend.”
“Why?”
“I thought you’d know.”
“Me? Why me?” I stood up. I needed more wine for this.
“You brought Caspar home, that Saturday afternoon.”
“Did I?”
“You stayed in the car.”
“Did I?”
“Caspar must have let himself in with his key.”
I didn’t like where this was going. “What happened, Fran?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
I poured more than I meant to into my glass. “This is the first I’ve heard of any of this.”
“So Caspar didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“That he’d seen me.”
“No.”
“He didn’t behave strangely when he came back to the car?”
“No.”
“Are you sure, Tessa? Think. This is important.” She sounded desperate.
“What do you think he saw, Francesca?”
“I fucked up, I really fucked up. I was supposed to be ending it. I was. We’d walked around the park in the rain for hours talking, he only came in to dry off…”
I didn’t dare speak.
“I was so lonely.” Francesca was crying now. “I couldn’t be in the same room with any of them. Sometimes when Katie was dawdling as she always did, I would yank her by the arm, knowing it was going to hurt, but yanking her anyway. I was angry with myself for getting into this situation and taking it out on them—”
“Francesca, what did Caspar see?”
“I don’t know, all I heard was the door slam.”
“What could he have seen?”
“Oh shit, I can’t even say it…”
“Where were you?”
I heard Francesca take a deep breath. I said a silent prayer. A few of them. Not on the kitchen table. Nor the stairs. Or the floor, the sofa, up against the wall…There were too many prayers and I figured God wasn’t particularly partial to hearing all of these rather sordid details. Adultery being one of his bugbears. The truth was there is no good position or place to catch your mother having sex with another man.
“Our bed,” said Francesca finally.
Better than on all fours on the sitting-room floor, I guess. I could not pretend I wasn’t shocked. Me? After my friend Samira, I was the least prudish person I knew. I was very careful with my next words, more careful even with how they sounded.
“OK, let’s think about this rationally,” I said brightly.
“You’re horrified, aren’t you?”
“No.” Yes.
“Disappointed?”
“No.” A little. “You would have had your reasons—”
“I felt like someone had bricked up all my fire exits. I was suffocating. I couldn’t get out.”
“Not a good time to go around lighting fires, then.”
Francesca sighed heavily. I didn’t want to sound like a school mistress. I wanted to try and be a good friend. “You would have had your reasons and you can explain all of them if you like, but it’s in the past, it happened, whatever. Let’s concentrate on Caspar for now. He wasn’t any different from when he got out of the car to when he came back in a few minutes later.”
“Are you sure?”
I thought hard. It was a long time ago, but I was fairly sure I would have noticed something. Caspar could not have witnessed what Francesca thought he had witnessed, then get back into the car as jovial as before. We went to get burgers as a treat. I remember where we went. I remember what we ate. And it was a lot. I can’t imagine he’d have had much of an appetite if he’d seen anything.
“Did you hear him come in?”
“No.”
“Well, then.”
“We were making a lot of noise, he’d have heard something.”
I felt a bit queasy. That sort of detail made it all too real. I preferred talking around the issue.
“Why had we come back?” I asked. “I can’t remember.”
“Some voucher for the War Museum.”
Of course. After the burgers we went and looked at a lot of killing machines that Caspar was fascinated with at the time. “Good memory,” I said.
“Not the sort of thing you forget. He had left them on the kitchen table. If only I’d seen them, but I hadn’t—hadn’t bloody clocked them sitting there.”
“If they were on the kitchen table he wouldn’t have come upstairs.”
“Our clothes were all over the place.”
“Well, you’re a fucking idiot.” It didn’t make me feel any better, and I was pretty sure it made Francesca feel worse and I was sorry as soon as I’d said it, but the words just blurted out. We both sighed and for a little while neither of us said anything.
“That wasn’t helpful,” I said.
“But honest.”
“At home, Francesca, why do it at home?”
“I didn’t mean for it to happen. I would never have done it in our bed normally…”
“Like that makes it better?”
“No. I don’t know. It felt like it made it better at the time. But we were at home, I was upset, I didn’t want to end it. We’re talking about a man with whom I risked everything I had, just to see him for half an hour. He was in my house. We were alone. I was trying to end it, I really was, but…”
“Don’t tell me, one thing led to another.”
“A paltry excuse, right?”
“Always has been. Though I’ve used it myself when I’ve slept with undesirables.”
“You’re allowed to sleep with undesirables,” said Francesca.
“True. But they’re not good for my health.”
“That may be true, but that is your choice. I wasn’t just going to hurt myself, I was going to break my family apart.”
“And that’s why you think Caspar won’t listen to you.”
“Lies to me, swears at me, has no respect for me. Frankly, being ignored would be easier to bear.”
“It doesn’t make sense—why wait four years before punishing you?”
“Maybe he didn’t realize what he’d seen.”
“Your son was twelve, not two.”
“Maybe he just blocked it out; that was why he could get back in the car as if nothing had happened.”
“Something doesn’t wash. He told me about the erection he got every time his art teacher, Miss Clare, walked into the room; he’d have told me about you. Maybe he got off on the whole thing…”
“Tessa!”
“Sorry. Trying to introduce a little light relief.”
“A Tessa King one-liner is not what I’m after here. This is serious.”
“Of course it’s serious, but it’s not the end of the world. You and Nick are still together.”
“Thank God.”
“And there hasn’t been anyone else?”
“God, no. Though I can see how it happens, if you don’t get caught; it’s a slippery slope. You think you’re going to be struck down for being unfaithful, that the world will end, so it’s quite weird when you discover you’re not—you can walk back into your marital home, put on the fishfingers as if nothing has happened, so why not do it again? Eventually, the secret becomes as delicious as the affair itself. We’d talk for hours about our life together—a cottage on a moor, a farm in Spain—it was all wonderful while it was still fantasy. But when I thought Caspar had seen…” I could hear Francesca fighting to control her breathing. “That’s why fantasy is so alluring, no one gets hurt.”
“So what happened after Caspar left?”
“I realized what I was doing had hideous consequences. Caspar literally snapped me out of my reverie. I told my friend to leave immediately. I was beside myself. I sat by the phone waiting for you to call me to tell me Caspar had phoned his dad and it was all over, bar the shouting. My friend rang me every hour on the hour for the rest of that afternoon, most of the night and throughout the next day. I just let it ring and ring and ring. Finally, I went and dropped my phone in the river. I regretted it as soon as I’d done it and nearly followed suit, but I managed to drag myself home. I knew I would find it a darn sight harder to call him from home. Eventually, I stopped yearning for him; in fact, that was the weird thing. Here was someone I truly believed was the love of my life and within ten days I was fine.”
“Lust is a very powerful thing,” I said. “And being lonely can drive you to do terrible, stupid things.” My place on the moral high ground wasn’t so firm either. “And things got better with Nick?”
“That’s the strange thing, the affair sort of saved my marriage. I know, you’re right. Maybe I say that to make myself feel better but Nick kind of mended me. Maybe he thought I was ill, I certainly looked ill. My cough came back. He sent me to bed, took himself off, rented me videos and even picked the girls up from school. He saw me through my period of mourning so well that I started to look forward to him coming home to break the monotony of being depressed. Somehow we managed to find our way back to the corridor and one morning I woke up and realized it had all meant nothing. I had not loved this other man. The man I loved was Nick. What was so terrifying was that if Caspar and you hadn’t come back that afternoon, I might never have had the willpower to end it, I would have broken up my family for nothing. Things with Nick and me got better. In the end, the only real casualty was Caspar. Apart from the hideous guilt I carry around with me.”
“Morning,” I said.
“What?”
“Caspar and I came back in the morning.”
“No, it was afternoon. We’d been out in the rain all morning. Didn’t get back until, don’t know, but later in the day.”
“Well, it wasn’t early morning, but it was before lunch.”
“Couldn’t have been.”
“It was. I remember it. Honestly, we sat in the car when he’d got the tickets and discussed either going to the museum first and then having a late lunch, or having an early lunch and then going to the museum. In the end we went for burgers then bombs.”
“I didn’t see your car; I heard a car leave.”
“We definitely sat there for a while. He really wasn’t in a state of anxiety. Maybe you were hearing things.”
“Footsteps on the stairs and a door slam? I don’t think so.”
“You said yourself you didn’t see the tickets on the kitchen table. We’d been and gone while you were mooning about the park. I promise you, it was the morning, eleven-thirty, twelve. No later than twelve.”
“We were in the park at twelve.”
“Well then, it wasn’t Caspar—he didn’t see anything, he isn’t scarred for life and he isn’t punishing you. I’ve said this from the beginning, this isn’t your fault. Caspar is being an arsehole and he needs to sort it out.”
“There is no way he came back later?”
“No. We were together for the rest of the day.”
“So who was on the stairs, who slammed the door?”
“The cleaning lady?”
“Tessa, I am the cleaning lady.”
“Oh.” I paused, thinking. “Well, who else has keys?”
“No one.”
“Someone must, unless it was a burglar.” No. A burglar would have assessed the situation and scarpered. Or assessed the situation and taken everything he could have got his hands on from downstairs, knowing the lady of the house was otherwise occupied upstairs and unlikely to hear a thing. And then it dawned on me. Just as it did Francesca.
“Nick,” we said in unison. The only other person who had keys was Nick.
After that Francesca was inconsolable, so in the end I got in the car and drove to her house where we remained until the early hours of the morning, talking about whether a man could see his wife with another man and not only love her, but seemingly love her more. Several times I stopped her from ringing him. If it had been Nick, and we were still not absolutely sure that it had been, then he had decided, for reasons known only to himself, to keep quiet about what he’d seen, or heard. Instead of blowing up, walking out and making her pay, he had cared for his wife and helped her mend an imaginary broken heart, which had felt as real as a genuine broken heart at the time. All along he had known that it had not been the persistent cough that had floored her, but the end of an affair, and still he had taken her cups of tea in bed, run her bath, taken the kids off her hands and given her space. So my conclusion was this: Nick was a bigger man than I had ever thought him to be. He loved his wife more than I believed possible and she owed it to him to repay his silence with silence. Making a happy home would be thanks enough since that, I was beginning to learn, was a bloody hard thing to do.
Alternatively, there was a petty thief walking around with a photographic image in his head of Francesca and her mystery man going at it hammer and tongs and Nick was nothing more than another blissfully ignorant spouse. Personally, I started hoping it was the former. In all its weird complexities, I found Francesca’s infidelity and Nick’s subsequent forgiveness more encouraging and life-affirming than a meaningless shag that she somehow got away with.
Of course, what neither scenario dealt with was Caspar and why he seemed intent on blowing holes in his young brain. I had drunk too much to drive home, so crawled into bed with Francesca and took the place of her cuckold husband.
Twenty-four seconds after hitting the pillow, two lithe, extremely wakeful creatures came and bounced on the bed.
“What the fu—”
“Morning, girls,” said Francesca brightly, cutting me off.
“What bloody time is it?” I squinted at my watch.
“Well done, you two,” said Francesca, inexplicably.
“Well done? Well done for what? It’s still dark outside.”
“For waiting until seven.”
“Seven!”
“We’ve been up since six, we waited and waited—”
“Poppy nearly came in.”
“Did not.”
“Did.”
“DID NOT!”
“Don’t shout, Poppy.”
“And she spilled the cornflakes.”
“Didn’t!”
“Don’t tell tales, Katie,” said Francesca patiently.
I fell back on the pillow and groaned. Since when had their voices got so unbearably squeaky?
“Welcome to my world,” whispered Francesca, peeling the duvet off her and stepping back into the clothes she’d removed only a few hours earlier. “Right, everybody, what are we up to today?”
“BALLET!” shouted Poppy.
“OK, ballet kit, in the airing cupboard.”
“Gym,” said Katie.
“Borrow one of Poppy’s shirts, I haven’t had time to clean yours.”
“Nooooo,” shouted Poppy.
“It’s too small. I look like a boy in it,” Katie complained.
“You don’t.”
“I do.”
“I have to take something for ‘show and tell.’ Something I cooked,” said Poppy. Cooked? She’s only five. Francesca swore quietly, but recovered quickly.
“Right, cupcakes it is.”
The two girls started jumping up and down and shouting very loudly, “CUPCAKES! CUPCAKES! CUPCAKES! CUPCAKES! CUPCAKES!”
I thought the pair of them would make extremely effective tools in Guantanamo Bay. I tried to smile.
“Don’t worry,” said Francesca. “They go very well with strong black, heavily laced coffee.” It was rather like waking up after a beer-goggled one-night stand—a very When Harry Met Sally moment—I lay there wondering how long I could bear it before being able to leave without causing offence.