Katie was having a good day.
It had started off badly. She had been buoyed up by the events at the dinner party, which had gone like a dream. Seeing James upset and embarrassed had given her an unexpected rush of pleasure, which had made her feel both guilty and elated. She had thought that maybe she would feel sorry for him or be tempted to own up to her part in his tragi-comic humiliation, but she had discovered a well-hidden core of steel inside her when it came to it, and she had watched him, moping about miserably, unmoved. This morning, though, as they had said goodbye for another three days, the reality that her relationship – which up until a couple of weeks ago, she had thought was perfect – was over had hit her full on. She had found herself crying on his shoulder and he, stupid man, had thought it was because she was going to miss him, although in a roundabout way maybe it was.
He had kissed the top of her head. ‘I’ll be back on Sunday, silly girl,’ he’d said, and Katie had thought how patronizing he sounded and that had made her stop crying and remember what she was doing and why.
Once he’d gone, she had flicked half-heartedly through the post, which contained cards from Hugh and Alison (‘What a lovely evening. Do let’s do it again soon’) and Sam and Geoff (‘Thanks muchly as always!’). Neither of them made any mention of the awkward end to the dinner and she knew that none of their friends ever would. They would just fade into the distance and eventually include some other poor couple in their exclusive dinner-party circle. With luck she’d never have to bother trying to make polite conversation with any of them again, beyond a hello in the post office.
She would miss Richard and Simone more – at least they were nearer her age and they had things in common – but then they would probably have thought the whole thing was hilarious and Katie was sure that if she rang Simone up and asked her if she wanted to go for a drink, once this was all over, she would say yes. Meanwhile she had no intention of making contact now because she knew James would be too embarrassed to make the first move and she wanted him to have to suffer the loss of his friends.
She looked round her little cottage and thought how nice it would be to reclaim it as her own. She could get some lilac paint or a pale pink, maybe, and freshen up the living room by painting one wall in a colour James would never have put up with. She could burn candles all day if she wanted to, without him commenting that the place smelt like a church. Stanley would be allowed to sit on the sofa. By the time her doorbell rang, a couple of minutes before ten, she had mentally redecorated the whole house and had forgotten all about Owen’s appointment again.
She was going through the motions (‘How are you sleeping’, ‘Can I look at your tongue?’), dreading the hour ahead listening to Owen rehash the same old story, when he surprised her. ‘I’m moving,’ he said, out of nowhere.
‘Really? Good for you.’ Owen had always been so adamant that he wouldn’t be driven out of his home despite the impossibility of the situation.
‘I’ve got a little house on Springfield Lane. Only renting but it’s a start.’
‘What’s brought this on?’ Katie asked.
‘What you said to me last week. About negative energy destroying you if you’re not careful.’
‘I’ve been saying that to you for months.’
Owen ran a hand through his hair. ‘I think I just started listening. Anyway, I should thank you. As soon as I made the decision I started to feel much more positive. Just like you said I would. Like I was taking control.’
Katie felt like she imagined a proud mother must feel watching her infant cycling without the training wheels on for the first time. ‘Gosh,’ she said. ‘Well done.’ It was amazing to think she might have made a difference to someone’s life, however small.
She managed to hold on to that feeling even when Owen went on to tell her that while packing up the house he had thrown every one of his wife’s possessions over the garden wall, mostly after defacing or damaging them in some way. One of them, a small Moorcroft vase that Miriam’s mother had given her when she was first married, and which he had found in a box in the attic, had smashed through her and Ted’s conservatory window.
‘Wasn’t it worth rather a lot?’ Katie asked, not quite knowing what to say.
‘Serves them right. I saw them snogging in there one night when I looked over the wall. Bold as anything, didn’t care that the blinds weren’t drawn,’ Owen said, through gritted teeth.
Katie laughed. ‘I meant the vase.’
‘Oh, probably.’
Despite Owen’s declaration that he had moved on, it looked as if they were going to go back along the same well-trodden path they always did (‘She’s a bitch, he’s a bastard’), but when Katie asked him to describe his new home and what he was intending to do with it, Owen’s mood changed and his new-found optimism returned. They spent the rest of the hour discussing colours and flooring, and even though Katie would still rather have retired to the other room while the needles worked their magic, as she did with her other clients, the hour passed much more pleasantly than usual.
‘Maybe,’ Katie ventured, when the session was over, ‘once you’re settled into your new place you’ll be able to find a job.’ She didn’t say what she really wanted to say, which was ‘And then you can pay me back all the money you owe me,’ but the thought was implicit.
‘Yes,’ Owen said, smiling. ‘Who knows? Maybe I will.’
After he had left, she put on her jacket and drove to Homebase on the outskirts of Lincoln where she picked up swatch cards for pastel paints, then went to the newsagent where she bought several interior-design magazines. No harm in getting a few ideas.
‘I’m tired. Maybe we should just skip it – have an early night.’
‘But I’ve got the tickets,’ Stephanie said, smiling innocently. ‘You’ve been going on about wanting to see it for ages. I thought it’d be a surprise.’
‘It is. It was a really nice thought but I don’t think I can face it. Tell you what, why don’t you see if they’ll exchange them for another night?’
Stephanie forced herself to pull a hurt expression. ‘But Cassie’s coming over to babysit. Come on, James, I hardly ever go out these days.’
James rubbed a hand across his forehead. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘What time does it start?’
Victory. What James couldn’t know, of course, was that Stephanie was fully aware that he had already sat through the new Will Smith blockbuster earlier that week with Katie because Katie had mentioned in one of her phone calls that they had gone to the cinema to take his mind off the dinner-party débâcle and had added that James had said afterwards that he would rather slit his eyes with razor blades than sit through that shit again.
‘Excellent,’ Stephanie had said. ‘I’ll book tickets.’
‘You know,’ he said now, as he and Stephanie were about to leave home, ‘I’ve heard it’s not as good as it looks.’
‘Where did you hear that?’ Stephanie said.
‘Oh, I just read a bad review somewhere. I don’t remember where.’
‘Well, everything gets a few bad reviews. When can you last remember a film that only got good reviews?’
She knew he was dying to say, ‘It’s shit, OK? I’ve seen it,’ but that he couldn’t because then he’d have to explain why he hadn’t mentioned to her on the phone during the week that he’d been to the cinema and then make up a story about who he’d gone with. James always affected to have no social life in Lower Shippingham, beyond a quick pint in the pub with Malcolm or Simon. Instead he grunted an ‘I suppose so,’ and shuffled his arm into his jacket sleeve reluctantly.
Once there, Stephanie wondered if she was punishing herself more than she was him. The film was interminable. Only James’s fidgeting and sighing kept her spirits up. At one point, about an hour and a half in, he leaned over and whispered in her ear that maybe they should cut their losses and go for a pizza, but she had said no, she wanted to stay and see the end ‘in case it gets any better’.
‘It’s not going to get any better now,’ he said huffily.
‘How do you know that?’ she said. ‘It might.’
‘Oh, well,’ she said once the film had finished and they were in a taxi on the way home, ‘who could have known it would be so bad?’
James said nothing.
‘And then he rolled his eyes all back in his head.’
Stephanie could hear Finn talking into the telephone as she ran down the stairs. She had heard it ring from the bathroom and had shouted, ‘It’s OK, I’ll get it,’ but to no avail. She had no idea who he was talking to – it was as likely to be a telesales representative as anyone he knew: he was happy to regale anyone who’d listen with the gory details of Spike’s untimely end.
‘His tongue hanged out,’ he was saying, as she took the receiver out of his hand.
‘Who is it?’ she hissed.
‘Granny,’ Finn said, rolling his eyes as if to say who else would it be.
‘Go and start that project you’ve got to do on the Vikings. I’ll come and help you in a minute,’ Stephanie said, her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Hi, Pauline, how are you?’
‘Oh, all the better for hearing about Finn’s friend’s hamster,’ her mother-in-law said, laughing.
Stephanie, flying in the face of cliché, was fond of her husband’s parents. The first time she had gone home with James – months after they had started seeing each other and after a lot of protesting from James that he didn’t really ‘do family’ – he had been apologetic on the way down, telling her that the house was small and his mother and father’s tastes parochial. She’d laughed at him; he hadn’t yet met her family and he seemed to have decided they must be upper-middle class and wealthy. He was wrong, as it happened, they were lower-middle class and impoverished, but she had later come to realize that his assumptions said more about him than they did about her. He was ashamed of where he came from.
Such was the vibrancy of the picture James had painted that when they pulled up outside the neat little semidetached house Stephanie had thought they must be in the wrong place. OK, so it was on an estate where all the houses were the same, but they were well cared-for. She looked round for the graffiti, the feral children, the drug pushers she had thought were implicit in James’s descriptions of where he had grown up, but all she saw was the odd garden gnome and a bit of stone cladding. James’s mother Pauline and his father John had flung open the front door, then almost suffocated their only son with hugs, and had welcomed Stephanie as if she was the daughter they had always wanted.
‘They’re small people,’ James had said to her, in the car on the way home. ‘Small people with small lives.’
‘They’re nice,’ she’d said, feeling suddenly protective of Pauline in particular. ‘They’re really proud of you, you know.’
‘I know they are,’ he’d said, mellowing slightly. ‘I’m the only one of their friends’ kids to go to university. It gives them something to boast about.’
‘Well, I thought they were lovely,’ she’d said, and turned up the radio, indicating that the conversation was over.
In the years that followed Stephanie would seize every opportunity to spend time with her in-laws. Pauline was so exactly like a mother should be, warm and caring and nurturing, always hovering in the background with a teapot and a plate of biscuits, ready to spoil you. Stephanie had no doubt that her own parents loved her but they were undemonstrative. Interested, but emotionally distant. Pauline was all hugs and kisses and endearments, soft and cuddly like a giant walking, talking teddy bear.
John wasn’t much different. He was totally sentimental, instantly moved to tears by a story in the paper about a lost child or an abandoned puppy, an attribute James found embarrassing but which made Stephanie want to get him in a bear-hug.
When Finn was born John was inconsolable, holding his first grandson and sobbing and laughing at the same time. Stephanie’s parents, drowning in an abundance of grandchildren already provided by her older brother and sisters were there, too, but they chatted to Finn dispassionately, as if they were calling him up for mortgage advice. Stephanie had always longed for a bit more unbridled emotion in her life. And now she had it.
The last thing she wanted to have to do now was to break it to Pauline and John that her and James’s relationship was over, although she supposed they would have to know some time. Meanwhile she knew Pauline was hurt that James had never invited them up to see him in Lincolnshire and she had decided the time had come to put that right. She felt uncomfortable using them as pawns in her campaign against their son but she would make sure they never found out – in fact, she was determined to try to make sure they had a good time.
‘I’ve had an idea,’ she said now, into the telephone. ‘James is always saying how nice it’d be if you went up to see him in the country …’
‘Is he really?’ Pauline said, and the note of pleasure in her voice sent a shard of guilt through Stephanie. She wondered if she could go through with this. She wished she could be certain that James would be kind to his parents when they turned up. She made an on-the-spot decision that it would be too cruel having them show up as a surprise, even though that would give James the biggest headache. But she knew too that if she told him they were coming he would ring them and tell them he was too busy and that they should come up to London one weekend instead.
‘So,’ she said, thinking on her feet, ‘maybe you and John would fancy a couple of days in Lincoln. We’d book you into a nice hotel in the city centre, because, you know, the flat above the surgery is a bit small. That way, when James is working you wouldn’t be stuck in Lower Shippingham, you could have a look round the cathedral and the old town. It’d be like a holiday.’ Perfect. They’d be close enough to James to make him uneasy but not so close that he would ever think they’d come into contact with Katie. Obviously, the truth was that Katie would make sure they did but, of course, James shouldn’t know that.
‘Will you and Finn be there?’ Pauline asked hopefully.
Stephanie had often wondered if Pauline thought she was a bad wife, abandoning James for half the week, but if she did she would never have said so. ‘Finn has to be at school.’
‘Maybe we should wait until the holidays – then we could all go together.’
‘Tell you what,’ Stephanie said, ‘why don’t you come on here afterwards? James can drive you down and you could stay for a couple of days. We’d all love that. We could do it next week.’
‘Gosh,’ Pauline said, sounding like an excitable schoolgirl. ‘It sounds lovely. Let me just talk to John and I’ll ring you back.’
Stephanie put the phone down. It had been almost too easy.