James thought he was hallucinating at first. He was trying to explain to his parents how the reservation at Le Château had fallen through (‘Trouble in the kitchen, they’ve had to close down for the night’ was the best that he could do) and why, instead of just taking them over to the pub in Lower Shippingham, they were now going to eat at what looked like a greasy spoon.
‘What kind of trouble?’ his mother was saying. ‘Hygiene?’
‘I’ve no idea. Probably,’ he said, slandering Le Château even further.
‘What, though?’ Pauline persisted. ‘Rats? Cockroaches? It doesn’t bear thinking about, really, does it?’
‘Well, anyway,’ James was saying, ‘this place is meant to be very good. Their chef came from Rome,’ he added, making things up off the top of his head. ‘He’s well known in …’
A woman who looked just like Katie was walking towards them. Paranoia, he thought, was making him see things. The woman was staring straight at him. She really did look a lot like Katie and, of course, Katie was in Lincoln this evening, although her class would be under way by now. Nevertheless he tried to usher Pauline and John along but he couldn’t seem to get them to move at more than a snail’s pace.
‘In where, dear?’ Pauline was saying.
The woman was still heading his way. She had Katie’s newly dyed red hair – which, by the way, was still making him feel rather unsettled. When he’d woken up this morning she had had her back to him and he had thought she was Stephanie, and it had taken him a moment to work out where he was and who he was with. She was wearing the clothes Katie had been wearing when she’d left the house, the flowing pink skirt and the white T-shirt with the soft baby pink mohair hoodie over the top. Shit, he thought. It’s Katie.
There was a moment before she spoke when he felt as if he was moving very fast in a tunnel. He could hear the blood whooshing round in his head and he wondered, briefly, if he might black out. His mother was wittering on, something about Italian food and how you couldn’t go wrong with it, except for sometimes when they got a bit carried away with the garlic, and he thought briefly about turning round and simply walking off in the other direction before Katie could catch him.
‘James?’
Too late.
He raised his eyebrows at her as if she might somehow understand telepathically what he was asking her to do. This was it. This was the moment when both Katie and his parents would find out about his double life.
‘Hello,’ he said, in a voice so falsely jovial he sounded a little insane. ‘What are you doing here?’
His parents had stopped and were smiling at this woman, who was obviously a friend of their son’s.
‘I’ve got my evening class, remember?’ Katie said, in a tone that gave nothing away. ‘Only I got the time wrong. It starts at seven thirty, not seven. So, I was just walking around, killing time.’
He waited for her to say more, to say, ‘What the hell are you doing here when I just left you at home eating dinner?’ but for some reason she didn’t.
‘I’m just having a quick dinner with Pauline and John here,’ he said, gesturing towards the restaurant. If he could just get in there, away from her, everything might be OK. He would have time to conjure up a plausible story. Something about old family friends and phoning out of the blue. He started to move away, hoping his parents would take the hint and follow, but his mother, of course, was not going to miss an opportunity to say hello to one of his friends.
‘I’m Pauline,’ she said, ‘James’s mum, and this is John, his dad.’
Katie just stood there looking at them all. There was still time to save the situation. OK, so he had lied to her about being estranged from his parents but he’d think of something. Just as long as she didn’t say, ‘Hi, I’m Katie, I’m his girlfriend.’
‘ This is Katie,’ he blurted out. ‘She lives in the village.’ He looked at Katie and gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. She would know what it meant – don’t say anything – and, hopefully, sweet, unsuspecting Katie would still trust him enough to give him the benefit of the doubt. She wasn’t the sort of woman who would ever have a public confrontation.
Luckily, she said nothing. She just smiled sweetly at his mother.
‘Right,’ he said, clapping his hands. ‘We’d better go – don’t want to be late for our table. ’Bye, Katie, nice to see you.’
He moved off towards the restaurant praying that she would just go away. If she did, if she was really that loving and innocent and generous that she would let him get away with whatever he was getting away with and be content to wait until later to hear an explanation, he swore to himself that he would make it up to her. He would never deceive her again. He kept his fingers crossed as he walked away and then he heard: ‘Well, it was nice to meet you.’
‘You too, dear,’ his mother said.
James dared to look round just as Katie was walking off. She looked back briefly and frowned at him, out of sight of his mum and dad, as if to say, ‘What’s going on?’, and he pulled what he hoped was a ‘trust-me’ face before ushering his parents through the door of Sorrento.
‘She seemed nice. Who was she again?’
‘Oh, just some woman from the village. She brings her dog into the surgery sometimes.’
James could feel that his heart was still on overdrive. Jesus, that had been close.
Concentrating on Reflexology Class One had not been easy. Katie had arrived a few minutes late, having got lost trying to find the college. Her head was all over the place, and she had turned left instead of right and by the time she had worked out where she’d gone wrong, she had been on the dual carriageway heading out of the city. Once she’d reached the classroom she had muttered apologies to the lecturer, who was already in full flow with his introductory speech, smiled hesitantly at her new classmates and taken a seat at the back. She’d felt elated in one way, that she had pulled it off, that she had put James on the back foot and left him stewing about how he was going to handle the consequences, but at the same time the whole thing had made her uneasy. If their meeting had been truly accidental, if she hadn’t known what she knew, then she had no doubt she would have introduced herself to Pauline and John as James’s girlfriend and the whole sorry story would have come out. She couldn’t believe James was stupid enough to have woven this elaborate web of lies in the first place. How could he ever have thought it would have a happy ending for any of the parties concerned? The truth was, she knew now, he had never been thinking about anyone other than himself. Well, she’d unsettled him now. That was a good thing.
She’d tried to concentrate on what the lecturer was saying and on the complicated diagrams of the human anatomy that had accompanied his talk. She had to keep her wits about her for her confrontation with James when she got home. She needed to be indignant about the way he had lied to her, to press for a satisfactory explanation without even giving a hint that she was aware of what was really going on. The one thing she knew was that he would never offer up the truth unless she actually presented him with it.
By the time she got home James was already there. He leaped out of his armchair before she had even had time to close the front door behind her. ‘I can explain,’ he said.
Remember, Katie thought, be sweet, innocent Katie. Don’t push it too far. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I’m listening.’
James had obviously been planning his speech and she decided to let him deliver it uninterrupted.
‘I couldn’t tell you,’ he said. ‘I wanted to, but I couldn’t. The truth, the absolute truth, is that my mum got in touch with me recently. She said she was sorry about how she’d been, and she wanted us to try and put it behind us. I invited them up to see if we could sort things out.’
He paused, and Katie wasn’t sure if he had finished or not. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something.
‘But that’s great. I just don’t understand what all the secrecy was about.’
‘Because I haven’t told them about you. That’s why I had them stay in Lincoln, not over here. You see, I think it’s a big step for them to accept that it’s not my fault my marriage is over. I don’t think in a million years they could cope with me telling them I was already with someone new. Not yet, anyway. They’d always be thinking that maybe we’d got together before Steph and I split up, that maybe you were the cause. And I’d really hate for them to have bad feelings towards you.’
She had to give it to him, he was good. Katie put a hand on his forearm. ‘But why didn’t you just tell me that? I would have understood. I’d just have been happy for you that you were patching things up with them.’
James looked at her like a grateful puppy. ‘Yes, you would have, wouldn’t you? I’m so sorry, darling. I underestimated you. It’s just … well, it’s just that I’m not used to being with someone who’s so supportive and kind.’
‘But I thought we didn’t have secrets from each other,’ Katie just about managed to say, without a hint of sarcasm.
‘I know, I know, you’re right. But sometimes I forget how amazing you are. You know, after all those years with Steph. She would never have been so understanding.’
‘Well, I think it’s great,’ Katie said. ‘And one day you’ll feel able to tell them and we can have them to stay and start being a real family.’
‘Definitely,’ James said, putting his arms round her. She could feel through his shirt that he was dripping with sweat.