April 2011
Another holiday, another carefully chosen cottage in one of England’s picture-perfect corners. It felt more like summer than spring. The temperature had been in the midseventies for days; the tender spring grass was already frazzled and brown; Maya had a tan mark under her wedding band.
The drive up to Suffolk had been a tonic; the sight of London fading away through the windows of a rental car had brought about a sense of release. The thought of not being in that flat, of not going through the motions, of breaking the weird patterns of the past few weeks since the drunken pronouncement of her night out with Sara. She hadn’t thought too hard about the prospect of what lay ahead, about seeing Luke and being watched and being judged, about the as yet uncommitted faux pas that would be reported back to her in cruel, exacting detail upon her return to London. For now she was just glad to be getting away.
She sat now, reading, upon the grass outside the French windows of her and Adrian’s ground-floor bedroom. She was wearing a black halter-neck bikini top and black shorts. In the distance she could hear the smaller children dashing around with the dogs, and behind her she could hear the sound of people arriving, the crunch of gravel, the banging of car doors. She put her book down by her side, folded open against its spine, and sat up. She recognized the sound of Luke’s voice. She hadn’t heard his voice for a long time. It filled her with something mad and stupefying. She heard Susie’s voice, too, loud and enthused. Then she heard another voice. A shrill voice. A silly, carefree voice. She recognized it and immediately stood up, slid her feet into warm flip-flops, pulled on a T-shirt and headed around the walls of the rambling house to the front door. Adrian and Susie greeted each other warmly and then turned to smile at Luke and his companion: Mum and Dad. It always surprised Maya how right her husband looked when he stood side by side with one of his ex-wives, how each woman complemented him in some unique and distinctive way. With Susie it was the scruffiness, the slightly shabby clothes, the outgrown hair and large feet and hands. With Caroline it was the height, the substance, the imposing presence. And with her? Well, they both had two arms and two legs. But that was about as far as it went.
“Hello!” She swallowed her discomfort and walked towards Luke. Then she turned to his companion, to the unannounced and unexpected guest. “Hello, Charlotte,” she said, leaning in to kiss each shiny, puppy-fatted cheek. “We weren’t expecting you! How lovely!”
She tried not to look at Luke but couldn’t help a brief sideways glance, just enough to theorize that maybe Charlotte’s being here wasn’t quite what he’d had in mind himself. According to the family grapevine Luke and Charlotte had split up last month. Again. Sources reported that Charlotte had taken it very badly. Sources also reported that this was it, over for good. No more off and on. Luke was adamant and his mind was set.
“No!” said Charlotte, echoing Maya’s forced jollity. “It was all a bit last-minute! I literally walked into the pub last night and there was Luke, completely out of the blue, and literally a few hours later he’d invited me up to Suffolk! I mean, literally!”
Susie, Adrian and Maya all nodded at Charlotte and made noises of muted wonder.
“Well,” said Adrian, “that’s great. Really lovely to have you here, Charlotte. Really.”
“I promise I’ll pull my weight. I’ll wash up and cook and all that business. I’m not just here for a free holiday!”
“No!” said Adrian. “No. Of course you’re not. And even if you were, nobody would particularly care. We’re pretty easygoing.”
“Yes, I suppose you need to be to have these kinds of holidays. Especially in your circumstances. I mean”—her face fell—“you know, this big extended family. Hard enough to make it work when you’re all apart, let alone when you’re all squeezed into a house together.” Her face fell again. “I think I’ll stop talking now,” she said.
Adrian and Susie laughed and said, “Nonono, don’t be silly, of course, you’re right.” Maya managed a smile. Charlotte was just adorable. Look at her, in her little pleated shorts with rosebud sprigs, her tight white Aertex polo shirt, shiny white Converse, vanilla-cream hair pinned back on each side with kirby grips. Just adorable. But what was she doing here? Where was she going to sleep? Luke was supposed to be sharing a room with Otis and Beau. The only spare bed in the house was in an anteroom, just off her own bedroom. A camp bed. Charlotte couldn’t sleep in there. It was too weird. And what about Luke? Was he expecting to share a bed with her? Were they having sex again? Why hadn’t he phoned ahead to say he was bringing her? What was she doing here?
“Where are you going to sleep?” she asked, more forcefully than she’d intended.
“Oh, I’ll sleep anywhere! A sofa. The bath. Anywhere that I don’t get in the way.”
“I’m sure we can rejig things,” said Susie. “Don’t you worry. It’s just lovely having you here.”
Susie looked at Adrian and Maya as though checking that they shared her sentiment. They both smiled back tightly and nodded.
It was another two hours before Maya was able to corner Luke by himself. She found him moving a mattress from one room to another on the first floor. Charlotte was in the garden playing croquet with Pearl. She took the other end of the mattress and said, “Where is this going?”
“The girls’ room,” he said, pointing his head in the direction of a door on the other side of the landing. “Beau’s going to sleep with Caroline, so we have a spare mattress.”
“Didn’t he mind?” Beau usually loved sharing a room with both his big brothers.
“You know Beau. World’s most obliging child.”
“So you and Charlotte, you’re not . . . ?”
A twitch of Luke’s left shoulder told her all she needed to know.
“Oh, Luke.” She sounded like his mother and she didn’t care.
“Don’t,” he said, pushing the bedroom door open with his back.
They positioned the mattress on the floor next to Cat’s bed and let it drop. Then they regarded each other across the bed-sized space between them. “I was already drunk when she got to the pub. She was being all sweet and lovely. I wasn’t thinking straight. Seriously, I was so drunk. She had to take me home. Back to hers. It’s all kind of a blur from there . . .”
“Fine,” said Maya, feeling that she was in no position to cast judgments on other people’s poor decision-making skills, “but why the hell did you have to invite her?”
“I didn’t,” he hissed. “She invited herself. This morning. She asked me what I was doing today and I was too messed up to think of a lie. Well, actually, I didn’t think I’d need one, I thought me going away with my family might be enough of a deterrent for her.”
“She’s quite something,” said Maya drily.
“Hm.” Luke puffed up the pillow and tidied the bedclothes.
He straightened up and put his hands into his pockets. His hair had grown longer since she’d last seen him, and flopped over his left eye. He was wearing his non-prescription glasses, a gray T-shirt and pale blue seersucker shorts. There he was, so young and half-formed. She looked for the memory of their kiss in his eyes and found it there. She flushed and looked away.
“So,” he said, “you had your hair cut?”
She put her hand to it as she did instinctively every time someone mentioned it.
“I really like it.”
Maya laughed gruffly. “Really?” she said. “You don’t think it makes me look like the ugly one in a boy band?”
He laughed as though she’d cracked a joke. “Absolutely not! It makes you look really feminine. And delicate.”
She smiled at him gratefully. She believed him. Which meant that someone else had seen the photo of her hair and someone else had made the spiteful observation. “I’m growing it, anyway,” she said. “It was a mad moment. Not sure what I was thinking.”
“You have to do those things sometimes. You have to give in to them. Surrender to whim. Otherwise how would you know what suited you?”
He was talking about fashion. He was talking about hair. But he could just as easily have been talking about her life. She stared at him for a moment, taking in the angles and the lines of him, taking in the unsettling eyes, the just-so hair, the thin legs and arms, the exquisite loveliness of him. Would he be just another bad haircut? Because that’s exactly what Adrian had been. She could see that now. She remembered the moments of prevarication in the early days of their romance. The mental pros and cons lists she’d run through in the dark of night. All the stuff she’d finally convinced herself wouldn’t be a problem because she was surrendering to whim.
He has too much baggage.
He’s too old for me.
His family will never really forgive me.
Other women have already had the best of him; I will get the dregs.
He doesn’t really seem to see me when he looks at me.
I’m not sure I really love him.
She’d looked at all these things and decided that they didn’t matter. What mattered was this: She’d been single for two years. She wanted to change her life. She’d just left teacher training college and had to find a first job and she wanted some security while she did that. Adrian was lovely. Adrian was kind. Adrian made her feel safe and protected. She knew he was lying when he said the children would be fine. She knew he was lying when he said everyone would understand. But she’d been prepared to take that risk. She’d had a master plan. She would be not only the sweetest, least-threatening person she possibly could be, she would actually make things better for everyone. She would find the weaknesses in Adrian’s family life and fix them. Adrian’s family would be grateful to her! They would wonder how they had ever managed without her!
Essentially, she saw now, she had gone into her marriage to Adrian with the same mind-set as she’d had going into that hair salon to ask them to cut all her hair off. I can always grow it back if it doesn’t suit me.
Stupid girl.
She ran her hand over her too-short hair again and said, “Well, I can safely say that this haircut does not suit me.”
“Well,” said Luke, “I disagree.”
“I’ve really missed you.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s been too long.”
“Three months and nine days.”
She looked at him strangely.
“I’m not being a freak.” He smiled. “It was the first of January. Easy maths.”
She smiled. “Are we cool now?” she asked. “You and I? Can we be normal?”
He laughed. “I thought we were being normal.”
“No, you know what I mean.”
“I do know what you mean. And yes, we can be normal. If you want us to be normal, that is?”
No, she thought, I don’t want us to be normal. I want us to be fabulously abnormal and twisted. I want us to be all over each other with tongues and toes and lips and teeth. I want us to climb naked over each other’s bodies while my aging, oblivious husband, your father, sleeps on in the next room. I want us to announce to the family that we are in love and watch their faces contort with incomprehension and hurt. And then I want us to suck each other dry until there is nothing left of us, until we are all done and desiccated and then I can move on and surrender to the next whim, commit the next heinous misdemeanor.
She couldn’t look at him. She didn’t recognize herself anymore. She felt like a soap opera villain: breaking up families on a whim, falling in love with handsome young stepsons, pretending to be so nice when really she was a scheming bitch. Dear Bitch. Her poison pen pal was right about her. Her poison pen pal had recognized her for what she was before she’d even recognized it herself.
She dropped her gaze to the floor and she said, in as bright a voice as she could muster, “Yes. I want us to be normal.”
“Normal?” said a voice from the doorway.
They both turned as one, the fading shadows of guilt still there in Maya’s eyes. It was Charlotte.
She smiled uncertainly from Maya to Luke and back again. “What are you two talking about?” Her tone was playful but sharp.
“Oh, God, nothing,” said Luke. “We were just . . .” He looked to Maya for assistance.
“Talking about work,” she said hopelessly. “Just stuff at work. New head of department. You know. All the changes.”
Charlotte nodded. “Right,” she said. Her eyes found Luke’s and Maya saw her study him closely.
“Your bed!” he said, with a flourish of his hands. “Will you be OK in here?”
Charlotte nodded again. “Sure,” she said, “I’ll be fine. Thank you. Both of you.” She looked again from Luke to Maya and then slowly she left the room.
Adrian was sitting at the table in the kitchen when Maya came downstairs. He had Beau on his lap and they were playing Snap together. Beau’s face was streaked red with dried tears and there was a crumpled tissue in his hand.
“Everything OK?” she asked, sitting down next to the pair of them.
“Oh, just some sibling rough and tumbling got a bit out of hand. Elbow in the eye. But we’re fine now, aren’t we?”
Beau nodded bravely and turned his next card over.
“Brave boy.” Maya ran her hand down the thick mane of Beau’s hair and felt it there as she’d felt it more and more often these days: the almost imperceptible shake of his head. He immediately tried to compensate for the head-shake by smiling at her. But the smile was brittle and forced. In her raw emotional state she was almost tempted to stalk into the garden and have a little weep of self-pity. But no, she’d done this, she’d broken this family on a whim, she needed to deal with all the messy bits she’d left in her wake.
Beau was like her. Such an anxious little people-pleaser, so keen to do the right thing, to be accepted and adored. But deep down inside he was just as full of bad thoughts and dark feelings as every other child in the world.
“Snap!” said Beau.
“You are a legend,” said Adrian, giving Beau a high five.
Beau beamed at him. Not the funny, crooked little smile he’d just given her, but a big, loving punch of a smile.
“One more?” Beau asked, his face upturned to his father’s.
“One more,” said Adrian. “And then back out into the garden.”
“OK.” He was already dealing out the pack.
“You all right?” Adrian asked Maya over the top of Beau’s head.
She nodded.
“Bed situation all sorted out?”
“Umhm.” She nodded again.
He smiled at her. It was that same smile he’d been giving her ever since her night out with Sara. That injured smile. That please don’t hit me again smile. It didn’t make her feel sorry for him though. It made her want to scream.
This, she’d realized, this was how he reconciled himself to the terrible compromises of his life. He simply pretended that things didn’t happen. He edited them out. Blacked them out. Carried on regardless. It was quite disconcerting and she longed now to talk to Caroline, to talk to Susie, to find out how it really was when Adrian left. Because she’d only ever heard Adrian’s side and she could see now that Adrian’s side was a crime scene stripped bare of even a shred of real evidence.
“Where is everyone?” she asked.
“Caroline, Susie and Cat have gone to the supermarket; everyone else is in the garden. I think.” He smiled pitifully at her again. She resisted the urge to slap him and damped down the familiar sense of irritation that she had not been included in a “wives’ outing,” had not been consulted on a shopping list, had once again been relegated to the status of unpaid au pair girl.
“OK,” she said, her voice deadened with resentment. “I’ll go and see what the kids are up to.”
Otis was throwing balls for the dogs. Pearl and Charlotte were playing croquet and shouting at Otis for allowing the dogs to run through their croquet pitch. Charlotte looked up at Maya as she approached. “Hi!” she said brightly. “We’re just starting a new round. Want to join in?”
“Sure,” said Maya.
Charlotte walked across the lawn to the croquet bag and pulled out a mallet for her. “There you go. We’ll play in age order, youngest to oldest. So Pearl, me and you. Oops, not to say that you’re old, obviously.” She squeezed Maya’s arm and grimaced and Maya truly could not decide whether she was being genuine or disingenuous.
“Well, that depends who you’re comparing me to, really,” she said, lightly.
“Ha, yes. It’s quite a spread in this family.”
“Yes,” said Pearl, counting on her fingers, “it goes four, nine, eleven, eighteen, twenty-two, thirty-three, forty-three, forty-seven, forty-eight. Like lottery numbers.”
“Which one is forty-eight?” Charlotte asked Pearl.
“Susie. She’s the oldest, then dad, then Caroline, then Maya, then Luke, then Cat, then Otis, then me, then Beau. And then whoever comes next.” She smiled at Maya.
“If someone comes next,” Maya replied.
“When someone comes next.”
“Oh!” said Charlotte. “Are you and Adrian trying for a baby then?”
Maya forced a smile. “Sort of,” she said. “But not very successfully so far!”
Charlotte’s face fell and she squeezed Maya’s arm again. “Oh God, I’m sorry,” she said. “That must be really tough.”
Maya arranged her face into an expression of terrible sadness. Her ongoing inability to conceive had gone from being a matter of worry and unhappiness to a matter of relief and marvelous good luck. And, now that she and Adrian had stopped having sex altogether, to a matter to which she no longer gave any thought at all.
“I’m sure it will happen for you,” said Charlotte, her hand still on Maya’s arm. “I’m sure you and Adrian will find a way. It must be hard, though,” she said, her cornflower eyes boring into Maya’s, “to be surrounded by all these children, if you think you might not have one of your own.
“Sorry,” she went on. “Christ. Sorry. That was tactless. Sorry. I just meant, you’re so good with the kids. You’d make a lovely mummy. You will make a lovely mummy.”
“Thank you,” Maya said. “I’m being philosophical.”
“Best thing to do,” said Charlotte, and gave Maya’s arm one last squeeze.
Pearl stood at the other side of the croquet pitch, having got her ball clear through the first eight hoops while they’d chatted. “I just got thirty points,” she said. “Your turn, Charlotte.”
“On my way,” Charlotte called out with a smile. She turned back to Maya. “By the way,” she said, “I really like your haircut! It suits you.”
“You think?” said Maya, her hand upon the bare nape of her neck.
“Yes. Totally. But then, you’re so pretty, you could get away with anything.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. I was just saying to Luke in the car on the way here, I don’t think you really know how pretty you are.”
Maya smiled awkwardly. “Nowhere near as pretty as you though.”
“I wasn’t fishing for compliments,” said Charlotte, her voice suddenly edgy.
“No, I know you weren’t. I was just—”
“This isn’t a competition.” She lingered over the break between her words. “Is it?”
“What?”
Charlotte stared at her coldly. Then the frost thawed and she smiled. “My turn,” she said brightly. “Better get back to the game.”