Nobody's Perfect

by Stephanie Butland

  Still. Here she is. She’s sitting in the dark, mulling over a past that is dead in more ways than one, when a good man who loves her is part of her life. She understands why Melissa and her mother want to protect her, but she knows her mind and she knows her heart.

  *

  The next day, Kate and Daisy meet Spencer at Richenda and Blake’s, where they’d been invited for lunch. It feels as though Richenda is watching Kate and Spencer especially closely; Kate’s glad when her mum is persuaded to go and bounce on the trampoline by Daisy, while Kate and Spencer wash up in near silence. Later, at Beau’s Heights, they get caught in two separate April showers; Daisy is well enough bundled up in warm clothes and waterproofs to stay snug and dry, but even so, Kate feels anxiety start to gnaw at her. Maybe they should have gone to the soft-play centre instead. The quiet of the countryside seems to amplify their silence. Every time Kate thinks of something that she wants to talk about, she discounts it. Either it references a happy future – so she sounds as though she’s ignoring the possibility of things going wrong for Spencer in the morning – or it’s a ‘what we could do in a worst-case scenario’, but she doesn’t want him to think that she has no faith in him. He’s obviously, and understandably, preoccupied, but Kate can’t help wishing he would understand that she is worried, too. She has skin in the game: Melissa’s words won’t leave her. Neither will the niggling thought that she doesn’t know, for sure, why Spencer came here. She finds that she is saying, ‘Are you OK?’ with a regularity that she can see is grating on him. And he isn’t asking her how she is doing.

  At the top of Beau’s Heights, he turns to her and says, ‘Kate. What will be will be. Let’s try to have a nice day.’ He smiles and kisses her forehead, but she moves her head, not realising what he intends, and his mouth catches at the side of her temple, sticks in her hair. He laughs, and so does she, and they make the descent back down to Throckton in something that feels more like a companionable silence than a dead space. Kate links her arm through his; when they pass a family who have a child in Year One, Kate feels him stiffen as they say hello, and sees the mother’s eyes widen as she realises what she’s seeing. As they continue on their way, the furtive hiss of under-the-breath conversation follows them. Kate squeezes Spencer’s arm, and he looks down at her and smiles, but it’s not a happy smile. Their conversations about how they aren’t doing anything wrong, and it doesn’t matter what people think, hang around them in the air. Kate remembers the sour, dark taste of being talked about, and tries not think about what might happen tomorrow, when the double-take of a Year One mother might seem like the least of their worries.

  *

  Kate is glad when bath time comes, and she can leave Spencer to his thoughts, while she gets pulled into Daisy’s talk of being a bridesmaid and whether she might be able to have a sleepover at Amelia’s in the summer, whether Granny and Blake might take her on holiday to a beach. She longs for her daughter’s sense of possibility.

  Once Daisy is sleeping, Kate walks back into the living room to find Spencer waiting for her with a smile. ‘This hasn’t been our best day,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. Everything will be easier when Jane’s done her investigation.’

  ‘I don’t mind us not having such a great day. But—’ She hesitates. Maybe it makes more sense to curl up together, then be ready for what the next week brings. Today has taken more out of it than it’s put in.

  ‘Kate—’ He looks as serious and remote as he did when she invited him to Daisy’s party, seven months ago. ‘If there’s something bothering you, please tell me. I need to know you’re with me.’

  ‘I was just wondering—’ And now she’s saying it, looking into those honest eyes, she feels unkind for even bringing it up. ‘I was just wondering why you left your last job, and the one before that. You said something, on Friday night. About gossip.’

  The feeling of betraying him gets too much. Kate goes to the sink, runs water against her wrist until the cold bites, fills a glass. When she looks up at Spencer, he’s watching her with a seriousness, a stillness, that makes her blood start to beat a warning in her temples.

  He looks at her for a beat too long. ‘It was time for a change. That’s all. Forget it, Kate.’

  She inhales. She knows him well enough – the thought a splinter in her heart – to know he isn’t being truthful. ‘I think,’ she says, ‘you had better tell me what happened.’ She ignores the part of her that whispers she would really rather not know. Skin in the game. Spencer looks at her, again, as though she’s a puzzle he’s trying to solve. He puts his head in his hands.

  ‘If I tell you and you tell anyone about it, I’m done for,’ Spencer says, into his palms. ‘And you’re too honest.’

  ‘Tell me.’ Kate can feel her heart shaking in her chest, but her voice is cold and calm. She sits opposite him. His eyes look fevered; his hands clench, stretch, clench. It’s hard to believe how often they have sat here, laughing, talking, happy, as though together they were the whole universe.

  ‘You don’t want to know.’ The look on his face tells her that he’s right; she absolutely doesn’t want to know. But she knows, too, that she absolutely must. She remembers the terrible things that she has coped with in her life: Mike’s death; the possibility that she might be carrying a baby with cystic fibrosis; the confirmation that Daisy was going to lead a constrained, curtailed life and that Kate was going to have to step up and make it the best it could be. And the minor crises, too: her parents’ divorce, the death of Daisy’s paternal grandmother. The postnatal depression. She can cope when she has to. But she really doesn’t see why she has to. Not again. It’s her turn to put her head in her hands.

  When she looks up, he’s looking straight at her. ‘It’s all in the past,’ he says. ‘That’s the first thing I need you to know. It was – it was a long time ago.’

  ‘So was your childhood,’ she says quietly, ‘but you told me about that.’ She is trying to look neutral, to look patient – it’s still possible, isn’t it, that whatever it is that he’s worried about is insignificant, or is some bit of classroom business that is hugely important to a school but won’t matter at all to her. But already, she knows that it isn’t. A flash of hurt, from crown to toe.

  He’s looking at her, with the seriousness that she loves. Except that now – how quickly things are changing – she suspects that he’s calculating: what to tell her, what she might conceivably discover, what he can continue to keep secret. ‘Tell me the whole story,’ she says, ‘beginning to end. Don’t leave anything out.’

  Spencer nods, leans back, although his hands will not be still. ‘It was all—’ he begins, but he stops. He looks into her face, and it seems so open, so worried and so anxious – he is almost as pale as she is, for once – that she almost reaches out to touch him, to say, let’s talk about it tomorrow. She is tired. They are both tired. It can wait. She opens her mouth to speak and sees that he is hoping for her to put an end to this confession. And then she thinks of how she told him every gruesome detail about her and Mike – the way she followed him, texted him, sneaked out of the house to meet him, left flowers in his widow’s garden after he died. There have been plenty of times when he could have told her everything about – whatever this is.

  ‘Just start at the beginning.’ She tries to sound gentle; her voice comes out afraid.

  He sighs, slumps, resigned now to whatever it is. Kate sits back, knots her fingers, listens, although now that it’s coming she doesn’t want to hear it after all. ‘It was my first teaching post,’ he says. ‘A year’s probation, which is fairly standard. It was a school near Maidenhead, bigger than the one here, two-form entry and up to Year Six. I was teaching Year One. There were twenty kids in my class, and one of them was Elise.’ He is speaking more and more quietly, and Kate is leaning in to hear him.

  ‘Elise was an only child with Down’s syndrome. Her mother was single, and older. Her father lived abroad. Elise was a sweet kid who got frustrated easily. Amanda, her mo
ther, picked her up most days and part of Elise’s routine was to walk her through the classroom, tell her what had happened during the day. It seemed harmless enough. The teaching assistant and I would clear up, they would walk around; Elise would talk about what she’d done.

  ‘Amanda used to chat to me, just a little bit, while Elise was putting her coat on. I wasn’t very happy. It was a new place and I was lonely, and having worked so bloody hard to get into teaching I wasn’t really sure whether I should have done. It seemed to be a lot more nose-wiping and a lot less shaping the future than I’d dreamed, in my heady idealistic student days.’ She can see that he’s said it that way on purpose, in the hope that Kate will laugh at him, but she keeps her face tight and still. She won’t be deflected. ‘She was – nice. Funny. Clever. She seemed to really know what she was about.’

  ‘Like me?’ Kate asks.

  ‘Yes,’ Spencer says, then, ‘No.’ He shakes his head. ‘There’s no right answer to that, is there?’

  ‘There might have been, if you’d told me before now.’ Now that the tide of panic has dropped in Kate, now that she can see the outline of what Spencer is going to tell her, Kate can feel that she is going to be angry. She isn’t yet. But it’s coming. And she has no time for Spencer’s self-pity.

  ‘One day she asked me how I was getting on. I told her I was struggling. It was a Friday. I had been wondering about going home to Edinburgh that weekend. I would have more or less had to turn round and come home as soon as I’d arrived. And I was worried that if I did go home, I would never come back. She listened. She didn’t say much but invited me to come over and have a drink, when Elise was in bed. I did.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Do you need to know the details?’

  ‘Yes. I do.’ Kate thinks of herself at the hospital, watching all of Daisy’s medical procedures as though she is an examiner, only crying and shaking when it is over and she has turned away. ‘What was she like?’

  ‘What was she like?’ He repeats the question, as though he doesn’t understand it, but Kate holds his gaze and he drops his head. ‘She was in her early forties. She seemed very confident and sorted. She wore jasmine oil for perfume. She was’ – he waves his hand in mid-air – ‘not very tall. And a small build. She did martial arts. She had a smile that made her look a bit sarcastic. Blue eyes. Brown hair.’ Kate finds herself adding details: linen trousers and silk shirts, high-thread-count cotton bedlinen. Goes to gallery openings and has a cleaner. Stop it, Kate, she tells herself. Amanda is not your enemy. Something strikes Kate: it sounds as though Amanda had money. More than me, probably, but money all the same. That’s something she and I have in common.

  ‘Amanda.’ Kate’s brain is working overtime; she thinks of something else. ‘Your tattoo.’ Spencer looks surprised, as though this is the last thing he expected her to say. But then he looks away, and Kate knows. If she trusted herself to touch him she would reach for his shirt, pull it loose, and take a close look. But she doesn’t need to. She knows, now, what the oddly angular design is. ‘It was an “A” and an “S” and you’ve gone back and had it changed.’ Once she’s seen that the tattoo is made up of overlapped letters she can’t unsee it.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘The tattooist said half of his work was disguising old tattoos.’ Kate remembers how he said that he would have her face tattooed on her chest; it was a joke, of course it was, but it seems a tattoo is the way he tells someone he loves them. Kate wants to write down every loving thing he ever said to her, examine their meanings anew.

  ‘Does Amanda have the same tattoo?’ Kate asks. Her brain can’t seem to focus on the important things, like Elise, and Down’s syndrome, and Spencer telling her that part of the trouble at school was the suspicion that he was exploiting a vulnerable parent of a vulnerable child. She can’t ask those questions. Not yet.

  ‘No,’ Spencer says, and he laughs, a short, bitter sound that makes Kate look away. ‘She said I was an idiot. She’s got a scorpion, on her ankle. She’s a graphic artist and that’s her – well, signature, I suppose you’d call it.’

  Kate makes a noise that comes from the back of her mouth: a snort or the beginning of a sob. She doesn’t know which it is. She touches her face; her eyes are dry. He looks at her, as though he’s checking for permission to continue. She nods.

  ‘Well, we started – seeing each other.’

  ‘Did it start that night?’

  ‘Yes,’ Spencer says.

  ‘How?’ She doesn’t want to know and at the same time she can’t not ask. Part of Kate already knows that this will be important, later, that she will have to lay her and Daisy’s relationship with Spencer next to that of Amanda and Elise, and see how much they match. And from there, decide how much of this story is going to be coincidence, how much she has been manipulated, used. Does he love her, or is it a vulnerable woman with a child with special educational needs and a bit of money in the bank that he’s after?

  ‘Well’ – Spencer rubs his hand across his eyes, as though he is trying to remember, but she doesn’t buy it, not for a second – ‘she was very – sure of herself. Direct. She actually said, “Would you like to come to bed, Spencer, you do know you can’t stay the night.” I said I did. It had been six months since I’d split up with Billie—’

  ‘Oh yes, you told me about her,’ Kate says, emphasising the last word.

  He continues as though he hasn’t heard; maybe he hasn’t. It seems that now he’s begun he seems determined that she should know everything. ‘And the sex was over before it started. I was embarrassed. I thought she would just ask me to leave. But she said we’d do it her way when I’d recovered.’

  Kate nods.

  ‘I love you, Kate,’ he says. It’s a plea.

  ‘Did you love Amanda?’ she asks, then, more quietly, ‘Did you love Elise?’

  ‘I didn’t have a lot to do with Elise, outside school,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t like – this. Elise had a routine and she slept well and though she had issues and sometimes problems they were – predictable. It was a three-storey house and Amanda had a bathroom, a bedroom and a walk-in wardrobe on the top floor. Elise was on the first floor. If she did get up we’d hear her’ – Kate sees how he winces at that ‘we’, maybe because he sees how it makes Kate flinch – ‘and I’d just’ – but he stops, because Kate is not laughing exactly, but making a laugh-shaped sound, with the humour taken out.

  ‘You hid in the wardrobe?’ she says. ‘Spencer, that’s ridiculous.’ But then she thinks back to how, before Daisy knew about the two of them, she would watch to make sure he didn’t fall asleep, bundle him out and into the night.

  ‘I know,’ he says.

  ‘So, what went wrong?’ Kate asks. She’s had enough detail, now. She’s got the measure of Amanda, her independence, her income. She’s full of a dark sadness. Lately she has thought she is able to read Spencer. She imagined she could tell, by looking at him, how his day was; whether he is tired or calm or about to suggest they go and do something. Her subconscious has learned to calculate based on mouth and eyes and set of shoulders and the clothes he’s chosen to wear. She thought they were close enough for her to do this; she thought she knew when to ask him what was wrong and when to greet him with a grin and pull his hands round her waist and say, ‘Daisy’s asleep already, let’s play.’ But she didn’t know him at all. Not really. ‘Something must have happened, something bad, or you’d have told me about her. I thought we had told each other everything.’ She means it as a statement, but it comes out as something feeble, childish almost. He reaches out to touch her. Although she doesn’t move away, her skin stiffens under his touch. He takes his hand back into his lap.

  ‘It was me,’ he says. ‘I read more into it than there was. Amanda was – she wasn’t like anyone I’d ever known before. She was so unapologetic. She had enough money – really enough, so that she didn’t have to think about money at all. I’d never known anyone like that before. I mean – there were a few people like that, at
uni, but none of them were training to be teachers. She had a full-time nanny and she worked from home. She picked and chose what she wanted to do, so although she always collected Elise from school, she very rarely brought her, because she preferred to work in the morning when the light in her studio was good. She ordered sushi in. I’d never eaten sushi.’

  Kate says, ‘She sounds awful,’ before she can stop herself. This isn’t about Amanda, she tells herself. It’s about Spencer. She can’t tell which part of what he said made her react: the money, the nanny, the studio, the sushi.

  Spencer shrugs. ‘It’s hard to judge, now. I think what I liked was that she was so different, and because she’d – picked – me, I felt special.’ He looks towards the window. The world is dark, now. His voice quiets. ‘I think I got a bit obsessed.’

  ‘Obsessed?’

  Spencer looks back at her, with an imitation of a smile. ‘I don’t know what you think of what I’ve told you, but worse is coming. If you’re already done with me, you could save me some humiliation. I’ll just go.’

  ‘I think I deserve better than that.’

  He raises his hands, lets them drop. ‘Of course you do,’ he says. ‘Of course you do.’ His voice is tight, now, as though his throat hurts, and every muscle in his body seems clenched. ‘She took me away for the weekend. Elise was with her father. We went to Amsterdam. I’d never been before. We did the usual things.’

  ‘I don’t know what the usual things are. I’ve never been to Amsterdam. I’ve only ever had one night away with a boyfriend. It was supposed to be a weekend, but my daughter was ill.’ Kate can hear how cold she sounds, and she’s glad.