Nobody's Perfect

by Stephanie Butland

  Spencer looks at her, pain shining from his eyes. ‘We went on a boat on the canals. Walked through the red-light district. Went to the Anne Frank museum. She let me hold her hand. We—’

  ‘I didn’t say I wanted to know.’ Kate’s voice is autumn leaves at first frost. She’s thinking of how Daisy whispered that she liked it when it was just the two of them. Well, it’s possible that a five-year-old child has better judgement of men than Kate has. When this conversation began, she was waiting for one great hurt. But in fact it’s a bouquet of small hurts, each one ready to bloom to a bruise, and leave her with pain everywhere. And she is sure they haven’t got to the end of it yet.

  He nods. ‘I’m sorry, Kate. I know it’s too little, too late, but I’m trying to be honest.’ She cannot stop herself from snorting, and he nods, accepting. Kate keeps her knees pressed together, her hands in her lap, as though only the tension in her own body can keep her together. ‘While we were away, I told her that I loved her, and she said’ – she thinks for a horrible moment that he might cry. He doesn’t, although his voice gives him away – ‘she said, “I know.” And then she turned on her other side and pretended she was asleep. Then she went to sleep for real, and I just lay there. All night.’

  ‘What did you think about?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That night. She slept, you didn’t. What did you think about?’ Kate is thinking of the times when Spencer has slept and she hasn’t; how she’s been listening for Daisy, planning their future, regretting her past. How she’s watched him and thought of how perfect he was.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ Spencer says, but he looks at Kate as he says it and it’s as though he understands that he must not tell even the smallest lie. ‘I thought about leaving, but I couldn’t afford to buy a new fare, and anyway we were travelling back the next morning. Then I thought about how she’d led me on, but I knew that wasn’t really true. But I think’ – he dips his forehead into his hands, and his words are muffled – ‘I think I mostly imagined how one day, we’d be on holiday in New York or Rome, in bed, and we would laugh about this. I thought about her saying, “I love you” and me saying “I know” and then we would smile at each other and talk about how far we’d come since we were in Amsterdam.’

  ‘She sounds awful,’ Kate says again, but it comes out softly. Spencer should have told her all of this, and she can’t even begin to unpick what Amanda and Elise mean for her and Daisy. But she would feel sad for anyone whose lover responded to ‘I love you’ with ‘I know’.

  ‘I was the one who was awful,’ Spencer says, taking his head from his hands and looking at her in a way that makes her know she is getting the unfiltered truth now. ‘She stopped inviting me over, but I still went. I used to stand on the drive and as soon as Elise’s bedroom light went out, I’d knock on the door. She tried to talk to me, the first few times, but I – I didn’t want to believe what she was saying. I got the tattoo. A for Amanda, S for Spencer. I showed her and she said she wished I hadn’t done it. She started sending her nanny to pick Elise up. The nanny couldn’t look me in the eye. I still didn’t get the message.’ He pauses, but Kate says nothing; watching, waiting. ‘She told me to stop going to the house or she would call the police, so I stopped going to the house. But I texted her until she changed her number. So I started to put notes in Elise’s book bag.’

  ‘You did what?’ This is not the Spencer Kate knows. It’s as though the air around her gets colder; her blood has slowed to a crawl. This can’t be.

  ‘I know,’ Spencer says, shaking his head. ‘I feel sick just thinking about it now. And, of course, Amanda did what any right-minded parent would do and she went to the Head. I saw her on the day she came in. She was laughing with the school secretary while she waited. She looked exactly the same. She was wearing a coat I hadn’t seen before. It was a sort of’ – he looks up, as though the word is above him, in the air – ‘brocade, I think it’s called. Or embroidered. Heavy-looking, reds and browns. It suited her. I hadn’t been sleeping. I’d lost about a stone. I knew then that I needed to give the whole thing up. And the weird thing is, I started to feel better almost as soon as I’d decided.’

  ‘That’s the weird thing?’ Kate says. She has become more and more still as he has talked; first fidgeting through the discomfort, the worry of it; she’s quietened, knowing that she needed to hear it. She knows this calm she feels won’t last.

  He shakes his head, half smiles, though his face drops to seriousness again when she doesn’t respond. ‘I know. The Head called me in that afternoon. I thought I was a goner, but he said that Amanda had explained what had happened, and that she took some responsibility for the situation and had requested that no formal action be taken, as long as I didn’t make any inappropriate contact with her or Elise anymore.’

  ‘That was all?’ Kate asks. Considering what Spencer is facing for being with her – for doing literally nothing wrong – this seems absurd. And unfair. Still, Amanda sounds like the sort of woman who could bend the world to her will. Kate closes her eyes, forces herself to take a breath. She imagines Melissa, and her mother, both telling her off for blaming a woman for what a man did wrong. Reminds herself that she was the other woman, once; that Mike was married and what they did was way worse than Amanda, who, objectively, is guilty only of knowing what she wanted. Oh, her head hurts. Not as much as her heart.

  Spencer sighs. ‘Not really. He tore me off a strip. I can still remember exactly what he said. As though it was yesterday.’

  ‘Tell me.’ If she is hurting this badly then he can hurt, too.

  He looks at her for a moment, sees that she’s serious, closes his eyes, and almost recites: ‘He said he was disappointed, that the minimum standard for a teacher, before anything else, was that a child should be safe and protected while in the school’s care, and that included being kept safe and protected from any complications in adult relationships. If Ms Lomax—’

  ‘Ms Lomax?’ Kate interrupts, even though she knows the answer. She needs to be sure of every detail of this.

  ‘Sorry. Amanda,’ Spencer says. Kate hears how his mouth softens those hard ‘a’s.

  ‘Go on,’ she says.

  He nods, looking like a man without a coat in a snowstorm. ‘He said, if Ms Lomax had chosen to make a formal complaint, then it would have gone very badly for me, and for the school, and I had brought the profession into disrepute. He said I was lucky and that I should consider this episode a warning. I felt like a child, and an idiot.’ It looks as though he has run out of breath, of steam. It looks as though he will cry. He rubs his hand across his eyes. Kate is looking at her hands, which are still in her lap. She can hear her own breathing: fast, shallow.

  ‘Is that all?’ she asks. She wants them to be at the end of this confession.

  ‘Not quite.’ She can see that he’s bracing himself to say it, whatever it is, and then it comes out, all in a rush. ‘He said that, from the outside, the situation could look as though I was preying on a vulnerable family, and using a child’s learning disability to further my own ends.’ Kate looks across at him, her hand at her collarbone now, as though it had been pulled on a string. Hearing it said, so coldly, like that – knowing that someone else had articulated the fear that is now making its way through her, from the heart out, from the head down, from the stomach through – she shivers.

  ‘He asked me what I was thinking of doing at the end of my probation year. The message was pretty clear. I said I had been thinking that maybe I should get some experience in a bigger school. He said he thought that was an excellent idea, and as long as I learned from my time here, I could be a good teacher. And that’s it.’

  ‘Yes.’ She nods. Oh, what she would give for Daisy to wake now, to give her an excuse to move, to be away from this situation. She thinks of all the things she wants to say. They jostle at the base of her throat. Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Did Daisy’s condition make me more, or less, attractive to you? How can I trust you? How c
ould you? Don’t you know how impossible I thought it was that I would ever meet someone, let alone someone who seemed so perfect for me? ‘This is why you didn’t tell your mum about Daisy having cystic fibrosis, isn’t it?’

  He nods. ‘I knew she would be concerned,’ he says. ‘I thought she would understand, once she’d met you. That this was different.’

  Kate nods back, though she’s not agreeing, she’s not saying it’s OK. ‘But you still didn’t tell me. Until today.’

  They sit in silence for a minute, two, three. Then Spencer says, ‘I should go.’

  Kate looks up from her hands, her ragged, unvarnished fingernails. Amanda doubtless had a fortnightly manicure. She tells herself again that Amanda is not her enemy, closes her hands into fists so she cannot see her nails. ‘Yes,’ she says. He puts a kiss that she neither accepts nor rejects on the top of her head. Kate finds that she cannot move.

  At the top of the stairs, he pauses. ‘I always thought Amanda broke my heart,’ he says, quietly, ‘but I broke my own heart. I didn’t listen to her. I didn’t read the signs. I thought that wanting her to love me was’ – he pauses, swallows – ‘was romantic. I broke my own heart, then. But you could break it, now. And if you do, it’s everything I deserve.’

  ‘Yes.’ Kate doesn’t know what she is agreeing with. Maybe she is thinking of Mike, the way she made love out of nothing. Or maybe it’s that yes, he deserves every painful word that she could throw his way. She doesn’t know, but it is the only word she has, so she says it again, ‘Yes.’ And perhaps he understands or perhaps he doesn’t, but he nods, says he will let her know what happens tomorrow, and then he’s gone.

  Chapter 20

  Mid-April, the next day

  K

  ATE SPENT THE REST of Sunday night in a back-and-forth of justifying Spencer then condemning him, of composing texts to him that she deleted before sending, of wondering whether to call Melissa and then realising that if she tried to say any of this out loud she would have to believe it, have to admit that all she thought was true is – well, that’s the thing. She just doesn’t know. When she wakes, it’s with the feeling of a bad dream unremembered.

  The Monday-morning school drop-off is a hubbub with only Miss Orr in evidence. Kate texts Spencer to say she hopes that all goes well; because she does, and because she is half-hoping for a reply, for something that will make her feel the misery of last night less acutely. But she isn’t surprised when no answer comes. She’s not sure there’s anything he can say.

  She thinks he will let her know the outcome, but all day, Kate’s phone refuses to ring. The only texts she gets are from Jo, suggesting that Daisy come for tea one day, and from her mother, offering to babysit one night. She spends a couple of hours looking through photos on her phone, deleting all of the duplicates and the blurred shots of Daisy, moving faster than the camera as she launches herself after the dogs or starts to laugh. Her heart lurches every time Spencer’s face appears. When looking at photos gets too much, she heads to Facebook and makes herself cry looking at her friends’ lives. Then – she will not be defined by the misery a man visits on her, ever again – she goes and sits in Adventures in Bread, drinking coffee and picking at a ham and cheese croissant, ordering new pyjamas online for her and Daisy, until pick-up time.

  There’s no sign of Spencer. Kate and Daisy go to the park with Jo, Jack and Amelia: Kate keeps her phone in her pocket rather than in her bag, ringer turned up as high as it will go. On the walk home, she asks Daisy, ‘What did you do with Spencer today?’

  Daisy looks up. ‘It’s Mr Swanson at school. You said that.’

  Kate laughs, despite herself. ‘Sorry. What did you do with Mr Swanson today?’

  Daisy ponders. ‘We growed some cress, but it won’t be ready for a little while. And we talked about vegetables.’

  ‘OK,’ Kate says. ‘Anything else? Was Mr Swanson there all the time?’ How, she wonders, did I become a woman pumping her child for information about her lover?

  Daisy rolls her eyes. ‘I was busy,’ she says, ‘with Amelia.’

  When they get home, they do jigsaws and colouring-in until teatime, when Kate suggests that they go to the Italian restaurant and get a takeaway pizza. (As she pays, she realises how much money she’s spent today, just because she is sad. She can’t let that go on.) She and Daisy eat on the sofa watching TV, tucked under a blanket, and Kate is almost enjoying herself, except that she’s desperate to know what’s happened to Spencer. It occurs to her, as she sits next to Daisy’s bed after putting her light out, that she’s acting as though the outcome of the disciplinary interview will tell her what to do next. But in her heart, she already knows what must come next. She cries, quietly, in the silent evening.

  Spencer knocks on the door at 9.15, just as Kate was sure that he had left school, packed up the contents of his flat, and was already driving back to Edinburgh, and she would never see him again. It’s raining. When she opens the door, he says, ‘I didn’t feel as though I should use my key.’ He steps inside and puts out an arm; Kate walks into the space it makes for her, before she remembers how everything is broken. But the embrace is just right: warm and strong. He kisses the top of her head. ‘Well, I still have a job,’ he says.

  ‘Come up.’ Kate sits where she sat the previous evening, listening to his tale of Amanda and Elise; he sits where he sat, telling her the whole truth, but only because she had called him out on keeping a secret. ‘Well? What happened? I was waiting for a message all day. I didn’t know what to think.’

  Spencer says, ‘I know. I’m sorry. But – well, I had to promise to be completely professional in school time and so I thought if I sneaked off to the toilets to text you then that wasn’t exactly starting as I meant to go on. But I was thinking of you.’ Kate remembers how she loves his face, when it’s serious. There’s the shadow of a frown on his brow. He moves so he’s sitting next to her, touches her face, lays his palm against her neck, below the ear, starts to pull her towards him. She puts her hand on his chest, pushes back. It cannot be this easy. He cannot pretend last night didn’t happen.

  ‘Tell me,’ she says, ‘what happened. Please.’

  ‘Well’ – Spencer leans back and looks up, recalling – ‘Jane called me in at ten, and she was sitting behind her desk, so I thought it was going to be bad, but she said that she had spoken to several members of staff and although there were some areas of my conduct that I might want to reflect on, she had no real cause for concern and saw no reason to take the matter further.’

  He smiles, his face inviting her to smile back, but she doesn’t have a smile in her. She waits, tucking her hair out of the way. When the silence has expanded too far she asks, ‘So what do you need to reflect on?’

  ‘Well, same old, really. Try to be part of the school community. Although, to be fair, she was good about that – she did say that she can understand why I would stay out of the staffroom. And to make sure I follow the correct channels as far as Daisy is concerned.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Oh,’ Spencer says, ‘nothing that I shouldn’t have been doing already. Treating Daisy like any other child. If she’s ill I take her to the office, and they call you. That kind of thing. I was a fool not to be doing it in the first place. It just – I know how you worry about her, and it seemed right to keep you updated. I couldn’t really go to the office every day and ask them to call you to tell you that everything was OK.’ He looks straight at her. ‘I’m not saying I was right.’

  Kate nods. It’s hard to read his face.

  ‘I don’t deserve you, Kate,’ he says.

  ‘Jane doesn’t know about Amanda and Elise?’

  ‘No. If she did it would have been very different.’

  ‘Like it’s different for us.’ Kate is fighting to keep her voice calm.

  She hasn’t felt like this since she found out that she was pregnant. Her mind is a Newton’s Cradle, thoughts striking thoughts like ball bearings on wires, one extreme
reached and then thoughts striking thoughts until they are back to the other extreme. After all, she has been the person that Spencer once was: dazzled by someone older, carried along, rescued from loneliness by something that looked like intimacy but turned out, when viewed from a distance, to be sex. Part of her wants to open her arms to him, tell him that he’s been an idiot, and say that she understands. Because, at one end of this spectrum of thought, she does understand.

  But. Spencer has lied to her. Spencer has lain in her bed and told her about girlfriends, about internet dating and missed chances. But he has never, once, mentioned Amanda. He has listened to her talk about Mike, about that awful madness and everything that came out of it, and he has never once said, let me tell you of my own disastrous love affair, the one that changed the course of my life.

  And he lied about the tattoo. He didn’t choose to omit, to brush over, to change the subject; he chose to lie. Kate – or at least the part of her that is looking for a place to hold onto, that will allow her to brush this off, to take a breath and see that it’s not as bad as it seems – cannot think of a single lie that she has told Spencer.

  He’s at the other side of the coffee table, but it feels as though he’s a continent away. If Kate reaches out, she feels as though she won’t be able to touch him, or if she does, that there will be no answering warmth, nothing that she can feel. Because now she is thinking about why he lied.

  A girl with Down’s syndrome. Another with cystic fibrosis. It stands to reason that women with children with special needs are more likely to be single. The chances of a relationship withstanding the constant care, the leeching of attention, that a child with special needs requires are, Kate knows, lower than the chance of other relationships surviving. From what she’s seen at the hospital and on the CF message boards, a child with CF will either weld a couple together or prise the relationship apart in the places where it isn’t strong. You could argue, Kate thinks, that a single teacher is more likely to form a relationship with a single parent of a child with special needs because teacher and parent will spend more time together. There will be meetings, school-door conversations, and if there’s the slightest of attractions between the two then there will be opportunity for it to grow. After all, that’s what’s happened here, in Throckton. That’s what’s happened to her.