by Tina Seskis
Sissy still made an effort to come to these get-togethers, to keep in touch with everyone, even Juliette, who’d been as good to Sissy as she could be under the circumstances – but she couldn’t cope with seeing Stephen these days. Sissy just couldn’t understand why Juliette would stay with a man like him. She’d actually quite liked Stephen once, especially when they’d gone to America together. He’d seemed quite decent when she’d got to know him better, beneath the bravado – but things had become awkward when Stephen and Renée had got it together. Although it was true he hadn’t technically been going out with Juliette at the time – after all, she’d finished with him, said she wanted to enjoy a bit of freedom – Juliette hadn’t been at all happy for one of her best friends to sleep with him instead. Not that it had lasted long: Renée had seemed to go off Stephen as quickly as she’d got into him, which was typical Renée of course, but Sissy always thought it had been more than that. Perhaps Renée couldn’t bear to risk losing Juliette’s friendship, no matter how much she may have liked Stephen at the time.
Sissy sat quietly watching Juliette and Renée, who appeared to be talking to each other for a change, Natasha having stalked off to dunk her unlovely feet in the fountain, definitely upset about something. Juliette was being cool, distant, and Renée, although chatty enough, barely gave her friend a glance, and their conversation was stilted, over-polite, even though they’d been best friends once. It was ridiculous after all these years – it just made these occasions awkward, agonising even. Sissy didn’t know why they both couldn’t move on, it was all such a long time ago now, and although they pretended to get along, had never actually fallen out, it was obvious they didn’t like each other any more.
The strange part though, Sissy thought, was Stephen’s role in all this. She’d never quite understood it. As the years passed he seemed to have changed, gradually lost any kind of morality – plus it was quite unbelievable what he’d do in the name of journalism these days. Sissy couldn’t bear him now, and she found that if she saw his smug jowly face appear on the TV she would have to switch it straight off, unwilling to let him into her house, even electronically, after what had happened. God knows how Juliette stayed married to him; she’d been so sweet, so down-to-earth once, but now she seemed tainted by him almost. Stephen acted as though he were above everyone these days, above the law even. Sissy shuddered.
When Natasha came back from the fountain at last, obviously still smarting but with a small, tight smile fixed determinedly across her face, Sissy shifted across to make room for her to sit down, knocking into Siobhan’s wine glass as she did so.
‘Ohhhh, Sissy!’ said Siobhan. ‘That’s gone all over me! Look what you’ve done to my jeans.’
‘Oh shush, Siobhan,’ said Renée mildly. ‘It was an accident, it’s no big deal. And anyway, you should’ve been holding your glass, it’s too wobbly on this rug.’
‘But I’m soaking!’ wailed Siobhan.
‘Oh, just get over it,’ said Renée, more sternly now, which made Sissy feel bad for Siobhan. ‘At least it’s not red wine – and look at the state of them anyway.’ Renée looked accusingly at the long, dark chocolate smear down the front of Siobhan’s trousers.
‘But that was the last of the Pinot,’ moaned Siobhan, trying a different tack. ‘I don’t like the fizzy stuff.’
Sissy sometimes wondered about Siobhan – her responses were so childlike, disproportionate, and she seemed to be getting worse as she got older, not better. Just what was going on inside Siobhan’s head these days? Had she any idea how she came across? Could she simply not help herself? One of these days, Sissy thought sadly, Renée’s going to tell her to just fuck off and that will be the end of it, which might be a relief in a way.
Camilla, ever the organised one, got a tea towel from somewhere and started mopping at Siobhan’s jeans, but all that did was make the chocolate spread further.
‘Ohhhhhh, look, it’s making it worse!’ said Siobhan.
‘Never mind, Siobhan, it’ll be dark soon,’ said Renée.
‘It’ll still show though,’ said Siobhan, seemingly not getting the irony. ‘I’ve got to get the Tube home, I can’t afford to get cabs everywhere, not like some people.’ And she looked at Camilla in her pearls, but Camilla ignored her, instead just gazed out towards The Serpentine as she took a sip of her drink. Natasha changed the subject, which was unusually diplomatic for her. She seemed to have made a monumental effort to cheer up. ‘Hey, has anyone seen Bridesmaids yet?’ she asked.
‘Yes!’ said Sissy and Juliette and Renée at the same time.
‘Hilarious,’ said Renée.
‘Shocking,’ said Sissy.
Siobhan looked upset. ‘Have you all seen it? Did you go together?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Siobhan,’ said Renée, not unkindly. ‘I went with a friend from work. Why do you always have to be so paranoid?’
‘Sorry,’ muttered Siobhan, feeling relieved and foolish at the same time. She knew she was acting appallingly tonight, and although the others probably wouldn’t believe it, she actually wasn’t like this with her other friends or with people from work. There was something about this group, perhaps that they expected so little of her, that she played up to, behaved like the useless undergraduate they thought she was still. Siobhan was well aware she wasn’t like everyone else – her life definitely seemed more accident-prone and drama-filled than the norm. But it was as if her friends from college still thought of her as a child, seemed to put her down whatever she did, pick on her really. She felt her eyes starting to prick, and she hastily shoved her sunglasses down from her head, even though the sun had gone. She felt despairing suddenly – she’d got up especially early to make those profiteroles, and she wondered now why she’d bothered.
‘Would you like another drink, Siobhan?’ asked Sissy. ‘There’s another bottle of white here, you don’t have to have Prosecco.’
‘Thanks,’ muttered Siobhan. She sat quietly, staring at her nails, which were ragged and had chocolate in them. She took a great slug of the drink Sissy passed to her and then put it down, more carefully this time, holding her hands in her lap now, fingers firmly hidden.
Michael Bublé rather inappropriately started singing ‘Feeling Good’, oblivious to the tension, but after a few moments of awkwardness his mood seemed to rub off on the group and they started to chat easily enough again, no doubt helped by the fact that they’d got through the third bottle of Prosecco already (everyone apparently having decided to turn to drink this evening as the only way to cope with the atmosphere), with even Juliette giggling despite herself at one of Renée’s dating-disaster anecdotes involving a pair of banana-yellow underpants. Sissy had finally perked up and was talking to Camilla about potential paint colours for her living room, about how the samples never looked like they were meant to, so she’d probably end up with magnolia. Renée was lying down yet again, flashing her knickers and eating a scotch egg in between drinking Prosecco, and Siobhan seemed to have seen the funny side of her profiterole catastrophe at last, thank God. Only Natasha still seemed fed up – after her brief burst of sociability earlier she’d gone back to the fountain, and was sat facing away from everyone, kicking viciously at the water.
‘Is she OK?’ mouthed Camilla. The others shrugged, and Siobhan looked awkward, perhaps blaming herself.
‘Maybe she’s had a bad day at work,’ suggested Juliette.
‘Yes, it’s so unlike her not to brag about her marvellous fucking husband and genius children,’ said Renée cheerfully.
‘Sshhh,’ said Sissy. ‘That’s mean.’
‘Oh, Sissy, stop spoiling my fun,’ she replied. ‘What’s life if you can’t take the piss out of your oldest friends? Anyway, she needs to be taken down a peg or two every now and again, she’s so high and mighty these days – maybe I should remind her of her origins in the Glasgow slums, she seems to have forgotten.’
‘That’s enough, Renée,’ said Camilla. ‘There’s no need to be rude.�
��
Renée went to say something, but thought better of it. Instead she got up and walked over to Natasha and to everyone’s surprise sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulder.
‘What’s up?’ she whispered, trailing her fingers in the water, but Natasha wasn’t to be placated and shrugged Renée off.
14
Barnes, South West London
Natasha found out about her husband’s affair from a text message. It was that simple. One tiny five-word message with two little kisses that popped up on his screen and that she would have avoided if she could have, she somehow knew these days never to check – but as she picked up the phone, thinking it was hers, to put it in her briefcase the message just appeared there, before she’d had time to drag her eyes away, and now it was stuck in her mind, and whatever she did she couldn’t make it go away, be unknown again. She couldn’t think what to do, it was all so bloody inconvenient. The strange thing was that she was more upset about the knowledge than about the deed itself. What was she supposed to do now? Leave him? Confront him? Hit him? They had two perfect little children together, a whoppingly expensive house that relied on both their incomes, shared friends, lives so neatly intertwined that it seemed insurmountable to think about disentangling them. The fact that they hadn’t had anything other than irregularly perfunctory, obligatory, lights-out sex for years was something she preferred not to have to think about, and if that meant Alistair went elsewhere for affection, well, what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. She was so busy, with her job, running, the kids, she barely had time to talk to Alistair any more, let alone feel any kind of physical passion for him, and that was OK. She’d been quite happy with the arrangement, before.
And now that text message had gone and ruined it all. It was not so much what it said but who it was from. It made her fucking furious, but bizarrely at the sender rather than at her husband: her betrayal felt greater than his somehow.
Natasha hadn’t wanted to confront him, not now anyway, but how could she give him back his phone without him realising she’d seen the message? It was so stupid that she’d picked up the wrong one off the wooden counter top, but they both had the same model these days, the same bloody phone everyone seemed to have – plus she’d been busy doing up her pencil skirt and slipping on her court shoes whilst briefing the nanny on the children’s various after-school activities before leaving for her breakfast meeting at the Landmark.
Natasha sighed. Why was her life so perfect on the outside and toxic on the inside? At what point had theirs become a phantom marriage, one where she and Alistair may as well be strangers co-existing in the same house, trying not to bump into each other in the kitchen? She’d loved him so much once, where had it all gone wrong? As Natasha put on her trench coat, she thought that maybe this was the time to confront it after all, maybe it was a sign; and she thought about the conversation they would have and the depressing conclusion they would reach and she felt – what? She stood in the hallway, by the front door with the bright stained glass that the sun was pushing coloured rays through, and tried to analyse it. What was the feeling? Desolation? No. Sadness? Not really. The words that came to her instead were ones such as anger, inconvenience, upheaval, embarrassment. Surely she should feel more than that? This was her husband after all. What was she going to do?
And then the solution came to her, how could she not have thought of it earlier? Natasha went back into the kitchen, picked up his phone and simply pressed ‘delete’, and the message was gone, disappeared into nothing. He would never know she’d seen it. Now all she had to do was delete it from her memory, which wasn’t so simple, and she wished she could have a cigarette to calm her nerves, but she’d given them up years ago. Maybe a wee glass of wine might do it instead. She knew it was madness straight after breakfast but these were extenuating circumstances, and it wouldn’t hurt just this once – the nanny had taken the kids upstairs to clean their teeth and she had another couple of minutes before she absolutely had to leave for her meeting. The wine was so cold it was almost frozen: someone had turned up the fridge too high, and it hit a spot in her brain that didn’t quite erase the memory of the interloping message, but it helped her cope better with the knowledge for now, just until she decided what to do next.
15
Cleveland, Ohio
Renée stood alone on the sidewalk in an ordinary middle-class suburb of an unknown city in a different state, anxiously looking around at the houses. At the end of the training course (which had actually only been five days but had felt to Renée interminable), Andy’s team had been allocated Cleveland, Ohio as their sales patch, and so they’d all pitched together to hire a minibus to transport them the five hundred-odd miles from Nashville. But now they were here they had nowhere to stay, and most of the students, Renée included, couldn’t afford a motel for more than a few days. Even so, she couldn’t believe what she was about to do, that this was what the bookselling company advocated all their students do, across the whole of America. It seemed bonkers to her now.
Renée had picked a cul-de-sac to try her luck in; she’d been told that people were more likely to know each other in those kinds of streets, be more friendly, but right now she felt exposed, as if she were being watched. The gardens were large and well tended, the expanses of grass brilliantly green, lush with life despite the mid-nineties temperatures, the sprinkler systems poking up like spies. The houses were well-kept too – in fact it was all rather perfect, movie-like, and it felt as if she had seen it all before somewhere, maybe she was having her very own American dream, or nightmare, she wasn’t sure which. As Renée hesitated, she felt small and frightened, not at all her usual self, like it was her first day of school perhaps, and the heat from the sun poured into her as if it was trying to cook her. She kept staring at the houses, trying to decide which one to pick first, which one would be the least unwelcoming. She tried to remember her training, how they’d been told that this was all part of the process, part of embedding themselves into the local community, of becoming a loved and trusted part of it for the summer. As if, Renée thought, why had she listened to that crap, why the hell was she here at all?
After perhaps two minutes of pacing, where her knees felt hot and unhinged, as though she really could fall over, she decided she just had to get on with it. She picked the friendliest-looking house, the one with a couple of kids’ bikes strewn on the driveway, and she marched on slim, wobbly legs up the path, through the neat front yard, and knocked firmly on the door. She stood back six feet, exactly as she’d been taught, and looked sideways down the road: the least threatening position for the door-answerer apparently, the one most likely to grant you an entry.
The knocking set off a terrible racket. What sounded like a pack of dogs started hurling themselves at the door, barking madly. Renée was about to run away when she heard a voice saying, ‘Now just you stop that, Betsy, and you too, Growler,’ and the door was opened four inches by a harassed-looking woman in a long satin dressing gown the colour of chewed-up bubble gum, as unidentifiable dogs’ teeth and paws scratched through the opening.
‘Hi, are those your attack dogs?’ said Renée. This was one of the stock jokes she’d been fed for exactly this kind of situation, but her voice was squeaky and her delivery was terrible. Renée swallowed hard and continued her patter.
‘Er, my name is Renée and I’m all the way from England! I’m on an educational programme here in Cleveland, from the University of …’
‘Sorry, I’m busy,’ said the woman, and shut the door.
Renée stood still for a moment, feeling shocked, violated almost – and then she walked self-consciously through the front yard back to the sidewalk, hoping no-one was watching. She hated rejection, felt it like a punch. She thought of her mother in Paris for an instant and felt sick. She had to keep going. She walked straight to the next house and knocked, firmly, three times. A little kid answered, dragging his filthy muslin behind him.
‘Mommy, there�
��s someone at the door for you.’
Renée waited and the roof of her mouth felt claggy, as if she were eating a peanut-butter sandwich. After a couple of minutes a bright, friendly-looking woman with eyes so blue they must have been fake came to the door.
‘Hi! My name is Renée and I’m on an educational programme here in Cleveland all the way from Bristol University in England! How are you today?’
‘I’m good,’ said the woman, but she seemed a little impatient now, as though she knew what was coming.
‘I’ve just arrived in Cleveland as part of an educational programme and … and I’m … I’m looking for somewhere to stay for the summer. And, er … do you have a spare room that I could possibly use?’ As Renée said it, she thought she might even keel over with humiliation, even though she’d practised it so many times. The woman smiled kindly and said, ‘No, you know what, our spare room is used as an office, so I guess I can’t help you. Good luck though, have a great summer,’ and as she closed the door Renée could hear her yell, ‘Joey, get back up those stairs right now and brush your teeth. We’re gonna be late for preschool.’
Renée marched straight to the neighbouring house, refusing to give up now that she’d started. There was no reply at that door, but at the next several the people were friendly enough, in between a couple more door slams, although for various reasons no-one was able to help. Finally she approached the last house in the close, the least inviting one. It was tucked back further from the street than the others, and there was a big shady tree in the front yard and the paint on the windows was peeling. She waited for ages and was about to leave when she heard shuffling inside and several locks being opened, and eventually a man appeared at the door. He was in his late forties, balding, with a big, droopy moustache that seemed old-fashioned somehow, and although his clothes were smart enough his trousers were ever so slightly too short for him.
