by Zoë Folbigg
Of course it wouldn’t be mine.
She tried each of their children’s birth dates, then panicked that the phone might be disabled if she made one more attempt. It was at that moment, as Kate slipped the phone back into the inside pocket of George’s jacket, as Jack shouted at his mum to bring over his gloves, that she realised she had no choice. Next time ‘Lunch B’ came up in the diary, she would go into London. She would sit in the sandwich shop – if it’s still there – opposite the London HQ of Digby Global Investors, on a stool at a wooden bench attached to the glass window, and wait for George to come out. She would follow him. She would find out who B was, because she doesn’t think it’s Baz Brocklebank from the Sydney office any more – Kate looks at his dull Twitter feed every now and then, full of musings on margin deadlines and trade deals and pensions, but he’s mostly ‘Down Under’ when these lunches crop up.
She didn’t expect ‘Lunch B’ to appear again so soon, given there was one only last Wednesday. But on Monday morning, George’s PA Bethany put one in the diary for 1 p.m. on Thursday, and given that today, Thursday 28th June, is a rare day without a PTA coffee morning or a WI planning meeting or a school sports day or a class assembly, Kate knows that today is her one shot. She can finally find out what the hell is going on with her husband. George was never terribly communicative or loving, not like Him, but he’d definitely been even colder and more awkward of late.
In the hazy carriage, Kate ponders her strategy: if George meets a city guy in a suit, she will head straight back to Claresham in time for the school run. If he doesn’t… well, the school run will be the least of Kate’s problems, and she’s sure Melissa or Venetia would help her out in an emergency…
As the train rolls across the country and starts to gather speed, Kate feels increasingly nervous. She presses her head back into the headrest and feels the tie of her ponytail bobbling into the back of her skull uncomfortably, taunting her on her way. She shifts her head, turning towards the window as she hears the impending doom of familiar voices from the village, advancing through the carriage towards the front of the train.
‘Keep going, sweetpea…’ says a clipped voice, knowingly.
Kate slinks a little in her seat. She can hear it’s Antonia Barrie from the WI, not just from Antonia’s smug intonation but from the sound of her polished heels walking the dirty carriage floor disdainfully, in unison with another pair. Kate scrabbles to put her sunglasses back on before the heels arrive at the point where she’s slinking deeper into her seat. In her peripheral vision, Kate sees a younger woman pass first. It’s Antonia’s daughter, Amber, equally, sickeningly glamorous and as well put together as her mother.
Amber Barrie is the most poised twenty-two-year-old girl Kate has ever seen, and whenever Kate stumbles into her at WI fundraisers wearing pretty floral shift dresses, or at the supermarket checkout in skintight leggings and a bodywarmer, her basket filled with kale and quinoa, or walking her German spitz klein on the green with her hair effortlessly piled high in a bun on her head, Kate can’t help but feel intimidated. Amber Barrie is everything Kate wasn’t at twenty-two, and everything Kate isn’t at forty-two.
As she glides past, fragrantly, ahead of her mother, Kate can’t help but look up. Amber wears a blush pink skirt suit and her long tanned legs stride through the carriage in elegant nude stilettos that won’t be sullied by the capital’s streets today. Amber’s meticulous mane is the same golden blonde shade as her mother’s, although Antonia’s hair isn’t quite as long and lustrous as her daughter’s, but both always look as if they’ve just had a blow-dry. No one can always have just had a blow-dry.
Gosh, how does she walk in those?
Kate snaps the heels together of her black round-toe ankle boots that are looking a little like Cornish pasties they’re so loved, but were the most comfortable option for all the walking she might do today, and drags her feet under her seat. She looks back out of the window. She’s seen enough, and doesn’t want to be seen.
With a swish of her hair, Amber presses the button on the internal door and eases through to the next carriage, her mother following close behind. Kate holds her breath, willing Antonia not to stop and see her.
Phew. Although I’m sure she saw me out of the corner of her eye.
Once Antonia has passed, Kate quickly looks up at the back of her. She is dressed almost identically to her daughter, although her two-piece is cream and the elegant hemline of her pencil skirt is longer, to the knee, and more befitting a fifty-something. She wafts through the doors, confidently, dismissively.
Kate clutches her doughy stomach, easing her hand over her full bladder. She is nervous about what she’s about to do, irked that Antonia Barrie pretended not to see her, even though she pretended not to see Antonia Barrie.
She turns her gaze once more out of the window, at the sprawling green flats of East Anglia. The feeling of the unfamiliar envelopes her and she rummages in her bag for a bottle of water.
This is ridiculous. I did this five days a week when I was pregnant with Chloe.
The tracks used to be familiar, Kate worked in London ever since she started her graduate trainee job at Digby’s, but routines of motherhood and mundanity mean she hasn’t been into London since…
Oooh, was it Wicked? That was my fortieth, and George drove because we’d just got the S-Max. He wanted to give it a run-out.
Kate unscrews the lid of the warm bottle of water and lingers over her fortieth birthday weekend. Dinner with Christine and Colin Leach on the Friday. The kids made her breakfast in bed on Saturday morning, then George surprised her with a trip to the theatre and a night in a London hotel. He’d got her parents over to babysit, and as Kate looked in the mirror and congratulated herself on her half-stone loss at Weight Watchers in the run-up to her birthday, she had a pang of guilt that she didn’t really want to be in a dusty hotel room in Bloomsbury; she would have been happy with a takeaway at home with the kids.
That half-stone went straight back on in a birthday blowout. The show was amazing. The kids were fine for the night. Kate and George even had sex. It was the last time they had had sex in fact.
Golly, over two years ago.
Kate looks at the clock on her phone and ponders whether it’s worth doing something else before she goes and camps out in the coffee shop. Perhaps she should head to the big John Lewis to get the kids some summer swimwear? Maybe the National Gallery?
Then she remembers Him. The artist. The Mexican.
I’ve been cheated on before.
Kate’s cheeks feel hot and she takes another slug of water. The butterfly motifs on her T-shirt retract through the fabric into her stomach and she feels them flying around her, uncomfortably trying to escape. Ahead, she can see a skyline of new shapes she doesn’t recognise and Kate wants to shrink with every metre she edges towards George’s city, his street, his building, his corner office. She feels deceitful as she agonises over what she’s about to do, yet proof of deception would be the only reassuringly familiar thing for Kate right now.
She remembers how small she felt that sticky night, when the boy she had been dependent on all summer, the life and soul of her trip, of the town, cheated on her, right in front of her very eyes. Kate had turned to say something to Hector who was sitting next to her, but only saw the back of his head. His soft brown curls, his terracotta-toned neck, his torn faded band T-shirt, his trapezius she so wanted to touch. His arms, despite being just a boy of eighteen, were strong from arching and reaching to paint his mural he had been working on all summer. Kate had looked at the back of his warm body sitting on the stool next to her. She could smell musk and sunshine emanating from his skin, even in the smoke-filled darkness of the bar. She wondered who he was chatting to so intently, who he was sitting so close to. Kate cocked her head and felt a blow to the stomach. She withdrew her hand from his denim-clad thigh and gasped in a blaze of dry ice as the band played ‘Sweet Child O Mine’, unaware that one girl’s world had just stopped tu
rning. Kate felt crushed and foolish to see her teenage lover, his tongue dancing with that of the beautiful girl next to him. He was cheating on her right in front of her.
At least I knew.
Kate had stood up and run to the toilets, shocked and embarrassed to see her summer romance in such a reckless and passionate embrace with Dani, the girl sitting on the stool on the other side of him; his paint-stained hands holding the girl’s face in a brazen clinch. They didn’t notice Kate noticing. They didn’t see her get up and run off. The band carried on while Kate took deep breaths in a toilet cubicle as she clutched a palm to a heart that Hector Herrera had just broken.
There were no secrets.
Kate packed up and left the Villa Infantil De Nuestra Señora the next day, one week earlier than planned. She told Sister Miriam that she was going to make an impromptu trip to see friends in Guanajuato before flying home. She didn’t have any friends in Guanajuato, but she was too humiliated to stay, to see Hector. She never did see Hector again. But Sister Miriam, Sister Juana and Sister Virginia, who had once had her heart broken, all hugged Kate tenderly and thanked her for her work helping to renovate and paint the Villa over the summer.
‘The kids won’t believe their eyes when they get back from Coatepec!’ Sister Miriam gleamed over her spectacles as she clasped Kate’s hands. ‘Thanks to you. And Hector, wherever he is… You were a good team.’
Sister Virginia gave Kate a sisterly hug. She knew what young Hector was capable of, and how vulnerable a twenty-two-year-old heart is. Sister Juana gave Kate a parcel of polvorones for her fourteen-hour bus trip to Guanajuato, which Kate unwrapped in the living room of her parents’ home in Norfolk less than forty-eight hours later.
They were happy to have their daughter home and didn’t ask why she had returned a week early. Kate’s family didn’t really ask each other questions.
Nineteen
In the window of the coffee shop, Kate reads the copy of Woman & Home that she bought conspicuously from the newsagent at Claresham train station. She flicks from the best wedding-guest cover-ups to a recipe for Normandy pork, without being able to focus on any of it. She looks up at the head office of Digby Global Investors, standing shiny and proud across the street. Six storeys of glass reflect white clouds bouncing against a blue sky. She wonders what George is doing inside and wishes she had gone to John Lewis first, because the past hour has been killing her. She looks at her watch, 12.45 p.m., and turns to a headline that says, ‘Ten things you should remove from your bathroom’, before wondering if she should pop to the loo again.
No, he could be out any minute. Don’t take your eyes off the door.
Fortunately for Kate, the entrance to the world headquarters of Digby Global Investors is a huge glass façade, through which you can see employees heading down an escalator into an airy lobby, as they leave through glass doors, and down four concrete steps onto the City’s streets for lunch. It’s a step-up from the red-brick offices around the corner, where Kate and George met as nervous trainees on the graduate programme, almost twenty years ago. Kate had wowed the selection panel the winter before, when she said she was going to volunteer in an orphanage overseas the summer after her finals; George was an Oxford graduate with a photographic memory, and they both had their places secured by Christmas of their final year. They just had to get first-class honours, which they both did: George in mathematics at Magdalen; Kate in business management at York. They met in the subsidised canteen on their first day when Kate handed George a tray in the queue for lunch. Kate was sun-kissed but meek, fresh from heartache in Central America; George’s small blue eyes jumped out against his Tenerife tan.
‘Hello there,’ he mumbled, stiltedly.
Kate mustered up a smile and her kind, cried-out eyes crinkled.
Now her eyes scan the offices of Digby Global Investors. No sign of George. 1 p.m. and he still hasn’t come out for lunch. Or had Kate missed him?
She looks back at her magazine.
Six royal baby facts you probably didn’t know.
1.06 p.m.
Damn that app.
1.10 p.m.
I’ve come all the way here.
She looks up to the top floor, where George’s office sits on the corner, and wonders if ‘Lunch B’ is happening right there, right now, in his office. Clouds dance across the reflection of the building, a wind picks up on the thoroughfare.
Can’t wait for lunch X
Kate stands, folds her magazine into a bag that’s too small for it, and puts her navy summer jacket on over her V-neck T-shirt. Time for Plan B.
*
In the light and spacious ground-floor atrium, worker bees descend the escalators fresh from cutting deals, ready for lunch. They look different to how they looked eleven years ago, when Kate left to have Chloe. The staff seem younger. More confident. Better dressed. Finely polished.
Two young women sit at a long low reception desk and Kate hits a glitch. She hadn’t honed her Plan B, seeing as she was sure she would be following George out of the building. He usually went out when he had Lunch with B. And now, now that she’s going to ‘surprise’ her husband with an impromptu visit, she can’t announce herself or this will give him time to work out a cover story, if indeed he needs one.
She walks across the shiny dark grey tiles flecked with silver shards, and thinks on her feet. The blonde hair, the B initial. Bethany must be her first port of call.
‘Kathleen Timberlake to see Bethany Henderson,’ Kate announces, in a slightly different voice than usual, as if she’s pretending to be a newsreader or an airline pilot.
Neither receptionist looks up.
‘Just one second,’ says the one with a sleek brown bob.
Kate looks at the escalators, to keep her eye on the downward traffic. If he sees her, if he catches her out, she will say, ‘Surprise!’ and pretend she just wanted to take George out for lunch.
‘Hmmm, I’m not getting anything…’
‘I’ll wait,’ Kate says firmly.
The receptionist looks put upon. She wanted to get back to telling the receptionist with the Pre-Raphaelite mane about whatever it was she was talking about in hushed tones, and again, Kate has the crushing sensation of being an inconvenience. A burden. She thinks of Hector holding the beautiful girl’s face in the bar.
The receptionist dials again.
‘Hi Bethany? Oh, hi Freya, is Beth about?’
Clearly all the receptionists and all the PAs know each other at Digby Global Investors.
‘I’ve got someone down in the lobby to see Beth.’
Don’t tell her who you are, she’s one of them.
‘Sorry, what was the name?’
‘Kathleen Timberlake,’ Kate says with unusual authority.
Kate sees the receptionist trying to repress a smirk.
‘Kathleen Timberlake… Yeah. Is it not in the diary?’
Kate can’t hear the voice on the other end.
The receptionist covers her mouthpiece. ‘Where did you say you were from?’
Kate has to think quickly.
‘Office supplies.’
Kate’s apple cheeks flush russet red, mostly in surprise at how quick she is to lie.
‘It’s the Staples rep.’
Rep? Rep? I’m his wife.
‘You want to come down or shall I send her up?’
Please don’t send her down please don’t send her down.
The receptionist hangs up.
‘OK, just sign in on the iPad, you can go up. Take this escalator and you’ll see lifts at the top. It’s the sixth floor. When the lift opens, turn right and Freya will meet you through the double doors, Bethany’s in a meeting with her boss. Freya said she’ll see you.’
The receptionist looks Kate up and down as she types her name on the iPad to sign in.
Kathleen. Timberlake.
Twenty
As the empty lift rises, the metallic taste in Kate’s mouth grows. She looks out at the overpowerin
g skyline. The Gherkin sits just beyond the end of the road. It was new and exciting when Kate left Digby’s, but already it is dominated by newer, more exciting, more polished architecture. The Walkie-Talkie. The Cheesegrater. The Scalpel. Kate feels as though she is drowning under all of them.
The doors ding like the bell at the side of a boxing ring. The moment arrives.
‘Kathleen? I’m Freya,’ a glossy Essex goddess with long brown poker-straight hair and plump gleaming lips stands in the doorway. ‘Bethany’s in with her boss at the moment, but I can deal with whatever you’re here for,’ Freya says, walking away, so Kate has to follow her. ‘As long as it’s quick, I’m having my nails done at 1.45.’
Kate’s eyes dart to the closed door of the corner office. The blinds are drawn over the glass walls so she can’t see inside. She has a fight-or-flight moment. She looks back at Freya’s pert and purposeful bottom, striding away in front of her to a desk further away.
‘I really need to see Bethany Henderson, is she in there?’ Kate stops, nodding to George’s office. Freya stops and twists on the stiletto of her pointed heel.
‘Yes. But you can’t go in, she’s in a meeting.’
She’s covering for them.
‘This is important.’
Freya’s incredulous mouth hangs open, her plump pout gleaming five different shades of nude.
‘So’s her meeting. You can’t just go in there… EXCUSE ME!’ An English affectation turns to a full Barking drawl. ‘They’re in a meetin’!’
Kate pulls the brushed-steel handle on the door down and opens it wide, deliberately, vengefully. George is sitting on the edge of his desk, and a cascade of long blonde hair extensions lean in towards his crotch. Bethany is in the chair facing her boss, and turns around clutching a tissue.
