Prime Time

by Jane Wenham-Jones

  He turned the cup round and round in its saucer. ‘Hannah is so – so interested.’

  I shook my head in despair. Hannah knew exactly what to do and it had worked a treat.

  ‘Do you understand?’ Roger gave me a beseeching look.

  I glared back. ‘Yeah, I understand. I understand that your ego has had the best massage it can remember in years. And if it carries on, you will hurt Charlotte whether you want to or not, and then she’ll get you by the balls and twist them off.’

  Roger winced.

  But for all my words, I felt a sudden flush of discomfort. Because I did know what he meant. It was nice, after years of being in the same relationship, to have someone pay you real attention, to want to know what you thought, what kind of person you were.

  It was all very well for me to take the moral high ground, but if all this TV stuff had happened while I was living with Daniel, wouldn’t I have still been flattered by Cal flirting with me? I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have gone any further, not that “further” was necessarily on offer. Here I paused to relive, for the thousandth time, the memory of his mouth on mine. The delicious, feathery brushing of his soft lips. The way it had sent a tingle right up my spine. And into a few other places …

  I shook myself back to the present to consider the matter in hand. Could I honestly say that if I were still married I wouldn’t have wanted to go for a drink with Cal, wouldn’t have been taken and tempted by his interest?

  Roger was looking at me miserably. I softened my voice again. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But look, Rog, if you want to talk about who you are, take Charlotte out more. Life doesn’t have to be humdrum – you don’t have to only discuss the dog and the kids. Do all that stuff they tell you to do on the problem pages. Make a date with her – take her away for a dirty weekend. Go for dinner, just the two of you, and start a better conversation. Who knows? She may want to tell you how she is too. I do think you two have something pretty good together – I mean you’re still friends, you still like each other.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Roger. ‘We are friends, of course. But Charlotte’s not always easy, you know.’

  ‘Easy?’ I squawked, freshly outraged. ‘Of course she’s not easy. She’s passionate and intelligent and sexy and has given you two beautiful children and a wonderful home life and loves you to bits. What do you fucking want?’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Roger said awkwardly. ‘I love Charlotte, you know I do.’

  ‘And would you like it if she was going out with one of her colleagues every single night and texting him when she got home?’

  ‘No, probably not.’

  ‘So what are you bloody doing?’ I asked, realising we’d come full circle and got precisely nowhere.

  ‘I don’t know. Obviously … Well the thing is, I mean … Well, I can’t just dump Hannah. She needs me at the moment – she’s fragile.’

  I looked at him hopelessly. ‘Oh pur-lease. She’s playing you. Being all needy – I can’t stand women who do that.’

  ‘She’s not playing me,’ said Roger. ‘But she does need me, I think. She is depending on my friendship. I suppose she has got a bit –’ he hesitated ‘ attached to me. It’s probably my fault.’

  I stared at him. ‘Have you slept with her?’

  ‘No! Not really.’

  ‘What do you mean “not really”? You either have or you haven’t.’

  ‘She wanted to, we got close to it, but I didn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Roger looked embarrassed. ‘We didn’t have any contraceptives,’ he said uncomfortably.

  ‘So you would have done, if you had?’ I demanded.

  ‘No – well, I don’t know. She was upset and I … I wasn’t going to but we got a bit carried away … And I think she just needed some affection. She was really quite distressed. But I didn’t, that’s the main thing.’ He’d started on the napkin now and was twisting it tightly round and round into a spiral in his fingers.

  I shook my head in disbelief. ‘But she still wanted to, didn’t she? She was still going to sleep with you whether you had a condom or not. Jesus!’

  ‘I don’t know really – she wasn’t thinking straight – she’d had too much to drink. Her ex had called her and she –’

  ‘See?’ I cried agitated. ‘See what she’s doing? Roger, please promise me you won’t ever touch her again. Even if you had a condom she’d probably make a hole in it. Are you mad ?’

  Roger shook his head silently, looking wretched. I gripped his arm in frustration.

  ‘Look at me. She’s trying to trap you – she wants to turn up on your doorstep pregnant. What would Charlotte say then?’

  Roger shuddered. ‘She was crying. I felt a bastard.’

  ‘I bet she bloody was,’ I said grimly. ‘I bet emotional blackmail’s right up her street.’

  Roger shook his head. ‘I don’t think she’s doing it deliberately,’ he said slowly, ‘but I do think she’s maybe a bit disturbed emotionally at the moment. To be honest, I did feel worried this morning when she phoned me. Even before you rang, I was thinking: what have I got into and how am I going to detach myself? I know it’s getting heavier than I ever intended and I don’t know what to do. It was only meant to be platonic …’

  ‘But these things never really are, are they?’ I said wearily. ‘Not really. Not unless the other person’s as ugly as sin and totally sexless to boot.’

  ‘Well, look at us – we are,’ Roger said, with a weak smile. ‘And I’m dead handsome and you look OK in the right light.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Very funny. We’re platonic because we’re like family. We known each other a long time – watched the kids grow up together, seen the worst of each other. Generally, seriously, it doesn’t happen often, does it? There’s usually a frisson – a little something if a heterosexual woman is spending time alone frequently with a heterosexual man – and even if they don’t remotely fancy each other, it’s still different from two women or two men, isn’t it? The sex thing is always there – even if it’s totally buried and nobody thinks about it.’

  ‘I guess so.’ He looked at me appealingly. ‘What am I going to go?’

  ‘You are going to accept that she’s bad news and stop the whole thing in its tracks right now. You don’t have to be a bastard. You simply tell her that you love your wife and kids and that while you’re sorry for her and about all her troubles, you can’t risk hurting them. Give her all that crap about what a special person she is, how she deserves a proper relationship of her own – with someone better than you.’

  I gave him a hard look. ‘And then you stick to it. No drinks, no texts, no phone calls. Tell her it’s the best way for both of you – so you can both get over it. It doesn’t really matter what you say as long as you mean it and don’t give in.’

  Roger nodded, suddenly resolute. ‘I will.’ He grabbed my hands. ‘Thank you, Laura. Thank you.’

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  I had a brief text from Roger telling me he’d “done it”; that Hannah had been very upset but he was holding firm.

  Thank God for that, I thought, as I swung my gym bag over my shoulder and left the changing room, looking sideways into the large mirror to check my newly-toned arms.

  I was definitely beginning to see a difference all over now. My upper arms had the beginnings of a shape to them – even my stomach didn’t wobble as much as it had done. I’d been on the treadmill for half an hour, spent 45 minutes on the cross-trainer – Clara had been right, it was just a case of building up and with the right music I could keep going almost indefinitely now – done some weights and a few squats on the power plate to finish off.

  Clara herself was “on earlies” that week so I wasn’t able to have an in-depth analysis with her of pounds lost and muscle tone gained – nor could I borrow the tape measure she carried in her handbag to check on the progress of our midriffs, but I felt firmer and my tracksuit bottoms were looser than they had been.

&
nbsp; I walked through reception, waving to the girl behind the desk and feeling pretty pleased with myself, loving the thought of Cal seeing how I’d changed even more in the last two weeks. I paused in the car park to send Clara a text update – I missed having her to compare notes with.

  So I was quite pleased to find Charlotte on my doorstep when I got back. Even though she’d be bored in seconds, at least it was someone to show off my triceps to.

  ‘You not at work today?’ I asked cheerily, as I stuck my key in the lock, noticing that my friend had on a pair of old jeans and a sweatshirt, and sported a distinct lack of make-up.

  ‘No,’ she said shortly.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I looked at her more carefully. Her blonde curls were scraped back into a scrunchie. She looked tired, her eyes small. She might even have been crying.

  ‘No,’ she said again.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked carefully, as I threw my jacket over the newel post and walked ahead of her down the hall to the kitchen, dreading looking at her. Surely that bloody Hannah hadn’t phoned her and told her all, just as Roger had finally done the decent thing.

  I filled the kettle and got mugs out of the cupboard. When I turned round, Charlotte hadn’t sat down at the table as she usually would, but was just standing looking at me. ‘What’s the matter?’ I said again.

  Charlotte stared at me. ‘It seems Roger’s been seeing someone else.’

  I swallowed, feeling awful. ‘No. Really?’ I squeaked. ‘Are you sure?’ Even to me it sounded unconvincing.

  ‘Yes I’m quite sure.’ Charlotte had a strange expression on her face I’d never seen before. ‘Becky saw you.’

  ‘What?’ My mind was racing. What had Becky seen? Me talking to Roger? But she wouldn’t have known what we were talking about.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked stupidly.

  ‘Becky saw Roger – her father – hidden away down the town with you. Holding hands.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes – she saw you, Laura. She’s been worrying about it for two days. I found her crying this morning. She hasn’t gone to school – she’s at home crying now. And I hate you for that even more than I hate you for going behind my back and having an affair with my husband!’

  I had a horrible nauseous feeling in my solar plexus. My heart was thumping in my chest.

  ‘No , Charlotte, listen, you’ve got it all wrong. I’m not having an affair with Roger. Charlotte, I wouldn’t – how can you think that?’ My hands were shaking.

  ‘Oh quite easily, really,’ said Charlotte, still in the same flat, remote voice. ‘It’s all making sense now. I noticed you couldn’t take your eyes off him at his bloody boring drinks do that you were so keen to come to. Why was that then? So you could be close to him? Oh yes, it’s all falling into place. The way you’ve been whispering together, the way you’ve been behaving as though you have a secret, the way you’ve been losing weight and dolling yourself up like a teenager.’ She looked at me with disdain. ‘I thought you were having a mid-life crisis, trying to make yourself feel better about Daniel. I didn’t know you were just after my husband.’

  ‘I wasn’t! I’m not.’

  ‘And the really stupid thing is that, as you know, I’d convinced myself that he was having one too. So I’d stopped worrying about him disappearing off and being funny about his phone and buying new shirts. And all the time, he was doing it all for you. I bet you were both having a good laugh at me, weren’t you?’

  ‘No, no, no. Charlotte, please believe me – you’ve got this all wrong.’

  ‘Have I?’ she said furiously. ‘What were you doing holding hands then? Why were you in a bar in town together?’

  ‘We weren’t holding hands – we were just talking.’

  ‘So my daughter is a liar?’

  ‘No, of course not. I think I put my hand on his – you know, for emphasis – and Becky must have seen me do it and got the wrong idea. Honestly Charlotte, we were just talking …’

  ‘What about? And why, if you had such pressing things to say to my husband, didn’t you come round to our house to talk to him. Openly – in front of me?’

  My heart was pounding even harder now. Roger had promised me it was over – that he’d told Hannah and would get everything back to normal. I couldn’t drop him in it now. I looked frantically at Charlotte. She looked utterly miserable, her eyes full of pain and confusion.

  I took a deep breath. ‘We were talking about you.’

  Charlotte continued to look at me.

  ‘Look,’ I said in a rush. ‘You’re not supposed to know about it but he’s taking you away on a special weekend. Somewhere lovely. And I –’ I took another deep breath, my brain in overdrive, desperately trying to come up with something plausible. ‘I am having the children.’

  Charlotte looked at me in disbelief. ‘Now I know you’re lying,’ she said coldly. ‘Roger has never taken me anywhere as a surprise in 24 years. Why start now? He doesn’t do that stuff. It would never occur to him.’

  ‘It was my idea,’ I said desperately. ‘You know that night when you came in and we were talking and you said what are you two looking so intense about?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Charlotte sourly. ‘I know now, don’t I?’

  ‘No, no, you don’t. He’d had a bit to drink and he was saying how much he loved you and how he knew he didn’t really do enough to show it, and I said, because I was drunk too, and I was feeling all emotional, you know –’

  I looked at her appealingly; she stared stonily back. ‘I said he should show it because it was awful when my marriage ended and a strong marriage like yours should be nurtured and appreciated.’

  I stopped and took another deep breath. ‘I said you should do something special. And then a few days later, I saw this ad for a romantic weekend away and I thought he could take you on it, so I phoned and said would he meet me and I suggested it and said I’d stay at your house and look after Benson and all the children.’ I stopped, feeling close to tears.

  ‘Where?’ Charlotte was still glaring.

  ‘Paris,’ I improvised.

  ‘And when is it?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure – he went off to book it. Um – end of the month, I think.’

  I could see Charlotte was weakening and I felt a mixture of relief and a horrible, sickening guilt that I was still lying to her. I turned away, suddenly unable to meet her eyes and started spooning coffee into mugs. ‘He was going to let me know when it was confirmed.’

  I spun round, in sudden panic. ‘You haven’t said anything to him yet, have you?’

  Charlotte sounded sad. ‘No. He’d already gone to work when Becky told me. I thought I’d come here first and find out what was going on. Kick him out later.’

  ‘Don’t do that!’ I tried to laugh. ‘This really is all a terrible mistake.’ I poured water and opened the fridge for milk, my heart still hammering. Charlotte had at least sat down now. I put a mug in front of her and sat down too.

  ‘I’m really sorry – it’s all my fault. I should have just talked to him about it on the phone. I only suggested we meet because it seemed easier. I never meant to cause all this. Never thought for a moment anyone would think …’

  I knew I was gabbling but didn’t seem able to stop. ‘I think he squeezed my hand when he said thank you, that’s all. I’m so sorry Becky is upset. It never occurred to me that anyone would see us And even if they did, I never dreamt you’d think …’ I put my hand on her arm. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Charlotte looked at me miserably. ‘I want to believe you but it doesn’t feel right.’

  I dragged up a smile, knowing it sat half-heartedly on my treacherous face. ‘It’s true. Look, please don’t say anything to Roger because it’s a surprise and he said himself that he’s never given you a surprise before and he really wants to see your expression when he shows you the tickets.’

  My insides contracted painfully at the now-fluent lies that were tumbling out of my mouth to my oldest
, dearest friend.

  Charlotte put her head in her hands. ‘I don’t know,’ she muttered.

  ‘Charlotte,’ I said, desperately, feeling close to crying. ‘How could you think I would do anything with Roger? I mean, I love Roger but he’s like a sort of brother or how I imagine a brother could be – not like Anthony, of course, who’s a bit of a dick. And he’s your husband. Charlotte, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t …’

  Charlotte raised her head. There were tears in her eyes too.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Never mind the Atkins, the Dukan or the GI Index, if you want to lose weight, have a trauma.

  Until I knew Roger had booked a weekend in Paris and safely presented the tickets to Charlotte, I could barely sleep or eat, so big was the knot of anxiety in my stomach.

  I hated the fact that there would now be this huge, unspoken issue between me and my best friend. Things could never be the same again. She might think everything was OK but I would always know I hadn’t told her the truth and neither had Roger, and we were complicit in that. It felt like betrayal.

  As I said to Roger, there are many more ways of being unfaithful than getting in the sack.

  Charlotte had been sheepish the next time I saw her and I’d felt even worse.

  ‘I’m really sorry I thought that,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said, feeling as guilty as hell because her instincts were right even if she’d got the wrong woman. I remembered saying it myself after Daniel – the worst bit of the whole business was the way he’d let me think I was paranoid. I didn’t want that for Charlotte.

  ‘I want you to tell her,’ I’d said to Roger when he’d phoned to say the weekend was sorted. ‘I want you to pick your moment and tell her that you’re sorry if you’ve been a bit odd lately but there was a girl at work coming on to you and you were worrying about it. That you’ve now told her it has to stop.

  ‘Quite aside from the moral aspect,’ I added, ‘it would be a good safety blanket. Suppose Hannah does one of her heavy breathing acts down the phone again?’