Players

by Karen Swan

  ‘She’d got some caterers in, some musicians, really went to town on it.’ He paused for a moment, as though trying to remember something. ‘She was wearing a blue silky dress, like a petticoat. She wasn’t wearing a bra. God knows, she needed to.’ He chuckled.

  Tor hugged her arms around her meagre B-cup chest. She felt freezing cold.

  ‘But then when everybody left, and I was getting my coat, she came out of the bedroom wearing nothing. Well, nothing but a smile, actually.’ He nodded at the memory, and closed his eyes, relishing it. ‘And there and then, in the hallway, she unzipped my flies and went down on me.’ He stopped and looked straight at her. ‘And I came harder than I’ve ever come in my life.’

  Tor felt her heart begin to crack and sank to the bed. Faced with the confession she’d been both dreading and longing for, it had never occurred to her that he’d describe it to her in all its pornographic passion. A simple admission was all she’d sought. Because then it would have just been about vague, anonymous sex. And she could compete with that – no matter what he’d just said.

  But standing before him as he described the seduction – relishing the details, savouring the memory – the graphic imagery of his affair was more vivid to her than her own heartbeat, and she knew with utmost clarity there was no way back for them now. He didn’t want to find a way back. He wanted to find a way with Julia, and her kiss with James had given him a ‘get out of jail free’ card.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

  ‘To Julia’s. She’s already expecting me.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  Hugh looked at his wife. Her tone was flat, and he could see that his words had wrecked her. His stomach tightened in despair. What the hell was he doing? He sat next to her on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands, looking like Atlas collapsing beneath the weight of the world.

  He wanted to relent. Tonight had been such a bloody shock. It had never occurred to him Tor would cheat. When she’d confronted him last night, he’d panicked. He’d been awake all night trying to think of stories that would cover his tracks. And if he did have to confess, he’d assumed he’d break it off with Julia and beg forgiveness. Never in a million years had he considered it would be her indiscretion, and not his, that was splitting their family.

  In his heart, he knew she was telling the truth; that whatever had happened between her and that doctor was just drunkenness. But he felt backed into a corner, tortured, by the image of her with James, their heads together, thighs apart. He’d felt like a voyeur on his own wife. He shook his head angrily and grabbed his bag.

  She jumped up, shaken out of her inertia by the reality of his leaving.

  ‘No! Hugh, wait, please! What – what shall I tell the children?’ Tor asked, panic-stricken, desperate for more time.

  He paused, so defiant even his tears didn’t dare fall.

  ‘This has nothing to do with them. It changes nothing. I’m still their father. No matter what.’ He looked around the room, at the wedding photos whose silver frames had tarnished to copper, the lilies three days dead in the vase, balls of socks piling up in the corner, the bed still rumpled from their earlier lovemaking. Nothing had changed and everything had changed. His wife, such a vision at eight o’clock, was wretched on the floor. His children were sleeping soundly in their beds.

  He took a deep breath and strode down the stairs, picking his keys up from the radiator cabinet. And then, quietly, regretfully, he closed the door on them all.

  The front door clicked shut and Tor wanted to scream, but – inhibited even in raw grief – she didn’t dare, in case she woke the children or titillated the neighbours. Instead, she sat on the floor at the end of the bed, hugging her knees. She held the pose. She couldn’t feel her lungs breathing or her eyes blinking but she supposed they must be. The yellow numbers on the digital clock racked up, and it was nine minutes before the tears began to spill.

  She knew she should get into the bed and try to sleep. But if she slept, it meant she’d wake up in another day, a new day, the first day of the rest of her life without Hugh. And she just couldn’t do that. She needed to stop time, halt its progress. She could do that if she didn’t go to sleep.

  She wondered if he was at Julia’s yet. He must be. It would only take five minutes around the common at this time of night. She imagined Julia – so happy! – naked in the bed, waiting for him. Candles lit, petals strewn, an open bottle and open legs. They were probably at it right now. Oh God. She ran to the bathroom and heaved.

  He had been gone an hour when there was a knock at the door.

  Tor uncurled herself from her foetal position at the base of the loo, and flew down the stairs so fast she swore her feet didn’t touch the ground. He’d changed his mind. Oh God, please let him have changed his mind. They could make it work. She’d try harder. She’d be a good mother and a good wife. They could have make-up sex right now and she’d make him forget all about Julia McIntyre. She’d . . .

  She opened the door. Two police officers were standing there, holding their hats.

  ‘Mrs Summershill?’

  Tor didn’t reply.

  ‘May we come in please?’

  Chapter Ten

  Even without sleep, the next day came anyway. And the day after. And the day after that. Cress moved in, despite Tor’s protests that her own family needed her. ‘Would that it were true,’ Cress smiled bleakly. ‘As far as they’re concerned, I’m just on another trip.’

  Tor’s own parents had died a decade earlier – within months of each other – so it fell to her friends to try to pick up the pieces. Everyone pitched in. Tor and the children were saved from Cress’s cooking by Kate, who came over with steaming food parcels twice a day which, although Tor could see and smell were utterly scrumptious, she was wholly unable to eat. But it did mean she didn’t have to think about what to feed the children, which was a small mercy. Tor couldn’t even begin to think about navigating the necessities of daily life – sleeping, eating, walking, talking.

  So Kate cooked, and came over every morning to help Cress. The two women drew up a rota which saw one of them take on the washing, ironing and shopping chores, while the other dressed the children and took them to nursery or the playground. Cress went home only in the evenings to feed and bathe her own children, before coming back to sit with Kate and monitor Tor, who just rocked in silence.

  Tor’s shock was deep and palpable. The doctor had had to sedate her after the police had left, and now she could only sleep when she’d had enough dopamine to knock out a horse. She was as limp as a rag doll, as pale as a moonbeam. Her usually lustrous hair hung straggly and even her lips had lost their colour. God only knew how much weight she’d lost.

  She wouldn’t take visitors or phone calls, and she let the sympathy cards pile up unopened. But somehow she managed to pass herself off as coping when the children were around. Then and only then, she drew upon an inner strength that no one could locate in their absence.

  Telling the children they’d lost their father had been the most terrible moment of her life. Worse than hearing that Hugh had died. Worse even than having to formally identify his body. His grave injuries had been internal, so the police had reassured her there wasn’t anything to frighten her when she saw him. But it was precisely the ordinariness of the situation that had made it so diabolical. His body was broken, yet it had looked so athletic and strong, the sheet tracing the contours of his muscles. And although pale, he had still looked so handsome and virile. She just couldn’t understand how it could possibly be that he was lying in front of her, stretched out on a gurney.

  She’d stroked his hair, and flinched when her fingertips brushed his forehead, feeling his marble coolness on her skin. His features were benign but he hadn’t looked like he was sleeping. He’d seemed somehow waxy, and there was definitely a lack, now. Whatever it was that had made him Hugh – his dirty laugh, the twinkle in his eye, his lackadaisical slouch – his essence, she supposed, wasn’t there
any more. He’d looked like a twin of himself, identical but for a fractional difference.

  Oscar, of course, was far too little to understand anything of what had happened, but to Tor’s surprise, the girls hadn’t cried immediately. Instead they peppered her with questions about where angels played, and how they didn’t fall out of the clouds, and why couldn’t they play with someone else’s daddy? Tor had kept her own tears in check, searching her children’s faces as if probing their souls. But their anguish only found a voice that evening, when Daddy didn’t come to give them a bedtime kiss. Picking them up in her arms, she had tucked them into her bed and curled around them both like a cat, stroking their hair and kissing their temples until exhaustion rescued them from despair and they fell fast asleep on wet pillows.

  But sleep barely came at all for Tor, and only when it was chemically induced. Every time she closed her eyes, she heard Hugh’s parting taunts, remembered the hurt in his eyes, the scorn of his words. He had left hating her. And now that he was never coming back, the burden – guilt, anger, recriminations – was hers alone. As indeed it should be.

  It was her fault he was dead. It was her actions that had driven him back out on to the street that night. If it hadn’t been for her jealous infidelity, he wouldn’t have packed his bags; if it hadn’t been for her pathetic and persistent inadequacies as a wife, he wouldn’t have had anyone to go out to that night. He wouldn’t have been in the car, exhausted, angry, drunk and driving. He would have slept in the spare room, woken with a hangover and spent a lazy Sunday reading the papers and playing with the children. Instead he was lying cold under a sheet, and she was lying alone in their bed.

  She left the funeral arrangements to Hugh’s parents. They were grateful for the chance to pay homage to their son, and simply assumed she was too stricken with grief to manage it herself. But the truth was she felt she had no right to do otherwise. After all, Hugh had left her, rejected her as his wife. He wouldn’t have wanted her eulogy. He would have taken her words of love and loyalty as lies, as he had that last night. Though she was the mother of his children and his wife of nine years, he had chosen Julia. He belonged to her now. To everyone else, Tor was Hugh’s widow, his memory’s keeper. But Tor alone knew she was a fraud.

  Chapter Eleven

  Kate spun round in her chair, lifting her heels off the ground and clearing four full spins before stopping squarely in front of the stone mullioned window. She was fairly expert at this now, like a ballerina ending her pirouette centre front to the audience. Though she looked like an excitable eight-year-old and it didn’t do much for her ball-breaking reputation (or the chairs), it was her own particular way of disengaging and thinking through problems. Monty always joked that thank God her offices weren’t open plan, or she’d never make partner.

  She was beginning to wonder if she ever would anyway – spinning or not. Obviously things had been different recently – taking leave and working from home to help out with Tor and the children. But everyone knew the hours she’d put in before then, regularly pulling fourteen-hour days, working weekends, forgoing holidays and networking even at christenings. She was never off-duty. Her peptic ulcer testified to that.

  She stood up and leant on the window-sill, swinging her hips from side to side and singing ‘The Bare Necessities’ to herself (from Marney Summershill’s favourite film, which she insisted on watching daily at ‘quiet time’, and now Kate couldn’t get the song out of her head). She watched the throngs milling about on Dean Street, the off-duty prostitutes covered up in jeans and denim jackets, drawing on Mayfair cigarettes and chatting in doorways; the office workers in cheap black suits heading to the corner pubs, the tourists making long-winded shortcuts from the glare of Oxford Street to the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus; and the on-trend media types diving into their private clubs for a line and a Jack Daniels.

  Apart from the shock of an occasional punk’s orange hair, it was a depressingly bland sea of black and grey that she looked down upon. She could be anywhere – Nice, Bruges, Milton Keynes – not London’s famous Soho. But the first neon lights were switching on, casting a faint blue and red haze on to the pavements and sending an electric crackle through the air. In a few hours, these streets would be humming and teeming, with cabs’ orange lights flitting like fireflies in the night.

  Kate checked the large round clock that hung from the jeweller’s wall just down the street. It was 6.45 p.m. She sighed. It had been a long, slow day. She watched a navy blue Maserati snake its way up the street. She was beginning to think cars should be her new rewards these days – there were only so many jewels a girl could own – and she liked the boomerang brake lights on the 3200GT model.

  Her eyes narrowed with interest as a posse of Vespas careered up behind it, each one ejecting a passenger riding pillion, cameras at the ready. The flashbulbs started popping at the blacked-out windows before the door had even opened, but through the clamour and strobes, Kate glimpsed a composite of tumbly blond curls, chestnut sports jacket, and powerful thighs in olive moleskin jeans.

  God. It couldn’t be, could it?

  It was. Harry Hunter flashed a devastating smile to the crowd of onlookers who had gathered so quickly she wondered whether he paid them as rent-a-crowd, before ducking into Agent Provocateur, next door to her building.

  Kate couldn’t help but laugh at the nerve of the man, doing his saucy shopping in full public view. The shop assistants pulled the black curtains across the windows, and the photographers dropped their cameras, getting on their mobiles, lighting up and standing around as aimlessly as the spectators, who were dithering about whether to wait or go.

  The street felt eerily quiet compared to the uproar of a minute previously – everybody seemed to have lost focus. It was as though all the lights and sound had been turned off. This must be what they mean by ‘star power’, Kate thought.

  She sat on the sill.

  ‘Shit,’ she thought, rubbing her face in her hands as she suddenly realized that he hadn’t called after Cress’s party. She’d been so concerned with looking after Tor, it had slipped her mind completely. Dammit!

  Ordinarily, she would have chased him – she wasn’t above planting an outrageous slur in the tabloids to channel her prey straight to her. Usually that, combined with a well-timed follow-up call and comforting lunch, was all it took. But more than a month had passed since the party. He wouldn’t remember who on earth she was. How many women would he have met – not to say bedded too – since then?

  She shook her head and reached down for her bag. She’d had enough of today. She closed her desk diary, locked her desk and shut the door. Her secretary, Camilla, motioned to her to sign a contract before she left, and as Kate scribbled away, she caught a glimpse of OK! magazine, showing guess-who on the cover with his latest bird.

  Kate stopped and stared. She couldn’t believe it.

  ‘D’you want to take it home, Kate? I’ve finished with it,’ said Camilla.

  ‘Oh, actually yes. That would be great. Are you sure?’

  She smiled and said goodnight, nodding to the other secretaries on the way. She strode towards the lift. All she wanted was to go home, pour a large glass of claret, run a hot bath and devour the magaz–– Wallop!

  She’d walked straight into a big, toned chest that smelled of apples and leather.

  ‘Whoa! Well, hello again. Don’t say I’ve missed you?’

  Harry Hunter smiled down at her. Kate gulped, and wondered whether it would be rude to conduct the conversation rubbing her cheek against his claret cashmere jumper.

  ‘Hunter!’ she burst out, almost scoldingly. ‘What are you doing here? I thought you were buying . . . buying . . .’ She tried again, regaining her composure. ‘I thought you were shopping.’

  ‘Decoy. I came through the back. And I do like the way you say my name like that,’ he said, eyes twinkling. ‘How are you?’ And before she could reply, he kissed her on both cheeks, holding her firmly by the shoulders as though she w
as Scarlett O’Hara in red taffeta.

  ‘Very well, thank you,’ she said stiffly, extricating herself from his grasp. ‘You? I see the paparazzi are still buzzing around.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘You saw that?’

  ‘Who didn’t?’ she said tightly. ‘Nice car, by the way.’

  ‘What, that old thing?’

  His smile was infectious and disarming, and his eyes never left her.

  ‘Was it me you wanted to see?’ she inquired, bringing things back up to a professional level.

  ‘Most definitely,’ he replied, with a wink that brought it straight back down again. ‘Have you got time for a drink? My club’s just around the corner.’

  She raised her eyebrows and checked her watch. ‘I’m afraid I was just off to a meeting.’

  ‘Ah, Mrs Marfleet. Just the person I was looking for.’

  Kate looked up. Nicholas Parker, the firm’s senior partner, had come out of his plush office – alerted, no doubt, by his secretary, Amanda, who was every bit as canny as her boss. ‘But I see you’re busy. It can wait.’

  ‘Mr Parker,’ Kate said, knowing exactly what he was doing in the corridor. ‘May I introduce you to Harry Hunter?’

  The two men shook hands. Harry had observed Kate’s deference and saw where the real power base lay. He turned on the charm.

  ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr Parker.’

  ‘The pleasure is all ours, Mr Hunter.’

  Harry laid a hand on Kate’s shoulder. ‘I’m very interested in securing your company’s services, Mr Parker. I met Kate at a party a few weeks back and she spoke very highly of you.’

  ‘Well, I’m delighted to hear it,’ he said, basking in the compliment. Harry Hunter was the big fish he’d been angling for, for months. He couldn’t believe Kate Marfleet had hooked him and said nothing of it. ‘Would you like to come into my office and we’ll talk privately?’ He gestured towards the double doors.