He left the bedroom and hurried down the stairs and Meg braced herself to hear the front door slam shut, certain he would walk out on this humiliating situation. But it remained silent.
When she came down she found Robert sitting in his chair in the living room with the TV on and Gripper sitting at his side gazing up at him, as he stroked her, with the kind of unquestioning adulation that Meg imagined he craved, especially now.
As soon as she appeared Robert switched the TV off and stood up.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, nodding at the set.
‘Why? It’s your house,’ Meg said. ‘It’s your TV. You pay for it.’
‘No.’ Robert looked abashed. ‘I mean, I’m sorry about before, upstairs. About trying to . . . I just want things to get back to normal between us, Megan. To be how they were before all this happened.’
Meg nipped at her lip. ‘Before you had an affair for several months with another woman you claim not to care for, you mean?’ she asked him archly.
‘I thought we were going to talk, not throw accusations,’ Robert countered defensively. ‘Frances said you weren’t dead set on ending the marriage. She said there was hope.’
Meg shrugged. ‘I want there to be hope, Robert,’ she said, her voice calm and clear. ‘But then I remember that when you were unhappy with me, instead of coming to talk to me about it, instead of trying to work on our problems and make everything right, you thought that having sex with some tart would solve everything. And when I remember that I feel a lot less like giving our marriage another chance.’
Meg looked at him standing there in a crumpled shirt and a pair of Craig’s trousers that were too short for him, and turning on her heel she walked smartly into the kitchen, Gripper close at her heels. She didn’t know how long it would last, this controlled feeling of calm and composure that was keeping her steady, but she knew she had to use it while it was there, before she crumbled again.
Robert followed her into the kitchen.
‘I was confused, Megan,’ he said, hovering by the sink as Meg took a wine glass out of the dishwasher. ‘That thing with Lynne . . . I didn’t mean it to happen. We had this drink after work one night and I knew she fancied me.’ He shook his head and shrugged. ‘And . . . it felt good to feel that way. To feel wanted. You hadn’t shown an interest in me like that for months . . .’
‘What, since you got me pregnant with Iris, you mean?’ Meg asked him sharply.
He paused, moistening his drying lips and taking a breath.
‘Even then it wasn’t exciting between us – you know it wasn’t. It was just . . . routine. You were always so tired all the time with the kids . . .’
‘Please don’t tell me you had an affair because I was too tired to have kinky sex,’ Meg warned him. ‘And I didn’t think it was “routine”. I thought it was caring, gentle, loving. I didn’t realise I was so dull.’
‘No, that’s not what I meant,’ Robert said, with some frustration. ‘It’s much more complicated than that.’ But he seemed unable to explain what the complications were just then.
‘It was only meant to be a one-off thing with Lynne,’ he said instead. ‘But she was so into me. I liked it. I liked the way she made me feel. It was hard to give it up. I didn’t want to.’
Meg took an opened bottle of wine out of the fridge and poured herself a glass. She did not offer Robert one as she sat at the kitchen table. She had to remain cool, she told herself. She had to keep detached.
If she could listen to everything he was saying as if it wasn’t about her, her husband, and her marriage then she would be all right, she could keep control. And she had to keep control, because if she fell to pieces here she knew that Robert would step in to put her back together, and she knew that she would gladly let him do it. And then he would have everything he wanted without having to fight for it. Meg knew if she didn’t make him fight for his marriage and his family, if she didn’t make him see just how much he really wanted those things, then he might give them away again all too easily.
‘Did you think about what you were risking giving up by being with . . . her?’ Meg asked him stiffly. ‘Or didn’t you care? Did you just want an excuse to give us up?’
Robert sat down heavily at the other end of the table and patted his thigh, a gesture that would normally bring Gripper straight to his side. But although she shifted on her bottom, she did not leave her place beside Meg. Meg took an odd sort of strength from Gripper’ behaviour. Even Robert’s adoring dog was on her side.
‘I didn’t think,’ Robert said, letting his hand fall against his leg. ‘It seemed that our lives were so separate. I honestly didn’t think you’d find out. And I always meant to end it, Megan. I never meant to leave you and the children.’ He frowned and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘I thought she knew that but . . . she thought differently.’ He leant back in the chair, his shoulders slumping like a man utterly defeated.
‘That night, when I came home and I saw you sleeping on the bed – you looked so amazing, Megan. God, I wanted you so much and it was incredible, don’t you think?’ Meg made her face remain impassive, even though her body remembered all too well. ‘It was just like it used to be,’ Robert continued. ‘No, better than it ever was. And it wasn’t just the way you looked – it was you. It was being with you, close and intimate again, that made it so amazing.’
Meg shook her head. He was saying everything that he must know she wanted to hear, but she knew that Robert was good at that. He could make any individual feel special and important, that was his talent.
‘Look.’ Robert watched her intently. ‘I don’t know what happened or why it happened, but everything suddenly clicked back into place, and I’d decided that night that it was over between me and Lynne. I swear to you.’
Meg made herself remember the text she had read on his phone.
‘You’d just come from seeing her, hadn’t you?’ she asked him, to remind them both of why they were sitting there.
Robert nodded. ‘Yes,’ he admitted.
‘You came from her bed to mine,’ Meg stated sharply.
‘No . . .’ Robert hesitated, clearly weighing up the risks of what he was about to tell her next. ‘I didn’t sleep with her that day. She invited me over to her place for lunch. She made a big fuss when I said I didn’t think I’d be able to make it. I was weak, I didn’t want her to make any trouble either at home or at work – so I went. When I got there she told me she had booked tickets for the five o’clock showing at the cinema. I could have left, if I’d tried harder I could have left and been on time for you. I knew you were waiting for me, I knew you would have cooked and dressed up. But I found excuses not to leave Lynne even after the film had ended. She thought it was because I wanted to be with her, but it wasn’t. It was because I couldn’t bear to come home to you and look you in the eye and lie.’
‘Until you knew I’d be asleep,’ Meg confirmed, wondering what inner unknown part of her was keeping her sitting in her chair erect and in control.
‘Yes,’ Robert admitted. ‘But then I came in and you looked . . .’ He half smiled. ‘Very sexy in all that get-up but more than that, you looked so vulnerable and beautiful. I looked at you lying on the bed and I knew I didn’t want to leave you. I knew I wanted to be with you more than ever. I made my mind up right then, before I woke you, to end it with her.’
‘So if you were so sure it was over between you then why were you with her the next day, kissing her in front of everyone?’ Meg asked him bitterly, as a spark of anger flared within her. ‘You know, it wasn’t until later that I realised that probably the whole of your office knew what was going on. I went in there with two of your children and they were all either laughing at me or worse, pitying me. Can you imagine how humiliating that feels? To be chatting to your receptionist while you were carrying on with her in the lobby. A very unusual way to end an affair.’
‘Lynne made it difficult,’ Robert said, unable to meet her eye. ‘When I said I thought it was
time to call it a day she got all hysterical. She threatened to come round here and confront you. I didn’t want that, I was trying to preserve our marriage not destroy it! I was trying to let her down gently so that she wouldn’t rock the boat.’
‘You’re a coward,’ Meg said quietly.
‘Pardon?’ Robert asked her, genuinely surprised by what he thought he’d heard.
‘If what you said is true then you are a coward, Robert. You would have carried on sleeping with her even though you say you love me so much, just because you were scared of getting caught out. Gutless.’
Meg had never spoken to Robert that way in all of the years they had been together, and he stared at her as if he was looking at a woman he no longer knew. Maybe he was, Meg thought, she felt like she barely knew herself any more.
‘I am truly sorry for what I’ve done to you, Megan,’ he said. ‘But please ask yourself, is it worth throwing away everything we have because of it?’
‘Have you asked yourself that question?’ Meg said.
Slowly Robert shook his head.
‘Well, I have,’ she told him. ‘I’ve asked it about a million times since all this happened and the answer is – I don’t know yet, Robert.’
She took a large gulp of wine and Gripper pushed her cold muzzle under her hand in a gesture of what Meg thought of as solidarity.
‘For us to continue to be married I’ll have to forgive you. Completely forgive you – and I don’t know if I can do that,’ Meg said dully.
Robert nodded. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘But I swear I’ll never let you down again – I love you, Megan.’
‘You’d have to prove that to me,’ Meg said. ‘You’d have to never get bored or fed up about proving it to me every day, until one day I feel I might be able to trust you again.’
‘I won’t,’ Robert assured her. ‘Not if you give us another chance.’
‘You’d have to leave your job,’ Meg went on. ‘In fact, you’d have to never go back to it.’
This time Robert hesitated.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘But to leave so suddenly won’t look good. It might be difficult to get another job. It might mean less money.’
‘Then we’ll sell this house,’ Meg said. ‘We’ll get a smaller place, take the kids out of their schools. They can go to the local primary, I hear it’s very good.’
‘If you’re sure,’ Robert said. ‘Then we’ll do it.’
‘It’s the only way this is going to happen,’ Meg told him. ‘If it happens.’
Robert got up and walked around the table. Once again he knelt at Meg’s feet, but this time he simply picked up one of her hands. She forced herself to be unresponsive.
‘I’ll do anything, Megan,’ he said. ‘I’ll do anything to make things right between us, I promise. I don’t want to lose you, or my children . . . I love you all so much, Megan, I really do.’ And Meg watched as he bent his head and wept.
It surprised her that she didn’t just fling her arms around him and reassure him then and there that everything would be all right, and she knew he would be stunned too. It seemed that she was stronger than she thought.
‘I have to think about it more,’ she said.
Robert looked up at her, clearly disbelieving that Meg wasn’t as moved as he was.
‘Really?’ he asked her.
Meg nodded. ‘How many months was it you were seeing her?’ she asked him. ‘Six at least, wasn’t it?’ Robert nodded regretfully. ‘Well, then, I think I deserve at least as long, if I want it, to decide what happens next.’
She turned her head away from him. ‘You can go now, Robert,’ she said.
And it wasn’t until she heard him pull the front door shut behind him that she sank onto the floor and buried her face in Gripper’s fur and wept.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Sandy was still asleep the following morning.
She had slept right through the afternoon, although she must have been waking up periodically, Natalie thought, as she had got through two thirds of the two-litre bottle of water Natalie had left for her with a glass next to the bed.
Natalie didn’t know how to feel about the state her mother was in.
She thought back, trying to dredge up some of the hazy and ill-formed memories of her childhood with Sandy. It did seem that Sandy had always had a drink in her hand, that was true. And she had always acted as if she were a little tipsy, but as Natalie grew older she had decided that was just an affectation, a pretence designed to make her more appealing. Still, although while Natalie had lived with her Sandy had always been distracted and preoccupied by almost everything apart from her daughter, Natalie was fairly sure she hadn’t been an out-and-out drunk.
Natalie had never seen Sandy this way before and she didn’t know how to handle her. She didn’t actually want to handle her at all. It seemed unfair that her mother, who’d done such a ham-fisted job of looking after her, now might require some serious looking after herself.
Although her mother presented a bizarre figure in her usual get-up of inch-thick make-up and tight-fitting clothes, at least that Sandy was happy with herself. The woman who had lain sprawled by the loo yesterday was a self-loathing wreck and Natalie didn’t want to see her that way again. She wanted her back the way she’d always been even if it was desperately embarrassing, because in the end she did care about what happened to her.
So, after she had put her to bed, with an acute sense of unreality Natalie had taken two further bottles of whisky out of her mother’s suitcase, took all the wine she had been unable to drink for so long out of the wine rack, gathered up the beer, vodka and even the cooking sherry and poured it all down the sink. She kept only the good wine, which she’d collected herself and couldn’t bear to waste. As she locked that in the old coal shed behind as much junk as she could shift, Natalie remembered the joke she’d made about doing just that with the vodka only a few days earlier. It didn’t seem very funny now.
Sandy slept on as the darkness gradually wore away into dawn, and Natalie and Freddie watched the sun rising together over the rows and rows of roof lines and chimneys, TV aerials and satellite dishes. Somewhere over those houses and streets, flats, churches and shops, Jack Newhouse was probably sleeping.
‘We’re going somewhere important today,’ Natalie told Freddie. ‘We’re going to go and see your daddy. Now, I must warn you. You might not like him and he might not like you, but I think it’s important to be brave and give it go, don’t you? It’s now or never kiddo.’
Freddie had taken the news with his usual cheerful indifference, which had made Natalie feel better. At least she could tell him when he was older that she had tried her best with his father. Whatever happened after that would not be her fault.
She sat on the edge of the bed and slid Jack’s numbers out from under the lamp where she had hidden them what now seemed aeons ago. She didn’t think he had started a new job yet. In fact, after everything that had happened she wouldn’t be surprised if he decided to leave London again, perhaps even go back to Italy where the climate was temperate and there were no love children hanging about, or at least none that Natalie knew of. She knew she should phone him and ask him if she could come over, but she didn’t want to do that.
First of all it would mean talking to him, which was an inevitability that she wanted to delay until the last crucial second because of the sheer effort of will it would require to talk to him politely. And secondly if she called in advance he might very well say, ‘No thank you very much, I don’t want you and your baby to come over. You’re nothing but trouble.’
No, it was best to maintain the element of surprise and just turn up, Natalie thought. If he was in he’d be far too polite to tell them to leave once they were actually on his doorstep. And if he was out they could just go and wander around the British Museum until he came back. And if he was in with another woman, Natalie could take some small pleasure in breaking up the party by introducing her to Jack’s son. Natalie thought it was
best for Freddie and her to set off as early as possible, so that they might catch him before he went out anywhere.
As for her not wanting to have to speak to him, she’d have to cross that bridge when she got to it.
It had just gone nine when Natalie arrived at the end of Willoughby Street. She looked at the blue-painted front door that was set into the side of the Georgian building. There were three buttons. Minnie’s flat was the top one. Natalie thought she saw a figure move across the window up there. Someone was in, then. A sudden wave of fear enveloped her and it took a great deal of will power to keep her feet rooted to the spot instead of running in the opposite direction.
A million thoughts rattled through her fatigued brain. What if Jack had already gone and the figure she saw was Minnie? Or worse, much worse, what if Jack had someone else in there, another woman? What if the minute she had left him on Sunday night he’d gone right out and met the next potential love of his life standing at a bus stop?
He was good at that, after all.
Natalie stood on the corner for several minutes looking at the door, frozen with fear and indecision, wondering and waiting. The bus stop she needed to return home was just down the road, and better still at this time of day there were taxis aplenty driving right by her, their friendly amber lights offering the promise of refuge and the shortest route to safety.
And then her thoughts were interrupted by a familiar voice.
‘Hello,’ Jack said warily. He had a large cup of coffee in one hand and a paper in the other. It might have been some kind of pastry that was in the paper bag tucked under his arm.
Natalie wondered if she looked as inexplicably guilty as she felt at being caught on the corner of his street. She was going to have to talk to him now. It was unavoidable. It would be much harder to try to sort things out with him without the use of actual words, especially considering that she was always the very worst person at playing charades.
‘I’m not stalking you,’ she managed to say. Her voice sounded strange in her ears, like she was listening to a recorded version of it. ‘I just came to try to talk to you and then I got here and wasn’t sure if I should any more.’ She looked up at his flat. If Jack was here, then who was the figure she saw in the window?
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